Big Deal in Paradise

I went down to Costa Rica recently to buy some land at a place called Golfito, on the Pacific coast just north of the border of Panama. A man in Florida had been sending me property listings and I could hardly believe the prices he quoted. Talk about bargains!

"Three acres with a nice sandy beach on the ocean side with jumbo shrimp and sport fishing right off the property, all for just $6000."

"Fish-smoking business with buyers for all that you can smoke. Business with all equipment, house and 65 acres--all offered for $55,000, with terms."

Other listings described beautiful sandy ocean beaches with palms and fruit trees and fresh-water rivers, ocean fishing at your front door, coconuts all over the property. The prospectus said: "Costa Rica is the ideal country with a very favorable government attitude toward foreign property holders and buyers. It is, undoubtedly, the most stable, peaceful and law-abiding of all of the countries in Latin America and has often been called the Switzerland of Latin America, though it does not even have a standing army.... If you are interested in Costa Rican property, we urge that you arrange to contact our broker/agent directly--let him know what you want and be ready to go down and have a look for yourself."

I was very excited. It was what I'd always wanted, a tropical Switzerland with jumbo shrimp and the Pacific Ocean at my front door. I could learn how to smoke fish. Better still, I could live off the business!

I was excited, and anxious. Other people would know about these opportunities. There was no time to lose. I telephoned the man in Florida. He gave me the number of his broker/agent in Costa Rica, a gentleman by the name of Loren Pogue. Mr. Pogue, when I called him, spoke with the accents of the rural South. He assured me that everything I'd read about property bargains in Costa Rica was true. "Why, they're just lyin' on the ground, waitin' for someone to come pick 'em up." And not only that, Mr. Pogue told me with a warm and delightful chuckle, I could put my money in the bank in Costa Rica and earn 28 percent interest on it! Astounding! At my bank in Chicago, I'm lucky to make six percent.

Costa Rica, clearly, was a kind of paradise. I was tempted to buy something over the phone. My dear wife was against this. She said I would be out of my mind, if I had a mind to go out of. For a woman who has sailed the Atlantic, she is not as adventurous as she should be.

Mr. Pogue had promised to send further details of his listings in Golfito but warned that the mails were often held up and that I shouldn't postpone my trip to wait for their arrival. Nonetheless, I put it off for a couple of weeks and then, when nothing came, flew from Chicago to San José, Costa Rica, via Miami.

In San José, I checked in at the downtown hotel where Mr. Pogue had said I should use his name and ask for the corporate rate. My Spanish is, unfortunately, restricted to the words huevos and peligro and I was unable to make much headway with the clerk, who at first registered me as Señor Pogue and then summoned an English-speaking security man who questioned me sharply about the name on my credit card.

With this misunderstanding cleared up, the immediate problem was to book a seat to Golfito for the next and only daily flight the following morning. The hotel people made it clear that there was no chance. Seats were booked for months in advance, they said. There was a good-natured argument about departure times: The plane didn't leave at seven, it left at six. Sometimes it left at five. Whenever it left, though, it was always full. Mr. Pogue had told me that the plane always left at seven A.M. Not so, said the man at the desk. Furthermore, it was impossible to confirm anything until the morning because everything was closed now. Also, the departure was from a small airport, not the main San José airport. It took either half an hour to drive to the small airport or five minutes, depending on a word that I couldn't understand and that the security man, with all his knowledge of English, was unable to translate. It sounded like mondifongo. I couldn't get to the airport unless the mondifongo worked in my favor. I felt tired and hungry. I went to my room, called room service, ordered some huevos and called Loren Pogue.

Mr. Pogue didn't answer his telephone. A woman who spoke a form of English said that he had gone to a place that sounded like Chunga Chunga. He would be back another time when he comes back again later, maybe. I called the front desk and put in a wake-up call for six A.M.

There were notices on the wall: The visit of the opposit sex in the roms are not aloud and for security purpose do not use no Iron in the Roms, both signed, thank youg. the mangement.

I lay in bed, reading The Tico Times, a weekly publication that describes itself as "Central America's Leading English-Language Newspaper." On the front page was a story headlined "Killer bee Attack: Ignorance plus inattention led to horror." A personal report written by Dery Dyer, it began: "I should have paid more attention to [the warnings in] The Tico Times. If I had, our three beloved parrots might still be alive. Lory, Minnie and Louie were stung to death July 13 in their outdoor aviary by a swarm of enraged Africanized killer bees that had been living in the ceiling of our house in the hills of Escazu, west of San José."

My first thought was, Thank God it wasn't Golfito.

Bees worry me, even ordinary ones. I'd heard of African killer bees but had forgotten about them. I associated them with the Weekly World News, a tabloid that once ran a story called "Scientists discover lost jungle tribe of Al Jolson Look-alikes."

Killer bees. Parrot assassins! Creatures that would murder a parrot, let alone three parrots called Lory, Minnie and Louie, are beyond human mercy. I read on. The attack sounded as if it had come from a horror film.

"There was no time to do anything but react. I was in our house; Diego and Sandra, the son and daughter of our housekeeper, Ana, were in Ana's house, some 100 feet away. Tearing madly through clouds of frenzied bees, the three of us managed to get four of the five yelping dogs and the three screaming parrots inside, plunging with them into the showers to wash the clinging, stinging insects off the animals and ourselves. The bees didn't buzz so much as whine--a horrifying, sad-angry sound I hope I never hear again.... The water drowned the attackers, but it was too late for the poor parrots. Two of them died in the shower; the third hung on for another half hour before succumbing. The floors of the showers in both houses were black with dead bees."

Mrs. Dyer reported that the bees had held both houses under siege on all sides for several hours, "humming threateningly." She herself had been stung 97 times, not including the stings on her head. Family members were sick for weeks afterward. Her dermatologist warned her that she should consider herself so sensitive to bee venom that she could die from a single sting.

In an accompanying report, I learned that the African bees had arrived in Costa Rica in 1982 and had attacked nearly 500 people, causing seven deaths and killing countless animals. They had almost completely displaced the native strain of bees and, because of inbreeding, were indistinguishable from the familiar honeybee. The annual Costa Rican honey harvest had been reduced from 2000 tons in pre-invasion days to 540 tons. According to The Tico Times, the bees are scheduled to arrive in Texas this spring.

I lay on my narrow bed and wondered whether I should go downstairs and buy some cigarettes. I had stopped smoking last year, but now I felt the urge again. It seemed that everyone in the adjoining rooms was awake. On one side, there was hysterical screaming and applause, possibly a TV game show; on the other, the savage roaring of a station that had gone off the air. Perhaps the people in that room were unconscious or dead.

The eggs arrived just after I'd fallen asleep. They had been cooked in a swamp of deep congealed fat and were surprisingly cold. It wasn't until later the next day that I realized I had tipped the waiter the equivalent of $12.

It was difficult to sleep. I had asked for a quiet room. This one had an air conditioner in the bedroom window and another in the bathroom window. Both rooms overlooked an air shaft lined with identical rows of windows and air conditioners. Even with both of my units switched off, the room throbbed and roared throughout the night.

In the morning, the front-desk clerk called the airport to ask about the Golfito plane. It had already taken off. The clerk was apologetic. "Usually, it leaves at seven, but today, it went at six," he said.

I called Mr. Pogue. To my relief, he answered the phone. I told him I had missed the plane but that it didn't matter, since the airline said all the flights were full for the next month, anyway. Mr. Pogue didn't say anything at first. Then he said, "Bastards, those bastards." Swiftly apologizing for this lapse, he said, "They always tell people the flights are full. They told me the same thing last week, but my plane had eight empty seats on it."

It was now Thursday morning. I needed to be back in Chicago by Monday morning. If I wanted to get to Golfito, I would have to rent a car and drive there. "How far is it and how long will it take?" I asked Mr. Pogue.

"Ooh, you're lookin' at about, say, maybe four, five, six hours on the road," he said. I gathered that he himself hadn't actually driven from San José to Golfito, but he'd heard the road surface was pretty good all the way. Regular paving kind of thing, couple of potholes here and there, but, hey, this ain't the L.A. freeway, chuckle, chuckle. I was looking forward to our meeting.

I wanted to drive just one way, San José to Golfito. By coincidence, a friend was delivering a fishing boat from Florida to California, and we'd arranged to rendezvous at Golfito that very day. My plan was to leave the car at the rental firm's Golfito office and take the boat to Puntarenas, farther north on the Costa Rican coast. From there, I would make my own way back to San José for the return flight to Chicago.

The agent at the rental counter said it was impossible to leave the car at Golfito. There was no office there. He said something to an associate. He laughed so hard, I thought he was going to have an attack.

"You are driving to Golfito?" asked the agent. He looked impressed.

"The road is good, yes?" I said.

"Sometimes it's very good. Sometimes it's not very bad. It is interesting. You pass the volcano. You must take the insurance; it is a rule."

"How far is Golfito?"

Both men discussed this question but were unable to agree. They had never been there. They produced a map, the map I would use for the journey. They seemed surprised when I pointed to Golfito, as if they'd expected it to be somewhere else. The map had no scale. My friends at the rental counter guessed that Golfito was somewhere between 300 kilometers and 500 kilometers from San (continued on page 156)Big Deal(continued from page 118) José. One hundred eighty-five or 310 miles. A breeze.

The car was a Toyota Corolla with less than 1000 kilometers on the clock. I was a happy man. A new car, an unknown country, a road with a volcano. A road that led to my new tropical paradise on the Pacific.

It was now approaching the morning rush hour. At the curb, I asked the rental agent how to get out of San José. He pointed along the busy road that led past the front of the hotel and said, "Keep going that way. When you get lost, ask for Panama."

I got lost in the city three or four times and on the last occasion was parked on a side street, consulting the map, when an unusually small man opened the passenger's door and sat down next to me. "You are lost," he said in English and handed me a business card. His briefcase was covered with airline stickers.

We shook hands awkwardly in the confines of the car, and he introduced himself as Señor Sánchez. His card said he was jefe de seguridad for something called Grupo Álvarez. "Chief of security," he explained. "Before that, I was in the police, and I am an ex-mayor. Where are you going?" He was very polite.

I told him.

"We will lead you out of San José," he said. There was a car parked in front of us that must have pulled in after I'd stopped. It had a Bush campaign sticker in the rear window. My new friend tapped my horn and another man got out of the parked car. I was introduced to him. His business card had just his name and telephone number. We drove off with the Bush car leading the way.

I thought this was a good opportunity to find out more about Costa Rica. My companion was eager to talk. He had been trained in police security in the United States, he said. He had been trained to kill Communists. Once there had been Communists in Costa Rica. In 1948, he said, there had been a civil wart. It was very terrible for a while. The Communists had wanted to do bad things, like take away the liberty and the speech rights.

Fortunately, they had killed most of the Communists, but sadly, today things were just as bad, because, even though the Communists had gone, nobody had any money. The company he worked for, Señor Sánchez said with a sigh, was totally broken.

It made him sad to say this, but the United States--which he loved very much because he had many friends there from his security-training days--was no help to Costa Rica. The United States, he said, made lots of speeches and many promises but in the end did nothing. Personally, he wouldn't be surprised if there were another civil war in Costa Rica before very long.

The car we were following stopped with a honk of its horn. Señor Sánchez shook my hand again. "We are here," he said. "You follow that road. It will take you to the mountains. It will take you to Golfito. Ask for Panama."

Two hours later, I was driving above a layer of cloud. Rounding a mountain curve, I saw two glossy black vultures eating the remains of a monkey at the side of the road. The volcano was hidden, but through a gap in the clouds, I could see a wide brown river far below.

The road had been extraordinary. By now, I realized I was driving the Pan-American Highway. For some reason, I had always associated this grandly named enterprise with that thrusting America of world fairs and expositions. But soon after leaving San José, it had deteriorated into a chain of potholes. Sometimes there were live animals on the road; sometimes there were dead ones. There was a lot of mud. There were big lizards. One of my two words of Spanish, peligro, meaning danger, was useful to know but not comforting. It appeared on signs every few hundred feet, always immediately at the exact location of whatever the particular peligro happened to be, so that by the time you saw the sign, you were already on top of the peligro.

Sometimes the road was washed out from above or it was eroded from below. There were many rocks and far too many boulders. One big boulder had the word Peligro painted across it. Some of the surface was broken where it had been hammered by boulders that had bounced off the road and into the abyss on the other side.

Some of the road's paving had been removed. It had been taken away and not replaced. Perhaps someone had stolen it. And some of the road was plain old rocky dirt that had never known paving.

I drove through rain, fog and clouds with all the lights on. On my left, though I couldn't see it, was the Mountain of Death. I crossed a bridge over the Riio Disciplina.

At first, I let myself be intimidated by drivers of gas tankers and buses, maniacs who deserved to be restrained and soundly thrashed, who drove at me or overtook me too closely in a blare of noise and smoke and rubble. As I got accustomed to the road and the nimble Toyota, however, I began to overtake everything I saw. I was out in front on the Pan-Am Highway. This wasn't just driving, this was Living.

The one annoying thing was the lack of gas stations. The car-rental agent had said there were "many, many gas stations." I didn't find one until after I came out of the mountains. At a truck stop, I topped up the tank and ordered huevos. Suddenly, I remembered more food words--con jamón--and changed the order to huevos con jamón. And uno café, decaffeinated, if possible. Sensing a linguist, the man rattled off something about huevos and jamón and I agreed.

The place was full of truck and bus drivers. Many of them seemed unnaturally small. I myself am a short man, but they were small men. Perfectly formed little men, all very dirty. But I was happy. Under the skin, we were all men of the Pan-American Highway. I was one of the lads. Chaps against the road, that was us. What stories we might have told if we had spoken a language we all understood.

My ham and eggs arrived. They had been diced, chopped and shredded and submerged in a pool of hot fat. "Delicioso," I said to the counterman and ate the lot.

It took nearly eight hours to get to Golfito. The mountains eventually gave way to hills, the hills began to flatten out and toward the end, the sun came through and lit up the brilliant green of trees and grassy fields on both sides of the road. The road opened up. There were very few Peligro signs. You could see the potholes from a distance. I saw the sun on the ocean, behind palm trees. The water looked like a sheet of metal. After the strain of driving through the mountains and the fog and the rain, the effect was magical. I was singing at the top of my voice. "My Baby Does the Hanky-Panky," an old driving favorite. I thought, Golfito and Loren Pogue, here I come.

The closer I got, the darker it got. By the time I reached Golfito--a row of drab wooden buildings lining a greasy waterfront--it was raining again. It looked as though it always rained in Golfito. At the end of the road, there was a Texaco station. Outside it were a dog with gigantic teats and a shirtless bald-headed man covered with tattoos. Of the two, the dog looked as though it would be more capable of speech. Nearby, abandoned on a short stretch of track, was an enormous steam locomotive, with tender. I got out and took a picture. The bald-headed man with the tattoos approached.

"Where are you from?" he said in perfect English. Not only in English but with a London accent.

"South London," I said, naming my birthplace.

"Fuck my boots!" he said. "I'm from Balham."

I was born in Balham.

I told him I was looking for Loren Pogue. He'd heard of him, didn't know him but knew where he could be found, in a hotel just along the street. We drove there. Geoff, my fellow Londoner, told me that he'd jumped ship in Gibraltar 15 years ago, got drunk with some Fijians and ended up in Golfito five years later. "Thought I might as well stay here and be unemployed instead of going home and being unemployed. It's cheaper," he said. I felt that there was a logic to this, but I was unable to grasp it.

There was no sign of Loren Pogue at the hotel. Geoff spoke to a woman at the desk. "She says he'll be here later, maybe four o'clock. He's gone somewhere."

This was a little irritating. Mr. Pogue knew I was coming. We'd been talking about it for almost a month. I'd flown all the way from Chicago, driven through the mountains for eight hours, eaten far too many huevos, and now he wasn't here.

"Do you want some fish and chips?" Geoff said. "There's a great place up the road. Cheap and cheerful. We'll find my mate Zack. Zack knows this geezer you're looking for--he's lived here for years."

Sure enough, Zack knew Pogue. Zack was an American, a giant of an old man who had almost finished his lunch when we arrived. The fish and chips were excellent. As I ate, I told Zack about my plan to buy land in Golfito.

"Well, that could be a good idea and it could be a real bad idea," he said. "Would you live on this land from the git-go or would you kind of buy it and come back later?"

I wasn't concerned about that. My only thought was to buy it and worry about the details afterward. "Does it make a difference?" I asked.

"If you don't live on it all the time, it could happen that them squatters will move on your land and that's it, my friend, that's all she wrote."

"Squatters?"

"They call 'em campesinos. Peasants. By Costa Rican law, land owned by outsiders, if it ain't lived on at all times and these campesinos come along and move onto it, it's theirs. The government gives it to 'em. Happens all the time. I used to own a lot of land around here, but I got out. Sold up. Now I just rent it, and I'm a happy man because of it. Ain't got a care in the world. You want to come and live here, you want to rent for a year before you buy; that's what you want to do. You do what you like, my friend, but that's my advice. Rent first, buy later."

Geoff didn't have anything to say. I had expected him to start working on the rum at lunch, but when I asked for a beer, he ordered a Coke. I wondered if he and his pal Zack were working some kind of scam. Land for rent. That must be it. They were rivals of Loren Pogue. Zack probably paid Geoff a commission for steering suckers his way, that was it. I would have to be cunning.

"What do you know about Loren Pogue?" I asked Zack.

The old man chewed a forkful of food and shook his head. "Not a lot," he said. "But when a man's buyin' land in a place he don't know from a man he's never seen, well, then." I waited, but there was no more. I began to feel as though I'd wandered onto the set of a Biblical Western.

"He could be a good man. I've heard people say he's a good man, and I've heard others say different. Don't prove a thing, does it, now?"

Geoff said, "I've 'eard a lot, but I ain't sayin' nuffin'."

•

I still haven't met Loren Pogue. He didn't return to the hotel, or if he did, I didn't find him when I went back again. My friend Perkins arrived in Golfito with the fishing boat he was delivering to California, and I spent the night on it, anchored across the bay from the dreary little town. We could have gone ashore--Perkins wanted to buy land, too--but the idea had lost its appeal. Señor Sánchez, the tiny Commie killer, may have had some bearing on it. And the squatters and killer bees. The dead parrots, the dog with the big teats at the Texaco station. Christ, I don't know what it was. I could see a lifetime of fish-and-chip lunches with Geoff. We'd talk about Balham. I would get tattoos and go mad. The wife would be off like a shot. And that drive through the mountains. How long before you got picked off by one of the peligros, moving or stationary?

I had wondered why the land was cheap and now I knew. It was dead simple: Nobody wanted to live there, that's why. Perhaps the great majority of people in Costa Rica would move to Chicago tomorrow if they could, the poor bastards. I know this is an arrogant and insulting thing to say--God knows, any big city is in many ways an earthly version of hell--but the worst part is that it's probably the truth, horrible as it may be.

Perkins had to get the boat moving early the next day. It was hurricane season and he didn't want to hang around. I would have gone with him if it hadn't been for the car. But it had to be driven back to San José; the rental people had taken a blank off my credit card. Rain was still drizzling down when I drove out of Golfito. The place looked as though it had been licked all over by some kind of big, dirty animal. I said my farewells to Zack, who was on the street. There was no sign of Geoff.

Back in San José, after an uneventful but stimulating drive--closer to six hours on the return trip--I checked in again at the hotel and booked a flight home. There was nothing until Sunday. That was fine with me. It was now Friday. I could keep the car a couple of more days, explore San José and the surrounding countryside. I'd paid for the trip; I might as well make the most of it.

I was surprised to find another edition of The Tico Times on sale at the hotel. The one I'd bought two days earlier must have been left over from the previous week. This one, dated September 8, 1989, had a story on page 14 with the headline "U.S. Landowners plead guilty to drug charges." Loren Pogue was mentioned in the second paragraph. It was a confusing story, because there was no suggestion that he was involved in smuggling drugs. What Pogue had done, however, was to be convicted of assault and sentenced to two years' probation for wounding squatters in a gun fight.

According to the Times, the squatters had started building on foreign-owned land. The land in question was part of an estate that once belonged to Robert Vesco, the famous swindler. He sold it to an American who is now in a Mexican prison awaiting extradition to the U.S. on drug-trafficking charges. Loren Pogue, The Tico Times said, is "the onetime administrator" of this property.

The story continued, "Costa Rican law permits squatters to gain title to unused land to give campesinos a chance to own property and to prevent speculation."

The Times said that Mr. Pogue was confident that he would be acquitted on appeal. He suggested that his conviction would be bad for Costa Rica.

"When you get a problem like this and the government takes their side, it scares away the investors," he said.

That Loren. Is he a card, or what?