Cocaine (3 page)

‘
Kit-Kat?’, she queried, in soft tones.

I reached out and took one, my first in more than five years. It tasted good.

‘
Yes, my clients keep saying to me, Jack, they keep saying, Jack, you’ve played an invaluable role in my investment strategy. The day
you
retire’ – his finger prodded my chest gently for emphasis – ‘is the day
I
retire.’

‘
You must be very good at what you do.’

‘
I am.’

‘
You help people with their investments?’

‘
I teach people how to invest. I show them an infallible method of not only making money, but avoiding losing it as well. Infallible.’

‘
Intriguing. Mrs Wiseman?’

‘
Yes dear?’

‘
Thank you for the Kit-Kat.’

‘
My pleasure, dear. Jack loves ‘em, bless his heart. Has he shown you his certificates?’

Jack Wiseman’s eyes lit up. I felt I couldn’t disappoint him.

‘
No…'

‘
It’s Jan. My name.’

‘
Jan’, I smiled, ‘I’d simply love to see them.’

Jack bounced over to his desk and picked up a framed certificate emblazoned with red wax scrolls and spidery calligraphy. He handed it to me, beaming and as I read it I realized I was now standing opposite ‘
Lord Wiseman of Littlehampton
’ which also happened to be the name on each of the three business cards he laid out carefully on the desk in front of me, advertising his involvement with a bank, an import/export company and a company that appeared to sell titles, aptly named ‘Peer-to-Peer’.

‘
I don’t like people knowing, normally’ said Jack. ‘I’m a very discreet person. That’s why my clients trust me with their money.’

I read the string of letters after his name. I looked to my right and there stood Jack Wiseman holding out another certificate for me to inspect.

‘
First University of Central Zurich’, he said proudly. ‘Two years for that MBA.’

‘
Konnen Sie Deutsch?
’

‘
Pardon me, George?’

‘
It doesn’t matter. I just thought, Zurich being German-speaking…?’

‘
Distance learning, George. I did everything over the Internet.’

‘
Very wise.’

‘
I like to think so. Now…did you have a Kit Kat?’

‘
Yes thank you. I must go now, Jack. I just wanted to meet my new neighbors. I’m sure you’ll be very happy here.’

‘
As long as we’re safe’, he beamed, putting his arm round his wife, ‘then we’re happy. A man like you knows what I mean.’

As I watched the sun set across the bay, the flat sea reflecting the creeping orange tendrils of light better than any mirror, I found myself wondering if Jack Wiseman was very, very stupid or very, very clever and I concluded that the only way I could know for sure was to give him a little test. It would give me something to do whilst I was waiting for Carlos.

October 1990 – Quito, Ecuador

The room seemed to close in on me, the low third-floor ceiling musty and black with fungus, the mattress as spongy as a semi-deflated lilo. My Swatch, the one with the fluorescent dial, told me it was two o’clock in the morning. I had six or seven hours to sleep and six or seven hours to decide whether or not to put my life in the hands of a gurning Canadian and a man who was meant to be dead.

Juan Andres hadn’t managed to finish his story – the whole evening had turned sour after a fight broke out between
Franz or Heinz
and the two Americans. But the offer still stood. Us, not ‘me’ anymore. Kieran seemed to be mesmerized by the whole notion of traveling to places where there were no
turistas
. Travelling in threes. I wasn’t too keen. Kieran didn’t seem in the least perturbed by Juan Andres’ story and he failed to draw the inevitable conclusion that Juan Andres Montero Garcia was not a safe person to be around. When the fight broke out he slipped into the shadows of the courtyard and when the local police turned up Juan Andres had gone.

‘We’ll see him tomorrow’, said Kieran. ‘He’s a good guy. Terrible things have happened to him, you know, English?’

‘I gathered.’

We drank for a while in silence, just the two of us. The teenager behind the bar, a pistolette jammed into the rear pocket of his creased blue jeans, passed round a bottle of cheap
aguardiente
after the police had left, to numb us all into believing we were having a good time. The police had taken
Franz or Heinz
with them for questioning. After a few minutes watching Kieran juggle, I asked him what he was doing in South America and he recounted his reasons without ever taking his eyes off the circulating black balls with their orange and yellow stripes.

Kieran Macdonald was originally from Vancouver and his father, so he told me, was rich. He also told me his father was an asshole. Two years before, Kieran had flunked out of school and taken a job as a house-painter. He was now twenty-four years old, the same as me, our birthdays one month apart. He told me he had played semi-professional soccer for a few seasons and coached a female soccer team until they managed to find a more ‘traditional’ coach.

‘I fell in love with the goalkeeper’, he said, chuckling. ‘Can you fuckin’ believe it?’

I couldn’t help smiling.

‘
I’m always fallin’ in love with
someone’,
he said, this time in an American redneck drawl. ‘Guess I’s dumb or summat.’

‘
Or mebbe you’re just an asshole’, I said, in the same redneck accent.

‘
Guess I am.’

‘
Guess you are.’

He let the juggling balls fall to the table, we raised our tiny thick glasses of clear fifty-per-cent proof alcohol and knocked them back in a toast. We gasped, our tracheae momentarily shocked by the rough potency of the lubricant and then, when the fire had subsided, Kieran giggled inanely.

‘
What’s so funny?’ I asked him.

‘
Your face, English. A picture.’

‘
And yours.’

‘
You hungry?’

I nodded. I was.

‘
Then let’s get us something pleasant to eat in this goddam town.’

‘
You mean, we go out? Now?’

It was past midnight and the streets of Quito were paved with wiry teenagers with bulging back pockets.

‘
Are you afraid of something?’ said Kieran, leering at me, a face-splitting grin stretched across his cheekbones which revealed his slightly goofy teeth.

‘
No’, I lied.

We walked through the darkness, the stillness exacerbated by the thinness of the air and the biting cold. It had been over seventy degrees a few hours earlier, but now it felt like Cambridge on a November evening; cold, a little damp, and breezy. We found a bar selling cheap whisky and rum, as well as the staple
aguardiente
. I looked at the bottles, lined up in front of us. Luckily, they also sold empanadas, little savoury pockets of pastry filled with meat.

‘
Soy vegeteriano
’, said Kieran to the man behind the plastic counter. ‘Cheese?
Con queso?
’

The man thrust something into a microwave for thirty seconds and handed over four piping-hot packages, wrapped up in fly-paper.

‘
Dos queso, dos jamon
.’

‘
Muchas gracias.
’

We paid him and headed outside. The empanadas were too hot to eat immediately and so we made our way to the main square, a large open space bordered by impressively wide government buildings and filled with cars and bicycles, although how anyone could cycle round Quito was beyond me. It was comparable to riding a bicycle in San Francisco but with less oxygen at your disposal. We sat on a wrought-iron bench, facing the distant lights of the hills surrounding the city. I thought I could see a plane coming in to land.

‘I got into a bit of trouble, you know, back in Vancouver. Dad told me best thing to do would be to lie low for a few months, you know, for it to blow over.’

‘For what to blow over?’

Kieran took a bite into his cheese empanada and spat it out again just as quickly.

‘There’s fuckin’ meat in here! I told him I was a vegetarian. Fuckin’ loser!’

Kieran passed me his packets of empanada flypaper.

‘Fuckin’ South America!’

In sympathy I waited for my empanadas to cool a little more.

‘What trouble?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, the usual.’

‘I’ve never been in trouble.’

‘You stick with me, we’ll have an awesome time.’

I tried to envisage what we looked like, two young men sitting on a bench at one o’clock in the morning with lousy empanadas, staring at the lights, thinking about tomorrow. I don’t think we looked like we were having an awesome time, as Kieran had put it. I think we looked like we didn’t have a clue.

‘
What trouble?’ I asked again.

‘
You really wanna know, huh?’

‘
Yes. I’m…interested. I won’t tell anyone, Kieran –‘

He put his head between his legs and took a deep breath.

‘
I was arrested. For dealing a little bit of grass, you know, nothing big, just a bit here and a bit there, nothing fancy.’

‘
Still not legal in Vancouver then?’

‘
Nope. And they found some coke on me too, which really fucked me up. That’s when dad had to get in the hotshot lawyers to say I was having a nervous breakdown, that I’d undergo treatment at a clinic in Europe, that sort of shit.’

‘
But they went for it?’

‘
Yup. They surely did. Right now, Ryan, I’m meant to be at a facility somewhere in the Swiss fuckin’ Alps, walking round like a frickin’ Moonie.’

Kieran had such an unusual expression on his face that I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, and I thought he was going to hit me but then he put his arm round me and laughed even louder.

‘
I like you Ryan’, he said. ‘You’re good-looking, for a man.’

‘
You too.’

‘
We need to get ourselves laid by two pretty girls, wouldn’t you say?’

‘
I agree.’

We looked around the square. A fat old woman, about four feet tall, waddled out of an alleyway and crossed the square not far from us.

‘
You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?’ asked Kieran.

‘
Well, she is the perfect height’, I said in our redneck accent.

We both started to chuckle and then I got out the bottle of
aguardiente
I’d stolen from the bar where we got our empanadas.

4

Honesto

A few days after the hit, Suares called Juan Andres Montero Garcia to the eleventh floor for a meeting. The two men sat at one end of the rectangular room, Juan Andres on the black leather sofa, hands clasped, head down, Suares in his tall black swivel chair, arms folded.

‘You are troubled by recent events, yes, Juan Andres?’

‘Of course I am. When I think of Pepe – ‘

‘Pepe did not follow procedure. That is why he was killed.’

‘Do we know who killed him?’ asked Juan Andres.

Suares shrugged, as if to say it could have been any one of a hundred individuals or organizations.

‘
I would have called in, Mr Suares, but I didn’t know Pepe was going to buy such an expensive car. I knew he couldn’t have the money for it. I knew –‘

‘
Listen to me, Juan Andres. There is no point being clever about this or trying to analyse what he knew or what you think you know. Sometimes there are no answers. This is Colombia, not Disneyland.’