Tropical Freeze (23 page)

Back in the receptionist’s lobby he said, “I have to get the rest of my tools now. I’ll be back, probably around the first of July.”

He posted a couple of the photocopies on the elevator walls. One over the inspection permit. He rode the elevator down to the parking garage.

There were two levels, hundreds of cars. It took him awhile, but there were only two brown Mercedes. One had Oregon plates, a Save the Whales sticker. The other one had to be one of Benny’s company cars.

Thorn slid some of the photocopies under the windshield wipers, rolled several up, and slid them into the door handles. He wedged them in the gas opening, in the tailpipe, punched a couple onto the antenna, more in the grille, around the hood. In ten minutes he’d used up all fifty.

The Xerox machine had reproduced the Polaroid fairly well. It showed Gaeton sitting at Thorn’s picnic table, the bay glittering behind him. A copy of yesterday’s
Miami Herald
opened on the table in front of him, with the headlines clearly visible,
LARGEST AIR DISASTER IN FRENCH HISTORY.
Shot from the side, the photo didn’t show his wounds. Or the ice cream bar that had frozen itself to his right cheek.

Before he left, Thorn slid the blade of Gaeton’s knife into each of Benny’s tires. Left them hissing with menace.

Darcy sat on a wooden bench in the bare white room. Cheers and applause echoed from out front in the fronton. At the oak table in the middle of the room Carlos Bengoechea was hunched over, reweaving a cesta with strands of dried reeds. They grew only in the Pyrenees, he had told her. Very strong, like the people there. He chewed on an unlit cigar, moving it from side to side, as he repaired the jai alai basket.

“You are mistaken if you believe every Basque is a terrorist,” he said. “These boys, they are athletes.”

“I know, Carlos,” Darcy said. “I didn’t say that.”

“I have enough trouble, equipment, wages, I don’t need trouble from Immigration. If I found out one of the boys had once been in ETA, had even painted a slogan on a wall, anything like that. I would send him back to Bilbao tomorrow.”

This was a necessary formality, Darcy knew that. The denial, cleansing his personal slate. But she was impatient. She’d driven three hours to Dania to see Carlos. It was after midnight.

Darcy had spent the afternoon lying on her bed, watching the paper shades flutter, going over her plan. She’d pictured every step, making it all neat. Then started over, neatening it even more. And now she was here. Her dead brother jammed into the cooler of an ice cream truck and she was at the Dania jai alai fronton.

Carlos Bengoechea must’ve been near seventy. Ten years earlier he’d been one of her father’s closest friends. It’d started as simply a story for the
Guardian
. Florida gambling, horses, dogs, bingo, jai alai. But her father had caught the fever. Gradually it became an addiction, three nights a week at the fronton, finally smuggling Gaeton and her along a few times. Sitting out there in a padded chair, looking at that smoky hall, they watched those young dark men run at the walls, run
up
the walls, catch that speeding goatskin ball, and sling it back at the high wall, all in one sweeping motion. The cheers, the curses, the graceful passion, the brute skill. Her father on fire beside her, watching it all.

Darcy said, “I didn’t know who else to ask, Carlos. Something like this, it’s out of my experience.”

“Your cousin with the IRA, she has murdered?”

“No,” Darcy said. She hesitated, considering how evil to make this cousin. “But she has committed crimes against property.”

“Yes, yes,” Carlos said. “And now she has had enough of the struggle and wants to live here.”

“That’s right.”

He snipped some reed ends, tucked them into the cross weave. He put aside his scissors and scooted his chair around to look directly at her. Carlos closed his eyes. The cheering out front rose, a smattering of boos. Stomping.

“You can buy bogus passports in Nassau, any nationality.” Carlos narrowed his eyes at her. “You can buy papers here in Miami, Fort Lauderdale. This is easy, forgeries.”

“She wants something better. She wants something first class, more than just a few papers, something that would stand up to close inspection. She can pay whatever is required.”

He shook his head, clicked his tongue. No, no, no.

He went back to braiding the narrow stalks into place. Bent over the cesta, focusing everything on it. She listened to the cheering, the announcer calling out the names of a new set of players.

This was all wrong. Carlos was just a simple businessman. When Darcy had thought of this, frantically running through her memory of people who could help with her plan, Carlos was the only one she had turned up. Now she realized he was simply a man like her father. Solid and honest. Let the police handle such things, he would say if she told him the truth.

She decided she would stay a minute or two longer, kiss him good-bye, go back to Miami. Maybe one of the reporters at WBEL would know the name of a quality document forger.

Finally he raised his head, looked sternly at her. He said, “Basques have known nothing but oppression. First Franco, now this socialist state. For a true Basque, it is not a question of joining ETA or not, but what work they will do.

“But sometimes, when a boy grows older, he changes, he wants no more of the struggle. Perhaps by then he has killed, he has bombed police barracks, murdered Guardia Civil, Franco generals. He was young, brave, but now he wants no more. But how does he begin over?”

She said, “A name. A phone number. Something like that would be all I need.”

Carlos held the cesta out, fit his hand into it. He moved it smoothly through the air.

“My boys are great athletes. You have seen them, Darcy, what they can do. Should they be punished forever because they once fought for the freedom of Euzkadi, their homeland?”

Darcy did not reply. She watched Carlos stare at the cesta as if trying to recall its purpose.

He drew the cesta off his hand slowly. Out front in the auditorium the announcer introduced more players. Carlos’s eyes, exhausted, moved to hers.

“Your father,” Carlos said, staring at her gravely, “he would approve of this?”

“I think he would,” she said. “Yes, definitely.”

“There is a man who lives in Homestead. He raises avocados,” Carlos said. “He uses the name Emilio Fernandez.”

Roger threw the last of the photocopies into the parking garage trash bin. He came back to the Mercedes. Benny was counting out bills to the tow truck man. Four new radials. Roger got in and started the car.

“What was that all about?” he said when Benny got in the back.

Benny sat there, looking at the parking garage wall.

When Roger started the car, Benny said, “You ever have to shoot anybody? Kill them?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking at Benny in the rearview mirror. “I killed a guy once, yeah. Missed a few, too.”

“You ever hear of anybody shot with the barrel pressing against their fucking head, they survived?”

Roger looked into the rearview mirror. He said, “In the newspaper, I read about a guy shot himself in the temple and it went through, didn’t kill him. He walked to the hospital, checked himself in.”

“Shit,” Benny said. “Don’t tell me something like that.”

“What’s this all about?”

“Don’t worry about it, Roger. It doesn’t involve you.”

Roger revved the car, looked at Benny thinking away back there. He said to the rearview mirror, “I seem to have a rapport with this Thorn guy. You want me to talk to him? See what’s eating him?”

“I took care of Thorn already. The boy’ll be back at the bottom of the food chain before he knows it.”

“How you mean?” Roger said. He put the car in gear, backed out.

Benny said nothing. Roger pulled the Mercedes out onto Biscayne Boulevard, cut into traffic.

Benny said, “The guy you read about, the one botched his suicide, he must’ve used a small-caliber something or other, just grazed himself, huh?”

“No,” Roger said. “I remember it. It was a thirty-eight or something big. Slug went right through, missed everything. Just tore hell out of his skull. The lesson was, you want to kill yourself, you got to use a twenty-two, so the slug gets in there, doesn’t come out, just Cuisinarts around, tears everything up.”

Benny staring out the window, said, “I never heard that.”

Roger pulled onto the ramp for the Dolphin Expressway. He said, “Makes you fucking wonder what it takes to kill somebody.”

“Yeah,” Benny said. “Yeah, I guess it does.”

On that Wednesday night the parking lot at the Bomb Bay Bar was full. And not pickups, not Keys cruisers with their peeling vinyl tops, broken-out windows. No, sir. Tonight it was new Mercedeses, Cadillacs, Lincolns. It looked as if the Republicans were having a fund raiser.

Ozzie saw Papa John standing out back of the bar, leaning on the fish-cleaning table, a bottle of whiskey sitting beside him. The man was staring out at the marina, out into the dark wind coming off the ocean.

Ozzie strummed a couple of chords as he approached, getting his fingers limber.

“Bonnie says you wanted me to sing,” said Ozzie.

John turned and said, “I got some people inside want to hear what you got.”

“This a trick?”

“Not on you it isn’t,” Papa John said. “You never mind what’s working here, you just stand up there and play your song the best you know how. But I want you to change the words around just a little bit first. You think you can do that?”

“What for?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t understand, boy.”

“Try me.”

Papa John lifted the bottle by the throat and bubbled down some of the bourbon. He gasped, set it down on the table again, and put his arm around Ozzie’s shoulder, moving him up to the edge of the seawall.

“I’m selling out,” he said. “I found me somebody knows what my worn-out old ass is worth, and I’m handing it over to him.”

Ozzie was quiet, scrambling in his head to stay with this.

Papa John said, “I got a gentleman inside there, he’s the new generation of bandit. He’s what’s coming next, Ozzie, my man. I thought it was you and your kind, but it isn’t. It’s this guy and his computer and his German cars.”

Ozzie didn’t understand it yet, but he knew he didn’t like how it sounded.

“All the training I was giving you, showing you how the rip-offs worked, giving you a sense of history, working on your sorry-assed storytelling, well, shit. I was wrong, little buddy. I was just being softheaded, thinking I could find me a son this late in life, get a little last-minute immortality. No, sir, by God, I hate to admit it; but I seen the future, and it’s in there in the bar, burping and slapping rich men on the back. A guy wanting to be somebody he ain’t, and without a goddamn idea how to go about it.”

Papa John drew his head down and got his eyes to within a few inches of Ozzie’s. He took hold of Ozzie’s shirtfront.

“You see what I’m saying?” Nodding his head at Ozzie. “You see it?”

Yeah, Ozzie did. And he didn’t like it, not even a little bit.

He said, “You’re cutting me out of your will.”

John let Ozzie go and looked off at the marina again. He leaned against the fish-cleaning table, getting his breath back. He cleared his throat, spoke out into the dark.

“I wouldn’t do that, boy, leave you high and dry. What I did is, I got you a screen test. I got a genuine talent scout from Nashville, Tennessee, sitting in there right now, primed and waiting to hear you warble, boy. Guy by the name of Benny. Mr. Benny Cousins.”

Ozzie gave it a couple of extra chord changes at the end, an extra flourish or two, strumming with his veins ignited.

It was forty years ago, he came to town riding a shrimp truck through the middle of the night, a lover of whores, a fighter, and a clown. Looking for a way to be free, free, free.

Looking for a way to make an American dollar. Bubba Benny, Bubba Benny, making the pretty girls holler. Their mommas squeal and their daddies take a big deep swaller. Bubba Benny, Bubba Benny, bigger than life, Toting his razor-sharp bowie knife, Bubba Benny.

Looking up into that smoky spotlight, going ooooh, ooooh, to end it all. To bring them back to earth, to settle them back light and easy on their barstools. All fifty of them.

He ducked his head out of the glare of the light to see them. Somebody whistled; a couple of them hooted and haw-hawed; there was some applause. And the conversations started again. The volume building back up to how it’d been when Ozzie got up on the stage and steadied his hand and hit that first G chord.

That was OK. It didn’t matter if these clowns had thrown eggs at him or if they’d fallen over and wriggled on the floor. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about them. Even that other guy, the little fat, bald guy in a white suit and pink T-shirt. The one from Nashville. It didn’t matter how he’d liked it either, because Ozzie’d done it. He’d stood up there in front of a crowd and had done his thing. He’d fucking beat his stage fright.

Benny was sitting there on a barstool, staring at Ozzie, like there was one more verse or something. Or no, maybe he was zonked from the music, off in the promised land, already counting up the money that Ozzie was going to make for him.

Papa John was pulling a tray full of draft Michelobs. He was smiling at Ozzie, but not a proud smile. There was a twist in it like he was about to say something shitty.

Ozzie came down off the stage, guys in their leisure suits and ironed shirts making way for him. He leaned his guitar against the bar and settled onto the stool next to Benny. The guy revolved his stool around real slow as Ozzie came over, watching him the whole time. And there he sat, knees touching the side of Ozzie’s legs, still looking at him while Ozzie waited for John to crack him a Budweiser.

“What’d I tell you?” Papa John said. “The kid a scream or what?”

“A scream,” Benny said.

“It’s his song for Old Pirate Days, the talent show.”

“It should win something,” Benny said. “God knows what.”

Ozzie asked could he have his Budweiser now. His throat was scratchy as hell.