by Sarah Dunant
Back in my room, I sat on the bed and tried to read the end of Northanger Abbey. But Jane’s world was too slow for me now. I was engulfed in my own fantasies. I took out the coke and laid out a couple of lines on the cover of the book. I would hardly call myself an expert, but even I could tell it was high grade. By the time it reached the noses of record producers on the coast, it would have been cut four, maybe five times and would be then—with luck—forty percent pure. But in that cold grimy bedroom in the slums of Bogotá it was nearer to ninety percent. I didn’t stop zinging for hours. I couldn’t sit still. In the end I went out onto the streets to watch the world go by. It’s a funny thing about coke. You feel so alert, so fast, so clean, but in fact you’re moving in a different orbit altogether. When the Indians in the Andes chew coca leaves, they do it in order to alter their consciousness. Even after all the refining and processing that turns it into street snow, the effect is still the same. Coke doesn’t help you with the world—it puts you outside it.
My thinking relationship with Colombia ended that morning. In the ten days that followed, we did a lot of cocaine. And I noticed very little of what was going on.
When I saw Lenny two days later, he was high and busy. We spent another night together, making love and snorting in equal doses. I was dancing five miles high. Neither of us was ourself, but at least we were equidistant from reality. The sex was great, but then so was the cocaine. That’s another of the rituals. I think now that maybe it’s all a huge hype. A figment of one’s stoned imagination. But I think differently about a lot of things now.
Then came a few days when he was away all the time. The shipment was already in. It had walked its way over the mountains of the Ecuadorian border in the saddlebags of half a dozen Indians, to be met on the other side by the first of an army of middlemen who would take a slice of the pie and start pushing up the price, until finally it reached its status as one of the most expensive drugs in the world. It had been refined and processed in a rural laboratory somewhere in the south of Colombia, and now all that remained was to divide it up, pack it down, and move it out. But how? That was my only prevailing curiosity. What scam could be safe enough to slide it under the nose of U.S. Customs officials?
On the sixth night Lenny came home to the hotel, wild-eyed and ragged with lack of sleep. I was already in bed. He came and sat next to me. I woke and reached over to touch him.
“Hi, babe.” I could tell from his voice that he was stoned, still “up” despite however many hours without sleep. “I brought you a present.”
I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my brain. “Don’t tell me. A jar full of snowflakes.”
He shook his head. “Nope. Something much more valuable.”
From his jacket pocket he pulled out a package, wrapped in tissue paper and about ten inches long. I took it. It was quite heavy, as if made of pottery or maybe a dense wood. I unrolled the tissue paper carefully, and out onto the bed in front of me tumbled a china statue of the Virgin Mary, blue and white robes and golden halo; the Semana Santa Mother of God, hands joined in supplication, eyes lifted to heaven. I looked up at him in surprise.
“Isn’t she lovely?” he said, picking her up and holding her in front of him. He ran a finger down the line of her body, as if he could feel the flesh under the china. “Look at her. So refined, so pure, and so full of goodness.”
“Lenny. Just how stoned are you?” I asked, half laughing.
He looked at me and smiled. “Oh, I would say very stoned. But you did mention that you were curious. So, here she is. Lenny’s latest deliverer. The safest, most pious carrier in the world.”
With a renewed sense of ceremony, I put out my hand and received Our Lady back into my palm. I held her, tested the weight. It seemed right. Not too heavy. I looked for the joins. I could see none. It was a professional job. Lenny enjoyed my appreciation.
“One tightly packed half pound in each statue. A shipment of a thousand of them. From one of the most respectable religious paraphernalia businesses in South America. A family firm. Generations of devotion. Half the shipment is clean, the other half filled with the cocaine. Our Good Lady is taking a hundred kilos of pure grade through the U.S. Customs for us. Traveling with God’s blessing.”
“Where does it go?”
“Half of them end up in the homes of some of our less fortunate citizens—our Puerto Rican and Italian neighbors—into whose lives they will no doubt bring a little light and love. The other half are picked up, taken apart, and distributed among the more wealthy WASP sections of the population.”
I shook my head in amazement. “And how do you know which are which?”
“Aaah. Examine carefully, señorita, the hands of the Madonna,” he said in the voice of an eager tourist guide. “You will notice, I think, a particularly attractive little detail on the fingers of the left hand. A wedding ring. See. Not strictly as Our Lady might have worn it in Galilee two thousand years ago, but nevertheless an appropriate reminder that she is indeed the Bride of Christ. Touching, I’m sure you’ll agree. Those with the rings are pregnant with treasure. Those without have not been so blessed.”
“My God.” I whistled admiringly. “It’s brilliant. Where did you get the idea?”
“You are sleepy. Where do you think? Now you understand why I go on annual pilgrimage to the cathedral during Semana Santa.”
I studied her halo. “Is she safe?”
He shrugged, putting his hands together in mock supplication, appealing to his benefactress. “Nothing is ‘safe.’ That’s part of the game. When the increased demand for the Virgin first arose, there was, no doubt, some curiosity in government agencies. They opened the first few shipments. I knew they would. That’s why they were clean. It won’t happen again. Especially as there are now a couple of customs officials who have been blessed by Our Lady. Wealth as well as grace. It’s not worth their while to disturb her progress. And if by chance something does go wrong and the wind whistles trouble … well, then we just don’t pick them up.”
“And what about the delivery point?”
He put a finger across the Virgin’s lips. “That’s for her to know and you not to ask. But put it this way. A small shop owner in Little Italy wouldn’t have any trouble explaining with credible astonishment (should he need to) how on the very day that his Virgins arrived, some crazy came in and bought hundreds of them. But only the ones with the wedding rings. What does he know? He has the sales slip to show for it. He’s just grateful for such a miraculous example of the Lord’s generosity.”
“So when do they arrive?” Just for that moment I wanted to know all of it. To live it through him.
“A while. Long enough for you and me to use the time in between to go to the Caribbean, pick up a little sunshine, a few more passport stamps, and then head for home.”
I lay back on the pillow, still cradling the Virgin in my hands. She looked up at me, promising intercession and forgiveness for all good Catholic girls. Hail Mary, full of grace …
“And what about her?”
“Her we take with us and break open the sacred heart on the islands.”
I watched him. His eyes were shining. It wasn’t just the coke that was making him high. I think it was the happiest, certainly the most unguarded, I had ever seen him. He was a man in love. I ought to have learned then.
“Is this the best bit?” I asked softly, putting my hand up against his cheek.
He smiled, the smile on the face of the tiger. “Yeah. It’s one of the best bits. Living on the fault line. How do you like it, my little English rose? Breaking the law?”
I stared at him. Half his soul was somewhere else entirely. “I dunno,” I whispered. “I’m a little frightened, I suppose. But I also like the taste of it all.” The words came out without my thinking about them. They were probably as near to the truth as I knew how to get.
He lay back heavily on the bed, not bothering to take off his clothes. He curled his body away from me and closed his eyes. I wanted
to make love, to bring him back into my orbit, but I didn’t know how to ask. I leaned over and touched his forehead lightly with my fingers.
“Yeah,” he said with a sigh, the word slurring slightly. “You’re right. It is a good taste. Welcome to the club, Elly.”
He was asleep immediately. I lifted the figurine off the bed and put her on the side table. Then I curled my body around his and closed my eyes. Our Lady—“blessed is the fruit of thy womb”—kept vigil over us.
The day after we left for San Andrés; and then, two weeks and two islands later, baked brown and lulled by images of blue-green coral seas, we arrived back at JFK Airport, the last of Our Lady’s bountiful harvest washed down the loo and our luggage and persons as clean as clean could be. It didn’t matter. They didn’t touch us. We felt blessed, walking through Customs hand in hand like a golden couple on honeymoon. Even the immigration officer had been kind—maybe he could see the stars in my eyes—I got a six months’ stay. I had no future other than a ride to an apartment I had never seen and where I was now to live. I was an accessory to a crime which could have put me inside an American jail for a decade. And frankly, my dear, I didn’t give a damn.
Love, Marla. It’s a worse addiction than cocaine. But they do go together well, and I was hooked on both from the start. Some of it I’m not very proud of. But I’ll tell it anyway. I know, for instance, that somewhere I was getting a real sexual buzz from the fact that Lenny was smuggling. It made him a kind of outlaw, and I got off on that. It was all part of the glamour. Coke, you see, is such a glamorous drug. The thoroughbred of narcotics. Nothing else can touch it. Grass is too plebeian, opium too passive, heroin too destructive. But not coke. Coke has style, wit, and the aura of excitement. I sometimes think that’s why people pay so much for it. It can’t be for the high. You can stay up longer with a handful of good old-fashioned uppers sold by the tubful in high school playgrounds.
But coke is high society, an entrance to the elite. The law forbids you to take it. It’s like disobeying your parents. Everyone wants to be a rebel sometimes.
And that’s what spiced my love for Lenny. He touched one of the oldest female fantasies in the book: the man outside the law, steely, confident, untouchable. I swear, Marla, my feminism went out of the window. If you’d given me a James Bond book to read during those first few months, I would have been hard-pressed not to identify with the women. I was so hungry for him it makes me ashamed now. You know, the kind of desire that comes at the beginning of an affair, when you want to possess the other person entirely, crawl inside their brain and see the world through their eyes, colonize them, take over their pasts and become their futures. I don’t care what feminism tells you you should or shouldn’t do. When everything is Technicolor you don’t think straight.
That’s why I never wrote, never told you. What could I say? You would have thought I had betrayed you. I had. I knew it even then, you see. I knew it would lead to trouble. That I had given up something of myself and there would come a time when I would regret it. But you have to remember it had never happened to me before. I had never fallen so hard for a man. I was thirty years old and I had never been in love like that. I wanted to be engulfed. I know this is painful for you to hear, but I can’t lie to you. It was like being caught up in a tornado. And by the time the storm had passed, all that was left was the debris. For me that is. For him it was different. There were bits of him that were nailed down. Maybe he had a more clearly defined sense of survival. Or maybe he’d just been at it longer. It was his lifestyle. He had warned me. He was not dishonest. He told me right from the beginning. He had also warned me about the coke. And I had listened. I just didn’t hear.
It was just before we left San Andrés, early evening at the end of another scorching day. We had baked ourselves stupid on the beach and spent hours snorkling, an exhaustion of pleasure. Back at the hotel we began the twilight ritual. A shower, a drink, and a couple of lines to set us up for the evening. I was enjoying it. I had, I suppose, developed a taste for it.
He was sitting out on the balcony. I was inside the room at the table by the bed, chopping the coca. I remember that he was watching me. After a while I looked up and smiled. He didn’t smile back.
“It’s a great drug, isn’t it, Elly?” He put it very casually, but there was something in his tone that set me on my guard. I carried on chopping, watching the crystals fluff up beneath the razor blade.
“Yeah, it’s a great drug. Although I’m not sure if I’d pay American street prices for it.”
There was a pause. “How much coca have you done, Elly? Before you met me, I mean.”
“Oh … some. A bit. Nothing like this quantity,” I said, still not looking at him.
“Have you ever been around unlimited supplies of it before?”
I stopped chopping and began running the blade along the mound, stringing it out into thick white lines. I glanced up. “No, you know I haven’t. Why? What are you worried about, Lenny? That I’ll get to like it too much? It’s supposed to be a female drug, isn’t it? Isn’t that the mythology about it? You tell me. Do women have a lower tolerance than men, or is that just in-house coke talk?”
It had been a glorious day. And it had been a long time since he had “switched off.” I was feeling secure. His folklore on coke had already become an in-joke between us, something I could tease him about. Although even then I think the reason I teased was that at some level I resented his sense of superiority, his possessiveness toward the drug. In all other things we thought and argued equally.
“The women I’ve been around usually get to like it a lot. Maybe more than the men. Yes.”
“Are you warning me?”
“No. I was just thinking out loud, that’s all.”
He got up and came over to the table. I pushed the mirror toward him. He sat down and plucked a note from his wallet, rolling it carefully into a funnel. Holy communion. Getting ready for the host. I watched in silence. Then he put out a finger and rubbed a little of the powder on his gums.
“The first guy I ever scored from in Colombia had been doing coke for fifty years. He was a walking history book. He’d lived through civil wars, revolutions, you name it. He had a face like the north side of the Eiger, and he dressed like a fashion plate. He was right out of Carlos Castaneda, a mix of streetwise and mystic. I never really figured him out. But he never fucked me over, and he taught me a lot about cocaine. He had a particular attitude to it. Very Latin American. You won’t like it. He saw it as a power relationship. He used to say that coca was like a certain kind of woman, the sort who isn’t satisfied until she takes over a man. Once you understood that, you could resist her, and if you resisted her then she would love you even more and the affair would go on forever. But once you let her in, let her take you over, she’d suck you dry.”
He was right. I didn’t like it. “He may have felt like Castaneda, but he sounds more like Norman Mailer to me.”
He shook his head impatiently. “Sure. I know it’s a stereotype, but don’t jump on it just because you don’t like the analogy. Get behind it. What he was saying is true. If you get involved with coke, you have to work out a philosophy, some ground rules. And his advice is as good as any. Use it, but always make sure it’s that way around.”
I felt like a child who’d been caught playing adult games, trying too hard to be grown-up. I didn’t like feeling so young to his age.
“Thanks for the lecture, Lenny. Don’t worry. I think I’ve done enough to understand a little.”
“And how much is enough, Elly?” he said softly. “If you stay around me, you’re going to be swimming in it. So much you could drown. All I’m saying is don’t go out of your depth. Because I won’t come out and save you. The reason I’m good at what I do is that I never go that far in. We’re good together. I want it to stay that way. But I won’t break my rules for anyone. Not even you.”
There was no reply. The words were hard and cold and deliberate. I couldn’t shrug them of
f. It was a declaration of intent, a kind of prenuptial settlement, and I didn’t want to sign. He watched me while I tried to disguise my discomfort. Then he handed me the rolled note and pushed the mirror toward me. I shook my head, got up, and went into the bedroom, closing the door behind me. He didn’t follow.
I had been warned, Marla. He’d said it. On a straight fight between me and the coke, he would protect her first. I couldn’t say I hadn’t been told.
Of course, in the beginning none of it mattered, not for the first few months. When we got back to New York he made a couple of calls from the airport, put me in a cab to the apartment, and went off to move the coke. He didn’t tell me where and he didn’t tell me how long he’d be away. He was gone three days. During that time he picked it up, cut it, subdivided it, and moved it on. The shorter the time he held it, the less the risk. And it was all big deals, that was the other trick. Lenny dealt only in kilos upward, and he sold only to a few chosen people. They in turn would recut it into smaller amounts, and others would cut it again into grams. By the time it hit the streets, you’d be paying maybe one hundred dollars for a gram which contained nowhere near that amount of cocaine. Lenny told me once that he moved the equivalent of about ninety thousand grams, pure. Even with a four to five hundred percent markup, by the time it reached the punter he was making one hell of a lot of money. I didn’t ask how much, and he never volunteered the information.
Enough, anyway, not even to think about working for a long time to come. Spring was exploding when we got back. We used to spend the weeks in New York and the weekends at Westchester. God, I loved Manhattan. It was like a giant toy box, and I played all day long. Movies and galleries, shops and shows. And the days danced by without my noticing.
With the summer swelter we took off, spent six weeks in California by the ocean, in this amazing house that a friend of Lenny’s had built. We were living on the pleasure principle. It wasn’t even to do with coke. When he arrived back from his “office,” he had brought a stash home—“There it is, Elly. Shavings of profit.” But he didn’t touch it, at least not when I was around, and hearing the island conversation in my head, I too withdrew my patronage. Once I’d made the decision, it wasn’t that hard. There was a week or so when I found myself yearning, when I seemed a little edgy and irritable. But it passed. And the world was too full to miss it.
