Rivers of Gold Page 5
Santiago knew there was something unusually wrong at the beginning of their last shift together, during one of those day-long drenching New York rains that sent the cockroaches scurrying up the pipes into people’s apartments to escape the deluge. Bertie Goldstein came on shift looking like a wet rag, and once inside the radio car, she slumped against the passenger window.
“You okay, Goldbug?” Santiago asked nervously. Chronic fatigue was an omnipresent condition with Bertie Goldstein, given her medical history, but Santiago sensed something further amiss.
“Tired is vat I yam,” Bertie Goldstein said in a ragged voice just above a whisper. “Okay you drive?”
Drive Santiago did, like a bat out of hell, straight to the emergency entrance of St. Vincent’s Hospital on Seventh Avenue (now on its umpteenth change of ownership), where he threatened to arrest two paramedics just lighting up if they didn’t move their fucking bus clear of the admitting bay. The shouting went unnoticed by Bertie Goldstein, who had lost consciousness almost immediately after Santiago had pulled away from the station house. Santiago jammed the navy blue Traffic Malibu nose-first into the admitting bay, left the motor running, and carefully carried the comatose Bertie Goldstein inside (Jesus, she weighed nothing, nothing at all, even in full uniform), where he got into a shouting match with a bitchy West Indian nurse who was nearly his own size. The last he saw of her, Bertie Goldstein was flat out on a gurney being slammed through a set of double doors bearing the words AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT in angry red letters. Santiago had then turned, slowly, to look at the half-dozen or so faces in the admitting area, waiting, offering each other only the same look of fear and helplessness. He steeled himself as best he could for the wait.
Although he’d been watching the clock, Santiago lost track of how long he’d stood there waiting for news. It seemed that a smiling, jovial young doctor bearing the name tag ZUCKERMAN simply materialized in front of him and told him with jarring bonhomie that Bertie Goldstein’s leukocyte count was down through the floor, acute neutropenia, the cancer already at end stage, would he be able to contact her family? The happy young medicine man then swerved off toward an anxious-looking couple behind Santiago, whom he cheerfully informed that the malignancy in their five-year-old’s liver had already metastasized, there was nothing they could do, they’d try to keep him comfortable, and would they please come this way? And off they went, Dr. Zuckerman waving to the nurses at the admitting desk.
Santiago had stood in the middle of the waiting area, Bertie Goldstein’s uniform jacket, hat, and belt gathered in his huge hands, utterly at a loss as to which violent emotion surging through him to indulge first. He watched the second hand of the hospital clock make a full revolution (though he could not, and later would not, remember what time it was). At some point a cool breeze blew in through his mind, as though from far offshore, and he had his iPhone in hand before he knew it. Within a minute he had an ID on a Dr. Marc Zuckerman, St. Vincent’s Hospital (Cancer Center), and in a second minute, the jaunty doctor’s ride, a silver BMW Z7 M coupe, brand new. The third, fourth, and fifth minutes involved processing, and the sixth minute got the wrecker dispatched. Within forty minutes, Dr. Zuckerman’s Z was on its way to the police impound on Eleventh Avenue (a half-cleared yard left fallow since the city’s Atlantic Yards renovation project collapsed in ’08) where it would stay lost for a month.
Bertie Goldstein didn’t last a month. Santiago went through the motions with the one relative he could locate, a cold, whiny spinster from Milwaukee who complained nonstop about costs, and why the hell the NYPD wouldn’t pick up the goddamn tab, best to leave her there, it’s the only place she was ever halfway comfortable. Santiago voiced the appropriate responses, which seemed to come from someone else’s mouth; he would not remember these later.
Once a year, on the anniversary of their first patrol together, Santiago drove out to the sprawling necropolis that was the New Calvary/Mount Zion Cemetery in Sunnyside, Queens, and placed flowers on Bertie Goldstein’s gravestone (at least the one that said her name in English—he couldn’t read the Hebrew).
Santiago had skidded a bit after that. Did some unprotected drinking, some binge-screwing. Got into a couple of fights (including one in which Bertie Goldstein’s replacement, a crewcut young gringo with biker tattoos and a penchant for conversational use of the word “kike,” had ended up face-down and unconscious in a fifty-five-gallon trash barrel). The second time he’d shown up at his parents’ house for dinner with combat-torn hands, his mother had reached up, cradled his face, and said, “Querido, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but whatever it is, fix it, or let us help you fix it.” The scowl on Victor’s face, as he stood behind her, conveyed all Santiago needed to know.
He’d have to shape up.
But, as is often the case with young men, it took a while.
On the third anniversary of Bertie Goldstein’s death, Santiago was spit-shined in full dress uniform, talking to the ugliest, sloppiest, most repulsive policeman he’d ever met, an obese captain named McKeutchen, who somehow knew about Bertie Goldstein and Santiago’s fondness for her. McKeutchen had dropped Santiago’s file onto a desk strewn with all matter of rank-looking food residue, peered out at Santiago with watery blue eyes all but lost in rolls and loaves and sheaves of fat, and said, “I need you to do something for me. I’ll tell you what it is when the time comes.”
And one year later, in December 2012, McKeutchen assigned him to an undercover taxicab with a new volunteer from ESU named Everett More.
“He doesn’t talk,” Santiago explained. “At least, not unless you ask him something. He’s always reading, right up until go time. When we’re on the set, he blends right in, talks if he has to, picks up on things people around him are saying, and sort of copies them. That’s probably why my boss chose him, he’s so—” Santiago searched for the right word in Spanish—“anodino. Nondescript. I mean, you don’t see him. He’s the kind of guy you might sit next to at a bus stop, or on the train, and five minutes later you wouldn’t be able to remember what he looks like.”
Victor appeared to be mulling this over as he veered off I-95 for the Long Wharf exit. Santiago could see the enormous Q Bridge span arcing over the Port of New Haven’s anchorage channel against a backdrop of massive oil tanks. This was usually the point where he began to feel slightly nervous, for reasons he could not entirely articulate. Sure, what they were doing was blatantly illegal, and McKeutchen would probably have his ass and his badge if he got caught, but there was something else, something more deeply unsettling about the exchange. Like watching one of the support pillars of the bridge in front of them, now covered with vehicles, beginning to sway, then crack, right before their eyes.
Victor rolled them down a cracked and potholed Long Wharf to the second row of harbor cranes, then hung a sharp right by a checkers’ booth, toward a towering nest of oil stacks, behind which the railroad tracks were all mixed up in a seemingly meaningless pattern (though Santiago remembered the first time he and his father made this run, nearly a year ago now, and Victor had explained how this was one of the largest rail hubs in New England, moving freight the length and breadth of the northeast corridor). Santiago could see the warehouse now, an amorphous concrete box laden with soot and graffiti, a tattered Dominican Republic flag draped in a barred window: all clear.
There were no cell phone calls, no horn honks, the corrugated aluminum door slid up and the Ninja Van slid in. A short, stocky Dominican in stained coveralls appeared in the doorway of a makeshift office and pointed them toward a kind of monkey-bar lattice of I-beam girders, which formed a giant set of shelves on which sat hundreds of shrink-wrapped pallets of cargo. About midway down the length of the mass sat an old orange three-wheeled propane crane, and in front of that sat a reinforced pallet made of pressure-treated wood. An electric pallet jack stood nearby, a wallflower at the dance.
Victor wheeled them around, backed the van up to the midpoint of the mass, and
popped the slow-motion tailgate release. Santiago climbed out, stretched, and wished for the hundredth time that this would go quietly, which he knew would never happen. Victor and his friend, a fellow platano named Luis whom Victor knew from God knew where, were Dominicans of a common age and generation, wherein polite conversation meant shouting into each other’s faces at the tops of their lungs. Santiago cursed under his breath and walked around to the back, pulling the old moving blanket off their own cargo they’d hauled up from the shop in Inwood. It was a Perkins Sabre M215C, an inline six marine turbo diesel that Victor had spent a full month rehabbing. Luis, who ran a fishing trawler when he wasn’t working the loading docks, would now have more than 200 horses on tap in any weather, enough for him to reach the striper and porgy grounds well south of Morris Cove. Luis’s family would eat well in the weeks to come.
As would Santiago’s. This pleased him to no end, for reasons more avaricious than familial. Santiago was under no illusions as to the congenital vulnerabilities of his tribe. Diabetes. Tachycardia. Atherosclerosis. Not so for him. Santiago lived largely on fish and vegetable dishes he prepared himself, and performed a demanding series of abdominal exercises each morning without fail. Not into yoga was he.
Luis worked the crane, Santiago helped maneuver the motor out of the van, and eventually they all swung it over onto the reinforced pallet. Victor pulled a handwritten list out of his pocket, and father and son walked to the wall of pallets. For the next thirty minutes, with Santiago sweating and constantly checking his watch, they cherry-picked their way through a cubic acre of dry bulk food. Bagged bunches of garlic. Flats of canned beans. Plastic sleeves of tortillas in three flavors. Huge cans of condiments and plastic jugs full of spices. Screw-topped boxes of premixed soup stock. Pints of pickled peppers, mixed dried mushrooms. High-fiber cereals, low-fat granola bars. Chips and crackers and cookies galore. And (Santiago, sweating, grunting, cursing in three languages) one fifty-pound sack of rice for each household in the family, arranged on the floor of the Odyssey’s cargo bed like flagstones.
Grasped right hands and abrazos between Victor and Luis signified the end of the exchange. Having covered their haul with the moving blanket, Santiago slid wearily into the passenger seat, grateful for the adjustable lumbar support. He had an eight-hour shift at his second job waiting for him back in Manhattan. Victor waited until Luis had checked outside and waved them on before wheeling back out to Long Wharf; then he headed for the interstate.
Half an hour later, coasting through Milford, Victor asked his son whether he trusted this new guy More. “¿Usted confía en este tipo?”
Santiago pursed his lips in thought. “No sé. Demasiado pronto para decir.”
Too soon to tell.
Still, he had to admit that More had been pretty fucking fast out the door when Santiago had called the code word stigmata (More’s idea, the weird fuck), and that big atacante with the blade, who could have easily filleted Santiago while he’d been rolling around with the mayate on the pavement, had stopped dead in his tracks when More had stuck that nasty little laser gun in his face. It reminded Santiago of that futuristic piece Harrison Ford carried in Blade Runner. No tremor in his hands at all.
No hesitation.
Quick.
Focused.
Santiago figured that had to count for something.
I N T H E S H A D O W
O F T H E T I T T Y B A R
Marty is a photographer’s dream: does everything for you but take the pictures. Handles the shoot setups, books the location, rents the equipment, finagles all transport and logistics, and keeps himself invisible yet always within reach while on the shoot. All I have to do is show up. It’s a good way to make trade connections and surreptitiously build my other client list, for Specials. Not to mention the endless supply of models for hire, all of them willing to do anything (or anyone) for their chance to one day fill the lens. Thy Name is Humanity, Vanity.
The Roundup shoot’s a week from tomorrow, at the Eyrie from eleven to four. Additional models: two. Lighting: floor, floods, and an oscillating icosahedron (I hate the soccer-ball light—as fragile as a dandelion—but you can’t beat its effects). The best/worst news is that Tony Quinones will be back from Cannes in time to be our stylist. Tony Q did the costumes for The Snake, a drama about a love triangle of gay sewage workers in Manila that’s this year’s odds-on favorite for the Palme d’Or. Tony is the kind of gay caricature who gives other gays a bad name (but he’s always good for a few Specials for himself and his so-called Queue’terie). As long as Johnette stays out of my face, this should be my easiest (and biggest) paycheck yet, courtesy of the rising young Retch and the delectable Miyuki.
Work. I sigh.
This is the sort of day I used to spend with X, going out with nothing but a camera and a Metrocard and drinking in the city through my lens. We were a natural fit: X was a model who didn’t like modeling, I was a photographer doing rag work to get by. She shared my fixation with city glances askance, the concept of capturing motion in an otherwise stillborn frame. She wasn’t just about Newton and McMullan like the rest of her tribe; she knew Pellegrini and Gottfried’s work and had a grasp of photography beyond the jargon. We would get into all sorts of places to get shots, crawling around under the anchorages of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Verrazano bridges, into the gatehouse of the reservoir or inside City Tunnel Number Three, even in the abandoned shafts for the Second Avenue subway. We’d put them all through my editing software and post them on my site in miniature book formats. The city was different then, a place of possibility and opportunity without menace, all warmed by the presence of X. That was when I shot my Mall Series, which I consider to be my best work. After the crash, after she was gone, the only other thing left of those times were the taxiscapes.
I’m feeling a touch melancholy remembering all this when I get the message from Prince William. The message is a photo of an old city subway token, the kind you either see in the Transit Museum or on T-shirts and coffee mugs in some cheesy tourist curio shop in Times Square. (My mother, deep in her personal twilight zone, still hoards them.) This is code to check in with him from a street phone for the location of the drop, and then I have to run the Subway Labyrinth.
Reza insists on it, and what Reza wants, Reza gets. I understand the logic. The best way to shake a tail is in the subway, and Reza doesn’t even want me using a pay phone in the same borough as the speak I’m about to supply. This may seem strange and inefficient to you, but it’s the best way we’ve worked out for supplying the speaks, and no one’s been busted yet, ever. The cops can’t tap a pay phone unless they’ve staked it out first. Maybe that’s why they were watching the Broome Street Bar last night? I should pass by the bar again soon and check the location of the nearest phones … nah. Just nerves.
Knowing I’ll be riding the rails to some less-than-stellar spot in the outer boroughs (Reza again, the farther out from Manhattan you go, the better), I dress down in jeans and army surplus for the occasion and I’m set. The speaks should be humming tonight. There’s one in Williamsburg, where the partially employed crowd will be slumming it, then another on the Lower East Side, then the mother lode—Le Yef, which tonight is in the old Toy Building on Madison Square, vacant lo these many moons since the big toy manufacturers all went broke last year. I might be able to move the whole shipment in one night. Even Reza won’t be able to bitch about that.
I wish I were in better shape physically, though. I definitely did not need that shaker full of nightcaps after L left. Maybe if she stayed the whole night through just once, it might keep my mind off of X. There’s a certain moodiness that sets in after episodic sex. It’s not a vacuum, not exactly, but you do tend to notice the sudden emptiness that much more.
Crossing Amsterdam at 103rd I see the Irish Bull on his cell in front of his truck, parked outside his pub, which I call the Drunk Factory. The Irish Bull is a contractor (did all the renovations himself ) who opened here last year in the space occu
pied by an old Italian restaurant that closed up abruptly at the end of December (a whole slew of restaurants around here did when their leases came due and no one could make the rent—Same Old Song). Cheap, noxious pubs are always in demand, though—if anything, people drink more when the economy’s in the shitter—and this one always pulls in the jocks with their beer guts and soccer jerseys, and the sort of females who go for them, the Spandex Brigade, all tube tops and lip gloss and Ultra Lights and whinnying laughter. You can always hear when it’s closing time from the shouts and fights, and you can gauge the previous night’s volume by the number of vomit sites in the morning.
Even from half a block’s worth of boarded-up storefronts away I cannot escape the inevitable reek of shit wafting from the subway entrance. When the budget cuts began, the MTA was already in the hole. The unions were arguing for pay hikes despite a big budget deficit and the mayor wasn’t having any of it. It made headlines for a while, but money—or lack of it—always wins in the end. The MTA didn’t budge, the state wouldn’t kick in any cash, and the transit budget was slashed right along with Sanitation and the cops. The subways and stations were actually pretty clean before the crash; now, I wonder if they’re more like what John Conn captured in his lenses.
—SUSAN!
I haven’t even cleared the turnstile yet and some crazy homeless guy is screaming right in my ear. Perfect.
—SUSAN LOWINGER!
The derelict has not been homeless long enough for his hairstyle to fully grow formless, although the streets have left their mark and scent on his clothing. He must have had a reasonably well-paying job until recently; his hands and face are not yet weathered by a full cycle of seasons without shelter. His wheeling eyes and slack jaw, however, betray the extent of his mental deterioration, the vast gulf separating his former self from where it is now. He’s also picked up The Scent, the indelible pong of the unsheltered, a combination of urine and ashes that every New Yorker equates with The Bottom. There is nothing distinctive about him, nor is he the only one of his species wandering aimlessly about the station, engaged in spirited dialogues with invisible interlocutors. Once again I am caught without my trusty Marathon Cyber SEX. Two frames: On the Way Down. Whoever Susan Lowinger is, she’s somewhere high above this fetid wet tunnel, well protected from its lost, damaged denizens.