Virgin Heat (16 page)

But wait a second, she reminded herself. She wasn't going to Ziggy's, it was out of the question, so why was she bothering to think about the suitcase?

She was in her room. She'd had her second shower of the day, dressed a second time; her skin was already flushed again as she paced between the dresser and the bed. She realized there were lots of other things she could do between now and five p.m. There was the beach. There was sightseeing. But her eyes kept flicking back to the torn-off piece of paper that held Ziggy's address. The paper sat in an ashtray on the night table. It was barely big enough to wrap a chewed-up piece of gum, yet the whole room seemed to pivot around it, it became the center of gravity, as if it were made of some impossibly dense stuff, a different kind of matter.

She approached the paper, or rather she was pulled in toward it. She nudged it gently with a fingernail, as if she feared it might explode. Then she picked it up, although it seemed to her that it jumped into her hand. She squeezed it hard, and ran downstairs to find a taxi.

*

In the moment before Paul Amaro lumbered through the doorway that gave onto the garden, Ziggy Maxx was nibbling a loose thread off the short sleeve of his faded shirt. His arm was raked across his face, his mouth was buried in his shoulder. He barely listened as Carmen Salazar tried to explain to him and a man named Johnny Castro—a half-black Bahamian with smeared freckles and strange green eyes—how important this meeting was, what an opportunity it represented. Ziggy hated pep talks, always had. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and kept chewing at the thread.

He was still working it when, in a macabre reshuffling of space and time, his past in New York loomed up before him in a Key West doorway.

It seemed to Ziggy as baffling as a tumble into an alternate universe, but there, moving toward him at a stately pace, broad-shouldered and silver-haired, his expression grim and dogged, was the man he'd sent to prison, the man who'd sworn to kill him. Ziggy's breathing stalled, his arm dropped to his side, left his new face naked in the garden's dappled light. His field of vision shrank, became greasy at the edges; a taste of sour milk climbed up his throat.

But he stood his ground somehow as Paul Amaro neared, flanked by the short man with creases in his pants and the handsome man with the Panama hat; as Carmen Salazar respectfully got up from his lawn chair; as the short man led the rituals of greetings, introductions.

Through the handshakes and the small talk of the more important players, Ziggy had a moment to wonder if he'd be murdered right there in the garden, and to ponder what it would be that would give him away, since he had no doubt that he would be exposed. He mostly trusted the surgeon's knife and hammer; he didn't think Paul Amaro would know him by his face. So then—would it be the hands? The voice? A telltale phrase or inflection, the smell of his aftershave or of his skin?

Carmen Salazar was introducing the other underling. "This is Captain John Castro—no relation, I assure you." People tried to laugh, there was something uncomfortably intimate, visceral, about the gurgling sound of forced laughter. "Smuggles people, hard currency, cigars. Has a good boat, knows Havana harbor like his bathtub."

There were handshakes. Touching. Looks in the eye, and breathing of the damp and common air between close-together faces. Ziggy's nerves felt swollen with adrenaline, he imagined they were visible, sparking like snapped wires at the places where they branched.

"And this," said Salazar, "is Ziggy Maxx. Tommy, Carlos—you remember him. Utility player with big-league capabilities. Isn't that right, Ziggy?"

Ziggy didn't want to talk, didn't want to risk moving the features that, in repose, had not undone him. It would be absurd to die because of the stubborn remnants of a Brooklyn accent, to be murdered for a rasping tone that might trigger recollection. Between barely parted teeth, he muttered, "That's right, Carmen."

Eyes were turned his way; hands were lifted toward him. He shook with Tommy Lucca, Carlos Mendez, and as he did so, he thought about his mangled finger and the way it made his grip unique. His mind reeled with a dim sense of all the million details of identity, the seldom thought-about codes and markers by which we know one person from the next, and in the instant before he shook hands with Paul Amaro, he tried to invent a handshake that was not his own.

His palm, now, was pressed against the palm of his sworn enemy; the two men were linked at the webbing of their thumbs. Ziggy squeezed down but only very softly; he willed his dislocated pinky to work beside his other fingers; he felt the damaged joint crackle like a broken hinge. Something told him he had to lock eyes with Paul Amaro, that shrinking from his gaze would leave his enemy's senses free to absorb signals that were harder to disguise, that did not admit of bluffing. With the moxie of the cornered, he stared straight at his former boss; what he saw in his glance almost gave him hope. Paul Amaro's shadowed eyes looked far away, indifferent, bored. Ziggy recognized the expression of a man who was only partly where he seemed to be.

He freed his hand, it felt very heavy at his side. Paul Amaro's exhausted gaze slid away to other things. A brief breeze, wet and unrefreshing, rattled the foliage, brought forth hints of fruit and flowers that mixed with the smells of sweat and cologne.

Carmen Salazar said, "So, gentlemen—to business?"

*

The cab drove off, and Angelina walked uncertainly down a narrow lane that wasn't very nice.

Low and rusted chain-link fence separated tiny unkempt yards; the barriers were colonized by scraps of browning vine. Fronds had fallen here and there at curbside, and no one picked them up, they dried and broke in pieces on the stony ground. The sun beat down on sagging roofs and splintered porches and jalousied windows with missing slats like gaps in teeth.

Angelina, her scalp throbbing as her body worked to shed its heat and that of the midday glare, paused in front of number fourteen, Ziggy's place.

Fenceposts leaned in unmoored foundations of cracked cement. A gate hung askew before a weedy path. An ancient birdbath, chipped and dry, sat in the dirt, spotted with lichen. Two drooping stairs led up to a door whose screen was torn. She approached, breathed deep in the relative cool of the porch, and knocked.

There was no answer.

She was less relieved and more disappointed than she thought she'd be. She knocked again.

She waited. A banking plane went by, its clatter reminded her that she was leaving in a matter of hours, with nothing really changed, nothing accomplished, nothing even understood. Quite suddenly she was furious with frustration. She yanked open the screen and reached for the knob on the inside door.

She knew it wouldn't turn. Ziggy was a paranoid, saw thieves and dirtbags everywhere, was not the type to leave his door unlocked; she was mostly just performing for herself, putting on a little show of temper.

She could not know that a Federal agent named Keith McCullough had considerately picked the lock for her, then settled back in his shady car at the head of the lane, to see what would happen when Ziggy Maxx and Paul Amaro's daughter got together.

The knob turned, the door fell open, and Angelina, utterly surprised, stepped into Ziggy's empty bungalow.

Something was bothering Paul Amaro, he couldn't pinpoint what it was.

The garden was steamy, he was damp inside his clothes, but he didn't think it was the temperature alone that was annoying him. Pollen and fruit sap were glutting up his sinuses, he had the beginnings of a headache, but what was gnawing at him did not seem mainly physical. There was, of course, his preoccupation with his daughter, but that had become a constant droning sorrow; what he felt now struck him as outside of that.

He pondered his malaise as the meeting progressed.

Tommy Lucca was saying, "We need a safe place to move the goods from my guy's truck to your guy's boat."

"We have a place," said Carmen Salazar. "An abandoned marina, ten, twelve miles up the Keys. Extremely private. Totally secure."

Paul Amaro thought: Bad enough I can't stand Lucca. Maybe what's bothering me is that there's someone else here I don't like. Was it Salazar, this arrogant little small-timer who talked fancy and sneered at everything?

"I'll make time," Johnny Castro said, and Paul Amaro wondered if it was the boat guy that was irritating him. He didn't like it when a person was doing a job for damn good pay and made it sound like he was doing you a favor. Or maybe he just didn't like the captain's hybrid looks, the yellowish skin with big oval splotches, the kinky reddish hair.

Salazar said, "He'll set the details up this trip, the goods'll be in Cuba twelve hours after they hit the Keys."

"How's that sound, Paul?" said Tommy Lucca. "Professional enough?"

Paul Amaro missed the beat. He cleared his throat to try to cover up the humiliating fact that his mind had wandered, his concentration had let down. "Sounds okay," he said without conviction. Then he vented some funk by adding, "If no one fucks it up."

"No one's going to fuck it up," said Salazar.

Paul Amaro, working to get back on top, shot him a smirk as bent and scornful as his own, then slipped once again into the morbid pleasure, seductive as a scab, of sorting through his irritations and wondering why he felt so lousy sitting there.

*

Ziggy's place made Angelina very sad.

It was a mess and yet it looked like no one lived there. There were no pictures on the flaking walls of the living room, no keepsakes on the scratched and dusty coffee table. There was nothing that suggested an enthusiasm or a hobby, no hint of an attachment or a memory. A faded couch with wrinkled lumpy cushions. A few old magazines and newspapers lying wherever they'd been tossed. The room felt less like a home than like a place to wait for a bus or an examination.

Feeling furtive, jumpy, she stepped through a low doorway into the tiny kitchen. An old refrigerator rumbled; the floor sloped beneath crazed linoleum. The stove was stained with boiled-over drips of things. But what things? Angelina gave in and opened cupboards, saw only a few cans of soup, a bag of pretzels, a bottle of tequila. Ziggy's coffee cup was in the sink. She touched it, she hefted it. She wanted to know how his cup would feel in his hand when he had his coffee in the morning.

She moved into the narrow hallway that led on to the bathroom and the bedroom.

Above the bathroom sink she saw a single toothbrush, frazzled, dangling from a porcelain fixture whose glaze was chipped. On a shelf before the mirror was a plastic razor and a can of shaving cream, dried foam honeycombed around its nozzle. Who did he see when he shaved? she wondered. What did he think? Were his thoughts as void of the personal as his place was? Had he never learned how to care for himself, about himself, or had the caring leached away, become vestigial, obsolete, like the name he used to have?

She moved slowly toward the bedroom, raking the tips of her fingers along the wall. A breeze stirred, made palm fronds scrape against the tin shingles of the roof. Guilty, Angelina was disconcerted by the sudden sound, felt caught by it somehow, like she was being watched even as she spied on Ziggy.

The bedroom door was three quarters open, left that way, no doubt, by a random nudge of an elbow or a shoulder. She stepped inside.

The windows were covered loosely, incompletely, by louvered shutters that sliced the daylight into vivid stripes alive with silver motes of dust. In a corner of the room, a simple chair stood draped in wrinkled trousers, faded shirts. A dresser, whose veneers had parted and were riffling out like playing cards, held loose change, a spare watch, a coiled belt, but not a snapshot or a souvenir.

Angelina was standing near the bed. It was unmade, she knew that it would always be unmade. Tormented pillows lay at jarring angles, crinkled flaps of pillowcases caught beneath them. A light blanket, kicked away, was bunched into crags and valleys. The bottom sheet was not stretched tight; crests of cotton rose up parallel, like waves stopped on the water.

She reached down, touched the cloth. It was soft, old, thin, it had a feel like lanolin from the sweat and oils of Ziggy's body. She smelled him now, as if her touch had renewed his presence in the sheets. It was a yeasty smell, slightly sour but as rich as the vapors of baking bread, as beckoning and basic. She traced the wrinkles in the sheet, she breathed in deeply, and she noticed that her other hand was at the collar of her blouse.

It was a blue blouse and it buttoned to the neck. She watched the silver motes floating in the stripes of light that filtered through the shutters, and although she knew full well that she was nothing like bold enough to do what she was doing, she began unbuttoning the buttons.

She put the blouse on the chair with Ziggy's clothes, then stepped out of the skirt she'd meant to travel in. The air had become very still; the house creaked, swollen with heat; the room seemed very full of Ziggy now.

Not until the last moment did Angelina hurry. Then some old shame of nakedness, some childish fear of leering eyes and wagging fingers, made her movements angular, abrupt. She shuffled off her underthings, clingy with damp, and settled into Ziggy's bed. The room was hot but the sheets felt cool as wind-dried flesh against her skin, and she told herself she could stay there forever if she had to, her face on Ziggy's pillow, her body snug against the mattress where the man she loved, for all his attempts to zig and zag, to slide through life untouching and untouched, had stayed still long enough to leave his imprint.