Читать книгу The Bandit of Kabul - Jerry Beisler - Страница 17

Chapter Ten

“If you have a job without aggravation, you don’t have a job.”

MALCOLM FORBES

Dutch Bob made “arrangements” through some Dutch Embassy fringe employees to pay off Karachi customs officials. Every three or four months I would put the overland-out-of-Kabul-to-Karachi trip together. Dutch Bob took it airport-to-airport into Europe after that. Then I would break away from our idyllic life in Jangalak, put on the white linen suit and go to Amsterdam to collect. The demand for Tibetan carpets and primitive Nepali Tribe jewelry was taking off in Europe as well. Buddha statues were in demand.

Between meetings with Dutch Bob I found time to fly back to the States to visit my friend Bill Wassman. Bill had purchased the top floor of an old warehouse in New York City’s SoHo district. It was a 4400 sq. ft., well-lit skeleton. He had a double bed, a coffee pot and a refrigerator. I brought in a futon, blanket and pillow as a house warming present. An actor named Robert DeNiro bought the floor below to fix up for his mother, Bill said.

Bill and I went out to Max’s Kansas City club to hear Lou Reed with his new band, but we couldn’t get into the place. Outside in the crowd, also unsuccessful in gaining entrance, was a tall, good looking blond man about our age who was wearing a baseball cap from the same university we had attended. It was The Sizzler. We all ended up back at Bill’s l’artiste primitivo loft and got to know each other over some Durbin poison weed. The Sizzler knew a sailor. The sailor knew somebody who knew somebody on the docks in Brooklyn. Every few months Sizzler visited the sailor in New York City. The Sizzler then drove South African herb 1200 miles to Chicago.

I enlisted Sizz in the Afghan to Amsterdam operation, offering him the position of “cold-hard-cash courier.” All the money had to be brought into Afghanistan via money belt and money belt only.

While the money bazaar in Kabul was wide open and you could exchange currencies of any nation in the world for any other, checks of any sort were prohibited.

Anyone associated with an organization that does business based on finding loopholes in various nations’ laws generally takes the historical view of it all and the romantic characters involved with the herbe dangereuse, as the French call it, must be chivalrous and honorable and streetwise. The Sizzler was just such a guy. The $30,000 to $40,000 cash that would come back to Afghanistan from Amsterdam had to be carried securely on his person. Once he retraced the overland bus route through Iran. Iran was ruled by the ruthless Shah who employed vicious SAVAK underground torture squads. Other times the Sizzler would come directly into Kabul by plane. The Sizz could have, at any time, said that he lost the money by theft, corrupt customs or even legally confiscated. Every penny made it every time.

Also, on the U.S. transit, I reconnected with a couple of old friends from Haight-Ashbury – William VIII and Aggie. William VIII was an accomplished musician who played the bass. He had been the driving force behind organizing us into our failed attempt at a way-too-psychedelic rock and roll band. William VIII and Aggie were inspired to come to Afghanistan and showed up within a month.