Virgin Heat (11 page)

"Predatory?" Michael said. "Aggressive? Sometimes it's like that. Look, someone has to have the nerve to lay it on the line, to make it clear, with words, with glances: I want it."

A nervous giggle started up from Angelina's tummy, didn't make it past her closed-down throat. Her legs twitched, the tanned knees rubbed together in the sunshine. "Michael," she said, "I can't throw myself—"

"Go back to that bar—" he interrupted.

"He doesn't want to see me," Angelina cut him off in turn. "You saw the way he fell back in the shadows, he looked like he wanted to be swallowed in the earth."

"The timing was all wrong," said Michael. "Your uncle was there ... Look, go back alone. Late. Go back looking very pretty. Show a little cleavage. And make sure he feels you looking at him. Your gaze—make sure it burns right through him."

"God, Michael, I don't know—"

"You do know. You know perfectly well."

Angelina bit her lip. Searing sun rained down and naked men cavorted in the pool. The air was freighted with the promiscuity of flowers, with a lubricious perfume of chlorine and coconut and viscous oils.

"Michael," she said at last, "lemme ask you. When two people ... I mean when, you know, it happens, I mean, like all of it, it happens—is it really as terrific as people say?"

His green eyes blinked. Was it possible? Was she really telling him what she seemed to be telling him? He tried to imagine the ripeness of her body, how the weight of that ripeness must tug at her, must pull and stretch like an over-ready fruit still captive to its vine, and he spoke to her not as a lover but as a priest of love, a guide, with a quiet holy fervor in his voice. "Yeah," he said, "it really is."

Uncle Louie, dressed in a turquoise cabana set and a plastic visor he'd bought that morning, sat on the seawall up by Smathers Beach, sucked at a mango smoothie, and quietly marveled at the variety of unnecessary exertions going on around him.

Along the broad but bumpy promenade, between himself and the long row of vendors' trucks that parked along the edge of A-1A, people with headphones whooshed by on Rollerblades. Bicycles went past, a few had dogs in baskets. Joggers plodded by, their skins glistening like those of basted birds. On the beach, against a background of bright green water, youths were playing volleyball, heedlessly diving on the thin layer of imported sand that imperfectly disguised the native lacerating coral.

The spectacle kept Louie entertained but could not quite cure his fretting. Since last night he'd doubted that coming to Key West was really such a hot idea; the thought was eating at him that, for all his good intentions, he'd done to himself what it seemed he'd done his whole life long—put himself in a pickle where no matter what he did was wrong. He'd found Angelina. But what had he really accomplished? He couldn't make her go home against her will; he'd promised her he wouldn't. On the other hand, he couldn't very well abandon her down here. Whatever she was going through, love or some other crisis, she was fragile. If he left and something bad happened, it would seem an unforgivable dereliction, not just to his brothers, but to himself.

Then there was the question of contacting the family. He'd vowed to Angelina that he wouldn't give away her whereabouts. But it seemed unfair, cruel, not to let the family know she was okay. But how? Louie didn't trust himself in a position where he had to answer questions. If he spoke to someone he was afraid of, like his brother or his wife, and they pressured him, he'd spill the beans, he knew he would.

So, sitting on the seawall, his knees already getting pink, he drank his smoothie and he fretted. Then, suddenly, he knew what he should do. He walked on burning feet to a pay phone near a frozen-custard stand with a speaker that blared out, over and over again, an irritating little tune, and called the plumbing store in East Harlem.

The Dominican kid picked up on the second ring, said, "Amaro Sanitary Fixtures. You got Eddie."

"Hello, Eddie," Louie said.

"Mist' Amaro!" said the kid, and there was a happiness in it, a pleasure of reuniting that took Louie by surprise. Until that moment it had barely occurred to him that he might be missed, worried about, that it wasn't only Angelina whose absence would leave a small hole in the world. "Where ah you, mang?"

There was a pause. Louie pictured Eddie leaning over the marred gray counter, shifting his crossed ankles the way he did when he was puzzling something out.

"Take it?" The words scared Eddie, seemed like some crude temptation out of a fable from Sunday school, or like further evidence that something dreadful had happened to his boss. "Mist' Amaro, you tell me never touch that money."

Louie said, "And now I'm telling you take it if you need it." He ran a hand through the sparse bundles of damp hair atop his scorching head, and wished he'd bought a cap instead of a visor. Rose would have made him buy a cap. "And call my wife," he said. "Good talking with you, Eddie."

*

Paul Amaro was pacing like a bear among the mismatched tables of the Gatto Bianco Social Club.

Clumsy with fatigue, dizzy now and then, he occasionally bumped a chair back with his hip. He hadn't shaved, he gave off a faint but penetrating smell of rage and worry.

His old friend Funzie Gallo was eating a cannoli, the kind with crushed pistachios garnishing the ends. He watched the other man pace, then said at last, "For your own good, Paul, try to think about somethin' else awhile."

Angelina's father didn't stop lumbering and rocking. He fixed the other man from under tangled brows and said, "Fuck else is there to think about?"

Gallo blinked, pads of semiliquid fat shifted all around his eyes. "Business, Paul. Money. We used to make a lotta money here, remember?"

"And it's turned to shit," said Paul Amaro.

Funzie Gallo wanted to disagree. He found he couldn't. But Amaro seemed to understand that an attempt at help was being offered, he tried to meet Funzie halfway. He resumed without enthusiasm, "Okay, okay, so talk to me."

Gallo said, "These rods for Cuba—"

"Funzie," Amaro interrupted. "You're practically as old as me. Y'oughta remember. Our friends, Trafficante, Lansky, even Luciano, they lost their shirts in Cuba."

Funzie nibbled around the edges of his sweet, licked back oily crumbs of crust. "That was different, Paul. That was heavy-duty investment. This is a one-time cash transaction."

Amaro leaned against the pool table where no one ever shot pool. For a brief time he floated free of his dolorous preoccupation with his daughter, but what took its place was a recollection of the busted car-shipping scam that had sent him to the can. "International," he said, "I don't like it. Customs. Coast Guard. Fucking navy."

"Not our problem," Funzie said. "That's the beauty part. We get the pieces far as Florida. After that, it's Tommy Lucca's problem."

Amaro tightened at the name. "Lucca's an asshole," he said.

"Did I say he's not?" said Funzie. What he left unsaid was that Lucca was active at least, doing deals while they themselves drank coffee. By cunning or good fortune, he'd left New York when the leaving was good, established himself in Miami, a wide-open town where things were happening. He'd prospered as lucky lunatics often prospered: As the world got crazier, it came his way.

Which didn't mean that Paul Amaro had to respect him. "He's a hothead and a whaddyacallit, paranoid, and he's got this bug up his ass, touchy, about how New York doesn't take him serious."

Funzie said, "But it's a sweet deal, Paul."

"Plus which," Paulie said, "I hear he's all hopped up on drugs. Rule one, ya don't do business wit' guys on drugs."

"Then I guess we're outa business," Funzie said. He went back to his pastry.

Paulie walked around the room. In spite of himself he was getting interested, he tasted in his throat the meaty joy of scamming. He said, "You telling me you trust that broke-nosed fuck?"

"Trust 'im?" Funzie said. "No. But I'm telling you I think we oughta stop sitting on our asses and do a little business. Just so, ya know, people remember we're alive."

Paulie considered. But not for long. Like a man who falls prey to dirty thoughts in church, he was suddenly furious, abashed at his own frailty, that he had allowed himself to be distracted even for a moment from his deeper meditations, the higher business of finding Angelina. He turned his face away, dropped his scratchy chin onto his chest, and very softly said, "Do what you want, Funzie. I don't give a shit."

"I do what I want, you're gonna have to get involved."

Paul said nothing.

"I do what I want," Funzie said again, "at some point you're gonna have to show your face, maybe travel, deal with Lucca."

Amaro did a kind of penance by not answering.

His old friend Funzie bit deep into the cannoli and decided, for the sake of his own sanity, that he would take the silence as a go-ahead.

*

When the phone rang at her Bronx apartment, Rose Amaro was two knuckles deep in a tall jar of maraschino cherries, her long red nails working awkwardly to untangle the stems of the last few sugared fruits. She cursed, sucked syrup from her fingers, and took her uncompleted cocktail to the living room, where she flopped into the chair next to the telephone.

"Miz Amaro?" said a voice in response to her lugubrious hello. "This is Eddie. Eddie from the staw."

He told her of his talk with Louie, and she began, very sloppily, to sob. Big hot tears started from her eyes, got bogged in her makeup like rivers thwarted en route to the sea. Diluted lipstick stained her hand and cheek as she roughly wiped away the drool that gathered at the corners of her mouth. Her chest heaved, iced Seagram's and sweet vermouth splashed onto her blouse. "He's all right?" she managed at last. "He said he's all right? Angelina's with him?"

Eddie repeated what he knew.

His boss's wife kept crying. The kid didn't know if he should hang up or listen to her cry. He held the phone a little away from his ear. It seemed that she was stopping. Then she started again, louder than before.

Rose pressed herself deeper into the creased upholstery and told him. "Because I've been such a rotten wife to him all these years. The kindest, sweetest man that ever walked the earth, and I've been nothing but a selfish bitch."

The kid looked at the phone. He liked his boss, but he didn't think he was
that
terrific.

"I've been awful to him," the wife sobbed on. "I was mean. I got away with it. It got to be a game, a habit. But who was I fooling? What did it prove?"

Eddie felt bad for this unhappy woman. He searched for some way to get her to stop crying. He said, "Look, Miz Amaro, maybe he wanted to call you."

"Oh yeah?" she said, with a quick and seamless shift from remorse to complaint. "Oh yeah? Then why the hell didn't he?"

Eddie paused. He'd only been trying to give a little comfort; how had it happened that he was under attack? His splayed eyes wandered and he improvised. "Maybe he wanted to call you, but they wouldn't let him call family."

Rose Amaro sat up straighter and suddenly sounded almost sober. "They?" she said. "Who's they?"

Eddie blinked, pushed up off his elbows. He'd got ahead of himself and now he tried to backtrack. "I don't know who's they. Only, you know, he said, when he's coming home, it isn't up to him."

In the Bronx, Louie's wife put down her drink, blew her nose, took a moment to compose herself, then called her sister-in-law Maria.

Having spent a damp and edgy night when she was never quite asleep, Angelina now endured a parched and vacant day when she never felt fully awake.

Hour after hour, she sat by the pool, her only activity the occasional moving of her lounge chair, chasing the slow march of a patch of shade like a refugee trailing a defeated army. Texture vanished from the sounds of the courtyard as insects rested in the cool of mounds and nests and burrows; without their buzzing and rasping, the occasional human voice or laugh seemed abrupt and harsh, a soloist without an orchestra. Beyond the picket gate, the melting streets were empty, stunned. Tourists were at the beach; locals were at home, naked under ceiling fans. Ease spilled over into a vague sorrow, sensuous languor phased toward quiet loss, as the heat of the tropics gave its gift of lassitude and claimed its price of wasted time.