Cocaine

by Jack Hillgate

  The old woman held up her hand to stop me. Her index finger was held up. ‘Uno’ was the only word she said.

  It had never occurred to me that Joanna would entertain us both at the same time, and if I had not been so tanned the old woman would have seen me flush deep red with embarrassment. She could have been Mama Garcia’s elder sister but for the absence of teeth. She motioned to a chair next to her but I didn’t, couldn’t, sit. It was too clinical. The door closed behind Kieran and Joanna and I waited, pacing up and down, avoiding the old woman’s gaze.

  I forgot to look at my watch to see how long it had been. Kieran ventured out again after a noiseless few minutes, a smile on his face.

  ‘She’s takin’ a shower’, he said. ‘Give her five minutes.’

  I didn’t ask him if it was good or not, if he’d enjoyed it. If she’d enjoyed it. I now felt unable to go through with what I must now do, but also felt that I had to go through with it out of scientific curiosity, as if it were the sort of experiment my university tutors would have constructed. ‘Can anyone tell me’, I could hear them say, addressing a packed lecture hall, ‘what it’s like to sleep with a teenage Colombian whore?’

  Ten minutes later, as she rocked me back and forth and I came into a thick yellow condom deep inside her, I had the answer.

  ***

  Less than a mile away, Felicio Suares smoothed down his gelled black hair and looked at himself in the mirror. Tonight was opening night. He had been staying at the Intercontinental at his country’s expense for the last two weeks. Overseeing the first Pan-American Anti-Narcotics Forum was an honour. He was about to welcome advisers, ministers, police chiefs and academics to the most picturesque city in Colombia, also a popular gateway for the export of cocaine in which he held a large personal and private equity stake. He had nearly forgotten about the loss of Franz or Heinz to a highly-concentrated overdose from a laboratory. Someone was stealing from the universities. So what? He had told the German not to take any product, to keep a clear head.

  Suares undid and redid his bowtie, the black one with the purple stripes of his notional employer, the Ministry of Information. He was a very rich man already. The Ministry paid him the sum of twenty thousand dollars a year, very little by American or European standards, but his cut from the Cartels now amounted to two million dollars a year, and he had been doing it for seven years.

  Suares tried to visualise the eight million dollars in his account at a Dutch bank on Aruba. Perhaps tonight’s opening of the forum would be a good moment to announce his retirement. He was nearly fifty years old and no other man in his family had ever lived to see fifty; not his father, nor his grandfathers, nor their fathers. He would retire peacefully to an island in the Caribbean, possibly even Aruba…the thought was seductive. But it was also unrealistic. The Cartels would not be happy to see one of their own depart, unless they could be guaranteed that his successor would be just as amenable to their activities.

  Of the potential successors, only two men could possibly fill Suares’s shoes. They were both younger, in their mid-thirties, and only one of them had been corrupted. The other, Michael Favorito, he would need to talk to. Maybe. Maybe. Favorito was the favourite. And his disciple? In time, he had hoped for Juan Andres Montero Garcia, a man he knew was incorruptible, but now, regrettably, also dead. There were so few good men, he rued, so few. How long could the Cartels realistically expect him to hold his job? Maybe until fifty-five, another five and half years. Five and half years was a long time when you had eight million dollars and no way of spending them. It was his own jail sentence. He must serve time before he could claim his reward. The dangers, the risks... he was well compensated for them but only in deferred bonuses.

  He picked up his jacket from the chair and slipped it on. There. He looked immaculate, ready for his opening address in the gala ball-room. His instructions were clear. Did he need to make that last call, or should he trust them?

  ***

  Juan Andres Montero Garcia peered through the gap in the curtains at the lights of the yachts in the water. It was a peaceful, humid night and Mama Garcia was busy reading a book about investing in commodities. She had drilled into all of her children the need for self-improvement and she believed in leading by example. They had been alone in the caravan for less than twenty-four hours and Juan Andres was sure that the international conference at the Intercontinental would be opening now. Suares, the man he had taken pains to avoid, would be making a speech a few hundred yards up the beach. The security levels would be high. No-one would be expecting anyone to be foolish enough to attempt to take out a hundred kilos during the conference, across the water and into the darkness. Which is why it was exactly the right time to do it.

  Blood was thicker than any other tie. It was the right time. Tonight would be the moment. Kieran and I would feature in his plan – he certainly hadn’t forgotten us - but our role was to be very different to the one for which I had rehearsed.

  21

  They arrested me at six o’clock the next morning.

  I don’t know what happened to Kieran but he wasn’t in the back of the green army truck that took me to the outskirts of a residential suburb in Cartagena and then through the tall steel gates of the prison. The sun was beating down and I was in a state of shock. We had been partying on the beach all night after we left Joanna and the old lady at the bordello. We had taken nearly five grams between the two of us over a twelve hour period and I was as wired as a power station. I could feel the paranoia building inside me, but it was justified this time. I would see Juan Andres and Mama Garcia at any moment. The Jeep and the Marauder would be towed through the gates, its valuable cargo inside. Kieran would follow soon, surely, his grin a faded memory, coked up like me, sweating to the core and trying not to shit on the concrete.

  A soldier in a green uniform ordered me out of the army truck and stood me in the centre of the courtyard. The sun was already high in the sky and it could not have been more than seven or eight in the morning. Metal cages lined the left hand side of the prison courtyard containing a group of about thirty locals. Noisy, coarse and poor, they must have been last night’s pickings from the city streets and beaches, the drunk and disorderlies, the pimps and the muggers. I turned my back to them, trying to control my emotions. No Kieran. No Juan Andres. No Mama Garcia. Just me.

  Prisoners looked through the bars of a cell-block on the right side of the courtyard. They were staring at me. I was very hot and dehydrated. I was coked up but I was also drunk. My bloodstream was a battlefield, the competing stimulant and tranquiliser forces making my eyeballs throb. I was in desperate need of a cigarette. I could feel my hands shaking so I put them into my pockets as casually as I could. In fact, I tried to do everything as casually as I could, although I could not ignore the fact that it was I that had been arrested, no other extranjero, and that someone must have told the Colombian army to raid the Hotel Doral. It could not be coincidence, bearing in mind my plans, our plans.

  What had happened to Kieran? Why had I been such an idiot? I knew I could manufacture synthetic cocaine from the safety of a laboratory. What the hell was I doing harvesting and then trying to export four million dollars of the real thing out of Colombia? Had the coke warped my brain or did I really not want to see my family again? They wouldn’t keep my job open for me, of that I was sure. I would be fired before I had even walked in the door. They would deny all knowledge of me. And my parents? Sitting in their house in Barnes, listening to the thud of leather against willow, walking to the church, having the neighbours round for tea. They would be horrified that I’d thrown it all away. The degree from Cambridge, the promising career at a bank in the City. And then, of course, the ultimate curse, their damnation by association, the sires of jailbait.

  Who could have told them about me? Why me and not Kieran? Was it Suares? Why had Juan Andres instructed us to be at that specific hotel, the Doral? How would they know we would be there at six in the morning? That we had only just re
turned from the beach? I had no coke on me, not in my clothing at any rate. Kieran had it all. It had happened so quickly at the Doral that I wasn’t sure if I’d seen him run up the back staircase, keeping low, crawl into our room and flush the remaining twenty grams of crystalline cocaine down the toilet, the bag we’d hidden inside the tubular metal bed post.

  An older man in green army uniform with a captain’s insignia offered me a cigarette. I took it gratefully and he lit it for me.

  ‘English?’ he asked, in a thick accent.

  ‘Yes.’

  He nodded and strolled off around the courtyard. I tried not to watch him but I could see him turning every minute or so and looking at me. After a few more minutes, and after my craving for another cigarette had reached a critical level, the prison door slid open and two women walked through in checkered green and white dresses. Each of them held a leather case that looked like a doctor’s bag. The women nodded to the men in green uniform and disappeared into the smallest block in the courtyard, tucked into a corner away from the cages and away from me.

  ‘Is time’, said the captain suddenly, standing right behind me, and he walked me over to the block. As I walked, slowly, deliberately, I looked up at the sky, the brilliant blue sky, and the hot sun burning in it. I had lived for less than twenty-five years. My parents would be mortified when they heard, when they read about it in the newspapers. I did not know what was going to happen to me but I took in every ounce of sky and sun in that moment. I steadied myself, mentally and physically. This could be the last time, I thought, the last time I see sky and sun. The last time I am free. I was resigned to the distinct possibility that I was going to die much sooner than I had ever anticipated.

  The door opened to a corridor and a room covered in large square turquoise tiles. The only part of the room that wasn’t tiled was the ceiling. There was a bed, two desks and two chairs and the two women in their checkered dresses, each one now covered by a nurse’s pinafore and topped off by a triangular white hat. A hospital bed was covered with a crisp white sheet. Next to it was a surgical tray on which I could see hypodermics and little bottles with tiny labels. There were also pipettes and test-tubes with black bungs.

  ‘Sangre, urine’, said the captain, leaving me with the two women and a guard in the corner, a rifle slung over his shoulder and a pistol in his holster. They wanted my blood and my urine. One of the nurses stood up and walked over to me.

  ‘Tranquilo’, she said, rolling up the left sleeve of my shirt to expose my newly-toned bicep whilst her colleague prepared a blood-pressure cuff. She was telling me to be calm. The cuff was slipped over my arm and they sat me in a chair.

  ‘Tranquilo’, she said again. I tried to be tranquilo, to breathe normally, but I couldn’t. I needed that cigarette, any cigarette, or a drink, a drink to calm down. I couldn’t stop my fingers shaking. One of the nurses took notes as the other carried out the examination. The cuff squeezed my bicep and I knew that the reading would be sky-high, a sign of hyper-tension, extreme anxiety or the presence of stimulants in the bloodstream. I felt faint when I saw the needle, the cuff still tight around the upper part. The nurse extracted a few milliliters of my blood and placed it into a small tube which she sealed and labeled.

  The cuff was removed from my arm and she handed me a urine sample kit. There was a rail which ran along a corner of the room and she drew the plastic curtains to screen it off. The soldier motioned for me to go inside. He stood by the gap in the curtains as I peed into a vial. A nurse took it from me when I’d finished, sealed and labelled it. She also cut my fingernails and put the clippings into a small plastic bag.

  ‘Quatro horas’, she said to the guard. Four hours during which they would be preparing the results of the simple medical tests which would show beyond any doubt that I had consumed vast quantities of cocaine in the preceding week, including a heavy dose in the last twelve hours.

  ‘Cigarillo?’ I asked the guard. He nodded and handed me a cigarette as he took me back outside to the courtyard. I had some matches in my pocket and he lit it for me. I sheltered in the shade of a prison-block, finishing the cigarette. They already had my passport along with everything else in my pockets including three hundred dollars. At least one bank-note carried the traces of cocaine, a note that I had rolled, snorted coke through and then unrolled and placed back into my wallet. There would also be traces of cocaine and cannabis on my fingernails and in my urine: cannabis took a month to clear through the system.

  ‘Oyez, gringo!’

  I looked up to see a large plastic bag tumbling towards me which exploded on impact and showered me in fecal matter and urine. I heard laughing coming from the cages on the side of the courtyard and I wiped my face. I vomited once, and then again. They pressure-washed me when I’d finished retching, training a single jet onto me. My clothes were drenched so when the jet cut out I walked into the sun and stood like washing hung out to dry.

  Three and a half hours later they gave me a glass of water and read me the charges in English and Spanish, with a local lawyer in attendance.

  ‘Entiendes? Understand?’

  I nodded.

  The lawyer, Gonzalez, was my government-appointed lawyer. He handed me a photocopy of a page from the Codigo – the Civil Code - which listed the mandatory sentences. Possession was three years, dealing twelve.

  ‘Ten, with remission’, he said helpfully. ‘The government is taking abuses by turistas very strong. You have family, someone to contact?’

  ‘No. There’s no-one.’

  ‘Very well. Come with me. They take you to a cell, in the jail, and they bring you before a judge tomorrow. You understand?’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘If you has any informations about anyone else you know who is dealing you must tell me. They search your room. There is another man, yes? He share your room?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘They speak to two girls. They know you have a friend. Do you know where your friend is?’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘You must not lie to me. I am your lawyer. You must tell me everything or they will charge you with dealing and you will go to prison for twelve years.’

  ‘I have never sold drugs.’

  ‘They find a bag of cocaine in your room.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  The lawyer shook his head.

  ‘This is all they find.’

  I wondered what had happened to my notes on the manufacture of synthetic cocaine. They were written in my own indecipherable shorthand, but the diagrams and the chemical symbols were legible in any language, as were the rough budgets I’d drawn up for working out how much money I could make from selling it. I prayed that someone had stolen it together with the five thousand dollars rolled up inside my underwear, that they would burn the bag and keep the money.

  They locked me in my cell, six foot by nine, low-ceilinged, no window, no ventilation. I watched the lawyer walk off through the bars in the ten inch grille in the door and I sat on a thin metal bed with a lumpy mattress. My drug-fuelled paranoia finally wore off because I had nothing more to be paranoid about. I lay down on the bed, shut my eyes and allowed a wave of exhaustion to send me to sleep, a state that had eluded me for nearly thirty-six hours.

  The Mangusta was nearly forty foot long and Juan Andres held the throttle to the maximum forty-five knots. The sun was rising again and they had kept going all night. The boat was a rich man’s toy but had been a poorly-guarded one: moored, fully fueled and ready for a visit from its master, a doctor from Bogota. Juan Andres had wheeled their cargo on board using a metal trolley, walking deferentially behind his mother who for once that night was wearing a fine silk dress, shoes with heels and make-up. She could have been mistaken for the owner, or the owner’s wife, which was the idea.

  The night-guard was asleep, drunk. Juan Andres loaded the materials on board in less than ten minutes, secured them safely below deck and then he spent another fi
ve minutes working out how to bypass the ignition and get straight to the starter motor. It was not unusual to take an evening cruise, normally a romantic event under the stars. This time, it was just with Mama Garcia. In a matter of minutes they were in international waters and soon they would be in Aruba, a safe port from which they could make their way, somehow, to paradise and four million dollars.

  Kieran hadn’t moved for nearly twelve hours. He was hiding under the floorboards of a room on the first floor of the Hotel Doral, a large unoccupied room with three beds and a giant bath in the centre of the room, more like a font. It was now evening and he thought he could hear the sound of glasses clinking and movement downstairs. He slowly eased up a floorboard and pulled himself out, covered in dust and spiders. He replaced the floorboard carefully and contemplated the room in the late afternoon sun. He had left the key in the lock and they hadn’t found him, in fact they’d only been in to search for a few seconds before someone had called them away. He tried not to think about anyone or anything else.

  He slipped out of the room quickly, a roll of money in his underpants and his passport in his moneybelt. He walked swiftly out of the hotel without stopping to check if his belongings were there or to pay the bill. He took the first ferry to Panama City, the overnighter, and when he arrived he bought an airline ticket back to Vancouver, via Houston.

  Kieran was going home.

  He’d had enough of the Swiss Alps.

  22

  ‘The more things a man is ashamed of,

  the more respectable he is.’

  George Bernard Shaw

  When they opened the large sliding metal door I felt an instinctive urge to run. I didn’t, because there were two soldiers in the way, waving in a truck stacked high with boxes of vegetables that had been discarded from the markets but were deemed edible by the prisoners. I had been given my clothes and they had even been washed. The linen suit was creased but clean, the loafers dry and cracked but still a good fit. The shirt felt starchy and itched, and the only thing I wasn’t wearing was underwear, or socks. They’d said they couldn’t find them and frankly I didn’t give a shit. No-one was there to meet me because no-one, not even my parents, had been given any notice that I was being discharged.