You Will Never Find Me by Robert Wilson

everybody going in and out of Heathrow and Gatwick Club Class lounges? Course they are. You got to look like nobody; that way you stay nobody.’ So for his first business trip to Spain Darren was travelling as he’d always travelled, and he wasn’t convinced it was his dad playing safe. He reckoned he was just being a tight old bastard.
    â€˜So who is this guy L. Osito?’ asked Darren, now sitting, huge and slumped, at the kitchen counter, eating fried eggs and chips with ketchup, drinking beer.
    â€˜He’s a Colombian,’ said Dennis from the sofa, lighting up his first cigar of the day. ‘His real name is Carlos Alzate . . . if that helps.’
    â€˜I thought his
real
name was L. Osito,’ said Darren, who didn’t speak a word of any foreign language, not even
cerveza.
‘Like Larry Osito or something.’
    â€˜Larry?’
    â€˜L for Larry or, maybe Lee or Leonardo seeing as he’s South American.’
    Christ, thought Dennis. This could be long day.
    â€˜El Osito is his nickname.
El
means ‘the’ in Spanish. They all have nicknames these guys, like Joaquin Guzman is called El Chapo, which means Shorty, cos—’
    â€˜He’s six foot eight?’
    â€˜No, because you’d never dare in a million years to call him Shorty or he’d have a blowtorch to your balls before you could say boo to a goose.’
    Darren stared into his plate, frowned. His father quite often chose the wrong saying for the occasion and nobody ever put him right.
    â€˜I thought you said
El
meant “the”, so why does El Chapo mean Shorty?’
    â€˜That’s how the English say it. The real translation would be the Short One.’
    â€˜So what does El Osito mean? And do we call him that?’ asked Darren, scratching his shaved head with one hand while the other was daintily poised with chip between thumb and forefinger. ‘I don’t want to balls it up and end up with my tackle under the grill.’
    â€˜It means Little Bear—like Teddy Bear.’
    â€˜So, like old Shorty, he’s a nice cuddly teddy?’
    â€˜No,’ said Dennis firmly. ‘I’m told he
is
short, but he’s built like a brick shithouse. Pumps iron. There’s something funny about that name of his that I don’t get. So it’s best we just call him Carlos. All right? Remember to shake hands. That’s what they all do every time they meet in this country.’
    â€˜What happened to the Mexicans? Didn’t you used to deal with Mexicans?’
    â€˜The Mexicans are still here: the brothers Jaime and Jesús. But the big boss, Vicente, told me they’ve moved their cartel guy back to Cuidad Juarez and they’re letting this Colombian run the Spanish end of things for a while. Nothing changes. This is a get-to-know-you meeting.’
    â€˜And what do we know about El Osito?’
    â€˜Not a lot,’ said Dennis, thinking: enough and I’d rather steer clear. ‘It’s just that the Mexicans have done a supply deal with his Colombian clan, which means they give them a share of the demand end in return.’
    â€˜And what does that mean?’ asked Darren, not that interested but knowing he had to ask questions.
    â€˜The Colombians used to sell to the Mexicans for $2,000 a kilo. The Mexicans sold that to wholesalers in the States for $10,000, who sold it to dealers for $30,000, who cut it and split it and sold it for $100,000. Now the idea is to split it a bit more evenly so that everybody in the chain makes decent money and you don’t get resentments building up. It also means that their rival, El Chapo, doesn’t have quite such a big percentage of the European market as before. Vicente’s got his toe in the door; now he’s trying to get his foot in.’
    Darren zoned out when his father talked about business, concentrated on sticking his chips into the egg yolk. Dennis kept an eye on