She got up and followed him down a hall past several closed doors and into his office, which looked very much like what she would have expected such an office to look like in New York or LA. Upscale corporate, with the right furniture, lighting, ambience. A money place. He waved at a chair, then sat behind a big wooden desk. “Have a seat, Lucy Ripken.”
“Sure.” She sat. “Nice office.”
“We like our clients to feel comfortable,” Machado said. “We just did this place over, in a more North American style, because increasingly our business has been with Norteamericanos such as yourself, Miss Ripken.”
“Why is that, Señor Machado?”
“I think that many people have come down here thinking that—well, if I may be so presumptuous, let me guess about your investment ideas. You and your associates were thinking perhaps that you wanted to buy a hotel, or some other tourist-related business, and maybe it doesn’t seem quite as simple as you expected?”
“Something like that. I was—we were—I’m representing a small group of investors—hoping to find something—”
“A small hotel, out-of-the-way, on the perfect beach, at a really good price?”
“Exactly, more or less.”
“So now you can see what we do here. These little places are not so easy to find or affordable anymore, as perhaps you have by now discovered. So we—the Four Señors, one of whom is my father, Jorge Machado, by the way—organize partnerships so that people can afford to buy into their dream, whether it be a hotel, or a cattle ranch, or a citrus farm, or even a teak farm.”
“Teak farm?”
“Lots of gringos—excuse me—Americans—have invested in hardwood farms. Teak is a very expensive wood, and increasingly difficult to harvest legally in the wild. So we have set up some farms for investors. Here,” he pulled brochures out of his desk and pushed them across the desk at her. “Here are some of our properties and projects.”
Lucy looked, while Machado talked. Teak farms, golf course resorts in Guanacaste, orange groves and cattle ranches on the fertile slopes of the less-active northern volcanoes, hotels up and down the Nicoya Peninsula. “Our arrangement is very simple, really. We guarantee a minimum twenty-five per cent annual return, and have averaged, over the past seven years, about thirty seven per cent. The investment must be for a minimum of two years, and the minimum amount is ten thousand dollars US.” He opened a drawer and looked at figures on a page. “Our current client list is about four hundred and fifty, of whom over one hundred and seventy five are US, Canadian, or European. Another hundred are from Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, and other Latin countries. The way we work, the money goes into a general fund, and then we form the partnerships and invest in properties and companies of our choice. It is our business to know what to do with your money. It is very simple, really. And it works.” He slid the drawer shut and looked at Lucy. “Mostly because my father and the other three original partners have contacts everywhere and in everything. This is what I have been learning for the past six years that I have worked here, since graduating from Harvard Business School. Contacts are everything. So what do you think?”
“Sounds good. Let me think about it. Can I take these?” She stacked the brochures and stuck them in her bag.
“That is fine. Here is my card.” They stood. She followed him out of his office.
“Oh, by the way, I’m also writing a tourist guide to Costa Rica, and I wonder if you’d have a problem with my putting in a blurb about your company? You know, adding it to the section on investments in Costa Rica.”
“Tourist guide? No problem, I don’t know, I mean, we have always gotten our business from referrals, so—I don’t know. I don’t think it is necessary.”
“So is that a yes or a no?”
“I think it is a no, if that is all right. I think that we do not need this. But please call me or come by again and we can talk about your own investment opportunities. What kind of figure did you have in mind, if I might inquire?”
“Around one hundred thousand to begin with,” she said casually.
“Oh, this is a good little sum,” he said. “There is much that we can do.” They stopped in the reception area. “Thank you Lucy for your time. And please, do think with seriousness about this opportunity.”
“Sure,” Lucy said, sauntering out. Back on the street she shook her head. You just never knew. It was always reassuring to be where money was. And yet—it sounded too good to be true, too easy. Harvard, twenty five per cent, teak farms and orange trees. On the other hand, private capital was probably in short supply in these parts. Maybe you could clean up here without getting your hands dirty. Maybe the Four Señors had gone legit since Manny had last heard about them, and now played the capitalist game according to the rules.
What rules were those? That Lucy wasn’t sure of. Not in the wake of the latest implosion of the US economy, and the criminal sleazoids that took the money and ran. What could these guys be doing that could possibly be worse than what the Enron crowd and the Halliburton crowd and the other thieves did back in the USA? Well, with all those Latin American investors they could be laundering millions in drug money, mixing it up with their gringo investors’ cash and making it disappear into the legitimate marketplace. Isn’t that the way the game got played down here? Capitalist thievery of another sort, but capitalist thievery nonetheless.
Back at the hotel she packed her bag yet again, checked out yet again, and took a taxi back to the seedy bus terminal, where along with a few dozen Ticos and half a dozen twenty-year old California surfers who’d come straight from the airport with board bags in hand, she boarded the three pm bus to Tamarindo, party and surf capitol of Guanacaste, Costa Rica’s wild northwest.
CHAPTER FIVE
TAMARINDO TIME
An hour careening down a mountain, two hours north on a hot dry plain, and another two hours west on increasingly smaller, dustier, and bumpier roads got the bus to what appeared to be the center of Tamarindo at tropical nightfall. Downtown consisted of a roundabout encircled by a motley assortment of low-rent restaurants and small hotels, with several hundred scruffy-looking surf n’ hippie kidsters eating or drinking in the streets or in the cafes, or aimlessly milling around, buying and selling beads, trinkets, shorts, tie-dyed shirts, hats, sandals, books, newspapers, and assorted recreational drugs. The bus stopped, Lucy and a few locals and a crew of surfers climbed off. First thing, she heard a wave breaking, fifty yards away across the beach, beyond an open air restaurant. She hoisted her pack, strolled over, and found a table on the side of the room closest to the sea. The floor was sand, the roof was palm thatch held up by hand-cut posts and beams, the cheap white plastic seats and tables were not particularly comfortable, but the menu listed eleven kinds of fresh fish, and a full rack of alcoholic beverages gleamed behind the bar.
The waiter meandered over, took her order for limonada con poquita tequila y una ceviche grande, por favor—her pidgin Spanish sharpening up slowly, day by day, and nearing now the realm of the comprehensible—and she settled in for a look around. A look out west to begin with, for across thirty yards of moon-glowing sand she saw lines of whitewater rolling in, and out beyond them soft little lights on a dozen bobbing boats, and a stripe of moonlight gleaming across the sea. The Pacific.
The cocktail went down cold, the ceviche was fresh and fabulous, and a gang of aging California surfer boys stupefying themselves on tequila shooters at the next table gave her the surf lowdown and several flattering, if ultimately irritating, propositions.
By the time Lucy knocked back the last of her third limonada con tequila, stood up, threw some colones on the table, and headed out, she knew where to surf tomorrow morning and where to sleep tonight. She marched up to Mariela’s, the best cheap hotel in town, cheap because it was across the road rather than on the beach. Lucy fell asleep listening to the lulling roar of the waves mingling with the less lulling roar of SUV taxis bombing back and forth on Tamarindo’s dusty main drag.
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nbsp; She woke in gray dawn light, aching for Harry, shoved the ache aside and put on shorts and a t-shirt and slipped out into the quiet morning. She could hear waves breaking, howler monkeys roaring in the distance, frogs and crickets getting in a last chorus. She crossed the hotel’s garden and emerged through a bougainvillea-entwined gateway into the street. The air felt soft and warm, suffused with the scents of wildflowers and sea salt. Down the street a pair of longboard-bearing surfers silently headed to the beach.
She crossed and picked up a trail that led through a cluster of palm trees in a vacant lot, coming out onto the beach a quarter mile south of the rivermouth. She looked out to sea. Early sun glowed on rocks offshore. A V-shaped squadron of pelicans swooped past, skimming for sardines, floating six inches above the waves that lifted and tumbled shorewards. The two surfers walked north towards the river, then slipped into the sea and paddled out through lines of whitewater. Following them up the beach, Lucy counted seven surfers jockeying for position in the line-up, three and four foot right-breaking peaks fifty yards off the beach. She walked as far as the river, and sat on the sand, watching the surfers to get a sense of the waves. A slight offshore breeze held up each wave for precious seconds, allowing the surfers a chance to carve down the line, climbing and dropping on the face of the wave. God did that look like fun!
She headed south, bound for Nogui’s café on the circle. Over fruit salad and coffee Lucy watched touristy Tamarindo wake up while cross-checking phone numbers. By the time she finished her work it was ten a.m. and the offshore wind had switched onshore. After waxing her rented longboard and attaching the leash to her ankle she paddled out, where the first sight she saw was strange indeed. Glancing down a wave as she paddled over it, she spotted a tall, perfectly-built man with long blond hair carving an elegant longboard bottom turn. As he raced down the wave in her direction, she noticed his flowing locks, his tanned, muscular body, and then noticed, hmmmm, that he was completely nude! She paddled over the wave wondering how many of the longboarders out here surfed au natural. A quick scan of the bodies sitting on boards awaiting waves told her the nudist worked alone. Indeed one of the guys from last night, recognizing her, smirked and said, “So I guess you saw nature boy, huh?”
“You mean that bare-ass wave rider? Yeah, I saw him,” said Lucy. “Seems like prone paddling might be a bit of a pain.”
“Ouch! You’d think. He’s this German guy who’s been living here for like ten years. Calls himself Paradise. He and his wife—her name’s Eden—run a little vegan restaurant in town. Calls it Paradise too. Strange dude, but he taught himself how to surf on this wave before anyone else was riding it. So now he thinks he owns it. Or at least that he has the right to surf it naked.”
“Well, that’s cool, I guess,” said Lucy. “Long as he puts his pants on when he goes to work. He looks like he knows what he’s doing out here.”
“Yeah…hey, here comes a good one. You want it?”
“Hey, thanks,” Lucy said, swinging her board around and paddling shorewards. Three strokes and she had it. Then it had her, as she went straight to the bottom in a classic nose-first pearl dive. She floundered to the surface, slithered back on her board, and paddled farther out. “Sorry, man,” she said to the guy that gave her the wave. “I’m still just figuring this out.”
“No problem, sweetheart,” he said. “Everybody’s gotta learn sometime.” He paddled into a wave, stood, and pulled off a smooth bottom turn just for her. She moved farther out, then sat and watched a while, to see how it was done.
A half hour later she’d caught three waves, got to her feet on two, and made a turn and rode down the line on the last one. Not bad for her first surf since Sayulita.
Maybe one of these years she’d actually get surfing, she thought, if she could just make the time. If she could find something to buy here in Tamarindo it would be perfect. But she’d already scoped the listings in the tourist directory. The two local hotels for sale were priced at one and a half million and three point three million. The place had gone real estate mad. She and her 100K were at least five years too late to Tamarindo.
Lucy ate a sandwich at the café in the Iguana Surf Shop, then climbed into a van with four other tourists for the short trip to the put-in on the San Francisco River estuary. Towing a trailer with six plastic sit-on-top kayaks, they bounced a mile south on a rough dirt road. On the right side of the road, high walls cut the road off from the small hotels, houses, and bed and breakfasts of Playa Langosta. Soon the van bumped down a small hill and stopped in a hard-packed sand parking area beneath some palm trees. The San Francisco River flowed past in front of them, pouring into the sea a hundred yards to the west. On their immediate right, on a small bluff, a hideous pink and green hotel perched, no doubt providing its guests with a magnificent view south down the long stretch of Playa Langosta, but otherwise looming like a transplant from Stalin-era Moscow, a hulking, comrades-on-vacation monstrosity. “Oh my God,” said Lucy. “What is that?”
“That is what happens when a developer has enough money to bribe the building commission into exempting his property from zoning laws,” said the guide, a California transplant named Winnie Johnson who ran the Iguana Surf Shop’s tour business. She’d lived in Tamarindo for eleven years, seen it go from scratch to boom town. “Welcome to the new Tamarindo. Supposed to be a two-story height limit for waterfront buildings. It’s gotta be the worst place in Guanacaste,” she went on. “They put in a septic system big enough for thirty rooms then built 150 rooms so they dump a lot of shit into the river and the ocean, they got a casino with a bar full of hookers imported from the Dominican Republic because they’re cheaper than the San Jose girls, and they don’t even pay their fucking town taxes to help keep up the roads. Plus they shine lights on the beach at night, which totally screws up the turtles.” Lucy and the five other tourists and the other guide, a local kid named Raphael, all shook their heads disapprovingly. “I’ll say no more,” Winnie said, “Except that I hope none of you are staying there.”
Lucy wandered over for a closer look at the hotel. It was called the Hotel Marcello Playa Langosta; the construction sign still standing announced the names of the architect, the contractor, and the developer; it also listed those who’d financed the project. Leading off that list Lucy saw the Four Señors.
Once they got in the kayaks and headed upstream, it took all of ten minutes to round a bend and put the hotel entirely out of sight, if not quite out of mind. Soon they were deep in the estuary, observing howler monkeys in the trees, alligators in the mud, and countless varieties of birds. Winnie had given each of them a plastic-covered sheet with about a hundred bird species listed in English, Spanish, German, French, and Italian, with a grease pencil attached. As they paddled quietly through the estuary, she’d call out softly as they spotted another species; after an hour, Lucy had checked off twenty-seven. As they swung around a bend in the stream, six kayaks in a tight cluster, they came upon the twenty-eighth: the roseate spoonbill. Caught by surprise, a huge flock of the bright pink beauties rose into the air in an explosion of hot color that filled the sky. The kayakers laughed and screamed, overwhelmed by the wind full of pink wings. The flock quickly disappeared behind the tree line, settling into the next bend in the river; the paddlers turned around and rode the dropping tide down the river, emerging twenty minutes later into the estuary. “By the way, you’re right,” Lucy said to Winnie as they outhauled the boats. “That hotel is about the ugliest thing I’ve seen in Costa Rica. It really sucks.”
“You should have seen this spot before they built it,” Winnie said. “Alligators in the river, monkeys everywhere, leatherbacks laying eggs on this beach from the rivermouth south for miles. Now they don’t lay eggs within a mile of here, and nobody knows how many are still showing up farther down. They haven’t got the tourism organized here like up at Grande. Plus a crew of local fishermen used to park on the bluff there all day long. They’d sit and drink beer and play dominos, every now and then take a
boat out and catch something. You could throw a net off the beach and catch your dinner. Or buy it from the fishermen for a buck. Now they’re all gone. There were even a couple of scarlet macaws.” She shook her head. “They’re gone too. And they won’t be back.” She smiled fiercely. “Not unless someone blows that fucker up.”
“At least there are still a lot of birds up the river,” Lucy said.
“Yeah, but this is a tidal estuary, so when the tide comes in here it pushes whatever comes out of that hotel into the river ecosystem. You should see the gardeners at work on the landscaping. It’s a total overload of insecticide, once a week. You know its going right through the ground and into the river. Along with a load of tourist poop. And they didn’t even hire local people to work here. Brought in a bunch of Nicaraguans who’ll work for like, nothing. As if the two bucks an hour a Tico might demand is way too rich. No,” she concluded, “There’s not one good thing to be said about this place.”
CHAPTER SIX
THE LEATHERBACK BLUES
Lucy woke in darkness, put on sunscreen and clothes, then packed and left the hotel.
Faint light rimmed the eastern sky as she stopped at the water’s edge and got her bearings. Five-thirty am. The tide headed out. Behind her, the lights of Tamarindo were few, but it looked like a metropolis compared to the black void of Playa Grande, a pale strand disappearing into darkness stretching north from the river. She headed that way.
At the riverbank she stopped. Waist deep, fifty yards across, not too fierce a current. She could do this. Ford a river in the darkness. One known to be home to alligators, though they were rarely seen this far downstream. On the other hand the Cocodril restaurant, three hundred yards away on the main drag through Tamarindo, had a tiny little pond behind it, and one enormous crocodile occupied that pond, living the high life on a diet of roast chickens tossed by patrons off the restaurant’s deck. Supposing that croc had taken a walk on this particular night? Supposing some disoriented croc got scared by a drunk golfer on the notorious 14th hole of the estuary golf course, where crocs napped on the green, and floated downstream? That guy over in Tortuguero might have gotten shot, but he had also gotten gnawed by gators, and it was not a pretty sight.
Lucy's Money: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 4) Page 7
