Virgin Heat (14 page)

Ziggy passed the silence by plucking at his moistening shirt, and wondering how it would have been if he'd met Angelina's waiting mouth, if his fingertips had followed the moonlight down between her breasts. Much too late, he said, "S'okay Carmen, why'd y'ask me to that meeting?"

But Salazar's brief spasm of concern had passed. He was annoyed now, his reply was crisp and neutral. "We'll be doing business with those men," he said. "You'll be working with them closely. I thought it would be good if you got to know their faces."

At this Ziggy pouted, pawed the ground, bitterly mourned his interrupted sleep.

Carmen added, the mordancy unnoticed, "And if they had a chance to look at yours."

*

"You have to go back," said Michael.

It was afternoon. They were sitting by the pool. Neither had been awake for very long; their schedules had gotten so bizarre that they were once again in sync.

"That's what you say," Michael challenged.

"That's what I
say?
That's what I know."

"Maybe there's another explanation."

Angelina feigned disinterest, looked off at the cool blue water staked with forms of naked men, gluteal folds jagged with refraction.

"How the hell should I know?" She sighed. Her bathing suit squeaked as she squirmed against her lounge chair. "Let's talk about something else, okay? When do I get to meet David?"

Funzie Gallo, unsure if he was doing right or wrong, but certain that he'd go crazy if he had to keep on watching his old friend lumber blindly around the social club, had gone ahead and laid the groundwork for the deal down in Florida. He arranged for Paul Amaro to meet with Tommy Lucca.

The evening before the sitdown, sitting with a bourbon in his silent living room, Paul told his wife he was going to Miami on business. She didn't answer him. She hadn't answered him in days. For a long time, many years in fact, her silences had been accusations; but what had changed in the week and a half since Angelina disappeared, was that Paul now knew they were. He heard the seething questions inside the silence, they found his guilty places like dye finds tumors, and he felt compelled to respond, he seemed not to notice it was a one-way conversation.

"What else can I do up here?" he said. "You're looking at me like I shouldn't go, like there's more I should be doing. What else can I do?"

She didn't answer. A lamp was on behind her, it reduced her to a silhouette of an old lady's hairdo and a face that was wrinkled at the edges. She turned away her eyes.

"I've talked to everyone I know. I've begged. I've threatened. I've sent messages to the Irish, to the Asians. Tell me, Maria, what more should I do?"

Paul Amaro's voice grew higher, thinner, craven. "You think I feel this less than you do, woman? You think I love her any less than you?"

Angelina's mother didn't answer. Her husband stood up heavily and left her sitting on the sofa, featureless and gray with the yellow lamplight reaching toward the corners of the room behind her.

*

Next day, Paul Amaro went to Florida. He was carrying no weapons, packing no contraband; there was no reason not to fly.

At Miami airport, he walked through the same corridors that his daughter had walked through, smelled the same faint salty mildew, saw the same pyramids of plastic oranges.

A driver met him, swept him past the clutter of downtown to discreet and shady Coral Gables, where rambling houses with red-tiled roofs crouched behind high walls of jagged limestone rock. At Tommy Lucca's place, a gate slid open silently, tires crunched over immaculate white gravel, and the car stopped beneath a columned porte cochere.

An Asian butler met him at the door, handed him a hot washcloth. Another servant brought a mimosa on a silver tray. Then the butler led him down a long hallway lined with vases, paintings; and around a sunny courtyard with a fountain; and toward a separate wing whose walls were paneled in mahogany. The elegance was seamless until the servant tapped lightly on the study door, opened it, and there was Tommy Lucca's face. The nose went even more sideways than Paul remembered; twisted cartilage showed a shiny dent, the nostrils didn't match. The mouth was broad and loose and twitchy, he seemed always to be about to suck his teeth. He said a single word but clearly he was showing off. "Welcome."

Paul Amaro said, "Nice to see you doing so well, Tommy."

The compliment was insincere but still it cost him. Paul Amaro could remember being on the wrong side of the discussion about Tommy Lucca's prospects in Florida. Like most of the New York goombahs who didn't have the vision or the guts to make a move themselves, he thought Lucca was headed to a backwater, the minor leagues. Now they were all near the ends of their careers, and Tommy Lucca was rich, was tan, was one of the few who had never been to jail. He'd proved them all wrong, though he'd yet to prove nearly enough to be content.

He plucked imaginary lint from his shirtfront, said, "I'm getting by. Come in, come in."

Amaro stepped farther into the room, saw a sad-eyed, handsome man rising from his chair, a Panama hat in his left hand as he reached out his right to shake. Lucca made the introductions. The handsome man's name was Carlos Mendez, and his host described him as an important businessman with many friends in Cuba.

". . . where great and long overdue changes are about to happen," Mendez said.

"He wants Castro's balls," Lucca explained. "Democracy. It gives Carlos here a hard-on, he thinks it's coming any day. People are getting ready for it, buying guns. Siddown, siddown."

Amaro settled into a chair, said skeptically, "Ya read the paper, ya'd think the Cubans had no money. Not for guns. Not for nothin'."

The handsome man tried and failed to keep a certain smugness out of his smile. "The money is no problem," he said. "America is still good to those of us who strive."

"Yeah, swell," said Paul Amaro. "So what kinda pieces ya want?"

"Two thousand handguns," said Mendez. "Preferably 9 millimeter. Five hundred assault weapons, Chinese is acceptable. You can do?"

Paul Amaro crossed his arms. He'd promised himself to be bored and distant, but the deal adrenaline was starting to flow. He said, "What about payments, transfers?"

Tommy Lucca hadn't sat. He was pacing, raking the hair on his forearms. "You get the merchandise far as Hialeah. When it gets there, I move it to Key West, where another guy—"

Amaro burrowed deeper into the negotiation, knew the fugitive peace of forgetting about his life. "I don't like it there's another guy," he said. "Why's there have to be another guy?"

"Geography," said Lucca. "Right here, we're like two hundred miles from Havana, the Gulf Stream in our face. Key West, it's only ninety miles."

Amaro ground his foot against the carpet. "This is why I don't like it there's another guy. I'm waitin' on my money while my merch is with some yokel?"

"Paulie," Lucca said, "the water near Cuba, the Straits, that's the hairy part. Cutters. Helicopters. The boat don't get through, someone's fucked. Who'd'ya wanna see get fucked—us, or the other guy?"

"I don't like dealin' wit' guys I don't know," insisted Paul.

Tommy Lucca's ears were getting red, lines of white were tracing out his mismatched nostrils. "I know him. That's not good enough for you?"

"No offense, Tommy, but no, it isn't."

Lucca stalled in his pacing, drummed stubby fingers on his rosewood desk. "No offense, Tommy? No offense to you, pal, but after all this time, you still got this fuckin' New York thing, like no one else knows how—"

"I didn't say that," Paulie said, though secretly he was pleased that he could sit in the enormous house of this successful man and so easily find a nerve where he could still be tweaked. "All I said—"

"All you said is that for you it don't mean beans that I picked this guy, that I trust him."

"Now don't get touchy, Tommy," said Amaro.

Carlos Mendez was working on his hat. His tragic eyes flicked back and forth, and he wondered if these two bullheaded gringos would scotch his deal before it started. At last he said, "Gentlemen, let's not quarrel."

"Who's quarreling?" said Angelina's father.

"I have a suggestion," Mendez went on. "Be my guests for dinner. If you like, we'll see a show, gamble, have some women. Tomorrow we'll go together to Key West, you'll meet our colleague there, I'm confident you'll be more comfortable. Is that acceptable to everyone?"

Angelina was feeling glum, unpretty, hopeless. She invited Michael out for a fancy dinner and, as he picked apart his lobster with great deliberation, she told him she was leaving town the next day.

He put down his tiny fork, very thoroughly wiped his mouth, looked out past the terraced tables to the ocean. "You can't do that," he said. "That's ridiculous."

"Ridiculous?" she answered. Her own plate was hardly touched, she pushed it an inch away from her, took a sip of Chardonnay. "What's ridiculous is that I came here at all."

Michael flicked his green eyes left and right, leaned low across the table, decided on a somewhat desperate stratagem. "Close to getting laid, for one thing."

Angelina was piqued. "You think I can't get laid?" she said. She said it louder than she'd meant to, heads turned here and there.

He reached for the wine bucket, poured them both some more. "So why haven't you?" he challenged.

She looked away.

"Because you're after the sublime," he answered for her. "Because you won't settle. So why settle now, when you've almost got what you've been waiting for?"

"I don't almost have it," she said. "That's exactly the problem. It feels farther away now than when I was home in my room and didn't even know if Sal Martucci was still alive."

"He's alive," said Michael. "He's here. You've touched him."

"And he practically dissolved," said Angelina. She sipped wine, gathered steam. "And another thing. Just in the last day or so it's finally getting through to me that it's a little pathetic to still be chasing at twenty-seven what you dreamed about at seventeen, especially when it was probably a bad idea to begin with."

"Is twenty-seven so different from seventeen?" said Michael. "Is
eighty
-seven so different from seventeen. People want what they want. They need what they need."

Angelina sighed, looked out at moonlight on the water, at misted stars that dimmed and brightened as scraps of cloud slipped past them. "It's beautiful here," she said. "And you've been a terrific friend, a godsend. But I'm leaving tomorrow."

Michael stared down at the tablecloth, fingered the base of his wineglass. He hated saying goodbye to people; no matter whose idea it was to leave, no matter what the circumstance, he always felt like he was being punished, renounced, dragged away to someplace dark and cramped and silent.

But then again, Angelina's giving up didn't mean that he had to give up too. After a long moment, he said, "What time tomorrow?"