After opening the Gladstone bag, DiLeo removed two kilos of white powder in sealed clear plastic bags, stacking them on the table. He put the bag on the floor, picked up his attaché case, put it down on the cushion next to him, and took out a red Swiss Army knife and a NIK test pack. From the bag he removed a thick plastic sack about six inches long and slid off the clip that sealed it across the top. Using the knife’s widest blade, he sliced into one of the plastic bags and carefully withdrew a small amount of powder on the blade’s flat side. He squeezed the sack open and dumped in the powder, tapping the sides to make sure all the material fell to the bottom. After refolding the pack across the original fold point on top, he slid back the clip, resealing the packet. Secured at the bottom of the plastic sack was a slender glass ampoule containing a reagent that identified opium alkaloids and heroin compounds. Using the tips of his thumb and forefinger, DiLeo squeezed the glass tube, crushing it and releasing the reagent on the powder. Gently agitating the packet, he watched the clear liquid turn a rapidly developing deep purple. “Up, up, up, and away,” DiLeo murmured, under Conrado’s and Ramón’s satisfied smiles.
“How’d it test?” Levi asked.
“Looks like eighty-five percent pure,” DiLeo said. After testing the remaining kilos, he looked up at the dopers and said, “Definitely quality stuff.”
“Then we got a deal,” Conrado said.
“Yeah,” Levi answered, quickly adding, “But there’s a problem. You’ve seen and marked our money, and all we’ve got are two keys that you’ve spoon-fed us. We gotta test the entire stash.”
Conrado’s lips drew back in an angry snarl, showing a lot of gold dental work. “We guarantee the quality.”
Levi and DiLeo smiled at each other. “You guarantee?” Levi said. “Lemme tell you something. The people we represent guarantee … with our lives. So if we don’t get to test the entire stash, we got no deal.”
Conrado started to say something when his beeper went off. He made a bewildered shrug of his shoulders at the other doper, looked down at the number in the device’s tiny display window, and, unfolding his cellular phone, walked over to the window, punching a number into the hand-held instrument. “Yeah?” His body tensed when he heard the voice on the other end. His back was to the others, or they would have seen his cheek twitch nervously. “Yes, sir. Yes, of course, Hector,” he said, and switched off the phone. He stood with his back to the others, staring out at the city, not saying anything.
DiLeo glanced at his partner with questioning eyes. Who was Hector? What was that call all about? Any unexpected happenings during an undercover buy was not a good sign. Bad vibes began to creep down the undercover’s spine.
Conrado turned, looked at Levi, and said, “We’ll take you to the stuff.”
On the way out of the suite, Levi looked at the painting over the sofa and shook his head, signaling he had no idea what was going down. Ramón and Conrado led them down the corridor toward the elevators. Conrado leaned in close to his partner and whispered something, then rushed ahead and held open the door to the stairwell and announced, “We’ll walk.”
It was a cold, silent place, with walls and stairs painted battleship gray and banisters colored a glaring cardinal red.
“What floor?” Levi asked, unable to ignore the bad vibes now surging through his body. Should they abort and collar the dopers or play it out? Who the hell was Hector? Whoever he was, Levi thought, he had to be someone muy importante for that stone killer Conrado to call “sir.” “What floor we goin’ to?” he repeated.
“Fifth,” Conrado said.
They had just passed the ninth-floor landing when the exit door was quietly pushed open behind them. A man stepped out onto the landing, a tall, distinguished-looking Hispanic dressed in a beautifully tailored brown light woolen suit. A wide streak of white ran through the middle of his black hair, and his dark, searching eyes were set deep under his overhanging brow. His cheeks were badly pockmarked; he was wearing latex gloves, and his right hand was hidden inside a brown paper shopping bag. Looking down at his quarry, he raised the bag.
DiLeo, sensing danger, wheeled around, saw the stranger pointing the shopping bag at them, and started to scream a warning. The man standing on the landing squeezed off a short burst from his silenced weapon, sending a hail of .45-caliber slugs tearing into the undercover’s chest, toppling him dead on the stairs.
His hand reaching frantically for the automatic in the small of his back, Levi spun to face the danger. He had just grabbed the Beretta’s checkered grip when a burst of silenced automatic fire plowed into his body, lifting him up and slamming him into the wall, where he sank to a sitting position, his blood leaving a broad smear down the cinder block. “I’m not going to David’s Bar Mitzvah,” he said in a tone of utter weariness, and died.
The shredded shopping bag was thrown down the stairs. Color drained from the dopers’ faces as they watched the shooter move down the steps toward them, his expressionless eyes peering at them with chilling indifference.
Ramón raised his hands in a gesture of supplication when he saw the MAC-10 with the blunt silencer at the end pointing at them. “We were told they were okay,” he pleaded.
“They were cops,” Hector whispered, and shot Ramón and Conrado dead.
2
“Too tall Paulie” kicked the wastebasket across his ninth-floor office in One Police Plaza and gloated with malicious satisfaction as it bounced off the wall, spewing paper across the room. He stormed after it and kicked it again. This time the force of his blow broke through the thin plastic skin, impaling the basket on his shoe. “Goddammit!” Hobbling, he worked it off his foot and hurled it at the wall, knocking down a photograph of himself and former Police Commissioner Ben Ward.
Behind his desk once again, he slumped onto his chair and stared out the window at the Municipal Building’s gingerbread cupola encased in scaffolding, wondering for the fiftieth time when the city would finish the apparently endless renovation.
Assistant Chief Inspector Paul Burke’s lithe, six-foot-two-inch frame had long ago earned him the nickname “Too Tall Paulie.” For the last eight years he had commanded the NYPD’s Narcotics Division. Most of his twenty-eight years in the Job had been spent working narcotics. Last night’s murder of DiLeo and Levi had raised to three the number of undercovers killed in the past year and a half, three of the best in the Job, all murdered while trying to infiltrate the same network. How had their covers been blown? he kept asking himself. He pushed himself out of the chair, went over to the coat closet, and rolled out his dance board, a large square of three-quarter-inch hardwood. After wheeling it to the center of the room, he let it fall flat on the floor and went back to the closet. He took out his tap shoes and walked over to the couch, where he sat down and unlaced his street shoes.
Except for the bagel and coffee he had wolfed down when he got to One Police Plaza at nine-thirty, he had eaten nothing since early last night, but he didn’t feel hungry. Just angry and puzzled.
Some people meditated; Too Tall Paulie danced. When he was on the board tapping, he was free, his body floating, his jumbled thoughts clearing, focusing. He had been at the crime scene for most of the night and had come directly to his office from there. He needed to clear his head, to focus on how their covers had been blown. Tossing aside his street shoes, he slipped his feet into his dance shoes and laced them up. After taking off his shirt and tie, he folded them carefully over the back of a chair, stood on the board, and began tap-dancing, his body loose, his arms moving in the same rhythm. He hit a triplet in swing time with his thoughts focusing on the mistakes that he might have made. Was there a leak in the office? Had the dopers bought one of his people? Was someone sleeping in the wrong bed, bragging to the wrong person?
After dancing for a while, beads of sweat glistened on his receding hairline. He had been at it for about fifteen minutes when Captain Dave Katz, his executive officer, walked in without knocking, carrying several brown manila file fo
lders. Ignoring the now familiar spectacle of his boss absorbed in a tap routine, something unlikely to be seen in any other police office anywhere in the world, Katz went over to the television in the corner of the room by the desk and popped a videocassette into the VCR. He turned on the machine, stepped back, and lowered himself onto the edge of the chief’s desk. His short legs dangled just above the floor. He was dressed in a gray suit that complemented his fresh, almost boyish complexion. People tended to assume he was younger than his actual age, which was forty-seven.
Too Tall Paulie continued dancing, his eyes riveted on the unfolding footage. DiLeo’s grinning face appeared on the screen. “You receiving, Big Guy?” Seeing the undercover caused Too Tall Paulie to break his time signature and start noodling, the tap dancer’s way of humming to himself, as he intently watched the four men leaving suite 1102. Katz got up off the desk, switched off the VCR, and inserted an audiotape into the slot of a Japanese-made high-quality audio playback unit. “Levi had a transmitter concealed in a pen,” he said, pressing the Play button.
Burke stopped dancing and ran his fingers through his gray hair as he listened to the sounds of shuffling feet going down a staircase, then the chilling sound of the muffled puffs of a MAC-10. A gasping sound was quickly followed by the thump of a body hitting treads, and then came the desperate scraping of feet, followed by the silenced bark of the MAC-10 and the thud of an object colliding with another. A pleading voice: “We were told they were okay.”
Katz shut off the machine before the sounds of men shouting frantically, “Get ambulances!” rolled off the tape. He looked at his boss and said, “The shooter probably took the elevator down to the lobby and then just calmly walked away.”
Too Tall Paulie stepped off the board and went into the bathroom. While urinating, he called out through the open door, “What about the Ghosts on surveillance outside the hotel?”
“I have them going over mug shots now. One of them might recognize the shooter as someone who left the hotel.” After washing and toweling himself dry, Burke came out of the tiny bathroom, removed a clean undershirt from the side drawer of his desk, and pulled it over his head. He sat down on the couch and wearily looked around his office as he unlaced his dance shoes. “Ya know how you know you’ve made it in the Job? When they give you your own bathroom.”
Katz grinned thinly.
“There’s a great golf course down in Pebble Beach. Right at this moment I have an urge to dash upstairs to the Pension Bureau, throw in my papers, and retire to California to play golf and get reacquainted with my wife.” Tugging off a shoe and casting it aside angrily, he added, “But I can’t do that, because three of my people are homicide victims, and that’s the kind of unfinished business I don’t intend to leave behind when I go.”
The XO looked at his boss with an expression of concern on his face. They had been friends a lot of years, through a lot of good and bad together, but never anything like this. He knew Burke well enough to know that he had the same searing frustration gnawing at his guts.
Getting up off the couch, Burke asked sadly, “How, Dave? How were they made?”
Katz screwed his face up and said softly, “I don’t know, Paulie. I just can’t figure it.”
“Did we make any mistakes?”
“None that I can see. A CI made the introduction after Fermi’s death and then got out of the picture. We figured DiLeo and Levi were totally convincing to the dopers, at least in the first two meets.”
“Was the same confidential informant used to introduce Tony Fermi into the network?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s our connection. Where is this CI now?”
Katz rubbed the bursitis pain in his left shoulder and said nervously, “Still out there working the street for us, Paulie. We’re holding three counts of direct sale, all A-one felonies, over this guy’s head. No way, no fucking way he’s gonna roll on us. He’ll do life plus fifty if we send him back inside.”
Burke plucked his shirt and tie off the chair. Shoving an arm through one sleeve, he said, “If we didn’t screw up, and the undercovers didn’t, and the CI didn’t roll over, then the only logical conclusion we can draw is that we have a problem at home.”
Shaking his head in emphatic disagreement, Katz said, “No way. Our undercovers are too compartmentalized. Only a handful of our people even know who they are.”
Buttoning his shirt, Burke paused and asked thoughtfully, “Remember JoAnn Banks? She fell in love with the network’s honcho and ended up in his bed.”
“I remember her all too well. I ran her. A three-year operation went into the toilet because of that bitch, not to mention a million dollars of taxpayers’ money.”
Burke sat at his desk and started making notes on a yellow legal pad. “One of our people might be dippin’ their dicks into the wrong honeypot. Check around. And lean on that so-called confidential informant, make damn sure he didn’t change camps, or isn’t playing both sides of the street.” He went over to the coat closet, pulled out his brown suit jacket, and slipped into it. Struck by a sudden thought, he looked across the room at his executive officer and asked, “Is Joey-the-G-Man still hanging around with those crazy Hasidim?”
3
Schoolbuses lined the curb in front of Yeshiva Beth Chaim. Passersby who bothered to look through any of the open first-floor windows would see Hasidic boys with yarmulkes and side curls studying at their desks.
The school, located on the northwest corner of West End Avenue and Ninety-sixth Street, had for more than fifty years been home to Public School 66. Eight years ago a new P.S. 66 was built on One Hundredth Street, and the city leased the old building to the yeshiva. It was a good deal for the religious group. The annual rent was only a thousand dollars, and the only other requirement, besides having to maintain the property, was to allow the Board of Education’s Manhattan maintenance unit to occupy, and use, the row of attached one-story stone garages strung across the back of the school yard.
Too Tall Paulie parked his Department-leased Cadillac Sedan de Ville in a garage a block away from the yeshiva. Walking across West End Avenue toward the school yard, he saw a group of boys playing basketball, their arms, curls, and tsitsis flailing. He grinned, recalling Joey-the-G-Man’s nickname for the Hasidim—Brownsville Detectives.
Deputy Chief Joe Romano had spent his entire thirty-three years in the Job working in the Land of Trick Mirrors, as the Intelligence Division was known in the Department. The NYPD’s table of organization listed only two subunits for the division, the Criminal Section and the Public Security Section. Too Tall Paulie knew that there were unlisted units within the Land of Trick Mirrors that only his old friend Romano knew existed. Joey-the-G-Man was the CO of the Intelligence Division’s nonexistent covert action unit—the Special Operations Section.
Walking across the school yard, Burke watched with interest as one of the players went up and jammed in the ball. At the string of garages, he made an oblique right, heading for the one with the plaque that read MAINTENANCE UNIT.
Pushing open the door and going inside, he saw a middle-aged woman in a cream-colored linen dress sitting behind an inch-and-a-half-thick glass wall. “May I help you, sir?” she asked through the microphone.
“I’m Chief Burke. I’m here to see Chief Romano.”
“Identification,” she asked, pushing out the steel depository drawer.
Too Tall Paulie took out his laminated identification card and plunked it into the cavity, then watched her pull the drawer closed and retrieve his card. Spinning around to the computer, she began scrolling the Force Record File to the B’s. When she entered that bank, she pushed several keys, and Burke’s picture rolled onto the screen. She compared the face on the other side of the glass with the one in front of her, dropped his identification card into the drawer, pushed it out, and, reaching under her desk, buzzed open the steel door.
Another woman appeared on the other side and led him through another door and down a corri
dor lined on both sides by closed doors with cipher locks. It was obvious to Burke that all the garages had been connected by a common corridor into one large suite of offices.
Romano was at the end of the hallway, waiting. The head of Special Operations hurried to meet his friend. Shaking hands, Romano said, “I’m not going to ask you how you feel, Paul. How are DiLeo’s and Levi’s families holding up?”
“’Bout as expected,” he said, following Romano into his Spartan office.
“The only thing keeping both widows on their feet is the Chaplain’s Unit working with them on funeral arrangements. Levi’s burial is first—you know they gotta plant him within twenty-four hours. Looks like DiLeo’s requiem mass will be on Thursday.”
Not one picture was on any of the walls, not one personal memento or remembrance anywhere to be seen, nothing that gave a clue as to the personality of the occupant. The top of the desk was bare, save for the telephone and one yellow pencil. Watching his friend going back behind his desk, Burke thought, Only phantoms work in the Land of Trick Mirrors.
Folding his hands on the desk in front of him, Romano smiled and said, “It was you who laid the moniker Joey-the-G-Man on me, wasn’t it?”
“I’ll cop a plea on that one. We were in the Academy. I never thought it would stick.”
Romano’s smile evaporated, leaving behind a bony face in a blank mask and a bald head. “What can I do for you, Paul?”
Burke tossed a glassine envelope on the desk. Romano picked it up and examined the logo of three golden horizontal stripes backgrounding the ancient face of a beautiful woman with taut braids across the top of her head. “What’s this?”
“A dime bag of Cleopatra Gold, guaranteed to be eighty-five to ninety percent pure heroin.”
Romano felt the tic invade his face. He sucked in a deep breath and rubbed his eyebrow, hoping the disturbance could not be seen. “Cleopatra?” he said wanly.
Cleopatra Gold Page 2