Rivers of Gold (13 page)

The attacks didn't bother him. He hardly noticed. It certainly didn't surprise him; those greedy camel-fuckers thrived on screwing things up for others, it was just how they were. Like that thieving little fuck Eyad, who deserved everything he got. The only way in which 9/11 impinged on his life at all was that he had to give free rides for the first couple of weeks afterward. That had nearly killed him, throwing away money like that. But his garage owner, a dissipated old Irishman who reeked of liquor even when Reza showed up for his shifts at seven thirty
A.M.
, had insisted. Reza had hated the faded, white-haired octogenarian who still showed up for work day after day, who sat in the dispatch booth listening to his annoying music full of lutes and whistles and accordions, who lived on whiskey and cut-rate cigarettes, and errantly pissed against the side of the garage several times a day.

But Reza did concede the ghostly old Irishman one point: taxicabs were rivers of gold, no doubt about it.

As the city recovered, Reza tended to his businesses as a horticulturalist would his garden, and fruition followed. This period had been Reza's first real experience in New York during hard times; 9/11 had merely exacerbated a recession that had begun the year before, in a flaming conflagration of dotcom destruction. As New Yorkers (with memories scorched by the attack) quickly forgot the tech-boom implosion that crashed to earth the year before the towers did, they eagerly embraced the new religion of Better Living On Credit. Reza silently watched a whole new crop of suckers flock to this latest delusion, that they could transcend even the go-go nineties with a whole new soaring mountain of excess built on debt. Real estate replaced the thirst for tech stocks; a new bubble rose like a sinister phoenix from the ashes of the old. For prescient opportunists like Reza, it was the ringing of a great dinner bell, inaudible to the prey.

Ever the hard-working immigrant, Reza had by this time sold his shipping store to UPS and migrated to the East Village to keep a closer eye on his core businesses. In the immediate aftermath of the attack many downtown property owners had panicked and sold, in some cases offering renters the option to buy their apartments cheap. Reza had bought two adjacent apartments in a well-maintained prewar building on the corner of East Tenth and Avenue A with a view of Tompkins Square Park, and combined and renovated them for next to nothing (thanks to his handlers, who saw this as rewarding his years of service with the easy gift of city permits and Pakistani work crews overseen by Ukrainian foremen, a small matter). Now a new property owner like many of his neighbors (though unlike them, free of debt), Reza watched the value of his new home swell like his penis now did each day, sometimes several times a day, thanks to his happy menagerie of bimbos from Washington Heights to Bushwick, whose tight pockets were now full of drugs and cash for their bar tabs, all courtesy of
tio
Reza.

He had plenty of girls and plenty of product and was moving more each year, thanks to his cultivation of a small network of cabdrivers and distributors, in particular one ambitious little fuck with a dumb hairdo and an even dumber name, said he was a fashion photographer or something, who had been introduced to Reza by the British bastard. Still, the new kid had the contacts and proved it regularly with clockwork earnings, as well as by procuring a somewhat higher grade of talent for Reza's service sector. Reza still stayed up late nights with legal pads, crunching numbers (though now with the help of a top-of-the-line Sony laptop), still by the light of a single lamp (though now a Danish designer model), trying to visualize a diversified empire of real estate, software, money-lending, narcotics, and flesh, all connected by a taxi-yellow transportation network, and all under the organization's protection.

His epiphany came at the end of a long, aggravating Tuesday, which he'd ended with a high-test bottle and a ditzy blonde whose name didn't matter. He'd been staring at the whorls and patterns made by the rising smoke from his cigarette (now a premium English brand, no longer exported to the U.S. but easily available to seasoned anglers in the shadow economy's waters), while the blonde (eager to please after he'd tossed her half a gram of premium flake) tried in vain to succor vitality from his exhausted glans.

He'd been worrying about money all day. A larger income meant more to hide, and the organization had been painfully precise about his taking steps to ensure clean transfer of funds without calling undue attention to himself from banks or regulators. Those from less-polished quarters, the chiselers and competitors, the organization handled with Swiss efficiency: One phone call from Reza and the problem disappeared.

It was not lost on Reza that he resided at a point of intersection between the white and black economies of the world, and that problems in the latter were much more easily solved than problems in the former. What was needed was a machine, an engine that would conglomerate and streamline his businesses in a manner that funded itself while providing solid legal cover for all illegal operations and revenues.

His epiphany came in a climactic expectoration of enlightenment that nearly asphyxiated his cokehead consort. Reza now knew just what he had to do.

The following day he secured a home equity line of credit from Urbank, a sweetheart arrangement that allowed him to draw the maximum with a pay schedule that was essentially his to call, and without penalties for early payoff of principle. The loan officer was, of course, a client of Reza's, who promised clean paperwork. Reza, in turn, promised a discount on the loan officer's trade, catering to the officer's peculiar tastes, which would certainly earn him a prison sentence were they publicized. The credit line ran to seven figures, available immediately.

Next, Reza worked up a prospectus on his laptop, burnishing and polishing the armatures of his dream machine. When he felt confident the presentation was solid enough, he took a big belt of Polish vodka and called his handlers to request a meet.

It went better than expected, although all things are relative. When he was finished with his pitch, the handlers stood silent, frowning at him. One of them went to the other side of Reza's large apartment to make a call. When he returned, he said: You will come with us.

They took him and his laptop downstairs, where a gleaming Audi QX TDI with blacked-out windows idled. Reza made himself comfortable in the plush backseat. He thought things were going well. His demeanor changed somewhat when he was bookended by two large, unsmiling men who took his laptop away, then handcuffed and hooded him. The Audi moved off, Reza marveling at how quiet its diesel engine was. He figured things might still be going well, considering how the organization did things. The fact that he was not being allowed to see the route to their destination suggested he would remain alive for some time after reaching it. He did not bother trying to guess the route, knowing they would drive in circles to defeat the purpose before setting out. He grimly settled for trying not to soil himself. After all, he had a pretty good idea what was happening.

He was finally going to meet with the Slav.

The Slav: a slab-sided monolith of horrific certainty. His presence drained the air from a room. Outdoors, the environment seemed to rearrange itself to accommodate him, as though the earth itself knew just who was standing on it. He stood swathed in black calfskin that kept his gigantic body in shadow, and the airport lights formed a penumbra around his shaven skull that gave the impression of a hideous mockery of a halo. Only the Slav's face and hands were visible, framing the mind that measured Reza's fate and the hands that could all too easily enforce it.

The Slav had no visible joints. His head simply rose out of his massive upper body in the manner of reptiles. He had no wrists; his enormous hands (the digits thick as rifle grenades) simply sprouted from arms like concrete pylons. Girth implies midsection; the Slav had none. His frame was impossibly wide and geometrically solid. What light there was around him was snatched from the air and imprisoned in his eyes, shining with an opacity that obscured iris and retina. The Slav rarely blinked. He looked like an early amphibian that had clawed its way out of the primordial sea, stood on dry land for the first time, and decided then and there that it all belonged to him.

Reza had once seen the Slav naked, in a bathhouse near Brighton Beach. His tattoos stretched from just beneath his clavicles to the wings of his pelvic girdle, circling his ribcage front to back, an atlas of stopping points on a long road of criminal and military history. The bathhouse meet was to discourage electronic surveillance; Reza had been subjected to both strip and body-cavity searches (including a naso-pharyngeal probe). The Slav had watched expressionless, men on either side of him in leather, wools, and furs, dripping sweat on a fearsome array of weapons, motionless in the steam.

That had been years ago. Since then the pendulum had swung from right to left and back again twice, with no visible improvement. Now was a new time of crisis, new fertile ground to exploit.

The Slav stood in front of Reza, impassive as he had been that day of their first meeting, impervious even in the wake of a 747 roaring just overhead on approach. When the squeal of the landing gear hitting the tarmac reached them from across the water, the Slav spoke, his voice clubbing the air between them into submission.

Reza did not speak the Slav's native Ukrainian; the Slav did not speak Reza's native Bulgarian. Russian was forbidden while discussing business in urban environments, as the Slav was too rich a prize for myriad police and intelligence services (replete with Russian speakers) the world over. For business, Reza and the Slav spoke Romanian. Being Bulgarian, Reza's Romanian was pure southern Bucharest. Being Ukrainian, the Slav's was northern, rougher, inflected with the murderous tinge of Chi
ş
in
ă
u.

“
Haide
Å£
i s
ă
-l
,” the Slav rumbled. Let's have it.

Reza shifted his cigarette from left hand to right, opening his left fist, which had until then been clenched around a tiny ten-megabyte flash drive containing his monthly operations report. He held it aloft on his open palm; it was immediately snatched by a shadow from behind him. Reza knew his men would be disarmed by now; he hoped the Slav would not kill them. This was one of those rare moments in life when being careful
could
hurt.

For the next three and a half minutes, Reza recited a carefully scripted spiel of revenues, expenditures, receivables, and requirements, the litany of operations. Reza was just hitting the high points; the details were laid out to the smallest denomination of various currencies and meticulously mapped out in tables and pie charts on the flash drive. Reza's voice was steady, as were his hands. The tremors came before and after he was in the Slav's presence; standing in front of him now, Reza was calmed by an overwhelming sense of finality. If the Slav wanted to kill him, he would do so, and (Reza's sniper notwithstanding) there would be absolutely nothing Reza could do about it. Such certainty removed the anxiety of the unknown.

Reza didn't mention the problem he'd had with Eyad; the Slav wouldn't care about his personnel problems. He would've handled things the exact same way, Reza thought.

The Slav inclined his head marginally, once, when Reza finished his presentation.

“
Bine f
ă
cute
,” he grunted appreciatively. “You've done well. What I don't like is the size of our market share. New York is for sale, and I don't like waiting in line.”

Reza's sphincter tightened. He'd known it would come to this. He did his best not to squirm.

“You know what we want,” the Slav said.

The pressure in Reza's colon was intense.

“
Ş
tiu
,” he replied, hoping that the Slav would not hear the turmoil in his voice. “But these things take time. Abruptness gets noticed. We can afford to move slowly. There's plenty of business for everyone.”

The Slav snapped his fingers; Reza nearly jumped. A rustling noise came from behind him. Reza groaned inwardly as two shadows, black-swathed, with night-vision goggles over their balaclavas, dragged his sniper, groggy and unsteady on his feet, in front of him. One of the shadows unslung the sniper's rifle from his shoulder and held it by the barrel, muzzle-up, to the Slav, who took it one-handed, by the grip.

“I don't blame you for taking precautions,” said the Slav slowly, effortlessly holding the eight-pound rifle dead steady, the suppressor muzzle resting lightly against the hollow of Reza's throat. “But the next time you put a sniper on me, I'll make you eat his kidneys
. În
Å£
eleg?”

Reza was rigid with fear. He was trying desperately not to fart.

In one disturbingly smooth motion, the Slav withdrew the rifle, flipped on the safety, popped out the magazine, and cleared the chamber, all without looking. One of the shadows caught the ejected round on the fly. “STG,” the Slav said with a smile that made Reza's stomach torque. “I carried one myself in Ossetia. I commend you on your choice of weapon.” He made a dismissive motion with one hand, and Reza's sniper hit the ground with a groan.

“
Pe curând
,” the Slav said. “I look forward to your next report.”