Rivers of Gold (14 page)

No long good-byes for military men, Reza thought as the Slav's squad mounted up and drove off in a matter of seconds. Just as well. As the last vehicle's taillights disappeared through the reeds, Reza loosed a long, jagged volley of flatulence in relief.

His men took that as their cue to take their hands from behind their heads and get up off their knees. They were Poles who did not speak Romanian. The two gunsels helped the groggy sniper to his feet.

“
Moja głowa jest zabicie mnie
,” the sniper moaned. “Why'd he take my rifle?”

“Yeah, what the fuck was that all about?” asked one of the support thugs.

Reza was still looking at the place where the Slav had stood. He could still feel the suppressor muzzle against his throat. He was not aware that he had moved his hand to where the rifle had touched him until the tip of his cigarette grazed his chin. There was no pain; as usual, the Kazakh had extinguished itself.

“The rest of your lives,” Reza growled.

P A R T  II

C A R N I V A L  O F  T H E  D A M N E D

T H E   S A C K L E R  W I N G

I
'm sitting in the copy shop that serves as a front for Reza's office. It's payday, meaning I make my Fast Forty drop and take my ten percent commission. Ordinarily, this is a fairly brisk matter; I don't like hanging around the office. Reza's tense enough these days, but there seem to be more overseas heavies here than usual. One of them, some steroid mongoloid as big as a fucking house, is in the office all the time now. I don't know if Reza's feeling heat from Eyad's death—supposedly the cops are looking into it, but there's no way they'd ever learn enough to follow the trail here—or if he's pissed about what's been happening in the speaks. Too many fights, too many ODs. I'm only on Specials, euphorics—when was the last time you saw someone fighting-mad while on Ecstasy? But who knows who's slinging what else on the circuit. Prince William deals a little powder, I know that for sure. I don't—I've never touched powder, neither personally nor professionally. Then there's smoke, ice, who knows what other kinds of pills besides Specials. This is what happens when the party goes on too long; what started out pretty turns painful, at an unpredictable rate.

While waiting to be summoned, I'm catching up on the latest slasher yarn by C, a British novelist I was once fortunate enough to photograph (though sadly not to swive). I'm probably one of the only people my age still reading hard copy. There's a good reason for it—phones stay
off
when you're in the office, and you don't turn them on again until you're out on the street. Besides, I like books, another lamentable casualty of our age. This author has a special meaning for me, too. Long have I dreamed of the day I could entice her back to town, to the Metropolitan Museum and the inner sanctum of Dendur within, where I would ravish her upon the temple's altar, carved kings and goddesses looking on, until her screams of joy would echo off the two-thousand-year-old stones …

Yes, I'm definitely in a Metropolitan mood. I'm due to meet N there in an hour, which is all the more reason to get in and out of the office fast. Sitting here now waiting on Reza's whim is just tedious. I'm actually excited—I haven't been on a real date in years. X was the last woman you could say I dated, someone I had a connection with higher than pelvic. Someone I liked, someone with whom time shared made for a little bit of light in the city's lingering gray. Someone not connected with business, with the speaks, or with Reza. Especially not with Reza.

N is … different. Yes, she and I spent our first night together at Le Yef. And yes, LA did invite her to lunch, something I'd like to hear more about, and something I want Reza to never, ever hear about. But she's much more independent, much more self-assured. She has the air of someone who knows what she wants and how to get it, someone older than she actually is. The more time I spend with her—and it's been whenever I can, L has been chiding me all week for ignoring her electronic come-hithers—the more I'm convinced N's headed in one direction: Up. She's got the focus, the drive, the hunger. She energizes me, something I haven't felt since—

—He's ready for you, Re-ni.

Reality has a way of shattering the fondest reveries, and at this moment it manifests itself as Edek, one of Reza's Polish rent-a-thugs, who suddenly looms over me and jerks his head silently for me to follow. Normally his garrulousness extends to grunts and curses. This is why I try to avoid spending time with the rest of Reza's crew. These aren't the sort of people I want to remember, or to be remembered by.

At the back door Jan, Reza's Tin Man, jerks his head for us to enter the Inner Sanctum. Jan's a gun nut. You rarely see him out in public, because Reza doesn't want to take the chance that he'll get busted on a weapons charge. I don't know how he gets all his iron, and I don't care. That's not my end of the business. Jan must have had some time off, though; his head's all bandaged up.

—Rough night? I ask him, trying for levity. Jan glares at me with blackened, bloodshot eyes and I decide to immediately disengage. We head inside.

How to describe the lair of a modern black-market tycoon? You'd expect custom, premium, high-end-low-profile, no? No. Reza's office looks like a small showroom for used office furniture, which is exactly how he wants it. Chipped desk, battered file cabinets, black swivel chairs with broken hydraulics. Deep Zone Project playing softly in the background.

This is called Hiding in Plain Sight.

The man himself is seated at his usual place, next year's Sony Mercury notebook on the desk in front of him. At his nine o'clock, the new gorilla's sitting in a chair watching HGTV on a wall-mounted flat screen with—I surreptitiously risk a second glance to make sure—a lollipop in his mouth. As Jan ushers me to sit down I just catch the end of the latest Immodium Anti-Diarrheal spot featuring the great Arnaldo Mazur's rich baritone over the backing track of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata:
Immodium. Stop the Squirts
.

—Love what you've done with the place, I say. It's a lame line, but I don't care. Usually I'm not this glib in Reza's presence, but today this whole routine just seems flat and distant, like a bad foreign-language gangster movie. And I have better things to do, with someone far above all this.

Reza closes his laptop and adjusts himself in his chair to give me his full attention. He might be forty-five, he might be sixty, I don't really know for sure. His wiry brown hair has receded a bit across the wide Slavic steppe of his forehead, and the hard slopes of his face bear the ravines and gulleys of a life not easily lived. But his jadeite eyes have the avaricious glint of a much younger man. I don't know how long he's been at this, or how much longer he can last. But he's in it for the long haul, unlike me. I've got no designs on his job. I just want enough to get out and start over, but clean and well capitalized. Let Prince William be Reza's golden boy, I don't care.

—Same as always, Reza replies in his inscrutable accent. I know he's from Hungary or Belarus or one of those places where everyone savors tiny cups of eye-watering coffee and speaks ten languages, but I like to think of him as Russian. Jan materializes off my left shoulder and I hold up my messenger bag. With a well-practiced sequence of movements, Jan pulls out the Tumi computer case within, handing it to Reza, who with equal economy of motion activates the machine sitting downstage right on his desk. It's a Cummins JetScan two-pocket, which can sort large bills from small, or sift new bills from old. I know this because I have the exact same one at home. The day I made my first commission from Reza, I asked him what model he had and went out and bought myself one. There will be no difference between my count and his—see Renny's Rule Number One. Reza extracts the cash from a waterproof parcel I special-ordered online for this job and runs it though the Cummins. No beep—a Fast Forty in full. Reza counting his money is one of the few times I get to see him smile.

—Right on the money, as usual, Reza exhales. He punches some numbers on the machine, pops the adhesive band on several of the stacks I meticulously sorted last night, drops them in the JetScan, and lets it trill. Abracadabra—my ten percent commission, which he silently passes to me. I'm stowing the cash in my bag's inner pockets when Reza says distractedly:

—Oh, I have something for you.

I figure it's my ration of Davidoffs, and I'm half-right. Reza slides open one of the panels in an ancient sliding cabinet behind his desk, pulls out two cartons of Davidoffs, and slides them across the desk. Then he reaches back inside the cabinet and pulls out something that hasn't been seen in this town since Bergdorf's went bankrupt: a pair of Vass boots, three grand at least. Reza plonks them down on the desk in front of me, picks up his cigarette, and takes a long, smoky Slavonic drag.

—These should be a good fit, he says through smoke.

—Well,
thanks
, I say, trying not to ham it up. I guess Reza's funk has ended, he's throwing me an extra bone. Well, no point insulting his generosity. Reza inclines his head slightly and gives me a half-wave, which is my signal to go. The boots are in the bag and I'm on my way to a better place, even swaggering a bit. Jan gives me half a sneer as I saunter out the door. The gorilla hasn't moved a muscle this whole time.

I'm happy, and it's been so long it feels foreign. I've got cash in hand, a snazzy new gift from the boss, and a lady in waiting. I feel so good it's not important enough to wonder how Reza knew my shoe size.

As the cab crests a hill on the Eighty-first Street traverse in the park, I see smoke rising from the cook fires in the New Amsterdam settlement. Originally it sprang up in the playground just across from the Met, but when it got too big, the city ordered it moved to the Great Lawn deeper inside the park, so the tourists wouldn't have to look out onto a shantytown. I've shot quite a few images of the place from the balcony of Belvedere Castle—my nod to Jacob Riis. Couldn't make a dollar off these, though, the big content agencies have shooters actually living in there, no shortage of Squalor Feed. Supposedly, there's even a couple of movies being filmed in there now.

I hop out down the avenue to avoid the logjam at the taxi rank, to stroll along the neoclassical facade in my fancy new kicks—taking care to avoid the concrete blast barriers, police kiosks, and rolls of concertina wire—to the huge pile of stairs at the front entrance. I love this place, I always have. I haven't been back since X left—we used to come here together all the time—and when you have a place like this in your hometown it becomes easy to take for granted. But no one should. A terror attack on the Met would be terminal, an attack on history itself. Humanity will have few supporters left on Earth if it comes to that.

Naturally, those in charge of the place have considered this too, and taken precautions. They'd already started work on the system the last time I was here with X, and now I see it in all its terrible splendor. Walking through the doors into the Great Hall, I see that the entire lobby-level gift shop is gone, having been turned into a massive security center, fronted with blast-proof walls of hardened steel. The nearest adjacent wall alcove, which used to hold a huge arrangement of flowers in a Grecian urn, now sports a massive white ball turret with three long barrels trained on the front entrance. I know these are cameras and X-rays and other prophylactic counterterror gadgets, but it looks like there's a huge multi-barreled cannon aimed at you when you walk in. The security center's supposed to have interconnected detection systems running throughout the museum, so that they can see whoever, wherever, whenever, doing whatever.

We'll see about that.

Passing through the scanner, the alarm goes off like I knew it would, and I hand over my titanium Thoth to a guard. I'm traveling light; I cabbed it back to my place to drop off my bag and stash my cash, then cabbed back over to the museum. I've only brought my pen, my phone, and my special gift to a lady who's fast becoming someone special.

N is standing by the information booth in some kind of pale gray diaphanous tunic that makes my throat catch. She could be one of the statues in the Greek and Roman galleries come to life. When we kiss—publicly, unabashedly kiss like we
need
to—there's a warmth that spreads from my mouth back through my face into my chest.

—I missed you, she says, holding both my hands. I can't remember the last time anyone's shown me this kind of tenderness. I'd almost forgotten it was possible.

N asks me where we should start, and I figure she probably wants to check out the new Anonymous show, and this produces a smile from her that could light up the entire Great Hall. I pay for the two of us, and down we go through the ages, streaks of orange and black as Attic amphorae drift by in the background. I'm so comfortable with her, our conversation is easy and unforced, none of the inane small talk I usually have to put up with. I almost don't want to ask her about her lunch meet with LA, but I know I'll have to. Still, I want to enjoy this innocent time as much as I can.

Anonymous is, of course, upstairs in the modern art wing (thank you, Lila Acheson Wallace). You don't see much new art these days, no market for it. But Anonymous doesn't seem to be in it for the money. There's so much urgency in each canvas, so much fear and chaos. No wonder he (or she) is being hailed as the consummate painter of our times. N and I are stopped in our tracks by one huge canvas titled “The Slow Evisceration of Saint Anton” that is so unspeakably violent it could only be the product of a disturbed mind recklessly provoked into psychotic rage.

—What was this guy
thinking
? N asks, wincing at the grotesquerie in front of us.

—Definitely a bad brain day, I cluck sympathetically. We move on.

I want to show her Tomonori Tanaka's new stuff, so I guide her past the Impressionists, through the aisle of Rodins, down the ramp and hard left into Modern Photography (thank you, Henry R. Kravis). This was always where X and I would wind up; after she left, I would still come to the Met, though I found this room too painful to enter. But now we glide through it easily; it's as though N has exorcised X's ghost from here. My god, this girl.

I gently steer her across the hall, down a short flight of stairs, and back five centuries. We stand on a cloistered terrace, leaning our forearms on the veined marble railing overlooking a Renaissance courtyard. I've always thought this was a nice mellow spot for conversation, and it's as good a place as any for me to ask N about How Things Went with LA.