“I understand.”
It’s not like we haven’t done this before. Maybe never anything of this magnitude, but the details of the profile don’t change. Still, Sammy is a stickler for the fine points of a scam, and I respect that in him.
“The goods need to be consigned to a known US import company with a well-established history,” Sammy continues between mouthfuls of sushi. “Trucking company, bonded carriers, the warehouse—they all need to be bona fide businesses that will hold up if they run ’em through the computer. No fly-by-night bullshit companies set up for this one deal. That’s a red flag. That’ll also trip the computer. Okay?”
I nod and keep eating.
“Now, I got all that covered on our end. Bordo Foods, okay… my old man knows the guy there, and they need dates. They’ll pay good money, and they’ll provide the letter of credit. Our profile will be solid gold. If you can get the dates.”
There is a war going on between Iran and Iraq. Because of the war, there is a demand that presents us with an opportunity: dates. First we must convince one of these huge food companies that we can get them Iraqi dates. “We’ll get them,” I tell him.
“You don’t sound so sure. What does Mr. M. say?”
Mr. M. is Mohammed. “He says no problem. But that’s what he always says.”
“You gotta go over there yourself, bro.”
“I know. I’m going.”
“No, I mean to Iraq. You gotta check the dates yourself. Listen, there’s what’s called an infestation rate that you gotta check. Don’t leave that to the Lebs. All these dates coming out of that part of the world, they have a certain amount of dead bugs in ’em. The people over there spray ’em and kill the bugs. But if there’s too much dead bugs, the infestation rate’s too high, then USDA will reject the dates. Understand? We can’t let that happen. You follow me? If the dates get rejected, we’re fucked. I’ll get all the info from my old man. But you gotta be on the ground over there in Iraq and Beirut to check out everything every step of the way. You can’t trust these fuckin’ camel jockeys to do anything right.”
He glances over at Bowie and Jagger’s table. “Do you believe this shit? That’s fuckin’ Jagger and Bowie, bro. Icons. Nobody bothers them. New York City, I love this town. People leave you alone. Here’s you and me, takin’ care of business, planning the scam of a lifetime.” He samples more sushi, sips sake. “And at the next table, rock legends.”
After a moment, Sammy asks, “Are you comfortable meeting with the guy from Bordo?”
“Sure, whatever we need to do to make this work, I’ll do it.”
“Good. I’ll have the old man set up a meeting. You’re Richard Lowell for this, right, bro?”
I nod.
“From where? Where the fuck are you from anyway?” He laughs. “I’ll have business cards made up,” Sammy says. “Doctor Richard Lowell, Import/Export. From who-the-fuck-knows-where? When are you gonna settle down, bro?” He laughs again. “We need an address. I’ll take care of that. Just be cool and act like you know what the fuck you’re talking about.” More laughter, louder this time. “Bro, this is so intense. We pull this off…”—he gestures toward Bowie and Jagger—“we’ll be as rich as those guys. Well, maybe not that rich. But cash, bro. Big stamp collections. Major cake. Tax free.” He opens his heavy, lidded eyes wide and smiles. “I’ll have the old man go along to the meeting with Bordo. Wear a suit. It’s all about how you look. The profile. Let the old man do most of the talking. He’ll tell you what to say.”
Sammy polishes off more sushi, thinks, ruminates, masticates. He’s one of what is known in the marijuana underground as the Kings of New York—five or six of the biggest wholesale dealers in the biggest market in the world. He rarely leaves the city except to go on vacation with his wife. He works every day, seven days a week. Long hours. Loves his work. Been doing it for years. Loves the product. He stays high, smokes only the best cannabis in the world. Over the past year he has invested a lot of money in his indoor growing operation. I visited once: a vast warehouse in Brooklyn full of expensive grow lights and hydroponic grow systems, fans, hundreds of graceful, green plants luxuriating in the artificial environment. He has three full-time workers under the tutelage of a guy Sammy calls the marijuana maven, the grow master, who has been profiled in High Times magazine wearing a mask and shades.
It’s hard to say how much Sammy is worth. Unlike me, he keeps close tabs on his money. He’s always got a few hundred grand in hundred-dollar bills available to invest if someone comes along with an importation trip that sounds like it might actually work. He doesn’t buy planes and boats and trucks; he’s a wholesale dealer as opposed to an importer. His biggest overhead expense, not counting the grow operation, is the several stash houses he maintains in Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Staten Island.
Sammy and I have pulled off a number of successful trips together—his money, my scam. He cashes out the product. We brought in a load of high altitude Jamaican weed known as Lamb’s Bread. Sammy hooked me up with a friend of his who owns a hotel in Negril. My pilot, the one I call Jonathan Livingston Seagull, flew the load into the ranch in Texas and we delivered it to Sammy in New York. We do regular importations of connoisseur-quality Mexican sinsemilla from Guerrero and Oaxaca. The Mexican border is where it all began. We still work it on a nearly monthly basis during harvest season. Sammy has his own sources of commercial Colombian. The hashish from Lebanon we were bringing in through a catch at Kennedy Airport before that went bad. Then the Logan catch came into play. Sammy provides seed capital, becomes an investor as well as the wholesale distributor. We share a belief that if the product is good and the price is right and you don’t cheat anyone along the way, good karma will hold sway and the trip will be a success.
“Now, here’s the most important part,” Sammy tells me, and he takes out a pen and notebook. “Packaging. We went over this.”
“Ten times,” I remind him.
“Cool. Let’s do it again. Whatever you do, promise me you will not take the fuckin’ rag heads’ word for anything. Check everything ten times yourself. With your own eyes. Inspect the load before it goes and make sure it’s packaged right. Okay? You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Good. Good. Very good. I’m depending on you, Doc. We’re depending on you. Our lives depend on you, bro. Our freedom. Our families. My old man’s business. It all comes down to,” he holds up a finger, looks over at Bowie and Jagger again, “proper packaging.”
As we leave the restaurant, the owner embraces Sammy in a bear hug and they slap each other on the back. “Ah! Lord Toranaga! My emperor,” the owner exclaims. “You eat well?”
“Very well. Always.” Sammy pulls out a fat wad of bills and pays the tab. No plastic for General Marijuana.
THERE IS STILL no answer when I call Dr. Kato’s room back at the Plaza. I’m pissed at Biff all over again for not picking up the money. One of the reasons Kato likes this hotel is that it’s so big he can bring hookers up to his rooms without having to go past the front desk. We have most of the security staff on the tab. As long as we don’t get too raucous, nobody’s going to bother us. He could be in there laying pipe. He could be anywhere. I’m ready to call it a night. With Val arriving early in the morning, Nasif calling from the Middle East, I would just as soon watch some TV and pass out. But with Kato in the vicinity, that’s not likely. He’s a man who likes a drink, and it’s still early. I try the Oyster Bar, the Oak Bar—no Kato. He’s probably out prowling, trolling, looking for ladies of the night.
In the suite, the message light is blinking on the telephone. “Dr. Kato, room 944,” his deep, melodious Islands lilt tells me what I already know isn’t so. Where is this guy?
There is something about hotel rooms that causes me to feel lonely; it doesn’t matter if it’s a Motel 8 or a suite at the Plaza. I turn on the TV, pour a glass of champagne, and feel a twinge of guilt over all the money I’m spending—why? To what end? What is the purpose of all this
? To make myself feel important? It doesn’t work. Or to make me feel like I’m worth something? What am I trying to prove? That I’m better than the homeless guy who spit on me? Or that I am more of a man than my father who never could earn a living as well as he could play golf?
Enough of this crap. Who cares? I grab a towel from the bathroom, roll it up, and place it along the bottom of the door to keep the smell of pot smoke from seeping out into the hallway—not that anyone ever bothers Dr. Lowell—and take a few hits off the fat joint of hydroponic Sammy gave me. The brief encounter with the homeless guy left me feeling troubled. All at once, the THC trips the synapses in my brain: instant paranoia. That guy was a harbinger warning me of impending doom if I don’t clean up my act. There but for the grace of God go I. When he spit on me, I felt as though I deserved it. I think about my parents, how they used to fight bitterly, almost always over money. Mother Mary spent too much; father Emery didn’t make enough—whatever it was. Both were from good families who had seen better days, vanguards in the decline of the WASP. We went from the mansion in Wellesley’s Cliff Estates, bought with help from my grandmother, to a duplex in one of the less desirable sections of town. In between, my father took a job as assistant golf pro at the Dorado Beach Hotel in Puerto Rico. He was a world-class golfer who was a decade ahead of the big purses on the professional tour. Judging by how he spent his days, he loved to play golf more than he loved his family. The one tried and true way I knew to get his attention was to get arrested. Is that what this is all about? Spending money like a sheik to convince myself that I am the man he isn’t? Flirting with disaster to force my father to acknowledge me? That’s fucking pathetic.
A surge of energy has me up and pacing, looking out the window. This suite is costing me upwards of a grand a day—I don’t even know how much, don’t care. New York City is the greatest city in the world, and I’m here planning the biggest trip of my smuggling career. Stay focused. Keep your eye on the prize. I haven’t even told my parents about the arrest in Maine. Haven’t told Sammy, either. It’s like I’m not taking it seriously, like I don’t even give a shit. Oh, but I do. That Jew Wolfshein worries me. I haven’t told Mailer that I put up the farm as bond. Godfried knows. I’ll tell Norman tomorrow night when I meet him for dinner.
The initial rush of paranoia recedes and delivers me to the other side. There is my mother, cheering me from the spectator’s stands as I win the Massachusetts State Wrestling Championship in the 167-pound weight division my junior year of high school. She came to every wrestling match, every football game. She convinced me that I could do whatever I put my mind to, and those other kids, the ones whose parents wouldn’t let them play with me, they were the ones leading me astray. Dear mother Mary, she spoiled me abundantly. Her mother, the indomitable Ethel Lowell Burnham, was my one constant adult influence. But she was frail and bitter in her later years. She lost a breast after an automobile accident and buried two husbands.
I’m deep in random contemplation, not even watching TV, way out on the pot train of thought going places I would never visit in my straight head. This is what I love about weed, and why I think everyone should smoke it at least once—well, maybe not everyone. Who am I to say what other people should or should not do with their minds? For this is a substance that alters the way the mind works. Good herb will take you places and give you insights you might otherwise run from and never face. I think of an evening I was visiting Godfried at his farm in Maine. He had a few guests there for the weekend: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, a friend of Godfried’s from Boston who is in the music business and his wife. Someone said something about wanting to get high. It wasn’t Hunter, he was already ripped on acid. I was asked if I had a joint. Godfried smiled and said, “Of course he has a joint. Rick always has a joint.”
I warned them the weed was powerful. It was Mexican lime-green-and-gold, lightly-seeded pot from high in the Sierra Madre del Sur near Acapulco. Really heady herb, the kind that instantly lights up your brain. No one heeded my warning. The wife of the guy in the music business got too high and had an anxiety attack. She became hysterical and began accusing her husband of cheating on her. It was true; the guy broke down and admitted he was having an affair with his assistant. All three of them had been living with this lie. The marriage would not survive the weekend.
A loud rapping on the door startles me out of my reverie. Cops? Agents? Hotel dicks? Relax.… It’s Doctor Kato in a trench coat, carrying an umbrella in one hand and a paper bag in the other. He is wearing shoes but no pants. “Here, take this. I’m being chased,” he says and hands me the paper bag as two wild hookers round a corner of the hallway in hot pursuit. Kato fends the girls off with the umbrella like a lion tamer wielding a prod. He’s parrying like a sword fighter. Naked under the raincoat, his limp pipe drooping, Kato shouts, “Back!
Back… you she wolves!” Then he whips a baggie of cocaine from the pocket of his trench coat and dangles it before their eyes like bait.
“Is this what you’re after?” he bellows and laughs. He has a great laugh, deep unrestrained belly chortle. The girls double-team him. One grabs the umbrella and tugs on it, distracting Kato while her partner snatches the bag of cocaine. Now it’s their turn to run with Kato giving chase.
Back in the room, I open the paper bag. Wads of small bills held together with rubber bands. Some figures scribbled on a scrap of paper. Counting money settles my spirit—or at least it gives me something to do. There is a little over forty grand in the bag. According to the figures on the slip of paper, Kato is not quite ten grand away from cashing out. That sounds right to me. What isn’t right is that I’m sitting on that bag of money. “Fucking Biff,” I mutter to myself and climb into bed.
When the phone rings well before dawn I am startled awake. Who the fuck? Kato? Is he in jail? Biff? Who else knows I’m here?
“Mr. Richard, how are you? This is Nasif,” says a deep-accented voice from half a world away.
“Ah, Nasif… I’m fine.” Relief. Short-lived, as I remember Biff told me Nasif would be calling.
“Sorry to call so early.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Everything is fine. My father sends his regards. He wants to know when we will see you.”
“Soon,” I tell him. “I’m working on it. I may have to come another way. You understand?”
“Of course. We will make all the arrangements.” He pauses, then says, “Your friend is here.”
As this sinks in, I sit up in the bed. “My friend? What friend?”
“Pierre…”
I think for a moment. “I don’t know any Pierre.” But, of course I do.
“He told me—”
“Wait a minute. Blond hair? Clean-shaven? Maybe thirty, thirty-
five? Big jaw and a goofy smile?”
Nasif seems confused. “Maybe… I don’t know.”
“Where’s he from?”
“I think from Miami.”
Then I know. Pierre my ass. It’s that fucking Wizard. Then it dawns on me, it wasn’t Wolfshein and his men who stole my briefcase. No! While I sat in the restaurant waiting for him, the Wizard broke into my car—expertly, I should add. He stole my briefcase. He got Mohammed’s numbers and split for Beirut. That motherfucker! But at least it wasn’t the DEA. I’m relieved and enraged at once. “What’s he want?” I ask, though I know the answer.
“Merchandise. He said you recommended him.”
“No, not true. Don’t do anything with this guy. You hear me, Nasif? Stall him. Tell your father I did not recommend him. He stole my briefcase. That’s how he got your number.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Never mind. Just listen. I’ll be there as soon as I can make travel arrangements. Whatever you do, don’t agree to any business with this… Pierre. He’s not my friend—he’s a thief.”
This fucking Wizard! I should have known.
I’m too worked up to go back to sleep. Val drags
in at around seven in the morning. She drops her suitcase, strips, showers, and hops into bed.
* * *
THE ORIGINAL GENERAL Marijuana, Mailer, looks fit and jovial as he presides over a table at Nicola’s Restaurant on the Upper East Side. His sixth wife, a tall, gorgeous, redhead; one of Mailer’s teenage daughters, a college freshman; light heavyweight boxing champion José Torres; and Biff—forlorn, chagrinned Biff: they are all seated at the table with Mailer, me, and Val. As Anthony Quinn finishes his meal and gets up to leave the restaurant, he stops by our table to pay his respects to Mailer.
“Are you kidding me?” Val whispers. “Fucking Zorba the Greek.”
Mailer is in good form, having delivered the manuscript of his long-awaited Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings to his publisher this afternoon. I pass him an envelope with a fat bag of weed under the table and his blue eyes light up. He leans over to me. “Hey, Rick… my man. Thanks. What do I owe you?”
“Nothing. Cheers.”
While the waiter takes our orders, I look up from the menu and notice a man enter the restaurant. He looks around and then sits at the bar. I recognize him immediately. It’s the blue-eyed DEA agent I helped when he was stranded at the side of the road leading up to Barnswallow’s pad. Before I even have time to absorb this, Wolfshein walks in, looks directly at me, and then joins blue-eyes as the bar.
Shit. I just handed Mailer two ounces of weed. I’m stunned with fear and guilt. I drew my Heat to Mailer, and now he is about to get popped holding enough pot to get him locked up in this crazy town. It’ll be all over the papers tomorrow: Famous novelist arrested for possession of marijuana. Fuck. And now I’m worried about how long have these guys been tailing me. Are they on to Sammy, Dr. Kato? Were they listening to my call from Nasif last night at the Plaza and so hip to the Lebanese trip? I’m tempted to take Val by the arm and bolt from the restaurant.
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