that he pinned Nestor again with his ironic, tongue-in-cheek, teeth-baring stare, interrupting it only long enough to say again, “Just… a… little… family… disagreement…”
Now all four of them had their eyes pinned on Nestor. Yeya had become hysterical.
“What did you do to your father?! Your own father! It wasn’t enough, what you did to that poor boy yesterday? Now you have to turn on your own father?!”
Nestor was bewildered… couldn’t get a word out… just stood there with his mouth open. His mother was looking at him in a way she had never looked at him in his whole life! Even Mami!
When he found his voice, he was almost as hysterical as Yeya. “Tell her the truth, Dad! Tell her what really happened! You’re—you’re—twisting it all around! In the name of God, tell the truth! Dad, you’re—you’re—”
He didn’t help his own cause by breaking it off right there, wheeling about, showing them his back, rushing to his room to pick up his car keys—bolting for the front door without so much as glancing at the rest of his family.
Bang—he slammed the front door of La Casita de Camacho behind him.
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