Back to Blood: A Novel Page 10

  “What about El Nuevo Herald? Why wouldn’t they figure that out?”

  John Smith shrugged. “I don’t know, Mr. Topping. I never see anybody from El Nuevo Herald out on stories.”

  Ed leaned back in his swivel chair as far as its universal joint would go, swiveled away from John Smith and City Editor Stan, cocked his head back, and closed his eyes, as if deep in thought. His ebullient grin returned. The rosy balls of fat regrouped upon his cheekbones, and his eyebrows rose way, way up, although his eyes remained closed. He was back at Broadway and York. It was noon, and freshmen were walking in and out of the Old Campus… He was tempted to stay longer.

  But he swiveled toward John Smith and City Editor Stan and opened his eyes again. He was still smiling. He was conscious of that. Why he was smiling he wasn’t sure… except that if you’re smiling, and nobody else gets it, you appear knowing, possibly even sophisticated. He only halfway admitted to himself that this was for the benefit of Yalie John Smith.

  “John, I see by your bio”—he nodded toward the computer screen—“that you went to Yale.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did you major in?”

  “English.”

  “English…” said Ed in a certain significant way. He broadened his smile, making it seem more inscrutable than ever.

  “Was Theory still a big deal in the English department when you were there?”

  “There were some professors who taught Theory, I guess,” said John Smith, “but I don’t think it was a big thing.”

  Ed maintained his I-have-a-secret smile and said, “I seem to remember—” Axxxx he cut that sentence off at the neck. In the next split second, if he hadn’t already, Stan would spot this I seem to remember talk for what it was: a labored way of letting John Smith know that he, Edward T. Topping IV, was a Yale man, too. Bango! He dropped the smile, rigged up a scowl, and started talking in a business tone that implied John Smith had been wasting his, T-4’s, time.

  “Now… Okay, let’s get down to cases. Where do we stand with this Coast Guard thing?”

  He made a point of staring first at Stan, then at John Smith. John Smith stared at Stan, and Stan stared at John Smith and motioned toward Ed with his chin, and John Smith stared at Ed and said to him:

  “Oh, they’ll send him back to Cuba, Mr. Topping. They decided last night.”

  He showed no particular excitement, but Stan and Ed were a different story. Both spoke at once.

  Stan: “You didn’t—”

  Ed: “How do—”

  “—tell me that!”

  “—you know that?”

  John Smith said to Stan, “I didn’t have a chance. I’d just gotten off the phone when you said I should come into Mr. Topping’s office.” He turned to Ed. “There’s a… a person at ICE I know very well. I know he wouldn’t tell me if he wasn’t sure. But I have to run it by Ernie Grimaldi at the Coast Guard to see if they’ll corroborate it.” He looked at Stan. “I had just called him and left a message when I came in here.”

  “You say they made the decision last night?” said Ed. “Who makes the decision? How do they do it?”

  “It’s pretty simple, Mr. Topping, and it can happen very fast. If it’s a Cuban, they give hihh—the person… a hearing right there on the Coast Guard cutter. They’ll have some officer who does these hearings all the time. If they can convince the hearing officer—”

  ::::::Aw, shit, the kid is PC… the way he almost said “him” and switched it to “person” on the edge of the cliff… and then gave up “person” for “they,” so he wouldn’t have to deal with gender in the singular, the “hims” and “he’s.”::::::

  “—that they’ve fled from Cuba because of a ‘credible threat’—that’s the term they use, ‘a credible threat’—then they’re given asylum. This man says his name is Hubert Cienfuegos and he’s a member of an underground organization called El Solvente, the Solvent. But I was here until eleven o’clock last night, Mr. Topping, calling everybody I could think of, and nobody had ever heard of Hubert Cienfuegos or El Solvente.”

  “Do you speak Spanish?”

  “Yes, sir, or pretty well, anyway.”

  “How do they decide about the credible threat and asylum?” said Ed.

  “It’s all up to the one man, the hearing officer. He either believes them or doesn’t believe them. He does it all right there on the deck. That’s the entire proceeding, Mr. Topping. It’s over in no time.”

  “How does he decide?”

  “I don’t know that much about it, Mr. Topping, but I gather two things can disqualify the person. One is, if they’re too vague, they can’t come up with dates or a timeline, or they can’t tell you who exactly is threatening them. The other is, if the story’s too, you know—too pat. It sounds rehearsed, or memorized, and they’re delivering it by rote? Things like that? The hearing officer can’t subpoena witnesses. So it’s a judgment call, I guess you’d say.”

  “Why do they do this on the deck of a ship?” said Ed. “Like this fellow yesterday—Cienfuegos. Why didn’t they bring him ashore and have a hearing—I mean, after all that chaos?”

  “If the person’s Cuban and they bring them into a police station or a holding pen or a jail or anywhere else, then they get asylum automatically. They’ve set foot on American soil. If they’ve committed a crime in American waters, they’ll be prosecuted, but they can’t send them back to Cuba.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, sir. And if the person has done nothing more than try to get into the country illegally, the only thing that happens is, they’re sentenced to a year’s probation and they walk away a free person. The Cubans have a sort of most-favored-migration status.”

  ::::::person person person they they they they they them them them them I fucking don’t want to believe it was Yale that made my man here mangle the goddamn English language this way, although most-favored migration is a pretty good play on most-favored nation:::::: but all he said was:

  “So this guy Cienfuegos’s goose is cooked, and he’s out of here.”

  “Yes, sir. But my source told me they may not say anything about it for four or five days or even a week. They want to give all the protestors some time to cool off.”

  “That would be great!” said Stan, who was so excited he actually sat up straight. “If we go with it right away, we’ll have the story to ourselves.” Stan stood up… straight, too, for him. “Okay, let’s get going, John. We got a lotta work to do!”

  Stan began heading for the door. John Smith got up, too, but remained standing there and said to Stan, “Would it be okay if I mention the Korolyov story to Mr. Topping?”

  Stan turned his eyes upward and exhaled a wearier-than-plain-weary sigh and looked at Ed. Ed broke into another big smile, the smile of a man who has Fate going his way. “Sure,” he said to John Smith, “let’s hear it. Korolyov’s a real piece of work. Talk about—”

  Ed noticed a dubious look, obviously for his benefit only, passing across Stan’s face like a shadow. But a happy man doesn’t worry about other people’s shadows.

  “—colorful,” he continued. “I happened to be seated practically next to him at that dinner the city and the museum gave in his honor last year. My God, seventy million dollars’ worth of paintings he had donated, and they must have had half of them hung in that dining room! What a show that was… all these Russian paintings lining the walls… Kandinskys, Maleviches… uhhh…” He couldn’t remember any more names.

  “Some Larionovs,” said John Smith, “Goncharovas, Chagalls, a Pirosmanashvili, and—”

  Ed pulled a face. “Piro—who?”

  “He was sort of a Russian Henri Rousseau,” said John Smith. “Died in 1918.”

  ::::::Christ, Pirowhatsavili?:::::: Ed decided to ascend from the level of the details. “Anyway, they’re worth at least seventy million dollars, and that’s according to the low estimates. No, Korolyov is a great subject. But we had a big profile of him not all that long a
go. What would your angle be?”

  Cloud after cloud was now rolling across Stan’s face as he stood behind John Smith.

  “Well, sir, for a start, the Kandinskys and Maleviches are fakes.”

  Ed cocked his head and lifted one eyebrow so high, so high, the eyeball looked big as a doorknob, and lowered the other eyebrow until it completely shut that eye, and said, “The Kandinskys and the Maleviches are fakes.” No question mark. “And by ‘fakes,’ I assume you mean forgeries.” Again, no question mark. But the look on his face implicitly, and dubiously, asked, “Did you actually say what I think you just said?”

  “Yes, sir,” said John Smith. “That’s my information.”

  Ed cocked his head still further and said in a mock-casual way, “All… forgeries.” Again, no question mark. His contorted eyebrows posed the question more emphatically than words could have: “What have you been smoking? Do you really expect anybody to take that seriously?” Out loud he said, “And I suppose that Korolyov was aware of all this when he gave them to the museum.” No question mark—this time it was an undisguised verbal sneer.

  “Sir, he was the one who paid to have them done.”

  Ed was speechless. ::::::What’s with this kid? He’s nobody’s picture of an investigative journalist. He’s more like a too-tall sixth grader who keeps raising his hand because he’s just dying to show the teacher how smart he is.::::::

  “And, sir,” said John Smith, “I know the two Larionovs are fake.”

  Ed started sputtering. “So one of the most generous and… and… public-spirited and… and… admired and respected individuals in Miami has swindled the museum.” No question mark even remotely necessary. The statement would sink without a bubble under its own absurdity.

  “No, sir,” said John Smith. “I don’t think it’s swindling, because the paintings were a gift, and he didn’t ask for money or anything else in return, as far as I know. And the recipients can’t be called gullible people. They’re supposed to be experts in the field.”

  A very unpleasant sensation, not yet a thought, began spreading through Ed’s innards like a gas. He was beginning to resent this skinny, too-tall troublemaker personally and professionally, Yalie or no Yalie. At that dinner last year, no man had sat closer to the guest of honor, Korolyov, than Ed. The woman who sat between them was Mayor Cruz’s mousy wife, Carmenita, who was small and painfully shy; in short, a nullity. So Ed was as good as at the very elbow of the illustrious oligarch. In no time they were “Ed” and “Sergei.” The world was at that dinner, everybody from the Mayor and his City Hall heavies… to the billionaire art collector Maurice Fleischmann, who had his hand in so many things he was known as the Player—rhymed with mayor. Fleischmann was about four seats down from Ed there at the head table. Ed could still see the whole scene as if it had happened only last night. Physically, Fleischmann wasn’t as big as he looked… which really didn’t matter when what you looked like was an angry bear, heavy in the body and hirsute in the face. To make up for his bald pate, he wore the currently trendy “double-stubble,” about four weeks’ worth of beard running from the temple down over the jaws and the chin and beneath the nose. To keep it neat and even, most men used the Gillette Double-Stubble electric razor. You could adjust it like a lawn mower to maintain whatever level of growth you wanted. This ten o’clock shadow left Fleischmann looking unusually fierce and aggressive. He was by nature a regular bear in business, much feared, much envied, much sought-after. He had made his fortune—billions—from a company called American ShowUp in a business nobody had ever heard of: “convenable infrastructure.” Several times at least benevolent and knowledgeable souls had tried to explain it to Ed, and he still didn’t get it. Yet who was it who sat practically tête-à-tête with the guest of honor, Sergei Korolyov? Not the grizzly bear, but Ed. The point was not lost on the other Miami celebrati there that night. Ed’s status got its biggest boost since he had arrived in Miami.

  He and the Herald had been Korolyov’s greatest backers in making him and his huge art donation the keystone of Museum Park. The Park had been dreamed up way back in the late 1990s… as a “cultural destination.” Urban planners all over the country were abuzz with this fuzzy idea that every “world-class” city—world-class was another au courant term—must have a world-class cultural destination. Cultural referred to the arts… in the form of a world-class art museum. Museum Park would also feature a new Miami Museum of Science, but the anchor of the whole project would be the art museum. Times were good in 2005, and the dream began to look believable. The Park would take over the grounds of the old Bicentennial Park—old because the Bicentennial had been almost forty years ago, an eternity in Miami time—twenty-nine acres in downtown Miami with a view and a half. It overlooked Biscayne Bay. The fund-raising began in earnest. The museum alone would cost $220 million, 40 percent in government bonds and 60 percent in private donations. A pair of world-class Swiss architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, would design the museum, and the world-class New York firm Cooper, Robertson would design the lavish landscaping. But there was a problem in seeking private donations. This world-class cultural destination would lead to a museum full of… next to nothing… the meager, third-rate art collection, several hundred contemporary paintings and objets, from the existing Miami Art Musuem, not founded until 1984, when all “great” art had long since inflated to prices that were out of sight.

  But then—a miracle. Four years ago a Russian oligarch nobody had ever heard of arrived in Miami from out of nowhere and offered to give the museum, now called the “New Miami Art Museum,” seventy million dollars’ worth of paintings by big-name Russian Modernists of the early twentieth century—Kandinskys and Maleviches and the rest. From that moment on, construction began pell-mell. They hadn’t quite finished by the time of the dinner last year, but one thing they had completed. After the dessert course, a team of eight union elves rolled a massive object, about fourteen feet high and eight feet wide—enormous—and covered by a mauve mantle of velvet, out onto the stage. The president of the now-named New Miami Art Museum said a few purposely vague words and then pulled a velvet rope. The rope was connected to a pulley mechanism, and the velvet mantle flew off, just like that. Before le tout Miami was a tremendous limestone rectangle incised with huge capital letters reading, THE KOROLYOV MUSEUM OF ART. Le tout Miami rose like a single colonial animal in a deafening paroxysm of applause. The board had renamed the museum in his honor. The massive slab of limestone, with incisions so deep the letters disappeared in shadow if you tried to look all the way to the incisions’ bottoms. The president of the board announced that the ornamental ten-ton sign would be hung from the girders above the entrance in the middle of a huge hanging garden.

  Ed never got over the ecstatic sight of those huge letters carved so deeply—for all eternity!—in ten tons of stone tablet. Explicitly they honored Korolyov, those letters that would endure across the ages, but implicitly they honored Korolyov’s great herald and champion—I, me, Edward T. Topping IV.

  ::::::And this too-tall little boy here right in front of me is, in effect, telling me I’ve let myself be used, duped, gulled, diddled with, in the most humiliating and yokel-headed fashion.:::::: The thought made him furious.

  John Smith probably wondered why Ed’s voice was seething so when he grimaced and glared at him and snapped. “Okay, fun’s over. Anybody can accuse anybody of anything. It’s time to get serious. What makes you think anybody should believe anything in the tale you’ve just told me? You’re making some”—he started to say “libelous”—“some ugly charges against a highly respected man.”

  “I got a tip, Mr. Topping. It was about the painter who forged the Kandinskys and the Maleviches. Apparently he can’t resist bragging about it to everybody. He’s fooled the experts.”

  “Who’s everybody?”

  “The hip art crowd, I guess you’d call them, sir, in Wynwood and South Beach.”

  “The hip art crowd in Wynwood and South B
each…” said Ed. “Who exactly in the hip art crowd in Wynwood and South Beach told you about all this?”

  “An artist I know who has a studio near the artist who did the forgeries.”

  “And he has the forger’s admissions on tape or in writing, I hope?”

  “No, sir, and the forger—his name is Igor Drukovich—he’s a Russian, like Korolyov—he hasn’t admitted it in so many words, exactly, but he doesn’t think of it as an ‘admission.’ He’s eager to have people know about it, sir. I gather he has a real drinking problem, and the hints get broader and broader.”

  “The hints get broader and broader,” Ed said as ironically as he could. No question mark.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that everything you’ve just told me is hearsay?”

  “Yes, sir,” said John Smith. “I know I have a lot of work to do. But I trust my sources.”

  “He trusts his sources,” Ed said with maximum sarcasm right to John Smith’s face.

  He immediately realized he had lost control of himself… but these John Smiths, these goddamned ambitious kids, these self-important children and their visions of “revealing,” “uncovering,” “exposing” scandals… For what? Civic good? Oh, give me a break! They’re self-centered, that’s all. Juvenile egotists! If they’re so determined to create trouble, to lay bare evil, even if it means libeling people, why can’t they stick with the government? With officeholders? With politicians? With government bureaucrats? They can’t sue! Technically they can—but as a practical matter, they can’t. There they are, yours for the kill! Aren’t they enough for you, you asinine little brats! You mosquitoes! You who live to sting and suck blood and then fly away and hover and wait for the next poor slob feeding at the public trough to turn his bare ass so you can dive-bomb and sting again and suck some more blood! Isn’t that enough for you? Do you have to choose people like Sergei Korolyov who do selfless public good—and probably have enough lawyers on retainer to tie up and humiliate the Miami Herald until it loses all credibility and slinks off into the yellow ooze?