Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Rolling in the dirt?”

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

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

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

  “Training?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Philippe… still a block of ice.

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

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

  “And you saw all this?” said Nestor.

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

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

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

  “Uhhh… yes?” he said.

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

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

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

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

  “I guess… he was… okay.”

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

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

  “I… I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Hervé and Honoré.”

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

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

  “Well… what about Philippe’s involvement?”

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

  “Let them all know?” said Ghislaine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Her eyes still fixed upon his face, Ghislaine spoke a single word barely above a whisper: “Nestor…” Her lips parted slightly. />
  The lips hypnotized him. ::::::Cut it out, Nestor! This is a police investigation, for God’s sake! But she’s giving me an open invitation! More than anything else, she needs comfort and protection. Right?… right. It’s just a way of restoring her composure. Right?… right!:::::: He brought his lips so close to hers that now she had only one eye, in the center of her forehead, practically on top of her nose—

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

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

  Ghislaine tiptoed on the ice:

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

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

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