James Grippando - Last to die

“Except for maybe one thing,” said Jack.

“What’s that?”

“Based on her will, I’d say revenge.”

Their eyes met and held. Finally she said, “You’re the first person I’ve talked to about this. I don’t even think Sally’s estate lawyer knows everything.”

“Thank you for telling me. I was hoping that if I came all this way I’d get to the truth.”

“Maybe it’s time I got to the truth, too. The whole truth.”

“How do you mean?”

“I was thinking about what you said yesterday, how you wondered if Sally might have reached such a low point in her life that she hired someone to shoot her. Other than myself, I can think of only one other person who would have known her well enough to answer that question.”

“I’m listening.”

A sparkle came to her eye, as if she were suddenly energized. “How’d you like to meet Sally’s rich ex-husband?”

“I thought he lived in France.”

“He’s French, but he lives here most of the year.”

“You can arrange a meeting?”

“No promises, but with your friend Theo tagging along, I think we can pull off just about anything. Brains, beauty, brawn. How can we miss?”

“I know which of us is the brawn. So that must make me-”

“The baggage,” she said with a wink, as if to confirm that she was two of the three. “Now go get your brawny friend. Time’s a-wasting.”

The road south was paved all the way to Man, a city of about 150,000 people in a breathtaking geographical setting. It was called the “town of eighteen peaks,” perhaps an overly romantic appellation for a confusing and frankly unattractive collection of urban districts that were spread across a valley and surrounded by mountains. Jack had no preconceived notion of West African cities, but Man reminded him of something else entirely, a place he just couldn’t put his finger on, until Theo spoke up.

“Like a shitty Colorado town without all the white people.”

They spent the night in Man, then set out in the morning for the coffee and cocoa farming region in western Côte d’Ivoire. The air had been scrubbed clean by an early shower, one last tropical blast at the tail end of a seven-month rainy season. Driving at the higher altitudes was a pleasant change from the dusty trek across the baked northern grasslands, but it wasn’t as beautiful as Jack had imagined it. High, forest-strewn ridges offered some insight into how the entire region had looked years earlier, before logging and agriculture claimed the rain forests.

“Are we there yet?” asked Theo.

Jack and Rene were in front, Theo in back. Theo flashed him a big grin in the rearview mirror, revealing not his teeth but the wedge of an orange that for some childish reason made Jack laugh. It reminded Jack of something Nate would have done, which made him think of Kelsey, which made him feel slightly guilty for having discreetly but frequently admired the shape of Rene’s legs since leaving Man. It got him to thinking that maybe he wasn’t interested in Kelsey after all. Maybe she’d simply managed to breathe life into a part of himself that he’d left for dead with his divorce.

Good thing we nipped it in the bud, he thought. Perhaps it was no coincidence that he’d jumped at the chance to leave the country at the first sign of anything serious between them.

“About another half hour,” said Rene.

Theo grumbled and went back to sleep. Over the next few miles, the road turned into dirt tracks. All signs of forest disappeared, giving way to row after row of cultivated cacao trees. Thousands of them stretched for miles up the hills and into the valley, each one about twenty feet tall with large, glossy green leaves.

“Slow down,” said Rene.

Jack cut his speed to a crawl as she pointed to a group of workers in the field. The team leaders were shirtless young men, each of them armed with a long pole that had a mitten-shaped knife at the end. It was their job to select the ripe cacao pods, slice them off the tree, and let them fall to the ground. Behind them were even younger-looking men, more likely boys, machete in hand and a cigarette clenched between their teeth as they performed the stoop-labor ritual of gathering the pods and cracking them open for a handful of cocoa beans.

“That boy over there,” she said. “Probably no more than ten years old.”

Again, Jack thought of Nate. “Where do these kids come from?”

“All over. Mali, Burkina Faso. The poorest countries you can imagine.”

“How do they get here?”

“Sometimes they’re stolen. Usually they’re tricked. Locateurs-recruiters-will go to bus stations, city markets, wherever, and promise these kids the good life. It’s all a con. That team of five over there-Sally’s ex-husband probably paid some locateur sixty bucks for the lot of them.”

“This is his plantation?”

“One of his. One of twenty thousand.”

“Twenty thousand?” he said with surprise.

“Sounds like a lot, but there are over six hundred thousand coffee and cocoa farms in this country.”

“That’s a lot of beans.”

“A lot of money,” she said, her gaze drifting back toward the workers in the field. “And a lot of kids.”

He glanced in her direction, catching a glimpse of the genuine concern in her eyes. He felt a strange rush of conflicting emotions, both sadness over the tragedy she was fighting and admiration for the passion with which she fought. It seemed like a strangely selfish thought, coming to him as it did while mere boys toiled in the fields around him, but Rene was definitely the kind of woman who could make a divorced man feel alive again.

“Turn down this road,” she said.

The dirt tracks turned into paved highway, and Jack realized that their little detour was over. “Where to now?” he asked.

“Almost as far as Daloa. Jean Luc has a house there.”

Jack had to think a moment, having almost forgotten that Jean Luc was the name of Sally’s rich second ex-husband. “Have you ever met him?”

“No.”

“Know anything about him?”

“He’s a French citizen, but he’s lived most of his life here.”

“Obviously wealthy.”

“Obviously. I just gave you some idea of his labor cost.”

“Good money in chocolate, I guess.”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘good.’”

“I assume Sally wasn’t unaware of his wealth when she set her sights on him.”

“He was reasonably handsome in the one photograph I’ve seen. But he was in his mid-sixties. Draw your own conclusions.”

They stopped at the gate at the end of the paved road. An armed guard emerged from the guardhouse.

Theo stirred in the backseat and said, “You want me to take care of this?”

“I’ll handle it,” said Rene. “This is one instance where looking like my sister should definitely be an advantage.”

“Like it’s ever a disadvantage,” said Theo.

She gave a little smile, then got out of the truck. The guard approached and met her halfway. Jack could hear them talking, but they were speaking French.

“What’s she saying?” asked Theo.

“Who do I look like, Maurice Chevalier? At this point, all we can do is trust her.”

“You’re cool with that?”

“I am.”

“Good. Cuz if she fucking sells me to this guy, I’m coming after your ass with that machete.”

Jack started humming “Thank Heaven, for Little Girls.” Rene and the guard finished their conversation with an exchange of smiles and multiple expressions of merci, merci, all of which Jack took as a good sign. She got back in the car, and the guard opened the gate to let them pass.

“What did you tell him?” asked Jack.