Tropical Depression (19 page)

"No."

"And then his gorilla attacked me with a sno-cone," Murray said, "and hit me with a block of ice and drove off in a Lincoln."

"Did you get the tag number?"

Sadly, the Bra King shook his head.

Magnus ate his sandwich. The sandwich was just getting to the stage where the last piece of the fish fillet always slid out of the frayed and cockeyed roll. Thinking aloud, the reporter said, "If I try and print this—"

"If you try and print it," Tommy interrupted, "LaRue and his friends are gonna tell you I'm a no-good drunk who sees things that aren't there and is a blot on the reputation of Indians everywhere."

Fish slid out the bottom of the roll, it landed on the pickle. "Are you?"

"Am I what?"

"A drunk."

But now the Bra King was getting nervous. He was from New York, he knew from crappy newspapers, he could imagine a scandal that would do nothing but humiliate his friend. He hunkered low on his elbows and leaned in across Tommy. "We're off the record here, right?"

"I never agreed to that," said Magnus.

"Ya mean we're on the record?" Murray said.

"I didn't say that either. Look, we're talking, well see what happens. I don't go off the record, it ties my hands too much."

"So we're just supposed to trust you?" Murray said. "Why should we trust you?"

The reporter picked up a french fry, pointed it at Murray. "You shouldn't," he said. "Nobody should ever trust a journalist. But sometimes people do. Don't ask me why."

He sipped beer, seemed content to let things drop.

Tommy scratched his head, then decided his neck itched, then his stomach, and he scratched those places too. "Look, I used to drink too much," he said. "Now I only drink a little."

The journalist said, "Since when?"

"Since I ordered this fuckin' club soda," Tommy said.

There was a pause, bar noise flooded in to fill it. With the strange inhalation of restaurants at lunchtime, the Eclipse had gotten packed, its walls seemed to billow outward, it smelled of suntan lotion and cigarettes.

Magnus ate a final french fry, pushed his plate away. "I don't know what to tell you guys," he said. "LaRue, I can't stand him. But the thinness of the facts, the lack of witnesses ..."

Murray leaned across Tommy, his face was pointed downward toward the bar. There was bourbon on his breath and the beginnings of real fear in his voice. "Arty, I hear what you're saying, but lemme run this by you, give us, like, a reality check. LaRue and Ponte are in cahoots—do you agree with me so far?"

"That's how it sounds," said the reporter.

"And the things that have been happening to us," said Murray, "they've been like nuisance things, warnings."

The journalist agreed.

"And given who we're dealing with," the Bra King said, "it isn't gonna stop with nuisance things."

"No," said Magnus. "If they're serious about persuading you, it isn't."

"So whadda we gotta do?" the Bra King said. "We gotta sit and wait for something really bad to happen?"

Arty wiped his mouth, dropped the napkin on his plate. "Listen," he said, "I'm sorry about this, I really am, but the way it works, when something bad happens, really bad, that's when they call it news."

Over the course of twenty-one years of marriage to Franny, Murray had formed a thousand little habits he didn't quite recognize as part of him; he'd invented, and been invented by, a thousand tiny rituals whose importance he never thought about, but which steered him through every hour of every day, and made his life his own and not some other life.

One of these unconscious rituals involved the opening of doors.

When Murray unlocked the door of his home— wherever his home had happened to be—he followed a procedure that was predictable as a sacrament and as crisply timed as music. He fished in his pocket for the key. Holding the knob in his left hand, he stabbed at the lock with his right. He waited for the crisp thunk of the bolt sliding free, then, precisely half a beat later, having taken precisely half a step into the room, he called out her name: Franny! The word always came out sounding exactly the same, though in Murray's throat it could feel a lot of different ways. On good days it was a bellow of triumph, on lousy days a crying out for comfort. But it was always an incantation, a sacred noise that kept foreign spirits from following him across the threshold, that separated home from outside world.

Now he slid his key into the lock at the Paradiso penthouse.

The power of ritual and dusty habit asserted itself over the power of change and loss. He waited exactly half a beat, took a half step through the doorway, and sang out, "Franny!"

Nobody answered.

With Tommy at his shoulder, the Bra King walked into the room, stopped in the middle of it and looked around at all four rented walls. He wasn't worried about Franny, he had no reason to be worried. It was only two o'clock, not even. Franny was looking at galleries. That was something she liked to do. So was shopping. So was going off on her own, chatting with strangers, exploring. She'd be home when she was ready to come home.

"Thanks," said Tommy. "But it's not the same. I like to see the tourists fork it over. I like to see how much it hurts them. I'll see ya later on."

He went to his room, picked up the key to his cart, and left.

As he was leaving, Murray had a thought that shamed him, that made him knock wood to undo it, to clear the slate. Tommy was going off alone, unprotected, on a bicycle, and Murray thought, if something bad is gonna happen, if it has to be that way, let it happen to Tommy, not to Franny. Tommy at least was tough, a pessimist, a stoic; Tommy was his friend but not his wife.

Barely had Murray banished that thought when he was visited by another, even more unpleasant.

Wait a second, it occurred to him, here I am, me, home alone, a sitting duck. Tommy they need; I'm the one that's standing in their way. Something bad happens, chances are I'm the one it'll happen to, and it would serve me right, God would punish me for thinking, even for a second, that it should happen to Tommy.

He got up and double-locked the door.

Then he thought, Schmuck! this is crazy, nothing bad is gonna happen, I shouldn't've had a drink with lunch, it's made me gloomy, paranoid.

He found himself pacing. He told himself to calm down, he took deep breaths and held them in; the exercise made him slightly faint but no less jumpy. He opened the sliding glass doors to the balcony and stepped outside. He smelled the clement salty air, looked out at the peaceful greenery, the serene tableau of pool and putting green and tennis courts. Self-consciously, he smiled; finally he could feel his heartbeat slowing.

But the next instant he was ambushed by an image of himself, plump, exposed, and slow, pinpointed in someone's crosshairs, targeted by a gunman hidden—where? Maybe behind the drawn curtains of Barney LaRue's penthouse, a straight shot across the quadrangle; maybe in a car with tinted windows cruising slowly past on A-1A.

His pulse whooshing in his ears, the Bra King dove back into the living room, drew the curtains closed behind him.

He paced some more. Absently, he wandered into Franny's room; through his fear he felt a guilty fascination as he spied upon her neatened bed, her plumped pillow, her herbal cures in brown glass bottles on the nightstand. Her suitcase was open on the floor; Murray felt a lunatic impulse to kneel before it and bury his face in her folded clothes.

Then he thought, My God, I'm fifty-three years old and I'm still sneaking peeks at women's panty drawers. Mortified, he lumbered from the room.

He went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, gulped some juice straight from the bottle. He thought of taking a good hot bath—yes, that would relax him—but the thought of being murdered in the tub, trapped and naked, his laid-open organs soaking like a brisket in the gray and soapy water, was too appalling.

The phone rang.

Murray flinched but then felt joy. He knew it would be Franny, saying she was still downtown, she didn't know where the time went, she was coming home. He moved quickly to the sofa with the nautical stripe, grabbed the handset, said hello.

It wasn't Franny. It was Les Kantor. He sounded all cranked up.

"Murray," he said, "
bubbala
, I'm glad I caught you in."

"Oh hi Les," said the Bra King.

"You sound distracted. I'm catching you at a bad time, wha?"

"Nah," said Murray, "it's a good time. I'm glad to talk, it'll take my mind off things."

"What things?"

"If I tell ya, Les, it's not gonna take my mind off 'em, is it? What's up?"

"The new campaign," said Kantor proudly. "A whole new campaign to go with this whole new line of bras."

"The bras with the built-in nipples?"

"Right. We're calling it the Perfect Endings line. Whaddya think?"

Murray considered. For a moment, like an untethered blimp, he floated free of his preoccupations. But he didn't answer fast enough.

Kantor said, "Perfect Endings, get it? Like nerve endings, the sex angle—"

"I get it, I get it."

"We played around with a lot of concepts, believe me. The High Points line. The Punctuator."

Murray said nothing. It dawned on him that maybe this was not in fact a good time to be talking, tying up the phone, maybe Franny was trying to get through.

"We're working on a slogan to go with the campaign," said Kantor. "I thought I'd run a couple things by you."

Murray was silent.

Kantor said, "Ya ready?"

"I'm ready."

There was a pause like a drumroll, then Les Kantor put on an announcer's voice and said, "BeautyBreast—Changing the way America buys bras."

"Not bad," said Murray. "But the way they buy— what are we changing?"

"We aren't changing dick," said Kantor. "It's just, ya know, a slogan."

"I don't love it," Murray said. He was staring at his closed curtains, wondering what was happening in the glary and unsparing light behind them.

Undaunted, Kantor said, "Then how 'bout this: BeautyBreast—Because no two are alike."

"Nah, Les. No. Ya don't go around reminding people their tits don't match."

Kantor paused. Murray thought he heard him rustling through a pocket, crinkling the foil on a pack of Tums. "Excuse me," the partner said at last, "but do I detect a certain lack of enthusiasm? Would you rather I didn't keep you in the loop?"

"Les, Les, I'm sorry. Like I said, I got a lot on my mind right now. Shit you wouldn't believe."

"And you don't want to talk about it."

"Another time. Listen,
bubbala
, I gotta free up the phone. We'll talk soon. Perfect Endings—that part of it I think is very good. Very, very good."

He hung up, double-checked that the receiver was secure in the cradle.

He looked at his watch. It was barely after three, and he had the sinking and defeated thought that getting through the afternoon would simply be beyond his stamina. He wished he had some Valium. He didn't, so he popped an extra Prozac.

He lay down on his bed, tried to empty his mind, but the screen kept filling up with scenes of torment and humiliation. He saw Franny bound and gagged, Tommy flayed across his rosewood back. Himself, he was getting slapped a lot, fists and pipes were hammering his ribs.

At length he exhausted himself and fell into a restless doze.

He awoke two hours later, drenched with sweat, to the sound of someone pounding on the door.

Comprehension filled in slowly. He remembered where he was, recalled what he was frightened of. But he couldn't quite remember who had, or didn't have, a key to the apartment. It was Franny knocking; he knew that it was Franny. But hadn't he given her a key? Maybe he'd forgotten. Tommy had a key—or did he?

The pounding paused, then resumed, and the Bra King, drowsy, cottony, plodded to the door.

He was reaching for the knob, when his hand, more savvy in that moment than his brain, suddenly pulled back. What kind of idiot blindly opened a door in this world? It was Bruno behind that door, garlicky and sneering, waiting to deliver a faceful of acid, a boot to the crotch, a fast and final bullet to the chest.

Murray moved quickly sideways, pressed himself against the foyer wall. Standing on tiptoe he leaned in toward the peephole. Silently, he flicked the tiny lever, squinted through the fish-eye glass.

He saw Tommy Tarpon shifting nervously from foot to foot, holding a small brown paper bag. He opened the door.

Tommy swept right past him. "I gotta pee like a pregnant cow," he said. "One more minute I woulda really had a problem."

"Now look at this," he said, as he reached into the sack. "Two beers, Murray. Used to be, after work I bought a six-pack. I'd finish it then decide what to drink. Today I bought two beers. I'm gonna drink 'em, fuck it. But after that, I go for more, I want you to take a knife and cut my fingers off."

Murray said nothing, and the Indian looked closely at him. Murray was a little green, the rims of his eyes were scarlet.

"You don't look so good," said the Indian.

"Tommy," said the Bra King, "I'm scared."

The Indian popped a beer, brought it halfway to his lips.

"Franny," Murray went on. "I can't believe I let her go off by herself like that."

"They wouldn't bother Franny," Tommy said by reflex, and realized in the next instant he had no reason for believing that.