The Informant (35 page)

Katey, standing in front of Forster’s desk, couldn’t run, couldn’t hide, and was too old to cry, but not too old to wish he was somewhere else. Anywhere else. He kept his eyes down, his gaze moving from his left shoe to his right, and back again. Hell of a way for a grown man to make a living.

“Sir, Shire’s working Dávila, it’s there in the report.”

“Report my ass. Kates, the federals don’t bring a snitch up from Miami to Fun City so’s he can sit around and beat his meat. What’s he doin’ here? And don’t tell me it’s in the fucking report. Nothin’ here says what Dávila’s doin’ in New York. Kates, hear me good: if the federals make this case, and fuck us in the process, if we get left out in the cold, it’s gonna be you and me, understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Walter F. X. Forster was as hostile as a strung-out nigger junkie lying on a Harlem rooftop and pissing at the moon. Walter F. X. was chewing huge chunks out of Katey’s ass this morning, using all of the teeth he owned to do it. All Forster wanted to know was why the police department didn’t have more information on Jorge Dávila. That’s all.

“Kates, I’m here to tell you that this case is
almost
out of my hands.
Almost.
It’s that big, that fuckin’ big, so a lot of people have suddenly developed an interest in it. People up in Albany, people from the mayor’s office, from a coupla task forces, what can I tell you? They all want to know when’s the fuckin’ press conference and what time does the goddamn picture taking start, so they can show up and get theirs. That’s law enforcement, Kates, in case you didn’t know. Everybody wants theirs.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, like it or not, I gotta deliver. I’m too old to marry the boss’s daughter, and I’m too white to go on welfare. I live for my pension, same as you. Fuckin’ city’s cutting back on detectives now. Not just the boys in blue, but the detectives are gettin’ it. Less than twelve hundred left. Go figure. So I gotta deliver, and that’s where you come in. All right, we know the federals are building one hell of a conspiracy case. Shire’s got, what …?” Forster looked at the report on his desk. “Thirty-two names. Now, that is going to be one hell of a collar, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, sir. I would say that.”

“Gonna be a lot of ink on that one. Publicity up the ass, and the pressure’s on me to make sure certain people are included when it goes down. So how the fuck you think I feel when somebody like Dávila’s brought in and I don’t know what he’s doin’ here? How you think I feel?”

“Not good, sir.”

Walter F. X. Forster nodded his head several times. “Smart. You hooked on to that without any trouble. Now, hook on to this: tell me something, Kates. Tell me about Dávila. I’m listening.”

Katey looked at the bridge of Walter F. X. Forster’s nose, giving the impression he was staring directly into Forster’s eyes. Got me by the cubes, thought Katey. Why the fuck couldn’t I have been born rich instead of good-looking, so I could afford to quit this job?

“Uh, well, sir, Shire mentioned something, but I don’t know if he was being righteous. Said something ’bout Dávila having an
in
with this Cristina Reina woman …”

“That’s already on paper, Kates. What kind of in? What’s the actual reason Dávila’s hangin’ around the Cuban woman? He wearing her old dresses or somethin’?”

“Shire says she’s tied in with a bunch of Castro people out of Miami and New York, and she sometimes passes stuff on to the CIA.”

“Shit. Big hairy deal.” Forster opened his fingers, letting copies of Neil Shire’s reports drop to his desk. “Every Cuban in this country over the age of two is supposed to have some kind of connection with Castro. Pro, con, who the fuck knows or cares?”

“Shire says that Dávila feels it might turn out to have something to do with this Betancourt deal.”

“So, why ain’t it on
paper
?” Forster leaned forward in his chair, slamming the reports with his palm, his face purple with anger and frustration. Survival was taking a lot out of him. “Why the hell ain’t it in our copies of Shire’s reports?”

Katey took a deep breath and plunged in. “I think maybe Saul Raiser might have somethin’ to do with stuff being cut out. I told you ’bout him. He’s the CIA’s man on the feds, he’s their pipeline, their rabbi. I think maybe he cut some stuff out.”

Forster looked at Katey for a long time, too long for Katey’s peace of mind. Then Forster said softly, “So that’s it, right? If we make waves because we think we’re being left out, we end up getting a knot tied in our dongs by more heavy federals. Jesus!”

Forster slammed the desk as hard as he could, then threw himself back into his black leather chair, eyes on the ceiling, as though appealing to God for help.

“I know nobody gets out of this world alive, but still you gotta wonder, you gotta keep tryin’. Some fucking days you wake up, and the assholes of the world are waiting for you at the foot of your bed. You don’t even have to go out on the sidewalk to get carved up. They come right into your home and dump on you. Kates?”

“Sir?”

Forster’s voice was calmer, flat, all the feeling squeezed out of it. He continued to lean back in his chair, eyes on the ceiling. “Work on Shire. Find out what’s with Dávila and this other Cuban bitch. Lydia Constanza’s out of the hospital, right?”

“She’s back working, yes.”

“All right.
You
go to work. Find out what’s with the CIA, how they fit in. See if this hurts us or not. You gotta know one thing, though.”

He looked at Katey. “You blow this, and I go down. Finished. It’s gonna be that way, because too much is riding on this, too many people will be disappointed at not having their picture took for the New York
Times.
They’ll get me, no two ways about it. And, Kates?”

“Sir?”

“I’ll get you. Now, get the fuck out of my office, you’re breathing my air.”

T
HE RUBY RING ON
Cristina Reina’s right forefinger was worth forty thousand dollars.

Each time she held a slim, blue-veined hand over the ashtray to tap ashes from a tiny black Cuban cigar stuck in a black ivory holder, the bloodred stone demanded attention. Lydia, frightened by Cristina and her reputation for being ruthless, thought that flashing the ring was jive street shit. The slow tapping of one long silver-painted nail on the black ivory holder and deliberately not talking while doing it. Cristina was an actress, thought Lydia, who considered the red ring just more blood on the woman’s hands.

She watched Cristina place the cigarette holder back in her thin mouth and look across the table at Neil with eyes as tiny and gray as the dots left by a pencil on white paper. This one’s a barracuda, thought Lydia, the kind who always goes for the soft parts on a man’s body and is never in a hurry to see him die.

Tonight, New Year’s Eve, Cristina wore a long-sleeved black silk gown covering her from chin to floor, with a pearl choker around her neck and over the gown. Diamond bracelets, also worn over the gown, glittered on both wrists, and there were two expensive rings on each hand, a symbol of the power and money Cristina Reina had achieved in narcotics. She was a small woman, with short frosted hair combed forward over her forehead to hide deep lines. Pockmarked skin was pulled tight over a chinless, birdlike face. The forty-year-old Cristina Reina also had two steel teeth on the right side of her mouth, the work of one of a handful of Russian dentists still left in Havana after the missile crisis of October, 1962.

Lydia watched her blink twice at Neil before speaking to him in a high nasal voice in heavily accented English. “You only buy white. Your people don’t like brown, maybe?” She narrowed her eyes at him as though he were on a slide under a microscope. Lydia, heart pounding, sipped scotch and milk, remembering that this woman once had an informant’s wife and thirteen-year old daughter raped in front of him. The informant’s eyes had been gouged out so that he could hear their screams but not see what was being done to them.

Neil said, “Blacks and Puerto Ricans, they do anything. Out where I come from, they only know from white. We’re old-fashioned, conservative. We still do things the old way.”

“I see.” Cristina Reina waited while Jorge Dávila, to her right, lit the new cigar in her holder. “You sell to teenagers, maybe?”

Neil, fingers playing with the straps on Lydia’s small rhinestone purse, didn’t look at her. “You sell to nuns, maybe?”

Lydia started to smile, changed her mind, and cleared her throat instead. She’d passed on what little she’d learned about Cristina Reina from Jorge Dávila, and the important thing Neil had to remember was that Cristina was hard, shrewd, capricious, friendly one minute and vicious the next. Lydia guessed that Jorge Dávila was sleeping with her because he was afraid not to.

Cristina sighed. “Such a night on which to talk business. I’m hungry. Mmmmm, you know, Jorge, that chili looks good.”

Jorge Dávila’s smile was quick, weak. “I’ll get you some. Anything else?”

“Cornbread. A little salad. Yes, we must have a little salad, I think.”

She smiled at Neil, at Lydia, who smiled back and hoped the night would go fast. Adjusting the dark glasses that hid her still-blackened eyes, Lydia reached for her glass of scotch and milk.

The six of them—Lydia, Neil, Cristina, Dávila, René Ateyala, and Carlos el Indio—were at the Palace, the floating after-hours club operated by a group of successful Manhattan pimps. Tonight the Palace had been installed on three floors of a brownstone on Seventy-fourth Street and Riverside Drive, and the extent of the Hundred Dollar Man’s reputation in narcotics was seen by the fact Neil had received three separate invitations to come here tonight. The New Year’s Eve party—a hundred and fifty dollars per guest, cash at the door, invitation only, and no exceptions—was to last around the clock, ending at noon the next day, when the Palace would cease to exist until
the players
—pimps—would again bring it into existence weeks later at a different location.

Tonight, all three floors were packed with people: with pimps, almost all of whom were black, and their stables of women (black, white, young); with drug dealers, gamblers, loan sharks, hustlers of all sorts, and other night people who lived on excitement and were well connected enough to be invited. Dancing to taped soul and Latin music occupied the first floor, with huge silk-covered pillows against the wall for nondancers to lie back and watch the action.

The second floor had the food—chili, chicken, ham, ribs, turkey, salads, greens, cornbread, cake, ice cream, and more, most of it cooked on the premises on portable stoves and ovens. Aquariums with dozens of multicolored fish stood on wooden tables against walls now decorated with huge paintings borrowed for the evening.

Backgammon, blackjack, roulette, and craps were on the third floor, and all tables were jammed. Each of the three floors had a well-stocked bar tended by black bartenders in tuxedos. Music was piped into each floor. Tonight, the partygoers were dressed garishly, fashionably, colorfully, wearing their extremes in clothes, hairdo, and jewelry with assurance and flair, each man and woman in tune with the feeling that the very fact of the Palace was so wrong, it just had to be right. The smell of marijuana was everywhere, and Lydia had heard that up on the third floor, a dealer was giving out free blows of cocaine—tinfoil-wrapped packets, one inch square—as New Year’s gifts to anyone who asked.

Enrique Ruiz had whispered to Lydia that he’d heard two pimps bragging to each other about their
ho’s,
their whores, resulting in a bet as to which teenage whore was the better cocksucker, the contest to take place after midnight. That’s when the ho’s, two white teenagers, were to kneel and suck off their respective pimps as a room full of people watched. The pimp who came first won five thousand dollars.

Just a rumor? Maybe. But with
players
, you could never tell. They were flashy, always showing off and bragging, always quick to let people know where they were coming from.

René Ateyala coughed into his fist. He was five feet five inches, a hundred and, ninety-five pounds, a chubby, round-faced man with extremely hairy hands and bushy black eyebrows meeting over a hooked nose. Except for a brown toupee that looked slightly orange in the dim light, the thirty-five-year-old René Ateyala wore all white—suit, shirt, tie, shoes, handkerchief. He’d had six drinks and wasn’t remotely drunk. He didn’t scare Lydia nearly as much as Carlos el Indio, the tall, broad-shouldered, brown-skinned man without an expression on his slant-eyed, flat face. Indio had huge hands that were now folded on the table as though in prayer. He sat still, saying nothing, his shiny black eyes not blinking, not looking in any particular direction, but seeing everyone and everything.

Lydia knew about him from Jorge Dávila, who said he’d had nightmares of Carlos el Indio coming after him. Carlos the Indian was a killer, a knife man, someone you never annoyed or insulted. He was the reason Cristina Reina could wear her jewelry tonight without worrying about some crazy trying a takeoff. Lydia wondered if even a bullet between the eyes would do more than scratch the big Indian’s skin.

As for Neil, he was becoming a damn good actor, too. Not anxious, not dumb or uncool, not in a hurry. He was exactly what you had to be when you were scoring dope. He got better each time out, and Lydia was proud of him.

As Dávila left the table to get chili, Cristina Reina blew smoke after him, then turned back to Neil. “Yesterday you said your people are expanding, moving up. That means money, my friend. That means you got money or you’re lookin’ to get it. I think maybe you need bigger packages than you buying, maybe.”

“You don’t know what I’m buying,” said Neil, looking at her. “You hear maybe about a few loads here, a few loads there. While people were checking me out, I was checking them out. So now I know who to rely on, and that’s important. To get white, the amount of white my people are gonna need, I’m willing to go anywhere. Some people already talked to me about my problem.”

“Who?” René Ateyala, on his eighth drink and not a hair on his toupee out of place, puckered up his lips when he spoke, as though blowing a kiss across the table.