Authors: Jack Hillgate
An older man in green army uniform with a captain’s insignia offered me a cigarette. I took it gratefully and he lit it for me.
‘English?’ he asked, in a thick accent.
‘Yes.’
He nodded and strolled off around the courtyard. I tried not to watch him but I could see him turning every minute or so and looking at me. After a few more minutes, and after my craving for another cigarette had reached a critical level, the prison door slid open and two women walked through in checkered green and white dresses. Each of them held a leather case that looked like a doctor’s bag. The women nodded to the men in green uniform and disappeared into the smallest block in the courtyard, tucked into a corner away from the cages and away from me.
‘
Is time’, said the captain suddenly, standing right behind me, and he walked me over to the block. As I walked, slowly, deliberately, I looked up at the sky, the brilliant blue sky, and the hot sun burning in it. I had lived for less than twenty-five years. My parents would be mortified when they heard, when they read about it in the newspapers. I did not know what was going to happen to me but I took in every ounce of sky and sun in that moment. I steadied myself, mentally and physically. This could be the last time, I thought, the last time I see sky and sun. The last time I am free. I was resigned to the distinct possibility that I was going to die much sooner than I had ever anticipated.
The door opened to a corridor and a room covered in large square turquoise tiles. The only part of the room that wasn’t tiled was the ceiling. There was a bed, two desks and two chairs and the two women in their checkered dresses, each one now covered by a nurse’s pinafore and topped off by a triangular white hat. A hospital bed was covered with a crisp white sheet. Next to it was a surgical tray on which I could see hypodermics and little bottles with tiny labels. There were also pipettes and test-tubes with black bungs.
‘
Sangre, urine
’, said the captain, leaving me with the two women and a guard in the corner, a rifle slung over his shoulder and a pistol in his holster. They wanted my blood and my urine. One of the nurses stood up and walked over to me.
‘
Tranquilo’
, she said, rolling up the left sleeve of my shirt to expose my newly-toned bicep whilst her colleague prepared a blood-pressure cuff. She was telling me to be calm. The cuff was slipped over my arm and they sat me in a chair.
‘
Tranquilo’
, she said again. I tried to be
tranquilo
, to breathe normally, but I couldn’t. I needed that cigarette, any cigarette, or a drink, a drink to calm down. I couldn’t stop my fingers shaking. One of the nurses took notes as the other carried out the examination. The cuff squeezed my bicep and I knew that the reading would be sky-high, a sign of hyper-tension, extreme anxiety or the presence of stimulants in the bloodstream. I felt faint when I saw the needle, the cuff still tight around the upper part. The nurse extracted a few milliliters of my blood and placed it into a small tube which she sealed and labeled.
The cuff was removed from my arm and she handed me a urine sample kit. There was a rail which ran along a corner of the room and she drew the plastic curtains to screen it off. The soldier motioned for me to go inside. He stood by the gap in the curtains as I peed into a vial. A nurse took it from me when I’d finished, sealed and labelled it. She also cut my fingernails and put the clippings into a small plastic bag.
‘
Quatro horas
’, she said to the guard. Four hours during which they would be preparing the results of the simple medical tests which would show beyond any doubt that I had consumed vast quantities of cocaine in the preceding week, including a heavy dose in the last twelve hours.
‘
Cigarillo
?’ I asked the guard. He nodded and handed me a cigarette as he took me back outside to the courtyard. I had some matches in my pocket and he lit it for me. I sheltered in the shade of a prison-block, finishing the cigarette. They already had my passport along with everything else in my pockets including three hundred dollars. At least one bank-note carried the traces of cocaine, a note that I had rolled, snorted coke through and then unrolled and placed back into my wallet. There would also be traces of cocaine and cannabis on my fingernails and in my urine: cannabis took a month to clear through the system.
‘
Oyez, gringo!
’
I looked up to see a large plastic bag tumbling towards me which exploded on impact and showered me in fecal matter and urine. I heard laughing coming from the cages on the side of the courtyard and I wiped my face. I vomited once, and then again. They pressure-washed me when I’d finished retching, training a single jet onto me. My clothes were drenched so when the jet cut out I walked into the sun and stood like washing hung out to dry.
Three and a half hours later they gave me a glass of water and read me the charges in English and Spanish, with a local lawyer in attendance.
‘
Entiendes
? Understand?’
I nodded.
The lawyer, Gonzalez, was my government-appointed lawyer. He handed me a photocopy of a page from the
Codigo
– the Civil Code - which listed the mandatory sentences. Possession was three years, dealing twelve.
‘
Ten, with remission’, he said helpfully. ‘The government is taking abuses by
turistas
very strong. You have family, someone to contact?’
‘No. There’s no-one.’
‘Very well. Come with me. They take you to a cell, in the jail, and they bring you before a judge tomorrow. You understand?’
‘I understand.’
‘If you has any informations about anyone else you know who is dealing you must tell me. They search your room. There is another man, yes? He share your room?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘They speak to two girls. They know you have a friend. Do you know where your friend is?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘You must not lie to me. I am your lawyer. You must tell me everything or they will charge you with dealing and you will go to prison for twelve years.’
‘I have never sold drugs.’
‘
They find a bag of cocaine in your room.’
‘
Anything else?’
The lawyer shook his head.
‘
This is all they find.’
I wondered what had happened to my notes on the manufacture of synthetic cocaine. They were written in my own indecipherable shorthand, but the diagrams and the chemical symbols were legible in any language, as were the rough budgets I’d drawn up for working out how much money I could make from selling it. I prayed that someone had stolen it together with the five thousand dollars rolled up inside my underwear, that they would burn the bag and keep the money.
They locked me in my cell, six foot by nine, low-ceilinged, no window, no ventilation. I watched the lawyer walk off through the bars in the ten inch grille in the door and I sat on a thin metal bed with a lumpy mattress. My drug-fuelled paranoia finally wore off because I had nothing more to be paranoid about. I lay down on the bed, shut my eyes and allowed a wave of exhaustion to send me to sleep, a state that had eluded me for nearly thirty-six hours.
The
Mangusta
was nearly forty foot long and Juan Andres held the throttle to the maximum forty-five knots. The sun was rising again and they had kept going all night. The boat was a rich man’s toy but had been a poorly-guarded one: moored, fully fueled and ready for a visit from its master, a doctor from Bogota. Juan Andres had wheeled their cargo on board using a metal trolley, walking deferentially behind his mother who for once that night was wearing a fine silk dress, shoes with heels and make-up. She could have been mistaken for the owner, or the owner’s wife, which was the idea.
The night-guard was asleep, drunk. Juan Andres loaded the materials on board in less than ten minutes, secured them safely below deck and then he spent another five minutes working out how to bypass the ignition and get straight to the starter motor. It was not unusual to take an evening cruise, normally a romantic event under the stars. This time, it was just with Mama Garcia. In a matter of minutes they were in international waters and soon they would be in Aruba, a safe port from which they could make their way, somehow, to paradise and four million dollars.
Kieran hadn’t moved for nearly twelve hours. He was hiding under the floorboards of a room on the first floor of the Hotel Doral, a large unoccupied room with three beds and a giant bath in the centre of the room, more like a font. It was now evening and he thought he could hear the sound of glasses clinking and movement downstairs. He slowly eased up a floorboard and pulled himself out, covered in dust and spiders. He replaced the floorboard carefully and contemplated the room in the late afternoon sun. He had left the key in the lock and they hadn’t found him, in fact they’d only been in to search for a few seconds before someone had called them away. He tried not to think about anyone or anything else.
He slipped out of the room quickly, a roll of money in his underpants and his passport in his moneybelt. He walked swiftly out of the hotel without stopping to check if his belongings were there or to pay the bill. He took the first ferry to Panama City, the overnighter, and when he arrived he bought an airline ticket back to Vancouver, via Houston.
Kieran was going home.
He’d had enough of the Swiss Alps.
22
‘
The more things a man is ashamed of,
the more respectable he is.’
George Bernard Shaw
When they opened the large sliding metal door I felt an instinctive urge to run. I didn’t, because there were two soldiers in the way, waving in a truck stacked high with boxes of vegetables that had been discarded from the markets but were deemed edible by the prisoners. I had been given my clothes and they had even been washed. The linen suit was creased but clean, the loafers dry and cracked but still a good fit. The shirt felt starchy and itched, and the only thing I wasn’t wearing was underwear, or socks. They’d said they couldn’t find them and frankly I didn’t give a shit. No-one was there to meet me because no-one, not even my parents, had been given any notice that I was being discharged.
The truck drove through slowly and the soldiers eyed me more respectfully than they had when I’d first entered these gates, the tall metal gates with a sentry box on either side, the normal suburban street staring me right in the face, thirty yards away. Twenty-five. They weren’t stopping me. Twenty. Somebody laughed but I didn’t look round. The urge to run was very strong now but I fought it. Ten yards. I had signed the release papers. They couldn’t stop me. My Spanish was fluent. I was almost one of them now. Five yards. Walk steadily, calmly, purposefully. Do not look to the left or to the right. Look straight ahead at the paved streets and the cars parked in front of the garages, at the kids on their bicycles and their mothers calling them in for lunch.
It was nearly one o’clock in the afternoon on the seventeenth of January, 1994. I had been incarcerated in Cartagena Prison, north-west Colombia, for three years and two months, but now, on another broiling day, I was a free man.
And I knew exactly what I had to do.
Life should never stand still, unless of course one is in jail, but even then it didn’t stand still for me. The weeks and months in virtual solitude altered my perspective. I avoided contact with the four hundred Colombians and three Russians locked up with me. The Foreign Office was notified that I had committed an imprisonable offence in Colombia, but in nearly four years it never tried to reclaim me as one of its own, never attempted to apply for extradition to my home country. There was no assistance at all, not even help with my airline ticket to England when they set me free. For that I had to thank the
Narcotrafficos
, the free passage in economy class on a brand new Avianca 737 direct to Heathrow. I had thought I was going to die in jail and now I had nothing to lose. I was as dead as Juan Andres Montero Garcia. Perhaps he really was dead now or perhaps he had managed to evade capture. Perhaps he had set me up. All these and other questions refused to go away. They gnawed at me from the inside in the same way as my stomach ulcer.
My parents had learned how to lie, and they had learned how to do it well. My father, the headmaster of a private school in Surrey, wrote a letter to the bank to tell them that I had received an offer from a humanitarian organization – his idea, not mine – and that I was turning my back on the notion of making money in the City. I would be helping people, he wrote, in his spidery handwriting, in some of the poorest countries in the world. To any friends that called – only three, as a matter of fact, in nearly four years – he told them the same story. ‘
Brazil, or maybe Paraguay
’, he would say. ‘
He writes, frequently.
’ ‘
Great thing he’s doing
’, they would reply. ‘
I’d like to do that someday. To have the guts, you know, to strike out and really do something meaningful.
’ ‘
Yes
’, my father would reply, ‘
we’re very proud of him.
’