Michael kept very still.
Ziggy said, "But in my heart I don't believe it's hopeless. And that's the sadass truth."
Michael studied him a moment, said, "You sent flowers? You really used to do that?"
Ziggy leaned for forward, propped his elbows on his knees. "Look, there's no reason you should help me but I could really use your help."
Michael said, "Would it be good for Angelina?"
"Ya just got done telling me that no one knows what's good for someone else."
"Don't ask me to do anything that would hurt her."
"Ya think she really hates her father?"
"Partly, yes," said Michael. "And partly loves him too."
"I been thinking about a couple things," said Ziggy. "I'm asking you to trust me."
Michael considered, then glanced over at the only bed and felt the peace of knowing and of being unafraid. "Looks like you have to trust me too."
Ziggy swallowed, said, "I can do that, Michael."
"Then so can I," said Angelina's friend.
* * *
Angelina lay back in a tepid bath and steered a jagged course among all the things she didn't want to think about.
She didn't want to think about Ziggy, about her battered half-dead love for him, about his brooding simmering manner that put her off and still somehow seduced her.
She didn't want to think about her father, about the taboo suggestion of her rage against him; didn't want to call up recollections of childhood happiness and safety, grotesque now against a backdrop of newspaper headlines, prison records.
She didn't want to think about her own body, half floating, half sunk in the tub, water immersed in other water, her skin wrapping a befuddling amalgam of nerves and secrets, sadnesses and appetites, recklessness and qualms, a mass of tangled circuits sucking juice out of an overloaded brain.
So she stared at the horizon line of water in the tub and tried to think of nothing. It didn't work and she grew annoyed. Other people, she imagined, managed to go blank; the tropics, as advertised, nurtured the process. But the draining temperatures, the restful whoosh of fronds—for her they weren't working.
Sitting there, she was assailed by unremitting images of men's hands and big dark cars and sharkskin suits and more toys than a little girl could ever get around to playing with, bought with pilfered funds. From decades before she remembered "uncles" bringing gifts—coming to the house, she more lately understood, to talk of crime. And Sal Martucci, visiting on business, stealing gutsy moments in the hallway to kiss her ear, stroke her neck. Crime, sex; father, boyfriend; shame, virginity; innocence, freedom. The warring pairs clapped together in her mind, seemed to set the bathtub water roiling like tremors underground.
Angelina, giving up on blankness, embraced the promise of riot instead, felt both hope and terror as she realized that some grand collision was on its way, had been set in motion weeks before; and that if the tumult didn't drive her totally insane, there was the chance, at least, that, in its noise and heat, rage might be resolved and overripe childhood finally finished, that she would walk away a grown-up woman and calm would come at last.
42
Up north, webby trees just coming into leaf were silhouetted against a red-reflecting sky.
At a warehouse on the Hudson, an hour or so above the city, the guns for Cuba were being loaded onto a truck that usually serviced the Hunts Point produce market. It had a picture of a cauliflower painted on the side, and its trailer smelled of tangerines, bananas; between its soft wooden floorboards was a residue of flattened grapes.
Funzie Gallo, eating a cheese Danish that would see him through till dinner, supervised the operation. "The nine millimeters," he said, "put 'em underneat' the broccoli. T'ree fifty-sevens, mix in wit' the cantaloupes. Uzis, make sure ya keep 'em separate, bury 'em good in escarole. Got it?"
The two guys loading just grunted under the weight of crates of firearms.
"Ya drive the speed limit," Funzie said, "don't fuck around. Hialeah. Ya got the address in Hialeah?"
One of the guys loading, a little testy at Funzie feeding his face while other people might have slipped a disk, said, "We got it, Funzie, we got it."
"Carlos Mendez. He hands ya a hunnert twenty-five. Right?"
"Right, Funzie. Right."
"Make sure ya coun' it. Guy's a spick."
The other guy loading slapped his crate down on the lip of the truck, said, "Funzie, watch it, huh. I'm a spick. Remember?"
"Jesus, sorry," Funzie said, and for solace he bit deep into his Danish, sweet cheese glued his teeth together. What had happened to the fucking world, he wondered, when you couldn't even recruit Sicilians anymore?