So we land at the Island of Innocence and deliver the hooch. The one thing Flanagan never thought about was that they had us over a barrel. That wasn't meant to be funny, but I guess it is. They knew we were stuck. We had to sell it to them because we couldn't very well turn around and take the whole shipment home. So they gave a us a fraction of what it was worth, and we had to take it. Flanagan lost thousands on that deal.

We took the money and put it aside for Flanagan. One thing we all knew: he wasn't going to pay us a dime. He'd accuse us of taking a bad deal, losing the money, or even worse, stealing it from him. However you looked at it, he was losing big and he'd have to pass the loss onto someone. We were the someone.

When the deal—such as it was—was done, we went to Fordlandia and rented a house for a week. They let us do that in the hopes that we'd want to stay and work there. Seems they were always hiring. They especially liked Americans. As it turns out, John did stay. He said he liked it down there, but I'm not so sure that he wasn't just afraid of going back and facing Flanagan. Truth be told, he was like Bruce and me; he was too nice a guy. He was a struggling artist—back then everyone was a struggling something—who just needed a steady job. We all liked John and didn't mind him deserting us. When I think back, the only real criminal in our group was Tony. He was bad. We were all a little afraid of him, I think.

So Vlad gave us the lowdown on the job. He made it sound easy. At least I think he did. I still had trouble understanding him. But Tony seemed to understand him okay, so I went with that. I still didn't know exactly what we were stealing. The rumors were that a lot of the bigwigs there were smuggling gold out of the country, so naturally I assumed that was the treasure. Turns out I was right … and wrong. They were smuggling gold, the whole lot of them, all those guys who lived in the nice houses on the hill. And we got some of the gold, but we got something else too, something that Vlad said was worth ten times what the gold was worth. I assume it was the eggs.

I never saw them myself, so this is all second-hand. You see, we split up to do the jobs. Bruce and I had one house and Tony and Vlad had another. Tony said we should concentrate on the two houses that they had scoped out as having the most gold. To try to break into all of them—there were about six—would be too risky. What Bruce and I didn't know was that the house Tony and Vlad were going in was the one the Russian was living in. And they weren't going after any gold.