Drugs and Police in India
Chapter 2
The day before I flew I went to meet Clive and talk everything through. He opened the door of the Covent Garden flat he was staying in and waved me in. Behind me I could hear a collective tut from the old ladies who peered through the chinks of their chain-locked doors. Clive was glued to his mobile phone and waved me through to the kitchen, gesturing for me to make some tea.
“Yes…I know….look, for fuck’s sake you don’t need to tell me that…I said I would didn’t I? Yes, yes, I’ll put it in the post today…yeah, you take care and all.”
Clive tossed the Nokia onto the couch and took the cup tea I brought in without looking up.
“Honestly, Tom, some people think they’re the only people in the world who matter. That was a girl in South Africa who’s complaining because I’m a couple of days late in mailing her some MDMA – which, I might add, I’m only doing as a favour for, as you can see, I’m a little busy here.”
On the floor around him were stacks of five different currencies, three mobile phones and two scribbled address books containing the contacts essential to staying afloat in this business. On the table there was a half-rolled joint, a pile of cocaine on a hand mirror waiting to be cut and a thick incense stick dropped ashes onto the carpet. It was 10:30 am.
“So where did you just come back from?” I asked, clearing bags and suitcases out of the way just to find a place to sit.
“I was over the water in Amsterdam but I don’t think I should do that route again.” Clive grinned ruefully. “The boys at Customs have stopped me five times in a row now. We’re on first name terms.”
“But they never find anything?”
“Nah, they’re a bunch of clowns, Tom. They’re used to catching the idiots who come back with a few hundred pills hidden in their underwear. All you need is the right kind of suitcase or shoes with a space cut in the heel and you’re home free.
I think there must be something against my name by now. I always look the part - hair brushed forwards, crap shirt, ‘life’s great when you’re straight’ glasses. But my legs are broken. Actually though I’m picking up a new passport later this morning.”
Two hours later we strolled down to the post office and picked up his new ‘walking stick’. Unwrapping the envelope he pulled out a brand new British passport with his photograph under the name “Curtis Spencer”.
For lunch ‘Curtis’ and I met two Irish men in their late 30’s at a nearby pub. They looked uneasy to see me but Clive put them at ease and they took his word for it that I’m trustworthy. The conversation was upbeat and friendly over pints of Guinness and then dropped to a bearly audible volume as they discussed business.
“Nect week…fly to Bali…pills in the ‘Dam…phone me in Dubai…Max will wait for you in New Zealand…contact info on your hotmail account…”
I tried not to listen too hard and soon after we took our leave and we were back in the street. Business now out of the way, we picked up some pasta and headed back to the flat.
We’d been chatting all morning and now I looked up and saw his eyes were full of tears. The pressure of being a one man operation while his heart was in jail 5000 miles away showed in the pain stretching across his face.
“So what the fuck happened, man?”
The story came out in dollops but I finally pinned down the story to this: Clive and Natasha were in their hotel room of the Raj in Delhi, getting ready for a run. They were on the same flight back to Europe but had taken the precaution of booking separately. Natasha was carrying the rucksack with two kilos of high quality mountain charas sewn into the lining. Clive was carrying the bottles of liquid acid and their real passports. Natasha was travelling under a fake.
It had been a crazy couple of days in Delhi. Natasha was not the kind of girl to stay still for too long. A 19 year old pretty girl from Russia she had come to India alone when she was just 14. Like a firework she made as much light and noise as she could wherever she went, perhaps conscious that she would burn out early. They had the best room at the Raj and their room was awash with music from the mini-disc, MDMA powder and the consequent all night love-making. Their room was an oasis of private chaos above the mass havoc that was the India street below.
Clive began to worry that they were drawing too much attention to themselves. They had passed through Delhi a little too often recently and there were always Indians who were only too willing to pass on information to the authorities for a little baksheesh. Natasha didn’t quite seem to grasp the notion of discretion either. Bright, young and blonde, she dodged up and down the street, in and out of the hotel rooms of a thousand friend, high as a kite and as wild as only a Russian party girl can be. On the day of the flight, Clive began to get a bad feeling about the run.
“I tried to call it all off but she wouldn’t hear any of it. She just turned up the techno and then made me go down on her so that she could squeeze more opium up her pussy.”
They went to the airport in separate taxis and they’d checked in as travelling alone. They were ignoring one another in the departure lounge when an announcement came for all the passengers to go and identify their luggage. An extra check had been called and the customs men were already ploughing though Natasha’s bags when Clive caught up with her. He tried to distract the customs guys with his own luggage but they’d already caught on. They tore her rucksack open down the side and a kilo of the best hash in the world tumbled to the floor. Clive watched Natasha being dragged away, screaming her innocence while he was powerless to do anything.
Soon enough he was pulled into the customs office as well and sat down next to her.
“We know you are together.” The chief officer told him. They both had to mumble that they’d never met before, barely having the courage to look one another in the eye.
“They made me strip down in a dark room to the side, Tom. I couldn’t see anything but I could hear rats running around. They didn’t find nothing on me and so I asked them if I could put my clothes back on. They wanted to know if I was afraid of the dark.”
They finally let Clive catch the flight and he could feel Natasha’s eyes on his back as he walked away to freedom. He spent the entire flight racking his brains for a plan but when he arrived in Vienna the Austrian Customs were waiting for him. He was led off the plane and his hand luggage was x-rayed from all possible directions. Delhi had phoned Vienna.
He was led through the back ways of the airport to a radiography department where they obliged him to have an x-ray of his stomach taken. Again there was nothing for them to find but Clive knew that trouble would come when they brought his checked-in luggage through and found Natasha’s real Russian passport. They might even work out that the mint breath freshener was actually a bottle of liquid lsd. They led him out in a Customs corridor and it looked like the walls were closing in on him.
Then a strange thing happened.
“The Krout who had been escorting me - arrogant bastard he was – it seemed he’d forgotten his clipboard or something. He told me not to move and he went running off down the corridor. I looked around me and I saw this door to the side and I could hear people moving behind it. I tried the handle and it opened onto a moving queue of passengers. I asked one of them and found out they were just arriving back from holiday so I pulled my bags through and walked along with them. I walked through the green channel of customs without any sensors going off and I hightailed it.”
Clive split to the railway platforms and jumped on the first train he saw. At the first stop he jumped out, changed platforms and jumped on the first available carriage. Only when he’d done this 5 or 6 times did he feel relaxed enough to call his contact in Vienna.
“Where are you?” He was asked.
“”I haven’t got a fucking clue!” He shouted, “Just get here fast!”
Since then Clive had enlisted the help of various friends to pass through Delhi and visit Natasha. None of them had lasted more than two weeks though and the last one had decided to give $3000 of Clive’s money to a lawyer who promised to obtain Natasha’s release within days. Naturally, the lawyer at once disappeared into thin air.
He took off the stress of running a one man multi-national smuggling operation by rolling a joint every hour. Then to keep his energy up he’d snort MDMA powder and stay on top of things. To suppress the intense sorrow that was tearing his heart into pieces, he smoked a lump of heroin from tin foil.
He had to keep going. There was no time to stop and get in touch with his feelings. He had to move and hustle, con and convince, do everything in his power to make as much money as he could in as short a time as possible. The clock was ticking on Natasha in a jail cell in the third world and each day she spent there was like a gram of lead added to his heart.
“She’s coming out, Tom. She’s coming out.” This he repeated like a mantra as often as he could remember and each day he lit an incense stick for her. His energy was unstoppable and he burnt past us with an intensity and a conviction that made our lives seem flimsy and unimportant. He was burning himself up in the process though. The dealing and the confrontations and the daily bullshit added years to his face. The drugs entered his nostrils like gasoline whilst the raw pain of it all just hardened his arteries into chains of sheer resolve.
