The goon increased the torque on the front of Michael's shirt, squeezed like he was wringing out a sock. "For why?"
"Ziggy sent me," said the messenger.
There was a pause, Michael's suspended leg still groping for the earth. Then a voice came from the dimness of the garden. "Pat him down, Pablo."
The big man gave a last squeeze, then let Michael come to ground. He felt the visitor's sides, his legs, his crotch. "He's hokay," he said back to his boss.
Michael mustered his nerve. "You don't know the half of it."
"Bring him here," said the voice from the garden.
Pinching his arm, the goon led him under vines and through the foliage to where a pensive and deflated Salazar was sitting in his lawn chair, a sticky residue of duct tape making linty coils around the frame.
Glancing up at his guest from under sullen brows, he said, "Ziggy sent you. I guess that means Ziggy's still alive." He tried to say it with his usual lilting cynicism, but the mordancy fell flat, his blitheness had deserted him.
"Very much alive," said Michael.
Salazar strove once again for bravado. "Hiding like a worm, I take it."
"Trying to work things out."
The seated man crossed his knees, came forth with a bitter and percussive little laugh. "Work things out? He still thinks there's a way to work things out with these crazy big shot lunatics?"
"Not exactly with them," Michael said.
Carmen Salazar uncrossed his legs, propped an elbow on his sticky chair arm, put his chin on his palm. "Let's not talk in riddles, friend."
"Okay," Michael said, and he tried to sound insolent yet chummy, just like he'd rehearsed. "Ziggy wanted me to tell you that you can take your chances with the big shots or you can maybe come away on top by helping him to plan a little party. It's up to you."
A breeze moved through the garden at a walking pace, delivering aromas like a mailman drops off letters. Carmen Salazar pulled on his chin and mocked himself. He was a small-time guy, but a small-time guy with brains; he knew, he'd always known, that when a little life collided with big ones, only trouble could result. Why did people go against what they knew? Why did they scorn even the few small scraps of wisdom that they had? Sitting there, he understood quite clearly that the illicit but congenial life he'd built around his garden was over. He'd overreached; he'd placed himself between two strong men and probably made enemies of both; he'd wrecked himself. Ruthlessly lucid in his depression, he saw that no matter what course he chose now, either he would be destroyed or everything would have to change.
He said, "Pablo, bring the man a chair."
* * *
On the balcony of the room that had been Louie's, then Louie and Ziggy's, and now Louie and Rose's, a single candle was burning. It was not an elegant taper; it was bug-flecked citronella in a galvanized bucket. Still, it cast a flickering flattering light on the man and the woman who sat at their small table eating Chinese food that had been delivered on a moped.
Comfortable together, they ate mostly in silence. Dinner companions for ten thousand dinners, they knew not only each other's favorite dishes, but each other's favorite bites within the dishes. Rose knew that Louie loved the baby corns, the tickle of the tiny kernels against his gums. Louie knew that Rose enjoyed the crunch of water chestnuts, he picked them out for her and lay them, tiny offerings, on the edge of her plastic plate.
He put his fork down, watched her eat an egg roll, the way her full lips locked securely on the crumbly wrapper before she bit. She watched him gnaw a spare rib, his unswerving method of nibbling one side of the bone, then flipping to the other, saving the knuckly knob of meat for last.
She poured him tea and beamed. He took a sip and glowed.
She blotted her lips on a paper napkin, reached across to put a hand on his. "Louie," she said, "isn't it amazing? We were happy all those years and didn't even know it."
43
"Hungry?" Ziggy said.
It was night and he'd realized he was lonely. His sulk had fallen away at last, and it seemed to leave him skinless, undefended, needy. He'd ordered in a pizza and two bottles of Chianti. Then he'd wandered the grounds of Coral Shores, hoping to find someone to eat and drink with him.
His heart did the leap of the friendless when he spotted Angelina sitting at poolside in a blue sarong, looking up at misted stars. But she said, "I don't feel like eating."
"Sit with me?" he asked.
She didn't say no, and he dragged a little table and a chair up next to her lounge. He opened the pizza box; an insinuating smell of cheese and garlic and oily cardboard wafted up. "Tempted?"
She shook her head.
"Glassa wine?"