“What a wild day you had,” she said. “How, pray tell, did you escape from all these armed men?”
“Don’t you think what you should be asking is what are all these criminals doing on my ranch?” said Remi.
Sarah Allersby smiled indulgently. “Think about the Everglades National Park in your country. It’s about one-point-five million acres. The Estancia Guerrero is more than twice that size. It’s just one of several tracts that I own in different regions of Guatemala. There’s no way to keep everyone off that land. Parts of it are unreachable except on foot. The peasant people have been in and out of there for thousands of years, no doubt plenty of them up to no good. I do employ a few men in the district to prevent commercial logging of rare woods, poaching of endangered species, the looting of archaeological sites. But armed combat with drug gangs is the government’s job, not mine.”
Sam said, “We thought we’d let you know about the illegal activity going on inside your property.”
Sarah Allersby leaned forward, an unconscious posture that made her look like a cat about to spring. “You sound as though you have doubts.”
Remi shrugged. “All I can be sure of is that you’re informed now.” She offered her hand to Sarah, who took it. “Thank you for giving us a few minutes of your time.” They stepped through the door to the foyer, and Sarah emerged behind them.
“It’s not likely to happen again,” she said. As she walked across the old tiles in the other direction, she added, “I just assumed you were here to say something amusing about my Mayan codex.”
Remi stopped and turned. “Your Mayan codex?”
Sarah Allersby laughed. “Did I say that? How silly of me.” She kept walking. As she disappeared through another doorway, the front door opened behind the Fargos. The servant who had let them in appeared. Now he was accompanied by two other men in suits. They held the heavy door open so the Fargos’ exit would not be delayed.
As soon as they were outside, Remi said, “Well, that wasn’t very satisfying.”
“Let’s try another way to get some action,” Sam said.
Sam and Remi walked down the steps and out to the street. They t
urned to the right and walked another hundred yards, and then Sam stopped and waved down a taxi. “Avenida Reforma. The embassy of the United States.”
At the embassy, the receptionist behind the desk asked them to wait while she tried to get a member of the staff to speak with them. Five minutes later, a woman appeared from a door beyond the desk and walked up to them. “I’m Amy Costa, State Department. Come to my office.” When they were inside, she said, “How can I help you today?”
Sam and Remi told her the story of what had happened on and near the Estancia Guerrero. They told her about the men who had tracked and attacked them, the vast plantation of marijuana plants and coca trees, the truck convoys. They described the doctor and the priest who had asked them to submit their pleas to Sarah Allersby and her response. And, finally, Sam told her about the Mayan codex.
“If the codex is in her possession, or is found to have ever been in her possession, then she got it by having men impersonate federal officials at the University of California in San Diego and steal it.”
Amy Costa wrote a report as she listened, only interrupting to ask for dates or approximate location data that had been recorded on their phones. When they had finished their story, she said, “We will be passing this information on to the Guatemalan government. But don’t be too impatient about results.”
“Why not?” asked Remi.
“The government has been doing a valiant job of trying to control the drug traffickers and growers, who are also destroying the forests, particularly in the Petén region, to make giant cattle ranches. But the drug gangs have them outnumbered and outgunned. In the past couple of years, the police have taken back about three hundred thousand acres from the drug lords, but that’s a tiny fraction of the total.”
“What about Sarah Allersby?”
“We’ve been aware of her since she arrived in the country, of course. She’s a very visible personality on the European party scene—beautiful, rich, uninhibited, flamboyant. She’s almost a celebrity in this city. And I’d not be at all surprised if she is behind the theft of the Mayan codex. She thinks laws are local customs for the unintelligent and unimaginative. But like aristocrats everywhere, she doesn’t do the unpleasant things herself. She hires people like the impostors who took the codex. It’s highly unlikely that she would ever be charged with a crime here.” She paused. “Any crime.”
“Really?” said Remi. “But she’s a foreigner just like us.”
“There’s a difference.” She paused. “What I’m about to tell you is off the record. She’s been here for years, making herself socially and financially useful to lots of powerful people. She’s a huge landowner, and while you can’t buy the old owner’s social status with the land, obvious wealth is certainly a good way to get invitations. She’s always contributed to the political campaigns of potential winners—and, even more important, to the sure losers who are well connected. She can accomplish a lot with a phone call, or even a hint dropped at a party.”
Sam said, “Can’t we at least get the Guatemalan police to take a look at the Estancia? Thousands of acres of plants in the fields and tons of buds in the drying barns are pretty hard to hide. And if they examined her operations, her offices, her houses, they couldn’t help but find—”
“The Mayan codex?”
“Well, that’s what we’d hope. But certainly evidence that she’s been profiting from these drug operations.”
Amy Costa slowly shook her head. “That would be too vast an undertaking. The authorities know that in the north and the west, the cartels have been operating in the big stretches of wilderness. The police would love to stop them. But what you’re describing won’t happen. If they found every single thing you saw, they still wouldn’t arrest Sarah Allersby. Don’t you see? She would be the prime victim. They could arrest a hundred poor Mayan peasants who took jobs tending the crop. All the action—the dirty deals, the money changing hands—took place in somebody’s fancy house here in the capital. In Guatemala, if you’re rich enough to own millions of acres in the countryside, you’re too rich to live there.”
“But you’ll pass on the information to the police?”
“Of course,” she said. “This isn’t one crime, it’s a war. We just keep on trying. What you’ve told me may turn out to be helpful, even important, sometime. It may put somebody away.”
Sam said, “Do you think we should go to the federal police too?”