At once he was moving toward the bedroom door. It wasn't far and he was moving fast. Yet the time it took for him to reach the doorway was time enough for Angelina to do a hundred oscillations. She wanted him to vanish. She wanted him to stay. She cursed herself for being here; she should have been the one to catch a plane, to turn her back on him, not the one walked out on, undressed and absurd. But loss was loss, what did it matter who left who?... She heard herself say, "But you don't know where you're going."
He had one foot in the hallway. As torn as she, he couldn't drag the other leg across the threshold and have this madness over with. He stopped to argue, his momentum stalled. He said, "At Miami airport there's this screen, it lists the whole world—"
Angelina said, "I have an idea."
Ziggy went on, "Jamaica, Paris, Bogota—"
"Coral Shores."
"—Puerto Rico, Italy—"
"Coral Shores," she said again. "No one would think to look for you at Coral Shores."
"—Antigua, Hawaii—"
"Ziggy, think about it. You have an edge—you know him, he doesn't know you. You stay in town, you see what happens, maybe there's a chance to work things out."
His voice turned shrill and raspy, the simple fear cut through. "Work things out? This isn't something you work out, Angelina. This isn't something you talk over. He wants me dead."
"And he wants me to be happy."
He looked at her, her violet eyes, the earnest and neglected body wriggling in his bed. "Your father, Angelina, happiness is bullshit to him. What he cares about is honor, and the balls of honor is revenge. You know that."
"Ziggy, you'll be safe a while, you'll see how things play out."
He knew he shouldn't even think about it, but he thought about it. He couldn't pull his eyes off Angelina. Her neck, her breasts, they'd kill him yet. "Coral Shores," he said, "it's fulla queers."
"It would be more pleasant," Angelina said, "if you called them gays."
The sun was moving, there were patches of light across the sheet where Angelina lay; he imagined that they made the cloth translucent, revealing swaths of flesh. "I don't see me hangin' out around a buncha queers."
Cautiously, she rolled onto an elbow, a browned shoulder with a pale chaste tan line came into view. "Think about your situation, Ziggy. Who's it make more sense for you to hang around with? A bunch of queers or a bunch of mafiosi?"
PART THREE
30
"It's very important," Uncle Louie said. "Family emergency."
"I understand," said the desk clerk at the Coral Shores Guest House. He had a shaved head above bleached blond eyebrows, and an expression so concerned that it put creases all across his scalp. "But there's no one registered by that name. Are you sure that's the name?"
"She's my niece," said Uncle Louie. "Of course I'm sure."
"And you're sure this is the place?"
"I've walked her home. In broad daylight."
The clerk leaned on an elbow, as intent as his visitor to puzzle this thing out. "We don't get that many lesbians. What's she look like?"
Uncle Louie said, "My niece is not a lesbian."
The clerk's expression darkened for a moment, the east-west furrows moved north-south. "You have a problem with lesbians?"
"Me? I don't have a problem with lesbians. I have a problem with relatives. But my niece, I never said she's a lesbian."
"Why else would she be here?"
"She's a single woman, on her own."
"Oh, her!" said the clerk, and in his relief he gave Uncle Louie a light slap on the arm. "Why didn't you say so? There's only one of those. Dark hair, a little chesty, right? That's Jane Starr."
"Excuse me?"
The clerk leaned closer across the orchids on the counter. "Alias, I guess. We get a lot of noms de sex down here—people closeted back home mostly, nervous. They pay in cash, it's all the same to us. Live and let live, right?"
"Uh, right," said Uncle Louie.
"You're welcome to wait out by the pool. Want a cup of tea?"
* * *
Half a dozen blocks away, Paul Amaro stood in his shower and entertained dark thoughts.
He wondered if his life was finally, irretrievably unraveling. He marveled at how little he cared. He noted with an odd detachment, almost a chastened ecstasy, how brittle his strength must always have been, if it could be undone so easily.
Hot water hit him in the face; he let it scour him, hoping vaguely that it would carry off dead skin, chip away old sins along with rotten flesh, leaving something better underneath. His mind raced. An ice-cream truck and a pay phone. Did those things mean his daughter was in Key West? Or did they only mean he'd taken too much sun, that the searing heat had put his sorrow over the edge into outright delusion?