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11





Ghislaine


Finding a long-sleeved shirt to cover up those famous—they were literally in the news today—those famous Nestor Camacho muscles of his took some doing. But it had to be done. Then he remembered a checked flannel shirt he had stuck away on the shelf in the closet he and Yevgeni shared. Obviously a long-sleeved shirt made of flannel with a dark check design was not not not the ideal choice on a hot hot hot Miami halogen-heat-lamp day like this… but it was the best he could do. It was pretty ugly, actually, and he wore it hanging outside the pants to make himself look like a feed sack full of modesty… all this, because he knew the story in the Herald this morning would be the Godzilla in the room anywhere his CSTeammates laid eyes on him. The thing was on the front page, with a smaller version of the picture of him with his shirt off after the Mast incident.

Sure enough, Nestor, Hernandez, Nuñez, and Flores, another cop in the unit, had just settled into a booth at Kermit’s, the little short-order joint just down the block from the big CVS—come to think of it, every joint in Miami seemed to be just down the block from one big CVS or another—anyway, they had just sat down in the booth when Hernandez said, “Who is this John Smith, Nestor? What’s it cost to hire a PR man, anyway?”

Oooof! That one nailed Nestor right between the eyes. But he managed to lie coolly, in a put-on tone, “As far as I know, Sarge, he’s just a guy who recognizes real talent when he sees it.”

Good one. Nuñez and Flores laughed appreciatively. Sergeant Hernandez didn’t. “Yeah, but he didn’t see it. He wasn’t there. But you’d never know it from this—” Hernandez picked up a copy of the Yo No Creo el Herald as if it were a toxic object and began reading out loud. “ ‘The rope-climbing cop, twenty-five-year-old Nestor Camacho, Police Department medal-of-valor winner a couple of months ago for carrying a panicked Cuban refugee down, bodily, from atop a seventy-foot-high schooner mast, yesterday left fellow cops—and a pair of Overtown crack house suspects—agog’—what the hell’s a gog?”—appreciative chuckles from Nuñez and Flores—“ ‘With yet another feat of strength. Camacho and his partner, Sergeant Jorge Hernandez,’ unfortunately not a legend in his own time himself—” More chuckles from Flores and Nuñez, and Hernandez swelled up with his newly found gift for wit—

Nestor broke in. “Hey, come on, Sarge, it doesn’t say that!”

“Gee, maybe I misread it,” said Hernandez. He continued reading, “Camacho and his partner, Sergeant Jorge Hernandez, still a virgin in the Land of the Legends—were trying—”

Nestor rolled his eyes up into his skull and moaned, “Give me—a—break…”

“—‘trying to arrest TyShawn Edwards, twenty-six,’ ” Hernandez went on, “ ‘and Herbert Cantrell, twenty-nine, both of Overtown, on drug charges when things turned deadly. According to police, Edwards, six-five and 275 pounds, had both hands around Hernandez’s neck, choking him, when Camacho, five-seven and 160 pounds, jumped on Edwards’s back and clamped him in a wrestling hold called “a figure four with a full nelson” and rode him rodeo-style until Edwards collapsed, gasping for breath. Nuñez tied Edwards’s hands behind his back and completed the arrest. Camacho credits an unorthodox training regimen’—”

Nestor broke in: “Okay Sarge—SARGE! We got it, we got, it!” Nestor’s cheeks were burning with embarrassment.

“Sure, you got it,” said Hernandez. “But what about Nuñez here and Flores and the rest of the unit? Most a them don’t read the Yo No Creo el Herald. You wanna deprive them?”

He continued reading the article aloud… hugely enjoying Nestor’s discomfort. Nestor’s cheeks were burning so, he figured his face must be one blazing ball of red. Then Nuñez and Flores really got into the spirit of it. They began hooting… “Wooop! Wooooop!”… as the details of Nestor’s triumph began to accumulate.

“Hey, Sarge!” said Flores. “What happened to you? Last I heard, some big negro had his hands around your neck, and then we don’t hear no more. Did you get offed or something?” Laughs all around for Nuñez, Flores, and the Sergeant.

Flores said to Hernandez, “Where do you suppose the guy got all those details? You know, like giving the big mook a ‘rodeo ride’ and all that.”

Hernandez looked at Nestor and said, “Well…?”

Mierda… Nestor didn’t know whether the Well…? was laden with accusation or not.

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “They told me to go ahead and answer some questions right after that mast thing. Captain Castillo was standing right there. But nobody’s said go ahead and answer questions about this thing. Where do these guys get those details in those crime stories? They’re always talking about ‘according to police’ or ‘police said’ or ‘according to a police spokesman’… I mean, who’s a ‘police spokesman’… and who’s saying it when it says, ‘police said’? Is it Public Affairs?—and how do they get the details? Call the officers on the case? I mean, they got to go ask somebody. Know what I mean?”

::::::None of that’s an actual lie, is it… but what if Hernandez or Nuñez or Flores asks me straight out? Can I just keep double-talking these guys? Probably none a them even reads the Herald. But suppose they add it up… John Smith plus John Smith plus John Smith.:::::: Quite aside from feeling paranoid, he felt guilty.

Just then came a vibration from the left breast pocket of his checked flannel shirt: Nestor fishes his cell phone out of his pocket and says, “Camacho.”

A girl’s voice on the other end: “Is this Officer Camacho?”

“Yes, this is Officer Camacho.” He used the “Officer Camacho” to show the Sergeant, Nuñez, and Flores that this was a line-of-duty call.

“Officer Camacho, this is Ghislaine Lantier. We were talking yesterday?”

“Uhhh… of course.” The sound of her voice gave him a lift he couldn’t have explained to himself. It just did.

“I probably shouldn’t be calling you, because this isn’t your responsibility, but I… I need some advice.”

“About what?” He could see her as if she were standing right in front of him… the pale, pale skin, the dark hair, the big, wide, innocent… anxious eyes… and her legs. Her legs popped into his head, too.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with what happened yesterday. It’s sort of complicated, and I couldn’t think of anybody else to call, and then I saw that big story about you in the Herald this morning, and I thought I’d try. I still have your card. Until I read the paper this morning, I had no idea you were the same officer I’d seen on television carrying that refugee down from on top of a mast.”

And the angel sang! Nestor said, “Hold on a second.” He covered the cell phone with his other hand and said to his mates, “I gotta take this call. I’ll be right back.”

With that, he got up from the booth and stepped out the door and onto the sidewalk and said into the cell phone, “I’m just going someplace a little quieter. There was too much noise in there.”

Someplace was the big CVS down the block. There was a heavy pair of automated plate glass sliding doors at the entrance. About six feet inside was another pair, creating a vestibule of sorts. Nestor leaned against a side wall and said to Ghislaine Lantier, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but this is a lot better.”

“Better” had nothing to do with noise, however. “Better” referred to the way this girl’s call had extracted him from Hernandez’s inquest into his relationship with John Smith. No use trying some flagrant lie, such as I don’t even know the man. Who knew who may have seen him with John Smith the night they went to the Isle of Capri restaurant and he crashed at John Smith’s apartment? Suddenly he had a dark vision: a departmental investigation of the collusion of a cop and a periodista. Come on! A twenty-five-year-old bottom-rank cop feeding information to the press without any authorization from above? ¡Dios mío! Grimmer and grimmer fates began to slither through his thoughts. He hung on for dear life to this conversation with Ghislaine Lantier… inside a CVS air lock.

“Now, you say you need some advice,” he said to her, “but it’s not about yesterday. Do I have that straight?”

“Yes… it’s about—I’m taking such a chance even bringing this up with you, with a police officer! But somehow I know I can trust you. I wish I could tell my father… I mean, I’ll tell him, but I can’t just, you know, throw it in his lap and say, ‘Here!’ Am I making any sense?”

“Uhhhh… no,” said Nestor with a laugh. “You haven’t even told me what this is about. Can’t you tell me something?”

“I don’t think I can explain this over the telephone. Is there someplace I could see you? When we were talking after you had that fight—I can’t explain it, but I knew you might be sympathetic. I knew you weren’t there just to arrest people. It was a feeling I had—”

Nestor interrupted. “All right, why don’t we meet for coffee somewhere, and you can relax and tell me all about it. Okay?” Good idea, but mainly he wanted to get her off the character analysis. She was beginning to make him feel like… he didn’t know what—all this business about how nice he’d been… “I can’t do it today. My shift is about to begin. What about tomorrow?”

“Let’s see… I have classes until one o’clock.”

“Classes?”

“Here at U. Miami. That’s where I am right now.”

“Oh yeah, you mentioned that. Okay, I’ll meet you over there at one-fifteen. Where will you be? My shift starts at four, but that ought to give you enough time…”

Nestor was consciously stringing all this planning out. He had one eye on his watch. He wanted to stay here in this CVS air lock until he knew the others would have to get out of Kermit’s to make the shift. One of them would have to eat his check, probably Hernandez. But it was only for one coffee… and hell, he’d pay him back. The main thing was not to have to sink back into that damned discussion.

The girl continued to chatter on about where they could meet on the campus… and Oh God, she hoped she wasn’t making a terrible mistake, because after all, he was a police officer. It wasn’t like seeing a lawyer, but she couldn’t afford to go see a lawyer… and the words kept popping out of her bundle of nerves, and pretty soon Nestor was only halfway listening. Instead he kept seeing her legs… her legs and her alabaster skin. He barely made the shift on time.

Shortly before 1:00 p.m. the next afternoon, Nestor had just entered the University of Miami campus in his Camaro for his rendezvous, or whatever it was, with Ghislaine Lantier. ::::::¡Santa Barranza!:::::: He had no history of deriving aesthetic pleasure from landscaping and horticulture, but now not even he could fail to notice ::::::This place is a real piece of work!::::::

A lush green lawn covered every inch of the campus and rolled on forever over vast distances, it looked like to Nestor from the driver’s seat of the Camaro. It was all so luxuriously green and uniform, you’d think God must have laid it out like Astroturf. Rank after soldier-like rank of royal palms with smooth palest-gray trunks created super-sized colonnades on either side of pathways in godly allées. They ran through God’s own greensward up to the entrance of every major building. Those grand entryways made the most ordinary white Modern and clay-tile-roof Colonial buildings look magnificent. Yet the allées were merely the most striking part of this arboreal show. There seemed to be hundreds—thousands?—of low shade trees, creating lush green frondose umbrellas fifteen or more feet in diameter… and they were everywhere… they were shades for shady terraces and sun filters for exotic and floriferous beds of tropical flowers. Lush was the word, all right. You would think Coral Gables had an annual rainfall equal of Oregon’s.

It was lunchtime, and students were coming out of the buildings and heading here and going there.

::::::They look like nice kids having a happy time… in their T-shirts and shorts and jeans and flip-flops. They’re smart, them or their parents. They’re on the road to running things. These kids walking around the campus right now—right there—they may not look like much, but they’re all in the game! They’ll end up with the degrees you got to have, the BAs and BSs and all that. Even in the Police Department these days you gotta have a degree from a four-year college if you want to get anywhere. To rise as high as captain, you got to have that degree, and it’s a huge, huge plus in the competition for lieutenant. Without those letters after your name, you can’t even hope to rise any higher than sergeant.::::::

Nestor stepped on the gas, and the Camaro’s souped-up engine made a great thrashing sound protesting the unfairness of life, and sped up San Amaro Drive toward Richter Library, the biggest library on campus, and his appointment, his police inquiry, his whatever, his rendezvous, with Ghislaine.

He might have known Richter would have a colonnade of palms. Thank God. It kept the building, which was wide-spread but only three stories high, from looking like a warehouse. He was ten minutes early. Ghislaine had said she would meet him out front. So he parked immediately at the street end of the colonnade and just watched people walk into and come out of the building. Occasionally an older-looking person showed up. He kept wondering just what this… appointment… was really all about.

Barely a minute before 1:15 a girl comes out of the library—a vision!—wearing only a straw hat with a black ribbon and a brim wide as a parasol, a demure long-sleeved shirt—and nothing else! Ghislaine! ::::::You’re seeing things, you idiot. Fool, you’re seeing only what you want to see.:::::: Now the fool realizes that a pair of white shorts covers the unspeakable delights that have set off such a tremor in his loins… Like those of half the girls he has seen since he got here, her shorts are short. They end barely an inch below her crotch. ::::::All those lubricious delights within. But her fair white legs, perfect, smooth as alabaster, are real, and the currents streaming through—¡for godsake cut it out, Camacho!::::::

Now she’s walking toward him through the colonnade. Only when she draws very close to the Camaro does she realize that is Nestor at the wheel. She smiles… faintly… more from nervousness than anything else, if he’s any judge.

“Hi!” said Nestor. “Hop in.”

She glanced at the car’s dubs, “dubs” being what car nuts like Nestor called the bespoke Baroque spokes the Camaro’s rims boasted. Their fantastic designs had been chrome plated so that when the car was rolling, every revolution of the wheels lit up the lives of onlookers with a thousand flashes from a thousand gleaming surfaces—or else stigmatized the driver as a gaudy Low-Rent lowlife. To tell the truth, Ghislaine’s life did not appear lit up by the sight. She looked at those flashy dubs—literally flashy—as if dubs, like tattoos, gave off whiffs of criminality.

When she first slipped into the passenger seat, she had to jackknife her legs before she could sit up straight, and the shorts were pushed up high enough to reveal the flesh of her hip—::::::Oh, come on, Nestor! You’re acting like some thirteen-year-old who has just felt the first churning of all that stuff in his pelvic saddle. They’re nothing but a pair of legs—okay?—and you’re a cop.::::::

Aloud he said, “Feeling a little better today?” A cheery tone he adopted, the tone that implies Of course you do, now that you’ve had time to think about it.

“Not really,” she said. “Except I’m grateful to you for coming over here.” What open, innocent, frightened eyes she had!

“Where would you like to go for coffee?” said Nestor. “There’s supposed to be a ‘food court’ or something here.”

“There is…” But she said it very tentatively.

“Well, you pick a place. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

“Starbucks?”—as if she were making a plea he was likely to reject.

“Okay, that’s fine,” said Nestor. “I’ve never been to a Starbucks before. This is my big chance.”

The Starbucks turned out to be on the ground level, in an arcade that ran through the library, front to back. It was the only commercial enterprise anywhere near the place. The legendary Starbucks!

Inside… what a letdown… There was nothing fancy about it. It wasn’t all that different from Ricky’s—cheap chairs and tables, just like Ricky’s… sugar granules left unswept on the tabletops, just like Ricky’s… plasticized paper cups, paper napkins, wrappers, the little sticks to stir coffee with, just like Ricky’s… a counter the height of the girls working behind it, just like Ricky’s… But two things were different… One, no pastelitos and therefore no ambrosial aroma… Two, the place was packed with people, but amidst all the babbling and gabbling he wasn’t hearing any Spanish at all.

Nestor and Ghislaine were stuck in a real pileup of people waiting to place orders at a counter. Nestor happened to look at the big glass case he was beside—and what the hell was that? Those shelves didn’t just have pastries and cookies, they had wrapped-up foods… things like chicken lettuce wraps, sesame noodles with tofu, tarragon chicken salad on eight-grain bread, Mallorca sweet bread. When they finally made it to the order counter, Nestor insisted, grandly, on paying for both cups. He handed over a five-dollar bill—and got wiped out! A dollar and twenty cents he got back. This grand gesture had cost him $3.80! One ninety for one cup of coffee! You could get a cup of Cuban coffee, probably a hell of a lot better than this stuff, on Calle Ocho for seventy-five cents! No one could be more bitterly shocked by the price of a cup of coffee than a cop. He led the way to a little round table with a light-colored top… and sugar granules on it. Fuming, he got up and brought back a paper napkin and ostentatiously swept the sugar off. Wide-eyed, innocent Ghislaine didn’t know what to make of him. All at once Nestor realized he had become his own father… Patience on a Monument. He calmed down and settled into the table with Ghislaine. But he remained so bitter about the cost of coffee in this place, he looked at Ghislaine as if she set the goddamned prices here. In an abrupt I’m-all-business-and-I-haven’t-got-all-day tone, he practically growled it out, “Okay, tell me what’s up. What’s going on?”

Ghislaine was taken aback by the transformation of her sympathetic knight into a plain standard-issue, foul-tempered, officious cop. Nestor could see it in her face immediately. Her eyes were now wide with fear. She seemed to be struggling to keep control of her lips—and Nestor experienced a deep rush of guilt. Patience on a Monument, smiling at Grief—in the form of… an overpriced cup of coffee!

Timorously, oh so timorously, Ghislaine said, “It’s my brother I’m worried about. He’s fifteen, and he goes to the Lee de Forest High School.”

“Sssweeeeeer,” Nestor exhaled through his teeth, creating a soft whistling noise. ::::::Dios mío… a nice polite fifteen-year-old white boy from a good family, going to de Forest. I hate to think what that poor kid’s been through. I don’t know which of them’s worse, the negro gangs or the Haitian gangs.::::::

“You know de Forest?” she said.

“Every cop in Miami knows Lee de Forest High School.” He made a point of saying it with a sympathetic smile.

“Then you know about the gangs,” said Ghislaine.

“I know about the gangs.” Another faceful of sympathy and kindness.

“Well, my brother—his name is Philippe. He’s always been a nice boy… you know, quiet and polite and studious—and he played sports last year in junior high.” ::::::Those big innocent eyes of hers! The very look on her face makes me ashamed of myself. A cup of coffee was all it took.:::::: “If you saw him today,” she continued, “you’d think he belonged to some African American gang. He doesn’t, I don’t think, but his entire demeanor says he does… the baggy pants worn so low, it makes you think, ‘One more inch and they’ll fall off’… and the bandanna around his head with ‘the colors’? And he swaggers in a certain way the gang members walk.” She rocked from side to side in her chair in pantomime. “And the way he talks! Every sentence begins with ‘man.’ It’s Man this and Man that. And everything is cool or it’s not cool. He’s always saying things like, ‘Okay, man, I’m cool with that.’ Any one of those things would drive my father crazy. My father’s a teacher, a professor of French literature at EGU. Oh, and I forgot the worst thing of all—my brother’s started talking in Creole with his new ‘friends’! They consider that very cool, because they can insult a teacher right in his face! The teachers have no idea what they’re saying. That’s what started all the trouble at de Forest in the first place! My father won’t allow us to speak Creole in the house. Philippe’s been picking it up from other students at Lee de Forest.”

“Wait a minute,” said Nestor. “Creole is Haitian, right?” Ghislaine nodded yes… very slowly. “So you’re saying… your brother is Haitian?”

Ghislaine expelled a deep sigh. “I had a feeling”—she stopped and sighed. “I guess I might as well explain everything now, because it’s all part of it. Yes, my brother is Haitian, and my father is Haitian, and my mother was Haitian, and I’m Haitian. We’re all Haitians.”

“You’re… Haitian?” said Nestor, not knowing any better way to put it.

“I’m so light skinned,” said Ghislaine. “Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

Yes, it was… but Nestor couldn’t think of any tactful way to talk about it.

“There are a lot of light-skinned Haitians,” said Ghislaine. “Well… not a lot… but a fair number. People don’t notice us for that very reason. Our family, the Lantiers, are descended from a General Lantier, one of the leaders of the French forces that first occupied Haiti in 1802. My father did a lot of research into it. He’s told my brother and me not to bring up the subject… about being Haitian, I mean. It’s not that he’s ashamed of being Haitian, not at all. It’s just that in this country if you say you’re Haitian, people pigeonhole you right away. ‘Oh, so that’s what you are, a Haitian.’ That means you can’t possibly be this… or this… or capable of that or some other thing. And if you tell people you’re French, they’re just not going to believe you, because they can’t imagine anybody born and raised in Haiti being French. But that’s what the Lantiers are.”

Nestor was bowled over. He didn’t know what to think. He had been ready for her to turn out to be some rare bird of paradise, from the way she looked… Haitian?—and she claims she’s French?

She smiled at Nestor for the very first time. “Stop staring at me like that! Now you see why my father told us not to bring up the subject? As soon as you do, people say, ‘Oh, you’re Haitian… one of those… and we can’t count on you for whatever-it-is.’ Come on, admit it. I’m right, aren’t I.”

That made Nestor smile at her, partly because smiling was easier than trying to come up with some appropriate comment… and partly because that smile of hers really lit up her face. She became a different person ::::::radiant… is the word, but she’s vulnerable at the same time… she needs a protector’s arms around her… and what a pair of legs!:::::: but he hated himself for even thinking about that! Hers was the pure kind of loveliness… and there was something else, too… She was so smart. He didn’t say that to himself in so many words at first. The things she knew, the vocabulary she used… it all built up gradually as she spoke. Nobody he knew would ever say, “He swaggers in a certain manner”… They might say “swagger”… maybe… but none of them would ever use the expression “in a certain manner” or a little thing like “he doesn’t.” He didn’t have a single friend who ever said “he doesn’t.” They all said “he don’t.” On the rare occasion he heard “he doesn’t,” it touched off a visceral reaction that made him sense “alien” or “affected,” even though he knew, if he thought about it, that “he doesn’t” was plain correct grammar.

“Anyway,” said Ghislaine, “I had to tell you, because it gets down to the heart of what happened at de Forest. My brother was in that class.”

“He was?—when the teacher knocked that boy to the floor?”

“When he was supposed to have knocked ‘that boy’ to the floor. ‘That boy’ is a big, tough Haitian kid named François Dubois. He’s the leader of some gang or other. All the boys are terrified of him… and I’m afraid ‘all’ includes my brother. I’m sure it happened the other way around. The teacher, Mr. Estevez, is a big man, but I’m sure this Dubois kid knocked him to the floor… and to cover it up, Dubois starts pressuring boys to tell the police it all started when the teacher, Mr. Estevez, knocked him down. And my poor brother let himself be used that way. Philippe is so desperate to be liked by the tough guys… Now this Dubois has Philippe and four other boys enlisted to back him up when the police come. The rest of the class says they don’t know what happened, they didn’t see it. That was the way they weaseled out of it. That way they didn’t have to lie to the police, and at the same time they didn’t have to incur the wrath of Dubois and his gang.” Incur the wrath. “A teacher hitting a student—that’s a very serious thing right now. Not a single student, not one, says that Dubois hit Mr. Estevez. So Mr. Estevez doesn’t have one witness to support him, and Dubois has four or five. The next thing you know, the police come out of the school with Mr. Estevez. They’ve got his hands handcuffed behind his back.”

“Well, what did Philippe say happened?”

“He wouldn’t talk about it to me or my father. He said he never saw what happened, and he didn’t want to talk about it. I knew right away that something was up. I mean, most kids—if something sensational like that happens at school—or even if it’s not sensational—you can’t keep them quiet. All we got out of him was that the whole thing began with this Dubois kid saying something to Mr. Estevez in Creole, and all the Haitians in the class start laughing. Mr. Estevez—”

“Wait a minute,” said Nestor. “He won’t talk about it—then how do you know he’s being set up to lie for this kid Dubois, him and the four other boys?”

“My father and I overheard him talking in Creole with a boy from the class named Antoine, one of Dubois’s posse, I think they call it. They didn’t know anybody else was home. I don’t know Creole, but my father does, and they mentioned the four other boys.”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t know,” said Ghislaine. “Just other boys in the class. I’d never heard of any of them. They only said the first names…”

“Do you remember them, the first names?”

“I remember one, because they called him ‘Fat Louis.’ They said it in English… ‘Fat Louis.’ ”

“What about the other three?”

“The other three? I think—I do remember one was named Patrice. That stuck in my mind… and the other two… both names started with an H… I remember that much… hmmm… Hervé and Honoré!… That was it, Hervé and Honoré.”

Nestor took a small spiral notebook and ballpoint pen out of his breast pocket and began jotting down the names.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know exactly,” said Nestor. “I have an idea.”

Ghislaine looked down and twisted one hand around the fingers of the other. “You see why I hesitated to talk to a police officer about this? For all I know, you’re obliged to give all this information to—well, whoever you report to, and maybe that’s enough to get Philippe in trouble already.”

Nestor began laughing. “Your brother is in no danger right now, even if I turned out to be a real tough cop. First of all, what you’ve told me so far doesn’t even reach the level of hearsay. I’d have nothing to go on other than his sister’s imagination. Besides, our department has no jurisdiction in anything that goes on inside Lee de Forest or any other public school in Miami.”

“Why not?”

“The school system has its own police force. It’s been out of our hands from the beginning.”

“I didn’t know that. They’ve got their own police force? Why?”

“You wanna hear some hearsay of my own?” said Nestor. “Officially they’re there to maintain order. But mainly, if you ask me, they’re there for damage control. They’re supposed to bottle up bad news before it gets out. They didn’t have any choice with this one. The thing had turned into a riot, and there was no way to keep it in the bottle.”

Ghislaine said nothing. She just looked at Nestor—but her stare became a plea. Finally, looking deeply into his eyes, she said, “Please help me, Nestor.” Nestor! No more Officer Camacho. “You’re my only hope—his life is about to be ruined… before it’s even begun.”

At that moment she was radiant again, radiant as any angel Nestor could possibly imagine. He wanted to put his arms around her and be her protector. He had no idea what to tell her. He only wanted to hold her and assure her that he was by her side.

With as reassuring an expression as he could contrive, he stood up and looked at his watch and said, “It’s time for me to go. But you have my number. You can call me any time, and I mean any time.”

They walked out of Starbucks side by side. They were about the same height. He turned his face close to hers. “I have a couple of ideas, but I need to do some research.”

He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer as they walked. It was supposed to seem like an avuncular hug, the semaphore for “Buck up, girl. Don’t be so worried.” He gave his eyebrows a mysterious arch. “If worse comes to worse, there are always… things… we can do.” He made we carry the weight of the entire police force.

She gave him a look you could anoint a hero of the people with. He thought of her legs, to tell the truth, and looked down to get a seemingly random look at them next to his. So long, firm, and bare… He quickly and resolutely chastened his thoughts.

“Look,” he said, “Is there some way I can talk to Philippe, without making it look like I’m a police officer asking him questions about some case?”

Ghislaine started twisting her fingers again. “I suppose maybe one afternoon you could just happen to be there, I mean at our house, when he comes home from school—something like that?”

“Approaching destination on the right,” said that woman from somewhere up in the GPS cloud. Okay, it was all computerized, that woman’s voice, but still—::::::how do it do it?:::::: Like that time up in Broward when he spun out on a slick pavement and wound up rolling backward into a creek. And he’s sitting there with the water up over the Camaro’s bumpers, wondering how to get out of this, and that woman says in the calmest voice imaginable, “Recalculating,” and in no time she’s back, and she tells him to drive three-tenths of a mile upstream on the creek bed and turn left where the remains of an old paved country road stick down into the water—and he drives exactly three-tenths of a mile in the middle of a creek and turns left—and it works! She had it right! He was outta there! ::::::But how do it do it?::::::

Now he slowed down on her say-so, and the houses began drifting by, the kinds of houses they used to build way back in the twentieth century… all that white stucco and clay-colored rounded roof tiles, and so forth. The lots were narrow, and only a few of the houses were any more than twenty-five feet wide… but there were plenty of tall shade trees, indicating it was an old section… With the sun almost directly overhead, the trees cast blotchy shadows upon the stucco and on the front lawns. The houses were pretty close to the street. Nevertheless, the lawns were a lush green, and they had shrubs and brilliant flowers, fuchsia cockatoos, lavender and yellow irises, bright scarlet petunias… Nice neighborhood! This was up in northeastern Miami, the so-called Upper East Side… plenty of upscale Latinos and Anglos up here—and lots of Latins and Anglo gaybos, for that matter… Immediately to the west on the other side of Biscayne Boulevard were Little Haiti, Liberty City, Little River, Buena Vista, Brownsville… Nestor could imagine the Latins and the Anglos up here thanking God every day for Biscayne Boulevard, which fenced them off from the badlands.

“You have arrived,” said the unseen Queen of the magical GP Sphere.

Nestor pulled over to the curb and looked to his right. ::::::What’s that? Ghislaine lives… there?!:::::: He had never seen such a house… It had a flat roof you could only see the edge of… walls of white stucco with two narrow bands of black paint about a foot below the roof, running all the way around the house… a couple of dozen tall narrow windows installed next to one another to create an enormous curve that began on one side of the house and swept around until it took up close to half the front. He just stood there gawking until a front door opened and her voice rang out:

“Nestor! Hi! Come in!”

The way Ghislaine smiled! Her sheer unconcealed joy as she hurried toward him! He wanted to stand there with his chest inflated like the prince’s in Snow White and have her rush into his arms! There she was! Ghislaine!—in her long-sleeved shirt and her shorter-than-short shorts, lovely long legs bare! Only at the last moment did he manage to restrain himself. ::::::This is police work, damn it, not a hookup. Nobody authorized this police work, but—but what is this all about?::::::

Now she was right in front of him, looking into his eyes and saying, “You’re ten minutes early!”—as if that were the most loving tribute a man had ever paid to a woman. He was speechless.

To his amazement, she took his hand—not to hold, however, just to tug on and said, “Come on! Let’s go inside! Wouldn’t you like some iced tea?”—all the while beaming a smile of the purest, most defenseless love, or so it seemed to Nestor.

Inside, she took him into the living room, which was flooded with light pouring in through the immense array of windows. The other walls consisted, top to bottom, of shelves of books interrupted only by a door and spaces for three jumbo posters featuring men with hats, European posters, judging by the hats they advertised: “ChapeauxMossant,” “Manolo Dandy,” “Princeps S.A. Cervo Italia”…

“Have a look around!” said Ghislaine. Her tone was one of inexplicable excitement. “I’ll get us some iced tea!”

When she returned with the iced tea, she said, “Well, what do you think?”

Nestor said, “I… I don’t know what to say. This is the most… amazing house I’ve ever seen.” He had started to say “unusual.”

“Well, it’s all Daddy,” said Ghislaine. She rolled her eyes in a rather jocular what-can-you-do way. “It’s all Art Deco, inside and out. Do you know Art Deco?”

Nestor said, “No.” He shook his head slightly. Here was another of those things that made him feel so—ummmm not so much ignorant as uncultivated, around Ghislaine.

“Well, it’s a French style from the 1920s. In French it’s ‘Les Arts Décoratifs.’ That means a lot to Daddy, its being French. I’m sure that’s why Daddy bought this house in the first place. It’s not very big, and it’s not all that grand, but it’s an original Art Deco house. These easy chairs and the coffee table, they’re authentic pieces of Art Deco furniture.” She gestured toward one of the chairs and said, “Here, why don’t we sit down?”

So they both sat down in the Art Deco easy chairs. She sipped some tea and said, “These chairs all by themselves cost Daddy a fortune. The thing is, Daddy doesn’t” ::::::doesn’t:::::: “want Philippe and me to forget that our origins are French. We’re only allowed to speak French at home. I mean, Creole—Daddy loathes” ::::::loathes:::::: “Creole, even though he has to teach Creole at EGU. He says it’s so-oh-oh-oh-oh primitive, he can’t stand it. That’s why when Philippe came home from school speaking Creole with a kid like this boy Antoine, who grew up without ever knowing anything but Creole… and Philippe obviously wanted to be accepted by this, I’m sorry… imbecile—it just killed Daddy. And then when Philippe talked back to Daddy in Creole to impress this moron… that’s when Daddy really went up in smoke. I mean, I love Daddy, and you will, too, once you get to know him” ::::::“once I get to know him,” meaning…?:::::: “but I think Daddy has just a tiny bit”—she put a thumb and forefinger out in front of her until they were this close to touching—“a tiny bit of snobbery. For example, I could tell Daddy didn’t want to let on how excited he was about my joining South Beach Outreach.” ::::::my joining, not me joining:::::: “I honestly think he was more excited—”

“What’s Philippe think about his French origins and everything?” said Nestor. He hadn’t meant to cut her off, but he had no patience with Daddy’s snobbery and South Beach Outreach and the rest of this social stuff.

“Philippe’s only fifteen,” said Ghislaine. “I doubt that he thinks anything about it at all, not consciously. Right now he wants to be a Neg, a black Haitian, like Antoine and this Dubois, and they want to be like American black gangbangers, and I don’t know what American black gangbangers want to be like.”

So they talked about Philippe’s troubles and schools and gangs.

“This city is so broken up into nationalities and races and ethnic groups,” Ghislaine was saying, “and you can try to explain all that to somebody fifteen, like Philippe, but he won’t listen. And you know what? Even if he understands, it’s not going to make—”

Ghislaine suddenly shhhhhhut her lips with her forefinger and turned toward the rear of the house… listening… Barely above a whisper to Nestor: “I think that’s him, Philippe. He always comes in through the kitchen door.”

Nestor looked in that direction. He could hear somebody, presumably Philippe, plunking something heavy down on the kitchen table… and opening a refrigerator door.

Ghislaine leaned over, and in the same whispery voice, she said: “He always gets something cold to drink as soon as he gets home from school. If he thinks Daddy might be here, he gets a glass of orange juice. If he knows Daddy won’t be here, like today, he’ll get a Coke.”

Thunk. The refrigerator door closed. Ghislaine looked that way warily before turning back to Nestor. “Daddy doesn’t try to keep Coke out of the house, but every time he sees Philippe drinking one he’ll say, ‘Just like drinking a liquid candy bar, isn’t it.’ Or something like that, and it drives Philippe crazy. He can’t stand it. When Daddy says things that are supposed to be funny, Philippe doesn’t dare laugh… because half the time Daddy’s slipped in some sort of… some sort of subtle sarcasm he’s got to deal with. He’s only fifteen. Sometimes I think I should say something to Daddy about it.” She looked rather searchingly at Nestor, as if he might have some wise counsel to offer.

Nestor smiled at her with as much warmth as he could put into a smile… smiled a couple of beats too long, actually. “Depends on your father,” he said. Depends on your father? What was that supposed to mean?… It meant that he was distracted… He loved the completely vulnerable, unguarded look on Ghislaine’s face… a look that seemed to say, “I surrender my judgment to yours.” When she leaned forward like that, her face was barely eighteen inches from the knees of her crossed legs. Her shorts were pretty short. Her beautiful legs were vulnerable, unguarded innocence in its carnal manifestation. He wanted to embrace—::::::Cut it out, you idiot! Isn’t it bad enough that you’ve decided to stick your nose into a School Police case? All you need to do now—:::::: He forced this business of conceivable carnal attractions out of his head. But his smile and his stare never changed. Neither did hers… until she began to compress her lips slightly… Nestor interpreted it as meaning “We can’t say everything that’s on our minds, can we.”

Pop! That swelling bubble vanished the moment she heard her brother coming out of the kitchen. She stood up from the chair and said, “Philippe, is that you?”

“Yeah.” You could tell the boy was trying to force his fifteen-year-old voice down into a manly baritone.

“Come here a minute,” said Ghislaine. “There’s somebody I want you to meet!”

A pause… then, “Okay.” Somehow he managed to push his voice down still deeper in search of the sludge of put-upon boredom at the very bottom.

Ghislaine arched her eyebrows and rolled her eyes upward. I’m sorry, but we just have to put up with this.

Philippe, a tall but terribly skinny boy, came walking into the living room with a slow rocking gait that Nestor recognized immediately as the Pimp Roll. The crotch of his jeans hung down practically to his knees… the waistline went around his hips… revealing about nine inches of a pair of luridly patterned boxer shorts. On top, a black T-shirt featuring some flashy yellow script saying, UZ MUVVUZ, a Neg so-called rasta-rap group Nestor was vaguely aware of. A cartoonish picture below the UZ MUVVUZ took you into an alligator’s gaping maw, teeth rampant, and right down the beast’s dark gullet. The boy, Philippe, topped that off with a bandanna around his forehead in loud shades of green, yellow, and red, shot through with white… all this rather dated black Street Dude haberdashery adorning a body the color of café au lait… and a gang bandanna crowning a babyish teenage head! The boy had a delicate face, or delicate for a Haitian, in Nestor’s eyes… almost Anglo lips… but slightly too wide a nose… It was a sweet face… even now as he surveyed the room with his eyebrows folded over on his nose at eye level and his jawbones swung off-center in an attempt at a f*ck-you scowl… it was still a sweet face.

Ghislaine stood up and said, “Philippe, I want you to meet Officer Camacho. You remember my telling you about Officer Camacho, don’t you?… and that big article in the paper—the thing that happened in Overtown while I was there with South Beach Outreach? Officer Camacho’s here about that.”

By now Nestor was on his feet, and Philippe was looking straight at him. The boy’s expression had completely changed. But what exactly was on his mind all of a sudden? He was… wary?… or just surprised?… or baffled?… or maybe startled by the extraordinary musclescape in navy chiaroscuro that now stood before him? As they shook hands, Nestor said, “Hi, Philippe!” with all the Cop Charm he could muster. Cop Charm was the other side of the coin of the Cop Look. The Cop Look worked because the cop had the confidence of someone who knows he has the Power and the official go-ahead to use it—and you don’t. Cop Charm worked for the same reason. I have the Power—and you don’t—but my intention right now is solely to be warm and friendly, because so far I approve of you. Radiating Cop Charm tended to strike a mere civilian as a present, a gift from a man who has the sanction to be violent. Nestor could see the boy’s entire attitude change with a completely unconscious gratitude.

At first Philippe just stared at Nestor, wonder-struck… all at once not a basso profundo… but a timid teenage tenor struggling to work up enough courage to say, “Gosh… I saw you online last night!”

Nestor kept radiating Cop Charm. “Really?” he said.

“There was a picture of you and a picture of this big guy you fought. He was really big! How do you fight somebody like that?”

“Aw, that’s not really fighting,” said Nestor. “You’re not trying to hurt the guy. You’re just rolling in the dirt, so you can arrest him.”

“Rolling in the dirt?”

“That’s what they call it,” said Nestor. “ ‘Rolling in the dirt.’ It could be on the floor, the way I was, or on a sidewalk or out in the middle of the street—that happens plenty of times—and plenty of times it really is in the dirt, but it’s all called ‘rolling in the dirt.’ ”

“But that guy was so big!” said the boy.

“That can make it easier,” said Nestor. “A lot of the really big guys let themselves get fat, because that makes them even bigger. And they don’t know what training is. They just wanna look big.”

“Training?”

“They don’t keep fit,” said Nestor. “They don’t run. Most of the time they don’t even lift. This big guy was like that. All you have to do is keep hold of a guy like him and let him wear himself out. The guy’s not in shape, and he’s jerking that big tub of his this way and that, trying to get loose, and he’s running out of breath, and he’s sucking air, and pretty soon he’s done for. All you have to do is hang on, and the guy does all the work for you.”

“But how do you hang on? That guy was really big.”

“Different cops use different holds, but me, I find a plain old figure four plus a full nelson is all you need in most cases,” said Nestor as nonchalantly as he could. Then he explained the figure four and the full nelson to Philippe.

By now Philippe had dropped his Neg gangbanger pose completely. He was just a fifteen-year-old boy fascinated by real-life tales of derring-do. Ghislaine said why didn’t they sit down. This Philippe did quite willingly… he who had made it clear, through his manner and tone of voice, that coming here to the living room where There’s somebody I want you to meet—some adult, no doubt—was about the last thing he wanted to do. Nestor gestured toward the easy chair, where he had been sitting, and Philippe sat down there, and Nestor took a seat on the couch. He didn’t even try to sit back in it. He sat on the front edge of the seat cushion and leaned toward Philippe.

They began chatting away, mostly about things in police work Philippe had always wondered about, and Nestor started asking Philippe about himself and his interests and remarked upon how tall Philippe was… and wondered if he ever played any sports. Philippe allowed as how he had thought about trying out for the basketball team at his high school but decided against it for this and that reason, and Nestor asked, “What high school do you go to?”

“De Forest,” said Philippe. He said it tonelessly.

“No kidding,” said Nestor. “De Forest?”

Ghislaine spoke up. “As a matter of fact, Philippe was in that class where that incident occurred, when the teacher assaulted a student, and there were demonstrations, and they arrested the teacher. Philippe was right there when it happened.”

Nestor looked at Philippe. Philippe appeared frozen. His face was a blank wall. Obviously his interest in expanding upon the subject didn’t exist.

“Oh, I remember that,” said Nestor. “Every cop remembers that. The teacher—what’s his name?—Estevez?—is charged with felony assault,” said Nestor. “That’s a lot more serious than simple misdemeanor assault. He could go away for a long time.”

Philippe… still a block of ice.

“As I remember, our department responded when the call came in, and so did Miami-Dade, Hialeah, and Doral. It must have been quite a scene, all these cops from all over… sirens, stagger lights, bullhorns—that must have been crazy. I guess they all take it very seriously, this business of teachers assaulting students. Anyway, the School Police ended up handling the whole thing. It’s completely out of our hands, but I remember wondering about it. How did it start, Philippe? You were there. What set the whole thing off?”

Philippe just stared at Nestor—stared absolutely blankly—and when he finally responded, he sounded like a zombie: “Mr. Estevez called François, his name is, up to the front of the class and François said something in Creole, and everybody started laughing, and Mr. Estevez got mad and choked François like this”—he pantomimed a headlock—“and threw him down on the floor.”

“And you saw all this?” said Nestor.

Philippe’s mouth fell open slightly and now he looked frightened. He had no idea what to say. You could practically see the calculations, the odds, the chances, the lies, churning inside his head. He couldn’t make himself say a word. He finally nodded his head up and down slowly and slightly, apparently to say yes without saying yes.

Nestor said, “The reason I’m asking is—do you know some students in your class ::::::time to go for broke:::::: named Patrice Légère, Louis Tremille—Fat Louis, they call him—Honoré Buteau, and Hervé Condorcet?”

Now Philippe’s expression went beyond frozen to sheer fear. This cop’s visit, supposedly in connection with his sister’s innocent presence in a crack house, was suddenly veering eerily straight toward him. Once more he wasn’t comfortable saying yes or no. He hit upon another answer that cast immediate doubt upon itself:

“Uhhh… yes?” he said.

“The reason I’m asking,” said Nestor, “is that I was talking to a detective I know in the School Police, and he told me that one of those boys has recanted his story and they think the other three will, too. All four had originally said the teacher, Estevez, had attacked—what did you say his name was? François?—Estevez had attacked this François, but now they were saying it was the other way around. Estevez had only clamped a headlock on the boy—François?—in self-defense, after the boy attacked him. If that’s true, then these four kids have spared themselves a lot of very serious grief… You know?… They could already be prosecuted for lying to police officers about this thing. But they won’t be, not if they tell the truth now. You have any idea what would’ve happened if they’d stuck to their original story and been sworn in as witnesses at a trial? ¡Dios mío! They’d be guilty of perjury and lying to police officers! They’re all sixteen or seventeen. They could be prosecuted as adults, and now you’re talking about serious jail time. And think about the teacher, Estevez! God knows what jail would do to him! He’d be locked up for years with a bunch of gangbangers totally lacking in affect.”

He paused and gave Philippe a hard look, waiting for him to ask what “lacking in affect” meant. But Philippe was too petrified to say anything at all. So Nestor just went ahead and told him.

“Half the lowlifes in prison are lacking in affect. That not only means they don’t know right from wrong and couldn’t care less—they also have no sympathy for other people whatsoever. They don’t feel guilt, they don’t feel pity, they don’t feel sorrow—unless you deprive them of something they want. And four boys from de Forest?—teenagers?—they’ll rip a kid-like-that’s pants off and—Christalmighty! Well, no use getting into the details, but I’m telling you, you have no idea how lucky these boys are, telling the truth this early. If they got caught later, Whoahhhh!” Nestor shook his head and said with a morose chuckle, “They wouldn’t even have a life after that. They’d just be breathing in and out!” Another morose chuckle… “Oh, and by the way, what do you think of the teacher, Mr. Estevez?”

Philippe’s fifteen-year-old mouth fell open… and no words came out… agony… He took a couple of deep breaths… and finally said in a soft, high-pitched fifteen-year-old voice,

“I guess… he was… okay.”

“Philippe!” said Ghislaine. “You told me you really liked him!”

“What did Patrice, Fat Louis, Honoré and Hervé think of him?” said Nestor.

“I… I don’t know.”

Nestor could see Philippe bracing himself for every question. Maybe he had already pushed him too far. “I was just trying to picture them sitting twenty feet from their teacher, Mr. Estevez, in a courtroom and sending him off to prison. I’d sure hate to be in that position myself.” He looked downward and shook his head and wound up with a mirthless I guess that’s life smile twisted on his lips.

“I gotta go now,” said Philippe. He was no longer a budding baritone. He was just a frightened boy with an overwhelming urge to turn into thin air. No one can see air.

He looked at his sister as if to ask was it okay if he got up from the couch and departed. Ghislaine gave him no cue one way or the other. Nestor decided to do it himself. He stood up and radiated a high dose of Cop Charm at Philippe, who took that cue right away and all but sprang from the couch to his feet. Nestor offered his hand… like a present, radiating… I have the Power—and you don’t—but my intention right now is solely to be warm and friendly, because so far I approve of you… as they shook hands. Nestor said, “Nice to meet you, Philippe!”… and added a little extra pressure… Philippe wilted like a peony. He gave Ghislaine the kind of panicked glance that says, “Help me out!”—then headed back to the kitchen. No Pimp Roll this time.

They heard the kitchen door leading outside open and close. Ghislaine followed to make sure Philippe had left… before going back to the living room for the postmortem.

“How did you get the last names of those four boys?” said Ghislaine, “Patrice, Louis Jean—what were the other two?”

“Hervé and Honoré.”

“Did you see the look on Philippe’s face? He must have thought the police already know everything about this case! Seriously, how did you get their last names?”

“It wasn’t all that hard,” said Nestor. “I have a friend on the School Police. We used to be in the Marine Patrol together. I noticed that really shook your brother up.”

“Well… what about Philippe’s involvement?”

“He’s scared,” said Nestor. “He didn’t want to say a word about the whole thing. My guess is he’s afraid of the kid involved, this Dubois. My friend told me he’s a bad kid, got a juvenile record this long. That’s why I wanted to let them all know they’ve got something much worse than this kid to worry about.”

“Let them all know?” said Ghislaine.

“Well, you know yourself that the first thing your brother’s gonna do is get hold of those four boys and tell them the cops are talking about them, and not just cops from the School Police, either, and that one of them recanted. Each boy will say that it wasn’t him, of course, but they’ll… you know… they’ll start wondering who the traitor is. If I’m right, everybody will start mistrusting everybody else, and they’ll be thinking, ‘Hey, is that what could happen to me if I lie to protect Dubois? It’s gonna be worse than what Dubois could do to me.’ I also think it’ll help if they start talking about this teacher, Estevez, and what’s gonna happen to him. They can’t all be lacking in affect! I can tell Philippe’s not that way.”

“I know he’s not,” said Ghislaine. She paused… composed… deep in thought… then exploded with “He lacks something worse, Nestor! He lacks courage! He’s a baby! He fawns over—worthless delinquents like Dubois! He fears them more than death itself—and therefore he’s drawn to their gross toughness and wants them to like him!… I’m sure they laugh at him the moment he’s gone, but he grovels before their every opinion. Does he worry about being arrested for perjury? Does he worry about the horrible things that could happen to him in jail? Does he know how guilty he will feel if he helps put Mr. Estevez in jail? Yes!—he knows all of that. But none of that is anything compared to his fear of the tough guys, this Dubois and all the rest of them. He idolizes them for being tougher and more violent than he is! And right now he’s trembling at the thought of the unspeakable horrors of what they will do to him if he betrays them. It’s worse than unspeakable—it’s unimaginable! In his mind it’s the ultimate horror!…! He’s just a poor little baby, Nestor, a poor little boy!”

Her lips began compressing and turning down at the corners… her chin trembled upward until it looked like a wriggling fig… her eyes began leaking…

::::::Yes? No? Perfectly okay if I put my arm around her to console her—right? Right… to console her.:::::: So he did.

They were standing side by side as his arm went across her back. Her head was down, but then she tilted it upward until she was looking him right in the face from no more than six inches away. Nestor turned the arm he had around her from a now-now-buck-up gesture to a genuine squeeze. That brought her face even closer to his. Her expression was a primordial plea for help.

“Don’t worry. If I have to take care of this Dubois, I’ll do that, too,” Nestor said in a hushed voice but quite grandly.

Her eyes still fixed upon his face, Ghislaine spoke a single word barely above a whisper: “Nestor…” Her lips parted slightly.

The lips hypnotized him. ::::::Cut it out, Nestor! This is a police investigation, for God’s sake! But she’s giving me an open invitation! More than anything else, she needs comfort and protection. Right?… right. It’s just a way of restoring her composure. Right?… right!:::::: He brought his lips so close to hers that now she had only one eye, in the center of her forehead, practically on top of her nose—

Sound of a key in the lock on the front door, barely eight feet from where they stood. Whoops! Their heads snapped apart. Nestor’s incriminating arm retracted from her side back to—slap!—his.

The door opened. A tall, slender man, a fifty-year-old Philippe, he looked like… stood before them… startled and embarrassed… Nestor felt the same way, startled and embarrassed… All three of them froze for a fraction of a second… appalling embarrassment! The man wore a light-blue shirt open at the collar, but on top of that, a navy blazer. In the blazer he embodied the mortal terror of every young man: Dignity!

Ghislaine tiptoed on the ice:

“Daddy, this is Officer Nestor Camacho! Officer Camacho is here—but you just missed Philippe! He left just a few minutes ago!”

::::::What’s that all about? ‘Yes, we’re alone now, but we haven’t been alone for long—Christalmighty! is that what she’s trying to say?:::::

Pell-mell romped randy clues in Lantier’s head. :::::My God, that Officer Camacho! We have a celebrity in our home! He’s famous! Why is he standing so close to my daughter—within inches of her? And why are their faces so red? Why do they seem embarrassed? What should I do? Rush to shake his hand? Philippe was here?… So what? Welcome him to the house? Thank the famous Officer Camacho… for what?… Has he put his hand on my daughter? Is the bastard here to fool around? Why didn’t anyone inform me he was coming? Look at him… the bodybuilder build bulging in the highlights of his polo shirt. He won a medal! They keep writing articles about him in the paper and showing him on television proclaiming his heroics. He’s important! What right does that give him to fool around with Ghislaine? She’s a child! He’s a goddamned Cuban cop! A Cuban cop! What is he doing here? A Cuban cop! Why is she standing so close to him?—a Cuban cop! Qu’est-ce que c’est? Quel projet fait-il? Quelle bêtise? What’s going on?!::::::