“When I was a little girl I always wanted to be a ballerina. I used to fantasize that I would meet a prince and fall in love, and he’d carry me off to his castle and we would live happily ever after.”
“And did you ever meet your prince?”
“Unfortunately he turned out to be an asshole.”
“Sorry.”
“I met him in graduate school. He was my professor in seventeenth-century English poetry. When I first saw him …”
Listening to her talk unguardedly, openly, about herself, he grew tense. He knew that there were no truths about himself that he could tell her. He lived a lie without friends or love, and in order to survive in this world he had long ago suppressed his emotions. They were now buried so deeply inside of him that he was not sure they existed anymore. Every time he was with a woman, Seaver’s long-ago warning—“Be careful of entanglements with women; their knowledge is deadly”—echoed through his mind like a storm warning. The NYPD had made up a complete “legend,” a totally bogus biography of Alejandro Monahan: an idyllic childhood, loving parents, puppy love, school, real love followed by heartbreak, his desire to become a singer, and his struggle to achieve that goal. He had learned to tell his lies so well that he almost believed them. As he pressed her close and told her about himself, he prayed that one day he would be able to reach deep inside, recover his feelings, and tell some woman how desperately alone and afraid he had been during his eternity of lies.
They lay in each other’s arms, enjoying the moment, listening to the faint sounds of the night. Then, abruptly, he told her that he had to go home and walk his dog. He got dressed, took her phone number, said he would call her, and left. He went home and crawled into his empty bed. He didn’t have a dog. In fact, he hardly had a real life.
The barge’s purple sail billowed in the evening sky. From its deck, music spread across the Nile, causing people to flock down to the river bed in the hope of seeing their queen. On the barge, half-naked servants served Cleopatra and Che-Che Morales a banquet on gold plates.
On deck, Alejandro, dressed in a tunic and running sneakers, moved toward the pavilion carrying a platter of delicacies, his hands flat beneath the tray, concealing a dagger coated with cobra venom.
The head eunuch stood outside the pavilion, inspecting each platter, making sure that the tasters sampled all the food and drink before passing them into her presence. Moving forward, Alejandro saw the woman named Ann standing by the bow talking to other women with familiar faces. They were staring at him, whispering.
Alejandro’s eyes flew open, his body was soaked with sweat. That damn dream. I always get close to her just before I wake up, he thought, aware of the ringing telephone. He reached out and snapped the receiver to his ear. “Yeah?”
“You sure you wanna go through with this?”
“Don’t you ever sleep?” he asked Seaver.
“No.”
“You already know the answer to that question, so why are you getting me up in the middle of the night?”
“It’s nine A.M. And I wanted to make sure you remembered the time and place.”
“I remember,” he said, and fumbled the receiver back onto its cradle. He reached over the side, groping for the wastebasket full of old sneakers and shoes. He yanked one out and chucked it over the foot of his bed. He’d always had a problem remembering a nocturnal telephone call in the morning, so a while back he’d taken to keeping a basket of old footwear nearby and tossing one out every time he got a nighttime call. Somehow the sight of the shoe or sneaker jogged his sleep-time memory. He turned on his side, remembering the woman Ann. He could smell her lingering scent on his body and wished she were next to him now. But she was gone, pushed away like all the others. It just wasn’t human not having feelings, and that scared him. Hell with it, get some sleep, he told himself, wishing away the irrational uneasiness churning up inside him. But it was no good; the dream and the call had left him wide awake.
The stinging lances of cold water washed away the memories of the dream and the woman. After shaving, he walked into the living room and went over to the music system inside the breakfront, turning on the compact disc player. The lilting sounds of the Clancy Brothers singing Irish ballads drifted throughout his apartment. He went back into his bedroom and dressed in the usual jeans, black sport shirt, black loafers, no socks. In the kitchen he made himself a cup of coffee, then walked out onto the terrace.
Looking down from his Fifth Avenue co-op at the Washington Arch, the marble gateway that presided over Washington Square Park at the foot of Fifth Avenue, he saw that the ravages of time and pollution had eaten away a good part of ol’ George’s face. The stonework on the arch had deteriorated a lot in the seven years since the Job had given him the money to purchase the apartment, he thought, taking another sip of coffee. He walked back inside, his attention falling onto the Aztec head on top of the breakfront. Looking around, he pursed his lips with satisfaction at the strong Mexican motif running through his apartment.
The Clancy Brothers were singing “Troubles,” and he recalled his long-dead Irish grandfather telling him about the Great Hunger. And he remembered his mother’s mother recounting stories of the Conquest and how the Spanish had destroyed their cities, burned their libraries, and slaughtered their priests. He wondered how his Irish grandfather and Tarascan grandmother would have gotten along. They would have been instant amigos, he decided, his lips pressed into a tight smile. Alejandro Monahan is a polyglot of misery, he thought, glancing at his watch. Seeing that it was almost ten-thirty, he gulped the remainder of his coffee and left the apartment.
Seaver would be waiting, but before going to the meet he wanted to stop off at the bank and wire his mother nine thousand of the thirty thousand that Che-Che had given him. Undercovers didn’t have insurance policies, so this way he could make sure that his family in Zihuatanejo was provided for if he vanished from the face of the earth, a strong possibility for someone in his line of work.
6
At eleven that morning Alejandro walked into the living room of the East Fifty-fifth Street safe house and tossed the envelope Che-Che had given him onto the cushion next to where Mother Hen was sitting. “A present from Che-Che for the intro to the banker,” he said.
Seaver lifted the flap and peeked inside. “A lotta green.”
“Twenty-one large. I took nine for the retirement fund. Make sure that’s debited against my expenses. What do I do with the rest?”
“Use it as flash money. That way the doper’ll be subsidizing you for a while instead of the taxpayers.”
Alejandro picked up the envelope and tucked it inside his shirt. “What have you come up with on Cleopatra?”
Seaver pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket and, holding it between two fingers, responded, “One alphabet soup intelligence report for the DEA, DIA, and CIA’s Narcotics Control Center.” He opened it and read: “Cleopatra, a pseudonym used by one of the narco-cartel’s top assassins. Real name unknown. Believed to be a female in her late twenties.”
He looked at Alejandro. “This report was compiled in seventy-five. She’d be in her forties today.” He continued reading: “Known to be fluent in English, Spanish, possibly French. Possible Mexican or U.S. citizen. Ran hit teams for Medellin and Calí in late sixties, early seventies. Known to be responsible for the murder of Jose Rodriguez, the police chief of Zihuatanejo, Mexico, on January 24, 1972. After that she disappeared, and is believed to have gone into the narcotics trade on her own.”
“What about the dopers killed at the Savoy?”
Seaver read from another report: “Ramón and Conrado had no criminal record in this country. The Counter-Narcotics Center had them cross-referenced to Cleopatra.”
“On what basis?”
“An informant in Bogotá dropped their names as two of her top shooters. That was in eighty-one.”
“What about the mule who lugged the dope to the hotel?”
“Roberto Barrios, ali
as the Thin Man, a stone killer who’ll run his own deal if the risks are minimal.”
“Greed and caution can be a deadly combination. Can we find this guy?”
“He’s findable. The Joint Task Force has a CI trying to score him.”
“Lemme ask you something: Does anyone inside our Narcotics Bureau or the DEA or the Joint Task Force know that the Intelligence Division has deep undercovers roaming around the slime pool?”
“The powers atop Mount Everest want us deep and quiet.”
“Like dividing your forces and losing the war?”
Seaver frowned. “Ever hear of Handschu?”
Alejandro shook his head.
“Handschu was an antiwar activist during Vietnam. Our Intelligence photographed her at several demonstrations and listed her in our files. A few years later she graduates from law school and applies for admission to the bar. The character committee of the bar does a round robin on her and comes up with our derogatory intelligence report. She’s denied admission to the bar on the basis of our report, and sues. The result: the Handschu Authority, an intelligence oversight committee made up of the first deputy police commissioner, the chief of detectives, and one eminent civilian-type jurist. No, repeat, no, covert intelligence operations into noncriminal civilian activities can be commenced without the authority’s imprimatur. Like we have a suspicion that a bank might be laundering narco-money, or a phony religious or civil rights group is extorting money from store owners or building contractors.”
“But a deep undercover can go where others dare not tread.”
“Something like that.”
“What about the CI who made the intro for DiLeo and Levi?”
“Jordon Hayes, a dime bagger who sees himself as a mover and shaker instead of the putz he is. Every heavyweight deal he ever dealt went down with either a NYPD or a DEA undercover. We own his soul.”
Alejandro walked over to the window and pushed aside the curtains. Peering past the venetian blinds, he watched women chatting with each other inside the vest-pocket park alongside the glass tower apartment across the street while their children played on a brightly colored Jungle Gym. Normal people, living normal lives, he thought, his eyes following the mailwoman as she pushed her cart past the cascading fountain. He turned and looked at Seaver, a shadow falling across his face. “Your stale intelligence report neglected to mention that when Cleopatra whacked the police chief she also slaughtered several others, including my father. It also neglected to say that I was there, and didn’t raise a finger to help him.”
“For chrissake, will you ever stop beating yourself? You were eleven years old. What the hell could you have done?”
“I should have done something.”
“And you and your sister would both be dead now. It was over in seconds. You had no way of knowing what was going on inside La Perla.”
Alejandro was silent for a long time, then said quietly, “I can’t forget one single second of what happened. It was around one o’clock. Dad was playing dominoes in La Perla with Jefe Rodriguez. They’d play every day; it had become a ritual with them. Mom had sent Maria and me to get him to come home for lunch. We were walking through the parking lot in the rear of the restaurant when I heard the first rounds. I shoved Maria to the ground and fell on top of her.” He sat on the ottoman, facing Seaver, folded his arms across his legs, and added, “I still have nightmares over it. I hear that bitch laughing as she ran for her car flanked by her shooters. She had on a long yellow dress, and the sun shone through it.” He stared coldly at Seaver. “How come you never mention my dad?”
Seaver lit up a cheroot, tossed the match into the ashtray, and said, “Eamon Monahan was my friend and one of the best detectives this Job ever had. But one winter he goes to Zihuatanejo on vacation, meets your mom on the beach, and falls in love. He was thirty-eight and three years short of retirement. After that trip he started to take all his overtime in lost time instead of cash, and hook it onto his swings and fly to Zihuatanejo for long weekends. He’d spend every vacation with your mom. When he had his time in, he threw in his papers, got married, and went to live in Mexico.” He dragged on the cheroot, looked over at Alejandro, and added, “Sometimes I wonder if your dad wasn’t the target of that hit instead of Rodriguez.”
“My parents knew that the local politico wouldn’t take kindly to a retired gringo cop living among them, so they told everyone Dad was retired army.”
“Your dad telephoned Joey-the-G-Man the week before he was killed, asking for the latest intelligence on the Medellin operating around Zihuatanejo and Ixtapa. The dopers were using an airstrip outside of town to transship their shit into Texas …”
“And the Federal Judicial Police were protecting the strip and charging the dopers a transit fee. I know all about that.” He fell silent, staring at some spot over Seaver’s left shoulder. “How long did Dad work for our intelligence people?”
“He spent most of his time in the Job working narcotics, but toward the end he transferred into the Land of Trick Mirrors.”
“Why?”
“He’d been in the slime pool a lotta years. He wanted a change of scenery.” He pondered the ash on his cigar, flicked it into the ashtray. “No way the Eamon Monahan I knew would sit by and let a bunch of scumbag dopers take over a town he was living in. He’d have given the locals the benefit of his considerable expertise.”
“He was out of it, Andy. No way he’d get back into it. He promised Mom.”
“But just suppose … he did get back into it.”
Something glowed in Alejandro’s eyes. “That would mean that Rodriguez or some of his people had their hands out, or someone in New York rolled over.” He fell silent. “Twenty years is a lot of agos. Naw, no way he’d get back into that world.”
Alejandro reached into his shirt pocket and came out with the crumpled glassine envelope that Mother Hen had given him the night before. He smoothed it out and studied the logo with the beautiful face backgrounded by the four golden stripes. “Why Cleopatra now, Andy? I figured she was history, vanished. Ever since my father’s death I’ve done a lot of research on the real Cleopatra. There is not much about her that I don’t know.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, exhuming memories. “My grandmother was fond of telling us the Tarascan story of an ancient queen from a faraway land who sailed the great sea in straw boats containing a great treasure. She landed in the land of the Tarascan Indians, and married the great king Itzamna, and together they founded a mighty kingdom.”
“An ancient myth.”
“Myth usually has some truth in it, and in the case of Tarascan oral history, a lot of truth, believe me.”
“What the hell are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m going to go back to the books on Cleopatra. I believe that there’s a reason our doper, Cleopatra, assumed that name. And if we find that reason, we find her.”
“She’s probably just a fucking killer who gets off on using the name.”
He looked at Mother Hen. “Would you like to know what problem consumed a lot of the real Cleopatra’s time?”
“I’ll bite.”
“The establishment of a strong criminal justice system throughout her kingdom, particularly the police department in Alexandria, where there was a high crime rate. She established anticrime units to take on the street gangs on their own turf; she also set up intelligence units to infiltrate the gangs.”
“I guess the real queen liked a cop.”
“And I bet you that our queen runs her dope business the same way the real queen ran Egypt.”
7
A puff of clouds floated over the Springfield Boulevard exit of the Long Island Expressway as Jordon Hayes drove his battered ’79 van off and stopped for the sign at the end of the ramp.
The dashboard clock read 2:18 P.M.
Twelve minutes later, when he drove off the Horatio Parkway onto Forty-ninth Road in Bayside, Queens, he saw his brick ranch house four blocks away, and his depression de
epened. That house was all that was left of his fortune. Life wasn’t supposed to have turned out that way for him, not Jordon Hayes, star quarterback of James Madison High School, class of 1969, not the Most Handsome, Most Likely. It had all turned bad when he went to City College and had to compete with all the other Most Likelies, and started dealing marijuana to make extra money to impress everyone on campus. Pushing grass had made him feel like the star quarterback again. He was in his junior year when he’d realized that he could make more money selling dope than he ever could in the straight world. So he’d married his childhood sweetheart, Rachel, bought an expensive home in Kensington, and told everyone he was a stockbroker, which he indeed had become—his job in a large brokerage house made for perfect cover. It had all gone down the tubes when he’d started dealing cocaine. His very first deal had gone down with a cop posing as a Miami dealer. A fucking Spanish-speaking Jew, he thought, ramming the van’s accelerator to the floor. Now he had to be content scrounging a living by conning and stealing money from his police and DEA controllers. Today his life options were simple: be an informer or die. He tried to steal a few hours off the street every day to be with his family. It was the only time that he felt human. Perhaps somehow, someday, he’d figure a way out of this mess. Get away from the garbage, someplace where he could start over again.
As his van drew up to his house he noticed a panel truck with the legend “Lake Appliances” on its side, and he cursed silently, thinking that the damn washing machine was on the fritz again. He parked at the curb and, walking up the driveway, glanced idly inside the unoccupied truck. Taking the side entrance, he stepped into the kitchen, and froze. Pop, the family dog, was splayed across the drainboard; its head was gone.
“Rachel? Ira? David?” he screamed.
Running into the living room, he saw Rachel’s upended sewing basket on the floor and ran from room to room, calling out their names. He stalked back into the living room and noticed that the basement door in the back of the kitchen was ajar. He jerked it open and flipped the wall switch. The light failed to come on. Poking his head into the darkness, he called out, “Rachel? Ira? David?”
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