High Crimes

by William Deverell

  “They’ve painted our balls black here,” Pete says.

  “Well, I got a contact with some real Juan Valdez, man. Punta roja. A hundred acres of punta roja. You interested?”

  “Is the bear Catholic?” Pete says. “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Johnny Nighthawk

  We will look at the crop and meet the connection. The family is that of Victor Publio Paez, and this is a connection muy grande. He is big on the north coast, bigger than Ugarte in Bogotá. The Paez group has palanca, which is what power is all about in Colombia. Palanca is a useful word — it means “lever.”

  His agents want to look us over, all of us. So we arrange to meet Marianne at the Barranquilla airport. Paez will send someone to pick us up there and take us to the plantation.

  Plantation. That is what Billy Lee tells us. Paez has a plantation on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Large-scale cannabis farming is something new in this country. Usually marijuana is grown by the poor farmers on small acreages, ensembrillas. The farmers are beholden to the Mafia families, who are the liege lords over the feudal serfs and who come by each season to collect the crop.

  “These folks is sharpies, man,” Billy Lee tells us. “They got more money than Bunkey Hunt before the fall of silver. And they’re putting it all into sinsemilla. They got theirselves greenhouses, man, they got trained aggies, and they’ve come up with some kind of rainbow punta roja, all flower, no seed. I ain’t seen it yet, but it’s pure female, man.”

  We are sitting in the bar at Barranquilla airport. Marianne enters. She waves.

  “Speaking of pure female,” says Billy Lee.

  His shades have dropped down over his nose and he is staring at her. Marianne still looks as if her insides are churning a bit, but she has her faraway mysterious smile.

  “Look but don’t handle,” Pete says. He narrows his eyes at Billy Lee. “Maybe you better not even look too much.”

  “Purebred, man,” says Billy Lee. “Purebred.” He glances slyly at Pete. “You sure you got papers say you own her?” He stands up, takes off his old tractor cap, swings it down in front of him, and bows in what is supposed to pass for a gallant southern gesture.

  “Since Pete here ain’t likely to,” he says, “may I have the pleasure of introducing myself. Billy Lee Tinker from Turkey Neck Creek, Alabama, ma’am. Tales of your grace and charm have superseded your arrival.”

  When Billy Lee goes to sit back again, he falls straight to the floor. Pete has pulled his chair away.

  Pete offers the chair to her, and she sits on it, cool and dainty.

  Billy Lee talks from the floor. “Hey, Pete, man, seein’ I’m savin’ you guys from going on the rocks, maybe you could offer me a job on the boat, man. I navigate, I’m handy with engines, and I know some funny card tricks. I also reckon I’d like to learn how to speak French.”

  Pete gives him an arm-lift up to his feet. “I want to have some weed left on board when we finally get this ship north. If you come, there’s no guarantee.”

  “Yeah, well, fifty tons, man. I might just not be able to smoke it all.”

  Marianne widens her eyes. “Fifty tons?”

  “Yeah,” says Billy Lee, “this is gonna be the trip of the century. This century or any other, man.”

  ***

  “They told me we should go to the Satena counter and wait,” Billy Lee says.

  So we are at the Satena counter. It is one of those little airlines that fly to little places. Owned by the Colombian army, I believe.

  We have all had a couple of beers, except Marianne, who is not drinking, and Kelly, who is our taster. With all the new hybrids coming out these days, a good taster can’t afford to dull his palate. Anyway, we are joking and carrying on, being the typically ugly American tourists, when this fat guy arrives, wearing a uniform.

  “Señor Billy Lee and party of four,” he calls out in Spanish. He gives us all boarding passes. There are other people here, and they are harrying the fat man, wanting to know about their flight.

  “Lo siento,” he says, “sorry, the flight is full.”

  We follow him outside the building. Billy Lee is looking nervously at the row of tired airplanes on the field. “These planes are falling apart,” he mumbles. The word is that Billy Lee is a very poor flyer when he is not at the controls.

  The fat man staggers a bit on the tarmac. It would appear that this fellow enjoys strong drink.

  Our plane is a DC-4 scarred by oil and grease and scorch marks. Our pilot, as we feared, is the fat man. As we climb in, the plane creaks and Billy Lee makes a strained face.

  “Where are we going?” he asks in Spanish.

  “Don’t worry, meesters,” says the pilot, strapping himself in. He hands a bottle to Billy Lee, who is standing at the cockpit door. “Quieres ron y cola?”

  Billy Lee asks, “Is anyone helping you fly this?”

  The pilot answers with a happy smile. “God is my co-pilot, señor,” he says in Spanish. Billy Lee turns white and slumps into the seat nearest the cockpit entrance.

  Three of the engines grunt into action, but the other one coughs and gags. Billy Lee is white-knuckling his chair arm. The fourth engine finally sends up a cloud of smoke and catches, and as the plane begins to stumble towards the runway, Billy Lee lurches to his feet, goes forward, buckles in beside the pilot, and starts checking out the controls. He takes a hit from the rum bottle.

  We circle around the ocean, north of Santa Marta, then cross the Guajira. There are some heavy winds coming around the Sierra Nevada that have me concentrating on my anus.

  This is our introduction to the Paez dope plantation:

  We follow a river into a high pass, slip between the walls of a wide canyon. The river disappears. I turn back to look, and I see a waterfall that drops six hundred feet into a valley so lush it shines. I see buildings and hundreds of neat rows of plants. There is a landing strip and two small aircraft at its edge.

  The plane hits an enormous blast of wind that comes rushing up the valley. The aircraft seems almost to explode open, my seat belt snaps, and I am somersaulting out of my seat. We are banking a hundred feet from the stone face of a granite cliff, and we come swooping down like a falcon in the tightest U-turn a plane like that can do. And all of a sudden we are leveling off at the right end of a dirty runway — with a sweet, gentle, gut-settling two-point landing, like an L-1011 coming in on Runway 3 at JFK.

  “That,” Pete says, “was a rush.”

  The pilot turns around and waves the bottle of rum at me. I knock one back.

  “Thanks for the flight,” I say.

  “Don’t worry, meester,” he says.

  “I nearly had a heart attack, man,” Billy Lee says. “I kept tellin’ him to give over the controls, and he kept sayin’ ‘Don’ worry, meester.’ What a fuckin’ flyer, man!”

  The valley is walled to the north and south. The north cliffs reach a thousand feet. The hills on the south side are low, and do not hide the sun. A jewel-blue river rolls down the valley from the foot of the falls, where a mist balloons into the sky. Behind us is high-altitude jungle. You can hear monkeys screaming high in the canopy, and see parrots flashing by.

  And the cannabis plants march up the valley in rows like an army, about three feet apart, with gaps where the male plants have been. They are mature, but they are short — maybe five or six feet. And dense. Thick with bud, weeping resin. The odor is powerful, a sweet, rich stench, and the plants seem to droop with the effort of supporting their weight. The air seems yellow, and when a breeze brushes the plants, we see why. The wind carries the resin into the air in billowy clouds.

  The pilot hands us gauze masks. We see that the men and women working in the fields are wearing them, too.

  I am assuming you know something about the horticulture of pot. Perhaps you do
not. Cannabis is dioecious — as with people, there are two sexes. If the male dies after it pollinates the female, the female gives seed. But if the male dies just before it can deliver its pollen, the female secretes only juice, no seeds, and the resin in the juice is what contains the bulk of the thc, the active ingredients, the stuff that gets you off, they stuff they make hashish from.

  Sinsemilla: It is a Spanish word meaning “seedless.” Colombian pot is normally characterized by the fact you are always cleaning it, picking out the seeds before rolling it up.

  There is an administration building. As we walk towards it, we can hear the thrumming of a generator that is working the pumps and the sprinklers. The harvest is under way. A group of farm workers is going down the first few rows, hacking away with machetes. A tractor and baler are following behind. By the administration building, heaps of flowertops are drying. A couple of men are running a compactor, others bagging blocks of pot into sisal sacking.

  I am awed. I am also stoned — just from breathing the air. I am brought down very fast, though, by the sight of a couple of guys wandering around with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. “Parrots,” they are called in Colombia. There is a saying here — when reasons fails, the parrots do the talking.

  “What’s the elevation?” Kelly asks Billy Lee.

  “Sixteen hundred meters.” He looks about. “Must get full sun all winter.”

  Kelly gets down on his haunches and sifts the soil. It looks dark, feels moist, seems full of nutrient, probably manure.

  The pilot, correctly guessing that Kelly is our taster, points to a heap of dry stuff. “Lo proba,” he says. “Try it.”

  But Kelly goes first to one of the growing plants, breaks off a bit of flower, sniffs at it, rubs it between his hands, licks them, rolls his eyes.

  He takes a jeweler’s eyepiece from his kit and does a hair count.

  “Nearly forty to the millimeter,” he says. Then he goes to the dried material and weighs out a gram with his scale and rolls up a little J with it, using very thin test paper. He gets a nice burn, then really puts his lungs on it, and sucks it about halfway. Then he pinches it out and holds his breath. I can see he gets a good one, a full-size toke.

  We are all standing around like interns watching a great surgeon.

  Kelly is staring off into space. He has a little leprechaun grin.

  After a couple of minutes he says, “Blast-off.”

  Another minute or so passes. Then he says, “Orbital velocity now.”

  A few minutes later, “It’s star wars, boys.”

  He lets loose a long, low whistle and shakes his head. Then he lights the roach, the cucaracha, and smokes it right down. “It’s a point three-five, maybe a point four.” After a few seconds with a quiet voice, “Maybe five.”

  We have some punta roja mind-fuck here. Your average hemp comes in anywhere from point zero-eight to point one-five on a thc scale. Top-shelf pot might average about two-five.

  “Real light,” Kelly says. “I’m seein’ Sergeant Pepper stuff out there.” There is a soft calm to the face of Friar Toke, and he is smiling, and is looking up into the valley towards the waterfall. “It’s an elegant fine smoke, b’ys,” he says, turning to us.

  “What did I say?” Billy Lee is grinning. “Supremissimo.”

  The morning sun is slinging spears at us. Birds are gossiping in the jungle. I feel the power of the waterfall. I hear the river whispering nearby. I feel calmed. I realize I should have been wearing the gauze mask.

  There is a voice behind us. And suddenly I feel a chill.

  “Good morning, gentlemen. Welcome to the farm.” An American.

  The sun is behind him and at first I do not make out his features. But I see he has broad shoulders and a round face with a stiff military moustache and a brushcut.

  His face seems to glow pink. We used to call such white men butt faces when we were kids. The man shows us a compressed, thin smile, a smile without teeth. He stands erect like a king and stretches out a hand.

  “I am Rudy Meyers.” He has an arm wrestler’s grip.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Johnny Nighthawk

  Behind Meyers, someone else emerges through the door of the administration building. The guy does have teeth. He poses for Pepsodent. He is Ricardo Montalban in a monogrammed polo shirt and a dashing red bandanna. A briar pipe, to boot. He is about fifty, but in very good shape.

  “May I introduce my aide, Colonel Augustin Escarlata,” Meyers says.

  The dark eyes of Colonel Escarlata flit from face to face, then settle on Marianne. As we introduce ourselves, he shakes hands. But Marianne’s hand, he kisses. This guy is smooth as chewed sealskin.

  Meyers turns to Billy Lee. “Thank you for the connection,” he says.

  Billy Lee shrugs. “It’s nothin’, man. You wanted a ship. You got a ship.”

  “I’m sure Captain Kerrivan will be happy to give you a finder’s fee,” Meyers says.

  “How ’bout that, Pete?” Billy Lee says. “Throw in a regular crew share, and we’re laughin’.” He sneaks a look at Marianne. Pete sees this and he looks at Marianne. She is not looking at either of them. She is looking at the colonel. Oh, boy, I think. It is like the look she first gave Pete in that bar in Montreal. And Escarlata is looking at her as if he is taking her picture. I am liking none of this.

  “You with the Army?” Billy Lee asks, trying to distract Escarlata.

  Escarlata turns to look at him, takes the pipe from his mouth. “I suspect that by now I have been stripped of my rank,” he says, with good English. “Let us say I am in retirement from the Cuban Army.”

  “Castro sent us some very good people,” Meyers says. “I recruited Colonel Escarlata from the last boatlift.”

  “How about that?” says Billy Lee. “I’m a deserter, too. Bunch of shit, the military, ain’t it?”

  The colonel merely says, “I had reasons for leaving.”

  “So did I,” says Billy Lee. “Hated fuckin’ killin’ people. Didn’t bother you, though, huh, Rudy?” Billy Lee turns to us. “Rudy liked it, man. Rudy and me, we’re old Nam buddies. Real good buddies.”

  “I had an honorable discharge,” Meyers says.

  “They can take their honorable discharge, man, and shove it up their Joint Staffs,” Billy Lee says.

  Meyers smiles at us. “Billy Lee was never what you could call one of your great American patriots. A little too much southern rebel inside the hillbilly. That’s what we used to call him — Hillbilly Lee Tinker. Maybe it comes from smoking too much marijuana, Billy Lee.”

  Pete is studying Meyers through all of this. Then he says to him, “We’ve met.”

  “Do you think so?” says Meyers.

  “Six years ago, West Indian Club on Grand Cayman.”

  Meyers’s smile seems to contract by just a hair. He says, “You have a good memory, Captain Kerrivan, a very good memory. May I call you Peter?” Pete nods. “I work for Senator Paez, Peter. I provide various business services to the family, services that require some expertise. For instance, Peter, one such service involves the movement of this,” he sweeps an arm out, pointing to the field, “to America. I have friends in New York. I have asked them to guarantee fifteen hundred dollars a pound.”

  Pete does not bat an eye.

  “The money will be going to a good cause,” says Escarlata. Meyers flashes a hard look at him, and Escarlata winks at us. “The cause of our patron, Senator Paez, who no doubt will put his profits towards the benefit of mankind,” he says. I suspect this guy has studied at an American university, so good is his English.

  “You got the senator’s go-ahead?” Pete asks Meyers.

  “I have his full power of attorney.” Again Meyers waves at the flowering pot field. “Do you know how much marijuana is out there?”

  “Enough to fill our holds,” P
ete says. “You got about a hundred acres out there, and you’re running about half a ton an acre.” A ton an acre is about average, but these plants have lots of growing space. “We can take it all. For the right price.”

  “I don’t think you’ll complain about the money,” Meyers says. “It is risk-free this side. Our people will handle the loading. All we ask of you is to guarantee delivery, through whatever are your usual routes in Canada, to a designated warehouse in New York.”

  “Tell me about the money that I’m not going to complain about.”

  “Ten million dollars.”

  I can feel my eyes popping. Ten million dollars. Crew share is five percent. I am on a coral beach in the South Pacific and Polynesian girls with no clothes on are dropping little purple grapes into my mouth.

  Pete is saying something, and suddenly I am sucking air.

  “No way. I don’t work for chickenshit like that.”

  Meyers’s pretty pink lips hold their smile.

  “You’re not going to sell this for fifteen hundred dollars a pound,” Pete goes on. “This will go better than Thai stick rates — two, two and a half. Most of the Guajira crop has gone seedy with the rain, and that’s going to drive up prices like crazy, especially for sinsemilla. They could gram-bag this stuff in New York, or at worst deal it off at a hundred a quarter. Even ounces, you’re talking three hundred dollars, and at that price it’ll go like penny candy. Wholesale, you’ve got a three-hundred-million-dollar crop.” Pete flashes Meyers his three-hundred-million-dollar smile. “We’ll take a tenth,” Pete says. “Thirty million dollars.”

  Says Meyers, “We can buy twenty ships for thirty million dollars.”

  “You don’t have time to buy ships,” Pete says. “You don’t have the people to run a ship. Let’s face it, you’re not going to take a chance on a Colombian crew, not with this stuff. They’d be lucky to get the ship out of the harbor, and if they did, they’d stash the dope somewhere in the Bahamas, and you’d never see them again — or the grass. You got to get this stuff north and into an air-conditioned warehouse before the thc starts to bleach out. You got to start moving it in a week.” Pete has a bland expression. “There’s only one reason you came to us. We’re professionals.”