Virgin Heat(7)

By the time he stirred his espresso in the back room of the Gatto Bianco Social Club on Prince Street, he had been subsumed entirely into his urban persona, his professional stance; he was angry, snarling, crude, and obsessed with honor in a shrill and sullen sort of way.

"Nine fuckin' years," he said to his old friend Funzie Gallo. "More like ten. All that fuckin' time, we can't find the mizzable fuck that ratted me out?"

Funzie was eating a pastry with powdered sugar on it; these days he was always eating pastry, as though to mask the souring of the life he knew with syrups, glazes, oils from nuts, reductions of fruit. The pastry was making him fat in odd places. His ankles hung over his shoes and little pads of blubber were narrowing his eyes. Now he licked his stubby fingers almost daintily before he answered. "We tried, Paulie," he said. "We put the word out everywhere. But the Feds, that program they got, they want a guy to disappear, they can make him disappear."

Paulie slowly, resolutely shook his head. "No one disappears except he's dead. People get new faces. Fuckin' government can give 'em histories, all the papers. But disappear? No. Ya know why? They don't disappear 'cause they never stop being who they are. Who they are, sooner or later it's gonna show."

Funzie licked his gums, tugged lightly on some extra flesh that hung down beneath his chin. Outside, trucks clattered past, music to smash things by was pumped out of people's radios. Cautiously, he said, "Paulie, what happened to you was a long time ago."

Amaro just stewed. Funzie knew he should leave it there but he didn't leave it there.

"Life goes on, Paul. We got businesses to run. Deals to consider. Opportunities, like this thing down south—"

Paulie wasn't listening. He didn't want to think about business; he wanted to think about revenge. "I want that scumbag dead."

"Dead, not dead," said Funzie. "It's not worth losing sleep. This grudge, Paul—for your own sake, why don't you let it go?"

Paulie's big knuckles were white against his tiny abused espresso spoon, blood pressure made his ears turn red. His voice was pinched, quietly furious.

"We didn't get where we are today by letting grudges go."

Yeah? thought Funzie. And where were they today? Hiding behind metal roll-down shutters that some nigger kid had had the balls to paint grafitti on, drinking coffee at a stained card table in a dim outpost that smelled of roach spray and anisette. Gray, unhealthy men who each day mattered a little less to the world outside than they had the day before. Paulie didn't realize; he'd been away too long. He'd seen the headlines, sure—the indictments, the betrayals, the defections—but the guts of their decline he didn't grasp. He, Funzie, had wolfed biscotti and run the brugad while Paulie was in the can; he understood the slippage all too well. "But Paul—" he began.

The other man cut him off. "Funzie, I'm sixty- three years old. That fuck stole nine years a my life. Took me away from my home, my daughter."

"I know, Paul. I know. But that's over now. It's over and the world has changed."

"You telling me it's changed so much that shit like that goes unpunished?"

* * *

Angelina had never in her life been guileful, had never had to be. She'd never snitched candy, because candy had always been pressed on her. She'd seldom fibbed as to her whereabouts, because all in all her whereabouts had been contentedly licit; it hadn't cramped her to stay in the neighborhood, because she lived mainly in the precinct of her thoughts, and for the most part she'd been happiest in her room, the nursery of her imaginings.

But now, as she was abandoning her home and her family to seek out the treasonous man she loved, she discovered, with surprise and an exciting shame, that an instinctual cunning seemed to exist in her, as ripe and fully formed as a baby on the day of birth, that had been waiting only for a purpose. Once the purpose had been revealed, she shocked herself by being rather shrewd and as outwardly calm as a veteran spy.

Noiselessly, carrying only a large handbag, she'd stepped out of her parents' sleeping house—the house that, with breathtaking suddenness, no longer seemed her own. She never once looked back at the shrubs still struggling to awake from winter, the brooding chimneys stacked up on the roof. Under swift clouds racing through an undecided sky, she'd strolled down Hillside Drive to the intersection with busy Maple Avenue. She'd called a cab to take her to La Guardia, where she paid cash for an airline ticket.

On the flight south, she'd sat silently among chintzy end-of-season tourists, watching with no real curiosity as they left their seats in brown sweaters and returned from the bathroom wearing shirts of pink and acid green. Through a gap in the jetway at Miami airport she caught her first real whiff of Florida, the smell of salted mildew colonizing damp carpets and the foam inside of vinyl chairs. She'd walked in a daze past promotional pyramids of plastic oranges and listened as lost travelers were paged in Spanish.