Back to Blood

19





The Whore


Magdalena woke up in a hypnopompic state. Something was stroking her. It caused no alarm, however, just a semiconscious bewilderment amidst her struggle to turn her lights on. By the time it slid up her mons pubis and her abdomen and began dwelling upon the nipple of her left breast, she had put it all together in a picture, even though her eyes remained closed. She and Sergei lay naked in his outsized bed in his great duplex in Sunny Isles—and she couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe a man his age could regenerate over and over, before they had finally gone to sleep. Now she opened her eyes, and with a single glance at the gap where a set of almost comically magnificent curtains came together, she could tell it was still black out. They couldn’t have been asleep more than a couple of hours—and obviously he was ready to go at it again. The Korolyov Museum of Art… She was in bed with a famous Russian oligarch. Todo el mundo knew who he was and how handsome he was. His body impinged upon hers, and his hand was stroking her here… and there… and there and there and there, and she despaired. She was a whore for the Korolyov Museum of Art in the body of an oligarch, an alien who spoke English with a heavy accent. But then the tips of her breasts became erect on their own, and the flood in her loins washed morals, despair, and all other abstract assessments away in a cloud of some sort of divine cologne of his. Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle’s own lips and maw—all this without a word. But then he began moaning and punctuating the moans with an occasional faux-agonized exclamation in Russian. It sounded like “Zhyss katineee!” He was amazing. He seemed to be able to last forever, so long that sounds finally came from her lips involuntarily… “Ah… ah… ahh… ahhh… Ahhhhhhh” as she climaxed over and over… When at last he was just lying next to her, she was able to think again. The clock on his bedside table said 5:05 a.m. Was she a whore? No! This was the modern sequence of love!—of romance! If anything, he was crazy about her. He was ready to love her to death. He couldn’t get enough of her, which meant herself, too, her spirit, her uniqueness as a person, her soul. Just looking at her, wanting her, yielding himself totally to her, wanting to have her every waking moment—and unwaking moment, too, obviously—Dios mío, she was so tired, so exhausted, she wanted to submerge herself in sleep—but then she had a vision of breakfast with him. Maybe they would be in terry cloth robes. He had some luxurious terry cloth robes hanging in the bathroom… the two of them having breakfast at a little table, looking out at the ocean, looking at each other, talking languorously, laughing at little things, their entire beings suffused with the sweetness, the dreaminess made possibly by, yes, carnal divine feelings that are the… the… the distillation of things that cannot be expressed in mere words, this perfect yielding to—¡Dios mío! what was that?!—P l i n g pling pling p l i n g p l i n g p l i n g pling pling p l i n g p l i n g p l i n g pling pling p l i n g p l i n g pling pling p l i n g p l i n g—Sergei rolled over and reached toward his bedside table—toward his iPhone. The music was his phone’s soft and soothing ring P l i n g pling pling p l i n g p l i n g p l i n g p l i n g pling pling—and she knew that music… but from where?… Ahh! from many years ago! Twice her mother had taken her at Christmastime to a ballet for children. What was it called? All she could think of was “The Dance of the Sugar Thumbs”… but that couldn’t be it—“The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”! That’s what it was! Yes, and the name of the whole thing was… The Nutcracker!… It came back to her! And it was by a great composer… What was his name?… Chaivovsky!… that was it!… Chaivovsky!… He was a really great composer, a famous composer of beautiful music. Nestor blipped through her head. To think that Nestor had one thing in common with Sergei—playing around with phone rings. Funny. Even in this little detail, come to think of it, Sergei was the aristocrat. Chaivovsky—a great classical composer!… whereas Nestor reveals his true Hialeah self… He has to choose a Low-Rent song by Bulldog, and Bulldog is like Dogbite and Rabies—an imitation of Pitbull. In a silly little thing like this, playing around with a phone ring, Sergei was part of a higher order of things. Sergei p l i n g pling pling propped himself up onto an elbow. She looked at the curve of his bare back. He had such a great body. He picked up the telephone with his other hand. That was the end of The Nutcracker. This call was so early… It was still dark out.

“Hello?” said Sergei. But the rest was in Russian. His voice began rising. He asked the caller something… a lag while the caller responded… Louder, Sergei asked another question. A lag… and Sergei asked another question, this time angrily. In all of it Magdalena could make out only one word, a name—“Hallandale”—the name of a town just north of Sunny Isles. The lag… and this time Sergei became furious. He was yelling.

He threw the phone on the bed. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, raising his body upright and steadying himself on the heels of his hands… He just sat there… with his spine straight as a string, and his head, too.

Under his breath he said something just as furiously. He shook his head from side to side in the semaphore that says, “A hopeless case… hopeless… hopeless…”

“What’s wrong, Sergei?” said Magdalena.

He didn’t even turn his head toward her. He said one word, “Nothing.” And he didn’t really say that. He breathed it.

He stood up and walked stark naked… muttering and shaking his head the whole time… to the closet where he kept his dressing robes… and pulled one out from off a big mahogany hanger… a real production, this robe, heavy silk in a pattern of navy blue, medium blue, and red, with white dots no bigger than grains swooping up and down like comets… huge red quilted lapels and cuffs… He flailed his arms into the sleeves. He stood facing her… without seeing her…

… Ah!—a note of hope! Even though he was five or six steps away, his polla was practically hanging in front of her face… and it was tumescent!—definitely tumescent! ::::::a sign that I still exist!:::::: but his eyes didn’t show it… Inside his head all seven types of neurons were banging into synapses to the nth degree… She was dying to ask him what about. She propped herself up on one elbow… wondering if the sight of her breasts with suddenly erect nipples might not make him seriously tumescent… mad for coño… but he successfully contained his lust, if any… apparently she no longer existed at this point, and obviously no curiosity on her part would be welcome.

He had scarcely stepped into his slippers… which were velvet and embroidered with what?—an ornate monogram in Russian characters?… and must have cost more than all the clothes he had so rutrutruttingly removed from her body last night put together… Last night… That must not have been all that long ago, because she felt so tired, even a bit groggy… The light that seeped out of the edges of the curtains looked awfully dim… had the sun even come up?… which made the telephone call even harder to figure out… Something had happened… He had scarcely stepped into his slippers when a doorbell chimed… didn’t ring, didn’t buzz… chimed like the middle key on a xylophone… Nobody was going to set off an explosion or any other alarming sound by pressing a button outside Sergei Korolyov’s bedroom…

Sergei ran his fingers through his hair and headed for the door… and Magdalena slid back under the covers to hide her bare body and considered sinking as far into the pillows as she possibly could and turning her back toward whatever was about to happen… but her curiosity got the better of her and she lay there under covers that hid all of her up to her cheekbones—but not her eyes. She didn’t want to miss a thing. Sergei said something in Russian at the door… a low voice responded outside. Two men entered, both about thirty-five… wearing identical tan—gabardine?—suits and navy—black?—polo shirts… one tall and slope shouldered with his balding head shaved down to an unfortunately misshapen knob… the other shorter, heavier… showing the world a head of wavy dark-brown hair he obviously worked on a lot… Both had deep-set eyes and struck Magdalena as hard cases. The taller one, from the servile way he shook his head, seemed to be apologizing for having awakened Sergei so early and then handed him a newspaper opened to a certain page… Still standing there, Sergei pored over it for about a minute that seemed to stretch out for an hour, since all of them, Magdalena included, wanted to get the godfather’s reaction. He scowled at the two men as if they had done something not only wrong but stupid. He didn’t say a word. He ordered them through a pair of old-fashioned doors with panes of glass and heavy wooden muntins—by pointing at them with a stiff arm and a forefinger that suddenly seemed a foot long. The doors led into a small study. En route they had to pass within five or six feet of the bed. Each of them took a single glance at Magdalena, each nodded his head all of two inches, each uttered, “Miss,” without so much as a micro-second slowing of their obedient march to the study. A micro-nod… a micro–word of greeting—no, not greeting; rather, a bare minimal acknowledgment of her existence. A hot wave of humiliation ran through her brain. Their “hospitality” was automatic. She was no doubt one in a sequence of naked young things to be found in the master bed in the morning.

Inside the study, she could see the smaller one, the one who loved his own wavy hair, fetching a wireless telephone receiver and handing it to Sergei where he sat. Sergei was growling into the telephone… in Russian. The only things Magdalena could understand were “Hallandale” and the expression “active adults”… which meant nothing to her but stood out simply because it was in English. When he finally concluded this Russian barrage of his, he handed the telephone back to the bodyguard with the wavy locks… and made note of Magdalena for the first time since the two men had arrived.

He emerged from the study and said, “A situation has developed.” He said it in a grave voice. He hesitated, as if he were going to say more… and he did: “Vladimir will take you home.”

He marched straight into his dressing room. He didn’t even give her another glance. That left Magdalena trapped under the bedcovers—naked. The two bodyguards stood inside the study… It hit her like a physical pressure… wave after wave of humiliation… abandoned with no clothes on in a big over-the-top bedroom with a pair of hard-looking Russians who could see her through the glass doors any time they cared to. At first she felt fear. But fear gave way to a scalding shame that she had let herself be used this way… a used coño waiting to be swept out like the rest of the filth of this place… Vladimir will take you home… After an interminable few minutes she was suffocating from the shame and humiliation of it all… and finally Sergei reappeared… hastily clad in an expensive-looking pale-blue shirt stuffed into a pair of blue jeans… she didn’t know he possessed anything so common as blue jeans… He was shod in a pair of ochre-color pigskin moccasins that must have cost a thousand dollars… and no socks… and no smile… just the worst, the curtest expression of hospitality she had ever heard: “Vladimir will take care of everything. If you want breakfast, the cook will prepare it. I’m sorry, but this is an emergency. Vladimir will look after you.” He walked out of the room with the other bodyguard, the shorter one who worked hard on his hair.

Magdalena was furious but too stunned to show it.

Like a zombie with a heavy Russian accent, the one called Vladimir said, “When you are ready, I take you. I wait for you outside.” He walked out the door and shut it carefully behind him.

His matter-of-fact manner made Magdalena feel as if he were used to hauling one naked girl or another out of here every morning.

“You bastard!” she said under her breath as she crawled out from under the covers and stood up. Her heart was hammering away. She had never felt more humiliated in her life. Sergei’s sadistic chess master at Gogol’s was nothing compared to the Master himself. For a moment she stood stock-still. In a wall mirror she could see a beautiful girl standing there stark naked in a huge over-elegant bedroom decorated in what was meant to be a grand manner but wound up looking more fussy and finicky than anything else… with its swags and antique chairs and chests and a fleet of deep-purple draperies pulled back by ridiculous gold-embroidered pulls into velvet folds as deep as a creek. That naked girl in the mirror looked more like a little whore than any girl she had ever beheld, and now the slut was supposed to gather up her cheap, trashy, puta-cutie clothes and get the hell out of here… now that she’s been consumed like a soufflé or cigar, and Vladimir… has instructions to throw the trash out.

In the bathroom there were so many mirrors the little bitch could see her bare whore’s ass and boobs from every conceivable angle. Fortunately, she had worn Amélia’s simple black dress for last night… yeah, so simple it was open in front down to here in a wide V… and sure, she could make her exit by daylight inconspicuously, since people could only see the inner halves of her boobs, and each nipple would be covered by a ribbon’s width of the dress’s black faux-silk cloth.

The pumps on her feet were scooped low and made of black satin with heels as high as they came, and they came very high this year. She looked like a tower of sex on tiptoes. Oh, well, no reason not to top it all off with some rake-a-cheek raspberry lipstick… and enough black eyeshadow to make her eyes look like a pair of glistening orbs floating upon a pair of concupiscent mascara pools.

She put her Big handbag over her shoulder, this year’s Big, of course, made of the very best black faux-python. She was about to walk out of the room, concentrating on how to contain her resentment of that robot with the shaved head, Vladimir, and enervated and humiliated by what he knew about her night and this morning… ::::::Sergei! You really are a bastard! You know that?:::::: She swore she would let him know that if she were ever so unfortunate as to run into him again. ::::::How could you possibly let those two Russian aborigines into the room?:::::: Was that perversity? No, it was worse than that. He had gotten what he wanted. He had f*cked her. So now she was just a piece of equipment lying around. And what does a piece of equipment care about how things look? Since when have pieces of equipment started having a moral sense that picks up feelings such as modesty?… Or, to put it another way, since when have whores started to feel like anything more than whores?

Now Magdalena was really angry. She noticed the newspaper lying on the floor by the chair where Sergei had sat down to read it. She picked it up and scanned the lower half-a-page he had been reading… in the Herald’s Section C, “Arts and Entertainment.”

Most of it was taken up by an article with a headline topped by a small, dense line of type in all-capital letters: REALIST SPEAKS OUT.

It began, “If laughs could kill, every prominent modern artist from Picasso to Peter Doig would have died in a pile this week on the floor of the Wynwood studio of a member of the most endangered species in the entire art world: a realist painter.

“Big, hearty, belly-laughing Russian-born Igor Drukovich is not the best-known artist in Miami, but he might be the most colorful.”

Magdalena wondered ::::::“Belly-laughing?” What does it mean, “belly-laughing”?:::::: buzz… buzz… buzz… she read on. This Drukovich keeps tossing down shots of some vodka concoction he’s dreamed up. Now he’s saying, “Picasso can’t draw”… If he, Drukovich couldn’t draw any better than Picasso, he’d start a new movement and call it Cubism… And what was that supposed to mean? She didn’t pause to figure it out… buzz… buzz… buzz… three Russian artists she’d never heard of… Mal-a-who?… At least she’d heard of Picasso… Whoever wrote this thing obviously thinks all this art and culture stuff is just fascinating… Magdalena glanced at the byline… John Smith… Dios mío… that same name again!… but it’s all so boring, she can’t imagine what set Sergei off like that… she can feel herself dozing off… falling asleep like a horse… standing up—pop!—up pops Sergei’s name from out of nowhere: “Twenty paintings, valued at $70 million, were donated to the Miami Museum of Art by the recently arrived Russian collector Sergei Korolyov.”

Now she’s alert… What about Sergei?… Sergei?… But there is nothing more about Sergei… buzz… buzz… buzz… just more about the Russian painters, Malevich, Goncharova, and Kandinsky… The “big, hearty, belly-laughing” Russian painter, this Drukovich, has another shot of vodka and starts making fun of all three of them… buzz… buzz… buzz… Does Drukovich think he could do what they’ve done? “Anybody could!” he says. “I could do it, except that makes me have to look at this [s--t].” He says he’d have to do it blindfolded, and as a matter of fact he has actually done it blindfolded… buzz buzz… another shot of vodka… Somebody asks him where these paintings are… He says he doesn’t know… Maybe he threw them away or lost them or gave them to somebody… If he gave them away, who would he give them to?… “Who would want them?” says the Russian. Somebody says, “The Miami Museum of Art certainly seemed happy to get the real things. They valued them at $70 million… Maybe you gave them to the museum.”… laugh laugh laugh… The Russian says, “That is the most silly thing I ever heard”… more vodka… buzz buzz buzz buzz… The guy must be drunk as a monkey by now… Magdalena reads the whole thing to the end… no more mention of Sergei… Then what freaked Sergei out? Would he get that mad because somebody nobody has ever heard of said he didn’t like what Sergei had given the museum?… That must be it… He must be very proud and very touchy about that… buzz… buzz… buzz… and to think she just forced herself to read all that stuff…

As ordered, Vladimir was waiting when Magdalena left Sergei’s suite. He bore the absolutely blank expression of the efficient automaton that he was. He didn’t move a muscle in his face when he saw her. But his very presence was enough to turn her head hot with shame. What would she look like to the rest of the world this morning? That was easy: like a cheap slut the morning after the orgy, wearing the same boobs-rampant almost-a-dress she arrived in last night… still dripping with diseased papaya ooze.

Thank God there was an elevator that took you straight down to the underground parking garage. Without a word, Vladimir led her to what turned out to be Sergei’s limousine, a tan Mercedes Maybach. She got into the capacious backseat and scrunched down into a corner, seeking invisibility. The only scenery she could see, as they went up a ramp and out onto Collins Avenue, was the back of the hairless white knob that was Vladimir’s head behind the wheel.

::::::Vladimir, don’t you say so much as one word to me.::::::

It turned out that she had nothing to fear on that score. So then she became paranoid.

::::::Sergei treated me like a cheap whore. What if this sinister automaton of his is not taking me home—but kidnapping me and holding me captive in some place I’ve never heard of where they’ll force me to commit unspeakable acts?::::::

Now her eyes were fixed upon the landscape as it rolled by. Desperately she looked for reassuring landmarks. But she knew so little about the geography up here north of Miami Beach—

Thank God! The Fontainebleau came drifting past… they were on the right route… She stared again at Vladimir’s noggin… A whole new rush of possible disasters began romping through her head… How was she going to live now?… Had she assumed somewhere in her head that Sergei was going to keep her the way Norman had?… It had never come to her before in just so many words. ::::::I was a kept woman all that time! It’s true! I turned my back on my family and Nestor and everybody else because Norman was a television celebrity… Some celebrity… he let himself be used anytime TV pimps were looking for some egotist with a medical degree to turn on the pervert in every viewer with the hottest news about pornography addiction… while the rest of the fraternity of psychiatrists looks upon him as a publicity addict and social climber who would do anything to call attention to himself… including cheapening the profession… ¡Dios mío! How do I let myself fall for these corrupt creeps?::::::

She was so ashamed, she had Vladimir let her out a block from her apartment. She didn’t want anyone to see her coming home in this car. Why is that girl wearing last night’s party clothes being returned to this Low-Rent (for Miami Beach) neighborhood this early in the morning in some rich man’s limousine driven by some rich man’s lumpy-bonehead automaton? Do we have to spell it out for you?

It was one of those miserable laundry-ironing-room Miami days. She walks one block and she already feels hot and sweaty and sorry for herself. She tries but can’t hold the tears back. The mascara supposedly adding drama to her eye sockets is running down her cheekbones, which is no more than she deserves, the little whore.

::::::Please, God, don’t let Amélia be home… Don’t let her see me like this!:::::: She can’t even try to fool Amélia… not on this subject. Magdalena barely has the door open and… Amélia is standing right there with her hands on her hips. She takes one look at Magdalena in the night-before black dress she lent her, and a what-have-we-here grin comes sneaking across her lips.

“And where have we been?” she said.

“Oh, you know where I’ve been—” And with that, Magdalena’s leaky eyes opened wide, and her mouth fell ajar… and she burst into tears. Her sobs came out in regular paroxysms. She knew she had to tell Amélia the whole story, down to the most humiliating details… but at this moment that was the least of her concerns. What gripped her was fear.

“Come on,” said Amélia. “Hey!—what’s wrong?” She put her arms around Magdalena—and would never know how grateful her morose roommate was for that little embrace. Even if she were calm and composed, Magdalena would never find the words to express what Amélia’s show of protection meant to her at that moment.

“Oh, my God, I feel so disgusting. That was the worst sob night sob of sob my whole life! sob sob sob sob.” Her words were swimming against waves and waves of sobs.

“Tell me what happened,” said Amélia.

sobbing sobbing sobbing “And I thought he was so sob cool sob and everything… and cultured sob… and like sob European sob and all and sob knew all these things about art sob and had all these good manners… and you wanna know what he really is?… He’s the nastiest pig that ever lived! He sticks his dirty snout here sob and there sob and wherever he likes and then he treats me like mierda!”—a regular bucket of sobs—“I feel so filthy!” sob sob sob sob…

“But what happened?”

“He brings these two… goons of his into the bedroom, right into the bedroom, and I’m still in bed, and he’s mad and yelling at them in Russian about something… and I’m thinking, ‘Like I don’t even exist’—but I exist, all right! sob I’m that piece of used coño sob over there sob in the bed sob sob sob and he’s ordering them to throw the used coño out like the rest of the trash sob before it starts smelling sob sob sob sob. He freaked me out, Amélia… totally freaked me out… but it’s worse than that. He’s scary. All he says to me is ‘Something’s come up. Vladimir will drive you home.’ That’s it!—and we have just spent all night—‘Vladimir will drive you home’! Vladimir is one of those goons… this big tall Russian with a shaved head… shaved right down to the bone… and that bald bone—it has all these lumps and bumps in it and no brains, just video game circuits… He’s a robot, and whatever Sergei tells him to do, he does. He drove me back here without saying one word. He has his orders. Take this piece of used coño out and dump it. So he drives it here and dumps it… There’s something—very wrong—there’s something evil about that whole setup. It’s scary, Amélia!”

She could tell Amélia was already bored by this recitation and couldn’t think of anything cogent to say. Finally she came up with “Well, I don’t really know anything about your Sergei other than—”

Magdalena laughed sourly and muttered, “My Sergei…”

“—what you’ve told me, but it sounds to me that for such a handsome, sophisticated oligarch-I-guess-he-is, he’s got the heart of one of those Russian Cossacks who used to go around cutting off the hands of little children caught stealing bread.”

Magdalena, genuinely startled: “Russian Cossacks?”

“Now, don’t start panicking all over again! I swear there aren’t any more Russian Cossacks,” said Amélia. “Not even in Sunny Isles. I don’t know why they suddenly popped into my head.”

“Cutting off the hands of little children caught stealing bread…”

“Okay, okay,” said Amélia. “I didn’t mean to come up with such an extreme comparison… but you know what I mean…”

Just as Magdalena was about to say something, a chill ran through her body. She wondered if Amélia could tell she was trembling.

Toward evening, Nestor and Ghislaine were in the Korolyov Museum of Art studiously inspecting a painting about three feet high and two feet wide… A caption on the wall said, “Wassily Kandinsky, Suprematist Composition XXIII, 1919.”

::::::What the hell is that supposed to be?:::::: Nestor wondered.

There was a big aquamarine brushstroke down here near the bottom and a smaller brushstroke up there in red… but a red dull as a brick. The two had nothing to do with each other, and in between them… a huge batch of narrow black lines, long, short, straight, bent, sickly, crippled, running over one another in promiscuous tangles but veering away from the occasional congestion of dots and dabs of every color you could imagine, so long as it clashed. ::::::Is this supposed to be a joke on a lot of serious people who think this is a great thing the public-spirited oligarch Sergei Korolyov has done for Miami?:::::: It was so crazy, Nestor couldn’t help but lean close to Ghislaine and say… in the kind of hushed house voice:

“That’s great, huh? Looks like an explosion in a sanitation dumpster!”

Ghislaine said nothing at first. Then she leaned close to Nestor and said in a pious tone, “Well, I don’t think it’s here because they hope you’ll like it or you won’t like it. It’s more because it’s a sort of milestone.”

“A milestone?” said Nestor. “What kind of milestone?”

“A milestone in art history,” she said. “I took a class last semester in early-twentieth-century art. Kandinsky and Malevich were the first two artists to do abstract paintings and nothing but abstract paintings.”

That was a jolt. Nestor could tell that in her own mild, sweet way, without wanting to hurt his feelings, Ghislaine had rebuked him. Yeah! He hadn’t figured out exactly how, in so many words, but she had rebuked him… in a hushed tone. What was it with all these reverent voices?… as if the Korolyov Museum were a church or a chapel. There must have been sixty or seventy people in the two rooms. They huddled reverently before this painting and that painting, the faithful did, and they communed… communed with what?… Wassily Kadinsky’s ascendant soul?… or with Art itself, Art the All-in-One?… It beat Nestor… These people treated art like a religion. The difference was that you could get away with joking about religion… You only had to think of all the ways people played with the Lord, the Savior, Heaven, Hell, the Outer Darkness, Satan, the Choir of Angels, Purgatory, the Messiah, Creeping Jesus… for humorous effect… In fact, there were plenty of people who wouldn’t feel comfortable using them seriously… whereas with Art you didn’t dare make fun of it… it was serious stuff… if you went around making would-be funny remarks… obviously you were a palurdo… a simpleton… a meathead unable to detect the self-demeaning clumsiness of your sacrilege… So that was it! That was why treating Kandinsky’s Suprematist Composition XXIII as a big solemn joke was so unfunny, puerile, excruciatingly embarrassing… that was why Ghislaine couldn’t just go along with it and emit a harmless little chuckle to lighten the load of his insensitivity and move on to some other subject… That, in turn, made him terribly aware of his lack of education.

It wasn’t that people with college degrees were any smarter than other people. He knew so many retards with BAs after their names, he could publish a reference book called Who’s a Loser. But along the way they picked up all this… stuff you needed for conversations. Magdalena used to call it “all that museum stuff,” and that was his problem now. He didn’t have—but he broke off that train of thought because he just couldn’t have Magdalena on his mind. All he could think of now was that Ghislaine had rebuked him… in the mildest way she could think of, but she had rebuked him, and he was damned if he was just going to stand here in front of this piece-a-shit painting as the penitent rebuked little boy.

All at once he heard himself saying, “Well, I’m not here to love art. I’m here working on a case.”

“You’re—did you say case?” Ghislaine didn’t know quite how to put it. “I mean, I thought you were…”

“You thought I’d been ‘relieved of duty’? Right? I’m still relieved of duty, but what I’m doing here is a private investigation. It’s about these paintings.” He swept his hand in an arc, as if to take in every painting in the place. He knew he shouldn’t say it, but this was a way to bury Ghislaine’s milestone loftiness and all the rest of it. He leaned next to her ear and said, “These are all fakes, everything in both rooms.”

“What?” said Ghislaine. “What do you mean, fakes?”

“I mean they’re forgeries. Pretty good ones, I hear, but forgeries, every last one of them.”

Nestor loved the startled look on her face. He had rocked her with that one. Whether or not he was a palurdo suddenly became irrelevant. He had hoisted the whole subject up to an infinitely more important plane… where art historians were little butterflies or insects.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m afraid that’s true. They’re forgeries, all right, and I know who Korolyov went to, to get them done, and I’ve been in the secret studio where he did them. What I’ve got to do is prove it. If they’re fakes—” He shrugged, as if to say, “Then we won’t have to waste time on that milestone stuff.”

There you had it! His work, his expertise as a private investigator, made her rebuke seem silly and girlish—and only then did he realize he shouldn’t have divulged anything about what he was doing. Now, on behalf of nothing but his wounded vanity, he had entrusted all this to a college girl he barely knew.

No! He did know her. She was transparent, and she was honest. He could trust her. He could tell that from the very start. Nevertheless… now that he had gone and done something foolish, it was time to get absolutely serious.

He gave her something just short of a Cop Look. “That’s just between us, you and me, okay? You understand?”

He Cop-Looked at her until he got that pledge out of her. “Yes,” she said in a tiny voice, almost a whimper, “I understand.”

Now he felt guilty. The quickest way to alienate her—and lose her trust—would be to continue in this tough-guy mode. So he broke into the softest and most loving smile he could come up with. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to sound so… so… serious and everything. If there’s anyone I can trust, it’s you. I absolutely—I just know that. I’ve known that from the start, and—”

He caught himself. From the start of what exactly? Now he was going overboard in the other direction.

“Anyway, you know what I mean… So that’s the main reason I’m here. I figured I should actually see all this—and I figured it was a chance to see you. I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to me that you’re here.”

Now the loving look he gave her was completely sincere. Having her by his side was a little bit of Heaven. For the first time, the words actually formed in his mind: “I’m in love with her.”

¡Mierda!—his iPhone! He had turned off the ring and put it on vibrate and now it was hopping around in his pocket. The caller ID told him it was John Smith. So he shot a quick Dios mío look at Ghislaine and bolted out of the gallery and into the lobby and put both hands around the offending instrument and answered in an exceedingly hushed voice:

“Camacho.”

“Nestor, where are you?” said the voice of John Smith. “You sound like you’re underneath a load of sand.”

“I’m in the museum. I thought I’d actually take a look at these—what we’re talking about. I’m—”

John Smith trampled right over Nestor’s voice: “Listen, Nestor, I just heard from Igor. He’s in a bad way. He just read the article—or somebody read it to him.”

“This late?”

“Somebody called him. I doubt Igor even reads English, and probably the same goes for his friends, whoever they might be. Anyway, he’s really agitated. I thought at first he was mad at me. He probably is, but that wasn’t what he was all worked up over. He’s terrified. He thinks Korolyov’s going to come get him. He really believes that. He’s afraid they’ll ambush him, ambush, as in kill, assassinate. He thinks they’ve already got the place staked out. He hasn’t seen them, they haven’t threatened him—he’s paranoid in the extreme. I said, ‘You think he’d come get you just because you made fun of his paintings?’ He doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then he says, ‘No’—ready for this?—‘because I’m the one who painted the pictures. Why did you have to print all that about me doing those pictures with my eyes closed? You’ve done this to me! You practically drew them a map,’ and on and on. He’s half crazed, Nestor… but he’s admitted it!”

“He came right out and said he forged them? Was anybody else listening to this conversation—or is it your word against his?”

“It’s better than that,” said John Smith. “I’ve got it all on tape—and he agreed to it. I told him he ought to have a record of every step of the way.”

“But isn’t he confessing to being a forger?”

“That’s the least of his worries right now. He thinks they’re coming after him. Besides, if you ask me, he’s dying to have his great talent ‘revealed.’ ”

::::::Jesús Cristo.:::::: Something about John Smith’s enthusiasm, his joy in the hunt, his anticipation of a great journalistic coup, spooked Nestor. ::::::“dying”::::::