Authors: Jack Hillgate
‘
I know. Me too.’
We both laughed, Juan Andres held up one of the sterile packets and the words ‘start-up capital’ popped into my head.
I had five months before the investment bank in the City could claim me as one of their own.
Five months to do it.
***
We had walked for what seemed like ten miles, but it was probably only two. Kieran and Juan Andres were much fitter than I and so I lagged behind, clomping along a dusty road that seven months before had carried a funeral cortege going in the opposite direction. The road went up and up and then suddenly dipped, the rocks getting bigger and the land greener. We were descending now, descending into a valley, a green valley filled with row upon row of three-foot high greenery, regimented, ordered, fertile.
The dust and the rocks slowed our progress. There was only the chirping of crickets to accompany us, their song blending into the shimmering heat and making me forget where I was. There were no telegraph poles, no wires, no aeroplanes, no cars. Nothing remotely mechanical or man-made apart from the regimented green rows beckoning us forward into the bosom of Juan Andres Montero Garcia’s family.
‘My name’, he said suddenly, stopping for a drink of water, ‘is not Juan Andres.’
Kieran and I exchanged a quick look of ‘I told you so.’
‘My family, they call me Ricardo.’
‘Ricardo?’
‘
Rico
. It means rich.’
‘Shall we, like, call you Rico?’
He seemed to think about this for a moment.
‘No. You can call me Juan Andres.’
Neither Kieran nor I argued with this. We each took a sip of water and continued down the hill, following Juan Andres/Rico as he headed for the solitary old farmhouse that only came into view around the next bend in the track, a modern garage block attached to one end.
12
Franz or Heinz
was twenty-seven years old but he looked more like thirty-five. He had been an arrogant, argumentative child in Germany, growing up as he did in Dusseldorf, an unremarkable town made even more unremarkable by the Allied bombing in World War Two. The
Altstadt
, with its little bars, restaurants and basement clubs, had been his home after he was thrown out of school for smoking marijuana inside an old Trabant parked at the bottom of the football pitches. Nearly ten years of buying, selling and using drugs had turned his face a grayish hue, and his shoulders were hunched, his muscles slack and ugly.
Franz or Heinz
was not an attractive man.
He smoked sixty filterless cigarettes a day and helped to distribute porn from a small lock-up garage. When he and his business partner Agatha, a muscular woman with a crew-cut, received the shipments, often from Holland,
Franz or Heinz
packaged them up and wrote out the recipients’ addresses. He bought the reams of thick brown paper wrapping and the stamps. He collected the funds and he showed Agatha how to turn a hundred Marks into five hundred by diluting the drugs they sold in the Altstadt. They passed relatively unnoticed, a slightly odd-looking couple wearing parka jackets and Dr Martin’s boots but no different to the thousands of other teenagers and twenty-somethings whose version of cool was to get blind drunk or stoned as quickly as possible in order to forget what a mess their lives were in.
Franz or Heinz
was letting the sun get to his face for the first time in a long time. He was sitting in a taxi-cab outside a smart apartment block in Cali at approximately the same time that we were arriving at Juan Andres’s family home a few hundred miles to the north. The block had a high metal fence and a security guard stationed in a little booth by the electric gates. A private compound of expensive apartments, newly built and, from what
Franz or Heinz
could tell from his vantage point in the back of the musty old Chrysler, almost deserted. There were parking spaces for forty or fifty cars and only three of them were taken. Many of the windows in the six-storey block were simply thick sheets of glass beyond which there was no sign of furniture.
He looked down at the address on the sheet of paper.
‘You…you wait, yes?’ he said to the driver, getting out of the cab.
‘
Quinietos vente-cinco,
’ said the driver, pointing at his meter.
‘You say five hundred and twenty-five you fucking wop?’, said
Franz or Heinz.
‘Wait for me. Ten minutes.
Diez minutos
.’
The driver shrugged and
Franz or Heinz
pulled himself up to his full height, tried to straighten his slouch and walked confidently to the sentry standing at the main gate main gate.
‘Speak English or German?’ asked
Franz or Heinz.
‘
No senor
.’
‘I want
Senor Lisi
’, said
Franz or Heinz
as he slipped a ten dollar bill into the sentry’s hand.
‘
Si, claro.
’
Franz or Heinz
walked through the car-park and into the white-tiled foyer. The elevator door was open waiting for him and he rode the small metal box to the sixth floor. He got out into darkness. He pressed the timer switch on the wall, which lit the corridor, and he made for the door at the end, apartment number 606, the Cali home of one
Senor
Gustavo Lisi. The money was heavy, weighing down the right pocket of his jacket. It was air-conditioned inside the block, but it hadn’t been in the taxi and
Franz or Heinz
could feel the clamminess on his back evaporating in the cool. He stood under a unit to calm himself.
‘
Lim-ou-sine
’, he thought, as he rang the doorbell. The sound was like a set of garden chimes, a friendly, homely tune. Turning a hundred Marks into five hundred had been his staple diet in Dusseldorf. This would require similar skills, negotiating strength and a lot more than a hundred Marks with which to negotiate.
The door was opened by a woman, a small friendly woman who smiled at
Franz or Heinz
.
‘
Alleman
?’
‘
I am the German.’
‘
Por aqui, por aqui
’, she said as she beckoned him into the apartment. 'Come through, come through.'
He walked through into the dark. All the blinds were drawn and there were no lights, just the chink of the sun through the sides of the window frames.
‘
Quieres café
?’
Before he had time to tell her if he wanted a coffee or not, she disappeared into what he assumed was the kitchen, although it was difficult to tell.
‘
Sit down, Herr Frankel’, said a voice.
‘
Hullo? I cannot see you?’
‘
I’m here Herr Frankel, in the armchair by the window.’
Franz or Heinz
’s eyes began to adjust to the gloom and he could now see the outline of a man, a small man, sitting right where he said he was. ‘
Herr Frankel
’ sounded good. Very professional. Not his real name of course.
‘
Do you want to test the merchandise, Herr Frankel?’
‘
Ja ja - yes I will test.’
A light clicked on and
Franz or Heinz
shielded his eyes momentarily from its glare. Lisi placed the lamp on the table and for the first time
Franz or Heinz
could see that his journey had not been in vain. Two plastic-wrapped packages, each about eight inches long, five inches wide and an inch thick, sat side by side on the smooth wooden top. Their weight, if Lisi had it right, was two kilograms, street value approximately one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The cost to
Franz or Heinz
, five thousand dollars.
‘I have a bag sealer’, said Lisi. ‘From the factory. You choose which bag to break open, you try, you like, we reseal, we weigh, you pay, you go. Yes?’
‘This is traditional, yes.’
‘
Muy bien.
Choose a bag, Herr Frankel.’
Franz or Heinz
looked at them. They were identical. Was this a trick? He had been tricked before. Maybe he should test both bags. He pointed to both of them and Lisi smiled.
‘Of course. I would do the same.’
Lisi suddenly had a scalpel in his hand and he made an incision across the middle of each bag so that the plastic fell open easily.
‘Anywhere’, said Lisi.
Franz or Heinz
dipped his finger into the bag on the left and tasted the white powder on the end. It was good. Then he dipped his finger in the right. Also good. He removed a small mirror and a razor blade from his left jacket pocket and collected a tiny amount of white powder from each bag using the blade, made them into wavy lines on his little mirror and snorted the left, waited a few seconds, then the right.
‘This is good shit’, he said, wiping his nose with a paper tissue and sniffing. ‘Very pure.’
‘It is grade A cocaine, my friend’, said Lisi. ‘Shall I ask Miranda to reseal the bags?’
‘Ja, ja. Yes. This would be appropriate.’
‘You have the money?’
Miranda came out from the kitchen holding a large plastic tray and wearing rubber gloves. She picked up the large bags of white powder, placed them on the tray and walked back to the kitchen.
Franz or Heinz
watched her.
‘The money?’
The envelope was dirty but the money was all in there. Fifty one hundred dollar bills. Lisi flicked through them quickly and then shoved the envelope and the money into a drawer underneath the table.
‘The cocaine is yours now, Herr Frankel. Miranda?’
Franz or Heinz
looked across towards the kitchen and he saw someone come out towards him. Suddenly, all the lights in the apartment went on and
Franz or Heinz
found himself squinting. The figure he’d thought was Miranda was actually that of a man wearing sunglasses and pointing a gun at him.
‘What the fuck is this?’
‘Good afternoon’, said the man. ‘My name is Hidalgo and I work for the Colombian government.’
Miranda walked out from the kitchen with the bags of cocaine and placed them on the table in front of
Franz or Heinz
. Then she turned round and walked back into the kitchen and
Franz or Heinz
started to cry.
13
April 2007 – Cannes, South of France
I told Jack I would need time to think about his offer of financial salvation, which seemed to make him angry. I heard Jan busying herself with something in the kitchen whilst he told me that it was vital I acted now. I repeated that I needed to see everything in writing and that I’d also have to run it past my lawyers. Surely he was used to making such written presentations for the hedge-funds he’d purportedly acted for, I reasoned with him. For a man apparently about to receive fourteen million dollars from his Moscow deal Jack Wiseman looked extraordinarily flustered when it came to my paltry few hundred thousand.
‘How much can you put in today?’ he asked.
‘Nothing, without the report and my lawyers' OK’, I said for the third time.
‘I misjudged you, George.’
‘Really?’
‘I thought you were an intelligent man, that you’d see an opportunity when it came along, that you’d jump for it. Like you and Arabella in my bloody toilet. I know what went on, don’t think I’m a bloody fool.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jack.’
I rose suddenly and he looked a little taken aback.