Red Jungle by Kent Harrington Read Free Book Online

or the loneliness of her affairs, or her addictions, or even the dreadful pain of missing her mother and father.
    “He’s a big boy,” Montgomery said, walking towards him, speaking a language that Russell couldn’t really understand. Isabella wouldn’t have cried, but Olga started, and then Isabella couldn’t stop herself. The boy, not accustomed to the two women in his life crying, looked at his mother for an explanation. None, unfortunately, was forthcoming.
    He was taken from his mother exactly a half hour later by a “nurse” who smelled of Listerine and called him Russ. The first word he learned in English was “Mother.” Russell once heard his father tell his stepmother that Russell’s mother was a drunk.
    The first thing Russell remembered about life—about being alive—was the gunshot that had saved them. It had been very loud. His mother had shot well. Everyone at the tennis club in Quatepeque said so. The guerrilla had intended to kill them, people at the club said, because he hated the rich.
     
     

FOUR
     
    The price of commodities throughout Latin America had collapsed completely, leaving strangled economies unable to breathe. Guatemala’s currency, the quetzal, dangled by IMF machinations and a prayer. Violent crime in the country had reached absurd, Hieronymus Bosch-style levels.
    The free markets were at work, just give them time, urged his newspaper’s editorial writers. But they were in London, and even to Russell—who believed in the system—their opinions on the crisis seemed hopelessly out of touch.
    Come to Carl’s Party in Antigua, the email had said. The invitation had come to Russell’s office computer in Guatemala City, the Thursday after he’d returned from Tres Rios . It gave an address and a long list of people, some known to Russell, who were planning on coming. He scanned the list of names. It promised a good time and he immediately wrote back, saying he planned to come.
    He called Katherine Barkley, an American girl, asking if she’d like to go to the party with him. She answered her cell phone from somewhere out on a coffee plantation, building housing for poor families.
    Barkley was the opposite of the wealthy Guatemalan girls he’d been dating, girls whose main preoccupations had been their hair and their breast size. Katherine worked for a UN-affiliated NGO called “Houses for Humanity.” She was serious, intelligent and completely unimpressed by his big job with the Financial Times , which she considered an “establishment rag.” At the party where they’d first met, they had argued about the IMF’s role in the life of the country. She was, she’d said, an anti-globalist. He thought her position ridiculous, and told her so. He’d told her that capitalism would make the world richer, but it would take time.
    He honestly believed that. It’s what he’d been taught at the University of Chicago, and like any neophyte, he believed what he’d been taught with passion. It was a harsh Darwinian system sometimes, he agreed, but it was better, far better, than anything else. Leave it to Adam Smith’s invisible hand . It was the only way, he’d told her. If it worked in America, it could work anywhere. Weren’t people all the same? He told her he thought it racist to think only white people had a right to prosperity.
    They’d agreed to disagree, and he was surprised when she’d given him her number and told him to call her. On the way home that night, he began for the first time to silently question his beliefs. Stopped at a traffic light, he’d looked at the pedestrians as they crossed in front of him. He couldn’t help but see the pain in their faces, really see it, as they stood waiting for buses, holding a child’s hand. Their faces were marked by suffering, really stamped by it now. He’d seen it clearly—anyone could—a shared frantic look that said there were limits to patience before people exploded. The communist insurgency had lasted thirty