Yet, with all this WASPiness, Danny Porush was a purebred Jew who could trace his roots back to a tiny kibbutz near Tel Aviv. Nevertheless, like many a Jew before him, he tried to be mistaken for a blue-blooded WASP—hence, those wonderfully WASPy glasses, which had clear lenses in them.
Meanwhile, the interior of the cabin looked like a flying DEA seizure locker. Between Danny and me, on a mahogany foldout table, a brown leather Louis Vuitton shower bag was overflowing with a fabulous medley of dangerous recreational drugs—a half ounce of sinsemilla, sixty pharmaceutical Quaaludes, some bootleg uppers, some bootleg downers, a sandwich bag full of coc**ne, a dozen hits of Ecstasy, and then the safe stuff, from the doctors: a vial of Xanax, a vial of morph**e, some Valiums and Restorils and Somas and Vicodins, and some Ambiens and Ativans and Klonopins, as well as a half-consumed pack of Heineken and a mostly consumed bottle of Macallan's to wash things down. Pretty soon, though, all the nonprescription stuff would be gone, shoved up our collective a**holes or buried deep beneath our scrotal sacs, as we negotiated our way through Czech Customs.
My trusted attorney, Wigwam, was sitting to Danny's right. He was also dressed casually, although, in his case, he also wore his perpetually glum expression and horrendous-looking toupee. It was mud brown in color, a poor match to his pale complexion, and had the consistency of desiccated straw. In fact, despite the Iron Curtain coming down four years earlier, it was still a safe bet that his horrific hairpiece would draw some second looks from the Czechs.
In any event, Wigwam was buzzed too, although, as our attorney, he was held to a higher standard. He understood that he was not to get sloppy until after we'd finished dealing with the Czechs. So he'd gone heavy on the coke and light on the Ludes. It was an inspired strategy that made perfect psychotropic sense; after all, taking a Quaalude was like drinking three bottles of grain alcohol on an empty stomach, while snorting coc**ne was like consuming eight thousand cups of coffee intravenously. The former made you sleepy and sloppy, while the latter made you pumped up and paranoid. Insofar as business was concerned, it was more effective to be pumped up and paranoid than sleepy and sloppy. But, alas, Wigwam had accidentally snorted himself into a coke-induced paranoia.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Wigwam muttered. “This cabin reeks of skunk weed! Can't you put that shit out, Danny? I mean… we're… we're… we're”—spit it out, Wigwam-“we're gonna end up in Czech jail, for Chrissake!” He paused, wiping the beads of sweat that had formed on his pale, paranoid brow. He was actually good-looking, in a boyish sort of way. He was average height, with fine, even features, although he had a bit of a paunch going. “I'm gonna get disbarred,” he moaned. “I know it. Ughhhhhhh ….” It was a paranoid drug groan, and as soon as he'd finished groaning he put his toupee in his hands and shook his egg-shaped skull in despair.
The Chef was sitting to my left, and he was straight as an arrow. In fact, he'd never done a drug in his entire life—being that rare breed of man who could surround himself with world-class drug addicts and be entirely okay with it. The Chef was handsome, in a striking sort of way, like a trimmed-down version of Mr. Clean. He was completely bald on top, with a prominent forehead, a very square jaw, piercing brown eyes, an aquiline nose, and an infectious smile.
The Chef was a born-and-bred New Jerseyite, who could lay his Jersey accent on real thick, especially when the occasion called for it, as it did now. “Whaddaya, whaddaya?” the Chef said to Wigwam. “You godda gedda grip dare, Andy! If you're worried about the smell, then turn on them overhead air vents. The pressure is so low ow dare”—out there—“it'll clear the stench out in two seconds flat.”
Indeed. The Chef was absolutely right. “You should listen to the Chef,” I said to Wigwam. “He has uncanny reasoning skills in these situations.” I reached over and placed my left hand on Wigwam's shoulder and offered him a concerned smile. “On a separate note, I strongly advise you to take a couple of Xanax. You need to even yourself out a bit.”
He stared at me.
“You look like a train wreck,” I said. “Trust me, a couple a Xanax is just what the doctor ordered.” I turned to the Chef. “Isn't that right, Chef?”
“Indeed,” the Chef agreed.
Wigwam nodded nervously. “I guess I will,” he said, “but I need to do some housekeeping first.” He rose from his chair and began walking around the cabin and opening air vents. I looked at Danny, who was still smoking a joint. “In spite of our attorney being a cokehead,” I said, “he's got a valid point. Why don't you get rid of that joint just to be safe.”
Danny held up the half-inch-long joint and cocked his head to the side, as if inspecting it. He turned the corners of his mouth down and shrugged, then threw the joint into his mouth and swallowed it. “Eating poss gets you f**ked up!” he slurred proudly.
Just then Wigwam sat back down, his jaw still doing a coke addict's version of the Latin hustle. “Here,” I said, grabbing the appropriate vial from the LV bag. I unscrewed the cap and poured out a few pills. “The correct dosage is two blues…” I paused, thinking for a moment, “although at this altitude there's no way to be sure. The body might be more susceptible up here.” I shrugged.
Wigwam nodded nervously, still trapped in the deep trough of the worry phase. If I plunged into the story of how he'd lost his hair while still in high school and then got caught cheating on his SATs, there was a better than fifty-fifty chance he would make a mad dash for the emergency exit and jump. But I took pity on him and said nothing.
I turned to the Chef and smiled respectfully. “Getting back to business,” I said, in hushed tones, “I wasn't all that impressed with the people I met in Switzerland, so I'm not going forward with them. They didn't seem trustworthy enough.” I shrugged again. That was a lie, of course, and as much as I hated lying to the Chef, I had my reasons.
Back in the United States, an obsessed FBI agent named Gregory Coleman was hot on my trail, and I needed to set up false trails for him to follow, to divert his attention away from my real Swiss accounts. I would have the Chef assist me to that end—opening a Swiss account for me that I would never actually fund but whose existence I would leak to Agent Coleman. And when Coleman petitioned the Swiss government to open my account, I would fight him tooth and nail on it, as if I actually had something to hide. It would keep him occupied for a good two years, I figured, maybe even more. And when he finally did get his way and the account was opened, he would find out that I had never actually funded it.
In essence, the joke would be on Coleman, and my real business would go on undisturbed. With that in mind, I said to the Chef, “So let's do the stuff you talked about before. What do I gotta do to get things started?”
“You don't gotta do nothing,” replied the Jersey Chef, using a double negative to reinforce how little I had to do. “I got the whole thing set up for you—trustees, nominees, and I can be an adviser to the trust. That'll put another buffer between you and the money. And God forbid the boys downtown start snooping around, then I resign as adviser and the money disappears into Liechtenstein and, you know… Schhhwiitttt!”—and he clapped his hands and slung his right arm out toward southern Romania— “we'd be good to go then.”
I smiled at the Chef and nodded warmly. He was a man of many talents, the Chef, although his most remarkable was his ability to use an intricate combination of hand gestures and blowing sounds to get his point across. And my favorite was Schhhwiitttt, which he elicited by curling his tongue into a reverse C and then forcing out a gust of air. And as he made the Schhhwiitttt sound he would clap his hands, sending his right arm flying out into the distance. The Chef used this sound when he was tying up loose ends of a cover story, as if to imply, “Yeah, and with that last phony document we've created, you know… Schhhwiitttt!… there's no way the feds will ever be able to figure things out!”
In retrospect, as I now sat on the Gulfstream, I knew I'd made a colossal blunder in not using one of the Chef's many fabulous recipes to satiate my Swiss banking appetite. But his relationship with the Blue-eyed Devil had spooked me. It was common knowledge that they were doing business in Switzerland, and, as hot as I was, the Blue-eyed Devil was that much hotter, and they still hadn't been able to catch him! So how did that bode for my plight? Rather well, I figured. Like the Devil, I was a careful man, always going to great lengths to cover my tracks.
I held on to that happy thought as I reached into my medicine bag and broke out the Valium, downing three blues. It was a lion's dose, I knew, but given the amount of coke I'd snorted, it was just what I needed to get me safely to Czechoslovakia.
Rather than going through the main terminal at Prague's Ruzyně Airport, the Gulfstream was directed to a small private terminal that, up until a short time ago, had been reserved for communist dignitaries. That suited me just fine, given my current state of intoxication, but as they led us to a room that looked like the inner sanctum of the Kremlin, there was something bothering me, something I couldn't quite place my finger on. Danny was standing beside me, looking disturbed. “You smell something?” I asked, scrunching up my nose.
Danny scrunched up his own nose and took two deep snorts. “Yeah,” he replied. “What the f**k is that? It smells like… I don't know, but I don't like it.” He took two more snorts.
I turned to Wigwam. “You smell something?” I whispered.
Wigwam darted his eyes around the room like a wild animal. “It's poison gas,” he said nervously. “I… I gotta get my passport back. I… please… I'm gonna lose it.” He put his index finger to his mouth and began biting his nail.
The worries, I thought. I leaned over to the Chef. “You smell something, Chef?”
He nodded. “Yeah, it's f**king body odor!” he declared. “These commie bastards don't use deodorant!” He scratched his chin, taking a moment to consider. “Or maybe they can't find it in stores. You'd be surprised how commies forgo the normal pleasantries.”
Just then a smelly middle-aged Czech, dressed in blue-gray police garb, walked over. He eyed us suspiciously for a moment, then motioned to a series of high-backed leather armchairs that had been arranged around an enormous mahogany conference table. Not too shabby, I thought. We sat down, and a uniformed waiter appeared from out of nowhere, carrying a tray of dessert aperitifs, which he placed before us without saying a word.
I looked up at the waiter, who was sweating bullets. “Excuse me,” I said humbly. “Why is it so hot in here?”
He flashed me the look of the disinterested and the lobotomized and then walked away without saying a word. As I reached for my glass, Wigwam warned, “Don't drink the wine!” He began looking around nervously. “That's what they want.” He looked back at me, with wild eyes. “You understand?”
Now the Chef leaned over. “I don't think that guy speaks English,” he whispered, “but when I was getting off the plane the captain told me they're having their worst heat wave in a hundred years. I think today was the hottest day in the country's history.”
Inside the taxi I breathed through my mouth.
“You ever smell anything so vile?” I asked Danny.
Danny shook his head gravely. “Never. The guy needs to be dipped in sulfuric acid.” The Chef nodded in agreement, then added more words of wisdom. “Don't worry,” he said confidently. “We're staying in the nicest hotel in the country. I'm sure there'll be air-conditioning there. You can count on it.”
I shrugged, not entirely believing him. “Is Prague the largest city in Czechoslovakia?” I asked the smelly driver.
Without warning, the driver expelled a giant gob of spit onto his own dashboard. “Slavs are dogs,” he snarled. “They are no longer part of country. We are Czech Republic: Jewel of East.” He rolled his neck, as if trying to regain his composure.
I nodded nervously and looked out the window, trying to take in the beauty of the Jewel of the East, but there were no streetlights and I couldn't see anything. Nevertheless, I was still hopeful; after all, our destination was the fabulous Hotel Ambassador, the only four-star hotel in Prague. And thank God for that! I thought. This leg of our journey seemed to be cursed. A bit of pampering would be just what the doctor ordered!
Alas, what the Chef hadn't been aware of was that the Hotel Ambassador had just been rated one of the worst four-star hotels in Europe. Just why I found out the moment we stepped into the lobby and it was two hundred degrees and a thousand percent humidity. In fact, it was so stifling I almost passed out.
The space was vast and grim-looking, like a Cold War-era bomb shelter. There were only three couches in sight, which were a disturbing shade of dog-shit brown.
At the front desk, I smiled at the Czech check-in girl, a pale young blonde with wide shoulders, enormous Czech boobs, a white blouse, and a nametag reading Lara2* “Why is there no air-conditioning?” I asked the lovely Lara.
Lara smiled sadly, exposing some crooked Czech choppers. “We have problem with air conditioner,” Lara replied, in heavily accented English. “It is not at work now.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Danny sag, but then the Chef offered more words of wisdom. “We'll be fine here,” he said, nodding a single time. “I've seen much, much worse.”
I recoiled in disbelief. “Really, Chef? Where?”
He smiled knowingly. “You forget I'm from New Jersey.”
Such logic! I thought. The Chef was a true warrior!
Emboldened by his words, I threw down my Am Ex card, smiled at Lara, and said to myself, “How bad could it possibly be? When you're as tired and post-Luded as I am, the tendency is just to pass out from sheer exhaustion.”
Two hours later I was lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, stark nak*d and contemplating suicide. My hotel room was hotter than the boiler room on the SS Titanic. The windows had been bolted shut and the radiator was on. Just why, no one in the hotel could seem to figure out. Nevertheless, there was heat coming from the radiator, nothing was coming from the air conditioner, and I would've paid a million bucks for someone to unleash a swarm of bumblebees to hover over me and flap their tiny wings.
It was a little after two a.m., about eight p.m. New York time. I desperately needed to speak to the Duchess. I needed to hear some kind words from her, for her to tell me that she loved me and that everything would be okay. She could always make me feel better, even in my darkest hour. But I'd tried her a half dozen times and kept getting the same f**king recording, saying the overseas lines were busy.
Just then the phone rang. Ahhh, the luscious Duchess! She always knows! I reached for the phone and picked it up. Alas, it was Danny. “I can't sleep,” he snarled. “We need to drop Ludes and go get hookers; there's no other way.”
I sat upright. “You're kidding!” I said. “We're getting picked up in a few hours, Dan! That's insane.” I took a moment to think it through, coming to the quick conclusion that his plan was, indeed, insane. “Anyway, where we gonna find hookers this time of night? It's too complicated.”
“I already got it worked out with Lara,” he said proudly. “There's a place less than ten minutes from here, on the outskirts of Prague. Lara assured me we can find some smelly Czech hookers there, which are the best kind, she said.” He paused briefly. “Anyway, we must do this, JB. It would be bad karma to let things proceed along their current course. We need to take drastic action. I fear for you if you can't see that.”
“No way,” I replied. “I gotta take a pass. You're on your own.”
Somehow—and I'm still not sure how—one hour later I was three Ludes deep, with an enormous Czech hooker with bleached-blond hair and the face of a sheepdog riding me like Seattle Slew. Hardly a word was exchanged, only two hundred U.S. dollars and something that sounded like “Ta-hank yew!” right after I came inside her enormous Czech p**sy. Whatever. Pussy was p**sy, I thought, and despite this one being wide enough to parallel park a Czech taxi-cab in, I had still felt it my patriotic duty to deposit a red, white, and blue load inside her, if for nothing more than to remind her who won the Cold War.
An hour later I was back in my hotel room, sweating again, plotting my own death, and missing the Duchess terribly. But, above all things, I was wondering why I'd just done that. I loved the Duchess more than anything, yet I couldn't seem to control myself. I was weak, and I was decadent. The Wild Wolf was lurking inside me—just beneath the surface—ready to rise up at the slightest provocation and bare his drug-addicted fangs. Just where all this would end up I hadn't the slightest idea, but the word on Wall Street was that I'd be dead within a few years. Whatever. In more ways than one, I was dead already.
At four in the morning, I broke down and raided the Louis Vuitton bag again. Finally, thirty minutes later, I was fast asleep, with enough Xanax bubbling through my central nervous system to knock out half of Prague.
At 7:30 a.m.—only three hours later—came my wake-up call.
I blinked, then vomited, and then rose out of bed and took an ice-cold shower. Then I snorted a half gram of coke, swallowed a Xanax to quell any future paranoia, and headed downstairs to the lobby. I felt a twinge of guilt about being coked out for my first business meeting in this fine country, but after last night's escapade into the seedy cesspool of Prague's red-light district, there was no other way I could possibly start my day.
Downstairs in the lobby, thirty-year-old Marty Sumichrest, Jr., greeted us warmly. He was tall, thin, pasty-faced, and wore steel-rimmed glasses with very thick lenses. He was living somewhere near Washington, D.C., but was in Prague today because he wanted us to raise $10 million for his company, Czech Industries. At this point, the company was nothing more than a worthless shell, but he assured us that he could use his father's status as a Czech War Hero to insinuate himself into the highest echelons of the Czech power structure.
We exchanged morning pleasantries and then crammed ourselves into a horrendous limousine called a Skoda. It was black, boxy, beaten up, and, of course, it had no air-conditioning. The foul stench of body odor was so powerful that it could have incapacitated a platoon full of marines. I looked at my watch: It was 8:15 a.m. Only five minutes had passed, but it felt like an hour. I looked around the limo and all ties were at half-mast; Danny was white as a ghost; the Chef's lips were twisted subversively; and Wigwam's toupee looked like a dead animal.