The owner checked his wristwatch. A minute till ten. He parted the strings of beads under the Employees Only sign and walked to the front of the store, flicking on fluorescent lights that revealed a skimpy, outdated selection of dusty books. He checked his watch again. Ten on the nose. A long line had already formed outside. The man flipped the CLOSED sign over, unlocked three large bolts and pushed the front door open.
Back in the storeroom, the staff was busy with box cutters, slicing open a dozen cases of paperbacks, 576 books in all, every one the same title.
The customers were not browsers. They went straight to the counter.
The owner stood behind the cash register and smiled. “Can I help you?”
“Uh, yes,” said the first customer. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I’d like The Stingray Shuffle.”
“I think we might have one left,” said the owner, reaching under the counter and producing a paperback. “Yes, here it is. But it’s a rare collector’s item. First edition. A hundred dollars.”
The customer handed over five twenties, took the book and left quickly.
The next customer stepped up.
“May I help you?”
The customer opened his wallet. “The Stingray Shuffle, please.”
“We might have one left,” said the owner, reaching down. “Yes, here it is…”
The line still had a dozen customers left when the owner felt under the counter and found an empty shelf. He yelled toward the bead curtain in the back of the store: “Need some more books up here!”
One of the workers burst through the beads and trotted up to the register with a fresh box. The others in the storeroom were hard at work with box cutters, slicing secret compartments into the middle of the paperbacks and inserting grams of cocaine.
A half hour later: “We need more books again!”
“We’re almost out.”
“So reorder,” yelled the owner. “Call the distributor.”
The phone rang in the back room. It never stopped ringing. Always the same question. “Yes, we have that title.”
But this call was different.
The employee who answered it got a nervous look. He cupped his hand over the receiver. “Boss! Come quick!”
The owner stuck his head through the beads. “What is it?”
“Some nosy person asking a lot of questions about books. Really suspicious.”
“Who is it?”
“Says he’s a publisher.”
“You idiot! Of course it’s a publisher! This is a fucking bookstore. Just get rid of him.”
“Right.” The employee uncovered the receiver and had a short conversation, jotting something on a scrap of paper before hanging up.
“What did they say?”
“They wanted an author to do a book signing here.”
The boss started laughing. “Here?” He broke up again. “That’s a riot!”
The employee started laughing, too.
The laughing gradually tapered off, and the boss caught his breath. “How’d you get rid of him?”
“Said Tuesday would be fine.”
“What! We can’t have a book signing here!”
“You just told me to get rid of him. You didn’t say no signing.”
The boss pulled a gold bullet of coke from his shirt pocket, stuck it under his nose. “Who’s this author, anyway?”
The employee checked his piece of paper. “Ralph Krunkleton.”
The boss sniffled and bunched his eyebrows in concentration. “Ralph Krunkleton, Ralph Krunkleton. Where have I heard that name before? Hmmm…”
The others continued slicing books.
“…Ralph Krunkleton, Ralph Krunkleton…” The boss looked down at the table full of paperbacks. “Oh, my God! Not Ralph Krunkleton!”
“Who’s Ralph Krunkleton?”
“The guy who wrote this book!” The owner snorted up again, and the coke began marching him in a circle. “We don’t need this kind of attention! We’ve worked hard to develop this book as our code title — one of the worst-selling novels in history, one that no law-abiding customer would ever, ever ask for. A signing is the last thing we need — it’ll screw up the entire procedure. And there’ll be press, TV…”
An employee slit into another paperback. “We’ll need snack mix.”
9
At the end of the twentieth century, major drug cartels were displaying enormous ingenuity and limitless finances. Cocaine was found encased in concrete posts, dissolved in soda pop, injected in breast implants.
But nobody expected what was discovered one cool morning high up the mountains twenty-eight kilometers west of Cartagena. Police were tipped off by farmers in a remote village, who said three strangers had moved into an old warehouse, never came out and appeared to subsist entirely on takeout delivered from God knew where. They heard drilling sounds at night.
There was no sign of the three men when the policia swarmed the warehouse in a coordinated predawn raid and found precision tools, welding tanks and Russian engineering manuals. But nobody was looking at that stuff. They were staring up at The Tube — the arc-welded, double-hulled, twenty-foot-wide steel cylinder running the entire length of the building. It couldn’t possibly be what they thought it was, not at this altitude.
Military experts soon confirmed their worst suspicions: a nearly complete military-class submarine that could dive to three hundred feet and carry ten tons of cocaine. The sub was to be built, then dismantled and trucked to the coast for reassembly. The estimated cost: twenty-five million U.S. dollars. The police had to shake their heads with grudging admiration. This was even more ambitious than the previous high-water mark in 1995, when the Cali Cartel attempted to purchase a used Soviet navy sub before the deal was uncovered and scuttled. But that was dismissed as a grandiose scheme doomed from the start. This, on the other hand, was frighteningly close to fruition. There was a wave of relief. Thank heaven they’d arrived when they did.
A police captain with as much imagination as the cartels deflated the mood. “How do we know there aren’t other subs already in the water?”
A tall, rugged man in a white linen suit stood on a sandy beach near the southern end of the Windward Islands and looked out to sea with binoculars. It was a beautiful horseshoe harbor of clear blue water, the shore ringed with quaint pastel buildings. Behind the man, the island rose quickly through coconut palms and a rain forest to the volcanic peak of Mount St. Catherine, the highest point in Grenada.
The man kept his binoculars trained on the water and for some reason remembered reading that Grenada had 154 TV sets per thousand residents. He looked a little like Gene Hackman and wore an expression of grave concern. Nobody knew the man’s name, but they all called him Mr. Grande, head of the infamous Mierda Cartel.
The cocaine business had always been a tricky proposition, and everyone knew the risks. The absurd amounts of money made it worthwhile. Except for the Mierda Cartel. It was the sixty-eighth-largest cartel in the world, which was last place, and it was broke. The other cartels fought extradition; the Mierda gang was hounded by bill collectors.
Everyone naturally assumed that all cartels were extremely rich and ruthless, and the residents of Grenada initially treated their hometown traffickers with the appropriate mixture of respect and fear. But a different picture soon emerged. The cartel was running up tabs all over town. Nobody wanted to say anything at first. They had heard the stories. But when the cartel couldn’t pay for transmission work on a Mercedes, and the mechanic impounded the car — and was still alive a week later — everything changed. The merchants started getting nudgey, and the cartel began avoiding town.