Cleopatra Gold

by William Caunitz

  “The network that murdered my undercovers. It’s been around for about two years, as far as we can determine. Designer drugs catering to upscale clientele. Before, heroin was never chic the way coke was, but AIDS made the hypodermic needle passé. This network is aggressive as hell; they market the shit out of their product. It’s really caught on. Their stuff is so pure it can be snorted; it gives a quick high without coke’s crash landing, and … no needles. They also peddle a line of high-voltage crack in the ghetto in these gold-sprayed vials—they collect a deposit on the fucking things and recycle. Environmentally concerned dopers, yet. We’ve been trying to work our way up the network; it’s cost us three of our people.”

  Looking up, Romano asked, “How’d they make your undercovers?”

  “We haven’t a clue.”

  Romano sighed. He knew Burke wanted the kind of help he couldn’t give to him.

  Burke’s voice took on a pleading edge. “They can’t be allowed to walk away from three dead cops.”

  Romano very carefully scratched an itch on his Adam’s apple, his eyes fixed on some distant spot. “Why come to me?”

  Leaning forward, Burke said, “I want you to insert one of your deep undercovers into the Cleopatra network.”

  Romano’s eyes flashed to the man sitting in front of him, and he said softly, “We don’t have any undercovers.”

  “Joey, three dead cops …”

  Romano held up a protesting palm. “Don’t. Okay? The simple answer is, we don’t have undercovers.”

  “Bullshit. It’s an open secret in the Job that you run the deep ones.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Three dead cops, Joey.”

  Romano picked up a pencil and began tapping it on the desk, staring expressionlessly at the man in front of him. “I don’t even know if there are any deep undercovers in the Job.”

  “Bullshit,” Too Tall Paulie snapped, glaring directly into Romano’s eyes.

  “All your years in the Job and you haven’t learned about the deep ones,” said Joey-the-G-Man. “Your undercovers have homes, families. You set them up in apartments, provide them with phony ID, give them flash cars, plenty of money, but they get to go home on weekends or during the week. I understand it doesn’t work that way with the deep ones. I’ve been told that they have given up their own identities for the ones we’ve provided them. None of them are married. There’s no record of them ever being a member of this Department, they’re trained by the CIA. They’re cop clones without a life of their own.”

  “They’re cops who take orders.”

  “Wrong. They’re people with a mission. And if they were under my umbrella, you could bet your ass I’d never allow them to be used in a narcotics investigation, because in the dope business there are no good guys or bad guys, only the same untreated sewage squishing around the same slime pool. You can’t trust anyone because there is no way of telling who is working what side of the street.”

  “I fucking resent that, Joey. My people are honest, dedicated professionals with a lousy job to do. Who the hell do you think you are, bad-mouthing my division? You … you … fucking spy.”

  Romano smiled; his tone softened. “Paul, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I know you and your people are a hundred percent. But the reality is that not a week goes by that some cop isn’t locked up someplace for dealing drugs. It’s become such a common occurrence in Miami that the newspapers there don’t even bother to run the story anymore.”

  “It’s not only cops,” Burke said sadly.

  “I know. It’s also the bankers and brokerage houses that launder billions for the cartels, and the chemical manufacturers who sell them their products, and the fancy law firms who research the court transcripts of every major drug conspiracy trial, studying the mistakes other traffickers made, and then flying first class to Colombia to give seminars to the cartels on the pitfalls to be avoided.” He let the pencil fall from his hand. “It’s a slime pool I would never insert a deep one into, no matter what the motivation. But that’s all academic, because, as I already told you, I don’t control them, and I really don’t know who does.” He looked Burke directly in the eyes, put forth his most trustworthy expression, and added, “Honest, Paul, I don’t know anything about the deep ones.”

  Shaking his head with disgust, Too Tall Paulie got up, leaned across the desk, and gave his friend a limp handshake, said, “See ya ’round,” and left.

  The Brownsville Detectives were still playing basketball in the mellow early-afternoon sunlight when Too Tall Paulie stalked across the school yard, cursing under his breath.

  4

  Joe Romano sat for several minutes contemplating a speck on the wall before he grabbed the telephone and dialed an in-house number, saying to the person who answered, “Meet me in the Room, now.”

  Romano left his office and walked down the long corridor of locked doors until he reached one in the middle. There he stopped, keyed the six-digit combination into the cipher lock’s keypad, and entered a cheerless room constructed of a foot of concrete and lined with an inch and a half of steel plate. A walnut table and four chairs, and floor fans in each corner, were the only furniture. A round ceiling fixture locked inside a steel grille was the only light in the gloomy room. Romano was inside the Special Ops conference room, known to the few who used it as the Room.

  Romano scraped back a chair and sat. From the table’s only drawer he took out a package of cigarettes and a sardine can that served as an ashtray and lit up, blowing a stream of smoke at the fan and watching it dissipate into nothingness. Last year his wife had cajoled him into promising to stop smoking, and with his most trustworthy smile he had promised to give up the dirty habit, and he had, almost. Now whenever he was uptight, and in the Room, he would sneak one or two, but only when he was alone with Andy.

  Lieutenant Andy Seaver’s name had not appeared in any Department orders since Special Order 142, dated July 1, 1965, transferring him from a patrol precinct into the Detective Division. His transfer on December 1, 1971, from the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad to the Intelligence Division was accomplished by a telephone message direct from the police commissioner’s office. He was still carried on P&C’s roster, and his biweekly paycheck was still sent by the controller to P&C.

  A medium-size, light-complexioned man with thinning blond hair and green eyes, he was seldom seen without a stubby Italian cigar stuck in his mouth. He’d never married, although he always wanted to. He was dating a woman who was the banquet manager at the Barrington Hotel, which meant she worked long hours. She thought he was a clerical patrolman assigned to Pickpocket and Confidence and that his boring, safe duties included typing roll calls and payroll records.

  When Seaver walked into the Room and saw Romano tapping the pack end over end, he groaned softly, because he knew that was a sure sign of trouble. “What’s up?” he asked, yanking back a chair.

  “Has this place been swept?”

  “This morning.”

  Romano took a quick drag on the cigarette and announced, “She’s surfaced.”

  “Who?”

  “Cleopatra.”

  Their eyes locked in the tense silence. Seaver’s head began to shake as though he were trying to rid himself of a horrible memory. “You sure?”

  Romano told him of Too Tall Paulie’s visit and the Cleopatra Gold network.

  “’At’s hardly proof positive. A lot of the shit peddled on the street has brand names. Makes the dopers feel important.”

  “It’s her,” Romano insisted.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Speak to him.”

  “Joey, he’s been sheep-dipped for twelve years, longer than any of them. We can’t keep him under forever. He doesn’t know what a civilian is. He thinks the world is made up exclusively of bad guys, scumbags, and assholes. If we don’t bring him out soon, he’ll never be able to surface and have a normal life, never.”

  “It’s
her, Andy.”

  “Joey, we put these people deep, make them live phony lives for too long. It’s against every law of human nature, and when we’re done with them, we resurrect them back into the real world. Then we toss them into the garbage heap. They can’t be cops, their personalities are too screwed up to deal with the public, so we retire them on a disability and wish them fucking adieu. This is Eamon’s son, for chrissake. We owe him a shot at a normal life.”

  Joey-the-G-Man stared at him for a long minute. “No cop has a normal life. Not me, not you, not anyone. We owe him a shot at her. He’d never forgive us if he discovered she’d surfaced and we didn’t tell him. He’d go bad on us. We owe him this final performance, and then we’ll make him a civilian.”

  Seaver tossed his cigar stump into the sardine can and said, “Give me one of those cancer sticks of yours.”

  Assistant Chief Paul Burke parked his car in a garage on Eighteenth Street and walked. People in the Job who rated flash cars did not park them on the street. There was just too great a risk of their being stolen, which created the embarrassing possibility of their owners being exposed as cops. Members of the service who rated flash cars also rated credit cards in their names or in the names of dummy corporations.

  A heavy weariness hung over Burke as he made his way along First Avenue thinking of Levi’s funeral tomorrow and DiLeo’s on Thursday. He would attend both and dutifully tell the widows how sorry he was, and he’d extol their husbands’ heroism and dedication and promise the Department would always be there for them and their children any time they needed help, knowing full well that their husbands had already passed on into the Job’s folklore and that the widows would be pensioned off and forgotten. He also knew that one question would haunt him for the rest of his life: How had the dopers known?

  Too Tall Paulie entered the Thirteenth Precinct station house and walked past the high, imposing desk, flashing his shield to the uniformed lieutenant looking down at him and continuing to the rear of the sitting room. Then he went through the door that led into the lobby of the Police Academy. Past the elevators, he turned right into the corridor of trophies and flags and pushed his way through the double doors into the gymnasium. A class of recruits jogged around the perimeter track in cadence while another class parried nightsticks, practicing combat techniques.

  Sergeant Jim Neary, the head physical education instructor at the Academy, had taught thousands of recruits the quickest and most effective way to disable a mutt. A well-built man in his late fifties, he was calling cadence when he saw Burke come in; he motioned to another cop to take over and walked across the gym. One of Neary’s unlisted duties was to scour recruit classes for undercover candidates. After what had happened last night, he’d expected to see Too Tall Paulie sometime today.

  Standing next to Burke, brushing his arm across his sweaty face, Neary watched the class work the track.

  “They’re babies,” Burke said.

  “How do you think I feel training them? Twice around and I need oxygen.” He looked at Burke and said, “Sorry about your men. I remember both of them.” They fell silent, old cops remembering lost partners, friends.

  Burke lifted his chin at the recruits. “Anyone interesting?”

  “Figured you’d be around today, so I pulled one folder for you. It’s in my office.”

  The glass-fronted office was on the other side of the gym. They walked inside, and Neary opened one of the side drawers of his desk, lifted a stack of papers, and pulled out a folder, which he handed to Burke.

  As he watched Too Tall Paulie reading the Character Investigation Report, a knowing smile creased Neary’s face.

  Burke looked up and asked, “What’s your assessment?”

  “Intelligent, and a lot of earned street smarts.”

  “This one is no virgin from Sunnyside.”

  “Inspector, if you want virgins, call a convent.”

  5

  Environment, the latest trendy club favored by the city’s leisure class, was located on Twenty-second Street in the Chelsea district inside a nineteenth-century building that had formerly served as a cloth factory’s warehouse. When Seaver arrived a little after midnight, a line of people snaked around into Fifth Avenue waiting to get in, even this early in the evening.

  Directly across from Environment, a sanitation truck was half up on the sidewalk making a pickup, its compactor groaning as the sanitation man beat a mangled refuse can across its lip before tossing the can onto the sidewalk, strewing bits of garbage across the street. A homeless woman squatted between parked cars, relieving herself, heedless of the catcalls coming from some of the people across the street. Up the street, a car alarm wailed.

  Walking toward the four bouncer types funneling the “beautiful people” through the iron gate, Andy Seaver lit up a stubby Italian cigar and decided to go over to the meanest-looking one. He slipped a ten into the goon’s hand, confiding, “I’m looking for my daughter. She’s only fourteen. Mind if I duck inside for a minute and look around?”

  The doorman’s paw gobbled up the ten, and a small nod of his oversize head motioned Seaver through the gate.

  Inside, Seaver joined the end of a line waiting to pass through the metal detector. A flashing neon sign on top of the machine blinked NO GUNS. PLEASE! Seaver had no problem with that rule; he wore a plastic Glock nine-millimeter that didn’t ring any bells on these older metal detectors. After being cleared through the detector, Seaver paid the twenty-five-dollar entrance fee, in cash, and walked through large wooden doors with bas reliefs of whales and into a huge room pulsing with earsplitting music. It had a long bar on its left under a row of stained-glass windows depicting a Rousseau-like jungle and animals.

  Edging up to the bar, he called out to one of the bartenders, a Chinese woman named Jasmine who always wore a yellow ribbon tied around her queue, “Johnny Black, rocks.”

  Jasmine took up a water glass, tossed in several ice cubes, and poured in a long stream of scotch until the glass was filled to the rim. Passing it out to him, she said, “Fifteen dollars.”

  Thrusting a twenty at her over the heads of other patrons, Seaver said, “Keep it,” and walked toward the darkened stage at the rear of the long main room. An ornately carved stone pulpit that once stood in a church was slightly to the right of the stage; it had a life-size cutout of the secular Madonna standing there preaching in her garter belt and bustier. Speakers, strapped to iron columns that ran up into the tin-slated ceiling, boomed out a wild samba-mambo beat, while a gyrating, humping mass danced under the many-colored lightning of rotating strobe lights.

  Sipping his drink, Seaver watched a woman dressed in long black bloomers, cowboy boots, a T-shirt with the logo FARM AID, and a black velvet ribbon pinned in back of her orange spiked hair. She was dancing with something whose gender Seaver could not determine; it was wearing a blue sailor’s uniform sprinkled liberally with rhinestones. The ridiculous and the sublime, he thought. He turned away and spotted two Oriental men draped with heavy gold chains, medallions, and rings, headed in his direction. Here comes the Golden Triangle contingent, Seaver thought.

  He brushed past the two men, making for the curving stone steps leading up to the balcony, a more exclusive retreat that overhung the dance floor and ran down one entire side of the main room. Long banquettes lined one wall, and cocktail tables were crammed around an inkwell-size dance floor. In the center of the wall was a busy, well-stocked bar. Scurrying waitresses wearing only black body stockings and high heels darted between tables.

  Seaver immediately spotted Che-Che Morales, a heavy-duty Mexican doper, and his crew of four Latino scumbags lounging on the banquette, drinking champagne and partying with their girlfriends.

  Unlike the other dopers, who were garishly dressed and bejeweled, Morales wore jeans, a dark guayabera shirt, and high-top sneakers. He was a thin man in his late fifties with a bony face that looked like stretched leather. His brazen black eyes, thick lips, flat nose, high cheekbones, and jet blac
k straight hair that fell to his shoulders stamped him a full-blooded Indian, not a mestizo.

  Morales was a major traficante about whom law enforcement knew all too little. His savage instinct for danger had enabled him to insulate himself from the best-laid traps the police could set for him. Ever since he had popped up in New York five years ago, he had been a key player in heavy drug commerce.

  Sipping his drink and ignoring the dopers, Seaver weaved his way past tables and dancers over to the other end of the loft; slipping a foot onto the mahogany railing, he stared down at the spirited dancers. Soon his foot was tapping out the reggae-samba beat blaring from the speakers, and his shoulders swayed to the rhythm. In his peripheral vision he saw the two Oriental men he had spotted downstairs making their way over to Morales.

  Suddenly the music stopped, and then the lights dimmed. The crowd below surged toward the stage, chanting, “Alejandro! Alejandro! Alejandro!”

  The room sank into darkness, and still they chanted. An anxious stir of anticipation swept the club. A single spotlight beamed down onto the stage, revealing a man standing with his head bowed, his hands at his sides, a trademark long-stemmed rose in the right one.

  A collective gasp escaped from many of the women, as the man remained motionless, controlling his audience, heightening their expectation. He was dressed in faded jeans, a black shirt with the three top buttons opened, and expensive Italian loafers, no socks. His wavy black hair, bronzed skin, piercing black eyes, and high flat cheekbones were pure Indian, while his straight nose and oval chin bore strong evidence of his gringo heritage. The crossing gene pool had given him an exotic and distinctive, magnetic appearance. Alejandro was the latest heartthrob to burst onto the club scene. He broke into a slow smile, his gleaming teeth a beacon. The women in the crowd squealed with delight as he raised his head and brought the rose up to his mouth, caressing it with his lips, kissing its petals. Holding the flower by the stem, he kissed it farewell and tossed it out into the blackness, where the women leaped to catch it. The winner pressed it to her well-displayed breasts and cried out, “We love you, Alejandro! We love you!”