Cocaine

by Jack Hillgate

  ‘Es ist gut hier, ja?’

  He hadn’t recognised me from the Gran Casino. He had been too engrossed with the two Americans to pay any attention to anyone else there that night, which included Kieran, Juan Andres and me. I smiled. I felt rather good in my new linen suit.

  ‘I’m English’, I said. ‘I can’t speak German.’

  ‘I said it is good here, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are on holiday?’

  ‘Yes. I’m meant to be teaching English but I haven’t done a lot of teaching.’

  ‘Ha! You have been enjoying yourself, of course? This is necessary when one is in this country.’

  ‘Yes. What about you?’

  ‘Oh…the same. I love the architecture. So different to my town. Dusseldorf. It rains all the time.’

  ‘Just like England.’

  We laughed, neither of us very genuinely.

  ‘You waiting for your friend?’

  ‘He has a stomach problem. He could be a few minutes.’

  ‘He is not…?’ Franz or Heinz snorted quickly and his eyes went wild.

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘He is not doing cocaine up the nose in the toilets?’

  ‘Good God no. He wouldn’t touch the stuff.’

  ‘Can I buy you coffee?’

  ‘Sure.’

  We sat down. I was sure now he hadn’t recognised or even ever seen me before, despite the fact that I’d seen and heard him ad nauseum extolling the virtues of doing exactly what Kieran and I were now doing.

  ‘I have a big confession to make to you’, he said after the coffees came. I looked askance at my watch. Kieran had been gone ten minutes.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I am here on business. Not on holiday.’

  ‘You’re dressed for it.’

  He grimaced momentarily and then he laughed.

  ‘Ha ha. Such a sense of humour. English. Ja ja.’

  ‘What business?’ I asked as nonchalantly as I could. ‘That is, if you don’t mind talking about it.’

  Franz or Heinz leaned in. The man he was looking at – me – was well-dressed, clean-shaven, tanned and lean. I looked the part.

  ‘I am buying raw commodities’, he said quietly. ‘In large quantities.’

  I tried to stop myself looking interested.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Something white and crystalline. I think you know what I am talking about my friend.’

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘No. You know.’

  I drank my coffee for a moment. Perhaps, just perhaps, Franz or Heinz was trying to score big. Perhaps, just perhaps, he could give us the money we wanted. But I couldn’t help not trusting him. I wanted Juan Andres here. He could sniff him out in an instant. Mama Garcia had said we don’t sell here. We just get a boat. Scouters, she’d said. Cartels. Sniffing out the competition and then snuffing out the competition.

  ‘It sounds very enigmatic…’

  ‘You call me Franz. Or Heinz. You choose. Your name?’

  ‘Gary’, I lied, picking the name from the song playing in the next bar.

  ‘Look Gary. I have a requirement for five hundred kilos. Can you satisfy that?’

  ‘Five hundred kilos of what?’

  ‘Charlie.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Cocaine. Cocaine. Cocaine.’

  I stood up quickly, my chair toppling onto the tiles. He stood too.

  ‘I am sorry’, he said. ‘I am sorry. It was a poor joke. Please. Sit down, Gary. Finish your coffee.’

  I sat slowly, sheltering behind my sunglasses. I took another look at my watch. Twenty minutes had passed. Where was Kieran? And why ‘Franz’, or ‘Heinz’? What was the point? I drank my coffee so slowly that it started to congeal at the bottom of my cup. I wished Franz or Heinz would fuck off, but he wasn’t budging. Five minutes later, Kieran emerged, sweating, from the café. He was holding our bags.

  ‘Found ‘em’, he said, coming over to me and handing me my small black sports holdall.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Kieran leaned over to Franz or Heinz.

  ‘Guy in the second cubicle wants a word.’

  ‘Can you repeat this?’

  ‘There’s a man in the toilets, second cubicle on the left, who wants to talk to you.’

  ‘You are sure it is me?’

  ‘Your name’s Franz or Heinz, right?’

  ‘This is correct.’

  ‘Said he had something interesting.’

  I looked at Kieran in puzzlement. What was going on? Kieran gave me a ‘don’t say a fucking word’ look, and so I didn’t.

  ‘Second cubicle.’

  ‘I am grateful, Mister…?’

  ‘No problem.’

  Franz or Heinz disappeared inside the café and Kieran sat down and ordered us some yerbabuena, a soothing local tea. He wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  ‘Kieran. What the fuck is going on?’

  Kieran raised his china cup and clinked it against mine.

  Franz or Heinz knew he’d made an error by repeating his offer to the wiry fair-haired Colombian in the second cubicle. His head wasn’t down the toilet for more than a few seconds, but it was enough to awaken in Franz or Heinz a strong sense of mortality. Juan Andres pulled him out, rammed his head against the ceramic cistern, breaking Franz or Heinz’s jaw for the second time and held his head in the toilet for a few more seconds while he flushed. When Juan Andres pulled the German’s head above the water-line he punched him hard in the right side, cracking his second and third ribs and rupturing a kidney.

  ‘Who you work for? You were at Gran Casino in Quito. What you doing here? You follow us? Digame. Tell me.’

  Franz or Heinz was slumped on the floor, soaked from the toilet-flush, bleeding slowly into the right armpit of his green shirt, the discoloration not unlike sweat.

  ‘Gran Casino? You are with the Americans?’ he whispered, barely able to speak. The pain in his side was making it difficult to breath.

  ‘Americanos? No. I am with no-one. Who you work for?’

  Juan Andres knelt over Franz or Heinz so that he could hear what he was saying.

  ‘He said…he said to help him…I …if you kill me, he will find you and he will kill you.’

  ‘Who wants to kill me?’

  ‘Suares.’

  Juan Andres stood up quickly. Had Suares had them followed? Was Suares watching them, waiting to take their hundred kilos? This German was the best kind of scout. An extranjero - a foreigner. A non-Colombian. Franz or Heinz took deep breaths, trying not to hyperventilate. Juan Andres listened for a moment. There were only three cubicles and the other two, and the urinals, were unoccupied. Less than two minutes had elapsed since Franz or Heinz had knocked on the door of cubicle numero dos and walked inside. Juan Andres would have to be quick.

  The contents of the tiny jar were now resting in a small see-through plastic bag. Juan Andres removed the bag from an inside pocket of his light-weight leather jacket, replaced the toilet seat and spread the contents, the crystalline powder from the Universidad del Cauca, onto the white plastic.

  ‘You have money?’

  Franz or Heinz slowly removed his wallet. Juan Andres was careful not to touch it.

  ‘Take out a bill and roll it.’

  Franz or Heinz looked at him like Juan Andres was crazy.

  ‘You will test my cocaine. You will tell me if it is good enough.’

  Franz or Heinz relaxed a little.

  This was the first time he had been approached in Cartagena, and maybe this Colombian was still interested in buying cocaine. Maybe roughing him up was part of the negotiation. Maybe if he landed a big cheese then Suares would let him go and drop the charges. That was what Franz or Heinz wanted to believe so he pulled out a ten dollar bill and rolled it. Maybe the coke would make him feel better, make him forget the pain from injuries which were not inconsistent with those of a man falling heavily against a hard ceramic toilet.

&nbs
p; 20

  The Hotel Doral on Media Luna was a small comfortable place with large rooms, ceiling fans and friendly staff. It had a good, cheap restaurant and the mix of travelers, low to medium budget, was invigorating. We hadn’t spoken much to anyone other than each other for the last month and it was good to relax, or to pretend to relax, in the large sunny courtyard surrounded by the rooms and the little staircases leading up to them.

  We took a room on the ground floor, number two I think, a large room with two double beds. There was an ensuite shower room and toilet and a tiled floor. The ceiling fan was temperamental and the first night the temperature hadn’t dropped below eighty degrees, leaving us shining and sweaty in the morning, taking shower after shower to cool down. There was no hot water, but in this climate it wasn’t necessary. We were at sea level, not ten thousand feet above at the foot of the Altiplano. ‘We do nothing for one week’, Juan Andres had said to us. ‘This man, Suares, he expect us to run, or to do something. We do nothing. I stay with Mama. We be fine. You find this hotel. One week. I meet you there. We eat lunch. We see.’

  I read a story in that morning’s local paper about a drugs bust. The Narcotrafficos had cornered the ring-leader of a gang planning on shipping out forty kilos of cocaine to Northern Europe, final destination Germany. As we sat with our morning coffee in the courtyard I read about one Franz Werter, from Dusseldorf, who had been found dead under a bridge, choked to death on his own product. The Narcotrafficos had tried in vain to save his life, the paper said, and his body was being flown back today to Germany at the request of his relatives.

  I felt the chill down my spine drying the sweat that was already there. I didn’t show the paper to Kieran. He was busy juggling. Juan Andres had given us our instructions to go to the Hotel Doral, which we had followed, and neither of us had asked him about what went on in the cubicle, or what had happened to Franz or Heinz. Two girls walked out of a room on the first floor and walked down the steps that led to the courtyard. They sat down at the table next to Kieran and I and they ordered breakfast in fluent Spanish. They were both pretty, but in different ways. One was called Helena, and she sounded Spanish. She was younger than we were, maybe nineteen or twenty, and she had a mound of curly light-brown hair piled up on her head, blue eyes and a body that was on the verge of losing the last of its puppy-fat.

  The other girl was darkly beautiful, Kerry, hair swept back from her face and smoothed to the sides of her head. Her face was very pretty, like a young Elizabeth Taylor, but her body was very large, surprisingly so, as if she had a glandular problem. She was still attractive, or, at least, I thought so. Kieran, I quickly gathered, was staring at Helena so I directed my gaze, behind my sunglasses, towards the voluptuous Kerry.

  ‘You wanna join us?’ he asked them, putting down his juggling balls and lifting his blue-tinted Lennon shades so they could see his eyes.

  ‘Sure’, said Kerry, getting up and introducing herself and Helena to us. We shook hands formally and all sat down to another round of coffees. Forty minutes later the four of us were sitting in room two of the Hotel Doral with The Velvet Underground playing in the background and twelve lines of coke laid out neatly on a copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude in the original Spanish.

  May 2007 – Cannes, South of France

  ‘It’s beautiful’, said Stephanie, walking round the apartment recently vacated by the Wisemans. ‘Just like yours.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So they left in a hurry?’

  ‘They were fraudsters, Stephanie. They stole money. Someone must have found them out, or maybe they stole enough. They were here for two months.’

  ‘Oh – un vue imprenable! What a beautiful view!’

  She walked out onto the terrace and looked out over the water in the burning sun, fifty little sail-boats cluttering the Mediterranean, following each other around a buoy and heading off away from shore again, carried by the wind towards a motor-yacht where I could see a man standing on deck holding a large white flag.

  ‘You ‘ave a boat?’ she asked me.

  ‘No. I don’t like boats.’

  ‘Why not? You get sick?’

  ‘No. I just don’t like them. Once you’re on it’s difficult to get off.’

  ‘So you don’t like aeroplanes?’

  ‘I don’t dislike them.’

  ‘You are strange man, George. I can say this? You not upset?’

  ‘No. I’m not upset. You’re probably right. I think I am strange.’

  ‘When do you tell me about this…this Carlos?’

  ‘When the time is right.’

  ‘He is a good friend, no?’

  I found the packet of Gauloises Blancs in my shirt-pocket, the brand we both favoured, part of the reason I was first drawn to her, that and her toned brown legs.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘Oui. Merci.’

  She took it from me, and my lighter. We were fourteen floors up and the breeze, even on a calm day, was enough to ruffle the hair and make sunglasses obligatory. The glare was also harsh today, and when we looked West we could see the swarm of people at the tail-end of the Film Festival, desperately trying to close a deal or to get laid or hook up with some good coke. The parties had already been going for a week, the nightly extravaganzas for movie studios and their stars, for television companies and their corporate bosses. Cannes was a jolly jolly, a good excuse to get drunk, to pose, to talk and to get laid.

  Stephanie lay back on a teak sun-lounger and finished her cigarette. One by one she undid the buttons of her dress, and she slowly slipped it off so that all she was wearing was a silver necklace with a tiny black stone in the centre.

  ‘I like you, George’, she said.

  October 1990 – Cartagena, Northern Colombian Coast

  We could see the lights of the harbour from the beach, the lights and the mobile homes and somewhere the Jeep with the Marauder caravan. Kerry and Helena were back at the Hotel Doral, probably having dinner and waiting for us to bring them back some coke.

  ‘I give good price’, said the bloodshot man to Kieran. ‘Seven dollar one gram. You buy ten? I give you for fifty.’

  His two little friends hung back, letting the smallest one, the guy with the tattoo on his shoulder do the talking.

  ‘Ten grams is good’, said Kieran, getting out two twenties and a ten. ‘Good shit, right?’

  ‘Pura cocaine, amigo. La berraquerra!’

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

  ‘Come on Kieran’, I whispered to him. ‘Hurry.’

  Kieran gave him the money and took the coke. He slipped it down his pants, his normal hiding place.

  ‘What say we go get laid?’

  ‘You’ve been saying that for weeks.’

  ‘Yeah, but this time, Ryan, my English friend, I mean it.’

  ‘They’ll be waiting for us.’

  ‘They want coke, man, they don’t want us. I think we find someone who wants us. Or our money’, he added, grinning like an idiot.

  Bar Conquistador was a trendy spot just outside the City walls, not far from the Intercontinental or the beach. We found it easily because the music was playing so loudly, a mixture of Michael Jackson and Merenge. We sat down at the bar, fuelled by the two lines apiece we’d done on the beach a few moments before. Kieran kept sniffing and holding a tissue to his nose.

  ‘Stop it Kieran! You look like you’ve been at it all day.’

  ‘Look, just find us a woman, OK?’

  ‘Surely we want two?’

  He blew his nose loudly, for emphasis, leaving tiny strands of snot and white powder hanging from his nostrils.

  ‘Wipe it for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Cool it, English. We’re fine.’

  We ordered two rum and cokes and sat at the bar watching the tables behind us and the bar-staff delivering endless trays of tequila to the people behind us. A few minutes passed and we ordered two more drinks. The alcohol passed through me swiftly. I hadn’t eaten anything since the mornin
g. The coke that the girls had given us completely wrecked any appetite. All I’d wanted to do was bounce off the walls, which is what Kieran had been doing, leaping around room two like a man possessed by demons, snorting lines and singing along to ‘I’m waiting for my man’.

  Her name was Joanna and she said she was eighteen. I wondered how old she really was. She sat next to me, to my right, with Kieran to my left. I bought her a drink and Kieran just stared at her, his trademark grin fixed to his face like a sign-post reading ‘fuck me.’

  ‘Que quieres?’ she asked me, looking at me with her big, brown eyes. What did we want? Wasn’t it obvious? She was slim, dark-skinned and wearing a short, tight spangly black dress. Her hair was black and she was wearing far too much lipstick.

  ‘Tell her we want her’, said Kieran.

  I turned away from him and took another sip of rum, feeling it settle warmly in my stomach and softening the buzz from the cocaine we’d taken earlier.

  ‘Queremos algo mas’, I said to her measuredly, looking her in the eye.

  We want something more.

  ‘Algo mas?’

  ‘Si, claro.’

  ‘Los dos?’ - the two of you? – she asked, breaking into a smile and dipping her finger into her drink, pulling it out and sucking it innocently.

  ‘Si.

  ‘Vente dollars.’

  I turned back to Kieran.

  ‘She’ll take twenty for the two of us.’

  ‘Say yes. I’ll flip you for who goes first.’

  ‘I go first, Kieran.’

  ‘Fuck it, English, let’s flip.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Joanna – if that was her real name – sipped her drink next to us, totally unphased by our discussion. She was only eighteen but she’d seen it all before. She was much better at this than we were. Kieran flipped a fifty cent coin and let me call it. Unfortunately, I called it wrong.

  The corridor was narrow and there was an old woman sitting at one end on a stool. Her face was wizened and despite the heat she was wearing three or four layers of clothing. She looked at us cold-eyed, betraying no emotion whatsoever. The hotel was clean although very sparse. It was noisy though, sounds coming from the doors to my right. I tried not to listen. I had never done this before and I was focusing on not betraying my lack of experience in the brothel department.