Rivers of Gold Read online

  We read the signals effortlessly in each other’s faces and not soon enough we’re in the back of a Toyota Jersey en route to my place, oblivious to the outside world as we drink deeply from each other’s mouths, our fingers whispering beneath fabric and the rising heat from her body diffusing through mine. I am delighted to discover she is wearing the tuxedo-style panties I bought her at Kiki de Montparnasse in SoHo. (Clearly, the man who thinks he is her fiancé has not familiarized himself with her lingerie collection, and thereby deserves his fate.) We maintain outer discretion from the backseat of the cab through the front vestibule and down the hall to my apartment, where she silently eases up behind me as I’m fumbling with my goddamn keys, smoothly pulls down my zipper, and deftly wraps her hand around my painfully stiff cock (I never wear underwear when I’m stepping out for the evening), letting out an appreciative grunt at the absence of pubic hair and presence of the condom I put on in the men’s room at Ouest (maintaining an erection indefinitely is not a challenge when I’m in L’s presence).

  I just barely manage to get the damn door open when she shoves me against the inner alcove wall, slamming the door shut with her magnificent ass, her tongue lighting a trail from my mouth to my balls to my brainstem. Now I’ve got her pushed back against the front door, her skirt up around her waist, one of her powerful legs wrapped tightly around my ass, her tuxedo undone and liquid fire between us. I recognize the suburbs of her first climax when she starts moaning softly in Czech.

  —Prosím nezastavit.

  The challenge at this point is to stave off my own orgasm for as long as possible (L is multiorgasmic, my record is four of hers to one of my own, and every time we’re together I try to beat it). Every man has his own method of doing this, of course, from the commonsensical (reciting the alphabet backward) to the tedious (counting backwards from one hundred by sevens). My own prolonging agent is the “Mahna Mahna” song from the Muppets, a time-honored method that never lets me down. Try it sometime and see.

  Mah-na mah-na (do do do-do-do … )

  —Slyšte!

  Mah-na mah-na (do do do-do … )

  —Těžšĭ! DÁT TO MĚ !

  Mah-na mah-na (do do do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do!)

  —Ó BŮH!! ZAMÝŠLÍM PŘIJET JEDNA TISÍCINA ČASY!!!

  And once again we leave this vale of tears all too briefly for one of shimmering golden stars.

  O N T H E S E T

  Santiago liked the view from Vernon Boulevard and Fiftieth. Sitting in the little park by the Number 7 train stop, the last one completed before the Greenstreets program was shut down to save money, he could look across the river from Queens toward the skyline of Manhattan, and wonder if the city would try to kill him again today.

  Probably not, he was pretty sure. It was his day off, which meant he’d have time to make the run up north with his father and still be back in time for his second job. Traffic and other conditions permitting, it would be a round trip of some four, perhaps five hours. Since it was currently four A.M., he would, as usual, have to go straight to work when the store opened at ten and let his father take the van home to unload. Like many cops, Santiago’s second job was doing retail security work, which was plentiful around town, as the surviving stores and restaurants needed all the help they could get these days. Santiago was a rent-a-cop for Barneys, pulling twelve-hour shifts standing around looking menacing for the rich, or at least those who still had good credit.

  It would be a fairly quiet drive; he’d loaded up his iPhone with Manzanita and Tomatito for the ride. His one contribution to his father’s van was an adapter for the dash radio, which his father had relented on after Santiago played him a Juan Luis Guerra track from his phone over the Bose speaker system at the audio place. Santiago always planned ahead.

  A chilly breeze came up off the river, bringing with it a nice whiff of a passing garbage barge. Santiago shifted his weight across the bench from one cheek to another, adjusting himself so that his gun wouldn’t dig into his back.

  Not that he’d have much need for it, even sitting by himself on a park bench in Queens at four in the morning, as the bars were shutting down and the drunks went windmilling their way home (or wherever they went). Detective (third grade) Sixto Fortunato Santiago stood six foot five and weighed between two hundred twenty and two hundred thirty pounds, depending on how recently he’d been to his parents’ house for dinner. His most prominent features other than his large eyes were his outsized hands, which had the look of leather well broken in. His hands were the product of years in his father’s machine shop, on the steel press, the English wheel, the lathe. Every family member took a turn in the shop, but Santiago had racked up the most hours by far. Smoothly worn callus extended from the base of his palms to his fingertips. A woman once told him that his hands felt like polished wood as he moved them over her body. The woman was long gone now, but her observation had stayed with him, a parting gift.

  As the youngest of four children, Santiago had taken plenty of shit as it rolled downhill from his sister and two brothers. His asshole brother Rafa had been especially cruel, viewing his younger sibling as a servant-scapegoat-punching bag put on Earth for his own personal use. Santiago always gave as good as he got, but the difference in age and mass favored the elder. That had changed during Santiago’s fourteenth summer, when his father got him a job on a Poland Spring water truck through a friend. The awkward Santiago, in the middle of his growth spurt and unused to his shifting size and weight, spent twelve-hour days humping five-gallon jugs and thirty-six-bottle cases of water into offices and delis all over town. That was when he’d first started learning about the city, its staggered lights, traffic patterns, the best shortcuts between boroughs to use at rush hour. The city had opened up and out for him then, expanding his sight far beyond his Fort Tryon neighborhood.

  At the end of that summer, at the start of a blistering, humid Labor Day weekend, Santiago’s asshole brother Rafa had started in on him over some meaningless shit that neither now remembered, right when Santiago had gotten home from a particularly grueling shift. Santiago had, without thinking, synchronized the relevant muscle groups from shoulder to wrist, now massively built up by the power of DNA, time, and water, and sent one huge fist along a dead-level trajectory into his brother’s solar plexus, aiming for the wall three feet behind Rafa’s back. Rafa had sat down on the floor and puked all over himself; their mother had come running and screaming, and Santiago had been banished to the shower by his beaming father, Victor, who then surreptitiously gave him a hearty pat on his broadening back.

  Later that weekend, Santiago had experienced for the first time the sublime joy of a girl putting her mouth around his penis.

  There had been nothing said, but a subtle shift in family dynamics occurred after that weekend. There was no more bullying, no more leaning on hermano pequeño. Santiago knew he had crossed an invisible barrier between childhood and something more, he could feel it in his carriage and gait, and the rest of the family knew it as well. His brothers had stopped bothering him, even warmed toward him a bit. His sister, Esperanza, with whom he’d always had the best relationship among his siblings, became a trusted confidante, who backed him whenever he cooked up a story to feed to their mother, on whom Santiago’s burgeoning popularity with the neighborhood girls was not lost. His father, Santiago knew, did not buy his bullshit for one second, but subtly toed the line. Santiago knew he could not lie to his father, and that Victor knew it as well. Their relationship deepened accordingly, something Santiago was privately fiercely proud of, living as he was in a time and place where more than twenty percent of fathers abandoned their families before their firstborn reached the first grade. Victor Santiago was differently made, and his youngest son realized it at a crucial time.

  Twice-tapped brights from down Vernon Boulevard brought Santiago off the bench. Victor’s van glided smoothly to a stop by the Café Brasilia and Santiago climbed in, wordlessly plugging his iPhone into
the dash and thumbing up his playlist, trying not to think about the large, heavy-looking shape behind them in the cargo area, hidden under an old mover’s blanket. Jesús Alemany’s golden trumpet fanned out from eight speakers.

  The van was typical Victor. It was a fourth-generation Honda Odyssey originally seized in a drug raid. Santiago had steered his father to a police auction after a rare argument. Victor had originally wanted to buy one off “a guy he knew” in the Bronx, an entrepreneur in the booming black market for hybrids, but his son the cop put his foot down. Victor had driven it off the auction lot for two thousand dollars cash, straight to his machine shop, where he’d spent the next six weeks breaking it down and rebuilding it. He’d junked the old cylinder head and bored out the cylinders another hundredth of an inch, machining a new head and valve covers himself. A metalworker he knew in Brooklyn forged him a new crankshaft and pistons. He’d run stainless-steel lines to new stainless-steel brakes, and bolted up a whole new stainless-steel exhaust system himself. New stainless tank and fuel pump, new alloy radiator, a larger oil cooler, ECU remap, lightweight alloy rims (not too fancy, Santiago didn’t want the neighborhood vatos all over the van) on premium all-weather tires.

  Santiago had helped out stripping the cabin, which was braced, plumbed for the Bose system, then outfitted and upholstered over several weekends by some guy named José from Jersey that Victor knew, who for an unspecified amount of cash replaced the factory front seats with eight-way power adjustables from a top-of-the-line Lexus. (Santiago didn’t want to know.) Wherever possible Victor had obtained the maximum warranties available on the new parts he’d installed. The paint job was good but unremarkable (though Victor had had the body and frame taken down to bare metal and sprayed with a chemical rust inhibitor before painting, courtesy of a fellow platano he knew from home who now ran a body shop in the South Bronx). At a glance, the van looked like every third people-mover on the street. Closer inspection hinted at the humdrum Honda’s hidden potential; one time behind the wheel turned the most diehard skeptic into a true believer. Santiago christened it the Ninja Van.

  Victor wheeled them around for the riverside loop north, up 278 and over the Kosciuszko Bridge to pick up the Cross Bronx Expressway (skirting the toll off the Triboro Bridge), slotting them smoothly up I-95 away from the city, the opposite lanes forming a single sclerotic artery of immobile semis, reefers, and tankers, inbound at a geologic pace to help the city survive one more day. Not for the first time, Santiago thought that blocking this crucial stretch of roadway, along with maybe one tunnel or bridge, be it barricade or bomb, would cause the city to crumple to its knees like a man kicked brutally in the balls.

  They spoke little as they left the city behind, watching the sprawling slums give way to derelict suburbs full of empty housing developments, artifacts of a boom gone bad. Santiago cherished the fact that he could simply sit with his father on a long drive without having to say anything. There were times when he thought that the city would finally triumph not by physically killing him, but by filling his head with so much noise that he would want to check out voluntarily. Growing up, there had always been a spare set of bunk beds in the tiny bedroom in which Santiago and his brothers were crammed, for relatives and close friends emigrating from the Dominican Republic to the city and points north. Santiago had gone to an overcrowded George Washington High School on Audubon Avenue, which he’d always thought of as a zoo with a loading zone. And joining the Department had plunged him headlong into the freak parade that was life in New York City at the turn of a century and millennium.

  It had been Victor who’d given him the unimaginable gift of privacy.

  It was partly the result of diligent hard work, part windfall, and part historical accident. Victor’s machine shop had prospered enough to support his growing family, though not enough to get them out of the cramped rental walk-up it was squeezed into in Inwood, a north Manhattan neighborhood that was just starting to turn in the 1990s. Nine-eleven had thrown everything up in the air. That night, Victor had come home with extra-fine particle filter masks and goggles for everyone, and told them in no uncertain terms that anyone going south of Twenty-third Street should wear them at all times or he would beat the living shit out of them, glaring at his youngest son. Santiago was put to work sifting rubble for bodies and directing traffic in and around Ground Zero for two weeks, and he wore the gear his father gave him every day, showering twice daily. Fourteen bronchial cases in his unit later, Santiago thanked the Virgin and her blessed son for his father’s foresight, although privately he tended to see his father as more of a shaman from an older time, when having such mystical vision was considered a blessing and not some voodoo bullshit to be buried under canon law.

  Victor had paid close attention to the government’s response to the attacks in the subsequent months, as the family tensed for financial disaster. When the Fed cut interest rates to one percent, Victor had borrowed as much as he thought he could recoup within one year, invested in new plant and equipment, and, over time, paid off the loan early. When Santiago had asked his father why he agreed to be penalized for early repayment, Victor had cuffed him a good one across the side of the head, snarling, “Carajo, you wanna save a few bucks or you wanna be debt-free, ASAP?”

  The gambit paid off. As the city recovered, the shop got more work, and with its new equipment and even some new hired hands (though Santiago and his siblings still put in at least ten hours a week at the shop on top of their day jobs), the Receivables column in Victor’s ledger got longer. Santiago began noticing the Wall Street Journal lying around the shop alongside the Post, the Daily News, and El Diario. The night of the first airstrike on Baghdad in 2003, Santiago (who by that point was living in Long Island City, and liking it) had been summoned back up to Inwood for dinner. Over his mother’s heavenly chivo picante, lambí guisado, and mofongo, washed down with glacial bottles of Presidente, Santiago and his siblings were informed that Victor was making a bid to buy the building in which his shop was located. Gasps of ay and coño went up from everyone except Santiago and his mother, who nailed his asshole brother Ricardo a good one on the back of the head for his profanity. After dinner, while the others whooped it up with cigars and rum, Santiago confronted his father privately and asked him just what the fuck he thought he was doing.

  “You want another one?” Victor replied, raising a cocked backhand. Though not, Santiago recalled fondly, without a smile—just as well, since Santiago by this time had nearly a foot and a hundred pounds on his father.

  Once again, Victor’s foresight brought his family unprecedented prosperity. Soon he owned not just the building housing his company, but the apartment in which he and Santiago’s mother lived. Victor had kept a wary eye on the city’s exploding real estate market, and Santiago often overheard his father muttering and grumbling to himself in the shop as he read the papers—things like, “Bitch, you take your fucking ARMS and shove ’em up your ass.”

  Since just before 9/11 Santiago had lived in a third-floor walk-up in a well-kept prewar apartment building on Vernon Boulevard. It was originally a two-bedroom with plenty of space and light, there being few skyscrapers in the neighborhood at the time. Santiago had little furniture with which to clutter it up. He’d only worked on the kitchen slightly to allow himself to indulge his keen interest in cooking, and he had turned the living room into a makeshift home gym with state-of-the-art Precor equipment bought on the cheap. The owner of the building, a tough old Jew named Hiram, had cashed out when property values peaked in ’06, and the new owner (some hedge-fund kid from Manhattan who never even visited the building) jumped in with both feet, leveraged to the hairline, thinking the market would never drop. Drop it did, and violently, over the course of the next two years, in every borough but Manhattan, and while trying to track down the new owner to find out why the building had no heat one January, Santiago discovered that said owner had thrown the keys at Urbank and disappeared (ahead of a host of creditors and an SEC investigati
on of his fund). Once Urbank repossessed the building, Santiago and his fellow renters were offered buyouts.

  And once again, Victor Santiago had displayed shamanic foresight and timing. When asked, he had advised his son to buy his apartment outright, counseled him on the finer points of first-time mortgage application (“Cabrón, you tell them you want a thirty-year fixed at this rate, that’s all, they try to sell you some horseshit deal you tell ’em to go fuck themselves in the ass”), and co-signed the loan with some tender words of advice for his youngest (“You miss one fucking payment, just one, you’re out in the street, I don’t give a shit, you come crying to me I’ll piss in your face, claro?”). Now Santiago had the monthly sword of Damocles hanging over his head, but—the apartment was his.

  Suddenly his mind was brimming with possibilities. He did two things immediately: He applied for a second job at Barneys on the referral of a brother from his unit who also worked there; and he celebrated his first night as a homeowner with a girl he knew from Inwood named Anilda, who fucked him so hard he had bruises and friction burns on his groin and thighs for three days afterward.