Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “Now, John,” said Ed, struggling to get his composure back. “Have you thought about the… the… dimensions of such a story, should you write it?”

  “How do you mean, sir?”

  Ed was speechless again. He did know exactly what he meant, but he had no idea how to say it. How could you look a young reporter in the eye and say, “Kid, don’t you understand? We don’t want any such great stories. Journalism? Don’t you get it? There’s journalism, and there’s the bottom line. And if you don’t mind moving aside for a moment, we have to at least take note of the bottom line here. We’re sorry, but you can’t be Woodward and Bernstein just now. And, incidentally, kindly note that they went after people who couldn’t sue. Richard Nixon was the President of the United States, but he couldn’t sue. They could say he fucked ducks in Rock Creek Park, and he couldn’t sue.”

  Struggling, struggling, Ed finally regained the power of speech. “What I mean is, in a case like this, you have to proceed very methodically…” He paused, because he was mainly buying time. He really didn’t know what he meant now.

  “Methodically? How do you mean, sir?” said John Smith.

  Ed slogged on. “Well… here you’re not dealing with Mayor Cruz or Governor Slate or the Tallahassee Round Ring. You get some leeway with political stories and politicians… politicians…” He studiously avoided the term sue. He didn’t want John Smith to think of that as an operative word here. “You can speculate about a politician and even if you get it wrong, there aren’t likely to be any terrible repercussions, because that’s all part of the game in politics, at least in this country. But when you have a private citizen like Korolyov, with no record of anything like this…”

  “Sir, as I understand it, Korolyov is like a lot of the so-called oligarchs who come here. He’s well educated, he’s cultivated, he’s charming, he’s great looking, he knows English, French, and German, and that’s in addition to Russian, of course. He knows art history—I mean, I gather he really knows it—and he knows the art market, but he’s a criminal, Mr. Topping. A lot of them are criminals, and they’ll get the worst thugs in the world, Russian thugs, to work for them if they have to, and they’re just incredibly brutal. I could tell you some stories.”

  Ed stared at John Smith again. He kept waiting for him to molt into something else entirely, a hawk, a scorpion, a Delta Commando, a stingray. But all this had come out of the mouth of the same face… of a mere boy with perfect manners and perfect posture. And the blush. When he saw the way Ed was staring at him, the boy did it again. He blushed a deep scarlet.

  ::::::Jesus:::::: Ed Topping said to himself. ::::::This kid is a classic… People have such a colorful picture of newspaper reporters, don’t they, all these daring types who “break” stories and “uncover” corruption and put themselves in risky situations to get a “scoop.” Robert Redford in All the President’s Men, Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success… Yeah—and in real life they’re about as colorful as John Smith here. If you ask me, newspaper reporters are created at age six when they first go to school. In the schoolyard boys immediately divide into two types. Immediately! There are those who have the will to be daring and dominate, and those who don’t have it. Those who don’t, like John Smith here, spend half their early years trying to work out a modus vivendi with those who do… and anything short of subservience will be okay. But there are boys from the weaker side of the divide who grow up with the same dreams as the stronger… and I’m as sure about this as anything in the world: The boy standing before me, John Smith, is one of them. They, too, dream of power, money, fame, and beautiful lovers. Boys like this kid grow up instinctively realizing that language is an artifact, like a sword or a gun. Used skillfully, it has the power to… well, not so much achieve things as to tear things down—including people… including the boys who came out on the strong side of that sheerly dividing line. Hey, that’s what liberals are! Ideology? Economics? Social justice? Those are nothing but their prom outfits. Their politics were set for life in the schoolyard at age six. They were the weak, and forever after they resented the strong. That’s why so many journalists are liberals! The very same schoolyard events that pushed them toward the written word… pushed them toward “liberalism.” It’s as simple as that! And talk about irony! If you want power through words in journalism, rhetorical genius is not enough. You need content, you need new material, you need… news, in a word… and you have to find it yourself. You, from the weak side, can develop such a craving for new information, you end up doing things that would terrify any strong man from the other side of the divide. You will put yourself in dangerous situations amid dangerous people… with relish. You will go alone, without any form of backup… eagerly! You—you with your weak manner—end up approaching the vilest of the vile with a demand. “You have some information, and I need it. And I deserve it! And I will have it!”::::::

  All this Ed could see in the baby face before him. Maybe these Russian thugs or whatever he was talking about were as brutal as he said. Ed himself had no idea. But he could see John Smith sticking his baby face and blond hair and blue eyes and great slathers of naïveté right in their faces and demanding information about Sergei Korolyov because he needs it, deserves it, and will have it.

  ::::::Well, I don’t need it, and I don’t deserve a big, messy, pseudo-righteous, money-hemorrhaging fight staged solely for the greater glory of a kid named John Smith, and I won’t have it.::::::

  But there’s something closer to home that you’d rather not think about, isn’t there, Ed… If one of these little vipers from the weak side of the playground somehow did expose Korolyov and his “seventy million dollars’ worth” of early Russian Modernist work as a con artist pulling off a colossal fraud, it would make the entire Miami establishment look like a clusterfuck!… The fools had put $500 million into a world-class cultural destination now worth precisely nothing! They would all become world-class jokes, utterly lamebrained, unbelievably gullible culture strivers! The horse laugh would resound ’round the world!

  And who would become the most laughable of all, the most pitiable and pathetic—turning four generations of Toppings, five if you counted Fiver, into a long, drawn-out, scabid dog story?

  And he was supposed to help his own minions drown him in shame?… ::::::Stand up for yourself, man! Get tough for once in your life! “Real journalism?” Fuck that!::::::

  4

  Magdalena

  Nestor took a deep breath… a free breath… in the open air of a nice clear Saturday morning. He glanced at the watch on his wrist, a big cop-sized watch packed with digital systems to burn. It was 7:00 a.m. exactly… unnaturally quiet out here on the street—good!… nobody stirring except for the women hosing down the concrete… a regular two-note concerto of spray hitting a hard surface. ¡SHEEEahHHHH ahHHHHSSHEEEE! He looks about… two doors away, Señora Díaz. He’s known her ever since the day he moved into this casita. Thank God, a sweet, kind friend from the free world! It makes him happy, just seeing her there with a garden hose in her hand, spraying concrete. Oh so very cheerfully he sings out, “Buenos días, Señora Díaz!”

  She looked up and started to smile. But only one side of her mouth moved. The other side stayed put, as if it had gotten snagged by an eyetooth. Her gaze went blank. ¡SHEEEEahHHHH ahHHHHshHEEEE! as she mumbled the most mechanical Buenos días he had ever heard in his life… Mumbled it!… and turned her back, as if she had neglected to hose the concrete… over there.

  That was all she was going to give him! A mumble and a retractable smile! And a stone-cold back… and he had known her forever! ::::::Got to get out of here, too! Off the street I’ve lived on practically all my life! Got to go—where, f’r chrissake?!::::::

  He had no idea. Aside from the women hosing down concrete, such as Señora Díaz, Hialeah was in a Saturday-morning coma. ::::::Well… I’m hungry. ¿No es verdad? Dios mío, I’m hungry.::::::

  He hadn’t had anything to eat for almost twenty-four hours, or pra
ctically nothing. He had his regular break at about eight o’clock last night, but so many of the guys were there asking him questions about the Man on the Mast thing, all he managed to eat was one hamburger and some french fries. He was counting on having something to eat when he got home. So his dad shoves a shitload of abuse down his throat instead.

  He went straight to his aging muscle car, the Camaro… Muscle car?… with his big black Cuban cop shades on, jeans tailored until they fit like ballet tights in the seat… polo shirt size S, for small, because that made it “too” tight across the chest and shoulders. ::::::Oh, fuck:::: what a stupid mistake! This morning he didn’t want to be seen showing off his muscles or in any other fashion calling attention to himself. Ricky’s Bakery would be open this early… in a shopping strip six blocks away. Six blocks—but he didn’t feel like showing his face in his own neighborhood and risking any more surprises like the one Señora Díaz hit him with.

  In no time the mighty Camaro was cruising along the strip. The place was still asleep… He cruised past the botanica where Magdalena’s mother had bought the statue of Saint Lazarus.

  Nestor climbed out of the Camaro in front of Ricky’s and got a whiff of Ricky’s pastelitos, “little pies” of filo dough wrapped around ground beef, spiced ham, guava, or you name it—one whiff of pastelitos baking, and he relaxed… ambrosia… He had loved pastelitos since he was a little boy. Ricky’s was a tiny bakery with a big glass counter in the rear running practically the width of the place. In the foreground, on each side, was a small, round, tinny metal café table, painted white—back when—and flanked by a pair of old-fashioned drugstore-style bentwood chairs. A lone customer sat there, his back to Nestor, reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee. He was middle-aged, judging by the way he had gone bald on the crown of his head without his hair turning gray. There were always three girls behind the counter, but the counter was so high, you had to come very close to see much more than the hair on the tops of their heads. ::::::Hey! Is that a blonde back there?:::::: Nestor had never seen a blond waitress at Ricky’s before. Maybe he hadn’t seen one now, either. His cop shades had engulfed the whole place in a half-dead dusk… at 7:00 a.m. So he pushed them up above his eyes.

  Big mistake. That also made his own face plain as the moon. The big head at the little white tin-top table turned toward him ¡Dios mío! It was Mr. Ruiz, the father of Rafael Ruiz, one of Nestor’s classmates at Hialeah High School.

  “Why, hello, Nestor,” said Mr. Ruiz. It wasn’t a cheery greeting. It was more like the cat toying with the mouse.

  Nestor made a point of smiling at Mr. Ruiz and saying as cheerfully as he could, “Oh… Mr. Ruiz! ¡Buenos días!”

  Mr. Ruiz turned away, then gave his head a quarter-turn toward Nestor, without looking at him, and said out the side of his mouth, “I see where you had quite a day for yourself yesterday.” No smile… none at all. Then he turned back to his newspaper.

  “Well, I guess you could call it that, Mr. Ruiz.”

  The head said, “Or else you could say te cagaste.” You blew it. Literally, you shit all over it. Mr. Ruiz turned away completely and showed Nestor his back.

  Humiliated!—by this—this—this—Nestor wanted to twist that big head off its skinny neck and—and—and cagar down his windpipe—and then he’d—

  “Nestor!”

  Nestor looked toward the counter. It was the blonde. Somehow she had managed to tiptoe high enough to lift her face above the top surface. He knew her. Cristy La Gringa! he wanted to cry out, but Mr. Ruiz’s presence inhibited him.

  He walked up to the counter. All that marvelous long wild blond hair! Cristy La Gringa! “Cristy La Gringa!” He realized that didn’t have the poetic wallop of “Inga La Gringa,” but it still made him feel like Nestor the Jester… a real wit, no es verdad? Cristy had been a year behind him at Hialeah High School, and she’d had a crush on him. Oh, she had made that obvious. He was tempted. She had made his loins stir… Pastelitos! Oh yes!

  “Cristy!” said Nestor. “I didn’t know you were working here! La bella gringa!”

  She laughed. That was what he used to call her at Hialeah High… when they were supposedly just kidding around.

  “I just started here,” said Cristy. “Nicky got me the job. You remember Nicky? She was a year ahead of you?” She gestured toward the third girl. “And this is Vicky.”

  Nestor ran his eyes over the three of them. Nicky’s and Vicky’s hair streamed down into turbulent waves at the shoulders, just like Cristy’s, but theirs was dark in the Cuban way. All three were shrink-wrapped in denim. Their jeans hugged their declivities fore and aft, entered every crevice, explored every hill and dale of their lower abdomens, climbed their montes veneris—

  —but somehow he just couldn’t… He was too depressed. “Vicky and Cristy and Nicky and Ricky’s,” he said. They laughed… uncertainly… and that was that.

  He went ahead and ordered some pastelitos and coffee… to go. He had come in with a vision of himself sitting at one of the little tables and making a long, leisurely breakfast of it, quietly, on neutral ground, just him and his pastelitos and coffee. Mr. Ruiz had put an end to that. Who knew how many more soreheads with smart mouths would show up here even now, this early on a Saturday morning?

  By and by, Cristy brought out a white paper bag—somehow all the little bakeries and diners in Hialeah used only white bags—with the pastelitos and coffee. At the cash register, as she gave him change, he said, “Thanks for everything, Cristy.” He meant it in a loving way, but it came out sad and beaten more than anything else.

  Cristy had already headed back behind the counter when he noticed a shelf beneath it with two stacks of newspapers.

  Whuh! His heart tried to leap out of its thoracic cage. Himself!—a photograph of himself!—his official Police Department photograph—on the front page of the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald! Next to his, a—a picture of a young man with a twisted face: Nestor knew that face, all right—the man on the mast… above those two head shots, a big photograph of the schooner near the causeway and a mob of people up on the bridge screaming until their teeth showed… and above that, the biggest, blackest print Nestor had ever seen on a newspaper: ¡DETENIDO! 18 METROS DE LIBERTAD—stretching across the entire front page… of El Nuevo Herald. Shock!—his heart began speeding. He didn’t want to read the story, sincerely didn’t want to—but his eyes seized upon the first sentence and wouldn’t let go.

  In Spanish it said, “A Cuban refugee, reportedly a hero of the dissident underground, was arrested yesterday on Biscayne Bay just eighteen meters from the Rickenbacker Causeway—and asylum—by a cop whose own parents had fled Cuba and made it to Miami and freedom in a homemade dinghy.”

  Nestor felt as if heat were surging up his cerebral cortex and scalding his brain. Now he was a villain, a vile ingrate who would deny his own people the freedom he enjoyed… in short, the worst sort of TRAIDOR!

  He didn’t want to buy the newspaper… Its stain would spread indelibly upon his hands if he so much as picked it up… but something—his autonomous nervous system?—overrode his conscious will and ordered him to stoop down and grab one. Holy shit! When he stooped down, he got an eyeful of the newspaper atop the other stack. The entire top half of the newspaper’s front page was one huge color picture—the blue of the Bay, the enormous white sails of the schooner… above the picture—English language! The Miami Herald!—a headline as big and bold as El Nuevo Herald’s—ROPE-CLIMB COP IN “MAST”-ERFUL RESCUE… He turned the newspaper over, to see the lower half of the front page—¡Santa Barranza!—a two-column-wide photograph, in color, of a young man with no shirt on… clad from the waist up in only his own muscles, an entire mountainscape of muscles, huge boulders, sharp cliffs, deep cuts, and iron gorges… an entire muscle terrain… ME! So in love fell he—with ME!—that he could barely remove his eyes from the image long enough to scan the story that filled the other four columns… “amazing feat of strength”… “risked his o
wn life”—“Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!”… rope-climbing… “rescued a Cuban refugee by locking his legs about him.” See that?… he rescued the little bastard… Rope-Climb Cop hadn’t doomed him to torture and death in Fidel’s dungeons… Oh, no… He had saved his life… It said so, in so many words!… Nestor’s mood swung so high, so fast, he could feel it in his gizzard. The Miami Herald had granted him a reprieve… in English… but that counted, didn’t it?… The Herald-in-English—the oldest newspaper in Florida! But then his spirits sank… “Yo no creo el Miami Herald.” I don’t believe the Miami Herald. If Nestor had heard that once he had heard it a thousand times… The Herald had opposed Cuban immigration, once Cubans had begun fleeing Castro by the thousands… resented it when there were so many Cubans, they took over politically… “Yo no creo el Miami Herald!” Nestor had heard this from his father, his father’s brothers, his father’s sisters’ husbands, his cousins, the whole Hialeah lot of them… from everyone old enough to say the words “Yo no creo el Miami Herald…”

  Still… this americano newspaper was all he had. Somebody in Hialeah must read the damned thing and even believe… some of it. It was just that he had never met that person. Plenty of the people coming to Yeya’s party could read English, though… Yes!… They could certainly read those huge letters calling what he had done a

  “MAST”-ERFUL RESCUE, couldn’t they? He ducked out of Ricky’s and returned to the Camaro… Ineffable clouds of Ricky’s Bakery aroma from the bag next to him took over the entire car… The pastelitos and the Miami Herald, which lay next to the bag… two feasts… and “That’s him right there, the turncoat cop, stuffing his face with food and reading about his glorified self in the Yo-no-creo Herald…” Not cool, not cool… but I’m so tired… He took the plastic top off the cortadito, indulged himself with a sip and a sip and a sip of the utterly hedonistic sweetness of Cuban coffee… He picked up the Miami Herald and consumed some more lip-smacking syllables of the ROPE-CLIMB COP… He reached into the bag from Ricky’s—pastelitos!—and took out a moon of beef pastelito wrapped in wax paper… A little bit of Heaven!… tasted exactly the way he hoped it would… Pastelitos! A little flake of the baked filo dough fell… and then another… the very nature of baked filo dough… little flakes of it fell if you picked up a pastelito… little flakes fell on his clothes… upon the Camaro’s reupholstered seats… Far from annoying him, the gentle doughfall in the stillness of 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning was a little bit of Heaven, too… made Nestor think of home, childhood delights, sunny Hialeah, a cozy casita… soft, fluffy clouds of love and affection… and protection. Gently, gently, the flakes were wafted about by the white-noise zephyrs that blew out from the air conditioner vents… Nestor could feel the terrible tension draining out draining out draining out, and he drank some more coffee… ineffable sweetness—and how warm the cup and the plastic top had kept it!… and he ate some more moons of pastelito, and the flakes fell ever so gently and tumbled about in the zephyrs, and he found himself… lifting the little lever on the side of the seat and letting his own weight take it back to a twenty-degree incline… and the coffee, which was supposed to keep him alert after a sleepless night, sent a wave of perfect warmth up through his body… and his body surrendered itself utterly to the incline of the seat… and his mind surrendered itself utterly to a hypnagogic state, and presently…