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said.
    “Five hundred, partner. I’m not made of money.” The German looked at him and shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, five-hundred. Das geht .”
    “If we find this thing, we have to sell it. How do we do that? We can’t exactly take it to London on a plane,” Russell said.
    “No, but it’s not illegal either. You own it if you find it on private property. I told you. It’s not like Mexico.”
    “Yes, I know. I looked into it. But how do we sell it?”
    “Carl. He said he’d buy anything we find. You can start with the stuff on the lawn if you want.”
    “Carl?”
    “Carl Van Diemen. The Dutchman who lives in Antigua,” Mahler said. “How do you think he paid for his big fancy house there?”
    Russell had met Carl Van Diemen once. “I know him. I thought his daddy was rich or something,” Russell said.
    “His daddy is rich, so … why you so pissing?”
    “It’s, why are you so pissed,” Russell said.
    “Okay, why?”
    “I think I just did probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. The German started to laugh at him.
    A clap of thunder rolled over the house and shook them. Russell started to laugh too. It was crazy. He’d gone crazy. It had finally happened. Russell had heard countless stories about people like him, foreigners who went around the bend. Foreigners who had been here too long. He’d been here three fucking years. That was long enough to go crazy, he supposed. The rain hammered the roof.
    “We’re both crazy,” the German said.
    “Yeah, but you have a PhD from the University of Düsseldorf—almost,” Russell said, still smiling. The laughing had broken his dark mood. Okay, he was crazy. Okay, he’d just bought a coffee plantation in the middle of nowhere because some German hairball had convinced him that a giant red-jade jaguar worth a fortune was buried on it! He started to laugh again, the kind of laughter he couldn’t remember since he’d been a stock trader in New York, when he’d lost ten million dollars almost overnight. He looked up, holding his sides because they’d started to hurt. Mahler was looking at him very seriously.
    “Fran…Fran…Frankfurt,” the German said, dead serious.
    “What?” Russell said. He finally stopped laughing.
    “Not Düsseldorf. Fran…Frankfurt,” Mahler said, very seriously.
    “No shit! What the fuck difference does it make!” Russell said.
    “It makes a difference.” Mahler smiled like he’d just found some money lying on the carpet.
    “Yeah? Why?”
    “Because everyone in Düss… Düsseldorf is a fucking idiot. They couldn’t find an elephant in a coal mine.” And he started to laugh again.
    While they were laughing, the girl—the one who had opened the gate for Russell—crossed below in the garden. Mahler turned when he saw Russell looking. He said something in German. Russell didn’t have to speak German to understand what Mahler had said about the girl; it was universal. She was a goddess.
    “Okay. Tomorrow we start,” Mahler said, turning back around.
     
     

THREE
     
September 1, 1973
San Francisco
     
    They say you shot a man,” Montgomery Price said. Isabella’s ex-husband was a tall, blond Protestant from a good San Francisco family, with a fabulous career as an IBM executive in front of him.
    He had won an award—in fact, it had been presented to him by J. P. Smith, the grandson of IBM’s founder. It had been the proudest moment of Montgomery’s life. He had sold more mainframe computers than any other salesman on the West Coast. Only the New York office had outsold him.
    The award was an important milestone in his career. The day Montgomery won the award, he knew he would have to divorce Isabella. He was smart enough, at 31, to comprehend the extent of his mistake in marrying her. He was still young enough to fix the one thing wrong with his life. He’d simply married the wrong damn woman; it hit him as he went back to his seat, award in hand, and glanced at Isabella