Virgin Heat (18 page)

He blinked, made sure he was hidden by tendrils of hanging thatch. He was utterly befuddled but at least he was no longer bored. He watched his relative slip into his room, then abruptly, his drink unfinished, he called for his tab.

"Ziggy, look at me," said Angelina.

"I am looking at you," he replied.

"My eyes, Ziggy. Look at my eyes. Look me in the eyes and tell me you really believe I put my father onto you."

He was standing over her at the foot of the bed. His hair was awry, he had green stains on the knees of his pants, broken bits of leaf were sticking to his shirt. His stare was wild and his voice was tight and scared. "Then why the hell's he here?"

"How should I know why he's here?" said Angelina. She was propped on Ziggy's unfresh pillows. She held the sheet up snug beneath her chin, but still the soft cloth traced out the curves of her legs and hips and tummy. Her body was confusing her. One second she wished that Ziggy was naked with her in the bed and the next second she wished that she was dressed and on a plane. "Why's he
say
he's here?"

Ziggy's reply was dismissive. "Some business thing. Some thing with Cuba."

Angelina said, "All right, then. There's your answer."

The answer didn't mollify his paranoia. He paced the width of the bed, dragged his hand over the dusty dresser top. "Fuck's the difference why he's here? He's here. He's in my face."

"You said he didn't recognize you."

"Yeah,
today
. But what's it take to recognize a person? A word? A look? Christ, you recognized me by my goddam finger."

"That's different," Angelina said. "I'm in love with you."

Ziggy's hands hardened into fists, veins stood out along his neck. His face got red, his eyes narrowed down, he looked like he would scream or cry. Instead, he squeezed out, "And right there is the mystery of the fuckin' ages."

She watched flecks of silver dust swim through the bright stripes near the shutters. "It was a pretty dumb idea," she said. "I admit it."

He stayed in his chosen exile at the foot of the bed, staring at the void and dirty corner of the room. "So what'll you do now?" she asked at last.

"Go far away," he said.

She thought about that, said, "This is far away."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning," she said, "you came here because you thought no one would find you, it would be safe."

"It
was
" he interrupted.

"But everybody found you," she went right on. "Everybody. And that could happen anywhere. The world just isn't that big."

Finally he turned to face her. "Ange," he said, "you have no idea how big the world is. You think— what?—the world is Pelham Manor, New York, and Florida?"

"It makes you feel better to insult me, Ziggy?" Then her voice changed and she added, "It's been ten years since you called me Ange."

He stood with his hands on his hips, sucking wretched, labored breaths.

After a moment she went on, "Besides, you have a life here."

This was news to Ziggy. A life? He had a so-so job and some second-rate action that was never going to make him rich. He had a nothing place to live and occasionally he got laid. Was this a life? Was this what other people had in mind when they talked about a life? Fact was, Ziggy was pretty clueless about what a life consisted of, still less how to get one.

This lack flooded over him now, enraged him, made his movements violent, jerky. He tore open a dresser drawer, reached in deep for his passport and his stash of funds beneath a heap of socks. Stuffing money in his pants, he wheeled back toward the naked woman in his bed, said, "Sorry things didn't go better, Angelina. I'm outa here."

At once he was moving toward the bedroom door. It wasn't far and he was moving fast. Yet the time it took for him to reach the doorway was time enough for Angelina to do a hundred oscillations. She wanted him to vanish. She wanted him to stay. She cursed herself for being here; she should have been the one to catch a plane, to turn her back on him, not the one walked out on, undressed and absurd. But loss was loss, what did it matter who left who?... She heard herself say, "But you don't know where you're going."

He had one foot in the hallway. As torn as she, he couldn't drag the other leg across the threshold and have this madness over with. He stopped to argue, his momentum stalled. He said, "At Miami airport there's this screen, it lists the whole world—"

"Ziggy, think about it. You have an edge—you know him, he doesn't know you. You stay in town, you see what happens, maybe there's a chance to work things out."

His voice turned shrill and raspy, the simple fear cut through. "Work things
out
? This isn't something you work out, Angelina. This isn't something you talk over. He wants me dead."

"And he wants me to be happy."

He looked at her, her violet eyes, the earnest and neglected body wriggling in his bed. "Your father, Angelina, happiness is bullshit to him. What he cares about is honor, and the balls of honor is revenge. You know that."

"Ziggy, you'll be safe a while, you'll see how things play out."

He knew he shouldn't even think about it, but he thought about it. He couldn't pull his eyes off Angelina. Her neck, her breasts, they'd kill him yet. "Coral Shores," he said, "it's fulla queers."

"It would be more pleasant," Angelina said, "if you called them gays."

The sun was moving, there were patches of light across the sheet where Angelina lay; he imagined that they made the cloth translucent, revealing swaths of flesh. "I don't see me hangin' out around a buncha queers."

Cautiously, she rolled onto an elbow, a browned shoulder with a pale chaste tan line came into view. "Think about your situation, Ziggy. Who's it make more sense for you to hang around with? A bunch of queers or a bunch of mafiosi?"

30

"It's very important," Uncle Louie said. "Family emergency."

"I understand," said the desk clerk at the Coral Shores Guest House. He had a shaved head above bleached blond eyebrows, and an expression so concerned that it put creases all across his scalp. "But there's no one registered by that name. Are you sure that's the name?"

The clerk leaned on an elbow, as intent as his visitor to puzzle this thing out. "We don't get that many lesbians. What's she look like?"

Uncle Louie said, "My niece is not a lesbian."

The clerk's expression darkened for a moment, the east-west furrows moved north-south. "You have a problem with lesbians?"

"Oh,
her!
" said the clerk, and in his relief he gave Uncle Louie a light slap on the arm. "Why didn't you say so? There's only one of those. Dark hair, a little chesty, right? That's Jane Starr."

"Excuse me?"

The clerk leaned closer across the orchids on the counter. "Alias, I guess. We get a lot of
noms de sex
down here—people closeted back home mostly, nervous. They pay in cash, it's all the same to us. Live and let live, right?"

"Uh, right," said Uncle Louie.

"You're welcome to wait out by the pool. Want a cup of tea?"

*

Half a dozen blocks away, Paul Amaro stood in his shower and entertained dark thoughts.

He wondered if his life was finally, irretrievably unraveling. He marveled at how little he cared. He noted with an odd detachment, almost a chastened ecstasy, how brittle his strength must always have been, if it could be undone so easily.

Hot water hit him in the face; he let it scour him, hoping vaguely that it would carry off dead skin, chip away old sins along with rotten flesh, leaving something better underneath. His mind raced. An ice-cream truck and a pay phone. Did those things mean his daughter was in Key West? Or did they only mean he'd taken too much sun, that the searing heat had put his sorrow over the edge into outright delusion?

He soaped himself, sought refuge in the practical. If Angelina was here, how would he find her? Who did he know that knew the town, who did he know that would help? Only Carmen Salazar. An arrogant pissant, but ambitious and not without intelligence, a man who understood the value of favors owed—as long as they were owed by people more important and more powerful than himself. Which meant that Paul Amaro would, as usual, have to hide his grief and his confusion, have to bend on the stiff mask of the formidable boss.

He rinsed, watched dirty suds go down the drain. For a long time he stood beneath the water, coaxing his mind to rest. He forgot about guns for Cuba. He forgot about calling Funzie Gallo. Or maybe he didn't forget. Maybe it was some dim defiance, some penitential courting of trouble that led him not to call. Maybe he just didn't dare distract himself. Like a weary actor mustering conviction to go out and reprise an ancient role, he needed to be empty of everything except the craft that might allow him to keep persuading others of what he himself had an ever harder time believing—that he was still a big shot, and that any of it mattered half a damn.

*

Less happened in the summer, but what happened was more strange. Ziggy had noticed it for years, but it had never been like this.

He stood now in the courtyard at Coral Shores, Angelina at his side, and he saw things that, in his staunch blue-collar prudishness, he was simply not prepared to see. At one end of the pool, two pairs of men, young, frisky, and innocent of bathing suits, were sitting on each other's shoulders, staging chicken fights. On the lip of the hot tub, a white man and a black man, bare-assed both, were sipping wine and exchanging enraptured stares. Buttocks gazed up from lounges, scrotums half-floated in clear water, diffuse as poaching eggs. Ziggy said, "Christ, Angelina, this is naked city."

Angelina surprised herself. Out of Ziggy's bed, she felt less sentimental. Back on her own turf, clothed, she felt more in control. She said, "Okay. So leave."

The baldness of it, the lack of protest, caught Ziggy off guard. He had nothing to add but his feet were planted in hot gravel, they weren't in a position to carry him away.

Then they both heard Angelina's name.

It came from a patch of shade at the far side of the pool, where a dressed man and a naked man were playing backgammon. Angelina looked toward the voice, said, "Jeez, it's Uncle Louie."

"Uncle Louie?" Ziggy said. "Zis a family fuckin' reunion?"

But in the next heartbeat his thoughts curdled and he realized he was trapped. Angelina, after all, had set him up, brought him to this sealed-off courtyard, this place of no escape. This was Paulie's brother. If Paulie's brother knew, that meant Paulie knew. That meant there were killers lurking. He wished he had his gun, which was taped beneath the dashboard of his car. All he was carrying was a good-sized pocketknife. Should he grab a hostage? His head swam. The hostage should be Angelina. Could he do it, could he point a knife at her, wrap his arm around her throat?

All this transited his mind in a second. He didn't move. Uncle Louie was walking quickly toward them, agitated, jerky. The knife was in Ziggy's right pants pocket and for now he left it there. The sun was on the back of his neck and there was splashing in the pool.

Angelina said, "Uncle Louie, what are you—"

"We have to talk," he whispered breathlessly. He barely glanced at Ziggy; in that moment he seemed too full of his own momentous news to recognize the bartender from Raul's.

"Okay," she said, "let's talk."

Her uncle's eyes flicked nervously toward the stranger, whose hand was in his pocket. Angelina's gaze told him he should go ahead. "Your father's here," he told her.

Wearily, Angelina said, "I know."

"You know?" said Louie, deflated as usual. He blinked down at the damp apron of the pool. "How d'you know?"

"How do
you
know?" she asked right back.

"I just saw him," Louie said. "At Flagler House. He took a room."