The Betrayers

by Harold Robbins

  “Uh huh. Where’d you hear that?”

  “A little birdie told me.”

  She avoided my eyes.

  It was Jack. The bastard had hollered me off to the cops.

  “I’ve got to get back. I’ll take this and make sure it gets to the local preservation society.”

  She grabbed the head and I grabbed her. She held onto the head and twisted in my arms. The button flew off the top of her light dress. Her face came around to me and for a stunning moment we were only a kiss apart.

  I found myself kissing her, pressing her breasts again my bare chest. At first she was stiff, then suddenly her lips met mine hungrily.

  She broke away and staggered back, locking eyes with me.

  “I—I—” She dropped the head and ran out the door.

  I stood still, not moving a muscle. I didn’t know what to think. Then I cursed myself.

  The last thing I wanted to do was complicate Sarah’s life. It was a stupid move on my part. I didn’t want to hurt her.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  I was all stirred up. I took some deep breaths to get my breathing going and my testosterone cooled off.

  I picked up the head. It wasn’t damaged. The Mayans knew how to make them so they lasted.

  A more pressing matter than my sexual transgressions was at hand. Jack had ratted me out to the police, so I could expect an official visit at any time. Things went slow in the colony, but it was inevitable that the local police inspector would get it ultimately into gear and pay me a visit.

  One option would be to simply get rid of the incriminating evidence, but I had too much into it—and was too innately greedy—to get rid of my stock in trade. I grabbed a fisherman’s net that Suez and I used to drop into the bay and drag behind his boat as we drank beer and talked about “old times.” I filled the net with the four artifacts I had and took them out to a pond a hundred meters behind my bungalow. I tied one of the lines from the net to a limb that hung out into the water and tossed the bundle into the pond. It sank out of sight in the dark green water. The local inspector wasn’t a rocket scientist and it would take at least someone capable of reaching the moon to figure out that my hoard was stashed in the murky waters.

  I went back into the house, completely satisfied with my deception, wondering only if the crocodiles out at the pond would eat stone.

  27

  A few days later I was in Corozal making a deal on another artifact that I was helping preserve for prosperity when I got a message from Jack that there was mechanical trouble at the sugarcane processing plant.

  I hadn’t given up the artifact business, but the police interest in my activities—despite the fact the inspector found nothing when he made a search—had cooled the trade, which left me flapping around, looking for another way to make money. I still worked for Jack, helping him run the plantation and processing plant, but it was a part-time job for me for two reasons—he didn’t pay me much, and I avoided too much direct contact with him simply because I didn’t like him. Now that I knew he’d hollered me out to the authorities, I liked him even less.

  One of the first lessons I learned in gangs on the streets of Leningrad was to always stand back-to-back when me and my mates were in a fight with outsiders. Jack had never learned the lesson. It never bothered him that getting me into the police commissioner’s clink might embarrass his wife because I was “family.” The only reason I wasn’t in the clink was because Sarah had warned me.

  Hanging around Jack really had diminishing returns. The more I had gotten to know him, the less I liked him. He treated Sarah badly and made no bones about the fact he had girlfriends. I didn’t care what he did in private, but when I’d see him at a Corozal bar with a couple whores hanging onto him, I wanted to kick his ass for not having any class.

  Suez’s pickup was already there when I pulled into the plant. The retired engineer was good at what he called bailing-wire-and-chewing-gum repairs on the plant equipment. I hopped out of the jeep and waved to the outside workers, returning their greetings as I hurried toward the plant entrance.

  The plant was a mile downriver from the heart of the plantation, where Jack and Sarah’s living quarters were located, and had been positioned to take advantage of plantations with river access. It was operating at half-capacity since the earthquake lifted the river bottom. I’d come to think of the earthquake as an attitude adjustment God gave Jack. But it didn’t improve the bastard’s disposition.

  The plant was a large, rambling, awkward set of tin buildings that looked like a barn and a couple sheds shoved together, set at a wide point in the river where there was room for river barges to tie up.

  The cane came in by cart, truck and barge, where it was processed into raw sugar and grades of molasses for export.

  Already trimmed in the field, the pieces of cane were put into a cutter that had revolving blades that chopped and shredded it. The cutter was the problem at the moment. Suez had told Jack repeatedly that the engine that ran it needed to be replaced, but Jack kept having him patch it up rather than lower the plant’s poor cash flow by spending the money for a new machine.

  I liked Suez. He was very British, proper, stuffy, but had a good dry—and wry—sense of humor. Most of all, I liked his range of technical knowledge. I was always fascinated about the way things work, and he knew, as I suppose the English grandfather I never met knew, how one piece of something fitted into another and did this or that. I spent many hours at his place, learning about machines and equipment. He could be a big bore, though, talking about his work on maintenance of the Suez Canal during the 1930s and the war years. His backyard was laid out as a miniature Suez Canal with ponds for the Mediterranean and Red Sea. Circling it was a model train he called the Orient Express.

  He retired after the war and came to the colony to live with his cousin, a widow. She died before his feet touched land and he moved into her house and soon became a colonial character.

  After I bought the army surplus jeep, he guided me as I literally field-stripped the jeep’s engine and put it back together so that it worked almost as well as it did before. Jack didn’t know it, but I could have repaired any machinery in the plant. I didn’t let him know my mechanical talents because I would have gotten my hands dirty for nothing, he wouldn’t have even given me his gratitude.

  Even though most people called him Suez, which was how I thought of him, I was always polite and called him Mr. Lawrence. He never asked me to call him by his first name and, in fact, I didn’t know what it was.

  I found him up to his knees in grease and curses by the cutter.

  “That bad?” I asked.

  “Worse.”

  “Terminal?”

  “Worse. It will work for another couple months and your uncle will call me again to fix it.”

  The sugarcane stalks were brought through big double-doors and into the plant where they were fed into the cutter. After they were cut and shredded, they were fed into a crusher, where they were squeezed to get the juice out.

  Once the sugar juice was extracted, the vegetable residue left from the crushed cane, bagasse, was allowed to further dry. It would become important in the process.

  The sugarcane juice had to be boiled at several stages and that took heat. It would have been too expensive to import petroleum to fire the boilers. Fortunately, the dry bagasse burned well, thus the sugarcane not only provided the essence to be extracted, it even provided the energy source for the extraction. Without the bagasse, wood, coal or petrol would have to be used, and that would make processing the cane much more expensive.

  From the crusher, the juice flowed to a tank with another fire heating it, then to a second heated tank, this one an evaporator that had an opening at the top that allowed steam to escape and the juice to condense into a thicker syrup. At that point we added already processed sugar granules to the mixture. The granules acted as seed crystals, which helped the syrup crystallize.

  When as much sugar as possible had cr
ystallized in the syrup, the mixture was spun in a centrifuge, which separated the remaining syrup from the raw sugar crystals, separating out the crystals and allowing them to dry.

  Bags were filled with the crystals, which were pale brown to yellow colored. This was the raw sugar, which was stacked on barges that were towed to Belize Town where the bags were loaded onto freighters. At the receiving end, usually Britain and the States, the raw sugar was remelted and processed at a refinery into retail and wholesale baking products.

  Sugar is sweet, but there was a byproduct of it that interested me even more.

  Molasses.

  For some people, it’s the syrup you put on pancakes, used in cookies and candy or even put in feed for cattle. For me, molasses had more exotic—and profitable—aspects. I got the idea from the local bush-rum stills and the vodka still I saw in Russia.

  Why not make vodka from sugarcane juice?

  When sugar was boiled at the plantation’s processing plant, some of the juice extracted didn’t turn into sugar crystals, but stayed in syrup form. The juice was called molasses. It got separated in several stages, creating different grades of molasses that were put to different uses.

  The first separation of molasses from the sugar crystal process created molasses that was the sweetest and lightest in color. This was considered a premium product. One use of it was to make fine rums.

  The second extraction created a darker molasses—also used in rum, candy making and cooking, but wasn’t as sweet and light as the first extraction, and not considered as high quality.

  The final separation of sugar crystals from liquid created a dark, heavy, thick and sticky syrup with little sugar content. This was called blackstrap molasses. Blackstrap and the rest of the residue was mostly turned into animal feed and sold to farmers. There wasn’t a big market for it among the poor farmers of the colony, and it was too cheap to export, so a lot of it was just poured into our fields under Jack’s theory that it would make a good fertilizer.

  Bush rums were made by Creoles out of anything they could find to create the product. Much of it wasn’t true rum but tafia, made from impure molasses.

  Now that smuggling pre-Columbian antiquities had been reduced to a crawl, I had to figure out a way to make money. And that wasn’t easy in the colony. Life was hard. This wasn’t Hong Kong or Bermuda. No tourists came here to spend money. We didn’t have oil wells or fine resorts or anything else that made money. Sugarcane, bananas and logging were not the games of kings, but of absentee British owners who tried to get as much work for as little money out of the locals. I couldn’t make a fortune working at the plantation—any real money to be made was kept by Jack and he wasn’t getting rich. He spent half his time pleading with the Scottish investors not to sell out, promising them things were going to get better.

  The idea of turning sugarcane into vodka had been the reason I had Suez talk to Garcia’s widow.

  Suez stood up, wiping his greasy hands on cloth. “Throw the switch,” he told Allen, the Creole shift foreman.

  Allen threw the switch and the cutter choked, coughed and spit into action.

  I walked Suez to his car.

  “By the way, Nick, I talked to Garcia’s widow about you,” he said.

  “Does she have a first name? Everyone calls her Garcia’s widow.”

  He thought for a moment. “Sarita. She’d like to meet you. She’s tired of hassling with the workers. She has a few good year-round people, but the ones she brings in for the harvest cheat her. Just drop by and say hello so she can get your measure.”

  “Good. Thanks, I appreciate it.” I could have approached the woman myself, but figured it was better if Suez talked to her first. Jack had alienated so many people in the colony, I didn’t know what my reception would be if someone like Suez wasn’t vouching for me. Especially when she found out I had little actual interest in running her farm.

  “What’s your uncle going to say when he finds out you’re running the widow’s operation?”

  “I don’t care what he says. He’s gotten enough of my sweat.”

  “I heard he hit another worker. He’s getting a mean reputation, drinking and—”

  “Fucking.” I said what Suez was too polite to say.

  “That too. Well, I have to get back to my own digs and get some work done. Drop over in a day or two and I’ll take you for a ride in my Bulldog. I can fly us almost anywhere in the Caribbean.”

  “I’ll wait until you have parachutes.”

  His Bulldog was the remains of a two-seater plane he bought that had been used in government mapping operations before it did a nosedive on takeoff. He had put it back together, but I wasn’t anxious to find out if all the screws and bolts were tight.

  Jack pulled up in his Land Rover before I’d made it back into the plant.

  “Suez been here?”

  “He just left. It’s been patched again.”

  “Fucking climate, people rust in it, no wonder equipment never lasts. Did you take care of the problem with the southwest fields? I want those lazy bastards fired.”

  “I took care of it.” Without firing anyone. The workers weren’t lazy—they were offended by Jack calling them “blackamoors.” He was the only one who used the demeaning phrase for black Creoles. No one ever told him that you can get more work out of people with sugar than vinegar.

  “Don’t let it happen again. Next time it does, I’m going to take it out of your hide.”

  I could smell the booze on him. And the cunt. He’d been out fucking around behind Sarah’s back again, this time in broad daylight on a work day.

  I blew. “What did you say? You’re gonna what?” I squared off to him with my fists clenched. “I’m tired of taking your shit. I’m outta here. You keep it up and no one will work with you.”

  “I don’t need you. Up yours. Go on, get out.”

  He stomped off and I went to my jeep. I drove like a maniac to the plantation. I no longer had any personal items there, but I knew family dinners were going to be a thing of the past and I had to say something to Sarah. I hadn’t been able to face her since I kissed her in my bungalow.

  She was on her knees working in the garden when I pulled in and hopped out of the jeep. She looked up and smiled as I came over.

  “Nicky, I was just thinking about you. I got the nicest beef roast—” She stopped when she saw my face. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just quit.”

  She got to her feet and brushed off her knees.

  “I was wondering when it was going to happen. Jack is a bit difficult—”

  “No, he’s impossible.” I almost said he was a “prick” but Sarah wasn’t the kind of woman that deserved such language. “I’m sorry, Sarah. You’ve been really terrific to me, but I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “I understand. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know, I have a few things in the fire.”

  She shook her head. “You’re not going to—”

  I grinned and shook my head. “I’m all through with the Mayan stuff. It’s the straight and narrow for me now.” It was better to lie to a nice person like Sarah than worry her.

  “I spoke to the police inspector about you,” she said. “I told him you were a good boy, just a little wild.”

  We both laughed at the description.

  She sighed. “Well, you can still come to dinners—”

  “You know I can’t.”

  Her cheeks blushed because my comment cut both ways.

  “Oh God, I’ll miss your pretty face at dinner.”

  She gave me a hug and I held her tight. She suddenly broke loose.

  “Jack!”

  The fucker had pulled up and was staring at us through the windshield of the Rover.

  I squeezed Sarah’s hand and gave her a peck on the cheek. “I’ll see you later.”

  Jack got out of the Rover and slammed the door as I walked toward him and the jeep. His face was red and his eyes ugly with rage.
<
br />   “There’s nothing between Sarah and me, and you know that,” I said. “You lay one hand on her and I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

  “You’re gonna what?”

  I got into his face. “You heard me, you prick. I’m not a ninety-pound woman. You hit Sarah and you’ll be shipped back home in a pine box.”

  I got into the jeep and left before I did anything I would regret. I hadn’t lied to Jack, though, when I said I’d kill the sonofabitch if he hit Sarah. I was that sick of him and his bullshit.

  Instead of heading home, I turned toward the farm of Garcia’s widow.

  28

  “You know I’m Garifuna,” she said.

  We were walking the farm. It was considered a big farm, but only a fraction the size of the plantation that Jack ran. Another difference was that the plantation was owned by half a dozen investors while Sarita Garcia’s farm belonged to her alone. It wasn’t a big enough place to get rich on, but it could provide a good living if it was managed correctly.

  “Yes, I know, it’s a mixture of Carib Indians and African slaves.”

  “No, not slaves. Our ancestors escaped from the slave ships and fought the slave owners until they were granted their freedom. That is the difference between us and the Creoles; they are descendants of slaves, we never submitted.”

  Suez had told me about the Garifuna, and I had also heard stories about her from others—people called her “Voodoo Lady” because her people claim to be able to connect to the spirit world. But the only spirits I was interested in were the ones that came out of a bottle when you drank from it.

  Personally, I didn’t care what they called her. All I knew was that she was the most sensuous women I had seen in the region. There were many good-looking Creole girls around, a few Mexican ones also, but none of them stirred my furnace like this woman. I’d seen her before at the marketplace in Corozal, but hadn’t gotten a real close look at her. Suez thought she was in her forties, but to me she looked much younger than that. I couldn’t help but notice her lush body, full and succulent, as I was walking up to her porch when she came out of the house, barefooted and wearing the standard loose, cotton shift that permitted some ventilation in the humid climate.