Rendezvous With the Fat Man

by Gail Sherman Jones

  “Wait till you see the souvenir she brought me. My class is going to trip out on a dried llama fetus called a sullu used for protection,” Gail shared.

  Jan stole a glance at her. “One of these days, I’ll convince my mom to open a shop with me to sell all the souvenirs I’ve sent her,” Jan responded.

  “Oh, she’ll never do that. It’s a full-time job just taking care of dad,” Gail countered.

  Ivy wandered over to Jan and handed her a pear from the basket. Jan was clearly ill at ease, getting antsy by the second. She accepted the pear and gave a half-hearted smile to Ivy. Clearly, she was not used to dealing with young toddlers.

  “I think you’re doing the right thing by traveling while you’re still young and healthy,” George said.

  “Sow those wild oats now. That way you’ll be ready to settle down when the time comes,” Barbara added.

  Jan stood up to get away from the child. “Not me. I’m never going to settle down,” Jan boasted.

  “Never say never,” Gail responded.

  Jan made a face before she stepped away and walked into the orchard without excusing herself. Everybody looked at each other in disbelief. Gail’s face turned red with embarrassment.

  “Was it something we said,” Barbara asked Gail.

  “More like something I said or did. I’m sorry about this. She’s always been different,” Gail apologized. She stood up and followed Jan into the orchard and found her sitting under a pear tree.

  “Well, that was rude,” Gail complained.

  “So was springing company on me. This was supposed to be our weekend together as sisters and catch up on five years of being apart,” Jan complained.

  “They’re my best friends and I wanted you to meet them. I didn’t think it would be a big deal.”

  “You could have at least asked me if I wanted to meet them. That would have avoided this awkward situation?” Jan answered.

  “You’re absolutely right and I apologize. Come on back. We’re all eager to hear more stories about your travels,” Gail pleaded with her.

  Jan shook her head. “I think I need to go.”

  “What? Why?” Gail asked.

  “I’m bored out of my mind. And I’m sure you’re bored, too, even if you won’t admit it to yourself. That’s why you have to tell my stories to your students and friends,” Jan said.

  “Stop this bullshit! You’re obsessed with your lifestyle being better than mine. Who gives a fuck? You always put up a wall between us. I know we had a rocky relationship in our past, but godammit, you gotta’ bury the hatchet.”

  “Stay with your friends. I’ll get my own way back to the airport.”

  “I can’t believe you wanna go. You’re acting like a prima donna bitch,” Gail responded.

  “I’m calling a cab,” Jan countered.

  “If you insist on leaving, I’ll drive you to the airport.”

  Jan turned around and walked towards the cottage.

  “Jan. Don’t go!” Gail pleaded.

  “Goodbye,” Jan responded.

  Gail stood watching as Jan entered the cottage to call a taxi and then walked back to her friends busy munching on sandwiches. She joined them on the blanket in an attempt to pick up where they left off.

  “So much for mending fences with my sister. I really believe Jan travels so much to run away from her personal issues,” Gail shared with her friends.

  “No explanation needed. Every family has that one ‘black sheep’ child,” Barbara responded.

  “At least we finally met her and know what she’s really like,” George said.

  Gail felt sad and disappointed that her attempt at reconciliation with Jan was a total failure. She was also embarrassed by Jan’s disrespect and treatment of her friends and the negative impression she left with them. It was an unfulfilled moment for everyone.

  She also realized how much she really didn’t know her sister. It seemed like the older Jan got, the more obsessed she became about her childhood memories of sibling rivalry, never letting them go.

  Fifteen minutes later, they saw a taxi pull up in front of the gate. Jan exited the house carrying her suitcase and walked down the long driveway to meet the driver. She briefly turned around to wave to Gail and her friends. Everybody waved back. And that was the last time Gail would see Jan for many more years to come.

  Chapter 9 — Here We Go Again

  It was time for Jan to let her hair down and celebrate the successful smuggle with Karen. All work and no play was not one of Jan’s mantras. She decided to have a ‘blow-out’ party with her stoner and coke-head friends.

  She made sure her guests had all the amenities necessary for a successful get-together; marijuana brownies, pipes filled with hashish, huge rolled joints with the strongest varieties of weed, lines of cocaine, bongs of all shapes and sizes, and platters full of other decadent food to satisfy everyone’s cravings when the munchies kicked in.

  While guests were having a great high time dancing to Parliament’s “Flashlight,” the doorbell rang announcing the arrival of another guest. It was Jan’s close friend Diane and her friend David, a gangly, red haired, blue eyed, hip-looking guy, with a gold skull earring dangling from his left pierced ear.

  “Hey, Diane, come on in.”

  “This is my pal, David. I thought you two might be able to work together.”

  “We’re in the same business,” David said.

  “Oh really. What type of work?” Jan inquired.

  “Drug smuggling,” he replied.

  Before entering the party scene, Jan locked arms with Diane and David and guided them down the hallway to her home office. “You guys come with me. I want to know more about David’s line of work.”

  They walked into her home office and sat on a huge sofa covered with an array of pillows. David pulled out a joint, lit it, and handed it to Jan.

  “This is the product I smuggle,” David said.

  Jan exhaled the marijuana smoke. “This is pretty mellow stuff.”

  “We fly a small Cessna over the Mexican border and dump it in a mile-long swath to friends below in the desert before landing for Custom’s inspection,” he described.

  “How do you keep the packaging from breaking apart?” Jan inquired.

  “We use an industrial heat sealer. It’s like an ultra-powerful blow dryer that melts and seals sheets of thick plastic or vinyl. It took a lot of practice to master the technique,” David responded.

  “They dropped fifty pound bales of pot from one thousand feet and never got busted,” Diane interjected.

  “You look so young. How old are you?” Jan asked.

  “I’m twenty.”

  “Amazing. Maybe we can work together. This packaging system might be useful with my product,” Jan replied.

  “What do you smuggle? Heroin?” David queried.

  “Hell no.” Jan opened her desk drawer and pulled out a vial filled with cocaine. “This is what I smuggle.” She handed it over to him to inspect. “You can make way more money for less work. As a matter of fact, I’m planning another trip to Bolivia in the next few weeks and need a mule to bring back a new batch of stuff. If you’re interested, I’d like to offer you the opportunity.”

  “Can I check it out?” David asked.

  “Do birds fly? Of course, you can,” Jan responded. She grabbed a small hand mirror from her desk and poured some coke on to it. Using a razor blade, she shaped three equal lines from the powder, then pulled out a $100 bill from her wallet and rolled it into a tube. Jan handed it to David and he snorted one of the lines. There was a long pause before he finally commented on the effects of the drug.

  “I usually only smoke weed, but the stimulating high of coke is outta sight. Let me think about your job offer and I’ll get back to you,” David answered.

  Diane and Jan snorted the
remaining lines on the mirror.

  “Okay, enough about business. Let’s go shake a leg,” Jan responded. They walked out of the room to join the raucous party-goers.

  Several days later, David called Jan to accept her business offer. He felt working together and combining their smuggling experience was a perfect fit for her upcoming trip. He also wanted to learn and compare the difference between working with cocaine as opposed to marijuana.

  Jan liked him immediately from the first time they met, especially because they were both experienced smugglers and knew the pitfalls and dangers of the trade. She respected David even more after getting to know him better, concluding he was shrewd beyond his years. And she admired his boast of how calm he was under pressure, a trait most necessary to thrive in this business.

  The first order of business was the purchase of an industrial heat sealer for $700. Under David’s direction, Jan tried to adapt its use to the intrinsic problems of cocaine storage. The sealer was a hand-held tool weighing about six pounds, with a tapered nozzle for precise direction of the air stream and a temperature control at the end with a range from 100 to 400 degrees. Different types of plastic required various temperature settings for bonding. An unsteady hand would cause burning of the plastic and an imperfect seal.

  They bought several types and thickness of plastic sold by the yard, looking for the ideal form that would work with cocaine packaging. It was a long, tedious process, requiring many hours of practice and experimentation. Too much heat could form a hole or a puddle of melted plastic. Too little heat and the bond would not adhere, splitting apart under the slightest pressure. Jan finally got the hang of it.

  They decided that the optimum design for packaging cocaine was row upon row of slim tubes formed from two overlapping sheets, similar to the appearance of corrugated cardboard. These would be sealed along the sides and the bottom, filled with coke, then sealed along the top. The coke would therefore be kept airtight and safe.

  Jan also devised a further scheme for carrying the drug through customs. She bought a MacGregor coat and leather bag for her friend Larry (a financially struggling college student), who was also going to act as a courier or mule for the trip. The coat was made of thickly padded corduroy with a plethora of fur trim on the collar, sleeves and along the bottom edge.

  With the aid of Jose Maria, a leather goods shop owner in Mar del Plata, Argentina, Jan planned to cut patterns from the plastic sheets, fill them with cocaine, and sew them into the trim and lining of the coat and leather bag. Jose Maria was an excellent craftsman and for the right price, he would do a superb job of concealing the cocaine to pass any customs inspection.

  Jan called Papi and told him when she and David would arrive in Santa Cruz, as well as communicating in verbal code of how much cocaine she wanted him to have ready; two kilos. This trip was to be her biggest score thus far.

  Her precautions were correspondingly elaborate, making sure to cover their tracks as thoroughly as possible. Most of all, she knew she had to be totally aware, to be able to observe everything, and not let the slightest detail escape her attention. One of her favorite sayings was “The line between paranoia and caution is very fine” and she much preferred to be paranoid and safe rather than merely cautious and caught.

  Jan was a perfectionist and quite demanding of others. She believed that she had survived as long as she did in the cocaine trade because of her observance of detail and demanded that her carriers be no less punctilious, and no less scrupulous about maintaining their cover. She would tolerate no slack from those who worked with her, and on several occasions in the past had flown into a violent rage when she felt her directives were being slighted or ignored.

  Being aware of people around her was critically important for Jan: their expressions, their movements, their vibrations. Of places: their construction, entrances and exits, the acoustics, and hiding places. Of insubstantialities: karma, the phase of the moon, her astrological forecast, and the reading of her tarot cards. She believed in taking chances, but only chances that were calculated, hedged, and had the odds stacked firmly in her favor. She knew that all her smuggles had a high element of risk, but she also knew that she stood the best chance of success if she planned well and kept the lowest possible profile.

  Like a drill sergeant, Jan went over all the arrangements in detail with her new mule, Larry the college student, making sure he understood where he was supposed to be and when. She made certain to rectify all the minor mistakes that Karen made on the last trip. Her main concern was to keep Larry as clean as she could. That meant excluding him from all the cocaine dealing and keeping him out of Bolivia altogether.

  Customs inspectors knew that Peru, Bolivia, and Chile were the cocaine warehouses of the western world and that people with passport stamps from those countries were much more likely to be smuggling drugs than from anywhere else. Consequently, future contacts with Larry had to be infrequent and always in Argentina.

  Jan and David planned to travel together the first leg of their journey starting from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires. As with her previous trip with Karen, she and David would purchase tickets for their connecting flight to Santa Cruz once they were in Argentina, using the duplicate passport switch to mask their travels.

  She would meet The Fat Man in Santa Cruz, while David waited at the hotel. They would then return to Buenos Aires, each carrying coke, with David carrying most of it. Larry would leave California a week after Jan and David and meet them there. The three would split up again; Jan and David going to Mar del Plata to meet the leather craftsman, Jose Maria and Larry taking an excursion to the ski resort in Bariloche.

  While in Bariloche, Larry was to buy as many souvenirs as possible to serve as proof that he had been there and to act as a diversion for customs inspectors. Then he would return to Buenos Aires and meet with Jan and David, pick up the coat and a leather bag that had been stuffed with cocaine and carry them through American customs. Jan and David would return to the States on the same flight but would not associate with Larry, merely keeping an eye on him. If anything should go wrong, they would be there to extricate him from trouble, or at least post his bail.

  On the flight to Santa Cruz, Jan and David sat in separate seats in different sections of the plane, never acknowledging one another and each took their own taxis from the airport to the hotel.

  David arrived first, checked in at the hotel and went straight to his room. Jan purposely delayed her arrival by asking the driver to stop at a roadside food stand to buy some fruit. She wanted to make sure that she and David didn’t walk in at the same time and appear that they were traveling together. Her concern about remaining inconspicuous was probably unwarranted, but Jan became obsessed with pulling off a flawless trip to correct mistakes made on her previous smuggles. After all, she started off with no knowledge about this business on her first trip, but learned so much since that time which served her well.

  It was agreed before the trip that David would keep a low profile, not leaving the hotel premises and spend most of the time in his room. He would pretend he was ill and eat all his meals there after ordering from the restaurant menu over the phone. This was the waiting game that all smugglers tolerated, no matter how boring the situation might be. David would have to accept his self-imposed room confinement and uncertainty up until the day they left for Buenos Aires.

  Jan checked in to her room and immediately called David confirming that she had arrived. This would be their last communication until she scored Papi’s cocaine, at which time she would bring it to his room so he could conceal it in his boots.

  She called Papi and arranged to meet that evening at Las Incas Night Club, owned by one of his friends. He had just returned from the jungle a few days before with a new batch of his product prepared for her arrival. All her smuggling plans for this trip with Papi were falling into place.

  To be ready and refreshed for her rendezvous with the
Fat Man, Jan decided to eat lunch at the hotel restaurant. Squeezing through the tables and chairs in the crowded dining room, she passed a corner table where two American men were sitting. They stood out with their crew cuts and suits and ties from the rest of the vacationing diners and local people. Glancing down, she noticed a book entitled “The FBI” resting on one of the chairs, and her heart began to pound. She looked over and quickly scanned the pair. ‘They must be FBI’, she thought to herself. They looked like Mutt and Jeff.

  One man was short and stocky with heavy jowls. The other was tall, slender, and not too bad looking. They watched Jan as she slipped into her seat with a plate filled with copious amounts of food from the buffet food selections. She caught them gazing at her out of the corner of her eye and that was all it took for Jan to lose her appetite and strike a little fear in her gut. After almost choking on a deviled egg, she signaled the waiter to bring a take-away box and the restaurant tab. Getting out of the dining room was the only thing on her mind at that moment, away from the prying eyes of the Americans at the other table. Jan paid her bill and left the dining area to return to her room,

  She tried to forget about the strange men in the restaurant as she munched on the take-out food while seated on her bed. With a full belly now, she decided to take a nap before meeting Papi that evening. Jan slept soundly for half an hour, when she was startled awake by a loud knock at her door.

  “Who is it?” Jan asked. She was not expecting David or any visitor.

  “My name is Sam,” a strange man’s voice answered, “I saw you at lunch in the restaurant.”

  “Yes?” she replied, getting out of bed and walking to the door, “What do you want?”

  “I was wondering if you’d come and have a drink with me,” he said, “You’re American, aren’t you?”

  Jan opened the door and stood facing the taller of the two Americans she had seen at lunch. Her pores were beginning to tingle and she felt she was being interviewed. Her first reaction was to refuse, begging off because of her fatigue, but he was insistent.