Virgin Heat(45)
It was a blue blouse and it buttoned to the neck. She watched the silver motes floating in the stripes of light that filtered through the shutters, and although she knew full well that she was nothing like bold enough to do what she was doing, she began unbuttoning the buttons.
She put the blouse on the chair with Ziggy's clothes, then stepped out of the skirt she'd meant to travel in. The air had become very still; the house creaked, swollen with heat; the room seemed very full of Ziggy now.
Not until the last moment did Angelina hurry. Then some old shame of nakedness, some childish fear of leering eyes and wagging fingers, made her movements angular, abrupt. She shuffled off her underthings, clingy with damp, and settled into Ziggy's bed. The room was hot but the sheets felt cool as wind-dried flesh against her skin, and she told herself she could stay there forever if she had to, her face on Ziggy's pillow, her body snug against the mattress where the man she loved, for all his attempts to zig and zag, to slide through life untouching and untouched, had stayed still long enough to leave his imprint.
27
The meeting was over.
On the glaring sidewalk, Tommy Lucca said tartly, "So Paul, this yokel, he meet with your approval?"
"I think I'd like a little time to myself."
Lucca shot a glance at Carlos Mendez. Mendez adjusted the tilt of his hat, said mildly, "Our colleague, your concerns are answered?"
Amaro said, "Later. Let's talk about it later."
"What later?" Lucca pressed. "I thought we're doin' business here?"
Paul said nothing.
Lucca twitched. He wanted to get home and he was tired of sitting on his exasperation. "Christ, Paul," he went on, "the guy's a pro, anyone can see that. Little shitass town like this, he's pullin' in—"
"Tommy," Paul Amaro interrupted, "it's nothin' against your guy, okay? He's a cocky scumbag, but that's okay by me. I have a lot on my mind, I'd like a little time to think. Ask your driver, please, to bring me to the beach."
"The beach," said Tommy Lucca. A Floridian, he did not, in the middle of a business day, see the big appeal of sand and water.
"That's right. The beach. To me, Tommy, the beach is very soothing."
* * *
Carmen Salazar was all pumped up about his flirtation with the big boys. Though he tried to be blase, he couldn't help replaying his sitdown with the mobsters, reviewing for his minions how well it had gone, how suave he had been. Ziggy, unless he wanted to reveal his panic, had no choice but to stand there in the garden, listening to his boss congratulate himself, before he could slip away and bolt.
He would bolt, there was not a shred of doubt about it now. He should have fled before, as soon as Paul Amaro's relatives had mysteriously begun appearing at his bar. He'd been stupid to stick around, and it was pointless now even to wonder why he'd done it. He felt damn lucky and stunningly surprised to have met Amaro face-to-face and not been murdered on the spot. He saw no virtue in pressing his luck still further.
He waited for Salazar to finish chattering, then said a curt goodbye and stepped briskly through the dimness of the candy store, paused on the top step of the cracked stoop, glancing left and right. Instinct was battling fatalism. If his enemy was onto him, he was dead, if not today, tomorrow; he knew that. Yet the innards counseled vigilance. He probed the glaring street for assassins, fairly tiptoed to the Oldsmobile, held his breath as the car cranked out the ignition spark that might set off a bomb.
He hadn't been shot. He didn't blow up. He put the car in gear and headed home to grab his little stash of money and a change or two of clothes, and tried to figure just where the hell he'd go to hide.
* * *
Paul Amaro left his suit jacket in the limousine as he stepped out onto the promenade flanking Smathers Beach.
It was early afternoon. The sun was white, the sky a careless blue with little clouds whose bottoms picked up green reflections from the waters of the Florida Straits. Paul rolled up his shirtsleeves, and even so he was sweating before the limo had rolled out of sight. He didn't mind. It felt good to sweat in the sunshine, salt air drawing at his open pores. It felt clean, uncalculated, simple; felt like nothing else in his baroque and convoluted life.
He walked a while, walked faster than he should have, so that his heart pounded, the pulse surged in his ears and in his feet. He looked around, and everything he saw made him feel nostalgic and remorseful. Kites bobbed on puffing thermals, they hung lazily outside of time. Vendors sold hot dogs, sausage, french fries that barefoot kids carried off in paper cones; they could have come from Rockaway or Coney Island forty, fifty years before. The beach, it never changed. People on towels, a guy red as a lobster. A couple necking, their elbows coated in sand. A little girl with a yellow pail and shovel, a naked boy with water wings, learning how to swim.