Cocaine

by Jack Hillgate

  ‘These parties are so dull, don’t you think?’ she said, less a question, more of an invitation.

  I watched her cut the white powder into four little lines with a black Amex card. The black plastic against the white sanitary-ware made for a wonderful contrast.

  ‘Thank you, Arabella’, I said, taking a hundred euro note out of my wallet. ‘You’ve restored my faith in the human race.’

  When we walked back in Jan Wiseman was laying a first course of smoked salmon. The six other diners watched as Arabella calmly sat in the empty chair next to Jan Wiseman's.

  ‘Thought you’d got lost’ said Jack, slightly put out, but I watched Sylvie’s face, the pretty petite blonde whose French antennae were far more attuned to this sort of thing than any of the other guests.

  ‘That must’ve been one hell of a shit, George’, said Bill the Aussie, Sylvie's husband. ‘Heard you from here.’

  ‘Just cleaning the pipes’, I replied, beaming. ‘Oh – smoked salmon. My favourite!’

  I sat down next to Jack Wiseman and leaned towards him.

  ‘So tell me, Jack, about Marbella.'

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  `Why did you leave?’

  ‘Wife and me, we’d had enough I think.’

  ‘There are a lot of criminals in Marbella, aren’t there?’

  Jack took a big glug of unchilled white wine and pulled a face.

  ‘Christ that tastes foul’, he muttered.

  ‘Aren’t there?’

  ‘Too many English’, repeated Heinrich from the other end of the table. ‘Too many fish and too many chips.’

  ‘You’re thinking of Torremolinos, isn’t he darling?’ asked Jan.

  ‘Maybe, maybe’, Jack replied, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

  ‘I think the weather’s rather good there.'

  ‘It’s hot, I’ll give you that, George.’

  ‘Rather conducive to crime, though, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Are you driving at something, George? Not happy with your salmon? Come on, lad, eat up and shut up.’

  It was nice to have one’s suspicions confirmed by one’s host. I realized that for the first time in years I wasn’t thinking about Carlos and the interminable wait.

  The conversation pattered along throughout dinner with talk of stocks and shares and Biotech and Jack’s infallible but strangely secretive investment strategy that seemed to have snared everyone in the room apart from me. After another two hours I was the last to leave. Arabella, it transpired, lived close to the Germans and so, after our formal goodbyes, they poured her into their car, a large silver Mercedes, and I used my electronic clicker to open the domain’s gates to let them out.

  ‘Speak soon, eh George?’

  ‘Lovely party, Jack. Sorry about the Marbella thing.’

  ‘Bad memories, George. Some bad people out there.’

  ‘There were.’

  I walked the six feet to my apartment door, turned the key and walked straight into the shower, leaving my clothes in a pile on the floor. I needed to feel clean again, cleansed of these gullible people, cleansed of the coked-up Arabella. The water on my skin enabled the evening to recede quickly, and I used copious amounts of my mouthwash to kill the taste of beer and cheap wine. Then, at nearly two in the morning, I sat on my terrace in my white bathrobe in the moonlight, watching the lights of the yachts reflected in the water. Always waiting, always looking, I had opened my hermetically-sealed existence and increased my small imprint to reconnect, to stave off boredom, the boredom that was eating me away inside, the boredom of waiting for Carlos.

  Where was he? No message? And then I thought again about Jack and Marbella and his infallible money-making scheme. I thought of the Taser in its drawer and the Glock in its spring holster inside my wardrobe.

  I hoped, for Jack’s sake, that he didn’t have hypertension or arrhythmia.

  10

  November 1990

  Green leaves glistened in the dew of the early morning. The sun rose quickly, casting its strong light into the valley and directly onto the lonely farmhouse where I was sleeping. The golden strands filtered through the gaps in the shutters, waking me slowly. I threw off the spotlessly clean single cotton sheet and sat on the side of the bed, trying to blink myself into consciousness. I wondered if Kieran and Juan Andres were awake yet. It had been so dark, so quiet that night that I had slept better than I had done since I arrived in Latin America three months before.

  The flight from London to Houston, the quick change of planes to Cancun, the lost luggage and the night spent sleeping on a spare bed in a luxury hotel room shared by two black girls whose names I couldn’t remember. They’d won a four day trip to Cancun from a local Texan radio station and they were keen to help out a traveler in need, especially one with an English accent. Once the airline delivered my rucksack to me I’d headed to Merida, further inland in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, and the state capital. It was an interesting place, but the food had been terrible, and I picked up amoebic dysentery which followed me all the way to Chichen Itza. At the site of the famous ancient Mayan ruins and in the burning heat I spent at least an hour doubled-up on the ground in agony, my stomach grinding into me like razor blades.

  The doctor back in Merida had offered me a questionable needle containing antibiotics, which despite my discomfort I declined. His office was dusty, hot and poorly ventilated, and I chose instead a large brown glass bottle filled with pills the size of gobstoppers and covered in green dust whose taste and texture made me want to vomit. The tiny black engravings on the label told me in Spanish that the pills were nearly two years past their sell-by date but this was better than being passed Hepatitis C intravenously or worse. When I remarked on the possibility of degradation of product through age and exposure to the sun, and that I might need to increase the dose accordingly, the doctor looked annoyed and told me that they were all he had and that I should be very grateful he was only charging me twenty American dollars for the bottle.

  I took two pills three times a day, with immense difficulty. The pills were so large that they were virtually impossible to swallow, and if you split them into two, which I tried, they crumbled into fifty pieces which heightened the disgusting taste. After three days I threw the bottle away. Even dysentery was preferable to trying to propel foul-tasting dusty green tennis balls down one’s oesophagus.

  The rest of Central America had been a blur. Guatemala was lovely, full of friendly Indios and smoky volcanoes, cheap Spanish schools where they taught one-to-one and breakfasts of frijoles with a healthy dose of chili, served by the matriarch of the family house at which I was staying. By the time I crossed the jungle border with Honduras my spoken Spanish was still terrible, but at least I could understand a little of what was being said to me.

  My only memory of Honduras was that it was best swallowed without letting it touch the sides. The most interesting thing in the whole country was a giant lizard hanging on a wall somewhere, basking in the unbearably hot sun. Honduras was dirty and humid, the people poor and unhappy and the capital city, the unpronounceable Tegulcigalpa, felt so forbidding to a lone traveler that I did not dare venture out of my revolting hotel room for fear of being mugged. I left the next day for Nicaragua.

  Nicaragua was even poorer than Honduras, both countries having been ravaged by war, but somehow there was a bit more fighting spirit. Other than Managua, the capital, trade seemed to take place by the roadside. A young boy would stand entrepreneurially in the central reservation between the two carriageways hawking fifty cabbages or a hundred cartons of unsmokable Honduran cigarettes. I stopped one night at a restaurant where the owner said everything was off apart from the chicken and that I better be quick if I wanted it because it was only big enough for two.

  ‘Mira’ he said, pointing at the scrawny thing running in the courtyard. ‘Es muy pequeno.’

  I treated myself to the whole thing because I was starving. My room that night – and I remember it well
– was a tin shack made of panels of corrugated metal heated by the sun and a window without any glass in it. That night the mosquitoes ate much better than I did. At least it was cheap. The next day I took a bus to Managua. A shit-hole, with one smart hotel and lots of crumbling buildings, some of which still had bullet holes tattooed in the walls, a striking form of modern art. Next stop was Costa Rica, the apartment with the two girls, Mary and the dark-haired one who hated me for sleeping with Mary, and then I took the Avianca 737 from San Jose to Quito and spent my first night in the shit-hole that was the Hotel Gran Casino.

  I opened the shutters and felt the sun on my face. I reached for my sunglasses, the old black Ray Bans. The fields stretched out before me in a meandering mass of tractor-made lines and squares, but the crop was uniform, and not an inch of ground lay fallow. Juan Andres’s family farm was infinitely nicer than anywhere I’d stayed in Latin America.

  I felt incredibly safe, surrounded by the hundreds of acres of green fields, birdsong and the chirping of crickets. This was the real Colombia, not the Colombia you read about in the newspapers. This was the place Juan Andres Montero Garcia had grown up with his brothers and sisters and under his strong mother, the place he first rode a horse, fired a rifle and made a fire. I could see him now, a teenager, studying for his science examinations, sitting on the wooden terrace with his feet up on the balustrade, listening to the crickets. This was life at its simplest; a self-sustaining existence with no intrusion from the outside world. A remote valley, an almost invisible farmhouse with its own water supply. I sighed contentedly. I loved those green fields, the richness of the fauna. For the first time I could see why Colombians were so passionate about Colombia.

  ***

  Monday April 2nd, 2007

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Two thousand five hundred’, I replied. ‘For the full ten hours.’

  Jack looked rather shocked. ‘I thought you weren’t interested.’

  ‘I changed my mind. The dinner party. Everyone was so complimentary, and I thought…in for a penny, in for a pound.’

  ‘This is euros, George. I need pounds.’

  ‘I can get you pounds. Not a problem. When can we start? What about right now?’

  ‘Now?’

  Jack looked a little taken aback.

  ‘We’ll need our materials, you see. I’ll need to prepare a little. Just a little time, mind.’

  ‘Surely we can start now? I want you to tell me all about it in an hour, and I’ll let you off the other nine. You can keep the money.’

  ‘An hour?’

  ‘The best ideas should be capable of explanation in under two minutes, Jack, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Not with this one. I tell you what’, he said, rising suddenly and stuffing the money into the breast-pocket of his safari shirt, ‘give me ‘til tomorrow.’

  ‘Done. I’ll see you here at ten thirty?’

  ‘Lovely. I’ll tell Jan to get in the Kit Kats.’

  I sat smoking on the terrace, letting the sun blast my face. It was nearly eighty degrees, which for early April was hot. What, I wondered, would Jack Wiseman be doing between now and tomorrow morning in order to prepare for our meeting? Would he be setting up a dummy bank account in which to siphon my capital, assuming he could somehow get his hands on it? Would he be arranging for various people to call or email him during our discussion to make it appear as if he were highly successful and actually doing what he was meant to be doing? What would he be using the two thousand five hundred for? To buy Kit Kats?

  Speculation was the most innocent of luxuries, confined as it was to one’s own brain. I speculated for a good few hours in the sun, toasting myself nicely, basting myself in coconut oil and turning regularly to avoid burning. I felt like an omelette, preparing myself for consumption tomorrow morning by Jack Wiseman. My diversionary tactics had worked well, and I used the word in the sense of diverting myself from the reality of my situation, which was the waiting, the not knowing. If I was still alive tomorrow morning then it would be great fun to listen to Jack Wiseman’s investment gems, his infallible scheme for protecting capital. Perhaps he would try and involve me in his import/export business, one of the three business cards I had from him from our first meeting. Or maybe he would try and sell me a peerage? What would I be? Lord Milton of Cannes? There already was a Rue Milton, as well as roads named Shakespeare and Byron. They criss-crossed the English quarter of Cannes and the Boulevard des Anglais, also known as Carnot, the road that ran north from the sea to Le Cannet.

  Twice a day, morning and evening, without fail, I enjoyed regular bowel movements. The predictability was delightful and helped give an order to my life. My evening ablutions heralded the night and the sparkling lights in the Bay of Cannes all the way from the Cap to the Esterel. That night there was a partial eclipse of the Moon, but by the time I’d run in for my camera it had gone, leaving me with a high-definition multi-pixellated image of a red circle and a black blob. I imagined Carlos’s face, wrinkled and drawn, slowly materializing out of the black blob. I stared at the digital image for a few seconds and then I wiped it from my camera.

  Tuesday 3rd April, 2007

  Another fine day. I walked down at seven in the morning and did twenty laps of the fifteen-metre pool which the management kept heated year round to eighty-five degrees. It steamed on cold days, like thermal springs. The laps didn’t take very long. I dried off under the low sun, lying on the white lounger in my thick white bathrobe and took out my camera from my wash-bag, the Nikon with the powerful lens. I tried looking up into Jack and Jan’s apartment using the zoom but they had their blinds drawn. In three hours I’d be sitting up there with him, eating one of Jan’s famous Kit Kats and being given the keys to Jack’s kingdom, the secrets to his intricate financial trapeze, complete with a money-back-guaranteed safety-net.

  Three hours passed slowly, the way it always did. No Carlos, of course. I was beginning to wonder. I knocked on Jack and Jan Wiseman’s door at ten-thirty sharp and Jack opened the door almost immediately with a beatific smile which turned almost ethereal when he noticed I was carrying an expensive bridle-leather attaché case that he no doubt imagined was brim-full with my financial affairs, ready for the master, Jack from Marbella.

  ‘I’ll tell you, George’, he said, edging closer on the sofa which someone had moved to his terrace, enclosed with glass and which we now shared with two desks, two computers and the young man sitting at one of them, tapping away on the keyboard. I noticed Bloomberg was on in the living room, the large silver plasma telling me London was up seventy points already, a one point two per cent gain, and that banks were looking to consolidate once more.

  ‘Nice set up’, I said, thinking that it looked like an office, suddenly. The two computers looked new, as did the desks. You could buy a lot for two thousand five hundred these days. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘It’s like this, see. I have a special arrangement with the Treasury.’

  ‘Really? How intriguing.’

  ‘It’s quite hush-hush, because it’s a tax loophole that applies only to expatriates, to non-residents like you and me, see?’

  ‘I understand. I won’t tell a soul.’

  ‘Good, because there’s only about a hundred of us worldwide.’

  ‘A hundred expats? I think there are – ‘

  ‘ – not a hundred expats, George, a hundred spaces.‘ He almost whispered the word.

  ‘Spaces?’

  ‘Spaces. In the program, George. The program I’m going to tell you about and get you enrolled in faster than you can say Swiss cheese.’

  I nodded, trying to look impressed. Jack Wiseman checked his watch and then the telephone rang. The young man picked it up.

  ‘It’s Moscow on the line, Mr Wiseman. They want to know if they should make a bid yet or hold on for a few more hours.’

  ‘Tell ‘em to wait.’ Jack chuckled and turned to me again, a Kit Kat in his hand. ‘Bloody Russians, eh? It’s one of my d
eals, mustn’t talk about it really, suffice it to say it’s a nine figure sum.’

  ‘And your role, Jack?’

  ‘Adviser. Retained adviser. You do know what two per cent of seven hundred million is, don’t you George?’

  ‘Fourteen million.’

  ‘Errr...yes...that’s right.’ Jack lay back smugly on the sofa and took a bite of his chocolate. ‘We’re very comfortable.’

  ‘Coffee, George?’ asked Jan Wiseman, creeping up on us silently.

  ‘I’d love some’, I answered, drawing my attaché case closer to me.

  ‘White? Sugar?’

  ‘Yes thanks.’

  She poured whilst I opened my case. I looked inside at the contents and pulled out a single sheet of paper on which I had set out a list of fictitious assets including shares worth about half a million and a property in Thailand worth the same again. I had also included my white Porsche, the lovely Portia, resting in her home fourteen floors beneath us.

  ‘That’s me’, I said. He studied it quickly.

  ‘You’re exposed’, he said almost immediately. ‘We must act soon, George.’

  ‘So tell me about this special deal with the Treasury, the one with the hundred expats and the spaces.’

  ‘Yes. Yes I think I better. Before it’s too late.’

  ‘Too late?’

  ‘That’s right, George’ he continued, ‘we’re in for a rocky ride. Market indications are troubling me.’

  ‘Market’s up seventy points this morning, Jack.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  He nodded sagely, as if party to some financial secret, some market surprise that was eluding the likes of Warren Buffet, the world’s second richest man, and me. ‘That’s what I tell the hedge funds I work with. Set up structures, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Structures? Which hedge funds, Jack?’

  ‘Can’t say.’ He tapped his nose conspiratorially. ‘Bound by confidentiality.’