a member of an underground organization called El Solvente, the Solvent. But I was here until eleven o’clock last night, Mr. Topping, calling everybody I could think of, and nobody had ever heard of Hubert Cienfuegos or El Solvente.”
“Do you speak Spanish?”
“Yes, sir, or pretty well, anyway.”
“How do they decide about the credible threat and asylum?” said Ed.
“It’s all up to the one man, the hearing officer. He either believes them or doesn’t believe them. He does it all right there on the deck. That’s the entire proceeding, Mr. Topping. It’s over in no time.”
“How does he decide?”
“I don’t know that much about it, Mr. Topping, but I gather two things can disqualify the person. One is, if they’re too vague, they can’t come up with dates or a timeline, or they can’t tell you who exactly is threatening them. The other is, if the story’s too, you know—too pat. It sounds rehearsed, or memorized, and they’re delivering it by rote? Things like that? The hearing officer can’t subpoena witnesses. So it’s a judgment call, I guess you’d say.”
“Why do they do this on the deck of a ship?” said Ed. “Like this fellow yesterday—Cienfuegos. Why didn’t they bring him ashore and have a hearing—I mean, after all that chaos?”
“If the person’s Cuban and they bring them into a police station or a holding pen or a jail or anywhere else, then they get asylum automatically. They’ve set foot on American soil. If they’ve committed a crime in American waters, they’ll be prosecuted, but they can’t send them back to Cuba.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, sir. And if the person has done nothing more than try to get into the country illegally, the only thing that happens is, they’re sentenced to a year’s probation and they walk away a free person. The Cubans have a sort of most-favored-migration status.”
::::::person person person they they they they they them them them them I fucking don’t want to believe it was Yale that made my man here mangle the goddamn English language this way, although most-favored migration is a pretty good play on most-favored nation:::::: but all he said was:
“So this guy Cienfuegos’s goose is cooked, and he’s out of here.”
“Yes, sir. But my source told me they may not say anything about it for four or five days or even a week. They want to give all the protestors some time to cool off.”
“That would be great!” said Stan, who was so excited he actually sat up straight. “If we go with it right away, we’ll have the story to ourselves.” Stan stood up… straight, too, for him. “Okay, let’s get going, John. We got a lotta work to do!”
Stan began heading for the door. John Smith got up, too, but remained standing there and said to Stan, “Would it be okay if I mention the Korolyov story to Mr. Topping?”
Stan turned his eyes upward and exhaled a wearier-than-plain-weary sigh and looked at Ed. Ed broke into another big smile, the smile of a man who has Fate going his way. “Sure,” he said to John Smith, “let’s hear it. Korolyov’s a real piece of work. Talk about—”
Ed noticed a dubious look, obviously for his benefit only, passing across Stan’s face like a shadow. But a happy man doesn’t worry about other people’s shadows.
“—colorful,” he continued. “I happened to be seated practically next to him at that dinner the city and the museum gave in his honor last year. My God, seventy million dollars’ worth of paintings he had donated, and they must have had half of them hung in that dining room! What a show that was… all these Russian paintings lining the walls… Kandinskys, Maleviches… uhhh…” He couldn’t remember any more names.
“Some Larionovs,” said John Smith, “Goncharovas, Chagalls, a Pirosmanashvili, and—”
Ed pulled a face. “Piro—who?”
“He was sort of a Russian Henri Rousseau,” said John Smith. “Died in 1918.”
::::::Christ, Pirowhatsavili?:::::: Ed decided to ascend from the level of the details. “Anyway, they’re worth at least seventy million dollars, and that’s according to the low estimates. No, Korolyov is a great subject. But we had a big profile of him not all that long ago. What would your angle be?”
Cloud after cloud was now rolling across Stan’s face as he stood behind John Smith.
“Well, sir, for a start, the Kandinskys and Maleviches are fakes.”
Ed cocked his head and lifted one eyebrow so high, so high, the eyeball looked big as a doorknob, and lowered the other eyebrow until it completely shut that eye, and said,