‘Mr Marks, your seat number is 34H. It’s in the aisle. We shall hold your passport until London. Then we’ll give it to the British authorities.’
I didn’t like the sound of that, but I was too mesmerised to pay much attention. Scoogsie and the Nigerian were placed out of sight. I sat down, gloated over magazines and newspapers and played with knobs adjusting seat position and volume of canned entertainment, like a child on his first flight. I had flown on commercial airlines thousands of times before, but I remembered none of them. Take-off was magic. I saw Texas disappearing. Then, all of America vanished. There is a God.
‘Would you like a cocktail before your meal, Mr Marks?’
I had drunk no alcohol and smoked nothing for three years. I was proud of my self-discipline. Perhaps I should carry on as a teetotaller.
‘Just an orange juice, please.’
A tray of food was placed in front of me. In the old days, I would rarely eat while flying: apart from the caviare and foie gras given to first-class passengers on long-haul flights, it was all fairly disgusting and well below the cordon bleu standard to which I had become accustomed. Prison fare had cured me of that bit of pompous pseudery. This meal was the best I could remember, and I loved fiddling around with the little packets of condiments. There was a very small bottle of red wine on the tray. Surely, I could drink that. It was exquisite. I ordered six more.
I began worrying about the remark made by the air hostess. Which British authorities? There were so many I’d upset and so much they could still do me for. While I was spending the last six years in prison, the British authorities had obtained evidence that I had been involved in countless other marijuana and hashish importations to England, ones that I hadn’t been charged with. They’d also found more of my false passports. There are no statutes of limitation in British law. They could bust me if they wanted to.
Two books had been written about me, each making it clear that I was an incorrigible rogue with nothing but contempt for the forces of law enforcement. Fourteen years earlier, at the end of a high-profile, colourful, nine-week trial, I had been acquitted of being the ringleader for the largest-ever importation of marijuana into Europe – fifteen tons of Colombia’s best. The charges had been brought by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. It had been their biggest-ever bust. They would never forget me.
A chief inspector of police had committed suicide after being blamed for leaking my involvement with the British Secret Service to the press. Scotland Yard had lost a good man because of me. There wouldn’t be many friends there.
MI6 weren’t too happy with me either, smuggling dope with the IRA when I was supposed to be spying on them.
Ten years ago, after assessing me as having earned two million pounds from cannabis smuggling, the Inland Revenue reluctantly settled for a total tax liability of sixty thousand pounds. As a result of public proclamations by the most senior of DEA staff, it was now accepted as a matter of fact that I had well over two hundred million pounds in Eastern bloc bank accounts. The tax man would want some, no doubt.
Even if the British felt I’d been punished enough, Special Agent Craig Lovato was bully enough to change their minds. During the mid-1980s, he’d almost single-handedly mobilised the law enforcement agencies of fourteen different countries (United States, Great Britain, Spain, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Pakistan, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, and Australia) to band together in unprecedented international co-operation to get me locked up for ever. He would be bound to take my premature release as a personal failure and suffer extreme loss of face. He’d get the British to arrest me on arrival. He’d get tough with them and promise them helicopter rides, computers, and days shopping in Miami malls. What was waiting for me at London’s Gatwick airport?
A large-scale map appeared on the screen and indicated we were descending over the Welsh mountains. Kenfig Hill seemed a long time ago.
My earliest memory is of throwing a cat into the deep ocean from the deck of a ship. Why did I do it? I swear that I expected the cat to go for a swim, catch fish, and return triumphantly. So, I didn’t know any better and mustn’t blame myself. But maybe consigning Felix to a watery grave was symptomatic of a character far from nice. If it’s any comfort to cat lovers, the image still haunts me. Whenever my life flashes before me, which happens not only when I’m about to die, that cat’s face is the first I see.
We were on the Indian Ocean. The ship was the Bradburn‚ a 10,000-ton freighter owned by Reardon Smith and Co., Cardiff. The cat belonged to the Prince of Siam, and was the darling of the rough-and-ready ship’s crew. My father, Dennis Marks, son of a boxer/coal miner and a midwife, was the skipper of the Bradburn, and he was coming to the end of his twenty-one years’ service in the British merchant navy. He had been allowed to take my mother, Edna, schoolteaching daughter of an opera singer and a coal miner, and me on various lengthy sea journeys. Between 1948 and 1950, I went everywhere. I remember very little, just the cat. Perhaps the reason this cat is indelibly imprinted on my psyche is that when my murderous actions were discovered my father was constrained to give me a spanking in front of the crew, who were seething with hate and developing murderous intentions of their own. He has never hit me since.
The incident did not turn me into an animal lover (though I do like cats best), but it has made me very hesitant of consciously inflicting pain on any creatures. Even cockroaches in prison cells do not have to worry for their lives (except in Louisiana). And if I do have to admit to any religion, I risk the hot flames of a Christian hell and say I’m a Buddhist, especially in Bangkok.
Although most inhabitants of the South Wales coalfield spoke Dylan Thomas English rather than Welsh, my mother was an exception. Her mother hailed from the Druidic wilds of West Wales. For the first five years of my life, I spoke only Welsh. The next five years, I attended an English-speaking primary school in Kenfig Hill, the small Glamorganshire mining village where I was born. Apart from my sister, Linda (a few years my junior), I had just one real friend, Marty Langford, whose father not only owned the local ice-cream shop but also had won a nation-wide competition for the best ice-cream. Marty and I were bright infants and most of the time could hold our own in schoolyard scraps.
While waiting for my 11-plus results, I decided to fall ill. I was very bored with school and needed some attention and sympathy. I had previously discovered that the mercury in a regular clinical thermometer could be flicked up almost as easily as it could be flicked down. So as long as no one was watching, I could decide what temperature to be. It’s true that near the thermometer’s bulb a gap in the mercury line was visible, but no one examines that end. Occasionally, I could not risk flicking it up without being caught, so I shamelessly fabricated symptoms such as sore throat, dizziness, nausea, and headache, while my temperature when I was unobserved would seemingly oscillate from just below normal to 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
Very few diseases produce roller-coaster temperature graphs. One is rather unimaginatively called undulant fever, although it is sometimes referred to as rock fever or even Gibraltar fever. It tended to occur in the tropics. Apparently St Paul had it. My father had certainly had it, unless he, too, was scamming. Although the local doctor was sceptical (he knew I was at it), he had little choice other than to agree with the medical specialists’ diagnosis that I, like Dad and St Paul, had contracted undulant fever. I was placed in an isolation ward in the