“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.