Back to Blood

3





The Daring Weak Man


Barely two hours later appeared an Edward T. Topping IV no one in the Miami Herald city room had ever seen before. Usually straight down the middle of his forehead, from his brow to his nose, ran a crevice… a crevice in the flesh of a man worrying about just how many people on the editorial staff, what was left of it, resented him. But this morning he was grinning… grinning a grin so broad, it raised his eyebrows as high as they would go… popped his eyes wide open… made his rosy cheeks well up atop each cheekbone, like Santa Claus’s. The ditch had disappeared. The eyes glittered.

“Take a look at it, Stan! Take a look at it, a really good look. You know what you’re looking at?”

He was standing in the middle of his office, which opened out into the city room. Standing, he was, not sitting halfway hidden within the cocoon of a high-backed Contract Modern swivel chair up against a kidney-shaped Contract Modern desk, the way he usually was. Not only that, he stood with his back to the wall of glass that provided him, as editor in chief, with the View… of all that was glamorous in Miami… the royal palm trees, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the royal palm trees, Brickell Avenue, the royal palm trees, Biscayne Bay, Brickell Key, Key Biscayne, the Venetian Isles, Indian Creek, Star Island, Miami Beach, and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean’s great parabolic curve at the horizon, 180 degrees’ worth of sun-bleached light-blue tropical sky, and the royal palm trees. No, at the moment he only had eyes for this morning’s Herald, which he held before him the way one might display a painting, full length, top to bottom, showing off the front page.

“Here it is! You’re looking at real journalism! Real journalism, Stan!”

Stan, namely Stanley Friedman, a thin, bony man in his forties, six feet tall but with atrocious posture that made his chest look concave and him six inches shorter—City Editor Stan watched this performance from an armchair barely four feet away. Stan had a squint-eyed look on his face. Ed Topping took it to be the look of a man in a state of wonder over what he has helped create: this!… this morning’s Miami Herald! If the truth be told, Stanley Friedman had no room in his heart or on his face for Topping’s “real journalism.” All he wondered about was how long he would still have a job. Two weeks ago the Mob, short for Chicago Mob, as everyone in the city room now referred to the six men the Loop News Corporation had dispatched from Chicago to take over the Herald, had fired another 20 percent of the paper’s workforce, bringing the total to 40 percent. Like City Editor Stan, everybody who remained felt as if he were hanging on to his job by his fingernails. Morale was—what morale? Everybody heeded Edward T. Topping IV’s words only to detect signs of impending doom. Impending Doom was what City Editor Stan’s eyes were squinting at. In fact, he was in no danger. The Mob had to have a local as city editor, someone whose memory bank was already stuffed with information he knew by heart about the entire metropolitan area, the street layout in detail, all fourteen police jurisdictions and their boundaries—very important, knowing the cops—the players, very much including all policy-making political officeholders, all of them, plus the celebrities, particularly the minor ones who felt more comfortable in Miami than in Los Angeles and New York… and… the nationalities and their turfs… Little Havana and Big Hialeah… Little Haiti, Little Caracas, also known as Westonzuela, Mother Russia (Sunny Isles and Hallandale), the Hershey Highway, that being the cops’ nickname for the Anglo enclave of South Beach otherwise known as “gay”… There was no end to it, and a city editor had to know who hated whom and why—

“Just look at that makeup, Stan!” Ed was saying, eyes still bright as lightbulbs.

He was referring to the front page. An inky black headline ran the width of the paper—ROPE-CLIMB COP IN “MAST”-ERFUL RESCUE. On the far right was a lone column of type. The rest of the top half of the front page consisted of an enormous color picture of a white schooner with two towering masts and clouds and clouds of white sails… floating upon the aquamarine vastness of Biscayne Bay… beneath the pale-blue dome of the sky… and way, way, way up there, the equivalent of six or seven stories above the deck, no bigger than a thumbnail against such gigantic expanses, two tiny living creatures, two men whose lives depended on one man maintaining his one-hand grip on a jib sail cable… two specks popping out amid these overwhelming dimensions, two little human beasts this close to plunging to their death… all captured in a photograph by an old Herald photographer named Ludwig Davis, whose talent had spared him the axe. Down below was a two-column picture of a bare-chested young man with muscles on top of muscle, all highly defined, “cut,” “ripped” to the point of looking shrink-wrapped. That picture on page one was a veritable male nude in chiaroscuro, school of Michelangelo.

Ed Topping couldn’t hold back the sublime joy the big color picture of the schooner gave him. He thumped it with the backs of his fingers. “There you have it!” this semaphore said.

“No other medium could have come close to that image, Stan!” the suddenly animated editor in chief was saying. “Newsprint is great for color as long as you have big shapes of uniform value, such as the sky, the bay, the schooner, the hull, those huge sails—all white—and you know what? The poor resolution of the newsprint makes the color blocks more uniform. It’s like a nineteenth-century Japanese print, the uniform blocks of color. The defect turns into an advantage!”

Ed opened his eyes wide… and turned them up brighter and brighter and brighter like a rheostat, as if to say, “Now you see what I mean, right?”

City Editor Stan stretched his neck upward and twisted his mouth and lower jaw in an odd way.

“No other medium could come close to this,” Ed went on, explaining in some detail why television couldn’t, why film couldn’t, why videotape couldn’t, why the internet couldn’t… why not even a great print of the original photograph could come close. It would have “too many values in the color blocks.”

City Editor Stan once again did that odd twisted contortion with his neck, mouth, and lower jaw.

::::::What inna nameagod is that all about?:::::: But Ed was too enchanted by his learned disquisition on color imagery… nineteenth-century Japanese prints, no less!… to linger upon old Stan’s tracheal twisting. In his heart Edward T. Topping IV took credit for this fabulous front page—or page one, as real newspapermen called it. During the tremendous excitement of putting the paper to bed last night—another Real Newspaperman expression, putting the newspaper “to bed”—he had left his office and gone out into the city room and stood by the shoulder of his managing editor, a fellow Chicago Mobster named Archie Pendleton, who was in turn leaning over the shoulder of the makeup editor, a local survivor who needed to be led like a pony on a lead line—all wondering what to do with this remarkable photograph by the old guy, Lud Davis… and Ed had said to Archie, “Go all the way with it, Archie. Make it big. Make it jump out at you on page one.”

And it was done. How was one to explain the immense satisfaction it gave him? It was more than being the big man, the editor in chief, the Power. It was being creative, but aggressive, too… daring to let it all out when it was time to let it all out. It was what was meant by the expression “He’s a real newspaperman.”

Ed turned the newspaper around so that he could look at page one more closely.

“What can you tell me about John Smith, Stan?—the guy who wrote the story.”

Stan’s whole expression changed. What a relief! What a relief to get a break from Grim Reaper IV giving a long-winded lecture! What a relief not to have to swallow yawn after yawn whole in strangulating gulps! He dearly hoped his contortions had seemed like nothing more than strenuous hiccups. What a relief to answer a simple question… and score a few status points by providing information you have and he doesn’t.

“John’s not a quick study,” said Stan. “He’s a long study. He’s one of these twenty-eight-year-old kids—incidentally, he hates nicknames, hates Jack, hates Johnny, Jay, or anything else anybody comes up with. Won’t f*cking respond to them. Yeah! Refuses to hear them! He’s plain John Smith. Anyway, he’s one of these kids with blond hair and a baby face who’s twenty-eight and looks about eighteen. I don’t even know if he shaves or not, but I’ll tell you something he does do—he blushes! He blushes all the time! I don’t know another grown man who can still do that… blush. And polite? These days it’ll—” As Stan burbled on, Ed turned to his computer and summoned up John Smith in the Herald’s internal directory.

“Keep talking, Stan. I’m just looking up Smith here.”

::::::Well, I’ll be switched:::::: thought Ed, as soon as it came up on the screen. ::::::John Smith went to St. Paul’s and Yale! We’re both Yalies… and St. Paul’s trumps Hotchkiss!::::::

To Ed this had the power of… revelation.

“—but you can point the kid anywhere,” Stan was saying, “and he’ll go there. He’ll go right up to anybody you want and ask him anything you want. You know the lead he wrote? The police brass were trying to keep him away from this young cop, Nestor Camacho’s his name—the cop who brought the guy down from the mast? They don’t like cops giving interviews without prior approval and briefings and so forth, especially in a case like this. But John won’t go away. If he could’ve handcuffed himself to the cop just to keep the interview going, I bet you he’d’ve done it. He describes that whole scene later on in the story.”

Ed read the lead again… “By John Smith, with additional reporting by Barbara Goldstein, Daniel Roth, and Edward Wong.

“ ‘Weight-lifting? Rope-climbing beats weight-lifting any day!’ Miami Marine Patrol Officer Nestor Camacho, adrenaline still pumping, told the Herald yesterday—after his acrobatics had saved a man’s life more than seventy feet above Biscayne Bay and electrified an entire city watching it live on television.

“ ‘That’s the way I train! I climb this fifty-five-foot rope at Rodriguez’s place, the “Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!,” without using my legs!’ he said. ‘Lats? Delts? Biceps? Pecs? Even pecs! It’s the best thing in the world for the upper body, climbing ropes is.’

“And now, who in all of Miami dared dispute the man?

“The twenty-five-year-old cop had just pulled off an astounding feat of strength—a high-wire act that saved a Cuban refugee from a fatal plunge, stopped traffic cold on the six-lane Rickenbacker Causeway for hours, riveted the entire city via live television and radio coverage—and drew the ire of Miami Cuban activists who called the cop a ‘traitor.’

“Shortly before three p.m., just south of the causeway’s William Powell Bridge—”

Ed stopped reading and looked at Stan, grinning once more. “You know, when this lead first started coming in, I said to myself, ‘What the hell is this? Pecs? delts? Ñññññño—or whatever it is—Gym? What’s this guy think he’s writing, a sidebar on bodybuilding in our time?’ It took a little bit before it dawned on me that this was the perfect lead. We have this constant problem. If there’s a big story, everybody’s already heard it on the radio or television or read it online. So by the time we come out, everybody’s saying, ‘What’s this? Yesterday’s newspaper?’ But we were the only ones who got to the cop and interviewed him, isn’t that right?” ::::::I’ll be damned… St. Paul’s and Yale.::::::

“Yeah,” said Stan. “The cops didn’t want to let the media near him, because this story cuts two ways. I mean, you remember all that booing, all those characters yelling down from the bridge—all the LIBERTAD signs and TRAIDOR? It turns out the cop is Cuban himself, Nestor Camacho. When he collars the guy, that makes the guy a Wet Foot. He never reached land or anything attached to land, like the bridge. So he can get sent right back to Cuba. Did you see the way El Nuevo Herald played it?”

“I’ve got it here, but I’ve been waiting to get it translated.”

“The headline says ‘¡DETENIDO!’ ” said Stan. “You know, with the two exclamation points, before and aft? ‘¡DETENIDO! ¡A DIECIOCHO METROS DE LIBERTAD!’ ‘Arrested! Eighteen meters from freedom!’ ”

“Sixty feet is eighteen meters?”

“Almost exactly. Sounds shorter, right?”

“What do we have for a follow-up?” said Ed.

“The big question now is what happens to the wet foot,” said Stan. “Right now he’s in the custody of the Coast Guard. The police took him from their Safe Boat and turned him over to a Coast Guard cutter. John mentions that in the story.”

“What does the Coast Guard do with him?”

“I’ve got John working on that right now,” said Stan. “He says he has some contacts over at the ICE he can get to talk to him off the record.” Stan began chuckling. That made his bony caved-in chest rock in a curious way. “If they send the guy back, there’s gonna be a whole lotta busted balls in Miami. I wouldn’t wanna be that cop, Officer Nestor Camacho.”

::::::ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.:::::: Ed was listening to Stan but at the same time ::::::Well, I’ll—be—damned… a Yalie… I wonder if he worked on the Daily News:::::: referring to the undergraduate newspaper, the Yale Daily News, which Ed had worked on himself. Blip!—and he was at Broadway and York Street in New Haven, looking at the campus… all those magnificent gothic piles of stone and stained glass casement windows and massive slate roofs and arches and gargoyles, the sacred tower of the library, Sterling Memorial.

::::::What did Stan just say about the kid and the ICE? Ahh, yes… the kid knows people at the ICE.::::::

“Stan, have him come in here a minute.”

“You mean John?”

“Yeah. I’d like to know exactly how he plans to proceed.”

Stan shrugged. “Well, okay. But I should tell you ahead of time: He may go into something else, an idea he’s breaking my balls with, a story about Sergei Korolyov and the new museum.”

In due course, in came a young man who stopped diffidently just inside the door. To Ed he seemed surprisingly tall, six-one or -two. He was also surprisingly handsome… in a tender coming-of-age sort of way. Otherwise he fit Stan’s description. He had a baby face, all right, and a head of longish, thatchy blond hair.

“Come on in,” Ed said with a big smile, beckoning the young reporter.

“Yes, sir,” said the punctilious John Smith.

—he blushed! No two ways about it! His smooth, pale, utterly lineless face turned almost scarlet.

He looked toward City Editor Stan. His expression was a question: “Why?”

“I think Mr. Topping would like to know a little about what we have on the Coast Guard’s decision,” said Stan.

Another violent blush. “Yes, sir.” He directed the yes at Stan and the sir at Ed Topping.

“Pull up a chair and have a seat,” said Ed, gesturing toward an armchair. He gave the kid another editor in chieftain’s big smile.

John Smith pulled up the chair and sat down with both feet flat on the floor and a posture so erectly correct, his back never touched the chair’s. He wore no necktie, but he did wear a shirt with a collar, in his case a white button-down shirt. That was about the best you could hope for these days, a shirt with a collar. Not only that, he wore a navy blazer—could that be linen?—a pair of khaki pants freshly pressed with a crease (didn’t see that every day around this office), and a pair of well-polished dark-brown moccasins. Most of the male employees of the Herald had no idea what shoe polish was, evidently.

::::::A very preppy boy I have here, a very preppy Yale man:::::: Ed thought. ::::::St. Paul’s preppy, at that.::::::

Ed picked up the paper and displayed it full-length, just as he had for Stan Friedman.

“Well,” he said, “you think your story got enough attention?”

John Smith’s lips seemed to be on the verge of a smile. Instead, the blood rushed to his cheeks again, and he said, “Yes, sir.”

That was his third yes, sir in a row and so far he hadn’t said another word. The moment went empty with silence. So Ed rushed into the vacuum. “How did you manage to get to the young cop, Camacho? As far as we know, nobody else got near him.”

That was Ed’s way of giving the kid a big pat on the back. One didn’t just blurt out, “Great story, Smith!” That wasn’t the real newspaperman’s way.

“I knew where they would dock the Safe Boat when they brought Camacho back. Over at Jungle Island. So that’s where I went.”

“Nobody else figured that out?”

“I guess not, Mr. Topping,” said the kid. “There was nobody else there.”

Since he had finally gotten a few words out of him besides yes, sir, Ed slogged on. “How did you know about it?”

“From covering police, Mr. Topping. I’ve been on Safe Boat runs a couple of times.”

“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 f*cking 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 ago. 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 Beach…” 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?

“Now, John,” said Ed, struggling to get his composure back. “Have you thought about the… the… dimensions of such a story, should you write it?”

“How do you mean, sir?”

Ed was speechless again. He did know exactly what he meant, but he had no idea how to say it. How could you look a young reporter in the eye and say, “Kid, don’t you understand? We don’t want any such great stories. Journalism? Don’t you get it? There’s journalism, and there’s the bottom line. And if you don’t mind moving aside for a moment, we have to at least take note of the bottom line here. We’re sorry, but you can’t be Woodward and Bernstein just now. And, incidentally, kindly note that they went after people who couldn’t sue. Richard Nixon was the President of the United States, but he couldn’t sue. They could say he f*cked ducks in Rock Creek Park, and he couldn’t sue.”

Struggling, struggling, Ed finally regained the power of speech. “What I mean is, in a case like this, you have to proceed very methodically…” He paused, because he was mainly buying time. He really didn’t know what he meant now.

“Methodically? How do you mean, sir?” said John Smith.

Ed slogged on. “Well… here you’re not dealing with Mayor Cruz or Governor Slate or the Tallahassee Round Ring. You get some leeway with political stories and politicians… politicians…” He studiously avoided the term sue. He didn’t want John Smith to think of that as an operative word here. “You can speculate about a politician and even if you get it wrong, there aren’t likely to be any terrible repercussions, because that’s all part of the game in politics, at least in this country. But when you have a private citizen like Korolyov, with no record of anything like this…”

“Sir, as I understand it, Korolyov is like a lot of the so-called oligarchs who come here. He’s well educated, he’s cultivated, he’s charming, he’s great looking, he knows English, French, and German, and that’s in addition to Russian, of course. He knows art history—I mean, I gather he really knows it—and he knows the art market, but he’s a criminal, Mr. Topping. A lot of them are criminals, and they’ll get the worst thugs in the world, Russian thugs, to work for them if they have to, and they’re just incredibly brutal. I could tell you some stories.”

Ed stared at John Smith again. He kept waiting for him to molt into something else entirely, a hawk, a scorpion, a Delta Commando, a stingray. But all this had come out of the mouth of the same face… of a mere boy with perfect manners and perfect posture. And the blush. When he saw the way Ed was staring at him, the boy did it again. He blushed a deep scarlet.

::::::Jesus:::::: Ed Topping said to himself. ::::::This kid is a classic… People have such a colorful picture of newspaper reporters, don’t they, all these daring types who “break” stories and “uncover” corruption and put themselves in risky situations to get a “scoop.” Robert Redford in All the President’s Men, Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success… Yeah—and in real life they’re about as colorful as John Smith here. If you ask me, newspaper reporters are created at age six when they first go to school. In the schoolyard boys immediately divide into two types. Immediately! There are those who have the will to be daring and dominate, and those who don’t have it. Those who don’t, like John Smith here, spend half their early years trying to work out a modus vivendi with those who do… and anything short of subservience will be okay. But there are boys from the weaker side of the divide who grow up with the same dreams as the stronger… and I’m as sure about this as anything in the world: The boy standing before me, John Smith, is one of them. They, too, dream of power, money, fame, and beautiful lovers. Boys like this kid grow up instinctively realizing that language is an artifact, like a sword or a gun. Used skillfully, it has the power to… well, not so much achieve things as to tear things down—including people… including the boys who came out on the strong side of that sheerly dividing line. Hey, that’s what liberals are! Ideology? Economics? Social justice? Those are nothing but their prom outfits. Their politics were set for life in the schoolyard at age six. They were the weak, and forever after they resented the strong. That’s why so many journalists are liberals! The very same schoolyard events that pushed them toward the written word… pushed them toward “liberalism.” It’s as simple as that! And talk about irony! If you want power through words in journalism, rhetorical genius is not enough. You need content, you need new material, you need… news, in a word… and you have to find it yourself. You, from the weak side, can develop such a craving for new information, you end up doing things that would terrify any strong man from the other side of the divide. You will put yourself in dangerous situations amid dangerous people… with relish. You will go alone, without any form of backup… eagerly! You—you with your weak manner—end up approaching the vilest of the vile with a demand. “You have some information, and I need it. And I deserve it! And I will have it!”::::::

All this Ed could see in the baby face before him. Maybe these Russian thugs or whatever he was talking about were as brutal as he said. Ed himself had no idea. But he could see John Smith sticking his baby face and blond hair and blue eyes and great slathers of naïveté right in their faces and demanding information about Sergei Korolyov because he needs it, deserves it, and will have it.

::::::Well, I don’t need it, and I don’t deserve a big, messy, pseudo-righteous, money-hemorrhaging fight staged solely for the greater glory of a kid named John Smith, and I won’t have it.::::::

But there’s something closer to home that you’d rather not think about, isn’t there, Ed… If one of these little vipers from the weak side of the playground somehow did expose Korolyov and his “seventy million dollars’ worth” of early Russian Modernist work as a con artist pulling off a colossal fraud, it would make the entire Miami establishment look like a clusterf*ck!… The fools had put $500 million into a world-class cultural destination now worth precisely nothing! They would all become world-class jokes, utterly lamebrained, unbelievably gullible culture strivers! The horse laugh would resound ’round the world!

And who would become the most laughable of all, the most pitiable and pathetic—turning four generations of Toppings, five if you counted Fiver, into a long, drawn-out, scabid dog story?

And he was supposed to help his own minions drown him in shame?… ::::::Stand up for yourself, man! Get tough for once in your life! “Real journalism?” F*ck that!::::::