I nodded. Rita looked at me and rolled her eyes and finished her second Scotch.
'Even there,' Fallon said, 'we're undermanned. Around here, we're just barely showing the flag.'
'But you know that Wheaton is a major coke plant.'
'Services the whole Northeast. If we got a little more from the local police . . .' Fallon shrugged.
'They been corrupted?' I said.
'Maybe,' Fallon said. 'Small-town police departments are not normally equipped to stand up against the kind of money and knowhow that cocaine represents.'
'State cops?'
'Same problem we have,' Failon said. 'There's a barracks in Brookfield, covers about twenty-five hundred square miles. Mostly they stick to highway patrol.'
'So how does it work,' I said.
'I beg your pardon?'
'How does the whole process work,' I said. 'It starts in Colombia . . .'
Fallon reached over and took one of Rita's cigarettes and put it in his mouth and picked up her lighter and lit the cigarette and inhaled it and let the smoke out slowly.
'Trying to quit,' he said. 'So far I've quit buying them.'
He took a sip of his martini and settled forward with his forearms on the bar. 'Actually,' he said, 'it begins usually in Bolivia or Peru.'
I knew that, but a guy like Fallon enjoys correcting you and I figured if I started with an error, it would prime his pump.
I said, 'Oh.'
'Sometimes Colombia, but mostly Peru and Bolivia. Coca grows best between fifteen hundred and six thousand feet. Needs a uniform mean temperature of about sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit. How technical you want this?'
'Had a little trouble for a minute there with Fahrenheit,' I said, 'but I'm okay.'
He nodded, took another tiny sip of his martini. Rita drank some of the melted ice water in her glass and gestured at the bartender.
'There's farmers all over down there, cultivating coca leaves. A farmer gets about a hundred to a hundred fifty kilos of leaves, distills them down into about one kilo of dry paste.'
Rita yawned. The bartender took her order for another round.
'The farmer usually deals with a guide, a kind of agent. If the farmer's Peruvian, the guide's the same. Brings the buyers, almost always Colombians, to the farmer. Meets them at the border and brings them in and agents the deal. None of them trust anybody but their own kind. Peruvians only deal through a Peruvian guide, Bolivians only through a Bolivian guide, you see?'
'Tribal,' I said.
'Yeah, sure, they're about two hours out of the Stone Age up in some of those mountains down there. Anyway, the buyers take it back across the border into Colombia and process it at a base lab, that goes then to a bigger lab, near one of the cities, and gets turned into crystal.'
The bartender brought the drinks. Fallon looked a little surprised to see his second martini. His first was only half sipped.
'I've fallen among hard drinkers,' Fallon said.
'Adamantine,' Rita Fiore murmured. Fallon glanced at her and frowned and then looked back at me and got back on ground he understood.
'Crystal is made out of base from all over. Like wildflower honey, you know. It's just generic coke. They take all the base, dump it in together and process it. People talking about pure Colombian coke are blowing smoke. It's something their supplier tells them, makes them feel smart.'
'When do we get to the Wheaton part, Phil.' Rita was leaning her right elbow on the bar, her closed fist against her right cheekbone. She was into her third Scotch.
Fallon smiled. 'Women,' he said to me. 'They want fast when you want slow, and they want slow when you want fast.' He shook his head in puzzlement. Rita gazed into the mirror back of the bar.
'Anyway, we're getting to Wheaton,' Fallon said. 'Once they got crystal they smuggle it into the U.S.A. Mostly in south Florida for obvious reasons. Sometimes they mule it in in small amounts. Sometimes it comes in three hundred kilos at a time. Usually the wholesaler goes to the point of entry, say some beach house in Florida, inspects the stuff, buys his share, and brings it home.'
'Is Wheaton a home?'
'Probably,' Fallon said. 'Anyway, the wholesaler's got it in some safe house back home, say Wheaton. Then he weighs it, tests it, and this'll vary, but he may cut it, then he packages it and sells it to a distributor, who resells it in small lots to dealers. This guy may cut it too, or he may do the first real cut. The dealers cut it and subdealers cut it, and some was probably stolen along the way by guys working for the smuggler and replaced with a cut, and so by the time your sophisticated scholar athlete, say, gets a gram or two for his head it's about twelve percent cocaine. Hell, half the people doing blow are reacting to the cut, they get pure coke they think it's no good.'
'Prices?' I said.
'Varies. Depends on how bad it's been stepped on along the way. At the moment, around here, a hundred, a hundred-twenty dollars a gram.'
'What do they cut with?' I said.
