by Tom Wolfe
Nestor broke in: “Okay Sarge—SARGE! We got it, we got, it!” Nestor’s cheeks were burning with embarrassment.
“Sure, you got it,” said Hernandez. “But what about Nuñez here and Flores and the rest of the unit? Most a them don’t read the Yo No Creo el Herald. You wanna deprive them?”
He continued reading the article aloud… hugely enjoying Nestor’s discomfort. Nestor’s cheeks were burning so, he figured his face must be one blazing ball of red. Then Nuñez and Flores really got into the spirit of it. They began hooting… “Wooop! Wooooop!”… as the details of Nestor’s triumph began to accumulate.
“Hey, Sarge!” said Flores. “What happened to you? Last I heard, some big negro had his hands around your neck, and then we don’t hear no more. Did you get offed or something?” Laughs all around for Nuñez, Flores, and the Sergeant.
Flores said to Hernandez, “Where do you suppose the guy got all those details? You know, like giving the big mook a ‘rodeo ride’ and all that.”
Hernandez looked at Nestor and said, “Well…?”
Mierda… Nestor didn’t know whether the Well…? was laden with accusation or not.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “They told me to go ahead and answer some questions right after that mast thing. Captain Castillo was standing right there. But nobody’s said go ahead and answer questions about this thing. Where do these guys get those details in those crime stories? They’re always talking about ‘according to police’ or ‘police said’ or ‘according to a police spokesman’… I mean, who’s a ‘police spokesman’… and who’s saying it when it says, ‘police said’? Is it Public Affairs?—and how do they get the details? Call the officers on the case? I mean, they got to go ask somebody. Know what I mean?”
::::::None of that’s an actual lie, is it… but what if Hernandez or Nuñez or Flores asks me straight out? Can I just keep double-talking these guys? Probably none a them even reads the Herald. But suppose they add it up… John Smith plus John Smith plus John Smith.:::::: Quite aside from feeling paranoid, he felt guilty.
Just then came a vibration from the left breast pocket of his checked flannel shirt: Nestor fishes his cell phone out of his pocket and says, “Camacho.”
A girl’s voice on the other end: “Is this Officer Camacho?”
“Yes, this is Officer Camacho.” He used the “Officer Camacho” to show the Sergeant, Nuñez, and Flores that this was a line-of-duty call.
“Officer Camacho, this is Ghislaine Lantier. We were talking yesterday?”
“Uhhh… of course.” The sound of her voice gave him a lift he couldn’t have explained to himself. It just did.
“I probably shouldn’t be calling you, because this isn’t your responsibility, but I… I need some advice.”
“About what?” He could see her as if she were standing right in front of him… the pale, pale skin, the dark hair, the big, wide, innocent… anxious eyes… and her legs. Her legs popped into his head, too.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with what happened yesterday. It’s sort of complicated, and I couldn’t think of anybody else to call, and then I saw that big story about you in the Herald this morning, and I thought I’d try. I still have your card. Until I read the paper this morning, I had no idea you were the same officer I’d seen on television carrying that refugee down from on top of a mast.”
And the angel sang! Nestor said, “Hold on a second.” He covered the cell phone with his other hand and said to his mates, “I gotta take this call. I’ll be right back.”
With that, he got up from the booth and stepped out the door and onto the sidewalk and said into the cell phone, “I’m just going someplace a little quieter. There was too much noise in there.”
Someplace was the big CVS down the block. There was a heavy pair of automated plate glass sliding doors at the entrance. About six feet inside was another pair, creating a vestibule of sorts. Nestor leaned against a side wall and said to Ghislaine Lantier, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but this is a lot better.”
“Better” had nothing to do with noise, however. “Better” referred to the way this girl’s call had extracted him from Hernandez’s inquest into his relationship with John Smith. No use trying some flagrant lie, such as I don’t even know the man. Who knew who may have seen him with John Smith the night they went to the Isle of Capri restaurant and he crashed at John Smith’s apartment? Suddenly he had a dark vision: a departmental investigation of the collusion of a cop and a periodista. Come on! A twenty-five-year-old bottom-rank cop feeding information to the press without any authorization from above? ¡Dios mío! Grimmer and grimmer fates began to slither through his thoughts. He hung on for dear life to this conversation with Ghislaine Lantier… inside a CVS air lock.
“Now, you say you need some advice,” he said to her, “but it’s not about yesterday. Do I have that straight?”
“Yes… it’s about—I’m taking such a chance even bringing this up with you, with a police officer! But somehow I know I can trust you. I wish I could tell my father… I mean, I’ll tell him, but I can’t just, you know, throw it in his lap and say, ‘Here!’ Am I making any sense?”
“Uhhhh… no,” said Nestor with a laugh. “You haven’t even told me what this is about. Can’t you tell me something?”
“I don’t think I can explain this over the telephone. Is there someplace I could see you? When we were talking after you had that fight—I can’t explain it, but I knew you might be sympathetic. I knew you weren’t there just to arrest people. It was a feeling I had—”
Nestor interrupted. “All right, why don’t we meet for coffee somewhere, and you can relax and tell me all about it. Okay?” Good idea, but mainly he wanted to get her off the character analysis. She was beginning to make him feel like… he didn’t know what—all this business about how nice he’d been… “I can’t do it today. My shift is about to begin. What about tomorrow?”
“Let’s see… I have classes until one o’clock.”
“Classes?”
“Here at U. Miami. That’s where I am right now.”
“Oh yeah, you mentioned that. Okay, I’ll meet you over there at one-fifteen. Where will you be? My shift starts at four, but that ought to give you enough time…”
Nestor was consciously stringing all this planning out. He had one eye on his watch. He wanted to stay here in this CVS air lock until he knew the others would have to get out of Kermit’s to make the shift. One of them would have to eat his check, probably Hernandez. But it was only for one coffee… and hell, he’d pay him back. The main thing was not to have to sink back into that damned discussion.
The girl continued to chatter on about where they could meet on the campus… and Oh God, she hoped she wasn’t making a terrible mistake, because after all, he was a police officer. It wasn’t like seeing a lawyer, but she couldn’t afford to go see a lawyer… and the words kept popping out of her bundle of nerves, and pretty soon Nestor was only halfway listening. Instead he kept seeing her legs… her legs and her alabaster skin. He barely made the shift on time.
Shortly before 1:00 p.m. the next afternoon, Nestor had just entered the University of Miami campus in his Camaro for his rendezvous, or whatever it was, with Ghislaine Lantier. ::::::¡Santa Barranza!:::::: He had no history of deriving aesthetic pleasure from landscaping and horticulture, but now not even he could fail to notice ::::::This place is a real piece of work!::::::
A lush green lawn covered every inch of the campus and rolled on forever over vast distances, it looked like to Nestor from the driver’s seat of the Camaro. It was all so luxuriously green and uniform, you’d think God must have laid it out like Astroturf. Rank after soldier-like rank of royal palms with smooth palest-gray trunks created super-sized colonnades on either side of pathways in godly allées. They ran through God’s own greensward up to the entrance of every major building. Those grand entryways made the most ordinary white Modern and clay-tile-roof Colonial buildings look magnificent. Yet the
allées were merely the most striking part of this arboreal show. There seemed to be hundreds—thousands?—of low shade trees, creating lush green frondose umbrellas fifteen or more feet in diameter… and they were everywhere… they were shades for shady terraces and sun filters for exotic and floriferous beds of tropical flowers. Lush was the word, all right. You would think Coral Gables had an annual rainfall equal of Oregon’s.
It was lunchtime, and students were coming out of the buildings and heading here and going there.
::::::They look like nice kids having a happy time… in their T-shirts and shorts and jeans and flip-flops. They’re smart, them or their parents. They’re on the road to running things. These kids walking around the campus right now—right there—they may not look like much, but they’re all in the game! They’ll end up with the degrees you got to have, the BAs and BSs and all that. Even in the Police Department these days you gotta have a degree from a four-year college if you want to get anywhere. To rise as high as captain, you got to have that degree, and it’s a huge, huge plus in the competition for lieutenant. Without those letters after your name, you can’t even hope to rise any higher than sergeant.::::::
Nestor stepped on the gas, and the Camaro’s souped-up engine made a great thrashing sound protesting the unfairness of life, and sped up San Amaro Drive toward Richter Library, the biggest library on campus, and his appointment, his police inquiry, his whatever, his rendezvous, with Ghislaine.
He might have known Richter would have a colonnade of palms. Thank God. It kept the building, which was wide-spread but only three stories high, from looking like a warehouse. He was ten minutes early. Ghislaine had said she would meet him out front. So he parked immediately at the street end of the colonnade and just watched people walk into and come out of the building. Occasionally an older-looking person showed up. He kept wondering just what this… appointment… was really all about.
Barely a minute before 1:15 a girl comes out of the library—a vision!—wearing only a straw hat with a black ribbon and a brim wide as a parasol, a demure long-sleeved shirt—and nothing else! Ghislaine! ::::::You’re seeing things, you idiot. Fool, you’re seeing only what you want to see.:::::: Now the fool realizes that a pair of white shorts covers the unspeakable delights that have set off such a tremor in his loins… Like those of half the girls he has seen since he got here, her shorts are short. They end barely an inch below her crotch. ::::::All those lubricious delights within. But her fair white legs, perfect, smooth as alabaster, are real, and the currents streaming through—¡for godsake cut it out, Camacho!::::::
Now she’s walking toward him through the colonnade. Only when she draws very close to the Camaro does she realize that is Nestor at the wheel. She smiles… faintly… more from nervousness than anything else, if he’s any judge.
“Hi!” said Nestor. “Hop in.”
She glanced at the car’s dubs, “dubs” being what car nuts like Nestor called the bespoke Baroque spokes the Camaro’s rims boasted. Their fantastic designs had been chrome plated so that when the car was rolling, every revolution of the wheels lit up the lives of onlookers with a thousand flashes from a thousand gleaming surfaces—or else stigmatized the driver as a gaudy Low-Rent lowlife. To tell the truth, Ghislaine’s life did not appear lit up by the sight. She looked at those flashy dubs—literally flashy—as if dubs, like tattoos, gave off whiffs of criminality.
When she first slipped into the passenger seat, she had to jackknife her legs before she could sit up straight, and the shorts were pushed up high enough to reveal the flesh of her hip—::::::Oh, come on, Nestor! You’re acting like some thirteen-year-old who has just felt the first churning of all that stuff in his pelvic saddle. They’re nothing but a pair of legs—okay?—and you’re a cop.::::::
Aloud he said, “Feeling a little better today?” A cheery tone he adopted, the tone that implies Of course you do, now that you’ve had time to think about it.
“Not really,” she said. “Except I’m grateful to you for coming over here.” What open, innocent, frightened eyes she had!
“Where would you like to go for coffee?” said Nestor. “There’s supposed to be a ‘food court’ or something here.”
“There is…” But she said it very tentatively.
“Well, you pick a place. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
“Starbucks?”—as if she were making a plea he was likely to reject.
“Okay, that’s fine,” said Nestor. “I’ve never been to a Starbucks before. This is my big chance.”
The Starbucks turned out to be on the ground level, in an arcade that ran through the library, front to back. It was the only commercial enterprise anywhere near the place. The legendary Starbucks!
Inside… what a letdown… There was nothing fancy about it. It wasn’t all that different from Ricky’s—cheap chairs and tables, just like Ricky’s… sugar granules left unswept on the tabletops, just like Ricky’s… plasticized paper cups, paper napkins, wrappers, the little sticks to stir coffee with, just like Ricky’s… a counter the height of the girls working behind it, just like Ricky’s… But two things were different… One, no pastelitos and therefore no ambrosial aroma… Two, the place was packed with people, but amidst all the babbling and gabbling he wasn’t hearing any Spanish at all.
Nestor and Ghislaine were stuck in a real pileup of people waiting to place orders at a counter. Nestor happened to look at the big glass case he was beside—and what the hell was that? Those shelves didn’t just have pastries and cookies, they had wrapped-up foods… things like chicken lettuce wraps, sesame noodles with tofu, tarragon chicken salad on eight-grain bread, Mallorca sweet bread. When they finally made it to the order counter, Nestor insisted, grandly, on paying for both cups. He handed over a five-dollar bill—and got wiped out! A dollar and twenty cents he got back. This grand gesture had cost him $3.80! One ninety for one cup of coffee! You could get a cup of Cuban coffee, probably a hell of a lot better than this stuff, on Calle Ocho for seventy-five cents! No one could be more bitterly shocked by the price of a cup of coffee than a cop. He led the way to a little round table with a light-colored top… and sugar granules on it. Fuming, he got up and brought back a paper napkin and ostentatiously swept the sugar off. Wide-eyed, innocent Ghislaine didn’t know what to make of him. All at once Nestor realized he had become his own father… Patience on a Monument. He calmed down and settled into the table with Ghislaine. But he remained so bitter about the cost of coffee in this place, he looked at Ghislaine as if she set the goddamned prices here. In an abrupt I’m-all-business-and-I-haven’t-got-all-day tone, he practically growled it out, “Okay, tell me what’s up. What’s going on?”
Ghislaine was taken aback by the transformation of her sympathetic knight into a plain standard-issue, foul-tempered, officious cop. Nestor could see it in her face immediately. Her eyes were now wide with fear. She seemed to be struggling to keep control of her lips—and Nestor experienced a deep rush of guilt. Patience on a Monument, smiling at Grief—in the form of… an overpriced cup of coffee!
Timorously, oh so timorously, Ghislaine said, “It’s my brother I’m worried about. He’s fifteen, and he goes to the Lee de Forest High School.”
“Sssweeeeeer,” Nestor exhaled through his teeth, creating a soft whistling noise. ::::::Dios mío… a nice polite fifteen-year-old white boy from a good family, going to de Forest. I hate to think what that poor kid’s been through. I don’t know which of them’s worse, the negro gangs or the Haitian gangs.::::::
“You know de Forest?” she said.
“Every cop in Miami knows Lee de Forest High School.” He made a point of saying it with a sympathetic smile.
“Then you know about the gangs,” said Ghislaine.
“I know about the gangs.” Another faceful of sympathy and kindness.
“Well, my brother—his name is Philippe. He’s always been a nice boy… you know, quiet and polite and studious—and he played sports last year in junior high.” :
:::::Those big innocent eyes of hers! The very look on her face makes me ashamed of myself. A cup of coffee was all it took.:::::: “If you saw him today,” she continued, “you’d think he belonged to some African American gang. He doesn’t, I don’t think, but his entire demeanor says he does… the baggy pants worn so low, it makes you think, ‘One more inch and they’ll fall off’… and the bandanna around his head with ‘the colors’? And he swaggers in a certain way the gang members walk.” She rocked from side to side in her chair in pantomime. “And the way he talks! Every sentence begins with ‘man.’ It’s Man this and Man that. And everything is cool or it’s not cool. He’s always saying things like, ‘Okay, man, I’m cool with that.’ Any one of those things would drive my father crazy. My father’s a teacher, a professor of French literature at EGU. Oh, and I forgot the worst thing of all—my brother’s started talking in Creole with his new ‘friends’! They consider that very cool, because they can insult a teacher right in his face! The teachers have no idea what they’re saying. That’s what started all the trouble at de Forest in the first place! My father won’t allow us to speak Creole in the house. Philippe’s been picking it up from other students at Lee de Forest.”
“Wait a minute,” said Nestor. “Creole is Haitian, right?” Ghislaine nodded yes… very slowly. “So you’re saying… your brother is Haitian?”
Ghislaine expelled a deep sigh. “I had a feeling”—she stopped and sighed. “I guess I might as well explain everything now, because it’s all part of it. Yes, my brother is Haitian, and my father is Haitian, and my mother was Haitian, and I’m Haitian. We’re all Haitians.”