Tropical Depression (26 page)

"This is why we wallow," Franny said. "You really have to."

"I had a dream," the shrink explained, smacking and flinching. "Anxiety. That prescription, like I shouldn't have given it, something terrible would happen."

The shrink weighed the statement's motivation. But a plague of insects was on him, they landed in a blurred mass on his neck and wrists and forehead, and soon he was sweeping off his jacket, kicking off his loafers, stepping out of his corduroy pants. In striped boxer shorts and an old-fashioned undershirt with shoulder straps, he stepped uncertainly overboard and rolled stoutly in the muck.

While he was rolling, Flaco explained, "I find him in the lobby. He looking for a Zemelman. He seem hokay. I feel him, you know, for gun, for knife."

Tommy nodded.

"I also see big car parked outside," said Flaco. "Two
pendejos
, mean. I think they maybe not hokay."

Tommy nodded again, then he asked Flaco to go to the office of the Key West
Sentinel
and gather up the reporter Arty Magnus; and to have him contact Bert, the old man with the little dog; and to bring them both to Kilicumba as soon as he could. Flaco asked no questions, made no protests, just handed over the provisions and Max Lowenstein's suit of northern clothes, and poled his little skiff off the bottom.

Meanwhile the psychiatrist wallowed. He rolled, he shimmied, he reflected on his day. He'd had his crotch patted by an old Spanish fisherman; the wife of a patient had suggested he disrobe. At length he sat in the inches-deep sea, and in his corpulence and his sagacity he looked like Buddha.

Murray stared at him, said, "Jesus, Max, I'm really touched you came."

*****

From a pay phone on the promenade, Bruno called his boss.

"It's been a day, a night, and most of another fucking day already, and we ain't seen shit," he said.

Charlie Ponte drummed fingers on his desk. He'd slept in his own bed last night, changed his underwear, what the hell did he care? "Give it more time," he ordered.

Bruno's nylon socks were crusty, his athlete's foot was driving him insane. "How about we break in, wait for 'em inside?" That way he could wash between his toes at least.

"Too risky those places," Ponte said. "Alarms, closed circuit. Then ya first got headaches."

There was a standoff. Bruno shuffled his tormented dogs against the hot sidewalk, looked at women facedown with their tops undone, sunning on the beach.

Finally Ponte said, "Maybe you'll take over LaRue's place, keep an eye from there."

The big thug loved that idea. Foot powder. A liquor cabinet. Television. "That gonna be okay with him?"

"Fuck what's okay with him," said Charlie Ponte. "I'm fed up with that dog turd anyway. Call me back an hour or two, I'll have it all set up."

"Jesus Christ," said Bert the Shirt, looking at the mud-smeared group in the notch of the shore, "youse look ridiculous."

The old man was sitting in the bow of Flaco's skiff, his ancient chihuahua nestled in his lap. Behind him stood tall thin Arty Magnus, a cheap pen and spiral notebook clutched in his hand, and behind both of them was a lowering sun that sent a weirdly even copper sheen across the water.

"The bugs," said Murray. "You'll join us, you'll see."

"Nuh-uh," the old man said, as Flaco dragged the little craft toward shore and the blood-feeders began to swarm. "Dignity, my friend. There has to be a line. I haven't met the lady. Charmed, I'm sure." From a trouser pocket he produced a huge silk handkerchief, the same soft lavender as his shirt; almost daintily, he wrapped the cloth around his hair, tied it underneath his chin. "And who's the gentleman in his underwear?"

"This is my psychiatrist," the Bra King said. "His name is Max."

Max nodded graciously from behind his smoking pipe.

"Psychiatrist," said Bert. "Y'opening a casino or a nuthouse?" The skiff scraped bottom, and slowly, carefully, he stepped over the low gunwale. He was holding his dog the way some people hold a prayer book, all he needed was the square black shoes to look like a Sicilian grandmother on her way to church.

Arty Magnus, wearing shorts and sandals, climbed nimbly overboard, waded calf-deep and coated his bare legs with marl. He slapped some on his neck and looked around at the unbroken shoreline, the strangling vegetation. "S'gonna be quite a feat opening anything here," he said.

The others followed his eyes, saw beauty or impediments, challenge or futility, according to their dispositions.

When Bert was securely up on land, he said, "So Murray, ya come up one jump short. Ya save the missus and now you're stuck out here. This is what I call one jump short."

No one disagreed.

Tommy led the way past gator holes and severed vines back to the clearing, where low sun threw blockish and ominous monoliths of shade on one side of the middens. They sat. Bert's dog smelled nature or history and began to tremble.

Murray told the new arrivals the details of Franny's captivity and rescue and the flight to Kilicumba.

Bert sadly shook his kerchiefed head. "Ponte," he said. "He wants to think he's a businessman, but he's still a thug at heart."

"A selfish child," Max Lowenstein put in, "justifying his pathology."

"LaRue's just as bad," said Arty Magnus.

"How'd you like the pleasure," Tommy Tarpon said, "of announcing that to the whole wide world?"

The journalist said nothing. Unconsciously, he licked his chops.

"Ever hear of a company called First Keys Casinos?" the Indian went on.

Magnus shook his head, waved bugs away from his ears.

"It's Ponte's front. Mentioned in what I guess you'd call the ransom note. A little digging, I'll bet you find the link."

"What's it got to do with LaRue?" the reporter asked.

"He was supposed to pressure me into signing on with them."

"Got proof?" said the reporter.

"There he goes again," said Murray.

"He's conscientious," said the shrink, blue whorls escaping from his mouth. "Too much, it's obsessive."

Tommy said, "If LaRue handed me a large cash payment to get the contract signed, would that persuade you he's involved?"

"LaRue himself?" said Magnus. "Never happen."

"If you saw it with your own eyes?" pressed Tommy Tarpon. "Senator as bagman. If you had an exclusive on the story?"

"He'd never risk that kind of exposure," said the journalist.

Tommy paused. Some pelicans flew past just above the level of the mangroves, you could hear the soft whistle of their wings. "I think he might," the sovereign said, "if the choice was even greater risk."

"My position is this. I'm ready to sign now, but only if LaRue himself is witness. I want him implicated. I want him to have a stake in making sure nothing bad happens to my friends or me."

Now Bert the Shirt spoke up, there was something grimly oracular in the way the voice issued forth from shadowed features underneath the silk
babushka
. "Guy like Ponte, don't kid yourself someone's name on a piece a paper is gonna protect ya."

"Did I say I believed it?" Tommy said. "I said that's my position."

The psychiatrist shifted on the lumpy ground, swiftly checked that the fly of his shorts had not gapped open. "A construct," he said. "A situational construct."

Bert hugged his nervous chihuahua, leaned back against the midden. The slowly cooling shells gave off a smell of salt and iron. "And how does Ponte find out what your position is?"

Tommy just looked at him.

Murray said, "Never hurts to have a friend in the business."

"Now wait a second—" the old man began.

Franny said, "They kept me locked up in a tote board, Bert. You have to help us."

"I'm asking you to have two conversations," Tommy said.

Bert waved bugs from in front of his silk-framed face. "Two? Now it's two?"

"Someone's gotta call Ponte," Tommy said, "and someone's gotta talk to LaRue. He's probably still in Tallahassee."

"Ponte'll call LaRue," said Arty Magnus.

The Indian stood, paced the shady trough between the middens. "Exactly. And that conversation will be a lot more interesting if the two of them have different information."

Max Lowenstein sucked his pipe. "Cognitive dissonance," he murmured.

"And then some," Tommy said.

"I don't think I understand," said Bert the Shirt.

Striding between the shell heaps, slipping from red light to purple shadow and back again, the sovereign of the Matalatchee spun out the details of his stratagem. Bert listened hard, stroking his dog like the dog was his own chin, and when Tommy finished, the old man's face was neutral as a saucer. "I'll talk to them," he said.

Tommy asked Magnus for the loan of some paper and a pen. "You want your exclusive," he said, "be ready for Flaco at one tomorrow. Come prepared to spend a while in the mangroves." Then, almost as an afterthought, he said to the psychiatrist, "You can leave, Max, if you want. You can go back home."

Lowenstein shifted on the hard warm ground, flecks of muck dropped off him like tiles from a ruined mosaic. "Actually," he surprised himself by saying, "I'd like to stay."

The sun hit the horizon, bugs and birds and frogs saluted it with a sudden rasping crescendo. "Good," said the Indian, masterful on his ancestral lands. "Maybe we'll find a little job for you."

It was Bruno who opened the door of Barney LaRue's penthouse, and now Bert was confused. Briefly speechless on the threshold, he stared at the gigantic goon, saw that he was barefoot, that his feet were heavily powdered, that the powder had left ursine footprints as he'd trudged across the living room to the entryway. A whirring whine revved up, and in a moment the old man saw Pascal, crab-walking in Bruno's wake, expunging his traces with a handheld vacuum cleaner.

" 'Lo, Bert," said the big man, with a grudging cordiality. They were slightly acquainted, comrades in theory but seldom allies of late.

"I'm lookin' for Bahney," the old man said, as the little vacuum was switched off.

"What about?" said Bruno.

There was a whiff of threat in how he said it, just enough for Bert to know he ought to lie. But his reflexes weren't what they once had been, a heartbeat passed before he said, "Gin rummy game."

"He's still in Tallahassee," Pascal told him. He was dressed in red tights and seemed very put out by company.

"Ah," said Bert, holding his dog tight against his wizened stomach. "Ya got a number for him there?"

A reedy voice piped forth from the living room. "Ya don't play gin rummy by telephone. You're not fuckin' wit' us, are ya, Bert?"

"Squeak, now why would I do that''"

"We're lookin' for a neighbor a yours," said Bruno. "Guy wit' the penthouse across the way. Seen 'im?"

Bert scratched his cheek, tugged an earlobe. "Not since ya took his wife to Hialeah."

"Fuck you know about that?" said Bruno.

Bert spoke calmly to Pascal. "Gimme a number for Bahney. Write it down, my memory's shot."

"You know where they are, don'tcha Bert?" said Squeak.

Bert didn't answer.

Bruno said, "Where are they?"

"Like I said, my memory's shot."

The big thug leaned closer to him, his powdered toes curled for purchase in the rug. "We got ways t'improve an old man's memory."

"An' I'm sure they're very clever ways," Bert said, as Pascal reached in and handed him the number. "But me, I'm goin' home now. I'm gonna call LaRue about a gin game. Then I'm gonna call Cholly, 'cause his number I remember. Then I'm gettin' inta my pajamas. Ya wanna come torture me, murder me, whatever, come right in, the door is open."

*****

"Why me, Don Giovanni?" said Bert the Shirt, as he labored across the pee-stained carpet to his BarcaLounger, half-consciously sidestepping rawhide bones and rubber burgers. "Why do I always get put inna middle?"

He put the chihuahua on its unspeakable dog bed, the creature looked up through milky eyes, gave a sympathetic twitch to its whiskers.

"One a these times," the old man rambled, "someone's gonna end up gettin' really mad at me. I'm too old for havin' people mad at me. It wears ya down, Giovanni."

The dog put its chin on a paw as scrawny as a chicken wing. Bert sighed, settled back in the cradling chair. He picked up the phone and dialed.

"Hello, Martinelli's," said an oily voice.

"This is Bert the Shirt. Put Cholly on."

"There's no one here named Cholly," said the maitre d'.

"Cut the shit. Everybody knows."

There was an affronted silence on the line.

"Awright, awright," said Bert. "Ya want passwords? Calf head. Gnocchi.
Stringozzi
. Now ya happy? Gimme Cholly."

The line went dead. In a moment Charlie Ponte picked it up.

"Same old Bert," said the Miami boss. "Always fuckin' wit' guys' heads."

"I'm doin' you a favor," said the Shirt. "Your headquarters, you might as well hang a sign."

"You call to tell me that?" said Ponte.

"I call with a message from your Indian."