‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said with his bottom lip pushed out stubbornly. ‘I want to go to Santa and get an exchange, so I’m making a ladder to climb to the North Pole.’
‘What do you want to exchange your present for?’ I asked curiously.
‘I want Santa to make mummy better.’
How strange that that memory is intact and yet has been hidden from me all these years. Remembering those words from his tiny mouth breaks my heart, and tears rush uncontrollably forward. I begin to cry for my baby brother.
Very quietly, I edge to the side of the bed and slip out. Going into the bathroom I climb into the bath and hug my knees to my body as the tears flow. I remember how my dad found us both building the staircase and managed to convince Luke that we could write to Santa. Santa preferred that, anyway.
That is the thing I’ll always remember and miss about Luke, his kind heart and beautiful innocence. He was a gentle dreamer and life should have treated him with care and love, but it didn’t.
‘Oh, Luke,’ I whisper.
I hear a small sound at the door, the whisper of clothes against wood. I look up and Jake is standing there looking at me.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks me. His eyes are full of concern.
‘I want to tell you about my brother,’ I tell him.
‘OK,’ he says and climbs into the bath and sits facing me, his toes nearly touching mine.
‘He was a heroin addict and he died from an overdose.’ My voice catches at that. I have never admitted that to anyone before. ‘I found his body.’
Something flashes in his eyes, but he does not say anything or attempt to hold me.
‘It was truly awful. It destroyed me. I became a little mad after that.’ I laugh, a rasping, desperate sound. He says nothing. Simply looks at me. I clear my throat and I tell him about the spoon, the rubber tube. The needle still embedded in his bloated arm. Then I tell him about my descent.
‘I was barely living. I survived on a mixture of rage and the need for revenge. I was so broken I even tried to kill myself.’
I peer into his eyes, looking for condemnation of my weakness, or pity, but there is nothing, only direct and tenacious focus. At that moment I know I can tell him anything and he will still be there for me. His regard is unshakeable.
I come clean. ‘Everything I told you about my parents so far has been lies, part of my cover story. My dad, he’s not an alcoholic or a wife beater. He’s a good man, a doctor. He put me on anti-psychotic drugs.’
Then I pour out the visit to the pathologist and how it made me so angry with the people who had sold the tainted drugs to Luke that I decided to become a police officer. I tell him about how I joined the secretive undercover outfit called SO10. I tell him about the crack den and how the terrible, terrible smell of it still haunts me. And how I realized very quickly that I didn’t want to go after the small dealers, but the huge drug barons, and how the assignment to trap Crystal Jake had dropped into my lap.
‘So you went undercover. To catch the big bad guys?’ he asks.
I nod.
‘If you come upon a case where a wealthy heiress has died under suspicious circumstances and you are the investigating officer, what is the first line of investigation that you would naturally take?’
I frown. ‘I’d follow the money.’
‘So if you want to catch the big drug barons, why are you not following the money?’
For a second I am confused. ‘I’m a foot soldier. It is not my job to do that. My superiors decide the avenues of investigation and I carry out their commands.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why no one at the highest levels of this “drug war” is doing that?’
I frown again, thrown by the turn the conversation has taken. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that you, your little secretive undercover unit, and all the other departments that are supposed to be fighting the drugs war are all being manipulated. Drug barons are worth billions. They have to wash their money somewhere. That somewhere is some of the biggest banks in the world. Why are they sending you out to trap me when the most obvious thing would be to punish the banks that hide the money, to freeze the billions that the drug cartels own, and to stop the drugs at the source?’
I stare at him. Feeling stupid. It is an issue that I care about very deeply and yet I have accepted the most shallow of explanations about it.
‘The most developed form of puppetry in the world is the traditional Japanese puppet theater called Bunraku. The Japanese are very proud of it because it is considered a very highly skilled art form. And it is rather special because unlike other puppet shows the manipulators of the Bunraku puppets appear openly, in full view of the audience. However, the audience pretends not to be able to see them because the puppet masters are cloaked in black robes and sometimes black hoods.
‘The war on drugs is the same. The real manipulators of the puppets are not invisible, but we pretend we can’t see them. The system has trained us to see only the small-time criminals, the powerless puppets. So they train people like you to go after small fry and to be happy you have shut down a drug den knowing full well that as long as supply is safe another den will pop up even before the arresting officers have written their reports.’
He pauses.
‘But as far as I am concerned I’m not even that small-time drug dealer, Lily. You have to believe me.’
‘So why do they want you?’
‘You tell me.’
I press my fingertips against my temples. ‘I have seen the file on you.’
‘I haven’t touched drugs since I was nineteen years old. Whatever you saw in that file is not me. You see, I’ve been in a crack den a few times. I’ve seen clawing addiction first-hand. That intolerable smell you talk about, that’s feces, the ammonia of stale urine, sweat, and layers of accumulated dirt. And those blankets that they put up to cover every little gap of light that would otherwise come through? They do that because of their paranoia. They have the unshakable impression that people are watching them.’
‘Were you a crack addict?’ I whisper in shock.
He smiles. ‘No, but I know because I was once that slightly bigger fish drug dealer that all those little drug dealers went to, to get their stock from. I went to a crack house so I could see the bottom of my chain. It made me so sick I started a charity to help them. I don’t have a lot of time so I don’t do as much as I should, but if you want to help them you can take over. We both know you are bored sick of your job.’
‘How did you know I was bored?’
He flattens his mouth. ‘Lily, that job was designed to bore the shit out of you.’
‘What?’
‘Of course. What, did you think I was going to put you into some position where you could get any kind of information that could be twisted and used against me?’
‘Right. What does your charity do?’
‘We send the addicts to South America to be purged out with ayahuasca assisted treatments. It may seem off the wall but it has been shockingly effective and the reoffend rate is better than anything else I have seen.’
‘Doesn’t that have a psychedelic chemical, DMT, a Schedule 1 controlled substance?’
‘Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew of vine and plants that has been used in traditional medicine and shaman practices for centuries in the Amazon region. It is perfectly legal in South America.’
‘Right,’ I say carefully, since I know nothing about this stuff, but my first thought is that if it works that well, why isn’t it on mainstream media?
‘International research suggests that when administered in therapeutic settings, ayahuasca can reduce problematic substance use by helping promote personal or spiritual insights and self-knowledge. That’s the spiel we give our detractors. This is my experience of it. It’s fucking brilliant. These kids go there like walking corpses, they projectile vomit, shit like crazy, experience strong audio and visual hallucinations, and come out a few weeks later
healed and whole. It is a form of psychic detoxification where they discover the root cause—unpleasant memories, fears, anxieties—of their addictive and harmful behavior. Sometimes that sense of deficient emptiness and inchoate distress that they have felt all their life is gone. It gives them their first taste of victory after being constantly defeated by life. They come to the understanding that they are already the perfect human beings they were born as.’
I experience a stab of pain. Poor Luke. It’s too late for him.
‘Have you tried it?’
‘Of course. I wasn’t about to let the kids go through something I wasn’t going to try first.’
‘What was it like?’
He smiles. ‘Ayahuasca shows you the baggage you have carried all your life. You see clearly that all that pain is not part of you. You can put it down. I cried tears of pure joy when I took it. If you want I’ll take you one day.’
I look into his eyes and I know instantly that I would like to do that. I’d like to heal, too. I’d like to put my baggage down and live like everybody else.
‘Why don’t you go around to the center tomorrow and see how you feel about it?’
‘I will.’ I pause for a second. There is something more important for me to tackle before I get involved in his charity. ‘Do you have enemies, Jake?’
‘Many.’
‘Someone is out for you. Someone is giving untrue information about you.’
‘And you think it is Tommy?’
I look up at him, surprised by how quickly he has surmised the situation. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because when I came to pick you up at the barn after the fight he looked at me as if he knew me, but I have never seen him before in my life.’
‘And BJ? You think he’s involved too?’
‘If you were out, he could move in and claim your territory, right?’
He nods slowly. I open my mouth to say something else, but he puts a finger against my lips. ‘Don’t say anything for a while.’
We sit staring at each other, trying to insert some normality into the scene we find ourselves playing.
Finally, he says, ‘Don’t tell anyone what you just told me.’
I nod.
‘Promise me, Lily. You are making some very dangerous accusations. These people are lethal. You don’t know the way they think. The question of honor is not taken lightly in our community. You have to promise to stay out of this. You’ve told me and you must trust me to sort it out, OK?’