Rivers of Gold

by Adam Dunn

  This is how it happened.

  The receptionist in the waiting room at Roundup is getting nervous. It’s been almost an hour since I asked to see Marcus Chalk, and of course she said he was out. I said I’d wait and I’m still here, waiting. She’s started cupping her hands over her mouth when she uses the phone to muffle her voice; by now she’s probably informed the whole office by e-mail about the guy who won’t leave, and would someone please call security?

  It doesn’t matter anymore. I’m pinned to this settee by entropy. I’ve got my earbuds in, and thumbed up the Only Ones’ “Another Girl, Another Planet,” repeating it over and over. On my phone’s screen, the front page of the magazine’s Web site features a bevy of beauties arrayed behind a naked and glorious N. Wrapped around N, her gym-toned arms deployed over key strategic points, is LA, striking a pose at once provocative and proprietary. The gaudy headline in the foreground reads EXCLUSIVE! THE STAFF GIRLS OF LE YEF.

  I don’t want the receptionist to call the cops. With leaden limbs I pull myself to my feet. On my way out of the office, I catch a glimpse of Johnette as she emerges from behind one door and disappears behind another. Our eyes meet for an instant: There is no gloating, no sadistic leer, no malice in her face at all. She sees me, or perhaps through me, and then she’s gone.

  There’s no rational explanation for why I park myself on a bench across the street from the lobby of the Roundup building. It’s another one of those unfinished parks you see now, abandoned when the money ran out, a fitting place for my vigil. I have to see Marcus Chalk. I’ve got to try to explain what happened and see if I can straighten things out. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll give me another chance. If I know I’ve got money coming in from Roundup, maybe I can work out a schedule with Reza for paying back the cost of the lost Specials.

  And here he comes, nodding to the doormen, one of whom raises a radio to his mouth. There’s a stunning woman with him. Even at this distance her confident, indescribably seductive bearing and carriage beckon to me.

  I should have known. L magnificently fills out a carnelian iridescent chiffon asymmetric suspension cocoon dress, every inch the belle du jour. It’s so decadent. So last-decade. So very, very L.

  I tear my eyes away as they share a laugh and the inevitable kiss. A throaty burbling sound gives me something else to try to focus on. A valet for the building roars up in a glossy black Audi RS9. I blink furiously through my tears to make sure I read the license plate right. I have. This is Reza’s machine. The valet jumps out and holds the driver’s side door open. Marcus Chalk holds out a folded bill while L slides behind the wheel. I can almost hear the rustle of silk across leather, bunching between the flesh of inner thighs softer than rose petals, and even then I can’t get hard. Everything’s falling apart.

  Marcus Chalk walks slowly, grinningly, smilingly around the front of the car, in my line of sight for a good three or four seconds, but he doesn’t see me, focused as he is on the prize behind the wheel. In he gets and off they go. The roar of the engine does not quite mask the growl in my guts.

  Sooner or later, we all end up working for Reza.

  I know the mood’s bad from the stillness that greets me as I make my way cautiously into the dragon’s lair. Jan doesn’t bother with a jacket now, and the pistol in his shoulder rig looks like it could bring down a helicopter. Jan opens the door for me but stays outside, and pulls it shut behind me.

  This is my one shot to make things right with Reza. I’ve come in on my own instead of running away. I’ve still got half a load of Specials stashed at home nobody knows about, which I can probably start moving tonight. Plus I’ve got an ace in the hole: Prince William’s sideshow paco operation. I’m auditioning for the role of my life, literally. But I can do this.

  The lights are off except for Reza’s desk lamp, which illuminates a near-empty bottle of raki and an ashtray heaped with the crumpled paper filters of those awful foreign cigarettes he smokes when he’s angry. The air is thick with the stench of burning hair they give off, laced with something else, something fruitish but synthetic.

  Like candy.

  As usual, Reza’s in his chair behind his desk—no sign of the goon with the lollipop, though, which is a big relief. Reza’s laptop is open on the desk in front of him, but he’s looking at the wall-mounted screen, which appears to be showing a real-time surveillance feed, the timer counting in the lower-right corner. The camera’s positioned obliquely over a bed, on which a couple is clearly engaged in rough, almost violent sex. The man behind the woman is large and muscular with an elaborate tattoo snaking from his right nipple over his shoulder. I’ve seen him before … yes, he’s one of the security goons that dragged me downstairs for my bathroom meet with LA at the Bryant Park Grill. But the woman on the bed … wait, it isn’t a woman, it’s a man. It’s Prince William. His lips are drawn back from his teeth in a rictus of strain; tears of joy shine on his cheeks.

  —You knew about this? Reza asks through a cloud of evil-smelling smoke.

  Holy shit. I figured the Prince was hedging his bets by playing both sides, but I never even imagined he’d do something like this. Or that Reza would find out so fast.

  I’ve got no choice, I have to play my trump card now. In the steadiest voice I can muster I say:

  —Reza, he’s working a scam on you. He’s been freelancing selling paco that he makes off your merchandise. He knew you were moving on LA’s territory. He tried to recruit me for her. I wouldn’t play ball, and she beat … she had her men beat me up. Look at my face, Reza, you know I’m not lying.

  Reza’s looking at me wordlessly, his hard eyes glinting even through the smoke and gloom. He’s listening; maybe I’m getting through to him. He’s got to know about the missing Specials, there’s no point trying to cover it up. If I come clean now, I should be able to bring him around, to make him see that all this wasn’t my fault.

  —So, says Reza, picking up his cigarette, you wouldn’t play ball.

  And slowly, very slowly, he turns his laptop around to face me.

  There’s a split-screen display on it.

  One window is still, showing the front page of the Roundup site with LA wrapped around N. The other window shows another surveillance feed. It’s from the Great Hall at the Met, and from the angle it must be from one of the cameras in that big cue-ball turret by the security center—how the fuck did Reza get that? The camera zooms in on a couple happily embracing, oblivious to the crowd around them.

  It’s me and N.

  —So, Reza grunts, pushing his laptop to one side of his desk, how long you been seeing this curva?

  There are so many questions piling up in my head I don’t know which one to start off with. In fact, I can’t speak at all. I’m just standing there with my mouth open when Reza makes a beckoning gesture with his hand and someone, no, something locks me in a terrible grip, all over, worse than the one LA’s goons put on me. Now I really can feel my bones grinding together and I try to scream but can only manage a broken croak. I feel something sharp poke me in the back of the neck and for a split second I think I’m being injected, but no, it’s a stick.

  A stick from a lollipop.

  That is much, much worse.

  I’m bent over from the waist, my upper body slammed onto the desktop, my right cheekbone taking the hit. Reza’s back is to me, his profile partially obscured by the darkness and the high back of his office chair. The samovar is nowhere in sight, just a near-empty bottle of raki and a glass, along with a battered old Zippo and a wide, flat cigarette box marked KAZAKH. I’m watching myself and N kissing on the laptop, a lifetime away.

  The force pinning me to the desk is immovable, a glacier sealing me in wood. A fierce orange point from the end of Reza’s cigarette flares against the blue glow of the TV screen on the wall.

  —You think I didn’t know? he growls.

  I can’t tell which screen he’s looking at, so I don’t know whether he’s talking about me or Prince William, but it doesn’t matte
r, I need to make my case now. But in this position, with the pressure on my back, chest, and face, every word is excruciating.

  —Reza, wait, I can explain. It was—

  —You almost got away with it, Reza says to the screen. His voice isn’t slurred, but there’s a rasp in it I’ve never heard before.

  —No, I stammer, this has nothing to do with—

  Reza makes an indistinct motion with his cigarette and the world streaks away from me, leaving a vacuum that is immediately filled with something far beyond pain, beyond agony, a realm of sensation I can only imagine is the province of the dying. This is the kingdom of the Lollipop Man.

  Even in the dark, with my head being ground into Reza’s desk, I can see it all clearly. That night at the BPG makes sense now. Prince William has been trading sex for information, playing both sides against the middle. That’s how he knew about the dead cabbies, the war, everything. That’s how he knew how to set me up so I would take the fall. If LA wins the war, he becomes head of distribution. If Reza wins, I’m still dead, and he’ll get a bigger slice of the pie. Prince William would have seen a conflict like this coming from miles away, and would have known he’d need a fall guy, but not one of the cabbies, because who gives a fuck about cabbies? No, it’d have to be someone higher up the line, higher than Arun, someone in middle management. Me. This can’t be happening, but it is.

  —Reza, listen to me. I’m not working for LA. He is. He set me up so that you would blame me. The girl was just somebody I met at Le Yef, I’m not even with her anymore. Even through the pain, it still hurts to say that.

  Reza raises his right arm for a moment and the couple on the screen disappears. He takes another drag of his cigarette, making the air more fetid. I’m going to be sick in a minute, from the smell if not from the pain.

  —Even if you were telling the truth, he says slowly, there’s no way I could trust what you say.

  —No. Yes. You can. Reza. I’ll make it up to you. Just give me a chance to make it back. I’ll pay you back every penny, I swear. We can work this out—

  —Tăcut! he barks.

  I’m losing sensation in my arms and legs. The thing on my back apparently can hold me in this position forever. And Reza’s just getting worked up.

  —You want to negotiate? Reza spins in his chair and leans into the light. His eyes are bloodshot, his face flushed and sweaty, his teeth bared. My master is a gargoyle, and he has set a demon upon my back. I can hear a strange keening sound coming out of me, but it seems like it’s coming from someone else. Nothing seems real but the pain.

  —Hristos, you Americans, you’re such fucking babies, Reza growls, and sucks the cigarette up to pinkish-white radiance. I try, I try to move, but the mass on my back is immense and unyielding.

  —No, wait, Reza, I didn’t mean … please … DON’T—

  —Renny, you take orders, you don’t give them, don’t you understand? Reza hisses.

  And he slowly brings the tip of the cigarette down to the left side of my neck, just below my ear, where L and N once let their tongues play, and the last thing I’m aware of is the smell of my own flesh burning.

  F I S H F A C E U L T O R

  Who sent you?” Santiago asked.

  “Classified,” More burbled.

  Santiago thought he might have better luck keeping things abstract. “What are you?”

  “I’m a scar,” More coughed.

  “You gonna be a fuckin’ scab, you don’t start giving me some straight answers,” Santiago bristled.

  “I’m part of a Recon SCAR /HUMINT element, twenty-sixth MEU(SOC),” More said in his clear disc jockey voice, free of phlegm.

  Even for Santiago, with years of NYPD acronym-speak under his belt, it felt like More had thrown a bowl of alphabet soup at him. “In English?”

  They were leaning against a wall of glass six inches thick, which formed one side of a holding tank roughly a square acre in size. The tank was filled with cold, murky seawater and was situated in a far corner of the New York Aquarium campus in Coney Island. More had finally agreed to talk, after asking Santiago to sign out an M4 from the armory for him, and after Santiago had spent a full minute cursing him out in English, Spanish, and what little Creole he knew. Then he’d signed out the carbine. Impulsively, he’d signed out the Benelli, too. Both weapons were stashed in a locked compartment behind the spare tire brace in the Crown Vic’s trunk.

  “SCAR stands for Strike Coordination and Reconnaissance. That’s what I do. Some people call it Deep Recon. I get into hard-to-reach places and gather intelligence. If I get the order, I coordinate an attack.”

  “You just go in, guns blazing?”

  “I call in the airstrike, then my unit goes in to mop up.”

  Santiago thought about what he’d just heard. Somebody in Washington had seen fit to embed a crazy-ass jarhead who did airstrikes into a CAB unit of the fucking NYPD in order to … what?

  “Why are you here?”

  “Classified.”

  “Oh no. No, no, no, cabrón, that song don’t play no more. I ain’t into this Commando Cracker bullshit. I’m a cop. I chase shitheads like the ones going around killing cabbies, and I will catch their sorry asses, so I can get my Second Grade and my credits and go to OCID with the real cops and kiss all you whack-job motherfuckers good-bye forever. Comprende? I don’t need some motherfuckin’ marine whose head is still stuck in Iraq—”

  “I was stationed in Afghanistan.”

  “—wherever the fuck, who thinks he can start raining down fuckin’ rockets and bombs in the middle of New York fuckin’ City like it was his own private fuckin’ artillery range—”

  “I’m a FAC, not an artie spotter.”

  “—who doesn’t talk for weeks at a time and when he finally does, he sounds like a busted radio, who waits six months before telling me what the fuck is going on, and then only after half of One PP comes down on my fuckin’ head, who had McKeutchen play me like a fuckin’ fish on a hook … Why the fuck are we at an aquarium?” Santiago had to catch his breath after the tirade.

  More gestured with his chin. “Meet Carl.”

  Santiago turned and almost went for his gun. Whatever breath he had managed to catch stalled in his throat, making him wheeze and cough. Sweat broke out along his hairline, neck, wrists, and armpits. A freezing bolt shot up his spine, and a burst of intestinal gas involuntarily escaped him.

  “Coño …” he whispered.

  The shark was a juvenile, no more than six or seven feet long, but already broad across the gills, its signature dentition visible even with its jaws closed. The stark white of its belly clashed deeply with the bronze-brown skin of its sides and back; Santiago could barely make out the dorsal and caudal fins, though the sweep of its tail was visible enough in the murk. The shark lazily drifted in a clockwise azimuth across the window where the men stood, one depthless black eye cocked vaguely in their direction. Santiago tried to keep it in sight as it swam off, but roughly twenty yards from them, it simply vanished, fading into the dark waters of the tank.

  Santiago turned back to More, who hadn’t moved a muscle, but whose face seemed somehow younger and slightly more animate. He liked being here, Santiago realized; maybe this was where he went after he finished his CAB shifts. Oh, Jesus, there was no getting back into a cab with More after this, no sir.

  “I never saw the ocean until I was seventeen,” More said, scaring Santiago even further. Non sequiturs were not More’s style. “Spent a lot of time in it during training.”

  “How nice for you,” Santiago whispered.

  “Don’t bother asking who or how,” More croaked, “I wouldn’t tell you anyway. But we need to work together on this. We have to trust each other. If it makes you feel better, I’ll tell you what I can.”

  Santiago pulled himself together. “What’s wrong with your voice?”

  “I was out on a long patrol with my unit and we were ambushed. I took a piece of an RPG in the throat. The surgeons couldn’t go
in through the back of my neck because of my spinal cord. Sometimes the scar tissue presses on my larynx, I have to work to speak clearly.”

  Santiago blinked. “You mean it actually hurts you to talk?”

  “No. Just takes more effort. Need to make each word count.”

  “Where did this happen?”

  More hesitated a moment. “Bajaur.”

  “Where the fuck is that?”

  “Northwest Pakistan.”

  Santiago was getting that swimmy sensation he’d felt earlier, when McKeutchen had opened the floodgates of truth on him. “We never went into Pakistan.”

  “Right,” confirmed More.

  “When was this?”

  “Classified.”

  Santiago tried again. “Why were you in Pak—”

  “Classified.”

  Santiago changed course. “You said you’re a scar. Does that mean you’re a soldier or a spy?”

  More considered this, his eyes searching the waters of the tank. “Technically, I’m tactical, but because of my operational background I’m an intelligence asset too. So I guess you could say I’m both.”

  Santiago felt like he was floating. “So you’re, you’re what, scouting a landing zone? The Marines are gonna invade New York?” He absolutely could not believe the shit he was hearing coming out of his own mouth.

  “No, just me. This is an OGA operation.”

  More soup. “OGA?”

  “Other Government Agency.”

  “Which one?”

  More blinked slowly at him.

  “Oh,” Santiago said, feeling like he was back in kindergarten. “Them.”

  They were quiet a moment, scanning the tank for the shark.

  “Look,” More gargled unexpectedly, “don’t ask why they’re putting operators like me into the Police Department. I don’t make policy, I’m just one of the people who execute it. The bosses are worried that some of the money pouring into the country might be dirty, and from what we’ve turned up, they’re right. Somebody built a network here, probably over a long period of time, and it’s moving drugs and other stuff through speaks connected by cabs, and they’re washing the money through some other part of it we haven’t turned up yet. Treasury must’ve been working this from another angle, and we stumbled across each other.”