Carmen Salazar was introducing the other underling. "This is Captain John Castro—no relation, I assure you." People tried to laugh, there was something uncomfortably intimate, visceral, about the gurgling sound of forced laughter. "Smuggles people, hard currency, cigars. Has a good boat, knows Havana harbor like his bathtub."
There were handshakes. Touching. Looks in the eye, and breathing of the damp and common air between close-together faces. Ziggy's nerves felt swollen with adrenaline, he imagined they were visible, sparking like snapped wires at the places where they branched.
"And this," said Salazar, "is Ziggy Maxx. Tommy, Carlos—you remember him. Utility player with big-league capabilities. Isn't that right, Ziggy?"
Ziggy didn't want to talk, didn't want to risk moving the features that, in repose, had not undone him. It would be absurd to die because of the stubborn remnants of a Brooklyn accent, to be murdered for a rasping tone that might trigger recollection. Between barely parted teeth, he muttered, "That's right, Carmen."
Eyes were turned his way; hands were lifted toward him. He shook with Tommy Lucca, Carlos Mendez, and as he did so, he thought about his mangled finger and the way it made his grip unique. His mind reeled with a dim sense of all the million details of identity, the seldom thought-about codes and markers by which we know one person from the next, and in the instant before he shook hands with Paul Amaro, he tried to invent a handshake that was not his own.
His palm, now, was pressed against the palm of his sworn enemy; the two men were linked at the webbing of their thumbs. Ziggy squeezed down but only very softly; he willed his dislocated pinky to work beside his other fingers; he felt the damaged joint crackle like a broken hinge. Something told him he had to lock eyes with Paul Amaro, that shrinking from his gaze would leave his enemy's senses free to absorb signals that were harder to disguise, that did not admit of bluffing. With the moxie of the cornered, he stared straight at his former boss; what he saw in his glance almost gave him hope. Paul Amaro's shadowed eyes looked far away, indifferent, bored. Ziggy recognized the expression of a man who was only partly where he seemed to be.
He freed his hand, it felt very heavy at his side. Paul Amaro's exhausted gaze slid away to other things. A brief breeze, wet and unrefreshing, rattled the foliage, brought forth hints of fruit and flowers that mixed with the smells of sweat and cologne.
Carmen Salazar said, "So, gentlemen—to business?"
* * *
The cab drove off, and Angelina walked uncertainly down a narrow lane that wasn't very nice.
Low and rusted chain-link fence separated tiny unkempt yards; the barriers were colonized by scraps of browning vine. Fronds had fallen here and there at curbside, and no one picked them up, they dried and broke in pieces on the stony ground. The sun beat down on sagging roofs and splintered porches and jalousied windows with missing slats like gaps in teeth.
Angelina, her scalp throbbing as her body worked to shed its heat and that of the midday glare, paused in front of number fourteen, Ziggy's place.
Fenceposts leaned in unmoored foundations of cracked cement. A gate hung askew before a weedy path. An ancient birdbath, chipped and dry, sat in the dirt, spotted with lichen. Two drooping stairs led up to a door whose screen was torn. She approached, breathed deep in the relative cool of the porch, and knocked.
There was no answer.
She was less relieved and more disappointed than she thought she'd be. She knocked again.
She waited. A banking plane went by, its clatter reminded her that she was leaving in a matter of hours, with nothing really changed, nothing accomplished, nothing even understood. Quite suddenly she was furious with frustration. She yanked open the screen and reached for the knob on the inside door.
She knew it wouldn't turn. Ziggy was a paranoid, saw thieves and dirtbags everywhere, was not the type to leave his door unlocked; she was mostly just performing for herself, putting on a little show of temper.
She could not know that a Federal agent named Keith McCullough had considerately picked the lock for her, then settled back in his shady car at the head of the lane, to see what would happen when Ziggy Maxx and Paul Amaro's daughter got together.
The knob turned, the door fell open, and Angelina, utterly surprised, stepped into Ziggy's empty bungalow.
26
Something was bothering Paul Amaro, he couldn't pinpoint what it was.
The garden was steamy, he was damp inside his clothes, but he didn't think it was the temperature alone that was annoying him. Pollen and fruit sap were glutting up his sinuses, he had the beginnings of a headache, but what was gnawing at him did not seem mainly physical. There was, of course, his preoccupation with his daughter, but that had become a constant droning sorrow; what he felt now struck him as outside of that.