Drug Smugglers in the Middle East
Chapter 10
After three weeks of being a hippy in the Negev Desert, returning to Tel Aviv was a trip. At first I thought that all the billboards and neon signs were decoration to make the city look nicer. Reality began to sink in as girls masked with cosmetics hustled past, arguing with their cell phones and avoiding eye contact. The neighborhood car alarms took turns to malfunction.
Feeling more of a stranger than usual I ambled through the streets to my friend’s apartment on one of the busier roads in the city. The roar of the buses was so loud that you had to pause in conversation sometimes until they had passed. I found the key under the doormat as usual and minutes later I was taking my first real wash in about three weeks. Afterwards it took around five minutes before I managed to remove the grim I'd left behind on the bath tub.
I squinted at the electric light bulb overhead that had replaced the desert moon, heated a cup of tea on a gas cooker instead of an open fire and sat down on a sofa and cushions that were a tad more comfortable than sand and rocks. Okay, I was back in Babylon. It was time to plug back into the Matrix.
In my email account I found four messages from Clive and one from a mutual friend of ours in London. Before I left for the desert I had written to Clive letting him know that I was broke – whilst I’d never asked him for anything in return for all I did for him in Delhi, he’d always promised to help me out if I got stuck in the future. He’d replied saying that he would see what he could do. The second and third emails confirmed this but he said I’d have to come to Amsterdam to pick up the cash. By the fourth email he was worried that I hadn’t replied and wondered what had happened to me. That message had been sent two weeks before.
The email from our mutual friend, Bob, in London and it asked that I ring him as soon as possible. This sounded a little ominous and I placed a reverse charge call straight away.
“Hello, Tom. Erm, have you seen the news recently? No? Ah, well, I think you ought to take a look at bbc.com and check out the Middle East section and call me back in half an hour.”
As I waited for the internet page to load part of me already knew what I was going to see.
5 BRITONS ARRESTED IN THE GULF ON DRUG SMUGGLING CHARGES. MAY FACE DEATH SENTENCE, SAYS SHEIKH OMAR.
The article blathered on about an international smuggling network using sophisticated internet communications to coordinate their activities. Yes, drug smugglers too use Hotmail. And of course there in black and white were the false names under which Clive and Natasha often traveled. They’d apparently been apprehended with piles of cocaine. I guessed they’d been on a run to satisfy the appetites of the ex-pat teachers, nurses and consultants out there who hold wild parties within their compounds.
Bob had received a frantic call from Clive soon after the news hit, asking him to phone up a list of contacts to see who could help. Everyone so far had either hung up or turned to jelly on the other end of the line. Bob himself had no intention of going anywhere near the Gulf States but was worried that Clive might be facing decapitation or death by stoning. He offered to meet the expenses if I was willing to go.
Sometimes I think there’s a bunch of drunken angels up there on a cloud, splitting a bottle of whiskey as they doodle around with my life script. I learnt in school that every story must have a beginning, a middle and an end – so what was going on? Natasha had only been free for 5 months since we’d gotten her out of jail in Delhi and only now was I beginning to recover from that nightmare story. Now both of them were behind bars in a drama that promised to even heavier than before.
It struck me that I should have just shook hands with Clive back in June and made my farewells then when I perceived he was on a trajectory of self-destruction. But I hadn’t. I still enjoyed his company and thought our paths might yet come together for the good. We’d even talked about going into business together exporting crystals from Brazil.
I knew from the moment that I spoke to Bob on the phone that I would go but it took me a couple of days to understand why. Firstly, I knew no one else would go. Most friends on the road are pretty much of the fair-weather variety and most would just shrug their shoulders and say it’s a hazard of the trade. I was still too idealistic to perceive that though and couldn’t just leave someone of Clive’s talent and charm to rot in an Arab cell.
Secondly, I had asked him to help me out and he’d agreed to come through for me. I’d been in the desert when he had invited me to come and collect but still, he’d been prepared to help. Maybe this run to the Gulf had even been in part to cover what he was going to give me. I wasn’t responsible but I couldn’t deny the karmic link.
Looking back on it now, maybe I also went because it was a good story. Most people don’t have all that much exciting happen to them in their lives. As a travel writer you have to be something of an experience-junky, if only so that you have something interesting enough to merit a few thousand words. There are few unexplored places left on the planet but new realms of human experience are being born all the time. No one in their right m mind would want to go there, maybe but you go anyway, hoping to savour, witness or understand something unique. Or at least get a good story.
Bob sent me a plane ticket and I spent my last 50 shekels on a taxi to the airport. It looked as though I might have to beg my train fare into London at Heathrow Airport. However struck up conversation on the plane with a guy who was kind enough to buy the last copy of my book. Those drunken angels again.
Bob looked relieved to see me as now he wasn’t alone in the middle of this whole story. The previous winter while Natasha had been in jail in Delhi Bob had let Clive stay in his apartment for months at a time. Clive had left burns in the coffee table, pills on the floor and the aroma of heroin fumes in the living room None of this however could quite outweigh Bob’s essential English decency about a friend in need.
Bob was a professional gambler. With the help of a mathematics don in Edinburgh he’d devised a system that gave the actual likelihood of a horse winning the race. So if Golden Soldier was given 7/2 by the bookies, the real odds might be more like 5/1. Bob paid a modest amount for the raw data each day and then put it through the filter of his own expertise and knowledge of horses. He’d then place a couple of thousand pounds a day on handful of names that came out most promising.
“I have bad years, of course.” He admitted. “Like last year I made a loss of 150,000 pounds. But this year I’m already up 250,000 quid.”
He was blacklisted from most of the bookmakers around London and several knew him by sight. He’d taken 15,000 pounds in a single afternoon from a Ladbrokes branch around the corner earlier in the year.
“The manager had to come down to confirm the betting slip. As he read it he just kept shaking his head saying: ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake; it’s going to take us 3 months to make this back.’”
Now if Bob tried to place a large bet at a bookmakers they phoned up head office and checked his name and physical description. As he could no longer bet in his own name he had to pay people for the right to set up betting accounts in their names. He felt no pity for the bookmakers, though.
“Fuck ‘em!” He grinned. “They’re just a bunch of parasites who feed on the naïve and desperate. It’s always the people who can least afford it who lose the most.”
Bob could blow a thousand pounds in a single night without blinking when thing were going well. That night he took me and a couple of friends out to a small and exclusive casino in Soho. We dined on aromatic duck and drank a bottle of Burgundy each as we discussed Clive’s situation. We speculated on the chances of bribing the officials and whether I might be picked up as a suspect just for visiting then jail. Maybe I would have to change cars a few times to avoid being followed.
The plotlines got more dramatic with each bottle of wine and I found myself so drunk that I got lost in the casino; I went to the bathroom and when I came out I found myself in front of the main reception. It was such a small place that it would have been absurd to ask directions but for the life of me I had no idea how to get back to the main salon. The receptionist’s gaze fell upon me quizzically. Fortunately in that moment Bob and his friends came out to collect their coats and find me.
“How are you going to get to the Middle East if you get lost inside a casino of this size?” Bob laughed.
