I wanted an adventure, and Nora had one on offer. Although I had been yearning to make a move to California, I had never been out of the United States, and the prospect was irresistible. "Why don't you come with me, keep me company?" she suggested.
Soon I was zipping around in that Miata, with Lenny Kravitz demanding to know, "Are You Gonna Go My Way?"Īt the end of the summer, Nora learned that she had to return to Indonesia. She dumped the cash on the bed and rolled around in it, naked and giggling. One day Nora returned home with a new white Miata convertible and a suitcase full of money. When she was in Europe or Southeast Asia for a long period of time, I all but moved into her house, caring for her beloved black cats, Edith and Dum-Dum. Over the months that followed, we grew much closer. As if by revealing her secrets to me, Nora had bound me to her, and a secretive courtship began. And while it wasn't exactly love at first sight, for a 22-year-old in Northampton looking for adventure, Nora was a figure of intrigue. Why was she telling me this? What if I went to the police? It all sounded dark, awful, scary, wild - and exciting beyond belief, a world about which I knew nothing. and was being paid handsomely for her work. Nora was trafficking heroin into the U.S. One night over drinks, she calmly explained to me that she had been brought into a drug-smuggling enterprise by a friend of her sister, who was the lover of a major West African drug kingpin named Alaji. Nora was the only one of that group of older women who paid any attention to me. Among them was Nora Jansen, a short, raspy-voiced Midwesterner who looked a bit like a white Eartha Kitt. My loose social circle included a clique of impossibly cool lesbians in their mid-30s. I decided that the latter choice was slightly more terrifying. Maybe I should try to get through customs and run? Or perhaps the bag really was delayed, and I would be abandoning a large sum of money that belonged to someone who could probably have me killed with a simple phone call. "Wait for the next shuttle from Paris - it's probably on that plane." Had my bag been detected? I knew that carrying more than $10,000 undeclared was illegal, let alone carrying it for a West African drug lord. "Bags don't make it onto the right flight sometimes," said the big lug working in baggage handling. Fighting panic, I asked in my mangled high school French what had become of my suitcase. When I arrived in Belgium, I looked for my black rollie at the baggage claim. I had done exactly as I had been instructed, checking my bag in Chicago through Paris, where I had to switch planes to take a short flight to Brussels. Dressed in suede heels, black silk pants, and a beige jacket, I probably looked like any other anxious 24-year-old professional, a typical jeune fille, not a bit counterculture, unless you spotted the tattoo on my neck.
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