Uncle Janice (3 page)

“Stop playing!” she told Korean Marty. She moved the purse strap off her neck so he couldn’t use it to choke her. “No more clowning,” she said. “Enough. I told you I ain’t trying to fuck him, believe me. And even if I got him into the bedroom, how you supposed to steal the stash out from under the doggie bed with that pit bull standing on top of it?”

Korean Marty put both his palms up in front of him and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

The other Marty sprang off the futon, toward either her or his buddy. She didn’t know which, because she’d already turned and run. When she reached the door, the welcome mat slid out from under her, but she kept
her balance. The dog was barking. An aerosol lemon taste gummied her throat. She unlocked the dead bolt and flung open the door and heard behind her what sounded like wood cracking bone. She ran out into the hallway. Too claustrophobic to ever take an elevator, even in the best of circumstances, she leapt down the stairs three at a time and raced through the lobby, past a tut-tutting old white woman collecting her mail.

Out on the sidewalk, Janice allowed her knees to start shaking. She couldn’t take deep-enough breaths. On the corner, next to a stop sign, two teenage Latinas in puffy jackets tossed an egg back and forth, higher and higher with each throw. Janice was chewing on cuticles when her ghost, Chester Tevis, materialized behind her to take her arm. As always, a bushy and magnificent soupsoaker of a beard obscured his round and black face. His eyes swam in yellow. Wiry gray hair burst from his ears. She leaned into his soft body, his long brown coat smelling of cocoa butter and Salvation Army bins, its rough wool scratching her cheek. Tasked with the responsibility of her safety—supposed to follow close behind her while remaining invisible, supposed to report via a Nextel walkie-talkie all her drug buys to the four investigators in their unmarked white Impala—Tevis felt most helpless whenever she went into buildings, with nothing for him to do except stand across the street and try to guess the window and scratch at his beard with both hands. The next time they go out, they’ll switch. He’ll be the uncle and she’ll be the ghost and it’ll be her job to worry. But for now, he had his arm around her shoulders. Together they turned the corner toward Roosevelt Avenue, which seventeen months ago he had told her to pronounce
Ruse-uh-velt
, not
Rose-ah-velt
, so that she’d sound like one of the locals.

“You okay?” he asked her.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Meanwhile, at around this same time, New York governor Eliot Spitzer was in a hotel room banging call girls. The CIA announced that water-boarding didn’t qualify as torture. China blamed the ongoing unrest in Tibet on the Dalai Lama. Barbers, bartenders, prosecutors, defense attorneys, street-corner lawyers, and tabloid op-ed writers insisted that the Sean Bell shooting—in which an unarmed black man, intoxicated on the morning of his wedding, rammed his car into police officers before they fired back with fifty bullets—was obviously an open-and-shut case of insert your biases here. Despite obvious rage issues and a fat face getting exponentially fatter over time, the baseball player Roger Clemens told a congressional committee that he had never self-injected steroids. Just as preposterously, presidential candidate Barack Obama vowed to end the divisive tone of D.C. politics. In sports fibs, the back page of the
Post
read, “Attention Knicks Fans: There’s Hope.” Three out of four economists claimed that the best way to solve the subprime mortgage crisis was to give more money to three out of four economists. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the Best Picture Oscar to
No Country for Old Men
, the very title of which was a lie, see above re: the economic solution to the subprime mortgage crisis.

And over at the original House of Lies, One Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan, the NYPD’s Big Bosses told young, ambitious minority cops like Janice that if they lasted eighteen months in undercover narcotics work, then they’d receive an automatic promotion to detective. See their silver shield turn gold … but that’s not all! Act now, last another eighteen months without getting killed, and you can switch over into Narcotics
Investigations
, not only a safer job but a jump in the queue toward the upper balconies of Major Case, Special Victims, Homicide, and Counterterrorism, the kinds of squads with the kinds of stories that get turned into movies.

Janice couldn’t remember where or when she’d first heard about the narco guarantee—it seemed to be something every young cop knew, and had always known—but she could remember the first time she saw an uncle on the job.

She was straight out of the Academy, a sore-footed soldier in Operation
IMPACT, Commissioner Ray Kelly’s plan to deluge the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods with the department’s most inexperienced cops. She worked Housing at the Queensbridge projects, where she spent her days and nights telling residents to extinguish their blunts, turn down their music, steer their bikes off sidewalks, and stop swinging baseball bats inside the bodegas. The worst, though, was verticals, schlepping up and down every step of every building to make sure nobody was hunched over a bottle of brandy in the stairwell or taking a leak off the roof. Within months her calves had hardened into bocce balls. Once, while resting in a lobby, she watched a middle-aged black man and an older black woman come into the lobby together, chatting about the things people chat about: the weather, the neighborhood, the way things used to be. They looked right through her, not even nodding, a uniform in their lobby as unremarkable as the Chinese takeout menus wedged under the front door. The woman carried her grocery bags into the elevator and asked the guy if he was coming up.

“Nah, Ma. Go ahead. I gotta check my mail.” As soon as the elevator door shuddered closed, he turned to Janice and said, “Listen, I’m on the job.”

He told her he was an undercover narc, sent in by the gang squad to clear out the lobby so they could execute a search warrant. An envoy from the secret world beyond this one, he talked quickly, quietly, his lips thin and chapped behind his overgrown beard.

“And your mom lives here?” she asked.

“My what?”

“Never mind,” she said. “I thought the lady in the elevator … it just seemed like you really knew each other, but I guess that’s the whole—”

“You wanna act like you belong,” Tevis said, his first-ever lesson for her.

“Right.” If she was going to hang around undercovers, she would need to think faster. She hiked the heavy patrol officer belt up over her hips, tried to make herself appear taller. “So,” she said. “Executing a warrant, great. What can I do to help?”

“Go away,” he said pleasantly. “You’re making everyone nervous.”

The other narco cops outside? The potential dealers upstairs? Both?
She didn’t ask. He’d slammed the secret world’s door on her, but she could still see the light bleeding around the edges. When her shift ended, she drove down to One Police Plaza to fill out an application with Narcotics. Young, brown, from the city, no college, desperate to move up, single and childless, without anyone to collect her pension if she got killed in the line of duty, she looked on paper like the perfect uncle, a narco lieutenant’s dream. But because nothing ever moved quickly through the department’s lymphatic bureaucracy, it took months for the Big Bosses to call her out for an interview at Rodman’s Neck, a little hamlet in the Bronx where the NYPD trained dogs for the K-9 unit, blew up suspicious if-you-see-something-say-something packages, and vetted all their potential undercovers.

An Asian woman with a clipboard gave her forty dollars and told her to go into the role-play room to buy some drugs. Five chaotic minutes later, the pretend dealers were shoving real shotguns, presumably unloaded, into her face. They went through her pockets. They ordered her to snort a line of powder off the desk, and when she bent her head to it, the exercise ended. She’d failed. But that was okay. Everyone failed, although she didn’t know that at the time. The Big Bosses were impressed that she’d lasted a full five minutes, that before going into the room she had stashed half the buy money in her sock. That sort of commitment to the department’s precious bottom line earned her a follow-up interview, also on Rodman’s Neck, with the clipboard-toting Asian woman and an old white bald man. The wizard who’d come out from behind his green curtain to meet her. Every time the bomb squad blew up another package outside the window, they flinched, all three of them, and the dogs for a moment barked a little bit louder.

She did not get a call. Or an email. No one came to find her in person or sent her a letter saying,
After a careful review of a number of highly talented applicants, we are pleased to offer you …

Nope, she found out in the regular way, on the daily sheet, with the news of all the latest transfers and memoranda:
ITWARU, J, TO REPORT TO NARCOTICS, 0900, 10/1/06
. She snuck away into the nearest stairwell and called her mother.
Guess what, Mom
, she whisper-shouted into the phone.
Guess what, guess what, guess what
.

On her first day as an uncle she gave twenty dollars to a crack fiend, who told her to wait out on the sidewalk while he ran up to his apartment real quick for some primo-quality rocks. He of course never returned. The investigators all whooped, crowing, happy to root against the new girl. “Fooled by the fools,” they said, and so she followed the next potential scam artist into his apartment building and made sure to come back out with both him and an eighth of weed. Tevis radioed Sergeant Hart and the investigators, who showed up a minute later to head-steer the dealer into a prisoner-transport van. A perfect buy, her very first.

And there were plenty more. Because female undercovers were a relative rarity, and because most dealers start dealing to impress girls, Janice’s early buys came quickly, in bunches. It helped that she hadn’t been in law enforcement very long. Her posture had not yet hardened into the policeman’s stance: hands on hips, feet spread apart as if expecting someone to knock you over. She could still speak to people, especially young men, without the automatic assumption of their deference. Half black and half Indian, assigned to the Babel of blocks in Jackson Heights, she bought weed, crack, coke, heroin, opium tar, and baking soda beneath the el, at the Manuel de Dios Unanue Triangle, in alleyways, liquor stores, apartment buildings, and on practically every corner of Roosevelt Avenue from Sixty-First Street to Ninety-Third.

But every time the investigators head-steered those dealers into a p-van, the U.S. Constitution compelled Sergeant Hart to inform them that they were being arrested for the criminal sale of a controlled substance to an undercover cop.

And the dealers would say, “The chick?!”

And Sergeant Hart would say something along the lines of “Shut the fuck up and take a seat toward the back.”

Now, seventeen months into her Narcotics career, with scorched sidewalks behind her, she had to travel far beyond the Jackson Heights border, all the way into Corona, to find willing dealers who didn’t yet know her face. Dealers like the Martys. And even then she still hadn’t made the buy!

That same night, when she and Tevis got back to the rumpus—aka the Queens Narcotics Division, a bland three-story office building hiding out on the edge of the borough—Richie the Receptionist asked them if they’d heard. Actually, to be technical about it, Detective First Grade Richard Szoke asked them if they’d heard.

“Heard what?”

He smiled with a mouth full of shredded cabbage. Outside of janitorial services, the narco Big Bosses refused to hire civilians, not even in an administrative capacity, and so as far back as anyone could remember the rumpus’s uncles and investigators all rotated two-hour shifts up at the front desk, where they frittered away the time reading the
Post
and playing
Snood
. But then one day last November, Richie sat down and the seat became permanently his own. The Big Bosses didn’t dare complain. With the exception of that miserable prick Raymond Gonz,
no
one complained, for ever since Richie had taken over he made sure that the kitchenette’s water cooler kept glugging, that photocopier jams were quickly fixed and toilet clogs discreetly handled. Invitations to the holiday racket went out on time for once. He kept the vending machines—don’t tell Mayor Bloomberg—consistently well stocked with sugary candy bars and high-fructose sodas. And most important, best of all, rumpus gossip was efficiently disseminated from the lightning-rod top of Richie’s bald head. All this in addition to his crime-fighting responsibilities as an undercover cop. An expert multitasker, he ate an egg roll while transferring a phone call while watching both Tevis and Janice sign themselves into the logbook.

“The bosses put up a buy board,” he told them. “A cheap shit piece of Taiwanese plastic. Completely gauche, not that anyone even bothered to ask me.”

“What’s a buy board?” Janice asked. “Like a board with all our buys on it?”

“See?” Richie asked Tevis. “It’s those kinds of instincts that’ll serve her well when she makes detective.”

“Har har,” she said, but with only twenty-seven days until her eighteen-month promotion, she knocked her knuckles against his desk.

They were on the second floor, the Queens narco squad, with phones
ringing everywhere. Thick sheets of construction paper covered the windows. At scattered desks, confidential informants described apartment layouts to investigators taking notes. The uncles all sat together in the corner, far from the Big Bosses’ private offices but close to the rumpus lounge, where from three to four every afternoon they watched their girl Rubí on TV.
¡Sacrificarás todo por ella!
No kidding, Janice thought. She’d missed today’s episode and had hoped to hear a recap, but she could forget about that now. With the exception of Grimes, who was asleep in the rumpus’s cot room, and that miserable prick Gonz, who was antisocially reading a
Planet Fitness
magazine, the uncles converged around Tevis the instant he sat down, before he could even begin his post-street ritual of rubbing cocoa butter onto his face and elbows to keep his skin from getting ashy.