COCAINE
VOLUME ONE
by
Jack Hillgate
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Published in the United Kingdom by Delacheroy Books in 2011
Copyright © Delacheroy Films Limited 2011
Jack Hillgate has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
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About the author
Jack Hillgate is a writer of books and screenplays.
He lives with his family in Europe.
Also available as an eBook by the author
The Jew with the Iron Cross
The Criminal Lawyer
COCAINE
Volume One
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’
George Bernard Shaw
1
October 1990 – Quito, Ecuador
They didn’t chew coca leaves anymore, at least not in Quito. Coca-leaf was out, beetle-nut was in, the plethora of brown-toothed smiles and constant spitting, the omnipresent sucking of jowls eking out the last atom of sickly brown juice. A disgusting habit, but it didn’t trouble me nearly as much as all the teenagers with grisly little moustaches carrying guns in the back pockets of their jeans.
At a bar, any bar, they would sit on stools and the guns would edge slowly out of their pockets whilst they sipped aguardiente and smoked fake Marlboros. The presence of those battered, Russian-issue pieces of metal had the effect of ensuring absolute politesse at all times, fewer fights than we used to get on the Holloway Road. I’d like to see the middle-aged, red-faced, pot-bellied pricks in their yellow puffa jackets try it with just one of my stumpy dark-skinned teenagers, but the pricks were four thousand miles away, eating chips with dirty fingernails and catching the night-bus to Tufnell Park. They would wilt fast at this altitude; unfit, overweight and starved of vindaloos and doner kebabs. They would fail to see the point in traveling four thousand miles to learn Spanish and teach English, which is what I was meant to be doing.
The German, Franz or Heinz, looked ill. He chain-smoked with yellow fingers and addressed the two Americans in a grating voice.
‘You know vot a kilo is wort?’
‘Look man – ‘
‘You know?’
‘What? Like, ten thousand?’
‘A kilo of pure in Northern Europe is worth up to sixty thousand my friend. Maybe more.’
‘We talkin’ US dollars?’
‘It is the international currency of this trade. This is elementary.’
‘Fuck off you dumb kraut. You going into business?’
‘I might just do this. You will see. You will see me one day in my lim-ou-sine’ – he stretched out the word gloriously, as if giving it Lebensraum – ‘gliding past your shitty Volkswagen. Then you will know.’
‘What? What will I know, kraut?’
‘You will see.’
Franz or Heinz coughed and his body doubled-up. He rested his head on the dark brown trestle-table and spat out a large globule of green gunk which he wiped away with his sleeve.
Kieran must have been watching me before he decided to sit down. He had dark hair, high cheekbones and large, round, almost feminine eyes. He was thin and tanned and from British Columbia. He wore black, the only one of us to do so, favouring military-style sneakers, cargos and a thick woolen jacket with a high collar. In another part of Ecuador he might have passed for a guerilla, but in Hotel Gran Casino he looked a little out of place, just like the rest of us. We were displaced vessels, sailing around on planes and buses and visiting cities for no reason other than we’d looked them up in a book and decided to go there.
We were treading water, all of us, but there is only so long you can tread water before you freeze, or succumb to cramp and drown, or, if you’re lucky, someone pulls you out.
March 2007 – Cannes, South of France
The sweep of the Bay of Cannes is best viewed from on high, from atop one of the monolithic apartment blocks that rise above Cannes Californie and give a one hundred and eighty degree view of the coast-line, all the way from the Esterel to the west and Cap D’Antibes to the east. My camera – a Nikon – had a powerful telephoto lens and I could pretend to take panoramic shots of the skyline while looking into the windows of the other apartment blocks and villas.
My car was sitting fourteen floors beneath me in its own little home, my twenty-year-old white Porsche 911 with the removable hard-top section that car manufacturers like to call a Targa top. The word made me think of my car as my girlfriend, topless and pale with a dark underbelly. My only friend. I didn’t own a property anymore. The apartment, with its white carpets, sweeping glass windows and mozaic-tiled bathrooms, was a rental. The tax man couldn’t grab anything if you left a small imprint, and I was very clean and careful to always remove my shoes before entering.
The sun had left marks on the doors of my American refrigerator and I had taken to wearing sunglasses inside as well as out because of the iridescent solar glare. The electric blinds made me claustrophobic and sometimes stuck, which meant I would have to call Pierre and part with twenty euros. Pierre didn’t know my real name. No-one did. He called me George, or Monsieur Milton, depending on whether I paid him more than the standard call out charge.
An apartment had been the right choice, I think, because of its anonymity. A villa, a house, can only have one owner. A block, or complex of blocks, faceless, concierged, marbled, clean, can have hundreds of owners or temporary inhabitants. TS Eliot could have written ‘Four Quartets’ in a domain similar to the one I live in. I can see him sitting just there, on a bench, looking out over the tennis courts, the sculptures and the immaculate pool, writing about people coming and going with all their Michaelangelo-ing.
I have to be very careful, as I approach the early years of my fourth decade, to ensure that I have something to look forward to as well as something to look back on. Carlos has said he is coming. He has promised me. He looked impossibly thin the last time I saw him, his teeth had blackened, in fact I think one had fallen out, and his wheat-free Vegan diet led me to stock up on fruit and vegetables and cigarettes, always cigarettes.
I made him smoke outside on the terrace because I didn’t want the smoke to mark the white carpet or the newly-painted white walls. I only took up smoking again in an attempt to keep busy. It was the interminable waiting that depressed me. It had to be done, there was no other way, but this waiting and waiting and waiting was destined to make me go quite insane if there was nothing else other than white carpet, white walls and the odd excursion in my four-wheeled girlfriend, the beautiful Portia with her throa
ty voice and tight rear end.
The local English theatre company put on a play every three months and I attended each performance religiously. The Cannes Film Festival in May was a good place to get lost, a swarm of sweaty bees buzzing around the nests of the Majestic, the Martinez and the Ritz-Carlton. The darkened screening rooms were the only places I removed my sunglasses. There were other things too, like the weekly Farmer’s Markets. They had the semblance of life, the semblance of movement and action, whilst in reality none of these little jaunts was more pleasurable than sitting on my toilet with my eyes closed, feeling the gradual release of pressure from my bowels.
2
October 1990 – Quito, Ecuador
I sank into my stale bed after a fourth day without a shower. I thought about the last three hours on the dark wooden benches and trestle tables and the casual way Kieran had introduced me to Juan Andres Montero Garcia.
‘Si, si. Podemos hablar espanol.’
I gave a thumbs down sign.
‘My Spanish is terrible. Horrible.’
‘OK. I try. Why you here?’
‘I’m traveling for a year. Teaching, learning. We like that sort of thing in England – we like to see the world.’
Kieran sat there with his set of spongy juggling balls, eyes locked on the Newtonian motion of their trajectories.
‘How do you two know each other?’ I asked Juan Andres.
‘El canadiense? Kieran? I meet him last week. Here in Gran Casino.’
‘Are you a guest here?’
‘No. I not.’
‘Do you live here? In Quito, I mean?’
‘No. I not live here.’
‘Are you Spanish?’
‘Colombiano.’
‘Oh right. What do you do in Colombia?’
‘Nada. Nothing.'
Juan Andres took a long gulp of beer. Kieran stopped juggling momentarily, letting the sponge balls fall to the trestle table. He grinned at me cheekily.
‘Juan’s a refugee. Like you and me.’
‘I’m not a refugee. I’m broadening my mind, that’s all.’
‘Me too’, said Juan. ‘You been los Estados Unidos?’
‘You mean the United States?’
‘Si, claro.’
‘Yes, I have. Great place.’
‘So you say, claro que si.’
‘Claro que si.’
‘Que chevere! Now you speak Spanish.’
Kieran started juggling again, his mouth hanging open, watching the fall and rise of the balls. Juan Andres shifted on his section of bench and put the beer to his lips.
‘So you been America, amigo?’
‘I traveled around there for a few months.’
‘You rich? No work?’
‘Student – estudiante.’
He laughed and winked.
‘Si, claro.’
‘Claro que si', I replied, returning the wink.
‘You are learning, Englishman.’
Juan Andres laughed infectiously and I caught his bug.
‘Juan Andres is a good guy’, said Kieran. ‘He can help us.’
‘Help us?’
I hadn’t realized there might be an ‘us’.
‘Yeah. These guys here, that German, the others, they’re all assholes my friend. I can’t hang with them. But I can hang with you guys.’
‘Oh.’
I felt rather flattered.
‘You me and Juan Andres…we can see some of the things these dinkums will never see. If we want to, that is.’
‘Like what?’
I drained my beer-bottle. Kieran blinked at Juan Andres and he blinked back. They both smiled. Juan Andres smoothed down the sleeves of his black leather bomber jacket.
‘You see, Ryan’ – he pronounced it ‘Ra - yaaan’ – ‘I been fired from my job. It was good job. Permanente. My last employer, it is the Ministeria de Narcotraffico in Cali.’
‘Why did they fire you?’
‘I was too honesto.’
I watched Kieran watching me.
‘I see. So they weren’t very honesto?’
‘Perhaps not. Now I have time now to go see my family. You want to see my country? I can go back now. I been gone six months. It is long enough. I live in a little place close to Villamaria. It is in center of the country. Very beautiful. No turistas.’
I smiled and Kieran nodded at me, grinning like an idiot.
‘Do you carry a gun?’ I asked Juan Andres, noticing for the first time the tell-tale bulge in his jacket as he leaned forward. Juan Andres nodded and patted his pocket.
‘In case they see me.’
‘In case who sees you?’
‘My former employer.’
‘Are you wanted?’
Juan Andres grinned at Kieran, now two idiots gurning at each other.
‘No, Ryan', he replied measuredly. 'Much better. They think I am dead.’
Juan Andres Montero Garcia was born in Manizales, in the geographical centre of Colombia, in 1961. His father was a farmer, but died when Juan Andres was a boy, leaving him his mother, seven brothers and sisters, and a succession of uncles, some of whom stayed longer than others.
Juan Andres was an intelligent child. His school reports noted that he was respectful, calm and excelled in science and mathematics. The family farm had sufficient brothers and sisters attached to function without him, and so by the time Juan Andres graduated from college in Bogota with a degree in chemistry he was free to consider a variety of career choices. The government was looking for scientists to assist the Ministry of Defence, the cartels were looking for scientists to perfect ever more ingenious ways of extracting from the humble coca leaf as many tiny white crystalline strands of pure cocaine as was inhumanly possible.
Neither of these options appealed to Juan Andres. He liked to hunt, fish and shoot. He liked riding horses, preferably at night when the moon was up and you could almost hear the fields soaking up the dark humidity. Juan Andres was a black belt in judo and he could swim and run for miles. He had been the Manizales under-nineteen four hundred meter champion. He had stamina, and even though Juan Andres’s hair was fair and he was about five foot nine, he had a heart at least a third bigger than average, just like the tiny Quechuan Indios of the Altiplano and just like one of his uncles.
In 1983, at the age of twenty-two, Juan Andres was recruited by Felicio Suares, the head of the Colombian military, for intelligence work. It wasn’t like Britain or the United States where languages were desirable. In Colombia, the recruiters, such as Suares, were looking for brute force and natural cunning. Apparently Juan Andres fulfilled both criteria, and after six months’ training in Barranquilla, a northern Caribbean port, he traveled south, towards the Rio Putumayo, near the border with Ecuador, the home of the cartels’ cocaine-production facilities.
At first, in the early to mid 1980s, the military was hopelessly outnumbered and underpowered. There was little ten intelligence officers could do against a hundred mercenaries with state of the art hardware and sophisticated radar early-warning systems. Normal procedure, set out by Suares to his men, was monosyllabic: run. Run as fast as possible. Hide in the jungle. Wait to be picked up. Do not under any circumstances attempt to engage a superior enemy. It was stupidity to waste one’s life when one was being paid less than the equivalent of two hundred US dollars a month.
By 1985, and after two years on the force, Juan Andres had done a lot of running. He had also jumped out of helicopters, slashed his body into ribbons falling through jungle foliage and had lost a small chunk of one ear to a ‘lucky’ bullet. Although the sun shone brightly for much of the time in Colombia, the men in Suares’s team were very pale. They spent most of their time scoring black and green crayon across their cheeks and lying in ditches, trying to find homing signals. Either that or it was the eleventh floor of a nondescript office block in Cali, to the south of the country, and the growing focus of the cartels’ operations. Medellin was now fading into history as the over-developed drugs
capital of the world. The jefes found it much easier to simply leave and construct nice new bullet-proof houses in Cali, replete with gymnasia, swimming pools and underground bunkers.
Cali was a modern city compared to the ancient settlements of Pasto and Popayan even further to the south, and it had a selection of excellent restaurants and car dealerships. Juan Andres was not motivated by envy, but a weekend trip to Cali in May 1985 had the unforeseen effect of sharpening his senses in that general direction. Suares told them to always travel in twos or threes. Juan Andres’s ‘buddy’ that weekend, Pepe, was only two years older than him and on nearly the same salary, but that weekend they danced in a Merenge club until well past dawn, drank several bottles of expensive imported Spanish Rioja and then, the next day, walked out of a Mercedes dealership with a brand new 300SL, the sports model with hard and soft tops, air-conditioning and rear bucket seats.
Pepe had grown up in a teetering apartment block in one of the poorest barrios of Barranquilla in the north of the country, a dirty port town with high unemployment and where, incidentally, Juan Andres had completed his training two years before. He had met Pepe’s father there and had even had dinner in the apartment one night. Pepe had four sisters and the father had asked Juan Andres if he’d like to marry one of them. ‘Si, claro’, he replied grimly, which in that situation was the polite way of saying ‘no’.
‘My father left me some money,’ Pepe told Juan Andres.
‘Si. Claro’, replied Juan Andres, his eyes focusing on the gleaming dashboard with the removable Bose stereo. ‘What you gonna do with this car, Pepe?’
‘I gonna drive it, my friend, that’s what I gonna do.’
‘I think I’ll walk’, said Juan Andres, getting out of the cream leather passenger seat and shutting the door carefully behind him. Pepe started the engine and the car hummed into life.
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