way they do:::::: “seeing a whole regiment of Cuban cops giving them the finger. You know what I mean?” ::::::Christ, did I really just say you know what I mean?:::::: “What we find works better is, we do what we call ‘relieve ’m from duty.’ The cop has to give up his gun and get relegated to a desk job, and we announce it very loud—once. And everybody gets it right away—everybody. Everybody realizes that taking a cop’s gun and badge away from him is like a public castration. After that nobody knows and nobody cares if he still exists. He vanishes. He’s the living dead.” He stares into the Mayor’s eyes some more. He tries to look as sincere as any man who ever lived.
The Mayor looks at the city manager and at Portuondo, the flack. They’re trying, but the boys Friday can’t pick up any cue as to what they now think. They just stare back at him like five mugs on a shelf.
Finally the Mayor turns back to the Chief. “Okay. But they damn well better vanish. You know what I mean?… If I hear so much as a hiccup out of either one of them, somebody else is gonna vanish. And you… know… what I mean.”
Two hours later, which is to say about 10:30 a.m., in Dr. Norman Lewis’s office, nothing could have been further from Magdalena’s thoughts than YouTube or her old Hialeah beau, Nestor Camacho. To her, all her juvenile days had receded into a dim and dimmer, outworn, outcast, outclassed past. This morning she was obsessed with the brilliant dawn of… him in her life. He had invited her and Norman to dinner on Friday, just a few days from now, at Chez Toi. Restaurants in Miami didn’t come any grander than Chez Toi, or so Norman informed her. She had never heard of it before. Chez Toi!! Norman went on about it in tones of socially religious awe. Oh, he was excited, too, Norman was, but not even remotely the way she was.
Sometimes her heart literally, literally, beat faster just thinking about it… which is to say, about Sergei. She could actually feel it speed up beneath her breastbone from fear of failure in his eyes… What should she wear? She didn’t possess one thread of clothing that could possibly impress these Chez Toi people… or him. She’d just have to go à la cubana… flash plenty of cubana cleavage… turn her eye sockets into nightclub-black pools with two gleaming orbs floating in them… have her long hair cascading down to her shoulders as full-bodied as she and Fructis shampoo, conditioner, and a Conair hair dryer could possibly manage… turn her dress, any dress, into nothing but a sheet of Cling Wrap around her breasts, her waist, her hips, her “butt,” and her upper thighs… only the upper thighs… at least eighteen inches above the knee… She’ll lift this whole production up close to six inches on stiletto heels. Sexy—that was the idea. Turn it on… the Body! Let sex override all the sophistication she didn’t have.
Or would she just look cheap and trashy? Her spirits plummeted. Who was she anyway? Who was she supposed to be at this high-class dinner, just an employee of Dr. Lewis, the generous Dr. Lewis who took employees to events like this? Or should she go in the other direction and intimate that there was a lot more than that and thereby let Sergei and the world know that a celebrity like Norman Lewis was mad for her, nurse or otherwise?
Plummmmet, went her confidence again. Maybe she was only deluding herself about the whole thing… Sergei hadn’t said a single word to signal any actual interest, not one spoken word… He had merely poured a certain look into her eyes and surreptitiously pressed his fingers into her palm… Maybe that was just the way he was around women, a chronic flirt… Yes, but pressing a girl’s palm with his fingers like that—was so strange that it had to mean something… and he had poured that certain look into her eyes not once, but three times… and her heart beat on, beat on, beat on, beneath her breastbone, beat so loudly that—what if Norman could actually hear it? She had reached the point of paranoia… She mustn’t let it be known in any way that she was even looking forward to the evening. Whenever Norman mentioned it, she had gone to great lengths to appear indifferent.