Cocaine

by Jack Hillgate

  ‘You know what, Juan Andres? You think Suares doesn’t have a car like this? One day, one day I show you how you can have a car like this one. Maybe even the 500SL, huh?’

  ‘One day.’

  Juan Andres kneeled to tie his bootlaces. He heard Pepe pull away, the powerful engine with its catalytic converter striking a different note to the crumbling Chevrolets and barge-finned Lincolns. He heard a scooter pass by slowly. A different note again, a harsher one, the loud two-stroke obliterating all the other notes. Perhaps the rider was looking for a house or one of the tiny side-streets whose signs were often obscured by leaves. Juan Andres looked back at Pepe in his shiny red sports-car. The traffic light was also red and Pepe was waiting, revving the engine as the man on the scooter drew up alongside him, pulled out a shiny pistol and shot Pepe three times in the head.

  3

  The Wisemans

  March 2007 - Cannes, South of France

  To my complete chagrin, I discovered that the new occupants of the apartment opposite were English. I heard the men moving heavy things in and out of the elevator on the Thursday and I made sure my door was treble locked and dead-bolted, that my telephone ringer was off and the blinds drawn. There were only two apartments per section of block and the one opposite me had lain empty for months whilst the newly-deceased owner’s descendants squabbled over what to do with it. I had considered offering to rent it - it would be somewhere to put Carlos when he visited – but then I heard that it had been sold at auction to a company from Luxembourg.

  The voices through my steel-plated door were muffled, but distinct enough for me to discern the flat tones of a couple from the North of England, possibly Yorkshire, who seemed to speak no French whatsoever judging by the way they shouted at their French removal men. They were definitely not from Luxembourg. I did not relish the presence opposite me of people who not only spoke my language and therefore might wish at some point to communicate with me, but who felt the need to buy their apartment through an offshore vehicle. Their fiscal imprint would be even smaller than mine, which meant that even before I met the Wisemans I was wondering what it was exactly that they had to hide.

  ‘Beautiful day’, said Jack Wiseman, rolling up the sleeves of his stripy Thomas Pink shirt, obviously straight out of the box, the factory-folded horizontal crease resting just above his stomach. ‘Beautiful country. Been here long, George?’

  ‘Forever.’

  ‘Aaah. You’ll speak the lingo, then. Me and the wife have no idea – really, I tell you – no idea how to speak Frog. None. You fluent, George, in French I mean?’

  ‘Yes I am, I suppose.’

  ‘The reading as well as the writing?’

  ‘Yes…Jack. Both of them.’

  ‘You could help me out then, maybe, if there’s something I can’t make head nor tail of? You know, a bill or something?’

  ‘Putain’, I said to him smoothly, a smile never leaving my lips. He looked at me quizzically and smiled back.

  ‘You trying to be funny, George?’

  ‘I said I’d be delighted to.’

  ‘Oh. That’s kind, that’s kind.’

  I looked around at the piles of cardboard boxes in the Wisemans’ apartment. I’d made the executive decision to pre-empt an unwanted visit from them by delivering a housewarming gift. My bottle of Bollinger had been much appreciated, in particular by Mrs Wiseman, who tried, unsuccessfully, to hug me as I handed it over.

  ‘You working, still?’ asked Jack Wiseman, watching me over his fizzing flute of ice-cold bubbly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nice.’ He took another sip. ‘Very nice indeed. At your age too. How old are you? Forty? Forty-five?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘You’re a young man. Lots of time ahead of you.’ Jack stood by the balcony door but I noticed he didn’t venture outside, despite the fact that it was a sunny day with only a gentle breeze. ‘I’d like to retire of course…and let me say we’re very comfortable, very comfortable’ – at this point he rested his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly – ‘but I can’t just leave my clients and bugger off now, can I?’

  Mrs Wiseman walked in smiling with a silver tray of ginger biscuits and Kit-Kats.

  ‘Kit-Kat?’, she queried, in soft tones.

  I reached out and took one, my first in more than five years. It tasted good.

  ‘Yes, my clients keep saying to me, Jack, they keep saying, Jack, you’ve played an invaluable role in my investment strategy. The day you retire’ – his finger prodded my chest gently for emphasis – ‘is the day I retire.’

  ‘You must be very good at what you do.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You help people with their investments?’

  ‘I teach people how to invest. I show them an infallible method of not only making money, but avoiding losing it as well. Infallible.’

  ‘Intriguing. Mrs Wiseman?’

  ‘Yes dear?’

  ‘Thank you for the Kit-Kat.’

  ‘My pleasure, dear. Jack loves ‘em, bless his heart. Has he shown you his certificates?’

  Jack Wiseman’s eyes lit up. I felt I couldn’t disappoint him.

  ‘No…'

  ‘It’s Jan. My name.’

  ‘Jan’, I smiled, ‘I’d simply love to see them.’

  Jack bounced over to his desk and picked up a framed certificate emblazoned with red wax scrolls and spidery calligraphy. He handed it to me, beaming and as I read it I realized I was now standing opposite ‘Lord Wiseman of Littlehampton’ which also happened to be the name on each of the three business cards he laid out carefully on the desk in front of me, advertising his involvement with a bank, an import/export company and a company that appeared to sell titles, aptly named ‘Peer-to-Peer’.

  ‘I don’t like people knowing, normally’ said Jack. ‘I’m a very discreet person. That’s why my clients trust me with their money.’

  I read the string of letters after his name. I looked to my right and there stood Jack Wiseman holding out another certificate for me to inspect.

  ‘First University of Central Zurich’, he said proudly. ‘Two years for that MBA.’

  ‘Konnen Sie Deutsch?’

  ‘Pardon me, George?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I just thought, Zurich being German-speaking…?’

  ‘Distance learning, George. I did everything over the Internet.’

  ‘Very wise.’

  ‘I like to think so. Now…did you have a Kit Kat?’

  ‘Yes thank you. I must go now, Jack. I just wanted to meet my new neighbors. I’m sure you’ll be very happy here.’

  ‘As long as we’re safe’, he beamed, putting his arm round his wife, ‘then we’re happy. A man like you knows what I mean.’

  As I watched the sun set across the bay, the flat sea reflecting the creeping orange tendrils of light better than any mirror, I found myself wondering if Jack Wiseman was very, very stupid or very, very clever and I concluded that the only way I could know for sure was to give him a little test. It would give me something to do whilst I was waiting for Carlos.

  October 1990 – Quito, Ecuador

  The room seemed to close in on me, the low third-floor ceiling musty and black with fungus, the mattress as spongy as a semi-deflated lilo. My Swatch, the one with the fluorescent dial, told me it was two o’clock in the morning. I had six or seven hours to sleep and six or seven hours to decide whether or not to put my life in the hands of a gurning Canadian and a man who was meant to be dead.

  Juan Andres hadn’t managed to finish his story – the whole evening had turned sour after a fight broke out between Franz or Heinz and the two Americans. But the offer still stood. Us, not ‘me’ anymore. Kieran seemed to be mesmerized by the whole notion of traveling to places where there were no turistas. Travelling in threes. I wasn’t too keen. Kieran didn’t seem in the least perturbed by Juan Andres’ story and he failed to draw the inevitable conclusion that Juan Andres Montero Garcia wa
s not a safe person to be around. When the fight broke out he slipped into the shadows of the courtyard and when the local police turned up Juan Andres had gone.

  ‘We’ll see him tomorrow’, said Kieran. ‘He’s a good guy. Terrible things have happened to him, you know, English?’

  ‘I gathered.’

  We drank for a while in silence, just the two of us. The teenager behind the bar, a pistolette jammed into the rear pocket of his creased blue jeans, passed round a bottle of cheap aguardiente after the police had left, to numb us all into believing we were having a good time. The police had taken Franz or Heinz with them for questioning. After a few minutes watching Kieran juggle, I asked him what he was doing in South America and he recounted his reasons without ever taking his eyes off the circulating black balls with their orange and yellow stripes.

  Kieran Macdonald was originally from Vancouver and his father, so he told me, was rich. He also told me his father was an asshole. Two years before, Kieran had flunked out of school and taken a job as a house-painter. He was now twenty-four years old, the same as me, our birthdays one month apart. He told me he had played semi-professional soccer for a few seasons and coached a female soccer team until they managed to find a more ‘traditional’ coach.

  ‘I fell in love with the goalkeeper’, he said, chuckling. ‘Can you fuckin’ believe it?’

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘I’m always fallin’ in love with someone’, he said, this time in an American redneck drawl. ‘Guess I’s dumb or summat.’

  ‘Or mebbe you’re just an asshole’, I said, in the same redneck accent.

  ‘Guess I am.’

  ‘Guess you are.’

  He let the juggling balls fall to the table, we raised our tiny thick glasses of clear fifty-per-cent proof alcohol and knocked them back in a toast. We gasped, our tracheae momentarily shocked by the rough potency of the lubricant and then, when the fire had subsided, Kieran giggled inanely.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked him.

  ‘Your face, English. A picture.’

  ‘And yours.’

  ‘You hungry?’

  I nodded. I was.

  ‘Then let’s get us something pleasant to eat in this goddam town.’

  ‘You mean, we go out? Now?’

  It was past midnight and the streets of Quito were paved with wiry teenagers with bulging back pockets.

  ‘Are you afraid of something?’ said Kieran, leering at me, a face-splitting grin stretched across his cheekbones which revealed his slightly goofy teeth.

  ‘No’, I lied.

  We walked through the darkness, the stillness exacerbated by the thinness of the air and the biting cold. It had been over seventy degrees a few hours earlier, but now it felt like Cambridge on a November evening; cold, a little damp, and breezy. We found a bar selling cheap whisky and rum, as well as the staple aguardiente. I looked at the bottles, lined up in front of us. Luckily, they also sold empanadas, little savoury pockets of pastry filled with meat.

  ‘Soy vegeteriano’, said Kieran to the man behind the plastic counter. ‘Cheese? Con queso?’

  The man thrust something into a microwave for thirty seconds and handed over four piping-hot packages, wrapped up in fly-paper.

  ‘Dos queso, dos jamon.’

  ‘Muchas gracias.’

  We paid him and headed outside. The empanadas were too hot to eat immediately and so we made our way to the main square, a large open space bordered by impressively wide government buildings and filled with cars and bicycles, although how anyone could cycle round Quito was beyond me. It was comparable to riding a bicycle in San Francisco but with less oxygen at your disposal. We sat on a wrought-iron bench, facing the distant lights of the hills surrounding the city. I thought I could see a plane coming in to land.

  ‘I got into a bit of trouble, you know, back in Vancouver. Dad told me best thing to do would be to lie low for a few months, you know, for it to blow over.’

  ‘For what to blow over?’

  Kieran took a bite into his cheese empanada and spat it out again just as quickly.

  ‘There’s fuckin’ meat in here! I told him I was a vegetarian. Fuckin’ loser!’

  Kieran passed me his packets of empanada flypaper.

  ‘Fuckin’ South America!’

  In sympathy I waited for my empanadas to cool a little more.

  ‘What trouble?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh, the usual.’

  ‘I’ve never been in trouble.’

  ‘You stick with me, we’ll have an awesome time.’

  I tried to envisage what we looked like, two young men sitting on a bench at one o’clock in the morning with lousy empanadas, staring at the lights, thinking about tomorrow. I don’t think we looked like we were having an awesome time, as Kieran had put it. I think we looked like we didn’t have a clue.

  ‘What trouble?’ I asked again.

  ‘You really wanna know, huh?’

  ‘Yes. I’m…interested. I won’t tell anyone, Kieran –‘

  He put his head between his legs and took a deep breath.

  ‘I was arrested. For dealing a little bit of grass, you know, nothing big, just a bit here and a bit there, nothing fancy.’

  ‘Still not legal in Vancouver then?’

  ‘Nope. And they found some coke on me too, which really fucked me up. That’s when dad had to get in the hotshot lawyers to say I was having a nervous breakdown, that I’d undergo treatment at a clinic in Europe, that sort of shit.’

  ‘But they went for it?’

  ‘Yup. They surely did. Right now, Ryan, I’m meant to be at a facility somewhere in the Swiss fuckin’ Alps, walking round like a frickin’ Moonie.’

  Kieran had such an unusual expression on his face that I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, and I thought he was going to hit me but then he put his arm round me and laughed even louder.

  ‘I like you Ryan’, he said. ‘You’re good-looking, for a man.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘We need to get ourselves laid by two pretty girls, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I agree.’

  We looked around the square. A fat old woman, about four feet tall, waddled out of an alleyway and crossed the square not far from us.

  ‘You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?’ asked Kieran.

  ‘Well, she is the perfect height’, I said in our redneck accent.

  We both started to chuckle and then I got out the bottle of aguardiente I’d stolen from the bar where we got our empanadas.

  4

  Honesto

  A few days after the hit, Suares called Juan Andres Montero Garcia to the eleventh floor for a meeting. The two men sat at one end of the rectangular room, Juan Andres on the black leather sofa, hands clasped, head down, Suares in his tall black swivel chair, arms folded.

  ‘You are troubled by recent events, yes, Juan Andres?’

  ‘Of course I am. When I think of Pepe – ‘

  ‘Pepe did not follow procedure. That is why he was killed.’

  ‘Do we know who killed him?’ asked Juan Andres.

  Suares shrugged, as if to say it could have been any one of a hundred individuals or organizations.

  ‘I would have called in, Mr Suares, but I didn’t know Pepe was going to buy such an expensive car. I knew he couldn’t have the money for it. I knew –‘

  ‘Listen to me, Juan Andres. There is no point being clever about this or trying to analyse what he knew or what you think you know. Sometimes there are no answers. This is Colombia, not Disneyland.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘We have all lost people close to us. You have already lost your father.’

  ‘Mr Suares?’

  Suares’s eyes lost their iciness and his arms slid gently to his sides.

  ‘I also lost my father, Juan Andres. It was a terrible experience, the worst thing that could have happened to my family.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘My mother tried to
kill herself. Just like he was killed. With a knife, by three of his compatriots, three men who had given up their souls for dinero.’ He spat the last word. ‘Two of them held him down while the third one slit his throat from ear to ear like a chicken. This is not how a man should die.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Pepe was a bad man, Juan Andres. He stole from your country.’

  Juan Andres looked down at the floor and nodded gently, whilst Suares re-folded his arms, once-more the monosyllabic blank-faced intelligence chief, watching his most highly-educated young agent carefully. Juan Andres licked his lips and looked up at his jefe.

  ‘We killed him then.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘And if I had been in the car with Pepe?’

  ‘We only wanted Pepe. You are too valuable to us. You just happened to be with him.’

  ‘Claro.’

  ‘I’ve been watching you closely, Juan Andres and I want to take this opportunity to congratulate you.’

  Suares reached over for Juan Andres’s hand. Juan Andres blinked and gave it to him.

  ‘Your honesty and fortitude through these difficult times have left me with only one course of action.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I’m promoting you to sergeant.’

  ‘Claro, jefe.’

  ‘I’m giving you Pepe’s job.’

  ‘Claro que si.’

  The undergrowth was filled with twisting vines that snagged on boots and clothing and slowed his progress. He was running hard and he had been for twenty minutes. He could still hear them behind him, calling his name, telling him to come back, that they didn’t mind that he’d found them. He kept going. He’d learnt not to stop just because someone called his name. He’d learnt his lessons very well, especially the over-riding command that had stayed with him since his first few months in Barranquilla, sweating through the training process and acquiring a taste for yerbabuena, a local mint tea. The over-riding monosyllable: run. Run for your life. He was very good at running and he ran faster than the men chasing him.

  When he had found the hatch, approximately twenty-two minutes earlier, he had wavered. To radio in, or to climb down the steep steel ladder and to see for himself, for the first time, what all the fuss was about. In six years, four of them as sergeant, he had never once seen a factory. This was the first time, and his chemistry background helped to ignite his natural curiosity and fuel a semblance of bravery as he dropped quickly down the rungs to the earth floor below.