Rivers of Gold Read online

  —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.

  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

  More 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 t
heir 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?