Back to Blood

18





Na Zdrovia!


The very moment Sergei Korolyov picked up Magdalena in his Aston Martin to drive to Hallandale for dinner, Nestor, accompanied by John Smith, found a parking place on a block where dilapidation reigned. Nestor had never seen so many windows with sheets of metal nailed over them in his life. He and John Smith had different takes on this part of town, now called “Wynwood,” which suggested lufts and wafts of zephyrs on an ancestral estate’s horticultured sylvan glade, where Igor maintained his official studio, his out-front studio, so to speak, the one with a telephone listing. Wynwood bordered on Overtown, and Nestor, being a cop, saw it as a worn-out old industrial area full of decrepit one-, two-, and three-story warehouses that weren’t worth rehabilitating… and a rat’s nest of Puerto Rican petty criminals who weren’t, either. John Smith, on the other hand, saw it as Miami’s version of a curious new social phenomenon—and oh, yes! real estate phenomenon—of the late twentieth century: the “art district.”

Art districts had popped up all over the place… SoHo (south of Houston Street) in New York… SoWa (south of Washington Street) in Boston… Downcity in Providence, Rhode Island… Shockoe Slip in Richmond, Virginia… and all of them were born the same way. Some enterprising real estate developer starts buying up a superannuated section of town full of dilapidated old loft buildings. Then he whistles for the artists—talent or utter lack of it makes no difference—and offers them large lofts at laughably low rents… lets it be known that this is the new artists quarter… and in three years or less… Get out of the way!… Here they come!… droves of well-educated and well-heeled people skipping and screaming with nostalgie de la boue, “nostalgia for the mud”… eager to inhale the emanations of Art and other Higher Things amid the squalor of it all.

In Wynwood even the palm trees were bohemian… poor raggedy strays… one over here… another one over there… and all of them mangy. The nostalgia-for-the-mudders wouldn’t have had it any other way. They didn’t want grand allées of stately palms. Grand allées didn’t give off emanations of Art and other Higher Things amid the squalor.

At this very moment Nestor and John Smith were on a freight elevator, bound for Igor’s studio on the top floor of a three-story warehouse some developer had turned into loft condominiums. All the elevators in the building were freight elevators… operated by sullen Mexicans who never said word one to anybody. There you had a reliable indicator of illegal-alien status. They didn’t want to draw any attention to themselves whatsoever. The nostalgia-for-the-mudders loved the freight elevators, despite the fact that they were ponderous, slow, and old-fashioned. Old-fashioned freight elevators gave off some of the nostalgie-de-la-muddiest emanations of all—the heavy electric groan of the industrial-strength pulley machinery overcoming inertia… the operator’s stone-sullen Mexican face…

Nestor had a digital camera in his hands… studded with dials, meters, and gauges he’d never seen or heard of before. He held it up in front of John Smith as if it were some utterly unidentifiable foreign object. “What’s this supposed to accomplish? I don’t even know what you’re supposed to look through.”

“You don’t have to look through anything,” said John Smith. “All you have to do is look at this image right here… and then you press this button. Actually—forget the image and just press the button. All we need is that little whine it makes. You only need to sound like a photographer.”

Nestor shook his head. He couldn’t stand not knowing what he was doing… and he couldn’t stand it when John Smith and not himself was running the operation, despite John Smith’s smooth performance at the Advanced Yentas home up in Hallandale. John Smith still insisted on this business of using outright lies as reporting devices! He had called Igor on his listed telephone number and said the Herald had assigned him to do a story on the recent upsurge in realistic art in Miami… and people kept mentioning him, Igor, as one of the important figures in this movement. Igor turned out to be so vain, so eager to rise up from out of obscurity… he was ready to believe it, despite the fact that his work had appeared only in two largely ignored group shows… and that there had been no such “upsurge” and no such “movement.” In fact, John Smith had no such assignment, either, and wouldn’t have been able to get a real Herald photographer to come along with him. Besides, at this point he didn’t want anybody at the Herald to get wind of what he was doing. It was too early. He had to get the facts nailed down first. Hell, Topping the Fourth had turned severely squirrelly at the very mention of the subject.

From the moment the elevator came to a lumbering, lurching stop on the third floor… lurching because the Mexican had to swing the tiller handle this way and that to make the floor of the enormous freight cab line up just right with the level of the floor outside… the nostalgie-de-la-mudders loved that part, the lumbering, lurching stop… it was so real… Even before the doors opened, Nestor and John Smith picked up the scent of their man… turpentine!… Upscale nostalgie-de-la-mudders might or might not object to the odor. But they couldn’t very well grumble, could they. Naturally there were working artists in these lofts, and naturally the painters were working with turpentine… You’re in the “art district,” my friend!… You’d best take the bitter with the better and consider it an emanation of Art and other Higher Things amid the squalor of it all.

As soon as Igor opened the door to his loft, it was obvious that he was primed for this major event in his so-far-negligible media life. His face was one great bright Rooooshian beam. If he had still had his outsized Salvador Dalí–jolly waxed mustache, it would have been really something. He had his arms stretched out. It looked like he was about to embrace them both in a Russian bear hug.

“Dobro pozalovat!” he said in Russian, and in English, “Welcome! Come in! Come in!”

Such booming bonhomie!—so much so that the two hard Cs in a row, Come in! Come in!, propelled the alcohol on his breath into Nestor’s and John Smith’s faces. He was bigger, more heavy chested, and drunker than Nestor remembered from the Honey Pot. And how art-district-fashionably he was dressed!… a long-sleeved black shirt with a silky sheen, rolled up to the elbows and open at the neck all the way down to the sternum… hanging outside a pair of too-tight-fitting black jeans in a game attempt to obscure his girth.

The entrance took you straight into an open kitchen at one end of a space at least forty feet long and twenty feet wide. The ceiling must have been close to fourteen feet high, making the place seem enormous… likewise, a bank of towering old-fashioned warehouse windows way down at the other end. Even now, close to 4:00 p.m., the entire work area was flooded with natural light… the easels… the metal tables… a ladder… some tarpaulins… the same sort of stuff Igor had at his hideaway studio in Hallandale. Nestor’s survey of the premises came to an abrupt halt when Igor stuck his face right into his and exclaimed, “Ayyyyyyyyyyyy!” and took Nestor’s hand and gave it a shake that felt like it had dislocated every joint in his right arm and clapped him on the shoulder in the manner that among men means, You are my pal and we’ve survived a lot of good times together, haven’t we!

“This is my photographer,” John Smith interjected—Nestor could tell that John Smith’s facile lying mind was churning to come up with a suitable fake name. Pop!—“Ned,” he said, probably because it started with Ne, like Nestor.

“Nade!” was the way it sounded when Igor said it. With another gush of inexplicable merriment he maintained his grip on Nade’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder again. “We have a drink!” he said, reaching back to a kitchen counter and producing a bottle with a Stolichnaya vodka label but containing a pale amber liquid… He poured it into a big shot glass, which he hoisted with one hand and pointed at with the other.

“Vodaprika!” he exclaimed, accenting the apri—and threw the entire shot-glassful down his gullet. His face turned arterial red. He emerged grinning and gasping for breath. When he finally exhaled, the air they breathed smelled like alcoholic vomitus.

“I take the vodka and I give it a little—what do you say in English?—‘spitz’?—of apricot juice. You see? One little spitz—vodaprika! We all have some! You come!”

With that, he led them to a big, long, stout wooden table with an odd lot of wooden chairs around it. He took the one at the head, and Nestor and John Smith flanked him. The big shot glasses awaited them. Igor brought his own shot glass and the bottle of vodaprika and a big platter of hors d’oeuvres… pickled cabbage with some kind of berries… salted cucumbers—big ones… slices of beef tongue with horseradish… salt herring… salted red salmon eggs (Low-Rent caviar)… pickled mushrooms, heaps of these briny beauties, intact or cut up and mixed with boiled potatoes, eggs, great slathers of butter and mayonnaise, great balls of them wrapped in pastry—guaranteed to keep a man warm up near the Arctic Circle and calorie-fried in Miami… all of it served in a heavy cloud of odeur de vomi.

“Everybody thinks the Russians, they drink only the plain vodka,” said Igor. “And you know what? They are right! That’s all they drink!”

Nestor could see John Smith trying to put a merry response on his baffled face.

“And you know why they drink like this?” said Igor. “I show you. Na zdrovia!” He grabbed a gob of salt herring with his fingers, stuffed it down the gullet, and knocked back another big shot-glassful… more blazing-red face, gasps for breath… and a veritable fog of odeur de vomi.

“You know why we do that? We don’t like the taste of the vodka. It tastes like the chemical! This way we don’t have to taste it. We only want zee alcohol. So why don’t we”—he pantomimed injecting his arm with a syringe—“take it like this?”

That struck him as highly amusing. He picked up a big briny pastry ball from the platter with his fingers and stuffed it into his mouth and began chewing and talking at the same time. He picked up the bottle and refilled his glass and hoisted it once more as if to say, This one, this the vodaprika! He beamed at John Smith, and then he beamed at Nestor and then at John Smith again, and—bango!—knocked back another shot. “And now you drink!”

It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t an order. It was a declaration. He poured each of them a glassful… and himself, too. “And now we go… when I say ‘Na zdrovia.’ Okay?”

He looked at John Smith and then at Nestor… and what could you do but nod yes?

“Na zdrovia!” he exclaimed, and all three of them tilted their heads back and tossed the drink down their gullets. Even before it hit bottom, Nestor realized that this goddamned shot glass was a lot bigger than he thought it was and had no apricot taste or any other taste to lessen the shock of what was impending. The damned thing hit bottom like a fireball, and he came up gagging and coughing. His eyes were flooding with tears. John Smith’s, too, and if his own face was now as red as John Smith’s, then it was a fiery red.

Igor came up smiling and picking up a gob of salted herring from the platter with his fingers and shoving it into his mouth. He found Nestor’s and John Smith’s performance hilarious. Hah hah hah-hah-hah haha. Obviously he would have been disappointed if they had done any better.

“Don’t worry!” he said merrily. “You must have practice! I give you two more times.”

Jesus Christ! thought Nestor. This was the worst white-boy-wasted behavior he had ever seen! It was gross! And he was taking part in it! Cubans were not big drinkers. In what was meant to be a lighthearted way, he said, “Oh, no, thanks. I think I’ve got—”

“No, Nade, we must have three!” said Igor. “You know? Otherwise—well, we must have three! You know?”

Nestor looked at John Smith. John Smith looked at Nestor sternly, and slowly moved his head up and down in the yes mode. John Smith? He was so tall and skinny. He had no normal physical courage. But he would lie, cheat… and probably steal, although he hadn’t seen him do it yet… and now, it turned out, cauterize his gastrointestinal tract… to get a story.

Nestor looked at Igor and with a feeling of doom muttered, “Okay.”

“That’s good!” said Igor. He was very cheery about it as he refilled all three glasses.

The next thing Nestor knew—“Na zdrovia!”—he threw his head back and tossed the vodaprika down his open maw—¡mierda!—and the gagging, the doubling over, the coughing, the gasping, the flood of tears were barely under control when—

Na zdrovia! Another fireball—Ahhhhhhhughh… eeeeeeeeuuughhh… ushnayyyyyyyyyyyanuck splashed down his windpipe—burned his throat—gushed up into his nasal passages and came leaking down onto his pants—and Igor congratulated him and John Smith. “You did it! I celebrate you! Now you honorary muzhiks!”

Somehow muzhiks didn’t sound all that great.

Judging by his morbid face, John Smith had suffered as much as Nestor had. But John Smith was immediately all business. Out the corner of his mouth, in a low growl, he told Nestor, “Get busy and start taking pictures.”

Get busy and start taking pictures? Why, you bastard! John Smith wasn’t putting on an act, either. My photographer! The bastard had started believing he was the commander! Nestor felt like throwing the damned digital camera through a window… although… hmmmmm… in tactical terms, he had to admit that John Smith was right. If he was supposed to be a photographer, he should start aiming the camera at something and pushing that dummy button. He felt good and humiliated when he so dutifully started taking pictures… dummy pictures, as instructed.

Meantime, John Smith was shaking his head in wonderment and glancing toward Igor’s paintings on the walls as if he couldn’t help it. “That’s great, Igor… amazing! Is this your own personal collection?” said John Smith.

“No, no, no, no, no,” said Igor, laughing in a way that says, “I forgive you for your lack of knowledge about such things.” “If only that was the truth!” He gestured with a lordly sweep of his hand toward both walls. “Two months from now, half of these will go and I must paint more of them. My agent, she keeps this all the time pressure.”

“Your agent?” said John Smith. “You said she? It’s a woman?”

“Why not?” Igor said with a shrug. “She is the best in all of Russia. Ask any Russian artist. They know her: Mirima Komenensky.”

“Your agent is Russian?”

“Why not?” Igor said with another shrug. “In Russia they still understand the real art. They understand the skill, the technique, the colors, the chiaroscuro, all of that.”

John Smith produced a small tape recorder from his pocket and put it on the table with the sort of arching of the eyebrows that asks if this is all right. Igor answered yes with a magnanimous flip of the hand that dismissed any concerns on that score.

“And what is the reaction to realism here in the US?” said John Smith.

“Here?” said Igor. The very question made him laugh. “Here they like the fads. Here they think art begins with Picasso. Picasso left art school when he was fifteen. He said there was not anything more they could teach him. The very next semester they are teaching anatomy and perspective. If I not draw any better than Picasso, you know what I do?” He waited for an answer.

“Uhhh… no,” said John Smith.

“I will start new movement, call it Cubism!” Waves and gales of laughter came pouring out of Igor’s great lungs, alcoholizing the air still further, and Nestor felt himself swept away, struggling to avoid strangling in a vomitous stupor.

Igor filled the three glasses again. He raised his and—

“Na zdrovia!”

—Igor threw his vodaprika down his gullet. But both Nestor and John Smith brought the glasses to their lips and tilted their heads back and faked it and came up going, Ahhhhhhhhhhh! in mock satisfaction and wrapping their hands around their shot glasses to hide the incriminating amber liquid that remained.

Igor came up much too drunk to notice. He had knocked back five big shots of the stuff since they had been here—and only God knew how many before they arrived. Nestor felt good and drunk now, after three. It was anything but a happy intoxication, however. He felt as if he had impaired his central nervous system and could no longer think straight or use his hands deftly.

“What about abstract art,” said John Smith, “like, say, ohhhh… Malevich, like the Maleviches in the Korolyov Museum of Art recently?”

“Malevich!” Igor sent the name rolling on the crest of his biggest wave yet. “Funny you should say Malevich!” He winked at John Smith, and the wave rolled on. “You know, Malevich said that the realistic art, God already give you the picture, you only have to copy it. But in the abstract art, you have to be God and create it all yourself. Believe me, I know Malevich!” Another wink. “He had to say that! I have seen his work when he started out. He try to be realistic. He haf no skill! Nozzing! If I paint like Malevich, you know what I do? I start a new movement, call it Suprematism! Like Kandinsky.” He gave John Smith a significant smile… “You see Kandinsky when he start out. He try to paint a picture of a house… it look like a loaf of bread! So he give up and announce he start a new movement, he calls it Constructivism!” Both a wink and a smile for John Smith’s benefit.

“What about Goncharova?” said John Smith. Now three artists were in play, names le tout Miami had been so grateful to the celebrated, the generous Sergei Korolyov for. What culture and luster he had given to the city!

Igor gave John Smith a conspiratorial smile as if to say, “Yes! Exactly! We’re both thinking the same thing.”

“Goncharova?!” exclaimed Igor. “She is most unskilled of all! She cannot draw, and so she makes the big mess of straight little lines, and they go here, and they go there, and they go in between, a real mess, and she say every line is a ray of light, and she gives it a name: ‘Rayonism.’ Rayonism! because my art is a new art, and why do I, the Creator, have to look behind me and think about the things already used and worn out… I don’t have to think the line and the anatomy and the three dimensions and the—how you say it? modeling?—or the perspective or the color harmony, any of those things… They were done… years ago… centuries ago, done until they die. They are from the past. You don’t bother me with the past! I am in front! All these things, they are somewhere back there!” He motioned back over his shoulder and then forward and upward. “And I am up here above all that.”

John Smith said, “Could you do what these artists have done, Malevich, Kandinsky, and Goncharova?”

Igor erupted with a big belly laugh. He laughed until tears were coming out of his eyes. “It depend on how you mean that! You mean could I make Americans take this silly business serious and pay the big money for it?… No—it make me laugh too much!” He started off another laughing jag and had to force himself to stop. “No, you must not make me laugh like this. It is too funny for me! It is not good for me… not good, not good…” Finally, he seemed to have himself under control. “But if you mean, could I do painting like theirs… Anybody could! I could do it, except that makes me have to look at this govno!” The thought caused his belly to go rumbling again. “I haf to do it blindfolded…” Rumble bubble bubble rumble… “And I can do it blindfolded!”

“Whattaya mean?” said John Smith.

“I have done it already blindfolded.”

“You mean that, or are you just kidding me?”

“No, I have done these things with my eyes closed… already!”

And I can do it blindfolded came out bubbling up and down on chuckles… but the No, I have done these things… already was too much for him. All the rumbles, bubbles, chuckles, bellows, and booms erupted at once—came exploding out of his lungs and his larynx and his lips. He couldn’t do anything to stop the launch. He was stamping his feet up and down. His forearms and fists were pumping up and down. He was beside himself. Nestor stood over him, faking taking pictures, before he realized it was pointless. He looked at John Smith and pulled a face. But once more John Smith was all business. He looked at Nestor with the utmost seriousness. While Igor was still off on his laughing jag with his eyes shut, John Smith pantomimed pouring something into a glass. He motioned toward the kitchen with his head. The way he jerked it, with an angry ditch down the middle of his forehead, it was like a direct order. Hop to it! Get me a big shot of vodaprika! This is a direct order!

What did John Smith think he was doing? Did he really think that I, Nestor Camacho, was his photographer? Nevertheless Nestor did it—hustled over to the counter, poured a shot-glassful of Igor’s na zdrovia apriconcoction and brought it back to John Smith. He couldn’t constrain a scowl, but John Smith didn’t even seem to notice.

When Igor finally descended from his jag and opened his eyes, John Smith held out the vodka toward him and said, “Here, have this.” Igor was still heaving his chest, trying to reinflate his lungs, but didn’t say no to the drink. As soon as he was able, he took the shot glass and tossed it back and went ahhhhhhh!… ahhhhhhhhh… ahhhhhhhh…

“You okay?” John Smith said.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes”… still breathing hard… “Could do nothing about it… You ask me something so funny… you know?”

“Well, where are those paintings now, the ones you did with your eyes closed?”

Igor smiled and started to say something—but then the smile vanished. Drunk as he was, he seemed to realize that he had gotten himself into treacherous territory.

“Ohhhh, I don’t know.” He gave a shrug to show it was of no importance. “Maybe I threw them away, maybe I lost them… I only amuse myself with them… I give them away—but who is want them?… I put them in someplace I do not remember… I lose them”—he shrugged once more—“I don’t know where they are.”

John Smith said, “Let’s say you gave them away. Who would you give them to?”

Igor responded not with a smile but with a canny look and all but closed one eye. “Who would want them?—even if those… ‘artists’… themselves painted them? I will not want them if they give them away across the street.”

“The Miami Museum of Art certainly seemed happy to get the real things. They valued them at seventy million dollars.”

Igor said, “Here they like the fads, I was telling you. That is their… that is their—I cannot tell them what they like. De gustibus non est disputandum.” Another shrug… “You do what you can, but there is not much you can do with some people…”

Nestor saw John Smith take a deep breath, and somehow he could tell he had worked up the courage to ask the big one. He had bitten the bullet.

“You know,” said John Smith, taking another deep breath, “there are people who say you actually did do those paintings in the museum.”

A sharp intake of breath—and no words. Igor just stared at John Smith. He shut one eye nearly all the way, as before, but now there was no mirth in his expression.

“Who says that!?” Uh-oh. Nestor could tell that one last redoubt of sound judgment in Igor’s vodaprikized mind had come alive in the eleventh hour. “I want to know who!—what persons!”

“I don’t know,” said John Smith. “It’s one of those things you just uh… uh that’s in the air. You know how it is.”

“Yes, I know how it is,” said Igor. “It’s a lie! That is how it is, a lie!” Then, as if realizing he was protesting too much, he forced out a huhhh that was supposed to make it lighter. “That is the most silly thing I have ever heard. You know the word provenance? Museums, they have a whole system. Nobody could get away with something like that. That is the more craziest idea! Why is anyone want to even try something like that?”

“I could think of a reason,” said John Smith. “If somebody paid him enough money.”

Igor just stared at John Smith. Not a trace of mirth or even irony in his face, not even a proto-wink. He couldn’t have looked more stone-cold serious. “I give you advice,” he said finally. “You don’t even mention such a thing to Mr. Korolyov. You don’t even tell anybody who ever see Mr. Korolyov. You understand?”

“Why do you mention Sergei Korolyov?” said John Smith.

“He is the one who gave the paintings to the museum. There was a big celebration for him.”

“Oh… Do you know Korolyov?”

“NO!” said Igor. He froze as if someone had just put a knifepoint against his neck. “I don’t even know what he looks like. But everybody knows about him, every Russian. You don’t play around with him the way you play around with me.”

“I’m not playing around—”

“Good! You don’t even let him know you think about these things, these gossips!”

Have a seat. Have a seat, my ass! What was that supposed to mean? The Chief never had to have a seat before he could go into Dio’s office. It was always him walking down the hall past all those dismal little used-to-be Pan Am seaplane offices with his shoulders back and his chest out. He wanted to make sure even the City Hall lifers got a good look at Chief Booker’s black mightiness… and if the door was open, there would always be some white or Cuban lifer standing just inside an open door who would sing out with an ingratiating, worshipful “Hi, Chief!” and His Mightiness would turn toward him and say, “Hey, Big Guy.”

But just now when he came down the hall, there were no lifers singing out “Hi, Chief” or anything else. They couldn’t have contained their worshipfulness more completely. They had no reaction to his mightiness whatsoever.

Could it be that Dio’s chilliness had seeped out into the whole place? Things hadn’t been comradely between him and Dio ever since the day the two of them had it out over Hernandez and Camacho and the crack house bust… before an audience of five, but those five, given their position and their big Cuban mouths, were quite enough. They were witnesses to him caving in to Dio over his mortgage payments and his status as the big black Chief. Of course, they probably didn’t know about the mortgage payments, but the other part—they’d have to be off musing in another world not to get it immediately. The Chief had felt humiliated ever since… more than the witnesses in that room could have imagined. He had buckled under to that pretentious Cuban hack, Dionisio Cruz, him and his purely, blatantly, political concerns…

Have a seat… Dio’s keeper of the gate, a horse of a woman named Cecelia… who wore the false eyelashes of a nine-year-old playing Makeup in the mirror… above jaws the size of a Neanderthal’s… she had said, “Have a seat.” No excuse, no explanation, not even a smile or a wink to show she realized how bizarre this was… just “Have a seat.” A “seat,” in point of fact, was a wooden armchair, along with four or five other wooden armchairs, in a mean little space created by removing the front wall of a mean little office. The Chief had just passed this so-called waiting room in City Hall, and wouldn’t you know the kind of people you’d find in there? Anthony Biaggi, a sleazeball developer who had his eyes on some derelict school building and school yard up in Pembroke Pines… José Hinchazón, an ex-cop fired years ago during a corruption scandal who now ran a shady “security” service… an Anglo who looked to the Chief like Adam Hirsch, of the failing-tour-boat-and-bus Hirsches… Have a seat in a room with that bunch?

So the Chief, looking down, gave the horse face of Cecelia an ambiguous, unsettling grin he had used to good effect many times before. He narrowed his eyes and curled back his upper lip, revealing his top row of big white upper teeth, which looked even bigger against the background of his dark skin. It was meant to indicate that he was about to broaden it even more… into a grin of pure happiness… or chew her up.

“I’ll be down the hall”—he nodded his head in that direction—“when Dio is ready to see me.”

Cecelia wasn’t the kind who was likely to flinch. “You mean the waiting room,” she said.

“Down the hall,” he said, looking more and more like he was going to chew her up—and spit her out. He took one of his cards out and turned it over and wrote a telephone number on the back. He handed it to her and turned his ambiguous grin into a happy grin, which he hoped she would perceive as ironic and become even more unsettled or at least more confused.

When he walked back down the hall and passed the pathetic waiting room, he could tell out of the corner of his eye that all three of them were looking up at him. He turned toward them but acknowledged only one, Hirsch—and he didn’t really know which Hirsch this was, Adam or his brother Jacob.

As before, nobody was paying “Hi, Chief” homage from the mouth of an open door, which meant he couldn’t slip into anybody’s office and start up a conversation to kill time while he waited for a summoning… a summoning from his Cuban master.

Hell, he couldn’t just loiter in the hallway could he… Goddamned Dio! All of a sudden he had the gall to treat him like any other humble petitioner who turns up at the court pleading for something from the king.

There was no other solution but to go down to the lobby of this Pan Am city hall and make make-believe phone calls. People going in and out of City Hall saw him standing off to the side, tapping on the glass face of his iPhone. They were unaware of his fall from grace… so far, anyway… they clustered about him almost like rap fans… “Hi, Chief!”… “Hey, Chief!”… “What’s going down, Chief?”… “You da man, Chief!”… and he was kept busy parceling out the Hi, Big Guys and Hey, Big Guys incessantly… How ironic… Him! Cyrus Booker, Chief of Police, mighty black presence at the heart of Miami city government… Him! Chief Booker, reduced to this insulting insignificance, lurking in a lobby… playing a stupid defensive game… trying not to lose instead of risking whatever it took to win… Him! Why should he be cringing before anybody? He was born to lead… and he was young enough, only forty-four, to fight his way back to the top… if not in this role then another one where the top was even higher, although he couldn’t think at this very moment what that might be… if necessary, he’d build it!… and what was all this pants-twisting fear about the house and the mortgage? What difference would a house in Kendall make in history’s verdict?… but then he thought of another verdict… his wife’s… She would be anguished, for maybe twenty-four hours… and then furious!… ooounnnghhh Jesus God!… but a man couldn’t flinch at a wife’s fury if he was going to risk all… to achieve all, could he? Shiiiiiiiit! She’d be on the warpath… “Nice going, Big Shot! No job, no house, no income, but noooohhh… you’re not gonna let that—”

His phone rang. He answered it as he always did: “Chief Booker.”

“This is Cecelia at Mayor Cruz’s office”… “at Mayor Cruz’s office,” as if he wouldn’t have any idea which Cecelia, out of the thousands in this city, in this world, this particular Cecelia might be. “The Mayor can see you now. I went to the waiting room… and I couldn’t find you. The Mayor has a very busy schedule this afternoon.”

Frosty? Goddamn freezing over!… Well, up yours, Horse Head! But all he said was “I’ll be right there.” Damn! Why had he stuck in the “right”? Made it sound like he was going to hustle… obediently.

For security reasons, you could only reach the second floor by elevator. Damn and damn again! On the elevator he was trapped with two more Hi, Chiefs, and one of them was a nice kid who wrote bulletins for the Bureau of Environmental Management, a black kid named Mike. He gave Mike a Hey, Big Guy… but he was unable to smile! He could only show his teeth!

He practiced smiling as he walked down the narrow hallway. He had to have one ready for Cecelia. When he reached her desk, she pretended for a moment not to see him. Then she looked up at him. How big and horsey that bitch’s teeth were! She said, “Ah, there you are,” and even had the nerve to flick a glance at the watch on her wrist. “Please go right in.” The Chief spread the smile he had been practicing from cheek to cheek. He hoped it read, “Yes, I understand the petty little game you’re playing, and no, I’m not going to get down to your level and play it.”

When he walked into the Mayor’s office, old Dionisio was seated in a big mahogany swivel chair upholstered in oxblood leather. The swivel chair was so big, it looked like a Mahogany Monster, and the oxblood leather looked like the inside of its mouth about to swallow Old Dionisius whole. He was leaning back into it with a gloriously bored self-satisfaction at a desk with a surface you could land a Piper Cub on. He didn’t get up to welcome the Chief the way he usually did. He didn’t even straighten up in the chair. If anything, he leaned back still further, to the limit of the chair’s joint springs.

“Come in, Chief, and have a seat.” There was a confident note of summons in his voice, and a nonchalant flip of the wrist indicated the other side of the desk. The seat was a straight chair immediately opposite Old Dio. The Chief sat down, making sure his posture was perfect. Then Old Dio said, “How goes the tranquility of the citizenry this afternoon, Chief?”

The Chief smiled slightly and indicated the small police radio clipped to the belt of his uniform. “Haven’t had one call in the thirty minutes I’ve been here waiting.”

“That’s good,” said the Mayor. His dubious look of mockery remained on his face. “So what can I do for you, Chief?”

“Well, you probably remember that incident at Lee de Forest High? A teacher was arrested for assaulting a student and spent two nights in jail? Well, now he has a trial coming up, and the courts consider a teacher assaulting a student on par with some lowlife assaulting an eighty-five-year-old man leaning on an aluminum walker in the park.”

“All right,” said the Mayor, “I’ll accept that. And therefore…?”

“We now know it was the other way around. The student assaulted the teacher. The student is a Haitian gang leader with a juvenile record for violence, and the other students are afraid of him. As a matter of fact, they’re scared shitless, if you want to know the truth. He ordered five of his hangers-on to lie to the officers and say the teacher assaulted him.”

“Okay, what about the other students?”

“Everyone else the officers interviewed said they didn’t know. Said they couldn’t see what happened, or they were distracted by something else, or—the long and short of it was, this punk and his gang would do something to them if they came even close to telling what happened.”

“And now…?”

“And now we have confessions from all five of the ‘witnesses.’ They all admit they lied to the officers. What this means is, the DA has no case. Mr. Estevez—that’s the teacher—will be spared what could have been a very stiff sentence.”

“That’s good work, Chief, but I thought this was a School Police case.”

“It was, but now it’s under the jurisdiction of the court and the District Attorney’s office.”

“Well, then, we have a happy ending, don’t we, Chief,” said the Mayor, putting his elbows up and clasping his hands behind his neck and lying back to about as laid-back as a man could get in a swivel chair. “Thank you for going to the trouble to bring me this happy news of justice served, Chief. And that’s why you had to see me in person and make this appointment at the busiest time of my day?”

The irony, the snottiness, the belittling and disdainful way he wrote him off as a pest—eating up his precious time—the full-bore contempt and blatant disrespect… that did it. That pulled the trigger… No more holding back… He was doing it… risking all… even the house in Kendall so beloved by his beloved wife, whose beautiful face blipped through his corpus callosum at the very moment he said, “Actually… there’s one other element to it.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It’s the officer who broke the case. He prevented a terrible miscarriage of justice. Mr. Estevez’s career, maybe his life, would have been destroyed. He owes a lot to this officer. We all do. I’m sure you’ll recall his name… Nestor Camacho.”

That name did terrible things to the Mayor’s ultra-supine posture. His hands descended from behind his neck, his elbows hit the top of the desk, and his head tilted forward. “What are you talking about?” he said. “I thought he was relieved of duty!”

“He was. He still is. But right after he handed over his badge and his gun—must not have been sixty minutes—he gave me the names of all five boys. He had done this all on his own. One of them he had already had a long talk with, and the kid had recanted what he had told the School Police. By now, Camacho was relieved of duty, and so I told the Detective Bureau to interrogate the other four. They didn’t stick to their story very long. As soon as they knew there’d been a break in their ranks and they might be arrested and prosecuted for perjury, that was it. They all folded. They’re only kids, after all. Tomorrow the DA’s gonna announce they’re dropping the case.”

“And they’re gonna release Camacho’s name?”

“Oh yes, of course,” said the Chief. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, Dio… I’m restoring him to duty… the badge, the gun, the whole thing.”

With that, the Mayor bolted forward in his chair as if the springs themselves had launched him.

“You can’t do that, Cy! Camacho just got relieved of duty—for being a goddamned racial bigot! We’ll lose all the credibility we gained with the African American community when we put that little sonofabitch on ice. I should have made you fire him outright. All of a sudden—what’s it been, three weeks?—all of a sudden, he’s back in the picture, bigger than ever, and he’s a f*cking hero. Every African American in Miami’s gonna be up in arms all over again—except for one, the goddamn Chief of Police! It seems like yesterday, they all saw your little bigot in action and heard him spew out all that racist shit of his, live, in the raw, on YouTube. And now he’ll have the f*cking Haitian community in a f*cking uproar. They were out in the streets for two days raising holy hell before. Now they’ll really be out in the streets, soon as they find out this known racist, this Ku Klux Camacho of yours, has managed to switch the blame onto one of their own. I told you this kid is a one-man race riot, didn’t I? And now you’re gonna restore him to duty and not only that, glorify him! I don’t get you, Cy. I really don’t. You know very well that one of the main reasons you were made chief was that we thought you were the man to keep the peace with all these—uh uhhh—communities. So you think I’m gonna stand by and let you turn racial friction into a goddamn conflagration on my watch? Nooooooooo, hoooooooh, my friend, you’re not gonna do that! Otherwise you’re gonna make me do something I’d rather not have to do.”

“Which is what?” said the Chief.

The Mayor snapped his fingers. “You’ll be gone like that! That I can promise you!”

“You can’t promise me a goddamned thing, Dionisio. Remember? I don’t work for you. I work for the City Manager.”

“That’s a distinction without a difference. The City Manager works for me.”

“Oh, you may have gotten him the job, and you’re the one who pushes his buttons, but the City Charter thinks he works for the City Council. You hand him this goddamned thing, and the press is all over him, and he’ll panic. He’ll be shitting bricks! I know some Councilmen—I know them—exactly the same way you know your so-called City Manager—and they’re ready to give your dicky-boy such holy hell, they’re so stoked to call him your personal tool… in utter violation of the Charter’s mandate… your little boy will turn into a gibbering dwarf. He’ll call for a goddamned committee to study the problem for ten months or until it goes away.”

“All you can do is delay me, Cy… maybe. But you’re already dead meat. The difference between you and me is, I have to think about the whole city.”

“No, Dio, the difference between you and me is that you are incapable of thinking about anything other than what the whole city thinks of Dio. Why don’t you try going into a small quiet room and thinking about right and wrong… I bet some of it will come back to you.”

The Mayor twisted his lips into a smirk. “Dead meat, Cy, dead meat.”

The Chief said, “You do what you have to do, and I’ll do what I have to do… and we’ll see, won’t we.”

He stood up and stared at Mayor Dionisio Cruz as belligerently as he had ever confronted anybody in his life… and never blinked once. But neither did Dio, who remained seated in the luxurious oxblood-leather-and-mahogany maw of his mammoth swivel chair and—coolly—stared back. The Chief wanted to laser Dio’s eyeballs out of his skull. But Dio didn’t flinch. Neither of them moved a muscle or said a word. It was a classic Mexican standoff, and it seemed to go on for ten minutes. In fact, it was closer to ten seconds. Then the Chief wheeled about and showed Dio his big powerful back and stormed out of the room.

On the way down in the elevator he could feel his heart beating as fast as it had when he was a young athlete. In the lobby there were citizens who had no idea he had been frozen out, cryogenized, two flights up. Down here, among these innocent souls, the Hi, Chief!s rang out as they always had. Uncharacteristically he ignored them, these good souls, his fans. He was completely focused upon something else.

The moment he stepped out of this ridiculous stucco Pan American Air-head city hall, Sergeant Sanchez pulled up in the big black Escalade, and the Chief got into the seat beside him. He realized he must have looked more morose and upwrought than Sanchez had ever seen him.

Not knowing quite what to say—but curious about what had happened—Sanchez said, “Well, Chief… uhhh… how’d it go?”

Staring straight out through the windshield, the Chief said two words: “It didn’t.”

No doubt Sanchez was dying to say, “What didn’t?”… but he was afraid to ask anything so direct. So he screwed up his courage and said, “It didn’t? It didn’t what, Chief?”

“It didn’t go,” said the Chief, still looking straight ahead. After a few beats he said to the windshield, “But it will.”

Sanchez realized he wasn’t talking to him. This was a conversation with his high and mighty Self.

The Chief took his iPhone out of his breast pocket and tapped its glass face with his fingertip twice and held the thing to his ear and said, “Cat.” It was a command, not telephone manners. “Call Camacho—right now. I want him in my office ASAP.”