He pondered his malaise as the meeting progressed.
Tommy Lucca was saying, "We need a safe place to move the goods from my guy's truck to your guy's boat."
"We have a place," said Carmen Salazar. "An abandoned marina, ten, twelve miles up the Keys. Extremely private. Totally secure."
Paul Amaro thought: Bad enough I can't stand Lucca. Maybe what's bothering me is that there's someone else here I don't like. Was it Salazar, this arrogant little small-timer who talked fancy and sneered at everything?
"And on the Cuba side?" said Carlos Mendez. "We have to take precautions on the Cuba side."
Salazar said, "The Cuba side is covered. Johnny, when's your next trip down there?"
"Day after tomorrow," said the captain. "Cash and Walkmans in, stogies and a couple refugees out."
"You'll have time to meet with Senor Mendez's people down there?"
"I'll make time," Johnny Castro said, and Paul Amaro wondered if it was the boat guy that was irritating him. He didn't like it when a person was doing a job for damn good pay and made it sound like he was doing you a favor. Or maybe he just didn't like the captain's hybrid looks, the yellowish skin with big oval splotches, the kinky reddish hair.
Salazar said, "He'll set the details up this trip, the goods'll be in Cuba twelve hours after they hit the Keys."
"How's that sound, Paul?" said Tommy Lucca. "Professional enough?"
Paul Amaro missed the beat. He cleared his throat to try to cover up the humiliating fact that his mind had wandered, his concentration had let down. "Sounds okay," he said without conviction. Then he vented some funk by adding, "If no one fucks it up."
"No one's going to fuck it up," said Salazar.
Paul Amaro, working to get back on top, shot him a smirk as bent and scornful as his own, then slipped once again into the morbid pleasure, seductive as a scab, of sorting through his irritations and wondering why he felt so lousy sitting there.
* * *
Ziggy's place made Angelina very sad.
It was a mess and yet it looked like no one lived there. There were no pictures on the flaking walls of the living room, no keepsakes on the scratched and dusty coffee table. There was nothing that suggested an enthusiasm or a hobby, no hint of an attachment or a memory. A faded couch with wrinkled lumpy cushions. A few old magazines and newspapers lying wherever they'd been tossed. The room felt less like a home than like a place to wait for a bus or an examination.
Feeling furtive, jumpy, she stepped through a low doorway into the tiny kitchen. An old refrigerator rumbled; the floor sloped beneath crazed linoleum. The stove was stained with boiled-over drips of things. But what things? Angelina gave in and opened cupboards, saw only a few cans of soup, a bag of pretzels, a bottle of tequila. Ziggy's coffee cup was in the sink. She touched it, she hefted it. She wanted to know how his cup would feel in his hand when he had his coffee in the morning.
She moved into the narrow hallway that led on to the bathroom and the bedroom.
Above the bathroom sink she saw a single toothbrush, frazzled, dangling from a porcelain fixture whose glaze was chipped. On a shelf before the mirror was a plastic razor and a can of shaving cream, dried foam honeycombed around its nozzle. Who did he see when he shaved? she wondered. What did he think? Were his thoughts as void of the personal as his place was? Had he never learned how to care for himself, about himself, or had the caring leached away, become vestigial, obsolete, like the name he used to have?
She moved slowly toward the bedroom, raking the tips of her fingers along the wall. A breeze stirred, made palm fronds scrape against the tin shingles of the roof. Guilty, Angelina was disconcerted by the sudden sound, felt caught by it somehow, like she was being watched even as she spied on Ziggy.
The bedroom door was three quarters open, left that way, no doubt, by a random nudge of an elbow or a shoulder. She stepped inside.
The windows were covered loosely, incompletely, by louvered shutters that sliced the daylight into vivid stripes alive with silver motes of dust. In a corner of the room, a simple chair stood draped in wrinkled trousers, faded shirts. A dresser, whose veneers had parted and were riffling out like playing cards, held loose change, a spare watch, a coiled belt, but not a snapshot or a souvenir.
Angelina was standing near the bed. It was unmade, she knew that it would always be unmade. Tormented pillows lay at jarring angles, crinkled flaps of pillowcases caught beneath them. A light blanket, kicked away, was bunched into crags and valleys. The bottom sheet was not stretched tight; crests of cotton rose up parallel, like waves stopped on the water.
She reached down, touched the cloth. It was soft, old, thin, it had a feel like lanolin from the sweat and oils of Ziggy's body. She smelled him now, as if her touch had renewed his presence in the sheets. It was a yeasty smell, slightly sour but as rich as the vapors of baking bread, as beckoning and basic. She traced the wrinkles in the sheet, she breathed in deeply, and she noticed that her other hand was at the collar of her blouse.