Free Cocaine by Jack Hillgate Page B

do.'
    ‘ And do you know what I always tell them?’
    ‘ No.’
    ‘ I’ll tell you. Look around, George. Look at where I’m living. Look at me. I’m a successful man, very wealthy. I enjoy setting up these investment structures – ‘
    ‘ Another tea, George?’ chipped in Jan, smiling sweetly.
    ‘ Yes please Jan.’
    ‘ Like I was saying, I get the pleasure of helping friends, plus I take a small commission only if the funds increase in value. You know, five per cent, summat like that.’
    ‘ So I give you ten pounds and you give me back twenty?’
    ‘ You got it, my son. Easiest money in the world.’

11

    November 1990

    We left Popayan the next day and took the bus to Cali. I noticed Juan Andres becoming more and more nervous as we approached the city, which, I recalled, contained his ex-employer's headquarters, somewhere on the eleventh floor of a nondescript downtown office block.
    ‘It’s Suares, isn’t it?’ I asked.
    He didn’t even blink.
    ‘No. He replied. 'It is my family.’
    ‘Your family?’
    ‘They think I am dead. It will be great shock.’
    ‘They’ll be real happy for you, Juan my man’, said Kieran.
    ‘Yes, compadre , but…’ His voice trailed off. ‘It will be great shock.’
    ‘We stoppin’ in Cali?’
    ‘No’, said Juan Andres and I, together. We turned to look at each other momentarily. I saw the look of sadness in his eyes. Three tourists, according to our passports. One of us was meant to be teaching English, the other was meant to be recuperating in a Swiss detox clinic, and the third was meant to be dead. We belonged with each other. I thought I had made the right decision, but we had so far only skirted around the possibilities of what we might achieve together.
    The job waiting for me in England was not a bad one, working in the quantitative analysis department of a minor investment bank somewhere in the City. The salary was to be twenty-two thousand, which was good for 1990, in fact, it was much more than most of my contemporaries, especially those with first class degrees who had gone on to do research in the labs just behind Downing College, the sandstone buildings shaded by damp green leaves. The bank had over-recruited, which meant they were happy for people to defer entry, people like me. I’d been given a grant of three thousand pounds to learn Spanish and teach English.
    ‘Communication’, said the head of HR, ‘communication and personal development. Broadening your horizons. Maturing.’
    If she could see me now, the supercilious forty-something woman in her tweedy suit and big black brogues, looking like a man in drag with those big clodhoppers on her feet, her condescension wrapped in one hundred per cent wool-twist. I had brought my signed employment contract with me to Colombia to remind me what I had to look forward to. I had already calculated that after tax and national insurance my monthly take home pay would be one thousand five hundred pounds, which meant twenty-five pounds an hour for sixty hours a week and the designation ‘grunt.’
    I knew a lot of people, especially those unfortunate enough to be unemployed, would have jumped at the chance to make so much so young, but when you thought about it, it wasn’t so much. And I didn't feel that young. I could have cheated the whole thing. I could have stayed in England, maybe spent a few months in Cornwall by the beach. The bank would never have known. I could have bought one of those ‘Learn Spanish in Three Weeks’ courses and sat on my towel watching the Atlantic rollers pound the shore at Newquay or Polzeath, the strains of ‘ donde esta el aeropuerto? ’ playing though my Walkman. Just like school. Ecoutez et repetez. I could have pocketed the three thousand pounds.
    That'd buy a lot of product.

    We were standing in what from the outside looked like a garage attached to the main house by a narrow door with two thick bolts across it. The room had a smooth concrete floor painted in a