Back to Blood

12





Jujitsu Justice


Just about 6:30 p.m. Magdalena unlocked the door to her cover story, her beard—which is to say, the apartment she officially shared with Amélia—took one step inside and UHHhhhnnnnggghhhhhhssssighed a lot louder and longer than she meant to. She heard a man talking in the living room: “Now, let’s just hold on a minute… I am not even suggesting that there’s anything unlawful about it—although I—” A second man broke in: “But that’s almost beside the point, isn’t it. A mistake—a blunder, to use your word—of this—” Actually, as soon as she heard the querulous, stentorian tone in which the first man said, “I am not even suggesting,” Magdalena realized it was only Amélia watching some sort of evening news show on that big plasma TV of hers.

The voices suddenly sank to a barely audible aububblyblumbling mumble mumble mumble and a single wumble wonk wonk wonk wonk of laughter and more mumblemumblemumblemumble, and Amélia appeared in the doorway in her T-shirt, jeans, and ballet slippers with her head tilted to one side and her lips twisted upward on the other side, until they practically closed her eye, that being her way of signaling, “Mockery coming”—and said,

“What was that?”

“What was what?” said Magdalena.

“That groan I heard. ¡Dios mío!”

“Oh, that wasn’t a real groan,” said Magdalena, “it was a sigh-groan.”

“A sigh-groan…” said Amélia. “I see… Does that mean it came from the heart?”

Magdalena rolled her eyes upward in the end-of-my-rope mode and said rather bitterly, “Yeah, from the heart or somewhere down there. I can think of several places.”

She walked right past Amélia and into the living room and practically launched her body bottom-first onto the couch and sigh-groaned again, “Ahhhunnnggghhhh.” She looked up at Amélia, who had come in right behind her. “It’s Norman… I don’t know how much more of Dr. Wonderful I can take,” whereupon she began a detailed recounting of Norman’s behavior at Art Basel, “practically shoving Maurice Fleischmann’s nose into porn to make sure he can keep him on his string and use him for his own pathetic social climbing, and it’s so unethical—I mean, it’s worse than unethical… it’s cruel, what he’s doing to Maurice—”

Sure enough, on the TV screen were three of exactly the sort of dead-serious know-it-alls she figured they were when she heard them from the hallway… the inevitable dark suits and various amplitudes of scarce hair on their domes, domes determined to paralyze you with solemn opinions on politics and public policy. The TV had such a big screen, their arms, legs, and lips, which never stopped moving, appeared big enough to be right here in the room with you, radiating a tedium Magdalena got only the faintest drone of, thank God, as she explained that “Norman’s love of Norman would be embarrassing even if he was subtle about it, and Subtle About It is not Norman in the first place. Sometimes I just want to throw up.”

She was only peripherally aware of it when the suits vanished and a commercial came on. A fortyish man in a golf outfit is bouncing on the floor of a living room as if he’s a basketball thubba thubba thubba thubba, while a woman, slightly younger, and two children point fingers at him and weep with laughter thubba thubba thubba thubba. The bouncing man vanished, an event Magdalena noticed only because the screen became much brighter. She was deep into the Columbus Day Regatta—“Norman was just aching to be recognized as the great porn doctor and get himself invited up onto one of those boats.” She flicked only the quickest glance at what had lit up the screen, namely, a second commercial, an animated cartoon of thirty or forty pigs with wings flying in a military formation beneath a radiant blue sky and then peeling off one by one and diving like dive-bombers, whereupon a single name takes over the screen: ANASOL, and Magdalena was telling Amélia how “the girls were pulling the thongs out of the cracks of their asses and the boys were taking their shorts off and f*cking them doggie-style right there on the deck in front of everybody, and Norman’s trying to get me to take off my bikini top, and I knew he wouldn’t stop there.” She was only momentarily aware of it when a news anchorman appears on the screen. A TV news reporter is in some sort of run-down gymnasium holding a microphone up to a tall man about thirty-five with a lot of muscles. Magdalena was vaguely aware of some guys, late teens, early twenties, milling about behind them… Couldn’t have been less interesting… All she was interested in was telling Amélia about how Norman was “sitting there on the deck, and he’s like crammed in with about forty or fifty other people, mostly men who look like they’re gonna need some porn-addiction therapy themselves—and I mean like need it very soon—and here’s the noted porn psychiatrist sitting there with them—and I couldn’t believe it. It was scary. They’re projecting porn movies onto the huge sails of a boat—huge—and ¡Dios mío! Norman’s the worst of them all! He’s got this tent pole underneath his bathing trunks, and it’s so obvious! Talk about a porn addict! He’s enchanted—I mean like on those huge sails all those erections looked gigantic, and when the girls spread their legs, it looked like a man could walk in standing up. I couldn’t believe it!” Magdalena had such a compulsion to impart every detail to Amélia, she didn’t even notice it when the same sort of boat, a schooner with very high masts and voluminous sails, appears on the screen, and way up on the highest mast two little figures are struggling, and the bigger one locks his legs around the waist of the smaller one, who’s about to fall to his death, and starts swinging hand over hand down the jib sail cable, carrying him down toward the deck and toward the camera, and now you can see the savior’s face—

“Magdalena!” said Amélia. “Isn’t that your boyfriend?”

Magdalena looked squarely at the TV for the first time “¡Dios mío! Nestor!”

The sight took her breath away… She hadn’t seen this on TV at the time. She had been too consumed that day with working up the nerve to tell her mother off and kiss Hialeah goodbye… and now she wasn’t in the mood for one second of Nestor’s great triumph… yet curiosity got the better of her: “Amélia, turn that up, will you?”

Amélia’s instinct exactly; she was already remoting the sound up. On the screen Nestor’s face is heading straight for the two of them, his face and the boos, catcalls, imprecations pouring down from the causeway up above, a regular squall of Spanish and English and God knows what other tongues. ::::::Good! His own people hate him! So what does it matter that he gets so much publicity—right?… right!… That old Hialeah stuff—you either get rid of it or you get all tangled up in it until it suffocates you completely… and Nestor was part of it, wasn’t he, a big part… How dare these americanos prop up his reputation and try to make some kind of hero out of him? How dare they insinuate that maybe I’ve made the wrong choice and given up a… celebrity?::::::

“¡Caramba!” Amélia said. “He’s really cute, that Hialeah boyfriend of yours!”

Magdalena grew quiet, testy, and abrupt. “He’s not my ‘boyfriend,’ Hialeah or otherwise.”

Amélia had her goat and couldn’t resist playing with it. “Okay, he’s not your Hialeah boyfriend. But you have to admit he is really hot!” On the screen is that newspaper picture of Nestor with his shirt off. “He could pose for one of those statues of a Greek god or something.” Amélia’s face was fairly sparkling with teasing good humor. “Sure you don’t want to reconsider, Magdalena? Or maybe you could fix me and him up.”

Magdalena’s mouth fell open, but she was speechless. She couldn’t think of a single riposte. She was aware that her face had become immobile, and she couldn’t do anything about it. ::::::Thanks a lot, Amélia! Thanks a whole lot… So sweet of you to put into words everything I’m feeling… Oh, thanks for shoving it all in my face.:::::

An airmada of animated-cartoon pigs with wings is flying at an incredible speed… so fast, white puffs of cloud rocket past against a sunny bright blue sky… all this to the martial music of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”… One by one, the flying pigs begin to peel off and dive like dive-bombers toward an unseen target below. A deep baritone voice-over says, “Smooth… powerful… fast-working, and always on target… That’s the promise of… ANASOL”… Simultaneously the name ANASOL fills the screen.

“Anasol…” said Yevgeni. “What is the Anasol?”

“Believe me, you don’t want to know,” said Nestor. “It’s a sort of a cream.” He and Yevgeni were sitting in front of the TV in Yevgeni’s studio. It was about thirty minutes after midnight, and Nestor had just come off the Crime Suppression Unit’s four-to-midnight shift. They were watching the local news, broadcast first at 6:00 p.m. and again now at the midnight hour.

Blip the so-called news team has returned, three men and a woman sitting at a maybe fifteen-foot-wide curving TV-Modernistic desk, where they read the news off teleprompters… all four chuckling and making faces to show what a witty, collegial time they had for themselves during the commercial break… and signaling that the lighter-sided, human-interesting, end-of-the-show segment is now on. The anchorman says, “Well, Tony, I gather the business news in Miami has taken a somewhat loopy twist, or is it a knot?”

Business newscaster Tony shakes his head side to side, “Come on, Bart, did you already know this story is about ropes and the business side of rope-climbing, or am I just a really lucky guy?”

He sockets his eyes into the teleprompter and continues: “Rope-climbing, using your arms only, not your legs, was a popular sport in Europe and America for at least a thousand years, until about fifty years ago, up until the Olympics dropped it in 1932, and schools and colleges soon followed suit. It seemed dead and gone for good… That was until one man here in Miami has just brought it back to life… and thrown South Florida’s thriving fitness-center industry into turmoil. The turmoil has only boiled hotter since then.”

Nestor’s heart sped up on red alert. ::::::¡Dios mío! This story can’t possibly be heading where it seems to be heading, can it?!::::::

Oh, but it can! Onto the screen comes video footage of a young man climbing hand over hand up a rope alongside the seventy-foot foremast of a schooner. Upturned faces on the deck and in small motorcraft and downturned faces from a nearby bridge look on with great excitement and concern, cheering, booing, screaming God knows what. A telescopic lens closes in on the climber. He’s wearing the shapeless shorts and short-sleeved shirt of a Miami Marine Patrol officer, but there’s plenty of shape, massive shape, to his shoulders and upper arms. The telescopic camera makes his face unmistakably clear—

Nestor’s brain and his entire central nervous system have become numb with something far more powerful than excitement, namely, fateful suspense. ::::::That’s me, all right, but ¡Dios mío!—Fate is sweeping me toward… What?::::::

Business newscaster Tony provides the voice-over: “And this is a Miami Marine Patrol officer named Nestor Camacho in action climbing a pulley cable of the seventy-foot-high foremast of a pleasure schooner on Biscayne Bay—that’s the Rickenbacker Causeway you see there—to rescue, some call it—or arrest, deport, and send to his doom, many of Camacho’s Cuban compatriots call it—the small figure you can just make out sitting in a little bucket seat up on the very top of the mast.”

In a short, highly edited sequence, the video footage shows ::::::me!:::::: and ::::::my:::::: exploits seizing ::::::my:::::: quarry and hauling him down the cable to safety.

Peripheral vision alerted Nestor to Yevgeni staring at ::::::me:::::: with intensity to the max. He didn’t dare return the gaze, however. He was having a hard enough time controlling the tremor of elation sweeping through his nervous system.

The voice-over man, Tony, is saying, “Every bodybuilder in South Florida—and their number is legion—has seen only one thing in this ‘rescue’… or ‘arrest’… call it what you will… and that’s this young Miami cop’s physique and sheer strength.” The Herald’s original photograph of Nestor’s bare upper body appears briefly.

“Since then,” business newscaster Tony continues, “awe has turned into a frenzy in the fitness industry. Four days ago, the same young officer, Nestor Camacho, performed another amazing feat of strength when he overpowered and arrested this six-foot-five, 275-pound accused drug dealer who was in the process of choking a brother officer to death in Overtown.” On-screen is a newspaper photograph of a hulking, beaten, bleary-eyed, head-down, handcuffed-behind-the-back TyShawn Edwards as he is led into custody by three Miami cops whom he dwarfs in size. “The rush to ropes among fitness devotees began the moment the young cop climbed to the top of the mast—but they can’t find any ropes to rush to and climb. In all of Miami’s metropolitan region there seems to be only one proper rope-climber’s rope—and it’s at the gym where Nestor Camacho has been working out for the past four years. It’s in Hialeah, and it’s called—are you ready for this?—‘Rodriguez’s Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym’… That’s right, ‘Rodriguez’s Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym.’ Channel Twenty-One’s Earl Mungo is standing by in Hialeah now with Mr. Jaime Rodriguez in the gym.”

Blip. On the screen there he is, Rodriguez, standing next to the TV reporter, Earl Mungo. The suddenly newsworthy rope, one and a half inches in diameter, is hanging—prominently—maybe eight feet back. Magnetized by the presence of a TV crew, a crowd of mostly muscular bodybuilders, Rodriguez’s clients, has gathered around, three deep. Rodriguez is wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt so tight, it looks like it’s been painted on.

Earl Mungo says, “Jaime, do you have any idea what a ruckus this rope here has kicked up in the South Florida fitness-center business?”

“Oh, man, tell me about it. It’s gotten wild! We getting run over by every gym rat in South Florida!” Laughter. “And I’m telling you, ever since Nestor took out that giant the other day, it’s gone crazy. So many people want to join this gym, I’ve had to hire all these girls for the office just to keep track of things, and never mind the new trainers. I’m telling you, sometime I think I got a madhouse on my hands.” Appreciative laughter and whistles from the boys. One yells out, “Yo! You go, Madhouse!” More laughter.

“What is it, exactly, that makes rope-climbing such a great exercise?”

“You’d have to combine five or six weight exercises to get the results you can get from rope-climbing, and even then you won’t get them all. You’re using your biceps—I guess that’s obvious—but it also gives a helluva workout to a big muscle a lot of people never heard of because you can’t see it. It’s called the brachialis, and it’s underneath the biceps. If you exercise it right, you’ll really be able to make a muscle.” He lifts his arm and makes a muscle that looks like a big steep rock. “It’s very hard to develop the brachs if you’re just using weights, but in rope-climbing you’re giving it a workout all the way up. Nestor has been working out here on this rope for four years solid, and man, I’m telling you, it’s some kinda paying off!”

Earl Mungo, beaming, says into the camera, “Well, Tony, Bart, there you have it—rope-climbing is some kinda paying off! To bodybuilders it’s like the introduction of the iPhone. Everybody jes’ gotta have it. And it all began where I’m standing right now—in Hialeah, in Rodriguez’s—I’m sorry, guys, but I gotta try it once anyway: Rodriguez’s Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!”

The anchorman was still reciting his segue to whatever was coming next—when Yevgeni said in a reverent, astounded, hushed voice: “Nestor, I have no idea—all this time I have no idea you are… who you are… the policeman who is bring that man down from the mast. I saw you myself on television and then you come live here, and still I have no idea it is you! You’re famous! My roommate—my roommate?—I live with a famous person!”

Nestor said, “I’m not famous, Yevgeni. I’m just a cop.”

“No—”

“I just did what I was ordered to do, and if that turns out the right way, the cop is a ‘hero’… for about ten minutes. He’s not famous. ‘Famous’ is something else.”

“No, no, no, no, Nestor! You just saw it! Famous is causing the crazy time in a whole industry! Famous is being the icon for a whole lot of people!”

“Well, thanks… I guess,” said Nestor, who had only a vague idea what icon meant. He directed a single dismissive flip of his hand toward the TV screen, that and a sneer, then turned away from it entirely. “They gotta hype everything, that bunch a monkeys.” ::::::To lie in behalf of modesty is not really lying, is it… There’s something generous… and thoughtful… about it… but what if those monkeys have just spoken Truth?… Can I prove from the evidence that they just made that up?… An icon? I gotta google that.::::::

As soon as he was alone, he did. He thought about it and thought about it. It was a quarter to 2:00 a.m. by the time he went to bed.

He fell asleep at once, and his dreams sailed along on a great tide of serotonin.

¡Caliente! Caliente baby… Got plenty fuego in yo’ caja china… Means you needs a length a Hose put in it… Ain’ no maybe ’bout it… Hose knows you burnin’ up wit’out it… Don’tcha—Bulldog was halfway through the song by the time Nestor managed to ascend from deep, deep down in a hypnopompic fog and realize try deny it that masculine voice was his iPhone on the floor beside the mattress—

—What time is it? ’Cause Hose knows you tryin’ a buy it The radiation hands on the little clock said 4:45 a.m. But Hose only gives it free and for about the fiftieth time he castigated himself for ever programming the phone with a song To his fav’rite char-ree-tee. Who would be calling at 4:45 a.m.?! Why?! Hose’ fav’rite cha-ree-tee. He managed to prop himself up on one elbow ’At’s me and find the right ’At’s me, see? and find the right An’ ’at’s me button Yo yo! and Yo yo! Mismo! push—

“Camacho.” That was the way he always answered. Why waste time with all the rest of it?

“Nestor…” It was a Latin voice. It didn’t say “Nes-ter.” “This is Jorge Hernandez—Sergeant Hernandez.”

“Sarge…”

“I know it’s early,” said the Sergeant, “and I probably woke you up, but you’ll want to know about this.”

That snapped Nestor fully awake. He racked his brain, trying to figure out what innanameagod he might want to know about in the dead of the night. He was speechless.

The Sergeant continued. “You gotta get up and get online. Go to YouTube!”

“YouTube?”

“You know Mano Perez, in Homicide? He calls me about a minute ago, and he’s gotten hold of this newspaper that’s coming out today—and he says, ‘You’re on YouTube! You and Camacho!’ I about fell out of the goddamned bed! So I go to YouTube—and it’s true! The goddamned thing’s about me!… and you, Nestor.”

Nestor felt volts going through his brainpan. “You’re kidding!” In the hypnopompic fog he felt stupid immediately. Sergeant Hernandez calling him at 4:45 a.m. to kid around?… couldn’t happen. “You and me, Sarge? What about us?”

“Its about that big comemierda negro we arrested at that comemierda crack house in Overtown. Well, some a*shole there had a cell phone and took some f*cking video. You can tell it’s a cell phone because it’s all jumpy and kinda blurry. But you can see me and you all right, the f*ckers! It’s got a guy’s voice goes along with it, to make sure you get our names and what a coupla mean Cuban bastards we are, torturing this poor negro who’s lying on the floor with his face all twisted up in pain and me and you, we’ve hog-tied this jungle bunny so he can’t move a muscle—”

::::::Jesus Christ, Sarge, I hope to hell they don’t have you on video saying “jungle bunny.”::::::

“—I mean he’s just lying there and they got you yelling into the f*cking guy’s ear, ‘Say what, bitch? Say what? Say what, you filthy little bitch?’ Then they got me saying, ‘Nestor, for Christ’s sake, that’s enough!’ They make it sound like you’re torturing him and I’m keeping you from killing him. Then they go on about women and children being in this ‘supposed crack house’ when really it’s a day care center. I mean, shit—and you never see the f*cker who’s saying all this.”

Guilt… a wave of guilt swept over Nestor. Remembering that moment—feeling… the terrible emotion—the desire to kill—the madness! Kill!… He couldn’t think of the circumstances in any rational way… only the guilt…

“—and then they got me saying,” the Sergeant continued, “they got me saying, ‘He’s a hothead, and he’s a big dick jigaboo who ain’t gonna take no shit off nobody, noway, nohow.’ The p-ssy f*ck calls that a ‘crude and slanderous’ attempt to mimic a black accent—crude and slanderous!—and I’m implying that black people are ignorant primitives. Jesus! That’s the least of it! The big bastard just tried to kill me! He had both hands around my f*cking neck and was trying to crush my windpipe. I already had my gun out when you jumped him. That’s supposed to mean I was ready to kill him in cold blood when you distracted me—distracted me!—plus, I’d called him a jigaboo. What’s the big deal? I was talking to you, not him, and there’s no way he could’ve heard me. And jigaboo means—I don’t know what the f*ck it means. It’s just a word. It wasn’t like I was cursing at him and calling him a shitball, which is what he is.”

::::::Sarge, you still don’t get it, do you. You’ve got to knock it all off—shitballs, macaques, and every other name you have for los negros. Don’t even think about it!—much less say it out loud, even to me.:::::: But what Nestor said was “The guy tried to strangle you, Sarge! Whatta they say about all that?”

“They don’t show any a that! They don’t even say like maybe there’s some reason this huge black bull wound up flat on his back like that in the custody of two cops, except that the two cops are Cubans. You’re supposed to figure the only reason is Cubans are cruel bastards who live for pushing los negros around and abusing them and dissing them and calling them monkeys and pieces a shit and then treating them like monkeys and pieces a shit. And there’s no use trying to tell people they have to put themselves in our shoes because they can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like rolling in the dirt with one a these huge gorillas. I’m telling you, Nestor, we’re gonna be knee-deep in this shit by daybreak and waist-high by noon…”

“Sarge, you gotta stop talking that way, even to me, because later on it comes popping outta your mouth and you’re in deep shit. We’re in deep shit.”

“I know. You’re right. It’s like f*cking gargling with cyanide… but right now we gotta think a something. We need a PR man. How the f*ck do you even find a PR man?… even if you can pay a PR man, which I can’t. I don’t know about you.”

“Whyn’t we go straight to the Chief?” said Nestor.

“That’s not funny, Nestor.”

“I’m not trying to be funny, Sarge. He’s not a bad guy; I spent maybe half an hour with him when they transferred me from Marine Patrol to CST.”

“I don’t care if he’s Saint Francis himself. What’s he gonna do? He’s un negro, Nestor! Why do you think they made him chief?… So the brothers could say, ‘Yo, we got the muh-f*ckin’ Chief a Po-lice now, baby. Now he be on our side! He be lookin’ out for us!’ ”

::::::Jesus! All this shit Sarge is saying! Talk about dissolving… He’s determined to dissolve himself!:::::: Out loud he said, “Whyn’t we just go undercover, Sarge?”

“What the f*ck are you talking about, Camacho?!”

“That way they won’t see us, Sarge. That way we dissolve ourselves.”

“Don’t you get—”

“I’m just kidding, Sarge, I’m just kidding. Where you want to meet?”

“Uhhh…” Long pause… “Shit… come on down to headquarters, as usual, and we’ll talk in the car. And look behind you. Nobody’s got your back on this one. You won’t feel like kidding around, after the sun comes up.”

Nestor thumbed the END button and remained propped up on one elbow on the mattress. He felt catatonic. His eyes focused on a nonexistent point in thin air. ::::::I’m slipping through a crack… into a parallel universe! Oh, come off it, Nestor.:::::: Parallel universe was a phrase he had heard on one of those heavy Dread Purple Dimension spook dramas on television. Parallel me no dread purple dimensions, Camacho. He was shocked and afraid, to tell the simple truth.

YouTube YouTube YouTube YouTube… the frightened part of him didn’t even want to look at the goddamn thing… but the rest of him yanked him up off the mattress and dragged him three feet across the floor through the dirty clothes and dirty towels and miscellaneous empty boxes and dust and hairballs… to his laptop. He sat down on the floor and propped his back up against the wall… and my God, right on the home page… there he is, in the crack house. He’s spellbound by the sight of himself on that little screen… Nestor victorious!! The big brute’s hulk is lying facedown on the floor. ::::::Look at that! The brute is twice my size, but I’m the victor! I’m straddling his back… Look! I’ve got him locked in the full nelson and the figure four. My hands are interlaced behind his neck, and I’m mashing his face into the floor with all my might. My God!::::::

His muscles had already been pumped up, gorged with blood, from wrestling the brute. Now, right there on that little laptop screen, he’s marshaling every last ounce of strength he has to driving the brute’s head into the floor, mashing his face flat for him. ::::::I’m… pumped!:::::: The enormous pressure of the full nelson has bent the brute’s neck forward to the point where he, Nestor, could have broken it, if he really wanted to. You can tell that even on this little laptop screen; the brute’s face is twisted beyond recognition—from the pain! His mouth is open. He wants to scream. But he wants oxygen more. The only sound that escapes his terrified 275-pound body is “Urrrrrrrunhhh… urrrrrrruhunhhh… urrrrrrrrunhhh!” Sounds like a dying duck. Yeah! A duck croaking. Another thirty seconds of maximum pressure—that’s all it would have taken! Stone-cold dead, O black brute! Nestor is mesmerized, watching his triumph on that little screen. Awesome! Nestor hadn’t been aware of the expression on his own face when it was actually happening. ::::::My God! Did I really bare my teeth like that? Did I really put on such a hideous, malevolent grin?::::::

Positively enchanted, Nestor can’t take his eyes off himself on the screen. He watches—and hears—Nestor Camacho remonstrating uhhh uhhh uhhh. He’s out of breath himself uhhh uhhh uhhh humiliating the giant as loudly as he can: “Okay, you uhhh unhhh stu-pid uhhh uhhh uhhh p-ssy!” He remembers wanting the whole room to know that he had utterly crushed the brute. He watches himself lean over until he’s two or three inches from the beast’s ear and shouts directly into it, “Say what, bitch? Say what?”

With that, Nestor’s morale sinks. He wants to click the window closed… From now on it only gets worse, doesn’t it!… What has he done?… He knows what’s next… and here it comes… The epithets, his own, the Sergeant’s, start piling on top of the bone heap at a furious red-mad rate—and the heap catches fire. Into the charnel pyre Nestor throws “Say what, you filthy little bitch?”

Only then, looking at the laptop screen, does Nestor fully get it. Only then does he comprehend, in so many words, how bad this all is… this YouTube introduction of Nestor Camacho to the world!

And what does the world see in this video? Where does the YouTube story begin? The world sees a black prisoner lying facedown, inert, helpless, racked with pain, struggling just to take the next breath, moaning in a way urrrrrrrunh no human being ever moaned before, under arrest at the mercy of two Cuban cops. One of them is mounted on the prisoner’s back, flashing a cruel thirty-two-tooth grin as he delights in the prospect of breaking his prisoner’s very neck with a full nelson. The other one is crouched barely two feet from him, ready to blow his brains out with a .44-caliber revolver. Both of them are humiliating their black prisoner, mocking his manhood, calling him a subhuman moron. Is there no limit to how abusive these two Cuban cops are willing to be toward a black man who, so far as the viewer knows, has done nothing?… And that is the way the YouTube version begins… and, very likely, ends.

No indication whatsoever of the life-or-death crisis that precipitated this vile “abuse,” not so much as a hint that this put-upon black man is in fact a powerful 250-pound young crack house thug, nothing to make it at all credible that he might have touched off the whole thing by wrapping his huge hands around the Sergeant’s neck, that he was within one second of murdering him by crushing his windpipe, that his life was saved only by the immediate reaction of Officer Camacho, who threw himself onto the brute’s back and, weighing only 160 pounds, clamped a couple of wrestling holds onto 275 pounds of crack house thug and rolled in the dirt and the dirtballs with him until the brute became utterly depleted in breath, power, willpower, heart, and manhood… and gave up… like a p-ssy. How could any man pretend not to realize that, faced with death, even a cop experiences an adrenal rush immensely more powerful than all chains of polite conversation and immediately seeks to smother his would-be killer with whatever vile revulsion comes surging up his brain stem from the deepest, darkest, most twisted bowels of hatred? How could any man, even the mildest and most sedentary, fail to understand?!

But nothing on YouTube could possibly let that man know the first half of the story, the crucial half… Nothing! And without that first half, the second half becomes fiction! A lie!

I’m telling you, Nestor, we’re gonna be knee-deep in this shit by daybreak and waist-high by noon. For it is already rising, and it is still dark outside.

And it was still dark outside at 6:00 a.m., when the Chief, an early riser, took a call on his personal line from Jorge Guba, one of Dio’s boy Fridays, saying the Mayor wanted him at City Hall in an hour and a half for a meeting. Seven-thirty? Yes. Had the Chief seen YouTube yet?

So the Chief took a look at YouTube. In fact, he watched it three times. Then he shut his eyes and lowered his head and massaged his temples with one hand… his thumb pressing one temple and his middle and ring fingers the other. Then he said aloud, under his breath:

“Like I really need this, don’t I.”

Grumpily he roused his driver, Sanchez, and told him to have the car ready. When they entered the circular drive in front of the little Pan Am–leftover City Hall at 7:20—one look, and he immediately grew grumpier. Waiting for him, and whomever else, in front of the City Hall entrance, was a platoon of the so-called media, about a dozen of them, dressed like the homeless but lent gravity by all the microphones and notepads in their hands and, above all, by two trucks with telescoping satellite transmitters extended a full twenty feet up in the air for live broadcast. The Chief was not so jolly this time as he got out of the big black Escalade. Hell, he wasn’t even able to take a deep breath and expand his massive black chief chest to the max before the so-called media were swarming over him like mosquitoes. Police abuse and racist slurs were the two terms they kept biting him with in their whining mosquito buzz as he bulled his way through them, without a word, and into City Hall.

Like he really needed this, didn’t he.

The Mayor’s men’s-gym lounge of a conference room was heavily populated with more of his boys Friday: his flack, Portuondo, and his city manager, Bosch, as before… plus Hector Carbonell, the district attorney ::::::district attorney?:::::: and his two gray eminences, Alfredo Cabrillo and Jacque Díaz, both lawyers Dio had known since law school and frequently called upon when confronted by big decisions ::::::big decisions?:::::: And the Mayor made six. The whole platoon was Cuban.

Dio was his usual exuberant self as the Chief entered the room. Big smile and “Aaaaay. Chief! Come in! Have a seat!” He pointed at an easy chair. “I think you know everybody in the room… Right?” The other five Cubans gave the chief little thirty-three-degree smiles. When they all sat down in the room’s jumble of easy chairs and armchairs, the Chief had an odd feeling. Then he realized the Mayor and the boys Friday were arranged in a horseshoe pattern… a sloppy horseshoe, but a horseshoe… and he was seated midway between the horseshoe’s prongs… with a big space between him and the nearest seat on either side. The Mayor was directly opposite him in a straight-back armchair at the crest of the horseshoe’s curve. The Chief’s chair must have been suffering from spring failure, because his bottom sank down so far, he could barely see over his kneecaps. Dio, in his armchair, appeared to be looking down at him. The choir had some chilly looks on their mugs… no smiles at all. The Chief had the sensation of being in a sunken dock, facing the grim visages of a jury.

“I think everybody knows why we’re here?”… The Mayor scanned his platoon… lots of yes nods… then looked straight at the Chief.

“What is it with your boy Camacho?” he said. “The kid’s a one-man race riot.” He was not joking. “Who’s he got left to shit on? The Haitians, maybe? And it’s not as if he’s a deputy chief or even a captain. He’s just a cop, for Christ’s sake, a twenty-five-year-old cop with a proven ability to piss people off in gross numbers.”

The Chief knew what was coming next. Dio was going to demand that he can him. The Chief didn’t have this feeling often… of not being sure of himself… On his good days his confidence and charisma kept Dio and his whole Cuban gang off-balance. He had been in gun battles, real shootouts. He had risked his life to save cops under his command, including Cuban cops, God knows. He had two medals for valor. He had presence. In this room it would take two Cubans standing side by side to have shoulders as wide as his… three of them to come up with a neck as wide as his… forty of them, or maybe four hundred, to have his willingness to risk his own hide for what was right… He really did jump off that six-story roof onto a mattress that looked the size of a playing card from up there. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he was a man… and nobody else in this room was. His confidence, his vitality, that certain look he had in his eyes. In this arena it didn’t matter what color he was. He radiated that rarest and most radiant of all auras… no one could help but behold… the Man! At this moment that wasn’t the way they regarded him, however… He could tell. At this moment they saw only un negro… and that damned negro was on the spot, because if that negro weren’t un negro, nuestro negro, our negro, doing what we tell him to do, he wouldn’t even rate being in this room… None of Dio’s boys had dared so much as twitch an eyebrow… even Dio… but he knew what they thought they were now looking at… just another black hambone in a costume.

That got the Chief’s back up. “What is it with Camacho?” he said, giving the Mayor a 300-watt stare in the eyeballs. “Since you’ve asked”—in the choir many eyebrows now twitched; they had never heard the Chief speak sarcastically to the Mayor before—“the short answer and the long answer and the in-between answer is, he’s a damned good cop.”

The room went silent. Then the Mayor said, “Okay, Cy, he’s a damned good cop. I guess we have to take your word for that. After all, you’re the top cop in this town; you’re the commander in chief. So what’s the problem here? We’ve got your damned good cop, and he and another cop are caught on YouTube abusing a citizen of our African American community, calling him an animal and a jigaboo and a subhuman moron with shit for brains—”

“He’s a drug dealer, Dio!” The Chief’s voice rose and hit a couple of not very commanding notes.

“And that makes it okay for Camacho to address this suspect—this African American suspect—as if he’s a member of a race of subhumans, a bunch of animals? I hope that isn’t what you’re telling me, Cy.”

“But you have to consider the context, Dio, the whole—”

“The context is, your goddamned good cop is shitting all over our African American community! If that’s a good context, then we got a bigger problem. And that problem is leadership. What else could it be?”

That brought the Chief up short—so short, he couldn’t get a word out. What the hell was happening all of a sudden? He was putting his job on the line, his whole career, on behalf of some twenty-five-year-old Cuban cop named Nestor Camacho? And that was being manly? After fifteen years of working hard, going the extra mile, risking your life, stepping right over racism as if it were a speed bump on the road to glory, becoming a leader of men, you risk it all… on some Cuban kid? But how could he get out of this… without showing that with a single sentence Dio had delivered such a rocket to the crotch, it had turned the supposed Ultimate Man into a p-ssy?

And Dionisio knew the fight was over, with that one punch, didn’t he… for he now dropped the sarcasm and spoke in a soothing, healing tone. “Look, Cy, when I appointed you chief, I had total faith in your abilities, your courage, and a lot of other things that would make you a natural leader, and I still do. You’ve never done anything that’s made me feel like I made the wrong decision… and one of those other things was my hope that with you as our chief, we could overcome many mistakes that had been made in the past. For example, I hoped to show our African American community that yes, they may have gotten the short end before, but now they were going to have not just somebody to stand up for their interests… they would have the Man himself. That’s a good thing, and it’s also a powerful symbol. Now, when that Man on the Mast thing happened, I told you to put Camacho on ice for a while. So what did you do? You gave him a medal and a ‘lateral transfer,’ and not to a horse in the park, because the only ones he could annoy there would be the goddamned rats and squirrels. No, that would be a lateral transfer with a ‘dip,’ I think you said.” The Mayor was heating up again, and slipping the leash off his sarcastic attack dog. He seemed to know that the Chief was down for the count. “In a situation like this one, no one person is the issue. You know what I mean? You want to stand up for one of your men, and that’s commendable. But right now, you and me, we got the obligation to stand up for hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people who can’t follow the fine points. You know what I mean?”

The Chief found himself nodding yes… and immediately realized that he had done the same thing, meekly nodded yes, a moment ago… They must be marveling at their leader’s jujitsu powers of persuasion… Just like that he reduces Black Superman to about the omnipotence of a smoked oyster—they being the boys Friday. They’re all staring. They’re not glowering. No, they’re fascinated, like little boys. They’ve got the best seats in the house… for watching the Incredible Shrinking Chief… shrink. You can’t put anything past our Dionisio Cruz, can you! All of five-feet-six, but he can handle any six-foot-four Supernegro who gets in his way. That’s why he’s… the caudillo. He doesn’t accuse el negro of anything, he doesn’t threaten el negro with anything… or not in any form you could introduce as evidence… he just lays out his net, and in no time… Gotcha!… el negro’s inside the net, struggling… punching thin air… trapped in a net of words.

“All they know,” the Mayor continued, “is that here’s this young cop, this kid—what?—four years on the force?—and everywhere he goes, the Four Horsemen follow… Racism, Chauvinism, Ethnic Slurs, and… uhhh…” He had been going great until that point. Now he was stuck. He couldn’t come up with a fourth mounted equestrian scourge. “… uhhh… and all the rest of it,” he finished off with, lamely. “You know what I mean?”

What bullshit! He couldn’t sit here and nod yes to stuff like that! So he said, “No, I don’t, Dio.” But it came out just as lamely as little Dionisio’s uhhh… and all the rest of it. It came out just as faint as his own yes nods. He put no heart into it… It was very noble, defending one of his men, a lowly one, too… but was it really noble if it put in jeopardy all the things you could do for your real brothers?

::::::It was as if Dio was reading my e-mail.::::::

“Look, Cy, the issue is not whether Camacho is a bad cop or a good cop. I’m willing to grant you that point. Okay? But he’s become something bigger than himself. He’s become a symbol of something that cuts everybody in this town to the quick. Your loyalty, which I admire, doesn’t alter the situation. I’m sure the kid never even thought about it at the time. But the facts are the facts. Twice in the last few months he’s made whole communities see red… He’s gotten their bowels in an uproar… He’s treated them like dirt; don’t you think your department could possibly get on with its work without this twenty-five-year-old kid’s services?”

::::::I wondered when he was finally going to get to this point. And when he did, I was going to draw a line in the sand and dig in.::::::

“Yeah, I do know what you mean,” he found himself saying. But he said it with a sigh, like a man yielding—unwillingly, of course—to destiny. “And I don’t like it.” That part came out as not much more than a mutter.

At that point the Mayor’s expression and his tone turned fatherly. “Cy, I want to tell you a couple of things about this city. These are things you probably already know, but sometimes it helps to hear them out loud. I know it helps me… Miami is the only city in the world, as far as I can tell—in the world—whose population is more than fifty percent recent immigrants… recent immigrants, immigrants from over the past fifty years… and that’s a hell of a thing, when you think about it. So what does that give you? It gives you—I was talking to a woman about this the other day, a Haitian lady, and she says to me, ‘Dio, if you really want to understand Miami, you got to realize one thing first of all. In Miami, everybody hates everybody.’ ”

The flack Portuondo chuckled as if the Boss were having his little joke. Dio shot him a reproving glance and continued: “But we can’t leave it at that. We have a responsibility, you and me. We got to make Miami—not a melting pot, because that’s not gonna happen, not in our lifetimes. We can’t melt ’em down… but we can weld ’em down… weld ’em down… What do I mean by that? I mean we can’t mix them together, but we can forge a secure place for each nationality, each ethnic group, each race, and make sure they’re all on the same level plane. You know what I mean?”

The Chief hadn’t a clue. He wanted to say he had never heard such bullshit in all his born days, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. What’s happened to Old Chief? He knew, but he didn’t want to put it into words, not even inside his own head. What happened… happened the moment Dio said, “… then we got a bigger problem. And that problem is leadership.” The rest of the plot played out in a flash in the Chief’s head. All Dio had to do was to fire Chief Booker and say, “We put him in a position of leadership and he couldn’t even look out for his own people. A real leader would create an atmosphere in which this kind of thing wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen. So I’m going to appoint a new chief, someone strong enough to change the mental atmosphere around here, a real leader… and he will also be from our African American community.”

African American community, my ass. The Chief wondered if he or any of the rest of the Cubans in here staring at him so as not to miss a delicious moment of this masterful lip-lashing—he wondered if anybody had ever heard Dionisio, Paragon of Democracy, utter the term African American before… except in the presence of a TV camera or some sentinel of the press. The Chief had begun to resent the term every time it came slithering out of the mouth of white hypocrites like Dio. White? Every Cuban in this room thought of himself as white. But that wasn’t the way real white people thought of them. They ought to hang around Pine Crest a little bit or the Coral Beach Yacht Club or some meeting of the Villagers of Coral Gables. That would curl their hair for them! To the real white boys they were all brown people, colored folks, just a shade or two lighter than he was.

You know what I mean? The Chief wasn’t nodding a little yes this time. This time he was shaking his head back and forth. It was a no, his yawing head was, but it was a yawning yaw and a pallid no, so insignificant that old Dio took no notice of it whatsoever. “So that brings us to the question of what we do with Officer Camacho,” said the Mayor. “He’s a mote in the eye for half of Miami. You know what a mote is? It’s from the Bible. A mote is like a speck of dust that gets in the eye. It’s just a speck of dust, but it’s irritating. It’s really irritating. In the Bible people seem to spend half their time removing motes. A mote’s not gonna kill you, but it’ll put you in a very bad mood. You know what I’m saying?”

::::::No:::::: but this time the Chief didn’t bother to make any response, not in any fashion. He was acutely aware of how he must have looked to the other Cubans in the room. He had let himself gradually slouch back into the depths of the chair. So he straightened up and slowly thrust his shoulders back in a half-hearted attempt to show these Cuban brownies that he still had a massive chest. It was a pretty halfhearted thrust, however. How much longer could he afford to let the Mayor f*ck with him like this before it came down to either losing all claim to manhood—or else getting up, walking the six or seven feet to where the Mayor was sitting, and yanking him up out of his seat by his head of hair with one hand and slapping him across his f*cking brown face with the palm of his hand and then the back of his hand the palm and then the back the palm the back the palm the back palm back palm back palm back palmbackpalmback until that brown face turns red as a rare meatball and he’s sobbing because he’s been totally humiliated by a Man—

::::::—oh sure, Superman… Tell me who, in fact, is just sitting here with his speechless mouth hanging open.::::::

“So how do we remove this pair, Camacho and the sergeant, Hernandez, from the public’s eye? I’ve done more of this, canning sinners, no matter what the circumstances, than you have. And I can tell you there’s no gentle way to do it. You have to come right out and say it: ‘These two have revealed themselves as racists, and we can’t have people like that in our Department.’ That’s the way you have to do it. Pow! Pow! It’s painful but it’s quick. One sentence—no, two sentences—and it’s over.” He began slapping palms up and down so that they grazed each other in the well, we’ve cleaned that up, haven’t we, and it’s over and done with manner. Then he compressed his lips and gave the Chief a little wink, as if to say, “Aren’t you glad we got that worked out?”

It was the wink that did it… that little wink… with that wink Dionisio had made too deep an incursion into the Chief’s manhood. Every one of Dionisio’s boys Friday was blank faced and enjoying this humiliation intensely. Old Dionisio is a piece of work, isn’t he? Snicker snacker snicker snacker snicker snacker he’s got the scissors out and he’s cut el blowhard negro up into little insignificant pieces in no time.

That little wink—those smug blank Cuban faces—the Chief felt like he had left his own body through astral projection and was beholding another creature when he snapped out, “We can’t do that, Mayor Cruz.”

It wasn’t an exclamation. It came out with a seething sound. The “Mayor Cruz,” as opposed to Dio or Dionisio, said it was time to get serious.

“Why not?” said the Mayor.

“It would jeopardize the morale of the whole Department.” The Chief knew that was a big exaggeration, but it was out on the table now, and the Chief pressed on. “Every cop who’s ever had to fight one a these crackhead slimeballs and go rolling in the dirt with him or had to pull a gun, every one a them puts himself inside the hide of Camacho and Hernandez the moment he hears about it. Every one a them can feel the adrenaline pumping. Every one a them knows the feeling of fighting for his life, because he don’t know who he’s tangling with, and every one a them knows he’s not himself when it’s over. Every one a them knows the feeling of fear turning into pure hate. There’s nothing in between. If you videotape everything cops say to these scumbags when they finally got ’em restrained and have enough breath to say anything at all, that tape would scorch the hair off every head in Miami. That’s just the nature of the beast, because don’t kid yourself, at that point you’re an animal.”

The room went silent. The Chief’s vehemence and impudence were a shock. After a few beats the Mayor came back to life. “So what these two cops said about African Americans doesn’t bother you… as the highest-ranking African American in this city?”

“Yeah, the words bother me,” said the Chief. “I’ve had to listen to that shit ever since I was four or five years old, and I know what the urge to kill is. But I’ve also been in the shoes of cops like Camacho and Hernandez—many times. And I know that every vile thought you’ve ever had in your head—the animal in you is likely to say it out loud. Look, Dio, this thing happened in a crack house. You got to be afraid when you enter one a them, because with dope comes guns. As it was, the biggest guy in the house tries to choke Sergeant Hernandez. Hernandez pulled his gun and would have shot the guy, except that Camacho jumped on the guy’s back, and Hernandez was afraid he might shoot Camacho, too. Camacho clamps some kind of wrestling hold on the guy and rides him until he’s out of gas and gives up. If he’d been able to get Camacho off his back, he woulda killed him and yanked his head off for good measure. None a that comes out when you just read from a tape of what they said.”

“Okay. Okay,” said the Mayor. “I get your point. But my point is we’ve got a big African American population here, and they’ve been here a long time. A thing like this could set off another riot. They always riot over the same thing, the criminal justice system. That’s not gonna happen on my watch. Your Camacho and Hernandez… they go, Cy… for the good of the city.”

The Chief started swinging his head from side to side, all the while staring the Mayor right in the eyes. “Can’t do it,” he said. “Can’t do it.” He was seething again.

“You’re not leaving me a hell of a lot of room here… Chief Booker…” The Mayor’s sudden formality was more portentous than the Chief’s. He had more to back it up with. “Somebody’s got to go.”

Sonofabitch! This one knocked the chief off his feet… down for the count… He could feel his defiance fading… This job was the biggest thing in his whole life… his family included. Chief of Police of Miami—he had never dreamed of such a thing when he became a young cop fifteen years ago… a young black cop… and now he ran the police department in a major American city… thanks to that man right there, Dio… and now he was putting Dio in the position of having to throw him off that eminent peak, and it was a long way down… for the ex-Chief, him and his salary of $104,000 and his house in Kendall… which cost $680,000… which he never could have swung if the UBT Bank hadn’t set him up with a $650,000 mortgage at the near-prime rate of 1.2%… which they never would have done, never, were it not important for them to do favors for Mayor Cruz… which they would foreclose faster than you could say subprime borrower… reducing him just like that from being the Man, though Black, to being another subprime deadbeat black man… He’d have to take the kids out of the Lorimer School… all that, in addition to getting himself stigmatized, big-time, as a traitor to his own people. Oh, Dionisio would see to that. He’s no genius, Dio, as the world defines genius, but he sure is a genius looking out for his own hide… and a cutthroat genius, if he has to be—

—and in that microsecond of awareness, all these thoughts hit him, in a single flash of many neurons, and zzzzzaaaapped his vows and his courage all at once—

—but not his accursed vanity. Oh no, not for a second. His new vow was not to come up looking like just a run-of-the-mill weakling in front of Dio’s Cuban choir, these brownies, these potted palms… his jury. Oh, they would love to see the Big Man, the Chief, the gran negro crawling in front of old Dionisio the way they crawled. They’d love it.

His mind began racing… and then he got it… or he got something. “Well,” he said, “let me just give you one piece of advice.” ::::::See, I’ve given in without having to put it that way! I’m the one handing out the advice to him!:::::: Out loud he said, “Camacho and Hernandez… fired over this?—discharged outright? The union’s gonna go apeshit, and the union’s run by two real loudmouths, and both a them’s Cuban. They’ll keep this thing going for a month, they’ll turn it into a real inferno, they’ll have black folks” ::::::I’m damned if I’m going to say “African American” and sound like I’m walking on broken glass the way they do:::::: “seeing a whole regiment of Cuban cops giving them the finger. You know what I mean?” ::::::Christ, did I really just say you know what I mean?:::::: “What we find works better is, we do what we call ‘relieve ’m from duty.’ The cop has to give up his gun and get relegated to a desk job, and we announce it very loud—once. And everybody gets it right away—everybody. Everybody realizes that taking a cop’s gun and badge away from him is like a public castration. After that nobody knows and nobody cares if he still exists. He vanishes. He’s the living dead.” He stares into the Mayor’s eyes some more. He tries to look as sincere as any man who ever lived.

The Mayor looks at the city manager and at Portuondo, the flack. They’re trying, but the boys Friday can’t pick up any cue as to what they now think. They just stare back at him like five mugs on a shelf.

Finally the Mayor turns back to the Chief. “Okay. But they damn well better vanish. You know what I mean?… If I hear so much as a hiccup out of either one of them, somebody else is gonna vanish. And you… know… what I mean.”

Two hours later, which is to say about 10:30 a.m., in Dr. Norman Lewis’s office, nothing could have been further from Magdalena’s thoughts than YouTube or her old Hialeah beau, Nestor Camacho. To her, all her juvenile days had receded into a dim and dimmer, outworn, outcast, outclassed past. This morning she was obsessed with the brilliant dawn of… him in her life. He had invited her and Norman to dinner on Friday, just a few days from now, at Chez Toi. Restaurants in Miami didn’t come any grander than Chez Toi, or so Norman informed her. She had never heard of it before. Chez Toi!! Norman went on about it in tones of socially religious awe. Oh, he was excited, too, Norman was, but not even remotely the way she was.

Sometimes her heart literally, literally, beat faster just thinking about it… which is to say, about Sergei. She could actually feel it speed up beneath her breastbone from fear of failure in his eyes… What should she wear? She didn’t possess one thread of clothing that could possibly impress these Chez Toi people… or him. She’d just have to go à la cubana… flash plenty of cubana cleavage… turn her eye sockets into nightclub-black pools with two gleaming orbs floating in them… have her long hair cascading down to her shoulders as full-bodied as she and Fructis shampoo, conditioner, and a Conair hair dryer could possibly manage… turn her dress, any dress, into nothing but a sheet of Cling Wrap around her breasts, her waist, her hips, her “butt,” and her upper thighs… only the upper thighs… at least eighteen inches above the knee… She’ll lift this whole production up close to six inches on stiletto heels. Sexy—that was the idea. Turn it on… the Body! Let sex override all the sophistication she didn’t have.

Or would she just look cheap and trashy? Her spirits plummeted. Who was she anyway? Who was she supposed to be at this high-class dinner, just an employee of Dr. Lewis, the generous Dr. Lewis who took employees to events like this? Or should she go in the other direction and intimate that there was a lot more than that and thereby let Sergei and the world know that a celebrity like Norman Lewis was mad for her, nurse or otherwise?

Plummmmet, went her confidence again. Maybe she was only deluding herself about the whole thing… Sergei hadn’t said a single word to signal any actual interest, not one spoken word… He had merely poured a certain look into her eyes and surreptitiously pressed his fingers into her palm… Maybe that was just the way he was around women, a chronic flirt… Yes, but pressing a girl’s palm with his fingers like that—was so strange that it had to mean something… and he had poured that certain look into her eyes not once, but three times… and her heart beat on, beat on, beat on, beneath her breastbone, beat so loudly that—what if Norman could actually hear it? She had reached the point of paranoia… She mustn’t let it be known in any way that she was even looking forward to the evening. Whenever Norman mentioned it, she had gone to great lengths to appear indifferent.

She had a magazine from the waiting room open on her desk but had barely glanced at it; so lost was she in a fairyland—that consisted solely of Friday night, Sergei Korolyov, and Magdalena Otero—she didn’t notice that Norman had come out of the swami room and was within six feet of her desk.

“Must be a great magazine,” he said.

Magdalena looked up, flustered, as if she had been caught out. “Oh, no,” she said. “I was sitting here thinking—about something else.” She quickly dropped that subject and opened her daybook and said, “Your next appointment is fifteen minutes from now, at eleven, with a new patient, Stanley Roth. I made the appointment myself, but I’ve got no idea what he does.”

“He’s a trader for some new hedge fund called Vacuum,” said Norman. He smiled. He found “Vacuum” amusing. “I talked to him on the phone.”

“Vacuum?” said Magdalena. “Like a vacuum cleaner?”

“Oh, yeah,” Norman said with a chortle. “A bunch of young guys. You’re gonna laugh when I tell you Mr. Roth’s little problem—” He broke off that thought. “What is that magazine?”

“It’s called—” She had to give it a close inspection herself. “La Hom?… Loam?”

Norman picked it up and inspected it. “It’s Lom,” he said, pointing at the name at the bottom of a page, L’Homme. “It’s French. ‘The Man.’ Take a look at these guys,” he said, holding up one of the pages. “All the male models these days are like these two. They’re all skinny. They look like they have a serious protein deficiency. They have these sunken cheeks and a six-or-seven-day growth of beard and this gloomy, hangdog look, as if they’ve just been released after five years of hard time, during which they contracted AIDS from getting buggered so much by other prisoners. I don’t get it. This is going to make young men want to buy the clothes these lulus are modeling? Or maybe these days looking like a gay AIDS blade is fashhhhionableahhHHHHock hock hock hock… They look like these emaciated young men Egon Schiele used to paint. They have this look like they’re all so weak and sickly, they’re going to pass out and collapse and die in a pile of bones right in your face.”

Magdalena said, “Who? Did you say Sheila?”

“It’s German,” said Norman, “S-c-h-i-e-l-e. Egon Schiele. He was from Austria.”

“And he’s famous?” said Magdalena… glumly… All this art stuff the americanos thought was so important…

“Oh, sure,” said Norman. “I mean I guess he’s famous if you’re into early-twentieth-century Austrian art, the way I am. I really consider—” He abruptly broke off whatever he was about to say and averted his eyes. His face fell. He looked sad in a way Magdalena had never seen before.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m ‘into’ early-twentieth-century Austrian art, all right. I’m ‘into’ it in those seventy-five-dollar picture books, that’s how far I’m ‘into’ it. It was twenty years ago when I first discovered Schiele and Gustav Klimt and, oh, Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka and that whole bunch. I could have bought this terrific Schiele for twenty-five thousand at auction. But I was in medical school, and I didn’t even come close to having twenty-five thousand dollars to spend on some ‘artwork.’ I was living practically hand-to-mouth. Same thing for another eight years as an intern and a resident. Finally I open my own practice and start making some money and I come up for air, and those Austrians—I look up, and they’re in earth orbit! A couple of years ago, that same painting sold for twenty-five million. It had increased in price a thousand times while I wasn’t looking.”

He paused… He looked at Magdalena in a wary, tentative way that seemed to say I don’t know whether I should be getting into all this stuff with you or not. He must have decided, Oh, what the hell, because he proceeded to get into it.

“You know,” he said, “people used to think doctors were rich. If you lived out where the doctors lived, you knew you were in the best neighborhood in town. That’s not true anymore. You can’t make any real money if you’re working for fees. Doctors, lawyers—we get fees for the time we spend on a case, so much per hour. So do violin teachers and carpenters. You go on vacation, you go hunting, you go to sleep—you get no fee. Now, just compare that with someone like Maurice. It doesn’t matter if he’s asleep, daydreaming, playing tennis, off on a cruise, or, for that matter, doing what he usually does, trying to find a way to wrap at least one finger and his thumb around his erect phallus without pressing upon any of his herpes blisters. Even while he’s doing the worst thing he can do in his condition, he’s got this company, American ShowUp, out there working for him day and night. They bring in the exhibition cubicles, the revolving platforms, the stages, the tents, the frameworks for everything you can think of from automobile shows and medical conferences to ordinary conventions. Believe me, if you have eighty percent of that business in the United States, the way Maurice does, that adds up to billions. That’s why you have to have a product. That’s why I go on all these TV shows. It’s not just the publicity. You have to admit I’m not bad on television. I could see myself getting a network show like this Dr. Phil. He makes a killing doing that show. That gives him something to sell. The more TV stations take the show, the more money he makes. He’s not working for fees anymore. Now he’s a franchise. He goes to sleep, he goes to Istanbul on vacation, and the franchise is still doing business while he’s not looking. I can see some good spin-offs, too, like e-books, even paper books—you know… like, printed.”

Magdalena was astonished, shocked. “What are you saying, Norman! You have a… a… calling—you have something that’s so much… so much finer than what they have… these Dr. Phils, turning themselves into characters on television. Doctors—nurses, too—I remember the day I raised my right hand—doctors and nurses, we take an oath to devote our lives to the sick. I remember that day because I’m proud of it. TV doctors turn their backs on the Hippocratic Oath. They’re devoting themselves to making money and being celebrities. When I think of ‘Dr. Phil’… I wonder what he tells his children he’s doing?… assuming he has children.”

Norman seemed chastened. Perhaps he even felt guilty, which was not his way. Oh, no—not at all. Quietly—for Norman—he said, “Oh, I’m sure he tells them he can help so many more people this way, people all over the country, people all over the world—or maybe he goes all the way and says ‘heal,’ not just help the whole world but heal it. If my parents had told me something like that when I was six or seven, I would have chosen to believe them… In any case, you’re right, Magdalena.” He didn’t say that very often, either. Maybe he did feel guilty. “Even if you go on television now and then, the way I do, your peers, other doctors, hold it against you. I used to think it was pure jealousy. Now I’m not so sure. I guess it is partly about that honor—but they’re jealous bastards, all the same.”

“But don’t you see?” said Magdalena. “It is about honor. We don’t do this for money, you and me. We do it for honor. Somebody like Maurice comes in, and he has an addiction that’s gradually eating up his life. Here he is, a billionaire—and does that make him feel secure? He’s a wreck! Last week at Art Basel I must have seen him trying to scratch his crotch without anybody noticing a hundred times. He’s pathetic… and he’s totally dependent on you. What’s worth more, all his money or your ability to heal people? He’s down here”—she lowered one hand and made the palm parallel with the floor and raised the other hand three feet above it—“and you’re up here. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. You’re Dr. Norman Lewis. You have a gift. Can’t you see that?”

Norman nodded a faint yes, looked down at the floor, and didn’t say a word. Was this modesty in light of the high place in the life of Man that she had just ascribed to him? But she had never seen him overcome by modesty before. Now he had his eyes aimed down… at what? The wall-to-wall carpet apparently. It was perfectly good, practical, with a forest-green background and a fine-line white windowpane plaid. Not bad… and maybe worth five seconds of study.

“What are you thinking about, Norman?”

“Oh… nothing…” He still wasn’t looking at her, and she had never heard his voice die like this.

A vile thought insinuated itself into her head. It was so vile, she resolved not to think about it at all. Maurice had been coming to see Norman three times a week, meaning close to $3,000 per week in fees. As far as she could tell, Maurice hadn’t improved in the slightest, and in some ways he had gotten worse. His leper-blistered groin was a disaster. But the whole thing was so vile, she just wasn’t going to think about it. Why try to out-analyze Norman? Norman was perhaps as well known as any psychiatrist in the country. How could she presume to second-guess him… and even wonder if Norman didn’t find it to his advantage to have Maurice undergo such endless therapy? But that was the vile part! How could she let her imagination run wild like that? She wasn’t going to. The next thing she knew, she would start wondering who was getting the most out of this doctor-patient relationship. How had Norman managed to get a slip for his cigarette boat in the famous marina at Fisher Island?… Maurice… How had he managed to be among the very first in line for the mad rush on the opening day of Art Basel? Maurice. How had he managed to be invited to dinner at Chez Toi by one of the leading figures in the Miami art world, Sergei Korolyov?… Because Sergei had seen him in Maurice’s entourage at Art Basel… Anyone who didn’t realize that Norman was a shameless climber would have to be blind.

She thought of a way to get Norman on that subject without being too obvious. There was nothing out of place for her to ask—and so she did: “Norman,” she said, “you think Maurice will be there Friday night?”

It was as if she had pushed the switch that turned Norman back on. “Oh, yes! He’s already talked to me about it. He thinks this Korolyov might be an important new friend. And he loves Chez Toi. Yowza yowza. It has the kind of cachet Maurice thinks is very important. I’ve been there and I know how much it impresses somebody like Maurice.”

“Cashay?” said Magdalena.

“You know, it’s like… a reputation or a certain social level.”

“Cashay,” said Magdalena in a dead tone of voice.

“They have a black membership card, and if you have that, you can go to the cocktail lounge upstairs. Otherwise, you can’t go up there.”

“Do you have a membership card?”

Norman paused. “Well… actually… no. But I’ve been in the lounge.”

Magdalena said, “You’ve been there a lot?”

“Up to a point.” Norman paused again, and his expression became tentative, which was not like him. “Come to think of it… twice, I guess.”

“Who did you go with?”

Long pause… a frown… finally: “With Maurice.”

“Both times?”

Longer pause… deflated scowl: “Yes.” Norman gave her a sharp look. Somehow Magdalena had become an interrogator and had found him out, not in a lie… but in the sin of omission… omission of anything that might reveal his dependence on Maurice—his patient. He changed course and brightened again. “But I know Maurice much better than most people, maybe better than anyone else. Everybody in Miami wants to be next to Maurice, the art collectors, the art dealers—art dealers! I mean, you better believe itttahHHHHock hock hock hock!—the museum directors, the politicians, every type of businessman you can think of—very much including our new friend, Korolyov. You remember the way Korolyov came hustling over to Maurice at Art Basel? He practically kissed his shoes, like a little Russian serf. I mean, Maurice has the most influential network in South Florida.” He smiled broadly, then looked into Magdalena’s eyes with great earnestness. “That’s why we—you and me—we’ve got to do everything in our power to get Maurice out from under this terrible weakness, this addictive weakness. Weakness shouldn’t become addictive, but it does. You put it correctly, Magdalena; it’s wrecking him. We can’t let that happen. He’s not just a rich and powerful man. He’s also a decent man, who is dedicated to doing good in the whole community. We have to get our job done, Magdalena! That’s why I try to stay with him even beyond our sessions. I felt it was important for me to be with him at Art Basel, even though most psychiatrists would never do that. So many exciting things in this town are like Art Basel. At their core they’re utterly amoral. The people there are comfortable with pornography, so long as it has a ‘cultivated’ provenance.”

::::::provenance?::::::

“Maurice could have sunk into that quicksand and we’d never find him again. But we didn’t let that happen, Magdalena. We stayed there with him to the end.”

The odd thing… maybe the happy thing is… he believes every word of that, thought Magdalena. He’s being utterly sincere. Dutifully, she warded off every countervailing interpretation.