She sat; she shifted her position by small increments; around five o'clock, she surprised herself by developing a vivid craving for some alcohol.
She wanted a cocktail, and a cocktail meant going out, but she lacked the ambition to get dressed, and it was much too hot to put on makeup. At length, she shuffled into sandals, wrapped a sarong around herself and tucked it into the bosom of her bathing suit. She headed for the gate with her hair askew, her skin salty, she didn't care who saw her. She was beginning to go native, and the purest part of the process was that she didn't realize it was happening.
Her loose shoes scratched along the pavement. She found a quiet bar, took a tiny table by a shaded window, and ordered up a margarita. Sipping it, her tongue smarting from the liquor and the lime, she gave in to the pleasure of being slightly scandalized by her own behavior. Drinking alone, just for the hell of it. Drinking alone as hazy intimations of lust curled through her mind like wisps of fog. Thinking about Sal Martucci's hands and her own salty body wrapped like a present in its bright-colored cotton.
Her drink was gone. She ordered another. So this was decadence, she thought—hot days, dim rooms, notions of love growing less inchoate and more fleshly as ancient barriers melted in the sun or were vanquished by tequila, as the blank black curtains that had sequestered Angelina from passion proved only to be made of gauze.
She crossed her knees, finished her drink. From the outside she looked demure, maybe just a little sultry; on the inside she was vacillating between carnality and the giggles. She was ready for a good long nap, and the nap itself seemed an emblem of her newfound sense of the luscious. Marvelously illicit, to go to sleep in daylight and wake in all-accepting darkness, refreshed by the night and ready to go out prowling for her lover.
* * *
It was almost six o'clock, there hadn't been a customer in hours, and Eddie, for the millionth time, was sounding out the flaking backward letters on the window: serutxif yratinas orama. At first he hardly noticed when the big dark car pulled up in front of the fire hydrant outside the store.
He became more interested when a thick man in a raincoat got out of the driver's seat, and held open a door for a tall man with wavy silver hair who now emerged from the back. They looked like gangsters, and Eddie watched them like he was watching television, curious, aloof, like nothing that was happening had anything to do with him.
Unease began when it became clear that the two of them were heading for his door; it ripened quickly to a paralyzing fear when the thick man reached up and grabbed the metal shutter that hid the premises from the eyes of the street. With a clatter as loud as a train and a clank as sharp as the ring of a driven spike, the steel curtain rolled down and hit the sidewalk, and Eddie realized he was doomed. Now he knew exactly what was happening: He'd been tempted, tested, and he'd failed. The consequences of his theft were coming due before he'd spent a nickel of the money he'd taken from the register.
The thick man came in first, his right wrist buried in his raincoat pocket. He said, "Okay, Jackson, put your fuckin' hands where I can see 'em."
Eddie was standing behind the counter. He raised his hands. They were shaking, his baggy shirt cuffs moved against his skinny forearms. The man with the silver hair came in. He locked the door behind him and pulled down the shade. All closed up, the store felt very small, the fluorescent lights seemed dim yet harsh.
Eddie said, "He tol' me I could take that money. I swear to God he did."
"Fuck you talkin' about?" said Paul Amaro.
"I put an IOU," said Eddie. "Exact amount, I swear."
"Where's my brother, kid?"
Eddie hadn't noticed when he started crying, but he was sniffling now, he tasted snot at the back of his throat.
"He called you. Where'd he call you from?"
Eddie was still holding up his hands, his arms were starting to get heavy. He was trying hard to understand what was wanted of him. Finally he said, "You're Mist' Amaro's brother?"
"Very good, Einstein," said the man whose hand was in his pocket.
"He called you," Paul Amaro said again. "He told you my daughter was with him. Did he say where he was calling from?"
"He didn't. I swear. I even asked him."
"What did he answer?"
"He said he couldn't tell me where he was. He said it wasn't up to him when he came home."
"What else did he say?"
"Nothing. I swear."
"What else did you hear?"
"Huh?"
"In the background, Eddie. Voices? People? Was he whispering?"
Eddie thought back. "Cars. I heard cars."
"Everywhere's cars," Amaro said. "What else?"