Virgin Heat (13 page)

They took a few steps; for a few seconds they might almost have been ordinary lovers. Then Ziggy yanked his arm away and wheeled to face her.

His features were twisted, not in anger but in cornered desperation, the fatigued confusion of a creature whose zigs and zags have failed to carry it to safety. "You didn't come to argue," he said. "You didn't come to get me killed. I keep hearing lots of reasons why you didn't come here. I still haven't got a clue why you did."

She looked at him until his face let go, until the furrows softened in his forehead and the lines released at the corners of his mouth. Then she very softly said, "You don't? You really don't?"

He stared at her. Red moonlight spilled down on her hair, traced out her ear and gleamed on one side of her neck, then trickled into her blouse and was swallowed up in shadow. His mouth was very dry.

"We started something a long time ago," Angelina said. "I was thinking we should finish it."

He watched her. Her lips stayed parted when she'd finished speaking; her chin tilted up, her shoulders lifted. His hand began to move toward her, toward the moonlight on her skin, but then it stopped, paralyzed by guilty fear, by a sudden sickening belief that at the moment he felt her flesh, bullets would rip into him, the revenge he'd dodged for so long would surely overtake him at this new affront.

His hand fell to his side, his lungs grabbed for breath. "Angelina," he said, desire and foreboding stretching his voice very thin. "Listen, this is crazy."

"Maybe it's supposed to be," she said.

He clenched his jaw, his feet pawed at the sand. "Before . . . ," he said. "Look, you were a kid and I was a different person."

She looked out across the flat and softly gleaming water. The sky was clear to the horizon. There would be a moonset soon, a perfect orange slice, and she understood she would not be in a lover's arms to see it.

She crossed the small space of beach between them, put her hands on Ziggy's chest, then craned her neck to kiss him, very chastely, on the cheek.

"I've waited ten years," she said. "I've imagined a lot of things but I never imagined I'd have to beg you to make love to me. I'll wait a little longer."

She turned and walked away.

Uncle Louie had for decades been an early riser.

After the first years of his marriage, there hadn't been much keeping him awake at night, and besides, he had a shy person's preference for being at large when most people were not. He loved to be the guy waiting on the sidewalk as the lights were switched on in the diner, as the Venetian blinds blinked open and the fellow in the paper hat crouched down by the door to lift the deadbolt that was pegged into the flooring. He loved to be there when the grounds still swirled in the just-made coffee, before the ink was quite dry on the newspapers, when the glaze on the Danish was sticky and warm.

So now, with the sun barely up, he emerged from his motel room and headed to Duval Street for some breakfast. Shadows were long, oblique and baffling, tall children who bore no resemblance to their parents. Dogs yawned under cars; cats stretched, scratching their flanks against garbage cans. Occasionally people went past on bicycles whose fat tires hummed against the silent pavements; Louie tried to figure who was awake already and who hadn't been to bed yet.

Down on Duval, he bought a paper, sat at a cafe a few steps above the sidewalk. He ate a croissant, drank a cappuccino, and allowed himself to feel that watching the scene was enough to make him part of it. Transvestites still vamped, impressive in their stamina to strut all night in high-heeled shoes. Now and then a police car listlessly rolled by, cops held vials of ammonia under the noses of people passed out on the curb. The town seemed utterly peaceful in its aberrations, and, looking without judgment, Louie felt worldly and extremely calm.

He watched a hooker half a block away, could barely imagine how, for her, night phased into morning. Her dark hair was tousled and wild, her makeup, though faded, still seemed alien and guilty in the new light of day. Her bright dress was wrinkled, sexily sloppy in the way it creased across her chest. Her stride was inconsistent, less like she was drunk than like she was trying to spread around the wear on aching feet.

She moved closer, and Louie, spasmodically blinking behind his paper, saw that the hooker was his niece.

His broad-mindedness caved in like a failed soufflé and he was suddenly abashed and appalled. Panicked, he hid behind his wall of newsprint to stall for time. He thought of hiding there till she had passed, to spare them both mortification. But he remembered, even if self-mockingly, his resolve to be a hero; a hero wouldn't chicken out like that. He lowered the paper and meekly called her name.

She looked up from sidewalk level, walked slowly over, and in a voice that was not the least embarrassed but very discouraged, said, "Oh hi, Uncle Louie."

"Want some coffee?"

She came up the steps, noticed the discomfort in his face. "It's not how it looks," she said. "I wish it was, but it isn't."

Flustered to be caught in narrow, judging thoughts, he tried to splutter out a denial.

Sitting down, she said, "It's okay, Uncle Louie. You think I look like a slut. I see it. And I tried. God knows I tried."

Louie mopped his head with a paper napkin. The waitress came over and Angelina ordered coffee.

Then she said, "
He
tried even harder not to want me."

"He?" said Louie. "Who?"

"Never mind," she said, and read the headlines upside down on his paper.

"Never mind?" Her uncle pushed croissant crumbs with his fingertips. "Angelina," he said, "I'm a meddling old fart and I'm only your uncle. Am I allowed at least to say I'm worried about you?"

Her coffee arrived. She blew on it and said, "Of course you're allowed."

He leaned closer, splayed his elbows wide. "You're a beautiful young woman, Angelina. A million guys would want you. Maybe something isn't right if you have to chase after—"

"Uncle Louie," she interrupted, "what was it like to want Aunt Rose?"

The query stood him up like a good crisp jab. He gestured, his mouth got ready to make words, but nothing came out.

"It's a real question," his niece went on. "I'm trying to understand. Could you just as easily have wanted someone else? Could you have
changed
what you wanted, like at a restaurant, they're out of lamb chops, you say okay, I'll have the steak? I mean, did you really
want
her, or was it just what came along?"

Louie pushed his lips out, made little circles with his hand. He was sitting there but he was traveling. He grew young, got trim, his hair returned as he remembered early kisses, the waxy taste of Rose's lipstick and the warm and thrilling breath behind it. His hand on the amazing place where waist flared into hip as they danced the cha-cha. He recalled the charged and lusty peace that happened when the clamor of loins clanged along in concert with the simple tune played by the heart, and he said, almost in a whisper, "I wanted her."

Angelina reached across the table, put her hand on his, and said, "All right, then." She took a small sip of her cooling coffee, then yawned. "Come on," she said, "you'll walk me home."

*

The federal offices in North Miami did nothing to dress up the blah neighborhood they stood in. Squat and beige, bleakly new and cheaply functional, it seemed their sole design imperative was the ability to withstand a hurricane or a siege. Inside, furtive blinds sliced up the sun that came through narrow windows; black shoes scuffed along squares of gray linoleum; green metal desks sat in offices defined by slabs of rolling wall that didn't reach the ceiling.

In one such cubicle, a baggy-eyed but pumped-up Keith McCullough stood in city clothes while his supervisor, Manny Links, sat placidly and rocked in a chair that squeaked and scraped with every movement.

"I don't see it," the supervisor was saying. "Why continue with this guy? You got a girlfriend down there, what?"

"I am telling you," said Keith McCullough, "it's just starting to get interesting."

Links looked down at the clipboard on his desk.

He had the clipboard; he had the pipe; he had the square chin and the salt-and-pepper hair: he seemed every inch the senior Fed. But in his mind he'd already moved on to the cushy private-sector security job that awaited him upon retirement. He'd practically forgotten he'd ever been an agent.

"Interesting?" he said, looking down at McCullough's latest report. "The guy's a bartender. He takes a drink on the job. I don't find that so interesting."

"It's a break in the pattern," said the undercover man. "He was very agitated."

Links took his pipe from his jacket pocket, serenely tapped it against his palm. He leaned back in his chair and didn't seem to notice that it screeched. "I get agitated sometimes. Don't you?"

"Look," McCullough said, "he changed right before my eyes. Someone came into that bar that he really didn't want to see. Who was it? Why did he flinch? I think something's going on."

"I think you like Key West," said Links. "There's nothing in this report to suggest—"

McCullough balled his fists, leaned forward so that his tie hung away from his chest. "The good stuff, Manny . . . it's not in the report."

The undercover man ignored the question. "Look, suddenly Ziggy's drinking on the job. Suddenly he's late for work. I think something is breaking with this guy."

His boss's eyes had moved to other papers on his desk. "Two weeks of careful, conservative, well-documented work. You got that?"

"Conservative," McCullough said. "Well-documented. Got it." He wheeled out of the cube with two more weeks to run his show exactly as he pleased.

It was much too early when the phone rang at Ziggy's bungalow.

With the boundless resentment of the tired, he freed a hairy arm from underneath a sweaty sheet, grabbed at the receiver and said a gruff hello that was muffled by the pillow meant to shade his eyes.

The caller was an associate of Carmen Salazar's. Ziggy was wanted in the garden, right away.

He cursed, rolled out of bed, threw himself under a lukewarm shower. He drank a cup of yesterday's reheated coffee that tasted of aluminum and dust, then started up his rumbling old car and drove toward the bogus candy store.

The car shook his brain, the ruined springs of the driver's seat jostled his bowels, and his mood got only viler as he went. Grogginess lifted, gradually and incompletely, but what replaced it was an edgy residue of stifled lust. Angelina had offered herself to him. Lips parted. Moonlight reaching down her blouse. Why the hell had he resisted, retreating on the crunching beach instead of going forward to press against her, answering readiness with readiness? He wanted to imagine it was gallantry, and maybe it was in part—the barren chivalry of a man who keeps his pants zipped because he knows that once the sex has passed he has nothing much to offer. But if it was gallantry, didn't he deserve to feel better?

He parked, climbed the single cracked step, entered the dimness of the store. The fat guy who always sat behind the counter was sitting there again, airing out his armpits by the filthy fan.

Ziggy walked through to the back, saw Salazar perched in his lawn chair, and the first thing Salazar said to him, said it even before Ziggy had come around to face him, was, "You disappointed me the other day. You let me down."

Ziggy did not deal so well with criticism in the best of times, and this morning was anything but. Sullenly he said, "I don't need to hear that, Carmen. You fuckin' get me out of bed to tell me that?"

"Those men who were here," Salazar continued mildly, "they're important men. Men of the world. The kind of men you've led me to believe you've dealt with in the past."

Ziggy shuffled his feet. His skin itched; his loins felt irritable and heavy, the tug of them was giving him a belly ache. He said, "So Carmen, what's your fuckin' point?"

"I thought you'd pay closer attention."

Ziggy said nothing, sulked. He felt last night's sand in his shoes. It was pissing him off that he was standing up and Salazar was sitting down.

Salazar said, "Didn't it occur to you to wonder why I asked you to that meeting? I do things for reasons, Ziggy. I think you know me well enough by now to realize that."

Ziggy looked at his feet. He should have remembered, but did not in that moment recall, that last time things went sour for him, it was sometimes his attention that faltered, other times his tact. He said, "Jeez, Carmen, I thought you invited me so I could stand in the sun while you sat in the shade and played boss."

Salazar drummed neat fingers on the arm of his lawn chair. His mouth got curvy in what was half a smirk and half a frown. He was not a nice person but he tried to be fair to his men; he tried not to place them in undue jeopardy if they could be just as useful to him doing something else. Salazar had noticed a subtly unnatural waxiness in the flesh at Ziggy's hairline. Ziggy had led him to believe he was not a stranger to mobsters from New York. If the big talker had more than the usual reasons to be wary of the Mafia, Salazar thought he should be given the chance to excuse himself. But if that chance was offered, and if all Salazar got in return was obtuseness, surliness, ingratitude ....