Tropical Depression (24 page)

"What the fuck?" said Ponte, wheeling, then crossing his arms in front of his face as if fending off a splash of acid.

The floodlight sent a blue-white fireball across the beach, everything it touched stood out stark as bone, movements were jerky as a flip-book. For a moment the thugs were blinded, then they thought that maybe they had lost their minds. A Viking ship was landing.

It had a high prow, painted gold and carved in the shape of a scaly serpent; many pairs of slender oars were powering it slowly so that its keel now scraped along the shore. Working the oars were forty women wearing horned and furry helmets, and pastel bras with built-in nipples.

The lovely Vikings disembarked, sashayed up the beach in tiny skirts made out of pelts. Instinct told the mobsters to turn their backs on the floodlights that tracked the oddly clad women and made them gleam like excited angels carved in soap. As the thugs cringed, the models joined hands and formed a wavy line that led on toward the Bra King.

"Sign the fucking contract," Ponte said again, but the command was whiny now, despairing, forceless, Tommy Tarpon just shot him a look that was solemn, judging.

Barely noticed, giddy with hope, Franny Rudin took her shirt off.

It so happened she was very small on top, she didn't care for bras, she wore an undershirt, boyish but for a tiny pink bow that lay against her sternum.

She made a dash and joined the Vikings. They opened ranks for her, welcomed her into the chain.

Moving at a ritual pace, the Viking Queen approached the Bra King, bearing his foil-covered cardboard trademark. Murray, the pulse still slamming in his neck, lowered his head to receive the honor. But before the model could anoint him, Franny gently but firmly took the crown away. Murray, soupy-eyed, looked at her; she pursed her lips, paused a moment, put on a disbelieving pout that was almost a smile, and crowned him.

They moved in a protective circle back to the boats. The Vikings climbed aboard their ancient ship. Murray and Franny and Tommy scrambled onto the power boat.

An engine fired—not the small electric motor, but a beast of many horsepower. Towing the Vikings in their bras, the boat roared off just as the sun lifted from the sea, striping the sky with pale bands of red and green and yellow.

Charlie Ponte, looking jaundiced in the sallow dawn, said to no one in particular, "That didn't happen."

Squeak said, "Jesus Christ Almighty."

The little boss moved toward Bruno, backhanded him across the cheek. "Ya see what happens, ya bring me a fuckin' woman?"

When the boats were out of gunshot range, they slowed, and Murray said, "Vikings? Ya send me Vikings? I asked for pirates."

"The notice you give me," said Les Kantor, putting down the bullhorn. "I did the best I could."

"So what happens now?" said Franny.

Murray went to scratch his scalp. He'd forgotten he was still wearing the Bra King crown, the fake gold foil scratched his wrist. "I dunno," he admitted. "I haven't thought that many jumps ahead."

35

At North Key Largo the models put their shirts on and were loaded into a bus back to South Beach. The Viking ship was dispatched to the Miami prop shop where it had been rented.

Then Les Kantor steered the power boat to a small marina looking out across Card Sound, and, by pink light through lavender clouds, he and Murray and Franny and Tommy sat down to breakfast among the fishermen. Murray still had his crown on, he forgot about it till the waitress looked at him funny, then he put it on the table next to him.

They sat on a wooden deck above the water, squinting at a day that seemed a whole new era, an age away from what they'd just escaped. It was wonderful, miraculous almost, this mundane business of having breakfast, feeling safe, being able to order what you wanted. Franny had juice, melon, a double stack of unbuttered whole wheat toast.

"So how's the footage?" said the Bra King, washing Prozac down with coffee. "Ya think it's any good?"

"The footage stinks," Les Kantor said. "Forget about the footage." A fastidious man, he was eating a Danish he'd cut into four pieces; he paused to wipe cherry glaze from his salt and pepper mustache. "Only good thing about the footage, it gives us something to show the IRS, we deduct the whole thing as a business trip."

"You're beautiful,
bubbala
," Murray said. "Always thinking."

"And what about you?" said Kantor. "You thinking, Murray? You thinking about giving up this casino
mishigas
and coming home?"

The Bra King mulled that over, glanced sideways at Tommy, watched a cormorant tuck its narrow head and dart down for a fish. "Coming home? Ya mean New York? Nah, Les. That's over."

"But Murray," said his ex. "This casino thing. You can't still want—"

"It doesn't matter what I want," Murray interrupted. "I've been noticing that lately. It matters that we get this settled."

Tommy was eating sunnyside-up eggs. The yolks were high and perfectly jelled, they reminded him of Vikings. "It's not settled yet," he thought aloud.

"No, it isn't," Murray agreed. "We got Franny back but now they're mad. We made 'em look dumb."

"They are dumb," said the Indian.

Les Kantor finished up another wedge of Danish, wiped his fingers on his napkin. "Look, a woman was kidnapped, for Chrissake. Why don't you go to the police?"

Murray fingered his fake gold crown, resolutely shook his head. "Call me a shitty citizen, I think that's a lousy bet. Maybe Ponte's got 'em in his pocket. Maybe LaRue pulls strings. Maybe they're just incompetent, they piss around long enough for us to disappear."

This seemed one more exasperation than the Bra King could process. He slapped his coffee down, a little of it spilled into the saucer. "Car's been nothing but aggravation. Well, fuck it, it's just a car. "

"He's right though," said Les Kantor. "Key West wouldn't be safe."

Murray thought that over, looked out at scudding pelicans, gently bobbing boats. He grabbed a toothpick from a plastic holder and said, "
Shlemazel
."

Les and Franny nodded as though the comment were neither more nor less than obvious.

"
Shlemazel?"
Tommy said.

"
Shlemazel
," Murray repeated, louder, so it would be easier to understand. "A guy with lousy luck. Like, other people, they come to Florida, they get a beautiful tan, their blood pressure goes down. Me, I come to Florida, I lose my car, I plunk down twenty grand for a penthouse I'll get murdered if I go to."

"Ah," said Tommy.
"Kamana wamputi"

"Meaning?" asked Les Kantor.

"He who falls from horseback into dung."

"That's Murray," Franny said. Absently, she again picked up a piece of toast, nibbled at the crust. "So where are we gonna go?"

*****

"Fuck you, Bahney."

The senator was not awake yet, had reached for the clamoring phone on the Tallahassee nightstand without even cracking an eye. He said, "What time is it?"

"You're in trouble, friend."

"What?"

"The fuckin' tribe you were gonna deliver, you ain't delivered dick."

Swimming up toward consciousness, sliding his shoulders higher onto pillows, LaRue said, "Charlie, I have no idea what you're talking about."

Clarity of speech, even in the best of times, was not what Ponte was best at. Now, back at his desk in Coconut Grove, he was hammer-tongued with rage. "A hundred fuckin' grand on the casino bill, I see squat for that, ya tell me sorry. Another fifty up front for this fucking Indian. Easy, you say. Easy my ass."

"I told you one Indian, one Jew amateur."

"Bahney," said the mobster, a grudging regard edging into his tone, "you don't know these fucking people. You made it sound like you know them, and you don't."

The politician made a miscalculation, tried to tweak the other man's pride. "I handed you this person, Charlie. You can't close the deal, what do you want from me?"

The truth was, Ponte didn't know. He swiveled in his big chair, looked with distaste at the early morning light squeezing through his fortress windows. Then he swiveled back, listened half a second longer to the faint but irritating sound of the politician's breathing, and dropped the phone back into its cradle.

*****

Les Kantor, his small ears and high forehead turning bright red as the unaccustomed sun reared up toward its zenith, whisked them down the Keys in the rented power boat.

Flaco, the old sponger, was to meet them ten, twelve miles above Key West, at a forgotten place that had once been called the Sand Key Marina. It had a falling-down dock whose planks were sprung like the keys of a mangled xylophone; its derelict gas pump was a column of rust caught in a stranglehold of vines. The place was reached by way of a winding overgrown channel that an uninformed boater would never find.

Tommy guided Kantor through it; the sleek and gleaming speedboat scratched its way between the mangroves. Flaco was already waiting in the small still basin. His skiff looked very meager, very frail. It sat low in the water, loaded to the gunwales with the provisions Tommy Tarpon had asked him to gather: fresh water, fruit, bread, rice, matches, line and net and fish hooks, blankets and utensils.

"And beer?" Flaco had asked, when they'd spoken on the phone.

Tommy had paused, and in the pause he'd tasted hops and malt, felt the tart astringent draw of a cold one on his tongue. "No," he'd said. "No beer."

The two craft were side by side now in the sunshot water; the grizzled Cuban, wordlessly efficient, was holding them together.

Murray put a hand on Kantor's shoulder, thanked him.

Kantor just shrugged. Then he said to Franny, "Look, it's none of my business, but you don't have to be as pigheaded as my partner. You could fly with me to New York, double back to Sarasota …"

Franny stood there in the sunshine. The boat was rocking softly, somewhere a gull was screaming. Cutting loose from the danger and the craziness, cutting loose, again, from Murray—it was awfully tempting. Returning to safe, normal Sarasota; really rather dull Sarasota ... Momentarily she lost her balance, she couldn't tell if it was the motion of the boat or her own contrary leanings. She grabbed a gunwale, surprised herself by saying at last, "No, I was never one for leaving in the middle of a show. I'm staying." She boarded Flaco's skiff. Still shaking his fastidious and sunburned head, Les Kantor roared off, heading back to the safe and normal business of selling bras.

The old Cuban waited for his wake to settle, then moved at a temperate pace toward Tommy's island, Kilicumba, that place of flies and snakes and gators, a place where nobody could find them and they could steal some time to rest and think.

When they were out in the back country, skimming through the flat and lucent water over barracuda and eagle rays and propeller scars and random tufts of turtle grass, Murray said, "This island—it's not gonna be what you expect, ya know."

"What do you think I expect?" said Franny.

"Ya know—a desert island. Beach, coconuts, waterfalls."

"Murray, I've lived in Florida half a dozen years. I don't expect that, Murray."

"Oh," the Bra King said, and he vaguely wondered why it was that everyone else's expectations of life and fate and the world in general seemed saner, more measured, and more accurate than his own. "Am I nuts?"

Franny thought it better not to answer, just looked across the green water to the featureless low islands that seemed to float a few inches above the surface, weightless, vagrant, resolutely dark in even the most searing sun. She was nestled among the provisions, her head was pillowed by a sack of rice. It was white rice, stripped of its nutrition, and she asked Tommy if it would be safe for Flaco to go sometime to the apartment and retrieve her vitamins. Tommy looked at the boatman and the boatman nodded yes. He knew the Anglos pretty well. He knew that no one would really look at him, he'd be taken for a maintenance man, a gardener.

They neared Kilicumba, Flaco zigzagged toward it with an airtight logic known only to himself.

They scraped aground at the kidney-shaped notch in the mangroves, and Tommy Tarpon jumped nimbly overboard, sinking, this time, only to his ankles. He dragged the skiff ashore, then, abruptly, like a man having a religious revelation, he dropped to his knees at the water's edge. In another instant he was rolling in the muck like a hog.

He rolled on his back, he rolled on his belly, he squirmed like a fetus on either side. When he was finished rolling he picked up big dollops of limestone goo and slapped them on his neck and face and hair. By the time he was done, nothing was left uncoated but his eyeballs and his lips, they stood out weirdly against the khaki mud, he looked a little like Al Jolson.