Virgin Heat (17 page)

The meeting was over.

On the glaring sidewalk, Tommy Lucca said tartly, "So Paul, this yokel, he meet with your approval?"

"I think I'd like a little time to myself."

Lucca shot a glance at Carlos Mendez. Mendez adjusted the tilt of his hat, said mildly, "Our colleague, your concerns are answered?"

Lucca twitched. He wanted to get home and he was tired of sitting on his exasperation. "Christ, Paul," he went on, "the guy's a pro, anyone can see that. Little shitass town like this, he's pullin' in—"

"Tommy," Paul Amaro interrupted, "it's nothin' against your guy, okay? He's a cocky scumbag, but that's okay by me. I have a lot on my mind, I'd like a little time to think. Ask your driver, please, to bring me to the beach."

"The beach," said Tommy Lucca. A Floridian, he did not, in the middle of a business day, see the big appeal of sand and water.

"That's right. The beach. To me, Tommy, the beach is very soothing."

*

Carmen Salazar was all pumped up about his flirtation with the big boys. Though he tried to be blase, he couldn't help replaying his sitdown with the mobsters, reviewing for his minions how well it had gone, how suave he had been. Ziggy, unless he wanted to reveal his panic, had no choice but to stand there in the garden, listening to his boss congratulate himself, before he could slip away and bolt.

He would bolt, there was not a shred of doubt about it now. He should have fled before, as soon as Paul Amaro's relatives had mysteriously begun appearing at his bar. He'd been stupid to stick around, and it was pointless now even to wonder why he'd done it. He felt damn lucky and stunningly surprised to have met Amaro face-to-face and not been murdered on the spot. He saw no virtue in pressing his luck still further.

He waited for Salazar to finish chattering, then said a curt goodbye and stepped briskly through the dimness of the candy store, paused on the top step of the cracked stoop, glancing left and right. Instinct was battling fatalism. If his enemy was onto him, he was dead, if not today, tomorrow; he knew that. Yet the innards counseled vigilance. He probed the glaring street for assassins, fairly tiptoed to the Oldsmobile, held his breath as the car cranked out the ignition spark that might set off a bomb.

He hadn't been shot. He didn't blow up. He put the car in gear and headed home to grab his little stash of money and a change or two of clothes, and tried to figure just where the hell he'd go to hide.

*

Paul Amaro left his suit jacket in the limousine as he stepped out onto the promenade flanking Smathers Beach.

It was early afternoon. The sun was white, the sky a careless blue with little clouds whose bottoms picked up green reflections from the waters of the Florida Straits. Paul rolled up his shirtsleeves, and even so he was sweating before the limo had rolled out of sight. He didn't mind. It felt good to sweat in the sunshine, salt air drawing at his open pores. It felt clean, uncalculated, simple; felt like nothing else in his baroque and convoluted life.

He walked a while, walked faster than he should have, so that his heart pounded, the pulse surged in his ears and in his feet. He looked around, and everything he saw made him feel nostalgic and remorseful. Kites bobbed on puffing thermals, they hung lazily outside of time. Vendors sold hot dogs, sausage, french fries that barefoot kids carried off in paper cones; they could have come from Rockaway or Coney Island forty, fifty years before. The beach, it never changed. People on towels, a guy red as a lobster. A couple necking, their elbows coated in sand. A little girl with a yellow pail and shovel, a naked boy with water wings, learning how to swim.

He walked, he sweated, the sweat on his face was of the selfsame stuff as tears. At length, his shirt translucent, he sat down on the seawall, mopped his forehead, felt his dreadful distance from everyone around him. They were ordinary people, the kind he usually despised. Working stiffs, taxpayers, suckers. People with mortgages, bosses, people who chewed their fingernails when it was time to pay the bills. Cowering civilians—but today he envied them. They did their jobs, they scrimped, they earned vacation and wallowed in sand and they savored it. They were decent, and their reward for being decent was that if bad things happened to them, as bad things would to some, they could at least believe that they were blameless, it was just bum luck.

He sat looking out at the ocean, life went on around him. A volleyball game on the beach. Behind him on the promenade, joggers, skaters, the small noisy commerce of people buying sodas and hamburgers and ice cream. His mind snapped back to the sitdown in the garden, the clench in his gut that told him something wasn't right. Somebody was lying; or somebody was cheating; or something was not as it appeared to be.

Or maybe, Paul Amaro dared to think, it was himself who was no longer what he seemed. Something had been shaken loose inside of him when his daughter disappeared. Settled matters of how a man should live were now called into doubt, unquestionable truths now needed to be questioned. Sitting there in the searing sun, his blood pounding and carnival sounds tinkling and clattering around him, Paul Amaro was like a man trying to pry open a long-sealed tomb, and he was also the tomb itself. Was there anything of value left inside? Would he look hard enough to change?

He knew that he would not.

He lacked the will, was too steeped in guilt and spite. Even so, the mere thought of being other than he was made him for a moment almost happy. Unburdened. His mind went empty, and in that brief emptiness he noticed something that had been there all the while but that he'd failed to focus on: A tune was going round and round. It was an irritating, catchy little tune; it finished on a warped note, caught its breath, then started in again, infernal in its cheeriness.

Paul Amaro swiveled on the seawall, looked over his left shoulder. He saw an ice-cream truck, an old-fashioned bullhorn speaker mounted on its cab.

For a moment he forgot to breathe. An ice-cream truck in April. Civilians on vacation.

His overheated brain thrashed toward sense like a swimmer in a riptide. Was it possible? His brother Louie's stupid video. His daughter's strange attention. Could it be?

He stood up too fast, blood drained from his head. When his vision returned he saw a pay phone thirty feet away. The phone that Louie used to call the plumbing store?

He stood there. With a sudden eerie calm he wondered if he was onto something or if he was going mad.

Then, wavery and insubstantial in the heat shimmer that floated off the pavement, Tommy Lucca's limousine came gliding up the road. Paul Amaro blinked toward it, bitter and confused. A deal had been set in motion; he'd gotten tangled up in business. He was supposed to go back to Coral Gables, he was supposed to play the solid and reliable
capo
. But there was no way he was going. Not now.

When the car had stopped in front of him, he said to Lucca, in what he hoped would pass for a calm, sane voice, "Bring me to a good hotel. I'm staying here a while."

Lucca's eyes tightened down, his lips twitched. "Staying here? For crissakes, Paul." His mouth stopped making words and chewed the air.

Carlos Mendez fretted with his hat. "But about our arrangements, Paul," he said.

"Our arrangements," echoed Paul Amaro absently, as he slid in alongside Mendez, felt cold upholstery against his sweaty skin.

The car started moving, Paul looked out the window at the beach, imagining that he might see his daughter as a little girl, playing in the sand. "Arrangements, right," he murmured. "Fine, no problem. Soon as I get settled in, I'll get in touch with Funzie."

Ziggy's house key was ready in his hand as, looking back across his shoulders, he strode the weedy walkway that led on to his sagging porch.

He climbed the two splintery stairs and stepped briskly to the door. He reached for the knob, which turned at his grip, before he'd touched it with the key.

He recoiled in terror, spun around, jumped down the steps, and hid behind a bush.

His bowels burned, his scalp was crawling along his altered hairline. He hadn't left the door unlocked; he never did. True, he'd been absentminded lately—left milk out on the counter in the heat, bollixed up drink orders at work. But leave his door open? No, that's not something he would do. He had to believe that somebody had broken in, that someone, maybe, was awaiting him in rubber gloves, at that very moment attaching a silencer to the muzzle of a gun.

He crouched against the foliage; sweat ran down his spine, trickled past his belt. He watched the door and riffled through his options. He could run back to the Olds, but what then?—he had no cash, no bank account, and besides, he'd be in the open, an easy target, as he ran. So he waited. He sniffed the air for smells of threat, listened for wrong sounds. There weren't any. The house seemed innocent, benign, just a funky bungalow. His fear leveled off. Maybe he
had
forgotten to lock his door.

He decided on a stratagem. Staying low, beneath the level of the windows, he started crawling through the yard to check his place out room by room. Lizards fled before his slow and cumbersome advance. He dodged the leavings of feral cats; half-buried shards of coral pocked his hands.

He came around a corner of the building and lifted his eyes to the level of the windowsill. He peered into his living room. No
goombahs
were glutting up the furniture; the place looked undisturbed.

He pressed on toward the kitchen, found it as grimy and lonely as he'd left it.

The bathroom window was frosted, he could only scan for telltale shadows.

His knees bruised, his lower back complaining, he kowtowed onward toward the bedroom. He contorted himself to avoid brittle fronds that might crack beneath his weight; he landed now and then with a hand against a thorn lurking in the camouflage of unraked ground. At length he reached the bedroom window, stretched his aching limbs before lifting up his head to peek inside.

At that moment, Angelina was lying peacefully, silently, dreamy in the doughy warmth of her longed-for lover's bed. Suddenly she saw a pair of eyeballs clicking upward through the louvers of the drooping shutter then sliding into place between two slats. She pulled the sheet up tight beneath her chin, and she screamed.

Ziggy, freshly terrified at the piercing howl, screamed right back. Then he tumbled over his heels and landed prostrate in a pile of damp and decomposing leaves.

His first impulse was to run like hell, but for a time he was paralyzed with fright, could do no more than pathetically wave his ungrounded limbs like a flipped turtle. Then his mind began to clear, to process what he'd seen. It was a woman. A woman in his bed, covered, mostly, with his sheet. He blinked, rolled over on his side.

He took a breath, then crawled back to the bungalow, slowly raised his head and took a long look in. He said, "Angelina."

She said, "Sal. I mean Ziggy."

His knees hurt pretty badly, it was a scraped-up hurt like something from boyhood. He said, "What the hell are you doing here?" His nerves were shot, it came out more unfriendly than he meant it to.

She didn't answer right away. Sorry now that she was naked, she tried to make the sheet into a tent to hide the contours of her body. Dimly, reluctantly, she admitted to herself that Ziggy's place had seemed much sexier before Ziggy had returned. Finally she said, "Do we have to talk about it through the window?"

*

Uncle Louie had fought it for as long as he could fight it, but he couldn't fight it anymore.

He was bored, pure and simple, and, worse, he knew that he was bored. He'd come to feel he had no purpose here, and in the absence of a purpose, the touristy amusements, the mango this and Key lime that, had quickly lost their novelty. He mocked himself; his fantasies of heroism seemed wretched to him now, ridiculous. And yet he stayed on in Key West, pinned by obligation, and a fear of having to explain his actions, and a sort of timorous defiance of giving in and going home.

He'd settled into a routine. He left his dreary motel room very early every morning. He walked Duval Street, wandered the beach, and the days seemed very long. So he'd taken to drinking in the afternoons. He was more or less indifferent to the alcohol, it was mainly that he needed a pretext to sit somewhere, a way to justify his presence. He drank sweet things with rum in them. He talked to bartenders; he talked to other tourists, every bit as bored as he, every bit as determined not to let it show.

One afternoon he was sitting at an outdoor bar at the Flagler House hotel, a slushy pink drink in front of him. He was helping a couple of fellow travelers gloat about how cold it was back in Minneapolis, when, at a distance beyond the clear focus of his eyes, silhouetted against the tinted glass that enclosed the lobby wing, he saw a man who bore an odd resemblance to his brother Paul. The same mane of wavy silver hair. The same pushed-forward chest and proud aggressive jaw. But this man had his jacket off, and from the shimmer of his shirt it seemed that he was sweaty, and Louie knew his brother Paul, a formal man, a slave to dignity, would not appear that way in a fancy hotel lobby.

Still, he squinted toward the man; he had nothing better to do. People talked about April blizzards, hailstorms in May, and Louie watched the stranger leave the front desk in the company of a bellman, although he had no luggage. He watched him stride around the pool to the tiki wing where the freestanding cottages were, the most expensive rooms. The bellman opened a door, and Louie watched the guest reach into his pocket to produce a tip.

Then he almost took a header off his barstool. The man didn't come up with a wallet, like most men would. He came up with a coiled wad of bills; he put his fingers to his mouth before he peeled one off. From the bellman's scraping little two-step, Louie understood that he'd been overtipped; suddenly he knew beyond a reasonable doubt what he couldn't help suspecting from the start: his big-shot brother was in town.