Virgin Heat (4 page)

Below her gleamed the Everglades, a weird inverted patchwork of wet and dry, puddles of grass standing in a desert of hot water. Then the mainland ended, just petered out—no bluffs, no surf, just the flattest of lands dissolving like a dunked cookie into the shallowest of seas. When the imprecise and arcing line of Keys appeared, it looked to Angelina like a spoiled necklace, irretrievable beads rolling off a broken string. Suddenly she was lonely, burdened for the first time by the enormity of what she had begun, rattled by an understanding that, whatever happened, her life had already been changed.

She needed to talk with someone.

She glanced at the man sitting next to her, thumbing with utter lack of interest through a magazine. He wore a lavender tank top that showed strong freckled arms and a stomach from the gym; his light brown hair was just barely longer than a crew-cut, and in his right ear, not the lobe but along the edge, were three stud earrings—diamond, ruby, sapphire.

She caught the corner of his eye and said, "I've never been to Key West before. Have you?"

He closed the magazine and faced her. His teeth were small and even, his eyes a disarming green; the sandy eyebrows had an enthusiastic arch. "A few times," he said. "It's heaven."

"You on vacation?"

"Vacation," he said, and he gave the word some thought. "Actually, I've just been fired. Retail. Just as well. I'm looking for romance. Looking for love. That's my real career, my calling. I'm Michael."

"I'm Jane," said Angelina, and in the next heartbeat she regretted it. Maybe she wasn't such a good liar after all. Besides, the problem with lying was that it was just too lonely, it created a floating world where no one could be trusted, where it would be much too easy to lose one's bearings altogether. "No," she said, "I'm Angelina."

Her seatmate gave a casual shrug. "Hey, it's Key West. Jane, Angelina, Liza Minnelli—what's the difference?"

"No, really. I'm Angelina. Jane—I was just being stupid."

Michael turned up his palms, smiled. There was mischief in the smile, and unbounded acceptance. Angelina felt she had to atone for her first deception with a headlong candor.

"And I'm looking for love, too," she went on.

He gave her a comradely look, the comprehending glance of one pilgrim to another. "Careful, hon," he said. "Remember: safe sex, maybe; safe love, no such thing."

"You don't know the half of it."

He looked intrigued, ready to hear and be nourished by some gossip of the heart. But Angelina went no further, and soon the plane began to bank, leaned against the thick and rubbery resistance of the air.

They were over the harbor now; below them, sails stretched back from masts, foamy chevrons spread out from the sterns of tiny boats. Michael toyed with his three stud earrings. "Not a great place for you to look for love," he said.

The plane sank lower, scudded over tin roofs throwing back the sun and over cool blue squares and rectangles of swimming pools. Michael looked at Angelina—the Annette Funicello hairdo, the stretch pants out of some other age. Was she simply clueless, or was there some screwball moxie there, some retro originality? "You'd be welcome," he said. "Of course you'd be welcome."

"Well, then—"

"The question is . . . well, the question . . . I'll be blunt: It's how comfortable you'd be around a bunch of naked queers."

The landing gear clicked down; palms came up so close that one could see the slow dance of their swaying fronds.

"Is that all?" Angelina said. "I got no problem with that."

For Ziggy it had not been a terrific day.

He'd awakened in a damp, stale bed with a slightly overweight redhead on his arm and a familiar wish in his mind—the wish that, starfish-like, he could simply shed the limb that was pinned under the heat and bulk of this wheezy stranger, and slink away, returning only after she'd smoked a cigarette and had the decency to vanish from the face of the earth. It hadn't always been this way for Ziggy; dimly, he remembered a time when appetite was not so stubbornly separate from emotion, when passion was not ashamed in daylight. But somewhere along the line some connection had been broken. Lately, night was night and day was day, and once the itch of sex had been briefly relieved, Ziggy craved to be alone, to think and scheme.

Though, after the redhead was gone, Ziggy had to admit that he didn't have that much to scheme about. He had his straight job; he had his action; they had both become routine. Was that good or bad? Pacing, he briefly pondered the question till he started to sweat, then forgot about it and blotted his back on the faded cushions of the droopy old couch. He felt muzzy-headed, logy. Maybe it was just the weather, the spongy heat that made vines hang discouraged against the crooked shutters of his bungalow, gave a narcotic heaviness to the smells of frangipani and jasmine that wafted through the ragged screens.

Or maybe it wasn't the weather.

He was anything but introspective; for the most part his inner life was as hidden from him as his asshole. Still, he'd lived thirty-six years, long enough for certain inner terrain to begin to look familiar, for certain signs to register as signs he'd seen before. And one of the few things he'd learned about himself was that, when he had a hard time concentrating, it might just be a tip-off that an upheaval was in the works, that he was nearing the end of something he was used to and approaching the start of something new and weird.

That's what had happened a decade ago, when he wasn't Ziggy Maxx but Sal Martucci. It happened in the weeks before he'd gotten arrested.

Things had been going swimmingly. He was an up-and-coming soldier in the Fabretti family, a trusted hand and a good earner in the crew of
capo
Paulie Amaro. He was at that intoxicating age when every week he felt a little more confident, a little more established. He'd muscled in on a couple of downtown restaurants; he had guys who owed him favors at the fish market. He'd just recently started buying custom suits; his loins twinged with importance when the tailor tugged the buttery wool to measure cuffs. He got laid at will, and he had started to tarry with his boss's pretty teenage daughter. He didn't dare to pop her cherry, but he liked her, was moved somehow by the chewing-gum taste of her mouth, the delicious unease with which she let his fingertips trace out the lace of her bra. It would not be a sacrifice, he felt, to marry into an alliance through her someday.

Then, in a way that seemed abrupt and mysterious even in retrospect, Ziggy/Sal lost his concentration and it all went down the tubes. Did things fall apart because his attention faltered, or was his attention overwhelmed by the droning approach of unstoppable disaster? Even now he didn't know. He only knew he'd begun to make mistakes. Here he missed an opportunity, there he made an enemy. His mind wandered, he didn't always notice when he was being observed or followed.

And in the midst of his floundering, something crazy, something ridiculous was going on. He was falling for Angelina. Not just toying. Falling. Getting all gooey and gentle, making promises he truly meant to keep. Absurdly, he found himself preferring Angelina's inexpert kisses and circumscribed caresses to the virtuosic strokes and mouth-play of his other girlfriends; to his shock, he came to shun the others. Angelina filled hollows he hadn't known were there. There was something in her violet eyes that would either redeem him or destroy him altogether; the weight of her head on his shoulder was either an insupportable burden or an insupportable hope, he was damned if he knew which.

Had he been thinking about her when he got nabbed? He couldn't recall; the shock of the arrest, its blinding quickness, obliterated everything.

He'd been delivering a hot BMW to the docks in Jersey City, where it would be discreetly loaded onto a ship whose official manifest listed as its cargo cigarettes and medical supplies. The Beemer—like many others, along with Jags and Benzes and Audis—was on its way to pre-Gulf War Kuwait, where it would be landed free of tariffs, stamped with a new serial number, and sold for lots of the same dollars the former owners had paid for gasoline.

Except this car wasn't making it to Weehawken, let alone Kuwait.

This car was ambushed at the Lincoln Tunnel tollbooth, locked in bow and stern by FBI guys in dented Plymouths. There were eight of them, and their dully gleaming pistols were pointed at Sal Martucci's head. For good measure, the toll taker had a bead on him as well.

And that was basically the end of Sal Martucci. They took him in, promised him Attica and not some cushy Federal establishment, and painted him a lurid and highly detailed picture of what happened to handsome young white guys who went to prison without their protectors. Whereupon he turned. It was a much longer story, of course, but, bottom line, he turned, traded in his former life at discount, said a distant goodbye to everyone and everything he knew. Including Angelina, who he never got to see.

The case, from the Feds' perspective, proved to be a disappointment. It didn't lead all the way to the top of the Fabretti family. It didn't bring indictments for murder, just the usual racketeering charges. Paul Amaro and two other
capos
got sentenced twelve-to-twenty.

Sal Martucci signed over his destiny to the Witness Protection Program. He ate steaks at the taxpayers' expense, stayed for awhile in nice apartments, had cops picking up his dry cleaning. Then he got his nose cracked like a walnut, the pieces rearranged. He got his scalp sliced open, his hairline reshaped like a refinement on a paper doll. For the loss of his young face he felt only minor regret. But when they told him that his new name would be Robert Clark, he rebelled. He would not accept such a white-bread name, a name like an ad for a credit card. His new name would be Ziggy Maxx—a jaunty moniker that just occurred to him one day.

Look, they told him, the whole idea was camouflage, you didn't want to draw attention.

Tough shit, Ziggy/Sal had said, it was still his life—a point the Feds thought arguable. But in the end he had mostly prevailed, his official name being logged as Sigmund. Sigmund Maxx.

They sent this new-created Sigmund to Ohio, got him a union card and a job in a tire factory. Like everyone else who worked there, he detested it. The stink of sulfur. The hiss of exploding steam. After two years he couldn't stand it anymore—the headaches, the boredom, the annoying paychecks with taxes taken out. He bolted in darkness and made a point of not staying in touch. He was through with the Program and, at least as far as he could figure, the Program was through with him.

But that was a long time ago, a tale from an existence long aborted, and Ziggy, wasting another Key West morning, mocked his own brain for lingering on it.

He stalled in his slow pacing, mopped sweat from his furry stomach. He went to the greasy stove, took a cup of lukewarm coffee into the bathroom. Coffee, a shower, maybe a fast belt of tequila. He had to get himself started, ease into his day now that it was afternoon. In a few hours he had an appointment with Carmen Salazar, the man who linked him to the world of crooks and fibs and ill-gotten cash, and thereby kept him interested in life.

*

Having registered under an alias, hit some stores for the rudiments of a tropical wardrobe, and had a nap under the ceiling fan, Angelina stood now on her tree-shaded balcony with its wicker settee and whitewashed gingerbread, and surveyed the postage-stamp paradise that was the courtyard of the Coral Shores resort.

Palms arched up from patches of white gravel, brown-tipped fronds scratched like hordes of crickets at the slightest breeze; hibiscus hedges squeezed out hot pink flowers from tangles of pale green leaves. Wooden lounges were arrayed around a pool shaped like a lima bean, and Angelina discovered that not everyone went around entirely unclothed. It was true that, here and there, a pair of pinkened buttocks saluted the sky, a blur of genitals spilled out from a nest of pubic hair. But most of the men wore tiny pastel bathing suits or kept their towels wrapped around them until they stepped into the pool or slipped into the sudsing and redundant warmth of the hot tub.

Angelina leaned across her balcony railing and sighed. These undressed men neither titillated her nor put her off, and she wondered if this was normal, if maybe something was wrong with her, after all. She had that simmer deep inside, she knew she did—but the warmth did not come out, nor did fresh heat apparently seep in to stoke it. Like an old crystal radio, she was locked on just one channel, thrummed to just one frequency. Or maybe she was being titillated all the time and had just stopped knowing it, maybe desire was always slowly accruing, like airborne toxins or like money in the bank.

She locked her room and went downstairs.

Crossing the courtyard, pretending not to be looking for him, pretending not to be lonely and afraid, she spotted Michael. Draped in a towel, he was catching late yellow sun and looking at promotional brochures. It surprised her that he was sitting alone. She'd imagined that he would move very easily, if not into romantic escapades, at least into some sort of breezy and congenial social life.

"Hello again," she said. "How are you?"

He must have seen something in her face, some comment on his solitude, because his answer sounded a little forced. "Great," he said. "Just relaxing. Settling in. And you?"

"Terrific," she said, though the truth was her stomach was in a knot at the thought of moving her yearning for Sal Martucci out of the realm of pristine fantasy and into smoky taverns and steamy crowded streets where she might conceivably find him in the flesh.