He walked, he sweated, the sweat on his face was of the selfsame stuff as tears. At length, his shirt translucent, he sat down on the seawall, mopped his forehead, felt his dreadful distance from everyone around him. They were ordinary people, the kind he usually despised. Working stiffs, taxpayers, suckers. People with mortgages, bosses, people who chewed their fingernails when it was time to pay the bills. Cowering civilians—but today he envied them. They did their jobs, they scrimped, they earned vacation and wallowed in sand and they savored it. They were decent, and their reward for being decent was that if bad things happened to them, as bad things would to some, they could at least believe that they were blameless, it was just bum luck.
He sat looking out at the ocean, life went on around him. A volleyball game on the beach. Behind him on the promenade, joggers, skaters, the small noisy commerce of people buying sodas and hamburgers and ice cream. His mind snapped back to the sitdown in the garden, the clench in his gut that told him something wasn't right. Somebody was lying; or somebody was cheating; or something was not as it appeared to be.
Or maybe, Paul Amaro dared to think, it was himself who was no longer what he seemed. Something had been shaken loose inside of him when his daughter disappeared. Settled matters of how a man should live were now called into doubt, unquestionable truths now needed to be questioned. Sitting there in the searing sun, his blood pounding and carnival sounds tinkling and clattering around him, Paul Amaro was like a man trying to pry open a long-sealed tomb, and he was also the tomb itself. Was there anything of value left inside? Would he look hard enough to change?
He knew that he would not.
He lacked the will, was too steeped in guilt and spite. Even so, the mere thought of being other than he was made him for a moment almost happy. Unburdened. His mind went empty, and in that brief emptiness he noticed something that had been there all the while but that he'd failed to focus on: A tune was going round and round. It was an irritating, catchy little tune; it finished on a warped note, caught its breath, then started in again, infernal in its cheeriness.
Paul Amaro swiveled on the seawall, looked over his left shoulder. He saw an ice-cream truck, an old- fashioned bullhorn speaker mounted on its cab.
For a moment he forgot to breathe. An ice-cream truck in April. Civilians on vacation.
His overheated brain thrashed toward sense like a swimmer in a riptide. Was it possible? His brother Louie's stupid video. His daughter's strange attention. Could it be?
He stood up too fast, blood drained from his head. When his vision returned he saw a pay phone thirty feet away. The phone that Louie used to call the plumbing store?
He stood there. With a sudden eerie calm he wondered if he was onto something or if he was going mad.
Then, wavery and insubstantial in the heat shimmer that floated off the pavement, Tommy Lucca's limousine came gliding up the road. Paul Amaro blinked toward it, bitter and confused. A deal had been set in motion; he'd gotten tangled up in business. He was supposed to go back to Coral Gables, he was supposed to play the solid and reliable capo. But there was no way he was going. Not now.
When the car had stopped in front of him, he said to Lucca, in what he hoped would pass for a calm, sane voice, "Bring me to a good hotel. I'm staying here a while."
Lucca's eyes tightened down, his lips twitched. "Staying here? For crissakes, Paul." His mouth stopped making words and chewed the air.
Carlos Mendez fretted with his hat. "But about our arrangements, Paul," he said.
"Our arrangements," echoed Paul Amaro absently, as he slid in alongside Mendez, felt cold upholstery against his sweaty skin.
The car started moving, Paul looked out the window at the beach, imagining that he might see his daughter as a little girl, playing in the sand. "Arrangements, right," he murmured. "Fine, no problem. Soon as I get settled in, I'll get in touch with Funzie."
28
Ziggy's house key was ready in his hand as, looking back across his shoulders, he strode the weedy walkway that led on to his sagging porch.
He climbed the two splintery stairs and stepped briskly to the door. He reached for the knob, which turned at his grip, before he'd touched it with the key.
He recoiled in terror, spun around, jumped down the steps, and hid behind a bush.
His bowels burned, his scalp was crawling along his altered hairline. He hadn't left the door unlocked; he never did. True, he'd been absentminded lately—left milk out on the counter in the heat, bollixed up drink orders at work. But leave his door open? No, that's not something he would do. He had to believe that somebody had broken in, that someone, maybe, was awaiting him in rubber gloves, at that very moment attaching a silencer to the muzzle of a gun.