The Dream Merchant (24 page)

*   *   *

When Jim told me his stories about Brazil, he often referred to Luis Carlos. Luis was a short, thin man in his late forties with a dark, Indian complexion, yet his skin had an odd transparency, particularly on his cheeks and below his eyes, where purple veins showed through, giving him the aspect of a fragile or sickly person. On a daily basis Luis worried about his blood pressure and other diseases, but it wasn't clear to Jim if there was any real problem, as this very bright, nervous man avoided doctors and the bad news they might convey. I could have a heart attack making love, he'd say out of the blue. His anxieties arose from a dense web of musings about his several lovers, his lists of appointments to keep when he returned to Manaus from the mining camp in the jungle, a thousand phone numbers jiggling in his head because he didn't carry a book. For all his worry, he could walk in the jungle at a brisk pace for a week.

Luis was a man of unusual resources and he was at Jim's side practically from his first day in Manaus. Jim hired Luis as a translator and guide, but his responsibilities quickly broadened and he became Jim's right-hand man. Jim couldn't have said where they met or who introduced them. Yet he knew how he'd made contact with most of his friends and business associates in Manaus—merchants, gold buyers, cardplayers, airplane pilots, mechanics, gunmen, beautiful women—because it was almost always Luis who made the introductions. Jim, I know someone, he would say. I have a man who could do this. He will be perfect. Don't worry.

In this city where people typically arrived late for appointments, very late, or they didn't show up at all, Luis always seemed to know someone who could track down the phone number or street address.

When Jim returned to Manaus, from his first visit to the campsite, he was exhausted and elated. It would be more than five weeks before the second trip and all the while he had to restrain himself from rushing back into the jungle. He wanted to touch the gold again with his fingers. He was beset with anxiety because he would never get another chance like this. Someone could steal what he had discovered. Gold would be Jim's redemption. Even Marvin Gesler could never hope to achieve the wealth that Jim would soon dig up from the fetid mud. His fears and dreams were so compelling that it became physically painful to focus on practical details. In Manaus, Jim felt trapped in a quicksand of impediments, red tape, permits, and broken appointments.

Luis counseled patience. There was no point tramping back into the jungle without a crew, without machinery to build a functioning camp, and without a master plan. Jim needed to find a safe house for the city part of his business, and he must hire armed guards to look after the gold in Manaus until he sold it for the best price. Luis warned Jim he must travel everywhere with several gunmen or he'd be murdered or kidnapped for ransom. He needed to learn a whole new way of life.

*   *   *

This one is much too large, Jim said to Luis the first afternoon they looked for a house. Jim's yellow sun-bleached Mercedes sedan was parked outside an imposing gate. Through iron bars he could see a sprawling house set back about three hundred yards from the road. Much too large, he said.

Probably, Luis agreed with a world-weary expression, but please have a look anyway, since we've come so far to get here. They had driven on the only road leading north out of Manaus for about twenty minutes to the extreme edge of the city limits, the very point at which Manaus was stymied by the rain forest. Luis got out of the car, mopped his brow in the afternoon heat. He suffered greatly from the humidity, and when Luis was in the city he liked to shower four or five times a day. He said a few words to one of the men working on the property and the heavy gate swung open.

The main house was handsomely built with dark, aromatic native wood, Angelim rajado, that is resistant to rotting in the wet climate. This wonderful name seemed to evoke the grand house itself, which had fifteen generous-sized rooms, newly painted white shutters, and a large wood-paneled office that reminded Jim of his office in the house on Lake Ontario where Jim's new wife, Phyllis, was now living with his cook and chauffeur. Looking out the window from the office, Jim saw tiered gardens, and beyond that there were several connected man-made lakes, strung together by waterfalls and raised walking trails; the lakes had many strange-looking Amazonian fish, and ducks swimming around, and there were a few small baby black caimans that would someday reach twenty feet but now lay harmless, sunning on the bank of the lake closest to the main house. All around the lakes there were apple, orange, coconut, and cashew trees and lovely flowering plants called
inga.

Jim stood on the back porch for a time, breathing the jungle air and considering the sharp turn his life had taken from a tremendously successful business life and from everyone he'd ever cared about. Yet he didn't feel at all lost or lonely. He felt impatient, hungry. Jim turned back to the big house. Through the open shutters to the kitchen he noticed a young woman with dark peasant features and a lovely smile. She was Caboclo, a mixture of indigenous and European ancestry. She was cooking something and the smell made his mouth water.

The house was situated on twenty acres of property, all of it encircled by a ten-foot concrete wall painted light green to blend into the foliage. On the east side of the estate, just over the wall, Manaus approached with its open sewers and glistening corporate headquarters. The most intriguing facet of the estate was its western vista: behind the house, servants' quarters, and past the lakes, the wall braced against the dense jungle that played out unabated for nearly four hundred miles. If you walked along the west wall at night you might hear the growl of a jaguar. The estate, presently owned by the wife of a diseased Mafia capo now living in France, was a buffer zone between conflicting realities.

The property was much more than Jim required but was very special, as Luis had said. Jim found himself lingering. From the front side of the house he looked out across a field of fruit trees, and the same kitchen girl was now taking a walk. She was very young, eighteen or nineteen, with long black curly hair. The girl was laughing and picking fruit. She was wearing red shorts and was moving slowly across the dusty property alongside a boy of about twenty, one of a half-dozen workers who maintained the property; they walked through a stretch of cashew and
guariguara
trees, close, in rhythm with each other but not touching. The girl looked toward the house and saw that Jim was watching, but this didn't make her self-conscious. Jim wondered if she and the boy were lovers and decided they must be. The girl's walk was slow and rhythmic, as though drawing purpose from the earth.

Jim was about to leave with Luis when the girl came back on the porch holding a knife and a piece of fruit. Jim didn't know what it was, but she was offering him a cashew. He cut off a slice and ate the tasty fruit from the skin like a mango. Then he looked around for a place to put the rind. The girl smiled at him and offered her hand. She won him on the spot. She was intoxicating but utterly from another world, and much too young.

At the start of their drive back to town, Luis looked amused, but his mind quickly turned to something else. The following afternoon, Jim bought the property from the owner's widow for $140,000, nearly one-third of what he'd brought to Brazil for his new business venture. It was much more than he wanted to pay, but he reasoned, impractically, it was only a tiny fraction of what such a place would cost in the States or Canada.

When Jim returned to the estate two days later as the new owner, the Indian girl didn't seem surprised.

*   *   *

Jim had never built a business without Marvin Gesler's vision and prodding. He wasn't a business genius like his partner, nor was he a detail guy. Marvin's vulgarity and raunchy deceits had always cast Jim in a favorable light, and Jim had relished being the good guy. Now he wasn't sure who he was or needed to be. Marvin had always known the rules, or he made the rules while Jim brokered their deals. Jim felt Marvin's absence, to be sure, but he had found gold near the Rio Novo four hundred kilometers south of Manaus. This simple fact quickened and thrilled him more than any lust he had ever known, more than any previous worldly success, perhaps more even than his desire for Ava, or at least it was enough to make him forget. The grains of gold in the
batilla
kept Jim on course. If it was the right course was a much larger question than Jim could resolve, not that he ever cared for abstract inquiry. Jim had no Marvin, limited cash, and scant knowledge of finance, but he had gold, or the chance for it, and he had Luis Carlos with his considerable quirkiness and personal magic. Jim had no desire to return to Toronto and the Quonset shed business. He didn't miss it or even want to know what was going on.

Luis guided Jim to a street lined with cantinas, maybe fifty cantinas housed in a four-block stretch of Spanish colonial buildings from eighty and ninety years earlier, when rubber barons had imported renowned architects from Europe to design the most daring, opulent residences on the entire continent. By 1980, they were long ruined from neglect and water damage. There were jungle plants sprouting through cracks in the floors as if the rain forest were trying to reclaim the land. The venerable houses smelled from hardworking girls and the sweat of an army of lusty
garimpeiros
back from the gold mines. Jim needed to learn about such places, counseled Luis while he mopped his brow and took Jim to see the tiny cheerless cubicles where girls worked on soiled mattresses for next to nothing. Most of them were very young; some were attractive, others fat; they did their work with dead eyes. Jim found these places depressing, but Luis urged him to stay awhile and take a look around.

During the next month, Luis introduced Jim to gold buyers, airplane pilots, gorgeous women. Luis introduced working girls with a touch of nostalgia or regret. Jim, he explained as a longtime connoisseur, many of these girls are sincere people, believe me. But on other occasions, Luis referred to them dismissively as bitches. He introduced the owner of a gun shop who sold Jim an arsenal of weapons, at a fair price, and then, within an hour, the white-haired shop owner had assembled a militia of thirty gunmen, each of them willing to risk his life for ten dollars a day. Luis drove Jim to meet Martha, a plump woman with an endearing smile who was a good cook and didn't mind working in the deep jungle; Luis brought the pilot Ramon Vega to Jim's estate.

Ramon ran his own jungle operation eighty miles east of Jim's camp. He was a handsome, powerful guy about Jim's height with a coffee-colored complexion and a contagious smile. Men and women were drawn to Ramon, who was nearly Jim's equal in terms of charisma and affability. He rented a turbopropped helicopter to Jim for two weeks to fly heavy equipment into the camp; after that, Jim bought two older planes from his new friend. When the two men were in Manaus they went to clubs with Ramon's knockout girlfriend, Iliana, who had studied geology in college and was presently working in the gift shop of one of the local hotels. Ramon entertained his friends with stories about the jungle life, ambushes, murders, animal attacks. He had a talent for finding the attractive or socially acceptable side of cruelty. Listening to Ramon was like going to the movies. His girl had a pleasant polished manner that you could almost take for softness, but she could turn on a dime. Iliana wanted a lot of money and would do almost anything to get it.

Jim questioned Iliana about rock formations that might offer clues to concentrations of gold on his property. She was attracted to Jim, even though he was twice her age. They were always fooling around, probing and tempting each other. Ramon didn't seem to mind. He had this manner: what's mine is yours. Jim enjoyed Ramon's largess and extravagant convictions about women and the predatory rules of the jungle, which he enunciated with deeply felt pleasure.

Whenever Luis saw Ramon and Jim together, he smiled, as if he'd known all along they'd become friends.

Luis seemed to grow in stature at the prospect of bringing people to meet Jim. These were Luis's Broadway moments. During the initial starburst of making introductions he was charming and well versed, verbally nimble about subjects one would not expect him to know about. He got people talking. He knew how to break the ice. But then he lost interest. Once he was past the stage of facilitating, Luis's observations became shallow or seemed ill-informed. The deepening levels of a subject didn't interest him. After fifteen or twenty minutes, he was looking off to the future, and he would say to Jim, I am like Cinderella. I have to leave now.

*   *   *

Over time Jim grew confident about his assistant's suggestions, even though it wasn't always apparent, with the language difficulty, where the quality of Luis's many acquaintances might diverge from his own considerable enthusiasm and charm. Luis became Jim's Jim. Of course, in their hardworking thirty-month history Luis would make some terrible choices. He'd wipe the perspiration off his face and make up for disasters with more matchmaking that was nothing less than astonishing.

He introduced Jim to Ribamar, a short, powerfully built man of about sixty with thirty years in gold mines south of Manaus. He had spent the past eight months living in the city with his young wife, Lu, and their new baby. No one understands the jungle better than Ribamar, said Luis, who became melancholic when he spoke of the older man. You'll need Ribamar to survive; you'll need him like clean water.

It was a hard moment for Luis and surely a reflection of his affection for Jim that he brought this new man into their world, because including Ribamar meant that Luis had to sacrifice some of himself, maybe the best part; whenever he was around Ribamar, Luis seemed undressed, cheapened, largely irrelevant.

Ribamar was a calm and serious man who filled a room without speaking. He sensed keenly, like the animals he knew so much about, and he trusted himself beyond all else. In their first meeting, Ribamar admitted to missing the jungle greatly. He had been away too long and was very pleased to hear about this new mining operation. Also, with a young family, he needed money.