Rivers of Gold (5 page)

Those had been a bad three days. The department essentially set up security islands north of the fortified Ninety-sixth Street barricade, dubbed “The White Zone” by the media in Manhattan, one around 181st Street to guard the George Washington Bridge; one at 168th Street to guard Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which by then was starting to overflow with Harlem's wounded; and one at 116th Street to guard Columbia University, where the more radical protesters were teargassed and clubbed and dragged around the corner to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital on Amsterdam Avenue, while their vocal support—those with lots of pins on their backpacks—disappeared in a hurry.

Up in Inwood, Santiago was more or less on his own, but the neighborhood was having none of it. Surly Latinos wielding an impressive array of weaponry both legal and illegal stood watch in front of their homes and businesses. Santiago himself made food runs between his parents' house and his father's shop, delivering large amounts of fried plantains and
pollo guisado
from his mother's kitchen to Victor and some of his staff, who had effectively barricaded themselves in the shop; Victor himself sat on the roof of the building with binoculars, his iPhone, and Santiago's service Glock. Santiago didn't blame his asshole brothers for not helping him with his vigil, as they both had families of their own to watch over while he himself was single. His sister was doing triage work at Mount Sinai, coping with the overflow of wounded, though well protected by a squad detailed from the nearby Twenty-fourth Precinct—another favor from McKeutchen, who claimed it dovetailed with department policy to protect all hospitals during the riots.

The occasional roving posse car excepted—nobody came near the old taxicab with the big scowling Latino at the wheel, with an enormous shotgun poking out through the driver's-side window—Santiago was left alone. He'd stuck his badge high up on the left side of his jacket, so that any trigger-happy uniforms or Emergency Services Unit teams wouldn't blow him away by mistake, and listened to the reports of fires and looting coming in from East New York, Brownsville, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, East Flatbush, Crown Heights, Greenpoint, Borough Park, Hunts Point, Mott Haven, Soundview, Morrisania, Parkchester, Tremont, Fordham, Hollis, Jamaica Estates, and Hillcrest. When the storm subsided as abruptly as it had begun, the death toll would be twice that of the 1993 Los Angeles riots, with untold numbers of wounded; property damage was estimated at half a trillion dollars. The media later reported that the most sought-after items from looted stores were iPhones, liquor, and Playstation 5s.

Santiago had traced a meandering route along Fort Washington Avenue, around Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, across Nagle Avenue to Dyckman Street, up and around Fort George Hill, down the western border of High Bridge Park, and back along St. Nicholas Avenue. He kept a wary eye on all the stairwells descending from the elevated Number 1 subway line, as well as the exits from the A train terminus at 207th Street. There wasn't much he could do about the Broadway and Henry Hudson bridges, but he knew from his radio that squads from the Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Precincts, as well as DOT teams, had set up twin checkpoints (later reinforced with some local National Guard units back from Iraq). Officially, Santiago was detailed to the bridge details; off the record, he was off the reservation.

Santiago hadn't done much reflecting about the riots or their place in the city's history. Other than immediate thoughts of his family, he found himself remembering his days coming up in Traffic, long before his transfer to CAB, and his old partner Bertie Goldstein, a wizened old Jewish lady from Sunnyside, looking to see how big a pension she could rack up before the Department cut her loose. Santiago'd been a happy young buck in those days of boomtime, before the credit and real-estate busts. The city had revealed another side of itself to him then, one of infinite possibility and prizes there for the taking. He couldn't wait to get to work in those days, nailing one stolen car after another, collaring joyriders, car thieves, and chop-shop couriers. He'd learned how to do research then, how to rapidly run down histories (criminal, credit, employment, or medical), how to find patterns in seemingly meaningless reams of data, how to spot a mope on the move from a great distance. It was so easy. He'd just drive to the nearest school, wait for the most expensive car to roll up, and pounce. He remembered once being chided by his partner for profiling, a concept he readily employed. “Bertie, honey,” he drawled, feeling oddly paternalistic toward the ancient dwarf sharing his radio car, “you call it like you see it. If you see some knucklehead barely old enough to shave behind the wheel of a brand-new SL95 AMG, you stop him on principle. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you either got credit card fraud or grand theft auto. If you don't, you just say ‘Have a nice day.' All it takes is a few minutes of time on your computer, and these badges we wear say we can stop whoever we want, whenever we want. At the end of the day, we get more collars, the city gets fewer people defaulting on their credit cards or using stolen or fake ones, and the department maybe even gets a few bucks selling the cars we seize at auction. Everybody wins except the knucklehead who deserves to lose anyway. See?”

“
Nu
, right you could
effsher
be, but as it is,
boychik
,” conceded Bertie Goldstein. “Even verse, ven young you are, but since ven the vorld vuz easy? Esk any Jew.”

Bertie Goldstein was always one for folk homilies like this. She never badmouthed anyone, never raised her voice, never cursed, and Santiago loved her for it. She was an oasis of warm harmlessness in a population bursting with anything but. He liked to give her “Goldbug hugs,” sincere embraces carefully designed for her tiny, delicate frame (he would have crushed her otherwise). But for all her kindness, Bertie Goldstein was beset over the years by a spectacular series of physical ailments—viral pneumonia, rheumatoid arthritis, acid reflux, tendonitis, constipation, heart murmur, and bunions. Still, she never complained.

Santiago knew there was something unusually wrong at the beginning of their last shift together, during one of those day-long drenching New York rains that sent the cockroaches scurrying up the pipes into people's apartments to escape the deluge. Bertie Goldstein came on shift looking like a wet rag, and once inside the radio car, she slumped against the passenger window.

“You okay, Goldbug?” Santiago asked nervously. Chronic fatigue was an omnipresent condition with Bertie Goldstein, given her medical history, but Santiago sensed something further amiss.

“Tired is vat I yam,” Bertie Goldstein said in a ragged voice just above a whisper. “Okay you drive?”

Drive Santiago did, like a bat out of hell, straight to the emergency entrance of St. Vincent's Hospital on Seventh Avenue (now on its umpteenth change of ownership), where he threatened to arrest two paramedics just lighting up if they didn't move their fucking bus clear of the admitting bay. The shouting went unnoticed by Bertie Goldstein, who had lost consciousness almost immediately after Santiago had pulled away from the station house. Santiago jammed the navy blue Traffic Malibu nose-first into the admitting bay, left the motor running, and carefully carried the comatose Bertie Goldstein inside (Jesus, she weighed
nothing
, nothing at all, even in full uniform), where he got into a shouting match with a bitchy West Indian nurse who was nearly his own size. The last he saw of her, Bertie Goldstein was flat out on a gurney being slammed through a set of double doors bearing the words
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT
in angry red letters. Santiago had then turned, slowly, to look at the half-dozen or so faces in the admitting area, waiting, offering each other only the same look of fear and helplessness. He steeled himself as best he could for the wait.

Although he'd been watching the clock, Santiago lost track of how long he'd stood there waiting for news. It seemed that a smiling, jovial young doctor bearing the name tag
ZUCKERMAN
simply materialized in front of him and told him with jarring bonhomie that Bertie Goldstein's leukocyte count was down through the floor, acute neutropenia, the cancer already at end stage, would he be able to contact her family? The happy young medicine man then swerved off toward an anxious-looking couple behind Santiago, whom he cheerfully informed that the malignancy in their five-year-old's liver had already metastasized, there was nothing they could do, they'd try to keep him comfortable, and would they please come this way? And off they went, Dr. Zuckerman waving to the nurses at the admitting desk.

Santiago had stood in the middle of the waiting area, Bertie Goldstein's uniform jacket, hat, and belt gathered in his huge hands, utterly at a loss as to which violent emotion surging through him to indulge first. He watched the second hand of the hospital clock make a full revolution (though he could not, and later would not, remember what time it was). At some point a cool breeze blew in through his mind, as though from far offshore, and he had his iPhone in hand before he knew it. Within a minute he had an ID on a Dr. Marc Zuckerman, St. Vincent's Hospital (Cancer Center), and in a second minute, the jaunty doctor's ride, a silver BMW Z7 M coupe, brand new. The third, fourth, and fifth minutes involved processing, and the sixth minute got the wrecker dispatched. Within forty minutes, Dr. Zuckerman's Z was on its way to the police impound on Eleventh Avenue (a half-cleared yard left fallow since the city's Atlantic Yards renovation project collapsed in '08) where it would stay lost for a month.

Bertie Goldstein didn't last a month. Santiago went through the motions with the one relative he could locate, a cold, whiny spinster from Milwaukee who complained nonstop about costs, and why the hell the NYPD wouldn't pick up the goddamn tab, best to leave her there, it's the only place she was ever halfway comfortable. Santiago voiced the appropriate responses, which seemed to come from someone else's mouth; he would not remember these later.

Once a year, on the anniversary of their first patrol together, Santiago drove out to the sprawling necropolis that was the New Calvary/Mount Zion Cemetery in Sunnyside, Queens, and placed flowers on Bertie Goldstein's gravestone (at least the one that said her name in English—he couldn't read the Hebrew).

Santiago had skidded a bit after that. Did some unprotected drinking, some binge-screwing. Got into a couple of fights (including one in which Bertie Goldstein's replacement, a crewcut young
gringo
with biker tattoos and a penchant for conversational use of the word “kike,” had ended up face-down and unconscious in a fifty-five-gallon trash barrel). The second time he'd shown up at his parents' house for dinner with combat-torn hands, his mother had reached up, cradled his face, and said, “
Querido
, I don't know what's wrong with you, but whatever it is, fix it, or let us help you fix it.” The scowl on Victor's face, as he stood behind her, conveyed all Santiago needed to know.

He'd have to shape up.

But, as is often the case with young men, it took a while.

On the third anniversary of Bertie Goldstein's death, Santiago was spit-shined in full dress uniform, talking to the ugliest, sloppiest, most repulsive policeman he'd ever met, an obese captain named McKeutchen, who somehow knew about Bertie Goldstein and Santiago's fondness for her. McKeutchen had dropped Santiago's file onto a desk strewn with all matter of rank-looking food residue, peered out at Santiago with watery blue eyes all but lost in rolls and loaves and sheaves of fat, and said, “I need you to do something for me. I'll tell you what it is when the time comes.”

And one year later, in December 2012, McKeutchen assigned him to an undercover taxicab with a new volunteer from ESU named Everett More.

“He doesn't talk,” Santiago explained. “At least, not unless you ask him something. He's always reading, right up until go time. When we're on the set, he blends right in, talks if he has to, picks up on things people around him are saying, and sort of copies them. That's probably why my boss chose him, he's so—” Santiago searched for the right word in Spanish—“
anodino
. Nondescript. I mean, you don't see him. He's the kind of guy you might sit next to at a bus stop, or on the train, and five minutes later you wouldn't be able to remember what he looks like.”

Victor appeared to be mulling this over as he veered off I-95 for the Long Wharf exit. Santiago could see the enormous Q Bridge span arcing over the Port of New Haven's anchorage channel against a backdrop of massive oil tanks. This was usually the point where he began to feel slightly nervous, for reasons he could not entirely articulate. Sure, what they were doing was blatantly illegal, and McKeutchen would probably have his ass and his badge if he got caught, but there was something else, something more deeply unsettling about the exchange. Like watching one of the support pillars of the bridge in front of them, now covered with vehicles, beginning to sway, then crack, right before their eyes.

Victor rolled them down a cracked and potholed Long Wharf to the second row of harbor cranes, then hung a sharp right by a checkers' booth, toward a towering nest of oil stacks, behind which the railroad tracks were all mixed up in a seemingly meaningless pattern (though Santiago remembered the first time he and his father made this run, nearly a year ago now, and Victor had explained how this was one of the largest rail hubs in New England, moving freight the length and breadth of the northeast corridor). Santiago could see the warehouse now, an amorphous concrete box laden with soot and graffiti, a tattered Dominican Republic flag draped in a barred window:
all clear
.