Virgin Heat (7 page)

Louie drove. Ahead, Manhattan poked up at the sky, cloud shadows put gloom on unlucky buildings, left misty sunshine on others. A hunch was growing in him, simmering: Angelina was a kindred spirit after all, was seduced by the Keys as he had been seduced, but she was nuttier and younger and therefore readier to act.

His meekness tried not to notice the hunch; his unconfident mind shushed what his heart was making bold to whisper. He didn't know where his niece had gone, he told himself; he didn't know, and in any case it was not his place to track her down.

But she had always been his favorite.

He drove. Above the cluttered, crumbling roadway hung a huge sign that offered monumental choices in the form of big white arrows. To the left, New England. Manhattan, straight ahead. To the right, the George Washington Bridge, New Jersey, and points south.

Louie's car was in the center lane and he had no intention of turning the steering wheel; he held his long-accustomed course. But then the steering wheel seemed to turn itself, he could swear he didn't do it, but was only carried helplessly past dashed lines and honking commuters by some freakish whim of rods and gears and tires.

His heart thumped as the runaway vehicle wound around the cloverleaf that put him on a strange new road that was not the highway he took to work each day. His balding head was burning, not from sunburn now but inside, as he veered from home and habit, as the bridge stanchions loomed up in the distance, high above the old brick buildings of the Bronx.

Then he was crossing the river, making the leap from the skyline to the Palisades. Vertiginous and giddy, he let himself imagine that he would find his niece, rescue her, and call up Paulie, call up everybody, with the epic news. Imagining that, his eyes smarting, he remembered an archaic fantasy, a fantasy so old and unweeded and unwatered that until that moment he was sure that it had died. The fantasy was that there would come a time when he would be a hero to his brothers, when he, Louie, would show himself as brave and wise, would be the one who saved the day.

Angelina sat at poolside, writing postcards then tearing them in little pieces.

She couldn't send them, clearly. But it was noon, she was faced with a chasm of empty hours before she could resume her quest, and she needed something to occupy her mind.

What did people
do
when they were on vacation? she wondered, glancing absently at towel-clad and naked men, late risers, as they straggled to the pool for their wake-up dips. Vacationers went sightseeing, she supposed. But that seemed like a lot of work when the temperature was ninety-three and the relentless sun caromed off the pavements and tripped you up behind the knees.

Maybe couples stayed in their air-conditioned rooms and made love through the heat of the day. Angelina could imagine that, sort of; and did. The details of the act itself remained teasingly hazy behind a curtain put up by her mind and the nuns and her mother; but the accoutrements of the moment she saw very clearly: the champagne chilling in its water-beaded bucket, a single perfect flower in its cut-glass vase; under silver domes, fancy eggs nestled in a warm and creamy sauce. Lovemaking became linked in her mind with toast points.

Or maybe what people did on vacation, Angelina thought, was wonder what other people on vacation were doing.

Like Michael. What did he do after eleven at night, by which time Angelina had had it, and he seemed just to be coming awake? Did he go off and have the kind of adventures that Angelina would and wouldn't want to hear about? Or did he stand around at clubs, ankles crossed and an elbow on the bar, too shy to ask someone to dance?

Angelina tore up another postcard, let her bare legs flop down against her lounge. Who knew what anybody else thought, or felt, or wanted? She sighed, watched with imperfect detachment the forms of undressed men, swimming, sunning, toweling dry. It was challenge enough in this life to have a clear idea of what oneself was thinking or wanting or trembling in the face of. It was enough to feel, once in life, the pure unceasing gravity of a fierce and un-deflectable desire.

*

At the Gatto Bianco Social Club on Prince Street, Paul Amaro had called a meeting.

His brothers Joe and A1 were there, A1 with his wrinkled shirttail hanging out. Funzie Gallo was there, his fat eyes pinching closed, his fingers sticky with strawberry glaze. Attending as well were seven or eight of the young and unreliable and half-the- time-on-drugs soldiers left in Paulie's
brugad
. As a token of respect and in recognition of the seriousness of the occasion, Benno Galuppi, the Fabretti family underboss and Paulie's direct superior, stopped by, wearing his amber-tinted glasses that changed to opaque brown when he turned away his gaze.

The Paulie Amaro they saw there was not the man that they were used to. The past few days seemed to have chastened him in ways that nine years in the can had not. His alert dark eyes looked flat and sluggish. Something tentative had crept into his raspy voice. The proud chest had caved in a little; for all his bulk, he seemed to be cowering under the soft wool of his dark blue suit.

He rose now at the front of the room; to mask a moment's lightheadedness, he leaned an elbow on the old Formica counter that held the espresso machine. He put down his coffee cup and began. "Most of you already know that my daughter Angelina is miss—"

His voice broke and he was ashamed. He drank some water and summoned rage to bully out the humiliating fear. Rage came easily as he looked out at his colleagues, sitting at card tables on ill-assorted chairs or leaning against the pool table where no one ever shot pool. These men were his allies, the closest thing he had to friends, but he would be ready in a heartbeat mortally to hate any of them, even his brothers, if it turned out that anything they'd done had led to Angelina's disappearance.

"—missing," he resumed, his voice edgier, louder. "We're here today to see if anyone has any idea where she is or how she got there."

His eyes panned accusingly, his mouth twitched, showing teeth. No one spoke. A few of the men had espresso cups in front of them, but they didn't pick them up, they didn't want to draw attention by even the softest rattling against the saucer. In the silence Paulie's anger and frustration swelled like mushrooms in the dark.

"Pete!" he spat out after a pause, and a thin young man whose nerves were chafed red on amphetamines jerked in his chair like a yanked marionette. "You still fuckin' with Pugliese unions?"

"No, Paul. No," said the wild-eyed soldier. "Funzie tol' me back off on that, I backed off months ago, I swear."

Paul sucked his gums, drank more water, turned on another of his minions.

"Butch, your Florida stuff—you makin' enemies wit' that?"

Butch was calm, well-dressed, and businesslike. "Everything's been divvied up," he said, "negotiated. I don't see that there's a problem."

Paulie paced. He didn't have much room, it was mostly just shifting weight from one foot to the other, turning his head from side to side. Noise of trucks and honking taxis came in from the street, people walked past the iron shutters talking loudly, heedless of these obsolete men with their quaint rituals and violent sorrows. Paul suddenly slapped the counter, slapped it hard enough so that tiny spoons did somersaults and attention was riveted as at the crack of a gun.

"Goddammit!" he said through a hard throat behind clamped teeth. "God fucking dammit!"

He leaned forward now, a thick hand raised as though to slap and pummel. Veins stood out in his forehead. His shoulders bunched up like the shoulders of a bear, his squat neck billowed with forced hot blood. "If any of you fuckers have been fucking up out there, if any of you have been using my name, turning people against me, I swear to Christ I'll have your fucking—"

A soft voice interrupted him. "Paul," it said. "Be fair."

It was Benno Galuppi talking. He was the only one who would have dared break in on Paulie's rant, the only one who could talk so softly and be sure that he'd be heard.

"You don't make accusations," the underboss continued. "You don't make threats like that."

Paulie Amaro was breathing hard, his arms and legs were pumped and nervous, like the limbs of a man pulled away from a fight that's just begun. He stared at Galuppi from underneath a blur of tangled, knitted brows. He didn't speak.

"We sympathize, Paul," Galuppi said. "We all do. We know how you must feel."

Bullshit
, Paulie thought. Not a man alive knew how he felt, to contemplate with horror and self-hate the possibility that his own hoarded sins had crashed down and destroyed his child.

"But Paul," the underboss went on, "her disappearing, there's no reason to assume—"

"Then where is she?" her father almost whispered, his rage suddenly melted to undisguised desperation, grief.

People breathed shallow, tried not to move their feet against the scratched linoleum. To Paulie's men, to his brothers, it was as fearsome seeing him brought low as seeing him enraged.

Benno Galuppi softly cleared his throat. In the instant before he spoke again, he flicked his eyes behind the amber glasses toward Joe and Al and Funzie, and this, maybe, was a mistake, or maybe not; but either way it sent Paulie a message, told him they had talked, conspired, come up with something they thought needed saying, that only the underboss could say.

"Paul," he began, "there's something—I just want to ask if you've even thought about ... Sal Martucci."

The
capo
tightened at the name. Galuppi went on, pitiless as a surgeon.

"I know you'd like to find him. I also know—we all do, it wasn't any secret—that your daughter Angelina was very taken with him. Infatuated. So what I'm asking—has it occurred to you, Paul, have you considered, that just maybe, if you find either one of them, you'll find them both?"

Paul Amaro didn't answer, couldn't answer; his mouth hung slack at the outlandish suggestion, he was acutely aware of the weight of his jaw. His daughter run off with his betrayer? Unthinkable. Beyond insulting. If anyone but Galuppi had mentioned it, Paul would have gone for him, seized his lapels, spit in his face. As it was, he stood there dumbfounded, humiliated, stripped bare and foolish in his beautiful expensive clothes, eating the shame of the idea like it was rancid food forced down his gullet.

Outside, trucks went past, rattling the metal shutters. A chair leg squeaked on the linoleum. When Paul could finally lift his head, he saw that his brothers Joe and A1 didn't really want to meet his eyes and Benno Galuppi's amber glasses had turned an opaque brown.

A day and a half later, achy and discombobulated, Uncle Louie dropped his car keys in an ashtray, kicked off his northern shoes, fell back on his motel bed, and soupily gazed up at the ceiling fan.

The fan was turning very slowly, the canted blades seemed to be swimming through the air. The ceiling, like the walls, was a coral color, sickened by time and damp toward orange. The carpet was a shaggy beige, thinned and darkened by the tourists' treading between the door and the bathroom, the bathroom and the bed; and it held a smell—of sandy feet, and contented mold, and a tang like that of sun-dried seashells—that, more than anything, reminded Louie he was back in Key West.

Back in Key West! The bare illicit fact, now that he was fifteen hundred miles too far along to ignore it, made him giddy. He was quite pleased with himself, no doubt about it. He was also terrified, beset by the secret dread of the meek, who fear that even the smallest detour from routine could be the end of order forever, that even the mildest act of daring could call down monstrous consequences. Louie, in his mind, was risking all.

What would Rose say? Would she be furious? Furious enough to throw him out? Awful to contemplate, because, no matter how it looked to others, Louie deeply loved his wife.

Viewed through different eyes, their marriage might have seemed like one more joyless habit, one more self-imposed diminishment, but to Louie it was something else, a remembered exaltation that he cherished all the more because nothing but his cherishing was keeping it alive. There was a time when they were young and Rose was beautiful, more beautiful, with her full lips and arching eyebrows and terrific shape, than any woman he ever thought would be attracted to his bumbling manner and clownish cheeks and uncontoured arms and shoulders. He loved being out with her, could hardly believe the way she clung to his arm, laughed at his ill-told jokes. Even then he realized in some part of himself that she was drawn to him because she knew his brothers were big shots and imagined he would be a big shot too. It didn't turn out that way, and Rose had made him pay every day for thirty-two years.

But Louie didn't blame her; in fact, he blamed himself. He knew he wouldn't end up like his brothers, he'd known it all along; he should have set her straight. But he didn't. By omission, he'd made himself a fraud for the pleasure of her company, a fake for the flash of her eyes. Even now he didn't want to lose her, because he knew there was nothing to replace the pride he used to feel in being her man, a pride that, on his side, had ripened into stubborn love.

Then there was the store. The plumbing store. An embarrassing secret: Louie kind of liked the place. Other people hated it on his behalf, but he was fond of it—the cool fluorescent lights that buzzed, the perforated metal shelves, the joints and valves in their dusty cardboard boxes stamped with codes and sizes. It was peaceful, and it was the only place he was the boss. He got a kick out of the Dominican kid who worked for him. His name was Eduardo, but he was an American now, you could only call him Eddie. Eddie's eyes looked off in different directions, he wasn't very mechanical, but he was honest and willing, sweet-natured. He leaned on the counter and worked on his English by reading newspaper horoscopes and doing those puzzles where you find words hidden up, down, backward, and diagonal. Louie liked when Eddie asked him what auspicious meant.

Truth was, he liked the whole crumbling East Harlem neighborhood, where what seemed decline to some, was the next poor bastard's promised land. He liked seeing the domino games on the stoops; he liked hearing the women shout down from windows, exactly like old-time Italian mommas back when Italians were the immigrants, the underdogs, the losers waiting for their turn at being winners. His brothers wanted to forget all about that, they couldn't grasp Louie's affection for the marginal. A marginal neighborhood, a marginal store, its remaining clientele a few stooped and white-haired plumbers with arthritis, a smattering of Puerto Rican supers with the enterprise to turn a wrench.