Word: heroines
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During the waning days of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, a journalist named John Converse takes up with a bored American expatriate woman in Saigon. She invites him to buy an interest in three kilograms of pure heroin. Once this deadly package is safely Stateside and distributed to her friends, Converse will earn $40,000. He agrees, persuades an acquaintance, Ray Hicks, to smuggle the heroin to California. There, Converse's wife Marge will take possession and pay Hicks...
...stark evil in this plan quickly flowers into nightmare. Two hoodlums pick up Hicks' trail the moment he arrives in Berkeley. He and Marge escape with the heroin, but when Converse gets home he walks into a trap. The thugs are not, as it happens, emissaries from the underworld but something worse: agents for a corrupt federal officer, bent on picking off the heroin for himself before staging a phony drug bust on Converse and his accomplices. The chase that follows is unforgettable...
...world capable of producing the horrors of war, "people are just naturally going to want to get high." Hicks concentrates on the exploit's challenge and itches to hurl his own aggressiveness into the void he imagines around him. Marge, already hooked on pills, accepts the heroin's arrival as fated...
Such equivocations blind them to the truth of their situation, which is also the novel's truth. The heroin is as shackling a possession as the bag of gold in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Indeed, it is worse. Chaucer's three thieves at least thought that the gold was benign. Their catastrophe stemmed from disregarding Christian doctrine: radix malorum est cupiditas (greed is the root of all evil). Without a moral compass, Stone's characters cannot even plead ignorance. The irony that the heroin's value is rooted in its destructiveness does...
...John K. Muelner, who tried to board an airplane in Los Angeles during week one of what the FAA calls "100-per-cent-security." Muelner's appearance and manner matched the airline's "skyjacker profile" and he was searched with special care. Security agents found 76 grams of heroin and more than half a kilo of marijuana in his suitcase. In his pants pocket they discovered a vial of hashish oil. Muelner was arrested, but subsequently freed by a federal judge who ruled the search was unconstitutional. The judge said there was no probable cause to believe Muelner was carrying...