Cocaine

by Jack Hillgate

  ‘So what do we do? How can you help me, Jack?’

  ‘This strategy, see, this tax loophole, it’s very complex, very complex but very profitable because you can’t lose. Your capital, sonny-Jim, is safe as houses.’

  ‘What do you want me to do with my capital?’

  ‘Basically’, he said, waving his arms around, ‘I offer you my management skills. I pool your funds into a government-backed scheme that guarantees you forty per cent return for twenty percent invested, eighty per cent borrowed. Can’t lose, see?’

  ‘So I have to borrow money?’

  ‘Oh no, don’t worry. I take care of that side of it. I just need the capital and some papers signed and the tax credit normally comes in direct from the government in about three months.’

  In three months’ time Jack and Jan would be sunning themselves in another location.

  ‘I should get my lawyers to look over this, I think. Do you have some literature I can give them?’

  ‘People always ask me that.’

  'I bet they do.'

  ‘And do you know what I always tell them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll tell you. Look around, George. Look at where I’m living. Look at me. I’m a successful man, very wealthy. I enjoy setting up these investment structures – ‘

  ‘Another tea, George?’ chipped in Jan, smiling sweetly.

  ‘Yes please Jan.’

  ‘Like I was saying, I get the pleasure of helping friends, plus I take a small commission only if the funds increase in value. You know, five per cent, summat like that.’

  ‘So I give you ten pounds and you give me back twenty?’

  ‘You got it, my son. Easiest money in the world.’

  11

  November 1990

  We left Popayan the next day and took the bus to Cali. I noticed Juan Andres becoming more and more nervous as we approached the city, which, I recalled, contained his ex-employer's headquarters, somewhere on the eleventh floor of a nondescript downtown office block.

  ‘It’s Suares, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  He didn’t even blink.

  ‘No. He replied. 'It is my family.’

  ‘Your family?’

  ‘They think I am dead. It will be great shock.’

  ‘They’ll be real happy for you, Juan my man’, said Kieran.

  ‘Yes, compadre, but…’ His voice trailed off. ‘It will be great shock.’

  ‘We stoppin’ in Cali?’

  ‘No’, said Juan Andres and I, together. We turned to look at each other momentarily. I saw the look of sadness in his eyes. Three tourists, according to our passports. One of us was meant to be teaching English, the other was meant to be recuperating in a Swiss detox clinic, and the third was meant to be dead. We belonged with each other. I thought I had made the right decision, but we had so far only skirted around the possibilities of what we might achieve together.

  The job waiting for me in England was not a bad one, working in the quantitative analysis department of a minor investment bank somewhere in the City. The salary was to be twenty-two thousand, which was good for 1990, in fact, it was much more than most of my contemporaries, especially those with first class degrees who had gone on to do research in the labs just behind Downing College, the sandstone buildings shaded by damp green leaves. The bank had over-recruited, which meant they were happy for people to defer entry, people like me. I’d been given a grant of three thousand pounds to learn Spanish and teach English.

  ‘Communication’, said the head of HR, ‘communication and personal development. Broadening your horizons. Maturing.’

  If she could see me now, the supercilious forty-something woman in her tweedy suit and big black brogues, looking like a man in drag with those big clodhoppers on her feet, her condescension wrapped in one hundred per cent wool-twist. I had brought my signed employment contract with me to Colombia to remind me what I had to look forward to. I had already calculated that after tax and national insurance my monthly take home pay would be one thousand five hundred pounds, which meant twenty-five pounds an hour for sixty hours a week and the designation ‘grunt.’

  I knew a lot of people, especially those unfortunate enough to be unemployed, would have jumped at the chance to make so much so young, but when you thought about it, it wasn’t so much. And I didn't feel that young. I could have cheated the whole thing. I could have stayed in England, maybe spent a few months in Cornwall by the beach. The bank would never have known. I could have bought one of those ‘Learn Spanish in Three Weeks’ courses and sat on my towel watching the Atlantic rollers pound the shore at Newquay or Polzeath, the strains of ‘donde esta el aeropuerto?’ playing though my Walkman. Just like school. Ecoutez et repetez. I could have pocketed the three thousand pounds.

  That'd buy a lot of product.

  We were standing in what from the outside looked like a garage attached to the main house by a narrow door with two thick bolts across it. The room had a smooth concrete floor painted in a rubber-based grey paint and the walls were white-washed. There were no windows, just two fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling which illuminated a large steel work-table and four chairs. Racks similar to those at the university lined two walls, filled with a variety of packets, cartons, tubs and bottles, each with a cryptic handwritten label that I couldn’t read.

  Juan Andres placed approximately one gram of the pure cocaine that we had removed from the Universidad del Cauca’s opthamology department onto a sterile Petri dish.

  ‘The control’, he said, ‘is close to one hundred per cent pure.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Si, claro.’

  ‘Is code’, he told me. ‘No-one else know what they say.’

  ‘Which one’s the tropinone?’

  He pointed to a large tub and took it down from one of the racks. Inside were a number of sealed packets with a stamp from a US laboratory.

  ‘These are from where I think they're from…?’

  ‘Si. We the only people doing this in my country, trust me.’

  ‘Of course. I mean, what’s the point, when you have the real thing growing in your back-yard?’

  ‘Exactamente. No-one here know or care if there is artificial cocaine. Is only gringos like you.’

  He grinned at me. We were both enjoying this. I opened up my bag and pulled out a sheaf of notes.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked me.

  ‘The danger in this whole business is the distribution', I answered confidently. 'The danger is the competition. If you make a different product, you’re not technically in competition with the people who distill it from the leaf. And if you have localized distribution, like a mobile laboratory, then you drive around and make it to order.’

  ‘And you put the Cartels out of business, all by yourself?’

  ‘It’s my plan. You can come with me. I'll need a bodyguard.’

  ‘Hah! Dios mio!’

  ‘The end user gets a hundred percent pure, every time, which we know they don’t if they buy from a source that’s ten steps down the supply chain. This is what I spent my last year doing. Dreaming up ways to make money.’

  ‘Thass why you come to Colombia? You should have stay in Cambridge. Good laboratories. Famous university.’

  ‘You think they wouldn’t perhaps be a little suspicious? Out here the dollar goes a long way plus we can perform quality control testing. You said five dollars for eighty per cent pura cocaine.’

  ‘Si.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Cartagena. In the north. Is beautiful. Nice chicas.’

  ‘Kieran’ll like that.’

  ‘You not tell Kieran about this?’

  ‘Do you trust him?’

  ‘I think he nice guy. He just want to find woman to have sex.’

  ‘I know. Me too.’

  We both laughed, Juan Andres held up one of the sterile packets and the words ‘start-up capital’ popped into my head.

  I had five months before the inves
tment bank in the City could claim me as one of their own.

  Five months to do it.

  ***

  We had walked for what seemed like ten miles, but it was probably only two. Kieran and Juan Andres were much fitter than I and so I lagged behind, clomping along a dusty road that seven months before had carried a funeral cortege going in the opposite direction. The road went up and up and then suddenly dipped, the rocks getting bigger and the land greener. We were descending now, descending into a valley, a green valley filled with row upon row of three-foot high greenery, regimented, ordered, fertile.

  The dust and the rocks slowed our progress. There was only the chirping of crickets to accompany us, their song blending into the shimmering heat and making me forget where I was. There were no telegraph poles, no wires, no aeroplanes, no cars. Nothing remotely mechanical or man-made apart from the regimented green rows beckoning us forward into the bosom of Juan Andres Montero Garcia’s family.

  ‘My name’, he said suddenly, stopping for a drink of water, ‘is not Juan Andres.’

  Kieran and I exchanged a quick look of ‘I told you so.’

  ‘My family, they call me Ricardo.’

  ‘Ricardo?’

  ‘Rico. It means rich.’

  ‘Shall we, like, call you Rico?’

  He seemed to think about this for a moment.

  ‘No. You can call me Juan Andres.’

  Neither Kieran nor I argued with this. We each took a sip of water and continued down the hill, following Juan Andres/Rico as he headed for the solitary old farmhouse that only came into view around the next bend in the track, a modern garage block attached to one end.

  12

  Franz or Heinz was twenty-seven years old but he looked more like thirty-five. He had been an arrogant, argumentative child in Germany, growing up as he did in Dusseldorf, an unremarkable town made even more unremarkable by the Allied bombing in World War Two. The Altstadt, with its little bars, restaurants and basement clubs, had been his home after he was thrown out of school for smoking marijuana inside an old Trabant parked at the bottom of the football pitches. Nearly ten years of buying, selling and using drugs had turned his face a grayish hue, and his shoulders were hunched, his muscles slack and ugly. Franz or Heinz was not an attractive man.

  He smoked sixty filterless cigarettes a day and helped to distribute porn from a small lock-up garage. When he and his business partner Agatha, a muscular woman with a crew-cut, received the shipments, often from Holland, Franz or Heinz packaged them up and wrote out the recipients’ addresses. He bought the reams of thick brown paper wrapping and the stamps. He collected the funds and he showed Agatha how to turn a hundred Marks into five hundred by diluting the drugs they sold in the Altstadt. They passed relatively unnoticed, a slightly odd-looking couple wearing parka jackets and Dr Martin’s boots but no different to the thousands of other teenagers and twenty-somethings whose version of cool was to get blind drunk or stoned as quickly as possible in order to forget what a mess their lives were in.

  Franz or Heinz was letting the sun get to his face for the first time in a long time. He was sitting in a taxi-cab outside a smart apartment block in Cali at approximately the same time that we were arriving at Juan Andres’s family home a few hundred miles to the north. The block had a high metal fence and a security guard stationed in a little booth by the electric gates. A private compound of expensive apartments, newly built and, from what Franz or Heinz could tell from his vantage point in the back of the musty old Chrysler, almost deserted. There were parking spaces for forty or fifty cars and only three of them were taken. Many of the windows in the six-storey block were simply thick sheets of glass beyond which there was no sign of furniture.

  He looked down at the address on the sheet of paper.

  ‘You…you wait, yes?’ he said to the driver, getting out of the cab.

  ‘Quinietos vente-cinco,’ said the driver, pointing at his meter.

  ‘You say five hundred and twenty-five you fucking wop?’, said Franz or Heinz. ‘Wait for me. Ten minutes. Diez minutos.’

  The driver shrugged and Franz or Heinz pulled himself up to his full height, tried to straighten his slouch and walked confidently to the sentry standing at the main gate main gate.

  ‘Speak English or German?’ asked Franz or Heinz.

  ‘No senor.’

  ‘I want Senor Lisi’, said Franz or Heinz as he slipped a ten dollar bill into the sentry’s hand.

  ‘Si, claro.’

  Franz or Heinz walked through the car-park and into the white-tiled foyer. The elevator door was open waiting for him and he rode the small metal box to the sixth floor. He got out into darkness. He pressed the timer switch on the wall, which lit the corridor, and he made for the door at the end, apartment number 606, the Cali home of one Senor Gustavo Lisi. The money was heavy, weighing down the right pocket of his jacket. It was air-conditioned inside the block, but it hadn’t been in the taxi and Franz or Heinz could feel the clamminess on his back evaporating in the cool. He stood under a unit to calm himself.

  ‘Lim-ou-sine’, he thought, as he rang the doorbell. The sound was like a set of garden chimes, a friendly, homely tune. Turning a hundred Marks into five hundred had been his staple diet in Dusseldorf. This would require similar skills, negotiating strength and a lot more than a hundred Marks with which to negotiate.

  The door was opened by a woman, a small friendly woman who smiled at Franz or Heinz.

  ‘Alleman?’

  ‘I am the German.’

  ‘Por aqui, por aqui’, she said as she beckoned him into the apartment. 'Come through, come through.'

  He walked through into the dark. All the blinds were drawn and there were no lights, just the chink of the sun through the sides of the window frames.

  ‘Quieres café?’

  Before he had time to tell her if he wanted a coffee or not, she disappeared into what he assumed was the kitchen, although it was difficult to tell.

  ‘Sit down, Herr Frankel’, said a voice.

  ‘Hullo? I cannot see you?’

  ‘I’m here Herr Frankel, in the armchair by the window.’

  Franz or Heinz’s eyes began to adjust to the gloom and he could now see the outline of a man, a small man, sitting right where he said he was. ‘Herr Frankel’ sounded good. Very professional. Not his real name of course.

  ‘Do you want to test the merchandise, Herr Frankel?’

  ‘Ja ja - yes I will test.’

  A light clicked on and Franz or Heinz shielded his eyes momentarily from its glare. Lisi placed the lamp on the table and for the first time Franz or Heinz could see that his journey had not been in vain. Two plastic-wrapped packages, each about eight inches long, five inches wide and an inch thick, sat side by side on the smooth wooden top. Their weight, if Lisi had it right, was two kilograms, street value approximately one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The cost to Franz or Heinz, five thousand dollars.

  ‘I have a bag sealer’, said Lisi. ‘From the factory. You choose which bag to break open, you try, you like, we reseal, we weigh, you pay, you go. Yes?’

  ‘This is traditional, yes.’

  ‘Muy bien. Choose a bag, Herr Frankel.’

  Franz or Heinz looked at them. They were identical. Was this a trick? He had been tricked before. Maybe he should test both bags. He pointed to both of them and Lisi smiled.

  ‘Of course. I would do the same.’

  Lisi suddenly had a scalpel in his hand and he made an incision across the middle of each bag so that the plastic fell open easily.

  ‘Anywhere’, said Lisi.

  Franz or Heinz dipped his finger into the bag on the left and tasted the white powder on the end. It was good. Then he dipped his finger in the right. Also good. He removed a small mirror and a razor blade from his left jacket pocket and collected a tiny amount of white powder from each bag using the blade, made them into wavy lines on his little mirror and snorted the left, waited a few seconds, then the right.

>   ‘This is good shit’, he said, wiping his nose with a paper tissue and sniffing. ‘Very pure.’

  ‘It is grade A cocaine, my friend’, said Lisi. ‘Shall I ask Miranda to reseal the bags?’

  ‘Ja, ja. Yes. This would be appropriate.’

  ‘You have the money?’

  Miranda came out from the kitchen holding a large plastic tray and wearing rubber gloves. She picked up the large bags of white powder, placed them on the tray and walked back to the kitchen.

  Franz or Heinz watched her.

  ‘The money?’

  The envelope was dirty but the money was all in there. Fifty one hundred dollar bills. Lisi flicked through them quickly and then shoved the envelope and the money into a drawer underneath the table.

  ‘The cocaine is yours now, Herr Frankel. Miranda?’

  Franz or Heinz looked across towards the kitchen and he saw someone come out towards him. Suddenly, all the lights in the apartment went on and Franz or Heinz found himself squinting. The figure he’d thought was Miranda was actually that of a man wearing sunglasses and pointing a gun at him.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’

  ‘Good afternoon’, said the man. ‘My name is Hidalgo and I work for the Colombian government.’

  Miranda walked out from the kitchen with the bags of cocaine and placed them on the table in front of Franz or Heinz. Then she turned round and walked back into the kitchen and Franz or Heinz started to cry.

  13

  April 2007 – Cannes, South of France

  I told Jack I would need time to think about his offer of financial salvation, which seemed to make him angry. I heard Jan busying herself with something in the kitchen whilst he told me that it was vital I acted now. I repeated that I needed to see everything in writing and that I’d also have to run it past my lawyers. Surely he was used to making such written presentations for the hedge-funds he’d purportedly acted for, I reasoned with him. For a man apparently about to receive fourteen million dollars from his Moscow deal Jack Wiseman looked extraordinarily flustered when it came to my paltry few hundred thousand.