Back to Blood

7





The Mattress


::::::Do I exist?… If so, where?… Oh, man, I don’t live… anywhere… I don’t belong anywhere… I’m not even one of “my people” anymore, am I.::::::

Nestor Camacho—remember him?—was evaporating, disintegrating, coming apart—meat from bone, turning into Jell-O with a beating heart, sinking back into the primordial ooze.

Never before could he have possibly imagined himself attached to… nothing. Who could? Not until this moment, just after midnight, as he emerged from the locker room of the Marine Patrol marina and started walking to the parking lot—

Officer Camacho!

… and now he was hearing things. Nobody but cops coming off the shift were out here at the midnight hour, and no cop was going to call him “Officer,” unless it was a joke. Himself alone, on a too warm, too sticky, too soupy, too sweaty, too dimly lit dusky September night in Miami… had he ever had the faintest notion of what desolation was? He hadn’t tried to kid himself about what was happening to him over the past twenty-four hours.

Exactly twenty-four hours ago he had left this place, the marina, soaring on the applause of his fellow cops, astounded by the realization that the entire city—the entire city!—had been watching him—him! Nestor Camacho!—on TV as he saved a poor panicked wretch on top of a seventy-foot mast teetering over the edge of the Halusian Gulp. Barely fifteen minutes later he walks into his own house—and finds his father standing right at the door, anger up, paunch out, to dismiss him from the family… and from the Cuban people, while he’s at it. Nestor is so upset, he barely sleeps at all and gets up in the morning and learns that the Spanish-language media—which essentially means the Cuban media—has been saying the same thing for the past twelve hours: Nestor Camacho has betrayed his own family and the Cuban people. His father not only considers him a non-person, he acts as if he no longer has a corporeal presence. He acts like he literally can’t see him. Who? Him? Nestor? He’s not here anymore. His neighbors, people he has known practically all his life, turn their backs on him, actually turn around 180 degrees and show him their backsides. His one last hope, his salvation, his one remaining attachment to the life he has lived for the past twenty-five years, namely, all his life, is his girlfriend. He has been seeing her, dating her, which is to say, these days, going to bed with her, and loving her with all his heart. So she shows up just a little over eight hours ago, just before he has to leave for the shift… to inform him that she is seeing, dating, and no doubt sharing the sheets with somebody else now, and hasta la vista, my dear Damaged Goods.

To top it all off, the shift starts, and his fellow cops, who were flocking about him like a bunch of cheerleaders twenty-four hours ago, have turned—well, not cold, but distant. None badmouths him. None acts like or insinuates that he has betrayed anybody. None acts as if he wants to take it back, the praise they gave him last night. They’re embarrassed, that’s all. After twenty-four hours they have this piece of meat beaten black-and-blue by Spanish-language radio, Spanish TV, the Spanish newspaper—El Nuevo Herald—and even kindly souls discreetly avert their eyes.

The only one who showed the faintest desire to talk to him about the whole mess was Lonnie Kite, his americano Safe Boat mate. He took him aside just before they boarded the Safe Boat to begin the shift and said, “You have to look at it this way, Nestor”—Nest-ter. “If that little f*cker had been up on top of a mast almost anywhere else, all anybody would be saying is ‘This kid Camacho is Tarzan with a pair of stones you could take down a building with.’ Your bad luck is that it had to happen in front of a bunch a gawkers on the Rickenbacker Causeway on a Friday afternoon at rush hour. They all get out of their cars and line the bridge, and they got the best seats in the house for a game a Cuban Refugee—he the brave little guy—fighting Dumb Cop. They don’t know shit. Without all these clueless a*sholes, there wouldn’ a been nobody with their undies in an uproar.”

The americano meant to be bucking up his spirits, but he depressed Nestor even more. Even the americanos knew! Even the americanos knew that Nestor Camacho just got whipped.

He was hoping something would happen on this shift, something so big, like a big boat collision—collisions, mostly involving small boats, happened all the time—that it would absorb his attention entirely. But no, it was the usual… boats adrift and they can’t get the engine to turn over… somebody thought they saw swimmers out in a boat lane… some idiot in a cigarette boat is barreling across the water, making extreme turns to rock other boats with his wake… a bunch a drunks are out on the bay, throwing bottles and unidentified trash into the water… that was the night’s catch, and none of it was serious enough to distract Nestor from his deep worries… and by the time they returned to the marina, he had begun totaling up totaling up totaling up his miseries…

… and the scene before him captured his tally—desolation—perfectly. He was approaching the marina parking lot. Here in the midnight hour at least a third of it was empty. The parking lot’s lighting didn’t truly illuminate much of anything. It created the feeblest mechanical dusk imaginable. The palm trees around this perimeter were barely discernible. At best you could see some flat black shapes. As for the cars in the lot, they were not so much shapes as feeble dusky glints of light… off a windshield here, a strip of chrome there… a wing mirror over there… a dub over there… feeble feeble reflections of feeble feeble light… In Nestor’s current state of mind it was worse than no light at all… this was light in its junk form…

He was heading for his Camaro… why?… where was he going to spend the night?

He could make out the Camaro only because he knew exactly where he had parked it. He headed toward it out of sheer habit. And then what? He had to drive somewhere and stretch out and log a good solid ten hours of sleep. He couldn’t recall ever feeling this tired and empty in his life… burnt out, dried out, drained… and where was that healing sleep going to take place? All evening, every time there was a lull he’d call up friends, asking for a place to crash, anything, even guys he hadn’t seen since Hialeah High, and the answers were all like Jesús Gonzalo’s, Jesús, his best buddy on the wrestling team, and he says, “Uhhhh well, I ahhhh guess so, but I mean, how long you wanna stay just tonight, right?—because I told my cousin Ramón—he’s from New Jersey—and he said he might be coming to town tomorrow, and I told him—”

His friends! True, for the past three years his friends had been mostly other cops, because only other cops could understand what was on your mind, the things you had to do, the things you worried about. Besides, you had an elite status. You had to face dangers your old friends couldn’t imagine. They couldn’t imagine what it took to beam the Cop Look and order people around on the street… Anyway, the news of what he had done had obviously seeped like a gas throughout the Cuban community. Okay. He’d ask one of the younger cops on the shift. He had his chance just now in the locker room over the past half hour… had plenty of chances all night… but he couldn’t do it! They’ve inhaled the gas, too!… His own family had thrown him out of his own house… the humiliation! Go to a motel? To a Hialeah boy that was not even a thinkable solution. Pay that kind of money just to lay your head down overnight in the dark? Ask Cristy? She was on his side. But could he stop with just a place to sleep? Okay, let’s see… there was always the Camaro. He could always conk out in his own car. He tried to picture it… How the hell would you ever get horizontal in a Camaro? You’d have to be a child or a contortionist… a second straight sleepless night… that’s all he’d get out of that.

I now live… nowhere… I don’t belong anywhere. Once more the question popped into his head: Do I exist? The first couple of times it popped into his head, it was with a tinge of self-pity. The next couple of times, it was with a tinge of morbid humor. And now… with a tinge of panic. I’m doing the usual, heading for my car at the end of a shift… and I’ve got no place to drive it to! He stopped in his tracks. Tell me truthfully now… Do I exist?

“Officer Camacho! Hey! Over here! Officer Camacho!”

Over here was somewhere in the parking lot. Nestor peered into the feeble electro-dusk of the place. A tall white man was running toward him along a row of parked cars.

“John! hunh hunh hunh hunh Smith! hunh hunh from the Herald!” he shouted. Not in very good shape, whoever the hell you are hunh hunh hunh hunh… panting like that after jogging maybe 150 feet. Nestor didn’t recognize the name but “from the Herald” sounded okay. Alone in all the media the Herald had been at least halfway on his side.

“I’m sorry!” said the man as he drew closer. I hunhunhunhunh couldn’t figure out any other way to reach you!”

Once they were face-to-face, Nestor recognized him. He was the reporter who had been waiting with a photographer when he and the Sergeant and Lonnie Kite returned to the marina in the Safe Boat. He couldn’t have looked more americano if he made a conscious effort… tall… floppy blond hair, absolutely straight… a pointed nose… “I’m sorry for intruding hunh hunh hunh hunh. Did you read my story this morning?” said John Smith. “Was I fair?” He smiled. He gulped. He opened his eyes like a pair of morning glories.

As far as Nestor was concerned, this John Smith’s turning up in this parking lot at midnight might as well have been the sort of apparition that people who don’t sleep and don’t exist are prey to… He still had enough sanity left, however, to take this americano at face value. He wanted to ask the americano what he was doing here, but he couldn’t come up with any diplomatic way to put it. So he merely nodded… as if to say, tentatively, “Yes, I read your story and yes, you were fair.”

“I know you’re probably hunhunhunhunh about to go home,” said John Smith, “but could you spare just a couple of minutes? There’s some things hunhunhunhunh I need to ask you.”

An eerie form of elation brought Nestor’s numb central nervous system back to life. He was reconnecting with… something, in any case. Someone, even if only some americano newspaper reporter he didn’t even know, was offering him, if nothing else, an alternative to driving around all night talking to himself. The vagabond in the Camaro! Homeless in the headlines! But all he said was “About what?”

“Well, I’m writing a follow-up story, and I’d hate to have to write it without getting your response.”

Nestor just stared at him. ::::::Response? Response to what?:::::: The word set off a nameless sense of dread.

“Why don’t we go have a cup of coffee or something and sit down?”

Nestor stared at him some more. Talking to this baby-faced reporter could only get him in trouble unless some lieutenant or captain or deputy chief okayed it. On the other hand, he had talked to this guy twenty-four hours ago, and that was okay… and as long as he talked to the press, he existed. Was it not so? As long as he talked to the press, he was… somewhere. Wouldn’t you say? As long as he appeared in the press he belonged in this world… You had to use your imagination… He knew there was not a lieutenant, a captain, or a deputy chief in this world who would understand that, much less swallow it. But maybe they would understand this: “Greatgodalmighty, Lieutenant, put yourself in my shoes. I’m all alone. You can’t even imagine how alone.” It all boiled down to one thing. He needed someone to talk to, not in the sense of talking to a priest or anything like that. Just someone to talk to… just so he could feel like he existed again, after twenty-four hours’ terrible toll.

He gave reporter John Smith a very long, blank stare. He once more nodded yes without a trace of satisfaction, never mind enthusiasm…

“How about that place over there?” said the reporter. He was pointing toward Inga La Gringa’s bar.

“It’s too loud in there,” said Nestor. That much was true. What he didn’t say was that the noise would be coming from other Marine Patrol cops coming off the shift. “There’s a place called the Isle of Capri, over on Brickell, near the causeway. They’re open late and you can hear yourself talk, at least. It’s a little on the expensive side, though.” What he didn’t say was that no cop coming off the shift anywhere in Miami would be going to a place that expensive.

“Not a problem,” said John Smith. “It’s on the paper.”

Off they drove to the Isle of Capri, each in his own car. As soon as Nestor turned on the ignition in the Camaro, the air-conditioning blasted him in the face. As soon as he slipped the floor shift into drive and started off, the muffler blew. In concert the air-conditioning and the muffler rupture made him feel trapped inside one of those leaf blowers that are so loud, the seven-dollar-an-hour operators have to wear baffles over their ears… Trapped inside a leaf blower he was… questions were blowing around in his head. ::::::Why am I doing this? What’s in it for me, besides trouble? What’s he want me to respond to? Why would this be “on the paper,” as he put it? Why should I trust this americano? Just why? I shouldn’t, obviously… but I’m bereft of all that matters in this life! I don’t even have an ancestry… My goddamned grandfather, the great sluice gate operator for the Malecón waterworks, cut the family tree out from under me… and I don’t even know where I’m going to sleep. Christ, I’d rather have a conversation with a snake than have nobody to talk to.::::::

Nestor and the reporter sat at the bar and ordered coffee. Very deluxe looking, the bar at the Isle of Capri… Lights from below beamed up through an array of liquor bottles against a vast mirrored wall. The beams lit up the liquor bottles… absolutely glamorous, and the mirrored wall doubled the show. The show dazzled Nestor, even though he knew all these bottles existed for the benefit of middle-aged americanos who liked to talk about how “hammered” they got last night, how “wasted,” “smashed,” “destroyed,” “retarded,” and even how they “blacked out” and didn’t know where the hell they were when they woke up. The americano idea of being a Man sure wasn’t a Latino’s. Nevertheless, the way the bottles here in the Isle of Capri put on their light show made him feel delirious with the luxury of it all. He was also as tired as he had ever been in his life.

The coffee arrived, and John Smith of the Herald got down to business. “As I said, I’m doing a follow-up story to the man on the mast—how you saved the guy—but my sources tell me that far from looking at you as a hero, a lot of Cubans think of you as something close to a traitor”… whereupon he cocked his head and stared at Nestor with an expression that clearly asked what do you say to that.

Nestor didn’t know what to say… the coffee with the sugar he heaped in it the Cuban way was ambrosial; it made him hungry. He hadn’t had enough to eat during the shift. The fact that his existence, if that was what it was, embarrassed other Marine Patrolmen took his appetite away. John Smith was waiting for an answer. Nestor was confused as to whether he should go into all this or not.

“I guess you should ask them,” he said.

“Ask who?”

“Ask… I mean… Cubans, I guess.”

“I’ve been doing that,” said John Smith, “but they’re not comfortable with me. To most of them I’m an outsider. They don’t want to say much… when I start asking them about ethnic attitudes and nationalities and anything in that area. They’re not comfortable with the Herald, period, as far as that goes.”

Nestor smiled, but not with pleasure. “That’s for sure.”

“Why does that make you smile?”

“Because where I come from, Hialeah, people say, ‘The Miami Herald’ and in the next breath, ‘Yo no creo.’ You’d think the full name of the paper was Yo No Creo el Miami Herald. You know ‘yo no creo’?”

“Sure. ‘I don’t believe.’ Yo comprendo. And they’re doing the same thing with you, Nestor.”

The reporter hadn’t called him by his first name before. It bothered Nestor. He didn’t know how to take it. He didn’t know whether the man was being congenial or using the first name the way you would somebody beneath you… like a fumigador. Many customers called his father Camilo right off the bat. “They’re twisting everything around with you, too,” the reporter was saying. “They’re taking what you did, which I—I think I made it pretty clear in what I wrote—which I consider an act of great courage and strength, and they’re twisting it into a cowardly act!”

“Cowardly?” said Nestor. That startled him and hit a nerve. “They can say a lot of things, traidor and all that, but I haven’t heard anybody say ‘cowardly.’ I’d like to know how the hell anybody could say ‘cowardly’… Jesus Christ… I’d like to see anybody else come close to what I did… ‘Cowardly.’ ” He shook his head. “You heard somebody actually use that word, cowardly?”

“Yes. ‘Cobarde,’ they said… every time.”

“They?” said Nestor. “How do you know that? You said they wouldn’t talk to you.”

“Some of them talk to me,” said John Smith. “But that wasn’t where I heard it. I heard it on the radio, and not just once, either.”

“What radio? Who said it?”

“The Spanish-language stations,” said John Smith. “ ‘Cobarde.’ In fact, I think it was two or three stations.”

“A*sholes,” muttered Nestor. He could feel his adrenaline kicking. “What’s supposed to be cobarde about it? How do they figure they can call it that?”

“They don’t bother with much figuring. Here’s their reasoning, if that’s what it is. What they say is, it’s easy to be a pez gordo and go around acting like a valiente when you have all the other peces gordos behind you, the whole police force, the Coast Guard, the Miami Herald.” He chuckled. “I guess they throw in Yo No Creo el Miami Herald for good measure. You haven’t been listening to the Latino radio?”

“I haven’t had time,” said Nestor. “If you knew what my last twenty-four hours were like…” He paused. He could feel he was entering some dicey territory now. “… you’d know what I mean.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened,” said John Smith. Now he was staring straight into Nestor’s eyes with an intensity that just wasn’t John Smith. Nestor got the feeling that this must be the Reporter Look, the same way cops hit people with the Cop Look. Not that the two were equivalent. He stared off at the liquor bottle light show. Every cop Nestor had ever talked to on that subject considered the press a bunch of pussies. Nestor was willing to bet that the one right beside him at this bar was a p-ssy, too. There was something about the soft way he talked and all his good manners… He was the kind—if you made the slightest threat physically, he could fold and run away. But the older cops also said that they were like little spiders, like black widows. They could bite and cause you major grief.

That being the case, he now focused on John Smith and said, “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

“Why?”

“Well, I’d probably need approval before I talked about that.”

“Whose approval?”

“I don’t know exactly, because I’ve never been through the procedure. But I’d need a zone captain at least.”

“I don’t get that,” said John Smith. “You talked to me after you brought the so-called leader of the underground down from the mast. Whose approval did you have to get before you did that?”

“Nobody’s, but that was diff—”

A suddenly aggressive John Smith ran right over Nestor’s words with “And who wrote you the most favorable story that came out of the whole thing?… and the most accurate. Did I treat you badly in any way?”

The man bored in with his Reporter Look.

“No,” said Nestor, “but—”

The reporter trampled again. “So what makes you think I’d try to make you look bad now? The people who are causing you trouble are El Nuevo Herald—I hope you saw what they said”—Nestor averted his eyes and rocked his head forward and back slowly, indicating a very faint yes—“and the Latino radio and Latino TV tried to bury you!” the reporter continued. “And they’re not going to stop with yesterday. They’ll keep it up today, too. Don’t you want anybody on your side? You want to be nothing but a piñata the whole bunch can keep on having fun whacking at? Oh, I can go ahead and write a nice piece analyzing what you did and why it was absolutely necessary and humane. But that would just be an editorial, and not even by an editor. I need some details that only you can provide.”

The hell of it was that reporter John Smith was right. The word cobarde kept throbbing in Nestor’s brain. His sense of honor decreed that such a slur not go unanswered. Revenge is mine, sayeth the Lord—and in the meantime, what happens to your job, big avenger? If he dumps everything out for the reporter’s benefit… even if he doesn’t criticize the Department in any way… a big newspaper article dwelling upon Himself in a police action this highly publicized—he doesn’t need any written-down protocols to know what the Department will think of that. ::::::Still, everybody—everybody—needs to get one thing straight. No way is Nestor Camacho a cobarde… you a*sholes… but that’s not for me to say, is it. That’s for the Department to say… and fat chance of them doing it. Oh, they’ll defend their decision to bring the guy down off the mast, but they’re not going to go into raptures over the cop who went up and did it—::::::

Nestor didn’t realize how he must have looked to John Smith. He was staring not at John, but into the mirror behind all the lit-up liquor bottles. He didn’t bother looking at himself, even though there he was in the mirror. He was running his right hand over the knuckles of his left hand and then his left hand over the knuckles of his right hand and his right hand over the knuckles of his left hand and his left hand—

Only at this instant did he realize what a picture of indecision he presented. John Smith said, “Okay, Nestor, I’ll tell you what. If you’ll give me the details, I promise I won’t quote you or even indicate I’ve talked to you.”

“Yeah, but there’d be things only I would know about, and then everyone would know it was me.”

“Look,” said John Smith, “I’ve run into that problem before, and I know how to handle it. I’ll indicate any number of other sources. How do you think the big police stories get in the papers? I’m not talking about straight-out news that a crime has occurred. I’m talking about the inside story on how a big crime was solved, who ratted out who, things like that. It’s all cops giving reporters information that makes the reporter look good and reporters writing stories that make the cops look good. Both sides know how to protect the other. It happens all the time, and I mean all the time. If you don’t have some way to get your story out, other people, like City Hall, for example, will tell your story for you… and believe me, you’re not gonna like that. To them you’re just this… this… mosquito who bites his fellow Cubans. Look, I can get your story out—and make it clear that you wouldn’t cooperate. I’ll say that you failed to return phone calls, which will be true. In fact, it’s already true. About nine-thirty I called the Marine Patrol office and asked to speak to you, but they wouldn’t put a personal call through to the Safe Boat.”

With alarm in his voice, Nestor said, “You mean they already know you wanted to talk to me?”

“Of course!” said John Smith. “Listen, I’m going to get a beer. Would you like one?”

A beer? How could the man suddenly start thinking about a beer? It astounded Nestor. He resented it. On the other hand… maybe a beer wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe it would calm him down a little, dilute the adrenaline flow. If he had some other kind of drug, he’d no doubt take it right now… and a bottle of beer was pretty mild stuff. “Uhh… yeah,” he said. “I’ll have one.”

John Smith raised his hand to get the bartender’s attention. As he ordered the two beers, Nestor’s resentment began to build back up. ::::::It’s not his ass that’s on the line, hanging out over the edge.:::::: John Smith turned back to Nestor, acting as if there had been no break in the conversation at all. “Of course!” he said. “If I’m planning to write a story about you—and they’ll see that story soon enough—of course I’d try to reach you directly. It would look weird if I didn’t. That’s just standard operating procedure.”

The beers arrived. Nestor didn’t wait for John Smith. He just tilted his up and drank… a nice long gulp of it, too… and a wave of warmth rose from his stomach and romped through his brain and flowed throughout his entire central nervous system… and it did seem to calm him down.

He started with the end of the shift twenty-four hours ago… and all the other cops going nuts over him and telling him, in a jocular cop way, of course, how he had electrified the entire city… and he had driven home… as if on wings… and he had a big surprise waiting just inside the front door.

“And there’s my father. He’s been waiting for me, and he’s standing there with his legs spread like a wrestler’s and his arms crossed like this—”

—all at once he cut himself off and locked on to John the Reporter’s gaze with his… and stayed that way for what he hoped would be a suspenseful few seconds… When he resumed speaking, it was in a different tone of voice, one that suited that look precisely.

“Do you remember what you just promised me about how you would use what I’m gonna tell you?”

“Yes…”

“About how you’ll cover me with the sources?” He intensified the look.

“Yes…”

“I’m just making sure we understand each other.” He skipped a couple of beats… “I’d be really pissed… if we didn’t.”

With that, he turned that certain look on to the max. Only then did he actually realize it was the Cop Look. Without a word it conveyed a message. On this terrain I rule. I have ultimate power, and I’m quite ready to blow you away if I have to. Oh, so you want to know what it would take to make me “have to”? Well, let’s start with breach of verbal contract.

The pale americano blanched dead white—or so it looked to Officer Camacho. Journalist John Smith’s lips parted slightly… but he said nothing. He just nodded yes, dipping his forehead forward ever so diffidently.

The next thing Nestor knew… he was sitting there in the glamorous glow of the Isle of Capri bar’s lucent liquor bottles, spilling, as they say, his guts. It all came out. He couldn’t tell this americano—he had seen exactly twice in his life—enough. He had an overwhelming urge… not to confess, for he hadn’t sinned… just one more beer but to tell somebody, some at least halfway neutral party, of his anguish and humiliation, his rejection by all those closest to him—at once!—in less than twenty-four hours!—and by untold thousands of his own people, just one more beer his fellow cubanos, who were only too happy to believe what they heard on that most powerful of organs, Spanish-language radio, and even by that old-fashioned medium no one under forty ever looked at anymore, namely, the newspapers… his father standing there in his doorway, which was Nestor’s, too, with his wide-legged stance, like a wrestler’s, and his arms folded across his chest—like an infuriated wrestler’s… just one more beer and neighbors he had known all his life who turned their backs the moment they saw him coming… and, to top it off, his fellow cops, who had hailed him as a hero twenty-four hours ago just one more beer… and had now turned chilly with embarrassment over this tainted man in their midst… just one more beer—in cervisia veritas… all of it, all of it, right down to his cell phone ringing in his pocket while he’s this close to falling to his death from seventy feet above a boat deck, trying to go hand over hand down a hundred-foot cable carrying a man with his legs… and then the goddamned phone starts beep-beep-beeping with text messages, and people—his own people—cubanos—are screaming bloody murder at him from the Rickenbacker Causeway bridge… all of it, even the cold expression on Magdalena’s face when he began shouting ¡CONCHA! at her—

For three and a half hours Nestor poured out every last drop of his sorrows and his soul… and would have never stopped, had not the Isle of Capri closed up at 4:00 a.m. The two young men were now out in the street. Nestor felt unsteady. His balance was… off. His gait lacked fluidity. Well, no wonder… the stress of the last two days… the lack of sleep… lack of food, too, come to think of it. He never did come to think he might just be close to wasted after downing nine beers in a row, plus a tequila shot, more alcohol than he had ever had in one evening in his life.

But the americano periodista must have come to think of it, because he looked at Nestor and said, “You’re planning to drive home now?”

Nestor barked a bitter little laugh. “Home? I don’t have one a those anymore, home.”

“Then where are you planning to spend the night?”

“I don’t know,” said Nestor, except that it came out I’ownoh. “I’ll sleep inna car if I’ve to… No! I know… I’ll drive overt Rodriguez’s and sleep on a mat inna gym.”

“What if it’s locked?”

Another bitter little laugh. “Locked? Nothing’s locked if you know what a cop knows.” Even Nestor picked up a whiff of his own cop braggadocio.

“Nestor”—that impudent first-name business again—“I think you’re too exhausted to drive anywhere. I’ve got a pullout in my apartment, and I’m only five minutes away at this hour. How about it?”

Is he kidding? Sleep at some americano periodista’s place? But that word the periodista used… exhausted. Just hearing it out loud made him feel even more exhausted… exhausted, not wasted… not wasted, worn out… never felt this worn out. Aloud he said, “Maybe you’re right.”

Afterward he could barely even remember John Smith’s driving him over to his apartment… or passing out on the pullout couch in a cramped little living room… or all the vomiting…

When Nestor woke up, returned to the land of the conscious, it wasn’t really as late as he had hoped it would be. Only the dimmest daylight showed through the weave of a length of hopsacking that served as a makeshift curtain over the room’s only window. He felt as bad as he had ever felt in his life. If he were to lift his head off this sofa, he would pass out again. That much he knew without even testing it. A pool of pain and nausea had flooded one whole hemisphere of his brain as he lay on that side of his head. He didn’t dare tilt that pool so much as one degree or—he could already smell it—smell it—the vomitus would gush out projectile-style. He had a bleary recollection of throwing up all over the carpet just before he passed out.

He gave up and closed his eyes again. Had to close them, and presently he fell asleep again. It wasn’t a good sleep. He kept waking up, fitfully. The main thing was not to open his eyes. That at least gave him a fighting chance of falling asleep again… however troubled sleep might be.

When he finally woke up for good, the hopsacking curtain was all bright points of light. It must have been close to noon. He dared lift his head a few inches. This time it was awful but not impossible. He managed to swing his legs over the side of the couch and sit up… and lowered his head between his legs to bring more blood to his brain. When he brought his head back up, he put his elbows on his knees and covered his eyes with the palms of his hands. He didn’t want to have to see any more of this tiny, fetid straw-colored room. He didn’t want to do anything, but he could tell he would have to make it to the bathroom one way or another.

He sighed out loud, for no other reason than to hear himself declare how miserable and paralyzed he felt. He sighed some more. The next thing he knew, he could hear the floor creaking with footsteps. What a dump this was… On the other hand, he didn’t even have so much as a dump to go to.

“Good morning. Buenos días. How do you feel?”

There was John Smith… standing in the doorway to the bathroom. Nestor lifted his head just enough to see him head to foot. The americano stood there dressed so americano, it was annoying… the khaki pants so well pressed you could cut your finger on the crease… the blue button-down shirt, open two buttons’ worth at the neck and turned back exactly two cuff lengths’ worth on each sleeve… all just so, just so. Had Nestor known and understood the word preppy, he would have realized why it got under his skin.

But all he said was “I feel like shit… but I guess I’ll survive.” He gave John Smith a quizzical look. “I thought you’d be at work.”

“Well, since the idea is to write a story about you, I guess I am at work. I thought I should at least hang around until you woke up.”

The idea is to write a story about you. In his fragile state, the thought hit Nestor with a jolt. His heart sank. What had he done? Why had he told the guy all that… crap last night? Was he insane?… all that personal crap? He had an urge to call it off—right now! But then he thought of how weak he would look to John Smith… reneging this morning after dredging his innards up for the americano and spreading them out for his inspection… four hours of it, pouring his guts out through his big mouth, and now, hungover, head throbbing… to start whining and begging, “I take it all back! Please, please, I was drunk, that was all! You can’t do this to me! Have pity! Have mercy!”—and that, the fear of looking weak and pathetic and frightened, as much as anything else, was what now kept his mouth shut… the fear of looking afraid! That by itself was enough to keep any Nestor Camacho from yielding to… the Doubts.

“Somebody’s got to drive you back to your car,” the americano was saying. “It’s six or seven miles from here, and I’m not sure”—he lowered one eyebrow and twisted his lips up toward it in a mildly mocking smile—“I’m not completely sure you’d remember where it is.”

That was true. All that Nestor could recall was a bar where the light show seemed so glamorous… the lights from below that filled the liquor bottles with tan and amber and tawny translucent glows and refracted a thousand tiny starbursts off their curved surfaces. He couldn’t have said why, but the memory of that glowing tableau began to calm him.

John Smith suggested breakfast. But the thought of swallowing anything solid made Nestor bilious. He settled for a single cup of black instant coffee. Christalmighty, the americanos drank weak coffee.

And then they were in John Smith’s Volvo, heading for the Isle of Capri restaurant. John Smith was so right. When he woke up during the night and when he first rose from the couch, he had no memory of where he had left his car.

They drove over to Jacinto Street and then turned down Latifondo Avenue… and the more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that John Smith was a good person. Last night the americano had literally taken him in… off the street!… and provided him a place to spend the night… and even waited around all morning to let him sleep as long as he wanted and drive him to his car. His fear of what this tall pale periodista americano might write began to recede. ¡Yo no creo el Miami Herald!… but John Smith was right on about how the powers that be would twist his story… his career… his life! any way that suited them best, as long as he had no voice to speak up for him… even if it had to be in the pages of the Yo No Creo Herald.

“John,” he said—and then he paused, because he had surprised himself. He had never called him by his first name before, or any name, for that matter. “I want to thank you for everything. When I finished the shift last night—I mean, talk about bummed out—I was… I was hard up as I’ve ever been in my life. I owe you one… no, a shitload. If there’s anything I can do for you, just say it.”

John Smith didn’t say a word. He didn’t even look at Nestor at first. He was still looking straight ahead at the road when he finally responded. “As a matter of fact, there is something. But I figured this wasn’t the right time. You’ve got enough to think about for one day.”

“No, go ahead. If I can do something for you, I’ll do it.”

Another long pause, and now John Smith turned toward Nestor. “Well… I need access to police files”—he glanced at the road and then back toward Nestor—“to see what information they may have on a certain individual, a man who lives in Sunny Isles.”

“Who is he? What’s his name?” said Nestor.

John Smith said, “Well… I haven’t mentioned this to anyone except my editors. But if I’m right, it’s a big story. His name is Sergei Korolyov. Does that ring a bell?”

“Ummm… no.”

“You don’t remember this Russian oligarch—that was what they kept calling him, a Russian oligarch—this Russian who gave a bunch of valuable paintings to the Miami Museum of Art? It wasn’t that long ago… a bunch of Chagalls, Kandinskys, and uhhh this Russian ‘Suprematist,’ he called himself… his name’s gone right out of my head, but he’s a famous modern artist. Anyway, the museum figured these paintings were worth close to seventy million dollars—Malevich! That was the guy’s name!—the one who called himself a Suprematist… Kazimir Malevich. This was such a gold mine, the museum changed its name to the Korolyov Museum of Art.”

Nestor gave John Smith a long puzzled look. The americano had lost him the moment he mentioned Seagulls or whatever the artist’s name was… and Kadinsky and Malayvitch… and the Korolyov Museum of Art, for that matter.

“The thing is,” said John Smith, “I got a very solid tip that they’re all forgeries, all those seventy million dollars’ worth of paintings.”

“No shit!”

“No, my source is a very serious guy. He’s not the type who’s just full of gossip.”

“Did the museum give him any money for these paintings?”

“No, and that’s the funny thing. These were straight-up donations. All he got out of it was dinner and a lot of flattery.”

The fantasy’s lights dimmed. “Mierda,” said Nestor. “If he didn’t get any money out of it, I don’t know if it’s even a crime. I’d have to ask somebody.”

“I don’t know, either,” said John Smith, “but either way, it’s a hell of a story. I mean, there they all were, the mayor, the governor, Maurice Fleischmann, every hotshot in Miami, all trying to outdo each other piling praise on an impostor. It reminds me of Gogol’s play The Inspector General. Did you ever—anyway, it’s a great play.”

::::::No, I didn’t ever—my pale americano… :::::: But his resentment evaporated quickly. He was a curiosity, John Smith was. Never had Nestor come across anyone more instinctively unlike himself. The guy didn’t have a Latin bone in his body. He couldn’t see him as a cop, either, not for three seconds. There was something bland and weak about him. This kind of guy—it was hard to imagine him being aggressive enough to come up with the Cop Look, even. ::::::Nevertheless, he, an americano, is my only hope of keeping the tide of my own people, my own family!—from sweeping me away.::::::

When John Smith drove him up to the Isle of Capri, he barely recognized the place. In the noonday sun it looked small and gray and dead. What would have ever seemed glamorous about it? It didn’t glow… it was a cheap little dump, that was all. He spotted his Camaro, thank God.

He thanked John Smith again and promised to find out what he could about the Russian. As he departed the car, he experienced a strange feeling. In a moment, John Smith would drive off, and he, Nestor Camacho, would be left abandoned. Abandoned was the feeling… it began to steal over his central nervous system. Now, that was strange. He had an irrational urge to ask the americano to stay a little longer… at least until the shift began at the Marine Patrol marina. I’m alone!… more alone than I’ve ever been in my life! And the patrol shift would only make it worse. By the time the shift had ended last night, at midnight, his “comrades,” his “brethren,” were looking at him as if they wished they didn’t have to. And that was merely the first day after the whole thing with the man on the mast. Tonight they would be wondering why couldn’t he do the decent thing… and disintegrate… the way all decent marked men do.

::::::Oh, why don’t you just jump into the river and drown, you miserable little maricón!:::::: He had always looked with contempt at people who submerged themselves in self-pity. At that point they lost all honor. And here he was, Nestor Camacho, treating himself to the perverse relief of avoiding the struggle—and all the a*sholes—by giving up and halfway hoping they’ll pull him under for the third time. Hey, that’ll end the pain, won’t it!

In fact, there must be something peaceful about drowning… once you get over the initial shock of never breathing again, never drawing another breath. But he had already gone through the initial shock, hadn’t he. What exactly did he have to live for? His family? His friends? His Cuban heritage? His loved ones? The great romantic love of his life? Or maybe for John Smith’s approval. That made him laugh… rancidly. John Smith would very much approve of his going under for the third time. That way he could wring one more touching human-interest story out of this shit. Nestor could see the pseudo-sincere look on John Smith’s face, as if he were still standing here facing him.

That conniving skinny WASP! Anything to get a story… that’s how sincere he is… Other faces began to appear… vividly… vividly… faces for an instant along the railing of the Rickenbacker Causeway bridge. For that instant—a woman in her forties… he had never seen a more hateful face in his life! She spit at him. She raged. She tried to finish him off by beaming death rays from eyes set deep within her contorted face. He could hear the boos coming at him from all directions, including from below, from all the small craft that had come out for no other purpose than to shoot him down. And—who… is… this? ::::::Why, it’s Camilo el Caudillo! He’s right there before me with his arms crossed smugly atop his paunch… and here’s my simpering mother sopping with sympathy, even though she knows el Caudillo’s word is Gospel… Yeya and Yeyo—hah!:::::: So every living Camacho generation looks upon him as the Ultimate Traitor… Uncle Andres’s cousin-in-law Hernán Lugo, who had taken it upon himself to preach at him at Yeya’s birthday party… Ruiz’s father, at Ricky’s, turning his head about forty-five degrees so he could say out the side of his mouth, Te cagaste—“You shit all over it, didn’t you, and all over yourself”… and aaahhh, it is Mr. Ruiz who now sits immediately before him with his back turned, snarling out the corner of his mouth beneath his shiny dome. All of them, the whole bunch, would love to see him go under… some, like his own family, to see the stain disappear once and for all… others, like Mr. Ruiz, so they would have such riveting, grossly embellished stories to tell… “He came skulking in wearing dark glasses, thinking I wouldn’t recognize him”… and you, Señor Comemierda Ruiz, you’d probably lubricate it with sympathy at the same time… Oh, how you’d love it if I now just went with the current and let the undertow take me all the way to the bottom… well—

I’m damned if I will!

You’d all find it too delicious, and I truly resent that! Sorry, you’re not going to have the satisfaction! And if you don’t like it, don’t blame me. Blame Mr. Ruiz with his te cagaste at the break of dawn. And then kindly go f*ck yourself!

“You maybe zink thees fonny,” said Mr. Yevgeni Uhuhuh—Nestor couldn’t catch the last name—“bot I moss say ze kvestion. What you know aboud art?”

Nestor had no idea what to say. He was getting desperate. It was 3:15 p.m. The shift began in forty-five minutes. This was his third Craigslist visit in the past three hours… and he had to have this apartment. By sharing it with the tall bony, somewhat stooped Russian before him he could afford it… and he had to have it! He couldn’t survive another night like last night, when he had no choice but to be taken in like a stray—by a reporter from Yo No Creo el Herald! He and this Yevgeni were talking in the pathetically small vestibule between the apartment’s two small rooms… Crammed into the vestibule were a tiny filthy kitchen, a tiny filthy bathroom, and the standard clattering aluminum-clad front door you found in Low-Rent apartments like this. Yevgeni, it seemed, was a “graphic artist.” He referred to the apartment, which he wanted to share, as his “studio.” Nestor didn’t know what a graphic artist was, but an artist was an artist, and he lived and worked in his art studio… and now he’s asking what does he, Nestor, know about art? Know about art?! His heart sank. ::::::¡Dios mío! I wouldn’t last two sentences in a conversation about art. There’s absolutely no point in pretending otherwise. Damn! Might as well look him in the eye and take it like a man.::::::

“What do I know about art? To tell the truth… nothing.”

“Yessss!” exclaimed Yevgeni. He raised his fist to shoulder level and pumped it with his elbow, like an American athlete. “You vant to share zees studio?—eet’s yours, my fren!” Noting Nestor’s consternation, he said, “Ze graphic art ees now not good, and I haf to share thees studio. Ze last person I vant ees ze person who zinks he knows aboud art, ze person who vants to talk aboud art, and zen zat person vants to gif me adfice!” He put a hand over his eyes and shook his head, and then looked at Nestor again. “Belief me, I cannot zink of any fate vorse. You are a police officer. How much you like it eef zomebody comes een, and he zink he knows about ‘ze cops,’ or he vants to know about ze cops, and you moss tell him… You crazy in vone veek!”

Besides, he didn’t want to live with the Russians up in Sunny Isles and Hallandale. They’d drive him crazy, too. Here, in this studio in Coconut Grove, he felt more at home. It didn’t hurt, either, that he liked to work from the afternoon into the night—and Nestor would be away, on his shift.

::::::Perfect:::::: Nestor said to himself. ::::::We’re both aliens, you from Russia, me from Hialeah. Maybe we can make it in Miami.:::::: He wrote out a check right away and showed Yevgeni his badge and invited him to write down his badge number. Yevgeni gave him the shrug that said, “Oh, why bother?” He seemed as eager as Nestor to be sharing this place.

This was the sort of thing the Chief never talked about to anybody… anybody… He wasn’t a fool, after all. People would sooner talk about their sex lives—sometimes, among cops, you couldn’t shut them up—or their money or their messy marriages or their sins in the eyes of God… about anything other than their status in this world… their place in the social order, their prestige or their mortifying lack of it, the respect they get, the respect they don’t get, their jealousy and resentment of those who wallow in respect everywhere they set foot…

All this went through the Chief’s mind in a single blip as his driver, Sergeant Sanchez, pulled up in front of City Hall in the Chief’s official Escalade. Miami’s city hall was a curiously small white building that stood alone on a half-acre rectangle of landfill sticking out into Biscayne Bay. The Escalade, on the other hand, was a huge brute, all black, with darkened windows and without a single marking to indicate it was a police vehicle… only a low black bar across the roof containing a lineup of spotlight and flasher lenses and a light on the dashboard, no bigger than a quarter, emitting some sort of ominous X-ray-blue radiation. As soon as they stopped, the Chief fairly sprang from the passenger seat in front… in front, next to Sergeant Sanchez. The last thing he wanted people to think was that he was an old coot who had to be chauffeured around. Like many men in their mid-forties, he wanted to look young, athletic, virile… and so he sprang, imagining himself a lion or a tiger or a panther… a vision of lithe strength, in any case. What a sight it was! Or so he was convinced… he couldn’t very well ask anybody, could he? He wore a darkest-blue military-style shirt, tie, and pants, black shoes, and dark wraparound sunglasses. No jacket; this was Miami… ten o’clock on a September morning, and the cosmic heat lamp was high overhead, and it was already 88 degrees out here. On each side of his neck, which he figured looked thick as a tree trunk, a row of four gold stars ran along each side of his navy blue collar… a galaxy of eight stars in all… and atop that starry tree trunk was his… dark face. There were six feet, four inches and 230 pounds of him, with big wide shoulders, and he was unmistakably African American… and he was the Chief of Police.

Oh yeah, how they stared, all those people going in and out of City Hall—and he loved it! The Escalade was in the traffic circle right in front of the entrance. The Chief stepped onto the curb. He stopped for a moment. He lifted his arms out to the side with bent elbows, thrust his shoulders back as far as they would go, and took a deep breath. He looked like he was stretttttching after being cooped up in the car. In fact, he was forcing his chest to bulge out full-blown. He bet that made him look twice as mighty… but of course he couldn’t very well ask anybody, could he…

He was still in midstretch, midpreen, when—

“Hey, Chief!” It was a young man, but he had City Hall Lifer written all over him… light skin, probably Cuban… emerging from the entrance and beaming a smile of homage at him and paying his respects with a wave that began at his forehead and turned into half a salute. Had he ever laid eyes on the kid before? Did he work in the Bureau of—what the hell was it? Anyway, he was paying homage… The Chief blessed him with a lordly smile and said,

“Hi, Big Guy!”

He had barely rolled his shoulders forward into a normal position when a middle-aged couple passed him—on their way into City Hall. They looked Cuban, too. The man swung his head around and sang out, “How’s it going, Chief!”

Homage. The Chief blessed him with a lordly smile and favored him with a “Hi, Big Guy!”

In rapid succession another “Hey, Chief,” a “How ya doin’, Chief!” and then a “Hi, Cy!”—short for Cyrus, his first name—and a “Keep ’em flyin’, Cy!” and he hadn’t even reached the door yet. The citizens seemed to enjoy paying homage with salutations that rhymed with Cy. His last name, Booker, was too much for their poetic powers, which was just as well, the way he looked at it. Otherwise, everything they called him would be mockery or a racial or personal insult… mooker, spooker, kooker, hooker… Yes, it was just as well…

The Chief said, “Hi, Big Guy!”… “Hi, Big Guy!”… “Hi, Big Guy!”… and “Hi, Big Guy!”

Homage! The Chief was in an excellent mood this morning. The Mayor had summoned him here to City Hall for a little… “policy meeting”… concerning this Marine Patrol officer Nestor Camacho and that Man on the Mast business. He broke out into a big smile, for nobody’s benefit but his own. It was going to be amusing to watch Old Dionisio squirm. Whenever things were going bad for the Mayor or driving him crazy, the Chief thought of him by his real name, Dionisio Cruz. The Mayor had done everything he could to make the whole world think of him as just plain Dio, the way William Jefferson Clinton had become Bill and Robert Dole had become Bob. The Mayor figured Dionisio, the five-syllable name of the Greek god of wine and party boys, was too unusual and too big a bellyful for a politician. He was only five-six and had a very luxurious paunch, but he had enormous energy, the best political antennae in the business, a loud voice, and an egotistical bonhomie that could take over an entire room full of people and swallow them whole. All of that was quite okay with the Chief. He had no illusions concerning the politics of the situation. He was not Miami’s first African American police chief, but the fourth. The concern was not the African American vote, which didn’t amount to much. The concern was… riots.

In 1980 a Cuban cop was accused of murdering an African American businessman, who was already lying on the ground in police custody… by bludgeoning his head until it split open and you could see his brains. Two of the Cuban’s fellow cops testified against him at his trial, saying they were there and saw him do it. But an all-white jury found him innocent, and he left the courtroom free as a bird. This set off four days of riots and wholesale slaughter in Liberty City, the worst riot in Miami’s history and perhaps the country’s. A whole string of riots ensued in Miami in the 1980s and beyond. In case after case, you had Cuban cops accused of knocking African Americans’ lights out. Liberty City, Overtown, and other African American neighborhoods became lit fuses and the bomb always went off. The latest riot was just two years ago. After that one, Dio Cruz decided to promote Assistant Chief Cyrus Booker to Chief. See? One of your own, not one of ours, runs the entire Police Department.

That was pretty transparent stuff. At the same time, there were five African American assistant chiefs in the Department—and the Mayor had chosen… me. Dio Cruz sincerely liked him and admired him, the Chief chose to believe… sincerely.

But this morning, thank God, it was his pal and admirer Dionisio himself who was caught in a bind by his own people. Usually it was him, the Chief. Outsiders, usually white people, used to talk to him with the assumption that black folks—“the African American community” was the currently enlightened phrase, and white folks uttered it like they were walking across a bed of exploded lightbulb shards—must be “awfully proud” that “one of their own” now headed the police force. Well, if they were so proud of him, they had a funny way of showing it. Every time a recruiter approached a young African American and suggested that he might make a terrific cop—the Chief had gone on this sort of mission himself—the guy would say, “Why would I want to be a traitor to my own people?” or something close to that. One kid had been so brazen as to look the Chief right in his black face and say, “Tell me why the f*ck I wanna help the f*cking Cubans beat up on my brothers?” No, if he had any respect on the streets from “the black community,” it was only because he was hooked up to the Power… currently. He had the power of the Man… currently. Unghhh huhhhnh… You don’t be jackin’ with the Traitor in Chief, man. He come after you and you be committing “suicide by cop.” You be committing suicide by getting a po-lice bullet shot clear through yo’ chest, and they be finding a gun on your corpse you didn’t even know you had, and they say you pulled this gun-you-never-knew-you-had on a cop, and you be giving them no choice. They got to act in self-defense. You don’t know you committing suicide. But that’s what you did when you pull this gun-you-don’t-know-you-got and aim it at the Suicide Squad. Nome sayin’?—but, hell, you ain’t even listening. Oh, I’m sorry, brother. Ain’t no way you be listening to nothing no more now.

The Cuban Suicide Squads… and so what did that make him? Oh, yeah… the Traitor in Chief. He was happy that this time it was the Mayor who got his dick caught in the door.

As he headed inside for the big “policy meeting,” he happened to glance up at the facade of City Hall, and his smile grew big enough for the gawkers to wonder what the Chief of Police thought was so funny. Miami’s was the weirdest of all the big-city city halls in the country, if you asked Cy Booker. It was a little two-story white stucco building done in the Art Moderne style, now called Art Deco, fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s. Pan American Airways had built it in 1938 as a terminal for their new fleet of seaplanes, which touched down and took off on Biscayne Bay upon their bulbous pontoon feet. But the seaplane future fizzled, and the city took the building over in 1954 and made it an Art Moderne city hall—and left the Pan American Airways logo on it! Yeah!—and not in just one place either. The logo—a globe of the world, flying aloft with Art Moderne wings on it and launched by the Art Moderne rays of the sun rising beneath it—this typical Art Moderne touch, promising a radiant future lit up by Man’s Promethean reach for the stars, was repeated endlessly, creating a frieze that wrapped around the entire building PAN AM PAN AM PAN AM PAN AM PAN AM beneath the cornice. There was something gloriously goofy about it… a big-city city hall proudly displaying a now-defunct airline’s seaplane terminal logo!… but this was Miami, and there you had it…

The Mayor’s conference room upstairs was not like any other big city’s mayoral conference room, either. The ceiling was low, and there was no table, just a random collection of chairs of varying sizes and comfort. It was more like a slightly beat-up little lounge in an aging athletic club. All the rooms up here, including the Mayor’s own office, were small and cramped. No doubt they were originally occupied by the work-a-daddies who did the accounting, procurement, and maintenance side of the seaplane operation. Now it was the Mayor’s domain. A phrase much resented in city halls across the country popped into the Chief’s head: “Good enough for government work.”

As he drew closer, he could see through the doorway. The Mayor was already there, along with his communications director, as City Hall PR flacks were now titled, a tall slender man named Efraim Portuondo, who could have been handsome if he weren’t so dour… and Rinaldo Bosch, a small pear-shaped man, only forty years old or so but bald as a clerk. He was the city manager, a title that didn’t mean much when a man like Dionisio Cruz was Mayor.

As soon as the Chief appeared at the door, the Mayor opened his mouth wide, primed to… swallow him, the gloomy flack, and the little bald man with a single gulp.

“Eyyyy, Chief, come on in! Have a seat! Catch your breath! Get ready! We got some a God’s work to do this morning.”

“Is that the same as Dio’s work?” said the Chief.

Abrupt silence… while the translingual logic of the crack linked up in all three Cubans’ heads… God equals Dios equals Dio’s…

A short bark of laughter from the communications director and the city manager. They couldn’t hold back, but they made it brief. They knew Dio Cruz would not be amused.

The Mayor gave the Chief a cold smile. “Okay, since you’re so fluent in Spanish, you’ll know what ‘A veces, algunos son verdaderos coñazos del culo’ means.”

Communications Director Portuondo and City Manager Bosch barked short laughs again and then stared straight at the Chief. From their big expectant eyes, he could tell that old Dionisio had put him in his place, and they were dying to see you and him fight. But the Chief figured it would be better not to get a translation. So he laughed and said, “Hey, just kidding, Mr. Mayor, just kidding, Dio… Dios… what do I know?”

The “Mr. Mayor” was just some mild irony he couldn’t resist tucking in. He never called him “Mr. Mayor.” When he was alone with the Mayor, he called him Dio. When other people were around, he never called him anything at all. He just looked at him and spoke. He couldn’t have explained exactly why, but he considered it a mistake to ever buckle under old Dionisio at all.

He could see that the Mayor was tired of this exchange anyway. He couldn’t stand coming out second best. Old Dionisio took a seat with a this-is-serious scowl on his face. So they all sat down.

“Okay, Chief,” said the Mayor. “You know this whole situation is bullshit, and I know it’s bullshit. This officer, this kid Camacho, is ordered to bring the guy down from the mast. So he climbs up and he brings the guy down, but first he has to put on some kind a ham-bone high-wire act. The whole thing is on TV, and now we got half the city yelling that we’re sitting on our hands while a leader of the anti-Castro underground gets legally lynched. I don’t need this.”

“But we don’t know that’s what he is,” said the Chief. “The Coast Guard says nobody’s ever heard of him, and nobody’s ever heard of the underground movement he says he leads, this El Solvente.”

“Yeah, but try telling that to all those people we got on our neck now. They’ll just tune out. This thing’s like some kind of a panic, like a riot or something. People believe it—they think he’s a f*cking martyr. If we say otherwise… then we’re trying to pull off some kind a cheap trick, some kind a cover-up.”

“But what else can we do?” said the Chief.

“Where is the guy, the guy on the mast—where is he right now?”

“He’s being held on a Coast Guard ship until they decide to announce what they’re doing. They’ll probably wait awhile and let things blow over. In the meantime, they’re not gonna let him say another word. He’ll be invisible.”

“I say we do the same thing with Officer Camacho. Put him somewhere he’ll be invisible.”

“Like where?”

“Oh… ummmm… I got it! Put him in that industrial area out toward Doral,” said the Mayor. “Nobody goes there except to repair coke furnaces and lubricate earth-moving equipment.”

“So what would Camacho do out there?”

“Oh, I don’t know… They ride around in patrol cars, they protect the citizens.”

“But that’s a demotion,” said the Chief.

“Why?”

“Because that’s where he started out. He was a beat cop. The Marine Patrol is one a the special units. He can’t be demoted. That’s like saying we did the wrong thing and this officer f*cked up. He didn’t do anything wrong. Everything was done by the book, in the routine way… except for one thing.”

“Which is…?” said the Mayor.

“Officer Camacho risked his life to save this guy. He did a hell of a thing, when you think about it.”

“Yeah,” said the Mayor, “but the guy wouldn’t a needed saving if the officer hadn’t a tried to grab him.”

“Even if you believe that, he did a hell of a thing all the same. He locked his legs around the guy seventy feet up in the air and carried him all the way down to the water, swinging hand over hand down the jib sail cable. You know—you won’t like this, but we’re gonna have to give Officer Camacho a medal of valor.”

“What!?”

“Everybody knows he risked his life to save a man. The whole city saw it. His fellow cops all admire him, no matter who they are. They all think of him as really brave, except that they’d never say it—that’s taboo. But if he doesn’t get the medal, it stinks of politics right away.”

“Jesus Christ!” said the Mayor. “Where you gonna do this? In the main auditorium at the Freedom Tower?”

“No… it can be done quietly.”

The communications director, Portuondo, spoke up. “The way you do it is, you put out a press release the day after the ceremony with all kinds of announcements, commendations, traffic flow decisions, whatever, and you list Officer Camacho’s award about eighth down the line. It’s done all the time.”

“Okay, but we still gotta make the guy invisible. How do we do that if you can’t make him a beat cop?”

“All you can do is give him a lateral transfer,” said the Chief, “to another special unit. There’s the Marine Patrol, which he’s in now, there’s the CST—Crime Suppression Team—the SWAT Team, the—”

“Hey!” said the Mayor. “How about the Mounted Police! You never see those guys except in the park. Put him on a goddamned horse!”

“I don’t think so,” said the Chief. “That’s known as a lateral transfer with a dip. That would be pretty obvious in a case like this… putting him on a horse in a park.”

“You got a better idea?” said the Mayor.

“Yeah,” said the Chief. “The SWAT Team. It’s the most macho of them all, because you’re always marching into a line of fire. You do battle. The guys are mostly young, like Officer Camacho; you gotta be in fantastic shape. The training—at one point you have to jump from the top of a six-story building onto a mattress. I’m not kidding… a mattress. If you can’t make yourself do it, you don’t make it onto the SWAT Team. You got to be young to do it without getting hurt, but that’s only part of it. As you get older, you begin to value your hide a lot more. I’ve seen it a hundred times in police work. You’re older, you’ve got a higher rank, you’re getting higher pay, you’ve got ambition itching under your skin. Every instinct you got is telling you, ‘You’re too valuable now, you’ve worked too hard to get there, your future is so damned bright. How could you possibly risk it all by doing a damn fool thing like that, jumping from six stories up… onto a f*cking mattress?’ ” The Chief could see that he had their rapt attention, Dionisio Cruz’s, the flack Portuondo’s, and the little bald city manager’s. They were staring at him with the nice big unsophisticated eyes of boys. “Yeah… looking down on the mattress from the top of that six-story building—the damn thing looks about the size of a playing card, and that flat, too. If an older man is there on the roof and looking down like that, he starts thinking about some… first things, as they say in church.” Oh, yeah! Now he had all three of the Cubans mesmerized. Now for the coup de grâce. “Every year when the SWAT candidates get to that part of the training… I make the jump myself. I want these kids to feel like, ‘Jesus Christ, if the Chief does it, and I put my toes on the edge of the roof… and there’s no way I can make my legs go into the jump mode… then I’ll be branded as a pathetic little p-ssy the rest of my life.’ I want those guys to refuse to fail.”

For a moment none of the Cubans said a word. But the Mayor couldn’t contain his emotions any longer. “F*ckin’ A!” he cried. “That’s it! If Officer Camacho likes action so goddamned much—take him right up on top of the building and show him the mattress!”

The Chief chuckled somewhere deep inside. ::::::Gotcha.::::::

But all of a sudden ::::::Aw, shit!:::::: he just thought of something, a big something… and he had to go and turn the Mayor and the yes-men into bug-eyed little boys with ninety seconds of SWAT Team lore, starring himself… He lowered his head and rocked it from this side to that side to this side to that side, slowly, and muttered out loud, “Damn!” Then he looked at the three of them and compressed his lips so tightly the flesh ballooned out above them and below them. “The kid would be perfect for the SWAT Team, but we can’t do it. We can’t just move somebody onto the SWAT Team for political reasons. They’d spot that right away. Every cop knows who Nestor Camacho is, or they do now. We’ve got forty-one cops on a waiting list for the SWAT Team right now. They’ve all volunteered… and talk about competition! Nobody can mess around with SWAT Team recruitment, not even the Chief.”

“Forty-one cops want to do this?” said the Mayor. “Forty-one cops can’t wait to jump from six stories and land on a mattress to qualify to go get shot at?”

The Chief started tapping the side of his forehead in the pantomime that says, “That’s using your head.” “You answered it yourself, Dio! ‘Can’t wait to get shot at’! There you have it! There’s a certain kind of cop who came to play. You know what I’m saying?”

The Mayor looked away glumly for a moment. “Well… I don’t care where you put Officer Camacho, as long as you get him off the goddamned water. Okay? But wherever you—what’s the word you like?—lateral transfer?—wherever you lateral transfer this TV acrobat a yours, he’s gotta do that thing. That’s gotta be one a the conditions.”

“What thing?” said the Chief.

“That thing with the mattress. If he likes action so goddamned much and has to go around breaking my balls, then you gotta take him right on up to the roof—and show him the mattress!”

The next afternoon Nestor iPhoned John Smith. “John,” he said, “you game for a cup of coffee? I got something to show you.”

“What?”

“I don’t wanna just tell you. I want to show it to you, in person. I wanna see the smile on your face.”

“Hey, you’re sounding up today. When I left yesterday, the look on your face—you should have seen it. You looked like you’d lost your last friend.”

Nestor: “You took the words right out of truth. But I got tired of feeling angry, angry at everybody who turned their back on me. One thing about anger is it sort of revs you up and gets the juice flowing. You wanna know what I did yesterday between the time you left and the shift started? I went on Craigslist and found an apartment in Coconut Grove. In three hours on a Sunday afternoon I did that. Anger is a wonderful thing if you get really angry.”

“That’s great, Nestor!”

“Oh, it’s a dump, it’s too small, and I’m sharing it with a ‘graphic artist,’ whatever that is, and I get to listen to all the goddamned wacked-out kids who hang around Grand Avenue until about four in the morning. They sound like alley cats. You know that sound, that sort of, I guess, yowl cats make when they’re outdoors at night… yowling for sex? That’s what these kids sound like. You know that sound?”

“Hey, we are up today, aren’t we!” said John Smith.

“I’m not up—it’s like I told you. I’m angry,” said Nestor. “Hey, where are you right now?”

“I’m at the paper.”

“Well, then, get up off your ass and leave the building and meet me at that restaurant Della Grimalda. It’s right near you.”

“I don’t know. As I say, I’m at the paper—and besides, I wouldn’t peg you as the Della Grimalda type.”

“I’m not. That’s the whole point. Neither is any other cop, and I don’t want any other cops around when I show you what I got.”

Long sigh… Nestor could tell that John Smith was weakening. “Okay, Della Grimalda. But what do you want to get there?”

“Two cups of coffee,” said Nestor.

“But Della Grimalda is a real restaurant. You can’t just walk in there and take a seat and order two cups of coffee.”

“I don’t know it for a fact, but I’ll bet you a cop can—and he won’t have to pay a dime.”

When John Smith arrived at Della Grimalda, Nestor was already sitting comfortably at a table for two by a window amid the place’s swag and bling—having a cup of coffee. John Smith took a seat, and a very attractive waitress brought him a cup of coffee, too. He looked all around. There were only two other customers in the whole restaurant, about forty feet away, and they were obviously finishing a big meal. Their table gleamed with a regular flotilla of stemware of every sort and squadrons of hotel silver.

“Well,” said John Smith, “I have to hand it to you. You did it.”

Nestor shrugged and produced a stiff nine-by-twelve envelope from under his chair, handed it to John Smith, and said, “Be my guest.”

John Smith opened it and withdrew a piece of cardboard that served as backing for a large photograph, about six by nine inches. Nestor had been looking forward to watching John Smith’s expression when it dawned on him what he had his hands on. The pale WASP didn’t disappoint. He lifted his wondering eyes from the photograph and stared at Nestor.

“Where the hell did you find this?”

It was a remarkably clear digital photograph, in color, of Sergei Korolyov at the wheel of a screaming-red Ferrari Rocket 503 sports car—with Igor Drukovich in the bucket seat beside him. Igor had a waxed mustache that came all the way out to here on either side. Korolyov looked like a real star, as usual, but anybody’s eye was going to fasten right away upon Igor, Igor and his mustache. The mustache was a real production. It took off from between his nose and his upper lip and flew all the way out to here—an astonishing distance—and he had waxed the ends and twirled them into points. He was a big man, probably close to fifty years old. In the I’m-an-artist manner he wore a long-sleeved black shirt open down to his sternum, giving the world a look at his big hairy chest. It was a hirsute triumph almost as grand as the mustache.

“Remember you asked if I could get you access to police files? This picture is from the Miami-Dade Police headquarters. They took it four years ago.”

“Why were they interested in Korolyov and Drukovich?”

“They weren’t interested in them as individuals. This I bet you don’t know, but all the police departments in the area do it. If they see somebody in a car and it looks suspicious or maybe it just looks highly unusual, they’ll stop it on some pretext—they were going five or ten miles an hour over the speed limit, or the car’s license plate begins with certain digits, or the registration sticker’s peeling off—any damned thing—and they check IDs and record them, and they take pictures like this one. Why they stopped Korolyov’s car I don’t really know, except it’s unusual, all right, and it looks like a lot of money.”

John Smith couldn’t take his eyes off it. “I don’t believe this!” he kept saying, and then he asked, “How did you actually get this? Did you just call up the Miami-Dade Police and ask them what they had on Korolyov and Drukovich, and they just gave it to you?”

Nestor chuckled the happy chuckle of the man who knows secrets and you don’t. “No, they didn’t just give it to me. I called a cop I used to work with on the Marine Patrol. You’d never get something like this by going through ‘channels.’ You have to get on the brothernet.”

“What’s the brothernet?”

“If you know a brother officer and you ask him for a favor, he’s gonna do it for you if he possibly can. That’s the brothernet. My guy also—”

“God, Nestor,” said John Smith, absorbed in the photograph, “that’s great. If the time comes and we have to prove that Korolyov knew Igor all along—here we have him tooling around with him in this half-a-million-dollar toy. What we need now is some more information about Igor’s personal life. I’d like to meet him in some—you know—some casual way.”

“Well, I was just about to tell you something else my guy passed along. This is not in any file. In fact, it’s out-and-out hearsay, but the word is—and Igor’s pretty hard to not notice—the word is that he’s a regular at some strip club in Sunny Isles called the Honey Pot. You game for trying to find a mustache in the middle of a herd of whores?”