Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  John Smith said, “Could you do what these artists have done, Malevich, Kandinsky, and Goncharova?”

  Igor erupted with a big belly laugh. He laughed until tears were coming out of his eyes. “It depend on how you mean that! You mean could I make Americans take this silly business serious and pay the big money for it?… No—it make me laugh too much!” He started off another laughing jag and had to force himself to stop. “No, you must not make me laugh like this. It is too funny for me! It is not good for me… not good, not good…” Finally, he seemed to have himself under control. “But if you mean, could I do painting like theirs… Anybody could! I could do it, except that makes me have to look at this govno!” The thought caused his belly to go rumbling again. “I haf to do it blindfolded…” Rumble bubble bubble rumble… “And I can do it blindfolded!”

  “Whattaya mean?” said John Smith.

  “I have done it already blindfolded.”

  “You mean that, or are you just kidding me?”

  “No, I have done these things with my eyes closed… already!”

  And I can do it blindfolded came out bubbling up and down on chuckles… but the No, I have done these things… already was too much for him. All the rumbles, bubbles, chuckles, bellows, and booms erupted at once—came exploding out of his lungs and his larynx and his lips. He couldn’t do anything to stop the launch. He was stamping his feet up and down. His forearms and fists were pumping up and down. He was beside himself. Nestor stood over him, faking taking pictures, before he realized it was pointless. He looked at John Smith and pulled a face. But once more John Smith was all business. He looked at Nestor with the utmost seriousness. While Igor was still off on his laughing jag with his eyes shut, John Smith pantomimed pouring something into a glass. He motioned toward the kitchen with his head. The way he jerked it, with an angry ditch down the middle of his forehead, it was like a direct order. Hop to it! Get me a big shot of vodaprika! This is a direct order!

  What did John Smith think he was doing? Did he really think that I, Nestor Camacho, was his photographer? Nevertheless Nestor did it—hustled over to the counter, poured a shot-glassful of Igor’s na zdrovia apriconcoction and brought it back to John Smith. He couldn’t constrain a scowl, but John Smith didn’t even seem to notice.

  When Igor finally descended from his jag and opened his eyes, John Smith held out the vodka toward him and said, “Here, have this.” Igor was still heaving his chest, trying to reinflate his lungs, but didn’t say no to the drink. As soon as he was able, he took the shot glass and tossed it back and went ahhhhhhh!… ahhhhhhhhh… ahhhhhhhh…

  “You okay?” John Smith said.

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes”… still breathing hard… “Could do nothing about it… You ask me something so funny… you know?”

  “Well, where are those paintings now, the ones you did with your eyes closed?”

  Igor smiled and started to say something—but then the smile vanished. Drunk as he was, he seemed to realize that he had gotten himself into treacherous territory.

  “Ohhhh, I don’t know.” He gave a shrug to show it was of no importance. “Maybe I threw them away, maybe I lost them… I only amuse myself with them… I give them away—but who is want them?… I put them in someplace I do not remember… I lose them”—he shrugged once more—“I don’t know where they are.”

  John Smith said, “Let’s say you gave them away. Who would you give them to?”

  Igor responded not with a smile but with a canny look and all but closed one eye. “Who would want them?—even if those… ‘artists’… themselves painted them? I will not want them if they give them away across the street.”

  “The Miami Museum of Art certainly seemed happy to get the real things. They valued them at seventy million dollars.”

  Igor said, “Here they like the fads, I was telling you. That is their… that is their—I cannot tell them what they like. De gustibus non est disputandum.” Another shrug… “You do what you can, but there is not much you can do with some people…”

  Nestor saw John Smith take a deep breath, and somehow he could tell he had worked up the courage to ask the big one. He had bitten the bullet.

  “You know,” said John Smith, taking another deep breath, “there are people who say you actually did do those paintings in the museum.”

  A sharp intake of breath—and no words. Igor just stared at John Smith. He shut one eye nearly all the way, as before, but now there was no mirth in his expression.

  “Who says that!?” Uh-oh. Nestor could tell that one last redoubt of sound judgment in Igor’s vodaprikized mind had come alive in the eleventh hour. “I want to know who!—what persons!”

  “I don’t know,” said John Smith. “It’s one of those things you just uh… uh that’s in the air. You know how it is.”

  “Yes, I know how it is,” said Igor. “It’s a lie! That is how it is, a lie!” Then, as if realizing he was protesting too much, he forced out a huhhh that was supposed to make it lighter. “That is the most silly thing I have ever heard. You know the word provenance? Museums, they have a whole system. Nobody could get away with something like that. That is the more craziest idea! Why is anyone want to even try something like that?”

  “I could think of a reason,” said John Smith. “If somebody paid him enough money.”

  Igor just stared at John Smith. Not a trace of mirth or even irony in his face, not even a proto-wink. He couldn’t have looked more stone-cold serious. “I give you advice,” he said finally. “You don’t even mention such a thing to Mr. Korolyov. You don’t even tell anybody who ever see Mr. Korolyov. You understand?”

  “Why do you mention Sergei Korolyov?” said John Smith.

  “He is the one who gave the paintings to the museum. There was a big celebration for him.”

  “Oh… Do you know Korolyov?”

  “NO!” said Igor. He froze as if someone had just put a knifepoint against his neck. “I don’t even know what he looks like. But everybody knows about him, every Russian. You don’t play around with him the way you play around with me.”

  “I’m not playing around—”

  “Good! You don’t even let him know you think about these things, these gossips!”

  Have a seat. Have a seat, my ass! What was that supposed to mean? The Chief never had to have a seat before he could go into Dio’s office. It was always him walking down the hall past all those dismal little used-to-be Pan Am seaplane offices with his shoulders back and his chest out. He wanted to make sure even the City Hall lifers got a good look at Chief Booker’s black mightiness… and if the door was open, there would always be some white or Cuban lifer standing just inside an open door who would sing out with an ingratiating, worshipful “Hi, Chief!” and His Mightiness would turn toward him and say, “Hey, Big Guy.”

  But just now when he came down the hall, there were no lifers singing out “Hi, Chief” or anything else. They couldn’t have contained their worshipfulness more completely. They had no reaction to his mightiness whatsoever.

  Could it be that Dio’s chilliness had seeped out into the whole place? Things hadn’t been comradely between him and Dio ever since the day the two of them had it out over Hernandez and Camacho and the crack house bust… before an audience of five, but those five, given their position and their big Cuban mouths, were quite enough. They were witnesses to him caving in to Dio over his mortgage payments and his status as the big black Chief. Of course, they probably didn’t know about the mortgage payments, but the other part—they’d have to be off musing in another world not to get it immediately. The Chief had felt humiliated ever since… more than the witnesses in that room could have imagined. He had buckled under to that pretentious Cuban hack, Dionisio Cruz, him and his purely, blatantly, political concerns…

  Have a seat… Dio’s keeper of the gate, a horse of a woman named Cecelia… who wore the false eyelashes of a nine-year-old playing Makeup in the mirror… above jaws the size of a Neanderthal’s… she had said,
“Have a seat.” No excuse, no explanation, not even a smile or a wink to show she realized how bizarre this was… just “Have a seat.” A “seat,” in point of fact, was a wooden armchair, along with four or five other wooden armchairs, in a mean little space created by removing the front wall of a mean little office. The Chief had just passed this so-called waiting room in City Hall, and wouldn’t you know the kind of people you’d find in there? Anthony Biaggi, a sleazeball developer who had his eyes on some derelict school building and school yard up in Pembroke Pines… José Hinchazón, an ex-cop fired years ago during a corruption scandal who now ran a shady “security” service… an Anglo who looked to the Chief like Adam Hirsch, of the failing-tour-boat-and-bus Hirsches… Have a seat in a room with that bunch?

  So the Chief, looking down, gave the horse face of Cecelia an ambiguous, unsettling grin he had used to good effect many times before. He narrowed his eyes and curled back his upper lip, revealing his top row of big white upper teeth, which looked even bigger against the background of his dark skin. It was meant to indicate that he was about to broaden it even more… into a grin of pure happiness… or chew her up.

  “I’ll be down the hall”—he nodded his head in that direction—“when Dio is ready to see me.”

  Cecelia wasn’t the kind who was likely to flinch. “You mean the waiting room,” she said.

  “Down the hall,” he said, looking more and more like he was going to chew her up—and spit her out. He took one of his cards out and turned it over and wrote a telephone number on the back. He handed it to her and turned his ambiguous grin into a happy grin, which he hoped she would perceive as ironic and become even more unsettled or at least more confused.

  When he walked back down the hall and passed the pathetic waiting room, he could tell out of the corner of his eye that all three of them were looking up at him. He turned toward them but acknowledged only one, Hirsch—and he didn’t really know which Hirsch this was, Adam or his brother Jacob.

  As before, nobody was paying “Hi, Chief” homage from the mouth of an open door, which meant he couldn’t slip into anybody’s office and start up a conversation to kill time while he waited for a summoning… a summoning from his Cuban master.

  Hell, he couldn’t just loiter in the hallway could he… Goddamned Dio! All of a sudden he had the gall to treat him like any other humble petitioner who turns up at the court pleading for something from the king.

  There was no other solution but to go down to the lobby of this Pan Am city hall and make make-believe phone calls. People going in and out of City Hall saw him standing off to the side, tapping on the glass face of his iPhone. They were unaware of his fall from grace… so far, anyway… they clustered about him almost like rap fans… “Hi, Chief!”… “Hey, Chief!”… “What’s going down, Chief?”… “You da man, Chief!”… and he was kept busy parceling out the Hi, Big Guys and Hey, Big Guys incessantly… How ironic… Him! Cyrus Booker, Chief of Police, mighty black presence at the heart of Miami city government… Him! Chief Booker, reduced to this insulting insignificance, lurking in a lobby… playing a stupid defensive game… trying not to lose instead of risking whatever it took to win… Him! Why should he be cringing before anybody? He was born to lead… and he was young enough, only forty-four, to fight his way back to the top… if not in this role then another one where the top was even higher, although he couldn’t think at this very moment what that might be… if necessary, he’d build it!… and what was all this pants-twisting fear about the house and the mortgage? What difference would a house in Kendall make in history’s verdict?… but then he thought of another verdict… his wife’s… She would be anguished, for maybe twenty-four hours… and then furious!… ooounnnghhh Jesus God!… but a man couldn’t flinch at a wife’s fury if he was going to risk all… to achieve all, could he? Shiiiiiiiit! She’d be on the warpath… “Nice going, Big Shot! No job, no house, no income, but noooohhh… you’re not gonna let that—”

  His phone rang. He answered it as he always did: “Chief Booker.”

  “This is Cecelia at Mayor Cruz’s office”… “at Mayor Cruz’s office,” as if he wouldn’t have any idea which Cecelia, out of the thousands in this city, in this world, this particular Cecelia might be. “The Mayor can see you now. I went to the waiting room… and I couldn’t find you. The Mayor has a very busy schedule this afternoon.”

  Frosty? Goddamn freezing over!… Well, up yours, Horse Head! But all he said was “I’ll be right there.” Damn! Why had he stuck in the “right”? Made it sound like he was going to hustle… obediently.

  For security reasons, you could only reach the second floor by elevator. Damn and damn again! On the elevator he was trapped with two more Hi, Chiefs, and one of them was a nice kid who wrote bulletins for the Bureau of Environmental Management, a black kid named Mike. He gave Mike a Hey, Big Guy… but he was unable to smile! He could only show his teeth!

  He practiced smiling as he walked down the narrow hallway. He had to have one ready for Cecelia. When he reached her desk, she pretended for a moment not to see him. Then she looked up at him. How big and horsey that bitch’s teeth were! She said, “Ah, there you are,” and even had the nerve to flick a glance at the watch on her wrist. “Please go right in.” The Chief spread the smile he had been practicing from cheek to cheek. He hoped it read, “Yes, I understand the petty little game you’re playing, and no, I’m not going to get down to your level and play it.”

  When he walked into the Mayor’s office, old Dionisio was seated in a big mahogany swivel chair upholstered in oxblood leather. The swivel chair was so big, it looked like a Mahogany Monster, and the oxblood leather looked like the inside of its mouth about to swallow Old Dionisius whole. He was leaning back into it with a gloriously bored self-satisfaction at a desk with a surface you could land a Piper Cub on. He didn’t get up to welcome the Chief the way he usually did. He didn’t even straighten up in the chair. If anything, he leaned back still further, to the limit of the chair’s joint springs.

  “Come in, Chief, and have a seat.” There was a confident note of summons in his voice, and a nonchalant flip of the wrist indicated the other side of the desk. The seat was a straight chair immediately opposite Old Dio. The Chief sat down, making sure his posture was perfect. Then Old Dio said, “How goes the tranquility of the citizenry this afternoon, Chief?”

  The Chief smiled slightly and indicated the small police radio clipped to the belt of his uniform. “Haven’t had one call in the thirty minutes I’ve been here waiting.”

  “That’s good,” said the Mayor. His dubious look of mockery remained on his face. “So what can I do for you, Chief?”

  “Well, you probably remember that incident at Lee de Forest High? A teacher was arrested for assaulting a student and spent two nights in jail? Well, now he has a trial coming up, and the courts consider a teacher assaulting a student on par with some lowlife assaulting an eighty-five-year-old man leaning on an aluminum walker in the park.”

  “All right,” said the Mayor, “I’ll accept that. And therefore…?”

  “We now know it was the other way around. The student assaulted the teacher. The student is a Haitian gang leader with a juvenile record for violence, and the other students are afraid of him. As a matter of fact, they’re scared shitless, if you want to know the truth. He ordered five of his hangers-on to lie to the officers and say the teacher assaulted him.”

  “Okay, what about the other students?”

  “Everyone else the officers interviewed said they didn’t know. Said they couldn’t see what happened, or they were distracted by something else, or—the long and short of it was, this punk and his gang would do something to them if they came even close to telling what happened.”

  “And now…?”

  “And now we have confessions from all five of the ‘witnesses.’ They all admit they lied to the officers. What this means is, the DA has no case. Mr. Estevez—that’s the teacher—will be spared what could have been a very sti
ff sentence.”

  “That’s good work, Chief, but I thought this was a School Police case.”

  “It was, but now it’s under the jurisdiction of the court and the District Attorney’s office.”

  “Well, then, we have a happy ending, don’t we, Chief,” said the Mayor, putting his elbows up and clasping his hands behind his neck and lying back to about as laid-back as a man could get in a swivel chair. “Thank you for going to the trouble to bring me this happy news of justice served, Chief. And that’s why you had to see me in person and make this appointment at the busiest time of my day?”

  The irony, the snottiness, the belittling and disdainful way he wrote him off as a pest—eating up his precious time—the full-bore contempt and blatant disrespect… that did it. That pulled the trigger… No more holding back… He was doing it… risking all… even the house in Kendall so beloved by his beloved wife, whose beautiful face blipped through his corpus callosum at the very moment he said, “Actually… there’s one other element to it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. It’s the officer who broke the case. He prevented a terrible miscarriage of justice. Mr. Estevez’s career, maybe his life, would have been destroyed. He owes a lot to this officer. We all do. I’m sure you’ll recall his name… Nestor Camacho.”

  That name did terrible things to the Mayor’s ultra-supine posture. His hands descended from behind his neck, his elbows hit the top of the desk, and his head tilted forward. “What are you talking about?” he said. “I thought he was relieved of duty!”

  “He was. He still is. But right after he handed over his badge and his gun—must not have been sixty minutes—he gave me the names of all five boys. He had done this all on his own. One of them he had already had a long talk with, and the kid had recanted what he had told the School Police. By now, Camacho was relieved of duty, and so I told the Detective Bureau to interrogate the other four. They didn’t stick to their story very long. As soon as they knew there’d been a break in their ranks and they might be arrested and prosecuted for perjury, that was it. They all folded. They’re only kids, after all. Tomorrow the DA’s gonna announce they’re dropping the case.”