Four
Paz was at last having sex again. It had been a long time between and he should have been more excited, for although he rammed away valiantly, and although the woman sighed and moaned beneath him, he seemed to have become somewhat detached from his sexual apparatus and also disturbed because he could not recall the woman’s name. They finished, leaving him drained but not satisfied. What thefuck was her name? He rolled off her. She chuckled. “That was great, Jimmy,” she said. So she knew who he was, why couldn’t he…?
“Could we turn on the lights?” he asked.
“You sure you want to?” she asked. She had a throaty, pleasant voice.
“Yeah, turn it on.”
He felt her moving, reaching for the switch, and then the light went on, a little pink bedside lamp. Paz was out of bed in an instant going for the door, scrabbling, kicking at it, although it was clear now that the door was just painted on the wall, crudely at that, a child’s drawing of a door. There was no way out of the room. The woman was still chuckling, although it was hard to know how she managed it, since her face was as smooth and featureless and white as an egg.
It was the pain that woke him up, the pain from his toes. He cursed vividly in the two languages he commanded when he realized he was standing in the little hallway leading to the rear door of his apartment. He’d kicked his right toe bloody against its base. Paz staggered to the kitchen sink and leaned into it, running cold water over his head. He turned the water off, dried himself with a dish towel, and listened. Mrs. Ruiz, his upstairs neighbor, was moving around. The old lady was a light sleeper and his screams and the kicks had awakened her, as they had before. Maybe the rest of the neighborhood too. He prayed no one had called the cops.
He had a tendency to be paranoid about his status in the department. At present he was untouchable because he had almost single-handedly cracked the biggest mass murder case in the history of the city, but that was fading in memory, or rather the false story of the so-called Voodoo Murders was fading. The memories of what had really happened were still pretty fresh in Paz’s mind.
He limped to a kitchen chair and examined his foot. The big toe on the right foot was nearly half again as large as its mate on the other foot and turning plum. The nail looked loose and was rimmed with drops of blood black as India ink in the crime-light glow coming in through the kitchen jalousies. He wiped the blood away with a paper napkin and used it also to wipe the sweat from his forehead and neck. Paz had been having nightmares every night for the past week, and walking in his sleep, and he took this as touching on his mental stability, a real concern after what had gone down last year. A flashback, a delayed thing from those events? Maybe, but there was also that…whateverin the interview room with Emmylou Dideroff. Was madness contagious? Or something even scarier? As this thought emerged, Paz used all his considerable intellectual and emotional energy to shove it back in its box.
The main thing was that it not happen again. The next time he’d be out the door and walking through the staid Cubano neighborhood, a black guy dressed in a T-shirt and nothing else, howling. Some householder would shoot him, or the cops would grab him up, and that would be it. They’d give him a rubber gun and sit him behind a property room grille for the rest of his career. Which was also why he couldn’t go to the department headshrinker. What he ought to do, had he any real balls, was talk to his mother…Uh-uh, no; he dismissed the thought.
He checked the clock on the stove: four-ten, too late to go back to bed. He put on a bathrobe and grabbed theHerald off the tiny front lawn, noting that he was going to have to cut it this weekend, or else Mrs. Ruiz was going to complain to his mother. His mother owned the duplex, and Paz lived in it rent free, which was where he got the money to buy the kind of clothes he wore. It was not exactly a free deal, because besides the routine maintenance around the place, Margarita Paz expected her son to help out at her restaurant. Paz did not mind helping his mother, but Mrs. Paz often failed to understand the exigencies of police work and gave Paz considerable grief when he chose to catch murderers rather than chop up snappers in her kitchen. She did not consider police work a real job.
Paz fired up a big hourglass metal espresso pot and made half a pint of Cuban coffee. He was getting hungry. Ordinarily, he took breakfast out, but he didn’t want to drive to an all-night joint. He opened his refrigerator. Paz did not dine at home, but sometimes he used his place to store the restaurant’s overstock of perishables. In the refrigerator were ten-pound bags of flour, a box of butter pats, a bag of powdered sugar, a box of salted cod, six dozen eggs. Stacked near the refrigerator were three five-gallon cans of peanut oil and a crate of mangoes.
Paz took flour, butter, salt, and water and made a dough, to which he added a healthy shot from a bottle of Anis del Mono that happened to be keeping company with the bottle of Ketel vodka in his freezer. He heated up oil in his only big pot and hand rolled the churros because he didn’t have a star press. As he dropped the pastries into the fat, he recalled, as he always did at such moments, how his mother had taught him at the age of seven to test the temperature of the hot fat by flicking drops of water at it, listening for just the right sort of crackle. He made a dozen, eating two and a half fresh from the fat after sprinkling them with powdered sugar. The others he put into a paper bag. He ate a mango over the sink, dripping juice, and washed his face again.
This apartment had two bedrooms, in one of which lived a rowing machine and a set of weights. Paz put on headphones and listened to Susana Baca sing Afro-Peruvian songs for thirty minutes of rowing. Then he did a routine with twenty-pound barbells and a set of crunches and push-ups. He exercised every other morning, and ordinarily he used the tedium to think through his day. A methodical man, Paz, despite his reputation on the cops as something of a cowboy.
Slow steps sounded above him. Mrs. Ruiz would wait until he was out of the house before calling his mother to report in. Mrs. Ruiz was a pretty good spy, and Paz often wondered if his mother gave her a deal on the rent in return for this information. Or maybe it was just a normal service of the Cuban Mothers’ Mutual Aid Society. Mrs. Ruiz’s boy was a graduate of Florida Atlantic University, a certified public accountant, married with two, and he was a year younger than Jimmy Paz. He also resembled a Barlett pear, but this fact cut very little ice with the mom when Paz pointed it out, as he did whenever she started on the why-can’t-you-be’s. Paz thought once again of discussing the dream and the other weird stuff with his mother but again dismissed the idea. He had spent most of his conscious life defending his privacy from her, and this habit was now too strong to break. Although his mother, as it happened, knew a great deal about dreams and other states of consciousness that differed from plain vanilla awake-and-aware.
Dressed, he poured another cup of coffee, added hot milk, grabbed a dish towel and the remains of his third churro, went out to the small backyard. There he wiped the dew from a seat of a redwood picnic set and sat down. The eastern sky was rosy with dawn and the air was as cool as it was going to get, scented with jasmine, citrus, the hot dough and coffee of his breakfast. So by dawn’s early light, Paz drank, ate, and read theMiami Herald. He skimmed the national news, checked the local news for crime and scandal, then the obituaries: here was a guy dropped dead in an office lobby, a developer, clipped at forty-seven. Paz was still a relatively young fellow, but being the sort of young fellow he was, he had discovered unusually early that he was not immortal, and so he had started this past year to read the obits with interest. Then he read the sports pages to have something to talk about to the men at work, and then he turned with somewhat more attention to the arts page. Paz was not a regular close reader of this section, which counted (if column inches of space meant anything) the movies and TV as the primary arts of mankind, but recently he had studied it with some care, especially the continuing coverage of the Miami Book Fair. There was a half-page announcement of the day’s event at Miami Dade’s downtown campus, and he found the name he was looking for and noted the time at which this particular author would appear. For the first time since his cruel awakening he felt a smile blossom in his heart.