Kingdom of the Golden Dragon by Isabel Allende Read Free Book Online

boy—or a spoiled brat, as she called him—but by the time they returned, he had become a man. Alexander—or Jaguar as he had got it in his head he wanted to be called—had been very brave; in all fairness she had to admit that. She was proud of him. The foundation existed only because of Alex and Nadia; without them the project would have been nothing but an idea, because the two young people had provided the financing.
    In the beginning, the professor tried to have the organization named after him: the Ludovic Leblanc Foundation. He was convinced that his name would attract the press and possible benefactors who would contribute to the projectwith grants. Kate, however, did not allow him to finish the sentence. “You will have to walk over my dead body before you put the capital furnished by my grandson in your own name, Leblanc,” she interrupted.
    The anthropologist had to give in because she had the three fabulous diamonds from the Amazon. Like the jeweler Rosenblat, Ludovic Leblanc did not believe a word of the story about those extraordinary stones. Diamonds in an eagle’s nest? Leblanc suspected that the guide, César Santos, Nadia’s father, had access to a secret mine deep in the jungle, and that was where the girl had obtained the stones. He cherished the fantasy of returning to the Amazon and convincing the guide to share the riches with him. It was a harebrained dream; he was getting old, his joints hurt, and he no longer had energy to travel to places that didn’t have air conditioning. Besides, he was very busy writing his masterwork.
    It was impossible to devote himself properly to his important mission on his measly salary as a professor. His office was a hole, dangerous to his health. And it was on the fourth floor of a decrepit building that had no elevator. Disgraceful. If only Kate Cold were a little more generous with the budget. What a disagreeable woman! the anthropologist thought. She was impossible to deal with. The president of the Diamond Foundation should work in style. He needed a secretary and a decent office, but that tightwad Kate would not let loose one penny more than was strictly needed for the tribes. They were arguing by e-mail over the question of an automobile, which to him seemed indispensable. Getting around by the metro was a waste of precious time that would be better utilized in protecting the Indians and the forest, he explained. Leblanc’s words were running across Kate’s screen: I’m not asking for anything special,Cold. We’re not talking about a chauffeured limousine, only a modest little convertible. . . .
    The telephone rang and Kate ignored it. She didn’t want to lose the thread of the heated arguments she was planning to use to nail Leblanc, but the ringing continued until it got under her skin. Furious, she picked up the receiver, growling about the dastardly person who was interrupting her intellectual labors.
    “Hi, Grandmother,” came the happy voice of her oldest grandchild from California.
    “Alexander!” she exclaimed, enchanted to hear his voice. However, she immediately controlled her enthusiasm, as she didn’t want her grandson to suspect that she missed him. “Haven’t I told you a thousand times not to call me Grandmother?”
    “We also agreed that you would call me Jaguar,” Alex replied, unfazed.
    “Jaguar! You can’t even sprout whiskers, you’re more like a Chihuahua than a big cat.”
    “You, on the other hand, are my father’s mother, so I have the legal right to call you grandmother.”
    “Did you get my gift?” she asked to divert him.
    “It’s wonderful, Kate!”
    And in fact it was. Alexander had just turned sixteen, and through the mail he had received an enormous box from New York containing his grandmother’s present. Kate had given up one of her most precious possessions: the skin of a ten-foot-long python, the same one that had swallowed her camera in Malaysia several years before. Now the trophy was hanging in