It was not till dinnertime the next evening that he heard a word about it.
His wife Rose was frying pork chops. She was a lousy cook, all she did was salt the pan, put the flame on high, slap the chops in straight from the supermarket plastic so that they sizzled dryly like souls in hell. Fibers of meat always stuck to the pan, when she flipped the chops there were tears in them, pale places like still-knitting scars. Cooking, she smoked a cigarette and sipped a Manhattan with a cherry in the bottom of the glass.
"Your niece Angelina," she said, as she stabbed the pork and tiny fat globules dotted the stove, "she flew the coop."
"What?" said Louie. He was looking out the window. They lived in a big tall building in the Bronx, near the Westchester line but still the wrong side of it, and what he saw out the window were other big tall buildings in the Bronx.
Rose said, "She didn't come home last night, didn't call. Maria's panicked."
Louie scratched his head. His head was still peeling from vacation, shreds of weightless skin rolled up beneath his fingernails. Angelina was his favorite, he wanted all good things for her. "Maybe she eloped," he said.
His wife sucked her cigarette, gave a short malicious laugh that ended in a cough. "Eloped with who? Who's she gonna 'lope with?" She sipped her cocktail, poked absently at the hissing meat. "Maybe she got picked up in a bar. That'd be a start at least."
Louie kept looking out the window. There wasn't much to see, but the familiar geometry was soothing, there was a kind of peace in the shifting patterns of lights turned off and lights turned on, shades pulled up and shades pulled down. "Paulie's worried?"
"How should I know, Paulie's worried? I talked to Maria. Maria's worried. Y'ask me, I don't see what the big worry is. Y'ask me, Angelina, for once that oddball kid is acting normal for her age."
"Maybe she's in trouble," Louie said.
Rose didn't answer. She put her cigarette in the corner of her mouth and stabbed the pork chops, flicked them off on plates.
Louie thought a minute, watched the frying pan, still sizzling and steaming.
* * *
"How many bars in this town?" Michael said. "How many would you guess?"
"I don't know," said Angelina. "Hundreds."
"At least they're close together," Michael said, as they ducked into another one, their fourth or fifth that evening.
It was in a courtyard off Duval Street. A mostly outdoor place, Caribbean. Cockeyed tables, their legs sunk in white and dusty stones, leaned against the trunks of scabby palms. Speckled crotons sprouted up from shallow soil and scratched at the backs of chairs. The bar itself was basically a shed—a seamed and ripply metal roof to siphon off the downpours of the tropics, a set of flaccid shutters for locking up the booze during the brief nondrinking hours between four and eight a.m. Vines clung to the overhang; a smudged mirror stood behind the ranks of bottles.
The place felt familiar, and Angelina wracked her brain to remember the details of Uncle Louie's video. But remembering was difficult. The bar where Sal Martucci worked—before the camera had zoomed in on the longed-for hands, how long had it been on the screen? Three seconds? Four? And, until she'd seen the hands, she'd had no reason to pay particular attention. She thought she remembered vines. She recalled a mirror, a warmly polished slab of wood in a place that was not quite indoors, not quite out.
But in Key West there were lots of places that looked like that, and with a tiny heartbreak Angelina saw that the hands that made their gimlets were long and regular and slender, not the hands she dreamed about. Discouraged and mirthlessly looped, she led her escort to a table under a palm whose deadly coconuts had been snipped away like the testes of some gigantic wild beast.
"Cheers," she said morosely, as they clinked their streaming glasses. Then she added, "This whole thing is crazy, isn't it?"
Michael beamed. "Absolutely."
"I mean," said Angelina, "who knows what he looks like anymore? Who knows what his name is?"
"That's what makes it so romantic," Michael said. "You've got to find him with your heart, there's no one that can help."
"You're helping," Angelina said.
Michael modestly blinked, toyed with his stud earrings.
They sipped their drinks, looked up at the sky. Lumpy clouds were massing, their pillowy bottoms reflected the red of city lights, their tall tops fell away in darkening shades of purple and charcoal and inkiest black.
"And it's really not fair," Angelina went on, "my taking up your time like this. You came here looking for excitement, passion."
"And I found it," Michael said.