Snowstorms in a Hot Climate Read Online Free PDF Page B

smiling broadly now. Enjoying it much more than I. I think that unnerved me too. For maybe only the second time in my life I knew that I was standing at a crossroads, I could still turn and walk away without contracting a fatal disease; I still had the power of choice. And do you know what, Marla? I couldn’t move. My brain had decided. It told my legs to start walking. They simply refused. Emotional mutiny. And, of course, he sensed it.
    “Elly, I like you very much. Why run away?”
    And I could have said, “Because I think I know what it is you do, and I don’t want to get involved.” Or, “Because I suspect at some level that I won’t ever be able to trust you, and who needs it?” Both of those things were true. I didn’t say either of them. Instead I closed the door, walked back across to the bed, sat down, and looked at him.
    “OK. I’ll wait for you. But I’ll do it from my hotel. Now you can decide whether or not you want to tell me what you do.”
    There are, you see, not a lot of things that a well-dressed young American could be doing in Colombia, short of spending his father’s fortune. It’s not a rich country: industry and export are important, and there are small fortunes to be made on the right deals, but it takes time and patience and playing the bureaucratic game, and it’s too much like hard work for most people. Certainly for Lenny. That was not his style. The reason I hadnot asked him what he did for a living was that I already knew. You get very adept at spotting coke smugglers when you’re on the road. Sometimes they try to blend in with the plebeian travelers, but more often the big fishes swim in the pools on the fancier side of town. Of course, lots of travelers do coca in the poorer hotels. Even on a small budget it’s hard to resist just a taste. And some of them play with the possibility of taking enough home to finance their next trip. Most of them don’t do it because they’re frightened of getting caught. Some do it and get caught. A few get away with it. But the real businessmen don’t operate in that way. They act more like the establishment—they are the merchant bankers of crime. They look clean—they stay at the best hotels; and they live on the right side of the law in the sunny side of society, until they take that one step which puts them in the twilight zone. Lenny had to be moving coke. He was too smart to be doing anything else.
    And there was another reason. He had to be moving it because he had told me he wasn’t. When the talk had turned to professions, he had described with some enthusiasm buying merchandise for a chain of shops back in the States. We both knew he wasn’t telling the truth. There may have been shops—there were as it turned out—but that wasn’t what he was doing. He knew I knew. But he offered no clues. His secrecy was part of my proof.
    So, you see, when I began to walk out of the door, he had a decision to make. He had to decide whether or not he could trust me with the knowledge. If he gave me that, he gave me everything. Lenny doesn’t usually trust people. In general, good coke men don’t. But I’d called him. He didn’t have a lot of options. I wasn’t interested in the casual fuck. Maybe he wasn’t either. And you can’t really carry on a proper affair with a coke man and not know what he’s doing. In effect I did have some power. I knew when he had made that remark about work thathe was giving away more than he needed to. On the other hand, I was still careful to leave him with a let-out.
    His answer was to lean over to the drawer next to the bed and take out a small leather case. From his neck he slipped a key off a chain and fitted it to the lock. Inside was a glass container, the size of a marmalade jar, filled to the top with white crystalline powder. No one can tell good coke from bad just by looking at it. But you can tell volume. There must have been a good half pound in there. And that would be just the