The Devil's Dozen

Eleven

The processing of opium to heroin is complicated and requires a laboratory. I had one ready-made in the candy factory of the red brick building belonging to Hauffmann Gesellschaft. It was evening and the regular employees had left for home. Dressed in overalls, I backed the truck I’d driven from the Lubeck rail terminal up to the factory door. Vera opened the factory door as I jumped out of the truck’s cab.

“Everything go well, Raki?”

I handed her the railway invoice for twenty inspected bags of almond powder. Then I started bringing each bag in. When they were all in and the door was shut and locked, I selected the $20 million bag and dragged it to the candy vats.

“I still don’t get it.” Vera was in overalls too with her blonde hair piled under a green wool cap. “I’ve never processed dope before, but I know that it comes out as white powder. How are you going to hide it?”

“We are going to hide it.” I checked my watch. “We have just fourteen hours until the workers return so we better get started.”

I handed her a rubber gas mask.

“The fumes will put you on the far side of the moon if you don’t use it,” I warned her.

She slipped the mask on as I did mine. Her cat eyes followed me with lingering doubt.

I removed the seals from the neck of the bag, pulled the band apart, and dumped the contents into the vat, shaking it so almost every expensive particle would fall.

“Take the bag to the incinerator chute and throw it in.”

Vera picked it up hesitantly.

“Won’t someone smell the burning opium?”

“The bag will be burned tomorrow with the rest of the bags. Nobody will smell anything but plastic.”

She shoved the bag down the incinerator chute. I poured acetone into the vat along with the opium.

“We’ll have to let that work by itself for a while,” I said and switched on the vat’s mixing paddles. “Don’t worry about the sound. This is a commercial street. It’s deserted now, and there’s still enough traffic on the streets to muffle what noise we make.”

“That’s all we have to worry about?”

“No. There are some real dangers. The mixture has to be heated. If you get it too hot, it blows up like a bomb. Then there are the problems of the amount of electricity you use and what to do with the waste water, tricky details if you’re trying to hide your laboratory in your home. But a candy factory uses a lot of electricity, and we have a commercial sluice for tainted water that flows right into Lubeck’s main sewer.”

“You’ve thought of everything, so far.”

After thirty minutes I opened up the temperature dials on the vat, usually used for melting almond powder and sugar, in this case for a different kind of taste delight. I set the heat at 100 degrees centigrade (212 Fahrenheit).

“The opium is really nothing more than a morphine base. The acetone will take out impurities.” Candy vats come equipped with vacuum pumps because impurities in confections are removed in much the same way as those in opium. I siphoned off the cleansing acetone, leaving the morphine base a rich brown color, the normal color of top grade opium. To change the purified dope back to white I added a bag of carbon black and started the vat’s paddles going again.

“We’re setting a world record tonight, Vera. The most opium any Marseilles lab ever processed at one time was less than twenty pounds. Were doing more than ten times that.”

Vera looked around the factory full of vats, ovens, and candy trays. On the walls were cheery scenes of children and cows, the two most wholesome symbols in the German imagination. Tomorrow at eight o’clock the room would be full of cheerful hefty fraus in white aprons, all working for the greater glory of Lubeck’s marzipan.

“I keep thinking you must be crazy,” she said, “and then I realize that you’re not, that you just simplify problems very effectively.... at least, so far,” she amended her praise slightly.

“What are you doing now?”

“Adding Chloric acid to neutralize the mixture. We’ll let that blend for a while, too.”

“And if a German policeman walked in now, even if he didn’t have a good reason, what would you do?”

“You still have your Beretta?”

She took it from her overall pocket.

“Good. Keep it out of sight, Vera. If anyone knocks at the door, we’re making candy. If he gets too suspicious we’ll even give him a taste. He’d get about one step before diving to the floor.”

“What if he won’t take a taste?”

“Then, we’ll let him come in to check, and, after about a minute of breathing this without a mask, he should forget what he came in for. But nobody’s going to bother us.”

“We’ve got only ten hours to go,” she checked her watch. “How much longer will this take?”

“You can get the candy molds now.”

Vera lost her breath for a second.

“Candy molds?”

“That’s right. I said we were making candy. The molding trays are on the shelves by the wall.”

“I take it back. You are crazy. You’ve lost your mind.”

I ignored her and went to the huge baking oven that took one whole quarter of the floor. Again, I set the dials at an explosion-proof level. When I returned to the vat, Vera was holding an armful of trays and shaking her head.

“Just hold one at a time. Set a bucket at your feet. Get a leveler in your hand. I’m going to open the vat taps. I’ll fill the molds, and you level the runover into the bucket. Got it?”

For all her doubts, Vera was an expert coworker. The opium, half-processed into heroin, was ready for pouring, and I threw open the vat’s smallest tap. A white cream flowed out over the tray. As Vera leveled it, she set each filled tray aside on a table and lifted another. There wasn’t time for questions or doubts anymore, there was only time for work. The entire 100 kilos had to be baked or thrown out before the day workers arrived in the morning. And it had to be boxed too, because I couldn’t afford to have a frau spaced out from nibbling on the company product.

There were trays with molds of pigs, fig leaves, cows, babies, the Holstentor, fish, apples, bananas, bread, pears, cupids, potatoes, grapes and grape vines, and peaches. When we had fifty trays in the oven, I rolled over a wagon carrying spray cans of vegetable coloring. After fifteen minutes, enough time for our “candy” to have an outer crust, I pulled the trays out.

“It’s like fudge!” Vera exclaimed.

“That’s right,” I said. “Fudge just happens to be one of heroin’s states during processing. Only we’re keeping it at the fudge state with chemical stabilizers. Then, when our fudge gets to New York, we’ll do the last step of the process, and our heroin will be the white powder you’ve been expecting to see all this time.”

“If I didn’t have this mask on, I’d kiss you. In fact, I’d do more than that.”

“Later, please. Just use that spray can. Try to make your potatoes brown and your fish blue instead of vice versa.”

We worked furiously, as two criminals intent on a $20 million batch of marzipan could be expected to. What eight normal employees might have done in eight hours, we did in four. Every redeemable ounce of heroin was poured, baked, colored, and baked again. Now we started boxing the warm candy. We filled only the bottom layer of each box. Despite our pace, it was only two hours before the morning shift would arrive.

From the previous day’s output of finished boxes, we took the top layers of real marzipan and covered our heroin candy. One hour was left, and the most critical work was still undone. There had to be not one trace of heroin or even the slightest hint of the abnormal when Vera and I left. We scoured the vat and the floor around it. Cans of vegetable coloring were refilled from stock. The trays had to be cleaned, new boxes brought from stock, and the whole work area and oven ventilated. All excess candy, boxes, the overalls, and gas masks were thrown down the incinerator chute and, last, the invoice for the bags of almond powder had to be changed from twenty to nineteen.

“The oven, what about the oven?” Vera asked. “It’ll still be warm.”

“An old oven would be. This one is gas heated and water cooled. We have eight minutes. Let’s go.”

I locked the door behind us. By the time we reached the end of the block I saw the first women arriving for work, walking in pairs in their white aprons. I felt like a wrung rag. Vera was exhilerated.

“You’re a genius.” She almost danced to the car.

“You’re a genius,” she was still saying when we got to our hotel room. “If you just made up a batch of special candy once a month, you could control the whole North American market. You could flood it and drive everyone else out of business.”

I dropped backwards onto the bed and gratefully let my head sink into the pillow. My eyelids shut simply from their weight.

Vera undressed me. She was still intoxicated with success.

“You will be the most powerful man in Europe, do you know that, Raki. And with my help, nobody can stop you.”

I was too beat to know or listen. A month of impersonation and precise planning was at an end. I’d beaten the Corsicans and half the customs systems in Europe. The marzipan would pass easily through the Lubeck inspection.

Raki Senevres was now worthy of the Mafia’s respect. I felt Vera’s naked body slide under the sheets next to me. We fell asleep in each other’s arms. Like scorpions mating, a voice in the back of my mind told me.