Rivers of Gold Read online

  This response is what had brought Santiago and his extraño partner to the Broome Street Bar the night two morons tried to fillet each other on the sidewalk outside. The night More had (for the second time) whipped out his little big-bore and saved Santiago’s ass. And the night that, in their sector (in which they of course were the only available unit), the mutilated body of a cabdriver named Eyad Fouad had been discovered near the Holland Tunnel entrance on Dominick Street, inside yet another restaurant padlocked for nonpayment of taxes.

  Eyad Fouad was Egyptian, born in Alexandria and a legal U.S. resident. According to his TLC license, he’d been driving a cab for two years. He was not on any known watch list. He had no violations and had never been summoned to the taxi court on Rector Street. He had no known medical problems, nor records for treatment of depression or violence.

  But the gasoline that had been used on him had not quite obscured the fractures and dislocations Eyad had suffered before immolation; the postmortem would confirm these had been inflicted while he was still alive. Eyad had been put through the wringer, slowly and carefully, by someone with time and expertise.

  Santiago jumped on this one immediately because Homicide nonchalantly dumped it in his lap without so much as a thank-you.

  He jumped on it because it meant more credits for him in his Investigative Function class.

  He jumped on it because slow torture was out of keeping with the frenzied drug killings that were the usual type of homicide around town these days.

  But mostly, he jumped on it because More did.

  For once, More actually showed interest.

  In a dead cabbie.

  Huh.

  I N T E R L U D E I ( A N D A N T E )

  The man called Reza covered his ears as another 747 drifted down toward tarmac that began just a few yards from the water’s edge. He was leaning against the front fender of an Audi RS9 that glimmered in the light pollution softly emanating from the airport. A second car, a tricked-out Honda Akuma sedan, idled nearby. Two men sat in its front seats smoking nervously; a third was out in the weeds somewhere with a suppressed STG-2000-C assault rifle with FLIR optics. The man called Reza would never have dreamed of coming to this meet without backup, but he had little faith in his troops. Especially given the ones they’d be up against.

  He absently crushed the long paper filter of a Kazakh cigarette in two dimensions, Russian-style, before lipping it up and cupping his hands around a gold Dunhill lighter that spat a three-quarter-inch blue tongue of flame. He held the gas jet to the plug of black tobacco at the cigarette’s end long enough to be sure he had a good draw going; they went out all too easily. An acquired taste, acquired long ago, in a prison he didn’t care to remember.

  The man who’d called the meet liked this sad little spit of land near JFK International because police surveillance aircraft could not overfly the airport directly, and the roar of the jets undermined the efficacy of most listening devices; infrared was usually distorted somewhat by the amount of heat generated by the airport lights and the exhaust streams of the planes. The marshy terrain made the advance insertion of any personnel other than trained frogmen exceedingly difficult. The man who’d called the meet knew all about such things, having learned them in campaigns in Ingushetia, Dagestan, and, of course, Chechnya, where he’d added to his already fearsome reputation by matching the savagery of rebel fighters with his own. He’d been drafted into the army during the second Chechen war, plucked from his home in Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk, where he’d been sent following a homicide conviction ( just how many deaths he was charged with was unknown) in his hometown of Kiev. Magadan was a relic from the days of the purges, when Stalin sent his enemies east, packed in boxcars for a weeks-long trip in temperatures reaching forty below zero. Reza had once known a Turkish criminal sentenced to Magadan. The inmate had bribed a guard for his cell phone charger, and then hanged himself with it the night before his transfer.

  The man who had called the meet—whose first name was in fact Miroslav but because of his background was usually called “the Slav,” in hushed tones—was Reza’s boss. Reza did not know who the Slav worked for, and knew better than to ask. The Slav was known to be a high-ranking officer in one of the five major syndicates that had sprung up in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse to divide up the country’s riches, and then, armed with the capital from their wholesale plunder, had set out to carve up the rest of the world among themselves. Multilingual, ravenous, and utterly ruthless, these men kept up the most enduring traditions of organized crime: Bigotry is for losers; work with whoever you can profit from; always be willing to work with existing local networks when entering a new territory; and, last but not least, use reliable subcontractors (and cutouts) wherever possible to maintain distance between the organization’s strategists at the center and those far out on the tactical edge of things.

  Which is where Reza came in. Now a naturalized citizen, Reza had first arrived in New York in the early 1990s with only a smattering of English and a criminal record he’d paid dearly to have expunged. As a new arrival from a former Warsaw Pact nation, he’d been screened (though not too carefully) by Immigration, which seemed more concerned with whether he was carrying any diseases and if he’d start paying taxes like a good resident (this was during the 1991 recession) than with scrutinizing his bona fides. Reza had done what many a good immigrant had done before him and would continue to do afterward: got a hack license and went to work as a New York City taxi driver.

  How easy it had been, in those days before 9/11, even before the ’93 bombing, for a cabbie who didn’t have to send money home to support a family of God knows how many in the middle of God knows where, one who actually had some decent connections, to make good money and put it to good use. Of course, he’d had his sponsors. Those who had cleaned up his record, who’d paid to get him into the country and set him up in a shitty apartment on McGinnis Boulevard in Queens, expected a healthy return on their investment. Reza understood his role perfectly; he was a plant, an independent contractor that the organization was looking to grow for long-term gain. He’d never be one of the inner circle, but he was fine with that. He’d always worked best alone.

  It hadn’t taken many nights behind the wheel, ferrying home horny drunken youngsters from the East Village, the Lower East Side, and SoHo, to the Upper East Side, Chelsea, Williamsburg, Carroll Gardens, and Park Slope, for Reza to figure out where the action was. He’d put out his feelers carefully, seeing which bars were best for women, which ones for drugs, which ones for the commerce in both. New York City nightlife in the nineties was a far easier market to work than contemporary southeastern Europe. Typical nights along Orchard Street, Driggs Avenue, Avenue A, or Houston Street—all were driven by the same hormonal and chemical propulsion as the region he’d left, but with no government or police supervision like the sort Reza was used to, and with none of the seething tribal malice that always simmered just beneath the surface of all the then-EU hopefuls. No, it was the same as working the summer crowd at Laganas, except these people had no sense of danger, no limit to their appetites, and, more importantly, no limit to their credit cards. He’d felt he was witnessing an entire generation underwriting its life on someone else’s expense account, and he knew he’d fit right in. God, these Americans are incredible, he remembered thinking repeatedly in those heady early days. The men who’d become his first clients had the same lack of scruples as their contemporaries in the Ionian Sea and points east, but absolutely none of the business sense. They’d film their girlfriends having sex with them, or with other men, or with each other, and then post it on the Internet. Unbelievable, Reza’d thought, these morons give it away for free! No wonder the U.S. had gone the way of its mother nation, the U.K.; its young people were dumber than dogshit, they seemed well aware of this fact, and they continued upon their aimless course unperturbed. A miraculous place, for an operator like Reza.

  Full of energy and flush with cash from his cab shifts and
initial ventures in flesh and narcotics (and far less encumbered by the expenses faced by his fellow cabbies, thanks to his handlers), he’d spent night after night drawing up new schemes for ever larger returns. The American appetite for marijuana and cocaine was absolutely bottomless, and Reza repeatedly mentioned this to his handlers, had even given volume and percentages from what he’d been able to glean from his contacts in the bars. Not your department, they’d told him. There’s a network of wholesalers in place that we deal with, it works much more smoothly and attracts far less attention. Your input is noted. For now, we’re sticking with pills.

  Very early on—ironically, about the time a new Italian mayor was beefing up the police presence around the city—Reza had investigated more niche markets for party-oriented substances then in vogue in the city’s bars and clubs. He’d met some British kid, like the ones he’d remembered from the Greek islands but sharper, who was looking for a connection for lab-grade pharmaceuticals, straight from the manufacturers. The kid had asked Reza if he could come by any Ketamine, Rohypnol, or especially MDMA. We’ll get back to you on that, Reza’s handlers had told him when he’d relayed the request. Reza had given the Brit a conversational shrug, and promised to keep in touch.

  He’d had better luck with his first legal business, a pack-and-ship place along a busy stretch of Queens Boulevard, not far from the TLC building. He was dumbfounded that Americans made it so easy to move vast amounts of freight, any size, by any means of transport, sometimes as quickly as next-day delivery. In Bulgaria moving a container of English cigarettes or Italian beer sometimes took a week’s worth of cajoling, intimidation, and bribes. But with a Photoshop-equipped computer and high-resolution color printer, a postage meter, a bank of postal boxes the police never bothered to check, and an account with a marvelous agency called Federal Express, he’d be able to bring the best of Istanbul right to Astoria!

  Very good, Reza, his handlers had said. This one will earn you some points with the brass. Of course, they’d commandeered a slew of the postal boxes (various sizes) for themselves, and he’d had to stay up late a few nights designing and printing letterheads for bogus corporations the organization opened and closed on a revolving basis, with multiple “offices” in Liechtenstein, Grand Cayman, Panama City, and, of course, Zurich. FedEx charges to these corporate accounts would be billed to fraudulent company credit cards (another sideline business Reza explored beneficially).

  Meanwhile, he’d grown his fleshpots. It had always surprised him how easily American girls would open their arms and legs to anyone with ready cash and an exotic accent, and even more so how many such young women, particularly in the East Village, would be willing to enter into an informal arrangement for services rendered in exchange for what they claimed were difficult necessities in life—a guarantor for an apartment, a letter of recommendation for a job or school, or loan collateral (oh, how Reza loved exploring this avenue for income!). Reza quickly recognized the dynamic commercial potential in party girls. Within eighteen months he had a string of tough barmaids, sycophantic waitresses, bored sales clerks, self-deluding artists, strung-out filmmakers, and neurotic actresses milking cash from barroom Casanovas from Gansevoort Street in Manhattan to Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg. Reza was careful to treat his talent in that casual, just-one-of-the-guys manner they all seemed to respond well to, never making threats or hitting them, and always ready with a few bucks or possibly something more as needed. Not only did the girls stick with him through their most productive years, they even procured new assets for him, since more arrived every fall, a bottomless wellspring of young, willing, needy talent.

  Excellent, Reza! his handlers had exclaimed. It’s always good to make use of local merchandise. Girls are a much bigger pain in the ass to move than guns. Transshipment points are the worst: they never want to go, we have to insist, and merchandise gets damaged or lost that way. Those fuckers at Interpol and Europol are always busting our balls about that.

  Flush with cash from eager orifices, Reza expanded his mercantile horizon. He still drove a cab, and during the long hours of each shift he daydreamed of cabs and contraband, a checkered yellow distribution network that would support his burgeoning empire of sex, chemistry, and software (he was keenly interested in the American addiction to wireless handheld devices and marveled at how many of them simply could not do without every fucking new application that seemed to appear week after week). Reza knew better than to try and cheat the taxi meters; the garage owners’ greed was legendary, and any anomalies between the driver’s trip sheet and what he brought to the cashier’s window at shift change would instantly result in termination and possibly prosecution.

  But that was a sucker’s game anyway, nickel-and-dime stuff. Reza was much more interested in the brokerages that provided drivers with the loans to secure the all-important medallion, the permit that allowed any moron just off a plane a chance to operate a taxicab in New York City. Since Reza had first arrived in the city, the price of a TLC medallion had more than doubled in two decades (it currently stood at nine hundred thousand dollars for an individual medallion, and two million dollars for a mini-fleet owner). To set up a front company that could access lines of credit for those amounts gave Reza a painful hard-on while he sat behind the wheel. He envisioned a vast, vertically oriented network that funded, secured, maintained, and operated a golden armada of mobile profit centers, which doubled as nondescript ferries of a wide range of products and services (with access to all airports, shipping ports, and railway stations!) widely desired by the general public and foolishly deemed illegal by the authorities, thus stoking demand while—

  Forget it, Reza, his handlers had told him flatly. The organization’s not interested in a bunch of dirty fucking taxicabs. The brokerage idea’s a good one, though. We’ll look into it.

  Reza was not discouraged by their dismissal. He knew his idea had promise, and he continued to hone and refine it.

  While he did so, 9/11 came and went.

  Interestingly, despite the initial investigation of the yellow cab fleet by the TLC, NYPD, FBI, and some worthless nonsensical agency known as the Department of Homeland Security, Reza (who had spent many a sweaty night following the attacks tending to his bolt-stash of fake passports, overseas SIM cards, Krugerrands, and cash in half a dozen foreign currencies) was completely overlooked. After all, by that time he was a naturalized citizen with a fixed address and clean criminal and tax records (necessary but unpleasant, for Reza hated paying taxes more than anything else). Moreover, he was an experienced non-Muslim cabbie, and the TLC in those days was desperate to maintain the pool of experienced cabdrivers that was depleted following the attacks by arrests, deportations, early retirements, and general flight from the industry, even going so far as to streamline the reentry process for those former drivers who had left the business but returned once the dust had settled, or once they’d secured new funds from God knows where.

  The attacks didn’t bother him. He hardly noticed. It certainly didn’t surprise him; those greedy camel-fuckers thrived on screwing things up for others, it was just how they were. Like that thieving little fuck Eyad, who deserved everything he got. The only way in which 9/11 impinged on his life at all was that he had to give free rides for the first couple of weeks afterward. That had nearly killed him, throwing away money like that. But his garage owner, a dissipated old Irishman who reeked of liquor even when Reza showed up for his shifts at seven thirty A.M., had insisted. Reza had hated the faded, white-haired octogenarian who still showed up for work day after day, who sat in the dispatch booth listening to his annoying music full of lutes and whistles and accordions, who lived on whiskey and cut-rate cigarettes, and errantly pissed against the side of the garage several times a day.

  But Reza did concede the ghostly old Irishman one point: taxicabs were rivers of gold, no doubt about it.

  As the city recovered, Reza tended to his businesses as a horticulturalist would his garden, and fruition followed. This p
eriod had been Reza’s first real experience in New York during hard times; 9/11 had merely exacerbated a recession that had begun the year before, in a flaming conflagration of dotcom destruction. As New Yorkers (with memories scorched by the attack) quickly forgot the tech-boom implosion that crashed to earth the year before the towers did, they eagerly embraced the new religion of Better Living On Credit. Reza silently watched a whole new crop of suckers flock to this latest delusion, that they could transcend even the go-go nineties with a whole new soaring mountain of excess built on debt. Real estate replaced the thirst for tech stocks; a new bubble rose like a sinister phoenix from the ashes of the old. For prescient opportunists like Reza, it was the ringing of a great dinner bell, inaudible to the prey.

  Ever the hard-working immigrant, Reza had by this time sold his shipping store to UPS and migrated to the East Village to keep a closer eye on his core businesses. In the immediate aftermath of the attack many downtown property owners had panicked and sold, in some cases offering renters the option to buy their apartments cheap. Reza had bought two adjacent apartments in a well-maintained prewar building on the corner of East Tenth and Avenue A with a view of Tompkins Square Park, and combined and renovated them for next to nothing (thanks to his handlers, who saw this as rewarding his years of service with the easy gift of city permits and Pakistani work crews overseen by Ukrainian foremen, a small matter). Now a new property owner like many of his neighbors (though unlike them, free of debt), Reza watched the value of his new home swell like his penis now did each day, sometimes several times a day, thanks to his happy menagerie of bimbos from Washington Heights to Bushwick, whose tight pockets were now full of drugs and cash for their bar tabs, all courtesy of tio Reza.