but he couldn’t think of the words that might calm him and coax him down. “Credible threat”… That’s it! He’ll tell him about “credible threat”… A refugee like him gets a Coast Guard hearing, right there on the deck, and if they believe he was endangered by a credible threat, he would get asylum. The word for “credible”—what’s the damned word for credible? maybe the same as English?—cray dee blay? But “threat”… threat… What was the damned word for threat? He knew he once knew it… There it went!… Right through his brain, before he could catch it. It had a z in it a z in it a z in it… Almost had it again!… but once more it was gone. For that matter, what about an official hearing?… He had to say something—anything—and so he ransacked his brain and looked up at the man’s face and said, “La historia—” He caught himself just in time! What was happening to him? A famous quote from Fidel Castro was what his poor desperate brain had almost blurted out!
Boos, taunts, every known loud expression of vilification rained down from the people packed against the railings of the bridge.
The man looked down at him in an anxious way and said, “¿Como?” trying to sort out what Nestor has said.
Maddening was what it was!… climbed sixty feet up a rope without using his legs—but he couldn’t make himself understood. He needed to get closer. He started climbing the rope again, hand over hand. He glances up at the poor drowned rat. His face is… aghast. How can he tell him he’s not coming up to arrest him? He can’t think of the words! So he stops climbing and wraps his legs around the rope to free his right hand to give a reassuring signal. But what signal? All he can think of is the peace sign… He spreads his index finger and his middle finger to form a V. The man’s face, now no more than four feet above Nestor, changes from aghast… to terrified. He starts to rise from the bosun’s chair. Jesus Christ, what does he think he’s doing? He’s up on top of a seventy-foot mast with nothing to support him but a tiny bosun’s chair—and he wants to stand. He tries to anchor his feet on the pulley housing. Now he’s out of his seat, teetering in a crouched position atop a mast that’s pitching on a choppy sea… Nestor can see the worst about to happen. He climbs seventy feet up a rope—hand over hand, without using his legs—only to cause a poor refugee to fall to his death—and whose fault is it? Nestor Camacho’s! Who has made the Miami Police Marine Patrol—hell, the entire force—look like the brutal, heedless persecutors and killers of a poor man whose only sin was trying to put one foot on American soil! Who has committed this heartless crime? Nestor Camacho, infamy incarnate!
With two furious hand-over-hand hoists he reaches the bosun’s chair and tries to catch the man’s leg—or even his foot—too late! The man pitches forward—to his death! A ferocious fire erupts inside Nestor’s skull… No! The man has pitched forward onto the cable. He’s trying to slide down it backward… This poor skinny emaciated gray-brown slurry rat—he’ll kill himself! The cable runs at a steep angle from the mast to beyond the bow to the bowsprit… more than a hundred feet. Nestor crouches in the bosun’s seat… For an instant he can see the mob on the bridge. He’s level with them now… three, four, five deep… Sunbursts! Sunbursts! Sunbursts! Sunbursts! They’re exploding off cameras! Heads are jumping up to get a better view of the show… a sign! One of them has a crude sign—from where?… written how?… COPS FIDELISTAS TRAIDORES… never been hated by so many people. He looks down… makes him dizzy… like standing on the edge of the roof of a ten-story building. The water’s a sheet of blue-grayish steel with sunbursts dancing all over it. Boats!… small boats around the schooner… from out of nowhere!… bloodsucking bugs… a boat—a sign. Can it really say what he thinks it says?… ¡ASYLUM AHORA!—
—all of this in an instant… Guilt! Fear! Horror!… but the greatest of these is Guilt! Must not let their hero die before their eyes! He swings down onto the cable… no use trying to catch up with him by sliding… Instinctively, in the mode they used in training camp, he starts swinging from the