two types. Immediately! There are those who have the will to be daring and dominate, and those who don’t have it. Those who don’t, like John Smith here, spend half their early years trying to work out a modus vivendi with those who do… and anything short of subservience will be okay. But there are boys from the weaker side of the divide who grow up with the same dreams as the stronger… and I’m as sure about this as anything in the world: The boy standing before me, John Smith, is one of them. They, too, dream of power, money, fame, and beautiful lovers. Boys like this kid grow up instinctively realizing that language is an artifact, like a sword or a gun. Used skillfully, it has the power to… well, not so much achieve things as to tear things down—including people… including the boys who came out on the strong side of that sheerly dividing line. Hey, that’s what liberals are! Ideology? Economics? Social justice? Those are nothing but their prom outfits. Their politics were set for life in the schoolyard at age six. They were the weak, and forever after they resented the strong. That’s why so many journalists are liberals! The very same schoolyard events that pushed them toward the written word… pushed them toward “liberalism.” It’s as simple as that! And talk about irony! If you want power through words in journalism, rhetorical genius is not enough. You need content, you need new material, you need… news, in a word… and you have to find it yourself. You, from the weak side, can develop such a craving for new information, you end up doing things that would terrify any strong man from the other side of the divide. You will put yourself in dangerous situations amid dangerous people… with relish. You will go alone, without any form of backup… eagerly! You—you with your weak manner—end up approaching the vilest of the vile with a demand. “You have some information, and I need it. And I deserve it! And I will have it!”::::::
All this Ed could see in the baby face before him. Maybe these Russian thugs or whatever he was talking about were as brutal as he said. Ed himself had no idea. But he could see John Smith sticking his baby face and blond hair and blue eyes and great slathers of naïveté right in their faces and demanding information about Sergei Korolyov because he needs it, deserves it, and will have it.
::::::Well, I don’t need it, and I don’t deserve a big, messy, pseudo-righteous, money-hemorrhaging fight staged solely for the greater glory of a kid named John Smith, and I won’t have it.::::::
But there’s something closer to home that you’d rather not think about, isn’t there, Ed… If one of these little vipers from the weak side of the playground somehow did expose Korolyov and his “seventy million dollars’ worth” of early Russian Modernist work as a con artist pulling off a colossal fraud, it would make the entire Miami establishment look like a clusterfuck!… The fools had put $500 million into a world-class cultural destination now worth precisely nothing! They would all become world-class jokes, utterly lamebrained, unbelievably gullible culture strivers! The horse laugh would resound ’round the world!
And who would become the most laughable of all, the most pitiable and pathetic—turning four generations of Toppings, five if you counted Fiver, into a long, drawn-out, scabid dog story?
And he was supposed to help his own minions drown him in shame?… ::::::Stand up for yourself, man! Get tough for once in your life! “Real journalism?” Fuck that!::::::
4
Magdalena
Nestor took a deep breath… a free breath… in the open air of a nice clear Saturday morning. He glanced at the watch on his wrist, a big cop-sized watch packed with digital systems to burn. It was 7:00 a.m. exactly… unnaturally quiet out here on the street—good!… nobody stirring except for the women hosing down the concrete… a regular two-note concerto of spray hitting a hard surface. ¡SHEEEahHHHH ahHHHHSSHEEEE! He looks about… two doors away, Señora Díaz. He’s known her ever since the day he moved into this casita. Thank God, a sweet, kind friend from the free world! It makes him happy, just seeing her there with a garden hose in her hand, spraying concrete. Oh so very cheerfully he sings out, “Buenos días, Señora Díaz!”
She looked up and started to smile. But only one side of her mouth moved. The other side stayed put,