We are delighted to welcome author Joff Sharpe to Omnimystery News today.
Set in Columbia, Joff's debut novel is Reciclador: The Recycler (CreateSpace; May 2015 trade paperback and ebook formats), the backdrop to which includes some of the more colorful aspects of Medellin and a host of interesting characters from every part of Colombian society.
We are pleased to introduce you to it with an excerpt, the first chapter.
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UNTIL THE KILLING HIS HAD been a perfect life.
He woke up a while before dawn when the air had a delicious coolness, the reward for a clammy tropical night. His alarm clock — and it was that reliable — was a rooster who marched around next-door's muddy yard sounding reveille. From the first crow the man knew he had about half an hour before the sun started to bake the red earth. Then the air would lose its freshness and the heat of the day would begin to assert itself.
The first few decisions of the morning were pleasantly un-taxing. He rolled out of bed, taking care not to disturb his sleeping wife and took a few barefoot steps to the musty tallboy that contained his life's possessions. The top drawer tended to squeak a little as he eased it open and reviewed its modest contents. There were two pairs of khaki cargo pants (one short, one long), a third pair of long trousers without the baggy pockets, a faded denim shirt and three T's. Every garment had been washed and worn to the point where it felt effortlessly comfortable without yet falling apart. He kept on his designer boxer shorts, in which he had slept and which had long since lost their elasticity, and made his selection. The choice he made that particular morning doesn't matter.
He crept down the wooden stairs to the kitchen of the restaurant, above which he and his wife slept. The great advantage of living in Colombia was, of course, that people didn't ask too many questions and nor was every last secret shared on the Internet. The only "tweeting" was coming from the colorful little tanagers in the branches of the tree that brushed against the shutters of their bedroom window. Besides anonymity, the other important thing this country gave him was the deliciously thick, aromatic coffee that soon filled a metal pot on the stove. One or two steaming cups always accompanied these precious moments of pre-dawn solitude, which he invariably spent on the decking of the verandah. More often than not he would also smoke the first hand-rolled cigar of the day as he looked out across the suburban sprawl of Medellin, stroking his beard, which was of the same burnt orange hue as his friend the cockerel. In spite of the bird, this was not a community that rose early and there were no staccato sounds or bustle to disturb his contemplation. There was plenty to think about.
His first thoughts were often for the wife who slept on in the bedroom above and whose perfume still briefly lingered on his body. The courtship of Yessica Sanchez began five years ago when he walked into La Bodeguita, her restaurant in Poblado, and occupied a corner table. He was so obviously taller, blonder and more foreign than her other customers that he looked immediately out of place. The other diners noticed that he positioned himself with his back to the wall, his eyes fixed on the door. But he sat quietly, ordered a steak, paid his bill and she saw no reason to question his motivations or his business. It was a process that was to repeat itself a number of times over the weeks that followed until eventually local clients began to nod to him and accept that he had a legitimate place in the order of things. The majority of his meals at La Bodeguita were taken at lunchtime but this shifted to dinner until one night he was the last customer in the restaurant, still sipping red wine close to midnight. Up to this point the man and his future wife had exchanged no more than restaurant pleasantries.
"You always eat alone," was her opening gambit. Coming from a different person those words might have been taken — or even meant — as criticism. But they were offered with a mischievous smile that invited conversation.
"But not by choice," he shot back. "Do you have time to sit with me and have a drink?" She was unsurprised to hear that he spoke with a foreign accent. She had thought he was probably Scandinavian, judging by his appearance.
"I have to do the washing up."
"If I help you with the washing up, then do you have time for a drink with me?" She laughed and sat down beside him by way of an answer.
The restaurant clientele didn't provide Yessica with much of a social life. They ran shops, mended cars, scratched a living from crappy websites or ran struggling tour companies. They were pleasant enough but, for a woman brought up in a household of fierce intellects, the conversation wasn't exactly stimulating. Occasionally people from the university would come along but they occupied tables for hours, ordered the cheapest items on the menu and were lousy tippers. At the other extreme were the cowboys with their crocodile boots and Versace, uncouth men and their Roger Rabbitt women who tipped ostentatiously to compensate for their hideous table manners. She wasn't overly given to romanticism or unrealistic thoughts about destiny. But she felt that her luck had changed when this tall, athletic man with his clear blue eyes suddenly showed up in her life. He had a relaxed style and a sharp wit, a little arrogant perhaps but in a way that was more enticing than offensive. The man, meanwhile, had long observed how she glided through the restaurant with an easy elegance. She was taller than most Columbian women, with an exotic face that was neither classically Hispanic nor Indian. It was undoubtedly beautiful but also an interesting face that invited questions about the place her ancestry might chose to call home. Her lustrous hair was a chestnut color but her most striking features were her eyes. A man could sweat for many hours in the Andean emerald mines of Muzo before he found a gem to match their color. And when they sat together at one of their restaurant tables they made for a striking couple, somehow more than the sum of their parts.
They hit it off immediately and talked until the candle on the table began to sputter. A pair of misfits, they were too smart for the local community but both sought contentment from the simple embrace of life that it provided. Yessica was the daughter of two academics, both teachers at the University of Bogota. Her father, Hector Sanchez, was a professor of Mesoamerican Anthropology and impractical with it.
"If you want to know anything about human sacrifice," she explained, "he's your man. But don't ask him to mend a faucet — at least not unless you want to flood the kitchen." Her mother had been quite the opposite. She taught engineering, one of the principal faculties at the Medellin campus, and was always doing things with her hands: mending things, occasionally designing things and — her great passion — cooking things.
"And what about you?" asked her tall companion. "If the choice was human sacrifice, engineering or cooking I can see how you wound up running a restaurant." Up to this point the conversation had been lighthearted but a slight shadow crept across the soft contours of her face. Then she said, a little more earnestly;
"Actually, I rebelled. I went to Medical School."
"Boy, what a rebel. Your parents must have been furious." She smiled.
"Don't laugh at me."
"I'm sorry. Go on. Med' School." She sighed and continued;
"I did the first couple of years and then my Mom got very sick; cancer.
I took a break from studying to care for her but things went downhill very fast after that. When she died I couldn't see much point in carrying on. I decided that if medicine couldn't save the person I loved most in the world then I should find something else to do." He looked at her over the top of the candle, drawn in by her vulnerability and realized that something was stirring in his heart.
"And the restaurant?"
"It was my mother's fantasy. She got fed up with teaching and wanted to open a restaurant or maybe something like a wine-bar." When La Bodeguita had come up for sale Yessica had dealt with her grief by acquiring and then rejuvenating the local restaurant in her memory.
The restaurant itself bore all the hallmarks of Yessica's personality. When she bought the place it had been called El Conquistador and everything was colored brown. The floor tiles were brown, the furniture dark oak and the pictures on the wall depicted brown Spanish knights imposing their peculiar brand of religion that spoke of love whilst hacking the locals' hands off and stealing their money. Yessica had rolled her sleeves up, covered her hair with a bandana and spent a week covering the walls in paint the color of egg yolk. Next she painted all the furniture white and took a loan from the bank to replace all the floor tiles with warm orange terracotta. When all was done, she threw blue and white checked cloths on the tables and covered the walls with abstract art that introduced vibrant greens and reds into the mix. Through the speaker system she played music whose beat contained enough energy to carry the restaurant along, even on a quiet day, but not so much that it caused a single mouthful to be rushed. The result was a bright, cheerful place. It was somewhere people came to feel optimistic.
"Now tell me about you," Yessica had demanded.
"Well," he began, looking no less serious, "my mother is a total bitch." It was a good tonic. They both laughed and the conversation resumed its light touch. It turned out that the man sitting at the table in front of her was called Marcus Hamm. He was a Swiss national and he had washed up in
Bogota at the end of a long backpacking trip across Southern and Central
America. From there it was a bus trip to the chaotic but intoxicating life of Medellin. He came from an over-achieving family, had conformed to their wishes by briefly becoming a banker before fleeing to a more carefree existence. It was immediately obvious to Yessica that he took little pleasure in discussing his background. In the weeks that followed Marcus would reveal facts about his past, one carefully rationed, toxic spoonful at a time.
The raw truth was that his perfect life had not always been that way.
Hamm propped his feet up on the verandah railing, took a sip of coffee and a long, slow draw on his cigar as he watched a pack of stray dogs amble past. He felt some empathy for their apparent aimlessness. Six years ago Medellin had been the logical terminus for his journey into oblivion. Before he came to South America he had been involved in increasingly reckless financial deals that, in turn, fuelled a life of faster cars, harder drugs and more meaningless sex. Aside from the vibrant street art, the bulbous sculptures in Plaza Botero and various other attractions, this was still a city that indulged such hobbies. When he first began eating at La Bodeguita he had been dating a club dancer called Isobel whose pride and joy were her silicon-infused buttocks. They collided, rather than met, at Discoteca Mangos and conducted most of their cocaine-fuelled relationship in her unhygienic bedroom which, in turn, sat in a red brick building well within machine-gun range of the slum district. He had surrendered himself to the zeitgeist of the place but knew that he was coming to the end of a downward spiral that was likely to wind up with a corpse in a storm drain somewhere. And perhaps, subconsciously, that was what he was seeking. So whilst Yessica had started out in his mind as simply another potential conquest, she had quickly become much more, an antidote to an increasingly meaningless and self-destructive life.
Marcus's main source of income wasn't the restaurant but an irregular stream of dividends from a small off-shore administrative entity called Executive Losungen S.A (Cayman Islands). It wasn't a lot of money but these days his needs were correspondingly modest: food, wine, cigars and enough petrol to keep his old Moto Guzzi motorbike on the road. As long as he kept to that pattern, there seemed to be no immediate danger of him running out of cash or becoming a financial burden to his wife. It was ironic, given his education and background, that it was also his wife who managed the restaurant finances. To her, commodities were tomatoes, derivatives tomato paste. But she understood the concept of profit and loss perfectly well and even made provisions for restaurant dilapidations, so that when the rain began to trickle through an opening in the tiled roof they could afford to have it swiftly repaired. You didn't need to go to Harvard Business School to know such things needed managing.
In short, the business had always belonged to Yessica and Marcus had made no attempt to muscle into the ranks of management. On the contrary, the arrival of the mail would bring conversations like; "Mail's here: a boring water bill from the boring Empresas Publicas and a boring gas bill from the equally boring electricity department."
"Yes, Darling, all very boring," she would reply, snatching the letters from his hand in the full knowledge that, if she didn't, they would end up in Marcus's file-'n-forget drawer. He helped with shopping and occasional cooking and from time to time he would also wait on tables but, of his many qualities, servility was not his forte. Simplicity was one thing, subservience quite another. Nor did Yessica necessarily want him to become more compliant or conformist. In some ways, he represented an escape route to a wider, more complex, more dangerous world — if she ever felt so inclined.
When he wasn't being a husband or a restaurateur, Marcus's two great passions were reading and expedition-ing. His native tongue was German and he had long since become entirely fluent in Spanish. A stint in the financial sector had sharpened his English and an Italian girlfriend had helped him on the way to a somewhat selective vocabulary in a fourth language. Thanks to Yessica's family connections with the university, he had almost unlimited access to the books, periodicals and newspapers that flowed through the library. Combined with his linguistic ability, this allowed him the richest possible diet of reading material and the pockets of his cargo pants were endlessly bulging with his latest acquisitions. His taste in literature was highly eclectic; academic books concerning The Age of Enlightenment, financial analysts' reports from US investment banks, reports on pandemics in Africa and every novel imaginable from Tolstoy to Tolkein. Although his literary appetite was voracious and indiscriminate he had his favorites. And top of the list was Che's Motorcycle Diaries.
A small pile of these reading materials would typically accompany his expeditions on the Moto Guzzi. The books would be joined by a flask of coffee, tobacco, a few pieces of fruit and other snacks, all flung together in his canvass knapsack. The only other garment he possessed was a baggy, olive-colored set of mechanic's overalls which normally hung on a peg in the garage like a cadaver. He used a leather belt to gather the surplus material around his waist and a pair of ankle boots in place of his usual sandals. He kicked the old machine into life with a roar and stormed off along the roads like a shark that needed to keep swimming to allow oxygen to pass through its gills. The precise purpose of these excursions was rarely well-defined. There were jungles, rivers, towns, beaches or even some point on the equator that needed investigating and he would charge off at dawn with dangerously vague plans or ideas about when a given adventure might end. The record for these jaunts was a four day round-trip to the Pacific Ocean that started on metaled road, degenerated to water-logged track and ended with a pathway that necessitated use of a sharp machete. Sometimes he would return to Yessica with tales of some minor El Dorado, at others discovering nothing more interesting than a non-descript village or natural feature. Ever the practical one in the partnership, Yessica frequently warned him of the dangers of motoring around the Colombian countryside, infested as it was with bandits of every variety.
"You know last week there was some poor guy from an American aid agency, an agriculture expert. The FARC stopped him at a roadblock in Vichada and when he argued with them they shot him on the spot. Is that what you want?" His response was to equip himself with an ancient Webley Service revolver, which almost certainly reduced, rather than improved his personal safety. In all probability, and though she might not admit it to herself, it was this combination of intelligence, wide-reading and impracticality that reminded Yessica of her own father and made her feel secure in Marcus's company. His recklessness was less comforting, not only because of the physical danger but because it spoke of some underlying self-destructive need that sometimes crept into the relationship — and often at unexpected moments.
Much-loved as she was, Yessica was not the only important woman in Marcus's life. "Mamita" Garcia was the engine room of the Medellin kitchen and by extension her husband, Alfonso, the electrician and handyman. Her particular brand of culinary magic came to the fore at the end of the week when the fridge was starting to get empty and you might expect the food to start running downhill. From chicken leftovers she conjured a delicious casserole with white beans. Into a steaming wrought-iron pot she threw pieces of bacon, tomato, a ripe plantain and boiled it all up with chicken stock, peppers and herbs. By the time she had finished the shredded chicken would melt in the mouth and Marcus took particular pleasure in mopping up the succulent gravy with corn arepas.
Mamita's other unofficial role was surrogate mother to them both, although she had little in common with either parent. Hamm's mother was highly strung. She had been in PR, marketing or something similar in his father's company and had been a strikingly attractive young woman. It wasn't hard to see how they ended up in bed together but the fires of passion soon turned into a conflagration of another sort. Many of Marcus's most vivid childhood memories consisted of blazing rows between his increasingly bitter parents. The impact on him had been substantial. Yessica's late mother Karol, on the other hand, had scolded her father for his impracticality and absent-mindedness but opposites attract and their relationship was underpinned by warm affection and mutual respect for each other's considerable intellect. Mamita was none of these things. Daughter of campesinos, she was sturdily built, though not unattractive, hard-working and had a simple, open manner punctuated by frequent laughter. For whatever reason she and Alfonso had no children of their own and so she enjoyed the status of restaurant matriarch. It is fair to say that Marcus and Yessica adored her.
Once a week, Marcus accompanied her on her shopping expedition to the farmers market in Plaza Minorista. Laden with straw baskets, it was not practical to take the Moto Guzzi and so instead they piled into Yessica's ancient Renault. Mrs. Garcia would bounce onto the rear seat of the car, a green leather sofa of a thing whose springs were now so weak that she felt her behind sink all the way down to something solid and uncomfortable.
Like the rest of the car, the upholstery was miles past its sell-by date. Marcus had become adept at acquiring spare parts from various secondhand dealerships and patching up brakes, suspension and other parts of the car that wore out and made protesting noises. It had become something of a personal challenge to him to eke out every last mile from the machine before it finally collapsed, exhausted into its grave. They would rumble to a halt outside Plaza Minorista and Mamita would soon be pinching the fruit, scolding the market vendors for their prices and loading Marcus up like a donkey.
If Mamita Garcia was an admirable substitute for Marcus's absent mother, his father-in-law, Hector, made up the other vital component of his adoptive family. Hector Sanchez, scourge of kitchen plumbing, was in his mid-Fifties but he seemed to have been born with a professorial look of indeterminate age. It was hard to imagine him ever not wearing tortoiseshell glasses, moth-eaten cardigans with pockets, baggy trousers hopelessly coupled with sandals or unfashionable shoes. But if his dress-sense was shambolic, his mind was quite the opposite. Fellow academics from Oxford to Princeton referenced his published works on Meso-American anthropology in their classrooms, using words like "pre-eminent" and "seminal" to describe his contribution. In spite of his lack of dexterity with an adjustable spanner, he was also a canny fox with an acute sense of realpolitik. If any of his students made the mistake of taking him for a bumbling fool they pretty soon found themselves tied in knots with their own arrogance and made to look ridiculous. Access to his brain was, alongside Yessica's heart, another of Marcus's life-support mechanisms.
Hector was a great debater and Yessica loved it when Marcus and her father indulged in intellectual jousting matches late at night at the kitchen table. Elbows planted firmly on the worn table surface, her husband would launch an all-out attack on the professor's beloved Mayans. If most people thought the two thousand year dynasty succumbed to plague or draught, Marcus was not afraid to offer his own alternative explanation. In his outspoken opinion, the Mayan proletariat had risen up against its bloodthirsty masters and seized control. Unfortunately the newly liberated population lacked the initiative to do anything constructive with this freedom and allowed the entire civilization to fall to pieces. If ever there was a case for the furtherance of a hierarchical class system, this was it. The professor retaliated by lampooning the sheer ridiculousness of a nation whose most famous export is a clock that contains a bird with a low reputation for stealing other bird's nests. In fact, elaborated the professor of pre-Colombian culture, it was entirely logical that a bird that couldn't be bothered to build its own nest would end up inhabiting a clock, once the other birds had sent it packing. Where the proletariat was concerned, the professor had considerable sympathy. Colombia had endured its fair share of repressive regimes over the centuries, whether in government or running a parallel administration based on the export of cocaine.
Switzerland meanwhile had, in his view, much to answer for. The secrecy of their private banking system was the scourge of democracy, a prop to despots and drug-runners everywhere. At this point in the conversation, Marcus made no mention of the fact that he had personally benefited from this service and, as for cuckoo clocks, he resisted pointing out that they originated north of the border in the Schwarzwald, the place of his ancestors. As the arguments flew back and forth across the table, Yessica would copiously refill their wine glasses and then sit back, enjoying the show; her two darling men, talking total gibberish as they got steadily plastered.
Marcus was finishing his cigar as Yessica woke up. Their bed was huge, like an old mahogany sailing ship that groaned and creaked as they shifted position. The white sheets tangled on top of them like the vessel's sails piled in a heap. She unwrapped herself, slipped out of bed and padded downstairs to join her husband. He was in his usual position, slouching in a planter's chair with his long legs splayed out in front of him, cigar stub and coffee cup in hand. She put a hand on his shoulder.
"What do you think about when you sit out on the verandah every morning so early?"
"I think of how much I love you," he replied truthfully. She smiled, grabbed his arm and laid her head against it. Not for the first time she thought what a great father he would make, God willing.
"But that can't be all you think about as you puff on that cigar of yours," she insisted.
For Yessica, the whole subject of starting a family had recently become something of a pre-occupation. When she had become pregnant the previous year, she had been over-joyed. She purred around the restaurant, fantasying about how beautiful their child might turn out, given its parents' genes. Then, at thirteen weeks, disaster had struck. She awoke in a sailing ship that looked like it had been in the center of a bloody sea melee. As a trainee doctor she had learnt all about the statistics of miscarriage. It didn't help one bit. And as the fallow months dragged on, she had begun to wonder whether she would ever be blessed with a child. She also worried that this had taken a little of the spontaneity out of their love-making and perhaps that was why she resisted asking her husband to take a break from his early morning meditations.
Her husband could have told tell her that the cool early morning air reminded him of that fleeting, blissful period in his own childhood when the Alpine air filed his lungs as he hiked up the hills near Feldberg with his father. He was never sure exactly what age he had been at the time but when he thought about it, he realized the innocence of his elder brother and sister had already been dashed by the degeneration of his parents' marriage. Such happy memories had been all but wiped out by what followed; a spiral into teenage dysfunction and despair. There were many things he might have shared with Yessica: his business troubles, the people he counted as friends and those who considered themselves his enemies, maybe even his darkest secret, the reason he had fled to South America in the first place. But the objective had never been to pack all his troubles into his suitcase and simply transport them to another country. On the contrary, he wanted to be free of them. If he kept certain things from Yessica it was because he didn't want to contaminate their simple, uncomplicated existence with unhappy memories. And if they were to be blessed with a child, let it live a perfect life; a truly perfect life.
Marcus didn't answer her question immediately but looked out towards the road that ran in front of the restaurant compound. A reciclador passed on his ass-drawn buggy, foraging for recyclables before the municipal garbage men swept through the neighborhood, snatching his precious booty. Marcus often saw the man in the early morning, his cart piled high with plastic cartons, an old fridge, acres of cardboard and bits of wood. The scavenger exchanged a nod and a wave with him, two men sharing a moment, eking what they could out of the last hour before the sun arrived. What the older man couldn't know was that Hamm understood perfectly what it meant to live a life precariously.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Joff Sharpe
Joff Sharpe has written about financial fugitives for Newsweek, Huffington Post and Hong Kong's largest circulation English-speaking newspaper, The South China Morning Post. He has previously published a non-fiction book, Who Dares Wins in Business, which combined wisdom from his early career as an SAS Special Forces officer and his role today as an executive in a £17 billion real estate investment company.
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Reciclador: The Recycler by Joff Sharpe
A Novel of Suspense
Publisher: CreateSpace
Medical school drop-out Yessica Sanchez opens a restaurant in her home town of Medellin, the most dangerous city in the world. She falls in love with a Swiss backpacker and together they enjoy a simple, idyllic lifestyle. But the traveller, Marcus Hamm, carries a dark secret and when a man is killed outside the restaurant it triggers a series of events that threaten their lives and will test their relationship to its limits.
Soon other interested parties like the CIA, mercenaries and Colombian police are competing to secure the huge financial prize that they believe to be at stake. Only Yessica's father, an unassuming but cunning professor of anthropology, can save his family from a terrible fate. He'll stop at nothing to do so.
— Reciclador: The Recycler by Joff Sharpe
