Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “Why were they interested in Korolyov and Drukovich?”

  “They weren’t interested in them as individuals. This I bet you don’t know, but all the police departments in the area do it. If they see somebody in a car and it looks suspicious or maybe it just looks highly unusual, they’ll stop it on some pretext—they were going five or ten miles an hour over the speed limit, or the car’s license plate begins with certain digits, or the registration sticker’s peeling off—any damned thing—and they check IDs and record them, and they take pictures like this one. Why they stopped Korolyov’s car I don’t really know, except it’s unusual, all right, and it looks like a lot of money.”

  John Smith couldn’t take his eyes off it. “I don’t believe this!” he kept saying, and then he asked, “How did you actually get this? Did you just call up the Miami-Dade Police and ask them what they had on Korolyov and Drukovich, and they just gave it to you?”

  Nestor chuckled the happy chuckle of the man who knows secrets and you don’t. “No, they didn’t just give it to me. I called a cop I used to work with on the Marine Patrol. You’d never get something like this by going through ‘channels.’ You have to get on the brothernet.”

  “What’s the brothernet?”

  “If you know a brother officer and you ask him for a favor, he’s gonna do it for you if he possibly can. That’s the brothernet. My guy also—”

  “God, Nestor,” said John Smith, absorbed in the photograph, “that’s great. If the time comes and we have to prove that Korolyov knew Igor all along—here we have him tooling around with him in this half-a-million-dollar toy. What we need now is some more information about Igor’s personal life. I’d like to meet him in some—you know—some casual way.”

  “Well, I was just about to tell you something else my guy passed along. This is not in any file. In fact, it’s out-and-out hearsay, but the word is—and Igor’s pretty hard to not notice—the word is that he’s a regular at some strip club in Sunny Isles called the Honey Pot. You game for trying to find a mustache in the middle of a herd of whores?”

  8

  The Columbus Day Regatta

  Second week in October—and so what? That great tropical skillet in the sky still boiled your blood, seared your flesh, turned your eyeballs into aching migraine globes if you insisted on staring at anything, even through the midnight-black sunglasses they were both wearing.

  In the front seat of Dr. Lewis’s convertible the wind blew through Magdalena’s hair. But the air was warm as soup. Letting it stream through your hair was like filling your glass from the HOT tap. Norman had the side windows up and the air conditioner on as high as it would go. But all she got out of it was an insipid wisp of cool breeze on her shins every now and then :::::: Forget the maximum air-conditioning, Norman! Just put the top back up, for God’s sake!::::::

  But she knew better than to say it out loud. Norman had a thing about… panache—a white Audi A5 convertible with the top down… and the top had to be down… had to have hair streaming in the wind… his longish light-brown hair and her very long dark hair… miles of hair streaming back from the shiny wraparound black shades they both wore… had to have the shades—all that, she deduced, must be panache.

  Norman had given her a little discourse on panache two months ago. At the time she hadn’t known why. For that matter, she hadn’t a clue what panache was. But by now she no longer came right out and asked him what new words meant. Now she waited and looked these terms up on Google. Aha… panache… the gist of it seemed to be… at this moment… that if you weren’t driving a Mercedes, a Ferrari, or a Porsche at the very, borderline least… you had to compensate for it with panache. And if a humble Audi A5, such as he possessed, were to have panache, it had to be startlingly white, had to have the top down… had to have a really good-looking couple in the front seat wearing big shiny bug-eyed black sunglasses… dazzling one and all with youth and glamour. But to have that panache, you couldn’t leave out any element, and keeping the top down was one of them.

  Right now panache was a killer out here on the MacArthur Causeway. Magdalena was burning up. Just before the causeway reached Miami Beach, a sign said FISHER ISLAND. Over the past two days Norman must have told her a dozen times that he docked his boat at the Fisher Island Marina and that they would be stopping off at Fisher Island Fisher Island Fisher Island to board it for today’s cruise way out to Elliott Key for the Columbus Day Regatta. Obviously the significance was supposed to register on her… so obviously that she didn’t dare admit her ignorance of Fisher Island, either.

  Norman turned off the causeway and headed down a ramp that led to a ferry slip. The great white hulk of a ferryboat, at least three stories high, already docked, dwarfed everything else. In the immediate foreground three lines of cars were forming for inspection, apparently by guards at booths just ahead. Why was Norman pulling up at the rear of the longest line? Should she ask him—or would that merely betray some spatial dimension of her ignorance?

  She needn’t have worried. Norman couldn’t wait to tell her himself. “See that line over there?” He extended his arm and his forefinger as far as they would go, as if the line were a mile away rather than fifteen feet or so. The mammoth midnight shades obscured the upper half of his face, but Magdalena could see a small smile forming.

  “They’re the servants,” he said.

  “The servants?” said Magdalena. “Servants all have to take that lane? I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “Servants and masseuses and personal trainers, and hairdressers, I guess. The island is private property. It belongs to the people who own real estate on it. They can make any rules they want. This is the same as a gated community, except that it’s an entire island, and the ferryboat is the gate.”

  “Well, I never heard of a gated community that had a lane for the lower class,” said Magdalena. She didn’t know why the whole thing riled her so much. “How about a nurse? Suppose I was assigned to a case on Fisher Island?”

  “You, too,” said Dr. Lewis, smiling even more broadly. He seemed to be enjoying all this… especially the fact that he had gotten her goat.

  “Then I wouldn’t do it,” said Magdalena, a bit haughtily. “I wouldn’t take the case. I’m not going to be treated like ‘the help.’ I’m just not. I’m a professional. I’ve worked too hard to be treated that way.”

  This caused Norman’s smile to move up to the chuckle stage. “But you’d be breaking your vow as a nurse.”

  “All right,” said Magdalena, “then what about you? If you had to make a house call on Fisher Island, would you get in that line?”

  “I never heard of a psychiatrist making a house call,” said Norman, “but it’s not totally improbable.”

  “And you’d get in that line?”

  “Technically,” he said. “But of course I’d drive right to the head of the line and say, ‘This is an emergency.’ I’ve never heard of anybody yet with the guts to tell a doctor he has to abide by the protocol when he says it’s an emergency. All you have to do is act like you’re God. That’s what doctors are when it’s an emergency.”

  “The problem is, you actually believe that,” said Magdalena rather crossly.

  “HahhhHHHockhockhock hock hock! You’re funny, Magdalena. You know that? But you don’t have to worry. Every time you come to Fisher Island you’ll be with meeeeuhuhhuhock hock hock hock!”

  “Haha,” said Magdalena, “I’m having a convulsion, I’m laughing so hard.”

  That made Norman even merrier. “I’ve got you going, haven’t I, babe…” She hated that. He was mocking her.

  “If you want to know the honest truth,” he said, “I don’t have to play God in the servant’s line. You see that little medallion up there?” It was a round thing, about the size of a quarter but not as thick, stuck to the inside of the windshield on the upper left. “That’s an equity owner’s medallion. This line is for equity owners only. You’re in the upper class now, kid.”

&n
bsp; Magdalena grew still more irritated. Suddenly she didn’t care anymore whether Norman thought she was uneducated or not.

  “So what’s equity owner supposed to mean?”

  Norman was grinning right in her face. “It’s supposed to mean, and in fact it does mean, you own real estate or real property on the island.”

  Magdalena grew aggravated on top of irritated. He was mocking her—and at the same time he was burying her in words she didn’t know. What the hell was a medallion? What the hell did real property mean? Was that different from real estate? What the hell did equity mean? And if she didn’t know that, how was she supposed to know what equity owner meant?

  She couldn’t keep Resentment on its polite behavior any longer. “So I bet now you’re gonna tell me you have a place on Fisher Island. You just forgot to tell me, right?”

  The good doctor’s antennae seemed to sense real anger this time. “No, I’m not gonna say that. All I’m saying is I have a medallion, and I have an equity owner’s ID card.” He pulled a small card out of the breast pocket of his shirt, showed it to her so briefly, and put it back in the pocket.

  “Okay, then, if you don’t own a place, then how come you have all this stuff… these IDs… and you’re so ‘upper class,’ as you call it?”

  The convertible advanced a few feet, then stopped again. Norman turned toward her and gave a sly smile… and a wink with a glittering eye. It was the sort of smile that intimates, Now I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

  “Let’s just say I made certain arrangements.”

  “What kind?”

  “Oh… I did someone a very big favor. It’s a quid pro quo situation. Let’s just say this”—he gestured toward the medallion—“this is the quid for the quo.”

  He was very pleased with himself… quid pro quo… Magdalena vaguely remembered hearing the term, but she had no idea what it meant. It was reaching the point where every new term he sprang on her inflamed her resentment. The hell of it was, he didn’t think he was springing anything on her. He seemed to assume she knew them because every educated person did know these things. Somehow that made it even worse. That really rubbed it in.

  “All right, Mr. Upper Class,” she said. “Might as well hear it all. What’s this line right next to us?”

  He apparently thought she was now making light of things. He smiled knowingly and said, “That’s what you might call the haute bourgeoisie.”

  That really rankled her. He was starting in again. She more or less knew what bourgeoisie meant, but what the hell was oat supposed to mean? The hell with it! Why not blurt it right out?!

  “What the hell is—”

  “These people are renters and hotel guests and visitors”—Norman’s exuberance, his joie de Fisher Island codified status rankings, ran right over her voice. He had never heard her say a profane word before, not even a “what the hell,” and he didn’t hear it this time, either. “If any of them can’t produce an ID card—let’s say they’re just arriving to go to the hotel—they won’t let them through until they call ahead to the hotel to see if they’re expected.”

  “Norman, do you have any idea how—”

  Rolls right over her: “They’ll take his picture and a picture of his license plate, even if the guy has an ID from the hotel. And I’ll tell you something else. No guest of the hotel can pay cash or use a credit card. Nobody on the island can. You can only charge things… to your ID card. The whole island’s one great big private club.”

  Magdalena made an exaggerated angry panoramic gesture, taking in the entire scene, and that so surprised Norman that he paused long enough for her to get a word in.

  “Well, isn’t this nice,” she said. “We’ve got upper class, middle class, and lower class… bim, bim, bim… and people like me would be in lower class.”

  Norman chuckled, mistaking the irony for joking around. “Nahhhhh… not really lower class. More like lower middle. If you’re really lower class, like a repairman, a construction worker, a gardener, let’s say, or anybody with a truck or one of those vehicles with lettering on it—I don’t know… pizza, carpets, a plumber, whatever—you can’t get on this ferry at all. They have one that comes in over at the other end of the island.” He motioned vaguely to the west. “It leaves from Miami itself. I’ve never seen it, but I gather it’s kind of a big old open barge.”

  “Norman… I just don’t… know… about your Fisher Island—”

  They were moving again. This time they arrived at a booth. A black-and-white arm blocked the way. A uniformed guard with a revolver!—no, it was a scanner—stood in front of the Audi and aimed it at the license plate and then at the medallion. When he saw Norman behind the wheel, he broke into a big smile and said, “Hey-ey-ey-ey, Doc!” He came over to the driver’s side. “I saw you on TV! Yeah! That was great! What was that show?”

  “Probably 60 Minutes,” said Dr. Lewis.

  “That’s right!” said the guard. “Something about—I don’t remember. But I saw you, and I said to my wife, ‘Hey, that’s Dr. Lewis!’ ”

  The good doctor put on a serious face and said, “Now let me ask you, Buck—I hope you called Dr. Lloyd, like I suggested.”

  “Oh, I did! It cleared right up! I can’t remember what he gave me.”

  “Probably endomycin.”

  “Hey, that’s what it was, endomycin!”

  “Well, I’m glad it worked out, Buck. Dr. Lloyd is tops.”

  Norman produced his equity owner’s ID card from his shirt pocket, but his pal Buck scarcely glanced at it. He waved them through the checkpoint and sang out, “Have a good one!”

  Dr. Lewis slipped on what Magdalena by now recognized as his smile of self-satisfaction. “You’ll notice Buck didn’t even look inside the booth. He’s supposed to look at a screen in there. It’s supposed to show the picture of the owner that’s in the system side-by-side with the picture he takes with the scanner. Likewise the number on the medallion and the one in the system. You’ll also notice that our line is boarding the boat first, which means we’ll be the first ones off on the other side.”

  He glanced at her as if waiting for a commendation. She could think of no fitting response. What earthly difference did it make? This ferryboat ride to the island of his dreams would take a little over seven minutes.

  “Buck and I are buddies,” said Norman. “You know it doesn’t hurt to learn these people’s names and talk to them a little. They interpret it as respect, and a little respect goes a long way in this world.”

  But Buck meant something else to Magdalena. No Latino was ever named Buck. It was americano through and through.

  On the ferry they were parked near the head of one of the equity owners lines. To Norman, this was exhilarating stuff. “If you lean out and look past that car ahead of us, you can see the island.”

  Magdalena, by now, couldn’t have cared less about the damned island. For a reason she couldn’t have put a name to, the whole subject was rousing her hostility. Fisher Island… if it suddenly sank to the bottom of Biscayne Bay, it wouldn’t bother her a bit. But she leaned out anyway. Mainly she could see the fender of the black Mercedes in front of them and the fender of the tan one at the head of the line next to them. Between the two fenders she could see… something. She took it to be Fisher Island… what little she could make out… It didn’t strike her as anything remarkable.

  She pulled her head back in and said, “I gather Fisher Island is very”—she was dying to come up with some more cutting word, just to shake up Norman’s status bliss, but she constrained herself and said—“very Anglo.”

  “Oh, I don’t know…” said Norman. “I guess I don’t think of things in those terms.” ::::::The hell you don’t.:::::: “I hope you don’t, either.

  “It’s not as if we’re in some place where you have to go around counting Anglos and Latinos to see if there’s diversity. Latinos run all of South Florida. They run it politically, and they’ve got the most successful businesses, too. It doesn�
��t bother me.”

  “Of course not,” said Magdalena. “Because you people run the whole rest of the country. You think South Florida is a tiny version of… of… of… Mexico or Colombia or someplace.”

  “Oh ho!” said Norman. He flashed another big smile. “So now I’m ‘you people’!? Have I ever acted ‘you people’ to you?”

  Magdalena realized she had gone out of control. She was chagrined. In the sweetest voice she could come up with at the moment: “Of course not, Norman.” She nestled her head against his shoulder and caressed his upper arm with both her hands. “I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean it that way. I’m so lucky just to be… be with you… Will you forgive me? I’m really sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” said Norman “We’re not taking any heavy baggage along on this trip. It’s a lovely day. We’re heading off to something that’s going to amuse and amaze you beyond anything you’ve ever seen.”

  “Which is what?” She quickly added, “Darling.”

  “We’re off across the waters… to the Columbus Day Regatta!”

  “What am I gonna see?”

  “I’m not going to tell you! This is something you have to experience.”

  Sure enough, their line, the anointed equity owners line, disembarked first on the other side, onto the legendary Fisher Island. Norman couldn’t help calling it, the anointment, to her attention again.

  ::::::Well, that’s all right. I’m not going to make an issue of it. He has a little boy’s excitement over these things, these social things. And on 60 Minutes he looked so self-confident. On national television!::::::

  From the ferry slip they headed east on an avenue called Fisher Island Drive. Norman enjoyed explaining that this was, in fact, the only street on Fisher Island. Yeah! The only one! It went all the way around the island in a great loop. Oh, a lot of roads led off of it, as she could see, but these were all private roads leading to private property.