High Crimes

by William Deverell

  Pete’s answer to that is, “Nothing to it.” I guess he figures we will all work double shifts or something. Pete knows we can hire on some local wharf rats for maybe a few thousand dollars a man, but he also knows it will eventually come out of his pocket. I can see myself sweating like a slave in the engine room. Pete can be really cheap, and with the other hand he will throw his money away.

  And we still have to locate some weed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Johnny Nighthawk

  Bogotá. I lived here for a year. It is a deranged city. It seems to simmer for weeks, then explodes. Then settles back into a hum. A couple of decades ago there were a few thousand people here, but now there are — who knows? — six, seven million. Some of them are very rich, but not many.

  The people are a torrent on the streets, and you will see them in their ruanas: peasants and pushcart vendors, shoppers and businessmen.

  The best time is evening, as the sun rolls into the dirty haze. Then a frenzy ignites the city. The rich voices of the vendedores sing the praises of their offerings, and meaty smells of chicharron and chorizos fill the streets. Women with a special beauty glide mournfully through the shops, and in the squares near the Centro the kids come out, the gamines, abandoned children who beg and steal and work the crowds.

  You step carefully along the broken concrete sidewalks and are assailed by gusts of diesel billowing from the trucks and the busettas and the ancient Dodge buses. These vehicles are dressed like floats in a carnival parade. They are driven bravely at night, without headlights. They prowl the streets like wolf packs, howling their horns.

  As the sky turns blacker, the rows of little shops near the Centro begin to close. At nine o’clock, their corrugated metal doors roll clanging shut, and the whores come out and watch the men strut by.

  Calle 26 divides the city north and south. The north is the better side, so-called — at least by the better people. But Pete and Kelly and I, we have always liked the south side, where there are few gringos. Near Calle 26 are the luxury hotels, the Tequendama and the Hilton. The Hilton is where we stay, because it is necessary to impress the Colombians or you get nowhere.

  As the night lengthens, you will see the rats begin to dance openly in the litter of the park behind the Hilton, and the street dealers, the marachaferos, scurry about with them, looking for Americans. They are armed with samples and testers, pipes and coke inhalers.

  There are cops all around. Soldiers. Narcs. They do not give a shit unless it earns a dollar.

  Gold was once the color of wealth here, but now it is green, and they push green on the streets: dart-eyed little men with quick tongues. In their palms they hold out emeralds wrapped in tissue. They hold out paper bags with green buds of pot and let you smell them. They worship the other green, U.S. green. Twenty times a day, people will come up to you: “Hey, boddy, change you dollars for pesos?”

  But the real deals are done in the air-conditioned boardrooms of the skyscrapers, the rascacielos. The gringo marijuaneros and cocaneros sit for long hours with the captains of the families and their representatives and lawyers. Never is grass mentioned. One speaks only of las mercancís or el producto. There is an air of legitimacy. Pete will wear a sports jacket. I bring along a white shirt for such an occasion. And of course I have to cut off my braids.

  Now I bring you right inside such a boardroom — into the offices of Articulos Exportados de Colombia, S.A., on the thirty-third floor of the Bogotá District Bank Building. On one side of the table is Señor Felix Ugarte and his simple cousin, Jorge, plus an abogado for the family, and also there are two sinister gentlemen standing by the door. On our side of the table are Pete and me. (Kelly is back at the hotel doing I Ching hexagrams, and Ms. Larochelle is still sticking it out in Barranquilla, trying to keep her eye on Juares, buying supplies from a list we gave her, and recovering from turista.)

  The session starts off with coffee in the American style and with the usual politenesses — token inquiries as to health, happiness, and general state of contentment, the whole Latin American two-step that you always dance on such occasions, even if someone is planning to slit your throat.

  Pete knows from previous deals that Ugarte has a penchant for cigars, although local ones are of dubious quality. So Pete has arrived with several two-dollar Cubans, Escepcions, and offers one to Ugarte. When he turns it away with a flick of his hand, we know there is going to be trouble. Ugarte appears unwilling to owe Pete anything, however small. So the old man lights up a smelly Colombian and Pete lights up a powerful Escepcion, and the atmosphere quickly becomes heavy.

  Pete’s main error in how he handles people is that he is too blunt, and also he is unwilling to play the games. Throughout, Pete is overconfident. He believed that when it came time to visit Ugarte he would be able to temper the hard feelings of the Mounties’ eight-ton bonfire of the previous year.

  There is a complex legal point here — the weed was fronted to Pete, although with a small down payment, and theoretically the ownership passed to him, and therefore he was in debt to Ugarte for the full value of the cargo. Not being a lawyer, I do not know the implications.

  But on the other hand, Pete had on four previous occasions bought Ugarte’s cannabis and had become a favored customer, and had always, within six months of delivery, made full payment when they met on one or the other of the Caribbean islands.

  The preliminaries over, Ugarte’s cheeriness slips. He says — now you will not enjoy the pure flavor in English translation but I will reconstruct as best I can — “Señors, my associates and I were at the Intercontinental Hotel in Aruba at the appointed time. We waited for three days, as was agreed, plus two more. Then I made telephone calls to Canada. I found you were in la cana.” He says it as if it is Pete’s fault.

  Pete expresses sorrow about this, explaining that the police had burned the product, and thus there was no money for Ugarte in Aruba, and Pete, in jail, was unable to make the appointment.

  “If what you say is true,” Ugarte tells us, “I find it difficult to understand why you are now sitting in this boardroom. If what you say is true, why are you not still in a Canadian prison?”

  Pete explains he was found not guilty.

  “But how can that be? You have been arrested. The merchandise was seized by the police. Is there not a long sentence to be served?” Ugarte, with this, folds his fat hands and leans towards Pete. “It seems you have perhaps friends in the Canadian police.”

  Pete shoots a look at me and I return it. It is dawning on us Ugarte believes we have pulled off a scam with the pot. He thinks we have paid off the police and sold the eight tons without cutting him in. Ugarte, of course, believes all the world is like Colombia.

  His abogado hands him a paper with figures on it, and Ugarte starts reading out the costs from it: two DC-6 flights for the drops to the beach, the trucks, the compacters, the peasants who had to be paid, the mordidas that were taken by the federales. It turns out to be a staggering sum, much exaggerated — twenty-five million pesos, or six hundred thousand dollars U.S.

  Plus — and this is the grabber — eighty million pesos on top of that. I do not know how they figure this. Ugarte knew we had a fast sale lined up at two hundred a pound on site, or two-fifty delivered in Boston. Ugarte was to have gotten half.

  Anyway, Ugarte folds the paper and presents it to Pete. It is a bill. It comes to one hundred and five million pesos.

  Pete looks at it and starts talking fast. He explains that he has a big ship and can make Ugarte a fair profit on a make-up deal, plus pay back his out-of-pocket costs on the previous one.

  But Ugarte keeps talking, and as he talks his smile dribbles away from his face. The account, he says, will be paid. Totalmente. In one week. And he gestures towards the two big gazoonies standing by the door. They nod to Ugarte. We look at them, too. They smile at us. “Totally,” Ugarte repeats. “There will not be more b
usiness with los fraudes.”

  This is a very hard expression. One must now either suck ass or show valor.

  There is a flash of color on Pete’s face. His eyes glint like ice. These are danger signs. He slides his chair back from the table, and he points to the bill for twenty-five million pesos.

  “Meta lo por el culo,” he says.

  What this means is: “Shove it up your ass.”

  There is no sound — just a slight hiss of air escaping from between someone’s teeth.

  Then Ugarte slams his fist down. “Hijo de puta!” he yells. “Son of a whore!” There is a torrent of spit as he sounds the hard consonants. This insult, in Colombia, is a prelude to battle.

  Pete — I think he is crazy, by the way — says, “Doble hijo de puta.” Most of us dealers have learned our Spanish in the hook shops and on the street.

  Ugarte ups the ante. “Doble hijo de puta remalparido!” Literally, this means: “Double son of a whore with birth defects.” You have to hear it in Spanish to get the full effect, with the r’s rolling like a drum tattoo.

  Pete crumples the bill in his fist, makes a motion as if using it for toilet paper, then throws it on the table. “Coma mierde,” he says to Ugarte. Very calm. He beckons me to leave with him.

  “One week,” Ugarte hisses. He nods to the two goons, who you can tell from the unnatural bulges in their suits are packing pieces. Ugarte requests that they “teach us manners.”

  We urge our asses out the door to the elevators, followed by Ugarte’s bodyguards. I look at Pete to let him know I think he is crazy. “You can’t let the jerks walk all over you,” he says.

  The hoods get on the elevator with us. There is a young lady already on board, a secretary I guess. “They’ll wait until we get out on the street. It would be bad manners to spill blood in front of this pretty muchacha.” Pete tips his cap to her. “Buenas, señorita.” She smiles. “You take the fat one behind you,” he says to me. “I’ll take the ugly fart with the big teeth.” He turns to the man and leers. “You are an ugly fart, aren’t you?”

  The man smiles and nods.

  We hit the twentieth floor, from where the elevator will go nonstop to the ground. Pete gives me a nod and at the same time unleashes an elbow to his man’s midriff. The other guy is looking away as I hit him on the jaw with my fist. It was a pretty hard hit, I guess, because I can hear a crack as if bone is splitting, and there is blood coming between his teeth. Pete’s guy is slumped over, retching. The girl is screaming.

  At the ground floor, we tear ass.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Alfredo J., sitting beside Jessica Flaherty on their customary park bench, was wearing a gray linen suit with a scarlet kerchief around his neck. Flashy dresser, Flaherty thought, feeling frumpy in her baggy jeans and tennis shoes. She was a little upset about Alfredo’s lack of progress.

  “I thought you were close,” she said. “If the target doesn’t trust you, who in God’s name does he trust?”

  Alfredo J. spoke calmly, trying to reassure her. “There is very little trust in this business, Miss Flaherty. Not to mention this entire world. You and I, we are still learning to trust each other, are we not?”

  True. Flaherty hoped she was not being set up. The CIA would have a real laugh on her. Their man had been warning her away from this operation. “Washington wants us to keep our hands off for the time being,” he had said.

  Flaherty had exploded at the CIA officer. “This isn’t some hippie operation with backpacks and duffle bags,” she had yelled. “We’re talking about the biggest damn thing anybody has ever had out of Colombia. I need something damn hard for Washington to pull me off this one.” The Agency could play all the wink-wink, nudge-nudge games they wanted with the April Seventeen Movement, but she wasn’t going to buy their act.

  “Do you think your government will try to block you in this?” Alfredo asked. It was as if he had guessed her thoughts. “This is what I mean by politics,” he said. “We should discuss politics, you and I.”

  He cupped his hands over her cigarette and lit it for her. “You have a good spirit,” he said. “You are a fighter. I like such women.”

  She studied his eyes in the light of the match.

  “They are talking about coming in through Canada,” he said. “North to the island of Newfoundland, then south. It is a straight run, deep into the Atlantic, away from the shipping lanes.”

  “I have heard about the plan,” Flaherty said.

  Alfredo’s eyebrows arched with surprise. “You have?”

  “I get other information, Alfredo. I also meet with Meyers.”

  “Of course. I forget.”

  “I just hope Operation Crackpot doesn’t screw it up for me.”

  “Operation Crackpot?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Perhaps I should meet with the Canadians,” Alfredo said.

  “No, don’t do that. I’m working with them. I’m just trying to make sure they don’t blow it.”

  ***

  At Operation Potship, everything was in slow motion. The men and women from the surveillance team were sullen and bitchy, and Harold Mitchell was particularly so.

  “What is that bastard doing, anyway?” Mitchell railed. “Why can’t we raise him?”

  No one tried to answer.

  Theophile O’Doull, meanwhile, had put together his tracking device and squared everything with the El Paso Intelligence Center. The equipment was ready to be delivered to Meyers for installation on the ship. If there indeed was a ship. And if indeed they could get access to it.

  But they had no information. No idea where Meyers was. No news from Colombia. Kerrivan could be in Outer Mongolia, as far as they knew.

  Ottawa was starting to grumble about wasted manpower, wasted hours.

  Johnny Nighthawk

  Tape Four.

  Aguardiente — too much drives you crazy. You are left with licorice headaches.

  We drank too much of it after the session with Ugarte. You would not believe how close Bogotá can become. The local families run it like a cartel. After Ugarte put the word out about us, Bogotá zipped up like a fly after a fast piss beside the road. We got the Bogotá blacklist, and were turned down by the Perrarra family, by the Lorcas, Hernandezes, and by a couple of smaller groups.

  We got depressed — deep and dirty depressed. The thought of Ugarte’s asesinos brought us right down, along with the fact of being in Colombia with an empty freighter and no prospects.

  At the end of another day in our fruitless quest for a connection we are sitting around El Ingles bar in the Hilton with some fellow contrabandistas from Miami and New York. El Ingles is buzzing, as it does at this time of year. Everyone else at our table was already connected, and we are pretending to be happy with them. Pete keeps getting drunker and drunker, and starts to dominate the table, ranting about Colombia, about the garbage and the poverty and the corruption.

  He stops in mid-harangue as Billy Lee Tinker wanders through the hotel lobby door.

  Pete shouts, “Hey, Billy Lee, you southern-fried chicken-shit, haven’t they busted you yet?”

  Billy Lee has trouble adjusting his eyes to the light. Basically that is because he is wearing sunglasses. But he is standing there with a shit-eating smile on his face — Billy Lee Tinker is always stoned — and he knows the voice of Pete Kerrivan.

  “I hear they reamed a hot poker up your ass, man,” he says.

  “Billy Lee Tinker,” says Pete. “It’s worth a round.”

  Billy Lee Tinker. He’s worth a few rounds. He is standing there in a patched military tunic with a big cannabis leaf sewed on where the medals would normally go. He is the ace of the Marijuana Air Force. He has never been shot down.

  Billy Lee was already hot when I first met him in Nogales in the early seventies. We were both waiting for a big diesel camion f
rom Oaxaca, with some for me, some for him, some for a lot of other guys doing the border run to Arizona. I had a Jeep and he had a Piper Seneca, and we were five miles from the U.S. border. The semi was three days late, so we kicked back and got to know each other. Then we helped each other with our runs.

  He was a daredevil flyer — he had been a wing commander in Viet Nam. He liked to get down real low, just above the top knobs of the cactus trees, when he made his drops into the desert.

  For a while, later, he was contracting out to a guy who owned a Lear jet, and what he used to do was follow the big jetliners north from Colombia, piggybacking behind them so they shared the same blip on the adiz radar screens. Airlines don’t have rearview mirrors.

  Like I say, he was an ace, but later came to be in the shadow of Pete Kerrivan, who had become number one. I am not just talking about volume. And I am definitely not talking about the fat cats in the Miami offices who make the big deals and pay off the cops and run their operations by phone and telex. I am talking about the guys who do the trip. The guys who sail or fly in with their loads. I have often wondered whether Billy Lee liked being number two. Maybe he was jealous.

  Pete and Billy were different, but in ways they were the same. One was a flyer, the other a sailor. Billy Lee was from the Deep South, and Pete from cold, cold Canada. They both came from small towns and were easygoing, and neither of them actually gave a damn, and both of them were in it for the game, mostly, not the money, which they lavished on others and on good times.

  In the bar, Billy Lee cheers us up. He has tall tales to tell about pirating the flight plans of registered cargo planes, getting radio clearance that way. He informs us he bought a war surplus B-26 bomber, got it flying, and has been going like crazy at a hundred thousand dollars a trip. But one of his engines just blew out on him, so the plane is sitting up in Alabama, and he is grounded.

  The night ultimately simmers down to just Billy Lee and Kevin and Pete and me. Billy Lee drunkenly puts his arms around Pete’s shoulders, and he says in a soft, confiding voice, “I hear you old boys ain’t got yisselves any weed this year.”