"I'm not in love with Belle," Anderson Menteur announced loudly during the first moment of our acquaintance, directly after my life savings disappeared in that poker game, and as soon as the lady in question ushered me into his tiny, sweltering bedroom on the second floor of the building. Anderson was propped up in bed and his skinny legs were exposed and his whole face had an unhealthy, golden pallor which indicated a recent bout of yellow fever. Everyone in Panama had yellow fever or malaria in those days, but Anderson's boyish face and his glittering light brown eyes made him seem substantially more lively and healthful than the sick, hopeless masses I'd seen languishing around the town. "I'm not in love with Belle, but we have an understanding."

"You don't need to explain anything to me," I shrugged. "It's none of my-"

"We're friends is all."

"Sure."

"We grew up in the same part of the South, you understand," he continued, either too feverish or too clueless-or too desperate-to realize that I wasn't interested in his explanations. I couldn't have cared less about the parameters of this man's relationships with Belle Watling, but he obviously felt the need to gabble on about it-so I let him gabble. I hadn't learned much about the world since I'd left my father's home in Charleston, but I knew enough to let a talker talk. "I'm from Memphis and she's from just across the river in Arkansas. Or so she says. We're kindred spirits, but we're not in love."

"Fine."

"We could never be in love," he said, ignoring my attempt to end this rather uncomfortable discussion. Belle had departed silently almost as soon as she'd deposited me in the room for my audience with Anderson Menteur, but the subject matter was uncomfortable despite her absence. Or perhaps because of it. "I'm holding out for a nice girl. A nice wife."

"I understand."

"Somebody with class."

"Understood."

"Good then," Anderson looked me in the eye and smiled. "As long as we understand each other, then I suppose it's time for me to make you an offer for your services."

I didn't know how to respond to his statement. It seemed as though the two of us had arrived at a contract for services of some sort; but as I sat there in his bedroom, sweating and dizzy from the oppressive Central American heat, I had absolutely no idea about the boundaries of our agreement. In one moment I'd been playing cards in the kitchen, and in the next he'd been discussing the status of his relationship with Belle, and in the next-

"What services?" I questioned, losing my cool and my patience all at once. "What are you talking about?"

"You are Rhett Butler, aren't you?" He gazed evenly at me. "From Charleston?"

"Yes," I nodded slowly, reluctant to reveal my identity even though it was clear that everyone in Panama already knew where I was from, why I was there, and what I was all about. "I am."

"You're a very skilled poker player, Mr. Butler," he told me. "We've heard the gossip about your abilities with cards. And your exploits on the boat on the way down here. Why we even heard that you-"

"I'm not going in with you on a gambling combine," I interrupted him and shook my head. "I don't need investors and I don't need a bankroll and I don't need help. If Belle hadn't interfered in my affairs a few moments ago I would already be on my way to California right now. If you want to learn to gamble-then I suggest you start by gambling. I don't need leverage. I just need a good game and a few fish and to be left alone, for goodness sakes."

"I ain't talking about using your poker skills," Anderson shook his head and chuckled a little bit. "Substantial and impressive though they may be. No sir, I'm not talking about poker at all. Or gambling or cards or anything to do with luck."

"You're not?"

"No."

"Then what are you talking about?" I pressed him, raising an eyebrow and jamming my hands into my trouser pockets and tapping my foot because I was impatient-oh so very impatient-to vacate the premises. I didn't have anywhere to go or a penny to bless me of course, but I wanted to lick my wounds and try my luck down at the docks. "Because I'm afraid I don't understand."

"I'm talking about your map making skills."

"Map making?"

"You went to West Point, didn't you?"

"How the hell did you know that?"

"Gossip, like I just told you," Anderson said. "It's not everyday that we get real live Southern gentry from good old Charleston here in Panama, you know. Most of the people headed toward California are ex-convicts or future convicts or murderers or whores or desperados-or worse. They're all going out there to strike it rich, and I intend on partnering with you to make a mint by selling maps to each and everyone of them."

"The United States government has already beat you to it," I mumbled, thunderstruck by his idiocy. "California was surveyed by the Spanish long ago, and there aren't very many corners of the state that haven't been drawn up in official government maps. I'm sorry, but there's no money in depictions of wagon trails and watering holes, Mr. Menteur."

"I'm not talking about anything so simple," he laughed again as Belle sashayed back into the room. She had pulled her hair back and had wiped off a little bit of her makeup, but she was still drenched in cheap perfume and she was wearing a fussy little Japanese kimono that was undoubtedly supposed to call to mind a Geisha girl but which instead looked like something straight out of a nightmare about samurais. I only gazed at her momentarily, but as I turned my eyes back toward Anderson I noticed that he kept his eyes locked firmly on Belle.

And it was in that moment that I knew.

I mean, I'd known it as soon as I'd walked into the bedroom and Anderson had started discussing his relationship with Belle without prompting, of course. But the flash in his eyes was unmistakable, and I could read his emotions as plainly as though they were spelled out in one of my father's dictionaries: love, hate, lust, despair, pain, and more than a little bit of exhaustion. It almost hurt to look at him while he looked at her, and I ducked my head instinctively against the raw, naked, helpless desire in his eyes.

I was embarrassed for him, really. He looked like a hapless character in a back alley melodrama, and the people I knew back in Charleston would have burned him at the stake in the middle of King Street for displaying his feelings in such an obvious fashion. I had been ostracized for breaking the unwritten rules of conduct, but Anderson would have been ex-communicated, tarred, and feathered for the way he stared at Belle in that moment. It was theoretically perfectly acceptable for a man to have a private passion for his wife or his children or his mistress or his concubine or his dog, but Anderson was barely a man.

And Belle was certainly no one's wife.

Or mistress.

Or concubine.

Her once-and-future profession was actually already all too obvious, and I was humiliated on his behalf, but Anderson didn't have the good sense to snap out of his glazed-eyed stupor. Instead he continued staring dreamily at Belle, and Belle matched his affection with blue eyes that glittered like diamonds even though they weren't-and couldn't have been-diamonds at all.

"Am I talking about anything as simple as drawing roads and ferry crossings, Belle?"

"Of course not, honey," Belle shook her head. "Of course not. Regular map making is too...regular for you, isn't it? You always say you've got to think big to make it big, don't you, sugar?"

"That is what I always say," he nodded his head. "I'm not talking about regular maps, Mister Butler. Any fool could do that, and any fool could buy those for thirty-five cents once they arrived in California. I'm talking about gold maps. Prospecting maps."

"But how in the world would I draw prospect maps?" I questioned. "I haven't even made it to California yet, remember? I don't know where the lodes are, I don't know the best places to pan for gold, and I certainly don't know where all the general stores and tent-towns that have cropped up around the American River are located. I'm not the man for this, Anderson."

"Who said anything about knowing anything?"

"Then I don't-"

"You don't understand," Anderson nodded and sat up just a little bit. "That much is plain. But since you're so central to our idea and obviously not quite as, shall we say, familiar with the world as the rest of us down here in Central America, I'll go ahead and explain it all to you right now."

Looking back, it's all kind of funny, isn't it? In 1849 the whole scheme seemed ridiculously illegal and sinful to my mind, but after everything I've seen and done over the past few decades it's not quite a devious as I thought. Anderson Menteur didn't know where the California gold was located of course, but neither did anybody else. And so we would capitalize on the ignorance of the masses by drawing up phoney maps and selling them to the millions of fools who were passing through Panama City on their way west. They would pay a premium for maps of the California gold, and they would pay incredible amounts for official looking maps under the assumption that these offerings would ultimately lead to more riches than the other crudely drawn, dirty, rolled up charts that had been circulating for most of that year.

It was a pretty good plan, all told.

And I was an important part of the plan because I had been at West Point. Ever since the War Between the States families have sent their sons to West Point in the hopes that they'll eventually become a brilliant tactician like Robert E. Lee or William Sherman. But in my day West Point only meant drill, French lessons, more drill, engineering lectures, night drill, and surveying courses.

I hated West Point and had never been any good at military drills or discipline of any kind, but I was more than competent at reading maps. And I was certainly able to draw a reasonably detailed depiction of the California countryside freehand, something that my uneducated, illiterate, and perpetually confused new friends Belle and Anderson couldn't have done if their lives had depended on it. And so, while the two of them had hatched the deception without my help, I was an accessory to the criminality because I was an essential part of the plan. I wonder now, of course, what would have happened if I'd simply not gotten involved with the two of them. It was in my power to quit the house as soon as I understood the plan, but-

I didn't.

I didn't want to.

It was a crooked, half-baked, half-brained scam, and it was fraudulent enough to land the three of us in jail for a long time if we were caught, but we weren't going to be caught. Simple as that.

I was sure of our fate, sure of our freedom, sure that we would be able to skirt by and avoid the law and make a decent living at it, too. It might have been a deceitful scam, but I was alright with it because our marks were greedy strivers trying to strike it rich quick. We were going to get one over on the grasping fools heading west, and that was fine with me because the people streaming to the Pacific were all short-sighted spendthrifts who gave no thought the morrow. They were foolish and I would have been a fool not to take advantage of their high-spirited optimism, and in my mind Anderson and Belle's plan was almost honorable compared to the schemes of the slave powers and industrial powers I'd left back on the Atlantic coast. It doesn't make much difference in retrospect given all my dubious deeds and everything that I've gotten involved in since those days.

But it made a difference to me then.

A great deal of difference, as I'm sure you will eventually come to understand.