The Informant (26 page)

Lydia smoothed on lip gloss with her little finger. “Tell Neil what you told me about the money.”

“Yes, the money. Seven and a half million dollars.”

Neil stood up straight, eyes on Dávila. “Seven and a half million dollars?”

“Betancourt.” A relaxed Dávila knew he had Neil’s attention. “Cristina says Barbara Pomal has completed moving seven and a half million dollars to Europe for Mas, and that’s just for the dope, not for expenses, not for bribes. Just for the dope.”

Neil whistled. “Holy shit! You serious? Seven and a half million just for dope?”

Davila nodded and smirked. “Big package, wouldn’t you say?”

“
Seven and a half million just for the package?
” Neil was stunned.

“Yes. That is what you agents call level number one, I believe. Barbara says this is Mas’s last deal. He wants to retire to Spain after this, so he’s going out in style. That’s why he needs manpower. Cubans, blacks, twenty mules, you name it. Based on my experience, a package that size means almost half that again for planning and for expenses—mules, transportation, hotels, bribes. What we’re talking about is the biggest shipment anybody’s ever seen. We’re talking about maybe ten, eleven million dollars up front. Now, that much dope on the street means an epidemic. That much Turkish white has a street value of a billion dollars or more in nickel and dime bags. If this load gets through, there’s going to be a lot of trouble, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Shire?”

Neil didn’t want to be awed, but he was forced to be. He was still trying to deal with numbers, statistics, the size of the package, the size of the deal, the number of people. What had started out as a rumor, as a
maybe
, was now hard gospel. Lydia Constanza was worth her weight in gold. Even without knowing when the load was due, just adding up what she, Neil, and Dávila had learned, made this case the biggest thing to hit the bureau in its history. And Neil Shire had the case in his two hot hands.

When the door opened behind him, he jumped. Olga. Her hair in braids, a new red-and-white party dress on, along with white socks and tiny black patent-leather shoes. There was chocolate ice cream around her mouth, framing a gap-toothed smile. “Mommy, mommy! Come to the party, please come!”

Lydia, now composed and wearing a silver lamé gown and black platforms with yellow rhinestones across the straps, crossed the small room to her daughter, scooped up the child in her arms, and rubbed noses with her. Mother and child giggled at each other, before Lydia turned to Jorge Dávila and Neil. “I have to go.” And she left the room with Olga in her arms, the two of them giggling and talking softly in Spanish.

“I hope we can work together,” said Dávila, lighting a tan Cuban cigar and offering one to Neil, who refused. Dávila decided that Neil was impressed with what he’d just heard, but was unsure of how to deal with Dávila. There was a tapping on the bedroom door.

Neil said, “Who?”

“Holmes Sweet Holmes, and Coyote Man.”

Neil turned to Dávila. “I’ll be talking with you.”

Jorge Dávila understood. He smiled, stood up, and decided not to offer his hand to be shaken, since it was obvious that Neil Shire didn’t trust him. The relationship between an agent and an informant struck Jorge Dávila as a rather intricate and bizarre ballet danced on ever-dangerous ground, with the dancers allowed one miscue and no more. The one thing you never did was rush the pace. Go slow, don’t hurry. Speed kills, especially in narcotics. Being in a hurry involved an urgency, and Dávila, an informant who believed that no secret could remain undiscovered forever, knew that one’s urgency would eventually be found out. That’s why he made a policy of never appearing to be urgent about anything, and that’s why he was still alive when other informants were dead.

He left the room quietly and without a fuss, the way Neil Shire wanted him to leave.

When Kirk Holmes and Katey were inside the bedroom, Neil stood with his back against the door. “That was a C. I. from Miami.” C. I. meant “cooperating individual,” a term preferred by some to “informant, “snitch,” “fink,” “Judas,” “stoolie.”

“Name’s Jorge Dávila, Cuban, in town because Saul Raiser and God knows Who else wanted him here to work on some Cubans up from Miami to work with Mas Betancourt. Dávila says Mas has borrowed manpower from Miami, a quaint Cuban custom. Those fucking people stick together like white on rice. No wonder we can’t beat ’em. Mas’s lieutenants are all in Europe, according to Señor Dávila, and that’s why he needs a little help, from his friends. To get by and score high. It may be temporary, it may not, I don’t know, since the movers and shakers at the bureau didn’t see fit to take me into their confidence. So
you
don’t know, ’cause
I
don’t know. I didn’t introduce you, ’cause I don’t know him well enough to blow anybody’s cover. He’s probably made you anyway. The dude’s been around, he’s been on the set long enough to know what’s going down.”

Neil let what he’d said sink in. Then he added, “There’s at least five of us in this crib right now who know what Mas is planning. There’s also some other Cubans out there in dope. Some of them, we know, have a piece of this thing, little piece, big piece, don’t matter. I don’t know if it’s a good idea two informants together like that, I don’t know. I mean, anybody out there in that room could get a pile of money from Mas Betancourt for betraying us. Some of them people out there would even blow us away for a thimbleful of snot because we’re ‘the man.’ ”

Katey smirked. “Lydia’s yours. I mean, she’s your talent. Don’t matter what Raiser does with Dávila, does it?”

“Raiser’s always on fire,” said Kirk Holmes. “The man’s got ambitions. He makes up the rules as he goes along. Like Neil said, he’s tied into people down in Washington, not all of ’em in our line of work. He wants to please them people, see that they don’t get embarrassed, and that’s why he sent Dávila an airplane ticket. Raiser wants to learn if anything we dig up can hurt his Washington friends. One thing, though. Got to remember that Raiser couldn’t shift a C. I. from Miami to New York without some kind of clearance from somewhere, and I mean up there.” Kirk Holmes jerked a thumb toward the ceiling. “We’d best go easy till we see what’s shakin’. Cut-’Em-Up’s got hisself a crowd ’round him on this one.”

Katey, who had watched Neil to see how he was taking the news that Lydia now had a partner, suddenly realized that he—Katey—had a problem because of this news. A new snitch meant that the feds could get information they didn’t have to share with the New York Police Department. Walter F. X. Forster wouldn’t like that He’d probably tell Katey to find a way to get Dávila’s information included in Lydia’s reports or in the other reports the bureau was passing on. Hell, Walter F. X. Forster would probably tell Katey to steal a copy of anything the bureau got from Dávila; to hell with waiting for a handout that might never come. Jorge Dávila hadn’t been in Katey’s life more than a few seconds and was already a problem.

Neil said, “Let’s split. Well talk some more outside. Cool it with Dávila. Don’t say anything to him. Not yet, anyway. Let’s see what’s going down with Raiser first. Tell you this: what Dávila just told me means we have got ourselves one hell of a chance for a big one. We make this case, and we get breakfast in bed for a year and egg in our beer with whipped cream on top. Blow it, and we go down the toilet nose-first. We let a load this size get past us with what we already know, and we won’t be able to get a job smelling a dog’s asshole. All right, let’s go somewhere and talk.”

On the way out, Katey waited by the front door with Holmes and noticed that when Neil and Lydia drew off to one side and talked, Lydia kept her hand on Neil’s arm the entire time. “Ain’t that something?” Katey said under his breath, and Kirk Holmes, thinking Katey was talking about a trick Enrique Ruiz was doing with three glasses of water and two white pigeons, nodded his head in agreement.

R
ENÉ VEGA STOOD IN
the bedroom doorway buttoning his overcoat and watching small yellow and blue flames crawl slowly along the edge of the tan blanket, turning the edge a dark brown, the line of flame creeping toward the huge black-and-white toy panda that lay beside Shana Levin’s left leg. Smoke rose gently from the burning blanket, a soft gray cloud growing fatter each second. Suddenly the pink sheets beneath the blanket caught fire, and those flames were brighter, louder, a hard red and orange that began snapping like a whip. On the bed, Shana Levin lay on her back, naked and dead, one leg pulled up under her, her long blond hair scattered across her face like carelessly tossed straw, her right hand covered with her own blood and resting on her breasts.

René’s eyes widened; he’d forgotten something. Fifteen minutes ago, he’d been seized by one of his black rages, and this time he’d killed Shana, pressing a pillow down over her face to stifle her screams while he stabbed her in the heart, stomach, and side forty times with a screwdriver. But he’d forgotten to take her money. Her purse. Through the growing smoke he saw it on the small table near the bed.

No sense leaving money behind. Wouldn’t do Shana any good now. René’s head still ached, but he wasn’t dizzy anymore; he didn’t feel as though he were going to black out, to faint. He was sorry for what he’d done to her, and he wished she hadn’t died, that the darkness hadn’t squeezed his brain so hard and made him kill her. He wanted to stay, to talk to Shana, to tell her … But the smoke was burning his throat, his eyes, making him cough and weep, sending tiny needles of panic into his mind.

He ran back into the smoking bedroom, found the purse, and with shaking hands tore out the billfold and took the money, shoving the billfold back inside. A last quick look around. The jewelry. Yeah, might as well cop that. Earrings, two bracelets, a necklace, and two pins. He scooped them up, dropped them into his overcoat pockets, and fled. He left Shana’s expensive cigarette lighter, which he’d used to start the fire.

On the corner of Fifty-second and Tenth, just a block from the apartment René shared with Shana, he went into a
bodega
, a Puerto Rican grocery store, and he stayed inside, sipping a small can of papaya juice and waiting. His heart jumped around inside of him, and the papaya, which he usually loved, now tasted too warm and too sweet. Customers came and left. The fat store owner argued with a woman and her small daughter over credit he had extended them, and he now demanded cash for food. Just over a front door of cracked glass covered by rusty thick wire stood a two-foot-high artificial Christmas tree blinking on and off. Only when René heard the fire engines and saw people hurrying past the grocery store toward the fire did he move. He left the store without finishing his papaya, shoving his hands down into his coat pockets, squeezing Shana’s jewelry in both fists.

Outside in the cold and snow, René let everyone rush by him as he walked slowly toward the fire. Thick gray smoke floated from several top-floor windows, and from somewhere in the building a woman screamed and children called out, and on the sidewalk in the crowd gathering quickly behind the fire engines, a weeping René Vega looked up at the building and began to shake violently, biting his lip to keep from crying out. The salt taste of his own blood quickly erased the taste of papaya from his mouth.

Neil lifted Olga up, his arms extended straight over his head. “Go on, touch it, touch it!”

The child squealed, laughed, her tiny arm stretching toward the huge Christmas tree, toward the yellow star at the top, a hundred and fifty feet away. “I can’t reach it, I can’t!”

Neil hugged her, the fur from the hood of her coat soft against his face. “Well, we tried, right?”

“Yes, yes. Again. Lift me again, please?”

Lydia bent down over her child, pulling the fur hood tighter around Olga’s face. “Twice is enough, all right? Now say thank you.”

The child opened its arms wide to hug Neil, who squatted to hug it back. “Thank you, Neil.”

Neil touched her tiny cold nose with a gloved finger. “Thank
you,
pretty one.”

The three of them were in Rockefeller Plaza, in a crowd at the base of the giant blue-spruce Christmas tree that overlooked the skaters and the skating rink below. Lydia had wanted Olga to see the decorated store windows along Fifth Avenue, and with Christmas only four days away, Neil had tagged along to do some shopping. At the skating rink, they had sat indoors at the Promenade Café and sipped hot chocolate while staring through the glass doors and windows at the ice skaters in front of them.

Tomorrow night was another buy, the second from Israel Manzana, a Cuban distributor Neil and Lydia had met through Enrique Ruiz. Neil was now so sought after as a customer that whenever he went into certain clubs, restaurants, or bars, Cubans and blacks would introduce themselves,
offering
to sell him dope. Hundred Dollar Man was accepted now; he had a reputation on the street, and more important, he had money. For a new boy in the city, Neil was doing all right, Lydia thought.

In more than three months of buys, Lydia and Neil had scored several kilos of heroin and cocaine, while compiling a list of twenty-four distributors, subdistributors, and dealers. In all cases, these were hand-to-hand buys, money from Neil in exchange for dope from somebody else, the best evidence a federal prosecutor could hope for. Lydia was making money, too, pleased with the new respect given her, and only occasionally worried about what would become of her after this case went down. Before now, the future could always take care of itself. But now she had a good life, and she respected herself. Was there a way she could keep all of this—the money, the attention, the power, the satisfaction?
Dios mío
, she would like that.

Olga’s nose was running. Taking a tissue from her purse, Lydia wiped it. Time to go home, before Olga caught cold. Besides, it was cold and getting dark.

Olga said, “Mommy? When are you going to give Neil his present?”

Lydia smiled down at her. “You weren’t supposed to say anything, remember?” She looked at Neil. “I’m sorry. It was supposed to be a surprise. No use putting it off. Come on back to the apartment, I can give it to you now. Olga, you are naughty.”