Virgin Heat (15 page)

*

Maybe Louie had simply been away too long. Maybe he was tired of walking up and down Duval Street, spinning the same postcard racks evening after evening, seeing the same T-shirts, the same pierced noses, the same tattoos. Maybe he was tired of the moldy smell of his motel room, the places in the towels where the terry cloth had been rubbed away on strangers' bodies. In any case, his traveler's delight was beginning to wear that thin, he was starting to feel homesick.

Homesick for what? he asked himself. For his wife's bad cooking, grains of salt bouncing off of watery mounds of tasteless vegetables? For the not quite kitty-cornered angle of the TV set in the living room, the tangle of extension cords behind it? For the traffic, the cold, the stinking air?

Truth was, he was getting homesick for all those things.

He missed his wife; he felt that now, intensely. Missing her, he afforded her the benefit of every doubt. She wasn't sarcastic, she was witty. Not malicious, but tough-minded and savvy. She wasn't vain, she was respectful of appearances. Not pushy, but high-spirited.

Besides, what did any of that matter? He missed her. She was his wife. Quite suddenly, he wanted more than anything to hear her voice.

He was standing in a pizzeria while this was happening, waiting for his calzone to be warmed up. The air smelled of oregano and yeast, flashes of heat shot forth from the ovens. He sipped his soda through a straw. He didn't really think that he should call, but he looked around for a pay phone. He saw one in the dim alcove that led on to the rest rooms. He asked the counter guy for change.

Names and numbers were scrawled in pencil on the wall around the phone. Louie's heart was pounding. He shouldn't call because he didn't know what he would say. He picked up the receiver, heard the dial tone, put it down again. He was afraid he'd catch hell, afraid he'd be asked too many questions. He felt a desperate impulse to brag, and he knew this would only lead to trouble.
I found Angelina!,
he yearned to tell his wife. Then what?

He again picked up the phone, nestled it between his shoulder and his ear as he dialed numbers, readied change. Quarters plunked, dimes tinkled. His hand shook. There were two rings, three, and then his wife said, "Hello?"

Louie heard the rasp of many decades' smoking, the thick tongue of an evening measured in cocktails. The TV was on, must've been a sitcom, he heard clustered laughing.

"Hello?" she said again, impatient now, aggressive.

Louie wanted to speak but he couldn't. Behind him, trays clattered, peels rang, a counterman sang out, "Spinach calzone!"

Rose demanded, "Who the hell is this? You there? You there?" Her own heart thumped now, she felt a burning in her tightened chest. Was this news? A ransom call? "Hello?"

Louie understood he had to talk, couldn't let things hang like this. But when he went to move his mouth, the best he could manage was a kiss, a wet and awkward smacking kiss into the phone.

There was a moment's disbelieving silence, the receiver felt like a dead fish in his hand.

Then Rose said, "Drop dead, ya fucking pervert."

The phone slammed down in Louie's ear. He blinked, then cursed himself. He knew if he called back, the line would be busy, off the hook. Why did he always make things worse when he tried to make them better?

He waited till his breathing slowed, then went up to the counter. He paid for his calzone but left it sitting there. He wasn't hungry anymore.

Ziggy was dreaming of lamb chops.

Or at least that's how the dream had started off. A pair of lamb chops, perfectly pink, were set before him on a clean white plate. He was ravenous. He had a big napkin tucked under his chin, and he contemplated the chops in the perfect rapture of appetite peaking, fulfillment in plain view. He admired the delicate and arcing bones, licked his lips at the prospect of the juicy resilient flesh between his teeth. But when he picked up knife and fork, the lamb chops began to change themselves into Angelina. Their curving bones became her sides, her face appeared like a medallion on the plate. The dollops of meat began to breathe; he saw them pulse, alive again, and with lascivious confusion, he pondered the dubious anatomy. These succulent pink morsels—were they her thighs? breasts? buttocks offered on a clean white plate?

The phone rang, kept ringing.

Ziggy whimpered, groaned, turned over. At last, with flustered effort he freed a hand from underneath the tangled sheet, brought the receiver to his ear beneath a sweaty pillow. "Yeah?"

Then he put the pillow on his head again and tried his best to dive back into sleep. He needed rest but more than that he needed sustenance; he longed to recapture the dream he now felt, bitterly, he'd been gypped out of.

His eyes closed tight, he labored at bringing back the images of nourishment and lust, projecting them like slides against his eyelids. It didn't work. The pictures were there, but without the all-acceptingness of sleep, they were ridiculous and crude, and Ziggy dimly understood he'd lost his chance to savor Angelina without the guilty weight of will, to relish the miracle of her availability without the dread of consequences.

Cursing, he gave up on rest and trundled out of bed, moving resentfully into another day of a life that, as he couldn't help noticing more and more, didn't fit him as a person's own life ought to, but pinched and drooped like someone else's borrowed clothes.

*

Another day, thought Angelina, another mango muffin.

Though this day, she realized, was very different from all the others that she'd spent at Coral Shores. The breakfast buffet was the same—the same thwarted bees hovering outside the tiny tents that covered the fruit. The poolside spectacle was more or less the same—the same mix of sleepy smokers and pinkened bare behinds. But everything was tinged now with the sepia of departure. Colors faded as things seen were already becoming things recalled; round objects flattened, the better to fit in the never adequate luggage of memory.

She was leaving today. She'd booked her flight. She'd tried to call her Uncle Louie, left a message for him. Thanks for everything. Sorry to be leaving so abruptly. Sometime, when she was feeling calmer, clearer, she would explain it all.

She was already mostly packed, her open suitcase sitting at the foot of the bed, piled with pastel blouses and floral shifts in hothouse colors that she doubted she would ever wear back in the austere and washed-out north. Things were very different up there, she reminded herself. Up there she wouldn't greet each sunset with a salty cocktail. Up there she wouldn't spend her evenings hopping bars, eating seafood on the ocean. What
would
she do up there, without Michael for a friend, without Ziggy for a mission, without her own awakened desires giving direction to her days? She didn't know; the question gave her the beginnings of a bellyache. She leaned back farther in her lounge chair, offered her face to the sun, and tried to think of other things, or better yet, of nothing.

She succeeded well enough in going blank that she didn't see Michael come in the front gate from the street, and it wasn't all his shadow cooled her skin that she noticed him standing above her lounge, staring down at an unsettling angle. Russet stubble bristled on his chin and underneath his nostrils. His eyes were narrow in the sun, laugh lines at the corners; his mouth was stretched in a slightly goofy smile powered by conspiracy and triumph.

"You're looking pleased with yourself this morning," Angelina told him.

By way of answer, he reached into the pocket of his jeans, produced a rumpled bit of paper which he dangled over her like a string above a cat. "Know what this is?" he said.

He sat down near the foot of her lounge. With effort he tempered his grin, looked almost priestly in a pagan sort of way. "Give me your hand."

"The place he lives, it's no pleasure palace, I have to tell you. Not without a certain tawdry charm, I guess . . . but you'll see what I mean."

He leaned closer to her, put both his hands on one of hers, closed her fingers around the precious scrap of paper. "Go there," he said. "Have a wonderful, wonderful afternoon . . . Write to me sometime, my address is on the back . . . And don't say goodbye, I can't stand to say goodbye."

*

They took the stretch from Coral Gables so no one would get crampy, cranky on the long ride down the Keys.

Even so, Paul Amaro was feeling foul. He looked out the window as a pretext for turning a wide shoulder on his companions, but he allowed himself to take no pleasure in the sparkling greens and blues that stretched away from Seven Mile Bridge, in the effortless flight of pelicans whose wing tips hung an inch above the water.

A suspicion was gnawing at him—the suspicion that he was being duped somehow, made a fool of. But when he pondered who or what was duping him, he could come up with no villain other than himself. He was pretending he cared about this deal. He was feigning a professional's interest in the details, going through the old charade of showing he was tough and sly. He was shamming, even, the expected avidity for money, when the truth was that, once the mindless spasm of involvement had passed, he didn't give a damn about any of it, not the guns, not the risk, not the payoff. He cared about his missing daughter. When he thought about her, worry and rage brought him to the brink of madness; when he tried to distract himself with thoughts of anything except her, he felt only a cowardly dishonesty, an emptiness beyond despair.

So he stared, unseeing, out the window, his sinews stretched between the poles of grief and fakery, and at last the limo reached Key West.

The highway narrowed, lost its forward thrust as it left behind the strip malls and the billboards. One traffic light sufficed to change it into a shady avenue where people sat on porches, where matching pairs of palms stood sentinel in front of doorways.

Tommy Lucca's driver veered off toward the dusty neighborhood where Carmen Salazar had his headquarters, parked on a street of dented cars, among them a battered hulking Oldsmobile.

Paulie emerged from the air-conditioned stretch into the blistering heat of noon. Through eyes constricted by a moment's dizziness, he squinted at the candy store, with its cracked stoop and streaked and filthy windows, loose mortar crumbling in its cheap facade of bricks.

"Place is a dump," he said to Tommy Lucca.

He said it to gain the upper hand but it backfired. Lucca didn't rattle, just flashed a sour smile, and what the smile said was that the Gatto Bianco Social Club was not exactly Caesar's Palace either, and you couldn't judge an operation by its headquarters, or then again, maybe you could.

They climbed the cracked stoop. Lucca and Mendez stood aside, gesturing graciously for their guest to enter first. But by old and reasonable habit, Paul Amaro declined to lead the parade through an unknown doorway. He waited until the others were inside, then stepped into the dimness, smelled ancient chocolate and the armpits of the man who sat before the fan, and was confirmed in his determination to be unimpressed.

For a while Angelina truly believed she wasn't going to Ziggy's place; then she caught herself wondering if she should bring her suitcase or leave it at the guest house.

Bringing it, she reasoned, would be awkward and could be regarded as presuming; on the other hand, it would be a nuisance to come back for it before going to the airport—especially since, if she went to Ziggy's at all, it would only be to say hello and goodbye, nothing more.