Virgin Heat(10)
Sal Martucci signed over his destiny to the Witness Protection Program. He ate steaks at the taxpayers' expense, stayed for awhile in nice apartments, had cops picking up his dry cleaning. Then he got his nose cracked like a walnut, the pieces rearranged. He got his scalp sliced open, his hairline reshaped like a refinement on a paper doll. For the loss of his young face he felt only minor regret. But when they told him that his new name would be Robert Clark, he rebelled. He would not accept such a white-bread name, a name like an ad for a credit card. His new name would be Ziggy Maxx—a jaunty moniker that just occurred to him one day.
Look, they told him, the whole idea was camouflage, you didn't want to draw attention.
Tough shit, Ziggy/Sal had said, it was still his life—a point the Feds thought arguable. But in the end he had mostly prevailed, his official name being logged as Sigmund. Sigmund Maxx.
They sent this new-created Sigmund to Ohio, got him a union card and a job in a tire factory. Like everyone else who worked there, he detested it. The stink of sulfur. The hiss of exploding steam. After two years he couldn't stand it anymore—the headaches, the boredom, the annoying paychecks with taxes taken out. He bolted in darkness and made a point of not staying in touch. He was through with the Program and, at least as far as he could figure, the Program was through with him.
But that was a long time ago, a tale from an existence long aborted, and Ziggy, wasting another Key West morning, mocked his own brain for lingering on it.
He stalled in his slow pacing, mopped sweat from his furry stomach. He went to the greasy stove, took a cup of lukewarm coffee into the bathroom. Coffee, a shower, maybe a fast belt of tequila. He had to get himself started, ease into his day now that it was afternoon. In a few hours he had an appointment with Carmen Salazar, the man who linked him to the world of crooks and fibs and ill-gotten cash, and thereby kept him interested in life.
* * *
Having registered under an alias, hit some stores for the rudiments of a tropical wardrobe, and had a nap under the ceiling fan, Angelina stood now on her tree-shaded balcony with its wicker settee and whitewashed gingerbread, and surveyed the postage-stamp paradise that was the courtyard of the Coral Shores resort.
Palms arched up from patches of white gravel, brown-tipped fronds scratched like hordes of crickets at the slightest breeze; hibiscus hedges squeezed out hot pink flowers from tangles of pale green leaves. Wooden lounges were arrayed around a pool shaped like a lima bean, and Angelina discovered that not everyone went around entirely unclothed. It was true that, here and there, a pair of pinkened buttocks saluted the sky, a blur of genitals spilled out from a nest of pubic hair. But most of the men wore tiny pastel bathing suits or kept their towels wrapped around them until they stepped into the pool or slipped into the sudsing and redundant warmth of the hot tub.
Angelina leaned across her balcony railing and sighed. These undressed men neither titillated her nor put her off, and she wondered if this was normal, if maybe something was wrong with her, after all. She had that simmer deep inside, she knew she did—but the warmth did not come out, nor did fresh heat apparently seep in to stoke it. Like an old crystal radio, she was locked on just one channel, thrummed to just one frequency. Or maybe she was being titillated all the time and had just stopped knowing it, maybe desire was always slowly accruing, like airborne toxins or like money in the bank.
She locked her room and went downstairs.
Crossing the courtyard, pretending not to be looking for him, pretending not to be lonely and afraid, she spotted Michael. Draped in a towel, he was catching late yellow sun and looking at promotional brochures. It surprised her that he was sitting alone. She'd imagined that he would move very easily, if not into romantic escapades, at least into some sort of breezy and congenial social life.
"Hello again," she said. "How are you?"
He must have seen something in her face, some comment on his solitude, because his answer sounded a little forced. "Great," he said. "Just relaxing. Settling in. And you?"
"Terrific," she said, though the truth was her stomach was in a knot at the thought of moving her yearning for Sal Martucci out of the realm of pristine fantasy and into smoky taverns and steamy crowded streets where she might conceivably find him in the flesh.
"Off to sightsee?" Michael asked her.
"Happy hour," said Angelina, and could not hold back a cockeyed smile at the perverseness of the phrase. "Gonna check out a couple bars."
Michael's sandy eyebrows moved the slightest bit closer together; he fingered his three stud earrings; he looked at her. Her imperfectly pouffed-up hair was translucent behind the passé headband; her bra strap showed haphazardly under a sleeveless blouse that was not quite red and not quite pink; she was wearing brand-new sandals that would surely hurt her feet after a few hundred yards of sidewalk. She did not look to Michael like a person who started doing bars at five P.M.