Paulie paced. He didn't have much room, it was mostly just shifting weight from one foot to the other, turning his head from side to side. Noise of trucks and honking taxis came in from the street, people walked past the iron shutters talking loudly, heedless of these obsolete men with their quaint rituals and violent sorrows. Paul suddenly slapped the counter, slapped it hard enough so that tiny spoons did somersaults and attention was riveted as at the crack of a gun.
"Goddammit!" he said through a hard throat behind clamped teeth. "God fucking dammit!"
He leaned forward now, a thick hand raised as though to slap and pummel. Veins stood out in his forehead. His shoulders bunched up like the shoulders of a bear, his squat neck billowed with forced hot blood. "If any of you fuckers have been fucking up out there, if any of you have been using my name, turning people against me, I swear to Christ I'll have your fucking—"
A soft voice interrupted him. "Paul," it said. "Be fair."
It was Benno Galuppi talking. He was the only one who would have dared break in on Paulie's rant, the only one who could talk so softly and be sure that he'd be heard.
"You don't make accusations," the underboss continued. "You don't make threats like that."
Paulie Amaro was breathing hard, his arms and legs were pumped and nervous, like the limbs of a man pulled away from a fight that's just begun. He stared at Galuppi from underneath a blur of tangled, knitted brows. He didn't speak.
"We sympathize, Paul," Galuppi said. "We all do. We know how you must feel."
Bullshit, Paulie thought. Not a man alive knew how he felt, to contemplate with horror and self-hate the possibility that his own hoarded sins had crashed down and destroyed his child.
"But Paul," the underboss went on, "her disappearing, there's no reason to assume—"
"Then where is she?" her father almost whispered, his rage suddenly melted to undisguised desperation, grief.
People breathed shallow, tried not to move their feet against the scratched linoleum. To Paulie's men, to his brothers, it was as fearsome seeing him brought low as seeing him enraged.
Benno Galuppi softly cleared his throat. In the instant before he spoke again, he flicked his eyes behind the amber glasses toward Joe and Al and Funzie, and this, maybe, was a mistake, or maybe not; but either way it sent Paulie a message, told him they had talked, conspired, come up with something they thought needed saying, that only the underboss could say.
"Paul," he began, "there's something—I just want to ask if you've even thought about ... Sal Martucci."
The capo tightened at the name. Galuppi went on, pitiless as a surgeon.
"I know you'd like to find him. I also know—we all do, it wasn't any secret—that your daughter Angelina was very taken with him. Infatuated. So what I'm asking—has it occurred to you, Paul, have you considered, that just maybe, if you find either one of them, you'll find them both?"
Paul Amaro didn't answer, couldn't answer; his mouth hung slack at the outlandish suggestion, he was acutely aware of the weight of his jaw. His daughter run off with his betrayer? Unthinkable. Beyond insulting. If anyone but Galuppi had mentioned it, Paul would have gone for him, seized his lapels, spit in his face. As it was, he stood there dumbfounded, humiliated, stripped bare and foolish in his beautiful expensive clothes, eating the shame of the idea like it was rancid food forced down his gullet.
Outside, trucks went past, rattling the metal shutters. A chair leg squeaked on the linoleum. When Paul could finally lift his head, he saw that his brothers Joe and A1 didn't really want to meet his eyes and Benno Galuppi's amber glasses had turned an opaque brown.
11
A day and a half later, achy and discombobulated, Uncle Louie dropped his car keys in an ashtray, kicked off his northern shoes, fell back on his motel bed, and soupily gazed up at the ceiling fan.
The fan was turning very slowly, the canted blades seemed to be swimming through the air. The ceiling, like the walls, was a coral color, sickened by time and damp toward orange. The carpet was a shaggy beige, thinned and darkened by the tourists' treading between the door and the bathroom, the bathroom and the bed; and it held a smell—of sandy feet, and contented mold, and a tang like that of sun-dried seashells—that, more than anything, reminded Louie he was back in Key West.
Back in Key West! The bare illicit fact, now that he was fifteen hundred miles too far along to ignore it, made him giddy. He was quite pleased with himself, no doubt about it. He was also terrified, beset by the secret dread of the meek, who fear that even the smallest detour from routine could be the end of order forever, that even the mildest act of daring could call down monstrous consequences. Louie, in his mind, was risking all.