“I think I can guess what you’re getting to,” I interrupted. “Instead of approaching the problem from the outside, I should present myself to the Mafia as a European dealer with a safe drug route.”
“And be invited into the Mafia as a partner, a welcome guest, instead of an intruder. That’s right”
“Fine,” I agreed, “except for one thing. The European routes are run by families that are even tighter than the American Mafia. Let’s be realistic. If I show up as a Corsican, the Mafia can fly in ten of my alleged uncles to check my story.”
In the dark I could still make out Hawk nodding and smiling.
“Correct, Nick. But you won’t be a Corsican.”
The projector clicked for the last time, filling the screen with bright color, a rolling blanket of poppies in red blossom and with a stark range of mountains that I recognized as Anatolia.
“You’ll be a Turk, Nick. We’re going right to the source of the opium in Turkey. That’s where the Corsicans get their raw material and for a very good reason. Turkish opium is the highest grade. With its enormous morphine ratio it can be cut down more than other opiums.”
“The economics are fantastic,” Dr. Thompson spoke up for the first time. “A farmer in Turkey grows ten kilos, or twenty-two pounds, of opium for 330 Turkish lira. That’s the equivalent of $22. Once that opium has been processed into heroin and adulterated for sale on American streets, its value has increased to $1,936,000.”
“The Mafia will listen to any Turk who can come to them with a deal,” Hawk concluded. “And farmers all over Turkey grow opium poppies. You don’t have to be involved with the current suppliers at all.”
“A Turk,” I rubbed my hand over my face. It wasn’t the handsomest face in the world, but it wasn’t the ugliest either. I turned to Thompson. As head of Special Effects he takes a particular delight in rearranging my features to fit drops into China. A silicone bruise can last for months. On the other hand, he designs lovely little tools, like finger rings that turn into 36 inches of garroting wire. I regard him as being somewhere between a dentist and a wizard. “How much make up will that take?”
“Not much. Well make the port town of Izmir your home, and Izmir has enough nationalities so you could be blonde without being suspicious. As it is, you’re dark and menacing enough, if a little tall for a Turk,” Thompson paused. “The main problem is making you look a little less like Nick Carter.”
“You aren’t entirely unknown to the Mafia,” Hawk reminded me.
“We’ll build up the bridge of your nose a bit, emphasize the lines around your mouth, and reshape your hair,” the scientist said airily.
“A touch here and a touch there? No dueling scar?” I asked just to see Thompson wince. “All right, I assume we have tapes of the Izmir dialect and idioms.”
“All taken care of. But there is one other small matter,” Hawk remarked mildly.
The lights went on, washing out the poppies on the screen and revealing Hawk’s grin as he lit another of his evil cheroots.
“You see, Nick, it’s no problem for us to supply you with any amount of opium you need to impress the Mafia that you are a desirable partner. However, you have to have more than opium. All the suppliers have that.
“You have to prove to the Mafia that you have a foolproof system of moving your opium from Turkey to New York. And I mean foolproof. If customs catches you, you go to jail. If the Mafia so much as suspects that this is a set up, that customs is not doing its best to stop your shipment, then you may wind up dead. Either way, our whole operation collapses.”
“I’m glad you pointed that out,” I frowned. “The Corsicans have tried everything from coffins to cars to send their heroin through. You mean you’ve actually thought of something they haven’t?”
“Actually, no,” Hawk blew a puff to the ceiling. “We’ve left that for you. You have a week to figure it out.”
“A week!”
Hawk stood up. Suddenly, he was in a hurry to go someplace.
“You’ll think of something, Nick,” he patted my shoulder. “You always do.”
I was still thinking up Turkish curses for our beloved Commander when Dr. Thompson and I entered one of Special Effects’ lower-level laboratories. Usually, the lab is full of weapons under research. Now it was littered with dismantled cars, all sorts of luggage, and even part of an airliner fuselage.
“It’s very frustrating,” Thompson confessed. “To impress your future partners you would have to bring in a substantial shipment. Everything my men and I develop seems to have been tried already or thought of by customs. Car engines, false panels, even Japanese radios. Either trained dogs can sniff the heroin out or customs X-rays see it. Some Mexicans have sewn heroin into the second stomach of cattle and then driven the cattle over the border, but customs is on to that now. You can’t bring fruit into the country. If you bring in canned goods, they have to be inspected. With all the hijacking that’s going on, handcarried luggage gets a much more thorough going over.”
“How about stuffing the heroin in my stomach?” I growled.
Thompson began considering the possibility, so I left him with a sigh of disgust and went over to the plane fuselage. It was of a first class section, and I found one of the wide seats had a hollow bottom.
“This would involve the cooperation of an airline sanitation worker, someone who would clean the plane after you left and deposit the shipment in his industrial vacuum cleaner,” Thompson explained.
“Not a bad idea,” I said hopefully.
“But it happens that it was tried last week at Kennedy Airport. You see, the suppliers in Marseilles and Munich have laboratories just like this, and they’ve been spending years working on new systems. They have a headstart.”
He was still muttering about his problems when I left him.
For the next five days, I rehearsed my Turkish background and tried to think of a way to ship 200 pounds of heroin into the United States. In the first endeavor I was successful, and in the second I was a bust. Special Effects kept calling me down to see how they were getting along but they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Heroin secreted in the mile of wiring of a Rolls Royce may seem clever to a researcher, but it wasn’t the sort of plan I wanted to stake my life on, not if a customs inspector tried to start the engine. Besides, I was faced with the task of bringing in a big shipment, not a token sample.
“Could you get me some aspirin and a bottle of Johnny Walker from the commissary?” I asked my new secretary when I made my way back to my office.
“You have a headache?” she inquired sympathetically.
“No, but I will have when I get to the bottom of the bottle.”
She was a buxom blonde with tight leather pants and a beauty spot next to her mouth. Her mouth was in perpetual motion, sucking the candies she constantly fed herself. She wrinkled her nose cutely now as she toddled off for the scotch and pills. From the start I’d labeled her as overly willing, and I hadn’t approached her except with some papers to type. In my depression I was starting to see her charms.
On my desk was the huge government ledger I’d been studying for days, the survey of all foreign imports from Afghanistan to Zaire and from anchovies to zircons.
“My, that’s a big book,” my secretary thrust out her chest as she came back.
“Yes, and the pages are heavy, too. Maybe you’d like to help me turn the pages sometime.”