Big If Read online

  “Are these the elevators?”

  “Where is Fish & Wildlife?”

  “Is jury duty over there?”

  “Miss please green stamps.” A fleshy woman of indefinite ethnicity. Russian? Polish? Byelorussian?

  Vi said, “Green stamps? I don’t think the government does green stamps, ma’am. The nearest supermarket would be Greenwich Street.”

  “Please no foot,” said the woman. “Foot foot foot stamps. I wish to apply myself today.”

  “Do you mean food stamps, lady?”

  “But they say they cannot give me without green card.”

  Rocky broke in. “She can’t help you, Mama.”

  The woman looked at Rocky. “Does she know who can?”

  When Vi was finally free of the women, she would follow her colleagues to the cars.

  “Foot foot foot stamps,” said Rocky on the sidewalk. “Now I’ve heard everything.”

  He offered to show Vi his personal technique for blowing off the questioners, which involved grandly sweeping past, or pausing, as he sometimes did, and giving people looking for the Labor Board precise and accurate directions to the mouth of the Holland Tunnel.

  They had a cycle in the Crim Division, not unlike the rhythms of a farm. Monday was for admin, routine death threat paperwork, and, after work, a subway ride to Chelsea and the Y. Tuesday was for prisoner transport, Vi at the wheel of a sixteen-seat Dodge Ram, two junkie chicks in back. Wednesday was for phony hundred-dollar bills, fake credit cards, cloned phones. Thursday was for everything they didn’t finish Wednesday. Friday was an early exit for Long Island, where most of the office lived.

  Threats arrived by UPS, Monday after lunch. Vi would come up from the street, burping from an ill-advised knish, and find the box sitting in her chair. The threats took every form, cards and letters, e-mails, voice mails, downloads from the Web, graffiti seen by passersby, cell phone interceptions from the satellites, flyers found in Texas gutters, things informants in Bahrain said they overhead, rumor, claptrap, speculation, bullshit, hatred, mental illness—

  I will kill the president.

  I will kill his Mrs.

  Mr. X will take ’em down.

  I heard the two men talking at a HoJo’s, sir, in Harriman, and later I saw them in the parking lot with rifles—

  The threats were pooled in Beltsville, Maryland, where analysts graded them from one to six for coherence, specificity, and overall heft. Ones and twos were generally handled by specialists from Beltsville. The rest, deemed random, wacky, or far-fetched, were routed to the district of origination for any appropriate follow-up.

  Vi learned to judge the dreck threats from the envelopes they came in. The addresses were often sketchy, like a wild guess, WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON, not even The White House, which always lost you points in Beltsville. The letters were sometimes direct—

  Dear Presadent Sir

  You WILL “DIE.” at 6:02 in the Morning on May 4th this year by GUN

  Sincerely,

  Leticia (Gomez) Jones

  Yonkers, NY

  Others were harrowing accounts of persecution at the hands of Jews, Nazis, Jesuits. Every threat, even the sad and hapless sixes, required follow-up, some gesture of investigation, and this was how Vi spent her Monday afternoons, visiting nursing homes, trailer towns, half-closed state asylums, hand-delivering an oddly formal notice to the effect that threatening the safety of a protectee was a five-year felony under Title 18 of the United States Criminal Code.

  She drove up to Harriman, the HoJo’s on the thruway, and interviewed a waitress named Yvette who remembered the two men distinctly, the muddy 4x4 they drove. One ordered flapjacks with pineapple syrup, the other had the steakwich with the flapjacks on the side. They read the paper, yet another presidential scandal, shook their heads and said somebody ought to pop the fucking guy, put him out of our misery, they said, and laughed and ate their flapjacks. Vi interviewed Yvette at the waitress station, noting their wording, drove back to the city, and filed a report on two Caucasian males of stocky build who read the paper over breakfast and carried rifles in deer season. Most threats were like the HoJo’s trip, a ripple not a fish, and half the day wasted. Vi followed threats to the point of peter-out, which was also something like infinity.

  She remembered, too, a balding boy of thirty-four who signed his letters Eric Harold Engelbrecht, as if bucking for the three-name treatment traditionally reserved for killers of the famous. His labored-over letter was a work of many drafts, studded with references to Jefferson and scripture, the tree of liberty, the whore of Babylon. The threat was mailed from Ozone Park, addressed to ex–first lady Nancy Reagan, no city and no zip, C/O The USA, which the Postal Service somehow took to mean the White House. Vi skimmed Eric’s letter, a crowded saga of narco-terrorists and CIA intrigue, signals beamed from Brooklyn to his brain. She flipped ahead. Several malicious misdiagnoses, rumors spread against him, a plague of staph infections. She flipped ahead. An investigation mounted, the conspiracy traced back to the China Lobby, certain unknown colonels, and the Reagans. Eric’s letter had been time-stamped in the White House mailroom, stamped again by the standing detail at 1600, stamped Rec’d Assessment Center Beltsville, deemed nonsensitive, graded five, boxed to UPS, stamped finally by Vi’s receptionist out front.

  Eric Harold Engelbrecht lived with his grandmother on Cross Bay Boulevard. Vi drove out to Queens, returning the letter to the sender, like a postman in reverse.

  The grandmother smoked extra-long cigarettes, the kind they called 100s. She offered Vi a lemonade. Vi took the glass and an old Mets coaster. Ron Darling smiled up at her. They didn’t entertain a lot, she guessed. Vi looked around the living room, plastic on the furniture, a piano with sheet music, rocks in the aquarium, goldfish swimming circles in the murk.

  The grandmother said, “Has Eric been scaring that Paltrow girl again? Her lawyers were so pleasant. I think I kept a copy of the restraining order.”

  Vi said, “We don’t do celebrities, Mrs. Engelbrecht,” and explained about the China Lobby.

  Vi waited in the living room as the grandmother lured Eric down the stairs. He wore a clean white golf shirt buttoned to his throat and a bicycle helmet lined with crinkly tinfoil.

  “Don’t usually let him wear the hat,” the grandmother said. “Not for company anyhow, but he’d be scared of you without it.”

  Eric seemed plenty scared as it was, sitting on the sofa, hands between his knees, knees together, each part of him shaking differently.

  Vi said, “Hello, Eric. I’m with the Secret Service.” She flipped her creds at him, slipped them in her jacket, then delivered the statutory warning, a letter passed across the coffee table.

  Vi asked the grandmother for more lemonade.

  When they were alone, Vi said, “Eric, listen up. Your thoughts are accurate. We know your thoughts, that’s how we know they’re accurate. If you try to shoot Mrs. Reagan, or any actresses, or anyone—if you make a move in that direction, we’ll know it, since we know your thoughts, and we’ll have to activate that capsule in your testicles. You know we have the power—we’re the ones who changed the taste of food.”

  This was another Rocky trick, fuck this legalistic shit, talk to crazy people in the crazy people language. It was something agents did when they were getting burned out on threat work. Walter had been dead for two months by then.

  Mrs. Engelbrecht came back with the lemonade. Vi took it with the coaster and thanked her. Eric shuffled to his room.

  Mrs. Engelbrecht sat on the piano bench. She said that Eric had an IQ of 402, according to one test he had written for himself.

  “Yes,” said Vi. “He seems bright. Do you keep any firearms around the house?”

  After the visit, Eric sent his threats to Vi, saving the analysts a step. First it was: Dear Agent Asplund, Please inform Mrs. Reagan that unless she curtails her invidious smear campaign, I will kill her. Later it was: I will kill you Violet.

  Leticia (Gomez) Jones
was a spookier gig. Vi never figured out her deal, except that she was a mad decrepit nuisance, well known to Yonkers 911. She lived in filth with a pack of Rotts and passed herself off as a Santeria priestess. Her letters said that she could make herself invisible and harm enemies with thoughts.

  Vi went up to Yonkers, carrying a freshly printed statutory warning, banging on the screens, shouting, “Ms. Jones, Ms. Gomez Jones, I know you’re in there. I’m a federal agent. We need to talk.”

  Vi looked through the screen into a room of magic clutter: saints’ candles burning, jars of pickled roots, shrines to this and that, lithographs of the Virgin in various dolorous poses, even an eyesight chart hanging from a nail—God knows what the woman used that for. On the floor of the front room was a circle of powder, white and fine like talcum, which Vi knew from the DEA guys was a heavy-duty Santeria curse.

  Vi kept banging on the screens, feeling sillier and sillier. Neighbors stopped to watch. The Rotts were barking out of sight, clawing at the walls. Then the Rotts went quiet. Fine, thought Vi, be that way. She mailed the statutory warning from her office, cc to the file, and never laid eyes on Leticia (Gomez) Jones.

  Tuesday with the prisoners came as a relief. Vi worked the airports, escorting new arrests, running a shuttle from La Guardia to JFK, where the Service shared temporary holding pens with DEA and Customs. Vi spent her Tuesdays in the pens waiting for the magistrate, watching drug suspects file through booking—prints and mugs and repartee and government box lunches. When Dawn Imperiali, her roommate in Hoboken, was doing airports and Vi was doing vans, they would hang out in the pens. They watched soaps and Oprah to keep their spirits up. Vi thought the jail at JFK was the worst place in the world.

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” said Dawn. “It’s just a lot of waiting. See, they smuggle heroin in their little tummies, don’tcha, ladies?”

  The women, chained to each other and the wall, nodded automatically.

  Dawn, being Customs, processed swallowers from many nations. “It’s a ticket to America,” she said. “But first they have to board the plane, survive the flight, and get to a safe house in New Jersey before voiding. If a condom breaks squeezing through the small intestines, these fucking gooms go into shock, vomit up the rest, and die. Come on, ladies, work with me. You ain’t even trying. I have a date tonight.”

  Dawn was not allowed to give them laxatives. Fruit juice was as far as the government would go. When the contraband was finally voided, Dawn made the women pick through the stool so that she could make her seizure, type her vouchers, and punch out.

  She said, “The record is two hundred and forty-seven condoms, but that was a dog.”

  Vi said, “What’s the human record?”

  “Most I ever got was twelve.”

  The magistrate was always running late. Dawn sat at a metal desk, doing her nails and waiting for nature. The women shifted on their hams.

  Dawn glanced over hopefully. “Any progress, ladies?”

  A voucher was a stat. Contraband in feces was a seizure and a stat. Wednesday was for counterfeiting and that meant a stat. They lived for stats in Criminal, cases opened, cases closed, forfeitures, arrests. This was how they judged you. You got selected for Protection or you stayed, you got to be a Rocky or you failed, based entirely on stats. Rocky would get to be an ASAC, boss of all the Rockys, if he had the squadwide stats, and the ASAC, Rocky’s boss, would get to be a SAC only if he busted Rocky’s balls, so everyone was driven to make arrests in volume. Good arrests were stats. Crap arrests were stats. They did not arrest the factually innocent (although it was a stat), because this was America, after all, not some fucked-up regime like the places all these people flee in leaky boats, and besides you could get caught and be someone else’s stat, the bums from IAB, some public integrity attorney with diplomas on his wall, which was the point of stats, of designing the division around stats—that is, accountability.

  Through all of this, all fall, Vi kept Walter’s dollar tacked to the carpeted wall of her cubicle on a floor of cubicles. She tried to kill her grief with work, staying late, sometimes missing the last ferry to New Jersey. Once or twice, she even slept on the floor, her coat over her head because the lights never went out. She stared at the bill for long stretches on those nights, trying to decode his meaning: US. She knew he hadn’t meant that we trust in the U.S., the United States, a unit of community meaninglessly large. No, he’d meant that we should trust in a small town, in the people of a town, or maybe just the people that you know.

  Vi tried to numb herself, to lose herself in stats, the static of statistics, the dreck threats and the jail runs and the counter-counterfeiting. There were seven counter-counterfeiting squads in New York station. They broke out like the countries on a map. One team did the Asians, another did the Haitians, another did Dominicans. Vi’s team, Rocky’s team, did the Russian mob, the boys from Brighton Beach, avid counterfeiters from way back.

  The Russians were proud of their fake paper. To Vi, it was the dumbest-looking shit imaginable. The green was neon, the gray black, as if the Russians couldn’t countenance the Protestant chromatics of the Federal Reserve, and felt the need to amp the iconage. The twenties coming through the airports made Andrew Jackson look like a transvestite vampire or one of the grimmer female martyrs. She was always amazed when any of it passed.

  Three months after Walter’s death, Vi was in the pens at JFK, fingerprinting crackheads as she watched One Life to Live with Dawn Imperiali. Rocky paged her in the pens, sent her out to Nassau to claim a female juvenile caught spending phony twenties, a Russian with no green card, thus a female juvenile illegal, but sadly just one stat for all her categories.

  The Russians used girls to pass their paper, thinking that no one would suspect a girl of counterfeiting. They also thought that girls would be less likely to skim, and this was probably true. Back in Russia, these girls had never seen more than ten U.S. in any one palm, but in Brooklyn they’d be handed a thousand dollars in crisp, pretty, worthless twenties. The girls were recruited by strapping young gigolos from Moscow, who drove them out to Long Island because the outerborough vendors knew the deal and wouldn’t take the paper. The gigolos would wait in cars outside the Bradlees in Ronkonkoma, the Toys “R” Us in Babylon. The girls would be inside, pushing their shopping carts in air-conditioned comfort, selecting random items, kandy korn, cordless phones, menthol cigarettes, stuffed animals, hairstraightener, Michael Jordan basketballs, a senseless cornucopia. It didn’t matter what they bought. The purpose of the trip was to pick out anything, pay the cashier fake money, and get real money back as change. It was a parody of shopping and a bit surreal: the change was the only thing of value.

  Vi took the van from JFK. She met the prisoner, a girl from the Urals who called herself Mariah for the singer she adored. Mariah had spent an hour in a Garden City Wal-Mart, guiding her empty cart from aisle to aisle, because she was afraid to take a box from the shelves, they were so orderly, she said. Outside, her driver, her handler—who Vi suspected was also her lover—got the willies, thinking that Mariah must have been picked up, and he drove away. Mariah didn’t know that she’d been stranded. She kept pushing the cart up and down the aisles, screwing up the courage to actually shop. She finally picked two items: a parakeet in a yellow plastic travel cage and a six-socket surge protector. She put them in her cart, wheeled them through the ten-items-or-less, and handed over her lurid money.

  The store detectives had some laughs with the alias. Okay, Mariah. Right this way, Mariah. Have a seat while I call the wind, Mariah. They called the Nassau cops instead, Nassau called the Service, and Vi took Mariah to the pens at JFK.

  Vi and Mariah in a roomy van. The parakeet hopped around the travel cage. The wind blew from two windows on the LIE. Mariah was a stat already, but she didn’t know it yet. She was feeding Cheez-Its to the bird.

  Vi asked her why she had picked the surge protector.

  Mariah didn’t know what a surge protector was.

&nbs
p; Vi told her to open the box. Mariah opened the box and looked at the sockets and the cord. She plugged the cord into a socket. Nothing happened. She pointed at the picture on the box—a family of toothsome Americans, father, son, and moppet daughter, grinning around a personal computer—as if she had expected all of them to be inside.

  Vi said, “Why the bird?”

  Mariah said, “He sings.”

  Vi wanted to smack Mariah, make a fist, aim for her mouth. The feeling came from nowhere, suddenly.

  Vi said, “What the fuck made you leave Russia anyway? I’m talking to you. What made you think you could survive a month in this country? Do you have any idea how much it will cost the taxpayers to deport your ass, Mariah? Why are you my problem? Why are you my afternoon? Tell me why, Mariah.”

  Mariah blinked at Vi, absolutely shocked. The blond American had been so kind till then.

  Vi said, “Oh for God’s sake. Here, take this bagel. Take it. It’s garlic, it’s good. You won’t be seeing your next meal until breakfast tomorrow.”

  Vi explained to Mariah that she was going to the tank at JFK for pre-arraignment, from arraignment to the Marshal’s and the Immigration maw.

  Parakeets were not allowed in the pens and Wal-Mart didn’t want it back. The bird was another refugee. After processing Mariah, Vi threw the bird and travel cage out the window on the inbound BQE.

  Vi was sick of Criminal by then and disgusted with herself. She asked the Service for a transfer and they sent her to Protection, the vice-presidential team, and this was how Vi started working crowds.

  the nervous system (sunday)

  The problem with her energy was sleeping, said her doctor, Dr. Lee, and the problem with her sleeping was her weight. Dr. Lee was on the list of preapproved primary care/gatekeeper physicians for the Treasury health plan, which was why Gretchen Williams had called the doctor to begin with, Gretchen being forty-five, almost forty-six, and three years without a checkup. Gretchen was three years without a check-up because her former gatekeeper, a white guy by the name of Weiss, had retired to Palm Beach, leaving Gretchen gatekeeperless, adrift, and too busy at the time to notice.