Authors: Cleary Wolters
“Okay, here goes nothing.”
Phillip sat down in the desk chair and crossed himself quickly, like he didn’t want me to see what he was doing. I dialed Benin and Alajeh answered on the first ring.
“What is going on?” Alajeh sounded frustrated, maybe angry.
“We have a little snag in our travel plans I need you to help me sort out.” I had to resist the urge to flip out and instead stay calm and sane while I spoke.
“Where are you? Let me come to you.” He didn’t mean that he
would come to me himself. He was saying that he would have someone else come.
“No. It would be better if we solved this problem first.”
“You won’t tell me where you are?” He sounded like I’d hurt his feelings.
“Don’t worry. We’re not trying to run away with your bags. I just have to solve something before it turns into a big problem.” I tried to sound like a rational businessperson and kept reminding myself
That’s all this is . . . It’s business . . . It’s business
.
“Yes. I know. Henry told me.” He quit playing the fake emotions.
“Really? When was that?” His candor had surprised me.
“It’s not important.” He cleared his throat after he’d said this.
“It is to me.” I heard myself and wished I hadn’t sounded so miffed.
“A few days ago.” I thought maybe he had really talked to him in the last hour. “I can help you. I can deal with Henry, and your friends will be fine. But you have to listen to me. He is hysterical. Is Phillip with you?” I looked up at Phillip and put the phone on speaker.
“He’s here. You’re on speaker now.”
Phillip sat up and focused on the phone.
“Phillip! My friend!” He sounded jovial, not like a cold-blooded kingpin.
“Alajeh,” Phillip answered, sounding tired and uneasy.
“You have to give Bradley and Henry two of the bags. They will leave tomorrow.” Alajeh said this to Phillip, not to me, but I didn’t give a shit who he said it to. It made no sense. Phillip looked at me and tilted his head like dogs do.
“Why two?” he asked.
“Give them two bags. I will send another one to you, and your friends can go back to Chicago then. I will make sure Henry goes now.” We wanted this to be as simple to solve and as small a wrinkle in our safe return to Northampton as Alajeh was making it out to be. We wanted it to be true so badly that we believed it was.
We took the bags back to the Marcopolo, where Bradley came
down to the lobby to retrieve them. Henry did not come with him and I did not go in with Phillip to give the bags to Bradley. Phillip got back into the taxi and we headed back to the Hilton resort to wait for Molly and Craig to get there. We would have to wait now for the replacement Alajeh had promised. He wasn’t going to make us carry the drugs ourselves anymore, as long as we had someone we could trust to do it for us. In fact, he actually liked our idea. We had saved ourselves and our friends from a potential disaster, but we had pretty much ruined the one out we had. We could be added to the watch list, get searched, questioned, and probed. We wouldn’t be the ones carrying Alajeh’s precious cargo, but we would be there.
Planet Earth
Midsummer 1993
H
ENRY AND
B
RADLEY
left us all behind in Jakarta. I was relieved by the time we knew they were on another continent on the other side of the world. They had made it as far as London and were due back in the United States before the end of the week. Prior to their safe entrance into Europe with the two bags they had taken from us, I had a little nagging fear in the back of my mind that if Henry got caught there—he was so bitter about losing his game—he might just take us all down with him and I wasn’t ready for that yet. Aside from that internal sporadic nag, things felt good again, manageable, like we might all get home in one piece.
I knew it was twisted to feel triumphant, since all that Phillip and I had really accomplished was deepening our own hole. We had taken such an incredibly huge risk to confront the situation with Henry and Alajeh head-on the way we had, hiding Alajeh’s drugs and ourselves from him and telling him the truth about what we had been up to with our friends. Either of those actions could possibly have gotten us killed. Alajeh was smarter than that though.
He let us off the hook for devising a scheme to have others carry the drugs, but he wasn’t at all forgiving when it came to not getting them where they needed to go.
I thought about that second call to Alajeh, after seeing the two men show up at the first hotel room we had been in. Alajeh had told Phillip and me that he had been looking for us at the Hyatt to offer us his help in our complicated situation. I wondered, though, if we had been there in the first room when the two fellows arrived, instead of across the hall, peeping through an eyehole, how differently this might have ended. Would we be alive? Would Craig and Molly leave Henry and Bradley in Chicago, return to Northampton, and then wonder what had happened to us? Would Piper try to find me when I never came home or try to find out where we were? Would Edith and Dum Dum be like Lassie and try to tell her we fell in a well?
We had to wait in Indonesia for two more weeks before the bags intended for Henry and Bradley arrived. Alajeh got more money to Phillip and me, but not enough for us to stay in two double rooms at the Hilton resort the whole time that we would have to wait for Molly and Craig’s bags to arrive. Phillip flew back to the United States, and I went with Craig and Molly to Bali to kill time.
Bali was the most beautiful place I had ever been. The beaches were gorgeous and it didn’t feel like a third world country at all. It felt more like Provincetown, but instead of being filled with gays from New York and Boston, its tourists were Dutch and Australian. It had the same bohemian atmosphere, shopping, clubs, and cafés, just with sarongs and sandals instead of short shorts and Doc Martens.
We left Indonesia with the new luggage two weeks later. We encountered no problems in Paris. It was as though having an American passport made us either special or not worth their energy—I couldn’t guess—but they barely gave us nods as they stamped our documents and let us into the country.
We checked into what was becoming my home away from home, the Hôtel Saint-André des Arts in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Phillip couldn’t come to Paris with Garrett, but he assured me his friend
was more than ready and able to travel on his own. I stayed at the hotel with our luggage while my friends took the Étoile du Nord—the European equivalent to Amtrak—to Brussels. Once there, they went directly to the U.S. consulate to report that Molly had lost her passport and needed to have it replaced with a new one. That solved the poppy-country-stamp issue. They returned to me at the Saint-André des Arts the following day.
Phillip had arrived in Chicago and would be waiting for Garrett and Molly at the airport the next day. Garrett flew into Paris the same day Craig and Molly returned from Brussels with her newly acquired passport. We had a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Île Saint-Louis that night and we all got to know Garrett over Chianti and pasta. Craig and Molly reminded me of myself during my first trip.
After a month in Africa of choking down goat meat and parasites, we had all come to this restaurant—Hester, Henry and Bradley, and me. We had sat at a table by the window. I stared at the table, occupied by two French couples dining together. The food had tasted like pure bliss in my mouth, even though I couldn’t eat my whole serving. My stomach had shrunk quite a bit from all the abuse in Africa. I could almost see us there at the table, laughing, smoking cigarettes, and drinking cognac because Henry had warned me I would need it to sleep before my first trip carrying drugs home. I had been so nervous and happy all at once, having gotten my sister away from the jerk in Africa but scared shitless about the next day. I had been anxious too, anxious for it to be all over, and it had been so close, I’d thought, to that being so.
The waiter dropped the check off at our table and I asked everyone to pony up all their francs, since we would no longer be needing them. Craig and Molly contributed some random coins worth about two hundred francs and I paid the rest from my dwindling stash of French currency. We had more than enough left over for a cab to the airport in the morning, and breakfast was free at our hotel.
It was such a lovely summer night, warm and dry, a welcome departure from the stinky humidity we had left behind in Jakarta.
Just as Henry had done with me only a few months earlier, I suggested we all walk off some of the wine and pasta before trying to go to sleep instead of being lazy and taking a taxi back to the hotel. We stopped on the bridge we were crossing, one of many bridges that anchor the Île Saint-Louis to the city. Notre-Dame’s buttresses and façade were illuminated so that even from our angle and at night it dwarfed everything around it. A dinner barge passed under the bridge where we stood, followed by a sightseeing barge, shining spotlights on the buildings it passed as it too slid under the bridge and out of sight, on its way down the Seine.
When the tour guide’s amplified description of the Latin Quarter, coming from the barge, died away in the distance, it was replaced by an accordion’s version of “La Vie en Rose,” coming from the vicinity of the cathedral. It mixed eerily with a violinist playing Ravel nearby. Garrett was staring at his manicured fingers as he tapped a rhythm on the stone rail of the bridge. I could see a hint of nervousness forming in his pensive expression. Molly and Craig stood, in a spooning embrace, and swayed slightly as they stared down at the passing boats.
“Time to make the donuts!” I started walking the rest of the way across the bridge and back to our hotel. It was time to get these guys back so they could relax, pack again for the zillionth time, and do all the weird, stupid things we humans do to calm ourselves the night before something decisive: battles, play-offs, recitals, and the walk through Charles de Gaulle airport and Customs in Chicago. Phillip and I got a break from the relentless globe-trotting after the trip to Indonesia. We had been in motion since April, I felt like I had been in motion since January, and it was summer already. Phillip had moved back to Provincetown with Meg in May 1993. He had abandoned me again to go take care of his real life with Meg, while in a hotel in Chicago I waited out the week it took to get our pay. Meg still had no clue what he was really up to, so he couldn’t stay away for six-week stretches like I had done now twice.
When I walked into the house at seven o’clock in the morning and woke my good friend Piper up, I was probably a little more cheerful
than anyone likes another human to be when they are woken by surprise. When she threatened to kill me, I backed off to give her a little space. I took the Tumi bag I had with over fifty thousand in cash to the living room and dumped it out onto the floor. I had to separate out my pay from Phillip’s, and a third pile had to go to pay off the American Express bill Phillip was going to shit himself when he saw. Not really. He knew how much we had spent. He had wired us money in Bali several times. In any case, all the cash sitting together looked like I had robbed a bank.
Dum Dum had no idea who I was, at least that’s the way she acted. But I knew otherwise. Cats aren’t like dogs. If they were, both of my kitties would have been attached to my face doing the I’m-so-glad-you’re-home dance the minute I’d walked in the door. Instead, Dum Dum was sitting up, alert, staring at me with her huge green lantern eyes like I might be a burglar. Piper was knocked out, and Edith was curled up right next to Piper’s face, almost certainly fake sleeping and trying to be like
Oh, you. Whatever . . .
I grabbed a wad of the cash, went back to my room, and threw the money into the air above the bed. Edith watched with a bored yawn from the pillow next to Piper, but Dum Dum thought it was playtime. It was.
Piper jumped out of bed like I had thrown a snake into it with her, so I played with Dummy and ignored Edith back. Meanwhile, Piper walked toward the bathroom and I heard “Holy shit!” as she passed by the living room. I assumed she’d seen the cash still spread out on the floor. Her made-for-TV movie had just gotten slightly more interesting.
“Go look in the driveway!” My fancy car still had its hardcover roof on it and I thought the car looked like it cost me much more than it did. The Miata had only been out for a couple of years; in fact, mine was from the year it was introduced. It was an impulse purchase I regretted the moment I handed over the cash to some guy in Chicago. I was acting just like the archetype idiot who buys his girlfriend a mink coat and a pink Cadillac after he robs a bank, and I knew Phillip would give me endless shit about it, so I claimed it was a gift from Alajeh. Not a particularly well thought out idea
either; Phillip was then irritated that he had not been treated to the same.
Piper got out of the shower and was dressed faster than I had anticipated. I had said I would put a pot of coffee on for us and I hadn’t even made it up off the bed. The cats had surprised me and come around very quickly this time. Either they were very comfortable with Piper replacing me and didn’t feel I needed to be extensively punished or they knew how much kitty food all this cash could buy. Whatever the cause, they were both being irresistibly cuddly with me. I rather doubt the latter, but who knows? It’s hard to tell what cats really know. People are a little easier to read, and I could tell Piper’s interest had been piqued by my big pile of loot. This was good. I had an idea growing in my brain, one Piper might like.
I could do anything in the world as long as I did not have to do it alone. I needed a cat sitter, but more than that, I needed a sidekick. I was not yet sexually attracted to Piper—maybe a little, but not enough to risk losing my cat sitter and someone to keep me tethered to Earth. I hadn’t had great luck with sexual entanglements of late—or ever. Besides that, I couldn’t figure out if she was attracted to me, and unless I was certain about that, I was not going to be the initiator. It’s too awkward when I’m wrong.
The idea came to me because I thought Phillip was about to run for the hills and I thought maybe Piper would be a good partner in crime. She could help me recruit people and take over Phillip’s role if and when he lost it. Phillip was in a tailspin at the time. I didn’t know about what the source of it was. I assumed it had something to do with Meg. He had kept her in the dark about what he was up to and I had no grasp whatsoever how that must be eating away at his soul. He loved her, perhaps more than the person he had used as collateral for Alajeh’s trust.
A week later, Craig, Molly, Phillip, and I were sitting in the Brewery, the same restaurant and microbrewery in Northampton that Piper worked at. We were drinking, celebrating, and telling stories, just as Phillip and I had done when he’d returned. Piper was serving
our drinks, and my motorcycle was parked where I could see it from the outdoor tables we inhabited once again. But it wasn’t the same. Something was lost on the trip we had just completed, but our friends were happy, paid, and done. They had no idea how blessed they were. Phillip and I no longer had a way out, but we didn’t have to actually smuggle the drugs ourselves anymore. We were now just well-paid escorts.
Our new arrangement had only a small financial impact on Alajeh. He paid a slightly higher fee to us to deliver the bags and continued to cover the travel costs of however many bags there were needing carriers. If there were four bags, he paid for the tickets and room and board for four. We took our pay and our travel costs off the top of the delivery payment, and the recruit was paid fifteen thousand dollars. Phillip and I could have made a lot more money than we did, by penny pinching. I was incapable of such a feat and this fault fueled Phillip’s growing nihilism and my worries.
Piper was a logical replacement for Phillip. If he did lose his mind and try to bail, Piper could step in and help me. It could even be fun. She could be Phillip’s stand-in and maybe save him from a horrible consequence. We could get a live-in cat-sitter maid if on a regular basis we were both making the kind of money I had just made. Hester would be perfect for that role and I could make sure my little sister used her time constructively, like going back to school or something.
In my plan, Piper would never have to carry any drugs—she would just help me coordinate the recruits, help figure out ticketing, hotels, and budgets, and all the things I sucked at. I spent most of that July in Northampton with Piper and my cats, but I did a little traveling too. Piper had decided to move to San Francisco when the summer ended. Moving to the West Coast sounded like a good idea to me, so I invited myself to be her roommate, and easily sold her on the idea that my inclusion would make it more affordable. Piper and I went to California. We found a real estate agent and got a place to rent in San Francisco together. We were there for less than a week.
Piper added a stable element to my otherwise adrift life and that would be as true in San Francisco as it had been in Northampton. I had already made the decision to leave Northampton before the impulse to go to San Francisco came up. Phillip was moving to New York in September and I hadn’t known how long Piper would stay before she moved on with her real life. She wasn’t going to work at the Brewery and cat sit forever, not with a degree from Smith. As long as I was traveling so much of the time, it didn’t seem all that important what city I called home.