Chapter 13- The Smuggler

“Are you brave?” He didn’t wait for an answer as he vaulted his heavy frame over fence.

Behind me, his lime green Mercedes watched, passing silent judgment.

We had cruised by a police station five minutes back and rolled through security five before that.

A silence hung in the air, swatted back and forth by the breeze. I decided I was. I gripped the cool railings, and hauled myself over.

We had met him only hours earlier- a Kurdish landowner with subversive tendencies. Mysteriously, he didn’t favour the leg that that had been shot by Iranian military in the mountains as his 25-donkey envoy hauled rugs.

He was a juggernaut of a man, more horizontally than vertically. His black leather jacket and penchant for ‘tax free’ Prestige cigarettes made him seem like a caricatured TV gangster. His laugh was deep, and his meaty gestures sweeping.

It didn’t take long for him to explain the nuances of automatic weapons. The tea was sipped with reckless abandon as he extolled the virtues of the AK-74, versus its mainstream sibling.

If three quarters of his stories were true, he had lived an interesting life. Maybe he wasn’t in cahoots with the locals digging up chromium. Maybe he was.

He’d wine and dine us. We had a date with a smuggler. Ex-smuggler, he’d remind us.

For someone who trafficked in goods, he said he had standards. No drugs, no weapons. Or people.

Maybe he was trying to impress us. Or one of us. He’d taken an interest in my travelling companion. She wasn’t reciprocating.

“Miss America” he called her. Repeatedly. Sometimes he would croon it.

On the other side of the fence, the world became electrified. It was where rules were broken. Where people were built up into legends, and then broken. Or maybe it was just a field with a building.

We were two and one- two over and one on the other side. After the tossing of bags, we were all in. The chips slid into the middle of the table.

The grim late afternoon cast everything in grey. We were a black and white film, actors improvising roles.

He had been before- he had seen the script. He tried the door. Locked.

He could tailor his stories well for his audience. For me, he gruffly recalled the booming smuggling trade through mountain passes. Donkeys, Iranian diesel and guns all danced in his eyes. For the American, he delicately wove tales of his white horse. Snowflake. Thick fingers pulled the silken words together.

Like a true Kurd, his proclivity for vices extended to tea. Smuggled, of course. He loudly announced he drank twenty a day. We had seen ten. Maybe he was putting on a show.

The locked door didn’t deter him. “I know another way,” he said. He convinced us in a way only an oversized, smuggling Kurd could.

“They need evidence to keep you in jail. They didn’t have any.” We should have grilled him more. But the fascination of his legend, the draw of a good tale lured us in. After all, it was our first night there.

He led us to the side of the building. There they were, the culmination of backroad mud in an old Mercedes, through a village with Kurdish folk music blasting from nostalgic cassettes.

There they were. White cats. One green eye, one blue. Meowing. Who cares. We didn’t. He stuck his fingers through the cage, cooing. Like a child. A large, hairy, tabacco-stained child. As I watched the scene unfold, I wanted to ask him if he was still brave. I wanted to say it with a laugh. Maybe I’d nick his skin with a sarcastic tone.

But I decided against it. It was a long walk back, and I didn’t know the way.