Virgin Heat (25 page)

Gloomily, he watched as Michael breathed deep, focussed, and brought a foot against the inside of the other thigh. At some point he surprised himself by saying, "I guess you think I'm a real shithead."

Maybe it was the yoga, the calm it induced, but Michael was not the least bit ruffled by the comment. He said softly, "I don't for the life of me get what she sees in you."

In some unconscious parody of Michael's exercise, Ziggy folded up his thick unlimber legs.

"I mean," said Michael, his green eyes straight ahead, just the slightest waver in the limb that held his weight, "Angelina has a spark. Life. Warmth. She's romantic."

"I useta be romantic," Ziggy said.

His only answer was a skeptical silence, which, now that he'd taken the leap and started talking, he found extremely frustrating.

"I
was
," he went on. "Flowers. Candy. Little presents, the whole nine yards. Then . . . Michael, can I ask you something? Y'ever like girls?"

The gay guy was switching poses, kicking a leg behind him, keeping it parallel to his flattened back. "In high school, sure. That's what people did back then. Boys liked girls, girls liked boys. It was cute."

Michael dropped to his knees, spread his elbows on the floor, and lifted himself into a headstand, feet arched, toes pointed at the ceiling. Upside down, he said, "That's fair."

"Well that's what it's like for me," said Ziggy. "Since they changed my name, my face, since I can't go back to where I'm from. Before . . . look, I'm not saying I was a good person, but I knew who I was, I knew—"

Ziggy really thought that he was being honest, even bravely open. So he was surprised when Michael, still standing on his head, his inverted eyes oblique and haunting like something out of Egypt, cut him off. "Ziggy," he said, "I think that's all a load of bullshit, just a big excuse."

Ziggy spluttered, found no words. Over the course of several seconds, a feeling of affront grudgingly gave way to the secret thrill, the relief, of being caught.

"I mean," continued Michael, his mouth moving disconcertingly above his nose, "what I understand, you used to be a little cheese hoping to become a big cheese. You had to be afraid of stronger guys and you had to be afraid of cops. Tell me what's so different now?"

"What's different—" Ziggy started, but then could only rearrange his cramping legs and gesture in the air.

"You know what's different?" Michael said. "What's different is that now it's just you and Angelina, period. She's not the boss's daughter. She's not the girl from the neighborhood whose family is in your business. There is no neighborhood. There's you and there's her, and the only question that matters is, come what may, do you want to be with her."

"It's not that simple," Ziggy said, squirming in his chair.

"It
is
that simple," said Michael, his face flushed with conviction or from standing on his head so long. "The rest is crap."

"Her father wants to kill me. That's crap?"

Michael dropped his legs, assumed a graceful jacknife. "Fathers always wanna kill the boyfriend. It's, you know, a dick thing, universal. Okay, maybe not as much as this ... Look, run away. Elope. Wait it out, pick your moment, and run."

The idea pressed Ziggy back against his chair. "Run where? Mexico? Cuba? Live under a tree till we fuckin' starve to death?"

"Imagination, Ziggy. You'll figure something out."

Ziggy pursed his altered lips, shook his tight-skinned head. "Wouldn't be fair t'Angelina."

"More crap," said Michael. "More excuses. No one knows what's good for someone else. No one knows what's fair."

Michael pancaked down, then rolled over and sat back against his heels. Blood was draining from his head but his face was still a ruddy pink, sparse freckles showing through the tan. He said, "You're pretty fucking stubborn yourself. You've made up your mind it's hopeless."

Ziggy looked off at a corner of the room, saw wisps of cobweb swaying slowly in the small breeze from the ceiling fan. "No," he said softly. "That's where you're wrong. I don't believe it's hopeless."

Michael sat there and said nothing.

"I act like it's hopeless," Ziggy went on. "Force a habit. Maybe I wish it was hopeless, it'd make things easier."

Ziggy leaned for forward, propped his elbows on his knees. "Look, there's no reason you should help me but I could really use your help."

Michael considered, then glanced over at the only bed and felt the peace of knowing and of being unafraid. "Looks like you have to trust me too."

Ziggy swallowed, said, "I can do that, Michael."

"Then so can I," said Angelina's friend.

*

Angelina lay back in a tepid bath and steered a jagged course among all the things she didn't want to think about.

She didn't want to think about Ziggy, about her battered half-dead love for him, about his brooding simmering manner that put her off and still somehow seduced her.

She didn't want to think about her father, about the taboo suggestion of her rage against him; didn't want to call up recollections of childhood happiness and safety, grotesque now against a backdrop of newspaper headlines, prison records.

She didn't want to think about her own body, half floating, half sunk in the tub, water immersed in other water, her skin wrapping a befuddling amalgam of nerves and secrets, sadnesses and appetites, recklessness and qualms, a mass of tangled circuits sucking juice out of an overloaded brain.

So she stared at the horizon line of water in the tub and tried to think of nothing. It didn't work and she grew annoyed. Other people, she imagined, managed to go blank; the tropics, as advertised, nurtured the process. But the draining temperatures, the restful whoosh of fronds—for her they weren't working.

Sitting there, she was assailed by unremitting images of men's hands and big dark cars and sharkskin suits and more toys than a little girl could ever get around to playing with, bought with pilfered funds. From decades before she remembered "uncles" bringing gifts—coming to the house, she more lately understood, to talk of crime. And Sal Martucci, visiting on business, stealing gutsy moments in the hallway to kiss her ear, stroke her neck. Crime, sex; father, boyfriend; shame, virginity; innocence, freedom. The warring pairs clapped together in her mind, seemed to set the bathtub water roiling like tremors underground.

Angelina, giving up on blankness, embraced the promise of riot instead, felt both hope and terror as she realized that some grand collision was on its way, had been set in motion weeks before; and that if the tumult didn't drive her totally insane, there was the chance, at least, that, in its noise and heat, rage might be resolved and overripe childhood finally finished, that she would walk away a grown-up woman and calm would come at last.

Up north, webby trees just coming into leaf were silhouetted against a red-reflecting sky.

At a warehouse on the Hudson, an hour or so above the city, the guns for Cuba were being loaded onto a truck that usually serviced the Hunts Point produce market. It had a picture of a cauliflower painted on the side, and its trailer smelled of tangerines, bananas; between its soft wooden floorboards was a residue of flattened grapes.

Funzie Gallo, eating a cheese Danish that would see him through till dinner, supervised the operation. "The nine millimeters," he said, "put 'em underneat' the broccoli. T'ree fifty-sevens, mix in wit' the cantaloupes. Uzis, make sure ya keep 'em separate, bury 'em good in escarole. Got it?"

The two guys loading just grunted under the weight of crates of firearms.

"Ya drive the speed limit," Funzie said, "don't fuck around. Hialeah. Ya got the address in Hialeah?"

One of the guys loading, a little testy at Funzie feeding his face while other people might have slipped a disk, said, "We got it, Funzie, we got it."

The other guy loading slapped his crate down on the lip of the truck, said, "Funzie, watch it, huh. I'm a spick. Remember?"

"Jesus, sorry," Funzie said, and for solace he bit deep into his Danish, sweet cheese glued his teeth together. What had happened to the fucking world, he wondered, when you couldn't even recruit Sicilians anymore?

*

Agent Terry Sykes did not know much, but he knew who Tommy Lucca was, and he was awfully pleased with the results of his day's surveillance—so pleased that, when Keith McCullough joined him for a poolside dinner at Flagler House, he wanted to go over every detail of his day.

Sykes looked down at his plate: half-eaten cheeseburger, the bun scalloped with bite marks; fries cooling in a pool of ketchup. He took a deep breath, as though he had a long tale to tell, but then realized he hadn't in fact seen much. Tommy Lucca had marched around the pool, looking purposeful and hell-bent—but then, he always looked like that. He had three palookas with him—but that, as well, was pretty standard. It seemed they'd gone right in—no key, no argument. The geek in woman's clothing came out a couple minutes after. In all, Lucca was in Paul Amaro's room twenty-two minutes, and when he emerged he looked perhaps a half-shade less pissed-off than when he'd gone in. Paul Amaro had not left with him.

"Maybe Lucca killed him," Keith McCullough said.

"If he did," said Terry Sykes, "room service didn't notice. Guy went in a little while after, rolled his table out."

"So they're doing business," McCullough said. "Lucca and Amaro. Fairly interesting."

Sykes's blond hair was slightly lavender in the blue light from the pool. He reached up and scratched his head. "But I thought this Ziggy guy—"

"The connection," said McCullough, absently pushing his plate away, "it's starting to make sense."

Sykes went back to eating, fried onions squeezed out the edges of his burger. "What connection?"

"Why Ziggy's involved," McCullough said. "What I couldn't figure out, is how Ziggy would get hooked into a deal with Paul Amaro. I mean, he's not that stupid. But if it started off as someone else's deal—"

"Someone else's deal?"

"Lucca's deal. See, it's Lucca's. Amaro comes in later, and boom, there's Ziggy, suddenly in the sack with the guy that wants to kill him. That make sense to you?"

Sykes's tongue chased scraps of dangling food. "Not really."

"Not really," McCullough intoned, impressed anew at his partner's obtuseness. "Okay, it doesn't have to. But Terry, try to figure it out by the time you have to testify, 'cause it looks like we're bringing down two big guys and not just one."

*

The Feds were still at dinner when Michael stepped through the picket gate of Coral Shores to carry out, with great misgivings, the first of two errands he'd agreed to run for his roommate Ziggy.

As quickly as possible, he slipped away from the bustle and glare of Duval Street, its carnival vapors of candy and grease, and disappeared into quiet residential precincts where cats slunk through the lattice under porches, and household shadows sent mysterious patterns through the slats of louvered windows. He skirted the cemetery, saw the whitewashed multilevel crypts where unburied bones waited for the trumpet blast that would rehinge them and send them dancing in the sun; crossed White Street, that slacking locals' boulevard, with its hand-scrawled shop signs, its beer bottles poking out the tops of paper bags next to old men playing dominos.

He passed into a neighborhood where the houses were cinder block and the dogs unfriendly, till at length he came to the candy store in whose garden Carmen Salazar held court.

He stood before it a long moment, licked his lips, smoothed his hair, approached with tremulous resolve the cracked stone step. He went inside.

Dim in daylight, by evening the store was rudely bright with a bluish grainy glare. Behind the counter sat the fat man in the undershirt, torpid and expressionless as ever. The greasy fan turned side to side, strings of matted dust fluttered on its grille. As instructed, Michael didn't speak, just moved steadily toward the open doorway at the rear.