Virgin Heat (9 page)

On the bustling sidewalk, with flashing neon throwing unflattering washes of orange, then blue, across her face, Angelina bit her lip and said, "I don't know how much more I can take of this."

Michael cinched his brows together, grabbed her gently by the wrists, tried with his gaze to lift her downcast eyes. "Look," he said, "do you want to find your prince, your stallion, your perfect love, or not?"

"The truth?" said Angelina. "Right at the moment I don't even know."

Michael frowned. He understood discouragement, recognized the dispiriting cycle of wanting too much and trying too hard, then plummeting down to a numbness where you ceased utterly to understand why you were bothering. Discouragement might yield briefly to serenity, which would be defeated in turn by loneliness and boredom, which would open the heavy creaking door to lust, which might cloak itself in the splendid garb of romance; romance would implode, and then the whole damn draining and befuddling thing would start again.

As fazed as Angelina by the relentless and exhausting weight of passion, he said, "Listen, hon, why don't we get off this vulgar street, forget about love, and just find someplace quiet and maybe a little seamy for a nightcap?"

*

Keith McCullough stepped out of his motel shower, patted dry, and thought about which of his crude moronic T-shirts he would wear that evening. He decided on the one that said free moustache rides.

For as long as he'd been working underground, he'd felt the simplest disguises were the best. His favorites weren't disguises at all, really—more like diversionary ploys. That was the beauty of these shirts—they made people dismiss him as a pathetic buffoon, embarrassed people to the point where they wouldn't meet his eyes, so that the smallest alterations—a pair of glasses, some fake sideburns— would make them fail to realize they'd seen his face before.

It helped, too, that his stature was average, his features unremarkable except in their flexibility, with hazel eyes that might appear amiably lax or killingly intent, a chin that could tuck down blandly or jut forth in recklessness. The pliant face was an asset, but more important was pliancy of personality. Disguises only worked if there was some oblique but resonant truth in them, a harmony between the mask and the person being masked. Working underground required, therefore, an unsqueamish knowledge of oneself, of one's alternate selves; and this knowledge was not the least scary thing about pretending not to be a cop while doing the things cops did.

In any case, Keith McCullough felt confident that his incognito was holding up, but he couldn't claim that his sporadic and routine surveillance of one Sigmund Maxx, a.k.a. Ziggy Maxx, a.k.a. Sal Martucci, had as yet turned up anything of interest. The guy had a job. He drove a crummy car and lived in a crummy bungalow whose upkeep seemed to be within the means provided by the job. If Ziggy kept criminal company, McCullough had not so far discovered it.

But the agent enjoyed these occasional postings to Key West, and had his reasons for hoping to prolong them by unearthing evidence of Ziggy backsliding. Backsliding, as everyone in the Program knew, was common as most other sins. People got bored with legitimate life, and who could blame them? They got lonely for old habits, old pals—even old pals who now wanted to kill them. Criminals rarely turned once and for all. They oscillated. And oscillating was something Keith McCullough understood.

Dressed now, he lay down on his bed and called his wife up in Fort Lauderdale. He asked if Keith Jr.'s cold was better, if Jeannie had done well in her soccer game. Then he rose and went to the mirror, where he applied a phony moustache and streaked his temples with gray, and thought with guilty anticipation about the night that would come after the evening's work, when he would slip into a disguise of a different sort and, on his own time, hit a couple bars.

*

"Gimme a slice," said Uncle Louie. He thought a moment, then said, "Extra cheese."

He watched the guy drizzle on the curls of mozzarella.

"While you're at it, pepperoni. Maybe a few mushrooms. Fried onions, ya got 'em. And a Coke. No. Dr. Pepper. Large."

He leaned against a wall as his wedge of pizza was slid into the oven, and he found contentment in the unlikely coolness of the tiles against his moistened clothes.

Back on the street, he soothed his burned mouth with Key Lime sherbet eaten off a wooden spoon with the astringent feel of a doctor's tongue depressor. A little while after, he happened upon a sidewalk stand that offered mango smoothies, and he had one because he could not resist anything with mango. Up and down the street he walked, twirling postcard racks, looking in store windows displaying leather bathing suits and harnesses, discreetly glancing at people with paisley tattoos, ripped denim vests festooned with bits of chain, silver staples through their noses and their eyebrows.

At length his legs got tired, but his mind still had some verve, he wasn't ready to surrender the easy fascination of the streets. So he tapped into his small store of extravagance, and hailed a pedicab, a sort of bicycle rickshaw powered in this case by the muscles of a beautiful young woman with skintight purple shorts, blue hair in a soup-bowl shape, and a rivet through her cheek.

She asked where to, and he told her there's this bar, he couldn't remember the name of it, it was outside sort of, off the main drag, by where the boats were, with like a frame for a roof, flowers hanging down.

The driver smiled pleasantly, didn't mock him, said she thought she knew the place he meant.

Louie settled into the broad and curving rickshaw seat, watched the dimples migrate in the driver's buttocks as her legs pumped up and down, and rolled slowly through the town he already thought of as his own, feeling nothing short of royal.

*

The first thing Angelina noticed was the vines.

They didn't really hang from their trellises; it was more like they were plucking downward, abrupt and greedy like monkey fingers, snatching whatever they could. The vines seized tree limbs, annexed the dark wood columns of the back bar, created by their grasping beauty a sinister impression that time was on their side, that vines and jungle riot would someday soon own all.

She recognized the vines—or thought she did, as she had thought about other things in other bars before. She reached for Michael's arm, twitched as though to hold him back. He felt her hesitation, that discouraged tug away from life and toward the unsatisfied ease of one's quiet room and empty bed. He urged her on, through the dim courtyard open to the sky, nearer to the gleaming horseshoe of well-rubbed wood, the smoky mirror, the celebrated bottles.

They found two stools on the near side of the bar.

At first the place seemed unattended. Then Angelina saw the bartender—saw the back of his dampened shirt as he crouched before an under-counter fridge, taking out lemons and limes. Slowly he stood, still facing away, and cocked his head just slightly as he took an order from a guy whose shirt said
free moustache rides
.

A hollow burn was set aglow in Angelina's stomach as the barkeep reached back for a bottle, his nubbly index finger arched away from all the others. Her throat clamped down as she noted the small flourish of the heavy wrist that now stretched upward for a glass. And when he poured, pinkies lifted, his arms defining a languorous loop that closed in like a slow embrace, she reached out silently, spasmodically, for Michael and her red nails dug deep into his skin.

There was no mistaking what was powering that grip. Michael felt the glory of the moment in his own empathic loins.

In the next instant, Angelina was twisting off her bar stool, her vision blurry, her thrumming body poised to flee.

Michael held her by the arm. You couldn't rush destiny, he felt, but you couldn't dodge it either. "Steady, kiddo. Steady."

She worked hard for a breath. Her nostrils flared, her forehead flushed, she felt the wet weight of her heart squeezed like a sponge by the hoops of her ribs. She was halfway off her bar stool, one foot was on the floor, the strap of her purse was dangling. Above her, vines plucked downward, seizing, grabbing; somewhere an unfelt breeze was rattling dry fronds. Angelina whispered: "Sal."

That wasn't his name. He'd been trained, he'd trained himself, never to respond to it. It was not his name; it had never been his name, except perhaps in some life so remote and dead that its names had been erased, forgotten. Still, reflex lived even after life was over, and Ziggy could not stop his head from moving toward the sound. It turned a few degrees; he tried to stop it, but then it was the voice and not the word that spun him till his eyes met Angelina's.

Angelina turned her head and saw her Uncle Louie, standing at her elbow. He had pizza on his breath and was looking very happy; a smile made the flesh bunch up beneath his sunburned cheekbones.

14

Ziggy had a policy. He didn't drink at his own bar, not while he was working.

But as soon as Angelina and her escorts had sipped one highly awkward cocktail and headed for the door, that rule went straight to hell. It was a deviation that Keith McCullough didn't fail to notice, watching discreetly as the bartender took a highball glass, filled it half-f with tequila, and fired it down.

With the rasp of sour cactus scratching at his throat, Ziggy leaned against the back bar, steadied his hands against the damp teak, and tried to think. Angelina in Key West. What a fucked-up idea. What a wild mismatch. What the hell was she doing here, and how in Christ had she recognized him when he could barely recognize himself? Thank God she'd had the smarts and the reflexes not to blow his cover when that funny-looking guy showed up. Uncle Louie. He'd distinctly heard her call him Uncle Louie. It was a name he remembered hearing long ago, back when his own name had been Sal. Louie— the black sheep of the family, the guy no one took serious.

But he was still Paul Amaro's brother; Angelina was still Paul Amaro's daughter; and Ziggy saw no percentage in getting reacquainted with the family.

He gazed absently around his now mostly empty bar, gave muddled but exigent consideration to the question of whether he should spring nimbly off the balls of his ass and get the hell out of there. Charter a plane to the Bahamas. Smuggle himself into Cuba. Go to Mexico, Panama, Belize—someplace he could again molt his soiled identity, peel off the numb dead skin of another weak attempt at a life.

Should he flee? Absently, he drew beers for a couple guys who really didn't need them, and tried to measure the depth of the dung he was standing in. Paulie didn't know his whereabouts, he reasoned: If he did, he would have sent the guys in trench coats, not his daughter. But why, then, was Angelina here? Was it possible that it was just an appalling coincidence? A lot of people, after all, came to Key West for vacation; a lot of them wandered into his bar. And how did Uncle Louie figure in? Now that Ziggy thought about it, the guy looked a little bit familiar. Had he been in here before?

The barkeep reached toward the tequila bottle, but then, midway through the motion, a whole different line of thought stopped his arm and tweaked a memory at the base of his belly. He finally let it register that Angelina looked very, very good to him.

She'd hardly changed. Her skin was not quite as taut as it had been ten years ago, not quite as burstingly translucent. She was a little fuller in the shoulders and the bosom. But in all—not just compared to Ziggy with his lopped-off being, but by any standard—she was remarkably, triumphantly the same. Unmarked; seemingly outside of time; constant as a compass needle though a whole world pivoted beneath her. The violet eyes remained clear and frank. The black hair was as lush and imperfect as it had ever been. Ziggy recalled the smell of her perfume, a little sweet and girlish. He remembered the pulse in her neck, the slight scratchiness of the lacy scalloped edge of her bra . . .

His hand shot out for the tequila bottle, and he quashed his incipient lust as decisively as though he'd slammed a window on his private parts. Was he crazy? Was he out of his mind? This was Paulie's daughter, for Chrissake, and he, Ziggy, was no longer family friend and protege, but mortal enemy, pariah. He may as well fuck death as lay a finger on her.

He should bolt; in his heart he knew it. But leaning against the bar, his shirt wet against his back, his revamped hairline beaded with oily sweat, he strongly suspected that he wouldn't. Maybe it was just the weather, the soggy sapping air that smothered decisions and nurtured indifference like a mold. Maybe it was the gnaw of something unfinished, an infecting tension passed down from one existence to the next. Or maybe it was something more perilous still. Maybe what kept him from fleeing Angelina was something that could almost stand for love, a mute desire for nearness that was as close as Ziggy or Sal had ever come to caring for a woman.

For Angelina the evening had been at least as flabbergasting as it was for her old flame.

When her Uncle Louie had appeared at her side at the bar where she'd found Sal, the abrupt combining of the forbidden with the incongruous had dizzied her, had hit her like a mix of pills and booze. Her eyes had gone unfocussed, the sinews of her knees had briefly caved, but somehow she had bluffed her way through a charade of social niceties. She'd kissed her uncle on the cheek. She'd introduced Michael, realizing in an instant that he—a young man, a date—served naturally as camouflage. The three of them performed a little skit of small talk as Ziggy stood apart, skulking in the shadows of the vines and wondering if he would be unmasked; as Angelina, stealing glances at the barkeep's hands, begged her reeling mind to keep alert; as Uncle Louie thrummed with his chance to be a hero to the family; as Michael fairly swooned with the desperate romance of it all.