Out of Orange (9 page)

“No. I haven’t got an itinerary yet. I’m not even certain yet I am going anywhere.” I told her I was simply trying to make sure I had someone I could trust with my cats.

“What are you going for?” I guessed Piper had heard the bullshit story that I worked for someone in Paris.

“I’m a smuggler.” This sounded so much nicer than saying I was a drug mule. She didn’t laugh, so she clearly didn’t think I was joking, and she hadn’t turned to stone, which kind of describes what I imagined people might do when I told them. I had shared my secret with a few others by then, not just Phillip. Nobody I’d told had freaked out yet though. Everyone just thought it was cool. But this was the first time I would tell someone about the trap I thought I was in.

Piper was slow to respond, but when she did, she didn’t seem to mind my occupation. I explained my predicament a little more, that I really hoped to figure out an alternative to going on another trip, and she was very sweet about it. She assured me that she would take care of the cats. She told me I was crazy when I offered to pay her, I didn’t have to pay her to do that, and she would stay at the house with them.

I felt like I had made a new friend and it surprised me that I had misjudged her so completely before getting to know her. She was no snob. She was very sweet, quite possibly even a little shy. I felt like I could trust anyone who loved cats so much. I know, crazy, but that’s the way we cat people are. Piper listened to my adventurous tales and the unlikely series of events that resulted in my having the tales to tell. I told her I felt like something bigger than myself was at work in my life. It was all too unreal. She agreed completely, and I think
she even bought into the idea; it would mean something bigger than her was also at work in her life. I had just made her my confidant after all.

We went to eat pizza and ended up going our separate ways when Phillip finally found me and was ready to address the big emergency I had called him about. His sudden appearance and demand of my attention probably seemed a little rude to Piper at first. But I apologized for it and sent her on her way, telling her I needed to let Phillip know she was in the loop but that first we had to deal with the situation I had explained earlier.

Phillip and I discussed my newly amplified fears and got extraordinarily drunk. One too many drinks while discussing our possibly unsolvable problem made it impossible for me to ride my motorcycle back to my apartment, but it did wonders to douse the fuse of my explosive emotions. Fueled by Dewar’s and sodas, Phillip and I came up with a great idea to save our own butts. We would find people who wanted to do what we had done and pretend we were the ones doing it!

Phillip and I simply opened our big mouths up and spilled the beans to people we thought might be interested. When someone we told our story to responded the way Phillip had when I’d told him about my trip and wanted to do it themselves, we added them to a mental list of possibilities. Very soon, we had a small group of friends who knew our secret and wanted a chance to do what we had done. You know what happens to secrets. The first two people who wanted to give it a go were interested because of the adventure, a couple of people were bored adrenaline junkies, and a couple of others needed money. Everybody wanted expense-free travel. I think one was either a sociopath or suicidal or some combination thereof, so we stayed away from that one. What none of our new recruits were was poor, desperate, or stupid. They all came from good families, and that is what would make it so easy. No one would suspect any of these people to be drug smugglers. They came off as educated, privileged, law-abiding yuppies, because that’s what they were.

Beyond the desire to go play outlaws and globe-trotters for a week
or two, they also had to meet some basic standards, and of course, Phillip and I believed we were experts on profiling the perfect drug smuggler, given our vast experience of just one trip together. They had to be old enough to hold a job that would take them overseas or old enough to be traveling college graduates. We told them enough of the real story, the many un-fun parts, and the danger that Alajeh might be to scare them off. Though we would do everything we could to keep it from happening, if anyone did have to meet Alajeh, there would be no easy way for them to get out. If Alajeh found out what we were doing, he would have to meet them, and our hope of using them to do our work would be dashed.

We explained that this last fact was why we were doing what we were doing, finding our stand-ins. We had both been like our recruits at one point, wanting to go on an adventure, make a little money, and be done with it. What we could offer them was a way to do that without making the same mistake we had made. If someone we did like was still eager to go, with all the negative information disclosed, we had a recruit.

Most important, there were no threats made. As long as everything worked out, they were also free to leave us at almost any time they chose. Heck, we would even pay the change fee for their return ticket if they chickened out. We never thought too hard about failure; I guess we didn’t think it was possible.

Phillip and I put our plan in motion. I was to take two of our volunteers to Chicago, pick the money up, escort them to Europe, pick up the drug-stuffed jackets, and put our friends and their nice new jackets on a plane back to Chicago. Phillip would leave Northampton a week after us and meet them coming into Chicago. He would deliver the drugs and get the payment, then pay our friends and finally send them home. A couple of weeks later we would do it all again, but with me in Chicago and Phillip in Europe.

In this arrangement, Phillip and I would no longer have to smuggle drugs. We were only in danger of being busted for drug possession, and that for only however long it took to retrieve the drugs from our friends and hand them off to Alajeh’s folk. It would look to
Alajeh like Phillip and I had taken two trips, back to back. He would at least stop bugging us for a minute. We had put a great deal of thought into this plan and we were fairly certain we had devised a brilliant escape route; on the way out we might make a little money and meet some adventurous people like ourselves, all while making everyone involved very happy. Sooner or later Alajeh would decide we had traveled so much that our odds of getting busted were too high. We couldn’t be his winning horses forever. We would be out.

The best part was eliminating our own risk, except for that tiny little window of time when we were actually in possession of the heroin. If we made this work, we would be fine, even if it took a little while to completely exit. We thought we were genius escape artists, the fucking Houdini twins.

This was our
Mission: Impossible
. There were a lot of variables to juggle that determined whether or not our seemingly simple plan could work, but we were motivated. Phillip and I were too scared to do it again ourselves. We thought that Alajeh could make us do it if he wanted to, and though he seemed to know we would not get busted, we were both convinced he was wrong. His repeated assertion that as long as we followed his rules, we would be taken care of, even if we did get nabbed by Customs, was not very reassuring. His rules included only two acceptable exits from his service. The first was going to jail quietly were he ever wrong about our not getting busted. The second was reaching an as of yet unknown magic number of trips taken. After that, we would be considered too high risk. How this sum was determined and by whom, I have no clue. I did know about an international flight watch list—that if you were placed on it, you couldn’t do the smuggling anymore—but I had as little insight into how Alajeh would have access to this list as I did the calculation for the number of trips it took to make the list.

There was always the possibility that we were being ridiculous. Maybe Alajeh wouldn’t follow through on these perceived threats. Maybe it was all just an act, meant to play with our imaginations and maintain control of us. We had considered this, hoped and wished for it. But what if we were wrong? It wasn’t our own lives we
thought we were betting with; it was my sister’s life and whomever Phillip had offered up as his so-called emergency contact.

The most important factors required in order for this charade to work were that Alajeh never find out what we were doing and, at the very least, we had to break even and not lose money on the trips. Our friends knew better than to expose the operation to anyone if they decided to back out or got caught. First of all, what did the recruits know to tell? The name that we called him and country of origin. The name wouldn’t have proven very useful, since it apparently wasn’t even his real name. Second, if they were caught by U.S. Customs, they would be waiving their access to good lawyers and their fat bonus for getting busted and staying quiet. Yes, there was a bonus for that. It came from Alajeh and we hoped never to have to make that claim. If that ever happened, we would be in deep shit, having to tell Alajeh not only what we had been doing in secret but also that our stand-ins, whom he didn’t know about, had been caught.

We knew there would be enough start-up cash for two airline tickets to Paris or Brussels and a modest stipend for living expenses for two. But three of us would be traveling, not two: Phillip or me with the two recruits. The modest stipend made a dent in costs, but we were not going to ask our friends to stay in the dumps that Alajeh’s stipends afforded. Phillip and I had to foot part of the bill for each trip, up front. This was part of the deal with our recruited friends. If all else failed, they would get the trip of a lifetime for free. Our friends would be risking getting caught and going to jail for a long time, maybe even as long as two years. That is what we had been told a first-time offender would face.

I finally placed a second call back to Alajeh for trip dates. We had an excellent plan, two perfect candidates, and we were ready to go. We had four other equally qualified candidates in the batter’s box, also prepared, when Alajeh said “Go.”

Until that happened, Piper, the kitties, and I hung out almost every day. She stayed overnight at my house sometimes, sleeping in my bed with me. There was no hanky-panky there, unless you count her and Edith or Dum Dum’s snuggling as such. Piper and I were becoming
friends, but that is all. She had a much closer relationship blossoming with my cats. I had been right about her being their godparent. She was perfect for that job. She was a very intelligent and serious woman, she wasn’t interested in becoming a drug mule, and I assumed she knew better than to get involved with me. Nonetheless, she was rapidly becoming my good friend and that was exactly all I needed. I was trying to avoid a recurring theme in my life up to that point. I would break up with a girlfriend, go into a tailspin, and fall directly into a new relationship as bad as or worse than the one before.

Piper’s presence in my life made it easier for me to manage the void. I had been a tomboy growing up and my friends had usually been boys. Interestingly, most of them turned out to be gay too. My mother once questioned if there was something wrong with our neighborhood. I don’t know, like perhaps it was in the water. But the point is, my friendships with girls were always complicated. It seemed like every friendship was based on one having an attraction to the other. It was rare to find a friendship where I felt there was a sort of equal ambivalence. That made it so much easier just to relax and hang out.

Piper was fine with not being invited to participate in any capacity other than as my cat sitter. She had a very calming effect on me, not just on my cats. In telling anyone what I feared might be in store for me if the plan I had failed, it somehow felt less likely to fail. In fact, I started feeling pretty optimistic about things, like I had it all figured out.

Phillip and I stumbled a little bit on the first obstacle to our seamless plan. We learned that the route was changing a lot and the method a little. We were told we would be starting in Jakarta, Hong Kong, or Manila. The trip was no longer a simple hop over to Europe and back. Now it was two hops. Our original plan, where only one of us traveled abroad with the recruits, was bungled. We would also be carrying two pieces of luggage each now. The method we had previously used, where jackets were secretly packed with heroin, was being retired. A new method was starting where the luggage we carried had the heroin packed inside its lining.

Starting out on the other side of the planet on a route we had never taken made us nervous. We had looked on a globe to find Jakarta. Phillip knew approximately where to look; I had no clue. Jakarta was a city on an island in the middle of a bunch of islands, between the Indian Ocean and the Java Sea. All this was between China and Australia. We were to fly from one of these very distant cities—Jakarta, Hong Kong, or Manila—wait for a week, collect our parcels there, and then make our way back to Chicago by way of a brief visit to Europe. It was double the complexity, risk, and expense. But it was more than double the reward. Definitely enough to pay the recruits, stay at fancy hotels, buy all the tickets, play, and still probably walk away with as much as we had made carrying jackets from Europe to Chicago.

By the time Alajeh announced our departure date, meaning it was time to go to Chicago, collect our travel money, and begin our journey, my fridge was no longer empty. Piper had loaded it up with healthy foods Edith and Dum Dum had never seen in our house, like yogurts, fresh spinach, and fruit juices. My cabinets weren’t bare anymore either. She had food stored there too, including the new healthy brand of cat food she had found for my cats. My apartment felt more like a home, and it had been a while since I’d felt like I had more than just a place for me and the cats to sleep.

She stayed over the night before I was due to leave Northampton. In the morning, when my travel companions arrived at the house before dawn, we all loaded into a car Phillip had rented to drive us to the airport in Boston. I remember getting warm fuzzies, watching Piper wave goodbye from my porch while we did our last minute do-we-have-everything checks. I watched her go back inside to the cats in my bedroom and turn off the light as we pulled away. It was nice to have a home with someone in it to return to. I felt so much less alone in the world just knowing I could pick up a phone and call my house to talk to my sane friend Piper. I think Piper probably observed my comings and goings like her very own made-for-TV movie, not as the reality she should have been running from.