Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

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 h
eaded 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.