the attorney's office. Ilario, she explained, would teach them everything there was to know about farming tobacco, if they were interested.
Joe looked at the small round man with the bandit's mustache as the widow's driver whisked her away in a two-toned Detroit Electric. He'd noticed Ilario with the Widow Gomez a few times, always in the background, and had assumed he was a bodyguard in a region where kidnapping wasn't unheard of. But now he noticed the scarred, oversize hands, the prominence of their bones.
He'd never thought about what he'd do with all those fields.
Ilario Bacigalupi, on the other hand, had given it plenty of thought.
First, he explained to Joe and Graciela, no one called him Ilario; they called him Ciggy, which had nothing to do with tobacco. As a child he'd been incapable of pronouncing his own last name, always getting hung up on the second syllable.
Ciggy told them that 20 percent of the village of Arcenas had, until very recently, depended on the Gomez plantation for work. Since Senor Farmer Gomez had fallen to drink and then fallen off his horse and then fallen into insanity and sickness, there had been no work. For three harvests, Ciggy said, no work. It was why many of the children in the village wore no pants. Shirts, carefully tended to, could last a lifetime, but pants always gave way at some point in the seat or the knees.
Joe had noticed a prevalence of bare-assed children on his drives through Arcenas. Hell, if they weren't bare-assed, they were naked. Arcenas, in the foothills of Pinar del Rio, was more the hope of a village than an actual one. It was a collection of sagging huts with roofs and walls constructed of dried palm fronds. Human waste exited through a trio of ditches that flowed into the same river from which the villagers drank. There was no mayor or town leader to speak of. The streets were cuts of mud.
"We don't know anything about farming," Graciela said.
By this point, they were in a cantina in Pinar del Rio City.
"I do," Ciggy said. "I know so much, senorita, that whatever I've forgotten is not worth teaching."
Joe looked into Ciggy's cagey, knowing eyes and reevaluated the relationship between the foreman and the widow. He'd thought the widow had kept Ciggy for protection, but he now realized Ciggy had spent the sales process watching after his livelihood and making sure the Widow Gomez knew what was expected of her.
"How would you start?" Joe asked him, pouring them all another glass of rum.
"You will need to prepare the seed beds and plow the fields. First thing, patron. First thing. The season starts next month."
"Can you stay out of my wife's way while she fixes up the house?"
He nodded at Graciela several times. "Of course, of course."
"How many men will you need for this?" she asked.
Ciggy explained that they would need men and children to seed and men to build the seedbeds. They would need men or children to monitor the soil for fungus and disease and mold. They would need men and children to plant and hoe and plow some more and kill the cut worms and mole crickets and stinkbugs. They would need a pilot who didn't drink too much to dust the crops.
"Jesus Christ," Joe said. "How much work does this take?"
"We haven't even discussed topping, suckering, or harvesting," Ciggy said. "Then there is the stringing, the hanging, the curing, having someone tend the fire in the barn." He waved his big hand at the breadth of the labor.
Graciela asked, "How much would we make?"
Ciggy pushed the figures across the table to them.
Joe sipped his rum as he looked them over. "So, a good year, if there's no blue mold or locusts or hailstorms and God shines his light down on Pinar del Rio without stop, we make four percent back on our investment." He looked across the table at Ciggy. "That right?"
"Yes. Because you are only using a quarter of your land. But if you invest in your other fields, bring them back to the state they were in fifteen years ago? In five years, you will be rich."
"We're already rich," Graciela said.
"You will be richer."
"What if we don't care about being richer?"
"Then think of it this way," Ciggy said, "if you leave the village to starve, you may find them all sleeping in your field one morning."
Joe sat up in his chair. "Is that a threat?"
Ciggy shook his head. "We all know who