Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

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

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

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

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

  “Which is what?” said the Chief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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.