Cargo of Orchids Read Online Free PDF Page B

reported that the
Byzantium
ran aground and the smugglers had to offload the cargo, which had shifted, so the boat could float again. One story credited a Royal Canadian Mounted Police undercover operation with the bust; another said it was the combined forces of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, assisted by the Canadian navy and the U.S. Coast Guard, tipped off by a pair of German kayakers.
    I found myself searching for references, in particular, to Angel Corazón.
    The trial lasted three months; I went to court with Carmen every day, at first because she wanted me to be there, and because Vernal liked me to watch him perform—and then for my own reasons. The Corazón brothers sat shackledtogether in the prisoner’s box, and Carmen held my hand, digging her long fingernails into my palm each time the prosecutor got up to object. Gustavo, the oldest of the three, with eyes like thimblefuls of black coffee and curly black hair misted with grey, nodded to Carmen when he came into court at the beginning of each day, but kept his eyes trained on the judge after that.
    For the first week, I stayed only for the morning sessions. But when I saw Angel looking for me in the crowded gallery, and smiling when he picked me out, I started staying for the afternoon sessions as well. He had a smile bittersweet as a love pill for the sick at heart, a pair of lips you wanted to lick under a moustache that would keep you from getting close enough, and fucky brown eyes. But I think it was his smell that attracted me most: even from the gallery I could smell him—like the air before a storm, long before there is any visible sign of it.
    And then there was Mugre Corazón, who had the same hair and regulation outlaw moustache as Angel, only his moustache was grey and stained with nicotine and his skin was a darker shade of brown. He was thinner, too, than either of his older brothers.
Mugre
meant “dirt.” You didn’t need to speak Spanish to see he came by his name honestly.
    I don’t think even Vernal was surprised when the Corazóns were convicted (their Mexican deckhands had all pled guilty and been sent to the penitentiary). It was the eighties, after all, and we were supposed to be saying no to drugs, and an emphatic “No, no!” to foreigners who smuggled drugs by the tons. Vernal, at sentencing, tried to argue thatGustavo Corazón had brought stability to Tranquilandia, a measure of prosperity to an otherwise impoverished Third World country, by financing low-cost housing, hospitals, community centres, roller-skating rinks and banks.
    Angel Corazón had sponsored a rehab clinic where drug addicts went to recuperate. While he recognized that Angel had made a lot of money by exporting narcotics, Vernal said a clinic to treat drug addiction allowed him to “give something back.”
    His Honour had a different view of Carmen María’s better half and his brothers. He noted that Mugre Corazón had been responsible for the executions of at least six members of the judiciary prior to the expulsion of the police force from Tranquilandia, and that the “rehabilitation centres” Angel Corazón had built were nothing more than five-star hotels with all kinds of facilities for “drugs and orgy parties.” Gustavo Corazón Gaviria was wanted in the U.S., Venezuela, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Mexico and Bolivia in connection with the biggest busts those countries had ever made. The judge said life imprisonment wasn’t long enough these days for drug traffickers, who looked upon doing time as an occupational hazard.
    Afterwards, Vernal was photographed on the steps of the courthouse, holding his Criminal Code. He told reporters it would be more fair to bring back the death penalty than to send men like the Corazón brothers to jail for twenty-five years. “They should kill you before burying you,” he said.
    Carmen and I went back to her hotel and had a few drinks in the bar. I asked her what she