Saint Death

Milton waited for a pause and then said, in his excellent Spanish, “My name is John and I’m an alcoholic.”

The others welcomed him and waited for him to speak.

“It’s been 870 days since my last drink.”

Applause.

“Why can’t we drink like normal people? That’s the question. It’s guilt for me. That’s not original, I know that, but that’s why I drink. Some days, when I remember the things I used to drink to forget, it’s all I can do to keep away from the bottle. I spent ten years doing a job where I did things that I’m not proud of. Bad things. Everyone I knew then used to drink. It was part of the culture. Eventually I realised why — we all felt guilty. I was ashamed and I hated what I’d become. So I came to these rooms and I worked through the steps, like we all have, and when I got to step four, ‘make a searching and fearless moral inventory,’ that was the hardest part. I didn’t have enough paper to write down all the things that I’ve done. And then step eight, making amends to those people that you’ve harmed, and, well, that’s not always possible for me. Some of those people aren’t around for me to apologise to. So what I decided to do instead was to help people. Try and make a difference. People who get dealt a bad hand, problems they can’t take care of on their own, I thought maybe I could help them. There was this young single mother — this was back in London, before I came out here. She was struggling with her boy. He was young and headstrong and on the cusp of doing something that would ruin the rest of his life. So I tried to help and it all went wrong — I made mistakes and they paid the price for them. That messed me up even more. When the first people I tried to help end up worse than when I found them, what am I supposed to do then?”

He paused, a catch in his throat. He hadn’t spoken about Rutherford and Sharon before. Dead and burned. He blamed himself for both of them. Who else was there to blame? And Elijah. What chance did the boy have now after what had happened to him? He was the one who had found Rutherford’s body.

“You can’t blame yourself for everything,” one of the others said.

Milton nodded but he wasn’t really listening. “I had to get out of the country. Get away from everything. Some people might say I’m ru

Milton rested back in his chair: done. The others thanked him for his share. Another man started with his story. The meetings were meditative, a peaceful hour where he could shut out the clamour of the world outside.

Ignore his memories.

The blood on his hands.

He closed his eyes and let the words wash across him.

3

The man they called El Patrón was in his early seventies, but he looked younger. There had been a lot of plastic surgery in the last decade. That pig Calderon would have paid handsomely for his capture — the bounty was ten million dollars the last time he had checked — and it had been necessary for him to change the way he looked. The first few operations had been designed to do that: his nose had been reshaped, new hair had been transplanted onto his scalp, his teeth had been straightened and bleached. The recent operations were for the sake of vanity: wrinkles were pulled tight with a facelift, bi-monthly Botox injections plumped his forehead, filler was injected into his cheeks. In a profession such as his, when Death was always so close at hand, it gave him a measure of satisfaction to be able — at least superficially — to thumb his nose at the passing of time.

His name was Felipe González, although no-one outside of his family used it any more. He was El Patrón or, sometimes, El Padrino: the Godfather. He was of medium height, five foot eight, although he added an inch or two with Cuban heeled boots. He had a stocky, powerful build, a bequest from his father who had been a goatherd in the Sierra Madre mountains where he still maintained one of his many homes and where he had learned how to cook methamphetamine, cultivate the opium poppy crop and move cargos without detection. He had large, labourer’s hands, small dark eyes, and hair coloured the purest black, as black as ink or a raven’s feathers.

He opened the door to the laboratory. The work was almost done. The equipment that he had been acquiring for the better part of six months — bought carefully, with discretion, from separate vendors across the world — had all been installed. The room was two thousand square feet, finished with freshly poured concrete floors and walls, everything kept as clean as could be. The largest piece of equipment was the 1200 litre reaction vessel, a huge stainless steel vat that had been positioned in the middle of the large space. There were separate vats for the other processes and a hydraulic press to finish the product. The top-of-the-line filtration system had been purchased from a medical research company in Switzerland and had cost a quarter of a million dollars alone. There were large tanks for the constituent parts: ephedrine, red phosphorous, caustic soda, hydrogen chloride, hydrochloric acid, ammonia hydroxide, other chemicals that Felipe did not recognise nor was interested in understanding. The actual operation of the lab was not his concern. He had hired a chemist for that, a man from a blue-chip pharmaceutical company who felt that he was not receiving a salary commensurate with his talents. Felipe could assuage all doubts on that score. He would make him a millionaire.

Felipe considered himself an expert in the tastes and preferences of his clientele and, so far as he was concerned, meth was the drug of the future. He had been a little slow in getting into it but that would all change now.

He had seen enough and went back outside. They were high in the mountains. The lab was stuffy but the air was fresh and clean. It was a perfect spot for the operation: the only way to get to the lab was along a vertiginous road that wound its way around the face of the mountain, slowly ascending, a unguarded drop into a ravine on the right hand side as the road climbed. There were shepherds and goatherds all along the route, each of them furnished with a walkie-talkie that Felipe had provided. In the unlikely event that an unknown vehicle attempted to reach the summit, they would call it in and the sicarios who provided security for the laboratory would take to their posts and, if necessary, prevent further progress. The government made all the right noises about closing down operations like this one but Felipe was not concerned. He knew the rhetoric was necessary for the public’s consumption but there would always be the cold, hard impracticality of putting those fine words into action. They would need helicopters and hundreds of men. It wasn’t worth the effort.

His second-in-command, Pablo, was behind him. The man was as loyal as a dog, perhaps a little too enamoured of the white powder, but very dependable.

“It is done, El Patrón,” he said.

“You have spoken to Adolfo?”

“I have.”

“It was straightforward?”

“Apparently so. They killed them all. One of them was still alive. Adolfo cut off the man’s head and posted the footage on YouTube.”

Felipe tutted. His son had a weakness for the grand gesture. There was a time and a place for drama — it was practically de rigeur among the younger narcos these days — but Felipe preferred a little more discretion.

Pablo noticed his boss’ disapproval. “It will be a message for the Italians.”