Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [59]
other in the back alleys of the Paris banlieue or the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles. And increasingly, Bond
– it makes me very happy to say this – in the jolly old British streets of Soho and Manchester. Once I’ve sold it, I dare say it may get cut with amphetamine or rat poison or weedkiller. But that’s not my responsibility, is it? Once Chagrin has signed it off, I lose interest in the product – though not in what effects it has.’
The workers were only a few feet below them. They wore grey shirts and loose trousers of the kind issued to Bond. Each man bent to his task with terrified intensity, particularly when he sensed the approach of one of the supervisors with his bullwhip and his Alsatian dog straining at its flimsy chain.
‘Do you know what heroin is?’ said Gorner. ‘A short chemistry lesson for you, Bond. We start with a pretty flower: the poppy or Papaver somniferum. A beautiful name for a beautiful plant – ‘‘the sleepbringing poppy’’. The juice from its seedpods gives you opium – the prince of drugs, extolled by poets from Homer to the present day. You’ve encountered it, I daresay.’
‘Briefly.’
‘Opium is expensive,’ said Gorner, ‘but highly desirable. The greatest drug cartel the world has ever
seen – before my own modest enterprise – was run, of course, by your British Empire. They fought two opium wars with China to retain their trafficking monopoly – and twice they defeated them. By the treaty of Nanjing in 1842, they stole Hong Kong and opened five new ports to the opium trade, turning millions of Chinese into gibbering addicts. It’s not unreasonable that someone should attempt to repay them in their own coin, is it? I’m doing nothing that the British haven’t done themselves.’
Bond said nothing.
‘It takes time, though,’ said Gorner, remorsefully.
‘God, it takes time.’
As he spoke, Bond was looking down at the row upon row of slave workers in their sweat-drenched uniforms. One seemed to have fainted or died and was being dragged away by the guards. The others alongside him were too scared to stop working.
‘Between opium and heroin came morphine,’ said Gorner. ‘It was first isolated by a German in 1805 –
the year of your famous Trafalgar. Then, in 1874, an Englishman called Wright produced diacetylmorphine, a white, odourless, bitter, crystalline powder, made by the acetylation of morphine. Heroin.’
Gorner coughed. ‘ That’s what they’re doing there. Acetylation. That’s the smell. I think you must know
my reputation, Bond. I have a number of degrees from universities around the world. Perhaps these long words are confusing to you, but they are like love poetry to me. ‘‘My love is like a red, red rose,’’
your Scotsman wrote, did he not? But my love is a red, red poppy. So various, so glorious. It gives me great pleasure that the poppy is the sentimental emblem of your pointless imperial sacrifice against the Germans in the Great War. I make sure that everyone in my narcotics supply chain repeats the words of your vacuous little poem: ‘‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow . . .’’ It’s their code. The code for death.’
Gorner coughed again and brought himself back as though from a reverie. ‘Anyway, your English chemist, this Wright – most unusually for an Englishman – failed to exploit his discovery for personal gain. It was a German, Heinrich Dreser, the head of Bayer’s pharmacological laboratory, who was the first to see the commercial uses of heroin. He tested it on his workers and they chose the name ‘‘heroin’’
because it made them feel heroic! Pharmacologically, heroin had the same effect as morphine, but you needed only about a quarter as much. It was also cheaper, quicker