by Louis Begley
Pedra Negra is a very serious cattle ranch, he assured me. We treat our herd on the highest professional level.
He also told me that I shouldn’t be surprised by the level of security at the ranch. A detail on horseback patrolled the area around the main house from dusk to dawn, and there were motorized patrols at the ranch’s perimeter. There are very many bad people in the Mato Grosso, Captain Jack, he said, and asked whether I would like him to lend me a weapon for the duration of my stay, one I could keep in my bedroom. I told him to stop calling me captain, and that I’d be grateful for the loan of a weapon. Later, Wellington placed a huge Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum on my night table and a box of ammunition on the floor. If you want to try it, Alberto said, there is a range complete with targets just beyond the swimming pool that Wellington can show you. Dr. Dirk—that was how he referred to his employer—enjoys pistol and rifle target practice.
Once more Harry had proved to be the most efficient and best of uncles. If a writer truly wanted solitude, the fazenda was a dream house. I wasted no time getting to work, and soon settled into an ideal routine: a three-to-five-mile run in the very early morning during which I was often followed at a distance by the horseback patrol, breakfast served on the open veranda by Dona Marisa, three hours of work, forty-five minutes of laps in the pool, lunch consisting of cold meat or eggs and crème de papaya—which I loved—or fruit for dessert, a nap, another three or four hours of work, target practice, a second more-relaxed swim, and finally dinner, with Catupiry, a soft and very mild white cheese, accompanied by guava jelly to round out the meal. I went to bed early, after deciphering, with the help of my Latin, French, and rudimentary Spanish, my sole source of news, the Portuguese-language Estado do São Paulo deposited on the veranda by Seu Wellington. That was how I learned, among other horrors of the day that crowded its pages, of the stampede at the Port Said stadium, where seventy-nine were killed and thousands injured after a match, a monstrosity that struck so resonant a chord even in soccer-crazy Brazil that Alberto drove over to the main house to discuss it and the differences in national character that in his opinion accounted for the outrages committed by fans. Afterward, he asked to join me on the range. Wellington had been telling him about my prowess, and he had brought his own pistol, a 9mm Beretta. We banged away companionably, and as he was a good shot I was glad to outscore him. When he congratulated me, I made no attempt to hide my satisfaction, saying that the Smith & Wesson had taken some getting used to—my own sidearm being a modified Colt M1911 .45 ACP, which I was sorry to say I hadn’t fired once since I became a civilian. I was grateful to him for getting me back into form. That was the truth. I had gotten the idea that even though I was a full-time scribbler I should keep in shape and continue to hone personal combat skills, or come as close as was feasible without being back on active duty.
As the end of the third week of my stay approached, I allowed myself a peek at the word count on my computer and saw that I had written just about a fourth of my novel as I then conceived it. That called for a celebration, and I accepted with alacrity and genuine pleasure two invitations Alberto extended. The first was to take an abbreviated tour of the ranch, from which I had previously begged off. I would at last meet his cows! The second was to a churrasco at his house. He wanted me to taste some of those very cows’ colleagues, as well as other barbecue delicacies.
The cattle—some thousand head, according to Alberto—waited for us when we arrived in their proximity after half an hour’s drive across the strangely exhilarating empty vastness of the savanna. Lined up in rows, perhaps thirty abreast, like infantry of a bygone era on parade, and flanked by cowboys instead of drill sergeants, the steers were spectrally white, built low to the ground, and somber looking, with prominent humps on their backs. Alberto explained that they were Brahman cattle, originating in India, bred for meat, polled to avoid injury in case of arguments. They were the prevalent breed in Brazil, especially in the Mato Grosso, for the same reason they were widely appreciated in India: their ability to thrive in very hot weather.
We have some milk cows on the fazenda, he added, just enough to make our own butter and Catupiry, but that’s only a hobby. The name of the game is meat—better meat than in Argentina. You will see when we get together tonight.
He was right. I had never eaten better steak. We drank caipirinhas, delectable concoctions combining cachaça, a powerful liquor made from fresh sugarcane juice, lime, and sugar—he advised me to have them prepared with only a pinch of sugar—and then beer, which is what everyone at the party seemed to be drinking, although Alberto showed me the two bottles of a very respectable Pauillac he had withdrawn in my honor from Dr. Dirk’s cellar upon the boss’s express orders. Alberto being the only real English speaker in this group of ranch supervisors and their knockout wives, all of whom, Alberto’s wife, Sonia, included, having quickly given up the effort to entertain me by their conversation, we sat down together in a pair of comfortable armchairs on the veranda and talked. It was thus that I heard, in addition to endless statistics about the productivity of Pedra Negra, an account of the circumstances that had led old Dr. Sampaio to sell to Mynheer van der Sluyten the fazenda that had been in the Sampaio family for generations. It was nothing less than the failure to take revenge as required by the Mato Grosso code of honor, and the disgrace and ostracism that followed.
You understand, Jack, Alberto said, there aren’t very many people in the Mato Grosso, and some are very bad. I’ve told you that. It’s the reason we pay so much attention to security. So when the eldest of the Santos brothers gunned down Ricardo, Dr. Sampaio’s ranch manager—the man who had my job—in cold blood, at the front door of this very house, with Ricardo’s wife and children watching from inside, got back into his truck, and drove away, there was only one honorable course for the old man to follow. The Santos are real thugs and run a vicious protection racket. No one expected Dr. Sampaio to kill José Santos himself: he was too old, and it wasn’t a job for someone like him anyway. But considering that the reason Ricardo was killed was that he wouldn’t pay protection money to the Santos gang and wouldn’t let them rustle Pedra Negra cattle, Dr. Sampaio had a duty to find someone who would do the job. Hire a professional. Well, the old gentleman said, those days were gone. He would go to the police. Everybody knew that was a big joke, because no policeman, no prosecutor, no judge in Mato Grosso would touch a hair on the head of a Santos. They all want to live, and they want their wives and children to live, and just between you and me they like the little presents they receive from the Santos. I don’t need to tell you, Jack, that government officials in Brazil aren’t paid a decent salary. So in short order it became impossible for Dr. Sampaio to come to the ranch. The personnel wouldn’t look at him, the cattle were falling sick, everything was going wrong. Finally, he got the point and announced that he would sell the ranch. And that’s where Dr. Dirk came in, and that’s where I came in too.
You? I asked, genuinely surprised.
Yes, Dr. Dirk hired me because of my credentials in cattle-ranch management and also because I’m a local—my family has been here forever—and he thought I’d know what needed to be done. I sure did. I wasn’t going to waste my time going to the authorities, and I wasn’t going to the bars in Cuiabá to hire a hit man. You never know if one of those guys is going to work for you or for the opposition, particularly if the opposition is the Santos, or when and how he’s going to shake you down after the job is done. On the other hand, I didn’t want to go to jail for the rest of my life for murder after I’d wasted José Santos. Dr. Dirk wasn’t going to protect me from the authorities. He wouldn’t know how, and anyway didn’t have that kind of pull. No foreigner does in the Mato Grosso. What do you think was the solution? Simple! I had to kill the bastard in self-defense. So I put the word out that I was going to get José, in order to square the accounts at Pedra Negra, and that for a week I’d be waiting for him at nightfall on the porch outside my office. If he still had real balls on him, I’d s
ay to whoever would listen, and let me tell you a lot of people didn’t dare to listen, he can come on a visit. So the week I named came, and I sat there on the porch in a nice armchair just like this one with my nice twelve-gauge Remington shotgun in my lap, bottle of cachaça at my side, waiting. Waiting. I start on Monday. Waiting patiently. Tuesday night I put the record player on in my office and open the window to be able to hear the music better. Cha-cha-cha! Thank God, we have no mosquitoes in this part of the ranch. Nothing on Monday, nothing on Tuesday. On Wednesday baaaam! José pulls up in his truck, gets out, waves hello. I see that in his left hand he’s got a fifty-caliber Smith & Wesson—I didn’t know the son of a bitch was a lefty—and I think he’s going to let me have it. But no! He laughs like a fucking hyena. In his right hand he holds a grenade, pulls the pin with his teeth, and whoosh tosses it on the porch. Only then he empties his magazine. You can’t imagine the racket—or maybe you can, if you think of Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s the end of me, right? Wrong! Because it wasn’t me in the armchair on the porch. I’d put a dummy, dressed and made up to look like me. He must have been mainlining stuff not to realize something was wrong, that the guy in the armchair wasn’t reacting to anything. Just keeping a stiff upper lip! Ha! Ha! Ha! The real me had always been holed up in a nice reinforced blind I’d built for myself under the porch. His hand grenade—no sweat! From there, my other Remington nicely braced, I emptied it right into José’s face. After I’d finished, he had no head left.
Holy cow, I said. So then you called the police, right?
Alberto nodded.
And you were in the clear?
Right again.
And how come the other Santos brothers haven’t come to get you?
Because it was a vengeance killing. He’d killed Ricardo, and I made him pay for it. The accounts were settled. That’s the Mato Grosso way. Once we’re even, we don’t keep going.
The next morning, he drove me to the airport. I promised to come back, and he promised to visit me in New York. He’d bring Sonia. She told him after the party that she’d get to work on her English.
—
The plane for Brasília, where I was going to get on a Varig flight to New York, was late. I didn’t mind. The waiting lounge at the Cuiabá airport was clean, and there was a functioning Wi-Fi connection. What’s more, the layover in Brasília was long. According to the functionary at the information desk, there was no risk of missing my connection. With something akin to resignation, I turned on my laptop and logged on to Gmail. It was as I had feared: a seemingly endless queue of messages. I rearranged them so that the oldest would be on top and found, practically adjacent to each other, two emails. One was from Kerry, dated January 9. The subject line read: Harry. Extremely Urgent. The message was brief: Harry died yesterday. Please call me as soon as you can at one of the following numbers. I recognized her home number. The other was a cell-phone number, which was not her office BlackBerry. I was struck by that, and by the fact that she did not ask me to call her at the office, but didn’t know what to make of it. The second, sent two days later, was from Fred Minot. Like Kerry’s, it had been sent from Jones & Whetstone, Harry’s law firm. I knew Minot’s name. He was the J & W trusts and estates lawyer whom Harry had gotten to do my will. It’s absurd, he’d said, that I should inherit if something happened to you. You should leave your money to Yale or some cultural institutions. This too was a brief message: I’m the preliminary executor under the will of Harry Dana who has passed away. Please contact me at your early convenience.
I got a cup of coffee. Realizing that my hands were trembling, I made an effort to control the tremor and called Kerry’s cell-phone number. It was early afternoon in New York. There was no reason that she should be at home. She answered at once and asked that I call the same number again in fifteen minutes. That is what I did, and once again she answered at the first ring.
It’s so awful, Jack, she said. He killed himself. He hanged himself, in Sag Harbor, in that beautiful studio in back of his house. From one of those beams he was so proud of.
Why, why? I asked her. Did something happen? Did he find out he was sick, some particularly awful sort of cancer?
I asked that question because Harry had told me more than once, beginning with the time when my father went into a coma after the stroke, that he was determined to avoid being kept alive if he came down with an incurable disease. At the time he was a member of the Hemlock Society—I didn’t know whether that organization still existed—and I knew that he had made preparations for the eventuality of having to take his leave, which was how he referred to killing himself. He hoarded sleeping pills and owned both a straight razor and a surgical lancet, being of the opinion that opening one’s veins was on balance the surest and least painful method. A crisscross cut, he said, was the best, because it’s the hardest for some medical interloper to repair. I’d never heard him mention hanging himself as a form of suicide he’d choose. And why hadn’t he waited until I returned, so that we could say goodbye? Unless—the thought flashed through my mind—he had concluded that doing it while I was away would spare me.
Did he have cancer? I asked once again.
No, she answered, I know for a fact he was in excellent health. He’d been to see his doctor in the week before Christmas and he said the doctor was happy about his bloods, his numbers, all that stuff. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him.
Was there a letter for me, some other form of explanation?
No, Jack, she said, absolutely nothing, no letter was found.
So why, why, why? I wailed.
I don’t know, Jack, she replied. All I can say is that he had been under pressure related to work and had experienced some recent unpleasantness. He decided rather suddenly to retire. I will tell you about it when we see each other.
Your email is from four weeks ago. Is that when it happened? I asked stupidly.
Four weeks ago last Sunday, she answered.
And no one tried to reach me!
Jack, I did try to reach you, I sent you that urgent email. I tried to call you on your cell phone. I had no other way to find you.
What about Harry’s secretary? She could’ve gotten hold of the owner of the ranch where I was staying. He would have called the manager or given her the number.
Jack, she said again, don’t you know—no, of course you don’t, Barbara Diamond is dead too. I know this is going to be hard to believe, but there was an awful accident. We can talk more about it when I see you, but she was killed the next day by a subway train.
There was a silence. What else was there to say? My uncle and his longtime secretary had both died within a day of each other while I was blissfully drinking caipirinhas. I was having trouble aborting my new reality.
She broke the silence, asking, When will you be back in the city?
I told her my plane was due to land the next morning, early.
There is a great deal we need to talk about, she said. Can you meet me for lunch at Osaka?
That was a restaurant near her office. I replied that I’d be there at whatever hour suited her.
Then come at twelve-thirty, she said.
Before hanging up, I mentioned the email from Minot and asked what she thought I should do about it.
Call him, she told me. You can see him after lunch. But I’d rather you didn’t tell him that you and I are getting together first. In fact, please don’t tell him we’ve spoken.
I didn’t ask her the reason. I dialed Minot’s number and was put through to him right away.
He wasted no time on condolences or small talk of any other kind. Mr. Dana, he said, your uncle Harry Dana committed suicide about four weeks ago. To be precise, he hanged himself at his home in Sag Harbor. Since we were unable to reach you we took the necessary steps. He was cremated. His ashes await your decision as to their disposal. There was a funeral service, of course, at the Christ Episcopal Church out there. As you may know, I’m the executor under your uncle’s last will and te
stament. That means I settle his affairs and distribute his assets after provision for expenses and taxes. As you may also know, apart from some minor bequests, including one to that church, he has left everything to you. It’s a substantial estate. You and I should meet to discuss the implications.
I found the way he’d spoken oddly formal and unpleasant. Not more than two years had gone by since he drew my will and supervised my signing it. We had a sandwich afterward in the firm’s cafeteria. Had he forgotten that he called me Jack? Was my memory failing me as well? I recalled Harry’s telling me some months ago that he had signed a codicil to his testament naming me executor in the place of Minot. Would Harry have changed his mind again? I decided against raising that question and, instead, thanked Minot and told him that I was on my way back to the U.S. I could be at his office tomorrow between two-thirty and three.
There was a delay during which he seemed to be consulting his secretary. That would be fine, he said in the end, my schedule is clear. Building security will know about your visit and will direct you to the floor on which I’ll meet you.