Virgin Heat (19 page)

"Shit," said Ziggy.

"How do
you
know?" Louie asked.

A team of naked chicken-fighters went down with a plunk like a depth charge, water lapped over the edges of the pool. Uncle Louie said, "The beginning might be good."

Angelina bit her lip. She sighed, and said at last, "Uncle Louie, you remember Sal Martucci?"

"Ya mean the skunk sonofabitch that—"

He broke off suddenly. He fell back half a step, squeezed his chin between a thumb and index finger, and for the first time he looked hard at Ziggy Maxx, tilting his head and narrowing his eyes. He said, "Angelina, no."

She nodded yes.

"
Marrone
, Angelina," said her uncle. "Of all the people."

Louie stood there in the sun. He thought about his family, its cockeyed way of giving everyone a favorite. He thought about his brothers, about their strength that had made him weak, their wadded bankrolls that had made him poor, their crooked confidence that had made him a quailing little man. He looked at the ground, said, "I'm still on your side. Of course I'm still on your side." Then he added, "But who's gonna break it to your father?"

"No one's gonna break it to her father," Ziggy said.

"But if he's here—" said Uncle Louie, and then he fell silent.

All three of them were silent amid the splashing and the laughing and the scratching of the fronds, and in the silence it was gradually dawning on each of them that they were captives there at Coral Shores. It didn't take a gun and it didn't take a knife to hold them hostage. The town was too small, the streets too narrow; the airport was a fishbowl. For as long as Paul Amaro was around, they didn't dare go out. They were marooned together in the naked city, their best hope the camouflage of undressed men and drag queens all done up in heels and rouge.

Uncle Louie pursed his nervous lips, shot his niece a resigned and sheepish smile. "Guess I'll see about a room."

"I see," said Carmen Salazar, when Paul Amaro, sitting in the stretched and loopy shadows of the garden in late afternoon, had told him as much of the story as he felt like telling. "I'm glad, of course, to help in whatever way I can. But perhaps it would be easier if I better understood a couple things."

Paul Amaro gave the smallest of nods. The nod told Salazar he was free to ask questions; the smallness of it told him he'd better be careful how he phrased them.

"Your daughter, Mr. Amaro—"

"Paul. People I do business with, they call me Paul."

Salazar smiled inwardly. He hadn't been invited earlier to use first names. "Paul," he said. It felt good in his mouth, seemed to promise income growth, prestige. "Do you believe that she was kidnapped or do you think she ran away?"

Amaro took a deep breath, slowly blew the air into his fist. "At the start, I thought that someone grabbed her. But I don't know who, I don't know why." He faltered, shrugged, stared off into knotted shrubbery that swallowed up the light. "Now I don't know what to think."

Salazar drummed fingers on the arm of his lawn chair; it made a dull cheap sound. "Your daughter and your brother. Excuse me, Paul, but the connection, I'm not sure I see—"

"I don't fucking see it either," admitted the capo. "That's why my first thought was vendetta . . . Look, my brother comes here on vacation. Gets back all excited. Comes to my house, shows his asshole video. Next thing I know, my family's torn apart."

When Carmen Salazar was thinking hard, he didn't scowl; instead, his top lip rode up on his teeth and quivered, rabbit-like. After a moment, he said, "That video—who has it?"

Paul Amaro shrugged, said, "His wife, I guess."

"Maybe there's some hint, some landmark. Might be interesting to watch it together."

Paul Amaro sucked at wet thick air, smelled musky fruits and overripe flowers. He looked down at his hands, grudgingly admitted that this Salazar was bright, already he was bringing some reason, some promising dispassion, to all this infuriating muddle. "Yeah," he said, "it might."

*

"Lucky me," said Uncle Louie, though he didn't really sound like he meant it. "Got the last room."

"The last room?" said Angelina. "What about Ziggy?"

They'd moved back from the pool to a shady little grouping of chairs around a stone table, and now there was an embarrassed silence. Louie was of the school that preferred to consign to genteel oblivion any discussion of the sex lives of unmarried female relatives. As for Ziggy, though he hadn't had much leisure to think about it, he'd been quietly assuming that he and Angelina would shack up. Behind his terror and his plotting, he'd retained an image of her lying in his bed; burned on the backs of his eyeballs was a picture of the roundness of her breasts beneath the sheet, the canyon where the cloth banked down between her thighs. His scruples about deflowering her had been eroding, as scruples do.

His testicles had framed a new logic: if he was a dead man anyway, why deprive them both of a little joy? And if there was the remotest chance of making things right with Paul Amaro, being his daughter's lover might help his case as easily as hurt it.

The only problem was that Angelina no longer felt like making love with him.

Not then. Not there. Not holed up like fugitives, with Uncle Louie practically next door. Her nerves had fired to exhaustion; she felt both spent and spared. Unkissed, untouched, she yet felt that she had gone to the very brink, and now she was pulling back again, moving away from the dizzying edge of the diving board.

The silent stalemate carried on, and she caught a fast and ill-hid glimpse of something in Ziggy's face. She'd never seen it quite so bare before but she recognized it instantly. Desire. Desire quickened by frustration. She almost smiled at the wicked pleasure of being, at long last, the one withholding union rather than the one from whom it was withheld. Sweetly, she said, "I guess you two are roommates."

"Not a chance," said Ziggy.

A pause. Then he frowned as Angelina glanced briefly toward the picket gate that led on to the wider world with all its many perils, its blithe murderers in trench coats, its ice picks and piano wires. He shot a sour look at Louie. "How many beds in that goddam room?"

Angelina smiled, said, "I'll leave you two to settle in." She looked full on at Ziggy. "I feel a little soiled. Think I'll have a warm bath and a nap."

*

Tommy Lucca, eager to finalize the details of the smuggling operation, tried to reach Funzie Gallo as soon as he and Carlos Mendez had returned to Coral Gables.

It took four phone calls and several go-betweens, and by the time he spoke to his New York colleague, Lucca was more irritable than usual. This should have been a simple business, and it was turning out to be nothing but delays and aggravation. "You New York guys," he groused to Funzie. "Still so fucking paranoid about the phone."

Funzie, who in fact was paranoid enough that he only took calls on a pay phone in a bakery across the street from the Gatto Bianco Social Club, was too cautious to respond to that.

"Ya heard from Paul?" asked Tommy.

"Was I s'posed to?" Funzie said, noncommittal.

"Yeah, you were supposed to," Lucca said. He jerked back in his study chair and plucked at the crease of his trousers. " Ya should've heard from him hours ago."

They were baking cookies in a huge black oven near the phone that Funzie used. A batch was taken out on an enormous wooden peel and a smell of anisette and almond filled the air. "Well, I haven't."

Lucca choked back exasperation, said, "Our arrangement, it's a go."

Funzie motioned to the baker. He wanted some cookies while they were good and hot, the pignolias soft and chewy. He said into the phone, "I gotta hear that from Paul. You know that, Tommy."

Lucca knew it but he didn't like it. He snarled. He smacked his thigh. Carlos Mendez gestured to him, be nice, go easy. Lucca said, "But fucking Paul isn't exactly on the fucking case."

On that Funzie offered no opinion. His mouth was watering at the thought of the warm cookies.

A moment passed, and the Florida mobster said, "You call me soon's you hear from Paul. Soon. You got that, Funzie?" Then he slammed the phone down, the futile momentum of his arm seemed to propel him from his chair and start him pacing.

Carlos Mendez tracked him with his eyes, rolled his hat brim in his lap, said mildly, "It's only been four, five hours, Tommy."

He paced and scowled until an ugly thought assailed him. Then he said, "Like stay in Key West and find a way to cut me out of this?"

"Tommy," said Mendez, "the money comes from me, remember?"

But suspicion had grabbed on to Tommy Lucca, and on a man like him suspicion was a ratchet, it only went tighter once it grabbed. "Salazar's boat guy, that fuck with the freckles, he's in Havana like every other week—ya don't think he knows other people who want guns?"

"There's no reason to imagine—"

"Fuckin' Paul was acting weird.
Take me ta the beach. Lemme see the water.
Weird."

"The fucking guy is jealous of me," Tommy Lucca said. "Always has been. My house. My tan. Now he's looking for a way to screw me."

But Lucca couldn't see a million things, he could only figure two. "He's fucking me or he's crazy. And either way, I don't like what I smell."

*

"Ziggy's
here
?" said Michael. "
Stuck
here?"

"Looks that way," said Angelina. It was early evening, and she was sitting on the end of her friend's bed, kicking her bare feet against the sisal rug. "In a room with Uncle Louie."

Michael said, "God, it's so romantic."

"For Ziggy or my uncle?"

"For
you
" said Michael. He was standing near the mirror, lifting his lip to check for specks between his teeth. "It's this perfect little dance. First you chase him, then he chases you—"

"And my family chases both of us."

"Sometimes family's involved," said Michael. "Sometimes it's like that. Like, look at
West Side Story."

"I seem to remember that ended badly."

"Now don't get pessimistic. We'll order in Chinese." He went to the bedside table, found a phone book, looked up Chinese restaurants.

The instructions that Rose received from Paul Amaro by way of her sister-in-law Maria were simple and specific. She was to take the Key West video to Federal Express and have it shipped to the Flagler House hotel for hand-delivery to a Mr. Paul Martin, the name under which her brother-in-law was registered.

That's all she was supposed to do. It was easy; it was clear, but Louie's wife had chosen not to do it. She'd sat in her steam-heated Bronx apartment, looked out the sooty windows, and she got to thinking. Why would Paul be staying in Key West, why would he want to see her husband's film, unless he had reason to believe that her Louie was down there? And what had always been the problem in her marriage, why had her husband finally abandoned her after all these years, except that she had taken him for granted, she had never gone out of her way to show him that she cared? She resolved that she would show him now.

She'd brewed a pot of coffee, got as close to being sober as she had been in several weeks, and booked an early morning flight to Florida. Something like hope, like tenderness, awakened in her as she packed badly folded clothes into a suitcase.

She arrived in Key West just before midday, the video in its black box in her purse, and took a taxi to the Flagler House. At the front desk she inquired as to the number of Paul Martin's room, had the savvy to slip the clerk a twenty when he said he couldn't give it out.