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AGAINST THE ODDS

high wire in Bali. Months after the first raid, two cops were back on his doorstep, trying to push their way into his house. ‘Police, police,’ they jostled trying to get in.

‘Hey,’ Rafael shouted, ‘I don’t care if you’re police, this is a private house. You cannot come in like this. What’s wrong?’

‘I have information you are a drug dealer, we follow you for three years.’

Rafael laughed, ‘Man, you cannot come inside my house, please get out of my property, you don’t have any warrant.’

‘They straight away go out, and then I know they’re pussies. If they’re tough cops, they say, “Shut up, motherfucker” and throw something in my garden to fuck me.’ Rafael agreed to talk to them outside his gate, after his neighbour Wayan arrived as a witness. They wanted names, but they didn’t have a hope: ‘I say forget me, you talk with the wrong guy.’

Around the same time, Rafael chanced an encounter with the chief narcotics cop, Pak Wayan, at Carrefour supermarket, still pushing to ‘help’. ‘Pak Rafael, remember me?’ the cop asked.

‘Pak Wayan, you still working for the police?’

‘Yes, if you need anything, you call,’ he said, then handed Rafael a business card.

‘Shut up, man,’ Rafael snapped, sure he would never be calling him. Paying off one cop didn’t stop another from busting you, as Chino’s situation proved.

*

With the cops sniffing around and the island so hot, combined with the risk of his horses getting the death penalty, Rafael started doing all his business in Europe and his wife’s native Sweden.