7.

It started with a day in the office.

The captain was a gray hair who wore his epaulettes with a dismal gravity. Displeased with the ill wind that blew his way after my dance with Internal Affairs, we generally didn’t talk much. It was all business with us, cordial and distant. I knew he tried to keep contact to a minimum, suffering those moments when we had to cross paths with the solemn dignity of a weary priest. So it was the other day when he came over to tell me there was a special agent coming to see me. It was no special briefing—he knew nothing about it, he said, only that the guy wanted my help and that he was coming all the way from Washington. I wondered if it had anything to do with Internal Affairs, but the captain shrugged off my questions with a terse request. “Just try not to give the department a shiner on this one.” This was no tongue in cheek. This was his parting shot, his way of letting me know he didn’t plan to be around for any of it. It put a rumble to my stomach that made me resent my visitor from Washington before I’d even laid eyes on him.

I wasn’t so much “office” once. Once I was so much more street. Contact hard ground tenement brick. Puerto Rican face molding fit to shape. Tenement hard or candyass soft, all shrink to fit. All devil with no bite but a lot of culo. First it was to prove I was smart enough. Then it was to prove I was tough. I thought I wanted power to help people. That was why I became a cop. Contact with the streets in a new way. And not so much “office,” like now.

It was nothing like now.

I was the cop spick ducking shells in 1991 when the South Bronx was more like Kosovo. I collected bullet holes while they fresh-scooped teenage bodies off the sidewalks. Spick kids getting ripped by high-caliber shells when I was flush with first love. The new missionary returning to his people. I was the young priest in that old Kojak episode. At the bedside handing the kid a Richard Wright. Twenty years on the force. Gold shield. And so much more street.

I knew streets. I knew them like people and the faces they make. Every nook every route. Every backyard pooch barking at a cat. I came from there. I was connected, born and bred South Bronx bonafide. I knew those people in my files and the places they lived. Each one had a story better than Broadway. I saw openings, I saw closings. Better than Cagney Edward G. and Bogey. Bad endings and funny names. Droopy, Cesar, Gooch. Like I was battling cartoon characters. Snort, Debit, Spider. The men of my Puerto Rican time. The schemers the achievers the heads of state. The diplomats the soldiers the army generals. A whole generation, how nobody noticed. Came and went. The wind blowing ash free tumbling over ashtray rim. I didn’t only see them climb to power and props. I always stepped onstage to bring the house down. To follow that simple Hollywood formula: There’s bad guys and there’s good guys. It was my personal arm wrestle, my eyeball to eyeball.

I did my job. I busted them. I busted them running, I busted them under the bed, hiding. I chased them over rooftops. I waited. Patient, parked down the block. They knew I was there. Building a file, getting to know habits, manners, style, face. I waited like an old lover throwing pebbles at a back window. I didn’t need some impatient trigger fuck to come start piling up bodies in the name of the law. I did it by the book for twenty years, and it was working. Crime was down drug dealing wasn’t so visible and the streets started to glow with people again, just hanging and gathering over there by the stoop … when this Dirty Harry motherfucker starts shooting people in the back.

Dirty Harry is a classic cop movie from 1971 directed by Don Siegel. It stars Clint Eastwood as a cop who takes the law into his own hands after a serial killer gets sprung on a technicality. The resulting murder spree inspired four sequels and made the vigilante cop a mainstay of Americana.

Two summers ago, drug dealers started getting popped. During arrests and mop-ups. Falling from rooftops, stairs. Cracked skulls after falling. Shot while trying to escape.

“He pulled a gun.”

“He was resisting arrest.”

“He turned in a hostile, aggressive manner,” because yeah, some cops get tired of process. Of filling out forms in triplicate. Of taking time off from real life to testify in court, only to watch the guy stroll out the revolving doors. It starts small like that, almost by accident. The pushing, shoving. The first-time kick or handful of hair. It starts to flow out of hand. How the other buddies cover for you. For each other. A special club. The precinct rippled every time someone got gunned down during a street stop. The rush to files: Was it one of ours? (Correction: They were all MINE, four names crossed off, plus two who only looked like drug dealers. My alleys and streets invaded by a “special task force” doing sweeps as if to clean up my mess.) There were some late-night debates about it, hand-wringing wrenchers about where did loyalty lie and duty and other big words, but nobody wanted to deal with it. It was a problem for some other precinct, maybe some other cop. But these people that were getting popped were from my files, and I was from here.

So I went out on the streets. Treated it no different than if I was hunting down a psycho. I asked questions of people that the other cops didn’t bother to ask. The streets talked back full blast. I used to think it had something to do with me being from here, but this was one of the biggest lies I ever believed. It was not the biggest of all, but hard to choose. I believed all of them.

I started a file on Dirty Harry. I packed that shit full and spent a drunken night with Lieutenant Jack, arguing. He said I should forget about it, wasn’t worth throwing a career away. I respect him for having said it. I still don’t hold it against him on days when I can’t join in on their reindeer games. I walked that file over to Internal Affairs. They were not too happy I did that, or that the story got leaked to the New York Post. (DIRTY HARRY COMES TO THE SOUTH BRONX!) The New York Times started buzzing the commissioner’s office. Resignations. The investigation took a year and a half, involved three precincts and led to five major acquittals. There were no riots. The people of the South Bronx went back to sleep as the story slid off the headlines without a squeak. Dirty Harry and his squad remained heroes to some in that Clint Eastwood/Oliver North kind of way, though reassigned—while “doing a Sanchez” became synonymous with squealing singing songs betraying buddies RAT FINKING. It was like throwing twenty years down the toilet. That first year right after everything was the hardest. There was talk that I was taking the death threats seriously. The captain said he had hoped to transfer me but found that no other precinct would have me. So he said I get to stay, suggested putting in for all that vacation time, as a favor to myself and the department. Prevent entanglements. “Scenes.” In any case, he didn’t plan on being around by the time I came back. “Let some new captain deal with it,” he said, and from then on developed the ability to not speak to me at all, even when talking.

“So much for moving up the corporate ladder,” Lieutenant Jack said. “Looks like I’m stuck with you.”

Lieutenant Jack had a face like an orange, round and studded with pores. A real bear-hug Irish bastard who loved working the South Bronx. It was the early ’90s when we started working together. His files as much as my files. Wasn’t a murder scene crackhouse stoop shooting we didn’t do together. Crack was the fast lane, the scam that scammed the town. Teenagers formed posses and shot each other to shit. A whole generation scraped off the sidewalk. Southern Boulevard Cypress 138th Street, all bullet-rattled window panes. Baggy-pant shootout boys lingered to watch the body wagons come. The staff at Ortiz Funeral Home got sick of seeing me turn up there, too many funeral parlors where posse members congregated to say adios to their foxhole buddies. I chased some, I jailed some. I scared some out, I scared some away. Back then, no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t as fast as what was killing them.

“You gotta let that stuff go.”

Yeah, well, that’s what Lieutenant Jack says. I can’t forget. All those kids getting killed. You would think it was some kind of civil war. Kids armed and taking charge. And then the pace slowed. Was like the kids got bored. Spotted the truth behind the hype. The big dealers found their young audience dwindling. Like politicians record producers teachers Ricky Martín—they hadn’t delivered. Dealers were no longer zipping by in big cars, popping caps across crowded streets. They learned to sit quietly. To keep a low profile. To share booty and bargain with rivals. Overnight, the face of the South Bronx changed. Empty lots got paved to fill up with rows of three-family houses, hedgerow lawn and suburb. The criminals moved indoors, got subtle.

For us, it was slow pace. Informers, alliances, betrayals. Endless surveilance. Took months to get inside, to know the workings and the players. It was all background scenes, establishing shots, and the long roll to end credits. That was my office, my street. My daily life for twenty years. Once there was an US vs. THEM story here somewhere. Once it was what I did for the South Bronx.

“And the New York City Police Department?”

I did what I thought was right. According to my training and my belief in certain principles. I put a stop to a gang. Nothing more, nothing less. But a lot of people didn’t think so. I stood my ground and I’m still standing right here. My wife and I even bought one of those new prefab houses on 156th Street and Kelly. As much of a quiet treelined street as I could get and still call it South Bronx. But connections popped like high-tension wires after Dirty Harry. Dancing, spinning, bursting sparks. Reminders of special non-status. What was I supposed to be doing if I quit being a cop? My wife and I were talking about having a baby, and three weeks in Mallorca ought to do the trick. It would be a gray slow time. Neither here nor there. Time to end things or get things started. A gold badge tossed on the captain’s desk. As movie-like an ending as possible.

But so much for Mallorca and great escapes and movie scenes rolling to end credits. I had started smoking again. Swiped loose cigarettes from everywhere. Menthols, kings, filter tips, Chesterfield Regulars. I had just about every type of smokable tobacco squirreled everywhere I could reach like pocket like shelf like desk drawer always a loose one someplace for a sudden drag. And to sit sometimes and smoke them in rows as if waiting for someone to walk through that door. An armload of facts, irrefutable. Maybe they had sicced some dark yoruba spick cop on me. Parked outside my house. Getting to know habits, manner, style, face. The pebbles striking my window at 4 a.m.

The agent had two bookends with him. Left them standing at the desk in the entry hall, faces impenetrably stone. Special agent? I expected older, salt-and-pepper hair, abrasive vocals. A face lined with experience and hassles, and not this young guy, hands sunk in the pockets of his long tan raincoat. I would have been more impressed had I caught him picking my lock or rifling through piles on my desk.

I hadn’t even stirred my first cup of coffee. It rained buckets that morning and the wet was still in my bones. How I sat and started talking to him about cop life was beyond me. I didn’t have visitors for a reason. Didn’t have to scratch the surface much to strike a nerve. Nothing to hide, and that’s the best policy. How it all comes spilling out.

“I’m Special Agent Myers,” he said.

There was also that hunger for the raspy bite of that first cigarette of the day, which went with the first taste of coffee.

“Detective Sanchez,” I said.

A calm, sure grip. Smile so simpatico in that AMERICAN HEARTLANDS kind of way. To trust that face the moment you spot it on the screen. Should I say CIA? It never pays to say. People get riled over the silliest shit these days. Three simple letters in an e-mail like FBI CIA or FALN (that’s four letters), and suddenly there’s a background check and a black car with tinted windows following you around. Funny clicks on the phone. That guy outside the bodega who for some reason says, “Smile for the FBI,” as you head for your car. Too clean-cut to be a used car salesman. Too much energy for such a small space. Offered him a coffee and that was a mistake. Ripping those sugar packets and sprinkling sugar liberal, then stirring mad. Spoon clang clanging like the fucking bells of Rhymney. On top of which he asked me to close the door. By the time I got behind my desk, it felt like the room had shrunk.

I guess I talked to him because I saw him as a cop from somewhere else—Washington, not South Bronx—another plane of reality where the power was stored. Maybe the feds had decided to step in and order a real investigation into what was happening here. It was an opportunity for me to talk to someone from OUTSIDE of here, OUTSIDE of this narrow confining orbit. To check and see if I was really going crazy. A new federal investigation would mean more new noise at a time when all was a vague limbo, not here not there. Good guys. Bad guys. A hazy blur. I don’t know now why I even bothered to raise my hand. I suddenly got the feeling from the deep silence that I didn’t want to talk anymore.

“I know about your record,” Myers said. “You came highly recommended.”

The best time to light up that first cigarette of the day is halfway through that first cup of the day. Had to be halfway, give the taste buds enough time to get saturated with coffee. The coffee would be the right temperature. My coffee was not yet at the halfway mark, yet I was already thinking about that cigarette. I was even thinking about what kind: a filterless Chesterfield. That rough, abrasive first taste of smoke. No filter to soften the hammer blow.

“Detective Hanson at Four-Three. Detectives Peterson, Lemmings, and Bryan at the Four-O. The Bronx district attorney’s office. There wasn’t a single paralegal there that didn’t know your name. And your captain.” Vague smile. “He had quite a few things to say about you.”

The open window faced a brick wall, a back alley of steel stairwells, and a basement grille. I was always going out there with Lieutenant Jack for a smoke, just standing on the grille and puffing away. Below were some glowy basement windows and hundreds of discarded butts. I was longing to go out that window.

“I know pretty well about your current troubles,” Myers said. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

I had the sense that I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. I had the sense that I knew deep down what he was after, and that troubled me. My seventh sip of coffee. As flaming burn as the first.

“It’s very important that I find Anthony Rosario.”

(Oh man. Another quick gulp of coffee.)

Drug dealers are born with real names like regular people but they develop street tags, alter-egos. Rap-star comic book villain names like Destructo, MurderMan, Sniffles, Ace of Spade. Names I became so familiar with that it took awhile sometimes to register, to put the real name to a face. It was as if the real name was a secret, something hidden. It didn’t please me to hear Myers just blurt it out.

“Spook? You’re looking for Spook?”

“A.k.a., Spook. That’s right.”

Silence. Deep cave.

“What makes a special agent come all the way from Washington to look for Spook?”

Standing ground again. Old habit. At first I thought he was here because of me. Now that he said “Spook,” I saw that it was still ABOUT me.

“I’m involved in a top priority investigation. We’ve been following certain trails and one of them has led here. The things I’m about to tell you shouldn’t leave this room.”

My fingers found a cigarette in a drawer. Totally unconscious. Automatic. Rolled it around. Thinking about that open window and no Spook thoughts. I longed for Lieutenant Jack, for his cynical laugh and the way he made trouble seem smaller.

Myers pulled out a manila envelope from an inside pocket. He tapped it against a thigh, bit his lower lip. He handed it to me.

“This is strictly confidential,” he said.

“Sure.”

“Are you aware that over the course of a month, Anthony Rosario deposited over ten million dollars in four different bank accounts?”

“No,” I said.

“Four accounts. A couple of names you might know. The other two are foreigners. Not from his organization. We were already watching them. They led us right to Mr. Rosario. We’ve been following the money since it came stateside.”

I opened the envelope. Bank statements, phone records. Numbers dialed on Spook’s cell phone. There were two names I recognized all right, trusted Spook workers. The other names I did not know. The room was feeling smaller and smaller.

“He floated the money into the accounts, then disappeared it. These two names.” Myers came around the desk to show me on the sheets. “They are known to us as individuals involved in a terrorist organization that has recently been waging an undeclared war against the United States.”

Bank statements. Deposits. Withdrawals. Phone calls. Transaction slips. Footprints in the snow.

“This organization has been flooding the country recently with money. Over the past six months we’ve snagged accounts in New York, Florida, Chicago, even Los Angeles. Closed a batch last month that used fake Social Security numbers. Unbelievable how banks let this stuff slip. A bunch of others we suspect but can’t touch because there are laws, laws, we have them, don’t we? And the more they protect people, the more these criminals use them to strangle us. We’re onto the bank thing, so now they’re trying to switch tactics. Last week we arrested two individuals using debit cards—individuals, again linked to terrorism—but every petty arrest we make generates a reaction. First, they were setting up accounts openly, with phony Social Security numbers. Expired visas, illegal aliens using debit cards … so we nail some. Now the method starts to change. Now they’re trying to launder the money in, approaching criminal elements who are highly skilled at it. We know they approached the mob.”

Myers, standing by my desk, now staring at the window as if he had followed my eyes. I had the cigarette in my hand. I had my hand up to my face. To sniff the bouquet.

“It was the mob that got us onto this thing to begin with. They told us right away. The mob is too patriotic to step into that. But a drug dealer … from the South Bronx? Who would even bother to look in the South Bronx? It’s a shift in tactics. Like an animal that’s aware it’s being hunted. It reacts, it shifts, it has a brain. We call that a conscious coordination of effort.”

The half-point to my coffee had been reached. The coffee was at the right temperature. Myers, spirited and antsy, walked around the desk. It seemed like he hadn’t gotten to the worst of it yet.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my words tasting sluggish. “I’m having a hard time seeing Spook involved in this.”

“I can understand,” he said. “But would you say his business has been so good over the past month that he would be making such a big deposit just coming out of jail?”

I didn’t want to answer a question like that. My guts were tighter than a Dominican ass in stressed jeans. How didn’t I see something like this? Was I so fucking lazy? So we busted him two months ago, raided some sloppy operation, didn’t get much on him. Nothing that would stick when you have a good lawyer, and Spook had that. His “clean as a whistle” brother David made sure to hook him up every time.

“But where’s the money from?” I felt testy, grasping for handhold along the ledge.

“You don’t need to know that,” he said. He was by the window, peering out into the alley. His voice sounded somehow gentle. “Anyway, it’s not your fault.”

“Why would it be?”

Myers took his seat again. There was concern creasing his face. “That you didn’t know. You can’t blame yourself.”

There was just the ticking of the clock. Our eyes met across a strange distance.

“Unless you really do know every last little thing about the people in your files,” he said.

It was one of those silent moments you replay later.

“Nobody could,” I said, hollow.

Myers gestured toward the flip-pad on my desk, which also came in the envelope.

“Mr. Rosario met someone this last visit to prison. His name is Mounir. He’s from Saudi Arabia. We know him pretty well. He’s been especially talkative right now, since he’s scared his old friends are going to kill him. He’s the one who made the connection to Mr. Rosario. Just think: You’re this two-bit drug dealer who just got his ass busted on some shit charge, and here comes this stranger, offering you a chance to launder millions of dollars. What would your attitude be?”

I wasn’t through rubbing my face shut.

“I would go for it,” I said.

“Okay, this is where it gets worse.” Myers leaned closer. “They’ll probably pay a certain amount for services rendered. Something reasonable for the trouble, but what if you start to think? Why take some small fee when you can have the whole ten million? Tax free. What if you think you can just run off with it, rip off a bunch of stupid foreigners, and disappear?”

“Ah, shit.” The room felt too small, too tight. Even Myers had to stand up. Hands in pockets, he walked over to the window and stared across at the brick wall.

“These people,” he said, “they’re psycho-killers with international connections. Fearless, well-indoctrinated, with goals and a purpose that goes beyond people. Mr. Rosario might have picked the wrong people to fuck with. It could be they’re tracking him down right now, him and everyone he’s connected with. This guy has really botched it up for us. We’ve been following this money trail for months now. If they get him, we could lose all of it. The money, the trail, the people it would have all led us to.”

“Maybe the money already got where it was going,” I said.

“No. It never got there. We know where it goes and it hasn’t reached point A. Mr. Rosario was just a pathway. He was not the final destination. This guy … Spook.” The way the name bubbled off his lips made him grin a moment, before his face creased up again. I read it like concern for Spook. All of a sudden that sick feeling, an old adrenalin kick from those “first love” years. That feeling that YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. That YOU have been chosen by providence to be at the right place at the right time to make that one special move. And maybe it was one of those big lies coming round to get believed in again. Or maybe it was just the goddamned truth. Staring me in the face as much as Myers. My destiny. My beginning or my end.

“I really need to find Spook,” he said.

My stomach was burning. My ears, my head. I stood up too. Fished out my cheap-ass lighter and stepped out through the window.

“I think it’s time for a cigarette,” I said.