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MARCHING POWDER

Mike was one of the few English-speaking foreigners in San Pedro. He came from Canada, but he spoke German, Russian, Spanish and Arabic as well. But you never knew whether he was telling the truth or not, because Mike was also a compulsive liar. Before prison, he’d had the most exciting life of anyone I’ve ever known. He had dined at the Bolivian president's home. He had been an international spy and a hired assassin. He used to deal cocaine to Hollywood movie stars. He’d been on first-name terms with the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. He had taught mathematics at a Canadian university before the physics department headhunted him to work on their black hole research team. He had a law degree. He knew how to assemble bombs. His ex-girlfriend was a famous model.

Most compulsive liars become very boring after a while. They repeat the same lies over and over until you can recount their stories better than they can. And you also start to notice inconsistencies in their stories. But Mike had an excellent memory, which made it very hard to disprove anything he said. He remembered every little lie he ever told and they never contradicted each other. In fact, he even started weaving them together.

‘I thought you had a wife and kid then?’ I jump in, trying to catch him out. But I never could. He was too quick for me.

‘Yes. That’s how I met Pablo Escobar in the first place. He was a friend of my wife’s sister. They met in Panama when she was a diamond trader. Remember, I told you about the diamonds?’ Mike was good. In fact, he was very good.

Mike was also a coke junkie. He had been caught with fifty grams of cocaine when the police carried out a dawn raid on his house in the south of La Paz. It wasn’t even a proper raid; they just walked through the door, which was left open, and crept into his room on tippy toes, trying to stop their boots from squeaking so as not to wake him. The drugs were on the bedside table and Mike was half-asleep next to them. From the moment the police first interrogated him until his sentencing hearing, Mike’s defence didn’t change: he claimed the fifty grams were for personal use. The judge didn’t believe him, but if you had known Mike, you would have known that that amount wouldn’t have lasted him a month.

Mike said he was clean now, but I never believed him. Everything went at full speed when he was around. I had real trouble keeping up