Cocaine (16 page)

As he heard the lyrics, the birds sitting on the doorstep, singing sweet songs of love and truth, he saw three very different little birds walking towards him along the beach, three short swarthy men wearing tatty jeans and no shoes, who stopped to watch the girls in their one-pieces. It looked like they were looking for someone which is when
Franz or Heinz
realized that the person that they were looking for was him. They were nearly four hours late but he bit back the venom that he was aching to vent, a diatribe about the merits and the decency of punctuality.

As they approached his table, two of them peeled off leaving only the smallest one standing beside him.

‘You is alone,
si
?’

‘
Si
.’

He sat down and the two others took a seat on a wall a few feet behind them, lost in the distraction of the all-girl volleyball game.

‘You would like a coffee?’

‘
No, gracias
.’

‘You no work for
policia
?’

‘Do I look like I work for the police?’

The short man stroked his left bicep, which bore the tattoo of a pirate ship called ‘
Jenny
’ replete with skull and crossbones. He squinted at
Franz or Heinz
, his lurid clothing and pale skin.

‘No.’

‘Good. Now, I need you to tell me why you have me sitting here for four hours. Tell me you have good news.’

‘No news.’

‘No news?’

‘
Nada
. Is shipment coming, maybe, but I no hear of nothing.’

‘Twenty kilos or more, you understand?’

‘
Entiendo
.’

‘
Du bist ein Saftsack.
You do not understand this?’

‘
No entiendo.
’

‘Good.’
Franz or Heinz
had just told him - in German - that he was a motherfucker. ‘You know I pay only on results.’

‘
Si si
.’

‘No results. No
dinero
.’

‘
Si si.
You want buy five grams?’ The short Colombian held out a small plastic bag of white powder. ‘Special price. Friends price.’

‘Twenty kilos or more.’

‘
Si si
.’ The Colombian scratched his bicep. ‘Fifty dollar?’

Franz of Heinz
thought about this. Suares had said nothing about not using the product himself. As long as he brought in results he would be immune from prosecution. That was what Suares had said and
Franz or Heinz
had no option other than to believe him. It was either that or twelve years. They were watching him now, he could feel it, but
Franz or Heinz
could always argue that he’d had to do it, to show them he was
au fait
with the product.

‘Thirty.’

‘Deal.’

The money and little bag of cocaine changed hands under the table and the short Colombian stood up.

‘
Friday’, he said.

‘
Twenty kilos. Or more.’

‘
Entiendo
.’

***

The film was sad but also very violent. Stephanie welled up at the same moment as the rest of the audience, the final realization that death was a release from the horrors of reality, that Ofelia would rise to meet her parents in the kingdom of Heaven.

‘Last year’, I whispered to her, ‘they gave this a standing ovation. It was the best film, by a long way, yet it won nothing.’

‘It is a beautiful film. Why did it not win?’

‘Another violent film. One about Ireland. That won.’

‘These films…you like violence?’

‘No.’

‘Then the people, they like violence.’

‘For some people’, I said evenly, ‘violence is a way of life.’

We sat there as the rest of the audience stood up whilst the credits rolled. The Olympia was only a short walk from Portia but I didn’t want to move. This was one place where I wasn’t wearing my sunglasses, one place where I was safe, safe amongst the red velour seats and the stale smell of sweaty bodies, safe next to a woman who barely knew me. Anonymity was easy here, after the last show, no-one coming afterwards, no-one to sweep the floor. I had a sudden urge to spend the night in Screen Four, sleeping in our clothes, safe from harm, an unpredictable move of the sort Carlos could never foresee.

Stephanie would protect me. She would be my shield.

17

November 1990

We had been at it for six days, the painstaking process of picking the coca leaves by hand to maximize the quality of our raw material. We worked from daybreak until eleven, when we stopped for lunch and a rest and we drove the tractor back to the farmhouse for rice,
frijoles
and chilli, home-made empanadas, including the vegetarian option
con queso
for Kieran and the unloading and storage of that morning’s crop. At half-past three we began again, working until dusk. By the time we had locked up, Juan Andres was preparing the garage for the evening’s production line, the distillation of our raw material into a substance that would soon become one hundred percent pure cocaine.

Kieran and I had reasoned with Mama Garcia that two hundred and fifty thousand each was not enough for the risk we would be taking, and after only a few seconds’ thought she upped her offer to one million dollars between the two of us, leaving her and Juan Andres with two and a half. We shook hands on the deal and then the next morning we began work. It seemed only fair.

Erythroxylon coca
was the technical name for the leafy plant growing in the valley of the Garcia farm, thriving in the warm, moist, frost-free environment and the fifteen hundred metre altitude. The tallest plants were six foot high and Mama Garcia told me that, from seedlings, they had had to wait three years for that first harvest but thereafter the yield was two harvests a year. The field was only twelve years old, she said, but the average they’d received per harvest was twenty-five thousand dollars. I made this three hundred thousand dollars in total.

‘
The children’, she said, ‘they have the money.’

‘
You must have some left.’

‘
Si si.
We have enough.’

It was the coca leaves that kept us going. Rich in vitamins, protein, calcium, iron and fiber, the cocaine content averaged half a per cent, according to Juan Andres. The best leaves, he said, were uncurled. We chewed them with a drop of powdered lime and the only unwanted side-effect I noticed was that my teeth were staining. Juan Andres told me he had a special whitener that we would use to remove any outward traces of the drug. We also worked with gloves, to avoid impregnation with the smell, and hats, which kept off the sun and protected our hair. Making the real thing from the real thing was much easier than the process we had had to follow for the synthetic production, which after a week had yielded us only two grams, all of which we’d given to Kieran as a reward for being a brave guinea pig.

To get to crystalline cocaine – cocaine hydrochloride – we first had to make c
ocaine sulfate. The process was simple and not dissimilar to the production of wine. The coca leaves had to be mashed and blended with water and kerosene in a vat after which we evaporated the excess liquid to yield a mushy paste which was easily purified and converted into its familiar, marketable, crystalline form.

It was hard work, but Kieran was even more dedicated than I was. He was off the grass and the booze, as was I, and we both put in sufficient back-breaking hours under the hot sun, and
under the inevitable downpours, to acquire a distinctly Latino weather-beaten look. With our bandanas and ripped shirts we looked as Colombian as the Colombians, only our accents giving us away. Juan Andres worked twice as hard as us, and his mother was more dextrous in picking the coca leaves and in crushing them to a pulp with her bare feet. She would not have been out of place in Provence, a viniculturalist of stout, squat proportions and endless enthusiasm.

We could not have a radio, not that we could have picked up a signal, and we worked in silence save for the tractor which we kept away from the coca plantation itself. We had two wheelbarrows, nineteenth century technology, to transport the leaves to the tractor and back again. The welcome side-effect of all this work was that I was becoming physically fit. Not as fit as Juan Andres, who had certain natural advantages over me, nor as fit as Kieran who maintained his ex-footballer’s nimbleness and stamina, but nonetheless I was proud of myself. I suddenly had stomach muscles that I could actually see, biceps that stretched my shirt and for the first time for years I found that I could touch my toes without bending my knees. That last evening, when the final crop was in, we drank a celebration bottle of
aguardiente
and let ourselves relax for the first time in nearly three weeks. However, I knew, with a slight sinking feeling that I could see mirrored on Juan Andres’s face, that from now on things could only become more difficult and more dangerous.

Mama Garcia had gone to fetch something a few minutes before, leaving the three of us sitting on the terrace watching the moon glow over the verdant farmland. Kieran had fired-up one of his huge reefers and he was telling us what it was like making love to a goalkeeper.

‘
The thighs she had on her’, he said, rolling his eyes and pretending to faint. ‘Could crush a bull between them thighs.’

‘
I had this girl in Costa Rica’, I began, but then I stopped. Unfinished business, even though when I’d vanished that morning I had left my share of the rent for the next month in an envelope on the table. I had nothing to feel bad about.

‘
What about you, Juan Andres, my Colombian stud? Where’s your girl?’

‘
You no want to hear. Is difficult for me.’

‘
What’s the problem? She bust your balls? Chew you up with them meaty thighs and spit –‘

‘
She’s dead.’

Kieran gulped and screwed up his face guiltily.

‘
Sorry man.’

‘
How did it happen?’ I asked. ‘If it’s not too painful.’

Juan Andres considered the clear liquid resting at the bottom of his glass, his eyes glazing over.

‘
It is painful. But I tell you anyway. Maybe it do me good to tell you. Mama?’

As if on cue, Mama walked in holding a battered brown leather satchel. She looked at her son’s face and she nodded at him
, some form of telepathic communication.

‘
I was married and I had a son.’

That made us go quiet. I lit a cigarette. We were about to receive a dose of reality of life in Colombia.

‘
Mama bought us a small house, not far from here, just outside Manizales. They knew I worked for Suares. They knew I was with Pepe when he bought the Mercedes. They knew…they did not…they…
hijo de puta
!’

He crushed the glass in his hand and it shattered to the floor. Mama Garcia put her arm around him and for the first and only time I watched as Juan Andres Montero Garcia cried like a new born baby.