Cargo of Orchids Read Online Free PDF

money on having someone retrieve Brutus’s sticks from the deep end?
    From our balcony on a clear night, you could see into the heart of the city. Our third Christmas together, Vernal gave me a telescope so I would still be able to see how the poor people lived.
    One night when Vernal and Brutus were still in Saskatchewan, I got a call. Carmen María said she couldn’t speak on the phone, but that she would be coming to Vancouver at the end of the week, and would need Vernal’s help. She’d also need a room in a hotel—a single room, she added.
    From the silence that followed, she must have assumed I knew more than I did. But Vernal read the newspaper for me, selectively, and I knew nothing of the trouble that brought Carmen back into my life. She was coming, she explained, because her husband and his two brothers were being held in custody there without bail.
    “What are they in prison for …?” I didn’t add “this time,” but Carmen knew how I thought.
    “For getting caught,” she said.
    I found the press clippings on Vernal’s desk, studied the photographs of the three Corazóns—Carmen’s husband, Gustavo, and his brothers, Angel and Mugre. The caption below Angel’s photograph read, “At sixteen exchanged a modestly successful career as assassin for chance to make millions as trafficker in drugs.” In the picture his long black hair was tied back in a ponytail. A scar shaped like an exclamation mark bisected his cheek. He didn’t have the eyes of a man who would cut himself shaving.
    The
Vancouver Sun
carried a front-page story describing the brothers as “ruthless drug tycoons” who had negotiated for eighty tonnes of marijuana in the middle of a Colombian jungle and had had the bales dropped from a plane onto a freighter waiting off the Tranquilandian coast. The bales were loaded into the
Byzantium
’s hold. The crew headed north with its cargo.
    The article included a sidebar on the disputed territory of Tranquilandia, described as being strategically situated between the major drug producers and the U.S., “where the refined end-product was snorted up by airplane-load,” and for this reason claimed by the Colombian, Venezuelan, Panamanian and American governments.
    La Ciudad de las Orquídeas (the City of Orchids), “a sprawling, predatory seaport at the island’s northern tip,” was known to be populated by thieves, assassins, cocaine queens, money laundresses and others attracted by the rich pickings to be had from the port’s thriving import-export business.
    The journalist, who had been commissioned to write an exposé of Tranquilandia’s drug trade, had lived over a series of low-life bars and in hotels not included in any of the tourist guides. A
viejo
, an old man, a resident of the Hotel Viper, told him that this outlaw territory had been named Tranquilandia by a dark-skinned woman pirate of the Caribbean who was executed in the late 1800s. Chocolata was so revered by the islanders that they had built a shrine in her honour on top of the island’s highest peak. For years, devout drug lords had sent their couriers up the mountain to beseech her image to bless their bullets, render theircrops bountiful, and to seek her guidance in customs and immigration affairs. Resident islanders and visitors from both continents gave thanks to her for drug-related employment, hospitals, orphanages, schools and community centres, all endowed by drug barons.
    These days, Tranquilandia was still controlled by a woman, the Black Widow, the spiritual leader of Las Blancas, the same narco-terrorist group responsible for Carmen María’s kidnapping. Carmen had, in fact, been lucky to survive. “They treat hostages like Dixie Cups,” she’d told me. “Use them once and throw them away.”
    I read every article I could find about the Corazóns. One paper said their boat had broken down off the west coast of Vancouver Island, and the crew found a remote fiord where they could make repairs. Another