Virgin Heat (21 page)

"I'd say that's his problem," said McCullough.

"And I'd say that's why he isn't gonna turn. The pain, the craziness—I don't see a person going through all of that a second time."

"He'd rather get rubbed out?"

"I would," said Links.

"Manny, this guy, I don't think he's as deep a thinker as you. I think he wants to live no matter what name we give him or how many times we relocate his nose."

Links leaned back in his office chair, the squeak came through the phone. "I don't have two agents. I'll send you Sykes."

"And Keith, about your source, all this terrific information—you still haven't told me who you got it from or what you gave away to get it."

"It's none of your business, Manny. Terry Sykes. Jesus, some backup."

"And the worst of it," Michael was saying—"well, maybe not the worst, but part of it that's bad—is how I told him all this stuff about you and Ziggy, and your family—"

It was late afternoon, the time when the sun loses its knockout punch and throws instead a sluggish heavy hook that is almost an embrace. Uncle Louie had found his naked backgammon partner, was rolling dice in dappled shade, had lost a dollar and a half so far. Ziggy was upstairs napping or maybe only sulking. Angelina and Michael reclined on poolside lounges, among men taking siesta in the open, confident as cats, their less-tanned places swathed protectively in towels.

Answering a thought of his own, Michael said suddenly, "But jeez, I hate a closet case. The harm they do, those chickenshits."

Angelina caught herself picking at a cuticle, forced herself to stop. Cautiously, she said, "Michael, I wonder if somewhere, somehow, you knew . . . Not that he was a cop, I mean, but that he wasn't really there for you, you couldn't really have him."

"The allure of the unavailable?" said Michael. "Lust with an escape hatch?"

Angelina changed the cross of her ankles, rocked her knees from side to side. "Something like that. But more like . .. like you had enough of an involvement so that you could believe you were involved, but what the involvement really did was keep you
un
involved."

He fingered his earrings, took a moment to sort that out. Then he said, "We talking about me, old girl, or you?"

"Both," admitted Angelina. She didn't hesitate, just half-turned on a hip and rearranged her arms.

Michael blinked, his sandy eyelashes became a blur. He'd had a measly week or so invested in David/Keith; Angelina had bet a decade on Ziggy/ Sal. He didn't think it was his place to question the wisdom of such a huge investment.

She did it for him. "It's just, you know, now that Ziggy's here, now that we're this close to getting together, I think back on what kept me going all those years, what kept me lonely and not minding it, and it just seems, I don't know, so
thin
."

"Thick enough to bring you down here," Michael said.

"I know, I know. But now—" She couldn't find the words, just gestured in the air, let her legs flop flat against her lounge.

"You know what I think'" said her friend. "I think you have postcoital depression."

"Michael, we didn't—"

"Without the coital part," he said. "You think you need coitus to have postcoital depression? You think life's that fair?"

"But what I'm feeling—"

"You're feeling let down, right? You're feeling you were with your lover, the whole universe should have been transformed, and here it is, the same old world, a mess. Am I right?"

Angelina didn't say he was and didn't say he wasn't, just lifted her behind a second and fretted with the elastic on her bathing suit.

"So now you feel regret," Michael went on. "It happens. You try for sex without remorse, sometimes you get remorse without the sex."

"I don't feel regret," protested Angelina. "What I feel ... I feel uninterested."

"Uninterested?! There you're kidding yourself, old chum. Look at you." He sketched the air along the length of her body. "You can't sit still a second. If ever a woman needed either a man or a hula hoop—"

"Michael!"

But Michael was launched upon the gospel of passion and he wasn't stopping now. "Uninterested? Then why'd you bring him back here? Just a good deed? A pure unselfish rescue mission?"

"It was the only thing I could think of," she maintained.

"And how convenient that it was!" said Michael. "You bring him here, excuse me, like a half-dead moth back to the nest, so you can watch him flit and flutter and then enjoy a tasty morsel at your leisure."

"That's a terrible thing to say!"

"Is it?" Michael parried, and did not unsay it, just crossed his arms on top of his stomach from the gym and gave a pagan little smile. Angelina pouted, untwisted a shoulder strap, shifted her disgruntled hips. A scrap of breeze put shivers on the pool and raised a smell of chlorine and damp towels.

After a moment Michael said, "Sweetheart, can you look me squarely in the eye and say it isn't so?"

*

In New York it was one of those heartbreaking April days when spring, like a drowning swimmer, gets sucked back into the cold gray eddies of winter. Looking out the bakery window at a chilly slanting rain, Funzie Gallo hunkered closer to the warmth of the big black oven, nibbled sesame biscotti, and held the phone a little distance from his ear as Tommy Lucca raved. When the Florida mobster paused for breath, Funzie softly said, "What could I tell ya, Tommy? He hasn't called."

"Tommy, if he called, I could tell you why he called. If he doesn't call, I really got no way a knowing why he doesn't call."

Only then did Lucca realize he'd been moving to the brink of war. He pulled back half an inch. "Time is money and rat shit isn't raisins. Y'unnerstand me, Funzie?"

Gallo looked out the window, wondered if the rain would harden into sleet in time for rush hour. "Not really," he admitted.

Lucca, pacing in his study, looking out the window at Haitian gardeners on their skinny knees, tending to his flowers, had a brainstorm. "Hey, why the fuck don't you call
him
? He's staying at the Flagler House hotel."

Air hissed through Lucca's teeth and whistled through his mismatched nostrils. "So you're telling me I gotta drag myself down there and find him?"

"You don't gotta do anything," said Funzie. "What I think you
oughtta
do is find some tweezers, pluck the hair outa your ass, and sit tight for a day or two."

Lucca put on the squeezed face and singsong voice of a man who knows damn well he's being lied to. "Innocent," he said. "So fucking innocent . . . Tomorrow, Funzie. I don't hear something by tomorrow, I'm going down there."

"Suit yourself," said Paul Amaro's number two.

"Don't say I didn't give you notice."

Finding Ziggy proved, of course, to be far more complicated than Carmen Salazar had thought.

He lent Paul Amaro a thug and a pistol that had never been fired and could not be traced, but he was not without misgivings. He was a crook, a con man, a small operator with medium-sized ambitions; a murderer he was not. He had no special affection for Ziggy, but even so, he knew the man, had nothing personally against him, was unhappy being party to his demise. Maybe what he felt was nothing nobler than squeamishness; that, and a fear of being implicated in someone else's grudge—a grudge of which he neither knew nor cared to know the details. Still, a mocking little voice was telling him that maybe he'd been better off before getting into bed with these big-time hoods, his heroes; maybe peace of mind lay in remaining a pissant little second-rater hunkered in a shady garden in a pissant little town.

But that was idle thinking. He'd come this far, had Paul Amaro asking favors of him now—money in the bank. Saying no was not an option. He watched the two assassins head off to do their business.

Graciously, he put a second car and a second sweaty driver at the disposal of Paul Amaro's relative. Rose made her chauffeur drive the melting streets of town for an hour and a half, hoping that, among the tourists with their peeling noses and the locals with their worn-down sandals, she might spot her Louie. When she didn't, she had the flunkey drive her to the office of the local paper, the Key West
Sentinel
. She went inside a while, then was driven back to Flagler House where, over the weak objection of a mumbled promise she'd made to herself, she ordered a cocktail, and then another.

In the meantime all that had been found of Ziggy was a fresh and damning absence.

Paul Amaro and his new accomplice had climbed the softly rotting steps of his bungalow, their damp hands wrapped around the butts of guns held in their pockets. Salazar's thug, choosing the theatric, kicked in the front door, which had not been locked, and which sent forth wet and darkened splinters from the decayed wood at its edge. The living room was empty. Paul Amaro shook his head in some strange vindication at the stained furniture, the mildew on the ceiling; it pleased him that his enemy lived in squalor. Guns ready, they moved to the unpeopled kitchen, the abandoned bath. In the bedroom they saw the signs of a fast disorderly retreat. Dresser drawers stood open, dripping underwear and shirtsleeves. Shutters hung undecided, not open, not closed tightly, prepared for neither day nor night. The bed was unmade, the pillows crushed, the sheet whipped into pointy crests and troughs. Paul Amaro stared a moment at the guilty mattress but no scent or imprint told him that the bed's most recent tenant, naked and hopeful, had been his beloved daughter Angelina.

Frustrated, spiteful, Amaro smashed the dresser mirror with his gun butt. Then the would-be killers left.

At Raul's they learned from a jumpy manager that Ziggy had not showed up the past two days, no phone call, nothing, their entire schedule was all screwed up, and he'd better have a pretty damned original excuse if he ever planned on coming back to work.

Out on the glaring sidewalk once again, Paul Amaro tried to think, but found that he had nothing of substance to think about, and so his mind burned and rumbled like an empty stomach looking for something to digest.

Slowly but uneasily, Salazar hung up, stared off at the tangled shade of natal plum and passionflower and philodendron and aralia. His garden, his operation, his life—in that instant they all seemed incredibly puny and totally precious, because Salazar was realizing he had somehow got himself in the middle of things he didn't really understand and that could easily undo him. He tried to think of the juncture when he'd begun to lose control. He couldn't pinpoint a moment when it happened or a decision that brought it on. No matter. Even if he had it to do all over again, he would have done the exact same thing, because he had always wanted big-time friends. Now he had them. Bigtime friends, and big-time headaches.

That evening the hostages of naked city had Cuban food.

Michael brought in rice and beans and
picadillo
, and a double order of fried plantains whose ample grease soaked through the bottom of the bag. He brought in six-packs of beer and a liter of tequila, and for dessert he found a mango torte—the only thing with mango in it that wouldn't melt in the stubborn warmth of early evening.

But for all the food and alcohol, dinner was anything but festive. Ziggy and Angelina had reached a new and mutually grumpy stage in the long slow dance that they were doing. Thwarted desire had put a dull but unremitting ache in Ziggy's loins; the distant pain made him mostly silent, and sarcastic on the rare occasions when he spoke. As for Angelina, some mix of pride and tactic and confusion was making it difficult for her even to meet the eye of the man she'd wanted for so long. They hated each other that evening, and yet it was the merest membrane of restraint and doubt that kept them from falling berserkly into each other's hot and gripping arms. Their standoff, with its musky smell of strangled lust, made Uncle Louie thoroughly uneasy, and flung Michael back into the throes of his own recent heartbreak and humiliation.