Cocaine

by Jack Hillgate

  ‘I stay here’, said Juan Andres. ‘You go.’

  I suddenly didn’t feel very hungry anymore. All I wanted was some more coke.

  ‘I’ll stay too’, I said.

  ‘Listen – I need to get out or I’ll just bounce off the walls, my friends.’

  ‘Bring us back some empanadas, Kieran?’

  ‘Sure, English. Catch you later, amigo.’

  ‘Si, claro.’

  When Kieran left we both seemed to relax. Juan Andres took off his boots and lay back on his bed, humming a song in Spanish.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked him.

  ‘Is about a beautiful black girl who send you crazy.’

  ‘Do you have her number?’

  ‘I wish, Ryyy-an.'

  ‘Tell me about Tropinone.'

  8

  March 2007 – Cannes, South of France

  ‘You English?’, she asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh I love London. Whereabouts exactly?’

  ‘All over really. Mainly Kensington and Chelsea.’

  ‘How funny. Me too. Roderick always used to say Kensington and Chelsea was the only part of London worth living in. The permit, you see. Rod's the ex, George, no need to look worried.’

  Arabella raised her glass. She was about forty, medium height, dyed blonde hair and lots of heavy jewellery. She was quite attractive and definitely, as Jack Wiseman had put it, ‘up for it.’ She crossed her legs, leaning on the side of the sofa, her skirt splitting open to reveal a large expanse of sun-tanned thigh.

  ‘Are you married, George?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Divorced?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Excuse me grilling you like this, George, but it is so rare these days that one meets a soul-mate, someone to really talk to, a good listener, you know.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

  ‘You’re a good listener, George.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘If it’s not a personal question, what do you do for a living? I mean, do you work?’

  ‘I don’t work anymore.’

  Arabella’s eyes twinkled like diamonds.

  ‘What did you use to do?’

  ‘A bit of this and that really. Technology, mainly. Boring really.’

  ‘My husband’, she said, edging closer along the top of the sofa, ‘was a banker. He left me a very rich woman, you know.’

  ‘Where do you keep her?’

  ‘Ha ha! You’re quite funny, George, in a lovely way. I hope you take that as a compliment?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Just opposite.’

  ‘I’m miles away. Was planning on getting a little tipsy tonight, you know, have a ball…’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea.’

  ‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it? You know, Jack wants me to invest some of the divorce monies. Roderick’s given me nearly seven million. What do you think?’

  ‘Pounds, euros or dollars?’

  ‘Pounds.’

  ‘That is an awful lot of money, Arabella.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You know it is. Don’t play games, now.’

  ‘Should I give Jack half a million? He says his scheme is brilliant.’

  ‘Has he explained it to you?’

  ‘Not yet. First he wants me to take a course, to educate me. It’s ten hours, two hundred and fifty an hour.’

  ‘Who gives the course?’

  ‘Why Jack of course. Here, in the flat.’

  ‘Ten hours and then what?’

  ‘Then, if I like what I hear, I can get him to invest my money.’

  ‘Excuse me just one moment, Arabella, I must use the bathroom.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I emptied the contents of my signet ring onto the loo seat. Those fuckers outside had no fucking idea. No fucking idea. But Jack Wiseman now, Jack had gone up considerably in my estimation. He was verging towards the very, very clever if tonight’s guests were anything to go by. Everyone wanted to give him money, everyone seemed charmed by a man who had, in his own words, not a clue. The little scalpel crunched the white powder into even finer granules, and I removed a five hundred euro bill from my wallet.

  Jan Wiseman had no idea what her husband was up to. How long, I wondered, had they managed to keep doing it in Marbella? It only worked when one of the team was an innocent, the other knee-deep in shit. I pitied Jan, and suddenly found myself despising Jack. An idea for an excellent test, more of an experiment, was beginning to form in my mind. I rolled the note up and knelt down on the miniature Persian rug in front of the cistern.

  Time to clean out the pipes.

  ***

  October 1990

  At nine-thirty we were inside the laboratory wing of the science faculty of the Universidad del Cauca. There had been no guards, there were students milling about, working in the libraries, smoking and chattering about Jon Bon Jovi, Sylvester Stallone and Michael Jackson, or at least that was what we could hear through the open window.

  ‘Leave it’, Juan Andres had said. ‘Maybe they always leave it open.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the fumes.’

  I pointed to a complex set of phials and connecting plastic tubes. The liquid inside was grey and smoked a little.

  ‘Si, claro.’

  ‘Claro que si.’

  We looked around at the metal racks that lined the walls. Large tubs of standard laboratory filler, the uninteresting part of my course, I remembered, were not much use.

  ‘Do they have medical students here?’ I asked.

  ‘Tal vez.’ Maybe.

  ‘Opthamology? Anaesthesia?’

  Juan Andres started walking carefully to the end of the large room, towards the double doors we’d entered by.

  ‘If they stop us’, I said, ‘we just say we’re lost.’

  ‘Claro.’

  We walked down a long corridor which smelt of disinfectant. It smelt like my school, like those first experiments with carbon and potassium and hydrochloric acid. The bumbling teacher, a former rugby prop-forward, getting the mix wrong and blowing little shards of glass into his stomach, the red spreading across his white coat, the fumbling for the door, the meandering down the corridor, the collapse and then, minutes later, the replacement teacher, a robotic man whose name I’d forgotten. We stopped under the tiny brass plate that we’d missed on our way in. Departmento opthamologico.

  ‘Is it open?’

  ‘Si si. Is good.’

  The ‘department’ consisted of one small room with four desks, two on each side, and bundles of papers piled untidily on a metal rack. The cupboard containing the materials we needed was locked, but Juan Andres opened it carefully with a strange implement that he called un chiave universal - a universal key – and he did it without scratching the lock.

  ‘Don’t touch anything you don’t need to touch’, he said.

  ‘Prints?’

  ‘Si.’

  The cupboard was large enough for both of us, but I left it to Juan Andres to go inside and have a look on the basis that not everything would be labeled in the generic mix of English and Latin, and there would be brand names that he would recognize and that I would not.

  Viennese ophthalmologist Karl Koller introduced local anaesthesia for eye-surgery in 1884. Solutions of chloral hydrate, bromide and morphine were unworkable, but after his colleague Freud remarked upon the numbing properties of cocaine, especially when spread across sensitive areas of skin or the gums, Koller realized that these were not unwanted side-effects. In fact, they could become its raison d’etre, a powerful local anaesthetic.

  It was perfect for eye surgery, which, prior to the late nineteenth century had been almost impossible. Involuntary spasms, the reflex movements of a patient's eye, made any form of contact extremely difficult. Koller discovere
d that a few drops of a solution of cocaine would overcome the problem, as well as causing the pupils to dilate, known as mydriasis.

  It was also perfect for dentistry because of the way it blocked pain, specifically the signal-conduction in nerves, when injected locally. By the early twentieth century a significant proportion of opthamologists and dentists used cocaine for themselves and for their patients. The problem was its addictiveness, and so in time it was replaced with substances like lidocaine, which had less ‘abuse potential.’ Normally, if any cocaine was kept, it would be in the opthamology department, and, as it was used for medical purposes, it was as close to one hundred percent pure as possible.

  ‘Ten grams’, said Juan Andres, carefully lifting out a small glass jar filled with white powder and labeled with a large red skull and cross-bones and exclamation mark. ‘It’s enough.’

  ***

  Kieran came back at eleven with six empanadas and a six-pack of beer and he found us sitting at the rickety pine desk in front of my writing pad.

  ‘You two getting on like a house on fire’, he said, grinning and tossing the empanadas on Juan Andres’s bed.

  ‘Thanks, Kieran.’

  Juan Andres got up and brought the steaming pastries over to me. The cocaine had worn off just enough for me to feel hungry again.

  ‘I sure could use some more’, said Kieran. ‘No chance out there. Have to wait, huh?’

  We didn’t answer, both of us concentrating on my diagram.

  ‘Wanna smoke some more grass?’

  ‘Not right now, Kieran.’

  ‘Jees. You guys. We’re in fuckin’ Colombia. Meant to be havin’ a good time.’

  ‘Were you a dealer, Kieran? I mean, you said you were, right?’

  ‘Guess I dabbled. Wouldn’t call it dealin’ though.’

  Kieran started to roll another joint.

  ‘We better open the window. Bit obvious, isn’t it, when the maid comes?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘You’re used to buying this stuff, Kieran, right? The coke, I mean.’

  ‘Yeah. Should be twenty or thirty a gram here, you know. Cheap.’

  ‘Is much cheaper than that’, said Juan Andres. ‘You be surprised what five dollars can get you.’

  ‘You’re shittin’ me?’

  ‘No. Five American dollars, one gram eighty per cent pura cocaine.’

  ‘Ohmigod.’

  Juan Andres smiled and shook his head.

  ‘You never get it out of Colombia. Lots of people try, extranjeros, turistas, gringos, they all think they clever, but Suares will not be happy. If you take it out, is less money for him, and if he catch you, his men get promotion.’

  ‘This is that guy, right? The one you told us about?’

  ‘Si, Kieran. The guy you don’t wanna meet. The guy I don’t wanna meet. You guys buy off the streets, he find you. My advice: don’t do this.’

  I had to admire Juan Andres’s logic, which seemed to have an effect even on Kieran, even though I suspected he would ignore it. It had a similar effect on me, but then I already had an unbreakable Perspex jar full of white powder from the opthamology department of La Universidad del Cauca hidden inside a bottle of contact lens solution in my padded washbag, next to my razor and my condoms.

  9

  The funeral cortege moved slowly along the dusty road, the large stones catching the horses’ hooves and the wheels of the carriage. Black suits, moth-eaten and ill-fitting, black bonnets, tired and limp, and black shoes, creased and uncomfortable. There were only six people in all, apart from the family, and one of those was Felicio Suares. He kept an even pace at the rear, watching the mourners in front of him, head bowed, hands clasped tightly behind his back. It was a very sad day, so unfortunate, so unnecessary. He had been so young, with so much ahead of him, a bright future, perhaps one day even Suares’s job. ‘Brilliance swiftly quenched’, Suares had intoned to the family earlier that morning, ‘an utter waste of a good man and a fine policeman.’ The obituary that Suares placed with the local press together with a black and white head-shot ran as follows:

  “This young man, caught in his prime, was beloved to us all in the district of Manizales. Juan Andres was a strong man, a gentle man. A man of honour who cared for his family, his wife, his son, his mother, his sisters and his brothers. They, in turn, cared for him. He was a farmer by birth, like so many of us. A good rider, a good worker, a sound financial head on young shoulders. A scientist and a soldier. In the famine of ’79 he worked tirelessly to introduce a different soil composition into the land requiring less irrigation. He could dance well, strong of foot although slightly built and not a tall man, he could light up the floor with his dancing and he often graced the dance-halls of Manizales.

  Juan Andres died on the fourteenth of this month, perishing in a traffic accident on a visit to the south of our country. He will be sorely missed by those that loved and cared for him. There will be a service in the Church of the Holy Virgin in three Sundays to commemorate his life. Donations to the Guild of Retired Farmworkers.”

  Juan Andres's family would have been proud to have had the head of Colombia’s narcotics intelligence operations attend the funeral of their dear departed son, if, that is, they had known that that was his job title. He introduced himself simply as Juan Andres’s immediate superior, his mentor and, lastly, his friend.

  The climb was harder now, the hill becoming steep, and the metal-rimmed carriage wheels rattled noisily as they bounced their cargo towards its final resting place. The cargo was encased in a plain wooden coffin, painted black. It had been impossible to have any form of open coffin because of the state of the body when Suares’s men found it, half-eaten by rodents and other scavengers and horribly mutilated. The identification had been difficult, but not impossible. The dental records were an exact match, even though the phosphorus burns had wiped not only the fingerprints but also the fingers and toes.

  The tattoos were also recognizable, the documents nearby incontrovertible and the Uzi and the Makarov were the same serial numbers as those that had been issued to Juan Andres in the last twelve months. It had been the work of the Cartels, and Suares was pleased that this was one thing he did not need to lie about. No-one else would have mutilated a body in this way, leaving a tell-tale pile of coca leaves in the chest cavity and removing the penis and testicles, probably before death.

  A few years before his funeral, Juan Andres took a keen interest in the new Narcotraffico computer system. He befriended a keen salsa dancer, Julio, who was about the same age as him and whose job it was to input data into the system. Julio, like Juan Andres, had been to university and the two young men used to go out for drinks, chase women and construct fabulous schemes whereby they could catch all the Cartel members in the same place at the same time and close all factories in one giant swoop of the Narcotraffico eagle. One day Julio told Juan Andres about his big mistake.

  ‘You see, I didn’t mean it to happen. It was the speed at which Suares wanted all the data transferred from paper files to computer. I think he wanted to impress the Americans, some kind of delegation, sabes?’

  ‘Si. Claro.’

  ‘So anyway I inputted one batch, data for the new recruits, and I found that if I introduced one extra step into the equation than the data would be scrambled, switched.’

  ‘What extra step?’

  ‘Turn the machine off mid-transfer, then turn it back on again and hit F4.’

  ‘Big mistake?’

  ‘We killed two innocent men because their addresses were switched.’

  ‘By you?’

  ‘Si. Recruits became targets. The two databases cross-fertilized.’

  ‘Mierda. What did you do?’

  ‘I said nothing, of course, but when I realized what had happened I switched everything back again. Nobody ever found out. They brushed it under the carpet as a Cartel hit on new recruits. No-one asked questions because no-one wanted to know the answers. No-one claimed responsibility. No-one wan
ted to get fired, least of all me.’

  Slightly more recently, Julio had done Juan Andres Montero Garcia the greatest favour one man can do another: he had helped him to die. Using a public telephone, Juan Andres had managed to contact Cali headquarters, speak to Julio and get him to switch dental records with the man he had left in the jungle two days before. Juan Andres swore him to secrecy. They were taking a chance that the call was being monitored, so Juan Andres had kept it short. Dental records, he’d been very specific. Nothing else. Juan Andres then made his way back to the jungle, found the body of the soldier he’d killed, dressed it in his uniform, mutilated it Cartel-style, torched it with a phosphorous flare and headed south to Ecuador.

  Six months later and after having attended his own funeral, he arrived at the Hotel Gran Casino.

  ***

  March 2007 – Cannes, South of France

  The knock on the door made me hurry more than I normally like to. I cleaned up quickly, artificially refreshed and alert, to find Arabella standing there. She was leaning against the door-frame in such a way that one of her tanned breasts was ninety-nine per cent visible as was seventy per cent of her right thigh. It was clear that her failure to realize there was another bathroom only ten feet down the hall had been deliberate. She pushed the door, came in and flicked the lock shut with a manicured finger.

  ‘Tell me, George’, she said as she turned to me, smiled and reached for the silver clasp that sat between her breasts. ‘Do you fancy a little pick-me-up?’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  Her hand moved inside her dress to a point approximately two inches below the silver clasp. I was waiting for the dress to fall to the floor, waiting to reach behind her for the lock on the door in order to let myself out, when she produced a little blue velvet purse and held it out to me.

  ‘It’s pure’, she said. ‘Best nose candy in Cannes.’

  I smiled as I watched her empty out a white plastic bag onto the same loo seat I’d used less than a minute before.