Mr Nice: an autobiography (55 page)

After finalising as much as I could, I flew from Taipei to Vienna and Zurich. At the PTT at Zurich airport, I called Tom Sunde. He advised me not to stay in Palma more than forty-eight hours. I telephoned Rafael, and he met me at Palma airport. We bypassed Immigration and Customs. He drove me home. I showered my children with Taiwanese presents before taking Judy out for a Friday
night wedding-anniversary dinner at Tristan’s in Puerto Portals, followed by some drinks with Geoffrey Kenion at Wellies. The weekend was spent in the bosom of my adorable family.

Amber cried from the back seat, ‘Daddy, Daddy, don’t drive fast. Please, Daddy, don’t drive so fast. I’m scared.’

It was almost 1 a.m. on Monday morning, and the five of us were returning from extended eating and drinking sessions at the Taj Mahal and Taffy’s Bar in Magaluf. I wasn’t driving fast. Amber usually enjoyed the sensation of speed, so I was doubly puzzled by her words of caution. I looked back and saw terror in her lovely blue eyes. What was frightening her? What did her subconscious know that I didn’t? Was she foreseeing some disaster that only a child’s mind, cluttered with neither prejudice nor preconception, could apprehend? I slowed right down and changed the compact disc from Simply Red to Modern Talking. No other sounds were made during the remainder of the fifteen-minute journey home. The children went quietly to bed. Amber still looked terrified.

I was almost out of hash. Judy’s sister Masha and her boyfriend, Nigel, had been staying with us for a few days. They had gone out to buy some hash in Plaza Gomila, but had not yet returned. A small bedtime joint would have to suffice. Judy and I made gentle love and slept peacefully in each other’s arms.

At 8.30 a.m. the phone rang. David Embley wanted to play tennis. He said he’d come round in an hour or so. I got out of bed. Francesca was already up, so I made both of us a light breakfast. I checked my dope box. It was no longer empty. Well done, Masha. She’d left a note. She and Nigel had just gone to the Club de Mar to look for work on the boats anchored there.

The phone rang again. It was McCann.

‘Get my fucking dope and get my fucking money. My wife and kids have been threatened. It’s heavy, man, and it’s your fucking fault bringing the heat on everybody.’

‘It’s not my fault you and Roger carried on without me and it’s not my fault Roger’s in the nick,’ I protested.

‘Well, find out from him where everything is. Send someone to Palma nick. It’s on your fucking doorstep. You arsehole!’

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Roger’s wife, Marie, was the next to ring. She wanted to come round. She had just seen Roger and had some important news.

As soon as I’d finished talking to Marie, the phone rang again. A long-distance call by the sound of the hiss. No one spoke, and the line went dead. It rang again. This time it was Tom Sunde. He talked about some trivial matters for a minute or so and hung up.

Tom and I had devised a code. If he began his telephone conversation with the words ‘how things are’, then I should infer that extreme danger was imminent. I went over his conversation in my mind. I couldn’t remember how he’d started. Never mind. The authorities never busted anyone halfway through a Monday morning. They preferred Friday evenings, when no lawyers would be available for sixty hours, or dawn on any day, when the victims were suffering from hangovers and unprepared.

I decided to take a quick swim. I looked at the chain of three Thai Buddhas hanging around my neck. Sompop’s words rang through my mind: ‘Wear in sea but not in bath.’

What was our swimming pool? Was it a small sea or a large bath? It was outside like the sea but enclosed like a bath. I never could work it out. Sometimes I wore the Buddhas when swimming in an outside swimming pool; sometimes I didn’t. On this occasion I took them off.

I emerged from the pool to the sound of the entryphone at the front gate. I rarely asked callers to identify themselves. I released the gate lock. It was Marie. She drank some coffee and talked with Francesca while I put on some shorts and a tee-shirt.

The entryphone buzzed again, and I let in David Embley, suitably dressed for tennis. Ten minutes later, he left. He promised he’d be back within the hour.

Yet again the entryphone buzzed. I presumed David had forgotten something and was coming back to retrieve it. Instead three overweight and casually dressed middle-aged men ambled into the courtyard and gazed at the tops of the five palm trees. The night before, Judy had mentioned something about some locals agreeing to trim and tidy up our palm trees. I guessed these were they. I began walking into the yard to greet them.

Suddenly, one of them pulled out a revolver and stuck it into my stomach. His lips were quivering, his glasses were steamed up, his hands were shaking, and his breath stank of peppermint. Twenty years in prison ran through my mind. Francesca let out a scream which I still hear every day. These guys were going to kill her daddy. Instinctively, I put up my hands and said, ‘
Tranquilo! Tranquilo!
’

My hands were handcuffed behind my back, and I was shoved on to the kitchen sofa. Francesca, trembling violently with fear, ran to me and began kissing and hugging me. One of the intruders pulled her off. In a panic she ran upstairs to where Judy was sleeping. A few more men barged into the kitchen and tore after her as if pursuing an escaped lunatic. Marie turned to stone as one of the cops grabbed her handbag and poured its contents on to the table. One of the
three fat intruders made himself at home on a kitchen stool. His eyes were sadistic, and his smile indicated he was having a quiet orgasm. With his open white shirt and Zapata moustache he looked Spanish enough, but he had the unmistakable aura of the DEA. Was this Craig Lovato?

‘
Es Policía Nacional?
’ I asked.

‘
Sí
,’ he replied, unconvincingly.

Then David Embley was escorted from outside the gate into the kitchen by two more cops. He, too, was handcuffed. His eyes refused to meet mine. The cops indicated we were leaving. I asked if I could change into more suitable clothes. They refused. I asked if I could say goodbye to my wife and children. They refused. Embley and I were both led out into waiting police cars. I looked up at the bedroom window as I went out of the gate. Maybe I would never see this house again. I heard Judy shrieking as the car door slammed. She’d be all right in a few days, I thought. She’d visit me as often as she could with the children. We still had a fair bit of money. I might be gone a couple of years, but then we’d survived similar problems in the past. And I knew they had no evidence. Spain wouldn’t give me up to the Yanks, anyway. They were far too independent to align themselves with America in its phoney drug war. Here they let people smoke hashish in the streets. I’d have a ‘lie-down’ in a Spanish jail. It would be manageable. I could brush up my Spanish.

At Palma police station I was told I’d been arrested on a drugs charge.

This didn’t come as a surprise. I asked for further details. None could be given now. I was given a piece of paper to fill out. Did I want anyone informed of my arrest? I put down Rafael’s name. He might be upset to find out I was a convicted drug smuggler, but we’d got on well enough, and he’d be surely able to ease my plight. After all, he was a Chief Inspector of Police. Did I have a lawyer? I put down Julio Morell, Rafael’s lawyer. Did I want the British Consul to be informed? Yes, I did.

With a decided lack of ceremony, Embley and I were relieved of all our personal possessions and put into separate subterranean holding cells. Mine already had two occupants: a comatose drunkard and a young Peruvian, who claimed to be a member of Sendero Luminoso. He was awaiting deportation and had been there for thirty days. It was rough, but he assured me that I’d be in the Centro Penitenciario de Palma tomorrow after the obligatory court appearance. He’d seen what had happened to prisoners over the last month. He said I’d like Palma prison: plenty of free time, lots of dope, and conjugal visits. I lay down on the concrete floor. There was no furniture, no water, no cigarettes.

I thought of what the police might find at home: the hashish Masha had scored, half a million pesetas, and my electronic notebook containing the telephone numbers I didn’t know off by heart. There wasn’t too much to worry about. Even if the British authorities had also raided our Chelsea flat, there were no dope-dealing accounts or other incriminating documents lying around.

I wondered if there was any possibility that I had been arrested as the result of my marginal involvement in Roger and McCann’s chaotic Moroccan scam. I reasoned that the Germans would have busted me the same time as they did Roger if they had thought I was involved. On the other hand, Roger might have suddenly decided to blame me for the whole thing in the hope of getting himself out of trouble. I also entertained the possibility that I had been arrested in connection with the Vancouver bust of Thai grass, but the Canadians were not known for wasting resources relentlessly pursuing cannabis offenders. It had to be the Yanks. I drifted off into a mixture of apprehension, sleep, and dream.

Suddenly, a disgusting sandwich was thrust into my hand, and I was asked by a jailer if I wanted to use the bathroom. I was taken to a filthy shower-cum-shithouse. On the way back I stared through the barred windows of the cell doors, wondering which one was Embley’s. A face came to one of
the windows. This must be Embley’s. I hoped he wasn’t freaking out too much. The face looked tortured and pained. Tears streamed from eyes full of terrified sadness. The face turned into Judy’s. It was Judy’s. I wanted it to turn into another face. It wouldn’t.

‘Oh God! Why have they got you here, love? Where are the children?’

‘They’re extraditing me to America,’ Judy sobbed. ‘They’re taking me away from my children. Stop them, Howard, please. Stop them, for God’s sake.’

‘
Silencio! Silencio!
’ yelled the jailer. ‘
No hable!
’

‘
Pero es mi esposa
,’ I pleaded.

‘
Más tarde, más tarde
,’ insisted the jailer as he grabbed my arm and led me back to my cell.

This was incredible. How could they possibly extradite Judy? Since my release from prison in 1982, she’d broken no law anywhere, let alone in America. She hadn’t stopped nagging me to quit smuggling. No one had even asked her to break the law. What was going on? Where were the children? I lay down and tried to keep calm.

The jailer’s watch showed 6 p.m. as the cell opened again. I was handcuffed and taken to an upstairs room. Judy, surrounded by four or five men and stunned by disbelief and sadness, sat crumpled in a chair.

‘Look what they’re doing to me,’ she said, handing me a piece of paper, which indicated that her extradition to the United States was being sought because of her involvement in a series of cannabis importations totalling several hundred tons and dating back to 1970.

‘I was only fifteen then, Howard. I didn’t meet you until years later, and even since then I’ve done nothing wrong. I never did anything. What are they doing? I can’t leave my children.’

‘Where are they, love?’

‘Masha’s got them. Thank God. Oh! Stop them, Howard. You must stop them. They can’t do this to me.’

‘They’re nuts, Judy. Absolutely nuts. Don’t worry, Rafael and his lawyer should be on their way.’

Judy’s sobbing became uncontrollable. Some uniformed cops took her away. I was shown a piece of paper similar to Judy’s. It stated that my extradition to the United States was being sought because I was the head of the organisation that, since 1970, had smuggled hundreds of tons of hashish to the United States. My Spanish was not good enough to understand the rest.

In the room were two plainclothes policemen who couldn’t speak English, a state lawyer who couldn’t speak English, and an interpreter who spoke very little English. They all talked to me at the same time. I understood very little of what they were saying but gathered that, because it was a fiesta, Julio Morell’s offices were closed. Furthermore, they were not prepared to call Rafael. I would have to make do with this state lawyer, who kept asking me if I wanted to go to the United States voluntarily and make a declaration to that effect. He gave me a stack of papers to sign. I stared at him with disbelief.

‘
Puedo fumar, por favor?
’ I asked, reaching out for the lawyer’s packet of cigarettes. One of the plainclothes policemen was obviously very senior. He looked at me, smiled, and lit my cigarette. In pedestrian Spanish he joked about the book that had been written about me. He said that a number of my friends had also just been arrested. As if to prove his point, the door opened, and Geoffrey Kenion was brought in. The Americans wanted him, too. We were prevented from talking, and I was taken back to the holding cell.