Cocaine

COCAINE

VOLUME ONE

by

Jack Hillgate

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Published in the United Kingdom by Delacheroy Books in 2011

Copyright © Delacheroy Films Limited 2011

Jack Hillgate has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of biding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Delacheroy Books, Hanover House, 14 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HP, UK

About the author

Jack Hillgate is a writer of books and screenplays.

He lives with his family in Europe.

Also available as an eBook by the author

The Jew with the Iron Cross

The Criminal Lawyer

COCAINE

Volume One

‘
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’

George Bernard Shaw

1

October 1990 – Quito, Ecuador

They didn’t chew coca leaves anymore, at least not in Quito. Coca-leaf was out, beetle-nut was in, the plethora of brown-toothed smiles and constant spitting, the omnipresent sucking of jowls eking out the last atom of sickly brown juice. A disgusting habit, but it didn’t trouble me nearly as much as all the teenagers with grisly little moustaches carrying guns in the back pockets of their jeans.

At a bar, any bar, they would sit on stools and the guns would edge slowly out of their pockets whilst they sipped
aguardiente
and smoked fake Marlboros. The presence of those battered, Russian-issue pieces of metal had the effect of ensuring absolute
politesse
at all times, fewer fights than we used to get on the Holloway Road. I’d like to see the middle-aged, red-faced, pot-bellied pricks in their yellow puffa jackets try it with just one of my stumpy dark-skinned teenagers, but the pricks were four thousand miles away, eating chips with dirty fingernails and catching the night-bus to Tufnell Park. They would wilt fast at this altitude; unfit, overweight and starved of vindaloos and doner kebabs. They would fail to see the point in traveling four thousand miles to learn Spanish and teach English, which is what I was meant to be doing.

The German,
Franz or Heinz
, looked ill. He chain-smoked with yellow fingers and addressed the two Americans in a grating voice.

‘
You know vot a kilo is wort?’

‘
Look man – ‘

‘
You know?’

‘
What? Like, ten thousand?’

‘
A kilo of pure in Northern Europe is worth up to sixty thousand my friend. Maybe more.’

‘
We talkin’ US dollars?’

‘
It is the international currency of this trade. This is elementary.’

‘
Fuck off you dumb kraut. You going into business?’

‘
I might just do this. You will see. You will see me one day in my lim-ou-sine’ – he stretched out the word gloriously, as if giving it
Lebensraum
– ‘gliding past your shitty Volkswagen. Then you will know.’

‘
What? What will I know, kraut?’

‘
You will see.’

Franz or Heinz
coughed and his body doubled-up. He rested his head on the dark brown trestle-table and spat out a large globule of green gunk which he wiped away with his sleeve.

Kieran must have been watching me before he decided to sit down. He had dark hair, high cheekbones and large, round, almost feminine eyes. He was thin and tanned and from British Columbia. He wore black, the only one of us to do so, favouring military-style sneakers, cargos and a thick woolen jacket with a high collar. In another part of Ecuador he might have passed for a guerilla, but in
Hotel Gran Casino
he looked a little out of place, just like the rest of us. We were displaced vessels, sailing around on planes and buses and visiting cities for no reason other than we’d looked them up in a book and decided to go there.

We were treading water, all of us, but there is only so long you can tread water before you freeze, or succumb to cramp and drown, or, if you’re lucky, someone pulls you out.

March 2007 – Cannes, South of France

The sweep of the Bay of Cannes is best viewed from on high, from atop one of the monolithic apartment blocks that rise above Cannes
Californie
and give a one hundred and eighty degree view of the coast-line, all the way from the Esterel to the west and Cap D’Antibes to the east. My camera – a Nikon – had a powerful telephoto lens and I could pretend to take panoramic shots of the skyline while looking into the windows of the other apartment blocks and villas.

My car was sitting fourteen floors beneath me in its own little home, my twenty-year-old white Porsche 911 with the removable hard-top section that car manufacturers like to call a Targa top. The word made me think of my car as my girlfriend, topless and pale with a dark underbelly. My only friend. I didn’t own a property anymore. The apartment, with its white carpets, sweeping glass windows and mozaic-tiled bathrooms, was a rental. The tax man couldn’t grab anything if you left a small imprint, and I was very clean and careful to always remove my shoes before entering.

The sun had left marks on the doors of my American refrigerator and I had taken to wearing sunglasses inside as well as out because of the iridescent solar glare. The electric blinds made me claustrophobic and sometimes stuck, which meant I would have to call Pierre and part with twenty euros. Pierre didn’t know my real name. No-one did. He called me George, or Monsieur Milton, depending on whether I paid him more than the standard call out charge.

An apartment had been the right choice, I think, because of its anonymity. A villa, a house, can only have one owner. A block, or complex of blocks, faceless, concierged, marbled, clean, can have hundreds of owners or temporary inhabitants. TS Eliot could have written ‘Four Quartets’ in a domain similar to the one I live in. I can see him sitting just there, on a bench, looking out over the tennis courts, the sculptures and the immaculate pool, writing about people coming and going with all their Michaelangelo-ing.

I have to be very careful, as I approach the early years of my fourth decade, to ensure that I have something to look forward to as well as something to look back on. Carlos has said he is coming. He has promised me. He looked impossibly thin the last time I saw him, his teeth had blackened, in fact I think one had fallen out, and his wheat-free Vegan diet led me to stock up on fruit and vegetables and cigarettes, always cigarettes.

I made him smoke outside on the terrace because I didn’t want the smoke to mark the white carpet or the newly-painted white walls. I only took up smoking again in an attempt to keep busy. It was the interminable waiting that depressed me. It had to be done, there was no other way, but this waiting and waiting and waiting was destined to make me go quite insane if there was nothing else other than white carpet, white walls and the odd excursion in my four-wheeled girlfriend, the beautiful Portia with her throaty voice and tight rear end.

The local English theatre company put on a play every three months and I attended each performance religiously. The Cannes Film Festival in May was a good place to get lost, a swarm of sweaty bees buzzing around the nests of the Majestic, the Martinez and the Ritz-Carlton. The darkened screening rooms were the only places I removed my sunglasses. There were other things too, like the weekly Farmer’s Markets. They had the semblance of life, the semblance of movement and action, whilst in reality none of these little jaunts was more pleasurable than sitting on my toilet with my eyes closed, feeling the gradual release of pressure from my bowels.

2

October 1990 – Quito, Ecuador

I sank into my stale bed after a fourth day without a shower. I thought about the last three hours on the dark wooden benches and trestle tables and the casual way Kieran had introduced me to Juan Andres Montero Garcia.

‘
Si, si. Podemos hablar espanol.’

I gave a thumbs down sign.

‘
My Spanish is terrible.
Horrible
.’

‘
OK. I try. Why you here?’

‘
I’m traveling for a year. Teaching, learning. We like that sort of thing in England – we like to see the world.’

Kieran sat there with his set of spongy juggling balls, eyes locked on the Newtonian motion of their trajectories.

‘
How do you two know each other?’ I asked Juan Andres.

‘
El canadiense
? Kieran? I meet him last week. Here in
Gran Casino
.’

‘
Are you a guest here?’

‘
No. I not.’

‘
Do you live here? In Quito, I mean?’

‘
No. I not live here.’

‘
Are you Spanish?’

‘
Colombiano.’

‘
Oh right. What do you do in Colombia?’

‘
Nada
. Nothing.'

Juan Andres took a long gulp of beer. Kieran stopped juggling momentarily, letting the sponge balls fall to the trestle table. He grinned at me cheekily.

‘Juan’s a refugee. Like you and me.’

‘I’m not a refugee. I’m broadening my mind, that’s all.’

‘Me too’, said Juan. ‘You been l
os Estados Unidos
?’

‘You mean the United States?’

‘
Si, claro.’

‘
Yes, I have. Great place.’

‘
So you say,
claro que si.’

‘
Claro que si
.’

‘
Que chevere!
Now you speak Spanish.’

Kieran started juggling again, his mouth hanging open, watching the fall and rise of the balls. Juan Andres shifted on his section of bench and put the beer to his lips.