Cocaine (2 page)

‘So you been America, amigo?’

‘
I traveled around there for a few months.’

‘
You rich? No work?’

‘
Student –
e
studiante.
’

He laughed and winked.

‘
Si, claro.’

‘
Claro que si',
I replied, returning the wink.

‘
You are learning, Englishman.’

Juan Andres laughed infectiously and I caught his bug.

‘Juan Andres is a good guy’, said Kieran. ‘He can help us.’

‘
Help
us
?’

I hadn’t realized there might be an ‘us’.

‘Yeah. These guys here, that German, the others, they’re all assholes my friend. I can’t hang with them. But I can hang with you guys.’

‘Oh.’

I felt rather flattered.

‘You me and Juan Andres…we can see some of the things these dinkums will never see. If we want to, that is.’

‘
Like what?’

I drained my beer-bottle. Kieran blinked at Juan Andres and he blinked back. They both smiled. Juan Andres smoothed down the sleeves of his black leather bomber jacket.

‘
You see, Ryan’ – he pronounced it ‘Ra - yaaan’ – ‘I been fired from my job. It was good job.
Permanente
. My last employer, it is the
Ministeria de
Narcotraffico
in Cali
.’

‘
Why did they fire you?’

‘
I was too
honesto.’

I watched Kieran watching me.

‘
I see. So they weren’t very
honesto?
’

‘
Perhaps not. Now I have time now to go see my family. You want to see my country? I can go back now. I been gone six months. It is long enough. I live in a little place close to Villamaria. It is in center of the country. Very beautiful. No
turistas
.’

I smiled and Kieran nodded at me, grinning like an idiot.

‘
Do you carry a gun?’ I asked Juan Andres, noticing for the first time the tell-tale bulge in his jacket as he leaned forward. Juan Andres nodded and patted his pocket.

‘
In case they see me.’

‘
In case
who
sees you?’

‘
My former employer.’

‘
Are you wanted?’

Juan Andres grinned at Kieran, now two idiots gurning at each other.

‘
No, Ryan', he replied measuredly. 'Much better. They think I am dead.’

Juan Andres Montero Garcia was born in Manizales, in the geographical centre of Colombia, in 1961. His father was a farmer, but died when Juan Andres was a boy, leaving him his mother, seven brothers and sisters, and a succession of uncles, some of whom stayed longer than others.

Juan Andres was an intelligent child. His school reports noted that he was respectful, calm and excelled in science and mathematics. The family farm had sufficient brothers and sisters attached to function without him, and so by the time Juan Andres graduated from college in Bogota with a degree in chemistry he was free to consider a variety of career choices. The government was looking for scientists to assist the Ministry of Defence, the cartels were looking for scientists to perfect ever more ingenious ways of extracting from the humble coca leaf as many tiny white crystalline strands of pure cocaine as was inhumanly possible.

Neither of these options appealed to Juan Andres. He liked to hunt, fish and shoot. He liked riding horses, preferably at night when the moon was up and you could almost hear the fields soaking up the dark humidity. Juan Andres was a black belt in judo and he could swim and run for miles. He had been the Manizales under-nineteen four hundred meter champion. He had stamina, and even though Juan Andres’s hair was fair and he was about five foot nine, he had a heart at least a third bigger than average, just like the tiny Quechuan Indios of the Altiplano and just like one of his uncles.

In 1983, at the age of twenty-two, Juan Andres was recruited by Felicio Suares, the head of the Colombian military, for intelligence work. It wasn’t like Britain or the United States where languages were desirable. In Colombia, the recruiters, such as Suares, were looking for brute force and natural cunning. Apparently Juan Andres fulfilled both criteria, and after six months’ training in Barranquilla, a northern Caribbean port, he traveled south, towards the Rio Putumayo, near the border with Ecuador, the home of the cartels’ cocaine-production facilities.

At first, in the early to mid 1980s, the military was hopelessly outnumbered and underpowered. There was little ten intelligence officers could do against a hundred mercenaries with state of the art hardware and sophisticated radar early-warning systems. Normal procedure, set out by Suares to his men, was monosyllabic: run. Run as fast as possible. Hide in the jungle. Wait to be picked up. Do not under any circumstances attempt to engage a superior enemy. It was stupidity to waste one’s life when one was being paid less than the equivalent of two hundred US dollars a month.

By 1985, and after two years on the force, Juan Andres had done a lot of running. He had also jumped out of helicopters, slashed his body into ribbons falling through jungle foliage and had lost a small chunk of one ear to a ‘lucky’ bullet. Although the sun shone brightly for much of the time in Colombia, the men in Suares’s team were very pale. They spent most of their time scoring black and green crayon across their cheeks and lying in ditches, trying to find homing signals. Either that or it was the eleventh floor of a nondescript office block in Cali, to the south of the country, and the growing focus of the cartels’ operations. Medellin was now fading into history as the over-developed drugs capital of the world. The
jefes
found it much easier to simply leave and construct nice new bullet-proof houses in Cali, replete with gymnasia, swimming pools and underground bunkers.

Cali was a modern city compared to the ancient settlements of Pasto and Popayan even further to the south, and it had a selection of excellent restaurants and car dealerships. Juan Andres was not motivated by envy, but a weekend trip to Cali in May 1985 had the unforeseen effect of sharpening his senses in that general direction. Suares told them to always travel in twos or threes. Juan Andres’s ‘buddy’ that weekend, Pepe, was only two years older than him and on nearly the same salary, but that weekend they danced in a
Merenge
club until well past dawn, drank several bottles of expensive imported Spanish
Rioja
and then, the next day, walked out of a Mercedes dealership with a brand new 300SL, the sports model with hard and soft tops, air-conditioning and rear bucket seats.

Pepe had grown up in a teetering apartment block in one of the poorest
barrios
of Barranquilla in the north of the country, a dirty port town with high unemployment and where, incidentally, Juan Andres had completed his training two years before. He had met Pepe’s father there and had even had dinner in the apartment one night. Pepe had four sisters and the father had asked Juan Andres if he’d like to marry one of them. ‘
Si, claro
’, he replied grimly, which in that situation was the polite way of saying ‘no’.

‘
My father left me some money,’ Pepe told Juan Andres.

‘
Si. Claro’,
replied Juan Andres, his eyes focusing on the gleaming dashboard with the removable Bose stereo. ‘What you gonna do with this car, Pepe?’

‘
I gonna drive it, my friend, that’s what I gonna do.’

‘
I think I’ll walk’, said Juan Andres, getting out of the cream leather passenger seat and shutting the door carefully behind him. Pepe started the engine and the car hummed into life.

‘
You know what, Juan Andres? You think Suares doesn’t have a car like this? One day, one day I show you how you can have a car like this one. Maybe even the 500SL, huh?’

‘
One day.’

Juan Andres kneeled to tie his bootlaces. He heard Pepe pull away, the powerful engine with its catalytic converter striking a different note to the crumbling Chevrolets and barge-finned Lincolns. He heard a scooter pass by slowly. A different note again, a harsher one, the loud two-stroke obliterating all the other notes. Perhaps the rider was looking for a house or one of the tiny side-streets whose signs were often obscured by leaves. Juan Andres looked back at Pepe in his shiny red sports-car. The traffic light was also red and Pepe was waiting, revving the engine as the man on the scooter drew up alongside him, pulled out a shiny pistol and shot Pepe three times in the head.

3

The Wisemans

March 2007 - Cannes, South of France

To my complete
chagrin
, I discovered that the new occupants of the apartment opposite were English. I heard the men moving heavy things in and out of the elevator on the Thursday and I made sure my door was treble locked and dead-bolted, that my telephone ringer was off and the blinds drawn. There were only two apartments per section of block and the one opposite me had lain empty for months whilst the newly-deceased owner’s descendants squabbled over what to do with it. I had considered offering to rent it - it would be somewhere to put Carlos when he visited – but then I heard that it had been sold at auction to a company from Luxembourg.

The voices through my steel-plated door were muffled, but distinct enough for me to discern the flat tones of a couple from the North of England, possibly Yorkshire, who seemed to speak no French whatsoever judging by the way they shouted at their French removal men. They were definitely not from Luxembourg. I did not relish the presence opposite me of people who not only spoke my language and therefore might wish at some point to communicate with me, but who felt the need to buy their apartment through an offshore vehicle. Their fiscal imprint would be even smaller than mine, which meant that even before I met the Wisemans I was wondering what it was exactly that they had to hide.

‘Beautiful day’, said Jack Wiseman, rolling up the sleeves of his stripy
Thomas Pink
shirt, obviously straight out of the box, the factory-folded horizontal crease resting just above his stomach. ‘Beautiful country. Been here long, George?’

‘Forever.’

‘Aaah. You’ll speak the lingo, then. Me and the wife have no idea – really, I tell you – no idea how to speak Frog. None. You fluent, George, in French I mean?’

‘Yes I am, I suppose.’

‘
The reading as well as the writing?’

‘
Yes…Jack. Both of them.’

‘
You could help me out then, maybe, if there’s something I can’t make head nor tail of? You know, a bill or something?’

‘
Putain
’, I said to him smoothly, a smile never leaving my lips. He looked at me quizzically and smiled back.

‘
You trying to be funny, George?’

‘
I said I’d be delighted to.’

‘
Oh. That’s kind, that’s kind.’

I looked around at the piles of cardboard boxes in the Wisemans’ apartment. I’d made the executive decision to pre-empt an unwanted visit from them by delivering a housewarming gift. My bottle of Bollinger had been much appreciated, in particular by Mrs Wiseman, who tried, unsuccessfully, to hug me as I handed it over.

‘
You working, still?’ asked Jack Wiseman, watching me over his fizzing flute of ice-cold bubbly.

‘
No.’

‘
Nice.’ He took another sip. ‘Very nice indeed. At your age too. How old are you? Forty? Forty-five?’

‘
Something like that.’

‘
You’re a young man. Lots of time ahead of you.’ Jack stood by the balcony door but I noticed he didn’t venture outside, despite the fact that it was a sunny day with only a gentle breeze. ‘I’d like to retire of course…and let me say we’re very comfortable,
very
comfortable’ – at this point he rested his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly – ‘but I can’t just leave my clients and bugger off now, can I?’

Mrs Wiseman walked in smiling with a silver tray of ginger biscuits and Kit-Kats.