Smuggler's Blues

by Richard Stratton

  I figure the answering service in New York is burned, since Wart Hog used that number. Wolfshein will check with the service and subpoena the records of every message I received. That will take them back to Carlos’s hotel in Farmington and provide them with his name. So it’s safe to assume my nephew will pick up Heat. My instructions to the nine or ten people who used the service were to never leave a home number, only pay phones and times. But people get sloppy. I’ll have to notify everyone that the service is no longer good and get some new means of receiving messages.

  The rest of the afternoon JD is busy getting the cash that was hidden in his old lady’s barn and putting it on the road to Boston, New York, and points beyond. Nasif is in Nassau clamoring for money. Anaïs is in Spanish Wells with money from Rosie. I hang out at Father Flaherty’s waiting for Carlos, while JD drives the cash-laden suitcases to a motel in Revere, near Logan Airport. We’re in gear now. Sammy sends a driver up from New York to Boston to retrieve two million. I call the charter service in New York and arrange for a jet to meet me at Logan and take me to Nassau with the rest of the money.

  But first I need to get Carlos and the truck full of hash out of Sugarloaf, out of the area. Send the kid on a long vacation until things cool down. Let everyone who needs to know that Wart Hog is no good.

  Another fucking rat has jumped ship.

  13

  ISLAND UNIVERSE

  ANAïS LEFT A message on the New York answering service. Damn. I had no way to reach her to let her know the service was burned. When I tried to call her at the house in Spanish Wells, the phone rang and rang. I picture her out walking on the empty, white-and-pink sand beach, the phone ringing through the empty white-and-pink wood-frame house. Her message was characteristically circumspect. Sometimes I think women make better criminals than men. Their egos don’t get in the way, though their emotions do. Still, so few words, so much information: Nassau Beach Hotel, room number 23.

  She is not in her hotel room when I try to reach her. I pump more quarters into a pay phone and call Avril in Toronto. She calls me back pay phone to pay phone.

  “Have you heard from Anaïs?”

  “Yes. She’s—”

  “I know. Tell her to move. The service in New York is no good. Tell her not to use it anymore. She should call Biff and leave a message with him once she relocates. I’m on my way there now.”

  Carlos and I are in a contraband-free truck, on the Maine State Turnpike heading south, when we hear an alarming grinding of metal on metal coming from one of the front wheels. Carlos pulls over into the breakdown lane. The right front wheel is smoking and looks like it is about to fall off. The axel appears to be broken. We’re stranded. All I can think is: Thank God there is no hash in the truck. If this had happened yesterday while we were driving around loaded, we would have been busted for sure. But I have got to get to Boston to catch my ride to the Bahamas. Both Nasif and Anaïs have been waiting for me for nearly a week. Every impulse I can decipher tells me to flee the country before the hammer comes down. Wolfshein has probably already contacted DEA agents in the Bahamas, or he dispatched someone to Nassau to watch Anaïs. She will unwittingly trip them to Nasif. Nothing to do but march into the blast furnace.

  It is a good mile and a half, maybe two miles to the nearest exit—the tollbooths at York, Maine. I grab my bag and jog to the end of the highway. There, soaked with sweat, I call a tow truck service for Carlos and the stranded pickup truck, and a taxi to take me to the motel in Revere where I rendezvous with JD and pick up 1.5 million in Canadian to take to Nasif. One third for the Arabs, plus a third of whatever Anaïs brought; a third for Sammy and the New York crew; and a third for me. I’ll bank mine in the islands. There is still another seven or eight million in hash to distribute and cash out.

  The aircraft is a Cessna Citation 500. One of the pilots knows me and does not question it when I ask him to change his flight plan and take me to Eleuthera. A diffident Customs and Immigration guy at the small island airport glances at my phony passport and almost misses the gratuity—a sepia Canadian $500 bill in diminishing circulation folded into the visa section. He smiles broadly when the bill flutters out onto his desk. A taxi delivers me to the narrow channel between Eleuthera and Spanish Wells, where I ferry across in a small motorboat.

  Spanish Wells is an anomaly in the Bahamian archipelago. The local inhabitants are mostly white descendants of British fisherman who emigrated here from Bermuda in the 1700s. A few extended families living on this tiny island still produce the bulk of lobster, grouper, and conch exported from the islands. As well as the legitimate fishing industry, some of the islanders have flourished in the square grouper trade—off-loading mother ships from Colombia and ferrying the hefty, oblong, pressed bales of pot to Florida. The square grouper gets its name from bales jettisoned from smuggling ships pursued by the Coast Guard. The plastic-wrapped bales wash up on Florida beaches and lie there like fat, square, headless-and-sightless creatures until discovered by some fortunate beachcomber.

  I catch a ride to the house from one of the islanders in a golf cart. Anaïs’s parrots squawk raucously when I enter the small, two-bedroom bungalow. The home is elegant in its simplicity, clean, open, warm, and bright. The furnishings are comfortable, utilitarian, and tasteful. Standing in the house, looking around at the uncluttered surfaces, the burnished wood floors, and vivid local art on pastel walls, I am taken by the order and sense of Old World decorum Anaïs brought to our life together—and reminded of all I lost when I ruined our marriage. I lock the money in a bedroom closet and set out on foot to find someone who’ll take me by boat to Nassau.

  It’s a little over an hour by speedboat, fifty nautical miles from Spanish Wells to the Bahamian capital of Nassau on New Providence Island. I go by taxi to West Bay Street on the north shore of the island, get out half a mile down the road from Anaïs’s hotel, and walk along the beach to the rear entrance. How to find her and my tall, plump Lebanese friend without stumbling into whatever Heat they might have emanating from the mainland? I wonder. Having donned a Panama hat and wrap-around shades and dressed in a white guayabera shirt, white linen slacks, sandals, I look like some character out of a Graham Greene novel.

  The beach is littered with oiled bodies searing their flesh in the harsh sunlight. There is no answer when I ring Anaïs’s room using the house phone. Room 23 is on the second floor. I walk up the service stairs and along the hall past the room. No curious characters lurking in the hallway. The front lobby also appears agent free. I collar a bellman, palm him a twenty, and ask him to check on the status of the guest in room 23 while I wait in the bar. He returns minutes later to tell me the room looks to have been vacated, the guest apparently checked out. So she got my message.

  No answer at Biff’s in New York. He’s probably out in Amagansett soaking up the rays, working on his melanoma. But there is no answer there either. Finally, I reach Avril, who tells me to call her back in half an hour and gives me a coded number. Even in paradise, I spend half my day going from pay phone to pay phone. “I spoke to her. She moved,” Avril tells me what I already know.

  “Did she say where?”

  “No. But I gave her your message.”

  My only alternative is to check into a hotel and keep trying Biff. This fucking jerk-off, the one thing I can depend on him to do is to disappear when I most need him. I take a suite in an historic downtown hotel and go shopping to relieve my anxiety. Diamond stud earrings for Anaïs and Val. A platinum Rolex for Sammy and a gold Presidential for Nasif. Drop a quick sixty grand and then wander around this former pirate haven pretending to be a tourist.

  * * *

  AT THE BLACKJACK table in the casino on Paradise Island, the cards are good to me. Stacks of red and blue chips are piled on the table. I’m up somewhere around forty grand when Nasif settles in beside me. “Mr. Richard,” he says and hugs me.

  I look around. He nods, and I spot Anaïs across the room at the baccarat table. It was always her game, chemin
de fer, the iron road. She is lovely in a black dress, her thick, dark hair halfway down her exposed back. This woman is too good for me, I’m thinking, gathering my chips. Too sophisticated, too civilized. No wonder it didn’t work.

  “Richard,” Anaïs greets me, using the French pronunciation, and gives me her cool, moist hand. “Mon ami,” she says with peck on the cheek, a squeeze of the hand. And then the now familiar line: “I was beginning to think we would never see each other again.”

  “That would be a pity,” I say. “You look beautiful.”

  I even become more refined around her, or so I would like to believe.

  She smiles. “I never would have recognized you.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  She and Nasif have checked into bungalows at Club Med. The three of us walk out to sit by the pool. Nasif orders a bottle of champagne.

  “Everything all right?” he asks.

  “We need to go to Spanish Wells,” I tell them. “I left the money there.”

  “No business tonight, please,” Anaïs says. “Tomorrow.” To me she asks, “How have you been? How is your mother? And Emery? Please give them my love.”

  My parents adore her, particularly my father. “I haven’t see them,” I say.

  “Of course…”

  There is a void between us. I don’t know her anymore. It has been nearly three years since we spent any time together and she has moved on. We would meet briefly in Toronto during the first year after she left, then not at all once I went on the lam. Jonathan’s death stands stiffly in the gap like a tombstone.

  “What happened?” Nasif asks when Jonathan’s name is mentioned.

  “Plane crash,” I say. “I don’t have any details.”

  “It’s the curse of this life,” Anaïs says quietly. “Why I never wanted it for you. For any of us.”

  “People die all sorts of ways,” I remind her.

  Nasif cannot contain himself. “How much longer before this business will be finished?” he asks.

  “Tomorrow, Nasif,” Anaïs says and puts a hand on his shoulder, gently pushes him, urging him to go.

  He stands, a bit embarrassed. “What time will I see you?”

  “I’ll call you in the morning,” I tell him. “Tell your father everything is fine. We’ll be done soon.”

  “How much should I tell my father to expect?”

  Anaïs laughs, a deep throaty chuckle. “Tell him—a lot.”

  “He asks when we can make another shipment?”

  “Go to bed,” she tells him in French. “Leave us. I haven’t seen this man for a long time.”

  “They don’t quit,” I say after Nasif leaves.

  “Like some people I know,” she says.

  “I can’t. Not until this is over.”

  “And then?”

  I shrug. “Some day it will be legal.”

  “Not in our lifetime,” she assures me.

  In the years we have been apart she has become even more bewitching. It’s her eyes and the elegant curve of her neck. She makes me think of the French actress, Anouk Aimée. The way she crosses her legs, wraps one leg around the other, and leans into the conversation, with her large dark eyes looking up at me. We would sit like this for hours playing chess and talking of everything but the here and now: religion, philosophy, literature, movies, music. I have never known another woman with whom conversation flowed so easily for so long and was so enjoyable. It was during those intimate talks that I fell in love with her.

  “For us, it’s over,” she tells me, and I’m not sure if she is speaking of us as a couple or the business. “Avril and I don’t want to do this anymore,” she goes on. “There is so much Heat in Toronto, it’s too dangerous.”

  “I know. I spoke to Rosie about it.”

  “Rosie doesn’t care. Prison means nothing to him. But Avril has a child, who now has no father. He must not lose his mother too.”

  “Enough said. I understand.” I hesitate but can’t stop myself. “No one forced you to—”

  I don’t finish the sentence. She scowls at me, nods, takes out a Gauloises and I light it for her.

  “I am so glad he wasn’t working for you when he… crashed,” she continues on the subject of Jonathan’s death. I can see it has spooked her, spooked Biff too. I don’t tell her about Jake and his Mexican wife. Or the rocket that hit Saad’s building in West Beirut. Death dwells in the shadows just beyond the soft-colored lights of the patio. “The insurance company refuses to pay because he was involved in illegal activity when he died,” she tells me and exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “You and Avril should hold on to whatever you need.”

  She nods, smokes, sips her champagne. “We’ll be all right.”

  “I should go.”

  “Stay,” she says. “Finish your drink. Tell me about your life. It may be a long time before we see each other again.”

  I MET ANAÏS in what seems like another person’s life on another enchanted island—Mallorca, in the Mediterranean. I was running couriers out of Spain with false-bottom suitcases filled with hash from Morocco and Lebanon, trying to put together a transatlantic sailboat smuggle. During the crew’s stopover in Palma, as they waited to journey on to Larnaca, Cyprus and off the coast of Tripoli to on load four hundred kilos—at the time the largest load we had attempted—the weather turned against us. One delay ushered in another. I was stranded on Mallorca for weeks, waiting for the weather on the North Atlantic to improve. For a time, with the crew back in the States over the Christmas holidays, I stayed aboard the sailboat, La Petite Mort, docked at the marina in Palma. Then, when the weather grew too cold, I relocated to a small flat in the basement of a monastery in the mountain village of Valldemossa. The place had history; Chopin and George Sand had both once lived in the monastery. It should have been a peaceful time for me, but we were losing money daily as the smuggle ground to a halt.

  I met Anaïs and her younger sister, Avril, at a party at the villa of a British documentary filmmaker and smuggler who lived in the village of Deyà on the north coast of Mallorca. Trevor, the filmmaker, had invested in the hash trip. The sisters spoke fluent Spanish with French accents. Lapsed Catholic girls. Russian and Belgian, brought up in France, their mother is from the Walloon part of Belgium. Anaïs and Avril hardly resemble each other and may actually be half-sisters; they never spoke of their Russian father except in the most general terms. Avril is tall and blond; Anaïs has black hair with a widow’s peak. She’s average height and has a stunning figure, delicate features, and a way of fixing you with her big, dark eyes and asking serious, pointed questions. “What do you do?” she asked when we met. “Why are you here, in Mallorca? You don’t seem like a tourist.”

  I lied, made up a story about being a journalist, said I was writing a magazine article on Trevor and his latest project—a film about a notorious British punk band. Actually, I was in correspondence with the editor at High Times, who was interested in the punk band, and even more interested in the hash Trevor and I were moving piecemeal to London and New York. Anaïs and Avril owned a small pension in Deyà. When it began to look like the sailboat trip would be postponed indefinitely, Trevor drove over to Valledemossa one evening with Avril and Anaïs. At dinner, when the ladies excused themselves, Trevor and I discussed rethinking the trip. This was before I began working with Mohammed. At the time my Lebanese connection was a Christian middleman out of the village of Zahlé, a guy named Fariz who spoke only Arabic and French, and who was putting a lot of pressure on me to finish the business. Trevor proposed, referring to the sisters, “These two are looking to make some money. Why don’t you suggest they help you get the rest of the hash out of Lebanon?”

  “I should suggest it? Why me? I don’t really know them.”

  “Yes, you see, that’s why—I know them too well. Rather, they know me too well. If anything should happen… Besides, they suspect that’s what you do, while they don’t know of my involvement. And I prefer keep it that way
. I must. They are my neighbors, after all. They’re friendly with my wife. You know, got to keep it away from home, that sort of thing.”

  “What makes you think they’re game?”

  “Believe me, they dropped hints. You know, ‘What does Richard really do?’ And with you passing out bits of hash. Pockets stuffed with money. I can tell you, they are intrigued.”

  It took me another two weeks of getting to know them better—and in particular, Anaïs—before I got up the nerve to broach the subject. I bought a motor scooter and began riding over to Deyà in the evening to dine and hang out, mostly with Anaïs. She had a boyfriend, a Frenchman, who worked as a translator in Paris and visited infrequently. Anaïs is an avid chess player. We would sit out on the patio at the pension, or in the sitting room by the fireplace on chilly nights, drink cognac, and play well into the early hours when I would ride the ten miles back to my room in the monastery. There, in my lonely bed, I would hug myself to sleep and know that I was falling in love with her.

  One day soon after the New Year we drove together in Trevor’s Citröen to Palma on the other side of the island to do the monthly shopping for the pension at the central marketplace. She was a good driver, told me she had once had a job driving an ambulance in Paris. I took her to the marina to show her La Petite Mort—which translates as “the little death” in English, a euphemism for orgasm. As I was helping her aboard, when she stepped from the dock to the boat, I took her hand. We had touched before, casually, or I shook her hand—but this touch was different. It was electric, a current of energy passed between us, and we both felt it, both knew it as a magnetic force that would draw us closer and closer until we came together, though it would still be months before we kissed. Sitting aboard the boat, sharing a bottle of wine, I finally told her what I really did for a living.

  I bought a used diesel Mercedes sedan, had it outfitted it with stash compartments that held up to 150 kilos. The sisters registered the car in France. Posing as photojournalists, they drove from Paris to Beirut and back twice and removed all of the hash Fariz had on hand. Trevor had the hash concealed in his film gear and the band’s sound equipment and shipped it to New York. Sammy and Rosie sold it all without losing a gram. We did well that winter and spring as civil war in Lebanon broke out. Early in the summer of 1975, we finally managed to load up La Petite Mort and land another 400 kilos in Montauk, Long Island.