"What? Who's gay, Uncle Louie?"
"This love of your life you found. This Michael."
"Michael? Of course he's gay. He's a friend."
"Ah," said Louie, and he blushed beneath his sparse bundles of hair. "Then who—"
Angelina reached across the small table, put her hand on top of his. "You can't ask me that, Uncle Louie. I'm sorry, but you can't."
"Why not?"
"And you can't ask why not. Sometime maybe I'll tell you."
They fell silent, sipped their coffee. Farther back in the alley, lizards made furtive scraping sounds as they nosed for bugs in gravel; from high up, tree frogs smugly croaked, nestled under the skirts of palms.
After a moment Angelina smiled, said, "Pretty smart, Uncle Louie, you figuring out I was here."
Louie smiled back, knowing that his favorite niece was being kind, was giving him a gift. But in that moment he was not so sure he'd done right by her. He'd set out in search of a lost child, and found instead a woman with her own desires. He felt like he was meddling, like he was in the way.
Angelina reached for him again, took his wrist this time, pressed it as she fixed him with her violet eyes. "But please don't tell my father, Uncle Louie. Please don't make it so I have to leave."
Louie sighed, blinked, weighed his giddy reborn fantasy of being a big shot, a hero, against Angelina's right to choose herself a life.
"Sometime I'll go back," she said. "But not now, Uncle Louie. I'm not ready to go back."
He slipped out of her grip, pushed back onto his chair's hind legs, and looked up from the confines of the alley, past the strings of Christmas lights, to a narrow swath of sky where tropic stars were nested one by one in cottony and lucent puffs of humid air. He said, "You know what, Angelina? I'm not ready to go back either."
16
The next morning, Ziggy was summoned to the garden of Carmen Salazar.
With not enough sleep behind his eyes and not enough caffeine in his bloodstream, he drove the still streets to the candy store. When he walked through to the bright doorway at the back, he found Salazar in conversation with two men, who fell instantly silent at the arrival of a stranger. Salazar nodded that it was okay to talk, and one of them resumed mid- sentence.
He said "... a chance to profit from a patriotic duty." This man was tall, with the rumpled and phlegmatic good looks of a warped aristocrat. He had a prosperous and graying moustache, the wise liquid eyes of a hound, and a Panama hat he held in his lap, slowly and ceaselessly rolling and unrolling its brim.
But his argument wasn't playing well with Salazar. "That Cuban stuff does nothing for me," he said. "My people left Havana in the 1870s. Me, I have as much feeling for Cuba as I have for Lithuania."
Ziggy recognized the other man—short and stocky, his nose so badly broken that you saw his profile when he was looking you right in the eye. He had crisp unlocal creases down his pants legs, and he couldn't sit still, was always plucking at lint or at imagined wrinkles. He said, "Right, this is exactly what I'm saying. Don't complicate it wit' politics, don't get all righteous and stupid. Treat it like a simple business. Weapons in; money out. Business. Simple."
"Business, fine," said Salazar. "Simple, not really."
Ziggy stood there. The sun was at a difficult angle, he couldn't find a piece of shade to hide in. His head felt cottony and, after the initial glance, no one had so much as looked at him.
"Forget that politics bullshit," the short man went on, his voice staccato, his fingers busy. "Politics. Overthrow. No one's talkin' overthrow. What I'm talkin', I'm talkin' like wit' Russia. When the time comes, it overthrows itself. It just happens. Then it's fuckin' chaos. The people wit' strength, they profit. Free enterprise, bang bang. So what I'm sayin', I'm sayin' see it as an opportunity to get in good wit' the people who are gonna be profiting."
But the tall man was not content to leave it at that, he badly wanted to dress the scam in some nobility. He added, "And a chance to participate in a great—"
"Will you cut that bullshit out?" the short man interrupted.
There was a silence filled with the smell of ripening fruit. Then Salazar sucked his gums and said, "I just don't know, gentlemen. I'm flattered by your trust, of course. But the scale of what you're proposing . . . Look, what I'm running here, it's a cozy, low-risk, small-time operation. Isn't that right, Ziggy?"
Ziggy said, "Hm?"
He'd given up expecting to be addressed. Logy in the sunshine, his mind had wandered; he'd been thinking about the skin on Angelina's neck. He didn't want to think about it, but his mind kept going back to it like a dog to a buried bone. The skin on her neck was smooth and dry, so soft it felt powdery, but he could remember that, after he touched it, it turned a little pebbly and gradually grew as moist as steak.