Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “Muhhfuggghh,” he kept saying, “you muhhfugghh.” He looked up at Nestor out of the corner of his eye. With that one cocked eye he fired some death rays and began muttering. “One day caughtchoo… oughta… slaughter… torture…” was the way Nestor heard it. Nestor felt himself consumed by something he had never felt before… the urge to kill… kill… He sank to his knees by the brute’s head and looked into his red-mad eyes and said in a low voice, “Say what, bitch? Say what?” With that, he pressed his forearm and elbow down on the brute’s jawbone and kept increasing the pressure until he felt the brute’s teeth cutting into the cheek that enclosed them. “Say what, you filthy little bitch? Gon’ do what?”—bearing down until the man began to contort his face in pain—

  A hand shook his shoulder. “Nestor! For Christ’s sake, that’s enough!” It was the Sergeant.

  A wave of guilt… Nestor realized for the first time that he could find exhilaration in inflicting pain. No such feeling had ever possessed him before.

  When they finally got the shirt out, they saw fragments of something. Nestor’s immediate thought was that the brute had a cheap piece of yellowish chinaware under his T-shirt… and it had shattered and crumbled… but why innanameagod would he have hidden that? On closer inspection, it looked more like a big sheet of peanut brittle that had begun to crack and crumble.

  “I’ll be damned,” said the Sergeant. He gave a weary chuckle. “I never saw anybody try to hide it on his belly. You guys know what that is?” Nestor and Nuñez looked at the crumbling whatever it was and then at the Sergeant. “That’s a sheet of crack… yeah… The supplier mixes the shit into some kind of a, like, batter… and rolls it into a sheet like that and bakes it, kind of like pastry or something. They sell it to meatheads like the ones we got here. They cut them into rocks they call ’em, and sell ’em for ten dollars apiece. So that big dipshit’s got maybe thirty thousand dollars’ worth a crack lying there on his belly. They could sell all those bits and pieces where it broke, too. Hell, they could sell those little crumbs. By the time a crackhead needs another rock, he ain’t very discriminating.”

  “But why would he stash it on his belly, Sarge, under a T-shirt?”

  “Don’t you see what happened?” said the Sergeant. “He’s out on the porch, and all of a sudden here come the cops. So he makes a run for it. He wants to grab that sheet a crack and hide it or just get rid of it. It was probably lying right out in the open on that table back there, the one we saw moving. He’s grabbed the sheet a crack and hidden under the table and stuck the crack under the T-shirt and stuffed the front of the T-shirt down his jeans. The first chance he has, he’s gonna make a run for it out the back door and get rid a the crack any way he can, so even if he gets caught he won’t get caught with the stuff on him. But he’s a hothead, this jigaboo is, and he’s a big dick who ain’t gonna take no shit off nobody. So when I call him a piece a shit, the big dick in him’s bigger than his common sense, assuming he has any, and all he wants to do is tear my arms off and shove ’em up my ass. I was on the way to ventilating him when Nestor here jumped on his back.”

  “How the hell did you do that?” said Nuñez. “This side a beef is twice your size.”

  Music music MUSIC to Nestor’s ears! “I didn’t do anything,” said this paragon of masculinity with becoming nonchalance. “All I had to do was, you know, neutralize him for thirty seconds, and he’d do the rest himself.”

  The heaving, sawing noise was still coming out of his throat… Bloody murder was oozing out of his eyeballs… His hatred of the Cuban invaders was now cold-cast forever in concrete. His mind would never change on that score. He had been humiliated by a Cuban cop half his size… and then this Cuban cop and another one rub it in by calling him a piece of shit and variations of a piece of shit.

  “Where’s the other fucker, Sarge, the skinny one with the mustache?” said Nestor.

  The Sergeant looked back at the door from the porch, the door they had all come in. “García’s got him. He’s right back there in the doorway, him and Ramirez. Ramirez caught the piece a shit who made the buy, the crackhead.”

  “He did? Where?”

  “Found him lying in the alley, wriggling around in the trash trying to dig the rock out of his pocket.”

  Nestor could now see that six CST cops were here inside the hovel, making sure all witnesses and possible perpetrators stayed put. The three babies were still wailing away… The white face… Nestor sought her out in the dimness of the room… and found her with his eyes… her white face and the black baby in her arms… squalling away… He couldn’t see her very well, but he could make out her big, wide-open—frightened?—eyes set in a white face that didn’t belong here… in a trash-littered bottom-dog dope den in Overtown… It was a dope den, all right, a retail outlet for the crack cocaine trade. It was hard to take that seriously, with all the women and children and bawling babies, but maybe his great victory, demolishing the monster, looked just as unreal and lightweight to them, to her, the one with the white face…

  Now began the usual procedure… talking to the prisoners and the witnesses… by themselves, one-on-one, beyond the hearing of the others. A lucky, or canny, CST officer could get good, usable information that way. But you were also looking for inconsistencies in their stories… Why are you here? Where did you come here from? How did you get here? Do you know anybody else in the room? Do you know the two guys in the white baseball caps? No? Well, do you know what they do here? No? Then whose house do you think this is? No idea? Is that so? You mean you just like to drop in on houses-you-don’t-know-who-the-owner-is, you don’t know what goes on there, you don’t know any of the other visitors there? Then Heaven sent you? Or you heard voices? An unseen hand guided you? It’s all genetic?… and so forth.

  Two cops positioned themselves outside, one in front and one in back, in case some upset denizen of the dope den managed to slip out of the hovel and make a run for it.

  Then the questioning began. The Sergeant and Nuñez removed the sheet of crack and its fragments from the giant’s belly. His full weight was on his arms, which were bound together at the wrists. He started to complain, and the Sergeant said to him, “Shut your filthy mouth, pussy. You’re nothing. You’re my pussy. You wanted to kill me, pussy? You wanted to choke me to death? We gonna see about who chokes who. Let’s shove shit up yo’ ass until it’s coming outcho mouth. You pussy faggot. He wants to kill a cop—and he’s a three-hundred-pound sack a shit-filled faggot.”

  With groans of exertion, Nuñez and the Sergeant lifted the huge man up into a sitting position. “I didn’t know sacks a shit weighed this much,” said the Sergeant. “Okay, what’s your name?”

  The man looked the Sergeant in the eye with molten hatred for a half a second, then lowered his head and said nothing.

  “Look, I know you got shit for brains. You were born stupid. Face it. You were going ooonga ooonga ooonga!” The Sergeant lifted his shoulders and curled his fingers up under his armpits in a semaphore for an ape. “But you learned a thing or two since then, ain’tcha? By now you’ve grown up into a real sub-moron. That’s a big improvement, but you’re so goddamned dumb, you wouldn’t know what a moron is, let alone a sub-moron. Right?” The giant had his eyes closed and his chin hung down over his collarbone. “From now on, every time you get up in the morning, I want you to go to the mirror—you know what a mirror is? Or do you have mirrors in the jungle?—I want you to go to the mirror and say, ‘Good morning, Shit-Faced Asshole.’ You know what morning means? You got any fucking idea—about anything?—any fucking thing at all, dumb ass? You know what dumb means? You look at me, stupid! I’m asking you a question! What’s your fucking name? Do you have a name? Or are you so dumb, dummy, that you can’t fucking remember? You’re in deep shit, shitfabrains. We found enough crack on your big fat belly to put you away for three consecutive life terms. You’re gonna spend the rest of your fucking life with subhumans as dumb as you are. Some’um got no brains at all. But I thi
nk you got one, or half a one. Count to ten for me.” The prisoner remained as dejected and slumped over as before. “Okay, I’ll give you a hint. It starts with one. Okay, then, count to three. You know about three, don’t you? It comes after one and two. Now count to three for me. You don’ wanna cooperate? Then rot, you fucking animal!”

  “Sarge,” said Nuñez. “Let me talk to him, okay? Take a break, Sarge. Go chill. Okay?”

  The Sergeant shook his head wearily. “Okay. But remember one thing. This asshole tried to kill me.” Then he walked away.

  Nestor headed straight for the white girl… ¡Coño!—it was dark in this room, with all the windows blocked the way they were. But the girl’s face was so white, she stood out in the gloom like an angel. He was absolutely intrigued—which made him conscious of how sopping wet with sweat he was. He tried to clear the sweat from his face with his hand. All that did was give him a sweat-wet palm, too. The worst of it was his T-shirt. It was drenched… and being too tight to begin with, it clung to his skin and made his whole torso look wet, which, in fact, it was. Could the girl stand being close enough to him to converse?—a concern that had next to nothing to do with the interrogation he was supposed to carry out. As he drew closer—that pure white face! She was as beautiful as Magdalena but in an entirely different way. Around men, Magdalena wore an expression that as much as said, “I know exactly what you’re thinking. So let’s start from there, okay?” This girl looked absolutely innocent and guileless, a clueless white madonna come to Overtown. She still had the black child—a girl, as it turned out—in her arms. The child was staring at Nestor with what?—wariness?—simple curiosity? At least she wasn’t crying. She was a pretty thing—even while sucking on the nipple of a pacifier with a swee-oooop glug swee-oooop glug earnestness. Nestor gave her a smile that was supposed to say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for I am here on a friendly mission.”

  “I’m Officer Camacho,” he said to the white-white madonna. “Sorry to be so…” He couldn’t think of an acceptable adjective to indicate he knew what a sweaty mess he must look like. Even “wet” would sound… like, crude. So he lifted his hands chest high and turned his fingers inward toward his torso and added a helpless shrug. “… but we have to ask everyone who saw what happened a few questions. Why don’t we go out on the porch?”

  The girl began blinking a lot but said nothing. She nodded a tepid yes and followed Nestor out to the front porch, still holding the child.

  Out here on the porch he saw her in the light for the first time. ::::::¡Dios mío! She’s so exótica!:::::: He couldn’t stop staring. He looked her up and down far faster than it takes to say so. Her skin was as white and smooth as a china plate—but her hair was black as black could be… well, straight, thick, shimmering, streaming down to her shoulders as luxuriantly as any cubana’s but black as black could be… and her eyes… staring at him wide-open with fright—and all the more gorgeous for that—and black as black could be… but in a china-white face. Her lips were delicate and curved in a certain mysterious way that Nestor thought of—for no good reason—as “French”—French perhaps but not red, more of an aubergine… no lipstick… she’s totally innocent of makeup—but hold on! That’s not really true, is it! He has just noticed the eye shadow. ::::::She’s got the rims of her lower lids coated with it!—really makes her big eyes pop out! And don’t tell me she’s not aware of that… and hey, don’t tell me she’s not aware of how short her skirt is—or does it just happen to show off her lovely long legs, the kind they call lissome… what other white americana would dare turn up at a raggedy dope den in Overtown showing off a pair of lissomely alluring legs like that?::::::… She doesn’t look very daring at this moment, however. She keeps blinking blinking blinking blinking… She keeps her lips parted, because she’s breathing fast… and with that her breasts rise and fall. They’re beneath a shirt, Oxford cloth, which has a coarse weave, button-down, only the top button open on the shirtfront, which amounts to not even trying to be sensual—even hidden this well they look to Nestor like perfection, those breasts… and somehow, her obvious fear really moves the heart of Nestor… Nestor the Protector… He immediately felt toward her the way he had felt toward Magdalena the day he first met her on Calle Ocho. He was a cop and she was a damsel. He was a chivalrous cop—but still 100 percent cop in his core. Not that Magdalena had looked frightened for a second. Nevertheless, the feeling of being the strong chivalrous warrior overseeing the damsel was the same.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Ghislaine.”

  “Jee-len… how you spell that?”

  “G, h, i, s, l, a, i, n, e.”

  “G, H?”

  Ghislaine, with an H, nodded yes, and Nestor cast his eyes down, as if looking at the notes he had just taken, screwed his lips up, and shook his head in an ancient cop mannerism that says, “Life is hard already. So why do you tontos go to so much trouble to make it harder?”

  At this point, to some punk he would have said, “You got a last name?” But in her case, the exotic Ghislaine’s, he just said, “What’s your last name?”

  “Lon-te-ay,” she said, or that was the way it sounded to him. She shielded her face from the sun with her hand.

  “How do you spell that?”

  Sweee-ooooop glug sweee-ooooop glug—rubber-suckled the child in her arms.

  “L, a, n, t, i, e, r. It’s French, like Bouvier.”

  ::::::What’s a bouvier? With my luck it’ll be something todo el mundo was supposed to know about.::::::

  But before he could ask that or anything else, this Ghislaine with the snow-white face said, “Am I… under arrest?” Her voice broke when she got to the “under arrest.” Her lips trembled. She looked as if she might start crying.

  Ahhh, the warrior felt very chivalrous now… a bit noble, even. “No, not at all,” he said rather grandly. “It all depends on why you’re here. That’s what I need you to tell me. And let me tell you one thing: It’s going to be better for you if you tell me the complete truth.”

  She looked up into his eyes with her big eyes and said, “I’m from South Beach Outreach.”

  South Beach Outreach… “What’s South Beach Outreach?” he said.

  “We’re volunteers,” she said. “We work with Children’s Services. We try to help families in poor neighborhoods, especially children.”

  “Families?” said Nestor, in a tone of cop street wisdom. “This is a crack house. I see a lot a crackheads”—even as the words left his lips, he knew it was a gross exaggeration, said solely to impress this snow-white young thing—“and crackheads don’t have families. They have habits, and they don’t even think beyond that. Families?”

  “Well, sir, you know more about this than I do, but I think—this isn’t the first time I’ve been here, and I know they have children, some of them, and they do care about them.”

  Nestor never got as far as the “than I do.” He didn’t hear a thing after “sir.” Sir? He didn’t want her calling him a sir. Sir meant she thought of him as remote and unapproachable and stuffy, the same way she would if he were a lot older than she was. But he couldn’t very well tell her to call him Nestor, could he… “Officer” would be better than “sir,” but how did you instruct her—or anybody—on that score without sounding like a protocol nut.

  So he had to settle for “If that’s a family, where’s the mother?”

  Tremulously: “Her mother’s been in a drug-treatment facility at Easter Rock ever since she”—she looked down at the baby—“was born. You know Easter Rock?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Nestor. He knew it, and he was surprised. Easter Rock was an upscale rehab facility for upscale people. “How did she rate Easter Rock?”

  “We—South Beach Outreach, I mean—intervened. They were getting ready to put her in a correctional facility for addicts.”

  “Whattaya mean, ‘intervened’?”

  “Mainly it was our president, Isabella de la Cr
uz. She knows a lot of people, I guess.”

  Even Nestor had heard of Isabella de la Cruz. Her husband, Paolo, had a big shipping business. Isabella de la Cruz was always popping up in the newspaper in those group pictures where everybody is lined up in a row grinning for what reason nobody knows.

  “So where do you fit into all this?” said Nestor.

  “I’m a volunteer,” said Ghislaine Lantier. “We’re assigned to… sort of… watch over children from uhhh… troubled families. I hate the word dysfunctional. A lot of the times the child, as in this case”—she glanced down at her little ward again—“is staying with a relative, usually a grandmother, but it could also be a foster home. She’s with her grandmother, whom you’ve already met.”

  “You don’t mean the big woman who kept telling the Sergeant he could shove—kept giving him a hard time…”

  Ghislaine’s tremulous lips wavered into half a smile. “I’m afraid so.”

  Nestor glanced into the dim dope den. There she was, about ten feet inside the door, the bigmouthed momma. In that gloom Nestor picked her out first by her Big Momma bulk. García was interrogating her… supposedly. You could tell she was doing all the talking. ::::::What’s that thing she has in her hands? A fucking iPhone! This is supposed to be the most impoverished part of Miami—but everybody’s got an iPhone.:::::: He turned back again.

  “But Ghislaine, you’re the one holding her, not the grandmomma with the mouth.”

  “Oh, I was just giving her a break. She also has two children of one of her daughters to look after. That makes five in all. My job is to check up a couple of times a week to make sure they’re being taken care of, in different ways—supervision, attention, affection, compassion… you know…”

  No, he didn’t know. Nestor was intimidated by this Ghislaine’s command of language. She could reel off words like supervision, attention, and whatever the rest of it was as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Magdalena was smart, but she couldn’t talk like that. This girl also had little mannerisms in talking that intimidated Nestor because they sounded more proper than the way he would have said the same thing. She said “the child, as in this case,” instead of “like this one here.” Or she said “whom.” Who the hell said “whom” in Overtown? “With her grandmother, whom you’ve already met,” she said, instead of “who you met.”