Virgin Heat Read online

  PRAISE FOR VIRGIN HEAT

  "Nearly impossible to put down. Its Key West setting and laugh-out-loud wit recall the best of Carl Hiaasen. Its quirky characters and tough-mindedness are like Elmore Leonard's.... It's art and entertainment at the same time."

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  "The plot of this slapstick caper…has been built for fun . . .even [Shames’] zaniest characters have a dark core that gives them dimension in this sun-bleached land of forgetting."

  — The New York Times Book Review

  "The Birdcage meets The Godfather ... Nutty enough to satisfy Shames's growing number of fans.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  "Shames once again gives us a wild ride. At once literate and accessible, often hilarious, and always on the mark.”

  --Washington Times

  "Laurence Shames just keeps getting better. That's saying something, too, because he's always been damned good."

  —Bookpage

  Virgin Heat

  By

  Laurence Shames

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 1997 Laurence Shames

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Originally published by Hyperion, 1997

  Please visit http://www.LaurenceShames.com

  Once again, to Marilyn

  ".… you're an O'Neill drama,

  you're Whistler's mama,

  you're Camembert. . ."

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is the fifth novel I have set in Key West, and I have never publicly thanked the town for being so humid and so strange, such a congenial place to write about. So, thanks to the fronds for rustling; to the compounds for being clothing-optional; to the bars for being serious; to the people for taking pride in their astute peculiarity; and to the island itself, for being a place where things can happen.

  If geography has always been an active— no, a crucial—conspirator in the work, then so have my editor, Brian DeFiore, and my agent, Stuart Krichevsky. Thanks, gents, for keeping me productive and for all the good ideas whose provenance I have conveniently allowed to blur.

  PART ONE

  1

  Paranoia doesn't sleep; a guilty conscience looks over its shoulder forever.

  Ziggy Maxx, nearly a decade after he took that name and the new face that went with it, still hated to be photographed, still flinched like a native whenever a camera lens was aimed at him.

  Cameras were aimed at him often. A bartender in Key West, he was a prop in a million vacations, an extra in the memories of hordes of strangers. He was scenery, like the scabbed mahogany tree that dominated the courtyard at Raul's, like the purple bougainvillea that rained down from its trellis above the horseshoe bar. The bougainvillea; the beveled glass and polished teak; the burly barkeep in his mostly open shirt with faded palm trees on it—it made a nice picture, a travel poster, almost.

  So people shot Ziggy with Nikons, Minoltas, with cardboard disposables that cost ten bucks at any drugstore. They'd raise the camera, futz with it a couple seconds, then they'd harden down and squint, exactly like a guy about to squeeze a trigger. If the barkeep wasn't quick enough to dodge and blink, to wheel discreetly like an indicted businessman, the flash would make green ovals dance before his throbbing eyes.

  Every time he was captured on film he felt the same archaic panic; every time, he had to soothe himself, to murmur silently, Hey, it didn't matter, no one would recognize the straightened nose with the dewdrop septum, the chin plumped and stitched out of its former cleft, the scalp clipped and sewn so that the hairline, once a prowlike widow's peak, was now a smooth curve, nondescript. Hell, even nine years after surgery, there were hungover mornings when he himself didn't recognize that fabricated face, thought his bathroom mirror had become a window with a dissipated stranger leering through it, begging for an aspirin.

  Still, he hated having his picture taken. The worry of it, on top of the aggravation from his other job, sometimes gave him rashes on his elbows and behind his knees.

  The guys with videocams, they were the worst.

  Like this guy right here, thought Ziggy, glancing briefly at one of his customers. Typical tourist jerk, fifty-something, with a mango daiquiri in front of him and a Panasonic beside him on the bar. Shiny lime-green shirt. The round red cheeks of a clown, and a sunburned head peeling already under thin hair raked in oily strings across the hairless top. Next to him, his wife—pretty once, with too much makeup, too much perfume, sucking on a frozen margarita, her lips clamped around the straw as though claiming under oath that nothing of larger diameter had ever penetrated there. Tourists. It was early April, the ass-end of the season, and Ziggy Maxx was sick to death of tourists. Sick of being asked where Hemingway really drank. Sick of preparing complex, disgusting cocktails with imbecilic names—Sputnik, Woo Woo, Sex on the Beach. Sick of lighting cigarettes for kindergarten teachers from Ohio, Canadian beauticians; nice women, probably, but temporarily deformed and made ridiculous by an awkward urge to misbehave.

  A regular gestured, and Ziggy reached up to the rack above his head, grabbed a couple beer mugs, drew a couple drafts. His furry back was damp inside his shirt; Key West was just then poised between the wholesome warmth of winter and the overripe, quietly deranging heat of summer. By the thermometer, the change was subtle; still, it was all-transforming. Daytime temperatures went up only a few degrees, but they stayed there even after sunset and straight on through the night. The breeze diminished, the air sat there and congealed, grew freighted like a soggy sheet with remembered excess. Sober winter plants died back, were overwhelmed by the exorbitant rude growths of the tropics—butter-yellow flowers as big and brazen as trombones, the traveler palm whose leaves were taller than a man, weird cactuses that dreamed white blossoms in the middle of the night.

  When the wet heat of summer started kicking in, Key West seemed to drift farther out from the familiar mainland, became ever more an island. Ziggy Maxx had lived here six years now, and he'd noticed the same thing every year: less happened in the summer, but what happened was more strange.

  Another tourist caught his eye. Ziggy's glance slid off the face like it was a label in the no-frills aisle, fixed instead on the jerky slogan on the tourist's T-shirt: WILL WORK FOR SEX.

  The tourist said, "Lemme get a Virgin Heat."

  Ziggy stifled a grimace. Of all the idiot drinks he hated to make, Virgin Heats were among the ones he hated most. Fussy, sticky, labor-intensive. Substitutes for conversation, they drew people's attention away from each other and toward the bottles and the bartender. The building of a cocktail like a Virgin Heat sent people groping for their cameras.

  And sure enough, as Ziggy was setting up the pony glass and reaching for the Sambuca, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the man with the sunburned head was readying his videocam. Ziggy flinched, turned a few degrees. He poured the thick liqueur, then felt more than saw that the camera was sliding off his manufactured face to focus on his busy hands. An artsy shot, the barkeep thought, with something like relief. Another jerk who'd seen too many movies.

  Ziggy made the drink He made it with riffs and flourishes it never dawned on him were his alone.

  Although he wore a short-sleeved shirt, he began by flicking his wrists as if shooting back a pair of cuffs. When he inverted the teaspoon to float the Chartreuse on the 'Bu
ca, he extended a pinky in a gesture that was incongruously dainty, given the furry knuckle and the broad and close-cropped fingernail. Grasping the bottle in his right hand, he let his index finger float free; mangled long ago from an ill-thrown punch, that bent and puffy digit refused to parallel the others. He didn't bring the bottle directly to the glass, he banked and looped it in, like a plane approaching an airport. Slowly, with the pomp of mastery, he poured a layer of purple cassis over yellow Chartreuse, green créme de menthe over purple cassis. He topped the gross rainbow with a membrane of grenadine, then delicately laid in a cherry that sank with a portentous slowness, carrying with it a streaky red lascivious rain.

  He slid the drink across the bar to the tourist who had ordered it. "Five dollars, please," he said.

  He took cash, glanced around. The videocam had been switched off, for the moment everyone was happy.

  A light breeze shook the bougainvillea on its trellis, the papery flowers rattled dryly. A woman, a nice woman probably, from Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, fumbled in a big purse for a cigarette. She didn't have a match, she looked at Ziggy. Damp inside his faded shirt at the beginning of that season when things got only damper and only stranger, he snapped his lighter and cupped his hands and lit her up. She smiled, then blew twin streams of exhaust through her nose. If she was out to misbehave, and if she could stay awake till closing time, and if she didn't get a better offer in the meanwhile, maybe she would misbehave with him.

  2

  A week later, in the chill and sniffly north, a tardy spring was still struggling for a toehold.

  Confused crocuses poked up through drab gray grass spiky with winter; forsythia strutted its early blooms against a bleak, gnarled backdrop of naked branches, hopeless twigs. In Pelham Manor, a sliver of lower Westchester that had learned its table manners in the Bronx, on an oak-lined street called Hillside Drive, the lawns were squishy with unseen thaw, yet patches of crusty snow still lingered under boulders; the early evening streetlamps made them blue.

  Louie Amaro drove to the street's highest point, parked his car at one end of his brother Paulie's grandly curving driveway, which was glutted with vehicles newer, bigger, sleeker than his own. He switched off his ignition, said fretfully, "Everybody's here already."

  "So everybody's here," said his wife Rose. "So what?" She flipped down her sunshade. It had a lighted mirror on the back, she checked her thick red lipstick.

  "Why are we always last?" said Louie.

  "Plenty a times we've been first," said Rose. "You don't like that either."

  "First I like," he said. "First shows respect."

  "Your big-shot family, they always make you nervous."

  "They don't make me nervous," Louie said. "You make me nervous. D'ya bring the cassette?"

  "It's right here in my bag." She blotted on a Kleenex. He watched her. Maybe they bickered, maybe she picked on him, but he still took pleasure, felt a thrill of intimacy, watching Rose do things like that. "Big shots," she went on. "Big shots when they're not in jail somewhere."

  Louie raised a cautioning finger. "We don't talk about that, Rose."

  "Don't talk about it? How do we not talk about it? The man's been in prison nine years, he's been out for a week. Whadda we talk about, the lottery?"

  "He's been away. He's back. End of story."

  Rose shook her head, emphatically buffed her makeup.

  Louie's unsure pride swelled in the silence. "And lemme tell ya somethin'. My brother Paulie, he's a big shot even when he is in jail. Don't kid yourself. My tan—I'm still tan, right? I look relaxed, ya can tell we took vacation?"

  The house was an enormous Tudor, with tall chimneys sticking up like organ pipes and a cluster of different-height brown roofs bunched together like a field of mushrooms. Security cameras panned across the pathway leading to the door. Louie rang the bell, then watched his breath until a buzzer let them in.

  In the entryway they hung their cloth coats on top of the furs and cashmeres already piled on the racks. Louie took his hat off; he stood before a huge smoked mirror and raked his sparse hair left to right; translucent flakes of skin drifted off his sunburned head. Then they walked down the long hall with its armoires and its torch lamps, to the living room.

  The living room was brightly lit and very big and noisy. From hidden speakers came the aged rasp of Frank Sinatra, the ravaged voice buoyed up by brass and strings. In one corner, a huge television set was blaring; half a dozen fat children watched it, tickling each other's ribs. In the middle of the room, three overstuffed gold couches defined a conversation nook; Amaro blood relations and in-laws sat back against the yielding cushions and perched on the pillowed arms.

  Louie's brother A1 was the first to notice the new arrivals.

  "Louie, Rose!" he bellowed, standing up and shoving a shirttail underneath his belt. "Look at yuhs! Those tans! I hate yuhs, ya pineapples!"

  He came lumbering around an end table topped with nut bowls and alabaster eggs, hugged his younger brother, coolly kissed the wife. "Great ta see ya, great ta see ya," he went on. "Ya seen Paulie yet?"

  That had always been the first question, Louie thought. Did you pay your respects to Paulie? Not just because, tonight, Paulie happened to be the guest of honor and the host. No. Because Paulie was the oldest, the big shot, the money man. "Hey," said Louie nervously, "I just walked in."

  A1 looked over his shoulder, the torsion pulling his shirt out of his pants again. "Where's Paulie? Louie wantsta say hello."

  "Must be onna phone or somethin'," shouted back the other brother, Joe.

  "Get comfortable," said Maria, Paulie's wife. She was handsome, stern, gracious by custom though her heart was all dried up. "Please, you'll have a drink."

  A1 led them through an archway to the dining room. Bottles were arrayed on a sideboard that small planes could have landed on. On the prairie of the mahogany table a vast buffet had been laid out—a bleeding beef, a turkey hacked and reassembled, wedges of cheese the size of splitting mauls.

  Al made Rose a Manhattan, poured Louie a glass of Bardolino. Then he patted Louie's cheek, the bulbous place just below the cheekbone that gave Louie the look of a clown. Apropos of nothing, he said, "Louie, kid, you're still my favorite."

  That's the kind of family it was. Everybody had a favorite, but the feelings were seldom symmetrical. What did Al see in Louie? A jumpy sweetness, maybe, a comparative innocence. Louie was the only brother who didn't hurt people for a living, who had never been to jail. To Al, those things made him lovable. As for Louie, he thought Al was a buffoon and a slob who spit when he talked and couldn't keep his shirt tucked in. His own favorite was his niece, Angelina, Paulie's only child. He loved her for her strangeness, her distracted gentleness, a certain feeling she gave off, like she was only partly where she was. What did Angelina think of him? With Angelina it was impossible to tell, though Louie strongly suspected she viewed him as a harmless fool, a smiling nobody.

  They went back to the living room, staked out places on a couch. A heated conversation was underway, Louie gradually realized it was about salami. One brand, the pepper was too coarse, it hit that thing at the back of your throat and made you cough. Another label, the rind stuck, yanked off half the meat with it. Then there was mozzarella.

  "Ya want mozzarell'," Joe was saying, "ya go ta Arthur Avenue."

  "Ya don't think it's the exact same mozzarell' they got up here?" somebody challenged.

  "No," said Joe, "I don't."

  "Come on," somebody said, "ya see the signs in every deli: Bronx Bread. Ya think they bring the bread but the cheese they don't bring?"

  "I am telling you," Joe said, "that me, my opinion, okay, the way it tastes when it's in my mouth, not yours, big shot, the mozzarell' tastes better if I go to Arthur Avenue and see it wit' my own eyes sittin' inna . . ."

  Joe fell silent. Louie twisted his sunburned neck and saw his brother Paul returning from the bedroom wing.

  Prison seemed not to have disagreed with him, thou
gh the truth was that, beneath the robust exterior, tubes were silting up, pumps growing sluggish, filters clogging. But he still had his mane of wavy silver hair, the dramatic upswept eyebrows, the power to stop conversation when he walked into a room. His shoulders were still broad and square, the stomach ample but not fat—imposing rather, imperial. The skin was ruddy beneath the careful shave, the strong nose Greek in profile, bridgeless. His pearl-gray suit hung as timeless as the drapery on a statue.

  Louie felt himself rising, moving in a kind of trance to greet his brother. Was it love or obligation, awe or fear or just a quailing habit from a lifetime of being the youngest, the weakest, the least important? He let Paulie hug him, smelled the clove and citrus of his aftershave.

  "Louie."

  "Paulie, ya look great."

  "I feel okay. And how's the plumbing business?"

  The younger brother flushed, shrank within himself. In a family of big shots, he sold elbow joints and toilet snakes and plungers. Paulie's question— was it concern or an old need to keep him down, humiliate? With family it was hard to tell the two apart.

  "Business is fine," said Louie softly. "We took vacation."

  "I see the tan," his brother said, looking at his peeling head.

  "Key West. I shot some tape. I brought it."

  Louie waited, wondered if his brother would ask to see the video, would offer him his moment. He didn't.

  Louie said, "Ya like, I thought we'd stick it in the VCR."

  Paulie blinked, ran his tongue between his front teeth and his lip. "Sure, Louie. Sure. Later on. For now how 'bout we eat? Anybody hungry?"

  3

  Angelina was upstairs in her room, marshaling her forbearance and her good cheer for the inevitable moment when she would join the party, be kissed and petted and fussed over by the gathered relatives.

  Not that she didn't love her family. In her way she loved them a lot—the men with their rough cheeks and loud laughs and crazy nicknames for each other, the women with their scents of roses and powder, their stunning, modest endurance, her mother presiding over the sacred confabs in the kitchen. She liked them fine, some she even admired.