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computer stood a pitcher of iced tea spiked with vodka, an explosive mixture she was very proud of having invented. On the other side lay her sailor’s pipe, cold. She was resigned to smoking less because her cough was a constant annoyance, but she kept the filled pipe for company: The smell of black tobacco soothed her soul. “At sixty-five there are not many vices an old witch like myself can indulge in,” she thought. She was not inclined to give up any of her vices, but if she didn’t stop smoking, her lungs were going to explode.
    Kate had been working for six months to organize the Diamond Foundation, which she had created with the famous anthropologist Ludovic Leblanc, whom, it should be mentioned in passing, she considered her personal enemy. She detested that kind of work, but if she didn’t do it, her grandson, Alexander, would never forgive her. “I’m a professional who likes action, I report on travels and adventure, I’m not a bureaucrat,” she sighed between sips of her vodka-spiked tea—or, more accurately, hertea-spiked vodka.
    Besides struggling with the matter of the foundation, she had had to fly twice to Caracas to testify in the trial against Mauro Carías and Dr. Omayra Torres, the persons responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Indians infected with smallpox. Mauro Carías was not present at the trial because he was on life support in a private clinic. It would have been better for him had the Indian who clubbed him finished the job.
    Things were getting complicated for Kate Cold; International Geographic had commissioned her to write an article on the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon. It was not wise for her to keep postponing the trip, because they might give the assignment to another reporter; she knew, however, that she couldn’t leave before she cured her cough. That small country was set amid the peaks of the Himalayas, where the climate was very treacherous; the temperature could drop thirty degrees within a few hours. The idea of consulting a physician never entered her mind, of course. She had never gone to a doctor in her life and she wasn’t about to start now; she had a terrible opinion of professionals who charge by the hour. (She charged by the word.) It seemed obvious to her that no doctor was in a hurry to have his patient get well, and for that reason she preferred home remedies. She had placed her faith in some tree bark she’d brought back from the Amazon. A hundred-year-old shaman by the name of Walimai had assured her that the bark was good for disorders of the nose and mouth and would leave her lungs like new. Kate had ground this natural remedy in the blender, and then, to disguise the bitter taste, had added it to her iced tea and vodka, drinking the concoction all day with great determination. The medicine had not yet given results, which was what she was explaining that very moment to ProfessorLudovic Leblanc by e-mail.
    Nothing made Cold and Leblanc as happy as mutually detesting one another—and never losing an opportunity to show it. They had no shortage of excuses, because they were inescapably united by the Diamond Foundation: he being the president and she the money manager. Their common effort for the foundation forced them to communicate almost daily, and they did that by e-mail in order not to hear the other’s voice on the telephone. They were determined to see each other as little as possible.
    The Diamond Foundation had been created to protect the Amazon tribes in general and the People of the Mist in particular, as Alexander had decreed. Professor Ludovic Leblanc was writing a heavy academic tome on that tribe—and on his own role in that adventure, although the truth was that the Indians had been miraculously saved from genocide by Alexander and his Brazilian friend Nadia Santos, not by Leblanc.
    As she looked back on those weeks in the jungle, Kate had to smile. When they had left for their trip to the Amazon, her grandson had been a coddled little