Two to Tango (Nick Madrid)

by Peter Guttridge

  Halfway through the journey the men changed into civilian clothes and stowed their weapons in sports bags.

  We moored at the same pier as before.They escorted us back up the dusty main street to the main hotel. Over a beer Harry explained our options. Or rather, lack of them.

  "I don't know how long you were planning to be down here. But if I were you I'd go back to Bogota on the next flight. There's a room here at your disposal.We've put your luggage in there.You got your passports and stuff? Okay, you got about an hour before you need to go to the airport. Then I'd get the hell out to the U. S. or Britain."

  "We were supposed to be down here for a week," I said.

  "Nix that. You were targeted and, for all I know, you may still be targeted." He paused. "We didn't get Porras.We think he did for your guide then took off. Listen-he didn't give you any indication as to his next destination did he?"

  "He said he was taking us farther into the jungle. But who exactly did you get? Did you get the girl?"

  "Look. it's not something I should be discussing but no, there was no girl. That's all I'm going to say."

  "I can't leave South America," I said. "I'm here working for the next month."

  "In the Amazonas?"

  I shook my head.

  "Well, at least get the hell out of the Amazonas. Then get a

  "A vaccination?"

  "Sure. It's like insurance.You buy one direct from the the kidnappers-it protects you from being kidnapped because you've already paid them."

  "How much?"

  "Okay for $100,000 you get maybe protection from a $1 million kidnap."

  "Wouldn't it be cheaper just to hire you guys to protect us?"

  "We're not in K & R."

  "K & R? I think I need a full time translator here"

  "Kidnap and ransom or kidnap and rescue depending on who you're talking to."

  "That's what you do?"

  "Nah. Bunch of ex-spooks do all that. Colombia busy."

  "Okay." I thought for a moment. "What about the authorities? Shouldn't they be told what happened?"

  "Sure we can do that-if you want to be tied up in red tape for the next month and be kept confined to barracks-probably literally-'til things get sorted out-but I tell you, sometimes round here it's best to do things kind of informally. There's a guy at the British embassy I'll put you in touch with. He'll debrief you but he'll keep it quiet."

  We showered and in the privacy of the bathroom. I checked as best I could I didn't have a fish stuck up myY-fronts.

  Harry, in T-shirt and chinos looking every inch the tourist, dropped us at the airport. He stopped ten yards beyond a drunk lying flat on his stomach on the pavement. People were stepping round and over him. He'd been rolled, his trouser pockets pulled out.

  "Shouldn't we do something?" I asked.

  "Just keep on walking," Harry said through the car window. "He's the customs guy who found the consignment of drugs the other day. He's not someone you want to be standing next to in the immediate future."

  He held his hand up in a little wave.

  "Okay friends-"

  "Thanks for all your help," I said.

  "No problemo-and in fact I'd rather you forgot all about it and me-forget we even exist."

  We took the next flight out. Looking out of the window at the rainforest spread out below me as far as the horizon, the Amazon threading through it, I sighed with relief.

  "I think I'm more your villa in Umbria type when it conies right down to it," I said to Bridget.

  She too was looking out of the window.

  "We're going to lose money on this you know," she said. "I can't imagine our insurance covers kidnapping and I don't think that spivvy yank will refund the cost of the unused part of our holiday, do you?"

  "What do you want to do when we get back to Bogota? I've got three days before I'm due to join the tour. We could go up to Cartagena to see your friend."

  "Meet the rest of the jumping Caribbean caiman family? No thanks."

  "Who is this friend you're being so mysterious about?"

  "None of your business," she said.

  Bridget's attitude puzzled me-hurt me, too.We'd never had any secrets from each other before, except for things I was really ashamed of that is. But she wasn't to be drawn.

  "I think Harry and his friends were mercenaries," she said in a transparent attempt to change the subject. I let her off the hook.

  "Mercenaries or SAS, what's the difference?" I said. "They're up against the drug barons I guess."

  "Nice ass," she said before putting on her headphones for the in-flight movie.

  Bogota isn't anybody's idea of a tourist town. Sprawling, polluted, with pot-hole roads and the most terrible slums alongside huge chrome and glass skyscrapers. Much of it comprises no-go areas for the tourists foolish enough to have believed the supplements and gone there in the first place.

  We had booked into the hotel the tour would be staying at. We were on the first floor in adjoining rooms. The lift was slow so Bridget and I walked up the flight of stairs.We stopped twice to catch our breath.

  The problems of altitude in Bogota had taken me by surprise. We were 2,650 meters above sea level. At that altitude air pressure is lower so each lungful of air captures fewer oxygen molecules. I assumed that with my yoga and all the breathing exercises I did I would scarcely notice.

  How wrong could I be? A couple of minutes exertion and if I didn't stop immediately I'd feel dizzy as well as rubber-legged.

  "This could kill your sex-life stone dead, Nick," Bridget gasped as we had made our slow progress to our adjoining rooms. "I mean you find it difficult to survive more than a few minutes shagging as it is. Imagine if you couldn't get your breath on top of that."

  I didn't respond to her cheap joke, partly because I wondered who'd been blabbing, largely because I'd been thinking the same thing. I followed Bridget into her room. She'd sent it on whilst we set off for the Amazon so the rest of her luggage was piled in here.

  Bridget was one of the last surviving travel divas, the kind that didn't think a girl could go anywhere without thirty-five items of luggage. The startling thing was that for a woman with so many clothes she could always look so dire.

  Playing the percentages there were obviously times when she looked okay but most of the time she looked like an expensive dog's dinner, leather and suede in bright colors and startling lengths combining to make her look like an expensive bag lady.

  There were bags of Colombian coffee on top of the televi- sion.We'd brought them into the country with us. Bridget had been told by a friend in London that you can't get a decent cup of coffee in the whole country because all the best stuff is exported. I'd been worried about customs-how mad would they think we were?

  I stood by Bridget's window and looked across at the hills beyond the wide highway. They were covered with wooden huts and other shelters cobbled together from cardboard, plastic sheets, and odd bits of tin. They were hovels of the most basic sort, leaning at odd angles or half collapsed.

  Beside them were these elaborate skyscrapers and apartment blocks - chrome and glass, expensive brick, lush hanging gardens.

  "All paid for by drug money," I said when Bridget joined me and handed me a glass of wine. "There's so much money from drugs awash in this country they can't figure out enough ways to launder it. Fifty percent of the money circulating in Colombia is being laundered one way or another. All building in Bogota is drums related. A place like this must be so deeply corrupt you assume everyone is on the take."

  We'd arranged to meet Harry's embassy contact at some club near the Presidential palace.We decided to walk. Okay, I decided to walk. Unwillingly Bridget swapped her five-inch heels for a pair of trainers.

  Within minutes of leaving the hotel we came to an army barracks, bang in the middle of the city. A row of tanks lined up on the square, guns pointing outwards. A tank either side of the entrance. Blank-faced young soldiers in puttees and polished boots, machine guns at the read
y.

  In the shopping area every shop had a guard, most of them armed.We saw a heavily armed guard-pistol at each hip, rifle at his side-giving fierce looks to the passers-by. He was guarding a dry cleaner's.

  "I read that when the drug people moved in on the coast in Cartagena they were very generous in what they paid people for their houses," I continued. "Then they went back later, said they had overpaid and demanded their money back. People had no alternative to selling of course.

  "You'd get a visit from a man who'd say he was going to buy your house. You'd say, `But it isn't for sale.' He'd say `You don't understand-I want to buy your house. It's an order not a request."'

  The rain came, sudden and hard. We dashed for the nearest doorway.We sheltered in the shop doorway and within five minutes a startling thing happened.The subterranean life of Bogota was pushing to get out. Sewers overflowed into the gutters, the gutters overflowed onto roads and pavements. I looked beyond the road to the hillsides packed with the shanty towns. Flash floods were running down the slopes, taking debris and garbage and the odd shelter with them.

  I was stunned by its immediacy. I watched in fascination as a heavy manhole cover in the middle of the road seemed like the lid on a simmering pan, bubbling beneath the pressure of who knows what disgusting stuff.

  The rain showed no sign of letting up. Our destination was only a couple of streets away.We were soaked by the time we got there. It was some kind of club. We pushed open the doors and went into a dimly lit foyer.

  We could hear a miked-up voice in the next room but not what it was saying. Then muffled applause.We went into a small room with a very small stage at the far end. A good crowd was sitting at tables with cocktails and beers.

  "Sorry mate, private party," a little man in an oversized jacket said in a low voice as he stepped in front of us to bar our way.

  "Didn't expect to hear a Burnley accent in Bogota," I said. "I'm from Ramsbottom myself."

  "Tupp's Arse by God," the man said, taking me by the arm. "You must be Nick and Bridget. I'm Ernest Beacon. I'm afraid you've just missed the show."

  "Tupp's Arse?" Bridget said with a curl of her lip. "Is this some kind of code you're speaking in? I thought you told me you came from Manchester."

  "Near Manchester," I said. "What show?"

  "It were a right belter, too," Ernest said, ushering us to a table. He was in his mid-forties, I judged, receding hair, round face, stocky build. He had on a jacket made of some really odd material. He caught me looking at it, leaned towards me.

  "Feel that lapel. Go on."

  I reached out and rubbed the lapel between my fingers. I frowned.

  "Deckchair material?"

  "Feels like it doesn't it?" he said, sitting back.

  He looked around the room.

  "All ex-pats," he said. "Pretty lively bunch of engineers from the oil industry." He pointed at a tall overweight man sitting beside a nervy woman in a black velvet cocktail dress that was as ill-fitting as Ernest's Jacket.

  "He's the head of a big airline's South American operation. That's his wife, Myrtle-hardly ever leaves her house and certainly never the city because she's terrified of being kidnapped. See her dress? That's a bulletproof dress she's wearing. Like my jacket.

  "Bulletproof clothing is very fashionable in Colombia this year, everybody is that terrified of death or kidnapping. That dress and my jacket can handle 32 calibre, 38 calibre, and 9 mm pistol-even an Uzi."

  "What's it made of?"

  "Christ knows-some compound five times stronger than steel. Hangs a bit loose at first but Myrtle tells me with her dress body heat moulds it round her breasts-"

  He looked at Bridget, no slacker in lung development, and got flustered.

  "They can bulletproof anything these days," he concluded weakly.

  "You're used to dealing with kidnapping?" I said.

  "In Colombia kidnapping is endemic. And there's nothing you can really do about it. Kidnapping is almost a national past time. Thousands of people, including dozens of multinational executives, are snatched every year. Some focus on fast food kidnappings-snatching some shopkeeper and giving him back pronto for a small ransom.You were very lucky. Usually if you're targeted, that's it, however much security you have. There's a whole K & R industry here.You know about K & R?"

  "Thanks to this experience."

  "Well, K & R is big business but it does nothing in the way of prevention. The K & R professionals give advice to newly arriving corporates-basically it boils down to don't get noticed. But really the K & R set-up is designed to do the business after a kidnapping. The job of the professionals is to get you back out alive. Provided you're insured with them."

  "So K & R is a kidnap insurance deal? How much does it cost?"

  "Conventional plan costs anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000 per person per year. Or you can buy a vacuna-you know about those?"

  "I know," I said.

  "What expats have to get used to here-and often can't - is the stockade life. Living in a secure area, guards outside your house, guards inside your house. Bars on the windows, locked gates everywhere.

  "You should see Myrtle and George's bathroom.The walls are machine-gun proof. The door is bomb-proof-steel, set in a steel doorframe, huge iron bolts-the works" He sniggered suddenly, showing long, yellow teeth. "If you're taken short and there's someone already in just have to wait your turn."

  I smiled politely. Bridget's mouth twitched, which counted as far as she was concerned.

  "The cost of preventing kidnapping is often higher than the ransom would be," he went on. "Myrtle and her husband are driven round in a Mercedes that's like something out of James Bond. It's bomb and rifle proof, has flip down gun portholes, and you can release an oil slick to throw off your pursuers"

  He leaned forward and whispered: "Don't tell them I told you but they both have homing devices implanted in their bodies." He sat back again. "But what's the alternative-there are thousands of kidnaps here a year and that means thousands of deployments, thousands of settlements."

  "As in?" I said, unfamiliar with the lingo.

  "Sorry, it's the language we ex- ScotlandYard people use."

  It worried me that Ernie-excuse me Ernest could be ex-Scotland Yard but then I've got a modern view of the way sleuths should work. It certainly didn't involve language.

  "A negotiation is a deployment, a ransom is a settlement," he explained. "It's a game over here-though a pretty serious one. But the same gangs negotiate with the same kidnap negotiators. Porras is known to most of them-first name terms.

  "You are in probably the most violent society in the world-drive by murders, kidnaps at traffic lights or road junctions, civil war."

  "Do the kidnappers ever get caught?"

  "Some, but only about 1 percent ever get convicted. More likely they'll be executed on the way to the police station"

  "So these kidnap negotiators-"

  "Have an 85 percent success rate with people that are insured with them. Their first rule is Preserve the Porcelain: keep the victim alive.The kidnappers want that, too.Although kidnappers have tried to ransom dead bodies, they know they get more money if the kidnapped person is alive"

  I swallowed.

  "Sounds like we were lucky."

  "Damned lucky. It's usually not a good idea to send in the men with knives in their mouths-too risky-or to involve the police since so many are on the take but Harry and his team were around at just the right time."

  "Why were they around? Who are they?"

  "The Colombian government has these stupid laws to try to sort out the kidnapping problem-kidnap insurance and negotiating with kidnappers is forbidden. Of course everybody ignores the rules but it means, in effect, that you are breaking Colombian law."

  "And Harry is who?" I repeated.

  "Best you don't know that. That's why I'm debriefing you here rather than at the embassy. I'd like this to remain unofficial, just as Harry is unofficial."

  "But he's working fo
r the British government?" Bridget said.

  "Negative"

  Ernest brought out a business card.

  "You've got my home number there. If you see Porras again or if you think you're in danger-call me day or night. You understand-day or night."

  I looked at him. He seemed remarkably relaxed for a man who spent every day under the threat of kidnap, possibly death.

  "How do you find a life for yourself here?"

  He smiled almost shyly.

  "Magic"

  "What-pulling rabbits out of hats?"

  "Have you read any Gabriel Garcia Marquez?"

  "Who?" Bridget said. If it wasn't in Vogue Fair, Bridget wasn't interested.

  "Sure," I said, not sure why Ernest had asked.

  "He's known as a magical realist but he's also Colombian.The world he describes-that mixture of magic and harshness, beauty and cruelty-isn't imaginary, it's Colombia.There are many things that are beautiful about this country and these people."

  Bridget at least tried to stifle her yawn.

  As we were leaving I asked again: "What is this place?"

  "The Bogota Magic Circle-we meet every Thursday. Come along if you're in Bogota next week"

  When we went back outside the rain had stopped but the air was sultry and smelled bad, the heavy clouds trapping the pollution in the city. We walked back as briskly as breath permitted to the hotel. When the sun was shining it was very hot but otherwise it was a constant chilly spring day in the city.

  As we turned the corner onto the street of our hotel I saw a solid-looking Mercedes draw to a halt out in front. I watched as a big man climbed out and staggered across to the hotel entrance. He stumbled on the three narrow steps before the door then pushed his way into the foyer.

  I recognized the drunk-for drunk he certainly was. It was Otis Barnes.

  Bridget went to her room to catch up on some sleep. I sat in the bar with a glass of wine and thought about Otis Barnes.

  He got into drugs in a big way in the late seventies and his music went ethereal. He produced some beautiful, spacey bal- lads.This was around 1978 just as I was getting into punk but I went with my dad to a couple of gigs. Otis would sit there alone in a spotlight and just lose himself in the long drawn out notes, the slurred vocals, the bent chords.