Florida Straits (21 page)

He started down the incline.

At the base of it was a set of swinging
doors, their brushed-steel surface marred from the push of trolleys
and the banging of trays. Joey went through and found himself in a
long narrow hallway lit by bare bulbs in yellow wire baskets. On
the left, through a broad open doorway, was the kitchen; above the
din of pans and dishes clattering, the singsong of Spanish banter
rang between the cinder-block walls. Joey slipped past, walking
quick and silent to where the corridor turned right and led to a
bank of elevators. Unfortunately, a room service waiter was already
there. He was thin and blond, had a cart in front of him with a
champagne bucket on it, and was dressed, absurdly, in a tuxedo.
Joey caught him picking his nose, which seemed to make the waiter
feel defensive.

"May I help you?" he asked accusingly.

Joey opened his mouth well before an idea
had sparked. But he was cruising on that insane and blessed sense
of readiness, and he said the first thing that came into his mind.
"Mafia."

"Excuse me?" said the waiter. His pale
eyebrows lifted, he swallowed so that his bow tie did a little
dance, and he seemed by reflex to be wiping his thumb on the satin
stripe of his pants leg.

"The linens, the labor situation," Joey
said. "It's like, ya know, a spot check. They treatin' ya right, or
what?"

"Oh, fine," said the waiter. "Fine." He
looked down at the napkins on his cart. He hoped he hadn't grabbed
a frayed one.

The elevator arrived. The employee stood
aside for Joey to enter first, though it was unclear whether he did
this out of protocol or to avoid showing his back. He rolled his
cart out, very quickly, at the second floor, and Joey continued to
the fourth, the top. Gino had a list for hotel rooms, as he had for
everything. Top floor, water side—that was the best, and so that,
of course, was what Gino had bragged he had. Only the best for
Joey's older brother. The best of every-thing, so he could remind
himself that he was doing good.

—
30 —

"Who is it?" said Gino Delgatto, in the
rough yet somehow mousy voice of a man who has his door
double-locked, with the night chain on, and his sweaty hand wrapped
around the warm butt of a gun he clutches by habit but in whose
power to protect him he has stopped believing.

"It's me. It's Joey."

There was a long pause. Gino had now been
holed up in his room for almost two full weeks, and his life had
become so radically uneventful, his mind and body so muddily
torpid, that the channels in his brain had silted over. Any piece
of information now struck him as dauntingly new; any decision, such
as when and for whom to open his door, required all the
concentration he could possibly muster.

"Whaddya want?" he said at last.

"I wanna save your sorry ass. Lemme in."

Again there was a pause.

"You alone?"

"Totally."

There was a sound like surrender in the dry
slide of the dead bolt, the cheerless tinkle of the night chain.
Gino opened the door just wide enough for a man to slip through,
and stood there framed for a moment in the slice of yellow light.
He was wearing a hotel bathrobe and he looked like hell. He'd put
on ten pounds during his days of doing nothing but eating and
drinking, and the increment was enough to push his barely handsome
features over the border into brutishness. His fattened cheeks rose
into little pads that accentuated the piggishness of his eyes. His
nose seemed somehow to have softened and broadened, and was
spreading across his face like melting clay. Deep lines at the
edges of his mouth gave his jaw the slightly spooky, hinged look of
a puppet's, and his skin had the stretched oiliness of someone who
is thoroughly constipated. But he was still strong. He grabbed Joey
by the arm and yanked him into the room so that the two men were
standing chest to chest. Was Gino giving his half brother a hug, or
just trying to get the door shut and double-locked as fast as
possible?

"Anyone see you?" he asked. Their faces were
close and Joey smelled the bourbon.

"No one that matters."

"How'd ya manage?"

"I came by boat."

Gino stepped back and took a moment to
process this new fact. He seemed to see in it an opportunity to get
on top of the situation by his time-honored tactic of patronizing
Joey. But for this he needed an ally, so he shot a facetious glance
at Vicki. She was lying in bed, the sheet pulled up so that only
the top acre of her chest was exposed. She'd been leafing through a
fashion magazine, which she now placed facedown on top of her
boobs; the bent spine made a kind of tent for her cleavage. Gino's
glance was meant to say,
Ain't he clever—for a nobody?
and
while he was flashing that look at Vicki, he said to Joey, "Fuck
you know about driving a boat?"

"Enough to get heah. It needed doing and I
did it, didn't I, Gino?"

Gino sat slowly on the edge of the bed, as
if something in Joey's tone had grabbed him by the shoulders and
pushed him down. Absently, he noticed that his gun was still in his
hand. He slid it along the sheet and tucked it under a pillow.
"Drink, Joey?" He motioned toward a low table where the dirty
dinner dishes were scattered and a two-thirds empty bottle of Jack
Daniel's was standing like a monument. On the dresser next to the
table, the television flashed the eleven o'clock news with the
sound turned off.

Joey shook his head, settled into a vinyl
chair, and took a moment to rearrange his damp trouser leg so the
wet part wouldn't lie against his thigh. "You're a selfish prick,
you know that, Gino?"

Gino absorbed the comment like an exhausted
heavyweight eating one more jab. "You come here just to tell me
that?"

"I come here to get you outta my town and
outta my life. But first, we talk. You coulda got me killed the
other week. You even give a shit about that?"

Gino wrapped his meaty hands around the edge
of the mattress and looked down between his knees. "I'm sorry, kid.
I was in a bind."

"In a bind?" Joey pulled himself forward by
the arms of his chair. "In a bind? You fucking jerk. You're in a
bind, so the whole resta the world can go to hell? What if Bert
dropped dead? What if Sandra was with me?"

Gino took a deep breath that seemed to cost
him a lot of effort. He couldn't help looking back over his
shoulder at Vicki. Girlfriends were not supposed to hear this kind
of thing. It messed with their respect. "Listen, kid, I'm sorry. I
fucked up. 'Zat what you wanna hear me say?"

"Yeah, Gino, that's exactly what I wanna
hear you say. And now that you've said it, I want some
explanations. Like why the fuck are you still here? You almost get
me killed so you can run away, then you don't even manage to run
away."

"Joey, Joey," said Gino, in a tone the
younger brother knew well. It was the tone he used when he wanted
to make it clear that he, Gino, was the planner, the thinker, and
Joey, like an army grunt, had neither reason nor right to ask the
why of things. "There's more to it than you know about."

"Wanna bet?" Joey snapped. "It's about three
million dollars in Colombian emeralds that disappeared from Coconut
Grove."

A wave of slow surprise moved across Gino's
swollen face. It pulled at his mouth and made him mumble. "Ponte
tell ya that? Bert tell ya?"

"Never mind. But now I want your side of it.
From the top."

Gino crossed his legs, uncrossed them,
slapped his knee, and grunted. "Sure you don't want a drink?"

"You have one, Gino. You need it. I
don't."

The older brother got up and lumbered toward
the bourbon bottle. Joey looked at Vicki, lying just at the fringe
of a yellow pool of lamplight. In some ways, oddly, she looked
better than she had before. She'd washed the tease out of her hair,
and while it was now lank, thin, and coarse as straw, at least it
looked like part of her. Without the foot-high helmet on her head,
her features looked less pinched, and without their labored paint
job, her eyes even had a kind of softness. Her mouth seemed calm,
though Joey could not tell if she had broken through to some
extreme form of patience or had become quietly deranged.

Gino returned with three fingers of Jack
Daniel's in a smudged glass and sat down heavily on the bed. Either
he sighed or some air came out of the mattress. "Awright, Joey," he
began. "Awright. Now the first thing ya gotta know is that nunna
this was my idea." He swigged half his drink. "But O.K. There were
these two guys, Vinnie Fish and Frankie Bread. They were, like, a
little bit attached to my crew, a little bit attached to Ponte, but
it was, ya know, a vague kinda thing, nothing really solid. Ya
follow?"

"Yeah, Gino. I follow."

"Well," Gino continued, "these guys knew
about the stones, they knew about the drop. So they come to me,
they wanna be partners, and Joey, I swear to God, I tell 'em it is
a very fucked-up idea. I tell 'em no way. But these guys, Vinnie
and Frank, they're like very persuasive guys. They say, look, who's
Ponte gonna suspect—his own
paisans
or the fucking spicks?
It's a piece a cake, they say. Lift the stones, Ponte decides the
Colombians fucked him, and that's the end of it."

Dried salt made Joey's scalp itch and he
gave it a luxurious scratch. "Then wha'd they need you for?"

Gino drank. "They figured they'd walk away
with like a million and a half each. How can they spend that kinda
money without it lookin', ya know. . . ? So the deal was this: They
cut me in, I get them made, so then it looks like they're earning
good with us, and that's where the cash is coming from."

Joey tapped his fingers on the blond wood
arms of his chair. "Except Ponte doesn't believe it was the
Colombians."

Gino tugged at the lapel of his bathrobe and
gave a bitter laugh. "Ain't that fucking sad? I mean, what's the
fucking world coming to when a guy would trust the spicks before
his own friends? Who knows, maybe Vinnie and Frank fucked up. Maybe
they left a trace, maybe they acted guilty. I dunno. I wasn't in on
that part of it." He lifted his glass and, unwilling to admit it
was empty, turned it upward until he was looking through the bottom
of it as if it were a telescope. Then he got up and plodded toward
the table.

Vicki looked at his wide back and spoke for
the first time. It was not the voice of someone who had found the
key to perfect patience. "Bring the bottle, Gino, you'll save
steps."

"Shut up, Vicki," he said without turning
around. But he took her advice.

"So what part
are
you in on,
Gino?"

Gino sat down and poured himself another
bourbon before he answered. He stashed the bottle between his
thighs, and the neck protruded unattractively. "Vinnie and Frank
got whacked. You know that, right?"

Joey nodded.

"Well, before they did, we made up a place
where they would leave the emeralds. My part of the job was to pick
'em up, bring 'em to New York, and get 'em sold."

Joey realized quite suddenly that the
flickering, voiceless images from the television were driving him
nuts. He got up, turned the set off, and paced the room. "Gino,
lemme make sure I got this right. Your partners get clipped. Which
obviously means that Ponte knows what's what. And you still come
down here to cop the stones? You gotta be a total asshole."

The older brother hunched forward, looking
more than ever like a tired fighter who puts his head down and
bulls off the ropes for one last and desperate offensive flurry.
"Joey, tree million bucks, and no one left to split it with—could
you just walk away and leave that sittin' onna table? Huh?" He
sipped bourbon. "So O.K., things ain't workin' out so good, now I
gotta sit here and get insulted. All of a sudden it's O.K., it's
safe to dump on Gino. Even you, Joey, you're the big man all of a
sudden. But what if it worked? Would I be an asshole then?
Bullshit. I'd be a hero."

"Some hero," said Vicki. It didn't seem like
she'd meant to speak. It just came out like an ill-timed fart.

"Shut up, you bitch. Yeah Joey, I'd be a
hero, and we both know it. I'd lay some money on Pop, I'd spread
some around, I'd take on some new guys, and even if, sometime downa
road, Ponte figured things out, you think he'd have the balls to
touch me? Nan. I'd be too big by then."

Joey reached out and grabbed his brother by
the arms. "Gino, there ain't gonna be no
then
. Can't you see
that?" He gave Gino a shake, but the bigger man seemed to have gone
limp; it was like shaking a bag of cotton. "So where're the
emeralds now?"

Gino looked down and said nothing. Vicki
cracked the silence with a tittering and demented little laugh. "He
don't know," she said.

Joey was not aware of starting to pace again
but found himself treading the narrow runway between the dresser
and the foot of the bed. "You don't know?"

"I do know," Gino protested. He half
swiveled and looked at Vicki with a face full of loathing. Then he
added, in a softer voice, "I just couldn't find em."

"Couldn't find 'em
when?"

Gino was seeking distraction in the bourbon
bottle between his thighs, toying with it like a masturbating
chimp. "The night I set up you and Bert," he said. "This is what
I'm tryin' to tell ya, Joey. I didn't do it so I could run, I did
it so I could cop the stones."

"But you didn't cop the stones."

Gino shook his head forlornly and came as
close as Joey had ever seen to looking embarrassed. "I couldn't
find the fucking place. Then I ran outta time. I barely made it
back here aheada Ponte. Maybe I shoulda just said the hell with it
and bolted. But tree million dollars! I wasn't ready to walk
away."

Joey suddenly felt very tired. It was the
kind of melting fatigue in which the most familiar things no longer
seem familiar. Was this fat drunk guy in the bathrobe a relative of
his, someone he was supposed to care about? This woman under the
sheet—who the hell was she? "So Gino," he said very slowly, "where
—are—the emeralds?"