Back to Blood

by Tom Wolfe

  “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 t
here—” 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 shift
less, 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!::::::