Florida Straits (10 page)

Joey just sat. He knew how to recognize a
debtor who couldn't meet his vig payments, he knew how to recognize
a contractor eager to kiss up to a union. He didn't know how to
recognize a likely hostage for a time-share tour.

Zack bounced the eraser end of his pencil
against his clipboard. "I'll give it to you in two dirty words," he
said. "Social class. What kind of tourist we get down here, Joey?
On the one hand, we get a lot of southern, blue-collar,
white-trash, flag-waving, Bible- thumping, football-crazy, redneck
slobs. No value judgment implied. They drive down in the ol' RV and
park near a pier so they don't have to walk too far to sit on a
milk crate and go fishing all day. When you see 'em downtown, they
always have a lot of writing on their clothes and there's usually
something weird about their socks. These are not our people, Joey.
This isn't snobbery, you understand. It's just that we want our
owners to be happy, and folks like this are never truly content
unless they're in a truck.

"At the other extreme," Zack continued, "we
get a few very rich people down here. New Yorkers. Bostonians.
People who own large pieces of downtown Toronto. They've already
done St. Barth's, Mustique bores them, now they're slumming closer
to home. They wear pastels. They weigh, on average, sixty pounds
less than the poor people. The women are flat-chested, the men have
no behinds, but they look good in their clothes. These are not our
customers either. The rich are squeamish about time-sharing. It
nauseates them to think, the week before, someone with less money
was sitting on their toilet.

"No," said Zack, standing up next to the
Parrot Beach model and gazing down like a god at a fresh- imagined
world, "our buyer is somewhere in between. We want the guy who's
like fifty-five, on his second or third wife. He's a dry cleaner, a
sales manager, he's making like sixty, seventy grand, and he thinks
he's upper crust because he has expensive golf clubs and a Ralph
Lauren shirt. He acts like he doesn't give a shit about the gifts
you get for taking the tour, but if you look closely, you can see
him toting it up: meal voucher, forty dollars; passes to the
Treasure Museum—"

"Treasure Museum?" Joey cut in.

"Yeah, the Clem Sanders Treasure Museum.
Clem's a salvor. Fucking rich by now—he's one of the partners in
the property. Anyway, the passes are worth twelve bucks, so that
makes fifty-two. Tour takes two hours, that works out to twenty-six
bucks an hour:
Is my time worth more or less than twenty-six
bucks an hour?
That's our boy, Joey. He's got some money in the
bank, he'll go the extra twenty dollars a week to rent a T-Bird
instead of a compact, but he can't stop wondering if his life is
worth twenty-six bucks an hour. You get it?"

Joey sat there. He was dazed. He wasn't sure
if he got it or not. It seemed to him that only when he entered the
Parrot Beach office had he truly left Queens. Before that, he was
carrying his neighborhood around with him, as if he had taken the
little stash of things he knew about and packed it in the car along
with his black loafers and alpaca cardigans. Now all of a sudden
he'd been plunked down in a vast new borough, the neighborhood of
American salesmanship. It was a different place.

"So you gonna, like, try me out?" The
question was a little weak, almost as if Joey was hoping Zack would
say no.

"No tryout, Joey. You want the job, you got
the job. Around here it's sink or swim. You fuck up, we won't have
to fire you. You'll make no money, feel like a horse's ass, get
disgusted with the whole thing, and stop showing up. Here." Zack
bent down, opened a desk drawer, and threw a pink shirt at Joey.
"This is what you wear."

He caught the shirt by reflex, but then
looked down at it as though it were a thing unclean. It was the
color of cotton candy and had the same ribbed cuffs that looked so
annoyingly perfect on Zack Davidson's well-tanned and lightly
freckled arms. "Shit," he said, "I gotta dress up like some
wimpy-looking prissy-ass WASP?" Then it occurred to him that maybe
he'd gotten a little too personal. "No offense."

"What offense?" said Zack, resuming his
chair and leaning it back on its hind legs. "You think I'm a WASP?
That's a crack-up. I'm a Jew, man, Litvak trash from Newark, New
Jersey, the lowest of the low. They fucked our name up at Ellis
Island. Should've been Davidovich, something like that. But Joey,
remember. Social class. Appearances. Reading people. Study up, my
friend. It's gonna be the key to your success in this
business."

—
13 —

Getting Sal Giordano on the telephone was
not a simple process. He was paranoid about wiretaps and refused to
have a phone at his apartment. You could leave a coded message for
him at Perretti's luncheonette on Astoria Boulevard, and if you got
lucky he might even be there when you called. But he wouldn't
actually talk on the old rotary pay phone in the green- painted
alcove at the end of Perretti's counter, because that phone could
be tapped as well. The most Sal would do was say hello, give a few
one-word answers, and arrange a conversation on a different phone.
To be safe, however, this other phone had to be away from the
immediate neighborhood and couldn't be used too often. This meant
there had to be several choices. So Sal had to figure out which
phone he wanted to use that day, how long it would take him to
reach it, given traffic and weather, and then hope the box hadn't
been vandalized by the time he got there. Crime paid, but
convenient it was not.

On an afternoon toward the middle of
February, after trying morning and evening, from home and from
downtown, for several days, Joey finally managed to connect with
his old friend. "Sal!"

"Joey!" said the gruff, familiar voice.
"Where are you, man?"

"Key West, like I said I would be." For Sal,
the question had been first and foremost a part of his routine
security check on telephones, and so the next and more radical part
of Joey's answer did not immediately sink in. "In a deli next to
where I work. Where're you?"

"Me?" Sal said. "Inna parking lot of the
Airline Diner, out near La Guardia. 'Scuse me if I gotta yell.
Lotta fuckin' planes going by. Hey, wait a second. Did you say
where you work?"

"You picked up on that, huh?" said Joey.
"Unbefuckinglievable, huh? Yeah, I got a job."

"Doing what?" Sal yelled, above the whine of
a landing jet.

"Real estate. Sort of. I stand onna corner
and con people into going to look at these condos. Time-snare, they
call it. Starting to make a little bit of money."

"Joey, that's great," Sal said, and though
he meant it, he could not keep out of his voice some of the same
doubt and sourness that had crept in when his younger pal had first
said he was heading south. It had to do with watching someone you
care about go someplace you know that you will never follow. "So
you haven't taken over the rackets yet?"

Joey laughed into the phone. "Hey, I tried.
Fact, I got some stories, Sal, you'll shit. Probably I'll try again
sometime. But ya know, what I was tryin' to do, it was too much too
soon. The rules down here, the traditions, everything's different.
Up north the money comes outta the street, down here it comes outta
the water."

"Fuck does that mean?" shouted Sal
Giordano.

"That's what I gotta figure out before I try
again," said Joey. "And inna meantime I'm hooking tourists for
forty bucks a couple. How are things up there?"

Sal hesitated as a plane screamed past. "Up
here it's like eighteen degrees, old ladies are falling down onnee
ice, and I'm freezing my nuts off."

"I'm not asking for the weather report, Sal.
How're things?"

Sal hesitated again, though this time there
was no airplane. "Not great, Joey. It's a very tense time up here.
Very tense."

"The cops?"

"Nah, not the cops. Cops are pretty much
leaving us alone. It's among our own people. There's a lotta
mistrust, lotta bad feeling. Some guys have been disappearing.
People are talking like maybe there's gonna be war."

" 'Zis about Charlie Ponte's emeralds?"

"Fuck you know about that?" Sal asked, and
even though he was talking to his adopted kid brother, the former
runt who never won a fight and was never entrusted with any but the
dullest and most trivial errands, such was the mood of wariness
among members of the Queens and Brooklyn Mafia families that he
could not quite squelch a note of suspicion. "You know more than
you did when you was up here."

"I got a friend down here," Joey said. It
sounded like, and was, a boast. "You remember a guy named Bert the
Shirt?"

"Sure I do," said Sal, above the jet noise.
"Good man. But wait, ain't he the guy that dropped dead onna
courthouse steps?"

"Yup. He kicked the bucket. But they brought
him back, and the Pope let him retire. People still look to him on
Florida business, though."

"Joey," said Sal, "do yourself a favor—don't
get curious about this. It's bad, I'm telling you. Your old man,
they finally made him
consigliere
, but it's not like they're
doing him a favor, the way things are. Everyone's like getting
ready for a siege. Practically every day there's sit-downs,
everybody plotting, trying to figure out who's with who. Your
brother Gino, he's tryin' so hard to look brave it's ridiculous.
It's a fucking mess."

"So Sal, get away, take a vacation. Come
down here and relax awhile. You'll love it. You're like the only
person I miss from the whole fucking city."

"
Marrone
, Joey. Think. With what's
going on, it would only be like the stupidest thing in the world to
suddenly show up in Florida. Besides, it wouldn't be doing you any
favor to show these guys you're buddy- buddy with the family.
That's just asking for trouble."

Joey frowned at the coin box and tugged at
the collar of his pink shirt. "You're right, Sal, I guess you're
right. Maybe not now. It's just that I'd like to see ya
sometime."

"Sometime. I'll get down there sometime."
Sal said it like he didn't believe it would ever happen. A jet
seemed to be revving up next to the phone booth. "So listen," he
screamed, "you stay outta trouble down there. You got any messages
you want me to take to anyone? Your old man? Your brother?"

Joey looked out the window of his phone
booth, at the life of a Key West deli. A guy with a shaved head was
making conch salad sandwiches. A girl with her boobs hanging out of
an undershirt was sucking mango juice through a straw. Outside, it
was eighty- two degrees, people were not worrying about tapped
telephones or about being murdered by their colleagues, and Joey
was suddenly very grateful to be right where he was, doing just
what he was doing, nothing more and nothing less. "No, Sal," he
said. "No messages. No messages for anybody."

—
14 —

"Hi, folks, how ya doin'? .. . Beautiful
day, huh? ... Y' enjoying Fantasy Island?.. . Great. Where ya from?
. . . Minnesota, whaddya know. Me, I never been to Minnesota, but
hey, there's lotsa places I never been. Minnesota, that's where the
Packers play, right? Nah, wait a minute, what's wrong with me,
that's Wisconsin, that's the other side of the lake or whatever it
is they got up there. Minnesota, that's the Vikings.... Whassat,
you hate football? Me too, to tell ya the truth. Silly game, ain't
it? Buncha big galunks breakin' each other's legs. Hey, who wantsta
wear helmets and shoulder pads and get flattened by three-hundred-
pound galunks when you can wear practically nothing, lay under a
palm tree, and get flattened by a pitcherful of margaritas, eh?
Speakin' of margaritas, how'd ya like to take a look at the most
beautiful resort in Key West? Sand beach, pool, balconies, the
works. Tour takes about ninety minutes. . . . Whassat? You're
meeting friends in an hour? Great. Bring 'em along. Come back here
with 'em, take the tour, and you'll all go out for dinner on me.. .
. That's right. Forty-dollar meal voucher. Per couple. Good at
twenty-five of Key West's finest restaurants. Conch chowder, key
lime pie. So you'll come back?. . . Great, I'll be here. You see
this little square of sidewalk? You'll recognize it? It's got a
crack over here, a curb over there? Awright. This is where I'll be.
. . ."

Joey slid off his sunglasses, wiped his
forehead, and watched the Minnesotans recede into the crush of
Duval Street. They'd be back, of that he had no doubt. Not that
they'd take the tour. No. They'd be back because tourists who
walked Duval Street in one direction always walked it in the other.
It was that, or swim to the motel. Sometimes people bantered on the
return trip, pretending they were still considering. Sometimes they
crossed the street a half block away to avoid a second pitch. Now
and then they got hostile. People reacted in different ways to
being charmed. Human nature.

Take the Minnesotans. Joey, as per Zack's
advice, was studying up, trying to read them. They'd seemed perfect
prospects. Fifty or so, wedding rings, family types, normal. The
woman wore green pants with an elastic waistband whose puckers
quickly stretched to accommodate her fallen bottom; the man had a
fishing hat with a trout fly in the band. Joey, who had no wife, no
children, belonged to no church, no civic associations, had never
been farther inland than downtown Philadelphia, had never caught a
fish, and had been part of the legitimate economy for nine days
now, tried to imagine their life. The wife, he gathered from a
certain softness around her mouth, didn't work, and probably felt a
little bad about it, now that all four kids were gone. The husband
was an assistant vice president in. . . in. .. What the hell did
people do in Minnesota? What did they have up there, cows? O.K., a
place that made cheese, something like that. So of course he liked
to fish, to get away from the cheese smell. The wife, well, she
mostly liked to do stuff at home, stuff with thread, that's where
she really felt confident. Joey wanted to think that after they'd
walked away, she said to her husband
, What a nice young man. It
must be hard just to talk to strangers like that
. But the
husband, he'd want to show that he was the worldly one, he knew
what was what
. Once they get you inside, it's hard sell, Martha.
Real hard sell. This fella Bill, he was once in Puerto Rico, and
one of these fellas got him to go inside, and four hours later. .
.