and there she was… he slid his hands up her rib cage—
The line to Amélia went down, vanished, became irrelevant from that moment on.
18
Na Zdrovia!
The very moment Sergei Korolyov picked up Magdalena in his Aston Martin to drive to Hallandale for dinner, Nestor, accompanied by John Smith, found a parking place on a block where dilapidation reigned. Nestor had never seen so many windows with sheets of metal nailed over them in his life. He and John Smith had different takes on this part of town, now called “Wynwood,” which suggested lufts and wafts of zephyrs on an ancestral estate’s horticultured sylvan glade, where Igor maintained his official studio, his out-front studio, so to speak, the one with a telephone listing. Wynwood bordered on Overtown, and Nestor, being a cop, saw it as a worn-out old industrial area full of decrepit one-, two-, and three-story warehouses that weren’t worth rehabilitating… and a rat’s nest of Puerto Rican petty criminals who weren’t, either. John Smith, on the other hand, saw it as Miami’s version of a curious new social phenomenon—and oh, yes! real estate phenomenon—of the late twentieth century: the “art district.”
Art districts had popped up all over the place… SoHo (south of Houston Street) in New York… SoWa (south of Washington Street) in Boston… Downcity in Providence, Rhode Island… Shockoe Slip in Richmond, Virginia… and all of them were born the same way. Some enterprising real estate developer starts buying up a superannuated section of town full of dilapidated old loft buildings. Then he whistles for the artists—talent or utter lack of it makes no difference—and offers them large lofts at laughably low rents… lets it be known that this is the new artists quarter… and in three years or less… Get out of the way!… Here they come!… droves of well-educated and well-heeled people skipping and screaming with nostalgie de la boue, “nostalgia for the mud”… eager to inhale the emanations of Art and other Higher Things amid the squalor of it all.
In Wynwood even the palm trees were bohemian… poor raggedy strays… one over here… another one over there… and all of them mangy. The nostalgia-for-the-mudders wouldn’t have had it any other way. They didn’t want grand allées of stately palms. Grand allées didn’t give off emanations of Art and other Higher Things amid the squalor.
At this very moment Nestor and John Smith were on a freight elevator, bound for Igor’s studio on the top floor of a three-story warehouse some developer had turned into loft condominiums. All the elevators in the building were freight elevators… operated by sullen Mexicans who never said word one to anybody. There you had a reliable indicator of illegal-alien status. They didn’t want to draw any attention to themselves whatsoever. The nostalgia-for-the-mudders loved the freight elevators, despite the fact that they were ponderous, slow, and old-fashioned. Old-fashioned freight elevators gave off some of the nostalgie-de-la-muddiest emanations of all—the heavy electric groan of the industrial-strength pulley machinery overcoming inertia… the operator’s stone-sullen Mexican face…
Nestor had a digital camera in his hands… studded with dials, meters, and gauges he’d never seen or heard of before. He held it up in front of John Smith as if it were some utterly unidentifiable foreign object. “What’s this supposed to accomplish? I don’t even know what you’re supposed to look through.”
“You don’t have to look through anything,” said John Smith. “All you have to do is look at this image right here… and then you press this button. Actually—forget the image and just press the button. All we need is that little whine it makes. You only need to sound like a photographer.”
Nestor shook his head. He couldn’t stand not knowing what he was doing… and he couldn’t stand it when John Smith and not himself was running the operation, despite John Smith’s smooth performance at the Advanced Yentas home up in Hallandale. John Smith still insisted on this business of using outright lies as reporting devices! He had called Igor on his listed telephone number and said the Herald had assigned him to do a story on the recent upsurge in realistic art in Miami… and people kept mentioning him, Igor, as one of the important figures in this movement. Igor turned out to be so vain, so eager to rise up from out of obscurity… he was ready to believe it, despite the fact that his work had appeared only in two largely ignored group shows… and that there had been no such “upsurge” and