“So do I.”
We discuss other ways to get her out of the country. By car to Damascus. Or to Israel. Mohammed has connections in the south that can assure her safe passage. Plans are made, but then Val balks. Part of her does not want to leave. She says it’s the most time we’ve had together since we’ve known each other. She wants me to go with her, as if she fears separation will make me, or her, more vulnerable. Or maybe she’s waiting to feel new life stir in her womb.
AT LAST THE day arrives. “Everything is ready,” Mohammed assures me. He urges me to remain in the relative safety of the penthouse and take his word that he and his men have followed the precise, detailed instructions I gave them for preparing the shipment. But my word, and my New York partners’ freedom, as well as fifteen million dollars worth of hashish, are on the line. Years of working with Arabs, Mexicans, Jamaicans, Colombians has convinced me they just don’t understand the lengths to which North American law-enforcement agents are willing to go in order to bust our loads and lock us up.
“This is serious business,” I remind him. “People go to prison.” Maybe not in Lebanon, not if you are the former chief of customs.
My Yankee WASP work ethic demands dependability and attention to detail. In more than fifteen years in this business I have never lost a load due to sloppiness. My suspicious side nags that Mohammed doesn’t want me to inspect the shipment because he’s gone ahead and hidden the ten kilos of junk in with the dates and hash—not that there is any way I could find it in half a million kilos of dates and seven and a half tons of hash. Reason argues Mohammed wouldn’t risk hiding the junk in the load knowing that once the shipment has landed in the States I’ll have total control and he would have no way of recovering the heroin. Except, of course, if he—or Tamer—has someone put a gun to my head and demand I turn it over.
Saad checks the street and signals to me. I step from the dim vestibule of the building, slip on my Arafat shades, pull the checkered kaffiyeh close around my American face and duck into the rear of the waiting Mercedes. Crouched on the floor for the dash across the Green Line, I hear sirens, mortar fire, loud explosions of bombs and rockets over the racing Mercedes engine and humming of tires. On the carpet near my face is a dried, rust-colored stain that looks like blood. The car has been shot up since our trip to the Bekaa. Nasif drives. Saad, clutching his Uzi, rides shotgun.
“You okay back there, Mr. Richard?” Nasif calls.
“Yeah.”
Nasif and Saad rant on in Arabic; they laugh and shout curses at the snipers on the rooftops. Nasif prides himself on being able to outmaneuver the shooters poised along the verdant no-man’s land separating East from West Beirut. Yet bullet holes pock the trunk and rear quarter of the Mercedes. Once we cross the Green Line into East Beirut, we are out of immediate danger of sniper fire. I sit up in the rear seat but keep the kaffiyeh wrapped around my head. Here in the Christian section of the city, the war is not as intense. It is a short ride along the Rue Charles Helou to the seaport district.
The warehouse is under guard by the four bearded Uzi-toting heavies in green fatigues who escorted the load to the port. Half a dozen orange sea/land containers are stacked on the dock beside the warehouse; a seventh is backed up to a loading platform. Nasif pulls up out front, and I am quickly hustled inside. As soon as I walk through the warehouse door, I am met with the spicy perfumed odor of premium-grade hashish mixed with the syrupy sweet smell of dates. Hundreds of brown waxed cardboard cartons labeled khistawi dates in English and Arabic are piled along the rear wall. The rest of the load has already been packed into the containers on the dock, waiting to be hoisted aboard a Greek freighter due to arrive in Beirut in a few days. As Mohammed told me, everything is ready. Or so it appears. Check the boxes yourself, Doc. Make sure they do it right, I hear Sammy admonish me. Leave nothing to chance. Trust no one. Believe only what you see with your own eyes. Fifteen million dollars—or fifteen years in prison—hang in the balance.
It will take all seven sea/land containers full of cartons packed with dates and hashish to conceal the contraband. Four of the containers will hold just dates; the other three are to be packed with dates and hash. The cardboard cartons containing the hash are wrapped with red plastic strapping to distinguish them from the boxes with only dates, which have green, blue, or yellow strapping. The hash is packed into sealed tin boxes. According to instructions I gave Mohammed, the tin boxes full of fragrant hashish are supposed to be packed into the cardboard cartons, then covered top and bottom with a thick layer of dates within those boxes. I walk to the rear of the warehouse and take down a box with red straps. It doesn’t feel right—too hard.
I snip the plastic bands and tear open the carton. Inside is a sealed tin box and no dates. I look at Mohammed. “Where are the dates?”
“In the other cartons,” Nasif answers, “as you wanted.”
I shake my head. I’m beginning to feel dizzy; I can’t believe what I’m seeing. After I waited weeks to get this load packed and shipped, they fucked it up. Is it stupidity, do the instructions get lost in translation, or are they just plain perverse, testing me to see if I am serious? I take down another red-strapped carton and rip it open. Again, they simply shoved the tin box with the hashish inside the cardboard box without packing it in layers of dates on the bottom and top as they have been told many, many times. I even drew them pictures to show how it must be done. But no, they ignored my repeated directions. As it is, if a US Customs agent were to choose to open one of the red-strapped boxes, the load is busted.
“No good,” I say, fighting to control my anger. “You’ve got to unload all these containers. Repack the cartons. And cover the tin boxes of hash with dates. Thick layers of dates! On the bottom and the top. The way I showed you fifty fucking times!”
As Nasif translates, I see Mohammed starting to turn purple with rage. Did he think I wouldn’t check the load? That I would just let it go and trust in Allah to get it past Customs? “But Mr. Richard, that will take days. Maybe more than one week,” Nasif protests. “We’ll miss the ship. It could be weeks before we can arrange new transport. And the war—”
“You tell your father I’m sick of this shit! It doesn’t matter how long it takes. I told you how I wanted the cartons packed. You—he—ignored my instructions! We can’t send it like this!” I’m yelling now. The dudes with the Uzis are getting tense. “It’s got to be done right,” I say, “or I’ll take every one of these fucking boxes and throw them into the sea!”
There is a lengthy discussion in Arabic between father, son, and one of the men guarding the warehouse. They give me a look that says, Forget about it, pal. The shipment’s going the way it is. As the former chief of Lebanese Customs, Mohammed just can’t understand that, unlike in Beirut, US Customs is not totally corrupt. To break the impasse and let them know I’m serious, I grab one of the cartons I opened, take it out onto the dock, and heave it into the murky Mediterranean. “Every fucking one!” I yell and head back inside. “I’ll go back with nothing. I don’t give a fuck. I don’t want to go to prison. Can’t you understand that?”
Finally, Mohammed relents. The men fish the box of hash from the sea and laugh at me. Crazy American! I feel my grandmother’s spirit swelling with pride. He may be a dope smuggler, but at least he’s a conscientious dope smuggler. After all, hadn’t some of our forebears made their fortune smuggling opium and God knows what else? It is a Yankee outlaw tradition to thumb one’s nose at the government and break the laws that are perceived as wrongheaded. Henry David Thoreau taught me that in his essay “Civil Disobedience.” Governments and their picayune laws are for the uninformed masses, the sheep. Every great fortune is founded on a crime, Balzac said. As a native New Englander, I was brought up with the rumors that Joe Kennedy made his family’s fortune smuggling booze during Prohibition—and his son went on to become president. The laws against cannabis are a cruel joke. It is only a matter of time before pot prohibition is repealed. In the interim, fortunes
will be made. I paid my dues. No reason I should not be a marijuana millionaire.
BACK IN OUR penthouse prison one afternoon as we lay in bed, Val announces she is going stir crazy. “I’ve got to get out of this place,” she tells me. “I don’t care how fucked-up it is out there.” She shows me an ad in the English-language newspaper. The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson, is playing at a movie theater on Hamra Street. “Take me to the movies. Or I’ll walk.”
We go to a matinee. On Hamra Street, as we walk from the car to the theater, a man walking behind us pulls a gun and opens fire on a group of men standing on the other side of the street, then he runs off. Val ducks behind me. “Sheesh! What was that?”
“Drug dealers,” Nasif says.
The movie is in English with Arabic subtitles. The audience loves it. So does Val. She is happy, at least for a couple of hours. After the show we go to dinner at Frank Terpil’s restaurant and drink whiskey and champagne. “I want to go home,” Val says, clutching my hand beneath the table. “I mean home home. Enough of this place already.”
“Soon, baby. Soon.”
“Soon… You sound like Mohammed.”
“Another week, maybe ten days.”
Nasif has arranged a car and driver to take us back to the apartment. We are both a little loaded, feeling mellow. Val rests her head on my shoulder and closes her eyes. She grips my arm and nuzzles up to me. “I love you, daddy,” she says.
When we turn down our street, I see swirling red-and-blue lights. Ambulances and emergency vehicles are pulled up outside the apartment building. The neighborhood has been struck by heavy rocket fire. Dazed, I get out of the car and look up at a gaping black hole in the sky where our bedroom was. Half of the top three floors of our building are blown away. Rescue workers search through the rubble for a family who lives on the floor beneath us.
“Saad… Saad!” I call to one of the rescue workers. He shrugs. I tell our driver to ask for Saad and his family. No one knows anything. I look around at the faces of the people gathered in the street but recognize no one.
Val is in the backseat of the car, sobbing. “No… no, no more. Please, I want to go home. Now.”
We spend the night at the Commodore Hotel. Val cries, begs me to leave the country with her. “You know I can’t go, baby. Not until the load is safely on its way to New York. We’ve come this far. I can’t quit now.”
“You’re crazy! You’re not thinking straight. These people are all insane. They won’t stop until everyone is dead.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Richard, honey, listen to me. All that money won’t do you any good if you’re dead.”
The next day Nasif arranges for Val to be driven by car across the border to Israel, where she catches an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to JFK. Nasif says eight people who lived in the building were killed or badly injured. Laila and her husband, the doctor, are among the casualties, Nasif tells me with the resignation of a man who is accustomed to announcing death. The Saad family, however, is safe, staying at another apartment building owned by Mohammed. “It is bad, Richard. You must leave soon.”
“Of course,” I say and manage a smile. “I wasn’t planning on staying.”
Once I get word Val is on a plane heading back to the States, I reach a point beyond fear. Nothing matters to me now except getting the hash secured on board a ship headed for New Jersey. It is demented, I know, but I value my life less than the load. Call it stubbornness, but what I fear most is failure. Going back with nothing but my dick in my hand. Humiliation. Then for the rest of my life I’m going to look in the mirror and say, Stratton, you ain’t shit. You let a half-assed war punk you out.
I stay at the Commodore with the foreign press corps. Drink in the evening at the downstairs bar with the intrepid barstool journalists who rarely leave the hotel and get their reports from wire machines clattering away in the lobby. I foster the fantasy that I am some kind of spook who meets nightly with a fat man straight out of Casablanca. The war still seems oddly unreal, an offstage tragedy for audiences who will never understand, as I never will, what it is all about, why so many people must die.
At last Mohammed shows up with the bill of lading. Our freighter carrying the load of dates and hash is one of the last ships to leave harbor before Israeli gunboats blockade the port.
In the morning, I flee east. Back to the Bekaa, where I am certainly not safe. Syrian and Iranian warriors encamped here are preparing for war. The Israelis are encroaching from the south. Americans have a price tag on their head. I keep traveling east into Syria, to Damascus, where I mail the shipping documents to Sammy in New York and board a plane for Dubai. From Dubai I fly to New Delhi, India to rest for a few days—stranger in a strange land, the only real peace I know. On to Hong Kong and a long flight to Honolulu. Then a short hop to Maui, where Val waits for me in a house by the sea on the slopes of a volcano.
9
A DATE WITH TEN MILLION DATES
THE GREEK FREIGHTER carrying our goods is at sea headed for the port of New Jersey. Using a clean set of phony ID, I fly from Hawaii to New York. There I check in to a suite in the funky Hotel Chelsea to wait for my ship to come in. Creature of habit, I stay at the Chelsea when I am waiting for a load. Once the goods have landed and the cash starts to flow, I will move to a suite at the Plaza and resume my pose as Doctor Lowell, the eccentric shrink who hands out money and free psychiatric advice like the Magic Christian.
Pre-load, what I like about the Chelsea is that cops or Feds will not go unnoticed here. The staff knows me and of my aversion to agents of the law. There is no need for false pretenses. Freaks, artists, writers, musicians, dope fiends, and dope dealers live in suites and rooms at the Chelsea. The place has history. Dylan Thomas was staying here when he drank himself to death in 1953. Sid Vicious killed his old lady at the Chelsea in 1978—the same year I was busted while staying here. The beat poet Gregory Corso wanders the halls talking to himself. I fit in. The desk clerk will tip me if anyone comes around asking questions. The Chelsea is a good-luck place for me, and I am as superstitious as a medicine man.
No one knows my real name. I have three sets of false ID and have to remind myself each morning who I am today. I make no calls from the room. To stay in touch with my people, I use a pay phone at the rear of El Quijote, the garish Spanish restaurant adjoining the hotel. I come and go, drink tequila at the bar, make my calls, waiting for word the load has landed. In the room I smoke joints and watch old episodes of Get Smart. Listen to music, Bob Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” which he wrote while staying at the Chelsea. At night I drift off to sleep with visions of dark freighters crewed by mustachioed Greeks steaming across the sea.
An article of faith in the dope smuggling business is shit happens. On an earlier scam—the infamous ’78 hash trip Wolfshein alluded to during that uncomfortable drive in Maine—I waited in this same hotel for a ton and a half of Lebanese hash coming in by airfreight to Kennedy airport. The load was disguised as a shipment of jet engine parts being returned to the US manufacturer for retooling. Every day I would meet with my Lebanese contact—Nervous Nick, I called him—for a progress report. Nick’s nervousness was contagious. We met at a coffee shop on Third Avenue in Murray Hill. Nick couldn’t sit still. He kept glancing over his shoulder. Wouldn’t look me in the eye. I assured myself that Nick was too nervous to be an undercover fed or a rip-off artist setting me up for a robbery. He was skinny, with a perpetual three-day growth—a rank amateur in his early thirties who admitted he’d never done anything like this before. His family owned a Lebanese restaurant in Brooklyn. Relatives from Montreal recruited him. He agreed to step in to ease some personal financial pressures.
“I will die if this business fails,” he told me.
From the start I suspected there was something amiss with this trip. It had been put together by the Canadians: a Lebanese crew working out of Montreal; my partner, Rosie, who was in jail at the time; and his former partner, Michael, who
warned me there might be a weak link somewhere between Beirut and New York. That was why they asked me to receive the load: they knew I would take the risk. Without risk there is no chance for the unexpected, no hope for true adventure and, perhaps, enlightenment. One has to ride out there on the wave of chance to grow.
So I met with Nick, and I waited at the Chelsea between meetings. Each day hash dealers came to my rooms to smoke dope and check on the status of the load. One day, Brendan, a Toronto smuggler who would pick up a heroin habit and die a junkie’s death in Bangkok, showed up with a slab of fresh Lebanese hash that I knew, from the stamp on the sack, came from the load I was expecting.
The load was in. How could this be? Someone had received the goods before me. But who? When I met Nick that afternoon, he was more nervous than ever. He said what Brendan showed me had to be samples or part of a similar load, because the first 500 kilos of the ton and a half we were expecting had now landed and cleared customs and was ready to be picked up at the airport.
Things were going from weird to weirder. I called Toronto to see what Michael knew. He never returned my call. Rosie was still in the slammer; no way to confer with him. I called Jimmy D. He drove down from the farm in Maine. We drank in the bar at El Quijote. “What do you want me to do, Kemosabe?” he asked after I told him of my reservations.
“What do you want to do?”
“You know me, chief,” he said. “I’m a grunt. I follow orders.”
“I’m not ordering you to do this. We could be walking into a trap.”
This guy had hardcore nerves forged in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. There was a part of him that didn’t give a fuck. Those are the most dangerous kind of outlaws—the ones who figure whatever comes their way they’ll handle it, or die trying. JD changed the subject. He told me he was fucking the wife of the guy who lives in the farm next to our place a half mile down the road. They were rich hippies. She was a trust fund kid. Her old man was a musician. They were good friends with Anaïs, my estranged wife.
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