a Wet Foot. He never reached land or anything attached to land, like the bridge. So he can get sent right back to Cuba. Did you see the way El Nuevo Herald played it?”
“I’ve got it here, but I’ve been waiting to get it translated.”
“The headline says ‘¡DETENIDO!’ ” said Stan. “You know, with the two exclamation points, before and aft? ‘¡DETENIDO! ¡A DIECIOCHO METROS DE LIBERTAD!’ ‘Arrested! Eighteen meters from freedom!’ ”
“Sixty feet is eighteen meters?”
“Almost exactly. Sounds shorter, right?”
“What do we have for a follow-up?” said Ed.
“The big question now is what happens to the wet foot,” said Stan. “Right now he’s in the custody of the Coast Guard. The police took him from their Safe Boat and turned him over to a Coast Guard cutter. John mentions that in the story.”
“What does the Coast Guard do with him?”
“I’ve got John working on that right now,” said Stan. “He says he has some contacts over at the ICE he can get to talk to him off the record.” Stan began chuckling. That made his bony caved-in chest rock in a curious way. “If they send the guy back, there’s gonna be a whole lotta busted balls in Miami. I wouldn’t wanna be that cop, Officer Nestor Camacho.”
::::::ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.:::::: Ed was listening to Stan but at the same time ::::::Well, I’ll—be—damned… a Yalie… I wonder if he worked on the Daily News:::::: referring to the undergraduate newspaper, the Yale Daily News, which Ed had worked on himself. Blip!—and he was at Broadway and York Street in New Haven, looking at the campus… all those magnificent gothic piles of stone and stained glass casement windows and massive slate roofs and arches and gargoyles, the sacred tower of the library, Sterling Memorial.
::::::What did Stan just say about the kid and the ICE? Ahh, yes… the kid knows people at the ICE.::::::
“Stan, have him come in here a minute.”
“You mean John?”
“Yeah. I’d like to know exactly how he plans to proceed.”
Stan shrugged. “Well, okay. But I should tell you ahead of time: He may go into something else, an idea he’s breaking my balls with, a story about Sergei Korolyov and the new museum.”
In due course, in came a young man who stopped diffidently just inside the door. To Ed he seemed surprisingly tall, six-one or -two. He was also surprisingly handsome… in a tender coming-of-age sort of way. Otherwise he fit Stan’s description. He had a baby face, all right, and a head of longish, thatchy blond hair.
“Come on in,” Ed said with a big smile, beckoning the young reporter.
“Yes, sir,” said the punctilious John Smith.
—he blushed! No two ways about it! His smooth, pale, utterly lineless face turned almost scarlet.
He looked toward City Editor Stan. His expression was a question: “Why?”
“I think Mr. Topping would like to know a little about what we have on the Coast Guard’s decision,” said Stan.
Another violent blush. “Yes, sir.” He directed the yes at Stan and the sir at Ed Topping.
“Pull up a chair and have a seat,” said Ed, gesturing toward an armchair. He gave the kid another editor in chieftain’s big smile.
John Smith pulled up the chair and sat down with both feet flat on the floor and a posture so erectly correct, his back never touched the chair’s. He wore no necktie, but he did wear a shirt with a collar, in his case a white button-down shirt. That was about the best you could hope for these days, a shirt with a collar. Not only that, he wore a navy blazer—could that be linen?—a pair of khaki pants freshly pressed with a crease (didn’t see that every day around this office), and a pair of well-polished dark-brown moccasins. Most of the male employees of the Herald had no idea what shoe polish was, evidently.
::::::A very preppy boy I have here, a very preppy Yale man:::::: Ed thought. ::::::St. Paul’s preppy, at that.::::::
Ed picked up the paper and displayed it full-length, just as he had for Stan Friedman.
“Well,” he said, “you think your story got enough attention?”
John Smith’s lips seemed to be on the verge of a smile. Instead, the blood rushed to his cheeks again, and he said, “Yes, sir.”
That was his third yes, sir in a row and so far he hadn’t said another word. The moment went empty with silence. So Ed rushed into the vacuum. “How did you manage to get to the young cop, Camacho? As far as we know, nobody else got