Cleopatra Gold

by William Caunitz

  Cleopatra Gold

  William J. Caunitz

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For my grandsons,

  Joshua and Matthew

  1

  The Ghosts arrived early. Two of them got out of a taxi in front of the Savoy Hotel on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. It was a little before ten in the morning as they quietly made their way through the lobby to the elevators. They were supposed to be businessmen, so they had dressed in lightweight suits appropriate for a humid New York summer. They clutched Louis Vuitton suitcases and wore watches with heavy gold bracelets.

  They took the elevator to the eleventh floor and walked along the corridor to suite 1101. One of them inserted a plastic key card into the slot above the doorknob, and when the bulb glowed green he pushed the door open, and they went inside. Fifteen minutes later four more well-dressed Ghosts carrying Coach leather carryalls knocked softly on the door of suite 1103.

  A short time later an aging, noticeably overweight female Ghost with short gray hair outfitted in one of the hotel’s maid uniforms appeared on the eleventh floor, pushing a service trolley. She stopped in front of the adjoining suite, 1102, and knocked. After getting no reply, she knocked again. Still there was no answer, so she took out her passkey and let herself in. The guest who had been staying in this suite was scheduled to have checked out at eight that morning in order to catch a ten A.M. flight to Los Angeles. She had to make sure he was gone. Stepping into the foyer, she called, “Hello? Housekeeping.”

  The small hall led into a large living room with a window that overlooked the jagged verticality of the city’s mix of buildings new and grand, aged, low and humble. The bedroom and bathroom were to the left, off the living room. The Ghost went directly into the bathroom and picked up all the dirty towels scattered on the floor. Then she walked back into the hotel’s corridor, tossed them into the trolley’s cloth hamper, and, reaching into the middle shelf, slid out a stack of oversize bath towels. Back inside the suite, she nudged the door closed with her knee and went into the living room, where she put the stack on the sofa against the wall between 1102 and the bedroom of suite 1103. Leaning forward, she reached up, spread her arms, and lifted down the eighteen-inch-wide reproduction of an anonymous oil painting of a shepherd herding his flock over rolling hills and put it down on the floor. The woman pulled out an identical painting carefully concealed in a stack of towels and hung it in the empty space. Stepping back, she made sure the picture was straight and looked naturally in position. She picked up the other picture and walked into the bedroom, where she put it on the bed and wrapped it in dirty bed sheets. Back outside into the main corridor, she shoved the dirty linen into the hamper, slid out clean sheets, went back inside to the bedroom, and unfurled and spread the top sheet over the mattress.

  The Ghosts in suite 1101 were unpacking their quite unbusinesslike equipment in the bedroom that adjoined the bedroom of suite 1102—two Uzi submachine guns were placed on the bed. The shorter of the two Ghosts opened another suitcase, turned the lid to face the wall, and clicked on a knob concealed in the suitcase’s hinge. The flat television screen concealed in the inside of the suitcase’s lid glowed, and a picture of the maid making the bed in the adjoining bedroom sprang into full color. The other Ghost was checking the reel-to-reel audio backup equipment inside the other suitcase. The rule was, when you stole sound and pictures, you made sure you really got at least one of the two.

  In suite 1103 the other Ghosts opened their carryalls and took out three double-barreled shotguns and one Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol with sound suppressor. The oldest of the four had unkempt dirty blond hair; he keyed a number into his cellular telephone and asked the person on the other end, “You ready?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah. Hang loose.” The older Ghost switched off the phone and looked down at the video receiver in time to see the maid walking out of the living room of the adjacent suite with a satisfied, somewhat nasty smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. He couldn’t repress a grin at the thought, We get off on doin’ this shit. After punching another number into his phone, he said in a low, suddenly intense voice, “Bring in the green.”

  A black Lincoln Town Car made a right-hand turn out of Sixty-third Street and drew up in front of the Savoy Hotel. Three burly men wearing obviously expensive jogging outfits got out and walked to the back of the car. One of them opened the trunk while another motioned to the bellhop to bring over his luggage cart.

  A barrel-chested man wearing a loose-fitting Mexican-style white shirt with an embroidered floral design down the front climbed out of the passenger seat, clutching a nylon flight bag. He joined the others and watched as four suitcases were taken out of the trunk and loaded onto the luggage cart.

  Seven minutes later the four of them got off the elevator on the eleventh floor of the hotel and convoyed the luggage down the corridor to suite 1122. The one with the nylon flight bag handed the bellboy a five-dollar bill and said firmly, “We’ll carry ’em inside.”

  Once inside the suite, the man with the flight bag took out a cellular telephone, keyed in a number, and said, “The green be here.”

  At three-thirty that beautiful June afternoon, undercover detectives Vito DiLeo and Jerry Levi let themselves into suite 1102 of the Savoy. They were swarthy, medium-size men both with black curly hair, although Levi’s was starting to recede in front. Levi was closely shaven, his jowls a heavily shadowed bluish color that comes from a twice-a-day need to shave. Curly black hairs escaped from the confines of the cuffs of his light Sea Island cotton shirt. His long, narrow face had an ascetic cast, El Greco-like, especially because of his huge black eyes. Both men had grown up on the streets of Manhattan, DiLeo on Mulberry Street in Little Italy and Levi in the small Sephardic community clustered around Hester Street. Levi was fluent in Spanish and Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of the Sephardic Jew, while DiLeo spoke several Italian dialects. His face was open, friendly—a man quick to tell a joke and laugh heartily at his own punch line.

  For the past eight months they had been working their way up the tangled branches of a narcotics-importing network that had uncovered and murdered an undercover detective ten months earlier. That cop’s name was Tony Fermi, another officer of Sephardic heritage. DiLeo and Levi had been posing as big-time dopers who represented a retailing network operating in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.

  Levi was wearing beige trousers, tasseled loafers, and a brown linen sports jacket over his white cotton shirt. DiLeo had on a gray summer suit and an open-necked blue button-down shirt. Both had .380 Beretta automatics jammed into their waistbands at the small of their backs.

  DiLeo ambled over to the painting above the sofa, gave a “thumbs up” gesture, and said, “You receiving, Big Guy?”

  One of the Ghosts in suite 1103 banged three times on the wall.

  Levi reached into his jacket’s left breast pocket and slid out what appeared to be a disposable plastic pen. Holding the instrument out in front of him, he tested, “One, two, three, four, I love the Marine Corps. All you Ghosts out there receiving me?”

  Knocks resounded through the living room and bedroom walls.

  “Is the money room set up?” Levi asked.

  More knocks.

  Looking carefully at the innocuous, cheap-looking pen, he said to DiLeo, “Incredible stuff Tech Services comes up with. The Job’s come a long way since the days when a cop had to rap his nightstick on the sidewalk to summon help.” He slid the transmitter pen back into the pocket of his jacket.

  DiLeo went over to the window to admire the view of the city baking in the unusually hot June morning. “I love this town.”

  Levi flopped down on the sofa. Picking up the remote and flicking on the television, he s
aid, “I hope this thing goes down today. David’s Bar Mitzvah is in two weeks. I don’t want to be still out there playing games with these scumbags. I need to devote some time to my family.” Flipping channels, he looked over at DiLeo and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I can’t wait to see you at the Bar Mitzvah wearing a yarmulke.”

  “Kiss my ass, you Rican half-breed.”

  Levi flipped to the in-house movie channel. “Sea of Love.”

  “Seen it. What’s today’s date?”

  “The thirteenth.”

  “Lucky we ain’t superstitious.”

  At five o’clock a well-dressed man carrying a gleaming black leather Gladstone bag walked into the Grill Room of the Savoy and asked the maître d’ for a table in the no smoking section, one that had a view of Park Avenue. The maître d’s practiced hand made a ten-dollar bill disappear magically as he escorted the guest over to a window table with a “Reserved” card on it. He let the maître d’ pull out a chair for him, sat down, and casually pushed his bag under the table.

  Two women in subdued but obviously expensive designer suits, one a strawberry blonde, the other a dark and quite voluptuous brunette, were chatting over tea and scones at one of the nearby tables. One of them laughed at something her friend said, picked up her napkin, and while dabbing her mouth whispered into the mike concealed in the right sleeve of her suit jacket, “The mule just arrived.”

  From his seat the man with the Gladstone bag had a view of the hotel’s entrance and the entire restaurant. Nervously repositioning the bag up against the wall with his foot, he studied the menu. A waiter in a starched white jacket came over and asked, “Are you ready to order, sir?”

  “Yes. I’d like the endive, watercress, and Bibb lettuce salad with the lemon vinaigrette on the side, and the Dover sole.”

  “Anything to drink, sir?”

  “Just water, thank you.”

  As the waiter turned to leave, the man slid his jacket open and checked to see that his beeper was turned on. He looked out the window in time to see an attractive woman half turn her body around, lower herself into the rear seat of a taxi, and gracefully lift in her legs. He loved this time of year; the skirts got so short that they virtually disappeared.

  Seventeen minutes later two casually dressed men got out of a taxi and stood under the hotel’s canopy, looking around with the idle expressions of people waiting to meet someone. The stout one had a pug nose and small ears set close to his head. His companion was over six feet tall and built like a pro basketball player. The shorter man glanced inside the restaurant at the man sitting by the window nibbling at his salad. Their eyes met briefly, then the two men walked into the hotel and took the elevator up to the eleventh floor.

  DiLeo and Levi lounged around the suite, not saying much or paying attention to the movie. They were suffering through the undercover doldrums, a mixture of anxiety over what was about to go down and boredom waiting for it to happen. It was during these periods that undercovers turned down their volume, conserving their energy while dreaming about such mundane things as cutting the lawn, strolling through the shopping mall with their family, and taking in a Saturday-night movie with the wife—anything but doing kilo deals with scumbag dope dealers.

  Levi looked at his watch. “Five-twenty. They were supposed to be here at five.”

  “Dopers are always late, you know that.” DiLeo pushed himself up off the sofa. “I gotta take a piss.”

  A few minutes later three slow knocks on the door made Levi jump up, his adrenaline surging. He took his Beretta out of the waistband of his trousers and went over to the door. “Yeah?”

  “It’s us, Ramón and Conrado.”

  Peering through the little glass lens in the middle of the door, Levi saw the magnified faces of the dopers. Conrado, the short one with the flattened nostrils and strong Indio features, came in and stood in the foyer, scanning the room. Tall Ramón came in behind him and closed and locked the door. He moved with an eerie mixture of silence and fluid grace.

  Walking back into the living room, zipping up his fly, DiLeo saw the new arrivals and said, “Hey, you guys finally got here.” Going over and grabbing Conrado by the shoulders, he added, “Good to see you, amigo.”

  Conrado’s eyes turned to stare coldly at the undercover cop. “I don’t like hotel rooms. They’re too easy to bug.”

  “Hey, amigo, if it’s not cool here, split. We’ll deal another time, another place. Next time out, you pick the spot,” DiLeo said, going over and flicking off the television.

  Ramón seemed to take up a great deal of the air-conditioned space of the hotel room; his cruel face, with an ugly scar running down the chin, turned toward DiLeo. He folded his arms and said slowly, in a low, hoarse voice, “You always smelled like the man to me.”

  DiLeo assumed a pissed-off expression, jerked his thumb at the door, and said, “There’s the fuckin’ way out, amigo. We came here with a mil six to deal. You don’t got trust … fuck you … we’ll take our green somewhere else.”

  Conrado raised an eyebrow, staring into Ramón’s cold gray eyes, and said, “My friend is overly cautious, sometimes.”

  Levi smiled. “There’s no such thing as too much careful in our business.”

  Conrado put his overnight bag on top of the writing table in the front of the living room and said, “I wanna make sure you understand the fine print. We give you a franchise to peddle our produce with your commitment that it’s not to be stepped on. You’ll do nothing to adulterate its purity. In return, we guarantee you your supply, and that no one else hustles our stuff within your territory.”

  Ramón then broke in, “You use only our glassine envelopes, the ones that have our logo. On the crack vials you should charge a deposit; you recycle them and maximize your profits.” Walking around the room, his fingers checking the moldings, looking for concealed microphones, he added, “As we agreed, the price is a hundred and sixty thousand a kilo, minimum first order, ten keys, payable on delivery. After we do business awhile, and we get to know each other better, credit terms can be arranged.” Looking at the painting hanging over the sofa, he went on to ask, “Questions?”

  The undercovers shook their heads.

  “Then let’s do it,” Ramón said. “Your money’s here, right?”

  “Yeah,” DiLeo said, “but before we go for it, we wanna taste.”

  “First the money,” Conrado insisted.

  DiLeo looked over at his partner and shrugged. Levi walked over to the door, opened it, and made a sweeping bow, throwing out his hand in a gesture of exaggerated courtesy. Conrado picked up his overnight bag from the writing table and followed the others out of the suite.

  DiLeo knocked twice on the door of suite 1122, counted to five, and knocked twice more. The door was jerked open to reveal the unsmiling face of the man in the loose-fitting white shirt, pointing a MAC-10 directly up at Ramón’s mean face.

  The dopers strolled into the suite contemptuously and were greeted by stern faces and the menacing snouts of sawed-off shotguns. Two suitcases were on top of the writing table in the living room, and two more were on the floor. The dopers went over to them and opened the two on the desk. Conrado ran caressing fingers over the tightly packed stacks of bills. He looked over at the unsmiling Ghosts and the shotguns cradled in their arms, grinned, and said, “Loosen up, guys.”

  Ramón unzipped the overnight bag and took out an electronic currency counter and a penlight device called the Black Light, which exposed counterfeit money. Randomly pulling bills from several bundles, he brushed the penlight across them, checking.

  Pretending to be offended, Levi lamented, “Ain’t there no trust left in the world?”

  “No,” Ramón said without looking up from his task.

  Conrado reached down into the suitcase, worked out a bundle of money, and began running it through the currency counter. Watching the bills spill through the machine, giving off an electronic buzz, DiLeo said, “Why d
on’t I send down for a couple of bottles of DP to celebrate?”

  Eyes fixed on the flashing red numbers, Conrado said, “We’re not done yet; besides, Dom Pérignon gives me gas.”

  Ninety long, tense minutes later, Conrado looked up at Ramón and said, “It’s all here.”

  Ramón nodded, reached back into the overnight, and took out a hand taping machine and three rolls of different-colored masking tape. After examining the rolls and deciding which color to use, he inserted the orange roll into the hand machine and proceeded to spread strands horizontally and vertically across the tops of the open suitcases, effectively color-coding the contents and preventing a switch. That done, he took out a Magic Marker and initialed each of the crisscrossing strands of tape. He did the same thing to the other three suitcases. When that was done, the dopers walked out of the money room, leaving the suitcases where they were. The undercovers followed them.

  Downstairs in the Grill Room, the man who had ordered the endive, watercress, and Bibb lettuce salad with lemon vinaigrette on the side was sipping decaffeinated coffee when his beeper went off. He put down his cup, switched off the signal, and motioned to the waiter for his bill.

  The two attractive women at the nearby table were still lingering over their tea. One of them turned sideways to get a tissue out of her pocketbook that she had hung over the back of her chair. Opening the bag and reaching inside, she whispered into her sleeve microphone, “The mule’s getting ready to leave.”

  His bill came; he paid in cash, then reached under the table, picked up his Gladstone bag, and left the restaurant. As he was walking across the lobby, he paused to admire the large floral arrangement on top of the Louis XV table, then saw that the elevator had arrived and stepped into it.

  Ramón opened the door of suite 1102, took the Gladstone bag from the man, then turned and handed it to DiLeo. The undercover carried it over to the coffee table and sat down on the sofa, beneath the painting of a shepherd herding his flock across the peaceful, rolling hills.