Out of Orange: A Memoir Read online

  But if Henry believed Alajeh was really dangerous, that meant Henry was willing to potentially sign our death warrants, as well as spoil his own opportunity to use a stand-in. That would make the whole thing pointless, unless Henry really believed we were too stupid to do what we were doing, and he really was trying to save Craig and Molly from us. It didn’t matter why he did what he did anymore, though. We just had to know if he told Alajeh about it. We thought the answer to that would determine if we were in real danger, not just saddled with the bags we had hoped to not carry because we thought we would get busted. We had an advantage as long as we had the three bags packed with heroin and nobody knew where to find us. But we couldn’t count on that to last long. I also had a funny feeling Henry and Bradley were much closer than we had thought. All bets were off as soon as Henry found out his diabolical plot or his intended rescue had failed, whichever it was. I had no idea what to expect from him when that happened.

  If Alajeh already knew what was going on, the bags weren’t just our advantage; they were our hostages for our own safety and our ransom for control over Molly and Craig’s fate for as long as Alajeh and Henry did not know where in Jakarta to find us. I didn’t know what the bags were worth to him, but if he had already been told what we had attempted to do, we had to assume that Henry and Bradley weren’t going to be the only ones who would have surprised us. Absconding with the bags might make Alajeh want to put a stop to it all. That is what the second room was for, a place to scoot after we made a phone call. From there we might have an opportunity to untangle the mess we had made before it got worse than it already had.

  We checked out one last detail, a sound check of sorts. Then Phillip sat down in the chair opposite me at the desk in our new hotel room. We were on the twentieth floor and had a view of the blue sky—no telltale signs of the huge, dirty, and stinky city we were in. Jakarta didn’t exist, unless we walked right over to the window and looked right down into it. I had done that and realized we were too far up from the street to clearly identify the people down there. Our other room would have nearly the same view but of the entrance side of the Hyatt. But I figured we would recognize Bradley’s shock of blond hair even from up here if he walked anywhere below where our view was not obscured. If anyone else was coming for us, we wouldn’t know who to look for anyway.

  I dialed the Benin number for Alajeh, and he didn’t answer. His assistant picked up and asked me to identify myself. I told him who I was, but I knew that he already knew exactly who I was. This was Alajeh’s special phone, by the way, the number we used to conduct our quick business calls. He always answered this phone. His assistant took a quick breath and for some reason that breath is what made my spider senses tingle. He asked for my telephone number and room number, and told me he would have Alajeh call me back. Why he did that only made sense if Alajeh thought they didn’t already have that information. But Alajeh already had our phone number and room number at the Marcopolo.

  These two pieces of information, if combined, were more precise than GPS coordinates: one defined the exact address we were at on planet Earth, the other the exact room in that address. Without the room number, the closest they could get to finding us was the building we were in, and the Hyatt was huge.

  I provided the information Alajeh’s assistant had asked for—my room number and the telephone number—shook my head, letting Phillip know that Alajeh had not come to the phone, and hung up. I turned the ringer’s volume up and left the phone I had just hung up as close to our room door as its cord permitted. We quickly went into our other room. We had already confirmed that we could hear the phone ring from our other room, even with both doors closed. The new room bought us very little time, but that was all we needed. I hoped.

  This had the potential of being a very big mistake, but we didn’t know what else to do. It was the fastest way we could think of to find out what we needed to know. If the phone rang within a few minutes, I would run like hell to answer it. In that case, it would be safer to assume that Alajeh hadn’t been told anything, otherwise we figured we would get an unexpected visit, not a call. We had to accept the possibility that both might happen, in that case we would only have a few minutes to talk to him and alter our fate, but at least we would have that. If it took long for him to call back, then I would have to remain at the window watching the hotel entrance and Phillip would have to stay with his eye stuck to the peephole until either a call or a visitor did come. The plan wasn’t perfect and it did not guarantee our safety, but it was the best we could do.

  Unfortunately, the phone didn’t ring back. It took only fifteen minutes, but it felt like an eternity waiting there in silence with our eyes glued on the entrance and peephole. Then Phillip backed away from the door and waved at me to come over. The expression on his face told me more than I wanted to know. He motioned for me to be quiet and pointed to the peephole. I looked out, just in time to see two young Asians or Indonesians turn and walk away from our other room door, down the hall, and back to the elevators. One of them had been with the guys who had delivered the first three bags. I had never seen the other guy, but he was not a hotel employee. Phillip and I sat in the quiet for a while, checking the peephole every few seconds to see if they came back. They did not.

  I hoped to God the desk wouldn’t give any information out to people who couldn’t even tell them the name of the person supposedly residing in room number 2022. Alajeh would know we had tricked him now, and he would have to assume we knew he had sent two of his people to the room we were supposed to be in.

  It was time to call Craig back. I didn’t want to talk to him now. I was so afraid that he might have talked to Henry again, and who knew what else might be happening on his end of the line? My hands weren’t shaking anymore and I had a weird kind of serenity flooding over me while Phillip and I sat in the silence. I had been praying to myself. “A bad Catholic” is what my mom would have called me years before when I would go to church only on Christmas and Easter, but I didn’t even do that anymore. That didn’t mean I couldn’t pray my heart out now.

  “Craig.” I listened carefully for anything other than Craig’s voice.

  “Hi.” He sounded tired but not false.

  “So what are your thoughts?” I asked instead of launching into hysterics and telling them to get the hell out of there as fast as their feet could run.

  “Well, we want to apologize first.” I thought he was about to tell me that they were going with Henry. “I was just freaked out about the whole passport thing. He told me you guys had lied to us about important shit and that you had no idea what you were—” I cut him off.

  “It’s okay. I know this shit got crazy. If I had known he was coming to Jakarta, I would have warned you. But listen. I need you guys to get out of that hotel. Go check into the other place you were thinking about.” I said this and instantly realized there may have been no other place; it may have been part of the ruse. Then I remembered the brochures they had shown me.

  “We are already packed up and got a driver.” They had planned on returning to meet us at the Marcopolo. They didn’t know we were no longer there.

  “Okay. Hang on a second.” I covered the phone and updated Phillip, asking him what I should tell them. They couldn’t go to the Marcopolo and they couldn’t come to the Hyatt, where we were now. We didn’t know what was going to happen yet. I didn’t want to freak them out or get them caught up in the middle of the shit we were in. Phillip looked at his watch and he took the phone from me.

  “Go back to the Hilton resort. Do not go to the Marcopolo. We are not going to be there when you get back. Check in under the name Adam Douglas and stay in your room. We will be there by midnight, but don’t leave your room till then. Seriously, dude. Henry has some shit going down and you do not want to get involved. If we don’t get back there tonight, go home.” He handed the phone back to me. I told Craig I would talk to him later and hung up.

  “Okay, here goes nothing.”

  Phill
ip sat down in the desk chair and crossed himself quickly, like he didn’t want me to see what he was doing. I dialed Benin and Alajeh answered on the first ring.

  “What is going on?” Alajeh sounded frustrated, maybe angry.

  “We have a little snag in our travel plans I need you to help me sort out.” I had to resist the urge to flip out and instead stay calm and sane while I spoke.

  “Where are you? Let me come to you.” He didn’t mean that he would come to me himself. He was saying that he would have someone else come.

  “No. It would be better if we solved this problem first.”

  “You won’t tell me where you are?” He sounded like I’d hurt his feelings.

  “Don’t worry. We’re not trying to run away with your bags. I just have to solve something before it turns into a big problem.” I tried to sound like a rational businessperson and kept reminding myself That’s all this is . . . It’s business . . . It’s business.

  “Yes. I know. Henry told me.” He quit playing the fake emotions.

  “Really? When was that?” His candor had surprised me.

  “It’s not important.” He cleared his throat after he’d said this.

  “It is to me.” I heard myself and wished I hadn’t sounded so miffed.

  “A few days ago.” I thought maybe he had really talked to him in the last hour. “I can help you. I can deal with Henry, and your friends will be fine. But you have to listen to me. He is hysterical. Is Phillip with you?” I looked up at Phillip and put the phone on speaker.

  “He’s here. You’re on speaker now.”

  Phillip sat up and focused on the phone.

  “Phillip! My friend!” He sounded jovial, not like a cold-blooded kingpin.

  “Alajeh,” Phillip answered, sounding tired and uneasy.

  “You have to give Bradley and Henry two of the bags. They will leave tomorrow.” Alajeh said this to Phillip, not to me, but I didn’t give a shit who he said it to. It made no sense. Phillip looked at me and tilted his head like dogs do.

  “Why two?” he asked.

  “Give them two bags. I will send another one to you, and your friends can go back to Chicago then. I will make sure Henry goes now.” We wanted this to be as simple to solve and as small a wrinkle in our safe return to Northampton as Alajeh was making it out to be. We wanted it to be true so badly that we believed it was.

  We took the bags back to the Marcopolo, where Bradley came down to the lobby to retrieve them. Henry did not come with him and I did not go in with Phillip to give the bags to Bradley. Phillip got back into the taxi and we headed back to the Hilton resort to wait for Molly and Craig to get there. We would have to wait now for the replacement Alajeh had promised. He wasn’t going to make us carry the drugs ourselves anymore, as long as we had someone we could trust to do it for us. In fact, he actually liked our idea. We had saved ourselves and our friends from a potential disaster, but we had pretty much ruined the one out we had. We could be added to the watch list, get searched, questioned, and probed. We wouldn’t be the ones carrying Alajeh’s precious cargo, but we would be there.

  6 The Day After Tomorrow

  Planet Earth

  Midsummer 1993

  HENRY AND BRADLEY left us all behind in Jakarta. I was relieved by the time we knew they were on another continent on the other side of the world. They had made it as far as London and were due back in the United States before the end of the week. Prior to their safe entrance into Europe with the two bags they had taken from us, I had a little nagging fear in the back of my mind that if Henry got caught there—he was so bitter about losing his game—he might just take us all down with him and I wasn’t ready for that yet. Aside from that internal sporadic nag, things felt good again, manageable, like we might all get home in one piece.

  I knew it was twisted to feel triumphant, since all that Phillip and I had really accomplished was deepening our own hole. We had taken such an incredibly huge risk to confront the situation with Henry and Alajeh head-on the way we had, hiding Alajeh’s drugs and ourselves from him and telling him the truth about what we had been up to with our friends. Either of those actions could possibly have gotten us killed. Alajeh was smarter than that though. He let us off the hook for devising a scheme to have others carry the drugs, but he wasn’t at all forgiving when it came to not getting them where they needed to go.

  I thought about that second call to Alajeh, after seeing the two men show up at the first hotel room we had been in. Alajeh had told Phillip and me that he had been looking for us at the Hyatt to offer us his help in our complicated situation. I wondered, though, if we had been there in the first room when the two fellows arrived, instead of across the hall, peeping through an eyehole, how differently this might have ended. Would we be alive? Would Craig and Molly leave Henry and Bradley in Chicago, return to Northampton, and then wonder what had happened to us? Would Piper try to find me when I never came home or try to find out where we were? Would Edith and Dum Dum be like Lassie and try to tell her we fell in a well?

  We had to wait in Indonesia for two more weeks before the bags intended for Henry and Bradley arrived. Alajeh got more money to Phillip and me, but not enough for us to stay in two double rooms at the Hilton resort the whole time that we would have to wait for Molly and Craig’s bags to arrive. Phillip flew back to the United States, and I went with Craig and Molly to Bali to kill time.

  Bali was the most beautiful place I had ever been. The beaches were gorgeous and it didn’t feel like a third world country at all. It felt more like Provincetown, but instead of being filled with gays from New York and Boston, its tourists were Dutch and Australian. It had the same bohemian atmosphere, shopping, clubs, and cafés, just with sarongs and sandals instead of short shorts and Doc Martens.

  We left Indonesia with the new luggage two weeks later. We encountered no problems in Paris. It was as though having an American passport made us either special or not worth their energy—I couldn’t guess—but they barely gave us nods as they stamped our documents and let us into the country.

  We checked into what was becoming my home away from home, the Hôtel Saint-André des Arts in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Phillip couldn’t come to Paris with Garrett, but he assured me his friend was more than ready and able to travel on his own. I stayed at the hotel with our luggage while my friends took the Étoile du Nord—the European equivalent to Amtrak—to Brussels. Once there, they went directly to the U.S. consulate to report that Molly had lost her passport and needed to have it replaced with a new one. That solved the poppy-country-stamp issue. They returned to me at the Saint-André des Arts the following day.

  Phillip had arrived in Chicago and would be waiting for Garrett and Molly at the airport the next day. Garrett flew into Paris the same day Craig and Molly returned from Brussels with her newly acquired passport. We had a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Île Saint-Louis that night and we all got to know Garrett over Chianti and pasta. Craig and Molly reminded me of myself during my first trip.

  After a month in Africa of choking down goat meat and parasites, we had all come to this restaurant—Hester, Henry and Bradley, and me. We had sat at a table by the window. I stared at the table, occupied by two French couples dining together. The food had tasted like pure bliss in my mouth, even though I couldn’t eat my whole serving. My stomach had shrunk quite a bit from all the abuse in Africa. I could almost see us there at the table, laughing, smoking cigarettes, and drinking cognac because Henry had warned me I would need it to sleep before my first trip carrying drugs home. I had been so nervous and happy all at once, having gotten my sister away from the jerk in Africa but scared shitless about the next day. I had been anxious too, anxious for it to be all over, and it had been so close, I’d thought, to that being so.

  The waiter dropped the check off at our table and I asked everyone to pony up all their francs, since we would no longer be needing them. Craig and Molly contributed some random coins worth about two hundred francs and I paid
the rest from my dwindling stash of French currency. We had more than enough left over for a cab to the airport in the morning, and breakfast was free at our hotel.

  It was such a lovely summer night, warm and dry, a welcome departure from the stinky humidity we had left behind in Jakarta. Just as Henry had done with me only a few months earlier, I suggested we all walk off some of the wine and pasta before trying to go to sleep instead of being lazy and taking a taxi back to the hotel. We stopped on the bridge we were crossing, one of many bridges that anchor the Île Saint-Louis to the city. Notre-Dame’s buttresses and façade were illuminated so that even from our angle and at night it dwarfed everything around it. A dinner barge passed under the bridge where we stood, followed by a sightseeing barge, shining spotlights on the buildings it passed as it too slid under the bridge and out of sight, on its way down the Seine.

  When the tour guide’s amplified description of the Latin Quarter, coming from the barge, died away in the distance, it was replaced by an accordion’s version of “La Vie en Rose,” coming from the vicinity of the cathedral. It mixed eerily with a violinist playing Ravel nearby. Garrett was staring at his manicured fingers as he tapped a rhythm on the stone rail of the bridge. I could see a hint of nervousness forming in his pensive expression. Molly and Craig stood, in a spooning embrace, and swayed slightly as they stared down at the passing boats.

  “Time to make the donuts!” I started walking the rest of the way across the bridge and back to our hotel. It was time to get these guys back so they could relax, pack again for the zillionth time, and do all the weird, stupid things we humans do to calm ourselves the night before something decisive: battles, play-offs, recitals, and the walk through Charles de Gaulle airport and Customs in Chicago. Phillip and I got a break from the relentless globe-trotting after the trip to Indonesia. We had been in motion since April, I felt like I had been in motion since January, and it was summer already. Phillip had moved back to Provincetown with Meg in May 1993. He had abandoned me again to go take care of his real life with Meg, while in a hotel in Chicago I waited out the week it took to get our pay. Meg still had no clue what he was really up to, so he couldn’t stay away for six-week stretches like I had done now twice.