Snowstorms in a Hot Climate by Sarah Dunant Read Free Book Online

The thoroughbred of narcotics. Nothing else can touch it. Grass is too plebeian, opium too passive, heroin too destructive. But not coke. Coke has style, wit, and the aura of excitement. I sometimes think that’s why people pay so much for it. It can’t be for the high. You can stay up longer with a handful of good old-fashioned uppers sold by the tubful in high school playgrounds.
    But coke is high society, an entrance to the elite. The law forbids you to take it. It’s like disobeying your parents. Everyone wants to be a rebel sometimes.
    And that’s what spiced my love for Lenny. He touched one of the oldest female fantasies in the book: the man outside the law, steely, confident, untouchable. I swear, Marla, my feminism went out of the window. If you’d given me a James Bond book to read during those first few months, I would have been hard-pressed not to identify with the women. I was so hungry for him it makes me ashamed now. You know, the kind of desire that comes at the beginning of an affair, when you want to possess the other person entirely, crawl inside their brain and see the world through their eyes, colonize them, take over their pasts and become their futures. I don’t care what feminism tells you you should or shouldn’t do. When everything is Technicolor you don’t think straight.
    That’s why I never wrote, never told you. What could I say? You would have thought I had betrayed you. I had. I knew it even then, you see. I knew it would lead to trouble. That I had given up something of myself and there would come a time when I would regret it. But you have to remember it had never happened to me before. I had never fallen so hard for a man. I was thirty years old and I had never been in love like that. I wanted to be engulfed. I know this is painful for you to hear, but I can’t lie to you. It was like being caught up in a tornado. And by the time the storm had passed, all that was left was the debris. For me that is. For him it was different. There were bits of him that were nailed down. Maybe he had a more clearly defined sense of survival. Or maybe he’d just been at it longer. It was his lifestyle. He had warned me. He was not dishonest. He told me right from the beginning. He had also warned me about the coke. And I had listened. I just didn’t hear.
    It was just before we left San Andrés, early evening at the end of another scorching day. We had baked ourselves stupid on the beach and spent hours snorkling, an exhaustion of pleasure. Back at the hotel we began the twilight ritual. A shower, a drink,and a couple of lines to set us up for the evening. I was enjoying it. I had, I suppose, developed a taste for it.
    He was sitting out on the balcony. I was inside the room at the table by the bed, chopping the coca. I remember that he was watching me. After a while I looked up and smiled. He didn’t smile back.
    “It’s a great drug, isn’t it, Elly?” He put it very casually, but there was something in his tone that set me on my guard. I carried on chopping, watching the crystals fluff up beneath the razor blade.
    “Yeah, it’s a great drug. Although I’m not sure if I’d pay American street prices for it.”
    There was a pause. “How much coca have you done, Elly? Before you met me, I mean.”
    “Oh … some. A bit. Nothing like this quantity,” I said, still not looking at him.
    “Have you ever been around unlimited supplies of it before?”
    I stopped chopping and began running the blade along the mound, stringing it out into thick white lines. I glanced up. “No, you know I haven’t. Why? What are you worried about, Lenny? That I’ll get to like it too much? It’s supposed to be a female drug, isn’t it? Isn’t that the mythology about it? You tell me. Do women have a lower tolerance than men, or is that just in-house coke talk?”
    It had been a glorious day. And it had been a long time since he had “switched off.” I was feeling secure. His folklore on coke had