Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (7 page)

I grinned at him. He’d done well. Everything I’d asked. If you kept John on message, he could be pretty efficient.

“Aye, well, that’s plenty, that’s more than enough, it’s up to me now,” I said.

“Listen, you’ve got to admit that I’ve been a help,” John began.

“Yeah,” I said suspiciously.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to go to America and the peelers owe me months of leave, and I work at the station only a day or two per month, for whatever reason,” John said.

“Maybe because of your stupid haircut, it looks like you should be on the cover of romance novels, not writing traffic tickets or—” I began but John cut me off.

“Let me finish, Alexander. My point is, I’ve been a big help to you, British Airways are doing two-for-one flights, you need me. I want to come with you,” John blurted out.

I looked at him. That big goofy face. Grinning. I didn’t see why not. He just might be able to help with the legwork. Watson to my Holmes. He was a peeler, after all, my best friend, and I didn’t want to go alone.

* * *

Blue meets blue at the curve of the Atlantic Ocean and the sky. America looming. An hour away. But I’m not here, I’m somewhere on the other side of the world.

The peaks, high valleys of the western Himalaya. The highest mountains on Earth. Formed fifty million years ago when India crashed into the continent of Asia and pushed them up.

I close my eyes and I can see them. Glaciers in Kashmir. Tarn lakes in Ladakh. Snow over the opium fields of the Hindu Kush.

I am crawling in my airplane seat. My body is craving heroin.

A village. Cooking fires. A weather-beaten old man down among his crop. He lovingly removes his penknife and scores the bud of the opium plant. The flower’s botanical name is
Papaver somniferum
. The Sumerians and ancient peoples of the Indus valley called it Hul Gil, the “flower of joy.” When the Aryans came to India, they discovered that the flower allowed you to see Brahma, the creator of the Universe.

Only a few weeks ago, red and yellow petals bloomed at the tips of tubular green stems. The old man is content. The petals have fallen away, but the plants have survived the snow. The egg-shaped seed pod is unharmed. Under the penknife an opaque, milky sap oozes out. This is the opium in its crudest form.

He calls his sons. The sap is extracted by slitting the pods vertically. On exposure to the high mountain air the sap turns darker and thicker, becoming a brownish-black gum. The family collects the gum, laughing, making a real harvest of it, the older boys molding it into bricks or cakes and wrapping them in plastic bags.

The big money isn’t in opium, but even so, the villagers are content to sell their crop to experts who will know what to do next. On a bright January day, a mule train shows up and takes the village supply of opium over the Afghan border and into Pakistan. The opium refinery is a rickety factory in a residential neighborhood of Lahore. The opium is mixed with lime in boiling water. The morphine is skimmed off the top, reheated with ammonia, boiled and filtered again. The brown morphine paste is heated with acetic anhydride for six or seven hours at 85 degrees centigrade. Water and chloroform are added to precipitate impurities. The solution is drained and sodium carbonate added to solidify the heroin. The heroin is filtered through charcoal and alcohol. Purification in the fourth stage, involving ether and hydrochloric acid, is notoriously risky and can blow up the lab. But assuming everyone survives, it is filtered again and stamped ready for shipping. The final fluffy white powder is known to everyone as number four. It has taken ten kilos of opium to make one kilo of heroin, but it’s worth it. One kilo of number four costs about a hundred thousand dollars.

The first person to process heroin was C. R. Wright, an English researcher who synthesized it in 1874 at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. He thought it was too dangerous to use. In 1897 Heinrich Dreser of the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company was presented with two new drugs, acetylsalicylic acid and diacetyl morphine: the first became known as aspirin, the second, heroin. Dreser tested both, deciding there was no future for the former, but the latter he called heroin, for it would be the “heroic” cure-all drug of the twentieth century.

From that heroin-refining factory in Lahore to a cargo flight carrying expensive cashmere shirts from Karachi to Newark Airport in the United States. It comes in under the noses of customs inspectors (who are too swamped to inspect every shipment of textiles from Pakistan to the United States) and makes its way to a warehouse in Union City, New Jersey. From Union City to a van traveling west.

The imaginary journey of my ketch. Aye, something like that or more likely a ship rather than a plane. But how to get it? I’m not fool enough to smuggle what’s left of my own supply with me. I have to get it in Denver. As soon as I get in. Fast. Now.

I mean, I know there is a case to be solved. A lot of questions. Who killed Victoria Patawasti? Who sent the anonymous note? How long can I stay in America before the English peelers or Irish peelers track me down? But the most important of all—how in the name of God am I going to score heroin within a few hours of touching down in Denver?

Thirty thousand feet. Greenland. John watching the movie, hardly able to contain his excitement. Back to my book. I’m reading a dual-language Bhagavad Gita. I suppose it’s because of Victoria. Lame, I know.

The coast. Islands. Lakes. Brown fields, irrigated to form huge circles. Rivers. Plains. We both stare as we cross the Mississippi. More fields, the odd sprawling settlement. A highway. The colors faded—like giants’ clothes washed and patched too many times.

Mountains like the barrier at the world’s edge. How did the settlers get through those? Why didn’t everyone just stop here? A squeal of wheels, a bounce. The plane touches down at the brand-new Denver International Airport. White tepees over the big terminal. Immigration. My skin is starting to burn. My hands are shaking. Shit, here goes. There are five desks. The man at one desk is called O’Reilly. He’ll do, in case I mess up somehow.

“What’s the purpose of your visit to the United States?”

“Tourism.”

“Been here before?”

“Yes, I was here when I was a student; I came for a few months and traveled around on Amtrak. Just the East Coast,” I say, shivering.

“Are you cold?” the man asks.

“I don’t like air-conditioning, it’s always too cold,” I say, keeping the panic out of my voice. I get momentarily worried, but the man’s not interested now that he sees I’m Irish.

“Ireland. Love to go there. Wonderful golf courses, I’ll bet,” he says.

“Oh yeah, great courses, Royal Portrush, great views of Scotland,” I say.

“How long do you intend to stay in the United States?”

“We’re here for a few months.”

He stamps the passport, smiles. I smile back. Walk off.

The luggage rack. The automatic sorting machine in the airport has misplaced about a third of our flight’s luggage. “Teething troubles,” a harried airport official says, trying hard to placate the potential lynch mob. But we get our rucksacks with no problems.

The customs desk. A blue form. We have nothing to declare, although I do have a lunch box filled with needles that I’ve marked “Diabetic Syringes.” I’d been concerned that this was far too obvious and customs was going to confiscate it and figure out I was a user or something; but we walk through the channel and no one says a thing. I could have brought the bloody heroin. Typical.

Outside. Christ, it’s hot. A cloudless sky. Three in the afternoon. One hundred degrees, says the temperature gauge above an ad for a bank. So many commercials. Even on the taxi. We get in the cab.

“We need a hotel, not too expensive,” I say before John can speak.

“It needs to be downtown, but not the Brown Palace, or the Adam’s Mark, cheaper than that,” John says, reading from
Lonely Planet USA
.

The taxi driver turns around. He’s an older black man with a gravelly voice. “I know the very place, boys,” he says, driving off.

“How come it’s so hot, didn’t it snow just a couple of weeks ago?” John asks incredulously.

“That’s Denver,” the driver says, laughing. “We get over three hundred days of sunshine a year. More than Arizona. Sometimes it snows at night and by lunchtime it’s gone. The traces of that big snowstorm we had a couple of weeks back, gone in two days. Year’s been real bad for weather. Need rain, we’re in the middle of a big drought.”

He’s not kidding. I look out the window. Yellow and brown fields, an unforgiving sky. No animals. In fact, from the highway it looks like it’s semidesert. The city, a line of big buildings and then the mountains. A punchy, aggressive sun.

Most people don’t know Denver. Maybe they came skiing here once, or went to a conference. Drove in from the airport, stayed downtown, went to the mountains. Maybe they live here in the white ’burbs. But even they don’t know it. They don’t know the Denver of Kerouac and Cassidy, of the hobos getting off the freight trains at the biggest intersection in the West. They don’t know because the bums have been pushed off the streets, the downtown has been regenerated, lofts, wine bars, trendy eateries and coffeehouses instead of dive bars and diners. John Elway’s toothy grin on the posters for his auto dealerships. But the old Denver still exists out on Colfax Avenue where they never go. Or on Federal or in the black section north of the city center.

Colfax for us. Desperate-looking motels, armored liquor stores, Spanish restaurants and bodegas. Prostitutes, pushers, hangers-on at the corners. What are they selling? Is everyone still on crack in this country, or is heroin coming back?

We turn on Broadway past two of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen. One is a tall windowless slab the color of baby puke, the other a demented Lego assemblage of blocks and pyramids.

“Art museum and library,” the cabbie explains and then stops at a place called the Western Palace Hotel 1922—pink and flat with a swimming pool. It looks slightly rundown and cheap. It’ll do. The Denver city center is about half a mile down the baking white strip of Broadway.

We pay the driver and remember to tip him 15 percent. Get our bags. Walk to the front desk.

“This is so cool,” John says.

I look at him. I’m sweating, jumpy, in no mood to talk.

I’d woken early, gone to the beach. Injected myself. Gone home, spent two hours packing and hiding my drug paraphernalia. It took an hour to pick up John and get to the airport, Facey driving slowly and carefully in his Ford Fiesta. Facey still too embarrassed to talk to me following the Land Rover incident even though I’d forgiven him, for if not him, who? They would have found me. Anyway, that long airport drive. Then a two-hour wait to go through security, then an hour-long flight from Belfast to London, then a five-hour wait at Heathrow to board our flight. A ten-hour flight from London to Denver. Three hours getting our bags and going through customs and the ride here. Its been twenty-four hours since I had a fix.

The hotel lobby exudes desperation and a hint of better days. The harsh setting sun streaming in through venetian blinds and illuminating an enormous cracked mirror above a chipped art deco check-in desk. A man at the desk reading a comic. An image of ourselves on a black-and-white security camera monitor. A dead or hibernating cactus plant. Dust vortices in the strobed sunlight. Tiles missing from a checkerboard floor and, on an orange sofa, a hatchet-faced old man with a portable oxygen tank. He and the desk clerk both smoking.

“Careful you don’t blow yourself up, old timer,” John says cheerfully to the old man.

“What’s it to you, shithead?” the man replies, incredibly slowly.

We go to the desk and the clerk gives us a room. We pay up front for a week. He doesn’t ask to see our passports or tell us the hotel rules or anything. He gives us keys and motions us upstairs. He’s reading
Justice League of America
.

The stairs, a long line of identical rooms. The key.

The door. In. Broadway out the windows. Hot, clogged with traffic.

“Shit, there’s an air conditioner,” John says enthusiastically.

He drops his stuff, runs to the AC, turns it on. By the time we’ve done a very quick unpack, the room is twenty-five degrees cooler.

John cannot contain his excitement.

“America, bloody America,” he says.

“Yes.”

“I mean, Jesus Christ, it’s
America
we’re talking about here.”

“I know.”

“You’ve been, but I haven’t. I always wanted to come. Did you see the bikes? On the ride in I saw two Harleys and an Indian. An Indian, can you believe it? And the cars, the cars are bloody huge. It’s just like
Starsky and Hutch
or—”

“John, listen, I need to score some ketch.”

John shakes his head.

“No. No, no, no. Come on, Alexander, couldn’t you use this as an opportunity to go cold turkey?” John asks. An excellent question.

I stare at him.

“No,” I say.

“Alex, if you—” but then he stops and sees the state I’m in. Shaking, pale, trying to keep down my meager stomach contents.

“Alex, ok, look. I can’t convince you?” he says.

“No.”

“Ok, if you really insist on going, go. Look, and score me some pot as well, ok?”

“Maybe. John, you’re what they call an enabler.”

“Sure. Just don’t get arrested”

“If I do, I’ll tell them you put me up to it.”

* * *

Heat. Sun. I walked down Broadway. Wide streets, flat pavements, ramps on the sidewalk. I found Colfax again. A lot of pedestrian traffic. Roasting, too, my beard itched. The Capitol Building. A statue of a Civil War soldier. The Ten Commandments.

Homeless people, desperate people, alcoholics on the sidewalk.

Ah, a scumball bar.

The bar, dark, smoky. Sun like laser light through cracks in the paint of the blacked-out windows. Very American. Budweiser signs, Coors signs, a pool table, strange things on tap. People on their own staring at shot glasses, hugging their beer. No women. Is this the right place?

Barkeep. Black guy, forty-five, bald, big strong hands that looked like they could wring your neck.