ZeroZeroZero

by Roberto Saviano

  No matter what name you choose, she’ll come when you call.

  7.

  THE PUSHER

  “It’s bitter on the tongue, and you’ll feel like you’ve just been given novacaine.”

  It’s the most common way of consuming coke in the Andes. Strip the central veins from a few leaves, put them in your mouth, and chew them slowly, wetting them with saliva and mashing them into a ball. Then add a pinch of ash—slightly alkaline—from the burned plants. It goes by various names, tocra and llipta being the most common.

  “If you do basuco it means you’re really in a bad way, because basuco’s the waste product from the extraction process, and it’s made with harmful chemical substances.”

  Basuco is what prison inmates use, because it’s really cheap. It often makes its way behind bars on the wings of a homing pigeon. Somebody on the outside paper clips a little bag under the bird’s wings and trains the bird to fly to a window, where a prisoner will be delighted to receive it, either for himself or to sell. Sometimes the pigeon’s wings are so loaded with the stuff that it crashes into the prison wall. Basuco is made with the worst quality ingredients: brick dust, acetone, insecticide, lead, amphetamine, and red gas. It’s an intermediate product. The leaves are cut, then the paste is extracted from them. Basuco’s the by-product of the second phase of production, the crude product, but some people don’t seem to mind.

  “If you do snow, you have to add hydrochloric acid to the paste and treat it with acetone or ethanol.”

  Snow is cocaine hydrochloride. Whitish, bitter-tasting flakes that are ground into white powder. You snort it, or at most shoot it up, usually twenty, thirty, even fifty milligrams, though regulars might get up to a hundred milligrams a hit.

  “If you do crack you have to add to snow a watery solution, made up of ammonia and sodium hydroxide or sodium bicarbonate, basic substances in other words, and then you filter the whole thing.”

  Crack is smoked in a special pipe, usually made of glass; it heats up and then you inhale the vapors. Or, more often, it’s smoked together with other substances, such as marijuana, tobacco, or phencyclidine—angel dust—but you have to mix it really well first. It works fast, in just a few seconds, and it’s highly addictive: The drug dealer’s dream and the drug addict’s nightmare, is what they say about crack.

  “To freebase, you have to dissolve the mixture with ether or other volatile solvents, but then you have to wait till the solvent evaporates.”

  As with crack, you need a special pipe, a water pipe or narguile (hookah). Freebase, which is also called “rock,” takes effect immediately; you start feeling euphoric as soon as it reaches your brain, but a little later you become irritable, partly because the effect wears off in a few minutes, making you want to get high again.

  “Erythroxylaceae. That’s what the primary material is called. I’ll give you fifty euros if you can say it without stuttering.”

  The unpronounceable Latin name of this family of plants is the common denominator for all forms of cocaine consumption. This plant family has more than 250 species, but two in particular interest me, because they’re where cocaine comes from: Erythroxylum coca and Erythroxylum novogranatense. The leaves of these plants contain from 0.3 percent to 1.4 percent alkaloids, including the tropane alkaloids that produce the effects of cocaine on your brain. Erythroxylum coca is native to the Peruvian Andes, but it now flourishes even in the tropical zones of eastern Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Its main variety—which is also the most common one—is Huánuco, Bolivian coca. It’s also the most prized: Its leaves are big and firm, dark green with yellowish tips. The second species, Erythroxylum novogranatense, comes from the mountainous regions of Colombia, the Caribbean, and northern Peru, areas that are drier, more arid. Erythroxylum novogranatense has two principal varieties: Colombian coca and Peruvian coca, the latter is called Truxillo; its leaves are smaller and more tapering than Huánuco’s, light green with grayish tips. But you don’t need fancy lab tests to identify these two species. Just put a bit in your mouth and chew: If you feel a slight numbing effect, you’ve got a good one, one that contains alkaloid. Huánuco and Truxillo, the protagonists of global commerce.

  • • •

  So many names to say the same thing: cocaine. Cocaine, which travels from producer to consumer, which goes from leaves to the white powder, which is passed deftly from hand to hand. From chemicals to street life. From the Andean farmer to a pusher who, once he’d explained his products, talked business to me:

  “The target. Walk around Milan, Rome, New York, Sydney, and you have to slalom your way among men who are packaged in suits selected by fashion managers—that’s what people who know these things call them—they choose quality fabrics, how many stripes, how much space between them, their initials monogrammed on their fashionable business shirts. One hand in their pocket, the other clutching their iPhone, eyes focused six feet ahead so as not to trip, or step in dog shit. If you don’t get out of their way, they’ll run right into you, but they can’t say ‘excuse me’ or even gesture courteously, because then they’d lose the flow, and everything would go to hell. Eventually you learn to weave around them, like in those old video games where you swing your spaceship around with a touch of the joystick to avoid getting hit by the asteroids that are flying at you. Same thing: You rotate your chest and your shoulders follow, turning sideways, and you slip past, barely brushing the guy’s cashmere jacket, and your gaze lands on his sleeve; he’s missing a button, and he sees that you noticed it and thinks you think he forgot and that he’s not a true gentleman, but I know that an open buttonhole is one of the characteristics of custom-made menswear, the sign that you’re part of an elite. I dodge him and then lengthen my stride, and he keeps walking straight ahead, talking the whole time, and the word I keep hearing is ‘target.’ The target has to be identified, chosen, hit, bombarded, made to surface.”

  That’s how the pusher talked to me. He’s sold a lot. And not on some street corner, either. A pusher’s almost never the way you imagine he’ll be. That’s what I keep saying, when I write or when I talk to someone about this stuff: It’s not the way you imagine. Pushers are seismographs of taste. They know how and where to sell. The better the pusher is, the easier he moves up and down the social ladder. There’s no such thing as a pusher for everyone. There’s the pusher who sells on the street, with a monthly paycheck and an assigned zone, who deals to strangers. There’s the pusher who delivers right to your door; all you have to do is text him. There are kid pushers. Nigerians, Slavs, Maghrebs, Latinos. Just as an aristocratic lady would never step foot in a discount store on the outskirts of town, there are pushers for every type of customer, pushers for gentlemen and pushers for down-and-outs, for rich students and day laborers, for wallflowers and extroverts, for space cadets and scaredy-cats.

  There are pushers who get their goods from a “base,” which is usually made up of four or five people. Bases are independent cells with strong ties to organized crime, because that’s where the drugs come from. Bases are intermediaries between criminal organizations and street pushers; they’re the ones who supply the stuff already cut, ready for retail, and they’re an insurance of sorts for the organizations: If the base fails or its members get arrested, the next level up doesn’t feel the effects, because those down below don’t know enough about them. The bourgeois pusher, on the other hand, has a direct relationship with an organization affiliate, but he doesn’t get a regular paycheck. He has a sort of deposit account instead. The more he sells, the more he earns. And it’s rare that he ends up with any unsold goods. The bourgeois pusher’s strength lies in the fact that he can create his own personal workforce over time. He uses fake names with his clients, or if he’s already known, he’s selective about who he sells to. When he can he prefers to hire people who have their own circle. The circle is made up of people whose day jobs are something other than dealing: The pusher supplies them, and they use
their own contacts to create a regular clientele, usually made up of friends, girlfriends, lovers. The bourgeois pusher’s workers never sell coke to someone new. It’s a layered organization in which the pusher knows only the people closest to him and can never grasp the whole chain. That way, if someone were to talk, only one person would pay. That’s the way it always is in the world of cocaine. You want to know as little as possible.

  At the bottom distribution level is the retailer, the one at the train station or on the street corner. He’s like a gas station. He often keeps balls of coke in his mouth, wrapped in plastic or tinfoil. If the police arrive, he swallows them. Some dealers won’t risk having the plastic break and their stomachs becoming a painful sore, so they keep the balls in their pocket. Retailers make their fortunes on weekends, Valentine’s Day, or when the local team wins. The more there is to celebrate, the more they sell. Like wine bars and pubs.

  The pusher who taught me how to choose a target thought of himself as a pharmacist rather than a cocaine dealer:

  “Every business has its target; the formula for success is in finding the right one, and once you do, you have to unleash all your firepower on it, drop the napalm and swallow up needs and desires, that’s the goal of the modern man who dresses according to the canons of the fashion manager. It’s exhuasting dealing with a fragmented market, where the niches keep multiplying; they come and go in the space of a week, replaced by others that maybe last even less, and you have to anticipate them, prepare your weapons in time; if not, you risk firing your precious napalm on empty territory. I attract my target. Targets, rather—plural—because, even though there’s only one product, the needs are many. So a woman came to see me this morning, she was probably pretty cute years ago, but now she’s all skin and bones, she doesn’t look so healthy; I wouldn’t fuck her even if she paid me; the only signs of life on her are her veins, they bulge out all along her forearms, her calves, her neck, but underneath she’s all flabby; it’s like she has chicken skin. She told me her name is Laura, a fake name, obviously, but she’s got nice, high, round cheekbones that light up her face, I really like cheekbones; they’re the sentinels of the face; they either let you in or repel you, it depends. In the case of Laura, they invite familiarity, and in fact, she told me once that at her gym she heard there’s this quick, easy, and—all things considered—fairly risk-free way to lose weight. It’s true, I said; why go buying those sci-fi gadgets for your abs, or running in the evening, and then eating only protein because some French luminary decided that’s the way it has to be? Laura’s sentinel cheekbones relaxed and she smiled at me. I’ve seen her every week since then, and every time those beautiful cheekbones seem like they’ve been sanded, and now those sweet sentinels of her face are like menacing halberds.

  “It was Laura who introduced me to the Connoisseur, one of those snobs with shabby clothes, his Moncler torn and full of burn marks, who when they greet you, even if it’s for the first time, they pull you close, press their right shoulder up against your left, like some kind of tribal salute of belonging, then they pat you on the back, all very cool. He never wanted to tell me his name, not even a fake one, call me ‘friend,’ he says, as if we were in some alleyway in the Bronx. I nearly laugh in his face, but I control myself, and I have to even more when he tells me he wants some Pearl. The Connoisseur’s referring to the most precious blow, 95 percent pure, maybe more: It’s silky to the touch, creamy almost, and so white it shines like a pearl. I’ve never even seen it, some people say it doesn’t exist, others that it’s super rare because it’s still made by hand by a small group of campesinos who use only two tools: time and patience. Time for the leaves to mature and patience to wait for the right moment to harvest them. But it doesn’t end there, because then you have to press everything by hand, package it in virgin oil, no impurities or noxious substances, work it with acetone, ether, and ethanol, never with hydrochloric acid or ammonia; you don’t want to risk damaging the active ingredient. If you do it right—ten days of work, sweat, and swearing—you get that pearly tone that’s so sought after. Of course I have it, I say to the Connoisseur; I don’t even try to steer him toward something more feasible, like Fish Scales; it’s not as pure as Pearl, but it has come my way, and I can say that its shine really does remind you of a freshly caught fish, and I don’t even dream of pushing him toward more crude varieties like Almond-flavored, or toward Stone—even though it is 80 percent pure—and I refuse even to take into consideration variants like Cat’s Piss or Mariposa. Guys like the Connoisseur have granite wills and—luckily—zero expertise; if not, he wouldn’t come back after I palm off some mediocre stuff cut with glass powder on him. It sparkled, he tells me every time, and I nod knowingly; I don’t even have to pretend anymore, it’s so natural now. Obviously I don’t always say yes; I can’t let word get around that you can always get everything from me. I’d risk inflation; I’d risk losing control of my targets, and then someone ends up having a heart attack.”

  Cocaine can be altered—cut, or stepped—with various substances, which get added to the drug either during production or, more simply, mixed with the final product, with the white powder. There are three kinds of cut: active cuts, done with substances that produce the same psychoactive effects as cocaine; cosmetic cuts, with substances that reproduce some of cocaine’s collateral effects; and inert cuts, with products that increase volume without creating damaging effects. People may think they’re snorting good quality stuff, but they’re really paving their nostrils with concrete. Active cuts are made with amphetamines or other stimulants, such as caffeine, that enhance and prolong the effect of the drug, as in the case of Chalk—low quality cocaine that’s dressed up with amphetamines. Cosmetic cuts use pharmaceuticals and local anesthetics, such as lidocaine and ephedrine, that reproduce some of the same collateral effects as coke. When you just want to increase the volume to get more doses and make more money, you use innocuous substances, such as flour and lactose. The most commonly used substance for inert cuts is mannitol, a laxative gentle enough for children and the elderly that, other than in appearance, has nothing in common with cocaine.

  “One of my most loyal customers just got back from the United States. He says blow there’s 30 percent.”

  “Thirty percent?”

  “Yeah, the active ingredient is 30 percent. But I say it’s a load of crock. I know places in Paris where it’s 5 percent. And in Italy some pushers sell balls of coke where the active ingredient’s practically nonexistent. But they’re real cheats.”

  Over the years I’ve seen just about everything there is to see in drug distribution. In Europe the average ranges from 25 percent to 43 percent; some countries come in lower, Denmark at 18 percent and England and Wales at 20. But these figures could change at any time.

  The cut is where the real money is made, because it’s the cut that makes a line of coke precious, and it’s the cut that ruins nostrils. In London some bourgeois pushers hide quality coke in garages to put on the market when drug seizures make for a shortage of goods and as a consequence everybody starts cutting it, lowering the quality. At that point you can sell the really good stuff for four times as much. In an economy in which supply and demand fluctuate so rapidly, the cut becomes the discriminating factor. The distributor can cut it, with the approval of the Mafia family. The base is allowed to cut only in extreme cases, and only with the authorization of the distributer. The pusher who cuts is a dead pusher.

  • • •

  “I took some courses; I crashed one of those clinics where people who want to quit are bullied with statistics, like 25 percent of heart attacks in people between the ages of eighteen and forty-five are caused by my product. If you ask me, these courses spew a lot of bullshit. But I did learn something. It acts on your neurons, makes your nervous system go haywire, and over time it damages it. In other words, it pisses your brain away. And that’s not all: It’s dangerous for your heart too; all it needs is an extra chaser to
make it collapse, and if the product’s washed down with a Long Island or a Negroni or a Jack Daniel’s, or accompanied by little blue pills, well, then it’s like stepping on the gas on a curve. You also have to consider that cocaine is a vasoconstrictor; it constricts your blood vessels, anesthetizes you. All these effects happen pretty much right away, depending on how you do it: If you shoot up, it starts taking effect before you even realize it; if you smoke crack or freebase, it’s a little slower but still really fast; and if you snort, it hits you a second later.”

  I ask him about the good moments.

  “The good moments? It wakes you up right away, raises your attention level, gives you energy, you’re less tired, you don’t even feel the need to sleep, eat, or drink. But that’s not all: It improves your sense of self, you feel happy, you want to do things, you’re euphoric, and any pain you might have disappears. And you lose your inhibitions, so it ups your sex drive, makes you more daring. And what’s more, coke doesn’t make you feel like a drug addict. A cocaine addict’s nothing like a heroin addict. People who snort cocaine are users, not junkies. They satisfy a need and then get on with life.”

  But then he starts right in on the bad moments.

  “If you do it a lot, you heart goes crazy, you have panic attacks, it’s easy to get depressed, you become irascible for no reason, even paranoid at times. Since you don’t sleep or eat much, you tend to lose weight. If you snort a lot for several years, you risk fucking up your nostrils. I know people who had to get their nasal septum redone because they snorted so much. I also know people who died: One dose too many and you have a heart attack. It’s common knowledge, after all; it’s not like I discovered hot water or something, but when I heard them say that if you use my product you can’t get it up anymore, I was, I mean, it’s not like I have that sort of problem, but a good chunk of my customers come to me precisely for this reason, and they all keep coming back; they’re really charged up, they tell me they fuck for hours, they have orgasms that electrify them from their heads to their toes, they do things they’d only ever seen in porn movies, things they’d never even dreamed of doing—a whole tribe of horny customers who, before they met me, would come after two minutes, and now they’re really having a grand time. I had to understand, but it’s not like I could ask them flat out, guys don’t talk willingly about certain things, and so I asked a woman friend of mine, she’s real tough and asks me for a bit of blow every now and then, but only because she’s finishing up med school and has to study all night, because she works as a cashier during the day to pay the tuition. With me she calls herself Butterfly, because she has a butterfly tattoo on one cheek; I asked her to show it to me, because I didn’t believe her, but she always refused. The fact remains that we agree to meet at the usual place, and as usual, she’s all elusive because she has a million things to do, but I stop her, ask her how things are going with her boyfriend, and then I wink, I feel like an idiot, but I don’t know how else to broach the subject, and luckily she understands and asks me how come I want to know, what’s it to me? I tell her I’m just curious, that she’s important to me, her pleasure’s important, and I wink again when I say pleasure, but this time I feel less idiotic, like I’ve gotten her attention. What’s on your mind? she says, and at that point I tell her the situation, that I heard it said that my product isn’t so good for those kinds of things, and so I’m conducting a sort of market survey, that’s all. And she does something real strange: She takes my hand and drags me to a bar, orders a couple of beers, and lights a cigarette. The bartender sees her and tries to tell her she can’t smoke, but she tells him not to bust her balls, so he retreats behind the counter and goes back to serving cappuccino. And she tells me about her boyfriend: At first it was really fabulous, so good it was almost scary, he’d have these amazing erections, Guinness world book of records, sex that would make the Italian Stallion jealous—but then it was all over. His dick, she says, is as flaccid as a sausage left to boil too long; it takes hours for him to get hard, and if she tries to touch him, it’s like he doesn’t even feel it; it’s like the heat’s gone and his blood vessels are pumping ice water. He’s superdepressed about it; all he does is apologize; he can’t even masturbate when he’s alone. So now he’s taking Viagra, a small dose at first, just twenty-five milligrams, then he upped it to a hundred, but it’s no good; he still only gets half hard, and he can’t come. There’s just no way to make him come, and it’s painful, all that built-up energy that can’t explode, it hurts like hell, and fucking for hours, waiting for him to finally blow, isn’t exactly fun for her either. He’s being treated by an andrologist, he confessed to using my product, and the doctor didn’t bat an eye; he said lots of people come to him with the same problem, and the only solution is to ditch my product, but it’s not easy. Butterfly talks freely, and I start putting the pieces together, and I realize I’m raising an army of sexually depressed men who just keep upping their doses on the remote chance they’ll get hard. Fuck, I wanted to shout, if it weren’t such an inappropriate thing to say right then. And then Butterfly tells me that women use it too, for the same reason, because it gets you aroused, really revved up, but from the point of view of sex it’s a disaster, because one of the product’s side effects is that it’s also an excellent anesthetic; it’s one thing if you rub a bit on your wisdom tooth that’s coming in, but if you stop reaching orgasm, which is already difficult enough under normal circumstances, well, that’s a whole different story. Not to mention, Butterfly continues, the things you do and then regret, like that time her boyfriend confessed to her that he was a bit too high one evening and ended up with a trans, that he’d always fantasized about it but never had the courage to do it. The courage? I say, and Butterfly nods, then after a minute of silence I ask her if she’ll let me see her tattoo this time, and she smiles and stands between the tables, unbuttons her pants, and lowers her underwear. What can I say? She wasn’t lying.