Snowing in Bali by Kathryn Bonella
Tota planned to throw the lot in the ocean and organise a revenge hit on the guy in Rio. Rafael suggested that instead they should just cut the price and hunt for a new buyer. Out of the blue, Fabio turned up a mysterious buyer from Jakarta, who’d apparently agreed to pay $45,000 a kilo. He wanted 1 kilo the following day, and two more in a week. Tota asked Rafael to do the exchange for a $10,000 fee, unwilling to risk it himself.
Tota was a big guy, big biceps, fit, goes to the gym, but was just showing off because he was really a chicken. This guy was not afraid to die, he don’t give a shit, but sometimes so fucking pussy to do anything.
– Rafael
Rafael would have liked a fast $10,000, but he didn’t have time. He was going overnight to Singapore with his family to do a shopping and visa run, something expats did to continue living in Bali by renewing their visas out of the country. So he passed the job to Jando.
And it quickly went to hell.
Rafael sensed something was wrong as soon as he flew back to Bali and spoke to Tota. His words said everything was okay, but his tone didn’t. He asked Rafael to come to his hotel. One of Tota’s hookers answered the door, stark naked, saying ‘Hi’, strutting back and draping herself on an armchair. Tota was sprawled on the couch with his knees spread wide, wearing only a sarong around his waist, covering little, exposing a lot.
Rafael hesitated awkwardly at the door, a little stunned to see this kind of X-rated scene sober, despite having seen a hell of a lot more in this room during Tota’s cocaine-fuelled orgies. ‘Come in, Rafael, come in,’ Tota sang out. Noticing his discomfort, the lewd biker started toying with him. ‘Come on, Rafael, come in, take your clothes off too, you can fuck her if you want. No problem if you don’t want, but please come in.’
Inside, things didn’t get any less out of kilter. Scattered across the coffee table were hundreds of $100 notes, some still in bunches bound by rubber bands. Tota stretched over, took a note and rolled it into a tube. Rafael stood watching, slightly bemused; the naked girl was totally uninterested. Tota used a lighter and lit the end of the rolled-up $100 note, then used the flame to light a Marlboro Red. As a finale to this weird little act, he flourished the flaming note in the air and stubbed it out in the ashtray before it burnt his fingers.
Rafael thought the guy had lost his mind.
‘What the fuck are you doing burning money? Now I know you’re crazy, man. If you don’t want it, you can give it to me.’
Tota sat back smoking his Marlboro. ‘You can take all this shit. Have a look at it.’
Rafael picked up a bunch to flick through and find out the problem. But he didn’t have to. It was obvious at first glance. Benjamin Franklin’s face looked as if it had melted.
‘Fuck, this is fake, man. Why did you take this shit?’ Rafael asked, aghast.
Now, it was clear that Tota was seething. His odd mood had been masking his fury. ‘Ask your friend Jando,’ he said darkly. Immediately, Rafael knew that tonight there was going to be big strife. Undoubtedly, somebody was going to pay for this before sunup. It was the second insult to Tota’s ego in two days.
Rafael phoned Jando, telling him to come to Tota’s hotel room pronto. Tota suspected Jando of deceit. Rafael didn’t. They sat and waited; the girl still draped on the chair stark naked. When Jando arrived, they showed him the money. Jando was shocked, but accepted no blame. He explained that the buyer, who’d dressed like an executive, had called the shots; insisting Jando pick him up at Denpasar Airport, drive to Uluwatu and pull over in some dark spot. Then, in the dimly lit privacy of the rental car, they exchanged cash and coke. Jando had flicked through the cash, checking for blanks, while the buyer sniffed a bit of the coke. Then, deal done, Jando took him back to the airport. Job done, Tota was a happy man. Jando left, unaware of the Benjamin’s facial problems until Rafael called.
The next person on Tota’s blame list was his close friend Fabio. All was fair in love and war, and this was war. He grabbed a vicious-looking scuba diving knife out of a drawer, telling Rafael, ‘This is for Fabio. I’m gonna kill this motherfucker tonight.’ Tota was suddenly now sure Fabio was involved.
Again, Rafael didn’t think so, but this night wouldn’t end until Tota exacted revenge on someone. ‘He fucked me with this shit, let’s go there now, come on, Rafael. I want to fix this, do you know where his villa is?’ Rafael insisted he didn’t, anxious that Tota’s years of Rio shootouts and knife fights would make it easy for him to slaughter their friend Fabio.
I say noooo, I don’t go anywhere. I have to go home. I don’t know where he lives.
– Rafael
Then Tota remembered that his horse had delivered the coke to Fabio’s new Canggu villa. Rafael left, desperately trying to call Fabio. But his phone was off.
Tota and the horse soon found Fabio’s villa. Tota tried the front door, but got no answer. He decided to jump over the wall, parking close enough to it to use the car as a leg-up. Inside, the lights were on and music was playing, but there was no sign of movement. Tota walked towards the glass doors of the master bedroom. He spotted Fabio asleep on the bed alongside one of his hookers. That didn’t worry Tota. He loved to share the girls, but his friend was about to get a trip to hell.
Awake and shocked, Fabio was being dragged out of his bedroom, feet first, then thumping down the marble steps to his swimming pool. Tota hurled him into the water and stood yelling obscenities and flinging fistfuls of the fake $100 notes at him. Then he jumped in, putting Fabio in a headlock and pushing him under. ‘Why did you rip me off, motherfucker?’ he yelled. Every so often he let Fabio up, gasping for air and spluttering, then dunked him again, holding him down longer and longer each time.
The horse, also a Hells Angel, was standing on the car peering over the wall. He’d done a lot of bad stuff in Brazil too, many rumoured brutal murders, and he could see that Tota was close to drowning Fabio. He yelled out, ‘Tota, no, don’t kill him, that’s enough.’ But Tota was now so crazed the horse had to jump over the wall and into the pool to drag Tota off.
Fabio was almost unconscious. They left him on the edge of the pool, giving him an ultimatum: ‘You have two days to give me back my stuff or the money, otherwise you’re dead.’ Tota didn’t know if Fabio was in on the scam or not. He wasn’t, but Fabio knew it was live or die, depending on whether he got the money or not. He was scared, desperately asking his friends, other drug dealers, for help, pleading, ‘He’s gonna kill me, man. Help me please, man.’ He thought about selling his villa, but he only had 48 hours. In the nick of time, he borrowed the $45,000 from the rich Indonesian who owned the bar Fabio ran, as well as being a buyer in the game. Fabio promised to pay it back with interest.
Fabio called me and says, ‘Oh fuck, very good, I get the money.’
– Rafael
Before long, Tota and Fabio were friends again, with the gangster throwing an orgy to wipe out any traces of bad blood between them. Ultimately, he believed Fabio had nothing to do with the scam, but had simply been so desperate to get his hands on some coke to snort that he’d been careless and hadn’t sussed out the new buyer – who they never saw again.
The day Fabio handed Tota the cash, they shook hands and went out for dinner, with his two babes and a new addition to the clique – a stunning blonde Swede who was keenly participating in Tota’s orgies, and also relished helping them hunt the night for more girls. Tota loved using his hot babes to lure more hot babes, and with his penchant for paying the bills, and providing free coke, he and his crew usually snared the sexiest girls holidaying in Bali.
They get so many girls, beautiful girls, because they were all so beautiful, and Tota was kind of exotic-looking. The western girls like, you know, a strong, macho Latin man. He had a good bite with the girls. The Swedish girl talks bullshit too, because they hunt together; because the girls attract the other girls. The prostitutes, the Swedish girl . . . he has a crew to catch the girls and the coke helps.
– Rafael
Th
I come, knock on the door, and fuck, it was very crazy already, coke on the table, two bottles of champagne. Cigarette smoke everywhere, loud music. It was like big shit, a big orgy.
– Rafael
As soon as he stepped inside, the girls ripped off his clothes, pre-directed by Tota to do so. Fabio and Tota stood watching and laughing, then Tota interrupted, shouting, ‘Wait, wait, wait, I’m gonna film it.’ Tota was a frustrated porn director and loved making his explicit dirty films. But he was baiting Rafael, aware his friend was always happy to join in the orgies, even be directed into crude, kinky positions, but point blank refused to be filmed.
Tota was such a pervert! He had it all planned. He knows exactly how he is going to do it.
– Rafael
The orgy went for a couple of hours, with the girls sporadically running to the table to use some of the left-over 2 kilos of bad quality blow. With his nose hypersensitive from overuse, Rafael couldn’t touch it; so he gulped champagne between the hot and weird sex scenes that Tota was manipulating him into. ‘Lift that leg, you go here, spread your legs, bend over,’ he’d direct brusquely, actually moving body parts, sometimes touching Rafael where he wanted no man to touch. One of Tota’s favourite scenes was his sex sandwich, where he got the girls to lie on top of each other with their legs spread, and Rafael to alternate between them.
Fabio, in his usual night attire of black shirt with black jeans, wasn’t interested in joining in, and spent his time sniffing coke, laughing and making quips. ‘Hey, Rafael, you’re doing good, man.’ Now and then Tota tore off his sarong and joined in, using his penis pump to make himself huge. Mostly he preferred slapping the girls’ backsides, yelling, ‘Rebola rebola, shake, shake, move your hips,’ and using his bag of tricks, like a black vibrating dildo and a small vibrating metal egg.
I don’t know how he has the imagination to make this sort of scenario.
– Rafael
The night finished with Rafael pulling on his clothes, exhausted, and staggering out into the street with Tota’s voice fading into the distance, ‘Come back, we’ve still got two bottles of champagne, come on, bencong, come back.’
Tota was known for his irrepressible energy for sex, gambling, partying and crazy antics. Rumour had it that in Brazil he’d once arranged to surprise his girlfriend. She was sunbaking with a bunch of friends on Rio’s popular Ipanema Beach, when a chopper landed nearby on the sand. Below the rotating blades, two waiters in black tie climbed out and ran over to her, balancing plates of sushi, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, a bunch of flowers and a short note, ‘From your love, Tota.’ As the chopper flew off, it rained flower petals down on her. The master of spectacle had done it again, although the relationship didn’t last.
There were times when Rafael would arrive at Tota’s Bali hotel room, knock and, after hearing Tota yelling, ‘Come in, it’s open’, walk in to find him in the middle of sex. Rafael would quickly turn to leave, calling, ‘I’ll come back later’, with Tota singing out, ‘No, stay, come on, bencong, come in here, it’s no worries, we can play together.’
‘No, no, no.’
The two often went out to clubs together, with Tota getting a kick out of pushing his hot friend Rafael to pick up girls; not that he needed persuasion or help. Tota would create stories, like Rafael was a famous TV star in Brazil, endlessly urging him to go for this hot Australian girl, or that French babe. Rafael usually liked Tota’s taste in eye candy and played along. Tota’s plan was always to get an orgy going back in his hotel room, and with his crew often got their prey to acquiesce to almost anything. One night, Tota was pushing Rafael to talk to an Italian girl.
Tota says to me, ‘Her tits point to the moon.’ She was beautiful – dark hair, green eyes, beautiful, beautiful. Tota makes all these jokes and he was so dirty, the way he talks, he says like, ‘You already have sex with two guys at the same time? I can do very good performance – me and Rafael, it’s the best.’
I say, ‘Shut up, man’, and he says, ‘You like to have sex with Rafael in front of us?’, and she was like, ‘Come on.’ He says, ‘I’m just joking, I just want to test you. Because all the Italian girls play like the angel but they have the devil inside.’ She says, ‘I already have sex with two guys, it was very good,’ and he says, ‘You like girls?’ and she says, ‘Yes.’ Whoa . . . Tota was happy.
The Swedish girl was talking bullshit too, because they hunt together, because they have a prey – a beautiful duck. Then we go to a small club, was loud music, and Tota and the Swedish girl do a sexy dance. She pretends to give him a blow job. And he’s like a Carioca dancer from Rio – all the Carioca guys they know how to Samba – and he does the moves.
He says, ‘You want a drink?’ And the Italian says, ‘Oh, I’m starting to get drunk.’ And I say, ‘Oh, drunk is no problem, I have some medicine.’ And then she was like, ‘What?’ ‘Oh, you wanna have some coke?’ She says, ‘Oh, I really need just a little bit. I can give you some money.’ ‘No, keep your money.’
Tota looks at me, winks, time to go . . . he says, ‘Let’s go to my home, I don’t bring coke here because I’m afraid of the cops, because Bali’s very dangerous, but we can go, take a couple of lines and then come back.’ But bullshit, he just wants to take the girl.
– Rafael
Once back at Tota’s rooms – with French champagne, copious coke and Carioca dancing – his harem of girls stripped to their G-strings, saying, ‘Oh, I’m too hot.’ Tota ripped his shirt off, telling Rafael, ‘Take your shirt off, man, show her your muscles.’ He replied, ‘Leave me be’, but soon Tota’s dirty dancing and talking, generous lines of coke, and his naked harem, worked like magic. The new girl was looking at Rafael with hungry eyes and the room erupted into a heaving orgy, with Tota directing and Rafael taking time out sometimes to just watch the girls together. This was a typical night out with Tota.
Rafael realised it was the cocaine that was mostly responsible for these girls participating in the kinky sex scenes; their behaviour was largely a product of being on holiday in Bali and they were not like that at home.
Sometimes I get their number, and when I’m in Holland or somewhere for business, I meet them and they are totally different. They are snobby. They don’t even give attention to me. In Bali it was, ‘Wow, Rafael, you are the man’ – they do anything to be with me.
When I come to their country, they have normal life, they work, sometimes have a husband. I call, they say, ‘Oh, where are you?’ ‘Amsterdam.’ ‘Oh my god! Let’s meet in the coffee shop . . . oh, Rafael, I have to tell you something. I am married.’
‘Oh, no problem . . . me too.’ But I never lie when I meet a girl, I say straight away, ‘I am married with kids’, because I just wanna fuck, I don’t want a relationship or romance. And I say, ‘I have a wife, kids.’ And if they continue they know I’m just gonna jiggy jig and ciao.
Sometimes I think of lying . . . ‘Oh, I’m single,’ but that’s not the way I prefer.
– Rafael
In Bali, Rafael would pick up girls, meeting them at bars, clubs, or private parties, and whisk them away, sometimes to a villa in Ubud for a couple of nights, or to his favourite Nikko Bali Resort. The staff were so familiar with him there they’d call out, ‘Hello, Mr Rafael’, sometimes putting their foot in it, saying, ‘Oh, where’s your girlfriend?’ when he’d already moved to the next girl.
Mostly the girls were European . . . French, Italian or Swedish a lot, Finnish, Norwegian, the Nordic girls . . . They come here to spend one week, they want to fuck. I go to the party, take the girl, go to the Nikko, check in, spend the night, I always have some coke
Big shit at home, my wife, ‘Where you been?’ ‘I was at party, shut up.’ Or, ‘I’ve been doing some business in a hotel’ . . . make some story you know . . . was easy for me.
Did your wife suspect you were seeing other women?
Little bit . . . she was very jealous. She never caught me. Sometimes I would have my secret girlfriend too . . . just for fucking, nothing else. Brazilian, Australian, you know, sometimes Swedish.
It was a dream life; and then all the other guys see me doing this, they were jealous. ‘Fuck, Rafael, I saw you yesterday with a blonde girl . . . my god, where is she from? How did you get this girl?’ They were curious why it was so easy for me to change the girls every night like this.
Sometimes I’m busy with one girl and then some other beautiful girl comes looking for me, asking my friends, ‘Are you Brazilian? Do you know Rafael with long hair? Where is he, I’m looking for him, you know him?’ And then they say, ‘No . . . Rafael’s not here,’ but I am already with another girl and she come too late.
So there was a queue waiting for you?
Exactly. Sometimes I get in trouble, because I have two or three girls . . . Rafael, Rafael, Rafael. Shit, which one am I gonna take? I always choose one, you know, and say, ‘Please can you go and wait for me in the corner of Circle K. I will pick you up in five minutes because my girlfriend is here . . . we’re finished but still, it’s better if you go there.’ ‘Okay,’ they go. I say shit easy, you know. And then she walks out by herself. I go to the toilet, and then pick up the girl on the bike, escape.
Did you ever take more than one then?
Yes, sometimes it was funny because normally the Nordic girls like it. I come with two girls, and then I start to kiss one and then the other one wants to kiss together. I have one here and one there. All the Brazilian guys, my friends, were like, ‘Ah, Rafael, come here, introduce me.’ And then I say please let’s go somewhere and it was hard because the guys follow me on the bike. I have to stop, ‘Hey, go away.’ Because the girls always say, ‘No, no, only you, we don’t want anybody, only you.’