Jasmine was still more than a hundred yards from the interstate, climbing over one vehicle after another, when the smoke from the burning Explorer suddenly began to blow more thickly. She turned around just as the Explorer blew up, and a huge orange fireball rolled up into the air. The explosion was deep and deafening, but even worse were the muffled screams of the hundreds of people caught in their cars.
Within seconds a station wagon next to the Explorer was blazing, and then a van directly in front of it. Dense brown smoke poured across the pileup, making it look even more like a battlefield. Jasmine clambered over the sloping silver hood of a Cadillac STS and managed to reach the retaining wall on the opposite side of the off-ramp. Now she was able to balance her way along the top of the wall, occasionally grabbing onto the vehicles next to her to stop herself from falling.
Over the flack-flack-flack of the helicopters, she heard a sharp series of pops and crackles, and then the BP truck exploded. Even though she was making her way up the opposite side of the ramp, shielded from the full force of the blast by a Jeep, she felt a wave of superheated air on the back of her neck, and she was blown so violently to the right that she almost lost her footing.
Another car’s gas tank blew up, and then another, and another. The screaming began to rise in a crescendo, an opera from hell. Within less than a minute, more than fifty vehicles were blazing, and the smoke was so thick that it blotted out the sun.
Jasmine saw six or seven people staggering and stumbling across the wreckage, some of them smoking and blackened, some of them still ablaze. Only two vehicles away from her, she saw a father and a mother and four young children, all of them frantically knocking on the windows of their burning Voyager. They were all sandy-haired. She didn’t know why that made such an impression on her, but it was like seeing a whole family album thrown into a fire.
She had almost reached the top of the off-ramp when she heard a woman screaming, “Save my baby! For God’s sake! Save my baby!”
Jasmine lifted her hand to shield her face from the heat. The smoke was so thick now that she could hardly breathe. Right in the center of the pileup, a young blonde-haired woman had managed to open the passenger-side window of her SUV and was holding up a baby boy in both hands. Next to her, in the driver’s seat, a man in a white T-shirt was slumped over the steering wheel, his hair matted with blood.
The baby was red-faced and kicking its legs and crying, but the woman managed to keep him aloft and continue to scream out, “Save my baby! Somebody save my baby!”
Jasmine climbed onto the hood of a taxi that had been crushed between the retaining wall and the side of a trailer. The taxi driver was slumped sideways in his seat, unconscious or dead, but the woman passenger in the back was shouting hysterically and trying to break the window with a gold high-heeled sandal.
Jasmine crawled across the hood on her hands and knees, and then walked across the trailer. Less than a hundred yards away five or six more vehicles exploded, and one old Chevy pickup was flung right into the air, landing on its roof with a thunderous crash.
Once she had crossed the trailer, Jasmine was able to climb onto the roof of the dark blue newspaper-delivery van that was crushed up alongside the woman’s SUV. The woman held up her baby as high as she could and begged her, “Save my little boy, please.”
Jasmine leaned over the edge of the van’s roof and tried to take hold of the baby’s hands, but he kept waving his arms and she couldn’t reach him. “Ma’am—can you lift him just a little higher?” she asked.
“I can’t. Both of my legs are trapped.”
“Okay, then, I’ll see if I can climb down farther.”
There was another explosion, much closer this time. The woman said, “Oh my God, listen to all of those poor people!”
Jasmine managed to get a grip on the van’s side mirror with her left hand, and lean over a few inches farther. She touched the baby’s fingertips with her fingertips, and suddenly the baby stopped crying and blinked up at her in bewilderment. He lifted up one hand toward her, and in that instant Jasmine thrust herself over the edge of the van’s roof as far as she dared and snatched the sleeve of his pale blue romper suit.
For one instant she thought that she had reached out too far, and that she was going to drop the baby and fall on top of him. But with something between a grunt and a scream, she heaved herself back upward, inch by inch, even though the mirror that she was holding onto was gradually bending.
“Please take care of him,” said the baby’s mother.
“Of course,” Jasmine told her. “You’ll be okay. The rescue services will be here any minute—they’ll get you out.”
The young woman gave her a panicky, wide-eyed stare, as if she didn’t believe her for an instant.
Jasmine climbed back toward the edge of the off-ramp, holding the struggling baby close to her chest. As she reached the retaining wall, she heard another explosion, right behind her, and then another. She turned around and saw that the young mother’s SUV was blazing fiercely, and that she was sitting in her seat, shaking her head from side to side in agony. The young man beside her was still leaning against the steering wheel, not moving at all.
“Oh, dear God,” said Jasmine. “How could you let this happen?”
But more and more vehicles exploded with a series of bangs that made Jasmine’s ears ring. By the time she reached the main highway, the smoke was so thick that she could hardly see where she was going. She could hear fire trucks whooping and warbling and blasting their horns, but there was no way that they could force their way through a half mile tangle of wrecked vehicles to reach the off-ramp.
Jasmine kept on walking along the side of the freeway, with the wailing, wriggling baby held tight against her shoulder. “There,” she kept saying, patting his back. “Everything’s going to be fine, l’il feller. You just wait and see. Everything’s going to come up roses.”
At last they were clear of the smoke. Jasmine kept on walking in the hot morning sunshine and didn’t once look back, even when she heard more explosions, and more echoes of explosions. Just before she reached the off-ramp that would take her down to Alameda Street, the baby fell asleep, snuffling and bubbling against her neck. She couldn’t even guess what he was dreaming about.
CHAPTER FOUR
Miami, Florida
“I dreamed that my driver took me to the the Classic Grille. I just had to have one of their lobster-and-crab burgers. My driver opened the door of the car for me, and I high stepped it into the restaurant as if I was a fashion model. Everybody turned to look at me, but I stuck up my nose and swung my pearl necklace around like I really didn’t care. It was only then that the maître d’ said, ‘Hasn’t madame forgotten something?’ I said, ‘I don’t think so, Luigi. What?’
“He leaned forward and whispered in my ear, ‘Madame is wearing no clothes.’
“I looked down and he was right. Except for my pearls and my black patent Prada pumps, I was absolutely butt-naked. Brazilian and all, for pity’s sake.”
I almost choked on my rainbow-colored cocktail, and if you had ever seen Mrs. Zlotorynski, you would have known why. She was seventy-one and skeletally thin, with huge Chanel sunglasses and a nose like a buzzard on the lookout for a baby prairie dog to swoop down on.
“You know what that means, don’t you, Mrs. Z?” I asked her.
“It means that I’m insecure?”
I shook my head.
“It means that I’m frightened of people finding out that I was born in the South Bronx, and that my father sewed linings for a living?” She leaned closer when she said this, and spoke in a very hoarse whisper, even though the nearest sunbather was more than twenty feet away, and he was snoring.
I shook my head again.
“It means that I’m worried about losing my money and ending up with nothing?”
“No, Mrs. Zlotorynski, your dream has nothing to do with your social status or your lack of self-esteem or, God forbid, your late husband’s invest
ments in Pfizer pharmaceuticals. Men will always need Viagra! It simply means that you have an inner glow that you very rarely share. In your daily life, as you go about your business, you hardly ever display your natural warmheartedness.”
“My natural warmheartedness?”
“That’s right. You understand people, Mrs. Z. You feel what they feel. You have so much spiritual radiance. But most of the time you keep it tightly locked up in your inner jewelry box so that nobody can appreciate how caring you are.”
Mrs. Zlotorynski swung her scrawny legs around and sat up straight. It was impossible to see her eyes behind those sunglasses, but I would have bet you ten portraits of Benjamin Franklin that they were piggy with self-approval. Well, piggier than they usually were. You know what too much blepharoplasty can do to a girl.
She prodded my shoulder with one orange-polished fingernail—once, twice, three times. It was like being bitten by a particularly annoying mosquito.
“You—are—so—right!” she agreed. “I do have spiritual radiance. I do have warmth. I am beautiful. Inside of myself, I shine. Yet—do you know?—you’re one of the very few people who has ever recognized it. Apart from Morry, of course—alev ha sholem—but then Morry was hardly ever home. What did he know?”
I sat up, too, trying to shift myself out of fingernail range. “I’ve seen your driver. What’s his name? Emigdlio. The way he scowls at you behind your back…It’s a disgrace, don’t you think? Just because you asked him to drive your friends home to Key West, at two thirty in the morning! It’s only three hundred twenty-eight miles, there and back! And Rosita! She’s supposed to be your maid. Yet when you told her to worm little Q-Tip for you, what did she do? She said that she wasn’t an animal doctor, and she stamped her foot and turned all sulky on you.
“Don’t these people understand how much you feel for them? I guess they don’t. But that’s what makes them ‘little people.’ That’s what you call them, isn’t it? And don’t they deserve it!”
“You are so right,” Mrs. Zlotorynski repeated. She opened her orange suede purse and took out her mirror so she could adjust her Marilyn Hikida straw hat with orange feather trim, and reapply her matching orange lip gloss. “They are little people, God help them. Well, God has to help them—doesn’t he?—because they don’t know how to help themselves!”
I lifted my cocktail in salute. My friends, I was having the time of my life. My old poker-playing buddy Marco Hernandez had gone on a three-month tour of Europe with the Joe Morales Mariachi Orchestra, and he had asked me to take care of his house in Coral Gables. Well, wouldn’t you? The humidity had been 93 percent on the day I left New York. The streets had smelled like a salami slicer’s armpit, and when I climbed out of the cab at LaGuardia, the handle had broken off my suitcase. But here I was, sitting on the beach outside of the five-star Delano Hotel, with the sun broiling the soles of my yellow plastic Crocs, and the blue Atlantic reassuring me with every languid splash that life had taken a turn for the very contented.
Marco had been a true friend. Before he left for Berlin, he had taken me to meet Eduardo, who was the concierge at the Casa Espléndido, and the smoothest-looking Cuban in Miami. Eduardo had a professionally-plucked pencil mustache and walked with a shimmer. For a modest percentage he had agreed to pass my cards around to every luxury hotel on South Beach: Harry Erskine, foreteller of the future and diviner of dreams—especially the dreams of wealthy widows who were starved for flattery and suggestive conversation.
You can be as cynical as you like, but those seventy-plus babes with their vulture’s talons for fingernails and their withered necks and their wind-tunnel eyes, they just melted when I told them how gorgeous they were. And when I promised each of them that there was a hunky young stud in their reasonably near future, with gym-sculptured muscles and overcrowded Calvin Kleins, they almost lost consciousness with gratitude.
Okay, maybe I was less of a bona fide clairvoyant than a supplier of fruity fantasies, but I told those old aardvarks exactly what they wanted to hear, and my fee was not to be sniffed at—$175 an hour—and even more if I thought that I could get away with it. And since I called on my lady clients, rather than having them come to visit me, I got to visit almost every swanky hotel on Collins Avenue, and have lunch and cocktails bought for me, too. Today Mrs. Zlotorynski had taken me to the Blue Door Brasserie and treated me to their signature dish of slow-roasted duck and bananas. I had ordered it mostly as an ironical comment on the two of us. In her dark brown Zara bathing costume, Mrs. Zlotorysnki looked just like a slow-roasted duck, and I was bananas for not having left New York and come down to Miami twenty years ago.
“What can I do, then?” Mrs. Zlotorynski begged me. “How can I make people appreciate how warm I am?”
I checked my watch. I had to be at the Biltmore by three thirty to give a tarot reading to Mrs. Kaplan-Capaldi’s Burmese cat. That’s right, Mrs. Benjamin Kaplan-Capaldi, whose third husband owned half of Hialeah.
I took hold of Mrs. Zlotorynski’s papery-skinned, sun-withered hands, and admired my double reflection in her sunglasses. I looked so much younger with a suntan and blond highlights. In New York, I always looked baggy-eyed and asbestos gray, as if I subsisted on a diet of hot dogs and Guinness and never left my apartment, which was not too far from the truth.
“Emigdlio and Rosita—they’re little people, sure. So what are you going to give them?”
“I don’t know, Harry. What do little people want?”
“No! That’s exactly it! They may be little people, but you—you’re big people, so give them more than they want! They won’t believe your generosity! They won’t believe how caring you are! You are caring, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean? Of course I’m caring. I’m beyond caring.”
“So what do you do to show how caring you are? You give Emigdlio some time off to spend with his family. Not just a single night. Not even two nights. You give him a long weekend, and you pay him a bonus, too, so that he can take his kids to Parrot World, or Chuck E. Cheese’s, or wherever little people go to amuse themselves.
“And Rosita, give her a bonus, too, and the pick of your wardrobe. I mean—why not? That will give you an excuse to go out and buy yourself a whole lot of new clothes.” As if she needed an excuse.
For a second I felt the tendons in Mrs. Zlotorynski’s wrists tighten up like piano wires. Generosity was so much against her nature that the very thought of it brought on a muscle spasm.
But I gave her my oiliest, most Liberace smile, and said, “Think how it’s going to get around. Emigdlio will tell all the other drivers how understanding you are, and Rosita will tell all of the other maids how happy she is to work for you, and before you know it, you’ll have such a reputation for warmth and humanity that—who knows?—you may even win a civic award for it.”
Mrs. Zlotorynski slowly started to nod, and then nodded even more emphatically, like a dipping bird. “You’re right, Harry! That was what my dream was all about! You’ve seen me as I really am—it’s about time the rest of the world did, too!”
But for God’s sake spare them the Brazilian, I thought.
I kissed her hand. She was wearing so many emerald rings that I almost broke my front teeth. Then I noisily sucked up the dregs of my Nagayama Sunset, although I really could have used another, especially since they were eighteen dollars a hit and she was paying. “I really have to go now, Mrs. Z. As always, it’s been a delight.”
I waited, and waited, and then I repeated, “As always, it’s been a delight.”
“Oh! What a muddlehead I am!” she exclaimed, and picked up her purse. She took out a Delano Hotel envelope, reassuringly fat and squishy. “I don’t know how I coped, Harry, before you came into my life.”
The envelope vanished into the top pocket of my blue-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt as if it had never existed. A stage conjuror called something like the Great Nintendo had taught me that when I was doing bar work in the Village. “It works both ways, Mrs. Z. Wh
at would I do without you?”
I stood up and was just about to leave when she clung to the leg of my flappy linen pants. “You don’t have a date yet, do you?”
“A date?” Jesus—don’t tell me she was going to ask me out for the evening.
“I don’t mean to be pushy, but you did say that it would come to you very soon, and I’m just dying to enter it into my diary. The date—you know—when my new young beau will be coming into my life.”
I let out a scream of laughter. “Of course! Ha ha! Your new young beau! Well—I checked your tarot cards late last night, and they’re still saying March-ish, without being specifically specific as to which specific day.”
“I can hardly wait.”
“Well…don’t get yourself too excited.” Especially since I’m making this all up and I shall be long gone by March, back to New York.
I was trudging back across the soft, hot sand when Mrs. Zlotorynski shrilled out, “Harry! Didn’t you forget something?”
I patted the front of my shirt. Forget something? I didn’t think so. My cell phone, my sunglasses, my Mega Millions lottery ticket, my $525 in large-denomination bills—all there.
“My mystic motto! You forgot my mystic motto!”
“Oh, your mystic motto! How could I? And I looked it up specially after I’d read your tarot cards!”
“Yes?”
I walked back to her. “It’s a very mystical mystic motto, Mrs. Z. More mystical than most. ‘Freedom is the greatest luxury of all. No matter how much caviar you heap onto a baked potato, it can never fly like a seagull.’”
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