Afterparty Part 14

We sat down across from them. No one spoke.

These were the second and third drug smugglers I'd ever met, but they supplied a much more dangerous product than Fayza's marijuana: the second-most addictive substance known to man or woman.

I wished Dr. Gloria were there; she could always settle my nerves. After a long while-probably only ten or twenty seconds, but it felt like a minute, all of us staring at each other-I said, "So. You guys smuggle cigarettes."

The men stared at me. Ollie tensed but said nothing.

The man in the ball cap said, "Yah. Pretty much."

Ontario was rife with smoke shacks, most of them on First Nations property, that sold illegal cigarettes smuggled in from the States. Rogue factories on the other side of the border, most of them also on Native American reservations, pumped out millions of cheap, untaxed, generic cigarettes a year. You couldn't blame the Indians. We took their land; they were giving us cancer. Of course, we also gave them alcoholism, poverty, and type II diabetes, so we were still coming out ahead on the deal.

Black-market cigarettes were big business in Canada, had been since the seventies. Oh, there were intermittent crackdowns, and joint task forces of RCMP and FBI and Six Nations police that made big busts on the evening news. But there was no political will for a war on tobacco. The border was just too d.a.m.n long, and too many people liked their cheap smokes. What politician wanted to shoot their own economy in the foot? Besides, n.o.body liked to look like the bully when dealing with the indigenous peoples.

Ollie spelled out the logistics of what we needed. The old man said nothing, and the young one said nothing but, "Sure. Yah. No problem."

Ollie said, "I've heard you've had some problems with the rowboats. Interference."

I thought, Rowboats?

"Not ours," the young one said.

My pen chimed. I glanced down at the name scrolling across the narrow body of the pen and said, "I've got to take this."

Ollie said, "Lyda-"

I put up a hand in apology and walked away from them. "Rovil," I said into the pen. "What do you got?"

"I can't believe it," he said.

"You're sure?"

"I can show you the numbers. Can you switch to video?"

I glanced over my shoulder. Grumpy and Son were eyeing me. "Maybe later," I said.

"I'll mail them," Rovil said. "The sample's not pure, and there are other chemicals mixed in it that look biological. But over ninety percent falls within the spectral range. It's ours, Lyda. It's NME One-Ten."

"s.h.i.t."

A curse of resignation, not surprise. As soon as I met Francine at the NAT, weeping and tripping on G.o.d and talking about "the Numinous," I knew it was NME 110 out there. But believing wasn't evidence. The hardware in the chemjet printer told me that the church's drug wasn't just another MDMA or LSD knockoff, but this was the first proof that it was our drug. There was no arguing with a ma.s.s spectrometer.

"Where did you find it?" Rovil asked. "Who made it?"

"I found it in a church," I said. "Some brand-new religion. They made it on a custom printer, and we have to a.s.sume it's not the only one."

"So this made-up religion-"

"I didn't say made-up. I said brand-new. 'Made-up religion' is redundant."

Rovil laughed, too comfortable to take offense. He knew G.o.d was real; he had Ganesh to tell him so. "This brand-new church," he said. "They made the printer themselves?"

"I can't see how. Hardware like that takes a load of cash, and these guys were set up in a f.u.c.king storefront. So it's either a millionaire or a drug cartel. Or a millionaire running a drug cartel."

"Lyda, drug dealers? You shouldn't be-"

"You wouldn't believe the people I'm hanging out with these days."

Ollie was crossing the room toward me, looking concerned. I covered the phone. "What is it?" I asked her.

Ollie said, "They don't like it when customers hop up and start making calls in the middle of a conversation. Is that Rovil?"

"Yep."

Her eyes widened. She could see the excitement in my face. "So it's for real then."

"Oh yeah." I nodded behind her. "So how much do they want?"

"Thirty-five thousand Yuan."

Holy s.h.i.t. She said it'd be expensive, but I hadn't been thinking that much. I wasn't sure what the current Yuan-to-Canadian exchange rate was, but these guys were asking for somewhere around $11,000.

"Apiece," Ollie said.

"Wait, what?"

"You have the money, right?"

I'd told her not to worry about the money. Which was not to say that I actually had the money. I said, "That's not what I'm talking about. Eleven K apiece?"

"I'm going with you," she said. She looked up at me with those dark eyes, her face set.

"You said you were never going back there. You said it was your own private Mordor."

"We're not arguing about this," she said.

We stared each other down. She didn't flinch. I put a hand to the back of her neck and kissed her, hard.

The kiss surprised her. Me too.

She shook her head in mock dizziness. "Hurry it up," she said, and walked back to our table.

I lifted the pen again. "So! Rovil..."

He sensed something in my tone. "No," he said. "No, no, no."

"It's not a lot," I said.

"I can't keep giving you money. You're the rich one!"

"What are you talking about?"

"I know you lost your investment when Little Sprout collapsed," he said. "But after Mikala died, didn't her estate-"

"That money's gone."

"Gone? How?"

"You'd be surprised how much a drink costs in this town." I said it to embarra.s.s him and shut down that line of questioning. Nice people didn't like to hear about an addict's life.

The tactic worked a little too well. The call went silent. "Rovil?"

After a moment, he said, "Lyda, are you using again?"

"What? What the f.u.c.k, Rovil. No. That's in the past."

"I want to help you. I do. But if you're spending it on other things-"

"I'm not."

"Then what is it?"

"I can't tell you. Not right now." I glanced back at the Ollie and the smugglers. We could bail out. Find some other, cheaper way, and eventually cross the border.

Except that Edo was landing in New York in three days.

"Fine. Forget the money," I said. "I need something else." I told him what I wanted him to do.

Rovil made sputtering noises. "Lyda, I have a high-level job, I can't just-"

"Sure you can. How many sick days have you taken this year?"

"None! But that's because-"

"Then you're due. Look, you're in this, too. This is the One-Ten. You and I, we agreed to keep it off the market. Don't you want to know who's doing this?"

He took a heavy breath.

"Thanks, kid."

I walked back to the table, and Ollie registered the look on my face. "Everything okay?" she asked.

"No worries," I said. "Are we done here?"

The younger of the cigarette smugglers looked up at me and said, "Half now."

Before I could answer, Ollie said, "Nope."

The two men turned their attention back to her.

"We're not going down like that Pakistani family that got stranded in the middle of the St. Lawrence," she said.

"That wasn't us!" the younger one said.

What Pakistani family? I thought.

"We'll give you ten percent now," Ollie said calmly. "Then forty percent when the rowboat arrives. The rest when we get to the other side." She shrugged. "It's either that, or I go to the h.e.l.l's Angels."

I thought, Would she really contact the h.e.l.l's Angels? Then: There are still h.e.l.l's Angels?

The young one started to speak again. The silver-haired man stopped him and said, "Twenty-five percent now."

Ollie seemed to weigh the offer. Then she reached into her jacket pocket and pa.s.sed an envelope under the table.

The man in the baseball cap kept it below the rim of the table and peeked inside. "Okay then."

Before the meeting at the marina I'd given Ollie everything I had left in HashCash, less than a thousand bucks. She added everything she'd had hidden in the duffel, for a grand total of $5,500 Canadian. That was before we took the hit on the Yuan conversion. There was no second envelope. She'd just handed them our last dime.

Ollie said to them, "You have some numbers for me, now?"

The older man took out a ballpoint pen and wrote something on the back of a beer coaster. Ollie looked at it, nodded, then put it in her jacket. "See you boys tomorrow."

Bobby was waiting for us in his Nissan. We'd left him outside like a tied-up dog, figuring a panicky schizo might frighten off the drug smugglers. Or rather, another panicky schizo. "Can we eat now?" he said. "I'm starving."

"Get us back into the city first," I said. "This place gives me the w.i.l.l.i.e.s." Ollie got in the back of the car. Before I climbed in after her, I scanned the parking lot, but there was still no sign of Dr. Gloria. The angel must have been really p.i.s.sed at me. What happened to "Lo, I will be with you always"?

Once we were rolling I used the burner pen to find a curry restaurant that was still open. I put in our order, then told Bobby to step on it. I was beginning to like having a chauffeur. I should have sworn off driving years ago.

A few minutes into the ride, Ollie said to me quietly, "We don't have the money, do we?"

I could have kissed her again for that "we."

"Not unless there's more in that duffel bag of yours," I said. More than once I'd entertained the fantasy that she was Agent Skarsten, International Spy, with a secret cache of pa.s.sports and stacks of bills in foreign currencies. But of course that was crazy. If Ollie had had that kind of dough she wouldn't have spent years living above a Thai restaurant, wouldn't have ended up in a public hospital like Guelph Western. And she sure as h.e.l.l wouldn't be hanging with me.

I'd never been rich. I'd grown up seesawing between middle cla.s.s and poor, depending on whether my dad had found work or my mom was home from the hospital. But Mikala came from money, and money followed her for the rest of her days. When we were "broke" and I didn't know how we'd afford our first apartment together, a trust fund would mature and a shower of money would descend just in time for the rent. We were invited to parties on yachts-yachts! And when Little Sprout needed an angel investor, a friend of a friend of Mikala's father appeared, and suddenly we were being financed by the loud and large Edo Anderssen Vik.

When Mikala died, her family fought the settlement of the estate. Why give their daughter's money to the white b.i.t.c.h she was going to divorce anyway? (All right, her parents never said "white b.i.t.c.h" to my face, but I liked to imagine they said it amongst themselves, because reverse-racism was the kind of racism my people liked best, and because "white b.i.t.c.h" was infinitely preferable to just plain "b.i.t.c.h," because that would have meant that they hated me because of me.) I managed to hold on to the estate, but only because we were still married when she died. In the absence of a will, everything went to the surviving spouse. I gave it all away the same week the check cleared. There were plenty of times I'd wished I'd kept some of it, but this was the first time I'd ever thought so while sober.

Ollie said, "If they'd asked for more than twenty-five down, they would have walked out on us."

"So tomorrow we may be dead, but today we still have a reservation."

Ollie looked at me.

"See what I did there?" I said. "That was an Indian joke."

"Oh, I got it," she said. We were going to meet the smugglers in Cornwall, which was five hours east of Toronto, just across the St. Lawrence River from upstate New York.