The Guyana Contract

by Rosalind McLymont

  It was big business, she had said. Grossing billions of dollars a year. Theron St. Cyr was a slave trafficker with a first-class abduction act. God help the poor innocents who did not get away, and the ones to come who will not.

  She was lucky. She would be a lot more careful now.

  She shivered as the train pulled away from the station. She had the strange feeling that Theron St. Cyr would cross her path again. And not in Europe. In America.

  When he does, I will take him down, so help me God, Dru swore.

  §

  Faustin stared at the collapsed door in disbelief.

  With trembling hands, he undid the padlock, uprighted the detached panel, and leaned it against the wall outside the studio. He stepped inside quickly. His eyes swept the studio as he made a beeline for the makeshift bedroom. The bed had not been slept in.

  He knelt beside it on one knee, lifted the ragged bedspread that hung down to the floor and peered underneath. He had to blink several times before his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. The dust made him sneeze twice. There was no body under the bed. Dru Durane had not been assaulted and left for dead in the studio.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, he rose to his feet, walked into the living room, and stood there. He looked around, perplexed. He saw no sign of a struggle. The place had been looted, naturally. What else could one expect of the “neighbors”? But that was the least of his worries. There was nothing of value in the place.

  Dru Durane was the focus of his attention. It was clear that she had broken out on her own. He wondered what time she had left the studio. He looked at his watch. If she was lucky, she had made it safely to the train and was about to leave France. It would be pointless to try to pursue her. He kept looking around, at a loss for what to do. How fleeting these encounters are, he thought.

  There was no evidence whatsoever that someone named Drucilla Durane had ever been there, nothing that singled her out from what was left of the stale clutter in this ravaged room, or from the ones that had come before her. She had vanished, as so many before her had done.

  He wondered if Ramy’s men had picked her up. He would never know. No one ever knows. These girls were windblown creatures.

  Sometimes, when he had finished his part and they were out of his life forever, he would spend hours wondering if they were real. They were so beautiful. All of them.

  Like Tabatha.

  Tabatha!

  Angrily, he kicked away the broken chair. Scattered about the floor, almost hidden in the detritus of the looting, was the story of Dru Durane’s escape. He saw the dinner knife. The long, rusty screws. The three heavy hinges that had held the door in place swung from the door. The clumsy screwdriver he had made in metal shop when he was in high school.

  He picked up the screwdriver, turning it this way and that. He saw the blood on the handle. It wasn’t quite dry.

  Yes, she was here. Here is her proof. She was no dream.

  Absently, he put the screwdriver in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. He stared at the gaping hole in the doorway. He would have to repair the door right away, of course.

  He set to work.

  He would not tell Michel that Dru Durane had run away from the studio. He would make sure the next one didn’t, for indeed, there would be another Dru Durane.

  Tomorrow, and the day after that, and all the days after that. Life guaranteed it.

  7

  June 15, 1998

  “Bad news, Dru.”

  Lawton Pilgrim’s sober voice on the telephone confirmed the suspicions Dru had been harboring in the two weeks since their return to the United States.

  There had been no word from Jamaica. No phone call, no letter, no e-mail, nothing.

  This time, no news definitely is not good news, she had told herself at the end of the first week. She had finally put the nagging feeling into words, said it out loud, just this morning, while she was showering.

  They screwed us, the bastards.

  “Let me guess. We didn’t get the contract,” she said to Lawton now. The lightness in her voice surprised her.

  “Right!”

  Dru heard the thump as Pilgrim’s fist smashed into his desk.

  “They went with BMG. Branford Mellon, for God’s sake!” The words grated between his teeth.

  “I’m not surprised we didn’t get it,” Dru said coolly. “Well, I damned sure am!”

  Dru jerked the receiver away from her ear a second before Pilgrim’s fist crashed down on his desk again.

  Pilgrim’s voice was strident. “This was a done deal as far as everyone was concerned. Everyone. On both sides. The prime minister himself said as much when we met before we left Jamaica! Good God, Dru, what—”

  He stopped abruptly. Dru waited, but he did not continue. She heard his quick, angry breathing gradually slow and return to normal. Lawton Pilgrim was not given to lengthy indulgences in what he called “leech emotions.” He was far too disciplined.

  “Anger, hate, frustration,—they suck the sense out of you like leeches. And when you’ve got no sense, you’re just taking up space on this good earth, fella. Nothing more than a breathing carcass, that’s what you become.” Dru had heard him say this to his chief financial officer, who was cursing and railing against the unmoving traffic on the George Washington Bridge that had made him late for an important meeting with his counterpart at Goldman Sachs.

  Dru remained silent, giving Pilgrim the time he needed to calm down.

  “I just don’t understand it,” he continued after several minutes, sounding bemused. “What the hell could have happened?”

  Dru had never heard him sound like this. Lawton Pilgrim perplexed? Didn’t happen. Anytime he walked into a negotiating session, you could put your head on a block that he had already figured out every possible argument, every possible scenario that could come up, and how to turn it all to his advantage. He was a master negotiator. He knew when to cajole, when to suck up, when to show contempt, when to walk away. And he knew the precise moment when he had hooked his fish and it was time to start reeling in.

  She found it odd that this unusual display of anger and exasperation didn’t really surprise her. She was taking it in the proverbial stride. Maybe I am a cold bitch like the rumors say, she thought. She shrugged away the thought. As far as she was concerned, Lawton was entitled to blow some steam. Losing this deal was a hard blow for Pilgrim Boone. She knew it. Everyone else in The Circle knew it.

  Hell, it was a hard blow for her, too. She was going to be the firm’s point person on the account, if they had gotten it.

  Pilgrim Boone had pursued this particular contract for more than a year. Contracts from developing countries that wanted to attract investment from rich countries—they were called Foreign Investment Strategies contracts, or FIS contracts—were coveted in the consulting world. It was multifaceted work that gave you an in with the movers and shakers in the client country, an in that led to all kinds of other contracts from both the government and private businesses.

  FIS work entailed reviewing and, in most cases, revamping entirely the country’s policies and the regulations that governed the way foreign investors behaved. Whoever got the contract would have to assess the country’s traditional and nontraditional industries to determine which ones were strong enough to compete globally, and which ones could be shored up to capitalize on domestic, regional, and global demand. Once all these reviews, assessments, and determinations were completed, the consultant was in a position to draw up a priority list of investment needs. Often, the client country would ask the consultant to go even further and assist in designing specific investment projects, vetting all proposals submitted, and selecting the right investor.

  Consultants milked these contracts for all they were worth. The money good, they could be leveraged to win similar contracts in other countries. Dru ruminated on all that could have been theirs. Hers. It would have been the first FIS for which she took the lead. She would have reported to Grant Feath
erhorn, of course, since he headed the firm’s Latin America/Caribbean division. But she would have been the one in the trenches. Organizing, supervising, making contacts, making decisions. Suffering the blisters, relishing the bliss.

  The thought of it, the nearness of it, excited her even now. She had done all her homework and she had been ready. She liked the country. She had roots in the Caribbean. She cared.

  She had watched her peers make their mark in Eastern Europe while she waited hungrily for the opportunity to work her ass off to help put this one little Caribbean country on the right track, to see that it, too, got the proper—no, enabling—environment that would bring in tons of investors who could do what they had to do with the least amount of regulatory or bureaucratic hassle or breakdown in the infrastructure, like blackouts and water shortages.

  It would have been a win-win situation for everyone involved. And now someone else was going to have it all. It would be Branford friggin’ Mellon, one of the Johnny-come-lately bulldogs, taking on the Jamaican banking system to make it easier to do hard-currency transactions. They would get the credit for getting rid of usurious interest rates, for making sure checks cleared in five days max instead of thirty-plus, as was the practice at certain banks when the checks of small businesses needed to clear. They would be the ones seeing to it that the ministries and state agencies were lean and efficient; that the legal infrastructure dealt with cases competently, fairly, and expeditiously; that rules and regulations were transparent, with no divergence between what was on the books and what was practiced; that the whole damn civil service was free of corruption; that the labor force was decently paid; and that utilities worked all the time.

  It wouldn’t be Dru Durane looking out for the local entrepreneurs who kept the economy going when the national budget was on the ropes. All of a sudden, everyone was braying about the importance of entrepreneurship, a point she had been making for years. The more entrepreneurs were able to expand their businesses, hire workers, and build fancy homes, the more money they put into local banks instead of their mattresses or accounts in the States, the better off the economy and the more the government could brag about the correctness of its policies.

  Yes, they would have to make sure the local business people were happy. That happiness, a measure of local investor confidence, was an important gauge for foreign investors.

  So maybe nobody could achieve all of the above. But she certainly would have given it her best shot because she cared. It would have been tedious work, but it was work that she had already carved out for herself and the team she would have put together from both Pilgrim Boone and local Jamaican consultants. The contract would have positioned Pilgrim Boone to go after a good chunk of the development money being freed up in Washington and in multilateral institutions for the Caribbean private sector. Money channeled away, at long last, from investment in government projects that either never saw the light of day or never were completed.

  All this had eluded Pilgrim Boone because of her. The black girl from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, whom many people referred to as “the ice queen” or “the frosted bitch.”

  Lawton had practically salivated over the contract. In his eyes, awarding such a contract to Pilgrim Boone was a no-brainer.

  “No firm in America is our equal when it comes to this kind of work and we’ve got the track record to prove it. I’d like to see one of these consulting wannabees take this one from us,” he had declared to The Circle, rubbing his hands gleefully.

  Wilfred Cunningham, bald, fat, and still given to silly ideas, had been skeptical.

  “We would be the logical choice if it was just American firms in the running. But there’s Brits, Canadians, even Frenchies in the mix, and the Caribbeans love to play us against each other,” he had said.

  “I very much doubt they would go for a non-U.S. firm, Willy. America is the big kahuna for the developing world, and Jamaica especially. We’ve got the pot of gold. This is where they’re all casting their nets. It’s America that they want to impress most,” Pilgrim had argued confidently.

  Sure enough, when the FIS contract was simultaneously put out for bid in Europe and North America, the inside scoop was that a U.S. firm was sure to win it because the Jamaican government, backed by its business and professional elite, wanted their country to be Washington’s most favored nation in the region, financially and policywise.

  So shameless was Jamaica’s pursuit of this status—one well-known local radio announcer even went so far as referring to a news report from Washington as “the news from our nation’s capital”—that other Caribbean nations joked that all that was left for Jamaica to do was to switch from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right side of the road. Jamaica was one of the biggest and most influential members of the Caribbean Community.Pilgrim Boone had wined and dined the ambassador and every minister and permanent secretary who showed up in New York and Washington, whether they came on official business or for private reasons. When the bid came out, Lawton himself had headed the team that traveled to the island to make the necessary presentations on behalf of the firm. Three trips the team had made. Dru had accompanied them on all three. On the third trip, Lawton had met with the prime minister for the first time. The local associates who had arranged the meeting had been compensated handsomely by Pilgrim Boone, even though the prime minister had agreed to spend only a few minutes with Lawton.

  Those few minutes had stretched to an hour and Lawton was grinning from ear to ear when he emerged from the meeting. He took the entire team and their local “associates” to lunch. He ordered champagne and proposed a toast. When he raised his glass, he uttered just three words: In the bag.

  The response was a boisterous eruption of hear-hears, pounding on the table, guffaws, and the clinking of glasses.

  Now this.

  Two weeks after the team’s triumphant return to New York, the surprising call had come to Lawton from the head of the investment promotion agency herself. It wasn’t about losing the money. The retainer the country was prepared to pay was laughable compared to what the average corporate client paid in America.

  No. It wasn’t the money.

  What made this loss so painful and potentially damaging was the signal it would send to the other developing countries Pilgrim Boone wanted as clients.

  So far, the firm had not been able to land any clients among the Group of Fifteen advanced and rapidly emerging economies. Landing the accounts of a tiny West African country that few people had heard of, another in Central America, and one more in the Pacific was as far as they had gotten in the developing world. Still, Lawton had used those contracts to begin cultivating Pilgrim Boone’s image in the press as the friend of developing countries. He would seize every opportunity to show off his Emerging Markets Team, letting the world see that its ethnic makeup reflected the people of the developing world. He made sure the team members had high-profile speaking engagements on development issues, that they were seen with visiting delegations, and that they got on the most important talking head shows on TV.

  The message from Pilgrim Boone’s media relations department was that this was the firm that would do right by poorer countries, the one that would keep them in Washington’s good graces. Favorable policies, substantial aid packages, and a river of private investment would come from their association with Pilgrim Boone.

  For all Lawton’s cunning, winning those first clients had been a hell of a hard sell. Officials from developing countries hadn’t yet caught on to the idea of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to polish up their image. This was especially true of officials from Africa and the Caribbean. Moreover, many of them were suspicious of American consultants, believing that they really worked in the interest of America alone and that, in the end, they sold everyone but America and themselves short. A few saw the logic of the idea, but they could not get past their development priorities when it came to allocating funds that already were in too short supply. Image was a cos
metic thing. Education and health care were not. “You make a great deal of sense, Mr. Pilgrim. But this cannot be a priority for my government now. The opposition would nail us to the cross if we were to put money into public relations instead of infrastructure and things like education,” one ambassador had said in response to Lawton’s pitch.

  Lawton had persisted with the same patience, precision, and shrewdness that he had used decades ago to build Pilgrim Boone into the behemoth it had become, the same stick-to-itiveness when he had to go it alone after the untimely death of Carter Boone in a plane crash.

  He countered the ambassador’s argument. “We’re not talking about public relations, Excellency. We’re talking about development, about taking those very priorities you talk about to a higher level. We’re development strategists, not a PR consultancy.”

  The ambassador did not see a difference and said so. “Anyway, the World Bank has given us all the consultants we need for the moment.”

  This was said with such finality that Lawton dropped the matter and switched smoothly to a discussion of the country’s chances in this year’s soccer World Cup competition. It was his signature strategy: deflect, parry, and punch. Even if the punch came much, much later.

  It was only now that developing countries were coming around. They were beginning to understand that American lawmakers and investors really liked it when a highly reputable American firm was involved in cleaning up a poor country’s act.

  But something had gone terribly awry with the Jamaica contract. Dru knew exactly what it was. She had known it the moment she was introduced on that last trip as the one who would be the lead on the account. Poor Lawton just didn’t get it. How could he? A different dynamic was at play here, one that the Lawtons of this world never encountered. Its vocabulary and the accompanying gestures were so subtle that they flew right past people like Lawton.