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 surreaclass="underline" 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.