Cleopatra Gold

by William Caunitz

  No answers came back.

  He wiped the sweat off his mouth with the flat of his hand and slid his foot onto the first step, made his way down the sagging staircase, his scared eyes probing the blackness in front of him. At the bottom he stepped into the dark coldness and whispered, “Rachel?”

  An unseen hand screwed up the bulb; the light glowed. Hayes’s eyes widened in horror at the sight of the naked bodies hanging from the rafters, the agony of dying forever chiseled into his family’s contorted faces.

  Jordon Hayes, Most Likely of the class of 1969, sank to his knees crying, unaware of the movement around him.

  The Beaux-Arts ornaments and furnishings of the Majestic Theater’s lobby on Madison Avenue and 112th Street had long ago been stolen and sold. The Majestic was Manhattan’s oldest continuous operating movie house, having been opened amid great fanfare by Mayor Jimmy Walker in 1927. Today the once proud house stood, crumbling and dirty, in ignominious blight in a section of the city now known as Cracktown.

  Cracktown’s drug lords bought the movie house four years ago to use as a secure meeting place where narco-gangs could straighten out their turf quarrels, fix the price of their product, and negotiate co-op deals to buy in quantity at reduced prices. If some stranger tried to buy a ticket to see one of the schlock blood-and-sex movies that were shown there, he or she would find the show was “sold out.” It was a private place open only to drug dealers and their voracious clients, among whom were hookers and transvestites who prowled the aisles plying their trades. Unknown to the drug lords, unarmed undercovers also worked the aisles, making buys, gathering intelligence, painstakingly working their way up the narco networks.

  About three-thirty that Friday afternoon, while the credits of Sisters ’N the Hood rolled across the screen, a shaft of light speared across the orchestra as one of the exit doors opened and several indistinct figures slipped inside. The door clanged shut; darkness returned. No one paid attention to the six men working their way toward the stage. Three of them carried a rolled-up carpet strung across their shoulders, while the others hefted a large sack.

  The dopers continued to deal; the hookers continued to work.

  Seven minutes went by before the sound track screeched to a stop and the movie fluttered off the screen, which glowed a dirty, dull ivory. A voice boomed over the speaker, first in English, then in Spanish, “Watch the stage and see how we deal with police informers.”

  Up in the balcony an undercover slid down as far as she could onto her seat, her heart pounding.

  A heavy thud came from the direction of the stage as three men dropped a large burlap bag on the stage and left it with the top open.

  The carpet was lifted up off the shoulders of the other three men and unrolled, toppling a terrified and naked Jordon Hayes onto the floor. He was roughly yanked to his feet, his hands untied, and the gag jerked out of his mouth. His eyes moved frantically from one to another of the sullen faces surrounding him, finally locking in horror on the man with a white path of hair down the middle of his head and cold dark eyes almost hidden beneath a thick, overhanging brow.

  “I’m going to give you a chance to live,” the man with the white streak of hair said softly. “All you have to do is walk across the stage to the other side.”

  Hayes looked out at the spotlight beaming down onto the silver screen. “I ain’t no fucking informer, man,” he pleaded.

  The man smiled and nodded to the men around Hayes. Three of them took hold of the Most Likely of the class of 1969 and propelled him out onto the stage.

  Fumbling to cover up his nakedness, Hayes looked out blankly at his unseen audience and took a few tentative steps, telling himself, Maybe I can make a break. He tried to see ahead of him, but all that was there was blackness and the beam of light from the movie projector. What were they going to do? A sniper out in the audience? Yeah! That’s it, they’re gonna whack me as soon as I step into the light. I’ll duck under it, make a run for it.

  He came to the shaft of light and stopped. Remaining motionless, he watched the hundreds of particles swimming around inside its brilliance. Swiftly he ducked into the darkness below the light. A loud hissing came out of the blackness, and some monstrous creature sprang up at him, throwing him to the ground.

  The spotlight beamed down; Hayes’s terrified screams pierced the silence. An orange-and-green anaconda, as thick as a man’s thigh and about fifteen feet long, was coiling itself around his legs, its forked tongue flicking out of its wedge-shaped head and its serpentine eyes fixed on its prey’s screaming face. Its coils glided effortlessly around Hayes, sending crushing bolts of pain throughout his struggling body. The more he fought, the faster the coils slithered around him.

  Pop-eyed junkies and dopers watched in silence as the powerful constrictor squeezed every drop of life out of Jordon Hayes. Undercovers also watched, helpless to intervene. The telephone inside the movie house had long ago been ripped out of the walls; the dopers’ cellular phones and beepers were the new order of the day.

  One undercover got up out of his seat and rushed into the lobby. He knew where there was a working phone about a block and a half away.

  A narco guard blocked him as he rushed out into the vestibule. “Where’t’fuck you goin’, man?”

  “I don’t like no moth’fuckin’ snake, man.”

  “Go back and sit down and close your eyes.”

  A junkie leaned up over the balcony and shouted, “Way to go, way to go!”

  Hayes’s left arm stretched out helplessly from the coils. A loud gurgling bubbled from his gaping mouth. A final spasm, and he went limp.

  The anaconda uncoiled, positioning its head and the head of its prey. Its mouth opened incredibly wide and clamped over a portion of the dead man’s head.

  A hooker vomited.

  Fiona Lee had just turned twenty-five. As a birthday present to herself, she had her auburn hair cut short, had her nails done at a salon on Washington Street, and bought herself a dress and some silk underpants.

  It had been early afternoon on Friday when the Academy’s head physical instructor, Sergeant Neary, had approached her on the gym floor and told her to report to him at 1600 today, Saturday, in civilian clothes.

  She had thought she was going to be assigned to the barrier detail that was stringing sawhorses along Fifth Avenue in preparation for the president’s visit on Sunday. So now she wore jeans, a black T-shirt, heavy black boots, no bra, and no makeup. But as she followed Neary to the fifth floor of the Academy’s west wing, she felt a sudden queasiness. This part of the building was off limits to recruits.

  Neary moved ahead of her, pushed open the door to one of the rooms, and beckoned her inside, where a tall stranger was waiting behind a desk. Burke motioned for her to take a seat on the chair in front of the desk, as he continued paging through a thick manila folder. “I see you’ve had a few brushes with the law.”

  She pulled a defiant face, the way she’d seen Wiseguys do in the movies, and said nothing.

  “When you were fourteen you stabbed a teacher in the arm.”

  Anger filled her tawny eyes. “I stayed after class for extra math help. I was doing square roots at my desk when teacher-of-the-year came over and came on to me.”

  “Maybe it was an accident.”

  “Accident my ass. He knew exactly what he was doing. I told him to fuck off, but he just grabbed me harder. Two years later teacher-of-the-year was arrested for sucking little boys’ weenies.”

  “But not before you were adjudicated a juvenile delinquent.”

  Her eyebrows rose in anger. Stiffly she recited: “A JD adjudication is not a criminal conviction and cannot be used or held against me in any way, shape, or form.”

  “And who says that?”

  “The law says that.”

  Too Tall Paulie continued to page through the folder, suppressing a satisfied smile. “When you were sixteen you broke a soda bottle across a store manager’s face, breaking his nose. He had you arreste
d, but you were lucky, he withdrew the complaint.”

  “I had a part-time job after school in the local supermarket. I was in the stock room on my break when he came on to me.”

  He looked up at her. “Don’t you like men?”

  “I like ’em fine, as long as they ask first.”

  He leaned back in his seat and laced his hands behind his head, his long legs stretched out under the desk. “Your language qualification card states you’re fluent in Spanish and speak some German. It also states you’re a licensed pilot.”

  “My father had a small air taxi business on Long Island. I’ve been flying since I was fifteen.” Her eyes bored into his suspiciously. “Why don’t you tell me who you are and what I’m doing here?”

  “I’m Inspector Paul Burke, and I’d like to know why you want to be a police officer.”

  “It’s a job.”

  “No, young lady, it’s more than just a job.”

  She brushed her hair back. “I want to help people, especially children.”

  “Do you have any idea how many babies are born crack addicts?”

  “A lot. In this city, the highest percentage in the country.”

  In a low, serious tone he asked, “Would you like to do something to help those unborn babies?”

  “Of course. But what can I do?”

  He closed the folder with an air of finality. “Care to join the war on drugs?”

  A smug smile, a sarcastic answer: “That war’s been lost.”

  “Fiona … the real war is only beginning.”

  They talked for three hours. When they finished he was convinced that he’d found the right person. She had all the requisites—she wasn’t married or encumbered with any “significant other” in her life.

  She looked at him and asked softly, “What’s next?”

  Burke smiled. “A vacation.”

  First Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Nagel was puffing antifungal dust on the roses in his backyard in Maspeth, Queens, when Too Tall Paulie pulled into the driveway. The CO of Narcotics had telephoned the first dep at his home as soon as Fiona Lee had left the fifth-floor office in the Academy’s west wing. He’d apologized for bothering him on his day off, then said, “I need to see you right away, Commissioner.”

  The first deputy police commissioner serves as executive aide to the police commissioner and is responsible for the day-to-day administrative business of the Department. But one of his unlisted duties is to oversee all intelligence and counterintelligence operations of the Department.

  Nagel had spent forty years in the Job and had been all set to retire at the mandatory age of sixty-two when the police commissioner asked him to fill the recently vacated first dep’s slot.

  Nagel’s pallid skin was blotched with brown age marks, and his tiny green eyes were set too close together. He was wearing khaki trousers that were smeared liberally with paint and oil stains, sneakers, and a worn Seventy-ninth Precinct polo shirt with the logo “Fort Shithouse” emblazoned across the front.

  Crossing the lawn, Burke called out, “Afternoon, Commissioner.”

  Nagel put down his sprayer and stood with his hands on his hips, turning his head to stare at the approaching visitor.

  Too Tall Paulie started to say something, but Nagel quickly silenced him by placing his forefinger across his lips. Nagel stepped over to the lawn mower and pulled the cord to the starter. The motor clattered to life, and Nagel adjusted the speed lever until the engine settled into a loud, steady bawl. Pushing the lawn mower over to Too Tall Paulie, Nagel said, “Can’t be too careful these days, not with all that fancy eavesdropping stuff the other side has.”

  Burke looked over the peaceful setting and sighed quietly.

  “What’s up?” the first dep asked, holding the mower with one hand while he stood in place beside his visitor.

  “A recruit class was put in the Academy three weeks ago. What’s the lag time before the Job notifies the various city agencies of their names?”

  Nagel looked at his visitor. “’Bout a month, give or take a week or so.”

  “Our Personnel Bureau notifies all concerned agencies?”

  “Correct. They send paper to the City Department of Personnel, Comptroller, the City Record, and the health plans.”

  “What about publishing the list of names in the Special Orders?”

  Nagel looked at Burke impatiently; he wanted to finish his chores before he and his wife had to go out that evening. “Orders won’t be cut until all necessary notifications are made. Then we predate the list to the effective date of appointment.” He smiled at his visitor. “I can see you don’t read ’em anymore, do you.”

  “Not since I made sergeant. Before that I used to read the Special Orders faithfully; I’d check off the vacancies whenever a sergeant died, retired, or was promoted.”

  “We were all headhunters way back then.” He adjusted the mower’s speed higher. “Why all these questions, Paulie?”

  “I want to put a recruit under, and I don’t want to leave a paper trail.”

  “What about salary and medical benefits?”

  “I’ll use our cash contingency fund for salary, and ask one of our cop-friendly corporate giants to bury the person in their health plan.”

  Nagel looked down at the lawn and pulled at his earlobe thoughtfully. “And you want all traces of this person pulled.”

  “Exactly, including the fingerprints in our files and in Albany and Washington.”

  Nagel looked at Burke with a suddenly grim expression. “This must be an important caper.”

  “Levi and DiLeo.”

  Nagel put his hand on Burke’s shoulder and said, “I’ll personally take care of it first thing Monday morning.”

  “Thank you.”

  Too Tall Paulie took out his pen and one of the phony business cards he always carried around with him, and wrote Fiona Lee’s name and Social Security number on the back. The first dep took the card and shoved it into his pants pocket without looking at the name.

  Too Tall Paulie ran his finger over the mower’s rust-pitted handlebars and asked, “Who runs the Job’s deep undercovers?”

  A puzzled expression clouded the first dep’s face. “I really don’t know. I’m not even sure we have any.”

  “Have a nice weekend, Commissioner,” Too Tall Paulie said, and walked off across the well-tended lawn, thinking, The Job’s made us all liars.

  Thickening clouds were gathering over the Blue Ridge Mountains Sunday afternoon as a Cessna Citation banked for a landing at a private airstrip eighty miles west of Charlottesville, Virginia.

  Fiona Lee was the plane’s only passenger. She had boarded at the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia just after one on Sunday. Looking out the window at the unending panorama of uneven mountains, she smiled as she remembered her sham fight with Sergeant Neary. It had been a beauty. Late Saturday she had gotten into her sweats and joined a section of the recruit class in the gym. On cue, Neary had reprimanded her for not wearing a bra and ordered her to go home and change; she would also be subject to command discipline for improper attire. The entire class was stunned into silence when she’d told him, “No.” She had expected to be on a work detail where it wouldn’t matter. They’d gotten into a screaming match with each other, and he’d marched her before the duty officer, who had told her she had a choice of resigning or being dismissed for insubordination. She’d told them to shove the Job and signed her resignation papers; as she’d stormed out, she had given the finger to both men.

  The wheels touched down. The pilot taxied over to a waiting Jeep, where a lean, leathery-faced man with short gray hair and a fine network of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes was leaning against the fender with his arms folded across his chest. There was something youthful about him, even though Fiona placed him somewhere in his early fifties. He was dressed in jeans and cowboy boots and had one of those string ties with a silver clasp on his plaid shirt.

  The propeller feathered to a stop. The
pilot reached over and opened the door; Fiona climbed out of the aircraft, carefully placing her feet away from the marked NO STEP area on the wing. Someone aboard passed her out her suitcase. She said, “Thank you,” and turned to admire the majestic ridgeline looming in the distance. Sucking in the crystal clear air, she became aware of a slight chill and the sounds and smells of the country. She heard approaching footsteps and saw a man out of the corner of her eye. She turned.

  “Hi, I’m Ted Porges,” said the lean man whom she had seen leaning up against the Jeep. He reached out and took her suitcase. And you’re Mary Beth—”

  “No, my name is—”

  He interrupted. “Mary Beth. As long as you are on this facility, that is your name.”

  “Are those the Blue Ridge Mountains?” she asked as he turned and headed back toward the Jeep.

  Instead of answering her, he made for the Jeep, leaving her standing on the tarmac. I just get off the plane and the first thing I run into is this guy’s attitude, she thought, annoyed, going to the Jeep.

  A road spurred off to the west of the landing strip and curved through the lush Virginia hills. “Sure is beautiful,” she said, trying to break through Porges’s glacial exterior.

  “Yep,” he answered, his eyes fixed on the road. “We’ll be at the Hacienda in a few minutes. After I get you settled in, we’ll talk.”

  The Hacienda was a sprawling complex of one-story farmhouses and barns built around a large ranch-style house that overlooked a verdant valley of peach orchards. There was a soccer field on the stretch of flat land between the main house and the mountains.

  Unlike the FBI’s groomed training base at Quantico, Virginia, the Hacienda was a secret training facility staffed by DEA and CIA undercover experts and a special Delta Force team whose peculiar mission had won it the nickname “Garbage Disposal Machine.”

  Fiona’s rooms were in the back of the house. They were large and comfortable and afforded a breathtaking view through a floor-to-ceiling glass wall. After checking out the bathroom and closets, she bounced herself on the queen-size mattress and smiled in satisfaction at its hardness.