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  12

  Jujitsu Justice

  Just about 6:30 p.m. Magdalena unlocked the door to her cover story, her beard—which is to say, the apartment she officially shared with Amélia—took one step inside and UHHhhhnnnnggghhhhhhssssighed a lot louder and longer than she meant to. She heard a man talking in the living room: “Now, let’s just hold on a minute… I am not even suggesting that there’s anything unlawful about it—although I—” A second man broke in: “But that’s almost beside the point, isn’t it. A mistake—a blunder, to use your word—of this—” Actually, as soon as she heard the querulous, stentorian tone in which the first man said, “I am not even suggesting,” Magdalena realized it was only Amélia watching some sort of evening news show on that big plasma TV of hers.

  The voices suddenly sank to a barely audible aububblyblumbling mumble mumble mumble and a single wumble wonk wonk wonk wonk of laughter and more mumblemumblemumblemumble, and Amélia appeared in the doorway in her T-shirt, jeans, and ballet slippers with her head tilted to one side and her lips twisted upward on the other side, until they practically closed her eye, that being her way of signaling, “Mockery coming”—and said,

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?” said Magdalena.

  “That groan I heard. ¡Dios mío!”

  “Oh, that wasn’t a real groan,” said Magdalena, “it was a sigh-groan.”

  “A sigh-groan…” said Amélia. “I see… Does that mean it came from the heart?”

  Magdalena rolled her eyes upward in the end-of-my-rope mode and said rather bitterly, “Yeah, from the heart or somewhere down there. I can think of several places.”

  She walked right past Amélia and into the living room and practically launched her body bottom-first onto the couch and sigh-groaned again, “Ahhhunnnggghhhh.” She looked up at Amélia, who had come in right behind her. “It’s Norman… I don’t know how much more of Dr. Wonderful I can take,” whereupon she began a detailed recounting of Norman’s behavior at Art Basel, “practically shoving Maurice Fleischmann’s nose into porn to make sure he can keep him on his string and use him for his own pathetic social climbing, and it’s so unethical—I mean, it’s worse than unethical… it’s cruel, what he’s doing to Maurice—”

  Sure enough, on the TV screen were three of exactly the sort of dead-serious know-it-alls she figured they were when she heard them from the hallway… the inevitable dark suits and various amplitudes of scarce hair on their domes, domes determined to paralyze you with solemn opinions on politics and public policy. The TV had such a big screen, their arms, legs, and lips, which never stopped moving, appeared big enough to be right here in the room with you, radiating a tedium Magdalena got only the faintest drone of, thank God, as she explained that “Norman’s love of Norman would be embarrassing even if he was subtle about it, and Subtle About It is not Norman in the first place. Sometimes I just want to throw up.”

  She was only peripherally aware of it when the suits vanished and a commercial came on. A fortyish man in a golf outfit is bouncing on the floor of a living room as if he’s a basketball thubba thubba thubba thubba, while a woman, slightly younger, and two children point fingers at him and weep with laughter thubba thubba thubba thubba. The bouncing man vanished, an event Magdalena noticed only because the screen became much brighter. She was deep into the Columbus Day Regatta—“Norman was just aching to be recognized as the great porn doctor and get himself invited up onto one of those boats.” She flicked only the quickest glance at what had lit up the screen, namely, a second commercial, an animated cartoon of thirty or forty pigs with wings flying in a military formation beneath a radiant blue sky and then peeling off one by one and diving like dive-bombers, whereupon a single name takes over the screen: ANASOL, and Magdalena was telling Amélia how “the girls were pulling the thongs out of the cracks of their asses and the boys were taking their shorts off and fucking them doggie-style right there on the deck in front of everybody, and Norman’s trying to get me to take off my bikini top, and I knew he wouldn’t stop there.” She was only momentarily aware of it when a news anchorman appears on the screen. A TV news reporter is in some sort of run-down gymnasium holding a microphone up to a tall man about thirty-five with a lot of muscles. Magdalena was vaguely aware of some guys, late teens, early twenties, milling about behind them… Couldn’t have been less interesting… All she was interested in was telling Amélia about how Norman was “sitting there on the deck, and he’s like crammed in with about forty or fifty other people, mostly men who look like they’re gonna need some porn-addiction therapy themselves—and I mean like need it very soon—and here’s the noted porn psychiatrist sitting there with them—and I couldn’t believe it. It was scary. They’re projecting porn movies onto the huge sails of a boat—huge—and ¡Dios mío! Norman’s the worst of them all! He’s got this tent pole underneath his bathing trunks, and it’s so obvious! Talk about a porn addict! He’s enchanted—I mean like on those huge sails all those erections looked gigantic, and when the girls spread their legs, it looked like a man could walk in standing up. I couldn’t believe it!” Magdalena had such a compulsion to impart every detail to Amélia, she didn’t even notice it when the same sort of boat, a schooner with very high masts and voluminous sails, appears on the screen, and way up on the highest mast two little figures are struggling, and the bigger one locks his legs around the waist of the smaller one, who’s about to fall to his death, and starts swinging hand over hand down the jib sail cable, carrying him down toward the deck and toward the camera, and now you can see the savior’s face—

  “Magdalena!” said Amélia. “Isn’t that your boyfriend?”

  Magdalena looked squarely at the TV for the first time “¡Dios mío! Nestor!”

  The sight took her breath away… She hadn’t seen this on TV at the time. She had been too consumed that day with working up the nerve to tell her mother off and kiss Hialeah goodbye… and now she wasn’t in the mood for one second of Nestor’s great triumph… yet curiosity got the better of her: “Amélia, turn that up, will you?”

  Amélia’s instinct exactly; she was already remoting the sound up. On the screen Nestor’s face is heading straight for the two of them, his face and the boos, catcalls, imprecations pouring down from the causeway up above, a regular squall of Spanish and English and God knows what other tongues. ::::::Good! His own people hate him! So what does it matter that he gets so much publicity—right?… right!… That old Hialeah stuff—you either get rid of it or you get all tangled up in it until it suffocates you completely… and Nestor was part of it, wasn’t he, a big part… How dare these americanos prop up his reputation and try to make some kind of hero out of him? How dare they insinuate that maybe I’ve made the wrong choice and given up a… celebrity?::::::

  “¡Caramba!” Amélia said. “He’s really cute, that Hialeah boyfriend of yours!”

  Magdalena grew quiet, testy, and abrupt. “He’s not my ‘boyfriend,’ Hialeah or otherwise.”

  Amélia had her goat and couldn’t resist playing with it. “Okay, he’s not your Hialeah boyfriend. But you have to admit he is really hot!” On the screen is that newspaper picture of Nestor with his shirt off. “He could pose for one of those statues of a Greek god or something.” Amélia’s face was fairly sparkling with teasing good humor. “Sure you don’t want to reconsider, Magdalena? Or maybe you could fix me and him up.”

  Magdalena’s mouth fell open, but she was speechless. She couldn’t think of a single riposte. She was aware that her face had become immobile, and she couldn’t do anything about it. ::::::Thanks a lot, Amélia! Thanks a whole lot… So sweet of you to put into words everything I’m feeling… Oh, thanks for shoving it all in my face.:::::

  An airmada of animated-cartoon pigs with wings is flying at an incredible speed… so fast, white puffs of cloud rocket past against a sunny bright blue sky… all this to the martial music of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”… One by one, the flying pigs begin to peel off and div
e like dive-bombers toward an unseen target below. A deep baritone voice-over says, “Smooth… powerful… fast-working, and always on target… That’s the promise of… ANASOL”… Simultaneously the name ANASOL fills the screen.

  “Anasol…” said Yevgeni. “What is the Anasol?”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know,” said Nestor. “It’s a sort of a cream.” He and Yevgeni were sitting in front of the TV in Yevgeni’s studio. It was about thirty minutes after midnight, and Nestor had just come off the Crime Suppression Unit’s four-to-midnight shift. They were watching the local news, broadcast first at 6:00 p.m. and again now at the midnight hour.

  Blip the so-called news team has returned, three men and a woman sitting at a maybe fifteen-foot-wide curving TV-Modernistic desk, where they read the news off teleprompters… all four chuckling and making faces to show what a witty, collegial time they had for themselves during the commercial break… and signaling that the lighter-sided, human-interesting, end-of-the-show segment is now on. The anchorman says, “Well, Tony, I gather the business news in Miami has taken a somewhat loopy twist, or is it a knot?”

  Business newscaster Tony shakes his head side to side, “Come on, Bart, did you already know this story is about ropes and the business side of rope-climbing, or am I just a really lucky guy?”

  He sockets his eyes into the teleprompter and continues: “Rope-climbing, using your arms only, not your legs, was a popular sport in Europe and America for at least a thousand years, until about fifty years ago, up until the Olympics dropped it in 1932, and schools and colleges soon followed suit. It seemed dead and gone for good… That was until one man here in Miami has just brought it back to life… and thrown South Florida’s thriving fitness-center industry into turmoil. The turmoil has only boiled hotter since then.”

  Nestor’s heart sped up on red alert. ::::::¡Dios mío! This story can’t possibly be heading where it seems to be heading, can it?!::::::

  Oh, but it can! Onto the screen comes video footage of a young man climbing hand over hand up a rope alongside the seventy-foot foremast of a schooner. Upturned faces on the deck and in small motorcraft and downturned faces from a nearby bridge look on with great excitement and concern, cheering, booing, screaming God knows what. A telescopic lens closes in on the climber. He’s wearing the shapeless shorts and short-sleeved shirt of a Miami Marine Patrol officer, but there’s plenty of shape, massive shape, to his shoulders and upper arms. The telescopic camera makes his face unmistakably clear—

  Nestor’s brain and his entire central nervous system have become numb with something far more powerful than excitement, namely, fateful suspense. ::::::That’s me, all right, but ¡Dios mío!—Fate is sweeping me toward… What?::::::

  Business newscaster Tony provides the voice-over: “And this is a Miami Marine Patrol officer named Nestor Camacho in action climbing a pulley cable of the seventy-foot-high foremast of a pleasure schooner on Biscayne Bay—that’s the Rickenbacker Causeway you see there—to rescue, some call it—or arrest, deport, and send to his doom, many of Camacho’s Cuban compatriots call it—the small figure you can just make out sitting in a little bucket seat up on the very top of the mast.”

  In a short, highly edited sequence, the video footage shows ::::::me!:::::: and ::::::my:::::: exploits seizing ::::::my:::::: quarry and hauling him down the cable to safety.

  Peripheral vision alerted Nestor to Yevgeni staring at ::::::me:::::: with intensity to the max. He didn’t dare return the gaze, however. He was having a hard enough time controlling the tremor of elation sweeping through his nervous system.

  The voice-over man, Tony, is saying, “Every bodybuilder in South Florida—and their number is legion—has seen only one thing in this ‘rescue’… or ‘arrest’… call it what you will… and that’s this young Miami cop’s physique and sheer strength.” The Herald’s original photograph of Nestor’s bare upper body appears briefly.

  “Since then,” business newscaster Tony continues, “awe has turned into a frenzy in the fitness industry. Four days ago, the same young officer, Nestor Camacho, performed another amazing feat of strength when he overpowered and arrested this six-foot-five, 275-pound accused drug dealer who was in the process of choking a brother officer to death in Overtown.” On-screen is a newspaper photograph of a hulking, beaten, bleary-eyed, head-down, handcuffed-behind-the-back TyShawn Edwards as he is led into custody by three Miami cops whom he dwarfs in size. “The rush to ropes among fitness devotees began the moment the young cop climbed to the top of the mast—but they can’t find any ropes to rush to and climb. In all of Miami’s metropolitan region there seems to be only one proper rope-climber’s rope—and it’s at the gym where Nestor Camacho has been working out for the past four years. It’s in Hialeah, and it’s called—are you ready for this?—‘Rodriguez’s Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym’… That’s right, ‘Rodriguez’s Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym.’ Channel Twenty-One’s Earl Mungo is standing by in Hialeah now with Mr. Jaime Rodriguez in the gym.”

  Blip. On the screen there he is, Rodriguez, standing next to the TV reporter, Earl Mungo. The suddenly newsworthy rope, one and a half inches in diameter, is hanging—prominently—maybe eight feet back. Magnetized by the presence of a TV crew, a crowd of mostly muscular bodybuilders, Rodriguez’s clients, has gathered around, three deep. Rodriguez is wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt so tight, it looks like it’s been painted on.

  Earl Mungo says, “Jaime, do you have any idea what a ruckus this rope here has kicked up in the South Florida fitness-center business?”

  “Oh, man, tell me about it. It’s gotten wild! We getting run over by every gym rat in South Florida!” Laughter. “And I’m telling you, ever since Nestor took out that giant the other day, it’s gone crazy. So many people want to join this gym, I’ve had to hire all these girls for the office just to keep track of things, and never mind the new trainers. I’m telling you, sometime I think I got a madhouse on my hands.” Appreciative laughter and whistles from the boys. One yells out, “Yo! You go, Madhouse!” More laughter.

  “What is it, exactly, that makes rope-climbing such a great exercise?”

  “You’d have to combine five or six weight exercises to get the results you can get from rope-climbing, and even then you won’t get them all. You’re using your biceps—I guess that’s obvious—but it also gives a helluva workout to a big muscle a lot of people never heard of because you can’t see it. It’s called the brachialis, and it’s underneath the biceps. If you exercise it right, you’ll really be able to make a muscle.” He lifts his arm and makes a muscle that looks like a big steep rock. “It’s very hard to develop the brachs if you’re just using weights, but in rope-climbing you’re giving it a workout all the way up. Nestor has been working out here on this rope for four years solid, and man, I’m telling you, it’s some kinda paying off!”

  Earl Mungo, beaming, says into the camera, “Well, Tony, Bart, there you have it—rope-climbing is some kinda paying off! To bodybuilders it’s like the introduction of the iPhone. Everybody jes’ gotta have it. And it all began where I’m standing right now—in Hialeah, in Rodriguez’s—I’m sorry, guys, but I gotta try it once anyway: Rodriguez’s Ññññññooooooooooooo!!! Qué Gym!”

  The anchorman was still reciting his segue to whatever was coming next—when Yevgeni said in a reverent, astounded, hushed voice: “Nestor, I have no idea—all this time I have no idea you are… who you are… the policeman who is bring that man down from the mast. I saw you myself on television and then you come live here, and still I have no idea it is you! You’re famous! My roommate—my roommate?—I live with a famous person!”

  Nestor said, “I’m not famous, Yevgeni. I’m just a cop.”

  “No—”

  “I just did what I was ordered to do, and if that turns out the right way, the cop is a ‘hero’… for about ten minutes. He’s not famous. ‘Famous’ is something else.”

  “No, no, no, no, Nestor! You just saw it! Fa
mous is causing the crazy time in a whole industry! Famous is being the icon for a whole lot of people!”

  “Well, thanks… I guess,” said Nestor, who had only a vague idea what icon meant. He directed a single dismissive flip of his hand toward the TV screen, that and a sneer, then turned away from it entirely. “They gotta hype everything, that bunch a monkeys.” ::::::To lie in behalf of modesty is not really lying, is it… There’s something generous… and thoughtful… about it… but what if those monkeys have just spoken Truth?… Can I prove from the evidence that they just made that up?… An icon? I gotta google that.::::::

  As soon as he was alone, he did. He thought about it and thought about it. It was a quarter to 2:00 a.m. by the time he went to bed.

  He fell asleep at once, and his dreams sailed along on a great tide of serotonin.

  ¡Caliente! Caliente baby… Got plenty fuego in yo’ caja china… Means you needs a length a Hose put in it… Ain’ no maybe ’bout it… Hose knows you burnin’ up wit’out it… Don’tcha—Bulldog was halfway through the song by the time Nestor managed to ascend from deep, deep down in a hypnopompic fog and realize try deny it that masculine voice was his iPhone on the floor beside the mattress—

  —What time is it? ’Cause Hose knows you tryin’ a buy it The radiation hands on the little clock said 4:45 a.m. But Hose only gives it free and for about the fiftieth time he castigated himself for ever programming the phone with a song To his fav’rite char-ree-tee. Who would be calling at 4:45 a.m.?! Why?! Hose’ fav’rite cha-ree-tee. He managed to prop himself up on one elbow ’At’s me and find the right ’At’s me, see? and find the right An’ ’at’s me button Yo yo! and Yo yo! Mismo! push—