Rivers of Gold Read online

  R I V E R S

  O F G O L D

  A NOVEL

  A D A M D U N N

  To the cabbies,

  and

  my family,

  and

  Eric Ambler, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Aniruddha Bahal,

  J. G. Ballard, Iain Banks, Peter Benchley, John Burdett, Anthony

  Burgess, Raymond Chandler, Louis de Bernières, Sean Doolittle,

  John Early, Dan Fesperman, Charles G. Finney, Alan Fisher, Alan

  Furst, William Gibson, Pete Hamill, Dashiell Hammett, Thomas

  Harris, Colin Harrison, Joseph Heller, Carl Hiaasen, Mo Hayder,

  J. Robert Janes, Joseph Kanon, Thomas Kelly, Philip Kerr, Dinah

  Lee Küng, John Lawton, Dennis Lehane, Elmore Leonard,

  Michael Malone, Dominic Martell, Colum McCann, Deon Meyer,

  Jim Nisbet, Chuck Palahniuk, Orhan Pamuk, Clay Reynolds,

  John Sandford, Steven Sherrill, Daniel Silva, Shane Stevens,

  P. J. Tracy, John Trevanian, Andrew Vachss, Joseph Wambaugh,

  Edward Whittemore, and Robert Wilson

  for telling me

  each in their own way

  to shut up and write

  The fish might have been asleep, save for the movement dictated by countless millions of years of instinctive continuity: lacking the flotation bladder common to other fish and the fluttering flaps to push oxygen-bearing water through its gills, it survived only by moving. Once stopped, it would sink to the bottom and die of anoxia.

  —Peter Benchley, Jaws

  Old men didn’t talk about this, not even to each other. Just bore the truth of it, the change of life. You learned something about the world when you lost your sexual desire, you saw things differently, how tormented young men were, how stupid and out of control.

  —Colin Harrison, The Finder

  Poets that lasting marble seek

  Must carve in Latin or in Greek;

  We write in sand, our language grows,

  And, like the tide, our work o’erflows.

  —Edmund Waller, “Of English Verse”

  You’re a saint in a world where the only cardinal sin is to be bored,

  And you’ll do what you love, you’ll love what you do, you won’t ask what it’s for.

  —The Verlaines, “Angela”

  They’ve got cars big as bars, they’ve got rivers of gold,

  But the wind goes right through you, it’s no place for the old …

  —The Pogues, “Fairytale of New York”

  P A R T I

  T E A B A G G I N G C H A R Y B D I S

  S T E P P I N G O U T

  We’re three lights from the frontier.

  The frontier of course being defined as the last green light beyond which stretches a solid column of reds, like Chinese lanterns. The frontier is my aim point, the hinge of possibility, the variable that will determine (a) the amount of time I will spend in the cab, and (b) the amount of my fare. It helps me to calculate whether or not I’ll be late, and if so, how late, and whether I call, text, or browse. If I’m working, it also determines whether or not I can shoot out the window for background material I can Photoshop in later, since the speed of the cab is usually somewhat proportional to its distance from the frontier. For my purposes, a good rolling glide of about thirty miles per hour at least one hour after sundown produces just the right effect of blurred dynamism. New York is truly the city that never stops moving, and the trick of my trade is to capture this motion at its most evocative—and lucrative—moments.

  If I’m making sport with a playmate in the back seat, the frontier tells me how much time I have before the cab slows down and the driver looks in his mirror at what we’re up to, which affects the complex algorithm of Taxi Sex: oral is best on smooth straightaways of guaranteed duration; furtive gropings and dishabilles better at low speeds when flanked by other, higher vehicles or along narrow streets affording increased pedestrian views; full-groin revelation out of the question in stop-and-go traffic, unless that’s what you’re into. Personally, I only find it preferable while traversing bridges at night.

  Then again, sometimes just being alone in the back of a taxicab, watching the infinite streams and whorls of the city streak by like passing galaxies, is preferable to Taxi Sex. After all, the city may try to kill you, but at least it doesn’t give you an earful of whiny complaint. None that stays within earshot for long, anyway.

  This cabbie’s got his timing down pat, he’s got a good foot, he’s maintaining a two-to-three-light gap, keeping his speed in a range using controlled deceleration rather than braking, which means that barring construction, accidents, police convoys, cable trucks, or anybody from fucking Verizon, we should sail down to the meet at moderate speed, minimum cost, and merciful lack of aggravation. Good incentive for a good tip.

  And at least it’s comfortable. My chariot this evening is the venerable Ford Heifer. You know this vehicle as the Crown Victoria. Designed with rear legroom in mind, it’s roomy enough for a man to properly and thoroughly adjust his equipment. I can hardly remember what it was like before the city adopted the stretch cabs, and can’t imagine how people tolerated the smaller ones—no, how people actually fit in them. When I was still an assistant, carrying rental lights along with cameras, lenses, bipod, tripod, batteries, cords, and extra memory, there was just no way anyone else could be back there with me, even though sharing the fare meant saving a few bucks. Now that I have the discretionary capital, of course, I hardly even consider sharing a cab. Unless the model is exceptional, and she’s prepared to come across. I’m in this game for one thing, and I don’t gladly suffer those who waste my time. I’ve lost enough of that already.

  At least this cab’s clean. I speak from painfully accrued experience when I say that drivers maintaining clean cabs should be awarded—how exactly, I’m not sure, probably free gas, at nine bucks a gallon they certainly wouldn’t say no, and it’d be good incentive for all the others to clean up the crumpled receipts, discarded water bottles, hair, cigarette foil, gum, roaches, used condoms, vomit, lighters, vials, and other assorted detritus of transit that shake loose from us like dandruff wherever we go. If you are going to engage in the extreme sport of going down on a woman in the back of a taxicab (not, I repeat, not for amateurs), take my advice: Do not kneel on the floor.

  We’re on Columbus Avenue just passing the old Museum of Natural History, which finally joined the others and closed down temporarily last year. This makes for an elongated stretch of darkness, which isn’t brightened much by what little trade is visible as we drift south. There was a time when this part of town was alive with restaurants, bars, clubs, stores, and markets. It’s a much more depressing scene than the one Bruce Weber might have shot back in the day. There’s plywood over two-thirds of any commercial property on each block along the avenue, covered with illegible graffiti and strewn along its base with trash. The few lights visible at street level come from the handful of remaining restaurants open for business, and even this is refracted through layers of security barriers and industrial-size doormen. Above these, lights still glow in people’s apartments, though the lowermost floors now sport the same wrought-iron window guards once reserved for the parlor floors of townhouses. Even twenty feet off the ground, New Yorkers take no chances.

  —Scyooz me, mohn. Ees okay I take Broadway all de way dohn and go across feefty-sebahn street? Feefth eez teddible raht no.

  —Yes indeed. No trouble a’tall.

  It’s street, with that machine-gun rolled R from behind the front teeth, rather than stweet left behind from a pulling back of the lips. That, plus the short vowel-heavy last-name-first on the license suspended in the scratched plastic partition between the seats (Omo), plus the dee
p velvety brown skin that looks so good under halide lights, plus the lack of pungent body odor, rules out Haitian in favor of African. He’s asking me if he can leave me across the street from the meet instead of driving up in front of it from Fifth, which might piss me off, but since we’re making such good time, I’ll have a chance to stretch my legs before the gathering, have a smoke, maybe check out the night’s diversions at Nobu 57—smoothly fleshed, but pampered, spoiled, and temperamental, with daddy complexes and engineered overbites. I don’t need to hang around the bar getting soaked beforehand. I’m properly primed, no more, no less.

  Indulge me. Renny’s Rule Number Five: Proper Preparation. It’s a big night for me, one that promises to turn drab, dingy June 2013 into a very good summer, should all go as planned. Which means I’ve taken the time to accessorize. A polish of the crystal face on my Jaquet Droz. A hefty shot of Ronsonol for my sterling lighter (Elsa Peretti), three sharp spanks on the rump of a fresh pack of Davidoffs. Each measure punctuated in turn with sips of the perfect Manhattan: Basil Hayden bourbon whiskey, a dash of sweet Tribuno vermouth, and, most important, three teardrops of Angostura orange bitters, shaken to a froth over as much ice as will fit, served only in stemmed Waterford. One’s not enough, two is too many, three is just the beginning.

  All of this is really just to prep the persona, get just loose enough, just numb enough, to be able to get through an otherwise intolerable time. It’s a hell of a thing to have to act grateful to someone you despise, to try to coax them out of enough money to justify a job you hate.

  But that’s what it takes, at least if you want to keep moving forward. I do what I do because I need to, and because it enables me to enjoy the lifestyle hitherto taken for granted. Think there’s a reward for loyalty, merit in hard work, honor among leaders? Not in this town, not anymore. There is prosperity, and then there’s survival.

  There is no comparison between the linoleum cell on Thirty-seventh Avenue in Queens, where my mother sits at the window slowly going mad, and my parlor floor-through one-bedroom on Manhattan Avenue, in Manhattan, where I sip my Manhattan. Maybe you think I’m vain or shallow. I’d say I’m a realist living in unreal times and making the best of it. Carpe diem, dipshit.

  A pothole in the spine jolts me back to reality. We’ve reached Columbus Circle. Between the Trump International Hotel and Tower and the Mandarin Oriental, this area once had everything going for it. But the going’s gotten tougher. The Time Warner Center was finished years ago, but the abandoned renovation of the Columbus Circle subway station has left the surrounding streets jagged and torn. The fountain was refinished just in time to revert to its former role as one of the city’s largest latrines. All along the roundabout’s southern rim, shantytowns line the boarded-up frontages of stores. In the semi-enclosed subway entrance at the corner of Fifty-eighth and Ninth, there’s a black market most nights where you can buy anything from gasoline to guns. Tonight, the streets are empty. The people are all indoors.

  Or in taxicabs.

  You can tell real New Yorkers from gawking tourists by the way they sit in a cab, lips parted, mouth slightly open, so they don’t bite their tongues off when the driver makes a point of hitting every hole in the pavement. The tourists milling about the safe havens in front of the big, well-defended hotels are the ones telling each other the San Remo’s the Dakota and the Dakota’s the Beresford. There’s a cluster of ambulances at the entrance to the Mandarin Oriental, some VIP must have choked on his Osetra. They’ve just arrived; the EMTs clamber down out of their trucks, wave to one another in world-weary recognition, and light up in unison. They’re in no hurry and there’s no IV on the stretcher, so they’ll be bringing down a bag, or maybe more than one. This is the sort of New York Moment best captured with my trusty 35-millimeter Marathon Cyber SEX. Four frames: Bring Out Yer Dead.

  Traffic’s crawling and I’m itching for a Davidoff, but there’s cops all over the place and my driver would probably have a heart attack if they saw me light up. It’s no longer possible to enjoy a smoke indoors legally, which is why the speaks have portable air filters as standard equipment (they don’t have much else). More on those later; to serious business first, before the serious business of pleasure.

  True to his word, after skillfully circumnavigating the Circus Columbus, the driver drops me precisely at the Fifty-seventh Street light halfway between Fifth and Sixth, an incongruous location for a useless traffic signal (if it was put there to ease crosstown congestion, it’s a dismal failure). This driver has been excellent—street-savvy and swift—which means there’s no point in trying to recruit him. Either he hasn’t been here long enough or he’s already on someone else’s payroll, and I’d just be chiseling in, which could have serious repercussions, depending on just who else is using this cab to what ends. I swipe my Urbank Electrum through the slot, leaving a generous tip. Share that which you have (or at least, that which you have been pre-approved for) with those who have not.

  Tonight’s first meet is for a fat new Roundup magazine contract. The second meet concerns the Specials. One should never, ever rely on one sole means of income.

  This stretch of Fifty-seventh I like to think of as the Street of Dreams. At its eastern boundary, the Survivors: Tiffany, Bulgari, the Louis Vuitton flagship store with its exquisite staircase (I’ve repeatedly told L that I want to have her on that staircase, and she’s repeatedly promised me that, should circumstances permit, I will). Thrusting westward: the new Throb store in the old Ascot Chang location—I covered the opening for Raid, two-and-a-half grand direct-deposited into my Urbank account the next day; the perpendicular ski jump of the Nine West building (you can skip the restaurant beneath it); the aforementioned Nobu 57 (no comparison with its downtown progenitor, in food, décor, or clientele); and my beloved Rizzoli store, my refuge from chaos. I pray this bookstore won’t close down like all the others. When things get too much and I need some quiet time, I hide out in a corner in the upstairs photography section for hours. Every man needs a sanctum sanctorum from the Charybdis of need, including his own, and this is mine.

  The first meet’s at Shelley’s, an Italianate sitdown spot with a laughable interior but dependable seafood. What they also have, however, and where Marcus Chalk (editor in chief of Roundup, media mug par excellence, and my current meal ticket) goes when he means business, is a private dining room downstairs in the wine cellar. It’ll probably be Marcus; his mousy but effective assistant Diane; Johnette the lesbian AD, my biggest obstacle in any Roundup job; and Fabryce from marketing (whose inevitable advances I hope to avoid, though I suspect he’d make a good client for Specials).

  Shelley’s private dining room: a wood-trimmed, marble-floored terrarium with walls made of wine. Marcus Chalk sits at twelve o’clock at the round table, Fabryce to his right, Johnette to his left, Diane at six o’clock, closest to the glass door (presumably in case her boss needs her to run out to throw herself in front of a FedEx truck) and, at about four-thirty, closest to a corner with a stool suggestively set, an empty chair for me. (The prick.) Smiles and soft handshakes all round, except from Johnette, who owns a grip like a forceps made for bovine breach births. I sit down and dial up my best Obsequious Compliant.

  Let the Games Begin.

  Obligatory pleasantries, anecdotes, and Tales of Petty Outrage are put through the conversation hopper in due course. Food is perfunctorily ordered, lightly and nearly all vegetable or marine, except for Johnette, who orders a tagliata extra rare. (My stomach contracts. Johnette has jet-black, razor-styled hair, dead-level bangs in front, and a severe fantail, cut off mercilessly mid-neck, that looks uncomfortably like an SS helmet. Sitting under Johnette’s withering glare can be unappetizing enough, but doing so while watching her saw through hunks of bloody meat is downright disturbing.)

  —Renny, we’ve booked Johnny Retch and Miyuki for the cover story. All next year’s Dolce, Canali, and Giovanni Kwan, Chalk intones in his trademark Boardroom Baritone, the overheads casting a fine patina ov
er his smooth coriander dome.

  Fashion photography was something I did to pay the bills. That had been the plan, anyway, before the bottom fell out of the art market four years ago—a harbinger of worse things to come. I had talent, I had contacts, I had a portfolio made up of girls I knew and others I’d picked up. But what caught the eye of guys like Marcus Chalk were my cityscapes, long washes of light and shadow play in motion, an animation of staid facades and gridlocked intersections—think Berenice Abbott on meth shooting digital. It’s a technique I worked up with X, but I don’t want to think about X now. If I do, I’ll want a drink. Then another. There’ll be time enough to torture myself with memory later. Right now I’ve got things to do. Roundup’s monthly circulation runs to a million downloads. No matter how much I dislike these people, it’s all about the ducats.

  —Just what is it you’re looking for?

  —We want more of what you did for Diazinon, the Hollywood issue, Fabryce lisps, his eyes sliding over to his BlackBerry.

  Diazinon is Malathion’s sister magazine for the West Coast. They flew me out there last spring for a week-long shoot. I was lucky enough to get paid just before the editor in chief was found in somebody else’s Brentwood house with two naked teenage boys, one of whom was already catatonic from an overdose. Things haven’t been quite the same between the two rags since, though there’s been no buzz yet about a formal breakup.

  —Just with a little less …motion, Johnette says in her icy snarl, biting off the last word.

  —Yes, Renny, we’re looking for the same urban backwash effect you’ve been doing, but not so much that it detracts from Johnny and Miyuki. A bit less movement in the background, a bit more contrast to bring focus to the actors and the clothes. You understand, Chalk says regally, pouring on the Professional Indoor Sincerity-Speak.