Virgin Heat(13)

Paulie thought, choked back the clammy taste that was the beginning of fear, said evenly, "She's a grown woman, Maria."

The comment, the unearned certainty with which it was said, made Maria angry. Her hands went to her hips. The kitchen light behind her made her outline look ferocious. "Who knows that better than me? Who was here with her, seeing it happen? I know her, Paul. She's considerate, she calls."

He sighed without a sound, walked right past his wife, moved through the dimness toward the dining- room sideboard with its stash of liquor. Maria followed, harrying him like a sparrow chasing off a crow.

"Animals!" she said. "People are animals. The people you deal with, Paul. Your friends. Your enemies. They'll do anything. You think your family's safe? You think your daughter's safe?"

With the bourbon bottle in his hand, he said, "No one would dare to touch my daughter." He said it faster than he wanted to, without a pause for thought. But some things, you could no more hold back an answer than stop a nerve from twitching at a shock. "She's out," he said, more softly. "She's at the movies, she's having dinner. She'll be home right away."

"Animals," Angelina's mother said again, and Paulie understood that the insult was meant to hit him first, before it went spattering outward to soil others.

He drank deep of the whisky, shut out his wife's voice but heard instead the voice of Funzie Gallo. The world had changed. The rules had changed, and people broke them now without shame or fear. Was it conceivable that someone had done something to Angelina? Why? Who were his enemies now? What would they want of him? He swallowed bourbon, thought as best he could, and in his silent, bitter way, he prayed.

* * *

When Angelina had told him the story, had revealed, in her tipsy loneliness, far more than she'd intended to, Michael said, "Jesus. And I thought I stuck it to my father."

"Whaddya mean?" she asked.

They were sitting at a beachside restaurant on flimsy plastic chairs. Lingering nighttime heat pulled salt vapor out of the surfless ocean, smells of garlic and parsley wafted up from plates of seafood. Michael sipped beer, studied her a moment for some sign of the coy or the facetious. Finding none, he said, "What do I mean? I mean, all I did, ten, twelve years ago, was come out at Thanksgiving dinner. My old man, military, Air Force, he about choked on chestnut stuffing. But loving the guy that sent your father to the slammer—"

Angelina interrupted with a slight impatience, as though what she was explaining should be obvious. "Yeah," she said, "but that was after."

"After what?" said Michael.

Angelina put down her fork, drank some water. Food was settling her tummy; talk was easing her mind; she felt the fragile well-being of a second wind. "After I was already in love with him," she explained.

Michael thought the comment over, watched a moonlit pelican do a brain-first dive into the shallows. Then he folded his hands, put his elbows on the table, and leaned close to his companion. "And once you were in love with him, it didn't matter what he did?"

To Angelina the question seemed rhetorical, she didn't see the point of answering. Michael thrilled at the realization that he'd met someone even more desperately romantic than himself.

"It didn't matter that he betrayed your father?" he pressed.

Angelina said nothing, her expression didn't change.

"It didn't matter that he abandoned you?"

"What else could he do?" she said. "It was that, or die."

"Die for love," Michael murmured.

"If he loves me," Angelina said.

"You don't know that he loves you?"

"He did before. At least I think he did. The only thing I know for sure is I love him."

"God almighty!" Michael said. "And what'll happen when you meet?"

Angelina shrugged. "Maybe fireworks. Maybe nothing. Nothing at all. That's what I have to find out.

Michael put his beer down, reached out with a cool damp hand and clutched his new friend's wrist. "Of course you have to, dear," he said. "Of course you do."





8


Typically, Uncle Louie was the last to hear of Angelina's disappearance.

Her mother and father, after a night bereft of both sleep and conversation, had set about contacting the people they looked to for help and solace, and Louie was on neither of their lists. Paul spoke to his other brothers, Joe and Al, grilled them as to whether they'd been party to anything that might end in a vendetta. He spoke with Funzie Gallo, he spoke with whatever members of his ragtag brugad he could roust from their slovenly beds. As for Maria, she called Angelina's girlfriends, she called her own relations; when there was no one else to call, she called her sisters-in-law. No one thought to call Louie, stuck in his plumbing supply store in East Harlem, armed with a claw-pole to grab toilet floats from upper shelves, as cut off from importance as a jellyfish cast out above the tide line.