Authors: Jack Hillgate
‘You’ve still got ten minutes’, he said.
‘Don’t worry about it.’
I headed for the door and I felt his hand on my shoulder.
‘Sorry if I said anything to upset you, George.’
‘You were a little brusque, perhaps.’
‘It’s my life, you see. Money does that to you. I’m sorry George. Here…let me make it up to you.’
He leaned over to the nearest wall and picked off an oil painting.
‘They’re Jan’s. Not bad, eh?’
I couldn’t think of a suitable reply. They were all ghastly.
‘Have it. Go on. It’s worth at least what you paid me for our session.’
‘Really, Jack – ‘
‘Call it goodwill. Go on.’
I took Portia into Cannes that afternoon, to give her a little run. I left her in the underground car-park on the lowest level and took the lift to the ground floor. I walked past my favourite toy shop but I didn’t go inside this time. This time I decided to go straight to
Sephora
and ask Stephanie if she wanted to go on a date with me. If I was going to die, I might as well die happy. I found her by a counter, waiting for someone to come up to her and ask for a makeover. I asked her straight out.
‘V
ous voulez quoi, monsieur?’
‘Je veut prendre diner avec vous.’
‘Mais – ‘
‘Mais quoi? Le Palm D’or dans le Martinez, huit heures?’
‘C’est tres chere, le Palm D’or.’
I guessed she’d heard about it but never been there. It was indeed very expensive.
‘
Je m’appelle George
.’
I watched her think about it as I stood smiling at her.
‘Okay’, she said in a good English accent. ‘I see you later, George.’
‘You speak English?’
‘Of course. I have a university degree.’
‘Oh? What subject?’
‘Chemistry’ she replied, smiling coyly.
***
November 1990
Kieran finally found us in the garage.
‘
Jees’, he exclaimed, ‘Jees-us Christ. You boys shittin’ me or somethin’?’
We were sitting at the large metal table, wearing goggles, surgical gloves and white coats. We each wore plastic hairnets.
‘If you come in Kieran, you better wear the same.’
‘Jees. What the
fuck
you doin’?’
‘Do you know how cocaine works, Kieran?’
He quickly donned the clothing that Juan Andres held out to him.
‘Yeah, well I may be Canadian but I’m not dumb. Stimulates the central nervous system, right? Like amphetamines. A big upper.’
‘It inhibits the re-uptake of the norepinepherine released by the adrenergic nerve terminals, leading to an enhanced adrenergic stimulation of norepinephrine receptors.’
‘You one too, huh?’
‘I studied sciences at Cambridge, Kieran. I think you knew that. I just wasn’t as good as Juan Andres.’
‘We can just
buy
some, guys. We don’t have to try and
make
it.’
‘This is just an experiment, Kieran. To see if it’ll work.’
‘And if it does?’
‘One step at a time.’
One step towards the potential mass-market dissemination of heightened omnipotence and euphoria, albeit temporary. One fix of pure stood a fifty-fifty chance of leading to addiction.
‘What’s that?’
‘Tropinone. Don’t touch.’
‘There’s bags of it.’
‘And you cannot carry it around with you, amigo’, said Juan Andres. ‘None of this leaves here. Is too dangerous.’
‘It’s research’, I added. ‘Pure and simple.’
‘We get to test the product?’
‘It take a few days. Is complex, solutions inexact, maybe. We try.’
‘Is this why we’re here?’ Kieran asked.
‘No. I come to see my family.’
‘I don’t get it. You guys are gonna spend all day in this garage to make stuff you’re never gonna do anything with?’
‘Kieran’, I said, removing my goggles and blinking, ‘one step at a time, okay?’
‘Can I watch, then?’
‘Sure.’
Thankfully we didn’t have to make the tropinone. We had lots of the crystalline substance in its packets. My notes, in spidery handwriting, were more copious on the procedure for just getting to the tropinone stage than the rest put together. The best way, according to my research, was to oxidize tropine with potassium dichromate, but the empirical i.e. trial and error methods we’d have to employ would take far too long. Thankfully, we had a head start thanks to Juan Andres and his foresight in collecting up the packets in the jungle as a form of insurance policy.
Getting to
2-Carbomethoxytropinone
was the next step, our first. This required, according to my notes, a
mix of sodium and methanol, three or four grams of tropinone, some dimethylcarbonate and about double that in toluene.
‘
Do we have all that?’
Juan Andres checked the tubs and bottles on the racks.
‘
Si’.
‘
What you tryin’ to do, put the cartels out of business?’
‘
Something like this.’
The resultant mixture needed to be refluxed for half an hour, perhaps a little more and then cooled into a solution of six parts pure water to one part of ammonium chloride.
It was getting very hot in the garage. The clock on the wall, just like an old school wall-clock, stood at ten minutes to mid-day. It would be over a hundred degrees in the sun.
‘We can leave it’, I said. ‘I need a cigarette.’
The three of us stood outside in the sun, the sweat from the clamminess of the garage evaporating quickly. We’d left our goggles and coats inside, and also the hairnets. I could hear the sounds of Spanish conversation coming from the kitchen.
‘She’s taking it well, Juan Andres. Your mother I mean. And your sister.’
‘Ryyy-an. This is Colombia. She happy I not dead. She very happy, Ryyy-an. Very happy. She not want me to go anywhere now I is back.’
‘So you not go – I mean, you won’t go?’
‘I must stay here for a while. To help my mother.’
I thought of him slaving away in the garage, producing hundreds of kilos of synthetic cocaine.
'Yes', I said emphatically. 'You must stay here.'
We extracted the solution using chloroform, and then evaporated the chloroform in a vacuum to get rid of it. Then we threw in some saturated potassium carbonate and dried and evaporated again until we came out with something that approximated to the consistency of an oil, which we dissolved in hot acetone. We left it to cool. It was now four o’clock in the afternoon. It was still a hundred degrees in the sun. By eight o’clock in the evening the oil had cooled. We hadn’t had a drop of
aguardiente
all day. The three of us ate the rice and beans as quickly as we could without offending Juan Andres’s mother and then headed straight back to the garage.
‘We’re doing great things here, gentlemen.’
‘Yeah, right’, said Kieran, producing his juggling balls and sitting on the terrace with them. ‘You go do great things. I’m just gonna chill here a while.’
I watched him unravel his cannabis stash and start to unpick a cigarette.
‘See you later, Kieran.’
‘Later.’
We had to scratch the inside of the flask with a glass rod to precipitate 2- carbomethoxytropinone and then recrystallized about fifteen grams of it in thirty milliliters of hot methyl acetate, some cold water and some acetone. Then we put the whole thing in the small freezer by the door and went outside to join Kieran on the terrace.
Over the next three days we followed the instructions in my handwritten manual and from Juan Andres’s notes. By day four and after a series of accidents and abortive sub-experiments we had successfully reduced 2-carbomethoxytropinone to methylecgonine. More to the point, it was active and ready for stage three, one stage from the finished product. Kieran was spending his days smoking and walking the fields. He also told us he was writing a book about his travels, although I happened to read the ‘book’ one night when he left it out and what I read was an unpunctuated scrawl of unconnected thoughts.
‘We’re not the only ones doing this, are we?’ I asked Juan Andres, back in the garage.
‘Ryyy-an, we’re
not
doing this’, he replied, smiling.
‘
Si, claro.'
‘
Claro que si.
’
The procedure was now becoming very fiddly and it required both of us. For the next four hours we gently refluxed
methylecgonine and benzoic anhydride in a hundred and fifty millilitres of dry benzene, using a drying tube to stop any water in the air from contaminating our material. We then cooled the resultant liquid in an ice bath, added hydrochloric acid, dried and evaporated it in a vacuum to get a red oil which, when we treated it with a little portion of isopropanol, gave us cocaine.
We sat outside, sharing Kieran’s joint. The crickets were chirping, it was five in the afternoon and the sun was burning the crops around us. It was a coffee plantation, Juan Andres had told us. The original farmhouse was three hundred years old but only two rooms remained. His father had added the rest in the nineteen fifties when he took it over, and Juan Andres had built the garage himself, with the help of two of his brothers, in 1980, when he was only nineteen years old.
‘We never had a car’, he told me, exhaling the smoke in a long plume that curled under the overhanging roof before the breeze dispersed it.
‘
Claro
.’
‘
Listo
? Ready?’
I nodded and Kieran removed his feet from the balustrade, leaving the joint to smoulder out in a stone ashtray.
I had annotated my notes with new notes as we had ploughed through the process, and I noticed Juan Andres had done the same. If only I had shown such diligence at Cambridge I might not have ended up with the fifth-lowest third in the university in my final year Tripos examinations.
Kieran volunteered to be the guinea-pig.
‘Not gonna kill me, is it?’ he asked, a little worried. ‘You got, what, two, three grams here?’
‘Maybe two. It’s got a finer crystalline structure than the real thing. Better for your mucal membranes.’
‘My what?’
‘Your nose.’
‘Right. Here goes.’
Kieran leaned over the side-table where we had set up our test. There were three perfect lines of white powder in front of him, numbered. One was ‘street’ cocaine which Juan Andres had said was thirty per cent pure, the line which he’d taken from Kieran a week ago, another was some of the pure coke from the opthamology department of the
Universidad del Cauca
and the last line was the result of six days’ toil in the garage.
‘We have to leave thirty, forty minutes between each one, OK Kieran? Enough time for you to come off the high of the last one.’
‘Sure.’
‘We’ll try them in order, OK? Start with number one.’
Kieran quickly snorted it up and sniffed, wiping away the excess from his nostril. He swallowed and I could see him trying to define the taste.