Florida Straits (9 page)

The old mafioso looked down and spoke to his
chihuahua. "This kid, Giovanni. Is he very brave, very stupid, or
does he just not listen?"

The younger man only crinkled his
forehead.

"I mean," Bert said to him, "what have I
been telling you heah? Your father's crew is suspected of stealing
tree million dollars from our own people. Two guys have already
been clipped. A coupla very nasty
paisans
show up in Key
West. Joey, why d'ya think they came heah?"

Joey just sat.

The Shirt addressed his dog. "This kid,
Giovanni, he's a nice kid, but he's an asshole." Then he glared at
Joey. "Asshole, they were looking for you."

"Me?"

"Joey, use your fucking head. You just
happen to be about twelve hundred miles closer than anyone else to
where the emeralds were. And you just happened to move down here
right around the time this whole thing had to get planned. How does
it look?"

Joey rubbed his stubbly chin and admitted to
himself that it did not look great. "But shit, Bert, I was always
the last to know what my father's crew was up to even when I was
living right there. Why d'ya think I ain't there no more?"

"Why should Charlie Ponte believe that?
Joey, you know how these people think. Always look for the blood
ties first. You're still your father's son. Maybe you don't feel
like you are. Maybe you don't have his name. But everybody knows
it, just like everybody knows Charlie Ponte sells dope. So, Joey,
I'm telling you like a father, watch your ass. These guys will
probably come back, and they are very pissed. If I didn't stand up
for you, they woulda been here last night. Just to talk. Probably.
But it would not have been pleasant."

"You stood up for me, Bert?" A sublime and
un-bounded gratitude made the hair lift on the back of Joey's
neck.

Bert looked at the rug, at his quailing
dog.

"What did you tell em?" Joey asked.

"Never mind what I tol' 'em."

"Hey," said Joey, "I wanna know." He
squeezed the arms of his chair and puffed up within himself,
opening the passageways like a young man does, the better to absorb
a compliment from a respected elder.

"Forget about it," Bert advised.

"Come on," Joey insisted. "I wanna
know."

"Awright," said Bert. "I told 'em you were
too much of a loser to be involved in anything that big."

"Thanks, Bert. Thanks a lot."

"Sorry, kid. You asked. Besides, it was the
best thing to say at the time. On that you hafta trust me."

—
11 —

"Joey, will you think about it at
least?"

Sandra held an enormous fish sandwich in
both hands and had a glass of beer in front of her. They were
sitting at the Eclipse Saloon, in a booth under a big stuffed
marlin and a faded photograph of a novelist who used to be
world-famous in that bar and regularly got stewed there. A loop of
fried onion was dangling from the underside of Sandra's roll and,
fish-like, she approached from below to snag it between her teeth.
"I mean," she said, "it's not like it's a regular job. All you do
is talk to people, schmooze 'em up. You work outside. It's straight
commission. You don't really have a boss."

"That part's bullshit," said Joey. He
absently dredged a french fry through a puddle of ketchup. "There's
always a boss. I'd still be depending on some suit to hand me a
paycheck."

"Joey, what can I say? Life is bosses.
That's how it works. Your pals from New York—don't they have
bosses? Your buddy Sal, he has a boss. Your brother Gino has a
boss."

"At least their bosses aren't citizens,"
Joey said, but the argument sounded thin even to him. His
resistance was fading, diminishing in direct proportion to his
bankroll, and in proportion, as well, to his growing if still
unadmitted awareness that it was no easier to launch a criminal
career than any other kind, only more dangerous.

Then, too, as jobs went, what Sandra was
suggesting didn't really sound so awful. OPC, it was called—
Off-Property Contact. What it meant was that he would hang out on a
corner of Duval Street, button-hole tourists as they drifted past,
and try to persuade them to take a tour of a time-share resort. If
they took the tour, Joey got forty bucks a couple, and that was the
end of it. Didn't matter if they bought, didn't matter if they'd
never buy in a million years. His job was only to talk them past
the door. The fellow who had the job now was this guy named Zack,
the husband of Claire, who was one of Sandra's fellow tellers, and
supposedly he was pulling in eight hundred bucks a week. A real
go-getter, this Zack. He'd just passed his real estate test and was
ready to move inside, to sell. No doubt Sandra, whose circuits were
wired between the opposing poles of practicality and dreaming,
imagined that Joey would get on that same track.

"Joey, you'd be great at it," she coaxed.
"It's exactly what you like to do. Don't be pigheaded just because
it happens to be legal. It's a hustle."

Joey wavered. The last thing he had in mind
was an ongoing entanglement with the world of pay stubs and file
cabinets, sales meetings and company picnics. But as a temporary
thing, very temporary, well, maybe he could salt away a few dollars
while planning his next moves. "I don't know, Sandra, standing
there all day, having to be nice to these jerks—"

Sandra played her trump card. "Who says you
have to be nice? That isn't how this guy Zack makes his eight
hundred a week. He browbeats. He needles. Joey, the idea isn't to
be nice, the idea is to capture these people. You use anything that
works. Guilt. Jokes. Fibs. Crazy promises. It's a con, Joey. It's a
game."

"And it's legal?"

"And it's legal. It's real estate. Joey,
think of it as a legal way of taking hostages."

—

Across the street from the Eclipse Saloon
was a bank, and in front of the bank was a sign that blinked out
the time and the temperature. Other places, those thermometer signs
tended to exert the morbid fascination of an accident scene: How
bad was it? you asked yourself as you drove by. Would it hit one
hundred in July? In January, would the frigid numbers skid through
zero into the awful minus? In Key West it was different. There was
something smug about the temperature sign. It made you feel like
knocking wood, as if you'd caught yourself gloating about your own
good fortune. In the daytime the sign always seemed to read
eighty-two degrees, though on occasion the mercury would plummet to
seventy-eight or a heat wave would raise it to a steamy
eighty-four. When the sun went down, the temperature went down with
it, and just as gently. By full darkness the reading had settled
into the middle seventies, and there it stayed until after
mid-night. By dawn it was just cool enough so that, many mornings,
you woke up with a dim but pleasurable recollection of having
groped for a cool sheet to pull under your chin.

When Sandra and Joey emerged onto the
sidewalk, the sign said seventy-six degrees and a moon just shy of
full was throwing a cool white light that broke into red and blue
fragments in the smashed glass of the Eldorado's windshield.

"Beautiful out," said Sandra.

"Drive to the beach?" said Joey.

The Caddy's top had not been up in weeks,
and the open car held the smell of sunshine and limestone dust.
Through what was left of the muffler, baritone pops issued forth,
steady as the beating of a drum. Joey slipped through the narrow
residential streets and onto A1A, the fabled road that traces out
the very rim of Florida, separating land from water with a line
hardly more substantial than a layer of skin. He drove past the
Paradiso condominium, almost to the airport, then pulled off the
pavement on the ocean side and pointed the car toward Cuba.

Sandra slid closer and put her hand on
Joey's knee. The feel of it made him realize that they hadn't
touched much lately. "It's been tough for you, huh?" he said. "With
the move and me not earning and all?"

"A little. I'm O.K."

For a while they sat in silence. Traffic
zipped by behind them, and ahead moonlight played on the shallow
water, tracing a rippled white line from the horizon to the seawall
in front of them.

"You know what I love about moonlight on
water?" Sandra said. "No matter where you are, it points right to
you, like the moon knows you're watching and is picking you out for
something, something special."

'Yeah, but it points to everybody," Joey
said.

"O.K., O.K., but I don't have to think about
that. I just see it pointing to us. Look. Right at us."

Joey put his arm around her. Sandra usually
wore clothes that puffed her up—fuzzy sweaters with big outlines,
blouses with built-in shoulders—and after almost four years, Joey
was still sometimes surprised to feel her narrow bones and thin
skin in his hands. He squeezed the small knob at the top of her
arm, rubbed the spare flesh between shoulder and elbow. "Sandra,"
he said softly, "what if I just can't do it?"

"Do what?"

"This job." He took his arm away, put both
hands on the steering wheel, and looked absently at his zeroed-out
speedometer. "I mean, Sandra, I think I'm pretty bright. I got
confidence. But I also got this lousy feeling, it makes me mad,
like there's all kindsa things that everybody else knows and I
don't. Dumb stuff. Filling out forms. What ya say onna telephone.
When ya use a paper clip and when ya use a staple. I mean, these
stupid little things that people know if they have a job. Me, I've
never done that. To me it's like a big mystery."

"You're a little scared, Joey. That's
O.K."

The word was like a lance, and after the
flash of pain and the squelched rage of denying it was so, there
was relief. Joey stared out across the flat and moon-shot water of
the Florida Straits and let out a long breath that whistled
slightly between his teeth.

"You can do it, Joey," Sandra said. "I know
you can. Things are gonna get better for us."

—
12 —

Zack Davidson was thirty-two, had
sandy-brown hair, hazel eyes widely spaced, horn-rim glasses held
on with an elegant elastic cord, and Joey Goldman hated him on
sight. He hated the way his hair fell onto his forehead in a
seemingly casual yet perfect arc, like a spent wave crawling up a
beach. He hated the confident pinkness of his knit shirt, the
perfect way the ribbed cuff neither hung loose nor pinched his arm.
He hated the cheap but perfect cotton belt holding up his khaki
shorts, and the conceited inexpensiveness of his Timex watch.
Everything about him said yacht club, golf course, prep school,
WASP, and gave Joey a feeling in his gut as if a hot fist were
yanking at the inside of his navel. It didn't help at all that Zack
had right away gone into the question of Joey's sunglasses.

"Eye contact is real important," he was
saying.

"Tough shit," said Joey. "The glasses
stay."

He said it as if throwing a punch, and like
a punch, the remark caused the receiving party to pause and
reconsider who he was dealing with. Zack put down the pencil he'd
been twirling and stared at Joey across the narrow desk. They were
sitting in the downtown office of Parrot Beach Interval Ownership
Associates, next to a scale model of the development. Immaculate
under Plexiglas, the model featured pastel duplexes with dainty
shutters, feathery plastic palms, Barbiesque figures on tiny lounge
chairs around a pool whose water was made of blue Saran Wrap. A toy
boat was pulled up on a real sand beach.

"Joey," Zack said at last, "you got a lousy
fucking attitude. I like that in a person. Shows spirit. But you
have to make it work for you, not against you. I can train you or I
can train the next hard-on down the line. So you want this fucking
job, or what?"

Now it was Joey's turn to ponder. He hadn't
expected to hear such blithe obscenities from Zack Davidson's
well-formed lips. Then again, all of this was new to him, he had no
idea what to expect. Stalling for time, he studied the miniature
development, the tiny hedges, the teensy people. He found it
spooky. Life sometimes seemed small enough without suggesting that
you could boil it down, stick it under glass, and take the whole
thing in in a single look.

"Yeah," said Joey, "I want the job, but I
ain't gonna let the job make me crazy."

"Good answer," said Zack. "So what you do,
you put your craziness into the job. You see what I'm saying?"

Joey didn't.

"Best OPC we ever had," Zack continued, "was
a total lunatic. His name was Whistling Freddie. Failed comedian.
He'd stand on the corner on a washtub, whistling Mozart. When
people stopped to listen, he'd start talking at them like the guy
in the Fed Ex commercials. Then he'd go into impersonations,
foreign accents, dick jokes. By the time ne got around to selling
the tour, people were helpless. People can't say no when they're
laughing. Remember when you were a kid, somebody tickled you and it
took all your strength away? Same thing. And you know where
Whistling Freddie is now? In the Virgin Islands, on top of a hill,
on three acres of his very own."

Zack ended with an emphatic nod, and it very
faintly dawned on Joey that he had no idea if he should believe a
single word. It was all so neat with Zack. You cursed, he cursed;
suddenly you're on the same side. You mention craziness, he jumps
in and makes it sound like craziness makes you rich. What if it was
all bullshit? Then again, what if it wasn't? What if having a
straight job meant that you unleashed your rotten attitude, gave
vent to your personality defects, made an ass of yourself in
public, and the upshot of all this legitimate embarrassment was
that you ended up a substantial property owner with money in the
bank?

"Look," Zack resumed, "this business is
about one thing and one thing only. Human nature. It's all a
question of reading people. Who's our best prospective customer? We
have two. A dumb guy who thinks he's smart, and a cheapskate who
thinks he's a sport. Why? Because the dumb guy who thinks he's
smart figures, Hey, why should I spend a hundred fifty bucks a
night in a hotel when I can spend thirty thousand on a time-share
and save money? The cheap-skate who thinks he's a sport, he wants
to let people know he's a player, he's in the market to buy, but
the thought of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house makes his
bowels loosen. So O.K., how do we recognize these people?"