Rivers of Gold

by Adam Dunn

  In an effort to combat the mounting sense of frustration caused by an investigation that no one at CAB seemed to care about, over the murders of cabdrivers nobody cared about, Santiago had decided to follow More’s lead—More’s less and less cop-like behavior notwithstanding. They’d started by trying to question a few drivers themselves. The very sight of a badge, however, made most cabdrivers’ mouths snap shut. Santiago tried repeatedly to get something, anything, from the cabbies about the killings, but it was always the same thing.

  “Les bus sont emparés de manière lente,” said a Senegalese.

  “Etot prokliati autobus uzasno medleno iediet,” said a Russian.

  “Yeh busen saali Itni Dheere chalti hain,” said an Indian.

  They were getting nowhere fast, and Santiago was getting annoyed even faster. Then he had an idea.

  After confirming the identities of the victims and securing the names of the garages where they worked, Santiago had gone to the one place he thought might be able to guide him through the city’s byzantine taxicab industry. It wasn’t the city’s Taxi and Limo Control; those fuckers never returned his calls. While he had been a student at CUNY, Santiago had spent a fair amount of time at the Dominican Studies Institute on Convent Avenue in Harlem. He still kept an eye on various DSI goings-on, and he remembered seeing something about the formation of a long-term research project on Dominican taxi drivers within the last few years. Reaching out to Periandro Herrera, one of the project’s researchers and a fleet owner himself, Santiago had been advised to meet with the lead organizer of the drivers’ “union” (which was more in name than fact, since under state law cabdrivers were classified as independent contractors and therefore prohibited from official union organization).

  Who now stood before him.

  “Trate de no mirar,” Herrera had warned him. “Don’t gawk at her. She’s touchy.”

  Baijanti Divya was nearly seven feet tall and wore the longest, loudest sari Santiago had ever seen. It was iridescent, in the exact shade of orange as the Creamsicle pops Santiago had devoured in childhood. She had large hands and a long neck, both of which shimmered with gold. (If it was real, Santiago thought, she had a night job that paid much better than labor organizing.) A filigreed gold braid was suspended between her left earlobe and nostril. A crimson bindi flared between her shaped eyebrows. There was no way in hell Baijanti Divya could keep a low profile, Santiago thought. It just wasn’t her nature.

  “You have two cabdrivers murdered in as many weeks,” she said in a deep voice that resonated oddly in Santiago’s tympanum. “Yet you suspect the drivers themselves to have been complicit in criminal activity?”

  Fucking More. It was his fault they were coming on like the cabdrivers were to blame for getting themselves killed. Barely speaks for six months, then boom, two cabbies get whacked, and suddenly he’s looking for Keyser Söze. All this shit about looking at the cabs, the cabs. Why was More so interested in a couple of garden-variety robbery-homicides in the middle of a fucking crime wave? The NYPD clearly didn’t give a shit about a couple of cabdrivers more or less. Not that Santiago accepted this, but why was More so hung up on it?

  “We have to look at all the possibilities,” Santiago replied in his best Polite But Official, since More was back in his mute mode. “You said yourself the industry is rigged against the drivers. Maybe one of them was skimming.”

  “You clearly have little grasp of the way the industry is structured, detective,” she said. “Taxi drivers cannot ‘skim,’ which I presume from your usage means cheating the meter. You cannot cheat the meter. All meters in yellow taxicabs in this city are attached to non-navigational GPS units, the presence of which is mandatory in all TLC-licensed New York City taxicabs. The drivers themselves are required in most instances to pay the maintenance costs for these meters and, in some cases, for their installation as well. The meter records the place and time of each and every fare. It is also connected to the engine of the taxicab. If it is tampered with in any way, it shuts off. All meters are connected to a central mainframe, which the TLC claims is used to send text messages to drivers alerting them to areas of high fare demand or traffic problems, but which in actuality is a surveillance system by which the TLC can keep track of all on-duty cabdrivers at all times. No city cabdriver is allowed to operate a taxicab with a broken meter; broken credit-card swipes are permissible, since the drivers can still conduct cash transactions. But a broken meter is prohibited by regulations. Any cabdriver operating with one would be immediately pulled off the road by TLC enforcement or your own NYPD colleagues, and could easily lose his license and his job. A cabdriver would have to be suicidal to try to cheat the meter, detective, and you have already described this as a homicide investigation.”

  She was tough, this one. Smart, too. And then there was that voice! “Would a cabdriver be able to hold back some money when he goes off duty?” Santiago asked.

  “There are two kinds of cabdrivers, detective. There is the lease driver, which applies to the majority of the drivers you see in this parking lot. Lease drivers pay a fixed rate per shift for the use of the taxicab. This ‘day rate’ or ‘lease rate’ is due in cash at the end of each shift. In addition, the gas tank must be filled before shift change. To use an example, the second victim, Jangahir Khan, worked a day shift for the Sunshine Taxi Corporation in Queens. He would be paying, I believe, one hundred and eighty dollars per shift. If he did not make that while on duty, he would have had to make up the balance out of his own pocket. The cabdriver who does not pay his shift rate would most likely not be permitted to work another shift for that garage. I should also point out that if he had incurred any tickets during his shift, he would be responsible for paying those as well, or risk losing his license and, possibly, his job.

  “The second kind of driver, the owner-operator, owns his medallion and taxicab, in principle. In actuality, the case is most often that he has taken on massive loans. The current market price of a TLC medallion is just over six hundred thousand dollars. If Mr. Khan or the first victim, Eyad Fouad, were owner-operators, they would have had to come up with over sixty thousand in cash to secure the medallion, then work off the remaining ninety percent as best they could. This can take a lifetime, detective, and sometimes cannot be done. I remind you that this is only for the medallion. They would then have to secure funds to buy the car, and have it prepared for taxi use, a process known in the trade as a ‘hack-up.’ They would have to pay all costs associated with the hack-up at the TLC. Failure to pay any of these costs would render their taxicab legally inoperable. No money means no cab, and no cab means no money. This is all just to get the cab up and running. Once they do, owner-operators must pay for gas, insurance, maintenance, emissions checks, garaging, and the city road tax. Whatever is left feeds their families. It is not,” Baijanti Divya concluded, “an enviable position to be in.”

  Her voice was causing mixed signals in Santiago’s mind. He tried to focus. “How would they get that kind of money, especially with the new loan regulations?” By 2010, after the subprime meltdown, commercial real estate collapse, and coast-to-coast credit card defaults, getting any kind of loan practically required one to sell his vital organs.

  “Mortgage lenders for the taxi industry offer ninety percent financing, often on terms that could politely be called usurious,” she replied smoothly. “These lenders have made themselves indispensable to the industry, even more so since the banking crisis.”

  “Where do they get their financing?”

  “Typically, they would make arrangements with the banks,” she said. “Given Urbank’s rapid growth, it is able to exert a greater amount of influence over the remaining brokers. Call it a leverage on leverage.”

  “How else would an owner finance a fleet outside of brokers and banks?” More asked out of nowhere, startling Santiago so much his teeth clacked. There was no trace of phlegm in More’s voice. Baijanti Divya’s luminous green eyes moved over to More.

  “There
are many places one may find money, detective,” Baijanti Divya said, and the new, faint note of coyness in her voice registered in Santiago’s head.

  “Like where?” he blurted out.

  Without taking her eyes off More, Baijanti Divya said, “I believe you are asking me to confirm something you already know.”

  Now Santiago was lost. The conversation had taken an abrupt turn, and he had been thrown out of it. “What do you mean?”

  “I believe your colleague is referring to the Javaid Tariq Corporation. It is, shall we say, an experimental paradigm, a pilot program for an aging industry,” she said. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it; most drivers would give quite a bit to be able to work there. At the risk of sounding trite, it’s a taxi corporation designed to provide better returns for the drivers as well as the owners, who, of course, are drivers themselves, as required by TLC regulations. It’s also only half a mile from where you now stand.”

  “Namaste,” More said, tilting his head slightly in her direction.

  “Shubh kamanaye,” replied Baijanti Divya, smiling.

  “What the fuck?” groused Santiago.

  “You want to tell me what the fuck happened back there?” Santiago grumbled. More had been keeping him off balance all day, and it was pissing him off.

  “She’s sharp for a hijra,” More gurgled.

  “Okay, before you tell me what that means, tell me what fucking language you were speaking and how you know it.” The last thing Santiago wanted was more linguistic surprises from his ordinarily taciturn partner.

  “Hindi. Rosetta Stone.” More was watching the jumbo jets lumber into the sky.

  “You speak Hindi? Is that part of your ESU training too?” Santiago was unconsciously pressing down on the gas as they hurtled creakily onto the expressway.

  More made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat. Santiago wanted to put a choke hold on him.

  “You were sent to Mumbai and Delhi to do CT stuff, is that it?” Santiago growled. In the wake of 9/11, sending NYPD “specialists” abroad for counter-terrorism cross-training had become all the rage. Until, of course, it got too expensive.

  “Jammu and Kashmir, actually,” More replied, and this confused Santiago, mostly because he thought he detected a trace of wistfulness in More’s voice, buried beneath the phlegm.

  “So what’s a hijra?”

  “Intersexual. In India they’re called ‘the Third Sex.’ ”

  “Wait. You. She. Not. A man?”

  “Could be a transvestite, a pre- or post-op transsexual, or even a hermaphrodite. There’s a long history of them in South Asia,” More said distractedly, apparently working through a bolus in his throat.

  For a moment Santiago considered shooting More, a thought that seemed to come to him more frequently of late. He just as easily dismissed the thought: If they were going to be working their way through the entire yellow-cab labor pool, he might need a translator.

  Intersexual?

  Fucking More.

  Javaid Talwinder was a well-contented man. His eldest son, Tariq, had submitted fitness reports on the two new hires, both good Punjabi boys only two months in-country. The new Moneymap GPS meters Tariq had insisted upon for each cab were paying off. Even after Javaid’s own week-long instruction course, it would be unreasonable to expect any immigrant to assimilate and memorize the entire road network of the five boroughs in less than one month. The in-dash Moneymaps used real-time navigational software, updated hourly, so no driver had called in lost. News reports on construction, accidents, and road closings also arrived on each driver’s screen in real time, along with TLC alerts on conventions, hotel checkouts, and airport volume, so the drivers could always follow the money and avoid being tied up in traffic. Thanks to the regenerative brake option (expensive, but worth the cost once put into practice, he reflected), the Moneymaps never went dead, which meant the meters never cut out, which meant the cabs stayed on the street, and the drivers stayed out of the TLC’s kangaroo courts. A moving cab is a river of gold, an idle cab is a money drain, Javaid thought, echoing the mantra of the old Irish supervisor who’d broken him in years earlier.

  Manesh, Javaid’s foreman in charge of keeping the cabs running, appeared off Javaid’s left shoulder as though by magic. “Need your signature, bhai,” Manesh said in a rumbling voice. He held out a clipboard in one huge, oil-stained paw. To his delight, Javaid read a list of familiar words and numbers comprising the final shipment for the bolt-on turbo/intercooler upgrades for the cabs, which would enable the Hondas to keep up with any five-, six-, or eight-cylinder cabs on the road, but which were also completely reversible (a necessity, come inspection time). The inventory was now complete; Manesh had a full set of replacement parts in-house for each and every cab in the fleet, just as they’d planned. Barring true catastrophe, no cab would spend more than one shift off-road on a lift with Manesh tearing at its guts. Javaid happily scrawled his name on the freight bill and beamed at Manesh, whose dull amphibian gaze never changed, and sent him on his way. Allahu akhbar, he thought, turning to face the front lot through the three open garage doors. God truly is great.

  Then he spotted the beat-up Crown Vic stretch taxicab drifting creakily to a stop not twenty yards away as the delivery van quickly backed out, and thought: bhenchod.

  For a moment he figured this was just another driver leaving his garage for greener pastures. He mentally called up the speech he’d rehearsed for turning away new job seekers; Javaid’s team was hand-picked, and his garage was already fully staffed. Interlopers were not welcome. He’d chased quite a few off already.

  Something about the taxi appeared wrong to Javaid. The paint scheme was right, the medallion was right where it should be at eleven o’clock on the hood, there was grime on the front valance and inside the wheel arches that no car wash would ever touch. As his eyes drifted over the cab’s hood, he caught it on the edge of his vision: This cab’s license plate was not the standard TLC sequence. This cab’s plate had six consecutive numbers bookended by matched capitals. This cab was not a cab.

  The driver was big and brown, and even at a distance Javaid could make out the same sort of hands Manesh possessed—mechanic’s mitts. As the driver closed the gap (long strides, a slight swagger), Javaid’s hopes for connecting along familiar South Asian ground faded in the face of Hispanic hostility. Puerto Rican, Javaid guessed. Maybe Cuban, or even Mexican. Javaid had a cousin who owned a greengrocery on the Upper West Side full of such men, who broke down cardboard boxes and stacked cans of condensed milk and cupped Newports in their tattooed hands when Javaid’s cousin wasn’t around.

  The man who got out of the passenger side was mamuli, nondescript. Caucasian, smaller than his companion, his form lost in a black army jacket and hooded sweatshirt, he moved on silent trainers and seemed to fade into the tarmac of the parking lot.

  The big Latino was already in his face, all frog eyes and bull neck. “Police Department, Detectives Santiago and More, Citywide Anticrime,” he said in a voice that oddly echoed Manesh’s in timbre.

  Javaid was well versed in dealing with hostile authority figures and put on his best expression of courteous compliance. “Yes?”

  “We’re pursuing an investigation into the deaths of two yellow cabdrivers during the past two weeks,” said the big dark one. “We’re treating these as homicides. Our intelligence suggests that the victims may at some point within the last year have tried to gain employment with your corporation. We’d like to review your employee application records.”

  Khun? Murder?

  “Of course,” he managed, finding a small outcropping of stability in his professorial mannerisms of long ago in Lahore.

  The garage was nothing like those along Vernon Boulevard. It was too new, too clean, too spacious. The outer lot, Santiago guessed, ran to maybe two or three acres, with new blacktop, split into more or less three areas. The first was the front lot they’d pulled into (fenced, with concertina wire running along the top
and floodlights mounted on each corner post, along with what appeared to Santiago to be CCTV cameras behind all-weather plastic housings, much like those deployed above traffic signals citywide to catch tags on light-jumpers, speeders, and hit-and-runs). The floods and cameras were arranged so that the entire front lot would be covered day or night.

  The front lot consisted of a compact, inverted-U-frame car wash (complete with soap guns and vacuum hoses, like those he remembered from his childhood back in the DR) and—More had caught this when they first rolled up to the garage doors—two brand-new diesel pumps (B-100 blend). Every garage Santiago had ever seen boasted lifts and grease monkeys trying to wring a few more miles out of each battered cab, but not every one had its own pump, let alone two, let alone diesel. The garages he drove by along Tenth Avenue in Manhattan were usually located along side streets next to gas stations, and the cabbies would drive right off the lifts to tank up. Santiago wrote himself a reminder in his phone to check with Traffic, DEP, and the TLC about new pump applications and permits. This place had been thoughtfully planned out by someone familiar with the industry, someone who would know all the bureaucratic requirements set down by the TLC for garage and fleet operations. Santiago bet himself there would be a large filing cabinet somewhere in this man’s office that contained every receipt for every payment for every permit this outfit required.

  “You’re an ex-driver,” Santiago said, no question in his tone.

  Javaid smiled for the first time since the foreign cab had first rolled onto his lot. His teeth were yellow and bore all the marks of hard wear. “No, detective, I am a current driver. TLC regulations specify that owners of mini-fleets, which are defined as corporations containing two or more medallion taxicabs, must themselves drive a minimum of twenty hours per week. I do, as does my son.”

  The son had been standing just behind his father’s right shoulder, a look of open hostility etched into his features. There was no question of family resemblance, the kid had his father’s high cheekbones, coriander coloring, and a good deal more hair, cut the same way as his father’s. He wore jeans and a teal-colored T-shirt with a VW logo and the words EAST LONDON ALL STAR DUBS CLUB on the front. Behind him, three lifts (brand-new, their rails painted a brilliant red to contrast with the undercarriages of the cabs they would support) ran the length of the main service area. The far wall contained a series of heavy-duty metal racks and shelves, reaching almost all the way up to the ceiling, each containing a row of what Santiago realized were all the components of the driveline, arranged by weight and size. The rack closest to the floor held new tires, with laser-printed signs designating front and rear neatly taped to the wall above each group. Above were gleaming new alloy wheels, arranged the same way. Above those, stainless-steel brake rotors, their machined surfaces catching a dull shine from the overheads, were neatly arranged alongside large black calipers with the word ALCON in silver dropped-out type. The next rack up contained odd-looking pinions and springs, which Santiago guessed were suspension components. The place seemed purpose-built to service taxicabs and put them back on the road in the smallest amount of time possible.