Lovingly Ricky Bloodworth rubbed the smooth brown paper, fingered the frayed twine.
Then he pinched one end of the magnificent bow and pulled, pulled on it until the knot popped.
And a savage furnace swallowed him.
Tore the air from his lungs.
And the flesh from his cheeks.
Until the universe turned molten white.
24
It had always puzzled Cab Mulcahy that Mr. Cardoza took such an ardent personal interest in the Miami Sun. Traditionally publishers love to meddle with the news operation (because that’s the most exciting part of a newspaper, the only part worth dicking around with), but Cardoza was not a typical publisher. He had little understanding of the tenets of journalism with no paternal affection for the newspaper, for his fortunes did not singularly rise or plummet with the Sun. Rather, Cardoza was a boundless entrepreneur, a man who loved the variety of making money; a man with dozens of incongruous irons in the fire. He owned a soccer team in St. Kitts, a stock car in Darlington, a chain of family cinemas, four butcher shops, a Liberian oil tanker, three thousand coin-operated condom machines, and a phosphate mine. Any single one of those enterprises, Cab Mulcahy thought, was infinitely more amusing as a money toy than the frequently struggling Miami Sun, of which Cardoza owned fifty-one percent. Which automatically made him publisher and meddler-for-life. On the evening of December 28, a Friday, Cab Mulcahy was summoned from an opulent pre-Orange Bowl cocktail party to explain to Mr. Cardoza why Skip Wiley’s column had not appeared in the paper since Christmas Eve.
The publisher did not particularly wish to see Mulcahy in person, and he certainly had no intention of visiting the newsroom. Cardoza preferred to do business office-to-office, by telephone—distance yields perspective, he liked to say. Also, he got a kick out of hanging up on people.
At the appointed hour, Cardoza dialed Mulcahy’s desk.
“I didn’t think much of that Christmas Eve column,” he began.
“Me neither,” Mulcahy said.
“Who gives a shit about some native fisherman who can’t swim? It seems to me Mr. Wiley can do better.”
“He’s still not himself,” Mulcahy said.
“He gets paid to be himself,” Cardoza said. “A small fortune, he gets paid. And here it’s Christmas week, tourist season, when our circulation’s supposed to shoot sky-high, and where’s our star clean-up hitter? Every day I pick up the newspaper, and nothing. No Skip Wiley. The Sun’s dead without him. Lies there like a dog turd on my front lawn.”
Mulcahy said, “Really, Mr. Cardoza, I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Oh you wouldn’t? You’d like to hear the cancellation figures, maybe. Or take a few hours to read some of the mail we’ve been getting.”
“That’s not necessary.”
For years Cab Mulcahy had tried to tell Cardoza that he overestimated Wiley’s popularity, that no single writer could pull enough support to significantly boost or bust the circulation numbers. Whether that was true or not, it was what Mulcahy chose to believe. However, as a pure businessman Cardoza felt that he appreciated the concept of a Good Product far better than some ivory-tower editor. And in Cardoza’s predominant and immutable view, what made the Miami Sun a Good Product were Skip Wiley, Ann Landers, and Dagwood Bumstead. On some days Wiley alone was worth the twenty-five cents.
“Where the hell is he?” Cardoza demanded.
“I don’t know,” Mulcahy said. “I expected him back in town on Christmas Day.”
“Send someone to Nassau,” Cardoza barked through the speaker box. “Do whatever you have to do.”
Mulcahy rubbed the back of his neck and closed his eyes. It was fortunate that Cardoza couldn’t see him. “Skip’s not in the Bahamas anymore,” he said. “Apparently he was deported from the islands on the twenty-fourth.”
“Deported!” Cardoza huffed. “For what?”
“It’s quite a long list, sir.”
“Give me the high points.”
“Attempted bribery, possession of a controlled substance, and behaving as an undesirable, whatever that means. For what it’s worth, the embassy says Wiley was set up. Apparently that column about the fisherman didn’t go over too well with the Bahamian government.”
“Now everybody’s a goddamn critic,” Cardoza said.
“All I know is that they put him on a plane,” Mulcahy said. “At gunpoint.”