Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  That got under Magdalena’s skin! He could have been talking about Norman and his star patient, Maurice! For an instant she was tempted to mention it—but she was damned if she was going to give him the satisfaction, this horrible chess champion. ::::::What does he think he’s doing? Playing with my head? He’s so horribly vile! vile! vile! vile!:::::: She was on the verge of tears, but she fought them back. She mustn’t give him the satisfaction of her tears, either.

  “Right?” he said once more, this time in a warm, sympathetic tone.

  Magdalena compressed her lips to keep them, this bunch of horrible Russians at the table, who were now all eyes, from seeing that her lips were trembling. Feebly, feebly, she managed to say in a low, beaten-down, vanquished voice, “I never saw anything like that… I don’t know what you’re talking about…” Feebler and feebler… overcome by defeat… and she couldn’t figure out why he had attacked, why he could have wanted to subject her to something like this… or how he had done it… or if he had done it… since she knew she couldn’t possibly have described it to another person. The great chess player never had an angry look on his face. He never expressed hostility… there was nothing other than the small, smug smile on his face… and a commanding air of intellectual superiority… and condescension as he tried to explain the things she didn’t know in words of one syllable. How could she make somebody else understand what he was doing to her?

  “Now, is it ‘don’t know’ or ‘just as soon not know’?” he was saying. “Which do you honestly think it is?” He said it with the kindliest tone imaginable… with the most sympathetic and understanding of looks on his face… with the softest little smile… with the slightest of avuncular tilts of the head—

  —and Magdalena was paralyzed. She lacked the power to say a word. She could reply to this vile man only by breaking into tears… but she managed to hold it down to silent convulsions… her neck, her stooped shoulders, her chest, her abdomen… convulsing. She doesn’t dare try to speak. What are they thinking? Here is a ditzy, clueless little Cuban cutie-pie… and she calls herself a “psychiatric nurse”! All eight of them have their little smirks on. It isn’t as if they are laughing at her exactly… one doesn’t laugh at a helpless child… No, indeed, they wouldn’t do that. They’re just eager to see what her brainless response will be.

  ::::::I must not! I will not give them the satisfaction!::::::

  She clenched her teeth; really clenched them. ::::::Not a single sob shall make it past my lips!—not in the presence of these blood-sucking voy—::::::

  “What is going on?” Loudly—his voice!—but with good humor. He was coming up so directly behind her, she couldn’t even see him by twisting her head about. The next moment—pressure of his hands and his weight on the frame of the back of her chair. His voice! came from directly above her head… but now lower, and with the faintest tinge of menace, he said in English, “Having your fun… Zhytin? I could see you playing your greasy game again from twenty feet away, and I could smell it. Quite the piece of shit, aren’t you.”

  Then he put his hands on her shoulders and began massaging, ever so gently, the muscles between her shoulders and her neck.

  She was in his very hands! With that, she gave way. Her eyes flooded with tears. They spilled down over her cheeks…

  Zhytin was looking up at Sergei. He tried to cover up a sickly, guilty expression with a smile of goodwill. He said in Russian, “Sergei Andreivich, Miss Otero and I were just having an interesting discussion about psychi—”

  “Molchi!” Like a fierce bark it was. Whatever it meant, Sergei had cut off Zhytin so sharply, he didn’t try to utter another word. His mouth fell open in bewilderment. Sergei barks again—and the color drains out of Zhytin’s blocky face. He turns white with fear. He looks at Magdalena… now he has the earnest voice of the peacemaker: “I’m very sorry… I assumed you knew we were only playing the little game of the wits.”

  Sergei leapt out from behind Magdalena, palms on the table, and leaned as far as he could toward the frightened face of Champion Zhytin and said something to him in Russian in a low, seething voice.

  Zhytin looked at her again, this time even more frightened than before. “Miss Otero, I sincerely regret my rude behavior. I now realize that—” He halted and looked at Sergei. Sergei seethed out a few more words, and Zhytin looked at Magdalena once more and said, “I now realize that I was acting like an impudent child—” He looked at Sergei once more. Sergei said something to him brusquely in Russian… and Zhytin said to Magdalena, “I beg your forgiveness.”

  For an instant Magdalena was relieved by her tormentor’s sudden—and total—abasement. But in the next heartbeat she began to feel uneasy. Something strange and unhealthy had been set in motion. Sergei barks out a few words, and Zhytin, the great champion, is all but prostrate before her in abject supplication. It was so strange, she felt even more deeply humiliated… to have to count on a third party to subdue her tormentor.

  Sergei said to Magdalena, right in front of Zhytin, “I must apologize for our ‘champion’s’ behavior.”

  These apologies were too much for Zhytin’s wife, a dark-haired woman, about his age… and getting thick as a man through the shoulders and upper back. She got up from her chair as noisily as she could, stood up straight… or straight for someone with a shell back like hers… flashed a malevolent glance at Sergei, and spoke sharply to her husband, in Russian. Zhytin was the very picture of fear. He didn’t look at his wife. His eyes were pinned on Sergei.

  Sergei said to Zhytin in English, “It’s okay. Olga is right. You should leave. In fact, I make the suggestion you do that very soon.” He flicked the back of his hand within inches of Zhytin’s face several times and said, “Vaks! Vaks, vaks,” apparently Russian for “scat.”

  Zhytin rose, trembling visibly. With a bent posture he took his wife’s arm and skulked hurriedly toward the entrance. He was leaning on her, not the other way around.

  Sergei turned back toward the other six who remained, the goon with the shaved head, the obese woman whose bosom stuck out like a table, the two women wearing pillbox hats… a very tall dour man with a too-narrow skull, sunken cheeks, and too-short shirtsleeves revealing a pair of outsized bony wrists and hands bigger than his head, and a little bull of a man whose eyes were sunk so deeply within the crevice between his overhanging brow and outcropped cheekbones, you couldn’t see them. Very eerie-looking… Sergei panned a cheerful smile across all six faces, as if nothing whatsoever had just taken place. He proffered various lighthearted subjects, but they all seemed too frightened to pick up a thread of any of them.

  Magdalena was mortified. She was the alien who had triggered the scene. If she had come up with something witty or smart enough—as she had at Chez Toi—the whole thing would never have developed. She wanted nothing more than to get away from this restaurant and its load of Russians. Sergei couldn’t coax anything out of her, either. She was too dispirited.

  After a few minutes of getting nowhere, Sergei called over the big hefty maître d’ or whatever he was and had a little conversation with him in Russian. Then he smiled again at the six misshapen goons and goonygirls before him and said in Russian and then in English: “You’re very lucky. Marko has a nice table for six for you. You will be very comfortable.”

  Sheepishly, warily, without a single word, the six got the message and got up and followed Marko, who led them to a distant destination in a far corner of Gogol’s capacious floor. Sergei leaned toward Magdalena and put an arm around her shoulders. “Now, this is more like it… a nice table for two.” He laughed out loud in the spirit of “Oh, what fun we’re having!”

  ::::::Well… no and no, my dear Sergei. There are not two of us, there are three: you, me… and Humiliation, who occupies the other eight seats. And no, I wouldn’t call this fun, particularly. All these roaring animals in this place haw-haw-haw-haw-hawing, these louts and their girlfriends, dressed, overdressed, over-the-top-dressed in musty styles and haird
os, these drunken louts with their rude animal vitality only too eager to seize the weak or unwary and have fun pulling her wings off, laughing all the while at the way she struggles… Oh, Zhytin the great Number Five—he’s brilliant at it! Brilliant! A past master! What? Didn’t you see it? My God, you missed a classic demonstration! But you can see the remains of her right over there… she’s the little Cuban papaya at that table for ten that’s nearly empty—empty in an otherwise jam-packed place like this! At a prime hour like this! Empty! She’s a shamed and empty shell. Nobody wants any part of her except for our renowned papaya collector, Korolyov… He’ll take her papaya and do whatever he wants with it and then throw it out like roadkill… Just feast your eyes! You can’t miss her! She’s alone at that huge table, except for our papaya connoisseur, and he doesn’t count, of course… Yes! Take a look! What’s worse than death?… Humiliation!… whereas her tablemate, Mr. Sergei Korolyov—he’s feeling so good about himself. He thinks he can jolly her up, and why not? He’s on top of the world! His spirits could hardly be higher! That’s how a man feels when all he has to do is make an appearance… and todo el mundo jumps up from its chairs and comes rushing over to pour warm grins all over him and attend to his every whim. Even better, no doubt, is to see the fear on other men’s faces when they cross him in any way… they’re terrified, as if they fear for their lives—they actually cringe… the way that vile vile vile vile vile man cringed the moment Czar Sergei barked in a certain way—

  —oh, Sergei is in Seventh Heaven right now… He’s content to stay at this table all night… at this huge table for ten, just him and his little chocha with a vast white flashing sequined sea before them. You can’t miss him! There he is! The mightiest man in the hall!… He can’t even begin to understand her misery, can he… Please, my handsome savior, please get me out of here… out of the sight of a thousand shaming, pitying, shunning eyes… but no-o-o-o-o-o, he has to put himself on maximum display, doesn’t he… Behold the Czar!… of Russia’s Hallandale, Florida, heartland.::::::

  Finally finally finally finally—and this finally felt like finally, after five years of sheer torture—finally Sergei suggested leaving and heading off to the big party on Star Island. His departure was like his arrival… the fawning, the bear hugs, the loud nothings in the ear, and Sergei standing up seven feet tall and expanding his chest as he watched them jump… Magdalena? She no longer existed. They looked right through her. Only the big side of beef who ran the place even said so much as goodbye… and that much, no doubt, only because he thought it might ingratiate him with the Czar, who had brought the little slice of papaya with him.

  17

  Humiliation, Too

  ::::::At the very beginning, as soon as he said “What do you do” and all that… “What do you do to get food, to get clothes” and whatever the rest of it was, all I had to do was say something like “Sir, do I know you?” And then, no matter what he said, I should have kept pressing him with that question, “Sir, do I know you? I’d have to get to know you really well before I answered questions like that”… and if he still kept going, I could have added, “And something tells me I’ll never get to know you that well, not in a thousand years, not if I can possibly avoid it”… Well, the “not if I can possibly avoid it” might have been overdoing it, especially coming from someone my age, twenty-four, and he’s in his—what?—fifties?—but that was the moment I should have cut him off, right at the very beginning, before he could get going on that vile, humiliating roll of his—::::::

  And that was all that was on her mind as she sat here in the passenger seat barely twelve inches from Sergei, who was letting this expensive sports car out for a romp down Collins Avenue in the dark… a black hole with a regular comet of red taillights plunging into it… Sergei laughing and chuckling and chortling and saying things like, “Creenge! He creenged! He creenged like a leetle boy who knows he haf been meesbehafing!”… whipping past this red taillight whipping past the next one and whipping past and whipping past the next one and the next one whipping past whipping past whipping past all of them in the darkness at an unbelievable speed… totally reckless and Magdalena is aware of it all but only in her cerebellum… it doesn’t even reach the pyramids of Betz, much less her thoughts… All she can think about is what she should have done, what she could have done to get that horrible piece of mierda off her… “Champion” Zhytin.

  ::::::You bastardo de puta!:::::: That kind of crude language Magdalena ordinarily didn’t allow even inside her head. But she was in the throes of Why didn’t I, that dreadful interlude when you’re walking upstairs to go to bed or speeding madly down Collins Avenue—after the party is over—and now you think of the comebacks you should have made… to obliterate that bastard who kept scoring points off you in conversation at dinner this evening… not that Magdalena knew the term l’esprit de l’escalier, but she was living it right now… furiously, uselessly ransacking her brain.

  Sergei was in such good spirits, he never noticed how silent and sunken in thought Magdalena was… and now he was off on the subject of Flebetnikov, the Russian who had invited them to the party they were heading for, at his mansion, estate, palace on Star Island—you really couldn’t give it too grand a name… and hadn’t she noticed that every Russian in Miami who lived in a big house was called an “oligarch”? What a joke that was! He himself got called an oligarch. He couldn’t help but chuckle over that. An oligarchy was rule by a few… so would someone kindly tell him what it was he was ruling and with whom? In fact, he had heard that Flebetnikov’s hedge fund had run into some real problems, and how many problems did a Russian have to have before he stopped being ranked as an oligarch? He chuckled again.

  By now they were passing through Sunny Isles, and Sergei pointed to the left at a condominium tower on the other side of Collins Avenue. “That’s where I live,” he said. “I have the twenty-ninth and thirtieth floors.”

  That caught Magdalena’s attention. “The entire floors?”

  “Well… now that you say it… yes, both floors.”

  “How tall is the building?”

  “Thirty floors.”

  “So that means you have the entire top two floors?” Big wide eyes.

  “Ummm… yes.”

  “The penthouse?”

  “Zey are ferry nice, zee fiews,” said Sergei. “But you vill zee for yourself.”

  Now he had her back on his wavelength ::::::Does that mean tonight?:::::: and Amélia’s question popped back into her head… and that hoisted her up out of her funk far enough to at least think about something other than the horrible scene at Gogol’s… You’ll see for yourself… and Magdalena began feeling the answer to that question. Could she conceivably be strong enough to go up to those two whole floors of a condominium tower overlooking the ocean and be a good girl who no la aflojare in his lap right then and there?—who is strong and waits for the second date? Or by that time would she be leaning so close that—why hold back now that we’re practically already there?

  With that, thank God, Zhytin slipped out of her mind and was gone.

  Sergei took the exit off Collins Avenue onto the MacArthur Causeway. He drove slowly for a change… for maybe four or five hundred yards… then pointed to the right toward Biscayne Bay… nothing but a vast black shape in the dark… “See that little bridge? That takes you onto Star Island right there.”

  “Star Island is that close to shore?” said Magdalena. “That’s such a short bridge, I don’t know how they could call it an island.”

  “Well,” said Sergei, “it doesn’t touch the mainland at any point, so I guess that’s how.”

  They zipped across the little bridge just like that, but then Sergei slowed down and said, “It’s the—I don’t know exactly which house on the right, but is not far. It is huge.”

  Even in the darkness, Magdalena was aware of how lush, posh, and lavish the vegetation suddenly became the moment you arrived on Star Island… finely sculpted hedges, endless perfect al
lées of giant palm trees. The houses were set way back from the road. Even in this light, it was obvious that they were huge… vast… showy estates, so big that it seemed like they had been driving a very long way by the time they reached the one Sergei recognized as Flebetnikov’s. He turned into the driveway… walls of shrubbery on both sides, so high and thick you couldn’t see the house. The driveway came to an end between two buildings you couldn’t see from the road. Each was two stories high and deep enough for a good-sized family to live in… fancy enough, too… a sort of Bermuda-white stucco… a valet took their car… these two structures were nothing less than a double gatehouse. Beyond it… the main house. There it was. What a pile! It stretched on… and on… for a good tenth of a mile. The walkway to the house had been laid out in gigantic and conspicuously needless curves. But what was this? The beginning of the walkway was blocked by a velvet rope. To one side, barely ahead of the rope, a blonde—about thirty-five?—sat at a card table with a stack of forms before her. As Sergei and Magdalena approached the table, she flashed a bright smile and said, “You’re here for the party?”