Standing at the glass wall, watching the three men gathering up the parachute, Fiona Lee realized that she had never before appreciated just how big a soccer field was. Watching them lugging the clumsy bundle off the field, she focused her attention on the man in the middle and thought, He’s got a cute behind.
By three o’clock that afternoon the soccer game between Delta Force and DEA instructors was in its second half. Delta Force was leading 1–0.
Sergeant Pollack led Alejandro and Seaver along a long corridor muffled by floral carpeting. A distant radio played country music, and the agreeable smells of cooking roasts and browning potatoes filtered the air. Pollack moved ahead of them and opened a heavy door, motioning them inside. Once they had entered and the door closed, the sergeant rushed outside to the game.
They found themselves in a rosewood-paneled room decorated with western art and floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Navajo rugs were scattered on the dark wood floors, and the worn leather chairs reeked of the smoke of expensive cigars and the fainter scent of old money.
Ted Porges stood up from the oval table to greet his former student, still known to him only as Chilebean. Shaking his student’s hand, he asked, “How goes it out there in the real world?”
“Ain’t a day in the sun,” Chilebean said, noticing with some shock how much Porges had aged in the last few years. Settling onto a chair, he noticed five flat packets of aluminum foil on the table in front of Porges. His smile lost its warmth, and he asked only half-jokingly, “Are we doing some blow today?”
“Not we, you,” Porges said.
Andy Seaver turned on his seat to face Chilebean. “If you’re going to get in tight with them, you’re going to have to learn how to fake a blow. Because at some point one of the scumbags might insist on you doing a line.”
Porges nodded his head in agreement. “That’s their acid test to see if you’re a cop.”
“How come you never taught me before?” Chilebean asked, reaching out and pushing over one of the foils.
“’Cause you never had the need to know before,” Porges said, picking up a remote control from his lap and aiming it at the bookcase. A portion of the bookshelves slid back to reveal a screen. “Now watch closely; and remember—the hand is quicker than the eye.”
The screen filled with a surveillance film, across the bottom of the frame the DEA index number, date, and time digitally whizzing by in seconds, minutes, hours. A hotel room; three people were sitting on a sofa in front of a glass coffee table that contained a suitcase full of money. Two of them were black males in their late twenties, well dressed, in a conservative fashion that said middle class and nonthreatening. One of them had a big gap between his front teeth, the other wore a kelly green tie over a brown shirt. The third person was an attractive black woman in her mid-thirties; her hair was cropped close to her head and she wore a Chanel suit and accessories. She was watching Green Tie run a stack of bills through the electronic currency counter. “It’s all there,” she said.
“But we have to make sure, don’t we?” said Gaptooth. Green Tie glanced sideways at her. “You might still be the Man.” Gaptooth inched closer to her, reaching out and caressing her breast, saying softly, “I’d be more trusting if I come in your mouth.”
Slapping away the offending hand, she said, “If you need reassurance, come in your mother’s mouth.”
Gaptooth’s nostrils flared in anger. His hand moved back as if to slap her.
Green Tie looked up from counting and announced, “It’s all here.” Staring at the woman, he said, “We could just whack her and take the money.”
“You’d never get off the floor alive, and you know it,” she said, slapping down the suitcase’s lid. “I’ve had enough of your uptown nigger bullshit. Either we deal now, or me and the green are out of here.”
Green Tie flipped the lid back up, contemplating the stacks of money. He slid a silver-foil packet out of his inside pocket and gave it to her, saying, “We never deal with anyone who won’t take a hit with us.”
She took the foil, looking at it with open suspicion.
Gaptooth got up off the sofa and stood a few feet away, watching her, folding his arms tightly across his chest. “Don’t sweat it, sister. It’s not a hot shot.”
Passing the foil back to Green Tie, she said, “You first. I wouldn’t want to blow a slab cocktail.”
“You gotta have trust, sister,” Green Tie said, opening the foil and tapping cocaine onto the table. He pulled a hundred-dollar bill from one of the stacks in the suitcase, folded it in half, and kneaded the drug into a line. That done, he rolled the bill into a straw.
The woman got up and stood next to Gaptooth.
Bending to the line, Green Tie stuck the rolled-up bill in his nostrils and sucked up the drug. The hit rolled his eyes back into his head. Grimacing pleasure, he smacked his lips and said, “’At be fine shit, sister.” Straightening, he passed the half-closed packet to her.
She tapped the rest of the drug onto the back of her left hand and handed the empty foil to Gaptooth.
Chilebean leaned forward, watching intently.
The woman passed her hand under her nose as if savoring the aroma, at the same time gliding the tip of her tongue around the white line as if she were trying sexually to tempt herself. She danced her tongue slowly over her fingertips and took her three middle fingers into her mouth, sucking them. And then, in one fluid motion, she snorted the drug into her nostril, threw down her hand, tossed back her head, rolled her eyes up into her head, and sighed contentedly.
“She took the hit!” Chilebean exclaimed.
“No, she didn’t,” Porges said, aiming the remote at the screen and rewinding the film. He fast-forwarded it to the moments before the hit, pushed the slow-motion button, and ordered, “Now, watch closely.”
Alejandro noticed that the woman’s self-excitation with her fingers had distracted the dopers because it momentarily turned them on. He also noticed that the sniffing sound came at the exact moment that her head snapped back, her eyes rolled, and her hand fell from her face, one fluid motion.
“You get it?” Seaver said intently.
“Let me see it again,” Chilebean said.
Porges aimed the remote. After viewing it three more times, Chilebean said, “Instead of snorting it in, she blows air out at the same time she hurls her face back, and throws her hand down.”
“You got it,” Porges said. “The force of air from her nose, at the exact moment her hand is hurled downward, scatters the cocaine. The granules are tiny so that when they’re scattered they’re invisible. The dopers see exactly what they wanted to see, her doing a line.”
“What happens if she can’t stand up and has to do the blow sitting down?” Chilebean asked. “There’s no hand motion to scatter the dope.”
“Look,” Porges said, and did a line sitting down. When done, he looked at his student and said, “You cup your hand around the straw, hiding your mouth. You still do everything in one motion, only you blow the stuff away with your mouth. It’s harder to do and takes more practice.” He looked at his old student grimly. “Always remember to think of some small diversion to get their attention away from your mouth. The way that undercover grabbed their attention by licking her fingers was perfect. You only need a second or two.” Porges pushed the remaining foils across the table to Chilebean. “Now you’re going to practice until it becomes second nature.” He pulled out a drawer in the table, took a handful of packets, and dumped them on the table.
Unwrapping one, Chilebean said, “This isn’t coke.”
“Sugar. It’s against the law to do dope,” Seaver said with a grin.
During the flight from Charlottesville back to New York that evening, Alejandro sat by a window staring down at the shadows creeping over the lush Virginia landscape, thinking of his recurring dream. It was always night, and he was aboard Cleopatra’s barge. The purple sails were billowing in the soft breeze, and half-naked slaves, adorned in gold, moved about
serving Cleopatra and Che-Che Morales. Huddled on the barge’s bow were many of the women he had been to bed with. They were watching him and whispering to each other. Each time the head eunuch would start to pass him and enter the queen’s tent, and each time just as he pushed the flap back to step inside, the eunuch’s yataghan would pierce his heart, and Alejandro would leap up in bed with the cold sweat of fear at his hairline.
Andy Seaver had inclined his seat and was stretched out with his eyes closed, thinking of Wilma Galt, his workaholic banquet manager lady friend who had spent a good part of her life making fancy parties at the Hotel Barrington for rich ladies she despised. Mulling over their five years together, he found it difficult to believe that she totally bought his legend that he was the lead clerical at Pickpocket and Confidence. But, he wondered, did it matter?
“Tired?” Alejandro asked.
“A little,” Seaver replied drowsily. “How’s your research on Cleopatra going?”
“Okay. She was the world’s first feminist.”
Seaver opened his eyes, looked over at his undercover. “There’s a problem with doing those fake hits.” His tone suggested a greater degree of concern than his words.
“You mean I might really have to take a hit.”
“Something like that. There are not many rules about what we do, but there are a few written in concrete. First, if an undercover is forced to ingest a narcotic agent, he or she must get themselves to medical attention, forthwith.”
“And second?”
“Three real hits and you’re out of a job.”
Alejandro leaned his seat back. “I’ll keep my nose empty.”
10
Lieutenant Sal Elia was holed up inside the Unified Intelligence office on the eleventh floor of One Police Plaza. He had listened several times to the tape of Che-Che Morales and Alejandro’s conversation. Blowups of the pair walking out of the tire lot were pinned to the cork board that hung on the wall over his desk. The more he viewed the video and listened to the tapes, the more convinced he was that Alejandro was worth getting to know. It was well known within the intelligence community that Che-Che prided himself on being unconnected to the human race. He had no known girlfriends, boyfriends, family, or close friends. The very few semitrusted members of his crew were terrified of him. There were many wiretaps on file of Che-Che’s people confiding their fears of him to each other. It was known that many of the narco crowd had imported anacondas from the Amazon to use as enforcement tools. Elia wondered where the hell they kept the snakes when they were not busy.
Wiretaps had also revealed that Morales did not hesitate to use his constrictors as punishment. Soon after he obtained his pets, stray animals started to disappear from the neighborhood of Lopez’s tire store.
Leaning back in his chair, staring up at the photographs, Elia thought, This guy is the only person I’ve ever seen get close to Che-Che, talk to him as an equal. He listened to the tape again, then shut it off, thinking, Yeah, this guy is most definitely worth getting to know.
Sal Elia was a medium-size man in his late thirties. His thick neck and squat appearance gave him the impression of being fat. He wasn’t. Beneath the loose sport shirt and jeans was a broad-shouldered, muscled body as tough as rawhide. Part of Elia’s exercise ritual every morning was doing forty push-ups. He had spent all of his sixteen years in the Job working the Junk Squad, as the Narcotics Division was sometimes referred to.
Elia had an abiding faith in his country, the Department, God, and the New York Giants. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man who had set himself a life’s mission of putting away as many dopers as he could before he retired and moved his family far away from slime city. His twin sister, Audrey, had OD’ed on heroin two days after her sixteenth birthday. She had taken the drug on a dare. With his sister’s death had come a painful emptiness in Elia’s soul that was quickly filled with hatred for those who dealt drugs.
After listening to Alejandro tell Che-Che how he had come upon the information regarding the Lloyds of Medellin shipment, Elia picked up the “wet” intelligence report, so called because it was prepared quickly, without an in-depth background investigation into the subject. It was meant only to provide fast intelligence for those in the “need to know” chain.
He read: “Alejandro Monahan, M/H/32–36 years. A singer in the club Environment, which is frequented by multikey dealers. Resides at Two Fifth Avenue. U.S. citizen. Utilities listed under A. Monahan. Unlisted telephone listed same name. No record D&B or Personal Credit Bureau. Pays all bills promptly. No credit cards, no savings accounts. No criminal records that name this department. NCIC, no record; FBI, no record; DEA, no record; Narcotics Control Center, no record. Owns 1989 Porsche, registered A. Monahan.”
Letting the report fall from his hand, Elia thought, Where does a guy like this get hold of secret information like that to warn Che-Che? A two-bit Latino crooner who can afford a Porsche. Looking up at the photograph of Alejandro, he felt the exciting tingle of the hunter who has sighted his prey.
Sweat glistened on Too Tall Paulie’s chest and beads of perspiration sprinkled his hairline as he danced in his office, his lithe body flowing easily to the rhythm of his feet. He had been dancing for almost thirty minutes, venting his anger on the plywood, ranting to himself over and over, They turned the goddamn ship around, and they murdered three of my undercovers. And he knew with cop certainty that the dopers had gotten a line into his office, somewhere.
A knock sounded at the door, and Dave Katz walked in, followed behind by Lieutenant Sal Elia. Not wanting to interrupt their boss, they padded across the office and sat on the sofa against the wall that held the chief’s twenty-eight-year collection of police memorabilia.
“What’s up?” the boss asked, slipping into quarter time.
Elia said, “We know who blew the Medellin shipment.”
Without breaking his time signature, the dancer said, “Talk to me, Lou,” using the diminutive of “lieutenant” that was common in the Job.
Elia opened the folder he had brought with him, took out the “wet” intelligence report and the transcript of the roving bug that the pigeons had picked up, index number 93-486-7 UI, and the video of the meeting and placed them on Too Tall Paulie’s desk.
“Read them to me,” the boss ordered, breathing hard.
When Elia finished reading the boss the reports and showing him the video, Assistant Chief Inspector Paul Burke stepped off the plywood circle and walked thoughtfully into his private toilet.
Listening to the running tapwater, Elia whispered to the XO, “He really looks pissed.”
“He is.”
Walking out of the toilet toweling himself, Too Tall Paulie looked across the room at the lieutenant and asked, “What do you suggest we do about it, Lou?”
“I’ve spoken to my undercovers who work the discos. This guy Alejandro is supposedly tight with Che-Che. They’re amigos from the same town in Mexico. He’s a hot number right now trying to break into the big-league music business. According to my people, he’s not in the business.”
Maybe he isn’t, the chief thought, angrily tossing his towel into the bathroom, but he sure as shit appears to have a line into my business, and I’m going to make it my personal business to find out how.
Elia continued: “My people tell me he’s a pussy hound.”
“So?” Katz asked warily.
“This guy is used to rich ladies who get turned on by him, who’ll give him a fast blow job in a car, or a one-night stand—and then they’re history. I want to insert a female undercover to work this guy.”
“I’m against it,” Katz blurted out impulsively.
“Why?” asked the boss, buttoning his shirt.
Easing his rumpled polyester suit to the edge of the couch’s cushion, Katz began, “Boss, every time we’ve inserted a female undercover to work a doper one on one we’ve ended up with a major problem called … fucking. They’ve invariably ended up in bed together, and we’ve ended up having to
shit-can a major case, then retire the undercover on a disability pension because of a bullshit job-related stress syndrome.”
“I have female undercovers who he won’t be able to seduce,” Elia offered.
Katz glared at Elia and said, in an almost pleading way, “This guy isn’t going to be turned on by any of your lesbian undercovers, Lou, no matter how much thigh they show.” Looking directly at his boss, he added, “I’ve been burned too many times, Paulie.”
Taking his time knotting his tie, Too Tall Paulie said, “Captain Katz is right. We’ve had too many problems in the past with male-female one-on-ones.”
“What do you want me to do with this guy, then?” Elia asked.
“Forget ’im. Your people already told you he’s not part of any crew. He probably did overhear the DEA informant running off at the mouth, and hauled ass uptown to warn his fuckin’ amigo.”
Two hours later Too Tall Paulie crossed Police Plaza and walked under the Municipal Building’s vaulted archway. Glancing at the line of Nigerian peddlers hawking designer rip-offs, he thought, A Rolex for fifteen dollars. You gotta be a real schmuck to believe that. Once out on Centre Street, he stopped with the rest of the lunchtime crowd, waiting for the light to change. When it did, he dashed across the street and entered City Hall Park. Rows of city limousines were parked in front of New York’s center of power. A large, boisterous crowd of Bensonhurst parents were surging up against police barricades, shouting their opposition to the “rainbow curriculum” in their local elementary school.
Leaving the park, he turned north on Broadway in search of one of the city’s scarcest resources, a working telephone. He passed several, all with their receivers dangling by their armored cords, all of which had been hurled down by frustrated consumers as a warning to others not to bother. He passed bars and restaurants with telephones. But street-smart cops did not use telephones in bars and restaurants around police headquarters and City Hall. Hurrying along, he found himself dodging the army of panhandlers who left their cardboard igloos to work the noontime crowd.
Cleopatra Gold Page 10