The market maker (24 page)

"I could pay it if necessary. Somehow."

Nelson held up his hand. "No. I think two million should be fine. You should be able to claim a million back from Dekker's insurers anyw^ay, although you will probably have to put up the cash to start with."

"Perhaps Dekker could provide it?" I suggested.

Luis's eyes narrowed for an instant. "No, thank you. I don't want to borrow money from Ricardo Ross."

The speed of his reaction surprised me, but in a way I was pleased to see that he could still think shrewdly.

Nelson and Luis argued back and forth on the target figure, and eventually settled for three million dollars.

"OK. We have a number," said Nelson. "We can't expect to come to an agreement of the price too quickly. We have to let the kidnappers string things out a bit, feel that they've had a proper negotiation. Otherwise they won't believe three million is our final offer."

Luis opened his mouth to protest.

"Offering more money won't get Isabel released any faster, believe me."

Luis saw the logic in this and nodded.

"I suggest we start off with a million dollars, then move it up in half million chunks until we get to two million. Then we need to raise our offer in ever smaller amounts so that it seems as though each rise is a struggle. We will aim to stop the negotiations just short of three million."

"It seems a long way to come down from fifty million to one million," said Luis doubtfully.

"Believe me, one million is a big first offer for a kidnapping."

We believed him. Zico called on Thursday night. He treated Luis's offer of one million dollars with derision. He said he knew that Luis owned Banco Horizonte. Luis explained that he only owned part of it and that he couldn't sell his stake. He performed well. He sounded cool at the beginning, and then as the conversation went on, he displayed more tension. His assertion that he couldn't raise more than a million sounded credible to me.

I listened to the tape played back. Although I couldn't

understand what was said, I was fascinated by Zico's voice. Calm, measured, cold, intelligent. The compulsory threats to Isabel had none of the mindless violence of the first hoax caller. But the coldness was menacing in its own way. Zico wouldn't kill Isabel imless it suited him. But if it suited him...

The police came. They took the tape of the conversation away for analysis of Zico's voice. They had traced the call to a mobile phone somewhere in a crowded shopping street in the Northern Zone. Mobile phones were common in Rio. The land-line system was so bad that its citizens had been driven to using them instead. And they were virtually impossible to trace.

A dozen policemen were searching the Tijuca Forest, but so far they had found nothing.

Maria fussed over both Luis and me. She seemed to be taking it well, until she would suddenly run from the room, trying to hold back tears. Cordelia would come around for a couple of hours every day, but she foimd the waiting stressful. She had become withdrawn, a different person from the tough woman I had met at the children's shelter. She had stopped going there. Just for the time being, she said.

I stayed at Luis's apartment during the day and my hotel at night. I tried to imagine where Isabel was, what kind of state she was in. Was she well fed? Was she allowed to wash? It was hard for us here, it must be harder for her there. But she was a strong woman. If anyone could cope with an ordeal like that, she could.

I shouldn't have left her alone. I shouldn't have left her

alone!

I avoided Ipanema beach. After the kidnap, I had forgotten my stabbing there. I wanted it to stay forgotten. My fears of money laundering and concerns about

220 Michael Ridpath i

Dekker were pushed to the back of my mind. I just j wanted Isabel to be freed. |

On Friday, Ricardo called for an update of the nego- i tiations. He seemed pleased with the progress. I

"So, I assume you'll be on tonight's flight? " he said. i

"I can't leave now!" I protested. "The negotiations , are at a crucial stage."

"I'm sure they are, Nick," Ricardo answered in a reasonable voice. "But we can't afford to have you out ; there until Isabel is freed. It could be months. It probably will be. We need you back here to brief Carlos on i Sao Paulo. I don't want to lose that deal to Bloomfield j Weiss as well."

"Ricardo ..." I was at a loss for words. I simply couldn't leave now. "Look. How about if I take a week off?"

Ricardo snorted. "You've only been in the firm a few weeks. Dekker people don't take vacation when there's a deal to be done."

"Ricardo, I cannot leave now."

"You will leave now. Or you won't have a job when you get back."

I was so tempted to tell him where he could stuff his job. But caution took over in the end. "All right," I said. "I'll come."

As I put the phone down, I saw Luis was watching me. "What was that about?" he asked.

"Ricardo wants me to fly back to London tonight."

Luis's brows narrowed. "That's not good. Do you want to go?"

"No, I want to stay here," I said. "But I have no choice."

"Give me the phone," Luis growled. "What's Ri-cardo's number?"

Within a few moments he had hold of Ricardo. He

spoke in Portuguese, deep, authoritative, in control. I could see how he had become the president of a successful investment bank. After a few minutes he passed the phone to me.

"He wants to talk to you."

I took the receiver.

"Nick," came Ricardo's voice.

"Yes?"

"I don't know what you're doing down there, but Luis obviously thinks it's pretty important. You can stay as long as the negotiations are active. But if things quiet dov^n, I want you right back here. Understand?"

"I understand. Thank you."

"Just get her back," said Ricardo, and rang off.

The police came again. They had fitted Zico's voice to two previous recordings of kidnappers they had taken. In both cases the victims had been treated well and eventually released. This lifted Luis's spirits. And mine.

I called Jamie. He was sympathetic. He said the whole office was in shock. But life had,to go on. In particular selling the Mexico deal had to go on. It wasn't going well, and there were still a lot of bonds on Dekker's books. The situation in Mexico itself was looking rocky; people were beginning to ask questions about whether the government would be able to refinance its borrowings that were maturing this year.

I didn't care.

The waiting began to weigh heavily on us. It had only been four days since Isabel had been kidnapped, but it seemed much longer. Nelson warned us to be prepared for a long wait. These cases took weeks, sometimes months to resolve, not days. Nonetheless every time the phone rang, Luis, Cordelia, and I thought it would bring an agreement for Isabel's release. Of course it didn't.

At Cordelia's suggestion, we went up to Luis's fazenda near Petropolis for the weekend. It was what the family usually did, and she felt a change of scene would be good for Luis. He was worried that Zico wouldn't be able to get in touch with us, but she pointed out that if he called the apartment and someone gave him the number in Petropolis, he could hardly object.

I returned to the hotel to check out, and was met by Luis. His chauffeur took us to the compact Santos Du-nnont airport in the center of the city. I was surprised, Petropolis was only forty kilometers away, and no one had explained we would be flying. Luis was distracted as he led me through the airport and into a little van that took us to a blue helicopter. It had five seats, and Cordelia and her husband were already waiting for us. I climbed in too, pretending that this was the most natural thing in the world. Within a couple of minutes the helicopter had eased itself into the air and we were scudding across Guanabara Bay.

Twenty minutes later we were up above the mountains. Below us roads and buildings wriggled like snakes through the folds of the hills. We descended so that the forest-clad mountainsides rose on either side. We burst around a comer and there, beneath a sheer rock face, was a large white house surrounded by a lush garden dotted with trees and a lake. Behind the house was a patch of flat grass with a large white H painted on it.

The fazenda had been the focal point of a substantial coffee estate. Its rooms were large and cool. The furnishings were tasteful without being opulent: dark colonial Brazilian wood, oriental vases, French nineteenth-century paintings. It was a few degrees

cooler than Rio, but it was still warm by my standards. Nevertheless a huge fire roared in the sitting room.

As soon as we arrived, Luis relaxed visibly. I could understand why Cordelia had insisted on it. It was his routine to come up here and unwind on a Friday evening; and unwind was what he needed to do now.

TTiat evening the atmosphere was almost normal. Cordelia's husband, Fernando, was good company. He was a lawyer who had a wry sense of humor, and an inability to take himself, or Brazil, too seriously. He doted on Cordelia, though.

We were laughing, actually laughing, at dinner, clustered around one end of a ridiculously long dining table, when the phone rang.

There was an extension in the dining room. We could tell from Luis's reaction who it was. Luis was prepared. He acted distraught but in control. The conversation lasted less than two minutes. Zico said one million dollars was insulting. Luis said fifty million was absurd. Zico wouldn't budge. Luis upped his offer to a million and a half. He wanted Zico to know that he understood the game, and he was playing.

hnmediately afterward, Luis called Nelson, who said he would be up the next day. Once again he was encouraging. According to Nelson everything was going to plan.

The next morning, Saturday, Luis showed me around the garden. It stretched up a gentle incline from the house for what seemed like a half mile, until it merged into a forest. It took my breath away. On either side and in front loomed large, absurdly shaped mountains, obviously with the same geological provenance as those that surrounded Rio. One had a sheer rock face, the others were covered with trees on their lower slopes, and

meadows higher up. The garden itself was a valley of lawns, trees, and shrubs, with a long lake down one side. The air was cool and clear, though a little damp, and filled with the sound of running water and birds squabbling. There were swans, both white and black, flamingos, exotic ducks, and a variety of other types that I didn't recognize.

"It's beautiful," I said.

"It was designed by Burle Marx, a German who came here during the war. It is extraordinary. There are over two thousand species of plants in this garden. And it has seen some wonderful parties in its time."

I glanced at Luis. He didn't seem a great entertainer. He seemed a tall, lonely man standing up well to adversity.

"How long have you owned it?"

"About five years."

It must have cost serious money I knew that Isabel came from a wealthy family, but I had no idea what that wealth translated to. It was strange to me to see a house and garden like this being used as a home. In England it would have been dotted with nice ladies in tweed skirts gently ushering visitors this way.

Luis read my thoughts. "We didn't always have money. Or at least I didn't. I come from an old family, one of the quatrocentonas, the Portuguese families that came over to Brazil four hundred years ago. My greatgrandfather had plantations in the state of Sao Paulo that were as big as some European countries. He had thirty thousand slaves. Then came emancipation. Then the collapse of coffee prices. Then the crash of twenty-nine. My grandfather wasn't astute. My brother still runs the rump of the property, a small coffee plantation. But I left."

There was a kerfuffle as a white swan tried to mount a black one. Luis laughed. ''True Brazilians. You see!"

"You came to Rio?" I prompted.

"Yes. I went to college there and joined a big bank. I found money fascinating. For many years now Brazil's financial system has been pretty complex. With inflation and interest rates at several thousand percent a year, there were opportunities to make a lot of money. In 1986 I decided to make some of that money for myself, and so I started Banco Horizonte. As you know, it's now one of the biggest investment banks in Brazil, and in fact we're beginning to think about expanding overseas. So that's how I can afford all this."

Luis made no attempt to hide his pride, and indeed he had a lot to be proud of. "But it's a shame to build this up and see it die with me. We wanted a son, Vivian and L"

"Vivian was your wife?"

He nodded. He turned back and looked at the fazenda. "She never saw all this. All that I have created. Or perhaps she can see it now."

"There's Isabel," I said.

Luis snorted. "Isabel! What chance have I of getting her to work for the bank? She's far too stubborn. You heard her. My daughters! I suppose no father understands his daughters. But I just don't know why Isabel and Cordelia won't for once do something sensible. Maybe this episode will make them think again."

"It might. But I'm not sure that's a good thing."

He turned to look at me, listening closely.

"They're just like you, aren't they? They want to go their own way. Do their own thing. The fact you disapprove just encourages them. I'm sure that's true of Isabel."

Luis gave a brief, dry laugh. "I suppose you're right."

''That's one of the reasons I like her."

There was a pause. He studied me. "You are close aren't you? More than colleagues. More than friends?"

For a moment I panicked, imagining myself accused by an indignant Latin father of deflowering his daughter. But Luis's gaze was warm, encouraging.

I nodded.

Luis turned to continue up the hill. "Bern," he muttered, I think. I couldn't quite hear.

We decided to stay at the fazenda. It was tough on Nelson, he had to make the hour and a half drive up from Rio every day. But it was good for Luis, and good for me. We were optimistic. As long as we could put up with the waiting, Isabel would be free.