“No, it’s a signal that bullshit is about to follow. It’s the hat that bullshit puts on before it goes out to get the paper.”
“How long has it been?” she said, refusing to get distracted. “Maybe an experimental phase in college?”
“You can’t seriously be doubting what team I’m on,” I said. “I was with Mikala for eight years. Five of them married.”
“I’m just asking about your life,” Ollie said.
“No, this is some weird jealousy thing over a nonexistent person.”
She pointed the neck of her beer at me. “And you’re not answering the question.”
“I will admit to fucking a zucchini when I was in high school. For years I thought I was a vegesexual.”
Ollie’s not a big laugher, but I caught her as she was drinking, and she had to purse her lips and put down the bottle. For Ollie, that was the equivalent of a spit take.
“How about you?” I asked. “Ever do one?”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Boys were never an issue.”
“I was talking about vegetables.”
She started to answer, then froze, her eyes on a reflection in the window. “Here we go,” she said.
This time I resisted the urge to spin around. After an appropriate pause, I glanced casually over my shoulder. Two men had come in, a guy in his sixties with a silver ponytail and a younger man in a Mercury baseball cap. I don’t know how Ollie recognized them, because she’d told me that she hadn’t met them before. They took a table in the back with no view of the water.
After a few minutes we walked over, carrying our drinks to look natural. They didn’t get up. We shook hands, and their palms were dry as burlap. Ollie had said they’d be First Nations people, but if she hadn’t told me I would have put down their ethnicity as Weathered. The older one had a face like a crumpled paper bag, and his companion looked out from under his cap with a squint that suggested too many hours out on the water.
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 damn long, and too many people liked their cheap smokes. What politician wanted to shoot their own economy in the foot? Besides, nobody 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.”
“Shit.”
A curse of resignation, not surprise. As soon as I met Francine at the NAT, weeping and tripping on God 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 mass 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 assume 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 God 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 fucking 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 shit. 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 embarrass 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?”