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.
5 The Day of Living Dangerously
THE FIRST TWO RECRUITS, Craig and Molly, had no objection to a new travel plan or method of transport. They were thrilled but nervous about going to the other side of the planet. Craig and Molly were a two-for-one deal. Not cheaper; they just wouldn’t go separately. Craig had long curly blond hair and shocking blue eyes. He was a soccer player, Hacky Sack marvel, mountain biker, hiker, semi-vegetarian, and retro-hippie child of the eighties. He was also twenty-three years old, a dishwasher, and a waiter, and he had just graduated from college.
Molly was a year behind him but smarter. She was a tiny thing, with a mane of black wavy or curly hair, depending on the weather. It was the same length and cut as Craig’s, and they synchronized the up and down do days. Neither seemed to have mastered the whole hairbrush concept, but they were adorable in spite of it. Craig had perfect white teeth, and Molly had a Lauren Bacall smile with the sexy gap. She was also a soccer player, Hacky Sack marvel, mountain biker, hiker, semi-vegetarian, and retro-hippie child of the eighties. I never asked why they were doing this. I just assumed it was like going on a trek to Tibet, just free with a big payday at the end.
There was a slight delay in Chicago, waiting to learn our endpoint was Jakarta and not Hong Kong or wherever else Alajeh had said it might be. Craig and Molly played Frisbee on Michigan Avenue and we wrangled tickets to Paris, the first stop. The helpful travel agent Henry had taken me to on my first trip now told us the airfares for Paris to Jakarta and gave us prices for a couple of nice hotels there. Our finances would survive the major game change as long as Phillip and I were willing to risk everything we had left of what we had made so far. Because this was such uncharted territory, we decided we would both escort Molly and Craig. Therefore, we had to cover all costs for our two recruits, and it was pricey.
We had already told Alajeh that we would do the trip, so the only alternative to investing all we had was to just give up and do it ourselves. Compared to our fear of ending up in jail, being broke wasn’t much of a risk, so we went all in. We would make the money back and then some at the end of the journey. We were paying Craig and Molly fifteen thousand dollars each for their parts, but we would be getting more than that for the delivery. Enough to cover the expenses for all of us, pay them, and make a few thousand dollars each.
Our companions got their vaccinations and visas in Paris, but we decided that we wouldn’t hang out there, which had been part of the original and simpler plan. Go to Paris, hang out, have a ball, swing up to Brussels by train, replace passports as needed, get heroin-stuffed-jackets, and come home. No, this trip wasn’t going to be that simple. We got on the first flight we could to Jakarta from Paris. It was a seventeen-hour flight via Singapore.
While Air France still had a smoking area, the move to a nonsmoking world had begun. Phillip and I hated the surprise of the nonsmoking flight this airline sprang on us. By the time we landed in Singapore for a brief layover, I was like a rabid dog ready to gnaw and tear my way out the door. I made it all the way to the exit, only to discover I couldn’t get off the plane to smoke during our non-nonstop flight to Jakarta. I sulked back to my seat and tried to sleep through the last couple of hours of the trip.
I didn’t know what to expect from Indonesia. My sum total knowledge of this corner of the world consisted of a vague recollection of The Year of Living Dangerously. The movie was set in Jakarta in the seventies and featured lots of political mayhem, misery, and poverty. Jakarta fit my hazy expectations. It was a sprawling metropolis that, for some reason, reminded me of the street scenes in Blade Runner’s futuristic version of a city at night, with drizzle or sewage sprinkling all the time, all dark with neon everywhere. It might have been the smell that made me think of that, since there were no flying cars or genetic mutants about. But it was dirty, stinky, and overcrowded beyond my immediate comprehension.
We stayed in the fancy and safe resort the travel agent had recommended, a Western resort—“Western” as in American extravagance, not cowboys and Indians. We were only going to be there for a week and we had promised our companions a five-star trip. There were acres of lush green landscaping, flowers, a huge swimming pool, and an outdoor café all nestled inside the resort walls. But it was planted smack-dab in the middle of awful, overcrowded slums that went on for miles. I expected the overwhelming stench of the city to vanish inside the walls of our oasis, but it didn’t. It hung in the hot, moist air around us, contaminating the pristine beauty with the smell of cholera and starvation.
Phillip and I realized how prudent the decision was for both of us to come to Jakarta. It would have been unnerving to try to negotiate this leg of the trip alone. I knew Jakarta was too far outside of my comfort zone. The culture was too foreign, the city was too huge, and—whereas every city has pockets of poverty, the desperation that most Western cultures pack into their projects—in Jakarta, the impoverished masses aren’t segregated in their own zip codes. Ten feet from our resort, thousands of human beings lived like refugees, in makeshift housing, alongside the stinking canals overflowing with raw sewage. Someone once compared the beautiful canals of Amsterdam to Dante’s concentric circles of Hell. The comparison seems more fittingly applied to Jakarta.
With the exception of a couple of seedy nightclubs, a McDonald’s, and a mall, we mostly stayed at the resort. I stopped trying to pretend we were some seasoned veterans of the t
hird world. Besides, it turned out Craig had traveled the third world quite a bit with his globe-trotting parents. We hadn’t expected our Hacky Sack hipster to have such a prestigious provenance that our field trips out into Jakarta would be a bore.
Craig didn’t look to me like someone who had traveled anywhere but to Dead concerts or soccer championships. But he had. This was information we should have known prior to letting him come with us. I didn’t know diddly-squat about Indonesia, but I did know a little something about smuggling heroin. The extensive travel already recorded in his passport meant he would not be able to use his current passport to go through border control carrying drugs anywhere, not even Paris, and that was supposed to be our next stop. Stamps in a passport from certain countries created a red flag for Customs agents or border guards anywhere. Craig’s passport had so many of these stamps already, a thorough questioning and search were almost guaranteed.
The Golden Triangle is not a geometric shape or a math calculation used to craftily identify likely smugglers of poppy products. It is a region made up of countries known to be cultivators of the pretty flower. Craig had stamps from Turkey, China, and Myanmar. It didn’t matter that the stamps were all dated from over three years earlier, as he had argued.
By then, we had all seen the bags they would be carrying—three of them anyway. The true nature of this black leather luggage was very well concealed visually. From the outside they looked like nice black leather garment bags. But a simple search would be the end of the line for Craig. A close look at the bags’ interiors would reveal the bags were hiding more than clothes. There was a big lumpy bulge under the leather lining, clearly concealing something substantial, like a mashed bag of flour might be stuffed in the interior of each bag.
Craig was understandably aggravated by the situation. He had just traveled halfway around the world with us, only to discover it had all been for nothing. Phillip assured him he had a better solution than his not being able to participate. He asked Craig to give him a minute to check out one detail. Without explaining what was going on in his head at the moment, Phillip said he would have his answer by morning and told Craig to relax, not to worry, that everything would be fine. I followed Phillip back to our room, where he finally shared his thoughts.
We hadn’t thought to ask any of our recruits about their travel histories. We didn’t need to for our original itinerary. It would have been corrected by “losing” the tainted passport and going to the embassy in Paris or Brussels to get a replacement. Problem solved. We had never carried the drugs out of the third world into Europe and then into the United States too. If Craig did this trick of getting a replacement passport in Jakarta, he would be okay going into Europe. But he couldn’t go to the consulate in Paris and say he lost his passport again so soon after, not without the possibility of raising a lot of suspicion.
The passport quandary worried me. I kept trying to put myself in Alajeh’s shoes and think what he would have expected me or Phillip to do after getting a stamp from Indonesia if we then couldn’t use that stamped passport going back into the States. It worried me that Alajeh probably expected us to lose the passport a second time in Paris. Was that safe or was this a suicide mission? These were the details that could become failure points. We had to resolve these first as if we were the ones carrying, then apply that same reasoning to our recruits’ predicament.
A consulate in Europe might know he had just done the very same thing in Jakarta. If they did know, they would surely make a note or something in the pages of Craig’s new passport, which would alert Customs agents. In 1993, our understanding was that government computers were not all connected to one another. We did know there was a watch list for suspicious travelers, but how and when it was compiled, we did not know. We had to assume a stunt like losing his passport once in Jakarta and again in Paris might raise some red flags and get him added to the list. If we were supposed to be using a clean passport in Paris, then both Molly and Craig were screwed. That would mean we couldn’t even make it to Europe. Game over.
Both Alajeh and Henry had told me about this database of suspicious travelers. Apparently, once a person was on that list, they were done. They could no longer be a smuggler because they would always be questioned and searched. This was a list Phillip and I wanted to be put on. When Craig’s issue came up, we thought we had found a much simpler way to solve our problem, one we hadn’t thought of. We could do exactly what we were trying to help Craig avoid doing and end up being put on the watch list ourselves.
At the moment, though, we needed our recruits to stay off that list or they wouldn’t be able to smuggle the bags in without getting searched. I realized that Alajeh could not have intended us to use clean passports in Paris. The first question they asked is where you just came from. Surely saying you had come from anyplace other than where the plane you just got off of had come from would raise more suspicion than one ugly visa stamp from Indonesia. That cleared Molly unless this was a suicide mission, but it didn’t resolve Craig’s populated passport issue.
Phillip explained his idea to me. We could use one of the other recruits that we had been planning to use on our next trip to complete the second leg of Craig’s trip. They could meet us in Paris and take Craig’s bag back to Chicago from there. Craig and the other recruit would then split the payment in half. The solution complicated our plans and meant more out-of-pocket expenses up front, but it would solve the problem.
Garrett and Edwin were Phillip’s friends from Chicago. More accurately, Garrett was Phillip’s best friend from their college days and Edwin was his boyfriend. Phillip had recruited Garrett, and Edwin was part of the deal. Phillip was able to get Garrett to agree to meet us in Paris to complete the trip. Craig also agreed, once Phillip explained it to him carefully.
A few days into our Jakarta stay, a new problem arose that might have exposed our whole scheme to Alajeh. Henry and Bradley unexpectedly appeared at the resort bar while I was having a wonderful and relaxing escape from everyone, waiting for a quick tropical rain to make its way through. I was sitting by myself in one of the big wicker rocking chairs that lined an elegant veranda on the opposite side of a series of French glass-paned double doors. The open doorways, punctuated by big picture windows of the same style beveled glass, made everything sparkle. The outdoors felt like it was inside, and vice versa, but the doors separated the veranda from the interior bar and obscured Henry and Bradley’s view of my location in the rocking chair.
The scrumptious veranda with stone floors, a beautiful hardwood ceiling, and gigantic slow-moving fans overhead flanked the resort’s main building. A long red oriental carpet stretched the entire length of the exceedingly long, narrow porch. The plantation-like charm was an odd juxtaposition to the green jungle-like fauna between the pool and the building but made a perfect perch for me and my frozen mudslide. Unfortunately, with all the glass between me and the guys, there was no place where I could really hide, so that was the end of my relaxing respite and the beginning of a problem.
Molly and Craig had taken shelter at an outdoor table under a protective canopy, by the poolside café. They were directly across the pool and beyond the sundeck. I had been waving wildly, trying to get their attention to come join me a moment earlier. But after I saw Bradley and Henry come in and walk to the bar inside, I stopped waving, turned my chair slightly, and sat down low in my seat. They were ordering drinks. Bradley faced my direction, but he was as blind as a bat. Henry had his back to me, but he kept scanning the room. My only exit would have been to either walk past them or past Craig and Molly.
If one pair saw me talking to the other, either way, it wasn’t good. I didn’t want Henry or Bradley to know what we were up to, and I didn’t want Craig and Molly to meet them and find out more than they should know. We had told Bradley about what we were planning once, back when the plan we were now executing had been just a drunk’s idea. Bradley had thought it wouldn’t work, but he would know what we were doing if he saw us with thes
e guys. It worried me that Henry might find out.
Bradley and Craig both spotted me at exactly the same moment and started walking toward me from their opposite directions. I lit a cigarette and rocked back and forth in the chair. I was like a deer in headlights, except for the rocking and smoking. This was really going to happen and there was nothing to do.
Bradley got to me first; he was closer. He was genuinely happy to see me. I learned quickly that they had arrived that morning and been sleeping all day. Wasn’t the resort beautiful? Wasn’t it amazing that we ran into each other? He was talking one hundred miles an hour. I watched Craig get closer. Henry had almost made them take a room at a cheap hotel in town, but they had changed their minds when they got a look at Jakarta. Bradley noticed the fellow approaching us and made a look-at-this-cutie kind of “Hmm.” The cutie, Craig, kept coming toward us and he stuck his hand out in a greeting gesture, which thoroughly surprised Bradley. Then Craig asked me to make introductions, which I’m sure confused Bradley.
I introduced Craig to Bradley as someone I knew from Boston. I didn’t want to tell Bradley he was from Northampton, so I tried to pass him off as someone I had miraculously bumped into on the other side of the planet who hailed from Boston. I told Craig to wait for me either back at his room or back at the pool café, as if we had plans to get together. I hoped Craig was smart enough to catch on. Bradley was a very smart fellow. If Craig corrected me and said Northampton, our secret would be no secret soon. I saw Henry was on his way over and he was also surprised to see me, but not pleasantly either. Thankfully, Craig got the message and told me it was nice to have run into me and left.
Out of Orange: A Memoir Page 9
