Mr Nice: an autobiography by Howard Marks

supervisor was a Polish logician named Jerzy Giedymin. He was reckoned to be brilliant, but only in areas that no one else could test. I found him very difficult to understand, whatever he was talking about. He made it plain he had no interest in irrelevancies such as confirmation paradoxes. I made it plain I had no interest in studying his irrelevantobsessions. He said I should never have left Oxford. I said he was right.
    I was still getting the Thomas and Elizabeth Williams Scholarship and spent the first term’s instalment on a new stereo system. The next few months were devoted to listening to Led Zeppelin, Blind Faith, Jethro Tull, and Black Sabbath. I decided to give up academic life and withdrew from the University of Sussex. Ilze’s school-teacher’s salary was barely enough to live on, but I managed to make up the shortcomings to almost survival level by getting more hashish from Graham Plinston, who often came down to Brighton for a weekend by the sea and a game of Go, at which we were both now becoming proficient.
    Graham had visited Morocco, where he met Lebanese Joe. Joe’s mother was an entertainer in Beirut. Joe knew Sam Hiraoui, who worked for the Lebanese airline, Middle East Airlines. Sam also had a textile business in Dubai, the great Middle East gold- and silver-smuggling port on the Persian Gulf. Sam’s partner in Dubai was an Afghani named Mohammed Durrani. Graham explained that through these people he was being delivered fifty pounds of black Pakistani hashish every month or so. For the first time, I imagined what an interesting and rewarding life a smuggler’s must be. But Graham was merely treating me as a confidant. He was not making me any propositions. I was just another provincial dealer selling a couple of pounds a year to survive and not wanting to do too much other than survive.
    There were one or two ex-Oxford students attached to the University of Sussex. One was a brilliant mathematics lecturer, Richard Lewis, who would often visit Ilze and me along with Johnny and Gina Martin. Richard came from a relatively wealthy family, owned property in Brighton and London, drank like a fish, smoked everything at hand, thought mathematical profundities, and was a keen and talented chess player. He had heard of Go, was interested inthe game, but had never played. I taught him. After a dozen games, he beat me. He still beats me.
    Richard had a beautiful wife, Rosie. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. At the same time, Ilze couldn’t take her eyes off Johnny Martin. In no time, all six of us had grounds for suing for divorce, all three marriages were breaking up, and Richard and Rosie’s daughter, Emily, was calling me Uncle Howie.
    Graham Plinston’s wife, Mandy, telephoned. She asked if I could come up to London to see her as soon as possible. When I got there, Mandy was distraught and crying.
    ‘Howard, Graham has disappeared. There’s something wrong. I think he’s been busted. Can you go and find out? You can have all the expenses you need.’
    ‘Where is he, Mandy?’
    ‘He’s got to be somewhere in Germany.’
    ‘Why do you want me to go?’
    ‘You’re the straightest of Graham’s friends. You don’t have a record or a file on you. Can you imagine what our other friends are like? Graham was meant to meet this German guy Klaus Becker in Frankfurt. He’ll probably be able to help you find Graham.’
    ‘All right, I’ll go.’
    I had never flown before, and I was excited throughout the flight. At his house, Klaus told me that there’d been a bust in Lorrach, a Swiss–German border town near Basle. He suspected the person busted was Graham. I flew from Frankfurt to Basle on a scary propeller plane. Not speaking a word of German hindered progress somewhat, but I was eventually able to get newspaper back-issues from the Basle public library and found a report of the bust. Graham had been driving a Mercedes from Geneva to Frankfurt. A hundred pounds of hashish had been stuffed