Hidden River

4: THE FLOWER OF JOY

Two days after her murder, Victoria’s brother Colin had flown to Denver to pick up her effects. The murderer was already caught. The case was open and shut. Nearly half of all murders that are solved are done so within the first twenty-four hours. The Denver police had a known criminal in custody. His Mexican driver’s license had been found in Victoria’s room. In the U.S. he had previous convictions for theft and burglary. He wasn’t particularly bright — he had been arrested by the police at his brother’s house. The police had assured Colin that they had their man, that prosecution would be easy, that he could go home with at least the thought that Victoria’s killer would be brought to book. And that since the murder was committed during the commission of another crime, he might even get the death penalty.

The Denver police had an air of competence that impressed Colin and he was convinced. In violation of the rules, the cops took him to the jail to see the man who had killed his little sister. After that, Colin drove the forty-five minutes to Victoria’s office in Boulder, Colorado. He got a great deal of sympathy. She had been well liked. She worked for a nonprofit called the Campaign for the American Wilderness. A charitable organization that explored new ways of looking at environmental policy. A very successful group, so successful, in fact, that they were moving out of their Boulder headquarters to a shiny new office in downtown Denver. Victoria had been in charge of many aspects of the Denver move and it was difficult without her. Everyone had been sweet and kind, especially the copresidents of CAW, Charles and Robert Mulholland. Charles and his wife, Amber, took Colin to the Brown Palace Hotel and bought him lunch.

Colin gathered Victoria’s effects and gave them to a thrift shop. No will had been found, but, of course, Victoria had only been twenty-six. The cops released the body. Colin met with an undertaker and they flew her home.

Four days after Victoria Patawasti’s funeral, on June 16, Mr. Patawasti received a letter with a Boulder postmark. It was slightly faded, computer printed (rather than typed), and said simply:

Don’t let him get away with you’r daughter’s murder.

A lead. Revealing something about the sender, but the family didn’t know that and the local peelers hadn’t seen it either.

The family called Carrickfergus RUC. A Constable Pollock came to see them. He checked for prints, found nothing, held the note up to the light, found nothing, and on that basis somehow decided it was probably the work of a crank. After all, didn’t the Americans already have the murderer in custody? America was full of cranks. They should throw the letter out, burn it.

Mr. Patawasti was an Oxford graduate, a professor; Constable Pollock’s analysis did not satisfy him.

He called up the Denver police and after a great deal of trouble got through to the investigating officer. Detective Anthony Miller. Detective Miller assured Mr. Patawasti that they had their man and that everything was under control. Of course, he could send the letter to them and they would add it to the investigation, but really the Northern Irish police were probably correct, it sounded like a crank.

Mr. Patawasti had seen me at the funeral, talked to Dad, had a think….

A phone call. A change of clothes. Shirt, tie, jeans, Doc Martens. Mr. Patawasti’s house on Empire Lane. That big house from the 1930s. The two wings. The Gothic tower. The servants’ steps. The massive front garden with a lawn and roses. A view down to Belfast Lough. On a clear day you could probably see parts of Scotland.

Doorbell, living room: Mrs. Patawasti, Colin, Stephen, Mr. Patawasti.

Stephen, six years older than me; Colin, four. I knew them both vaguely from school. Stephen had been captain of the rugby team. Colin had been head boy and a prefect who had given me lines and detention at least a dozen times. Even now he intimidated me.

The living room. Pictures of her: playing hockey for Carrickfergus Grammar School, matriculating at Oxford, with the family in front of the Red Fort in Delhi, dressed in a sari and stepping out of an Indian river. The rest of the room was academic, tidy, scrubbed. A bookcase, framed cricket posters, shining surfaces.

I stared at everyone while we sat. Mr. Patawasti looking a hundred years old. Colin: angry, impatient. Stephen: aloof, sad. Mrs. Patawasti: utterly destroyed.

“Would you like some tea, Alexander?” Mrs. Patawasti asked, her face deathly pale, her hair gray.

I shook my head. I was supposed to take charge here, ask the questions, but I wasn’t sure of the protocol, I hesitated, stumbled over words.

“Um, well, uh…”

Colin glared at me. His lips white with mounting fury.

“Look at him. Just look at the state of him. Can we end this farce now, please?” Colin said to his father.

Clearly, Colin remembered me as the screwed-up wiseass from school. And here I was confirming it all, looking like a wreck. Hadn’t I quit the police under mysterious circumstances? Didn’t I have money troubles, too? Now come like a vulture to exploit his parents’ grief.

“Colin, please,” Mrs. Patawasti said.

“Look at him, what can he do that the Denver police can’t?” Colin insisted.

“Um, Mr. Patawasti, you said in your phone call that there was an anonymous note. Maybe I could take a wee look at it, if you don’t mind,” I finally managed.

“Oh, yes, of course,” Mr. Patawasti said, standing, going upstairs. After he left, silence descended.

A clock ticking. The gables rattling. Victoria staring at me from the photograph. The unspoken person in the room so badly needed now, so adept at defusing a situation such as this.

“Sure you wouldn’t like some tea, Alex?” Mrs. Patawasti asked.

“I wouldn’t mind some tea now, please,” I said to give her something to do. She went to the kitchen.

Another long pause. Colin, Stephen, and I stared at the floor. Mr. Patawasti came back down. I took the note gratefully and examined it.

“Hmmm, very interesting,” I said. I knew I would have to bullshit them a bit to get the case. Not exactly ethical. But this was life and death.

“Why? How so? Constable Pollock said it was a crank,” Colin said.

I began slowly: “It says a lot. Obviously a great deal of thought went into this.”

“What are you talking about?” Colin interrupted. “Everyone agrees it’s a nutter.”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s a very deliberate piece of work. Taking the trouble to avoid fingerprints. And look at the mistake, ‘you’r’ instead of ‘your.’”

“Constable Pollock tells us it was an uneducated person,” Mrs. Patawasti said, coming back in with no tea.

“Aye, could be, but I don’t think so. I think that’s what he wants you to think. He wants you to think he’s stupid. He’s disguising himself by making a mistake, but would he (I say ‘he’ but of course it could be ‘she’) really make the mistake ‘you’r’ on a word-processed document? Most word processors have a spell check that would have caught that. The more common mistake is to mix up ‘your’ and ‘you’re,’ which a word processor won’t catch. Also, he doesn’t misuse the apostrophe after ‘daughter.’ I’d say that if he were an ignoramus, he would have blundered over the apostrophe first. You could say he was in a hurry, he didn’t have time to do a spell check. But it only takes a second and in any case this note was written with a great deal of consideration. An anonymous note about a murder. It’s not the sort of thing you dash off.”

“Ok, where does this get us then, Alex?” Colin asked a little less aggressively.

“Well, we want to know who wrote it. Someone that knew Victoria personally, someone who knows or suspects he knows who the killer is, someone who doesn’t believe the police have arrested the right man, someone educated enough to be worried about appearing too educated, so he makes a deliberate mistake in the anonymous note. I’d say someone who worked with Victoria or was a neighbor or close friend. He wants us to take an interest in this case and expose whoever did this crime but he’s not sure he wants to be involved. Do you still have the envelope it came in?”

“I think I threw it out,” Mrs. Patawasti said. “The RUC didn’t want to see it.”

However, she went into the back room and appeared with it a few minutes later. The envelope was more revealing than the note. A lot of times that’s the case. It was postmarked June 12 in Boulder, also slightly faded, and said:

Mr. Patawasti

The Tiny Taj

78 Empire Lane

Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim,

N. Ireland BT38 7JG

United Kingdom

“Any help, Alexander?” Mrs. Patawasti asked.

“Yes. Postmarked June the twelfth in Boulder. Your daughter was killed on June the fifth. The Denver police arrested their suspect two days after that. He thought about this for five days. He was frightened to reveal what he knew. He didn’t want to go to the police, but he wanted you to do something. To stir the pot, to lead the police in the right direction. He couldn’t do it — he’d be implicated because he’s already very close. Like I say, friend, neighbor, coworker. It’s interesting that Victoria lived in Denver, but commuted to her office in Boulder. Possibly a coworker,” I said.

“He could have just driven there, and posted it there,” Colin said sharply.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Victoria had an address book,” Mrs. Patawasti said.

“I’d like to see it,” I said.

“She didn’t know that many people, she didn’t have time to socialize much outside of work,” Colin said defensively.

“Well, I think we can eliminate some of the names. We know the writer owns or has fairly exclusive access to a computer. This isn’t the sort of thing you print out at the local library. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, but did you notice the way the note and the address were slightly faded?”

“I did,” Mr. Patawasti said.

“The cartridge was running out. Could it be that he didn’t know how to change the cartridge, that that was his secretary’s job?”

“You can’t know that,” Colin said.

“No,” I agreed. “Anyway, now I’d like to see her passport and her letters, the things that were in her apartment with her home address on them.”

With a heavy sadness, Mrs. Patawasti brought the meager box of things I wanted. I skimmed through them, saw what I needed. I knew I was on to something. Something significant.

“And do you still have an unlisted phone number?” I asked, remembering the frantic time eight years ago when I had temporarily lost her number.

“It’s not listed, so what?” Colin said.

“Well, it’s the name of the house. Victoria would never have told anyone that this house was called the ‘Tiny Taj.’ It embarrassed her. It’s not on any of her letters or her passport, or other personal items. The post office doesn’t give out addresses. So how could anyone know? It’s not here on any of her documents. When you wrote to her, did you put the name of the house on the sender’s address?” I asked.

Everyone turned to Mrs. Patawasti.

“No, I never write Tiny Taj, or mention it,” she said, “it is embarrassing.”

“So how could anyone know that this house is called the Tiny Taj? Victoria would never have told anyone. I’ll bet the only way someone could know was if he had access to her personnel file at work and saw it written there as her full postal address. She would never have spoken about it, but she might have written her full home address on her personnel file. It would fit. And who could know that but someone who worked with her in Boulder and had access to her file? It’s just a guess, but I’d say if you were to go to her office and ask around, you might be close to finding who wrote the note.”

I put the note and envelope and the effects down on the coffee table. A little silence. Some of it had been flimflam, but some of it real enough. Colin unfolded his arms. Mr. Patawasti’s face broke into a little half smile. I’d impressed them. Like I’d been trying to do.

“Alexander, do you think you can find the man who killed my daughter?”

I looked at him, nodded.

“Find him, find who did it, Alex,” Colin said, his voice breaking.

“It might well be the man they have in custody,” I said.

“Find out the truth,” Mr. Patawasti said.

“I will,” I said.

Mrs. Patawasti and the boys left so Mr. Patawasti and I could agree on terms. He’d pay me three hundred quid a week plus my airfare and any other expenses I’d need. I tried not to see it as a way out of my difficulties. A case. I was working for a family friend. I was doing them a favor using the skills I’d learned in the peelers. Everything I’d promised myself never to do again. But it wasn’t me. It was altruism. Victoria. The fact that it would be the perfect excuse for getting out of Ireland, getting money, away from Douglas, away from the RUC, was beside the point.

I went home and read all the documents. Mr. Patawasti had given me Victoria’s personal effects, employment documents, apartment receipts, company personnel profile, a copy of the Denver County Police report. Victoria had been shot during a struggle in her apartment. According to her cleaning lady, a number of things were missing. The police theory was that the assailant, Hector Martinez, had botched the robbery, killed Victoria. During the struggle his Mexican driver’s license had fallen out of his jacket or trouser pocket. It was too soon for forensic evidence, but the circumstantial evidence was pretty good. He had two previous convictions for theft and had fled the jurisdiction once on a grand theft auto rap. He’d been living with his brother and they’d picked him up easily. Martinez’s lawyer, Enrique Monroe, had been denied bail for his client. Martinez was considered a flight risk. Pretty damning, but clearly the note writer believed they had the wrong man. Either that or he wanted to muddy the waters to get Mr. Martinez off or implicate someone else. Worth checking out. I called John and asked him to do some snooping for me, using the police computers.

John met me in Dolan’s that night. He was happy. I’d given him a lot to do.

“Ok, Alex. Envelope and letter normal office stuff. No help there. But the font is New Courier 2. An updated version of Courier that is only available on the latest packages of WordPerfect. It’s been out about three months and is only in office suite packages. No, don’t ask, I already checked. Victoria’s employers, the Campaign for the American Wilderness, do indeed run WordPerfect rather than Word. And yes, they have the latest release. However, so do tens of thousands of other businesses. Hundreds in Colorado. Tough getting through to CAW, spoke to a college student, they’re moving the whole office from Boulder to Denver, Denver’s not set up yet and they only have a skeleton staff. But anyway, yeah, it’s not impossible the note writer could be someone who worked with her in Boulder and printed it out there.”

I grinned at him. He’d done well. Everything I’d asked. If you kept John on message, he could be pretty efficient.

“Aye, well, that’s plenty, that’s more than enough, it’s up to me now,” I said.

“Listen, you’ve got to admit that I’ve been a help,” John began.

“Yeah,” I said suspiciously.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to go to America and the peelers owe me months of leave, and I work at the station only a day or two per month, for whatever reason,” John said.

“Maybe because of your stupid haircut, it looks like you should be on the cover of romance novels, not writing traffic tickets or—” I began but John cut me off.

“Let me finish, Alexander. My point is, I’ve been a big help to you, British Airways are doing two-for-one flights, you need me. I want to come with you,” John blurted out.

I looked at him. That big goofy face. Grinning. I didn’t see why not. He just might be able to help with the legwork. Watson to my Holmes. He was a peeler, after all, my best friend, and I didn’t want to go alone.

Blue meets blue at the curve of the Atlantic Ocean and the sky. America looming. An hour away. But I’m not here, I’m somewhere on the other side of the world.

The peaks, high valleys of the western Himalaya. The highest mountains on Earth. Formed fifty million years ago when India crashed into the continent of Asia and pushed them up.

I close my eyes and I can see them. Glaciers in Kashmir. Tarn lakes in Ladakh. Snow over the opium fields of the Hindu Kush.

I am crawling in my airplane seat. My body is craving heroin.

A village. Cooking fires. A weather-beaten old man down among his crop. He lovingly removes his penknife and scores the bud of the opium plant. The flower’s botanical name is Papaver somniferum. The Sumerians and ancient peoples of the Indus valley called it Hul Gil, the “flower of joy.” When the Aryans came to India, they discovered that the flower allowed you to see Brahma, the creator of the Universe.

Only a few weeks ago, red and yellow petals bloomed at the tips of tubular green stems. The old man is content. The petals have fallen away, but the plants have survived the snow. The egg-shaped seed pod is unharmed. Under the penknife an opaque, milky sap oozes out. This is the opium in its crudest form.

He calls his sons. The sap is extracted by slitting the pods vertically. On exposure to the high mountain air the sap turns darker and thicker, becoming a brownish-black gum. The family collects the gum, laughing, making a real harvest of it, the older boys molding it into bricks or cakes and wrapping them in plastic bags.

The big money isn’t in opium, but even so, the villagers are content to sell their crop to experts who will know what to do next. On a bright January day, a mule train shows up and takes the village supply of opium over the Afghan border and into Pakistan. The opium refinery is a rickety factory in a residential neighborhood of Lahore. The opium is mixed with lime in boiling water. The morphine is skimmed off the top, reheated with ammonia, boiled and filtered again. The brown morphine paste is heated with acetic anhydride for six or seven hours at 85 degrees centigrade. Water and chloroform are added to precipitate impurities. The solution is drained and sodium carbonate added to solidify the heroin. The heroin is filtered through charcoal and alcohol. Purification in the fourth stage, involving ether and hydrochloric acid, is notoriously risky and can blow up the lab. But assuming everyone survives, it is filtered again and stamped ready for shipping. The final fluffy white powder is known to everyone as number four. It has taken ten kilos of opium to make one kilo of heroin, but it’s worth it. One kilo of number four costs about a hundred thousand dollars.

The first person to process heroin was C. R. Wright, an English researcher who synthesized it in 1874 at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. He thought it was too dangerous to use. In 1897 Heinrich Dreser of the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company was presented with two new drugs, acetylsalicylic acid and diacetyl morphine: the first became known as aspirin, the second, heroin. Dreser tested both, deciding there was no future for the former, but the latter he called heroin, for it would be the “heroic” cure-all drug of the twentieth century.

From that heroin-refining factory in Lahore to a cargo flight carrying expensive cashmere shirts from Karachi to Newark Airport in the United States. It comes in under the noses of customs inspectors (who are too swamped to inspect every shipment of textiles from Pakistan to the United States) and makes its way to a warehouse in Union City, New Jersey. From Union City to a van traveling west.

The imaginary journey of my ketch. Aye, something like that or more likely a ship rather than a plane. But how to get it? I’m not fool enough to smuggle what’s left of my own supply with me. I have to get it in Denver. As soon as I get in. Fast. Now.

I mean, I know there is a case to be solved. A lot of questions. Who killed Victoria Patawasti? Who sent the anonymous note? How long can I stay in America before the English peelers or Irish peelers track me down? But the most important of all — how in the name of God am I going to score heroin within a few hours of touching down in Denver?

Thirty thousand feet. Greenland. John watching the movie, hardly able to contain his excitement. Back to my book. I’m reading a dual-language Bhagavad Gita. I suppose it’s because of Victoria. Lame, I know.

The coast. Islands. Lakes. Brown fields, irrigated to form huge circles. Rivers. Plains. We both stare as we cross the Mississippi. More fields, the odd sprawling settlement. A highway. The colors faded — like giants’ clothes washed and patched too many times.

Mountains like the barrier at the world’s edge. How did the settlers get through those? Why didn’t everyone just stop here? A squeal of wheels, a bounce. The plane touches down at the brand-new Denver International Airport. White tepees over the big terminal. Immigration. My skin is starting to burn. My hands are shaking. Shit, here goes. There are five desks. The man at one desk is called O’Reilly. He’ll do, in case I mess up somehow.

“What’s the purpose of your visit to the United States?”

“Tourism.”

“Been here before?”

“Yes, I was here when I was a student; I came for a few months and traveled around on Amtrak. Just the East Coast,” I say, shivering.

“Are you cold?” the man asks.

“I don’t like air-conditioning, it’s always too cold,” I say, keeping the panic out of my voice. I get momentarily worried, but the man’s not interested now that he sees I’m Irish.

“Ireland. Love to go there. Wonderful golf courses, I’ll bet,” he says.

“Oh yeah, great courses, Royal Portrush, great views of Scotland,” I say.

“How long do you intend to stay in the United States?”

“We’re here for a few months.”

He stamps the passport, smiles. I smile back. Walk off.

The luggage rack. The automatic sorting machine in the airport has misplaced about a third of our flight’s luggage. “Teething troubles,” a harried airport official says, trying hard to placate the potential lynch mob. But we get our rucksacks with no problems.

The customs desk. A blue form. We have nothing to declare, although I do have a lunch box filled with needles that I’ve marked “Diabetic Syringes.” I’d been concerned that this was far too obvious and customs was going to confiscate it and figure out I was a user or something; but we walk through the channel and no one says a thing. I could have brought the bloody heroin. Typical.

Outside. Christ, it’s hot. A cloudless sky. Three in the afternoon. One hundred degrees, says the temperature gauge above an ad for a bank. So many commercials. Even on the taxi. We get in the cab.

“We need a hotel, not too expensive,” I say before John can speak.

“It needs to be downtown, but not the Brown Palace, or the Adam’s Mark, cheaper than that,” John says, reading from Lonely Planet USA.

The taxi driver turns around. He’s an older black man with a gravelly voice. “I know the very place, boys,” he says, driving off.

“How come it’s so hot, didn’t it snow just a couple of weeks ago?” John asks incredulously.

“That’s Denver,” the driver says, laughing. “We get over three hundred days of sunshine a year. More than Arizona. Sometimes it snows at night and by lunchtime it’s gone. The traces of that big snowstorm we had a couple of weeks back, gone in two days. Year’s been real bad for weather. Need rain, we’re in the middle of a big drought.”

He’s not kidding. I look out the window. Yellow and brown fields, an unforgiving sky. No animals. In fact, from the highway it looks like it’s semidesert. The city, a line of big buildings and then the mountains. A punchy, aggressive sun.

Most people don’t know Denver. Maybe they came skiing here once, or went to a conference. Drove in from the airport, stayed downtown, went to the mountains. Maybe they live here in the white ’burbs. But even they don’t know it. They don’t know the Denver of Kerouac and Cassidy, of the hobos getting off the freight trains at the biggest intersection in the West. They don’t know because the bums have been pushed off the streets, the downtown has been regenerated, lofts, wine bars, trendy eateries and coffeehouses instead of dive bars and diners. John Elway’s toothy grin on the posters for his auto dealerships. But the old Denver still exists out on Colfax Avenue where they never go. Or on Federal or in the black section north of the city center.

Colfax for us. Desperate-looking motels, armored liquor stores, Spanish restaurants and bodegas. Prostitutes, pushers, hangers-on at the corners. What are they selling? Is everyone still on crack in this country, or is heroin coming back?

We turn on Broadway past two of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen. One is a tall windowless slab the color of baby puke, the other a demented Lego assemblage of blocks and pyramids.

“Art museum and library,” the cabbie explains and then stops at a place called the Western Palace Hotel 1922—pink and flat with a swimming pool. It looks slightly rundown and cheap. It’ll do. The Denver city center is about half a mile down the baking white strip of Broadway.

We pay the driver and remember to tip him 15 percent. Get our bags. Walk to the front desk.

“This is so cool,” John says.

I look at him. I’m sweating, jumpy, in no mood to talk.

I’d woken early, gone to the beach. Injected myself. Gone home, spent two hours packing and hiding my drug paraphernalia. It took an hour to pick up John and get to the airport, Facey driving slowly and carefully in his Ford Fiesta. Facey still too embarrassed to talk to me following the Land Rover incident even though I’d forgiven him, for if not him, who? They would have found me. Anyway, that long airport drive. Then a two-hour wait to go through security, then an hour-long flight from Belfast to London, then a five-hour wait at Heathrow to board our flight. A ten-hour flight from London to Denver. Three hours getting our bags and going through customs and the ride here. Its been twenty-four hours since I had a fix.

The hotel lobby exudes desperation and a hint of better days. The harsh setting sun streaming in through venetian blinds and illuminating an enormous cracked mirror above a chipped art deco check-in desk. A man at the desk reading a comic. An image of ourselves on a black-and-white security camera monitor. A dead or hibernating cactus plant. Dust vortices in the strobed sunlight. Tiles missing from a checkerboard floor and, on an orange sofa, a hatchet-faced old man with a portable oxygen tank. He and the desk clerk both smoking.

“Careful you don’t blow yourself up, old timer,” John says cheerfully to the old man.

“What’s it to you, shithead?” the man replies, incredibly slowly.

We go to the desk and the clerk gives us a room. We pay up front for a week. He doesn’t ask to see our passports or tell us the hotel rules or anything. He gives us keys and motions us upstairs. He’s reading Justice League of America.

The stairs, a long line of identical rooms. The key.

The door. In. Broadway out the windows. Hot, clogged with traffic.

“Shit, there’s an air conditioner,” John says enthusiastically.

He drops his stuff, runs to the AC, turns it on. By the time we’ve done a very quick unpack, the room is twenty-five degrees cooler.

John cannot contain his excitement.

“America, bloody America,” he says.

“Yes.”

“I mean, Jesus Christ, it’s America we’re talking about here.”

“I know.”

“You’ve been, but I haven’t. I always wanted to come. Did you see the bikes? On the ride in I saw two Harleys and an Indian. An Indian, can you believe it? And the cars, the cars are bloody huge. It’s just like Starsky and Hutch or—”

“John, listen, I need to score some ketch.”

John shakes his head.

“No. No, no, no. Come on, Alexander, couldn’t you use this as an opportunity to go cold turkey?” John asks. An excellent question.

I stare at him.

“No,” I say.

“Alex, if you—” but then he stops and sees the state I’m in. Shaking, pale, trying to keep down my meager stomach contents.

“Alex, ok, look. I can’t convince you?” he says.

“No.”

“Ok, if you really insist on going, go. Look, and score me some pot as well, ok?”

“Maybe. John, you’re what they call an enabler.”

“Sure. Just don’t get arrested”

“If I do, I’ll tell them you put me up to it.”

Heat. Sun. I walked down Broadway. Wide streets, flat pavements, ramps on the sidewalk. I found Colfax again. A lot of pedestrian traffic. Roasting, too, my beard itched. The Capitol Building. A statue of a Civil War soldier. The Ten Commandments.

Homeless people, desperate people, alcoholics on the sidewalk.

Ah, a scumball bar.

The bar, dark, smoky. Sun like laser light through cracks in the paint of the blacked-out windows. Very American. Budweiser signs, Coors signs, a pool table, strange things on tap. People on their own staring at shot glasses, hugging their beer. No women. Is this the right place?

Barkeep. Black guy, forty-five, bald, big strong hands that looked like they could wring your neck.

“A beer please,” I said.

“You got ID?”

“What?”

“ID.”

“What for?”

“Are you from out of town?”

“Yes.”

“You have to be twenty-one to drink here.”

“I’m twenty-four. Must people think I look older,” I said.

“I don’t give a shit, you got ID?”

“Uh, wait, yeah, I got my passport.”

“That’ll do, let me see it.”

I showed him my passport, he looked it over, I don’t how he read it, so dark in there.

“You from England?”

“Yeah.”

“Tourist?”

“Yeah.”

“Been to Denver before?”

“No.”

“You’re too late to ski,” he said, his face contorting into a disconcerting chuckle.

“I don’t ski.”

“What type of beer you want?”

“I don’t care.”

“Coors ok?”

“Yeah.”

The barman pulled me a Coors and set it down.

“Three dollars,” he said.

I gave him a five and as I’d seen in the movie, I left a dollar of the change back on the bar.

“Tourist, huh. I was born here. Native, very rare. You know what the first permanent building in Denver was?”

“No.”

“A bar,” he said with satisfaction.

“Really?”

“Yup, you know what the second was?”

“No.”

“A brothel.”

“Fascinating.”

“You know that TV show Dynasty?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s Denver.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

I finished the beer and bought another. I was getting increasingly anxious. It’s not that I needed a hit, I told myself. I just wanted one. The bar began to fill. A few more desperate types but also a party of college students. Four guys, two girls. Maybe they would know. The guys all had buzz cuts and were well muscled, they actually all looked like undercover cops, so maybe it wouldn’t be too clever asking them. It would have to be the barman. I cleared my throat.

“So,” I said, “I hear there’s a big drug problem around here.”

“You heard that?” His face frozen, revealing nothing.

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

“You know, pot, smack, that sort of thing.”

“Is that a fact?” he said, giving me a quizzical look.

“It’s what I heard.”

He wiped the bar and served a customer at the far end. Obviously thinking something over. Clearly, I was from out of town, he had seen my passport, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t a sting operation. Suspicious, but not a sting.

“Bar tab’s twenty bucks,” he said, coming back to me.

I owed him nothing, I had paid and tipped for each drink. I took a twenty from my wallet and put it on the bar. He lifted it and put it in his pocket.

“I heard,” he began slowly, “I heard that the biggest problem with product was behind the Salvation Army shelter on Colfax and Grant. That’s what I heard. I heard, you should say Hacky sent you.”

“Hacky sent me?”

“Hacky.”

I left the beer, grabbed my baseball hat, practically ran out into the dusk. I went east. Night was falling fast and there were many more prostitutes out on Colfax, skinny black and Latino girls who looked as if they were about fifteen. Most of them on something. Crack, presumably. They were wired, nervous, looked for vehicle trade. Pimps on the corner, big guys, little guys, enforcers, all of them obvious, unconcerned about peelers or being seen. I found the Salvation Army hostel and walked around the back. Garbage, a small fire. A dozen men drinking from brown paper bags. Older guys, mostly white.

First character I saw, old for his years, pale, thin, drinking vodka. Rotted gums and teeth, horrible smell.

“Listen, I need to score, Hacky sent me,” I said.

The man looked at me.

“You want the kid. Are you a cop?” he asked.

“No.”

“Better not be a cop.”

I shook my head, what would he do about it anyway? Breathe on me?

“Hey, kid,” he yelled, “guy wants to book you.”

The kid came from out of the shadows. He really was a child. Maybe sixteen years old. Spanish, obviously, well dressed in jeans and a black cowboy shirt. Walking slow, smoking a cigarette. Was he the dealer? If so, why was he hanging out with a bunch of indigent white guys three times his age?

He came over.

“You’re no cop. I know all the cops.”

“I know. Hacky sent me.”

“Hacky sent you?”

“Yeah.”

“What you want?” he asked, suspicion flitting around his eyes.

“Ketch, I mean, horse, smack, heroin.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know, a few grams, seven good hits.”

“What you talking about? Where you from?”

“Ireland.”

“Where’s that at?”

“England.”

“See your money,” he said, the light gleaming on his smooth baby-face cheeks.

I opened up my wallet, he looked at me. His face had a scar under the chin. I stroked my beard nervously. He took out five twenty-dollar bills, put them in his pocket, said nothing, walked off to a door, went inside. I waited for about ten minutes. Had they stroked me? Was I ripped off? It would be the easiest scam in the world. Who would I complain to? I didn’t care about the money. I wanted the goddamn heroin. Let them rip me off, just give me the bloody ketch.

The sun disappeared behind the mountains and I stood there watching the oblique light illuminate the vapor trails of airplanes flying west.

Venus came out. The sky turned a deep blue.

From the Colfax side of the alley a homeless man shambled over to me with a brown paper bag.

“This is for you,” he said.

I opened the bag, inside was a plastic bag containing a white powder. Easy to get bait and switch in a situation like this, so I opened the bag, tasted the heroin. Milky, acidic, the real McCoy.

“Where’s this from?” I asked the homeless man.

“I don’t know,” he answered. I wanted to know where the heroin had originated — Burma, Afghanistan, South America. I wanted to know its purity, but the man was drunk, he knew nothing, just the fall guy on the outside chance that I was a peeler. I put it in my pocket and jogged back to the hotel. Night. Almost no pedestrians. I took a shortcut through the grounds of the state capitol, no one paying me any mind at all.

When I slid back into the motel room, John was asleep and the place stank of shampoo and hair conditioner. John washed that long mane of his twice a day.

“Who the hell is that?” he muttered from the bed.

“Me.”

“Did you get your ketch?” John asked from under the covers.

“I did. No pot, though.”

“Shit, ok. Was the guy trustworthy? I mean, you’re going to shoot that stuff into your veins. Did he look trustworthy?”

“He looked fine.”

“Ok, then it’s your life.”

“It is.”

I took out my syringes. I went into the bathroom and brought out my spoon and the distilled water. I took the heroin out of the plastic bag. I sieved it through my fingers. I boiled it in the spoon. Injected, drew it in, saw there was blood, I always find a vein first time, always. I injected myself.

A weird hit. A deep high.

I lay down on the bathroom floor. Goddamn, this stuff was purer than the gear that made it to Ireland. Wow. Everything that was hurt in my body disappeared. My thoughts became clear. The shower curtain, the tiles on the bathroom floor, the cream-colored ceiling. The traffic on Broadway. The fan from the AC in the bedroom, the bathroom pipes. One irritation. Helicopter, probably from the TV news. In Belfast there are no civilian choppers, all belong to the British Army. A copter is an ominous sound meaning trouble. I had to get rid of it. Blend it into the cars, pipes, air conditioner. Going, going, gone.

Noises, absence of pain.

Until you take heroin you don’t know how much pain there is in your body. Most humans just get used to it. With heroin every little ache disappears. Every ache of body and spirit. The wound of memory, the fear. That nagging fear that never quite goes away. For how can you live happily on Earth, knowing that your consciousness will be annihilated along with everything else you cherish? All the matter in the universe will someday decay into random photons and neutrinos. Diamonds are not forever. Nothing is forever. All the works of man will be lost in the Heat Death of the universe. Doesn’t that make everything pointless?

The girl is dead? We are all dead.

Heroin relieves you of these thoughts. And it was heroin, after all, that had saved my life. But for heroin I would be dead in a ditch somewhere in Ulster. Rain on my beaten body.

But I was smarter than them. Maybe not smart. But smarter than them.

The cars. The fading light. The airplanes. Men yelling. A fat June night. An urban symphony. A heavy overcoat of emptiness. I drift on an air bed over the ocean of eternity. On the infinite nothingness of a black sky.

The list of a diesel engine. The air horn of a freight train. Vehicles. Voices. A TV in another room. A breathing city. We are clawed by the past. I have read up on the history of this town. I think of the Spanish, the gold rush, of hard-faced Denver men throwing the bodies of the Indian women and children into Sand Creek. I think of Oscar Wilde at Denver’s Union Station. The golden spike. Walt Whitman’s beard. A father’s tears.

A beautiful girl in an orange sari, beaming from a photograph.

Everything eased….

Later.

Denver ketch.

The purest heroin I’ve ever had. Enough to make you become an addict. Lying there. Floating. Remembering the poet Novalis. “Inward goes the way full of mystery.” I don’t even have to take heroin now. Now I’m out of Ireland. I don’t even have to take it. I could be free of it. It has served its purpose. It’s been my shield. Like the beard, like the skinny stoop and the broken voice.

No reason now. Yeah, I’ll stop, quit. Solve the murder. Save myself. Yes. Thoughts. Coming down from a deep high. Heroin doesn’t end like anesthesia. The world slides you out.

Not today, though.

John shook me.

“Up, you bastard.”

“What time is it, you dick?”

“Ten o’clock,” he explained.

“In the morning?”

“Night.”

“Jesus Christ, what did I tell you about jet lag?”

“I’m hungry, I wanted to see if you wanted to go out and get something to eat. Besides, it’s America, we want to get out there, see stuff, do things, you know.”

“Yeah, but John, you’re supposed to sleep through the night, adapt to a new time zone.”

“Were you going to sleep on the bathroom floor in your underpants all night?”

“No.”

“Come on, then. I’m going to get something to eat. Are you coming or not?”

We dressed and went downstairs. The man behind the desk was watching baseball on a portable TV.

“Is there somewhere we could get something to eat around here?” John asked.

“White Spot Diner, three blocks south,” the man said, not looking up.

The diner. A waitress, ashen skin, dyed blond hair, a smoker, forties, exhausted, beaten down by the day and life. We looked at the menu. There were at least a dozen things we had never heard of: sloppy joes, meat loaf, submarine sandwiches, huevos rancheros; so we plumped for cheeseburgers and french fries, which was pretty bloody American in any case. When my burger came, I’d lost my appetite but John ate his and half of mine and I had a few fries. We drank Coke and John smoked and left. A nice night. I was feeling better now.

We walked down Broadway. The city of Denver ahead of us. The sky filled with stars and airplanes crossing the vast continent from coast to coast. Amazing to be here. Very different from living on an island as small as Ireland. You could get in your car in Ireland and the farthest you could drive from home was two hundred miles. Here, you could get in your car and drive to the top of Alaska or to the jungles of El Salvador.

Neon lights. The warm night. Police cruisers. Sirens. Big American cars. A club letting in a line of kids. John turned to look at me.

“No way, no way,” I said. “I’m going home and I’m going to get a good night’s sleep. No way, mate. No way.”

The nightclub…

Girls at the upstairs bar. A redhead in the PhD astronomy program at the University of Colorado. Brown eyes, feline, intelligent. John with an Asian girl in Daisy Dukes and sandals, John explaining that in The Wild One, Brando rode a Triumph, not a Harley. The girl feigning interest wonderfully.

John got us a round and his big smile infected all of us. He took the brunette to the dance floor and I talked to the redhead about astronomy. I told her my dad was a maths teacher and she said that astronomy was about 80 percent maths.

For possibly the only time in history our talk of mathematics proved mutually seductive and I found myself biting her pink, moist lower lip. She kissed me and moved from her stool to my seat so that the breasts under the R.E.M. T-shirt were touching my chest. We kissed and she tasted of beer and honey.

She stopped to get a breath.

“Hey, you know what day it is today?” the girl asked.

“Apart from my lucky day, no.”

“Ain’t lucky yet, mister.”

“Ok, what day is it?”

“It’s the start of the solstice. Began at sundown. You know what the solstice is?”

“Longest day of the year.”

“That’s right,” she said, surprised. “We’re going to a rave on the Flat Irons behind Boulder. Have you been to Boulder yet?”

“We only got in today,” I said.

“Denver sucks, man. Boulder’s where it’s at. Have you been to a rave before? You’ll need a sleeping bag. I can rustle one up. Do you take e? We’re going to dance all night until the sun comes up.”

“Why?”

“Haven’t you been listening? It’s the shortest night of the year. Midsummer night. Wait, I’ve got a flyer.”

She rummaged in her tight jeans back pocket. Raves were impromptu illegal affairs on public land. They were organized in secret and news of them spread through word of mouth. The ecstasy/rave scene was new to America. Rave culture here was in its infancy. Still enthusiastic, unironic. You could tell. The flyer had a big lowercase e and underneath it the words “Midsummer Madness Rave. Acid House. Party Till the Sun Comes Up.”

“Sounds like a lot of activity,” I said with a slight air of skepticism.

“Forget it then,” she said.

I stared at her. She was pretty and I liked her. I wanted to placate her. Words from Heine, my favorite writer about the poppy.

“What did you say?” she asked, unable to understand me.

“Du bist wie eine Blume, you are like a flower,” I said.

Her face reddened. She breathed in. Amazingly, it was a line unknown to her, maybe it was the German, although no one’s ever said it’s the most romantic of tongues.

She leaned forward and we kissed again until John came back up from the dance floor with his girl.

“You look serious, you weren’t talking about why beards are coming back, are you?” he asked me with a wink.

“No, were you talking about the Platonic embodiment of your Triumph Bonneville?”

“No, and by the way, that was far too long a sentence to work as sarcasm. Anyway, did you hear about the rave, are you in, man?” John asked, with a big, hopeful grin.

“I don’t know where you get the energy from, but I think I want to go home,” I said.

“No, no, no, the rave is in Boulder, we have to go to Boulder tomorrow, right? To go to Victoria’s office?” John said.

“So?”

“So it’ll save us the trip,” John said.

I had no resistance and the girl was cute.

“Ok,” I said….

A small thing but, who knows, with a good night’s sleep what happened the next day might not have happened.

An hour later. The highway to Boulder. The drive to the university. Drunk kids saying “Ssshhh,” very loud. Jeeps and SUVs up into the mountains. A long walk through a forest to the top. A clearing. The city of Boulder a few thousand feet below.

Tents. Speakers. A DJ. About three hundred kids. Ecstasy being passed around in solemn little tablets. The DJ faking a British accent. A smiley-face poster. All of it Manchester, 1989. The generator started up. The spotlights came on. The speakers kicked in. Dutch trance music. The mountains. The city. Everybody yelled and started dancing. She passed me an ecstasy tab. But I might be unemployed, I might be a druggie, I might be in the throes of existential crisis, but I wasn’t stupid. A few hundred people die of heroin overdoses every year. There are about four thousand heroin cocktail deaths. Heroin and coke, heroin and speed, heroin and e. You don’t mess with that shit.

I palmed the pill, fake-swallowed, kissed the girl. We danced. They played acid house and Euro dance and trip-hop and for variety the Soup Dragons and the Stone Roses and Radiohead. At two we drifted away.

We laid out sleeping bags and we took off our T-shirts and our jeans and I stole beside her and kissed her breasts and her long legs.

We had sex and I still didn’t know her name and in the dark she could have been anyone. And our moves were theater and our words rituals. You are beautiful. You are my little flower. You are the negation of the enemy. But a substitute. Oh yes, my dear, a substitute.

And I ground my hips and my heart pumped and from nowhere some last residue of that wonderfully refined opium plant changed the chemistry of my brain. I smiled and the world’s pain eased. We got to our feet and we walked naked to the tent and the stars lit our way and our feet trod lightly on these subtle and unforgiving grasses of the New World.