‘How much can you put in today?’ he asked.
‘Nothing, without the report and my lawyers' OK’, I said for the third time.
‘I misjudged you, George.’
‘Really?’
‘I thought you were an intelligent man, that you’d see an opportunity when it came along, that you’d jump for it. Like you and Arabella in my bloody toilet. I know what went on, don’t think I’m a bloody fool.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jack.’
I rose suddenly and he looked a little taken aback.
‘You’ve still got ten minutes’, he said.
‘Don’t worry about it.’
I headed for the door and I felt his hand on my shoulder.
‘Sorry if I said anything to upset you, George.’
‘You were a little brusque, perhaps.’
‘It’s my life, you see. Money does that to you. I’m sorry George. Here…let me make it up to you.’
He leaned over to the nearest wall and picked off an oil painting.
‘They’re Jan’s. Not bad, eh?’
I couldn’t think of a suitable reply. They were all ghastly.
‘Have it. Go on. It’s worth at least what you paid me for our session.’
‘Really, Jack – ‘
‘Call it goodwill. Go on.’
I took Portia into Cannes that afternoon, to give her a little run. I left her in the underground car-park on the lowest level and took the lift to the ground floor. I walked past my favourite toy shop but I didn’t go inside this time. This time I decided to go straight to Sephora and ask Stephanie if she wanted to go on a date with me. If I was going to die, I might as well die happy. I found her by a counter, waiting for someone to come up to her and ask for a makeover. I asked her straight out.
‘Vous voulez quoi, monsieur?’
‘Je veut prendre diner avec vous.’
‘Mais – ‘
‘Mais quoi? Le Palm D’or dans le Martinez, huit heures?’
‘C’est tres chere, le Palm D’or.’
I guessed she’d heard about it but never been there. It was indeed very expensive.
‘Je m’appelle George.’
I watched her think about it as I stood smiling at her.
‘Okay’, she said in a good English accent. ‘I see you later, George.’
‘You speak English?’
‘Of course. I have a university degree.’
‘Oh? What subject?’
‘Chemistry’ she replied, smiling coyly.
***
November 1990
Kieran finally found us in the garage.
‘Jees’, he exclaimed, ‘Jees-us Christ. You boys shittin’ me or somethin’?’
We were sitting at the large metal table, wearing goggles, surgical gloves and white coats. We each wore plastic hairnets.
‘If you come in Kieran, you better wear the same.’
‘Jees. What the fuck you doin’?’
‘Do you know how cocaine works, Kieran?’
He quickly donned the clothing that Juan Andres held out to him.
‘Yeah, well I may be Canadian but I’m not dumb. Stimulates the central nervous system, right? Like amphetamines. A big upper.’
‘It inhibits the re-uptake of the norepinepherine released by the adrenergic nerve terminals, leading to an enhanced adrenergic stimulation of norepinephrine receptors.’
‘You one too, huh?’
‘I studied sciences at Cambridge, Kieran. I think you knew that. I just wasn’t as good as Juan Andres.’
‘We can just buy some, guys. We don’t have to try and make it.’
‘This is just an experiment, Kieran. To see if it’ll work.’
‘And if it does?’
‘One step at a time.’
One step towards the potential mass-market dissemination of heightened omnipotence and euphoria, albeit temporary. One fix of pure stood a fifty-fifty chance of leading to addiction.
‘What’s that?’
‘Tropinone. Don’t touch.’
‘There’s bags of it.’
‘And you cannot carry it around with you, amigo’, said Juan Andres. ‘None of this leaves here. Is too dangerous.’
‘It’s research’, I added. ‘Pure and simple.’
‘We get to test the product?’
‘It take a few days. Is complex, solutions inexact, maybe. We try.’
‘Is this why we’re here?’ Kieran asked.
‘No. I come to see my family.’
‘I don’t get it. You guys are gonna spend all day in this garage to make stuff you’re never gonna do anything with?’
‘Kieran’, I said, removing my goggles and blinking, ‘one step at a time, okay?’
‘Can I watch, then?’
‘Sure.’
Thankfully we didn’t have to make the tropinone. We had lots of the crystalline substance in its packets. My notes, in spidery handwriting, were more copious on the procedure for just getting to the tropinone stage than the rest put together. The best way, according to my research, was to oxidize tropine with potassium dichromate, but the empirical i.e. trial and error methods we’d have to employ would take far too long. Thankfully, we had a head start thanks to Juan Andres and his foresight in collecting up the packets in the jungle as a form of insurance policy.
Getting to 2-Carbomethoxytropinone was the next step, our first. This required, according to my notes, a mix of sodium and methanol, three or four grams of tropinone, some dimethylcarbonate and about double that in toluene.
‘Do we have all that?’
Juan Andres checked the tubs and bottles on the racks.
‘Si’.
‘What you tryin’ to do, put the cartels out of business?’
‘Something like this.’
The resultant mixture needed to be refluxed for half an hour, perhaps a little more and then cooled into a solution of six parts pure water to one part of ammonium chloride.
It was getting very hot in the garage. The clock on the wall, just like an old school wall-clock, stood at ten minutes to mid-day. It would be over a hundred degrees in the sun.
‘We can leave it’, I said. ‘I need a cigarette.’
The three of us stood outside in the sun, the sweat from the clamminess of the garage evaporating quickly. We’d left our goggles and coats inside, and also the hairnets. I could hear the sounds of Spanish conversation coming from the kitchen.
‘She’s taking it well, Juan Andres. Your mother I mean. And your sister.’
‘Ryyy-an. This is Colombia. She happy I not dead. She very happy, Ryyy-an. Very happy. She not want me to go anywhere now I is back.’
‘So you not go – I mean, you won’t go?’
‘I must stay here for a while. To help my mother.’
I thought of him slaving away in the garage, producing hundreds of kilos of synthetic cocaine.
'Yes', I said emphatically. 'You must stay here.'
We extracted the solution using chloroform, and then evaporated the chloroform in a vacuum to get rid of it. Then we threw in some saturated potassium carbonate and dried and evaporated again until we came out with something that approximated to the consistency of an oil, which we dissolved in hot acetone. We left it to cool. It was now four o’clock in the afternoon. It was still a hundred degrees in the sun. By eight o’clock in the evening the oil had cooled. We hadn’t had a drop of aguardiente all day. The three of us ate the rice and beans as quickly as we could without offending Juan Andres’s mother and then headed straight back to the garage.
‘We’re doing great things here, gentlemen.’
‘Yeah, right’, said Kieran, producing his juggling balls and sitting on the terrace with them. ‘You go do great things. I’m just gonna chill here a while.’
I watched him unravel his cannabis stash and start to unpick a cigarette.
‘See you later, Kieran.’
‘Later.’
We had to scratch the inside
of the flask with a glass rod to precipitate 2- carbomethoxytropinone and then recrystallized about fifteen grams of it in thirty milliliters of hot methyl acetate, some cold water and some acetone. Then we put the whole thing in the small freezer by the door and went outside to join Kieran on the terrace.
Over the next three days we followed the instructions in my handwritten manual and from Juan Andres’s notes. By day four and after a series of accidents and abortive sub-experiments we had successfully reduced 2-carbomethoxytropinone to methylecgonine. More to the point, it was active and ready for stage three, one stage from the finished product. Kieran was spending his days smoking and walking the fields. He also told us he was writing a book about his travels, although I happened to read the ‘book’ one night when he left it out and what I read was an unpunctuated scrawl of unconnected thoughts.
‘We’re not the only ones doing this, are we?’ I asked Juan Andres, back in the garage.
‘Ryyy-an, we’re not doing this’, he replied, smiling.
‘Si, claro.'
‘Claro que si.’
The procedure was now becoming very fiddly and it required both of us. For the next four hours we gently refluxed methylecgonine and benzoic anhydride in a hundred and fifty millilitres of dry benzene, using a drying tube to stop any water in the air from contaminating our material. We then cooled the resultant liquid in an ice bath, added hydrochloric acid, dried and evaporated it in a vacuum to get a red oil which, when we treated it with a little portion of isopropanol, gave us cocaine.
We sat outside, sharing Kieran’s joint. The crickets were chirping, it was five in the afternoon and the sun was burning the crops around us. It was a coffee plantation, Juan Andres had told us. The original farmhouse was three hundred years old but only two rooms remained. His father had added the rest in the nineteen fifties when he took it over, and Juan Andres had built the garage himself, with the help of two of his brothers, in 1980, when he was only nineteen years old.
‘We never had a car’, he told me, exhaling the smoke in a long plume that curled under the overhanging roof before the breeze dispersed it.
‘Claro.’
‘Listo? Ready?’
I nodded and Kieran removed his feet from the balustrade, leaving the joint to smoulder out in a stone ashtray.
I had annotated my notes with new notes as we had ploughed through the process, and I noticed Juan Andres had done the same. If only I had shown such diligence at Cambridge I might not have ended up with the fifth-lowest third in the university in my final year Tripos examinations.
Kieran volunteered to be the guinea-pig.
‘Not gonna kill me, is it?’ he asked, a little worried. ‘You got, what, two, three grams here?’
‘Maybe two. It’s got a finer crystalline structure than the real thing. Better for your mucal membranes.’
‘My what?’
‘Your nose.’
‘Right. Here goes.’
Kieran leaned over the side-table where we had set up our test. There were three perfect lines of white powder in front of him, numbered. One was ‘street’ cocaine which Juan Andres had said was thirty per cent pure, the line which he’d taken from Kieran a week ago, another was some of the pure coke from the opthamology department of the Universidad del Cauca and the last line was the result of six days’ toil in the garage.
‘We have to leave thirty, forty minutes between each one, OK Kieran? Enough time for you to come off the high of the last one.’
‘Sure.’
‘We’ll try them in order, OK? Start with number one.’
Kieran quickly snorted it up and sniffed, wiping away the excess from his nostril. He swallowed and I could see him trying to define the taste.
‘Describe it to me’, I said, my pen hovering over my notepad.
Juan Andres sat on a metal chair, watching Kieran closely.
‘This is good’, he said, 'very good.'
‘Which one is it?’
‘Well hey there, English, let me try ‘em all first, why dontcha?’
‘Give him the juggling balls’, said Juan Andres suddenly. ‘To test coordination. Pupil dilation.’
‘Good idea.’
I went back outside and brought them in. I noticed that their black cloth covers had been bleached by the sun.
‘You timing this?’
‘Si.’
To anyone entering the garage at that point we would have looked an odd bunch. Two of us, sweating, taking notes, looking for pupil dilation and signs of enhanced neuron activity in the third, our subject, who was sitting on a stool, juggling calmly and humming a song I couldn’t recognise.
‘Still buzzing?’
‘Yup.’
Thirty minutes had passed.
‘I nearly broke my own record.’
‘How many?’
‘Seven hundred fifty, seven hundred fifty one, fifty two, fifty three…’
Kieran was counting the revolutions of the three black balls. It was hypnotic.
‘How do you feel Kieran?’, I asked ten minutes later.
‘Wearin’ off now’, he said. ‘Can feel it.’
‘Marks out of ten?’
‘It was pretty good, for a small line. Maybe a seven?’
‘Care to guess which one it was?’
‘Nope. Not til I tried ‘em all.’
He took the second line and we repeated the process. His pupils were heavily dilated now, the counting had ceased and he was humming a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, ‘Under the Bridge’. We stopped speaking to him and continued to observe. The dilation was marked now, he had started to sweat, although it was hot and airless inside, but the interesting thing was the twitch just under his right eye each time a ball moved past it.
‘How long?’
‘Forty minutes.’
‘Kieran?’
He didn’t answer. He kept the balls in the air, humming the same refrain over and over, the twitch becoming less pronounced.
‘Kieran?’
‘Yup?’
‘How goes it?’
‘Still up there. Good shit, man. This yours?’
Neither Juan Andres nor I said anything. I made another note in my log. Suddenly Kieran stopped juggling and placed the balls on the table.
‘Can I get a glass of water or somethin’?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Mouth’s bit cottony.’
‘Describe the taste?’
‘Umm…like, medicine, bad medicine.’
Juan Andres handed him the water and he drained the glass in one gulp.
‘Unpleasant?’
‘Uh…a little, I guess. But good shit man. This yours?’
We didn’t say anything.
‘Ready for number three?’
‘Yup. Comin’ down.’
‘You want to take a walk outside, fresh air?’
‘Nope. Let’s do it.’
Juan Andres nodded and I handed Kieran another clean rolled up dollar bill. He snorted the third line and we realized instantly that something was wrong.
‘Kieran?’
He slid to the floor, gasping for breath.
‘Kieran?’
‘Mira! El color!’
Kieran was turning grey and was covered in a thick sheen of sweat.
‘KIERAN!!!!’
No answer.
We knelt down and I let Juan Andres examine him. Kieran's pupils were completely dilated and his throat was making a gurgling sound. White spit oozed from his nose and his mouth. He was trying to speak, to say something.
‘What’s happening?’
‘He is in shock.’
Juan Andres checked his pulse and his heartbeat, holding his head close to Kieran’s chest.
‘Mierda.’
‘Shit. What do we do?’
‘I go get mama.’
Juan Andres raced out of the garage leaving me with the sputtering Kieran, propped up like a motorized doll whose batteries were nearly dead.
‘Kieran’, I whispered into his ear. �
�Can you hear me?’
He nodded very slowly and closed his eyes.
‘FUCK! JUAN ANDRES!!!!’, I screamed, as Mrs Garcia barged into the garage with Juan Andres holding something that looked like a primitive defibrillator.
‘You're shitting me!’
‘Leave it to mama! Venga mama!’
Mrs Garcia didn’t need to be told what to do. She hitched up her long dress and squatted next to Kieran.
‘Tienes.’
She passed the plug to Juan Andres and he fitted it into a spare socket in the wall. Mrs Garcia pulled Kieran by the legs so he was lying flat on the concrete and rubber floor. She looked at me and motioned for me to move out of the way. When I heard the hum of the pads I scooted quickly over to Juan Andres. I looked at the little vial of powder that we had taken nearly a week to produce. I looked back at Mrs Garcia, hunched over Kieran, just in time to see his body jolt once, then twice and then a third time.
He should have been drying out in a clinic somewhere in the Swiss Alps, he should have been breathing fresh mountain air, but here he was with Juan Andres, Mrs Garcia and me in a garage in the middle of Colombia with his mouth oozing cocaine and two hundred and fifty volts passing through the left side of his chest.
There was nothing else I could do, so I closed my eyes and prayed.
14
April 2007 – Cannes, South of France
The chocolate-brown suede banquettes were complemented by a pristine white linen tablecloth and cream napkins. The carpet was a matching shade of brown, lustrous and thick, just like Stephanie’s hair.
‘Tell me about chemistry’, I said, sipping from my glass of champagne and popping one of the amuses bouches into my mouth.
‘My family…they like me to do ballet, or singing.’
‘You can sing?’
‘I am told I can sing.’
‘You refused to be smothered by the pink blanket.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I mean you did not want to be a stereotype. Science. What made you start?’
‘You are scientist?’
‘I’ve worked in technology.’
‘I was thirteen. French school is very tough. We learn by rote, we must fit into the system.’
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