Saffire by Sigmund Brouwer Read Free Book Online

angled a look at Goethals. “Colonel Goethals, given our earlier conversation, you are welcome to elaborate for Mr. Cromwell.”
    Namely that my lack of curiosity stemmed from the fact that I would be on the next train to Colón.
    Instead, Goethals said, “I’m so glad you asked, Mr. Holt. As you probably know, Mr. Cromwell is considered the de facto governor of Panama. His circles are the Panamanian elite, the influential men who had the power in 1903 to trigger the revolution against Colombia and declare Panama an independent country. One of those men, Ezequiel Sandoval, is among Mr. Cromwell’s closest friends.”
    “Ezequiel Sandoval.” I felt a shrinking in my gut. I had just signed that name into a copy of
The Virginian.
    “I’ll be the host for him at the party I mentioned,” Cromwell said. “You should like the setting. It’s a ranch down in the lowlands, in which he and I share ownership.”
    “Mr. Sandoval and Mr. Cromwell are in an awkward situation,” Goethals continued. “At a similar party a few months earlier, one of Mr. Sandoval’s employees ran away. Shortly thereafter, she fled to the United States with an engineer before anyone understood that she had betrayed Mr. Sandoval’s trust in her by engaging in theft.”
    “Sandoval shouldn’t have been surprised,” Cromwell said. “These types of people are not reliable in any sense. The night she disappeared, not a small amount of jewelry was stolen from a collection. By her absence, there is no doubt she is the thief and, for good reason, has chosen not to be found. What makes it awkward is the child she left behind, who insists her mother never abandoned her.”
    He paused and drew on his cigar again.
    I wanted to grab the cigar and snap it and feed it to him. We were talking about a child mourning the disappearance of her mother.
    “My experience,” I said, “is that a mother would not leave behind a child.”
    “You obviously don’t know these types of people, then,” Cromwell snapped. “The canal has brought the dregs of the world to lap at American expenditures on the canal. The silver-dollar people don’t marry like decent Christians. The degree of their licentiousness is disgusting and they breed profligately. No birth registrations. No addresses to be responsible taxpaying citizens. They run from attempts to enumerate them as if we are trying to spread the plague. It wouldn’t take much money to tempt them to leave behind a child.”
    His view made sense. Cromwell had no sense of morality when it came to accumulating wealth, so he naturally believed it was the same for anyone else.
    “As you can plainly see, this is not a good time for me to be implicated in any kind of additional scandal,” Cromwell said.
    That left unspoken what might be scandalous about him being the victim of a woman who stole from his estate and disappeared. Goethals had said this was a high-stakes situation. Cromwell’s wealth—ill gotten as alleged or not—was beyond imagining. I did not believe for a moment this was about missing jewelry. But since I had no intention of getting involved, I resisted the temptation to point that out to him.
    Again, Cromwell waited for me to ask him something. Again, I did not.
    “Ezequiel Sandoval has no interest in any media attention either,” Cromwell said, obviously irritated again at my silence. Didn’t he realize his irritation would just motivate me to more silence? “Sandoval has made this clear to the Panamanian police, and they had little interest in the matter anyway. As for involving our own Zone police, there is entirely too much chance that word of an investigation into the situation and our shared ownership of the ranch would reach the American reporter for the
World
newspaper. I simply can’t and won’t have that.”
    Cromwell waited.
    He could afford to let the jewelry go, and nobody was looking into the situation. What, at this point, was high stakes about any of this?
    Cromwell looked at