3.04 Paranoid

Later Friday afternoon after I had gotten back from Kokura, two officials from the Custom's Office, Nakata, the pudgy one with the wimpy little mustache and Windbreaker, came by to see me.

Nakata had told the morning of the raid that my cell phones would be returned to me by Friday afternoon, but, thanks to Azami's incessant calling, the battery died before the data could be transferred.

The two were now making a humble entreaty, practically cap in hand, asking if they could borrow the adaptor so they could recharge the phone. They didn't have the authority to confiscate it out right, Nakata explained with a tinge of embarrassment; my permission was required.

Had there been anything remotely incriminating on that particular cell phone, I might have had second thoughts about cooperating with the two Customs officials. Fortunately, I had for many years been in the habit of erasing all out-going mails and keeping the in-box tidy, purposely free of anything that could implicate me in any crime or expose any extracurricular love affairs. I had my friend Jean to thank for that.

“Sure, no problem,” I said and excused myself to fetch the adaptor from my bedroom.

*

Those two grams of meth didn’t last nearly as long as I had expected. Imagine that! Before I knew it, I was buying a gram here, another there, but always for some express reason or another, of course. If it weren’t finals I had to cram for, then it was Giles Peterson DJ-ing at O/D or a date with a hot nurse that required me to be sharper than usual. Within six months of that first enlightening hit, I was buying ten-gram bags of the drug for the bargain-basement price of seven thousand yen a gram.

Jean meanwhile was buying the shit in bulk--a hundred grams at a time--and, as a precaution, keeping most of his stash in a safe place an hour's drive outside the city. Whenever he couldn't be bothered, or was just too damn “baked” to make the trip, he would ring me up from a pay phone and ask to “borrow” a gram of "Shinji" like a neighbor knocking on my door to borrow a cup of sugar.

I’ll never forget that first neighborly visit.

Jean wasted no time getting down to business. The man was as methodical as a surgeon, and as cautious as a Scot. After, giving the coffee table in my living room a good wipe down with tissue, he took the small packet of crystal meth I had given him and snipped a corner off with his Swiss Army knife. Placing the bit of plastic he’d just cut off in the center of the tissue, he twisted the tissue up.

Next, Jean set about preparing the foil. I handed him a strip of tinfoil, which he folded in half to form a perfect square. With another narrow fold along the open end he created a cuff sealing the foil. He then wiped the foil down with a fresh tissue making it nice and flat, free of any wrinkles or creases where the meth might catch and burn. Finally, he manipulated the foil with his fingertips to form a shallow trough into which he then sprinkled some of the crystals.

Before lighting up, Jean dug a small, but powerful penlight out of his pocket and, illuminating the surface of the table, searched every inch of the table and the surrounding floor.

"Aha," Jean said, pointing to a speck on the table. “You see that?”

He dapped at an infinitesimal splinter with the tip of his index finger and added it to the rest of the crystal on the foil. After placing the first tissue into the second and twisting the two of them up, he gestured for me to follow him to the toilet. There, he set the tissue alight, allowing it burn slowly and thoroughly.

"You may think I'm being paranoid,” Jean said, “but, my friend, paranoia has nothing to do with it. I'm merely being careful. And, I want you to be very careful, too. You have to realize what the risks are. Do you want to go to jail?"

"Of course not," I said. "You think I'm stupid?"

"Well then, if you are so smart, I need not tell you that little piece of plastic in there could get you arrested. It's not much, but it's enough for the cops to take your freedom away, to put you behind bars until you talk, and believe me, you will talk. If talking gets you out and back to your life, you will 'sing like the canaria', just as everyone does." 

Jean turned the tissue to keep the flame alive, and once satisfied he had destroyed any evidence, dumped it into the toilet and flushed it.

"Mon ami, ici, ce n'est pas l'Amerique. La France non plus," he said. This is not America, my friend. It's not France, either. "The police won't break down your door here. They're much more subtle. The first thing they do is go through your garbage when you're not around, then they go in and check all the surfaces in your apartment, wipe them all down, vacuum the floors. Then, they take it all to their labs to be tested. And if they find traces of our friend Shinji here, how are you gonna explain how he got there? A little bird flew it in?"

Jean stared intently at me, looking past my eyes into that thick head of mine to listen to the thoughts I was whispering to myself.

"No, my friend, you will not say anything,” Jean continued, “because they won't find anything here that incriminates you. And you know why? I'll tell you why. Because, so long as you want to meet Shinji you will be as careful as I am. You understand?"

I nodded.

“Tres bien.”

We returned to the coffee table and smoked up.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.