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20





The Witness


¡Caliente! Caliente baby… Got plenty fuego in yo’ caja china… Means you needs a length a Hose put in it. ::::::Jesus! What time is it?:::::: Nestor rolled over to his iPhone and picked it up ::::::5:33 a.m.—mierda:::::: and growled as truculently as he had ever growled in his life: “Camacho.”

The woman on the line said, “Nestor?” with a big question mark… She wasn’t at all sure that this inhospitable animal voice was Nestor Camacho’s.

“Yes,” he said, in the tone of voice that conveys the message “Kindly disintegrate.”

Feebly, almost tearfully, the woman said, “I’m sorry, Nestor, but I wouldn’t call you like this unless I absolutely had to. It’s me… Magdalena.” Her voice began breaking. “You’re the… only… person who… can help me!”

::::::It’s me… Magdalena!::::::

A single memory swept in under the radar, which is to say subliminally, and suffused Nestor’s nervous system without ever becoming a thought… blip Magdalena is dumping him on the street in Hialeah and speeding off so fast in her mysteriously acquired BMW that the tires are squealing and two wheels actually lift off the ground as she turns at the intersection to get away from him. It came in under the radar, but it did a good job of finishing off love, lust, libido, even sympathy… at 5:30 a.m.

“Nestor?… Are you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “You have to admit this is pretty weird.”

“What is?”

“Getting a call from you. Anyway, ¿qué pasa?”

“I don’t know if I can explain all this over the telephone, Nestor. Can’t we meet—for coffee, breakfast… anything?”

“When?”

“Now!”

“Does it have to be right now? It’s five-thirty in the morning. I went to bed at two.”

“Oh, Nestor… if you never do anuh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uhther thi-ing for me! I ne-e-ee-eed you now-ow-ow.” Her words were breaking up into tears, even little words like now and thing. “I ca-a-n-n’t sleep. I haven’t slept all night. I’m so scared. Nestor! Please hel-l-lp me-ee-ee!”

As has been true throughout recorded history, rare is the strong man strong enough to shrug off a woman’s tears… To that add Nestor’s pride in his strength and—dare he even think it?—valor as a protector—the man on the mast about to plunge to his death… Hernandez about to be strangled by the giant in the crack house… the tears of a woman pleading for the Protector… He caved.

“Well… where?” he said. Both of them had roommates in apartments so small there would be no privacy. Okay; they should meet for coffee, but what was open this early? “Well, there’s always Ricky’s,” said Nestor.

Magdalena was astounded. “You don’t mean Ricky’s in Hialeah!”

::::::Oh, but I do:::::: Nestor said to himself. The simple truth was the moment he said “Ricky’s,” the ambrosial smell of the pastelitos came back to him… and made him intensely hungry… which in turn convinced him that he couldn’t possibly stay awake without Ricky’s. All he said out loud was “I don’t know any other place that opens at five-thirty a.m., and if I don’t have something to eat, you’re gonna have a zombie on your hands.”

So they settled on Ricky’s forty-five minutes from now, which would be 6:15 a.m. Nestor couldn’t hold back a profound sigh… followed by a profound groan… What was he doing?

Nestor had to park the Camaro two blocks away from Ricky’s, and walking those two blocks reignited his many Hialeah resentments. In his mind not only his parents but his neighbors—he could see Mr. Ruiz snapping his fingers as if he had forgotten something and slipping back into his house so he wouldn’t have to pass by El Traidor Nestor Camacho on the street—all of Hialeah had treated him like an embarrassment, or maybe a plain rat, after he rescued ::::::yes, I saved the man! I never even thought of arresting the man on the mast!… The only ones who gave me an even break were Cristy and Nicky at Ricky’s::::::… and with that, the free-floating lust he had always had for Cristy blipped through his loins and gave him a mild lift.

Now he was on the sidewalk of that mean little row of rickety shops he’d have to pass on the way to Ricky’s. Oh, yeah… there it all was… the stupid Santería shop where Magdalena’s mother went to get all that voodoo rigmarole… Wouldn’t you know it! Right there in the window was a three-foot-high ceramic Saint Lazarus, in the sickly, sallow shade of yellow that brought out the sickly brown-black leprosy lesions that covered his body…. Magdalena’s mami… my own mami… Why does that woebegone leper make me think of my mami?… a woebegone soul living on the sufferance of others… She has to believe her caudillo, of course… but she must keep her son the traitor’s love… and offers him, despite his transgressions, a nice soft pallet of pity… “I forgive you, my prodigal son, I forgive you”… Disgusting was what it was!

But now he gets his first whiff of the pastelitos, meaning Ricky’s is just ahead. Ambrosia! He’s at the door… he can feel his teeth cutting through the filo dough, he can see the filo dough shedding flakes as beautiful as tiny flowers, he can taste the ground beef and minced ham his teeth are delivering onto his very tongue upon a bed of filo petals. Now he goes inside… It seems like an eternity since he stood in this doorway, but nothing has changed. There’s the big glass counter with its bulb-lit shelves of baked bread, muffins, cakes, and other sweet things. The little round tables and their old-fashioned bentwood chairs are still there—unoccupied, here at 6:15 in the morning. Okay, he’ll sit there with Magdalena when she arrives… Above all, the rich aroma of the pastelitos! That’s what Heaven will be like. Four men are at the counter waiting for their orders—construction workers, if Nestor has to guess. Two of them have on hard hats, and all four are wearing T-shirts, jeans, and work boots. Waiting… there’s no sign of Cristy or Nicky—

—at that moment a coloratura cry from somewhere behind the counter: “Nestor!”

He can’t see her yet, the counter is so high, but there’s no mistaking that voice, soaring through some high-flying register. Mygod!—the way it fills Nestor with joy! He doesn’t completely understand why at first. She stuck by him throughout all this, treating him as him and not some counter in a political game. True, true, but don’t try to fool yourself, Nestor! You want her, don’t you! So cute, so lively, so nicely put together in her small way, such a gringa among gringas with her spinning gringa hair, such a sweet, promising socket, my heavenly gringa socket, my Cristy!

“Cristy!” he sings out, “mía gringa enamorada!”

He’s aroused by the very thought! He goes straight to the counter, pushes past the four construction workers as if they’re air, sings out a happy greeting, a loud one—at the same time making sure it can be interpreted as a jocular voice: “Cristy, the one and only! You got any idea how much I miss you all the time?!”

Now he can see the very top of her gringa locks and her joking eyes—she knows how to play the game, too—“Mío querido pobrecito,” she says in a teasing voice, “you missed me? Awwww, just didn’t know how to find me, did you? I’m only here every morning from five-thirty on.”

She has stopped two steps from the counter—and her waiting construction worker customers—holding up a tray with two orders of pastelitos and coffee with her left hand and giving him a look of—if not love, something close to it. Nestor leans into the counter until his body is practically draped over it, so he can reach out near her with his right hand. She slides the tray up onto the counter without so much as a glance at the construction workers in order to take Nestor’s hand into the grasp of both of hers. She gives it a playful squeeze and releases it. She’s totally committed to him with her eyes.

“Yeah, mía gringa,” Nestor says, “the Department don’t make it easy for me to get around anymore.”

“Oh, people have told me about it.”

“I don’t doubt that, but whatta they say about it?” said Nestor.

A deep voice: “They say, ‘Whyn’tchoo stop sniffing the girl and let her bring us our damned food.’ ”

It was one of the construction workers Nestor had just pushed past… without so much as a por favor. A good five inches taller than Nestor, this tub was, and God knows how much heavier… americano construction worker from top to bottom—the hard hat, the forehead slick with sweat, the full mustache worn with the accoutrement of an eight-day growth of beard that gave a grizzly look to his sweating jowls, the white T-shirt, now sweat stained the color of broth and stretched over a long expanse of flesh that rated the term “wrestler’s gut,” a pair of fleshy but thick arms, one with a so-called half-sleeve tattoo featuring a huge eagle surrounded by crows wrapped around his biceps and triceps, a pair of gray Gorilla-brand twill working stiff’s pants, scuffed brown steel-toed boots, soles thick as a slice of roast beef—

Nestor was in such a good mood, thanks to Cristy, he would have been glad to laugh at the big lug’s crack—which did have a valid point, after all—and let it pass… except for one word: sniffing. Especially coming from the working-stiff lips of a hulk like this one, it meant sniffing Cristy in a sexual way. Nestor ransacked his brain to find a reason why even that might be okay. He tried and he tried, but it wasn’t okay. It was an insult… an insult he had to stomp to death on the spot. It was disrespectful to Cristy, too. As every cop on patrol knew, you couldn’t wait. You had to shut big mouths now.

He stepped away from the counter and gave the americano a friendly smile, one you could easily interpret as a weak smile, and said, “We’re old friends, Cristy and me, and we haven’t seen each other for a long time.” Then he broadened the smile until his upper lip curled up and bared his front teeth… and kept stretching that grin until his long canines—i.e., eyeteeth—made him look like a grinning dog on the verge of ripping open human flesh, as he added, “You got a sniffing problem with that?”

The two men locked eyes for what seemed like an eternity… Triceratops and allosaurus confronted each other on a cliff overlooking the Halusian Gulp… until the big americano looked down at his wristwatch and said, “Yeah, and I gotta be outta here and back on the site in ten minutes. You got a problem with that?”

Nestor nearly burst out laughing. “Not at all!” he said, chuckling. “Not at all!” The contest was over the moment the americano averted his eyes, supposedly to look down at his watch. The rest of it was double-talk… trying to save face.

Suddenly Cristy was looking right past Nestor in a significant way but not a happy way. “You have a visitor, Nestor.”

Nestor turned around. It was Magdalena. He never dreamed that Cristy knew about him and Magdalena. Magdalena was dressed plainly, modestly, in jeans and a mannish long-sleeved, loose-fitting light-blue shirt buttoned at the wrists and not far from all the way up in front, simply, sensibly. Her face—what was it about her face? A big pair of dark glasses covered a lot of it. Even so, she looked so… pale. “Pale” was about as far as his analytical powers could take him. Men don’t notice a girl’s makeup until it’s missing and even then have no idea what’s missing. The Magdalena he knew always turned her eye sockets into dark shadowy backdrops that brought out her flashing big brown eyes. On her cheekbones she always wore blush. Nestor was innocent of any such sophisticated knowledge. She looked pale, that was all, pale and haggard—was that the word? She wasn’t herself. Plainly, modestly, simply, and sensibly—they were not her, either. He walked right up to her and stared into—or rather, upon—a pair of impenetrable dark lenses. He saw his own dim, small reflection… and no sign of her at all.

“Well, it is you, isn’t it.” Amiably he said it, amiably but without emotion.

“Nestor,” she said, “you’re so kind to do-oo thi-is.” The do and the this nearly broke apart in sobs.

What should he do now? Console her with a hug? But God knew what teary outcome that would have. He also didn’t want to greet her with an embrace right in front of Cristy. Shake hands? To greet Magdalena with a handshake, after all the time they had lain side by side over the past four years, was too wooden to contemplate. So he just said, “Here… why don’t we sit down.”

It was the little round table farthest from the counter. They sat down on the old bentwood chairs. He felt more awkward by the moment. She was as gorgeous as ever. But that didn’t convert from an observation to an emotion. All he could think up to say was “What would you like? Coffee? A pastelito?”

“Just a café cubana for me.”

She began to slide her chair back, as if to go to the counter herself, but Nestor stood up and motioned to her to stay seated. “I’ll get it,” he said. “It’s my treat.” The truth was, he longed to escape from the table. He was embarrassed. She was so beautiful! He wasn’t swept away by lust but by awe. He had forgotten. Everyone would be staring at her. He flicked a glance toward the counter… and, yes, they were… the four construction workers, Cristy, even Ricky… Ricky himself had left the kitchen area long enough to gawk. Nestor began to get ideas of his own, but he wasn’t going to dwell on any such ideas, was he? The fact that she had come back to him because she needed him now… the completely vulnerable look she gave him… these had nothing to do with lust, did they? But he could see—see!—as if it were all happening right now—he could see her the time he was lying in bed, and she was standing a couple of feet from him naked, except for a wisp of lace panties, and she gave him that teasing look she had at such moments, slowly slipping her fingers inside the elastic band—that teasing look!—and lowering them… slowly lowering them… until—

::::::But she’s already betrayed you once, you imbecile! What makes you think she’s changed? Just because she’s boo-hooing for your help? What about Ghislaine? You haven’t done anything… but you’re just outside the door. How is she supposed to feel? But she wouldn’t have to know, would she… Oh, some game that would be… there’s not enough testosterone in your body to turn you into that much of a fool. Well… why not just go with the flow for a while? Great, Nestor! There you have the very battle cry of the fool!::::::

At the counter, Nicky brought him the two cafés cubanas he ordered. He didn’t know Nicky nearly as well as Cristy, but she leaned her chin over the counter and cast her eyes at his table, then turned back to him and said, “So, that’s Magdalena?”

He nodded yes, and she arched her eyebrows in an exaggerated and very knowing way. Did that mean that everybody knew about the two of them?

He returned to the table with the two coffees… and his first friendly smile. “Magdalena, you look terrific. You know that? You don’t look like somebody worried to death.” He continued smiling.

That didn’t change her mood in the slightest. She hung her head. “ ‘Worried to death…’ ” she muttered… then she lifted her head and faced him. “Nestor… I’m scared to death! Pleeease!… I don’t know of anybody, not a single soul, to tell me what to do, except you. You’ll know because you used to be a policeman.”

“I still am,” he said, a bit more curtly than he meant to.

“But I thought—” She didn’t know how to put it.

“You thought I had been thrown off the force. Right?”

“I guess I got confused. There are so many things written about you in the newspapers. Do you realize how many big stories they’ve written about you?”

Nestor shrugged. That was his outward response. Inside he tingled with vanity. ::::::I never thought about it that way before.::::::

“I was what’s called ‘relieved of duty.’ I’m still a cop, but ‘relieved of duty’ is bad enough.”

Magdalena obviously didn’t understand. “Well… whatever it is, I trust you-oo-ooo”—her words rolled out on mere sobs—“Nes-tor-or-or-or.”

“Thank you.” Nestor tried to sound sincerely moved. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me what you’re worried about.”

She took off the dark glasses to wipe the tears from her eyes. ::::::¡Dios mío! They’re all red and puffy… and she’s so pale!:::::: She quickly put the glasses back on. She knew what she looked like. “This whole thing is driving me crazy.” She snuffled back more tears.

“Look, you’re gonna be all right! But first you gotta tell me what it is.”

“All right, I’m sorry,” she said. “Well, so yesterday I was in Sunny Isles visiting a friend of mine. He’s always been so cool and aw-aw-aw-all tha-at—” She broke down again and began sobbing silently, lowering her head and muffling her nose and mouth with a napkin.

“Magdalena—come on now,” said Nestor.

“I’m sorry, Nestor. I know I sound… paranoid or something. Anyway, I was visiting this friend of mine… he’s very successful. He has this two-story apartment, like a penthouse, in a condo on the ocean. So I’m there in Sunny Isles, and we’re just talking about one thing and another, and his phone ri-i-i-iings…”—she sobbed silently—“and from that moment on, my friend, who is always so cool and elegant and confident, becomes very nervous and all tensed up and angry—I mean, he’s a different person… you know? He’s yelling into the telephone in Russian. He’s Russian himself. And pretty soon these two men show up. They looked like out-and-out thugs to me. One of them was really scary. He was a big tall guy with a completely shaved head, and his head was—it looked too small for a man as big as he was. It had these odd shapes to it, these sort of hills, like the mountains on the moon or something. It’s hard to describe. Anyway, this big tall guy gives my friend a newspaper, yesterday’s Herald, and it’s turned to a particular page. I saw it later on. It was a long article about some Russian artist I never heard of who lives in Miami and does—”

::::::Igor!::::::

Nestor interrupted a little too excitedly. “What was his name, the artist?”

“I don’t remember,” said Magdalena. “Igor Something-or-other—I don’t remember the last name—and now my friend is really mad and starts rushing around and giving orders and being abrupt with everybody, including me. He tells me I’m going home. He doesn’t ask me or say why. He just orders one of the thugs to drive me home. All he says to me is ‘Something’s come up.’ He doesn’t offer me one clue what this is about. Then he goes into this little library in the next room and takes the two thugs in there with him, and he starts yelling at them—not actually yelling, but he’s obviously mad—and then he starts sort of barking orders into the telephone. It’s all in Russian, but this library has double doors, and they don’t close them completely, and I can hear what they’re saying even though I don’t understand any of it, except for one thing, Hallandale. And then he and one of the thugs rush out, without any explanation. The other thug, the tall one with the shaved head—he’s like a… a… a robot. He drives me home and doesn’t say one word the whole time. It’s all beginning to be… you know, weird and sort of spooky, the way he orders them around and they just take it. But… What’s that look you’re giving me, Nestor?”

“I’m just surprised, I guess,” said Nestor. He was conscious of breathing too fast. “And what’s your friend’s name?”

“Sergei Korolyov. You may have heard of him? He gave the Miami Museum of Art about a hundred million dollars’ worth of paintings by famous Russian artists, and they named the whole museum after him.”

Had he ever heard of Sergei Korolyov?!

In the throes of astonishment a wave of information compulsion—the compulsion to impress people with information you have and they would love to have but don’t—the police investigator’s best friend, in fact—the wave hit Nestor head-on.

Have I ever heard of Sergei Korolyov!

::::::You’re gonna be bowled over by what I’m about to tell you:::::: but at the last moment another compulsion—a cop caution to guard information—brought him back from the edge.

“How did you meet this guy Korolyov?”

“At an art show. Anyway, he invited me to dinner.”

“Where?”

“Some restaurant up in Hallandale,” said Magdalena.

“And what was that like?”

“All that was fine. But being there with Sergei—” She hesitated, then added, “Korolyov… gave me a strange feeling.” Nestor wondered if she had added the “Korolyov” so he wouldn’t get the idea she had an intimate thing with the guy. “From the minute we got there, starting with the parking valets, everybody treated Sergei”—she paused again but must have decided that the “Korolyov” was too heavy to keep hauling into the conversation—“treated Sergei like a king, or maybe czar is the word, only not a czar even… more like a dictator… or a godfather. That was what started making me nervous, all this godfather stuff, not that I thought ‘godfather’ at the time. Everywhere we went in that place, as soon as he came close, everybody stopped whatever they were doing and—well, they might as well have been bowing to him. If he didn’t like what somebody was saying, they’d turn around and say the opposite of what they’d just said—right away! I’ve never seen anything like it. There was some kind of famous Russian chess player there who was giving me a hard time—I still don’t know why—and so Sergei ordered him to leave, and believe me, he left! Right away! Then he ordered the other six people at the table to move to another table—and they did—right away! A lot of it was embarrassing, but I have to admit it was sort of exciting to be with someone with so much power. But what I saw there was nothing compared to what happened yesterday.”

Poof! the aura of his Manena and his Manena’s good looks, and memories of life below the waist, vanished—just like that. Now all Nestor saw before him was… a witness, a woman who had seen Korolyov read John Smith’s article about Igor and turn into a homicidal maniac right then and there, before her very eyes, and start ordering people around like World War III just broke out and start screaming into the phone about Hallandale and rush off with one of his goons… He looked at his watch: 6:40 a.m. Should he call John Smith or text him? Probably text him. But writing was not his greatest strength. The idea of tapping all this out with fingers on the glass face of an iPhone—

“Magdalena”—no longer Manena��“I’ll be right back.” He headed for the men’s room, which was no bigger than a closet. Inside, he locked the door and made the call.

“Hel-lohhhh…”

“John, this is Nestor. I’m sorry to call you this early, but I just ran into an old friend—I’m in Hialeah, having breakfast—and she told me something you ought to know before you go in there for your meeting at the newspaper. They want an eyewitness? Well, here’s an eyewitness.” He proceeded to tell him what Magdalena had seen… the panic that rattled Korolyov “as soon as he read your story yesterday”… and the one word she had understood in a regular hurricane of Russian: Hallandale.

“All this may mean nothing,” said Nestor, “but I’m gonna drive up there to the condo and check on Igor.”

“Nestor, that’s awesome! Truly awesome. You know what you are, Nestor, you’re a great man! I’m not kidding!”… John Smith gushed in that fashion for a while. “I worry about your being out in public” ::::::your:::::: “so much in broad daylight during the curfew hours—eight to six, right?”

“Yeah,” said Nestor. “I guess I should play it a little safer.”

“What’ll they do if they catch you?”

Nestor went silent. He didn’t like to think about it, much less talk about it… “I guess they’d… throw me off the force.”

“Then is it all that important to go check on Igor now?”

“You’re right, John… but I just gotta do it.”

“I don’t know… well, be careful, for godsake, will you?”

On the way back to the table, he started thinking it over… the Honey Pot and tailing Igor to the Alhambra Lakes Active Adults condo?… That was late at night, long after 6:00 p.m. So that was okay… But returning the next day, posing with John Smith as an inspector from “the Environment”? That was insanity. Maybe what saved him was the suit and tie. If he looked as weird in that outfit as he felt in it, then he was in no danger. In any case, taking that chance had paid off. They had discovered a whole wall of new Igor forgeries and had taken some great pictures… and here he was, returning to the Active Adults condo in blindingly bright Miami sunlight. Lil was no genius, but she was no dummy, either. What if by now she had figured it out… seen him on YouTube or on the network news… and wondered what a cop was doing there making out like he was from the Environment?

But something was propelling him to go back there anyway.

When he returned to the table, he managed to put on a cool face. The Witness’s face was not cool at all. She kept looking here… looking there… all the while gnawing at the knuckle of her index finger… or that was what it looked like.

“Magdalena, don’t keep thinking about the worst that can happen. Nothing at all has happened so far… but if you’re really worried, why don’t you move in with someone else for a few days?”

The look she gave him made him think she was waiting for him to say, “Why don’t you move in with me?”… He had no urge at all… He couldn’t see her lowering her panties anymore… He didn’t need a witness in his tiny apartment… He looked at his watch… “Seven-fifteen.” He said it aloud. “I’ve got forty-five minutes to get home before the curfew begins.”

Nestor didn’t actually think of driving home for a second. He was just keeping a Witness on an even keel. In fact, he headed straight for I-95 up to Hallandale.

He braked the Camaro down from sixty miles an hour to forty-five and not one m.p.h. faster—now that it was a couple of minutes past 8:00 a.m…. and all he needed was to do something stupid like getting himself pulled over by a state trooper for speeding and have his violation of the curfew come out that way. He was down closer to forty as he swung around that last big curve on Hallandale Beach Boulevard—

—and there it was, the Alhambra Lakes Home for Active Adults, baking a little harder beneath the great Miami heat lamp… crumbling a little more… the “terraces” sagging a little more and that much closer to giving up and plunging upon the concrete below in a pile. The place was silent as a tomb… Like 99-plus percent of the citizens of South Florida, Nestor had never seen a tomb… and “silent”—how would he know? From here inside the Camaro with the windows up and the air-conditioning struggling to push a gale through the vents, Nestor could hear nothing from outside. He just assumed it was silent. He thought of everybody in the Alhambra Lakes Home for Active Adults as—well, not as dead exactly, but they weren’t what he would call alive, either. They were in Purgatory. In Nestor’s take on how the nuns had explained Purgatory, it was a huge space… a space too big to be called a room… like those huge spaces in the Miami Convention Center… and all the newly dead souls milled about anxiously in that space, wondering what region of life after death God was going to dispatch them to… for eternity, which of course never ends.

Once more he parked in the visitors’ parking zone nearest the highway and farthest from the building’s main entrance. He was already wearing his darker-than-dark CVS wire-rim sunglasses… in the name of vanity, not subterfuge… but now he reached under the front seat and pulled out his white looks-like-woven-straw plastic porkpie hat with its big brim… in the name of disguise.

How long? Maybe five seconds?—after the air-conditioning turned off, a suffocating heat took over the Camaro’s interior. When he got out, there was no fresh air… just stultifying heat from the great heat lamp. His clothes felt like they were made of blanket wool and leather, even his mock-gingham polyester shirt. He had picked it out to meet Magdalena because it had long sleeves. He didn’t want to flex so much as an inch of Camacho muscles. His chino pants might as well have been leather. They were tailored so tight in the seat, every step he took seemed to squeeze more sweat out of the flesh of his crotch. A couple of times he looked down to see if it showed. The vast parking lot was a dazzle of sunlight flashing off metal trim, so much so that the cars became mere shapes and shadows—even when peered upon through darker-than-dark cop shades. By squinting he was able to make out Igor’s Vulcan SUV. Well, he hadn’t gone off somewhere, in any case—not that he was in any mood to venture out into public, from the way John Smith described his paranoia. Uh-oh, up at the curb near the entrance there were two police cruisers from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. That was all he needed… some cops standing around who could easily recognize, cop shades and all, the curfew-coshing, relieved-of-duty Miami cop who had insisted on getting himself a lot of publicity—most recently bad.

As he approached the police cars, he turned his head and his big-brimmed hat away from them, as if for some inconceivable reason he were inspecting the cheap painted bricks of the facade. He could hear such a clatter of aluminum walkers, he wondered if a crowd of them was heading to breakfast… but that couldn’t be… the active adults always amassed for meals at the earliest possible hour. There certainly wouldn’t be so many of them heading for breakfast after 8:00 a.m. When he went inside, quite a lot of them were standing or clattering about the lobby, talking to one another… or whispering to one another as closely as they could get to one another’s ears. ¡Santa Barranza! Not twenty feet away from him was Phyllis, the fill-in superintendent. She might recognize him. The last thing he needed was to get entangled with someone like her… absolutely humorless and by nature a hard case… More aluminum walkers, clattering from one side to the other, were crowded into the opening that led into the courtyard. But nobody seemed to be going in. It was as if all the walkers had become entangled and choked the opening. Quite a buzz of conversation, too… a mass of old women clanking and buzzing and buzzing and clanking. No use trying to go in that way. Nestor ducked into the elevator and went up to Igor’s floor, the second… He emerged onto the catwalk… there was more buzzing and clanking and clanking and buzzing. He couldn’t remember seeing this much activity on a catwalk the first time he was here during the day… He began walking toward Igor’s apartment… slowly and gingerly.

“Look, Edith—right there—it’s one a them from the Environment… You don’t believe me, then who is that?!”

It was from slightly up ahead. He immediately recognized the voice as big Lil’s and now he spotted them… Warily he started walking toward them… and they came walking and clattering toward him. Lil looked as hearty as ever. As usual Edith was hunched over her walker, but now she was clanking and clattering along at quite a pace.

Even from this far away Nestor could hear Edith saying, “Now he comes… after the smell goes away.”

“So where’s the tall one?” said Lil. “He’s the one with all the—” She broke it off and tapped her forehead with her forefinger.

::::::Thanks:::::: Nestor said to himself. ::::::Why did she say “all”?:::::: He couldn’t remember what he’d said last time or if he’d said anything.

Lil came straight up to him. Without so much as a hello she said, “So now they send you back—we have to drop dead first, and then maybe you show up.”

Nestor stood there and shrugged and started to say, “That’s not necessary”—but he got no further than the—“ne—”

“Can you believe this?” said Lil. “This I never heard of in my life. We get heart attacks here. We get strokes. People fall. They break their hips. They break an arm. But a neck?! Who ever heard of such a thing? And falling all the way down to the bottom. Mygod, mygod, what a terrible thing. Such a thing to happen here. Such a shock. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“I don’t—who broke a neck?” said Nestor.

Edith piped up from about Nestor’s waist level, “Who?… Am I hearing right? Over at the Environment they send you all the way over here, but why they forget to tell you?” She looked up at Lil and tapped her own forehead.

“But who!?” said Nestor.

“The artist,” she said in the slow, emphatic pronunciation one puts on for dense people who just don’t get it. “The one with the turpentine and he couldn’t draw, the poor man.”

Nestor was so shocked, he heard a sound like a rush of steam in his ears. He couldn’t shut it off. The feeling in his brain—a wave of guilt he was too shocked to analyze. He looked at Lil. Why Lil and not Edith he couldn’t explain, either. He could only feel that Edith was too small and twisted to be trusted.

“When was this?” he said to Lil. “What happened?”

“During the night sometime, it hadda be, the poor soul. Exactly when? Exactly when I don’t know. Everybody they talk to, nobody knows. But a broken neck—he’s right down there on the concrete. If you could see through this floor, he’s right underneath your feet, if—”

Nestor recognized it, the same feeling he almost gave way to when he was talking to Magdalena earlier and was dying to tell her what she didn’t know about Korolyov. Information compulsion. Lil was now in its thrall. It seemed that someone had found Igor’s body at the bottom of the stairs just before dawn. He had tumbled down headfirst. Anybody could see his neck was broken. The rest of his body lay twisted about on the steps just above it. Rigor mortis had begun to set in by the time they found him. He still reeked with alcohol. Wasn’t hard to add up two and two, was it. By the time Lil woke up, the police were already here… and tenants were already out on the catwalks, chattering and clattering and pointing… a regular percussion concert for aluminum walkers. At first they all clattered to the courtyard, where you could get the best view. Igor’s body—or “Nicolai’s,” as Lil put it—was at the bottom of the stairway from the second level to the courtyard level. Right away, the police put a blanket over the body but left it the way it was, all twisted and broken. Why didn’t they take the poor man’s body away and stretch it out horizontal and give what was left of him a little dignity? But he was still there, and the police were standing around doing nothing but putting up yellow crime-scene tape that you see in the movies. Same thing. They taped off the stairway, so nobody could go up or down. Then they built a whole fence of yellow tape in the courtyard to keep people from getting too close to the body, there were so many nosy people in the courtyard. Then they shooed them all out and began putting tape across every opening to the courtyard.

“Take a look. You see right there?” said Lil. “The tops of the stairway?… That’s the tape. And over there?”

She was pointing past the stairway. For the first time Nestor could see a fence of yellow tape around the entrance to an apartment… Igor’s. Two bored cops stood nearby. “You should take a look!” Lil said with enthusiasm. “A good look. Things like that you don’t see around here. A big piece a tape, this wide”—about six inches—“they glued it over the handle to the door and the keyhole. And on the piece a tape? The writing you can’t see from here. It’s a warning about how the tape—don’t mess with it. You ever see such a thing? A good look you should get. I got here before they put that big piece a tape, and the door was still open. They had a whole bunch a cops in there. Looked the same as it was when we saw it, except all those pictures were gone from that wall.”

“They were gone?!” said Nestor. He hadn’t meant to reveal such surprise. “You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. The ones in a line on that long wall. Them I woulda noticed, they were so bad. Maybe the poor man couldn’t stand them. Maybe he threw them out. Pictures like that, I had them on my wall, I woulda started drinking, too… the poor soul,” she added, so as not to speak ill of the dead.

“They’re gone…” said Nestor, as much to himself as to her.

Just then one of the cops turned, and Nestor thought he was looking right at him. ¡Mierda! Maybe it was because he was so much younger than anybody else up here on the catwalk. Or maybe—the first one must have said something to the other one, because now they were both looking right at him. He wanted to pull his plastic straw hat down over his face, but that would only make it worse.

“I wanna see it from over there,” Nestor said to Lil. He indicated the opposite side of the catwalk.

“Over there? Straight there you should go for a good look,” said Lil, indicating the yellow tape around Igor’s doorway.

“No… first I go over there,” said Nestor. He hoped he didn’t sound as frightened as he really was. He wheeled about to leave, but not before Lil glanced sideways at Edith. He could see the striations in her neck as she lowered her lips on one side, as if to say, “The boy’s a nut job.”

He tried to walk nonchalantly in a crouch that would keep him below the eye level of the aluminum walker gawkers and the rest of the spectators up here. Walking nonchalantly in a crouch—it couldn’t be done. The active adults were staring at him. He must have looked like a prowler or something. So he stood up… and now he could see all too well the hulk down there, shrouded, misshapen… Igor?… the living person he had tailed back to this “secret” place of his?… He felt himself sinking helplessly—too late to do anything about it!—into a sump of sheer guilt… He had “tailed” him, and that was the first step, wasn’t it! ::::::Please, Dios, let it be that he got drunk and fell down the stairs of his own accord… He was just a forger! He didn’t deserve to be struck dead! And I started it, and—wait a minute… what am I talking about? I didn’t tell Igor to start forging pictures… I didn’t tell him to aid and abet some outrageous Russian con man… I didn’t tell him to set up a secret studio in some Active Adults condo in Hallandale… I didn’t tell him to become an alcoholic and drink his vodaprikas all day long… I didn’t tell him to go to the Honey Pot and pay for whores.:::::: By and by, staring at the crumpled dead hulk of Igor, Nestor worked it out in his mind… He hadn’t created Igor and turned him over to a bunch of homicidal thugs… By and by he had absolved himself… without divine intervention, but Dios mío, all—

—all four cops in the courtyard were staring up at him as he had been staring down at the remains of Igor… a bunch of Anglos these Broward County cops were, too!… They’d be happy to turn him in. ::::::Am I getting paranoid?… But they are looking at me, just like the two at Igor’s door, right? I’m bailing!::::::

Nestor crouched again, but this time he made no pretense of being nonchalant. He scuttled to the elevator and went to the ground floor—halfway expecting Broward County cops to be waiting for him at the elevator door… He was getting jumpy, wasn’t he?!… He tried not to walk too fast toward the lot near the highway, where he had left the Camaro… and practically laid down rubber getting out of there. ::::::I don’t believe this! This is what it feels like to be a hunted man!::::::

Driving east on Hallandale Beach Boulevard toward Sunny Isles he began to pull himself together. ::::::Get home! That’s the main thing. Actually be there, in case they send somebody around to check.:::::: Nevertheless, he had to find a pay phone and make one call… now. If he used his iPhone, they’d know who he was and where he was in half a second… but where innanameadios was there a pay phone? It was as if pay phones had disappeared from the face of the earth… or Hallandale, whichever… Miles drifted by… His eyes searched every gasoline station, every shopping strip, every motel parking apron, every drive-through restaurant, the Broward County water authority grounds, even utterly hopeless cases… a little one-story store with cheap garden statuary all over the lawns, unicorns, bears—big ones—cherubs, elves, Abraham Lincoln, two Virgin Marys, a plaster flying fish, a plaster Indian with a plaster headdress—

Finally, some sort of nightclub by the side of the road… called Gogol’s… The parking lot was empty, but in the corner nearest the club—a pay phone. Thank God he had change. He had to call Information for the number of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office… and after more coins, they threw him in voice mail jail. The recorded voice of a woman said: “You have reached the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. Please listen carefully. For emergencies, press zero-zero… to report non-emergency incidents, press two… for billing and accounting, press three… for human resources, press four”… until at last… a human voice: “Homicide. Lieutenant Canter.”

“Lieutenant,” said Nestor, “I have some good information for you. You have something to record this with?”

“Who’s calling?”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, all I can give you is the information, but it’s good information.”

A pause. “Okay… go ahead.”

“As soon as the ME gets there—” Uh-oh, “ME” sounded too cop-like. He rephrased it, “The medical examiner”—but that didn’t help much… still too much cop knowledge. By now the lieutenant must have pushed the rocker switch to the tape recorder—“After the medical examiner arrives and gets finished, you’ll be getting an ambulance with a corpse tagged”—he spoke very slowly—“Ni-co-lai Ko-pin-sky… Okay?… from the Alhambra Lakes Home for Active Adults. His real name is I-gor Dru-ko-vich… Okay? He’s an artist with a telephone listing in Miami. He apparently broke his neck in a fall down a stairway. But the ME… uhh…”—oh, the hell with it… he just left it at ME—“shouldn’t take that at face value. He should do an autopsy to determine if it was an accident… or something else… Okay? The paintings he did… uhhh… he did them in the exact style of famous artists—and we’re talking exact here, Lieutenant—twelve of ’em are missing from his apartment at the condo—”

With that, Nestor hung up abruptly. He jumped into the Camaro and gunned it, heading back to Miami. ::::::Am I crazy? I can’t go “gunning it” anywhere. I’m a wanted man! a hunted man, for all I know. All I need is some Broward County trooper to haul me in for speeding… speeding!::::::

He slowed the Camaro to the wanted-man speed of just a shade below the speed limit. He let his breath out and became conscious of his heart beating too fast.

Mierda! The clock on the dashboard… way after 8:00 a.m.! The curfew—but also John Smith!… must be in his big meeting at the Herald by now—

This one Nestor could make on his iPhone while he drove… He had John Smith’s number in his contacts list… ¡Dios mío! All he needed now was for some Broward County cop palurdo americano to pull him over for driving while using a handheld device… He looked into the rearview mirror… and then the two side wing mirrors… then scanned the road ahead… the road and the shoulders… a chance he had to take. The wanted man tapped out the number on the glass face of the iPhone—

It was just a figure of speech, of course—“they’ve really got the noose around my neck now”—but Ed Topping could actually feel a constriction in his neck… or his throat, in any event. Things had progressed to where he couldn’t very well expect John Smith to discuss all this standing up. Oh no, this time, the three of them—John Smith, Stan Friedman, and himself—were seated at a round table near his desk. And there was a fourth: the Herald’s number one libel lawyer, Ira Cutler. He was a man in his early fifties, probably, one of those late-middle-aged men who still had smooth jowls, big ones, and smooth bellies that looked inflated not by age but by the vitality, the ambition and ravenous appetites of youth. He reminded Ed of the portraits of great men in the eighteenth century by the Peale brothers, who always gave their subjects smooth, stout stomachs as a sign of success and vigor. Belly, jowls, shiny fingernails, ironed white shirt, and all, Ira Cutler was a well-dressed, well-fed, highly buffed pit bull when it came to legal questions, and he loved litigation, especially in the courtroom, where he could insult people to their faces, humiliate them, break their spirits, ruin their reputations, make them cry, sob, blubber, boohoo… and it was all sanctioned. He had it in him to stop this six-foot-two baby, John Smith, in his tracks. There was something really crude about Cutler. Edward T. Topping IV would not like to have him to dinner or anywhere else his drooling-pit-bull persona might reflect badly upon the House of Topping… but he was welcome to be on his worst behavior at this table.

“Well, gentlemen… let’s get things under way,” said Ed. He looked at each of the other three, supposedly to see if they were “on board,” as the phrase goes, but actually to make them recognize his authority, which was in fact wilting in the presence of this tough guy. His T-4 gaze settled, as best he could make it settle, upon John Smith. “Why don’t you tell us about this latest piece of information you have.” Report in, soldier—that was the aura Ed wanted his leadership to establish.

“As I told you, sir, I think we have the sort of eyewitness information our case lacked. The off-duty policeman who’s been helping me in this, Nestor Camacho, ran into an old girlfriend who happened to be visiting Sergei Korolyov when he read our story yesterday about the painter, Igor Drukovich, who we think forged the paintings Korolyov gave to the museum. She described Korolyov’s reaction—”

Ira Cutler broke in. He spoke in a curiously high-pitched voice. “Wait a minute… Camacho… Isn’t that the name of the cop who got fired recently for making racial remarks?”

“He wasn’t fired, sir, he was ‘relieved of duty.’ That means they take the cop’s badge and service revolver away until they investigate the case.”

“Ummm… I see,” said Cutler… in the tone that says, “I don’t see, but go ahead. We can come back to this bigot later.”

“Anyway,” said John Smith, “this woman, a friend of his”—and he went on to describe the scene, Korolyov’s panic and the rest of it, as relayed by Nestor.

Ed looked at Cutler. Cutler said, “First of all, that’s not an eyewitness’s account. It’s corroborating evidence, but an eyewitness is somebody who actually saw the crime while it was taking place. It’s information you can use in making a case, but it’s not eyewitness evidence.”

Ed said to himself, ::::::Thank God for you, Cutler! Nobody’s throwing any knuckleballs past you, baby!:::::: It was all he could do to suppress a smile. He lifted his chin and looked at John Smith. What a look it was! It came with the bearing of a tolerant-up-to-a-point leader. “Tell Mr. Cutler what else you have.” ::::::Now that he’s blown your big one out of the sky.::::::

John Smith turned to Igor’s outright confession that he had forged the paintings. He told of the photographs he had of Igor’s forgeries-in-the-making… and his revealing all the steps Korolyov had taken to give the paintings a lock-tight authentic provenance, including the name of the German expert and the trip to Stuttgart to pay him off. He told him about the sub-forgery, so to speak, of a catalogue from a hundred years ago, printed on paper from the period… the catalogue was a work of art in its own corrupt way. John Smith paid an un–John Smithly lyrical tribute to the skill it took to fabricate it… finding paper from a hundred years ago, duplicating binding eccentricities, out-of-date photo-reproduction processes, even rhetorical quirks from the period… In fact, it was all so un–John Smithly lyrical, the catalogue seemed to rise up from out of its ankle-sucking sleaze into some Dionysian eminence far above the scales of right and wrong…

When John Smith finished, Ed looked at his salvation, a man immune to childish ambitions and emotions… Lawyer Cutler. Stan Friedman and John Smith himself fixed their eyes, too, upon the pit bull with the law degree.

The unassailable arbiter leaned forward and thrust his elbows and forearms on the top of the table and looked at each of them in turn with an expression of absolute canine dominance… canine, insofar as a middle-aged man with jowls, a belly, a newly laundered and crisply ironed white shirt, and a fine Italian silk necktie could actually look like a pit bull. Then he spoke:

“Based on what you’ve told me… there is no way you can run a story saying that Korolyov has done this or done that, other than give these paintings to the museum, not even on the basis of the forger’s admissions. Your man, Drukovich, seems eager to take credit for his own talent and audaciousness. That’s typical of hoaxers of any sort. Besides that, he’s an out-and-out drunk and obnoxiously proud of what he’s done.”

::::::Yes! I knew I could count on you! You’re a realist in the midst of these juveniles who have virtually nothing to lose, no matter what we run… whereas I—I have everything to lose… such as my career, my livelihood… all to the music of my wife’s unending scorn. I can just hear her, “You’ve always had your shiftless and trifling tendencies—but my God! do you have to take it up to this level? Do you have to libel a leading citizen, a man so generous they rename a museum for him and carve his name in marble letters this big and this deep on the face of the museum, and the Mayor and half of the other eminent citizens of Greater Miami—including my shiftless, trifling, used-to-be-eminent, self-destroyed husband—all these eminent people come to a banquet in his honor, and now you’re intent upon making them look like dupes, fools, marks, hooples, hicks—all because of some newborn post-puppy’s ideals of a free press with a mission to fearlessly inform… and make a name for his Yale-educated self and his self-educated ego—well, I hope your own trifling, shiftless ego is happy now! Your freedom of the press, your mission of the press, oh, you sentinel of the citizenry, you, who keeps watch while they sleep—yaghhhhhn! you incompetent dope, who was about to take his first big step as a big-time newspaper editor—first big step… oh, yes!… into the worst car wreck imaginable yaghhhhhhhh!” God bless you, Ira Cutler! You saved me from the weakest side of myself! On this subject there is no higher power than—::::::

Ira Cutler’s voice broke in. “You can’t afford to accuse Korolyov of anything—”

::::::Yes! Tell ’em, brother! Tell ’em where it’s at!::::::

“—because you lack sufficient objective evidence and have no eyewitness. You can’t even indicate that Korolyov is to blame for any of it—”

::::::Oh, testify, brother! Draw ’em a map of the straight and narrow!::::::

An enormous weight slid from his shoulders… The monkey jumped off his back. Finally he could let his breath out! ::::::There is a God in Heaven! I’m freed from the—::::::

The high-pitched voice of the pit bull sounded again: “On the other hand, you’ve got some strong material there, and you’ve nailed down the facts you have pretty well, it seems to me. Whatshisname—Igor?—says he forged the paintings, and you’ve got that on tape. That’s what he said. You’ve established the fact that the same Russian painter goes by two names, Igor in the city and Nicolai in the country—”

::::::But what’s going on? What is this “on the other hand” business all of a sudden?… and this “strong material” stuff? My pit bull is cutting the ground out from under me with his hind legs? Stick to your guns! Stick to your guns, you miserable hound!::::::

“—and he has a secret studio in an old-age condominium in Hallandale, which is north of nowhere,” Cutler was saying, “and you can use that material, so long as (a) this guy was aware you were taping it, and (b) you don’t write it so that it looks like your sole purpose in going to all this trouble has been to expose Korolyov as a fraud.” He looked at John Smith and said, “I understand you’ve tried to get in touch with Korolyov, John.”

::::::“John” he calls him, and I know he’s never laid eyes on him before. But he sees him for what he is—a kid! A kid playing with fire! Just a kid!::::::

“Yes, sir,” said John Smith. “I’ve left—”

He broke it off because a cell phone began ringing somewhere in his clothes. He dug it out of the inside jacket pocket and looked at the caller ID. Before answering he bolted upright and—looked at Counselor Cutler and said, “I’m sorry… sir… but I have to take this.” He went to a corner of the office and nestled his face so closely into it that one cheek was mashed against the interior wall and the other against the exterior glass wall, even with the BlackBerry squeezed in between.

The first thing they heard after “Hello” was John Smith saying, “Jesus!” in something close to a moan, a very much un–John Smithly “Jesus” and even more un–John Smithly moan. Then he went, “Oooooouh!” as if he had just been punched in the pit of his stomach. Nobody could imagine such sounds coming out of John Smith’s body. He stayed in the corner for what seemed like forever but was more likely twenty or thirty seconds. Then in a soft, polite tone, he said, “Thank you, Nestor.”

John Smith had a pale complexion, but when he turned around, he was as white as a corpse. All the blood had drained from his face. He stood stock-still and said in a hopelessly defeated voice, “That was my best source. He’s in Hallandale. They just found Igor Drukovich dead at the bottom of a stairway. His neck was broken.”

::::::Damn!:::::: said Ed to himself. He knew what that meant… There was no way he could not run the story now… and Sergei Korolyov’s name was cut in stone on the front of the museum… and he had sat just two seats from him at dinner! ::::::And now there’s no way I can get out of risking my neck. Fearless Journalist Ed Topping… Damn! and damn again!::::::