Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “Okay, you’re a volunteer for South Beach Outreach. Do you live in South Beach?”

  “I just happened to hear about it. I live in a dorm at the University of Miami.”

  “You’re a student there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m going to need an actual address and a phone number, in case we have to get hold of you.”

  “Hold of me?” She looked as frightened as she had at first.

  “This is a serious case,” said Nestor. “We’ve already got three dirtbags under arrest in there.” He motioned toward the interior of the hovel.

  Ghislaine just stared at him… long pause… then, very timidly, “They’re young. Maybe there’s hope.”

  “You know what they were doing in there?”

  Now she compressed her lips so hard you could no longer see them. All of her body language indicated that, yes, she had known what they were doing. So did the long pause… “We don’t inquire about anything other than the children’s needs and conditions. We don’t pass judgment about anything else. If we did, we’d never—”

  “Needs and conditions?!” said Nestor. He shot out a stiff arm and pointed to the interior of the hovel. “That’s a crack house, for chrissake!”

  “At least this way they’re with their own flesh and blood. I think that’s so important!” For the first time she had allowed her voice to rise. “Her grandmother”—she glanced down again at the child in her arms—“is in there, bad as the environment may be. Half brothers of hers are in there. Her father is in there, even though I’ll admit he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her.”

  “Her father?”

  Ghislaine looked more frightened than ever. Once more tremulously: “Yes… You just had a… a fight with him.”

  Nestor was speechless. “You—that piece a—flesh and blood?—you think—these—not a drop of morals in his body!—‘totally lacking in affect,’ as the DAs say—he’s a goddamned crack dealer, Ghislaine! He’d just as soon yank her head off for the fun of it”—Nestor flicked a glance at the child—“as look at her! He’s an animal! Holy Christ!”

  Ghislaine lowered her head and began staring at the floor of the porch. She started swallowing her words and half-muttering. “I know… He’s horrible… He’s proud to be the progenitor of children, but he won’t have anything to do with them… That’s what women—he’s so gross—he’s a big huge—” She looked up at Nestor and said, “I couldn’t believe it when you beat him—and so fast.”

  Music… did Nestor hear a strum of music?… the thrum of an overture? “These idiots may be ‘huge,’ but they’re sub-morons,” he said, quoting the Sergeant without attribution. “Only a sub-moron tries to roll in the dirt with a Miami cop,” he said, modestly sprinkling praise over the entire force, not hogging it for himself. “We don’t beat them. We let them beat themselves.”

  “Still—he must be twice your size.”

  Nestor studied her face. She was apparently utterly sincere. And she made music… she made music… Here is what he’d say! Sometime, when this is all over, I’d like to sit down with you and talk about this whole Children’s Services business. Take a chance! Don’t hold back your emotions! I can’t believe anybody would let a big dirtbag like that anywhere near a child…

  … He’d say, Why don’t we go get a cup of coffee? And she’d say, That’s a good idea… At South Beach Outreach we never have a chance to look at things from the Police Department’s point of view. I’ve learned something important today. Criminology is one thing. But actually confronting crime where the rubber meets the road is very different. Subduing a man as big and strong as the one you just subdued—all the criminology in the world doesn’t help at that point. At that point you either have it or you don’t!

  Or something like that… and the music would build slowly, like an organ’s to that chord at the crescendo that makes your rib cage vibrate.

  10

  The Super Bowl of the Art World

  It was December, which in Miami Beach had only the most boring meteorological significance. Imagine a picture book with the same photograph on every page… every page… high noon beneath a flawless, cloudless bright blue sky… on every page… a tropical sun that turns those rare old birds, pedestrians, into stumpy, abstract black shadows on the sidewalk… on every page… unending views of the Atlantic Ocean, unending meaning that every couple of blocks, if you squint at a certain angle between the gleaming pinkish butter-colored condominium towers that wall off the shining sea from clueless gawkers who come to Miami Beach thinking they can just drive down to the shore and see the beaches and the indolent recliner & umbrella people and the lapping waves and the ocean sparkling and glistening and stretching out to the horizon in a perfect 180-degree arc… if you squint just right, every couple of blocks you can get a skinny, thin-as-a-ballpoint-refill, vertical glimpse of the ocean—blip—and it’s gone… on every page… glimpse—blip—and it’s gone… on every page… on every page….

  However, at high noon, or 11:45 a.m., to be exact, on this particular December day, Magdalena and Norman were indoors… in the distinguished, if itching-scratching, company of Maurice Fleischmann, along with Marilynn Carr, his “A.A.,” as he called her… short for art adviser. In fact, he had begun using that as her nickname… “Hey, A.A., come take a look at this”… or whatever. With dignity, insofar as that was possible, the four of them sought to keep their place in a line, more or less, less a line, in fact, and more like a scrimmage at an Iranian airline counter. Two hundred or so restless souls, most of them middle-aged men, eleven of whom had been pointed out to Magdalena as billionaires—billionaires—twelve, if you counted Maurice himself, were squirming like maggots over the prospect of what lay on the other side of an inch-thick glass wall just inside a small portal, Entrance D of the Miami Convention Center. The convention center took up an entire city block on Miami Beach. An ordinary person could walk past Entrance D every day for years and never be conscious of its existence. That was the whole point. Ordinary people didn’t know and musn’t know that billionaires and countless nine-digit millionaires were in there squirming like maggots… fifteen minutes before Miami Art Basel’s moment of money and male combat. They all had an urge.

  The maggots!… Once, when she was six or seven, Magdalena had come upon a little dead dog, a mutt, on a sidewalk in Hialeah. A regular hive of bugs was burrowing into a big gash in the dog’s haunch—only these weren’t exactly bugs. They looked more like worms, short, soft, deathly pale worms; and they were not in anything so orderly as a hive. They were a wriggling, slithering, writhing, squiggling, raveling, wrestling swarm of maggots rooting over and under one another in a heedless, literally headless, frenzy to get at the dead meat. She learned later that they were decephalized larvae. They had no heads. The frenzy was all they had. They didn’t have five senses, they had one, the urge, and the urge was all they felt. They were utterly blind.

  Just take a look at them!… the billionaires! They look like shoppers mobbed outside Macy’s at midnight for the 40-percent–off After Christmas Sale. No, they don’t look that good. They look older and grubbier and more washed out… the whole bunch are americanos, after all. They’re wearing prewashed baggy-in-the-seat jeans, too-big T-shirts, too-big polo shirts hanging out at the bottom to make room for their bellies, too-tight khakis, ug-lee rumpled woolen ankle-high socks of rubber-mat black, paint-job green, and slop-mop maroon… and sneakers. Magdalena had never seen this many old men—practically all were middle-aged or older—wearing sneakers. Just look—there and there and over there—not just sneakers but real basketball shoes. And for what? They probably think all these teen togs make them look younger. Are they kidding? They just make their slumping backs and sloping shoulders and fat-sloppy bellies… and scoliotic spines and slanted-forward necks and low-slung jowls and stringy wattles… more obvious.

  To tell the truth, Magdalena didn’t particularly care about all that. She thought it was funny. Mainly, she w
as envious of A.A. This americana was pretty and young and, it almost went without saying, blond. Her clothes were sophisticated yet very simple… and very sexy… a perfectly plain, sensible, businesslike sleeveless black dress… but short… ended a foot above her knees and showed plenty of her fine fair thighs… made it seem like you were looking at all of her fine fair body. Oh, Magdalena didn’t doubt for a second that she was sexier than this girl, had better breasts, better lips, better hair… long, full, lustrous dark hair as opposed to this americana’s sexless blond bob, copied from that English girl—what was her name?—Posh Spice… She just wished she had worn a minidress, too, to show off her bare legs… as opposed to these slim white pants that mainly showed off the deep cleft of her perfect little butt. But this “A.A.” girl had something else, too. She was in the know. Advising rich people, like Fleischmann, about what very expensive art to buy was her business, and she knew all about this “fair.” If somebody called it “Miami Art Basel,” thinking that was the full name, she would inform him in some mostly polite way that it was officially Art Basel Miami Beach… and that those in the know didn’t call it “Miami Art Basel” for short. No, they called it “Miami Basel.” She could fire off sixty in the know cracks a minute.

  At this very moment, A.A. was saying, “So I ask her—I ask her what she’s interested in, and she says to me, ‘I’m looking for something cutting-edge… like a Cy Twombly.’ I’m thinking, ‘A Cy Twombly?’ Cy Twombly was cutting-edge in the nineteen fifties! He died a couple of years ago, I think it was, and most of his contemporaries are gone or on the way. You’re not cutting-edge if your whole generation is dead or dying. You may be great. You may be iconic, the way Cy Twombly is, but you’re not cutting-edge.”

  She didn’t address any of this to Magdalena. She never looked at her. Why waste attention, much less words, on some little nobody who probably didn’t know anything anyway? The worst part of it was that she was right. Magdalena had never heard of Cy Twombly. She didn’t know what cutting-edge meant, either, although she could sort of guess from the way A.A. used it. And what did iconic mean? She hadn’t the faintest idea. She bet Norman didn’t know, either, didn’t understand the first thing Miss All-Business sexy A.A. had just said, but Norman created the sort of presence that made people think he knew everything about anything anybody had to say.

  Iconic was a word that was beginning to pop up all around them, now that there were just minutes to go before the magic hour, noon. The maggots were rooting amongst one another more anxiously.

  Somewhere very nearby, a man with a high voice was saying, “Okay, maybe it isn’t iconic Giacometti, but it’s great Giacometti all the same, but no-o-o-o—” Magdalena recognized that voice. A hedge fund billionaire from Greenwich?—Stamford?—someplace in Connecticut, anyway. She remembered him from the BesJet party two nights ago.

  And some woman was saying, “Koons’d die at auction right now!”

  “—Hirst, if you ask me. He’s high as a dead fish after fifteen minutes in the sun.”

  “—what you just said? Prince is the one who’s tanked.”

  “—the fish that’s up there at Stevie’s, rotting its forty-million-dollar guts out?”

  “—iconic, my ass.”

  “—svear, ‘de-skilt’ vas vot she said!” (“—swear, ‘de-skilled’ was what she said.”) Magdalena knew that voice very well, from last night at the dinner party Michael du Glasse and his wife, Caroline Peyton-Soames, gave at Casa Tua. She even remembered his name, Heinrich von Hasse. He had made billions manufacturing… something about industrial robots?… was that what they said? Whatever else he did, he had spent so many millions buying art at Art Basel in Switzerland six months ago, people were talking about him at practically every party she and Norman and Maurice had been to.

  “—about to see it! A measles outbreak, baby!”

  “—and no time to kick the tires!”

  “See it—like it—buy it! That’s all you—”

  “Art Basel in Basel?” That was A.A. piping up again. “Have you ever been to Basel? The only place worse is Helsinki. There’s no place to eat! The food is not anywhere near as good as the food here. The fish tastes like it arrived in the backseat of a Honda, and the price—”

  “—keep his hands off my adviser, for Christsake.”

  “—think you’ve got a fifteen-minute reserve, but five minutes later—”

  “—the price is twice what it is here. And Basel’s so-called historic hotels? I’ll tell you what’s historic—the basins in the bathrooms! Aaaagh! They’re that old kind. You know what I mean? You could have somebody scrub them day and night for a week, and they’d still look gray like somebody’s old bedridden grandmother with bad breath. No shelf space and these old gray metal cups screwed into the wall they expect you to put your toothbrush in? You just—”

  “I’m what?”

  “—what I said. You’re rude. Gimme your mother’s phone number! I’m gonna tell her on you!”

  “Whattaya gonna do—get Putin to slip an isotope into my cappuccino?”

  As covertly as possible, Fleischmann lowered his hand to the crotch of his pants and tried to scratch the itch of his herpes pustules. He could never do it covertly enough to fool Magdalena, however. Every two minutes at least, Fleischmann shot one of his sixty-three-year-old looks at her… pregnant with meaning… and lust. Norman’s diagnosis was that they were one and the same. The meaning was… lust. The very sight of a gorgeous girl like her was live pornography for a porn addict like Fleischmann… better than a strip club. Gross as they might be, Magdalena loved those looks. Those pregnant lustful looks she commanded from every sort of man—she loved it, loved it, loved it. First they looked at her face—Norman said her knowing lips insinuated ecstasy, even when she didn’t have the faintest smile. Then they looked at her breasts—her somehow perfect breasts. She was aware of it all the time! Then she would see them searching her crotch… expecting to find what, in God’s name?

  All the old men in this wriggling infestation of maggots… if she cared to walk up and down and cock her hips before them… their riches… they’d melt! They dreamed of… depositing them into… her.

  It was as if one of those storybook fairies children love so much had waved her wand over Miami… and—Wanderflash!—turned it into Miami Basel… The spell lasted no more than one week, one magical week every December… when the Miami Basel “art fair” went up in the Miami Convention Center… and swells from all over the United States, England, Europe, Japan, even Malaysia, even China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, even South Africa, todo el mundo, came down from the sky in swarms of private planes… to buy expensive contemporary art… or to see the swells buying it… to immerse themselves in their mental atmosphere of art and money… to breathe the same air they did… in short, to be where things are happening… until the fairy waved her wand again a week later and—Wanderflash!—they disappeared… the art from all over the world, the private planes from all over the world, the swell people who had descended from the sky from all over the world, and—poof!—every trace of sophistication and worldliness was gone.

  At this very moment, however, all these creatures remained under the fairy’s spell.

  Miami Basel wouldn’t open to the public until the day after tomorrow… but to those in the know, those on the inside, Miami Basel had already been a riot of cocktail receptions, dinner parties, after-parties, covert cocaine huddles, inflamed catting around for going-on three days. Almost anywhere they were likely to enjoy a nice little status boost from the presence of celebrities—movie, music, TV, fashion, even sports celebrities—who knew nothing about art and didn’t have time to care. All they wanted was to be… where things were happening. For them and for the insiders, Miami Basel would be over the moment the first foot of the first clueless member of the general public touched the premises.

  Magdalena would have remained clueless herself without Maurice Fleischmann. She had never even heard of Miami Basel until Maurice inv
ited her, along with Norman, to the fair… at Norman’s prodding. Socializing with a patient was very much frowned upon in psychiatric practice. The psychiatrist’s effectiveness depended in no small part upon his assuming a godly stance far above the patient’s place in the world, no matter what it might be. The patient must be dependent upon his paid god, not the other way around. But Norman had Maurice mesmerized. He thought his “recovery” from his “disease” depended entirely upon Norman, in spite of the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that Norman kept telling him that he was not suffering from a disease but a weakness. For his part, Maurice felt rather special taking Norman around, because Norman was on television a lot and was seen by so many people in Miami as a celebrity. Nobody would suspect that Fleischmann was Norman’s patient. They were two well-known men who traveled in the same circles, at the same altitude. What could be remarkable about that?

  Every day Fleischmann and his driver, a little Ecuadorian named Felipe, had picked up Norman and Magdalena from the Lincoln Suites, after Norman’s last appointment, in a big black Escalade SUV with dark-tinted windows. The first stop, the first day, was the insiders’ opening event—a cocktail party known as Toffs at Twilight. A man named Roy Duroy staged that party every year at the hotel he owned, The Random, on Collins Avenue, not all that far south of the Lincoln Suites. The Random was a typical hotel of the much-touted South Beach Retro boom. A clever developer like Duroy would buy a small, crabbed hotel, eighty years old or more usually, give it a lick of paint and some in-room computer outlets, change the name from the Lido or the Surfside to something hip and flip like The Random, and pronounce it an Art Deco architectural gem. Now you had a small, crabbed gem. The rear of the property was its saving grace. It overlooked an inlet from the ocean. Duroy had put a lot of big umbrellas with magenta, white, and apple-green stripes out there. Very colorful, these umbrellas, and Toffs at Twilight was already going strong when Maurice, Norman, and Magdalena arrived. A hundred, two hundred Miami Basel insiders were crammed around tables under the umbrellas, drinking, or milling about between the umbrellas, drinking. Everybody was drinking and kicking up a noisy surf of big talk and haw haw haw haw haws! and scream scream scream screams!