Three Minutes Page 4

  You pay if you threaten El Mestizo.

  Hoffmann had finished spraying and wiping away any powder residue and carefully oiled the barrel, the very last part of his gun. Twelve pieces of metal on the open newspaper. Each of them harmless. But when they were bolted together again they’d be deadly.

  That fucking image wouldn’t go away. Right between the eyebrows. A small entry, an explosion as it exited the back of his head.

  He crawled out through the gap near the back of the tarp covering the truck bed, sniper rifle slung over one shoulder. He chose a tree a hundred and fifty meters away, mounted the laser instrument, and checked the telescopic sight against a red point to make sure it was perfectly calibrated. He loaded a new magazine with nine bullets—ready to fire.

  “They’re here now.” El Mestizo pointed in the direction they’d come from. You couldn’t see them yet, but you could hear them. Two, maybe three vehicles coming along a muddy, narrow, waterlogged dirt road. Hoffmann went back up on the truck bed, fastened the sniper rifle to its two hooks, and jumped down again.

  Two motorcycles and a minivan with six seats. Eight police officers. But only one of them counted. El Cavo.

  El Mestizo waved them over to the edge, greeted a tall, skinny man who was a little pigeon-toed, rare among police officers.

  “Sánchez. It’s been a while.”

  El Mestizo seldom answered to his surname. But they had that kind of relationship nowadays.

  “And every time the same . . .” El Cavo broke off suddenly. He’d just noticed the corpse. “. . . circumstances.” Or rather, the uniform on the corpse. And recoiled. “A captain? From the regular army?”

  “Shit happens.”

  “This is not even close to what’s included in our agreement!”

  El Mestizo had signed agreements with more people than Hoffmann could keep track of—and he’d been working by his side for almost two and a half years—still, someone new was always popping up. Some customs official who could manipulate declarations, prosecutors who don’t bring charges, a judge who fabricated findings, soldiers who registered weapon licenses, police officers who turned a blind eye. There were a ton of those types, when it came to documents. But then there were the others. Hoffmann had met them in at least seven of Colombia’s thirty-two provinces. High-up police officials who take care of something a little trickier than paper—dead bodies. For example, this El Cavo, whose jurisdiction was in the province Caquetá. Hoffmann had seen him once before, then it had been Johnny who’d done the shooting, someone who leased the land, grew the crops, and forgot a little too often to pay his fee.

  “It was this boy here.” El Mestizo pointed at Hoffmann. “He’s from Sweden. And accidentally shooting someone here in Colombia could make it complicated with his papers. So I’d appreciate it if you took care of this.”

  Hoffmann didn’t shake his head, but he wanted to. Boy? I’m thirty-eight years old. Not much younger than you are. But he understood what El Mestizo was up to. Marginalizing. Generating sympathy.

  “So I’ll give you nine million pesos right now. In addition to your monthly payment.”

  “Hey, man, there’s eight of us. You want us to split nine mil?” The tall thin one, who squinted just as often at the blown-off back of the head as at the four soldiers tied up on the ground, spoke in a strange dialect that Hoffmann had never heard before. Even though his Spanish had become almost as good as his Swedish or Polish, he still had difficulty following these twisted words and sentences that seemed to form their very own language.

  “What are you thinking here, Sánchez? There won’t be anything left.”

  “I think you get a good salary from me already. Usually without having to do shit.”

  “If I, we, are gonna clean this up it’ll cost nine million. Times eight.”

  “You better goddamn . . .”

  “Look at me, Sánchez. If you shoot a military officer, that’s just how much it costs. And I want it in dollars. Thirty-five hundred dollars each. That’s twenty-eight thousand. How do you want it?”

  El Mestizo rarely gave in in a discussion about money, or any discussion at all. But this time he did. He went to the cab of his truck, rustled around in the glove compartment, and returned with a brown envelope. El Cavo stretched out a slender arm and took it. They both knew what would happen next. A phantom image of someone who had never been there. A call over the radio, a black man was noticed running from the scene.

  But that’s not how things ended this time. El Mestizo handed over the envelope, nodded after the completion of the negotiation, and walked toward the dead officer. A machine gun hung around his lifeless neck. He unfastened it, nodded back toward El Cavo, and continued toward the four bound and prone soldiers—who you really could call boys—and set the weapon to burst mode.

  Then he shot them one at a time, in the back, in the direction of their hearts.

  “If you’re getting paid that much, you might as well take care of this too.” El Mestizo nodded a third time toward the chief of police, who was silently holding a brown envelope. “Twenty-eight thousand dollars. Divided by the five bodies. An average cost of . . . fifty-six hundred. That feels a hell of a lot better. Right, chief?”

  Hoffmann reached out through the open window and adjusted the side mirror—El Cavo and his men were getting smaller and smaller, but not as quickly as he hoped. The two trucks were moving almost painfully slow, twenty kilometers on a road that started out undrivable and got even worse, which meant forty-five minutes of driving.

  Side mirror again, still not quite right—needed to be turned a little more to the left. There. Maybe angled slightly downward. Perfect. He saw what he expected to see—El Cavo’s little troop had already started digging. Not very deep, the forest dogs had to be able to catch the scent. He’d seen their tracks when he dumped the off-road vehicles, they were close by, hiding and waiting patiently. They usually came down quickly, working in teams like wolves, making it to the bottom of a two-foot deep grave in ten, fifteen minutes tops. And tore the bodies up quickly too—knowing their time was limited, ate quickly, the smell would spread and with it came competition. Condors and vultures would circle overhead, then start to attack the dogs who gave up and loped away. The big birds continued the meal, but more calmly—nothing would disturb them until nightfall when the Andean bear took over and cleaned up, first crushing the bones to get to the marrow. Until the jaguar challenged it. Until they both left with a femur. Only the skulls would remain, stripped to the bone, there at the bottom of the hole—by tomorrow morning five people would have disappeared.

  The conversation with Zofia felt more heavy than usual, all the more fucked up. At first she would try to comprehend that her husband killed another man. Because he thought he had no choice. Then she’d attempt to comprehend that four boys had been buried and then dug up. Because El Mestizo had felt he had no choice and did what he always did when he felt threatened or wanted to position himself. She would try her best to understand why someone she never met, someone called El Cavo, and his men had cleaned up body after body for thirty-five hundred dollars each.

  Hierarchy. Money. And it just kept going. As it does when the system outside of you becomes the system inside you. You are born into it, nurtured by it, embraced by it, until eventually you embrace it back. And your breath is no longer your own survival, it’s the death of others.

  “Zofia?”

  Cell phone in hand. It took her a few rings to answer.

  “Hello. Again. It cut off before?”

  “I’m in the jungle, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Tonight, Zofia.”

  “If you . . . I’ll wait for you here.”

  “I love you.”

  The call broke off again. This time because of his index finger on the answer button. It was enough. She knew what it meant. She should put Rasmus and Hugo to bed early, and they would sit across from each other in the kitchen and talk through this until they were done, then si
t next to each other on the sofa hand in hand without saying anything at all.

  The jungle tightened around him. It was becoming more difficult to move forward as branches and leaves and lianas whipped against the windows. A road the guerrillas had built up, dug out, routes to meeting places and camps that no one else could find, a world of its own. And inside it, the sounds. The strange hum of hundreds of thousands of insects hovering in black clouds, herons and giant toucans and macaws amplifying each other’s calls, and the monkeys, who sat in almost every tree, sounding their warning calls—a dark-green reality that formed a giant greenhouse with its own primordial soundscape.

  Hoffmann read the map, again. And he was sure it couldn’t be far away, a kilometer or so, not more. He wiped his shirtsleeve across his neck, face, scalp, but was no less sweaty, just added new moisture from the fabric. There. There. He glimpsed a zinc roof, and walls of bamboo and dried mud. Cocina. Work and home for ten people—the camp manager, two chemists, three chemist assistants, and four guards. He stopped the truck just as El Mestizo was stopping his, got out, said hello. First to the camp manager, El Comandante, who welcomed them in his slightly bigger caleta. He lived alone, a stained straw mattress on his floor, a simple desk under a bare bulb, and outside his door a large TV hanging from a tree, with an adjustable antenna, connected to the generator like the lamp. Then the older chemist, the only one not in camouflage, introduced himself as Carlos. Hoffmann smiled—all five head chemists he’d met so far had called themselves Carlos.

  The two truck platforms looked identical, covered by tarps. Six rows with four large bags in each, stacked two by two, the bulky kind reminiscent of packs you see outside construction sites—all of them brimming with coca leaves. And then, at the back, four oil barrels filled with chemicals.

  The crane rooted around like a hunting claw, an arm of metal sticking up between the cab and trailer, easy to maneuver. One by one sacks and barrels landed on pallets holding them up from the mud that drowned everything else, and with every step Hoffmann’s hiking boots were stained by that soft, brown gruel.

  Hoffmann, like El Mestizo, had handled this kind of load several times before—a half hour and the truck bed was empty.

  “You hungry?” El Comandante tied mosquito nets to branches and nails and rolled out black plastic bags over the wooden planks that connected his own caleta to the guards’ and chemists’, creating an open living room in the middle of their jungle home. “Ajiaco? Today’s main course. And for the first time we have the pleasure of serving cold beer to our guests.”

  There was a small shack behind the chemists’ cocaine kitchen and the camp manager proudly led them inside and showed them a fairly new refrigerator connected to a generator. He smiled broadly as he opened it, revealing several rows of Aguila and Club Colombia bottles, light and easy to drink. El Comandante and the chemist Carlos settled down onto the plastic-covered wooden boards, invited El Mestizo and El Sueco to sit opposite, and they all ate potato soup with chicken and sweet corn and toasted with cold beers while the guards and assistants stood a bit farther away awaiting their turn.

  Hidden by a wall of trees at least thirty meters high, which prevented sunlight from penetrating and satellites from discovering them. Inside this demarcated terrain, the cocina became an inaccessible fortress impossible to survey. The cocaine laboratories that Hoffmann had visited so far were all like this, or located in desolate regions close to Venezuela, which offered a different kind of protection—if the military attacked, and the PRC were at a disadvantage, the guerrillas could always flee across the border. The domestic troops never followed them there. A blown cocina was not worth the risk—armed soldiers in a foreign land could be interpreted as an attack and result in launching another war between two countries that were tired of fighting each other.

  “Dessert?”

  The camp manager was waiting for one of the chemist’s assistants to clear the table and take the plates and cutlery to a primitive but functioning kitchen—water in a plastic can and a crumpled piece of metal as a sink.

  “Not me . . . But maybe this young man?” El Mestizo nodded toward Hoffmann.

  “Arroz con leche de coco. Any interest?” The camp manager smiled at his other guest, as proud as when he opened the refrigerator. “It’s not every day I can offer you that out here.”

  “Thank you. But I’m good.”

  “You know the coconut, it . . . my friend, you can’t even taste the rice.”

  Hoffmann patted his stomach lightly. “Still—I’m full.”

  El Comandante lifted a hand, held it up smiling, a gesture of defeat. “Well then. More for me. Right? But in that case I insist you take some tamales with you. We’ve got some ready to go. It’ll do you good.” Rice, chicken, vegetables. Inside a can of Coke. Hoffmann nodded and stood up, stretched, looked in the direction where he guessed the river flowed. He didn’t see it. The green walls were in the way. But according to the map it lay close by.

  He had to go there before they headed back. He had to be alone. Only a criminal can play a criminal.

  He took a slow lap around the sacks and barrels, ran his hand through the tightly packed coca leaves, and knocked on the rounded metal—a muffled sound, filled to the top with chemicals. This was the heart of the cocina, the main building, which also had a roof of zinc, panels and walls of widely spaced bamboo. Earth-packed floor, which got looser near the middle and had a tendency to turn to mud. As soon as the others finished their meal, the coca leaves would be soaked in ethanol inside those sawed-open oil drums, methodically drained of their juice. Then moved to the next barrel where the gasoline would be separated out, and the coca mixed with ammonia, then filtered. A long time ago—before Zofia and the children, before the lies and the promises that he eventually started to keep—he’d smoked a lot of the sticky mass that was created midway through this process. Freebasing. That’s what they’d called it back when he bought and sold it in downtown Stockholm; in this country they called it basuco and, according to Johnny, it was of an entirely different quality, gave a different buzz, total fucking paranoia, anyone who tried got stuck inside it for days.

  Now and then he longed to do it again, but of course he never did.

  That last step, from basuco to cocaine, the white powder, was the same—more chemicals. The ones he’d transported here today. Ether, butanone, hydrochloric acid. That was all he could make out from the waybill. And there was more, he couldn’t decipher the contents of the last barrels.

  “Something wrong in here?” El Mestizo put his hand on Piet’s shoulder. That didn’t happen often. He was in a good mood.

  “Yes.” Hoffmann had already scanned the laboratory as he always did when he entered a new space. Now he did it a second time. Workbenches made of empty shipping boxes. The other benches made of plywood balanced on sawed-off tree trunks. Plastic barrels, plastic buckets, metal containers, serving trays, fabric, microwave ovens, pallets, fragile racks of test tubes.

  It all fit.

  “Those seem a little . . . out of place.”

  There was a pile of bags in one corner. Bags stacked on top of each other. Purses on top of briefcases on top of suitcases of various sizes. All in the same color and material, some kind of leather.

  “You’re right. And wrong. They don’t quite fit in. And yet they do. Carlos?” El Mestizo shouted through the gap-filled wall to the chemist standing outside with a cigarette in his mouth. “Come in here. I want you to show our European friend your little secret.”

  The head chemist dropped his cigarette into the mud, stomped on it with the heel of his boot, and went into the laboratory. Carlos. Hoffmann remembered his predecessor who’d borne the same name—just like his predecessor—had been the type to get a little too chatty sometimes and so last year El Mestizo had had to take care of him. Now this version of Carlos went over to the pile of bags, grabbed a mid-size suitcase, and put it on one of the workbenches.

  “Show him.”

  Two unexpectedly ca
lloused hands opened the suitcase, whose interior looked just like any other suitcase.

  “This is our method for providing a customer with . . . selected samples.” The head chemist pointed with one of his callused hands at the empty suitcase. “Small bag, not much cocaine. Big bag, lots of cocaine. This transports about three kilos.”

  Three kilos. Samples? Hoffmann didn’t know much about street value these days, but back when he was dealing in Stockholm that amount of coke would have meant a huge party and a shitload of money.

  “The exterior is made of leather. You see? And inside, some plastic, but mostly leather—here too, basically the whole interior—the compartments, the bottom, the sides.” Carlos ran his hands over the leather, which was an unassuming brown. “The leather contains cocaine. Which I have killed. Or at least the smell, anyway. Completely odorless cocaine. You can get through any customs you want, pass by any dog you like.”

  El Mestizo gestured that he wanted the bag, and the head chemist handed it over.

  “The first time I saw this, Peter, I was just about to kill him. Do you remember that, Carlos? I came in here and saw a huge saucepan with some black goo boiling inside it. I asked what it was and Carlos replied, that’s your cocaine. It made me fucking furious. I’ve never seen it before. What the hell are you doing, you idiot, you’re destroying it! I screamed until Carlos interrupted me. I’m not destroying anything, let me show you.” El Mestizo took hold of one of the bag’s inside pockets, ripped it loose, and held up the bit of leather. “There are two steps. The first, you have to kill the stuff. I’ve never seen it done. And I haven’t pressured anybody. I understand you, Carlos. I’ve explained that it’s your technique, the livelihood of you and your colleagues, and you have to protect that.”