‘No,’ I replied as levelly as I could.
I wasn't sure, as it was so dark, but it looked like Mama Garcia was carrying the defibrillator.
‘We have one more crop’, she said. ‘It is harvest time soon. You help us.’
‘With the work? The harvest?’
‘I need four men. I help too. I be man for harvest. You, Kieran, Juan Andres an' me. Four men.’
‘That's lucky. That there's four of us I mean.’
‘If we no leave South America, they kill Juan Andres. All my kids, they gone now, grown up. My daughter, she in Canada.’
I sat up and reached over for my trousers.
‘You help us sell our crop to Americanos. In the north. Cartagena. Is much easier make cocaine from coca leaf. We produce enough money you can be rich. We can take boat. We go Caribbean. British. Canadiense. We can have bank account. We can go Canada. New passport.’
I wondered what the woman in Human Resources at my bank would have made of this proposition. ‘We encourage all our trainees to be enterprising individuals, to think for themselves, to think outside the box, to innovate, to win.’ It wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind.
‘How much can we get?’ I asked.
She came over, shut the door behind her and sat on the bed.
‘I be straight with you, Ryyy-an. If I sell cocaine here, we get maybe one hundred thousand dollars and maybe they decide to take my farm.’
‘After it’s been refined?’
‘Si. Juan Andres know what to do. Is easier than this experiment you been doing with tropinone. Much quicker. You gets more product.’
‘You know about the....?' I stopped myself. Of course she did. 'How much product?’ I asked, after pausing to catch my breath.
‘I think we get fifty kilos, maybe sixty. We can make bigger with artificial product. One hundred kilos. We only get five thousand per kilo in Colombia. But if we get it to Caribbean, we get thirty-five thousand per kilo.’
Three point five million dollars.
‘And I give you and Kieran two hundred fifty thousand each.’
Which left her with three million.
‘Three million is good for me’, she said.
I nodded. Of course it was. And two hundred and fifty thousand dollars was good for me too. It represented at least five years' salary, and I wouldn't have to work for five years to get it. In fact, I'd have made the money before my banking job was even due to start. How difficult could it be?
Making synthetic cocaine which did not require having to move anything illegal across any dangerous borders.
Tick.
Harvesting a coca field and dragging a hundred kilos of product half-way across Colombia, onto a boat and then somehow getting to the Virgin Islands or Aruba.
Fucking madness.
‘Sounds interesting’, I said. ‘Let me talk to Kieran.’
16
May 2007
Portia had been begging me for a proper outing for days. She had waited patiently in her concrete cubicle, her spartan grey-slabbed home, clean, well-fed and watered, only drinking the highest grade unleaded fuel, the ninety-eight, not the ninety-five. Portia enjoyed a journey into Cannes, along the Croisette, especially if there was a big conference like MIPCOM (TV, multimedia and film), a chance for her to display her aerodynamic lines and rear spoiler to as many people as possible. My GAP baseball cap would be pulled down firmly over my face teamed with the biggest pair of sunglasses I possessed, the big black unisex Gucci ones.
It was the sixtieth Cannes Film Festival and the celebrations promised to be more spectacular than ever. I never found it a problem getting in anywhere at the Festival, despite my lack of official accreditation. I guided Portia along the Croisette, waving at the police as I passed through their roadblocks, and turning straight into the U-shaped drive of The Majestic. I handed the blue-liveried concierge a hundred euro note and the keys to Portia and sauntered quickly inside the hotel without giving the paparazzi enough time to work out if I was worth photographing or not.
Stephanie was waiting for me at the bar, wearing a light cotton dress. I walked up to her, skirting around the excitable wannabe film producers and inconsequential actors that held their meetings at full volume in front of everyone else in order to convince themselves of their own importance. This was the perfect place to meet her. Crowds were always good places in which to be anonymous and there was only one spare seat, a bar stool, in the whole establishment. The fifty pre-premiere tables outside were packed, heaving with men in dinner suits and women in long dresses.
‘Bonsoir’, I said, taking the hand that she offered me and kissing her on both cheeks, the right first, then the left, Cannes-style. ‘You look lovely.’
‘Bacardi-coke. You want one?’
‘Sure.’
I sat next to her and waited for my drink. She was looking very young in her light dress. Her skin was smooth and tanned and she had done her hair up into a bun.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked me suddenly, her eyes not wavering from mine.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Why are you doing this…with me? It is because you want to make love to me?’
I sipped my drink whilst waiting for time to formulate my reply.
‘I would like that’, I replied, taking her hand. ‘I have been lonely – apart from one evening – for a long time.’
‘You think you can buy me, George Milton?’ We held each other’s gaze and I knew she could see what I was thinking. ‘There is a street, you know, with your name. Milton. Here. In Cannes.’
‘I know. Tell me that you’ve thought about my proposal.’
‘It is a good proposition for me.’
‘You’ll have your own apartment. They’ll be gone soon.’
‘You seem so sure.’
‘Yes, I am. I think they’re going to the Caribbean, or maybe Australia.’
‘I do not want to pay tax, George.’
‘Nobody wants to pay tax.’
‘You must pay me the first twenty-five thousand in cash, five hundred euro bills, clean, unmarked you say?’
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘You trust I not run away?’
‘I don’t know. I have to trust someone.’
She ran her finger along the rim of the glass. I wondered what she could be thinking. Was this man, fifteen years older than her, merely eccentric, a criminal or simply mad? Was he rich, or was he just trying to get her into bed? There were many men who would have paid for the pleasure of her naked company beneath the sheets of one of the grand hotels. There were many men who would have tried to charm her into the self-same position, and who possibly would have ended up paying out far more.
‘I like you, George Milton.’
‘And I like you, Stephanie Delacourt.’
***
November 1990
Franz or Heinz was sitting in hot sun on the deck of a café which overlooked the mulatto girls playing beach volleyball. They were muscular and wore one-pieces rather than bikinis. Franz or Heinz would normally have stared at them, collecting ammunition for his own brief and lonely forays into sex, generally with himself. He could not afford to look at the bikinis for long though. Not today. He was wearing fluorescent green beach shorts, a stripey T-shirt and brown leather sandals. A cheap Panama hat, two sizes too small, perched on his head. Next to his coffee was a guide-book about Colombia, written in German. Next to his feet was a shopping bag containing a foot-high wooden figurine for which he had paid double the going rate. He was clean-shaven, white-skinned and he had had a haircut. To the waitresses in the café, to his fellow customers and to the men and women on the beach, the mulattos and negras walking out from the sea to be dried by the sun, Franz or Heinz looked like a tourist.
Franz or Heinz was booked in at the Intercontinental a few hundred yards up the beach, and he could see its rectangular white and silver presence from where he was sitting. The sun was shining right into his eyes but the black pla
stic Ray Bans were heavily tinted and they enabled his blood-shot eyes to scan the beach and the promenade without having to move his head. This was a good thing, because he was very tired. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and he had been sitting at the café for the last five hours, drinking coffee and glasses of water – no alcohol – and pretending to read his guide-book.
So far the only people who had approached him had tried to sell him more sunglasses, a poncho, some fake jewellery and what he judged to be a stolen Cartier watch for which the old woman wanted three hundred dollars. Running counter to his normal behaviour, Franz or Heinz declined each offer politely, even though the Cartier had been very tempting, and he simply settled back into his book after each little visit, reading up on the history of the city on whose beach he was sitting.
Apparently, or so the book told him, Cartagena dated back to the 1530s, one of the first places that the Spanish had colonized in the whole of South America. The city walls were thick and enclosed the old Spanish settlement with its narrow streets and numerous places of worship and reflection. Outside these walls, where Franz or Heinz was sitting, was a line of modern bars playing salsa, Merenge and Bob Marley’s ‘Three Little Birds’.
As he heard the lyrics, the birds sitting on the doorstep, singing sweet songs of love and truth, he saw three very different little birds walking towards him along the beach, three short swarthy men wearing tatty jeans and no shoes, who stopped to watch the girls in their one-pieces. It looked like they were looking for someone which is when Franz or Heinz realized that the person that they were looking for was him. They were nearly four hours late but he bit back the venom that he was aching to vent, a diatribe about the merits and the decency of punctuality.
As they approached his table, two of them peeled off leaving only the smallest one standing beside him.
‘You is alone, si?’
‘Si.’
He sat down and the two others took a seat on a wall a few feet behind them, lost in the distraction of the all-girl volleyball game.
‘You would like a coffee?’
‘No, gracias.’
‘You no work for policia?’
‘Do I look like I work for the police?’
The short man stroked his left bicep, which bore the tattoo of a pirate ship called ‘Jenny’ replete with skull and crossbones. He squinted at Franz or Heinz, his lurid clothing and pale skin.
‘No.’
‘Good. Now, I need you to tell me why you have me sitting here for four hours. Tell me you have good news.’
‘No news.’
‘No news?’
‘Nada. Is shipment coming, maybe, but I no hear of nothing.’
‘Twenty kilos or more, you understand?’
‘Entiendo.’
‘Du bist ein Saftsack. You do not understand this?’
‘No entiendo.’
‘Good.’ Franz or Heinz had just told him - in German - that he was a motherfucker. ‘You know I pay only on results.’
‘Si si.’
‘No results. No dinero.’
‘Si si. You want buy five grams?’ The short Colombian held out a small plastic bag of white powder. ‘Special price. Friends price.’
‘Twenty kilos or more.’
‘Si si.’ The Colombian scratched his bicep. ‘Fifty dollar?’
Franz of Heinz thought about this. Suares had said nothing about not using the product himself. As long as he brought in results he would be immune from prosecution. That was what Suares had said and Franz or Heinz had no option other than to believe him. It was either that or twelve years. They were watching him now, he could feel it, but Franz or Heinz could always argue that he’d had to do it, to show them he was au fait with the product.
‘Thirty.’
‘Deal.’
The money and little bag of cocaine changed hands under the table and the short Colombian stood up.
‘Friday’, he said.
‘Twenty kilos. Or more.’
‘Entiendo.’
***
The film was sad but also very violent. Stephanie welled up at the same moment as the rest of the audience, the final realization that death was a release from the horrors of reality, that Ofelia would rise to meet her parents in the kingdom of Heaven.
‘Last year’, I whispered to her, ‘they gave this a standing ovation. It was the best film, by a long way, yet it won nothing.’
‘It is a beautiful film. Why did it not win?’
‘Another violent film. One about Ireland. That won.’
‘These films…you like violence?’
‘No.’
‘Then the people, they like violence.’
‘For some people’, I said evenly, ‘violence is a way of life.’
We sat there as the rest of the audience stood up whilst the credits rolled. The Olympia was only a short walk from Portia but I didn’t want to move. This was one place where I wasn’t wearing my sunglasses, one place where I was safe, safe amongst the red velour seats and the stale smell of sweaty bodies, safe next to a woman who barely knew me. Anonymity was easy here, after the last show, no-one coming afterwards, no-one to sweep the floor. I had a sudden urge to spend the night in Screen Four, sleeping in our clothes, safe from harm, an unpredictable move of the sort Carlos could never foresee.
Stephanie would protect me. She would be my shield.
17
November 1990
We had been at it for six days, the painstaking process of picking the coca leaves by hand to maximize the quality of our raw material. We worked from daybreak until eleven, when we stopped for lunch and a rest and we drove the tractor back to the farmhouse for rice, frijoles and chilli, home-made empanadas, including the vegetarian option con queso for Kieran and the unloading and storage of that morning’s crop. At half-past three we began again, working until dusk. By the time we had locked up, Juan Andres was preparing the garage for the evening’s production line, the distillation of our raw material into a substance that would soon become one hundred percent pure cocaine.
Kieran and I had reasoned with Mama Garcia that two hundred and fifty thousand each was not enough for the risk we would be taking, and after only a few seconds’ thought she upped her offer to one million dollars between the two of us, leaving her and Juan Andres with two and a half. We shook hands on the deal and then the next morning we began work. It seemed only fair.
Erythroxylon coca was the technical name for the leafy plant growing in the valley of the Garcia farm, thriving in the warm, moist, frost-free environment and the fifteen hundred metre altitude. The tallest plants were six foot high and Mama Garcia told me that, from seedlings, they had had to wait three years for that first harvest but thereafter the yield was two harvests a year. The field was only twelve years old, she said, but the average they’d received per harvest was twenty-five thousand dollars. I made this three hundred thousand dollars in total.
‘The children’, she said, ‘they have the money.’
‘You must have some left.’
‘Si si. We have enough.’
It was the coca leaves that kept us going. Rich in vitamins, protein, calcium, iron and fiber, the cocaine content averaged half a per cent, according to Juan Andres. The best leaves, he said, were uncurled. We chewed them with a drop of powdered lime and the only unwanted side-effect I noticed was that my teeth were staining. Juan Andres told me he had a special whitener that we would use to remove any outward traces of the drug. We also worked with gloves, to avoid impregnation with the smell, and hats, which kept off the sun and protected our hair. Making the real thing from the real thing was much easier than the process we had had to follow for the synthetic production, which after a week had yielded us only two grams, all of which we’d given to Kieran as a reward for being a brave guinea pig.
To get to crystalline cocaine – cocaine hydrochloride – we first had to make cocaine sulfate. The process was simple and not dissimilar to the production of wine. The coca leaves
had to be mashed and blended with water and kerosene in a vat after which we evaporated the excess liquid to yield a mushy paste which was easily purified and converted into its familiar, marketable, crystalline form.
It was hard work, but Kieran was even more dedicated than I was. He was off the grass and the booze, as was I, and we both put in sufficient back-breaking hours under the hot sun, and under the inevitable downpours, to acquire a distinctly Latino weather-beaten look. With our bandanas and ripped shirts we looked as Colombian as the Colombians, only our accents giving us away. Juan Andres worked twice as hard as us, and his mother was more dextrous in picking the coca leaves and in crushing them to a pulp with her bare feet. She would not have been out of place in Provence, a viniculturalist of stout, squat proportions and endless enthusiasm.
We could not have a radio, not that we could have picked up a signal, and we worked in silence save for the tractor which we kept away from the coca plantation itself. We had two wheelbarrows, nineteenth century technology, to transport the leaves to the tractor and back again. The welcome side-effect of all this work was that I was becoming physically fit. Not as fit as Juan Andres, who had certain natural advantages over me, nor as fit as Kieran who maintained his ex-footballer’s nimbleness and stamina, but nonetheless I was proud of myself. I suddenly had stomach muscles that I could actually see, biceps that stretched my shirt and for the first time for years I found that I could touch my toes without bending my knees. That last evening, when the final crop was in, we drank a celebration bottle of aguardiente and let ourselves relax for the first time in nearly three weeks. However, I knew, with a slight sinking feeling that I could see mirrored on Juan Andres’s face, that from now on things could only become more difficult and more dangerous.
Mama Garcia had gone to fetch something a few minutes before, leaving the three of us sitting on the terrace watching the moon glow over the verdant farmland. Kieran had fired-up one of his huge reefers and he was telling us what it was like making love to a goalkeeper.
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