Cocaine by Jack Hillgate Page A

so.’
    ‘My family, they call me Ricardo.’
    ‘Ricardo?’
    ‘ Rico . It means rich.’
    ‘Shall we, like, call you Rico?’
    He seemed to think about this for a moment.
    ‘No. You can call me Juan Andres.’
    Neither Kieran nor I argued with this. We each took a sip of water and continued down the hill, following Juan Andres/Rico as he headed for the solitary old farmhouse that only came into view around the next bend in the track, a modern garage block attached to one end.

12

    Franz or Heinz was twenty-seven years old but he looked more like thirty-five. He had been an arrogant, argumentative child in Germany, growing up as he did in Dusseldorf, an unremarkable town made even more unremarkable by the Allied bombing in World War Two. The Altstadt , with its little bars, restaurants and basement clubs, had been his home after he was thrown out of school for smoking marijuana inside an old Trabant parked at the bottom of the football pitches. Nearly ten years of buying, selling and using drugs had turned his face a grayish hue, and his shoulders were hunched, his muscles slack and ugly. Franz or Heinz was not an attractive man.
    He smoked sixty filterless cigarettes a day and helped to distribute porn from a small lock-up garage. When he and his business partner Agatha, a muscular woman with a crew-cut, received the shipments, often from Holland, Franz or Heinz packaged them up and wrote out the recipients’ addresses. He bought the reams of thick brown paper wrapping and the stamps. He collected the funds and he showed Agatha how to turn a hundred Marks into five hundred by diluting the drugs they sold in the Altstadt. They passed relatively unnoticed, a slightly odd-looking couple wearing parka jackets and Dr Martin’s boots but no different to the thousands of other teenagers and twenty-somethings whose version of cool was to get blind drunk or stoned as quickly as possible in order to forget what a mess their lives were in.
    Franz or Heinz was letting the sun get to his face for the first time in a long time. He was sitting in a taxi-cab outside a smart apartment block in Cali at approximately the same time that we were arriving at Juan Andres’s family home a few hundred miles to the north. The block had a high metal fence and a security guard stationed in a little booth by the electric gates. A private compound of expensive apartments, newly built and, from what Franz or Heinz could tell from his vantage point in the back of the musty old Chrysler, almost deserted. There were parking spaces for forty or fifty cars and only three of them were taken. Many of the windows in the six-storey block were simply thick sheets of glass beyond which there was no sign of furniture.
    He looked down at the address on the sheet of paper.
    ‘You…you wait, yes?’ he said to the driver, getting out of the cab.
    ‘ Quinietos vente-cinco, ’ said the driver, pointing at his meter.
    ‘You say five hundred and twenty-five you fucking wop?’, said Franz or Heinz. ‘Wait for me. Ten minutes. Diez minutos .’
    The driver shrugged and Franz or Heinz pulled himself up to his full height, tried to straighten his slouch and walked confidently to the sentry standing at the main gate main gate.
    ‘Speak English or German?’ asked Franz or Heinz.
    ‘ No senor .’
    ‘I want Senor Lisi ’, said Franz or Heinz as he slipped a ten dollar bill into the sentry’s hand.
    ‘ Si, claro. ’
    Franz or Heinz walked through the car-park and into the white-tiled foyer. The elevator door was open waiting for him and he rode the small metal box to the sixth floor. He got out into darkness. He pressed the timer switch on the wall, which lit the corridor, and he made for the door at the end, apartment number 606, the Cali home of one Senor Gustavo Lisi. The money was heavy, weighing down the right pocket of his jacket. It was air-conditioned inside the block, but it hadn’t been in the taxi and Franz or Heinz could feel the clamminess on