The tours and my new tienda continued to do well. When I got out of prison, I wanted to have some money saved up so that I wouldn’t have to go back to trafficking, but I knew if I had the cash in my hands, I would spend it on partying with the tourists. I decided that it would be safer to have everything tied up in assets, so I began to look around for other ways to invest my money. Eventually, I chose to buy another prison cell, on the ground floor in Alamos. Because of its four-star rating, the prices in Alamos rarely went down, so it was a good investment. However, rather than renting it out, I converted it into a restaurant.
Setting up a restaurant was a lot cheaper than setting up a shop because I didn’t have to invest money to purchase stock, apart from the food for the day. I didn’t need to provide tables or chairs either, because the section already had them. We had signed a deal with the Bolivian distributors of Coca-Cola – we would sell only their soft drinks and, in return, they loaned us tables, chairs and umbrellas, as well as providing cash that was to be used for improving the inmates’ living conditions. I only needed a cooker, some plates and some plastic knives and forks, which I already owned. The restaurant soon started to do well, and it was obvious that I would need some help, which is how I became close friends with Mike.
Mike was one of the biggest personalities in the prison. When I met him, he was fifty years old and had grey hair that ran down past his waist. He tied it in a ponytail, which made him look like an old hippy. Two years later, after the night he went crazy, he shaved off all his hair in order to start his life over again. When people kept commenting on how young he looked, he decided to lower his age to forty and keep his hair that way.
Mike was one of the few English-speaking foreigners in San Pedro. He came from Canada, but he spoke German, Russian, Spanish and Arabic as well. But you never knew whether he was telling the truth or not, because Mike was also a compulsive liar. Before prison, he’d had the most exciting life of anyone I’ve ever known. He had dined at the Bolivian president’s home. He had been an international spy and a hired assassin. He used to deal cocaine to Hollywood movie stars. He’d been on first-name terms with the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. He had taught mathematics at a Canadian university before the physics department headhunted him to work on their black hole research team. He had a law degree. He knew how to assemble bombs. His ex-girlfriend was a famous model.
Most compulsive liars become very boring after a while. They repeat the same lies over and over until you can recount their stories better than they can. And you also start to notice inconsistencies in their stories. But Mike had an excellent memory, which made it very hard to disprove anything he said. He remembered every little lie he ever told and they never contradicted each other. In fact, he even started weaving them together.
‘I thought you had a wife and kid then?’ I’d jump in, trying to catch him out. But I never could. He was too quick for me.
‘Yes. That’s how I met Pablo Escobar in the first place. He was a friend of my wife’s sister. They met in Panama when she was a diamond trader. Remember, I told you about the diamonds?’ Mike was good. In fact, he was very good.
Mike was also a coke junkie. He had been caught with fifty grams of cocaine when the police carried out a dawn raid on his house in the south of La Paz. It wasn’t even a proper raid; they just walked through the door, which was left open, and crept into his room on tippy toes, trying to stop their boots from squeaking so as not to wake him. The drugs were on the bedside table and Mike was half-asleep next to them. From the moment the police first interrogated him until his sentencing hearing, Mike’s defence didn’t change: he claimed the fifty grams were for personal use. The judge didn’t believe him, but if you had known Mike, you would have known that that amount wouldn’t have lasted him a month.
Mike said he was clean now, but I never believed him. Everything went at full speed when he was around. I had real trouble keeping up with him. He couldn’t sit still for one minute; he spoke at a million miles an hour; and he worked flat out all day in my restaurant, even when there were no customers.
‘These Bolivians are lazy,’ he would say. ‘I can’t stand it. They do nothing all day except eat and complain. Look at them. They’re fat.’
Not everyone in San Pedro got along with Mike, because he was so highly strung. His personality also made it tough to work with him in the restaurant, especially since the kitchen area was small and crowded. However, once you knew how to handle him, Mike was quite a good employee. For a start, he was an excellent chef: he could produce a delicious meal using a few simple ingredients, and he always seemed to know how much salt to add or how many more minutes the fries needed cooking. He hated it if he thought I was interferring.
‘You’ve hidden the salt again, McFadden. I can’t work under these conditions,’ he said one time when I moved some things during the morning preparation.
‘I’m only trying to help.’
‘Well, you’re not helping. You’re slowing me down,’ he complained, throwing a tea towel over his shoulder and then flapping his arms like a distressed bird.
Mike was very polite and professional in the way he dealt with customers. He was meticulously clean; he tucked his ponytail into the back of his jeans so that it wouldn’t get in the way, and he always wore an apron while he cooked. And like all good chefs, he couldn’t stand anyone being near him when he was cooking.
‘I can’t have this stress hanging over me all the time, McFadden. When I was working on Fifth Avenue in New York, they gave me complete creative control.’
Mike also had eyes in the back of his head. He could be crouched down, getting something out of the refrigerator, but he would still know exactly where I was and what I was doing. I would sneak over to eat a french fry when he wasn’t looking, but he always caught me.
‘That’s it, McFadden. Get out of my kitchen. Out!’ He’d stamp his foot and then point to the door in the same way as Ricardo did, except that Mike was serious. ‘I’ve warned you before about touching my french fries.’
‘Your french fries?’ I’d laugh, wondering how he always got me. ‘I paid for them.’
But Mike had an answer for everything: ‘Well, they’re my fries while I’m cooking them. Now get out!’
Then I’d politely remind him that I was the owner of the restaurant and he was my employee.
‘OK, then, McFadden. You just sit there and keep out of the way. I’ll call you when I need you to serve up.’
I was supposed to be the boss, but somehow I ended up as waiter and drinks boy. I didn’t mind, though; Mike made me laugh. While Mike cooked, I sat in the corner and cut the onions or peeled potatoes and listened to him go on and on. He would talk the whole time and do at least four things at once, without ever losing his concentration. I never got bored listening to him, either. He fascinated me, even when I knew that he was lying. He had an entire imaginary world that he had created for himself and sometimes he lived in it, or reminisced about it, and he always added new details and elaborated his stories until they almost got to the point of being ridiculous, but not quite.
‘And I said to Pablo, I said, “Pablo, don’t be fucking with me. This is Canadian Mike you’re talking to here.” And you know what? He listened. Pablo actually listened, for a change. He never listened to anybody else, but he used to listen to me. You know why? I’ve got a theory I developed from when I was a psychologist in Montreal: I think it was because Pablo wasn’t used to anyone standing up to him. In fact, I’m convinced of it. He’d been surrounded by yes men his whole life, when all along he was just waiting for somebody to say no. And you want to know something else about Pablo? Listen to this …’
Mike was funny. He didn’t know it himself, but Mike was very funny. He took himself way too seriously, which is what made him so funny. His funniest obsession by far was hygiene. One time I bought a bucket and some special soap for rinsing his hands, but he said you could only use the water once before it got infected with bacteria. Between orders, he would run to the bathroom to wash his hands and change the water. He always came back even more energetic than before. That guy could sniff a lot. And he had been doing it for so long that it was his normal state of mind, so you hardly noticed. He never admitted to it and even if you had caught him in the act, he would have denied it, because Mike had convinced himself that he wasn’t doing coke anymore.