Authors: Jack Hillgate
The first planting had been a disaster. One of the uncles had run off with most of the seedlings that she had invested in, leaving her with even less money and another financial hill to climb. But Mama Garcia was strong and determined. By 1978, when Juan Andres was seventeen, he was out in the twenty-acre plot sowing, planting, cutting, harvesting, watering, testing and chewing. Using the coca leaf sparingly enhanced stamina and enabled him and his three brothers and two sisters to work the land efficiently, harder and with more care than many a larger operation.
The first harvest had proven problematic. Distribution was risky, always risky, and volume raised eyebrows and prompted questions. How to maximize income without drawing attention to oneself was very difficult. There was no other option. Mama Garcia went to see the Mayor and cut him in on the deal. She made sure she got him to sign a paper with their agreement, as insurance. The Mayor trusted Mama Garcia, in fact, he viewed her as very enterprising, for a woman. Mama Garcia on the other hand, didn’t trust the Mayor at all.
Twelve thousand dollars was the first payment, in cash, and she kept it in a fireproof metal box which she hid in the foundations of the house. She did not change her lifestyle an iota.
Frijoles
– refried beans - and rum, the cheap stuff, rather than fish and
Rioja
. The clothes were threadbare, the farmhouse now dilapidated, but the crop was coming in. She could hire no external workers, only family, as she could not trust external workers to keep their mouths shut. But one by one her children left the nest, most of them with apartments in good locations paid for in cash ‘
by a rich uncle
’. Juan Andres was the bright one. She had always known he was the brightest, the one who would be able to become a
jefe
one day, to earn sufficient money to enable her to lay fallow her memory and the twenty acre plot.
Morning arrived and with it the rain. In the half-light of my shuttered room I lay awake, thinking. It would be better for me, and probably for Kieran too, if we parted company with Juan Andres and Mama Garcia, but I knew that it was unlikely that that was going to happen now. Not after I told Kieran what Juan Andres had shown me the night before, not after I told Kieran that the white powder that nearly killed him had not been the one that we had manufactured ourselves. I felt another presence in the room, and I looked over to see the shadow of Mama Garcia, standing in the doorway, silently, watching me as I lay on my bed in my boxer shorts, hands clasped behind my head.
‘You want go,
Ryyy-an
?’ she said softly. ‘You thinking this. I can tell.’
‘No,’ I replied as levelly as I could.
I wasn't sure, as it was so dark, but it looked like Mama Garcia was carrying the defibrillator.
‘We have one more crop’, she said. ‘It is harvest time soon. You help us.’
‘
With the work? The harvest?’
‘
I need four men. I help too. I be man for harvest. You, Kieran, Juan Andres an' me. Four men.’
‘
That's lucky. That there's four of us I mean.’
‘
If we no leave South America, they kill Juan Andres. All my kids, they gone now, grown up. My daughter, she in Canada.’
I sat up and reached over for my trousers.
‘
You help us sell our crop to
Americanos
. In the north. Cartagena. Is much easier make cocaine from coca leaf. We produce enough money you can be rich. We can take boat. We go Caribbean. British.
Canadiense
. We can have bank account. We can go Canada. New passport.’
I wondered what the woman in Human Resources at my bank would have made of this proposition. ‘
We encourage all our trainees to be enterprising individuals, to think for themselves, to think outside the box, to innovate, to win
.’ It wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind.
‘
How much can we get?’ I asked.
She came over, shut the door behind her and sat on the bed.
‘
I be straight with you,
Ryyy-an
. If I sell cocaine here, we get maybe one hundred thousand dollars and maybe they decide to take my farm.’
‘
After it’s been refined?’
‘
Si. Juan Andres know what to do. Is easier than this experiment you been doing with tropinone. Much quicker. You gets more product.’
‘
You know about the....?' I stopped myself. Of course she did. 'How much product?’ I asked, after pausing to catch my breath.
‘
I think we get fifty kilos, maybe sixty. We can make bigger with artificial product. One hundred kilos. We only get five thousand per kilo in Colombia. But if we get it to Caribbean, we get thirty-five thousand per kilo.’
Three point five million dollars.
‘
And I give you and Kieran two hundred fifty thousand each.’
Which left her with three million.
‘
Three million is good for me’, she said.
I nodded. Of course it was. And two hundred and fifty thousand dollars was good for me too. It represented at least five years' salary, and I wouldn't have to work for five years to get it. In fact, I'd have made the money before my banking job was even due to start. How difficult could it be?
Making synthetic cocaine which did not require having to move anything illegal across any dangerous borders.
Tick.
Harvesting a coca field and dragging a hundred kilos of product half-way across Colombia, onto a boat and then somehow getting to the Virgin Islands or Aruba.
Fucking madness.
‘
Sounds interesting’, I said. ‘Let me talk to Kieran.’
16
May 2007
Portia had been begging me for a proper outing for days. She had waited patiently in her concrete cubicle, her spartan grey-slabbed home, clean, well-fed and watered, only drinking the highest grade unleaded fuel, the ninety-eight, not the ninety-five. Portia enjoyed a journey into Cannes, along the
Croisette
, especially if there was a big conference like MIPCOM (TV, multimedia and film), a chance for her to display her aerodynamic lines and rear spoiler to as many people as possible. My GAP baseball cap would be pulled down firmly over my face teamed with the biggest pair of sunglasses I possessed, the big black unisex Gucci ones.
It was the sixtieth Cannes Film Festival and the celebrations promised to be more spectacular than ever. I never found it a problem getting in anywhere at the Festival, despite my lack of official accreditation. I guided Portia along the Croisette, waving at the police as I passed through their roadblocks, and turning straight into the U-shaped drive of
The Majestic
. I handed the blue-liveried concierge a hundred euro note and the keys to Portia and sauntered quickly inside the hotel without giving the paparazzi enough time to work out if I was worth photographing or not.
Stephanie was waiting for me at the bar, wearing a light cotton dress. I walked up to her, skirting around the excitable wannabe film producers and inconsequential actors that held their meetings at full volume in front of everyone else in order to convince themselves of their own importance. This was the perfect place to meet her. Crowds were always good places in which to be anonymous and there was only one spare seat, a bar stool, in the whole establishment. The fifty pre-premiere tables outside were packed, heaving with men in dinner suits and women in long dresses.
‘
Bonsoir’
, I said, taking the hand that she offered me and kissing her on both cheeks, the right first, then the left, Cannes-style. ‘You look lovely.’
‘
Bacardi-coke. You want one?’
‘
Sure.’
I sat next to her and waited for my drink. She was looking very young in her light dress. Her skin was smooth and tanned and she had done her hair up into a bun.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked me suddenly, her eyes not wavering from mine.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Why are you doing this…with me? It is because you want to make love to me?’
I sipped my drink whilst waiting for time to formulate my reply.
‘I would like that’, I replied, taking her hand. ‘I have been lonely – apart from one evening – for a long time.’
‘You think you can buy me, George Milton?’ We held each other’s gaze and I knew she could see what I was thinking. ‘There is a street, you know, with your name. Milton. Here. In Cannes.’
‘I know. Tell me that you’ve thought about my proposal.’
‘It is a good proposition for me.’
‘You’ll have your own apartment. They’ll be gone soon.’
‘You seem so sure.’
‘Yes, I am. I think they’re going to the Caribbean, or maybe Australia.’
‘I do not want to pay tax, George.’
‘Nobody wants to pay tax.’
‘You must pay me the first twenty-five thousand in cash, five hundred euro bills, clean, unmarked you say?’
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘You trust I not run away?’
‘I don’t know. I have to trust someone.’
She ran her finger along the rim of the glass. I wondered what she could be thinking. Was this man, fifteen years older than her, merely eccentric, a criminal or simply mad? Was he rich, or was he just trying to get her into bed? There were many men who would have paid for the pleasure of her naked company beneath the sheets of one of the grand hotels. There were many men who would have tried to charm her into the self-same position, and who possibly would have ended up paying out far more.
‘I like you, George Milton.’
‘And I like you, Stephanie Delacourt.’
***
November 1990
Franz or Heinz
was sitting in hot sun on the deck of a café which overlooked the mulatto girls playing beach volleyball. They were muscular and wore one-pieces rather than bikinis.
Franz or Heinz
would normally have stared at them, collecting ammunition for his own brief and lonely forays into sex, generally with himself. He could not afford to look at the bikinis for long though. Not today. He was wearing fluorescent green beach shorts, a stripey T-shirt and brown leather sandals. A cheap Panama hat, two sizes too small, perched on his head. Next to his coffee was a guide-book about Colombia, written in German. Next to his feet was a shopping bag containing a foot-high wooden figurine for which he had paid double the going rate. He was clean-shaven, white-skinned and he had had a haircut. To the waitresses in the café, to his fellow customers and to the men and women on the beach, the mulattos and
negras
walking out from the sea to be dried by the sun,
Franz or Heinz
looked like a tourist.
Franz or Heinz
was booked in at the Intercontinental a few hundred yards up the beach, and he could see its rectangular white and silver presence from where he was sitting. The sun was shining right into his eyes but the black plastic Ray Bans were heavily tinted and they enabled his blood-shot eyes to scan the beach and the promenade without having to move his head. This was a good thing, because he was very tired. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and he had been sitting at the café for the last five hours, drinking coffee and glasses of water – no alcohol – and pretending to read his guide-book.
So far the only people who had approached him had tried to sell him more sunglasses, a poncho, some fake jewellery and what he judged to be a stolen Cartier watch for which the old woman wanted three hundred dollars. Running counter to his normal behaviour, Franz or Heinz declined each offer politely, even though the Cartier had been very tempting, and he simply settled back into his book after each little visit, reading up on the history of the city on whose beach he was sitting.
Apparently, or so the book told him, Cartagena dated back to the 1530s, one of the first places that the Spanish had colonized in the whole of South America. The city walls were thick and enclosed the old Spanish settlement with its narrow streets and numerous places of worship and reflection. Outside these walls, where
Franz or Heinz
was sitting, was a line of modern bars playing salsa, Merenge and Bob Marley’s ‘Three Little Birds’.