"And you think Amaro's here to do the dirty deed himself?"
McCullough searched for patience. "Amaro came here for something else. What, we still don't know. That Ziggy's involved, that's a lucky break."
Sykes swabbed his moustache on the back of his hand, gave a goofy laugh. "Not too damn lucky for Ziggy."
McCullough kept an eye on the hotel's long and arcing row of cottages. Sykes watched a woman with her top undone, taking sun across her back.
"Not lucky for Ziggy at all," McCullough said.
"Which is why, when the screws get just a little tighter, Ziggy's gonna crawl to us and beg to be allowed to spill his guts."
Sykes said nothing, hoping for a glimpse of breast.
"And when that happens, Terry, I hope you'll be paying attention."
"Sure thing, Keith," he said. "No problem."
* * *
"Where's Uncle Louie?" Angelina asked, shading her eyes and looking up from her lounge at Ziggy.
Ziggy swigged coffee before he answered. "Guy's my roommate, not my wife. How the hell should I know where he is?"
"I see you're gonna be all charm again today," said Angelina.
Ziggy's eye sockets felt too small for his eyes. He wasn't quite awake yet, and mid-morning sun was already scorching the back of his neck. He surprised himself by going on the offensive, and realized only afterward that the attack was a sure sign he was caving in. "Don't talk to me about charm," he said. "The way you're acting—that's charming?"
Angelina looked away, gave her thick black hair a shake, successfully tweaked him by her silence.
"First you're all over me," he went on. "Flirting. Kissing. In my bed, for Chrissake. Then it's like, I don't know, I became a frog, a leper. When a woman acts like that, there's a name for it, Angelina."
"And I'm sure it's a quaint and lovely name," she said.
He turned his back, looked out across the pool. Men in tiny bathing suits stood thigh to thigh and talked. Another man rubbed suntan lotion on the bare shoulders of a friend. Did it make him queer, Ziggy vaguely wondered, that he realized this whole place pulsed with sex, that the atmosphere seeped into him, that it was a lousy setting in which to have satisfaction dangled then withheld?
Facing her again, he said, "I just don't get it, Angelina," and he felt the vibration of his clenched voice in his gonads. "I just don't understand."
She looked up at him, rearranged her edgy knees, and made a considerable concession. "Maybe I don't understand either, okay?"
He'd stopped expecting her to yield an inch; the frank perplexity in her eyes now disarmed him and gave him hope. He sat on the edge of a lounge next to hers, tried to rid his own voice of its mordant rasp. Almost gently, he said, "If you don't understand, and I don't understand, maybe we're making it more complicated than it's s'posed to be. Desire, Angelina, it's really pretty simple."
"I know about desire," she said, the hardness, unbidden, back in her voice. "I know more about it than you do. Desire's all I've had."
Ziggy's frustrated hands squeezed the flesh above his knees, his freshly discouraged head hung down between his sagging shoulders. "Should we argue who knows more?" he said. "Would that get us anywhere?"
She didn't answer. She looked off at a frangipani tree, at the creamy yellow tucked deep within the bright white petals of the flowers.
After a time, Ziggy said in a tone of seething calm, "This place is driving me crazy. You're driving me crazy. You and me, Angelina, I got no idea how it's gonna end up with us, but I'm telling you, I gotta bust out of here, and soon."
She'd heard the bravado before. Her eyes stayed on the flowers, she scratched an ankle with the bottom of the other foot.
"Angelina, look at me," he said. There was no bombast in his voice, just a quiet urgency. Grudgingly she turned to face him. "Your father," he went on, "he's involved in something down here. Something that's not kosher. You know that, right?"
She hesitated, bit her lip, and nodded. That her father was a criminal, that threats and fixes and plunder had always provided the family livelihood— she'd absorbed that dirty knowledge; but when had she first known it, first really known it? Vaguely, she remembered being a regular kid with what she thought was a regular daddy; then she'd become a strange young woman with a lot of things she couldn't talk about to anyone. But the transition eluded her. Was it gradual or was there one grim buried day when it happened?
Ziggy said, "I'd really like to find a way out of this without sending him away again."
Angelina stared at him, felt her pupils squeezing shut then spiraling open. Her face flushed, strands stood out in her neck. What was he saying to her? Was it a threat? Blackmail? An ugly proposition, silence in exchange for sex?