Virgin Heat (30 page)

Angelina's uncle smiled inwardly, took it as a compliment. Which it was. The kind of thing that people only said to someone that they'd really noticed, to someone whose being there, or not, made a difference in the world.

*

Later, as the sinking moon was going from yellow to orange and painting a russet stripe across the flat waters of the Florida Straits, Ziggy and Angelina walked without touching along the trucked-in sand that imperfectly covered the nubbly rock of Smathers Beach. There were no waves; the ocean made the softest hiss as a line of foam, thinner than the head on beer, dissolved between the stones.

Ziggy was shaking his head, impressed, amused. He said, "You bowled him over?"

"I didn't plan it," Angelina said. "Didn't have time. He stood up very fast. But then there was a hesitation, he sort of swayed, his eyes went out of focus."

"Shoulder, head, everything," said Angelina. "Hard as I could. His hands never came up. He fell back across the bed. I landed on top of him, bounced off, and then I got really terrified."

"That he'd hurt you?"

"That I hurt him. He didn't move. His eyes were closed. I thought ... I didn't know what to think. Stroke? Heart attack? An awful idea grabbed hold of me: What if he died and the last thing he carried into death was this feeling that I hated him? It made me start to cry. From one second to the next I was crying like I haven't cried in years and years. I touched his hair, his face. I thought, all growing up I had this lie, he was the greatest daddy in the world, he was perfect, and nothing got around that lie, I couldn't see anything wrong with him. Then when I saw it I got so mad that I couldn't see he was still my father, couldn't see I loved him anyway. Now finally I felt it all at once, all sides of it together."

Ziggy said, "And then he came around?"

Angelina nodded, soft red moonlight played across her skin as her face turned up then down. "Was only out a few seconds, I guess. Maybe fainted. Maybe I just knocked the wind out. I was stroking his cheek and his eyes popped open."

"He try to leave again?"

"No," said Angelina. "The fight was out of him. Out of both of us, I guess. Call it a draw. We just sat and talked and cried until the cops showed up."

Ziggy was silent, respectful of a daughter talking alone with her father. They walked, felt the peaceful heaviness of footsteps over sand, the odd relief of knowing you could not go very fast or very far. The he said, "The cops, there's nothing they can do to him this time."

"Thank you for that," said Angelina.

There was nothing pointed in the way she said it but the words made Ziggy wince, the eyebrows pulled together along his remade forehead. He said, "Jesus, don't thank me."

She said nothing. The russet line of moonlight on the water tracked them as they strolled.

He went on, "There's something I have to tell you, Angelina, I've never come right out and said it. What happened with me and your father, what I did, I've always been ashamed of it."

Looking down at softly gleaming sand she said, "My father did bad things. He got punished for them. They call that justice, right?"

"Yeah, but what I did, it wasn't about justice, it wasn't about believing in the law or any crap like that. I just tried to make things easy for myself."

She didn't answer, just watched her feet churn through the beach.

"And the fear," he said, "the looking over your shoulder all the time—it's not only fear of the guy you sent away. It's shame. That's what keeps your skin feeling wrong, makes your face seem unfamiliar. Shame."

They walked. A south breeze carried smells of iodine and spice; on the land side palm fronds rustled dryly, the sound was like maracas. Angelina said,

"I'm glad you told me that. You feel better, telling mer

Ziggy's hand came up against his chest, he rubbed himself like he was checking for wounds. "Yeah," he said, sounding a little bit surprised. "I do."

The moon slouched toward the horizon, its orange color dimmed and warped toward powdery pink, a gentle, used-up shade. They walked, their footsteps crunched. Their legs were weary as the moon but they kept on walking, they were on their way to some end or some beginning and it seemed they couldn't stop until they'd reached it. Ziggy said, "What we've been through, you and me, it's been pretty crazy."

Angelina crossed her arms against her midriff, squeezed herself a little. She remembered kissing Sal Martucci in the shadows in her father's hallways, his fingers putting goose bumps on her neck. She thought about the fallow years, years she'd mostly believed were exalted by their dedication to a secret passion. "Yeah," she said, "it has been pretty crazy."

"I was thinking," Ziggy said, "that maybe the crazy part is over."

Angelina feared to answer that, just walked and watched the pocked face of the slipping moon. Ziggy reached out, took her hand, tried to stop her walking. She left her hand in his but pulled him onward, something was preventing her from standing still.

Ziggy tagged along, a little flustered. He was ready to propose, and it seemed odd to be proposing on the march, and it did not occur to him that Angelina knew that too, and maybe she was walking to fend off the long-awaited question. He kicked a rock. He cleared his throat. He said, "Angelina, I was wondering if you'd marry me."

For all the preparation, the ten years' biding time, the question seemed abrupt, the moment clipped. It had to, being one of those divides that neatly severs history into before and after. Angelina didn't answer right away. She plodded on, looking at the moon. It was a hand's breadth above the water, it stained the ocean underneath it. At last she said, "Why?"

He struggled not to lose heart in the unaccustomed effort to explain himself. "I know you're beautiful," he said. "I know you waited for me."

"It doesn't matter," Angelina interrupted. "But Ziggy, doesn't it feel, I don't know, like kid stuff, like something from a life that's finished now?"

He looked off at the ocean. Everybody wrestled with the same few questions in life, but people asked them at different times in different ways; kept asking them even after they'd been answered; and Ziggy vaguely realized that he and Angelina had gradually swapped positions on almost everything. He asked her. "How many lives you think you got?"

"More than I've lived so far," she said.

They walked. The moon sank toward the water, in its final moments it changed from something that was falling to something that was melting, its contours going soft and edgeless as its red reflection climbed up off the sea to join it.

Ziggy said, "Those other lives, maybe we could live them together."

Angelina stopped at last. Without the steady crunch and squeak of footsteps the world seemed very quiet. She looked at him, at the black eyes she remembered, in the changed face that by now challenged memory as the true face.

The moon touched the horizon, seemed to balance there a moment, then began to slide into the ocean, serene and stately as a queen entering her bath.

Angelina watched it being slowly swallowed up, said, "One fantasy, Ziggy? One fantasy at least? Hold me till the moon is gone."

He reached across the tiny swath of beach between them and took her in his arms, they stood like lovers until the moon was covered up in ocean, and the stars got bluer as the red gleam was extinguished and the russet arrow on the water disappeared. Then she walked away from him, her footsteps crunching on the coral underneath the sand.

Ziggy was right about the cops and Paul Amaro.

The guns could not be traced. The seafood truck led back no farther than Tommy Lucca's chop shop. Neither Carmen Salazar nor Johnny Castro nor Carlos Mendez chose to say a word that would implicate the mobster from New York. It took one phone call from his lawyer to get him released.

As for the other would-be smugglers, they followed Carlos Mendez's lead and played the Cuba card; the U.S. government chose to regard them not as common criminals but misguided patriots. In quiet plea bargains, Johnny Castro agreed to the forfeiture of his boat and six months minimum security; Carlos Mendez paid a fifty-thousand-dollar fine and received a two-year sentence, suspended in light of his standing in the Miami charitable community.

Carmen Salazar, who was, after all, only a middle man, got off with three years' probation, a settlement he cheerfully accepted, once he'd bargained for wording that would allow him to hold a liquor license. He painted the candy store turquoise, put a kitchen at the rear, and opened up a funky-stylish Cuban bistro where people paid twelve dollars for a plate of rice and beans. La Bodega was a triumph for its owner, who had lost his taste for rackets anyway, and really wanted nothing more than to make a living without having to leave his garden very often.

Less of a victory fell to Keith McCullough and Terry Sykes, who received private congratulations for their work, but no official recognition. Politically, that would have been awkward. No one was doing real jail time for a conspiracy to smuggle weapons, and a suspect had been shot through the heart when a wound in the arm might have been sufficient to subdue him. Even so, Sykes was miffed. "You said I'd get a citation," he groused. McCullough just shrugged. For him, the value of the undercover posting to Key West lay elsewhere. Not without anguish, he'd tardily examined his range of disguises and ploys, traced out the scarred seam where the masks ended and the person began. He decided on a trial separation from his wife and started discreetly keeping company with a cute town cop from Boca.

Michael, a connoisseur of romantic disappointments, got over Keith/David quickly, and, in the calm of retrospect, put him far down on the B list of significant attachments. Still, he swore to himself, as he had a hundred times before, that next time, he'd fall in love less hard, less fast. He managed to remain uninfatuated until he left Key West, but on the plane back to New York he sat across the aisle from a handsome guy named Ted. When Michael wrote to Angelina, as he'd promised he would, he told her he and Ted were trying to take it slow and easy, but his eye kept wandering around his fourth floor walk-up, trying to find room enough for two.

Louie and Rose also went back to New York, but only to put their affairs in order. Enough was enough with the plumbing business and enough was enough with the Bronx. Louie closed the store, but not before he'd tracked down Eddie the Dominican kid, hired him to help pack up the apartment, and given him a generous severance. Then Angelina's aunt and uncle moved back to Key West and started looking for a house. Their retirement would be a very modest one, but neither of them cared. After a life of feeling small, Louie had found a town where he felt big, where he'd found the bigness that was in him all the time; in the same town, a mild and tender contentment had sneaked up and surprised the hell out of Rose.

Paul Amaro went back to his quiet mansion and silent wife as a man who'd realized he was old. The world no longer matched the things he thought he knew about it, and while he might perhaps still have the strength to learn things over, he wasn't sure he cared to. There was peace in becoming archaic, serenity in lack of interest. Most mornings he still went to the Gatto Bianco Social Club, but he went there now as an obsolete executive, politely consulted but seldom obeyed. He drank coffee, watched Funzie Gallo get fatter and fatter. Sometimes he thought about his daughter. She would never again live at home, he knew; he wouldn't see her very often. Yet the loss he felt was tempered by the memory of their talk at Flagler House. She loved him for what he'd tried to do; forgave him for what he'd done. How many fathers could expect more?

Ziggy was both surprised and not surprised that Angelina wouldn't have him. How could a decade of devotion go so suddenly thumbs-down? Then again, how could a flesh and blood man, sloppy and selfish and sulky and real, measure up to the daydreams of such a passionate virgin? He would have disappointed her; just as well she dumped him. Secretly he was relieved. He'd flirted with the terrifying prospect of having a life, and he was off the hook again.

He was even more off the hook when word came, through intermediaries in Tampa, that Paul Amaro had absolved him, he was no longer under threat.