Dark Rivers of the Heart

Vietnam, was a hero, won more medals than you would believe…and died there. Rachel — oh, you should have seen her, so beautiful, her picture was there on the mantel, but it didn’t do her justice, no photo could do her justice — had been killed in a traffic accident fourteen years ago. It was a terrible thing to outlive your children; it made you wonder if God was paying attention. Theda and Bernie had lived most of their married life in California, where Bernie had been an accountant and she’d been a third-grade teacher. On retirement, they sold their home, reaped a big capital gain, and moved to Vegas not because they were gamblers — well, twenty dollars, wasted on slot machines, once a month — but because real estate was cheap compared with California. Retirees had moved there by the thousands for that very reason. She and Bernie bought a small house for cash and were still able to bank sixty percent of what they’d gotten from the sale of their home in California. Bernie died three years later. He was the sweetest man, gentle and considerate, the greatest good fortune in her life had been to marry him — and after his death, the house was too large for a widow, so Theda sold it and moved to the apartment. For ten years, she’d had a dog — his name was Sparkle and it suited him, he was an adorable cocker spaniel — but, two months ago, Sparkle had gone the way of all things. God, how she’d cried, a foolish old woman, cried rivers, but she’d loved him. Since then she’d occupied herself with cleaning, baking, watching TV, and playing cards with friends twice a week. She hadn’t considered getting another dog after Sparkle, because she wouldn’t outlive another pet, and she didn’t want to die and leave a sad little dog to fend for itself. Then she saw Rocky, and her heart melted, and now she knew she would have to get another dog. If she got one from the pound, a cute pooch destined to be put to sleep anyway, then every good day she could give him was more than he would have had without her. And who knew? Maybe she would outlive another pet and make a home for him until his time came, because two of her friends were in their mid-eighties and still going strong.

To please her, Spencer had a third cup of coffee and a second of the immense chocolate-chip cookies.

Rocky was gracious enough to accept more paper-thin slices of ham and submit to more belly stroking and chin scratching. From time to time he rolled his eyes toward Spencer, as if to say, Why didn’t you tell me about this lady a long time ago?

Spencer had never seen the dog so completely, quickly charmed as he’d been by Theda. When his tail periodically swished back and forth, the motion was so vigorous that the upholstery was in danger of being worn to tatters.

“What I wanted to ask you,” Spencer said when Theda paused for breath, “is if you knew a young woman who lived in the next apartment until late last November. Her name was Hannah Rainey and she—”

At the mention of Hannah — whom Spencer knew as Valerie — Theda launched into an enthusiastic monologue seasoned with superlatives. This girl, this special girl, oh, she’d been the best neighbor, so considerate, such a good heart in that dear girl. Hannah worked at the Mirage, a blackjack dealer on the graveyard shift, and she slept mornings through early afternoons. More often than not, Hannah and Theda had eaten dinner together, sometimes in Theda’s apartment, sometimes in Hannah’s. Last October Theda had been desperately ill with the flu and Hannah had looked after her, nursed her, been like a daughter to her. No, Hannah never talked about her past, never said where she was from, never talked about family, because she was trying to put something terrible behind her — that much was obvious — and she was looking only to the future, always forward, never back. For a while Theda had figured maybe it was an abusive husband, still out there somewhere, stalking her, and she’d had to leave her old life to avoid being killed. These days, you heard so much about such things, the world was a mess, everything turned upside down, getting worse all the time. Then the Drug Enforcement Administration had raided Hannah’s apartment last November, at eleven in the morning, when she should have been sound asleep, but the girl was gone, packed up and moved overnight, without a word to her friend Theda, as if she’d known that she was about to be found. The federal agents were furious, and they questioned Theda at length, as if she might be a criminal mastermind herself, for God’s sake. They said Hannah Rainey was a fugitive from justice, a partner in one of the most successful cocaine-importing rings in the country, and that she had shot and killed two undercover police officers in a sting operation that had gone sour.

“So she’s wanted for murder?” Spencer asked.

Making a fist of one liver-spotted hand, stamping one foot so hard that her orthopedic shoe hammered the floor with a resounding thud in spite of the carpet, Theda Davidowitz said, “Bullshit!”

* * *

Eve Marie Jammer worked in a windowless chamber at the bottom of an office tower, four stories below downtown Las Vegas. Sometimes she thought of herself as being like the hunchback of Notre Dame in his bell tower, or like the phantom in his lonely realm beneath the Paris Opera House, or like Dracula in the solitude of his crypt: a figure of mystery, in possession of terrible secrets. One day, she hoped to be feared more intensely, by more people, than all those who had feared the hunchback, the phantom, and the count combined.

Unlike the monsters in movies, Eve Jammer was not physically disfigured. She was thirty-three, an ex- showgirl, blond, green-eyed, breathtaking. Her face caused men to turn their heads and walk into lampposts. Her perfectly proportioned body existed nowhere else but in the moist, erotic dreams of pubescent boys.

She was aware of her exceptional beauty. She reveled in it, for it was a source of power, and Eve loved nothing as much as power.

In her deep domain, the walls and the concrete floor were gray, and the banks of fluorescent bulbs shed a cold, unflattering light in which she was nonetheless gorgeous. Though the space was heated, and though she occasionally turned the thermostat to ninety degrees, the concrete vault resisted every effort to warm it, and Eve often wore a sweater to ward off the chill. As the sole worker in her office, she shared the room only with a few varieties of spiders, all unwelcome, which no quantity of insecticide could eradicate entirely.

That Friday morning in February, Eve was diligently tending the banks of recording machines on the metal shelves that nearly covered one wall. One hundred twenty-eight private telephone lines served her bunker, and all but two were connected to recorders, although not all the recorders were on active status. Currently, the agency had eighty taps operating in Las Vegas.

The sophisticated recording devices employed laser discs rather than tape, and all the phone taps were voice activated, so the discs would not become filled with long stretches of silence. Because of the enormous capacity for data storage allowed by the laser format, the discs seldom had to be replaced.

Nevertheless, Eve checked the digital readout on each machine, which indicated available recording capacity. And although an alarm would draw attention to any malfunctioning recorder, she tested each unit to be certain that it was working. If even one disc or machine failed, the agency might lose information of incalculable value: Las Vegas was the heart of the country’s underground economy, which meant that it was a nexus of criminal activity and political conspiracy.

Casino gambling was primarily a cash business, and Las Vegas was like a huge, brightly lighted pleasure ship afloat on a sea of coins and paper currency. Even the casinos that were owned by respectable conglomerates were believed to be skimming fifteen to thirty percent of receipts, which never appeared on their books or tax returns. A portion of that secret treasure circulated through the local economy.

Then there were tips. Tens of millions in gratuities were given by winning gamblers to card dealers and roulette croupiers and craps-table crews, and most of that vanished into the deep pockets of the city. To obtain a three-or five-year contract as the maitre d’ at main showrooms in most major hotels, a winning applicant had to pay a quarter million in cash — or more — as “key money” to those who were in a position to grant the job; tips reaped from tourists seeking good seats for the shows quickly made the investment pay off.

The most beautiful call girls, referred by casino management to high rollers, could make half a million a year — tax free.

Houses frequently were bought with hundred-dollar bills packed in grocery bags or Styrofoam coolers. Each such sale was by private contract, with no escrow company involved and no official recording of a new deed, which prevented any taxing authority from discovering either that a seller had made a capital gain or that a buyer had made the purchase with undeclared income. Some of the finest mansions in the city had changed hands three or four times over two decades, but the name on the deed of record remained that of the original owner, to whom all official notices were mailed even after his death.

The IRS and numerous other federal agencies maintained large offices in Vegas. Nothing interested the government more than money — especially money from which it had never taken its bite.

The high-rise above Eve’s windowless realm was occupied by an agency that maintained as formidable a