Authors: Jack Hillgate
‘What say we go get laid?’
‘You’ve been saying that for weeks.’
‘Yeah, but this time, Ryan, my English friend, I mean it.’
‘They’ll be waiting for us.’
‘They want coke, man, they don’t want us. I think we find someone who wants us. Or our money’, he added, grinning like an idiot.
Bar Conquistador
was a trendy spot just outside the City walls, not far from the Intercontinental or the beach. We found it easily because the music was playing so loudly, a mixture of Michael Jackson and Merenge. We sat down at the bar, fuelled by the two lines apiece we’d done on the beach a few moments before. Kieran kept sniffing and holding a tissue to his nose.
‘Stop it Kieran! You look like you’ve been at it all day.’
‘Look, just find us a woman, OK?’
‘Surely we want two?’
He blew his nose loudly, for emphasis, leaving tiny strands of snot and white powder hanging from his nostrils.
‘Wipe it for fuck’s sake.’
‘Cool it, English. We’re fine.’
We ordered two rum and cokes and sat at the bar watching the tables behind us and the bar-staff delivering endless trays of tequila to the people behind us. A few minutes passed and we ordered two more drinks. The alcohol passed through me swiftly. I hadn’t eaten anything since the morning. The coke that the girls had given us completely wrecked any appetite. All I’d wanted to do was bounce off the walls, which is what Kieran had been doing, leaping around room two like a man possessed by demons, snorting lines and singing along to ‘
I’m waiting for my man
’.
Her name was Joanna and she said she was eighteen. I wondered how old she really was. She sat next to me, to my right, with Kieran to my left. I bought her a drink and Kieran just stared at her, his trademark grin fixed to his face like a sign-post reading ‘fuck me.’
‘
Que quieres
?’ she asked me, looking at me with her big, brown eyes. What did we want? Wasn’t it obvious? She was slim, dark-skinned and wearing a short, tight spangly black dress. Her hair was black and she was wearing far too much lipstick.
‘Tell her we want her’, said Kieran.
I turned away from him and took another sip of rum, feeling it settle warmly in my stomach and softening the buzz from the cocaine we’d taken earlier.
‘
Queremos algo mas
’, I said to her measuredly, looking her in the eye.
We want something more.
‘
Algo mas?
’
‘
Si, claro.
’
‘
Los dos
?’ - the two of you? – she asked, breaking into a smile and dipping her finger into her drink, pulling it out and sucking it innocently.
‘
Si.
‘
Vente dollars.
’
I turned back to Kieran.
‘
She’ll take twenty for the two of us.’
‘
Say yes. I’ll flip you for who goes first.’
‘
I go first, Kieran.’
‘
Fuck it, English, let’s flip.’
‘
Okay.’
Joanna – if that was her real name – sipped her drink next to us, totally unphased by our discussion. She was only eighteen but she’d seen it all before. She was much better at this than we were. Kieran flipped a fifty cent coin and let me call it. Unfortunately, I called it wrong.
The corridor was narrow and there was an old woman sitting at one end on a stool. Her face was wizened and despite the heat she was wearing three or four layers of clothing. She looked at us cold-eyed, betraying no emotion whatsoever. The hotel was clean although very sparse. It was noisy though, sounds coming from the doors to my right. I tried not to listen. I had never done this before and I was focusing on not betraying my lack of experience in the brothel department.
The old woman held up her hand to stop me. Her index finger was held up. ‘
Uno’
was the only word she said.
It had never occurred to me that Joanna would entertain us both at the same time, and if I had not been so tanned the old woman would have seen me flush deep red with embarrassment. She could have been Mama Garcia’s elder sister but for the absence of teeth. She motioned to a chair next to her but I didn’t, couldn’t, sit. It was too clinical. The door closed behind Kieran and Joanna and I waited, pacing up and down, avoiding the old woman’s gaze.
I forgot to look at my watch to see how long it had been. Kieran ventured out again after a noiseless few minutes, a smile on his face.
‘She’s takin’ a shower’, he said. ‘Give her five minutes.’
I didn’t ask him if it was good or not, if he’d enjoyed it. If she’d enjoyed it. I now felt unable to go through with what I must now do, but also felt that I had to go through with it out of scientific curiosity, as if it were the sort of experiment my university tutors would have constructed. ‘
Can anyone tell me
’, I could hear them say, addressing a packed lecture hall, ‘
what it’s like to sleep with a teenage Colombian whore?
’
Ten minutes later, as she rocked me back and forth and I came into a thick yellow condom deep inside her, I had the answer.
***
Less than a mile away, Felicio Suares smoothed down his gelled black hair and looked at himself in the mirror. Tonight was opening night. He had been staying at the Intercontinental at his country’s expense for the last two weeks. Overseeing the first Pan-American Anti-Narcotics Forum was an honour. He was about to welcome advisers, ministers, police chiefs and academics to the most picturesque city in Colombia, also a popular gateway for the export of cocaine in which he held a large personal and private equity stake. He had nearly forgotten about the loss of
Franz or Heinz
to a highly-concentrated overdose from a laboratory. Someone was stealing from the universities. So what? He had told the German not to take any product, to keep a clear head.
Suares undid and redid his bowtie, the black one with the purple stripes of his notional employer, the Ministry of Information. He was a very rich man already. The Ministry paid him the sum of twenty thousand dollars a year, very little by American or European standards, but his cut from the Cartels now amounted to two million dollars a year, and he had been doing it for seven years.
Suares tried to visualise the eight million dollars in his account at a Dutch bank on Aruba. Perhaps tonight’s opening of the forum would be a good moment to announce his retirement. He was nearly fifty years old and no other man in his family had ever lived to see fifty; not his father, nor his grandfathers, nor their fathers. He would retire peacefully to an island in the Caribbean, possibly even Aruba…the thought was seductive. But it was also unrealistic. The Cartels would not be happy to see one of their own depart, unless they could be guaranteed that his successor would be just as amenable to their activities.
Of the potential successors, only two men could possibly fill Suares’s shoes. They were both younger, in their mid-thirties, and only one of them had been corrupted. The other, Michael Favorito, he would need to talk to. Maybe. Maybe. Favorito was the favourite. And his disciple? In time, he had hoped for Juan Andres Montero Garcia, a man he knew was incorruptible, but now, regrettably, also dead. There were so few good men, he rued, so few. How long could the Cartels realistically expect him to hold his job? Maybe until fifty-five, another five and half years. Five and half years was a long time when you had eight million dollars and no way of spending them. It was his own jail sentence. He must serve time before he could claim his reward. The dangers, the risks... he was well compensated for them but only in deferred bonuses.
He picked up his jacket from the chair and slipped it on. There. He looked immaculate, ready for his opening address in the gala ball-room. His instructions were clear. Did he need to make that last call, or should he trust them?
***
Juan Andres Montero Garcia peered through the gap in the curtains at the lights of the yachts in the water. It was a peaceful, humid night and Mama Garcia was busy reading a book about investing in commodities. She had drilled into all of her children the need for self-improvement and she believed in leading by example. They had been alone in the caravan for less than twenty-four hours and Juan Andres was sure that the international conference at the Intercontinental would be opening now. Suares, the man he had taken pains to avoid, would be making a speech a few hundred yards up the beach. The security levels would be high. No-one would be expecting anyone to be foolish enough to attempt to take out a hundred kilos during the conference, across the water and into the darkness. Which is why it was exactly the right time to do it.
Blood was thicker than any other tie. It was the right time. Tonight would be the moment. Kieran and I would feature in his plan – he certainly hadn’t forgotten us - but our role was to be very different to the one for which I had rehearsed.
21
They arrested me at six o’clock the next morning.
I don’t know what happened to Kieran but he wasn’t in the back of the green army truck that took me to the outskirts of a residential suburb in Cartagena and then through the tall steel gates of the prison. The sun was beating down and I was in a state of shock. We had been partying on the beach all night after we left Joanna and the old lady at the bordello. We had taken nearly five grams between the two of us over a twelve hour period and I was as wired as a power station. I could feel the paranoia building inside me, but it was justified this time. I would see Juan Andres and Mama Garcia at any moment. The Jeep and the Marauder would be towed through the gates, its valuable cargo inside. Kieran would follow soon, surely, his grin a faded memory, coked up like me, sweating to the core and trying not to shit on the concrete.
A soldier in a green uniform ordered me out of the army truck and stood me in the centre of the courtyard. The sun was already high in the sky and it could not have been more than seven or eight in the morning. Metal cages lined the left hand side of the prison courtyard containing a group of about thirty locals. Noisy, coarse and poor, they must have been last night’s pickings from the city streets and beaches, the drunk and disorderlies, the pimps and the muggers. I turned my back to them, trying to control my emotions. No Kieran. No Juan Andres. No Mama Garcia. Just me.
Prisoners looked through the bars of a cell-block on the right side of the courtyard. They were staring at me. I was very hot and dehydrated. I was coked up but I was also drunk. My bloodstream was a battlefield, the competing stimulant and tranquiliser forces making my eyeballs throb. I was in desperate need of a cigarette. I could feel my hands shaking so I put them into my pockets as casually as I could. In fact, I tried to do everything as casually as I could, although I could not ignore the fact that it was I that had been arrested, no other
extranjero
, and that someone must have told the Colombian army to raid the Hotel Doral. It could not be coincidence, bearing in mind my plans,
our
plans.
What had happened to Kieran? Why had I been such an idiot? I knew I could manufacture synthetic cocaine from the safety of a laboratory. What the hell was I doing harvesting and then trying to export four million dollars of the real thing out of Colombia? Had the coke warped my brain or did I really not want to see my family again? They wouldn’t keep my job open for me, of that I was sure. I would be fired before I had even walked in the door. They would deny all knowledge of me. And my parents? Sitting in their house in Barnes, listening to the thud of leather against willow, walking to the church, having the neighbours round for tea. They would be horrified that I’d thrown it all away. The degree from Cambridge, the promising career at a bank in the City. And then, of course, the ultimate curse, their damnation by association, the sires of jailbait.
Who could have told them about me? Why me and not Kieran? Was it Suares? Why had Juan Andres instructed us to be at that specific hotel, the
Doral
? How would they know we would be there at six in the morning? That we had only just returned from the beach? I had no coke on me, not in my clothing at any rate. Kieran had it all. It had happened so quickly at the
Doral
that I wasn’t sure if I’d seen him run up the back staircase, keeping low, crawl into our room and flush the remaining twenty grams of crystalline cocaine down the toilet, the bag we’d hidden inside the tubular metal bed post.