Read Online Water from My Heart by Charles Martin - Free Book Online

motorcycle on the dusty roads of Central America doing reconnaissance on who made what coffee, what made it great, and how it made its way to market. In each new town—Corinto, Chinandega, León—I’d call Amanda and ask her to take the jet and meet me for a long weekend, but Marshall had not only micromanaged my schedule, he’d configured hers as well. And nine times out of ten, Brendan would just happen to walk by Amanda’s office the moment she was talking to me. “Tell the rock star hello.” Uncanny how many times that happened.
    Brendan was the best player of us all.
    To take my mind off the growing anger and the momentum of the wheel from which I could not escape, I studied the source, the first middleman, the second middleman, the guy who took a percentage of the second middleman’s profits, the police who dipped their fingers just because they could, the politicians who brought in the international distribution company and took a liberal “consulting” fee for their efforts, and finally the shipping company that took what little remained. If I learned anything, it’s that in all my business dealings, I’d never discovered anything more corrupt than the Nicaraguan coffee business and nobody, and I mean nobody, got more screwed than the farmer who grew the beans. On average, Nicaraguan coffee was sold to buyers in the United States and elsewhere for just over two dollars a pound. How much of that did the farmer make? On a good day, about ten cents.
    That’s right. A dime.
    Then came the day that I happened upon the Cinco Padres Café Compañía.
    *  *  *
    Three decades prior, revolution and blood in the streets had solidified an agreement between five farms that, despite their personal differences, knew they had better join hands or what little they had would be ripped from their fingers. So these five fathers with farms of similar size and production, led by a man named Alejandro Santiago Martinez, joined forces and created a company that wielded enough selling leverage to eradicate some of the middleman nonsense. Alejandro owned a sizable plantation on the side of a dormant volcano, which, I later learned, was the single-most sought-after coffee in Nicaragua. Rumor had it that Alejandro, through years of buying, had pieced together his plantation on the mountainside leading down from the lake that had filled the crater atop the volcano. Further, Alejandro had planted hundreds of mango trees along the sides of the mountains, believing there was an intrinsic connection between his coffee and those mango trees—that the taste of one bled into the other and vice versa. I didn’t know if it did or not but I could say beyond a shadow of a doubt that Alejandro’s Mango Café was the best coffee I’d ever had in my life. For once, Marshall agreed with me.
    Completely.
    *  *  *
    If Marshall had a personal motto, it was “Everything can be bought for a price.” The unspoken half of that motto was “And if you don’t like my price, I’ll manufacture circumstances that will cause you to reconsider its attractiveness.”
    Marshall quickly sent me with an offer of ten cents on the dollar. I told Marshall that his price would never fly down here and he told me to remember whose money I was playing with, so I shut my mouth. In an effort to insulate myself from the backlash—because as dumb as I was, I knew enough to know that they might attempt to kill me if I delivered it in person—I contacted an attorney who, for an up-front cash fee, carried the offer to the Cinco Padres while I sat at a café watching the bank entrance from across the street. To no one’s surprise, he entered and exited within the same five minutes, quickly returning with a no and a soiled dress shirt where one of the fathers had thrown his manure-stained boot at him.
    No counter. No consideration. No conversation. No nothing.
    About what I expected. The five fathers’ farms had been in their families for two and three hundred