Tropical Depression (22 page)

"So pee," said Squeak. A standoff. Then he said, "Okay, I'll turn around." He made it sound like the most magnanimous thing he'd ever done.

Afterward, he led her to her cot. She lay down and he hovered over her, unlocking the metal rings. He smelled like clothes that have been worn a day too long, there was something talon-like about his thin and veiny hands. His shadow stretched across her like a flight of buzzards.

"You remind me of my son," she said. She didn't have a son, she said it to make herself sound old, to make him feel unsexy.

Clinically, dispassionately, as if he were trussing a veal, he clamped her wrist and ankle, locked the rings around the slender bones.

"You do bondage with your kid?" he said, and he came forth with a demented cackle that rang like a warped gong off the metal walls and floor and ceiling.

Franny turned her face away, closed her eyes, and tried to make herself invisible.

*****

Murray made the water very hot and took a long soak in the Jacuzzi. Steam swirled up around him, sweat dripped from his eyelashes.

The bath left him faint but not the least bit sleepy. Woozy, wrapped in rented towels, he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. The room rocked like a boat, his mind sailed along. He pictured Tommy, thought about the brave and sudden purpose in his strength. He thought about Franny, her neat suitcase in the now-vacant guest room, and his eyes filled up with tears. He thought about what Bert had said. Plot, scheme, think. The old man was right—there was a kind of tentative salvation in being able to imagine oneself on top, to entertain notions of triumph, of revenge.

But Murray didn't know how to start. Obstacles were everywhere. His enemies were ruthless, while he was a cream puff and a coward. His enemies had weapons
, were
weapons, and he hadn't thrown a punch since junior high. His enemies were holding Franny, and he was holding nothing.

This mortified him as he lay there: He was wretched, but for the moment he was safe, while his wife, guilty of nothing but coming to visit, was in jeopardy whose grim specifics he couldn't bring himself to think about. Then there was Tommy. When, inevitably, they caved in and gave Ponte what he wanted, it would be Tommy who'd be stuck with the Mafia for a partner, Tommy who would be used, humiliated, eventually squeezed out or even killed. Murray would lose ... what? Only a diversion he no longer needed. His life had somehow gotten full enough without the new challenge of the casino business.

Still, the whole disaster was his fault, he was like the guy who got a bar brawl going then sat under a table while others got their teeth kicked in. It wasn't fair. He made the problem, he had to fix the problem. He accepted that.

The night dragged on. He tried to think. He pulled the sweat-soaked towels out from underneath him. His stupor deepened and he may have dozed.

Around three
A.M.,
he sat bolt upright, totally awake. A window had shattered. It was a big window and it was very close, the sound was no mere tinkle but a symphony of wreckage, it hit several notes at once and lingered in a brittle echo.

The Bra King threw a towel around himself and ran into the living room. Tommy Tarpon was already there, kneeling in his underwear above a brown manila envelope wrapped around a rock. The rock was near the bottom of the curtain that covered the sliding door to the third-floor balcony. The carpet there was strewn with shards and spears of glass.

Tommy took off the rubber bands that held the envelope to the missile. The two friends went to the sofa with the nautical stripe, sat down side by side. Tommy fumbled with the clasp, removed a single sheet of paper. It was a ransom note, but not the old-fashioned kind pieced together of words of different sizes in jarring typefaces, snipped from magazines. No, this note came from a computer printer. It was neat and grammatical and seemed to have been written by a lawyer. It said:

"I'll sign," the Indian said quite calmly, "and then I'll kill LaRue, and then I'll take a shot at killing Ponte, and then I'll either be dead or go to the electric chair."

Murray's elbows were on his knees, he was tugging at his hair. "No you won't," he said. "I'll think of something."

Tommy didn't believe it for a second. His old pessimism had woken up big and grouchy as a bear, he took a bleak satisfaction from the bleakness of how things were turning out. Sovereign of the Matalatchee, flunkey of the Mob, assassin. "You ready for some coffee?"

Murray didn't answer, he couldn't get his face to work. He got up from the sofa, wrapped his towel more snugly around his slack and hairy waist, then knelt down like a mantis and began to clear away the spears and icicles of broken glass.

After a long time Franny Rudin fell asleep.

But her sleep was haunted by slicked-haired demons and spiders in suits, leering insects that held cigars in sawtooth jaws, filthy cackling birds flying over her with scaly yellow talons dangling down.

She willed herself awake, struggled up from the gargoyle dreams as from a deep and muddy ditch. Her heart was swollen inside her ribs, she felt her pulse dammed up by the metal rings that held her wrist and ankle.

She lay perfectly still, blinked up toward the ceiling; it was invisible in the utter darkness but even so its nearness had a smothering weight. She lay there and she wondered why this was happening to her. But her conscience was clean, she knew there was no reason, and so she turned her thoughts away; to wonder too much why awful things befell the undeserving was worse than futile, it led to corrosive grudges against life itself, provoked a rage beyond repair.

She tried to think about pleasant things instead. She thought about her garden. She pictured a glass full of paintbrushes, the water turning a milky lavender as the washed-off tints blended and swirled. To her surprise she thought about Murray, about how they used to be. They laughed a lot; they probed; they wrapped in wisecracks their little scraps of understanding, and together they figured out a small piece of the world. Murray—a romantic klutz is what he'd always been. Shooting out light fixtures with errant champagne corks. Getting cramps in his feet at moments of passion. He'd proposed on his knees, let slip an inadvertent fart as he stood up. And always with his schemes, his big ideas— undaunted, untrammeled, and usually nuts. He gave you a headache, Murray did. And yet... No, she wouldn't think about it. She was done with Murray. This hell she was going through now—if she survived it, it would serve as a sign, a vivid warning: Go back to Sarasota, a healthy place, a
reasonable
place, a place free of gangsters and ex-husbands.

She heard Squeak breathing. He didn't snore, he wheezed, it was a bent, tormented sound, pinched air following the curves and cave-ins of a nose that had been often smashed. She wondered what time it was, wondered what would happen in the morning. Her thoughts came back to Murray. She banished them, but not before smiling secretly at an image of him falling out of a hammock on their first Caribbean vacation, back when they were young and strapped for cash and working hard to make a life— a life, Franny fended off admitting, that had been the most full of juice and closest to the bone of all the several lives that she had lived so far.

*****

It was just after four when Tommy and Murray got on their bikes and rode to White Street Pier.

The predawn air was calm and damp and salty. Pinkish halos puffed like dandelions around the street lamps; palms stood still as pictures, darker black against the flat black sky. Unfamiliar stars twinkled overhead, the water was so flat that it reflected them, showed points of starlight intermixed with the glowing trails of phosphorescent creatures scudding on unimaginable missions through the nighttime ocean.

A bum was sleeping on the pier, nestled on a tarp. Feral cats stalked and slunk, searching out fish heads left behind, the chambered bodies of broken crabs. A pelican stood on the railing, blinking out to sea.

Tommy Tarpon got out his casting net, spread the mesh like pizza dough across his fists, made a single perfect throw. The net landed softly, dim green streamers flashed as the weighted edges sank through the living water.

The captured pinfish, spilled out on the pavement, seemed to glow from within themselves, shone a more urgent silver color than they could have borrowed from the sky.

The two friends baited their hooks and fished. They fished in silence, tracked the maneuvers of their doomed minnows, let useless voltage escape from their overheated brains and run down their arms to be doused in the twinkling sea. Time went neither slow nor fast; after awhile they started catching fish, small yellowtails and mangrove snappers. They weren't fishing for dinner, they threw them back. Tommy was trying not to think but now and then he thought about the endless ingenuity of God's dark humor—so many ways to bring dead hopes to life, so many ways to murder them again.

Now and then Murray checked his watch. He wanted to know how the world looked at 5:45 a.m., what they would be surrounded by when Tommy signed his life away to ransom Franny. If, that is, the other side kept to the agreement. But now that he thought of it, why should he suppose they would? A deserted beach at dawn—they could as easily kill him, kill Franny, get Tommy's signature at gunpoint and bully him into a petrified silence. No, the Bra King reflected, that part of it was wrong: They couldn't bully Tommy. Tommy would be a hero, Tommy would win revenge or go down trying. Of course, what the hell good would that do anybody?

Around five-thirty Murray stopped fishing. He leaned his rod against the rail and watched the sky, scanned the universe for answers, stratagems. Chinese checkers, Bert had said. He should think, he should scheme, even though he'd come up one jump short. But what made Bert so sure, goddammit? The Mafia—okay, they were tough, they were practiced, but were they really all that smart? Were they smarter than him, Murray Zemelman, a big executive, the Bra King?

He looked down at his watch. It was exactly 5:45. On the beach, the unmoving palms still looked black, though the spaces between them were taking on some color now, a murky purplish gray. On the horizon, the sky was just barely floating free of the ocean; the morning's first breeze wrinkled the water like the soft breath of an old woman blowing on a cup of tea. Quite suddenly Murray had an idea. It was a lunatic idea, excessive, extravagant, exorbitant. He didn't trust it but he had it, and it was the only one he had.

The idea made him itch, he scratched himself, walked around in a circle, felt the idea all over, squeezed it like you squeeze a melon. He sat on the rail, stared at the beach, turned the idea around some more, stood up. "I got it," he said.

Murray didn't answer. He was already gathering up his gear, heading for his bike. "I gotta go lay down," he said. "I gotta count the jumps, I gotta make some calls."

"Ya wanna tell me?" Tommy said.

But Murray didn't hear him. Wobbling, weaving, carrying his fishing rod like a blunt and fragile lance, he was already riding up the pier in the mild unpeopled dawn.

Someone pounded on the metal door. The whole chamber clanged like a beaten garbage can.

Squeak was still lying on his cot. The place was dark, though faint scraps of light lined the edges of the strange closed shutters. Franny's captor took a moment, then piped, "Yeah?"

"It's Bruno."

Squeak stood up, fumbled for the bolts. The door fell open, a wedge of dusty brightness tumbled in.

"Christ," said Bruno, "ya still asleep? It's almost nine awready."

"Fuck I got to do but sleep?"

"I brought coffee, donuts."

Squeak turned on the light. The bare bulb threw a rude glare that discovered Franny, stiff, chafed and red-eyed, lying on her back.

"How's the Mouth this morning?" Bruno said in her direction.

Franny said nothing.

"No smart answers today?" the big thug taunted. "Get up, Mouth, have a donut."