So he stared, unseeing, out the window, his sinews stretched between the poles of grief and fakery, and at last the limo reached Key West.
The highway narrowed, lost its forward thrust as it left behind the strip malls and the billboards. One traffic light sufficed to change it into a shady avenue where people sat on porches, where matching pairs of palms stood sentinel in front of doorways.
Tommy Lucca's driver veered off toward the dusty neighborhood where Carmen Salazar had his headquarters, parked on a street of dented cars, among them a battered hulking Oldsmobile.
Paulie emerged from the air-conditioned stretch into the blistering heat of noon. Through eyes constricted by a moment's dizziness, he squinted at the candy store, with its cracked stoop and streaked and filthy windows, loose mortar crumbling in its cheap facade of bricks.
"Place is a dump," he said to Tommy Lucca.
He said it to gain the upper hand but it backfired. Lucca didn't rattle, just flashed a sour smile, and what the smile said was that the Gatto Bianco Social Club was not exactly Caesar's Palace either, and you couldn't judge an operation by its headquarters, or then again, maybe you could.
They climbed the cracked stoop. Lucca and Mendez stood aside, gesturing graciously for their guest to enter first. But by old and reasonable habit, Paul Amaro declined to lead the parade through an unknown doorway. He waited until the others were inside, then stepped into the dimness, smelled ancient chocolate and the armpits of the man who sat before the fan, and was confirmed in his determination to be unimpressed.
25
For a while Angelina truly believed she wasn't going to Ziggy's place; then she caught herself wondering if she should bring her suitcase or leave it at the guest house.
Bringing it, she reasoned, would be awkward and could be regarded as presuming; on the other hand, it would be a nuisance to come back for it before going to the airport—especially since, if she went to Ziggy's at all, it would only be to say hello and goodbye, nothing more.
But wait a second, she reminded herself. She wasn't going to Ziggy's, it was out of the question, so why was she bothering to think about the suitcase?
She was in her room. She'd had her second shower of the day, dressed a second time; her skin was already flushed again as she paced between the dresser and the bed. She realized there were lots of other things she could do between now and five p.m. There was the beach. There was sight-seeing. But her eyes kept flicking back to the torn-off piece of paper that held Ziggy's address. The paper sat in an ashtray on the night table. It was barely big enough to wrap a chewed-up piece of gum, yet the whole room seemed to pivot around it, it became the center of gravity, as if it were made of some impossibly dense stuff, a different kind of matter.
She approached the paper, or rather she was pulled in toward it. She nudged it gently with a fingernail, as if she feared it might explode. Then she picked it up, although it seemed to her that it jumped into her hand. She squeezed it hard, and ran downstairs to find a taxi.
* * *
In the moment before Paul Amaro lumbered through the doorway that gave onto the garden, Ziggy Maxx was nibbling a loose thread off the short sleeve of his faded shirt. His arm was raked across his face, his mouth was buried in his shoulder. He barely listened as Carmen Salazar tried to explain to him and a man named Johnny Castro—a half-black Bahamian with smeared freckles and strange green eyes—how important this meeting was, what an opportunity it represented. Ziggy hated pep talks, always had. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and kept chewing at the thread.
He was still working it when, in a macabre reshuffling of space and time, his past in New York loomed up before him in a Key West doorway.
It seemed to Ziggy as baffling as a tumble into an alternate universe, but there, moving toward him at a stately pace, broad-shouldered and silver-haired, his expression grim and dogged, was the man he'd sent to prison, the man who'd sworn to kill him. Ziggy's breathing stalled, his arm dropped to his side, left his new face naked in the garden's dappled light. His field of vision shrank, became greasy at the edges; a taste of sour milk climbed up his throat.
But he stood his ground somehow as Paul Amaro neared, flanked by the short man with creases in his pants and the handsome man with the Panama hat; as Carmen Salazar respectfully got up from his lawn chair; as the short man led the rituals of greetings, introductions.
Through the handshakes and the small talk of the more important players, Ziggy had a moment to wonder if he'd be murdered right there in the garden, and to ponder what it would be that would give him away, since he had no doubt that he would be exposed. He mostly trusted the surgeon's knife and hammer; he didn't think Paul Amaro would know him by his face. So then—would it be the hands? The voice? A telltale phrase or inflection, the smell of his aftershave or of his skin?