Hashish: A Smuggler's Tale (5 page)

A week later the prices rose again, and the man who had bought our trocas cleared over a million francs.

Floquet took all this with disconcerting calm, which I admired unreservedly at this moment. All the same, I wanted to set out for Le Havre to lodge a complaint, or start an inquiry. Floquet did all he could to dissuade me, and finally informed me curtly that he would not be a party to any such course of action.

Just think, attack so powerful a man! He had the Legion of Honour, was President of the Chamber of Commerce, had an immense fortune, the finest house in Le Havre, rich properties and shootings, a magnificent Hispano and a marvellous collection of pictures. He enjoyed the esteem and consideration of the entire town, and his word was law in the Chamber of Commerce. He was the respectable man, the business man of stainless reputation, the accomplished gentleman, and if they did not raise a statue to his memory when he died, the town would certainly one day give his name to a street which was tired of bearing that of Pasteur or Joan of Arc.

The idea that I had been swindled flitted for a moment through my head, but my friendship for Floquet was too great, and my confidence in him too absolute not to banish it at once. I hastily brushed aside such a horrible thought. We are always a little cowardly in facing ideas that will trouble our hearts; we shrink before moral suffering as we do before the surgeon’s knife which will cure our ill. We prefer the torture of doubt to the ghastly pain of certainty.

But all the same, this deal left me sick and disgusted for ever with business men and their methods, these pitiless games in which those who
know the rules can ruin with impunity the poor innocents who believe in the value of justice, honour, integrity and conscience.

It had been a good lesson to me, and it would be the last. Henceforth, I should conduct my affairs alone, far from the beaten track in which the practised hands had set snares.

I certainly believe that there may be honest men in business, but as swindlers so skilfully disguise themselves as honest men, I am afraid of making mistakes. So I prefer to leave the whole business alone, like a basket of mushrooms of doubtful purity.

I was still in this frame of mind when one evening I sat listening to my friend Chabaud telling me about his life as a midshipman on board a vessel belonging to the Chargeurs Réunis. He spoke about the hashish smuggling in Egypt. It was a State institution, it appeared, jealously hidden and kept secret, but with agents everywhere, high up in the police, in the customs service, even in the diplomatic service. Like a flash it occurred to me that here was a new field of action into which I could plunge as navigators of old plunged into unknown seas in the happy days when the globe was not yet all explored. I would smuggle hashish under the nose of this trust. I didn’t know the first thing about it; however, that might be a trump card in my hand, for my ignorance would keep me from being afraid. I didn’t even know exactly what hashish was; everything would have to be learnt and done; it meant adventure and discovery. I knew only two things – that it was grown in Greece, and sold very dear in Egypt. That doesn’t seem much on which to build an enterprise, but it was enough. If I had had all the information one might have thought indispensable, I should probably never have dared to plunge into this adventure. But these two bare facts left me all my courage.

Logically, I should have to begin with buying; the rest would come
later. There was no use worrying about possible difficulties to come; they always loom very large and terrible in the distance, but when one arrives at the foot of a wall, there is always some foothold which enables one to climb it.

I remembered the little Greek steamers I had so often seen at Port Vendres, bringing locust-beans to the firm of Santraille. They probably still went there, and might be very useful in giving me the information I required. So I booked a deck-passage on a steamer leaving Djibouti, and twelve days later I reached the pretty seaport in the Eastern Pyrenees, encircled by russet mountains covered with thyme and rosemary.

It was spring; a little snow still lingered on the tops of the Alberes, and a little wind, fresh and pure as crystal, swept down between the cork-oaks, laden with all the aromatic odours which once smelt can never be forgotten, the perfume of Spain and Corsica. Coming as I did from the torrid heat of Aden, where the hot monsoon brought nothing but the iodized smell of seaweed, I breathed in this lavender-scented coolness as if it were new life.

Up on the heights the two towers, the Madeloque and the Massane, watched over the plains of Catalonia as they had done when the armies of the Cardinal were besieging Perpignan. They were only phantoms now, ghosts of the past, still obstinately standing up to the buffets of the tramontana, towering above the high-lying moors with their carpet of sweet-smelling plants. At the narrow quay, an old steamer was unloading locust-beans. A few yards away was the empty terrace of the Café de Commerce, with its two scrubby orange trees in battered tubs and its round metal-bound marble tables. Carts with huge parti-coloured wheels bumped over the cobbles, and over everything was that stale smell of dust, characteristic of ports where it never rains.

I went on board the rusty steamer, over a narrow plank as elastic as a spring-board. A fat man in shirtsleeves was sitting aft in the shade of a tar-stainéd awning. He was eating a salad of cod and raw onions, and in front of him was an enormous, pink-fleshed water-lemon. He was the captain. He washed down his salad with great gulps of black wine out of a skin, and when he saw me coming he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He glowered sullenly, stuck his pipe insolently in his mouth, and sent forth a jet of saliva which nearly fell on my feet, just to show me how welcome I was. After several
attempts on my part at conversation in various languages, this master after God deigned to send me to hell in a jargon which bore some faint resemblance to Italian. It would have been madness to attempt to extract the smallest piece of information about the delicate questions which interested me from this coarse brute.

As I went back over the springy plank I saw a man, dressed just as shabbily as the rest of the people on this elegant vessel but wearing a celluloid collar, yellow and clouded as a clay pipe, but still a collar. This individual waited politely until I had crossed the slender gangway, keeping my balance by movements worthy of a tight-rope dancer. When I reached the shore end of the plank I mechanically uttered some vague words of greeting. He replied in French. I was saved; this was the man I was looking for. He was the chief engineer, for the old tub boasted a chief engineer.

It was useless to start any conversation where we were, with avalanches of locust-beans showering down on us from the badly fastened sacks which were being swung ashore by the crane. Though I must say that this dirty little man received them on his beribboned straw hat with an indifference born of long habit. I led him off to the deserted Café de Commerce, where I woke the echoes with my shouts. Finally a white apron loomed up out of the shadows and a bald and pallid waiter brought us the traditional can of beer.

My new acquaintance was a little man with an oily face, protuberant eyes, and a flat nose; he reminded me irresistibly of a friendly bull-dog. Without beating about the bush, I asked him what I wanted to know. I spoke as naturally as if I were asking the price of locust-beans, and he did not seem the least bit surprised, but spoke about hashish as if it were the most everyday merchandise.

‘My name is Spiro Smimeo; my family lives in the Piraeus. I shall give you a letter for my wife, and she will introduce you to my cousin Papamanoli, who is a priest. He will take you to relatives in Tripolis who grow and deal in hashish on a very large scale.

‘You can trust him, he is an honourable man, as pure as gold,’ and he made an expressive gesture as if he were holding an imaginary scale for weighing precious metals between two fingers.

There was no use hanging back; I decided to trust this fellow, follow his indications blindly, and walk straight into the unknown.

Next day I embarked at Marseilles on the Messageries’ packet
Le Calédonien,
which was leaving for the Near East. I went steerage, my finances not permitting anything better for the moment.

These lines are very different from those of China or Madagascar. The fourth class was invaded by repatriated Russians, Bulgars and other dagoes, each one dirtier than the rest. The men were shaggy and bearded, dressed in clothes of indefinite colour, all shining with grease. They looked more or less like the beggars one sees under the porches of provincial churches. You can just imagine the state of their linen, for whenever they shook themselves or simply moved, vermin fell from the folds of their garments.

I couldn’t see myself sleeping between decks among this evil-smelling throng, so I went to see the head steward of the third class. I found him in a great state of agitation, not knowing which way to turn. At the last moment, twenty-two Russian women and an incalculable number of children of all ages had been thrust upon him. These were the families of the men in the fourth class. They were Russian peasant women with sunburnt faces and kerchiefs tied over their heads, as uncouth and primitive as the Somali Bedouins, and completely bewildered by the stir on board.

I offered my services as extra steward, and was thankfully taken on. I laid the tables, sorted the silver, and acted as waiter. In return for this I ate with the chief steward the same food as the first-class passengers, slept on a table in the dining-room, and had a share in all the little extras the staff consider their due. By the third day, I had completely mastered my duties; it really looked as if I had missed my vocation.

Fabre was an old head steward who had been tossed about on all the seas of the East, both Near and Far. He was a very decent fellow, and had acquired a mellow philosophy through contact with all the passengers he had rubbed up against. During their voyages, men thrown together by chance indulge in a sort of moral nudism, and lay bare many strange things which they carefully hide in their ordinary lives. Fabre was
very amusing on his favourite topic, the frightful trouble caused by that cumbersome, unpacked, dirty and exacting merchandise – passengers.

We called at Malta, a curious town where there is nothing but churches, and the only sound of life is the ringing of church bells. The whole place reminded me of the strange towns one often sees in the nightmares of delirium.

As soon as the ship anchored, a regular battle began between the boatmen for possession of the passengers. These unhappy creatures were hustled hither and thither, and finally one, waving his arms like a marionette unhinged, lost his balance and fell back into a boat. It immediately bore him off with a cry of triumph, and the defeated boatman revenged himself by carrying off his luggage in a different direction. All this took place amid a hail of oaths in Maltese, with many suggestive Arab words intermingled.

The young priests in the second class, freshly hatched out of the seminary, turned vividly pink, and the good nuns covered their faces with their veils and fled under the mocking gaze of an old bearded missionary, who wasn’t to be upset by such trifles.

I did not go ashore, for getting back to the ship was too much of a problem. Some passengers had to pay a veritable ransom before they could return. Two French sailors, who had got mixed up with churches when looking for a building of quite another character, solved the matter very simply by throwing their grasping boatmen into the sea. A few strokes with the oars, and they were alongside, and as a tug was just leaving they tied the little boat to it, to the accompaniment of indignant shrieks from the owner as he floundered in the water.

This morning we entered the gulf of Athens. It is an intensely blue lake, surrounded by faintly blue mountains, dotted with rose and green patches, with here and there a white blob like a daisy in a meadow. These were houses and villages, and very picturesque they looked in the rays of the rising sun.

At last we reached the Piraeus, standing against a background of red-gold mountains. In the clear morning light the red roofs stood out vividly against the blue of the sky, and the soft, warm air smelt of lavender and pine-woods.

The fact that this was Greece, land of heroes and demi-gods, lent a glamour born of antique memories to the landscape. I went as far forward as possible, so as not to see the odious modernity of the ship, and smell the coal smoke that trailed in our wake. All I saw was the stem cutting through this blue silk carpet, throwing up curls of white foam, as the triremes of ancient days must have done through this same clear water.

As soon as I landed I was besieged by an army of small shoe-blacks; I really believe the children here must be born with a shoe-shining outfit. The only way to get peace is to wear canvas shoes.

The carriages for hire were most peculiar, rather like the moth-eaten equipages one sometimes sees even today in the Faubourg St Germain, taking for an airing some very old marquise who disdains such modern inventions as motor-cars. These landaus and victorias at the Piraeus were in the last stages of dilapidation, like the evening clothes hanging in second-hand clothes shops. The coachmen were dressed according to their fancy; most of them were in shirt-sleeves, and wore an immense red woollen sash which they used as a general store-cupboard. Into it they stowed their lunch, when the exigencies of business obliged them to interrupt the eating of it. I should have preferred to see a pair of immense pistols or a wicked-looking cutlass in them, for these men had the faces of brigands of grand opera. They were badly shaved, like peasants on Sundays, and many of them wore old opera hats or toppers with curling brims.