Marching Powder

by Rusty Young

  ‘We’re friends of Colonel Montesinos,’ Marcela announced when I came back with two glasses. ‘He should be here soon.’

  ‘He sent us around as the advance party,’ giggled Maria-Teresa. ‘He said you wouldn’t mind entertaining us for a while.’

  That might explain things. Everyone knew that the governor liked to play around with women. Maybe he needed somewhere private to go where his wife wouldn’t find out? That was possible, but I was still suspicious that my friends were playing a joke on me, or setting some kind of trap. And if it was a trap, I wasn’t going to fall into it easily.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Marcela snapped when I refused a sip of the whisky she was holding out to me. ‘More for me, then!’ She drained the glass and her friend giggled again.

  Even though it was almost freezing, the girls insisted that they have ice in their whisky, so I went to get some from the freezer, glad of the opportunity to be out of their way. Then there was a firm knock at the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ I called out from the kitchen. I had hardly got the question out before Marcela leaned back in her chair and unlatched the door and the governor of the prison, Colonel Montesinos, came into my room. He was wearing his usual shiny black shoes and green uniform, but he was wearing a casual sweater over the top, which made him look a bit younger and not so serious.

  I stood to shake his hand and greeted him in the most formal manner, ‘How are you, my governor?’ We were friends but I always showed him complete respect, calling him by his full title, especially in the presence of other people.

  ‘Hola, Thomas. Bien,’ he answered casually, greeting each of the girls with a kiss. ‘I see you’ve met the girls. What’s the latest news from San Pedro, my friend? You look hungover … mucha fiesta or what?’ he asked, sitting down and pouring himself a whisky in one of the girls’ glasses.

  The governor seemed perfectly relaxed – like this was a completely normal situation. I was the exact opposite: perfectly nervous. He had visited my room before and we had always been very friendly, but never this late and never this friendly. He was still a colonel in the Bolivian police and the most powerful person in the whole prison and I didn’t know what he wanted with me, turning up at my room like that with two beautiful women so late at night. However, I couldn’t say anything, especially in front of his guests. I hoped he would explain, but he didn’t. Instead, he offered me a glass of whisky.

  ‘No, thank you, my governor.’

  ‘Don’t like whisky, hey Thomas? Not even Black Label. Well, I’m sure you’re accustomed to finer things. We should obtain something a little stronger perhaps?’ He raised his eyebrows at me knowingly and added, ‘I want the best stuff you can find.’

  At first, I wasn’t sure if I had understood him correctly. I looked at him blankly, wondering if he really meant what I thought he meant. Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me because I was stoned. But then he repeated his request and there was no doubt.

  ‘Bring me five grams,’ he commanded, pulling out a wad of cash from his top pocket and peeling off a few notes. ‘How much will five grams cost?’

  Marcela stared at the bundle of cash and whistled, but I stared straight at the governor’s face, completely stunned. Suddenly everything seemed surreal; I was stoned, two strange, beautiful Bolivian women were in my prison cell drinking Black Label whisky, and the highest-ranking official in the jail was asking me to buy cocaine for him.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows again, but I didn’t know what to do. I was almost lost for words.

  ‘Five grams of what, my governor?’ I managed to stammer, pretending not to know what he was talking about. I honestly wished there was a black hole in the floor next to me. I wanted to step into it and just disappear.

  ‘Coca, what else? Pollo. Don’t play stupid with me,’ he said gruffly, fixing me with a heavy stare. He even knew the code name for cocaine.

  ‘But … you’re not joking with me, my governor, are you?’ I asked as politely as possible. I suspected a trap and there was no way I wanted to fall into it, but I didn’t want to offend him either. He was the head of the whole prison. ‘I honestly don’t know about this stuff.’

  ‘Come on, Thomas,’ he patted me on the shoulder and smiled. ‘The coke here in the prison is better than anywhere else in the whole of Bolivia. And if the governor of the prison can’t get some coke, then who can?’

  Both the girls burst out laughing and the governor joined in, adding, ‘Don’t look so confused, my friend. Tell me. How much is a gram these days? Still twenty bolivianos or has the price gone up again because of those bastard gringos and their crop fumigation?’

  This made them laugh even more. Then I started laughing too, finally realising that it had all been a joke. And once we were all laughing, no one could stop, especially me – I was laughing the loudest of anyone, mainly from relief. In public, the governor pretended to be very strict and I had forgotten that when no one else was there, he always joked around with me. I was so stoned that I had taken him seriously and fallen for it; he had had me completely convinced.

  Then the laughter stopped just as quickly as it had begun and everything changed back in an instant. My mind had played another trick on me. The governor became serious again and held out the money to me, demanding that I take it. It was no joke – he really did want me to get him some cocaine. I tried to get out of it again without being rude, but he kept insisting.

  ‘Come on, Thomas, get me five grams. Of course you know where to get it. Come now, we’re all friends here.’ He pressed a pile of notes into my hand and opened the door, motioning me towards it.

  ‘But, my governor, I don’t know where to get any of that stuff. I don’t take it and I don’t know who does.’

  He didn’t like me arguing with him in front of his friends. ‘Stop playing games and just get it!’ he snapped at me suddenly, and I had no choice but to obey. I took one last look at him to make sure he was really serious, then went out of my cell and Marcela closed the door behind me.

  Outside, the air was cold and I hadn’t had time to put a jacket on, so I was even colder. All of a sudden I was no longer stoned. In fact, I was feeling remarkably sober.

  I leaned back against the door, wondering what I should do. I needed to think fast, but I still couldn’t believe that any of this was actually happening. The governor wouldn’t have been risking his own reputation by being in a prisoner’s room with two young women and a bottle of whisky for nothing. Unless it was a very elaborate trap.

  Yes! I decided it was a trap. They were taping everything I did in order to set me up and track down the source of cocaine in the section. I wouldn’t fall for it though; I would simply say that I couldn’t find any. I knocked on the door and the governor opened it immediately.

  I felt like I had been outside for a long time, but in reality only a few seconds had passed. The governor was surprised that I had come back so quickly, and empty-handed. When he saw how worried I was, he came outside, leaving the door slightly open, and wanted to know what the problem was. I tried to explain once more that I didn’t take drugs and couldn’t get anything, but he looked me directly in the eyes and spoke sharply.

  ‘You’re not going to embarrass me in front of these girls, are you? I promised them a good time. Don’t disappoint me, Thomas,’ he commanded, patting me on the shoulder again. Then he gave me a short but strong squeeze on the bicep before going back inside and closing the door again, locking me out of my own room.

  The governor was a man who rarely gave orders because he rarely needed to; he was used to having his will obeyed. However, this was an order, and there was no way out of it. Even if it was a trap, I now had to comply. So off I went, with the governor’s money in my hand, to buy five grams of cocaine.

  As I walked through the section, I heard strange sounds and I stopped every now and then to look behind me and see if anyone was following, but there was no one around. Well, no one that I could see anyway. However, that didn’t
prevent me from feeling that I was being watched.

  Before I bought the stuff from my usual dealer, who we called Comandante, I knocked on three different doors and asked to borrow things from inmates who weren’t dealers. That way, if there was anyone following me, they would hopefully get thrown off the scent. And also, if Comandante got busted by the police, I would be able to prove to him that I was trying my best not to cooperate.

  I bought the stuff, slipped it into my shirtsleeve, ready to drop it if anyone stopped me, then hurried back to my room. Footsteps echoed in the corridor behind me. I wasn’t sure if they were all mine, but I didn’t stop or turn around to check. I climbed the wooden ladder to my room and knocked to gain entry.

  The governor opened the door once more and when I handed him the package I closed my eyes, expecting to get arrested on the spot but he only inspected it and then handed it back to me.

  ‘So. Is it good quality?’ he asked, closing the door.

  ‘I don’t know, my governor. I don’t take drugs.’

  ‘Oh. So you’ve never taken cocaine, Thomas?’ he asked sarcastically, showing off to the girls. ‘What are you in here for? Didn’t pay your parking fine?’ Maria-Teresa laughed as if this was the funniest thing she had ever heard. Then the governor became serious again. ‘Thomas. You make the lines, will you? I’m too lazy.’

  Maybe the police wanted to catch me in the act; that way, I couldn’t deny it was mine. I pretended I didn’t know how to make lines, but Colonel Montesinos looked like he was losing his patience, so I did as I was told, cutting up some coke on the wooden table. However, I only made three lines so that they wouldn’t think I had any intention of taking any myself.

  ‘It looks good,’ he commented, ‘but we can’t be giving the señoritas just any old rubbish. So, you try it first, Thomas, and let me know if it’s good quality.’

  When he said that, I was totally convinced that my friend, the governor, was setting me up. If the police caught me in my own room with five grams of cocaine, making lines on the table and actually sniffing it, there was no way I could deny a thing. But I refused to fall into their trap. They couldn’t force me to take cocaine and if this conversation was being taped, I wanted my disagreement – and the governor’s name – to be on record.

  ‘With all due respect, Colonel Montesinos, you and I are friends and I respect you a lot, but you must look at it from my point of view. I am an inmate here and you are asking me to take drugs in front of you. You are the governor of the whole prison. I could get in a lot of trouble for that. If you are serious, then would you please go first?’

  I tried to phrase this as politely as possible, bowing my head as I spoke, so as not to offend him, but it didn’t work. The girls stared at me like I was crazy and the governor looked like he was ready to explode; however, not wanting to cause a scene in front of the company, he produced a note from his pocket and rolled it up, then bent forward over the table. Just as he was about to sniff one of the lines he stopped, sat back and said.

  ‘What’s this, Thomas? That’s not how you make lines. Here, give me the stuff. And why are there only three lines when there are four of us?’

  The governor pulled out an American Express card and scraped the cocaine from my table onto a plastic CD cover, then added more from the bag. In a matter of seconds, he had four massive, perfectly parallel lines of cocaine laid out on the smooth surface of the CD case. Not even Jack could have made them better; you had to go to university for that.

  The governor bent forward and took one of the lines, half in each nostril, like a true professional, then sat down in the chair for a minute with his head tilted back, as though he was concentrating.

  ‘Not bad. A bit too much acetone, maybe. But not bad, Thomas. Primera clase. Well done, my friend.’ He handed the note to one of the girls and the CD case went around and finally came to me. As I sniffed back my line, I kept an eye on the door, half-expecting it to be knocked down by a tactical response team and the two girls to pull out undercover police badges. But nothing happened. I finally relaxed and even allowed a little laugh to escape. It had all been in my imagination.

  ‘Thomas, you are acting very strangely tonight. What’s wrong, my friend?’

  ‘I’m just tired, I guess,’ I said.

  The girls tipped back their whiskies and made a few trilling noises as the coke hit home. I sighed. The danger had passed, but it was still going to be a long and interesting night.

  13

  THE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY

  OF COCAINE

  Once I was friends with the governor, I managed to get the FELCN police to return my possessions. A taxista called me to the front gate where several boxes were waiting for me. When I sorted through the boxes, I noticed that most of the valuable items were missing: my money, my best clothes and my gold jewellery, including my good luck ring. Surprisingly, however, they gave me back my industrial hair dryer and steamer, which were worth over a thousand dollars each. They probably didn’t know what they were.

  My machines were still in pieces from when the colonel’s men had dismantled them at the airport. I reassembled them but, unfortunately, I didn’t have them for very long. Ricardo had told me about surprise raids the police sometimes conducted, known as requisas. He told me to be careful when they searched my room, because they often planted drugs, then asked for a bribe to make them disappear, especially with foreigners and new prisoners. The best way to avoid this was to demand that a witness be present during the search.

  The first time the police performed a requisa in my room, I didn’t have time to call a witness. Immediately, four policemen crowded around my steamer, blocking my view.

  ‘Stand still. Right there!’ they ordered me when I tried to get closer to make sure they couldn’t plant anything.

  I stood by helplessly as, one by one, they inspected inside the head mechanism while the others stood back, nodding and whispering to each other. Any second, I was expecting one of them to produce a bag of cocaine. But they didn’t. They continued pointing and whispering to each other as if they had found something suspicious, although they weren’t quite sure what. It took me some time to realise that it wasn’t anything hidden inside the steamer that they were concerned with, but the steamer itself. They started backing away from it.

  ‘Careful. Don’t get too close,’ the policeman who had made the original finding warned his friend who was sneaking up for another look.

  They backed away towards the kitchenette, leaving me standing in the middle of the room wondering what was going on. They spoke in hushed tones, so I couldn’t pick up much. However, I did hear one word repeated several times: bomba. I laughed to myself.

  ‘It’s not a bomb,’ I said loudly, smiling in relief. ‘I’ll show you.’ I bent down, picked up the power cable and went to plug it in at the wall but two of the police crash-tackled me to the ground before I could get there. The lieutenant then jumped on top of me, digging his knee into my neck.

  At that exact moment, the major in charge of the prison requisa appeared in the doorway. He took one look at me choking on the ground and immediately demanded an explanation. The lieutenant did a re-enactment of what had just happened, completely exaggerating the part where I went to plug in the steamer. He made me look like a suicidal terrorist making a desperate leap with a fuse in my hand, and himself look like an action hero who had stopped me. The major glared at me. He wouldn’t go near the machine, but he wouldn’t let me get up to tell my side of the story either. Since the policemen were still sitting on top of me, I couldn’t show him how the machine worked. I did my best to explain without the use of my hands, but admittedly, I was never good at doing sound effects and my impression of the noise the steamer made did sound rather like a bomb exploding.

  My machines were confiscated and the governor couldn’t get them back for me. I didn’t want to push him. There was still so much more for me to learn about the way things worked and I might need his help in more important matters
.

  San Pedro wasn’t like any other prison – it was like a small city with its own unique set of rules and its own bizarre economy. For a start, you couldn’t count on the prison administration for anything, not even to maintain the buildings, so everything that needed to be done or bought was done or bought by the prisoners themselves. And because of this, anyone who wasn’t independently wealthy had to have a job.

  At the very top of the prison economy were the big businessmen who continued to manage their empires using specially installed fax and phone lines. Among them was San Pedro’s most notorious inmate. Barbachoca – ‘Red Beard’ – had been charged with trafficking 4.2 tonnes of cocaine after his aeroplane, which the newspapers called ‘el narco avion’, was intercepted in Lima, in Peru.

  The prison middle class was made up of those inmates lucky enough to have had a trade or profession on the outside that they could continue to practise on the inside. There were cooks, painters, restaurateurs, carpenters, electricians, cleaners, accountants and doctors. There were artesanos who sold their artwork and tiny handicrafts – such as paintings and figurines – to visitors. There was even a lawyer in for fraud, who, although he obviously couldn’t accompany them to court, offered cheap legal advice to the inmates. Basically, anything you wanted done or anything you wanted to buy, you could, and if they didn’t have it, someone could get it in for you for a small commission. But in fact, many of the services were actually cheaper than on the outside, so sometimes bargain hunters came into the prison to visit imprisoned barbers and dentists who offered cut-price deals to attract trade.

  At the very bottom of the economy were those who didn’t have a trade or profession, but who performed the countless small jobs around the place that needed to be done. These ranged from being one of the messengers – known as taxistas – who informed inmates when they had a visitor waiting at the gate, to people who shined shoes or sold tokens for the phone cabins. These prisoners made next to nothing, but at least they managed to stay alive.