Welcome to Paradise (6 page)

Sharply, the cop said, "D'ya touch the door
handle?"

He had Al there. He pressed the attack.

"Anybody mad at ya?"

"I just got here."

"Hot climate," said the cop, "it don't take
long for people to get mad. Ya look too long at someone's
girlfriend's titties? Get talkin' politics with shrimpers?"

Al had not yet had food or coffee. He was
hatching a headache and he wished he was home. He said, "Look, if I
could just get a report. For insurance."

The cop produced a pad, began scrawling. Now
he pretended to be helpful. "I was you, I'd call a dealer."

"Got one here in town?"

"Fancy car like this, closest one's Miami.
Sun, I think it's called." He paused, and Al Tuschman tried to
believe he didn't see a quick malevolent flash behind the Ray-
Bans. "Towing cost ya six, eight hundred bucks."

The cop snapped the report from his pad and
roared off on his motorbike.

Al Tuschman stuffed the paper into his
pocket, went back into the office, called the dealer in Miami. The
towing, as it turned out, would cost a mere 517 bucks. Al left the
car key with the desk clerk.

"Who should I give it to?" the man with the
shaved head asked.

"Anyone that wants it," said Al
disgustedly.

The clerk bit his lip. What a sarcastic guy,
he thought, as his big, rough-looking guest pivoted on aching knees
and left.

*

Back in his mildewed motel room, Chop
Parilla was more than half asleep. A sweaty sheet clung to his
hairy back; its wrinkles seemed to continue in the thick skin of
his stub of neck. Fugitive shafts of light and the dull hum of
traffic from the Boulevard were prying him out of the millionth
version of his favorite dream—a dream of weightless sex amid the
knobs and gauges of a stolen car, never the same car twice.

In his mind he copped a final feel of the
dashboard and kissed the dream good-bye. Then he heard the doorknob
rattle and he reached by reflex for the revolver underneath his
pillow.

As the door swung open and a rude wedge of
sunshine cut into the room, he came up on an elbow, cocked the
hammer of the gun, and drew a bead on a greasy-haired hippie with a
red bandanna and stupid-looking little glasses way down on his
nose.

"Hey, don't fuck around. It's me."

Squid Berman was slurping coffee from one of
a pair of Styrofoam cups. He handed the other to Chop, who put the
gun down on the nightstand. Squid tore off the bandanna and the
wig, polished off his java, and started pacing the narrow alley
between the single beds.

"So how'd it go?" Parilla asked.

"Went shitty," Squid admitted. "Went weird.
The fucker hardly flinched!"

Chop rubbed the pads of fat beneath his eyes.
"I'm not surprised."

"Whaddya mean, you're not surprised? Bullshit
you're not surprised."

Calmly, Chop said, " Ya don't get the fish
market goin' off half-cocked."

Squid paced faster, pivoted more furiously.
"He acted like it was, I don't know, a mosquito bite. Closes the
car door. Doesn't even slam it. Rubs his chin. Fuckin'
philosophical."

"Smart," said Chop. "Ya don't just get mad.
Ya give it time. Ya get
really
mad. Ya find out who to hurt.
Then ya let it out. That's the smart way to get mad."

"Watches the dog take a leak," said Squid.
"Strolls back to the hotel. Like ho-hum, just another fuckin'
morning ... A gorgeous piece a work like what I did, and the fucker
barely flinches!"

Chop sipped coffee, rearranged the damp sheet
that lay across his butt. "Ya want I should call Nicky, ask
advice?"

"Don't insult me, Chop."

"Hey, it's just that Nicky knows 'im
better."

"Not half as good as I'm gonna know 'im by
the time I'm through. I'm goin' to school on the sonofabitch. I'm
learnin' every minute."

"And what ya learned so far?" Chop
challenged.

"Possessions, which is money, he don't care
about," said Squid. "So what's that leave? His dignity. His person.
I'll find a way in, Chop. I'll make 'im nuts."

"Enough with the pacing, Squid. You're makin'
me a little nuts."

The bandy man kept doing laps. "You'll see.
You'll see. Have I ever let ya down before?"

Al Tuschman surprised himself by not being
more upset. Maybe it was just that food and coffee sufficed to make
a hungry person happy, brought life back to basics.

He'd found a good breakfast place down on
Duval Street. A courtyard a few steps up from the sidewalk.
Outdoors, he could sit with Fifi, and, even better, the place had
the kind of stuff that he was used to. God bless the Greeks. They
had one recipe for home fries, disseminated it around the globe.
Used the same take-out cups in Florida as in Jersey: blue
background with a white acropolis, the seam of the cup always
slicing through a statue's crotch.

Comforted by these familiar things, Al felt
himself becoming more receptive to the newness parading before
him.

Drag queens who hadn't been to sleep yet.
Homeless guys tying up their mildewed bedrolls. Miserable youths
with baggy pants, rings through their noses and tattoos on their
feet. And the inevitable mismatched couples. Slight men with wide
women. Brassy women with mousy men. Here a tall and chesty babe
weighed down with shopping bags, on the arm of a grinning short guy
who might have been her uncle, leading a rottweiler whose fleeting
nearness made Fifi tick her paws against the gravel of the
courtyard. The woman met his eye, held it for some fraction of a
second. He thought he saw a quick twitch at the corner of her
mouth. But she didn't seem to be flirting; more like apologizing
for something.

A funny town, Al decided. He went back to his
eggs and tried not to think about his car. Or, if he had to think
about it, to find a way to rationalize what the towing and the
deductible would cost him. Less than a Florida vacation. So he was
still ahead. Sort of. Then again, he wouldn't be on vacation,
certainly not on this vacation, if he'd had to pay for it.

Was that good or bad, he wondered—that he
wouldn't take vacation unless he won it? Did it mean he was a
workaholic, or just cheap? Was it that he didn't have a lady to
take vacation with? Or was he simply the kind of guy who didn't
like vacations? And why did that seem somehow shameful to
admit?

He finished his omelet, paid his tab, and
rose to leave.

But that was another thing about being on
vacation— now that breakfast was over, he had no idea what his next
activity should be, or what it would accomplish.

For a moment, he stood there indecisive,
slowly wobbling like a bothered compass. Finally an ancient
instinct steered him toward the water and he joined the stream that
brainlessly headed down Duval, vaguely aware that in so doing, he
had become a part of the tourist show, a big, burly, lonely guy,
still in Northern pants, his only friend a fussy and unlikely
little dog.

*

"The beach?" Big Al Marracotta had said
dismissively. "Who needs it? Sand in your crack? Riffraff all
around. No place to get a cocktail. .. Come on. Right here we got
the pool, the swim-up bar. Beautiful."

Katy Sansone had pouted but decided not to
argue. If she was ever going to have her way about anything, she
had to pick her battles. Besides, could she explain to him how she
felt about the difference between the ocean and the pool? Something
vast and alive as opposed to something filtered and contained?
Something full of mystery and romance compared with something
tourists' children peed in? A blue and infinite horizon instead of
a view of the lanai rooms behind the towel kiosk and the row of
lounge chairs? She felt those things but she knew she wouldn't
explain them very well, and Big Al would look at her like she was
crazy.

So she'd sighed, pulled on her thong, settled
it between her buttocks, slipped into a shift, and gone down to the
pool.

Big Al at least was happy there, as
usual.

He had a boxer-style bathing suit with a mesh
cup that left him room to breathe. A Knicks cap kept the sun out of
his eyes. He could look at the water cascading down women's
cleavages as they pulled themselves out of the pool. Katy let him
rest his knuckles against her bare hip, as long as he was careful
not to leave some bizarre handprint of a tan line on her butt.

Sunshine and near-nudity. For Big Al this was
heaven. He lay back on his lounge till he was good and sweaty, then
waded, thigh-deep, into the pool. Tepid water. Beautiful. The sun
had made him thirsty. "Cocktail?"

Katy squinted toward him. She doubted it was
noon and she didn't want a drink. Problem was, it was hard to say
no without a reason, and reasons to say no got only harder to
find.

She joined him in the pool. They waded to the
bar.

Water reached her navel and Big Al
Marracotta's nipples. He ordered pina coladas.

When the drinks were made, he squinted down,
pushed aside the paper umbrella, and sucked his cocktail through a
straw. Then, almost boyishly, he smiled at the sweetness of it, the
cloy of coconut, the slushiness of pineapple. Smiled as though he
had a virgin conscience and not a problem in the world.

*

In fact he had at least one quite serious
problem; he just didn't know it yet.

His problem was that, at that very moment,
Benny Franco, the guy he'd left in charge of the fish market in his
absence, was having his rights read to him as he was bundled into a
government Plymouth and carted off to the Metropolitan Correction
Center.

In New York, Benny's arrest was regarded as a
slight surprise. There'd been rumors, speculation. The feds had
been looking pretty closely at his pre-seafood careers in paving
and trash carting. Had noted certain patterns—a consistent lack of
gusto in the bidding process if Benny was involved; a tendency of
determined competitors to undergo misfortune. These patterns did
not place Benny in a flattering light.

But no one had expected the indictment to
come down quite so soon; and even though Benny Franco would be out
on bail before the sun went down, his arrest was a nuisance. It
didn't do to have a guy who'd just been indicted on racketeering
charges running, even temporarily, such a visible enterprise as the
wholesale fish market. The connection might lead people wrongly to
imagine that their seafood was tainted by the raunchy hands of
organized crime.

This, at least, was the position taken by
Carlo Ganucci, the gaunt and ancient
consigliere
of the
Calabrese family. "Don't look right," he said to Tony Eggs Salento,
the
capo di tutti capi
, as they sat on folding chairs in the
back room of their social club on Prince Street. "Guy's name gets
inna paper. Place of employment: Fulton Fish. People like put two
and two together."

"Fuck is Big Al at?" Tony Eggs demanded. He
was an old-style boss, though he'd risen to the top only recently,
as the flashy, newer-style bosses became celebrities and, one by
one, were put away forever. Tony Eggs knew enough to stay in the
background. He didn't go to nightclubs and wasn't photogenic. He
wore undistinguished suits and plain white shirts and let hair grow
out of his ears and nose. He was so somber and so glum that nobody
was jealous of his power. He was known for being starkly fair and
unforgiving, and he had a work ethic like the guy who beat the drum
in Roman galleys.

"Flahda," said the
consigliere
. The
skin on his face was pale and paper-thin. You could see his skull
move when he talked. "Took vacation."

"Vacation," said Tony Eggs with contempt. To
him there was a dark satisfaction and a grim responsibility in a
mobster's work. Since when did mobsters take vacation?

"Ya want we call 'im home? Might take a day
or two to find 'im."

Tony Eggs pulled on his face. It was a long
and fleshy face and it stretched considerably as he pulled it. "Who
else we got could run the show awhile?"

Ganucci thought it over. Not that there were
many people to choose from; not anymore. But it could be a headache
if they put in the wrong guy, someone who was not respected.

The boss tugged his chin, fretted with the
short black hairs protruding from his nostrils, and answered his
own question. "There's Nicky."

"That's true," Ganucci said. "'Course, ya
fired him before."

"Never said he wasn't good at what he
did."

There was a pause, then the
consigliere
said, "Well, ya don't mind my sayin' so, I never
quite understood why ya took it away from him then."

Tony Eggs leaned far back in his chair,
interwove his fingers, stretched them inside out so that the
knuckles cracked. "He liked it too much.
Capice
?"

Ganucci wasn't sure he did.

"He bragged about it," the boss went on.
"Strutted. Gettin' in his mind like a fuckin' movie star. When I
heard he's goin' ta Gotti's tailor, I said,
basta
, that's
it."

Traffic noise filtered in from the street. In
the front room of the club someone was shuffling cards.

The
consigliere
cleared his throat.
"Tony," he said. "Nicky liked the job too much before. It worry you
at all that maybe he'll remember just how much he liked it?"

The boss pulled on an earlobe.

"Ya know," the ancient counselor went on.
"Like maybe make a problem between him and Al?"

Tony shrugged. In the shrug was the patient,
durable malice that comes with disapproval. "No one put a gun to
Big Al's head," he said, "and tol' 'im that he hadda take
vacation."

Al Tuschman finally got into bathing trunks
and sat out by the pool at Paradise. Sitting there, his dog splayed
out in the shade beneath his lounge, he felt torn between looking
at everything and looking at absolutely nothing.