Valley of Bones

Seven

Do you have any brains left,” she asked into his ear, “or shall we continue?”

“No, I think you got the last neuron,” said Paz. “And let me say that was quite a performance. Don’t they have fucking in Iowa?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Willa Shaftel disdainfully. “All I do is read and write. No, I tell a lie. Writers are horny creatures, and I have dabbled, but one has always the sense that they’re collecting material, and that your every spasm is going to wind up in some novel.”

“As mine did in yours, I couldn’t help noticing.”

“Oh, yeah, but that wasn’t serious. It was just to make a shitload of money so I could escape from the poet’s poverty ghetto.” A long sigh. “My God, I haven’t been trulynailed like that in a coon’s age.” She stretched luxuriously and picked several of his chest hairs from her exiguous breasts.

“My pleasure,” he said. “Anyway, you did good writing. I liked that line about the herds. ‘There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.’ “

” ‘Through them the belled herds travel at will. Long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.’ Yes. Did you actually read the whole book?”

“Yes, but the words don’t stick in my mind the way they do when you say them. It’s because I’m still in touch with the primitive oral tradition.”

“As you so amply demonstrated this evening,” she said. “Is this paradisical or what?” she asked the world. “He’s not a wuss, packs a rod, and likes my poetry. A ten.” She laughed and hoisted herself up on an elbow to look at him more closely. He had a more sober expression on his face than she was used to seeing there.

“Something the matter?” she asked.

“No.” Meaning yes. “I was just thinking about something you said once. You were going on about how great I was, like you just did, one of your complimentary litanies…”

“Complimentary litanies is good.”

“Yeah, all about how I was polite but not a sensitive New Age man, buy a girl champagne, show her a good time, a great lay, albeit with a penis of only moderate size, and then you said there was a forty-foot-wide state highway sign over me that read DON’T GET SERIOUS, or something like that.”

“Yes, DANGER! HEARTBREAK AHEAD. I remember. It was the night of one of the murders, when I went out to the crime scene and got you in trouble.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I was thinking that I should take down the sign.”

“Really.”

“Yes, and you remember something else you said around back then, about Afro-Cuban-Jewish babies. When you were leaving for Iowa?”

“Ye-es?” Cautiously.

“Well, we should have some.”

Her mouth dropped momentarily and then she laughed. “Jimmy Paz, are youproposing to me?”

He swallowed. Most of the blood seemed to be gone from his forebrain. “In a manner of speaking. The fact is that for, what is it now, fourteen months, you’ve been my only, I guess you could say, girlfriend. I think about you a lot, and not just lustful stuff…anticipation. And I’ve been thinking, okay, if not now, when?” He paused to check out her face. Paz was a professional judge of facial expressions, but he couldn’t quite read hers now. Her eyes were wide, bright, and sharply focused, and there was a faint rosy blush on her cheeks. Romantic fascination? Or horrified traffic-accident fascination? He added, “I mean I didn’t get a ring or anything. I wanted to sound you out first.”

“That was wise,” she said. “But then prudence has always struck me as one of your virtues.” She groaned softly and wriggled half-upright, so that she was leaning against the headboard. “Gosh, I’m a little stunned. I had no idea. I mean, I thought we were great fuck-buddies and all, and now this. But it’s not justtime, is it? Not just, ‘But at my back I always hear…’ “

” ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.’ No, not completely. I changed, more than I thought I had, since that summer, you know, with the killings. I used to?I mean this can’t come as a surprise to you?have multiple girlfriends.”

“Yes, I recall, having been of their number.”

“Right. Three, four, five at any one time, up front about it and all, no sneaking, and either it was right for them or not, but I played it pretty straight, and I don’t think anyone got hurt. Fun and games for healthy young adults, right? But since…what happened and all that, I don’t know. I tried to, like, get back on the circuit, but nothing doing. I couldn’t…I mean fun and fucking and fun…I started to feel like a jerk, like one of those assholes out on the Beach, forty-eight, on their second peel job, with the Tom Jones shirt and the gold chains. That’s not me. So what is? And like I just said, the more I started thinking about that, the more I started thinking about you.”

“And why me particularly, from out of the thousands? Now’s the time for any litany of compliments you may have prepared.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I like you. We’re funny together. You got your own life, you wouldn’t be hanging on me to make you feel like a real person. Some of the people I work with have wives like that.” He paused and added, “My mom likes you.”

“Oh,there’s a selling point!”

“Laugh if you want, but Margarita is a great judge of people. Plus you’re notlike her.”

“No, I’m not. Continue…”

“You’re smart as shit. You tell me poetry out of your head. I love your hair. And your skin. And your mouth. You have the hottest mouth in the world. And, finally, I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that we are sexually compatible.”

“Mm. Of course, it’s easy to be sexually compatible when there’s nothing else on the table.” Ten seconds later, without warning, she expelled a loud sob and then began to cry woefully.

Paz sat up in bed and held her while she trembled and dripped tears and snot down his chest. “What’s wrong? What’d I say?” he kept saying, but for once she couldn’t find the words.

A little later, when she had gone to the bathroom and washed her face and dressed in the hotel’s white terry cloth robe, she sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “Well, that was unexpected. I’m sorry.”

“No problem. Let me guess. You like me, but not enough to marry me, and you didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I’m assuming now it wasn’t tears of happiness and we’re going to rent the hall.”

“No and no. No hall. And no, it’s not about you at all. Oh, how to explain this so it doesn’t sound like total lunacy? Come on, Shaftel, use your vaunted word power! It’s like this: I don’t have a heart. No, that’s wrong, I have, but not one like you have. Not like regular people.”

“Like the tin woodman?”

“Almost. The part that in normal people is occupied by living in a couple, loving, having children, making a home, is consumed by what I do. I fall in love, I have affairs. Hell, I’m in love withyou, if it comes to that. You’re my absolutely favorite man in the world right now. But it doesn’tmean anything, Jimmy. Because I’m never going tobe any different than I am now. All the growth and change is going to be in connection with the poetry and not within a couple. It’s a little like being a nun, the kind that gets bleeding palms. And, you know, I’m on my super very best behavior when I’m with you. You haven’t seen it working, when it’s really voracious, when I stop washing and combing my hair and talking to people, and I eat cold chili out of a can. I’m talking weeks here. I’d kill a baby, I really think I would, just leave it in a car or in the bath and forget about it, like you read about.”

“What, that’s a rule, poets don’t have kids?”

“Few do, and the ones they have are generally sad ones. It’s probably not as bad for males. They can havewives. You’re not a wife. Shit, I don’t know, maybe it’s the ghost of Sylvia Plath. Or Virginia Woolf…”

Paz stared at her. Virginia Woof? Fuck Virginia Woolfe! She wasrejecting him? Fucking blowing him off? Smash her face. Smash her, break her nose, knock out her teeth, this fucking fat, white bitch this fuckinggusano maggot was rejectinghim? Stick his gun up her fuckingcunt…

“Jimeeeee!” A high wail, a shriek.

Somehow Willa had slid off the bed and was now cringing in the corner of the room, on the other side of the night table. Her face, normally pale, was skim milk blue, except for heavy red marks around her neck and her eyes were rimmed with tears.

“What!” he cried. “What’s wrong?”

“What’swrong? Jesus Christ, Jimmy, I thought you were going to kill me. It was like fucking Jekyll and Hyde. You grabbed my neck and you had your fist all balled up and cocked and you had an expression on your face…it was like something out of my goddamnedbook.” She rose shakily to her feet. “I guess you’re back to normal now, ha ha. What happened? A little problem with handling rejection?”

But Paz had no desire to return to badinage. He felt a wash of self-contempt, mixed with confusion and not a little terror. He started grabbing up his clothes and jamming his limbs into them. He was sticky and badly wanted to take a shower, but it didn’t seem the thing to do just then.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I drove you literally crazy.”

He stopped and looked at her. “No, I’m the one should be sorry. I don’t know what the fuck just happened, but I don’t think I should be alone with you right now. I’ll call you,” he said, picking up his jacket. He started for the door and then made himself stop and give her a nice hug.

“Shouldn’t we sort of talk about this?”

“Nah, I don’t think so. Sorry.”

“The search for Miss Right begins immediately?”

“I guess.” He embraced her again. “No hard feelings, Willa,” he said into her hair. “You’ll send me your next book.”

“I’ll do that,” she said to his back and the closing door.

Paz went to his car and sat there for a while, watching his hands tremble. Gradually this passed as the rationalizing part of his mind, an industrial-strength unit, reinterpreted what had just occurred into something more normal, a mere flash of anger, mistaken by a hypersensitive and overimaginative woman as being something weird and alien. This done, he fell into a desperate numbness. It had simply never occurred to him that he would get turned down. Willa liked him, she’d said so, they got along fine. Everyoneknew that girls wanted a permanent hookup, just like everyone knew that gravity sucked. Meeting the contrary was like observing an object falling upward. He noticed the yellow poetry book on the passenger seat. Suddenly seized by fury again, he grabbed it and flung it into the dark. Two minutes later he cursed himself, went out into the night-deserted street, and picked it up again. It was lying open, facedown, its bright yellow cover looking like a painting mistake on the yellow traffic line. He stood there in the middle of South Bayshore and read the poem on the page that had fallen open:

“Nothing lasts”?

how bitterly the thought attends each loss

“Nothing lasts”?

a promise also of consolation

Grief and hope

the skipping rope’s two ends,

twin daughters of impatience.

One wears a dress of wool, the other cotton.

Paz felt a chill that was unconnected with the freshening bay breeze. He didn’t like it when books fell open with meaningful messages showing. Even more irksome was that he actually felt consoled by reading it. He got back in his car and drove to his apartment, where he made himself a stiff drink of freezing vodka and lime. He changed into cutoffs and a sweatshirt and sat in a lawn chair in his backyard, chewing on the taste of the drink, dozing fitfully while the soft Florida night passed away.

When the sun was fully risen and he could no longer pretend that sleep was a possibility, he hit the bathroom, and afterward he pulled on a pair of checked pants from the restaurant service and a pair of greasy boots, and walked around the corner to Calle Ocho, where he had a cafe con leche and a fruit tart at his usual little no-name joint, and read theHerald and smoked a short, fat, strong, black cigar. Then he went across the street and opened his mother’s restaurant.

There was something entrancing, he thought, about an empty restaurant early in the morning, rather like looking at a beloved but aging mistress at about the same time of day. You could see the scratches and wear that candlelight would obscure in the hours to come, but the revelation just added to the intimacy; no one else knew this side of her. He went into the kitchen, donned a tunic, a plastic apron, switched on the oil-splashed kitchen boom box. A samba band came on loud, Martinho da Vila, “Claustrofobia.” Paz, bouncing a little on his toes, used his keys to open the meat reefer, walked in, came out with a whole round of beef, the entire boned hip of a steer. At the sink he stripped off the purveyor’s thick plastic integument, washed the blood off the meat, dried it, and slapped it down on the butcher’s block set against the wall between the two standing refrigerators.

If you sell a lot of beef in a restaurant, then the difference between profit and loss on those items is portion control, and at Guantanamera portion control was Jimmy Paz. Paz sharpened his favorite knife, licked the back of his left wrist, shaved a swipe of hair off with the blade, wiped it carefully away. Now he proceeded to turn a thirty-two-pound full round into (ideally) 102palomilla steaks, each one weighing within a speckle of five ounces.

Paz sliced without obvious effort, peeling the red wafers off the mass, weighing each, and tossing each into a steel pan. This work took absolute attention if one were both to keep one’s thumbs and make a buck, but made little demand on the higher functions, and from an early age Paz had used portion control to let his mind roam free. He belonged to that small fraternity of extremely bright men who have no patience at all with academics, from which is drawn most of history’s entrepreneurial billionaires as well as those responsible for the physical maintenance of Western civilization: carpenters, masons, firefighters, soldiers, cops. Like most autodidacts, Paz had an original rather than a disciplined intellect, and much of what composed it had been put there across the pillow by a long skein of brainy women, the only sort he liked to take to bed.

His thoughts: how dumb could he have been, nearly twenty years of selecting from just that restricted set of women whodeclined to pursue permanent arrangements, and he’s surprised when one of them turns him down, hilarious really when you considered it, what a jerk; possibilities of love, romantic love as against love that lasts, how to transit;jerk, Christ!; elective affinities, Goethean phrase whispered into his ear by German grad student white-blond Helga, idea that linkage of romance between two people was as natural and irresistible as chemical bonding, sodium and chlorine, no, not Helga, Trude, Helga was the Danish geologist, marine oolites, radio-carbon dating thereof in shallow seas, he’d taken her diving down at Pennekamp, should get the boat hauled and scraped soon, shouldgo out in the boat sometime, find a girl, maybe run across to Bimini, where to find the time?; like a nun she said, with bleeding palms, stigmata, abnormal psych, varieties of religious experience, William James, skeptical acknowledgment of the reality of same, Beth the sociologist, not a believer but agreed with James’s rejection of the “agnostic veto” insisting on rationality in decision imposssible to decide on rational grounds. Nature of faith, why can’t he jump, given what he’s seen, given his mother…and the crazy woman, Dideroff, or not crazy, thoseeyes, no, didn’t happen, sleep deprivation, and the shrink, Wise, nice voice on the phone, and Sudan, Emma the geographer, the Sudan, sahel, savannah, ecotypes, ecotopes, dry, seasonal rains, thorny growth, the acacia, the baobab, something too about a civil war, she’d had to cancel a winter field trip, check that out…

He finished cutting and took the twenty-ounce cast-iron toothed mallet down from its hook above the butcher block and pounded steaks, making each one a quarter of an inch thick with just the correct number of blows, and afterward throwing each one into a bucket of the house marinade?garlic, lime juice, salt, pepper, and a bouquet of herbs whose composition was known only to Paz, his mom, and God. He pounded, pounded to the samba beat, and found (for this is why he had come in to do this task) that, as always, the work tenderized his heart along with thepalomillas. Just before nine Rafael, the prep cook, came in and started parboiling a hundred pounds of potatoes, saying not a word to Paz, as he understood as well as any man the meditative aspects of poundingbiftek. The kitchen grew warmer, sweat dripped from Paz’s face, and he pounded the drops into the meat. His mother, demonstrating the process in the cramped steaming hole-inthe-wall kitchen of their first restaurant, twenty years previously, had said that Paz sweat was the real secret ingredient in theirpalomilla. Paz had believed it as a boy and believed it now.

The last steak dropped into the bucket. Paz washed and put away his knife and his mallet, stretched, doused his head under the sink, dried his face on a towel, and when he put it down there was his mother, yellow pantsuit, hair in its afternoon turban, a flowered one, hands and wrists ringed with pounds of gold.

“What’s wrong,” she demanded.

“Nothing’s wrong, Mami,” he said.

“You didn’t sleep last night. You come in here, where I usually have to drag you, and you cut and pound out a whole round of beef. And”?here she waved her hand around his head, around the aura that she claimed to be able to see, jingling her many golden bracelets?”you’re all cloudy and brown. So don’t tell me nothing’s wrong. It’s some woman, hmm?”

“If you know, why do you even have to ask?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, I told you. I just kind of broke up with Willa.”

Mrs. Paz faced the heavens and jingled her hands at the uncaring gods.

“I willnever have grandchildren. This is my fate. And there is something else…” She passed her hands through the air, as if trying to net a vapor. “An influence, a curse? God forbid! No, not a curse, but something heavy, dark…”

He turned away from her abruptly and covered the motion by taking off his apron. “Cut it out, Mami! You know I’m not interested in that kind of stuff.”

“No, you’re not interested, but it is interested inyou. I tell you again, you have to be washed.”

“No washing. I told you, I’m fine.”

“Your woman left you, you’re not fine, my son. And here I was so sure you were going to ask her to marry you.”

“I did. She told me no.”

“What! You said you loved her, that you could not live a moment more on this earth without her, and she said…what?”

“I didn’t say that, Mami. I said we got along great together and we should, you know, make it formal, permanent. And she said no thanks.”

“Of course she said no, youbesugo!Zoquete! Don’t you know that women like to hear that you love them?”

“Actually, I do know that, but I guess it turned out that I didn’t. Sorry.”

Cesar, the chef, walked in, picked up the vibes, decided he had forgotten something in his car, turned on his heel and vanished.

Paz had always had a hard time meeting his mother’s glare, especially since, as he had observed from an early age, when Margarita was out of temper she seemed to increase alarmingly in size. She was a broad-shouldered woman, well muscled from years of heavy work, nearly as tall as her son, teak-colored, with elaborately processed and braided hair, glossy as licorice, still stunning in a harsh way at fifty. Now she towered over Paz (so it seemed to him) like a Latina Godzilla, and her nostrils were flaring preparatory, he knew, to reciting the tale of his failures, starting at age four. He therefore felt immense relief when a tingle at his belt line informed him that he had a cell phone call. He whipped it out and punched the button.

“Sorry, Mami, I got to take this. Police business.”

“Don’t give me police business when I’m talking to you!”

Paz headed for the rear of the kitchen with a parting mumble: “Why don’t I just give you a sperm sample, you can forget about marrying me off.”

“What! What did you say?”

He ignored this and scooted out the rear door. In the parking lot, he leaned against his car, put the phone to his ear, and heard the voice of his new partner, tentative.

“Jimmy? Morales. I’m not disturbing you or anything?”

“No, I explained this, man?youcan’t disturb me, I’m your partner. You got something I need to know, then any hour of the day or night is cool. I could be getting a piece of ass, I got to take your call. And the same the other way around.”

“I mean what you were saying about a sperm sample? I thought…”

“No, that was just my mother. What’ve you got?”

A pause here. Then Morales said, “Okay, I checked out David Packer off of the motorcycle license. He’s had the bike for a year and change, no violations. I called the credit bureaus, like you said, and they got nothing on him.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I mean there’s no credit history on a David Packer, SSN 092-71-9116. He must pay cash.”

“Do you believe that? A middle-class-looking guy, owns a boat and a twenty-eight-grand motorcycle, never had a credit card? What does the phone company say?”

“Pays the minimum by check, no long-distance calls. The bank says he gets a U.S. government check for $2,467.18 deposited every month, and various checks from brokerages quarterly. He’s good for about fifty grand a year, but he owns the boat and the bike free and clear, so he’s doing all right, I guess.”

“I guess. You call that passport bureau number I gave you?”

“Yeah, and that was another funny thing. I couldn’t find out if he has a passport or not. I gave the girl on the line his information and there was a long hold and then she said she couldn’t release that data, it was restricted and she gave me a number to call, her supervisor. Floyd Mitchell.”

“And what did Mr. Mitchell have to say?”

“I couldn’t get him. The phone just rang, no answering machine or anything. So I called the State Department locator and asked for a Floyd Mitchell, and they said there was no such person there. So I called the passport number again and the same thing happened, and I told them all about no Floyd Mitchell, and then after about ten minutes on hold, a guy came on and said he was Floyd and could he help me.”

“And did he?”

“Not much. He said the computer was messed up and they couldn’t extract the information I wanted, but if I left my name they’d get it to me when the computer got fixed.”

“Yeah, Florida’ll be underwater by then. Well, well. A man of mystery, old Dave. What about the other guy?”

“Oh, he was no problem. John F. Wilson, aka Jack Wilson, bought the business about two years ago. Before that he worked as a chief mechanic for Empire Boat Livery in Hallandale, eight years; before that he was in the navy. Credit’s good, he pays his bills on time, owns a house in the Gables and a two-year-old Lexus. Plus the truck.”

“He worked for Empire,” said Paz. “Well, what d’you know?”

“You heard of it?”

“Oh, yeah. It belongs, or belonged, to a guy named Ignacio Hoffmann. Ignacio had a fleet of Cigarette boats, which he typically did not rent out to Dad and Johnny to go fish for snapper off Fowey Rocks. Did a lot of night work out in the Straits.”

“But he’s not still in business?”

“No, the feds busted him, must’ve been three or four years back. One of his people ratted him out, they got him on a federal indictment, he paid his million-dollar bail in cash, and took a hike. Interesting. I bet Wilson bought his business for cash.”

“I don’t know,” said Morales. “I could check.”

“Hm. Hell, what does it matter? We’re not interested in Hoffmann or Wilson except where they connect to Emmylou. You do any good with all those business cards?”

“Yeah, he visited one of them the morning of the day he got it. I called but the guy was out.”

“Just hold off on that until I get there. We’ll go see him together.”

“Okay, what do we know about this guy?” Paz asked when they were in the official Impala and heading east on Flagler. Morales was driving while Paz took his ease, like a prince, and smoked a cigar. Paz was pleased with himself and looked at his new partner benignly.

“He’s in the oil business,” said Morales. “The spot market, whatever that means. Our guy had an appointment with him the day he died. Seems okay, a citizen.”

“But an Arab.”

“That’s not a crime.”

“So far. No, but it’s another ruffle on a shirt that’s a little too fancy already. I wanted him to be a Cuban-American or a white-bread Presbyterian. A Jew would’ve been okay too. Our vic’s an Arab on a federal watch list, the last person we know he saw before getting whacked is an Arab….” He shrugged. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Could I ask you something?” said Morales, after a pause. Now they had turned onto Second Avenue. Traffic was heavy, but they were in no rush.

“Ask.”

“What the fuck is going on?”

“Be more precise.”

“I meet you by accident and a couple of days later I’m a homicide detective. My lieutenant knows diddly-squat about it. I go into the squad bay and everyone treats me like I got a contagious skin condition. Then you get me working on a case I know is closed. Is that enough to start? This is our building here.”

“Park it in the bus stop,” said Paz. “Okay, I was wondering when you would get around to asking. You’re in because I needed a partner. Oliphant’s orders, and I pulled some strings of my own. Why you? Whynot you? First, while you haven’t done anything particularly brilliant, you haven’t fucked up either, and I liked the way you handled yourself at the crime scene. You didn’t puke and that scene was fairly puke-worthy. A small thing, but what you might call a sine qua non for a homicide dick. No heaving. It fucks the crime scene and disturbs the witnesses, if any. Also, you followed my lead at the scene without me having to write it out in big letters and pin it to your shirt. You’d be surprised at the number of guys who can’t do that. Finally, I kind of like giving orders to a white Cuban. That enough on your first question?”

“Yeah,” Morales snapped.

Paz didn’t answer immediately. He was staring at the side mirror.

Morales said, “What’s up?”

“Nothing, I thought I saw something. I’m getting paranoid in my old age. And you’re pissed, but I’m being truthful with you. I’m modeling the right behavior. Lie to your wife, your girlfriend, your mother, whatever, but never lie to your partner. Get mad at him if you want, but don’t lie. Okay, next question. A kid patrolman with no apparent clout gets a high-visibility, high-prestige appointment. What do the other members of his new organization believe? Think!”

Morales thought for a while and then a look of dismay came onto his face. “They think I’m a rat?”

“Half of them do, given this is the Miami PD. They think IA is putting a mole into the bosom of the homicide unit. The other half is trying to figure out who you know, who’re you connected to, what faction you’re from, so they know if they should kiss your ass or kick it. Also, you’remy partner, so that adds a little extra salsa to it, guys are going to give you grief just because you’re with me. They don’t much like me on the fifth floor. It hurts, but I try to live with it.” He smiled, and after a brief hesitation, Morales returned it.

“Okay, I can live with it too. Now tell me why we’re working on a closed case.”

“Because we’ve been told to. And the case may not be all that closed. You understand what I’m saying?”

Morales nodded vigorously. “Packer is wrong, Wilson is wrong, the victim’s on an FBI watch list, the suspect is nuts, and this Arab in the oil business. Too many ruffles on the shirt.”

“You got it. Speaking of which, do you have any money?”

“You meanon me?”

“No, in the bank. Like a couple of grand you can spare.”

“I guess. Why?”

“You need to get some serious clothes. I’m wearing a fourteen-hundred-dollar suit and three-hundred-dollar shoes and you’re wearing a piece of shit looks like you got it for first communion. What does that say, if someone looks at the two of us?”

“You like clothes more? I’m cheap?”

“No, it says I’m on the take and you’re not. I want us both to look dirty.”

“You want people to offer us bribes?” said Morales.

“See, I was right about you. You look like a choirboy, but you have a devious mind. Exactly right. Since I’ve been working solo I had three people offer me money. Best way of breaking a case ever invented. The guy’s got money in his hand, you got it on tape, it’s like his dick is hanging out of his pants. Prosecutors love it. After this, we’ll go shopping.”

The building was a ten-story brick near the Metro elevated route, white marble/black glass with a coral stone fountain in the lobby. Michael Zubrom had an office on the eighth floor fronted by a teak door on which raised bronze letters told the passerby that Polygon Brokers, PLC, would be found within. The reception area was small, with a glass gate for the receptionist. Zubrom himself, who came out to greet them, was a short, compact, olive-skinned man of around forty, with a fine head of dark hair, a beaked nose, and a look of knowing more than he ever said. They showed their badges and followed him in.

His office was messy, a place of work rather than a stage for acting successful?framed maps of the world on the wall, with pins in them, bookcases full of technical reports, drooping piles of printouts, and a rack of television monitors, four in all, silently flickering. They sat on dusty chairs, and Mr. Zubrom sat behind his cluttered desk, peering at them from between a computer monitor and a tall stack of oil industry journals.

“So, the police,” he said. “I have to tell you at the start that I really don’t know very much about this Sudanese.” His voice was slightly accented, a familiar one.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Paz in Spanish. “Is it possible that you are Cuban?”

A little smile. “No, I’m Mexican,” he answered in the same language, “actually, Palestinian-Mexican. This is a branch of my family’s Mexico City office.”

Paz switched back to English. “And what was Mr. al-Muwalid’s business with you on the day he died?”

“He sold me some oil.”

“Like a sample?”

“More than that. Do you know what the spot market in petroleum is?”

“Not really,” said Paz.

“Well, it’s simple in concept, complex in practice. Perhaps police work is the same? Let me try to explain the concept at least. Oil is a valuable and fungible commodity. A barrel of sweet light crude, let us say, is the same in a tank in Dubai, on a ship in midocean, in a pipeline in Russia, and the rights to these barrels are traded just like currency. I come from a family that is fluent in Arabic, Spanish, and English, and so we can deal with most of the people in the world who have oil to sell.”

“Why Miami?” asked Morales. “Why not Houston?”

“Good question. For that matter, why not stay in Mexico? The answer is that sometimes it’s better that nobody knows your business. In oil towns everybody is looking to see who is visiting who, who’s in town from Venezuela, the Gulf, Norway, Nigeria. In Miami, this little hole-in-the-wall office, it’s better for privacy, for certain deals that require discretion.” Zubrom’s eyes kept flicking from Morales to his array of screens.

“And al-Muwalid had that kind of deal?” asked Morales.

An elegant shrug. “Mm. You understand that the spot market is abstract. We bid and contract for, you could say, only chips, markers, as in a casino. Promises to deliver at a certain price. But occasionally we have a situation where someone is selling to us a specific lot of actual petroleum, and this was the case with him. He said he had eleven thousand barrels in a tanker at Port Sudan. He had the papers, the clearances from the government there, so I did the deal. Oil is fungible, as I said, it’s all one big pool more or less. Just a moment, please.”

He looked at his screen and tapped his keyboard. “Sorry. There is something in Singapore I have to attend to.”

Paz said, “Mr. Zubrom, what you have to attend to is us, right now. You were probably the last person to talk to the victim before he was murdered. He might have been murdered because of something that happened in this room. Maybe we should go downtown….”

This remark obtained somewhat more of the man’s attention, although they could see he was straining his peripheral vision to keep track of the flickering numbers and the feeds on the Bloomberg and the set tuned to CNN. “No, please. And I really don’t see how that could be. It was a very simple deal from my standpoint. Let me see what I paid….” He punched some keys. “Yes. Twenty-nine-dollars-forty a barrel, base price, less commission, less fees, less insurance and so on, made $303,533.76, which I had transferred to a numbered account at the ARPM bank. In Jersey.”

“Where in Jersey?” asked Morales.

Zubrom gave him a peculiar look. “Not the state. It’s an island in the English Channel with loose banking regulation.”

“Anything else?” said Paz. “Any indication of what his plans were, other appointments?”

“No.”

“Any mention of a woman named Dideroff?”

“No. Really, Detective, I am in the middle of my business day….”

“What else did he say, Mr. Zubrom?”

“Well, we did not exchange small talk. He was not a pleasant fellow, I am afraid. But many of the people in the oil business are like that. Especially the Africans, if I may say so.”

“And why is that, sir?” asked Paz genially. “If I may ask.”

Zubrom seemed taken aback by this question. He licked his lip and stammered a little. “They…they…I don’t mean to be offensive, Officer.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Zubrom, I’m not an African. Go on. They what?”

“They lack…lack the idea of public property. If a man controls something, it is his own, like his shoe or his house, his and his family’s, or clan or tribe. The nation is just a figure of speech. Now, my own nation is corrupt enough, but we have a sense of limits. We have our commissions and bribes, but we don’t think that our oil is the personal property of the petroleum minister and his friends. I think in Nigeria, in Sudan, they do think that. I believe this Mr. al-Muwalid had connections that were able to divert a quantity of crude to this tanker, so he could sell it for himself, which he certainly did. But you asked what we talked about. After the deal was over, he relaxed a little. I gave him a drink. He gave me a tip.”

“A tip?” said Paz.

“In a manner of speaking. He asked me what would happen if a new strike was made, an oil field say fifty times larger than the Widha and Kordofan and Adar Tel fields combined. These are the main Sudanese fields, you see. I told him that it would not have an immediate effect on the spot market, for the reason that it is still difficult to get oil out of Sudan. The oil is highly parafinized and requires heating, the pipeline through Khartoum is small, and almost all the oil is in the south, where it must be moved through the middle of a civil war. But as I said to him, a find of that magnitude might?”

“What are we talking about here,” asked Morales, “Saudi Arabia?”

A patronizing smile. “Of course not. Saudi is in a class by itself; it has no serious rivals as far as reserves are concerned. Do you understand that at this time Sudan is atiny producer? Reserves of perhaps point six billion barrels. I mean tiny compared to Libya, with nearly thirty billion proven and Iraq…who knows about Iraq these days? Anywhere from one hundred twelve through to as much as two hundred twenty billion barrels. So I said to him if you multiply point six by fifty you are in a class with Libya, and that is a very serious class, and if that were to happen, it would create a change on the geopolitical level, never mind in the spot market.”

Another shrug, a hand gesture partaking of both the Middle East and Latin America, acknowledging the futility of expectations. “Perhaps. Depending on the quality and cost of production and so on. I told him I had not heard of any such find and he said, Oh, it is there, we know it is there, but we don’t yet have the proof of it. He meant data for the oil companies, so they could begin development work. He was somewhat full of himself then, talking, I don’t know, how he was going to be a key figure in the future of Sudan, if he could get the data on this field, and he knew someone who knew where it was, right here in this city. This is why he required this money, you see, for expenses, to hire people, to look, you know, hard people.”

“For protection, you mean?” asked Paz. “He felt threatened?”

“I believe he did.”

“Who by?”

“You know, he didn’t say. We were not best buddies. He took a call on his mobile while he was here and left immediately after. In something of a rush as I recall. That is totally all I know about this man.” He looked desperately at his screens. “Honestly, gentlemen, this is ruinous. I am losing money by the minute.”

They thanked Mr. Zubrom and left.

In the car, Paz said, “That was good. You did good, you picked up his eyes.”

“He was looking at me,” said Morales, somewhat uncomfortably. “He hardly ever looked at you, even when you were talking to him.”

“Uh-huh. A black guy and a white guy show up together, and nine out of ten people are going to assume that the white guy is in charge, even when the black guy is wearing Zegna and the white guy’s got a JCPenney confirmation suit on. Life isn’t fair that way, and it gives me a bad attitude sometimes, which I intend to take out occasionally on your lily ass. In this line of work, though, it works pretty good. I can slide something in where they’re not looking. An off-balance informant is the policeman’s friend, as we just saw. So what did you make of all that?”

“I don’t know. The vic had a hold on some serious cash. He had enemies. He was looking for something worth a zillion bucks. We know the guy wasn’t a sweetheart off of that FBI thing the major told you about, plus what the suspect said. So…” He waggled both hands.

“So it looks a little less like a loony having a fit and clocking the vic on the head.”

“Yeah. You think maybe she was set up?”

“Oh, I think she did it, but I also think she had some help. We didn’t recover a cell phone off the vic, did we?”

“No.”

“And Emmylou sure as shit didn’t have one. She’s got one built into her head connected to a switchboard in heaven. So that means…”

“There was someone else in the place,” said Morales instantly. “He took the cell phone so we couldn’t find out who called him at Zubrom’s, the call that got him moving.”

“Very good. Drive on.”

Morales pulled away from the curb and headed north of NE First Avenue. “Where are we going?”

“Bal Harbour,” said Paz, “take a look at some suits. I think you’re a keeper, but I want to see how you clean up. After that…shit, there he is again!”

“Who?”

“Guy in a white Explorer with tinted glass. He’s been following us. Make this next left.Now! “

Morales stamped on the gas and swept across the oncoming traffic into a left turn, leaving screeching brakes and angry horns in his wake. Paz swiveled around in his seat, expecting to see the white SUV make the turn as well, but it proceeded north with the other traffic. He felt Morales’s stare. “Wait here,” he said, “pull over, he’ll go around the block.” Morales did so and they waited. After five minutes’ silence, Morales asked, “Did you get his plates?”

“No, did you?”

An uneasy pause. “No. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even see what car you were talking about. A white SUV? I didn’t spot it. Are you sure…?”

“Fuck, yeah, I’m sure!” Paz was almost shouting. “You think I don’t know when I’m being tailed?” Paz had a moment of rage so intense he thought he was going to have a stroke right there in the unmarked. Irrational. He was seeing things. It could’ve been a white Explorer, and maybe next time it’d be a hearse with a zombie driver or a circus van playing a calliope. First that thing with Emmylou, then the craziness with Willa, now this, and he’d realized now that he’d screwed up the interview with Zubrom, he should have pulled the guy out of there, taken him downtown, and sweated him some more, the guy was laughing at them, he knew a lot more than he’d said, if he had a decent partner instead of this asshole kid, he would’ve gotten a lot more…no, that was not him, not a line of thought that should have appeared in his brain. Morales was fine. He felt cold sweat start up on his forehead and back.

“Hey, Jimmy?you okay?” Paz looked at Morales, at his pale and worried face.

“Yeah, it’s nothing, I’m a little…just go, drive.”

A little what? Paz asked himself as they rolled. A little crazy? Crazy he could deal with, but not the other thing, not the…the wordpossession floated into his mind. He skittered away from that and took refuge in the forms of old prayers and grasped certain objects hung about his neck. By the time they got to where they were going he felt nearly human again.

The next seven years went peacefully by for the de Bervilles. Georges’s affairs prospered. He had cannily observed that the world of the mid-nineteenth century had a lust for illumination, and that whales could not possibly supply all the oil required. He therefore began to procure and sell kerosene and also invest in the illuminating gas companies that were then getting started throughout Europe. By 1870 Paris was being called the City of Light, a good deal of which light was being produced by Georges de Berville et Fils. Georges bought a large stone mansion in the most elegant district of Metz. The little house at Pony was sold and replaced by a substantial chateau, Bois Fleury, at nearby Gravelotte.

The children prospered as well. Alphonse, despite his youth, was if anything more canny than his father, as well as owning a charm that his elder could not match. He had been given responsibility for negotiation with the suppliers of petroleum. In 1869 he traveled across the Atlantic to America, where he soon became conversant with American ways of business, and met many of the leading figures of American industry, including the young John D. Rockefeller, who took an instant liking to the French youth, going so far as to bring him into his family circle, a rare honor.

Meanwhile, Jean-Pierre had entered St. Cyr. He had always loved horses and excitement and desired a career in the army. As for Gerard, the youngest boy, he had received a call to serve the Church during his education at St. Arnulf’s, and was by the year in question living at the seminary in Montigny. Thus only Marie-Ange was left at home to care for her father, although she was a day student at the convent of the Sisters of Providence, located just down the Rue Richelieu from her family’s elegant home. We know from her school records that she was a student of no great distinction, except in languages, where she excelled. At this time she was near fluent in both English and Italian; German she had, of course, spoken from childhood, along with most of the citizens of Metz. What sort of girl was she then? In answer, we have from this period some letters written by Marie-Ange to her mother’s sister, her beloved Aunt Aurore, who lived in Paris. In one of these, she writes:

I confess my heart is torn between my desire to serve Christ as a nun and my love for my dear father, and my sacred obligation to him. He has been so good to me and has suffered so much! He wishes me to come out in society and go to balls like other girls do, and after that to marry, the poor man! How I wish I could oblige him, but I cannot. I do not care for balls, and, whatever may come, I shall never marry.

It is clear from this that the vocation of the Bd. Marie-Ange de Berville came early and strong.

— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.