Rivers of Gold (15 page)

When I do, N's lightness fades; her countenance becomes that of a person who's just been asked to recount something unpleasant. I can't imagine LA would have roughed her up in public. I'm feeling a wave of protectiveness wash over me, something I don't feel for anyone these days except my mother. Naturally I'm dumbstruck when N tells me that LA wants to hire her.

—What do you mean, hire? I ask incredulously. I'm not quite sure how to take this. If N joins the Staff Girls, there should be nothing to worry about, since LA doesn't deal in women—only spectacle—and her security goons would make short work of any moron who got the wrong idea. But there's an ugly green plume of jealousy suddenly rising in my gorge, as I imagine the likes of Timo and Luigi drunkenly monopolizing her. But I don't know what to say about it either; N and I have just met, and while this past week has been a bona-fide whirlwind, I don't know how Serious this is yet. I don't even know if I'm ready for Serious, if it's been too long.

—It's not about that, N says in a more soothing tone, as if sensing the knots forming in my stomach.

—No? What is it, then?

—She's branching out. She wants to trademark the Staff Girls, get them into the mainstream. She says she's already got some big contracts in media, cosmetics, jewelry …

N's continuing, but I'm having trouble concentrating on what she's saying. LA's branching out. She's expanding her territory out of speak country into legitimate business. She wants to have one foot in the light and one in the dark—she wants to do what
I
do, but on a much larger scale. She's amassed her illicit capital to invest above street level.

LA wants to get ahead of Reza.

And I think she just might.

I snap back into focus when N says:

—And she mentioned your boss, too.

—What. What did she say. What about my boss. Did she call him by name or—

—Take it easy, baby, she just mentioned you and
the guy he works for
, nothing specific. She made it sound like … competition.

You could call it that, I say to myself.

—She had a certain look in her eyes when she was talking about you two. I can't really describe it, but I got the impression she doesn't like your boss much, you know?

(Oh honey, you have no idea.)

N shifts her body along the railing to face me more fully.

—Renny, maybe you should … find some other gig. You've had a lot of success with your photography for someone so young. Who knows, maybe it'll be
your
pictures on the wall in that gallery we were just in someday. Someday soon. Maybe if you … stepped down from whatever job this boss of yours has you doing, you'll have more time to focus on your photography. You keep telling me that's what you want, right?

She puts her hand on my neck, just below my ear.

—Now's the time, Renny.
Carpe diem
.

My mind is in overdrive. N can't possibly know how this development has realigned things. If she joins LA's team, I'd have eyes inside LA's camp. This could be dangerous—I don't relish the thought of becoming Reza's spy, but I'd have a much better chance of knowing which horse will win this race. And which one to back.

Of course I can't deny this windfall for N, either. She'll make good money, real money, legal money, which I can boost with my commissions from Reza. I could get gigs shooting N and the other Staff Girls for the high-end fashion conglomerates, the ones that were big enough to survive the crash—with Marcus Chalk as a reference, this should be a snap. N and I could move in together, build a fast nestegg, and then we could do what X did when she dumped me for that Wall Street guy—we can
escape
. Get away from Reza, LA, the speaks, this putrefying place. We'll have cash in the bank, kickass portfolios of high-profile work, while still in the prime of our lives. Now, at last, I can see A Way Out.

But not just yet. It'll take us maybe two, three years to get there. But we will.

I really can have it all.

I pull N close and kiss her, on the balcony of the Vélez Blanco castle, and there's plenty of heat in it but also something else, a deeper kind of warmth beneath the fire. This is—New.

—Come with me, I gasp when we break apart. N's eyes are shimmering wet, but she can't be sad, those must be the tears of joy I've always heard about but never seen. We half-walk, half-run through Ancient Near Eastern Art (bearded warriors with elongated faces and hollow eyes follow us out), across the Great Hall Balcony passage, past yards of Korean ceramic, through Ancient Chinese Art (thank you, Charlotte C. Weber) and stumble breathless into the Sackler Wing, the finest collection of Japanese art this side of Tokyo.

The air is always hushed here as you pass the great carved Buddha, and more humid thanks to the near-silent Noguchi fountain. I have to consciously restrain myself from pulling N down on top of me onto the tatami mats in the
shoin
room with its vast ancient plum-tree scroll—security would be all over us. The special gift I have for N requires privacy and sepulchral quiet.

I lead her by the hand into the Asian Art library. This was a study center up until the crash, when staffing cuts caused it to revert to its previous incarnation of a documentary film theater. Gone are the rows of books and computer terminals and long tables I remember, but they put in some cheap old pews, and we settle on the farthest corner of the last one, me with my back to the wall, N seated to my left. Koto music drifts around us from hidden speakers. There are two elderly Asian tourists up in the front row, and us in the back. No one else.

With as much sleight of hand as I can muster, I pull out N's gift. Her eyes widen and her hand goes to her mouth to stifle a gasp. It's a Little Something by Jimmy Jane, just over five inches long, with the platinum finish. It's silent, insertable, and completely waterproof—fun for the bathtub and dishwasher-safe for all you clean livers out there. I twist its base to its slowest setting and slide it beneath N's tunic, up between her smooth tan thighs to a place I've become very familiar with in a very short period of time.

N arches her back and closes her eyes. She slowly brings her arm up across my chest, bringing her hand up to my face, her fingers lightly stroking my right ear. On the wall-mounted screen in front of us, Phoenix Castle rises through a mist of cherry blossoms.

—
Mi pobrecito
, she murmurs wistfully as I increase the vibrator's speed, what are we going to do about you.

E A U  D E   D E A D  C A B B I E

M
ore bothered Santiago.

It wasn't anything he said—More could go whole shifts without speaking, and often did. Nor was it anything he did, or didn't do, at least as far as the job was concerned. More easily held his own in a fight, taking down even the most violent drags with little apparent effort, and (best of all) always giving Santiago the collar—and thereby the credits. OCID didn't look so far away after all.

It wasn't even that More was clearly uninterested in any kind of bonding bullshit, either. No pictures of family on his phone (come to think of it, Santiago had never seen More's phone, nor did he know if More even had one). No drinks after work for More, which were starting to become more commonplace among the other CAB cops, as the camaraderie born of a small group in near-desperate straits began to coalesce. Santiago had also picked up on More's barroom trick of only touching the water back of his usual shot-and-a-beer when working the bars. More never showed up to work with a hangover, never had the reek of metabolized alcohol oozing through his pores. Whatever he was, Santiago concluded, More was not a drunk. More's job routine was simple: appear out of nowhere at the beginning of their shift, haul drags until end-of-watch, then disappear again. Santiago's second job and classwork prohibited him from working doubles (not that the department had any OT money anyway), but McKeutchen had told him that, if the situation arose, More would work doubles with him.

“He likes you,” McKeutchen told Santiago in his office late one night after his shift. “You don't bother him.”

“Nothing bothers him,” Santiago countered. “And that bothers
me
. Six months on shit detail, he doesn't even blink. Shit, I don't think he
can
blink. Nothing that happens to us out on the street gets to him. He doesn't talk, he doesn't want any credits—Cap, what gives?”

McKeutchen shrugged his meaty shoulders, his smile thin beneath curtains of fat. “He's ESU.”

That was the heart of the matter, the thing that nagged at Santiago while he was pumping iron or scrubbing clams or poring over his textbooks. The Emergency Services Unit liked physically aggressive officers and was infamous for grueling training and qualification standards. Santiago had heard all the stories about ESU trainees fast-roping from choppers onto rooftops in driving rain, or doing rope climbs from river barges up the Triboro Bridge in full riot gear. ESU had replaced the earlier SWAT units of the NYPD, which wanted an updated paramilitary force to deal with any contingency, never mind the Atlas patrol wannabes pulling guard duty around Rock Center and Grand Central, posing for the news cameras with their black tac helmets and slung M4s. The cops who survived the ESU induction were given the “special” rig-out of weapons and medical training, as well as learning advanced communications and imaging systems. They cross-trained with the department's air and marine units, and received visiting instructors from the FBI, various military branches, even foreign security and intelligence agencies whenever somebody got a feeling that al-Qaeda wanted to hit the Javits Center (not that there had been a convention in town for the past three years). The ESU was an elite province of the NYPD, and those cops who'd served in it usually had their pick of the plum assignments when they transferred. If they survived.

Not that ESU had given him a scrap of information about More. When he'd finally gotten through to a lieutenant at the ESU command in Brooklyn, the conversation had gone like this:

SANTIAGO
:  More, I'm trying to find out about Detective More.

LIEUTENANT SHIT-FOR-BRAINS
:  Who?

S
:  More, Detective More!

LSFB
:  Detective-Specialist More? The new sniper guy?

S
:  You have more than one?

LSFB
:  We have snipers, and we have sniper instructors. It depends on the course being given—

S
:  Just tell me which one you're teaching him!

LSFB
:  Teaching him? He teaches
us
!

S
:  Say what?

LSFB
:  Who is this again?

S
:  Detective Santiago, CAB Group One.

LSFB
:  If they don't tell you who you're working with, why should I? Click.

Why would a cop leave the ESU to haul drags in a dirty fucking taxicab? And why would said cop forgo the arrest credits that could take him above even the vaunted ESU, maybe all the way to OCID? It wasn't that More was riding on Santiago's coattails; the guy hauled more drags by himself in one night than Santiago did in two (or than most of the other teams did in five). More did more than his share of heavy lifting, but for what?

And where did More go after he finished his shift? McKeutchen had shrugged and said he probably went back to the ESU in Brooklyn. Or picked up extra CAB shifts on the weekends. Santiago knew that was a lie, because the weekends belonged to the Narc Sharks, who frowned on any other cops, even brother CAB cops, poaching on their turf. In the same way civilians used to look forward to the weekends as a time to party, the Narc Sharks viewed weekends as a bonanza of credits. The holding tank bulged with their drag hauls from Thursday night to Monday morning. The only other team in the unit whose credit count was even remotely close was that of Santiago and More, perhaps owing to More's loose interpretation of individual rights.

The night things came to a head and Santiago decided to investigate his partner had not begun in any unusual way. For weeks, the drag hauls had been getting worse. The sort of random “stranger violence” that typically occurred at night in neighborhoods emptied by the real estate bust was now taking place in otherwise low-crime areas at all hours, a trend confirmed by a month-long series of consecutively grim COMSTAT reports. To make matters worse, a new hobby with the street moniker “mad-dogging” was threatening to become a city pastime. The activity had begun as a form of separation anxiety for the thousands of newly unemployed who could no longer shop at the kinds of stores nor eat at the kinds of restaurants they once took for granted. Crowds would form at the windows, looking in at those lucky enough to enjoy what they themselves now could not. The first incidents were merely disruptive and profane. The spiral did not take long. Groups of youngsters began trying to outdo each other with feats of daring, such as running through restaurants tearing tablecloths off tables, sending knives and broken glass flying in the faces of terrified diners. Soon widespread reports of drunken and drug-fueled criminal entries were clogging the airwaves. A new charge, EAR (Entering, Assault, and Rape), was being entered on indictments around the city. The ensuing drop-off in restaurant traffic drove dozens of establishments out of business; merchant security responses, such as full-body friskings required upon entry, closed dozens more. Now streets formerly resplendent with glittering, prosperous stores stood lined with shuttered, padlocked gates. Those surviving stores now bristled with the sort of security countermeasures usually reserved for the UN: security cameras, armed guards, even concrete blast barriers. Ever looking to the classical past, Ralph Lauren had festooned the doors and windows of his stores with barbed wire, and deployed jackbooted private K-9 security guards with massive drooling Rottweilers and Alsatians in his twin mansion flagships on Madison Avenue.

The mass of store closings was a body blow to the city's tax revenue. The dying restaurant scene, however, together with the City Council's ill-conceived price caps on landowners (meant to keep businesses and tenants in their locations), begat a parallel economy of illegal restaurants and bars. This shadow world of mobile clubs, the locations of which were often available only hours before opening time via a coterie of electronically linked insiders, allowed for a resurgence of a sophisticated drug trade that remained frustratingly out of reach of the overburdened police department, stretched thin as it was by a surge in violence fueled by cheap, highly addictive street drugs like
paco
. Since the well-organized, exclusive, mobile supper clubs and speakeasies did not have anywhere near the levels of violence being borne by the brick-and-mortar businesses of New York, The Powers That Be at City Hall and One Police Plaza did not deem them as immediate a threat as the wave of EAR crimes (known colloquially as “EARgasms” among the rank and file). Hence fewer police investigations, hence a burgeoning underground nightlife, the likes of which hadn't existed since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.

Except, of course, for a few crusty, pain-in-the-ass dinosaurs in the chain of command, who refused to toe the party line on the grounds it was strangling the city. Men like McKeutchen, who had nurtured and cultivated loyal pups like Santiago, grooming them to follow in the paw prints of salty NYPD dogs like Joseph Petrosino.

“Who?” asked Santiago.

“Get the fuck out of here,” growled McKeutchen. “More, wait here a minute. Shut the door.”

When he looked back on it all much later, Santiago would reflect that that had been the last straw, McKeutchen shutting him out like that on that fateful night. The captain had periodically done that over the six months he and More had ridden together, taking More into his confidence behind his slammed office door. Santiago had come to think of himself as McKeutchen's golden boy, and the sight of an interloper like More getting the same preferential treatment made him feel left out and jealous, something he would admit to no man.

And so he decided to test his budding investigative skills out on More. After all, he reasoned, if you can't trust your partner, who can you trust?

It probably wouldn't have come to pass at all, Santiago thought later, if he'd just let the drag die.

They'd rolled on an assault call straight from dinner, which was takeout from Santiago's favorite Peruvian restaurant in Spanish Harlem. Santiago had thrust his order of
parihuela
at More (who never seemed to eat anything, the weird fuck), fired up the siren and wig-wag lights hidden in the Crown Vic's grille, and screeched the cab over to the Conservatory Garden along Central Park's northeastern edge at 103rd and Fifth.

Jumping the front wheels onto the curb, Santiago put the lights on an unconscious nurse, and a drag geeked to the gills on
paco
doing his best to separate a moaning, drooling geriatric from her oxygen tank–equipped wheelchair, which would probably retail enough on the street for enough dope to kill the drag and six others like him. Santiago figured the nurse had wheeled the old bag of bones out to the garden from the Cardinal Cook Medical Center across the street to take the evening air. Up jumped the junkie, and here they all were.

As usual, More was out the door before Santiago brought the cab to a full stop. As usual, the drag never saw him coming. This time, however, More used a short, vicious technique Santiago didn't recognize, although there was no mistaking the loud crack that followed. The drag took one look at the fractured radius poking through the skin of his forearm, and promptly passed out. The broken bone had severed vital vessels on its way to the great outdoors, and a pool of blood formed rapidly under the drag's inert form, spreading in a zigzag pattern through the mortar of the garden's old brick sidewalk.

Santiago, with blood thumping in his ears and wrists, cilantro rice sticking to his forehead over his bulging eyes, pointed out that the suspect needed emergency medical attention.

“Why?” rasped More.

“What do they teach in ESU school, how to burn the fucking police manual?” Santiago gasped as he tried to pull the drag's wounded arm above heart level without doing further damage. “Help me tie this off.”

“Why?” More repeated, as still as the unconscious junkie.

“More, just shut up and HELP ME!” Santiago bellowed. He didn't know which was more frustrating: that he was telling a nearly mute man to shut up; or that he had been partnered with said mute, who, among other things, seemed okay with letting an injured suspect publicly bleed to death. Santiago saw all his prospects dribbling away with the junkie's blood, and knew what he needed to do was to get this suspect across the street to the hospital, then get himself straight with McKeutchen. If the junkie died later, fine, his own ass would be covered. More could go take a flying fuck, there were plenty of other eager-beaver applicants for CAB who wouldn't jeopardize Santiago's career on a routine drag haul.

As things turned out, Santiago might have hoped for better.

The trio of burly orderlies who rushed across the street when they saw the taxicab on the curb with an overturned wheelchair in front of it weren't prepared to like the cops, who they figured had just run over their ward. When they found out the drag had coldcocked the nurse, who was well liked and respected around the hospital, as well as terrorized an invalid octogenarian who never raised her voice to any of the staff, well, they just weren't prepared to guarantee the young thug's safety once he was brought onto the premises. Things did not improve when Santiago asked to speak to the chief medical officer, and instead got a quivering resident whose pupils were clearly dilated by something stronger than coffee. The resident said, like, they had no beds, and, um, maybe they'd be better off taking this, uh, patient down the street to Mount Sinai?