Key West Luck Page 10

  “Who said I worked for either of them? I told you, I’m a musician.”

  “Right. I remember. Unemployed. I’ve seen your hand, Nicky. Can’t be easy playing music with that hand.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “So who’d you work for?”

  Nicky sipped his drink. “Zito.”

  “Enforcer?”

  “Very briefly. I was bad at it. I quit.”

  “Quit? Just walked away? So you’re not a made guy then.”

  “Not even close.”

  Ponte sniffed at the night air and considered. “Involved in anything down here?”

  Nicky shook his head.

  Ponte leaned in closer, so close that Nicky could smell the stuff he used to keep his hair-fringes tidy. “Wanna be?”

  “Not if it means beating on people. I can’t do that anymore.”

  “How about if it doesn’t? And how about if I pay you fifty grand?”

  He’d told Nicky about the job then. He lied about parts of it, of course. He said that all Nicky would have to do would be to pilot a boatload of cigars from Havana to a place out near Sand Key Light, where the cargo would be off-loaded onto a flotilla of local fishing skiffs that would attract no notice as they came to port. Nicky could then continue to Key West in a perfectly legal craft complete with phony registration papers.

  Nicky listened and he tried not to let it show that he suspected from the very start that he was being lied to. The job sounded too easy to be worth fifty grand. And why would Ponte give it to a guy he’d never used before? Something was fishy. It was probably a set-up. Nicky realized that. But here’s the thing about so-called fall guys: They don’t necessarily fall into things because they’re too dumb to see them coming. Sometimes they choose, even if they hide from themselves the fact that they’re making a choice. Nicky had no job, no prospects. He carried a burden of guilt from old misdeeds for which he’d never been punished. He had a lady friend he really wanted to help, and until Charlie Ponte came along he’d seen no way that he’d be able to help her.

  Sipping his drink and looking out at the misted streetlamps that surrounded the marina, he considered Ponte’s offer. Finally he said, “I’ll need ten grand, cash, up front.”

  Ponte said that wouldn’t be a problem.

  “And the other forty?”

  “As soon as the job’s done. Call me.”

  He pushed a phone number across the little table, and Nicky said okay. Simple as that to wreck a life. They went to Ponte’s car and Nicky climbed in. The little mobster handed over a sheaf of hundreds. Nicky crammed the bills into an envelope along with a very brief scrawled note and dropped the parcel, addressed to Phoebe Goodyear c/o General Delivery, into a mailbox.

  Then they’d headed to Miami.

  Nicky slept that night in a guest bedroom in Ponte’s penthouse. In the morning, his host ordered in a sumptuous breakfast. A few hours later he had an elaborate lunch sent up. By the second meal Nicky had realized he was being about as well-fed as someone going to the Chair. No mistake, he was a prisoner. His new employer would hardly let him out of his sight. They sat around the apartment all day long, squinting out at sunshine,

  looking down at boats, gazing vaguely at the sea spilling over the horizon like a too full bathtub.

  At sunset they finally went downstairs to the marina, where a huge Cuban in a metallic silver jacket was waiting to take charge of Nicky. There were no greetings. The huge man led him to the end of a long dock, where a small seaplane was tied up to the last piling. Next to the massive, swollen yachts, the plane looked like a toy. Its fuselage seemed not much thicker than foil and its wing struts were screwed on like something from a child’s erector set. The pontoons seemed as preposterously oversized and clumsy as clown shoes. The big Cuban pushed Nicky inside and they flew off toward Havana.

  22.

  It was getting to be dusk when Phoebe pulled the Sno-Cone truck into the mangrove clearing out beyond the airport. She switched off the engine and in the sudden quiet she heard Pineapple rustling around in the swath of foliage between their two encampments. A moment later he emerged into the open, holding a somewhat meager bundle of fallen branches and twigs. “Building a campfire,” he said. “Gonna heat up a few cans of Beef-a-Roni. Want one?”

  Phoebe said, “No, Piney, no thanks.”

  “Fred’s drinking already. Feel like a beer?”

  “No, I don’t think so, thank you.” Her voice was even softer and more level than usual and her eyes never quite lifted from the ground.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Fine. No.”

  She told him about Nicky going missing. She didn’t tell him about the miserable feeling she’d been carrying around all day, the gnawing suspicion that maybe it was all her fault.

  The only thing Piney could think of to say was, “Maybe you’d like to come sit with us awhile.”

  She didn’t answer, just followed him to the next clearing over. Fred was sitting on a plastic milk crate, midway through his second beer. The rest of the six-pack was next to him on the ground, the plastic rings still strangling the necks of the cans. He offered one. Phoebe passed. She sat down on a wooden pallet and looked at the fire that Pineapple was building and thought about Nicky hurtling up the gangplank and charging when Gus Delios had insulted her, about his sweet if bullheaded insistence that they’d find a way to keep the truck.

  The fire crackled and lobbed sparks into the air. For a while no one spoke. Then, apropos of nothing, Pineapple suddenly said, “Hey, you know what I sometimes wonder about?”

  Fred rolled his eyes because this was a conversational gambit he’d heard many times before. Pineapple wondered about many different things, you never knew what large and unanswerable conundrum might next flit across his mind. Indulgently, Fred said, “No, Piney, what do you sometimes wonder about?”

  “I sometimes wonder what percentage of people live in houses.”

  Fred had no idea but he liked to sound authoritative. “Big percentage. Maybe ninety.”

  Pineapple said, “But that’s what’s weird. We don’t know anyone who lives in a house. You and me, we live in a hot dog. Phoebe here, she lives in a truck. Ozzie and Nicky live on a boat. Guy I know out on Cow Key lives underneath an old turned-over dinghy. We don’t know anybody who lives in a house.”

  Fred belched and said, “That’s ‘cause we know a bunch of dirtbags.”

  Mildly but firmly, Piney disagreed. “No we don’t. Dirtbag is as dirtbag does. Dirtbags steal, fight, make trouble. We don’t know that many dirtbags. Okay, maybe a few. What do you think, Phoebe?”

  “Hm?”

  “Are people dirtbags just because they don’t live in houses?”

  She blinked toward the fire and looked baffled. “Sorry,” she said, “I wasn’t listening.”

  Fred said, “Not listening to Piney, that’s usually a good idea.”

  Phoebe said, “I’m sorry, just too much on my mind. Can’t sit here. Gotta go.”

  She stood abruptly and headed for the narrow break in the mangroves. Fred didn’t get her moodiness, figured it was just some kind of woman thing, but Piney understood at once.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to her retreating back. “He’ll turn up. You’ll find him. We can help, just let us know.”

  The flight to Cuba was a short and shallow one, the tiny plane never even grazing the bottoms of the clouds. Below the rattling wings, puffs of breeze were traced out on the darkly gleaming water and the wakes of boats seemed to unzip behind them as they plowed slowly through the viscous sea.

  Barely an hour from Miami, the lights of Havana first appeared as a vermilion smudge on the horizon. The glare gradually brightened, pieces of the city appeared and spun as the little plane began to bank, and in just a few minutes more the clownish pontoons had touched down and were skipping along the flat water near the dark and stagnant top of the harbor. The man in the metallic silver jacket maneuvered slowly toward an unlit dock and the plane was soon
tied up only steps away from the cabin cruiser Mariposa.

  Nicky was escorted aboard and presented to an old man with a grizzled white beard and tormented, remarkable posture. Age and arthritis seemed to be pressing down on him, urging him to slouch; at the same time, dignity and pride tugged at him like taut piano strings, demanding that he stand up straight and firm. His bearing, then, was a clenched and brittle compromise that seemed at any moment like it could snap his bones or break his ligaments. In the dim light it was impossible to determine exactly what he was wearing, though it appeared to be a faded uniform from some long ago defeated army. The old man’s black eyes drooped slightly and darted here and there with the quick movements of the zealot or the paranoiac. For a moment he just stared appraisingly at Nicky. There was no handshake, no exchange of names or greetings. Finally he said in a raspy voice heavily tinged with a Spanish accent, “I thought they’d send someone more impressive.”

  If Nicky minded the insult, he didn’t let it show. “Well,” he said, “they sent me.”

  “You’ve made this run before?”

  “This run?”

  At that the old man’s face went sour and fretful. He’d spent years planning and plotting and bribing and killing to obtain a certain document. Now he was on the brink of fulfilling his life’s obsession–to get the paper safely out of Cuba and into the hands of his last remaining relative, his nephew, his heir. At this crucial juncture, they had sent him an incompetent, a man without experience? “Havana–Key West,” said the old man. “You’ve traveled the route before?”

  “No.”

  “But you do know how to run a boat? Read a chart? Use GPS?”

  A kind of bland and surly defiance had settled over Nicky. He didn’t like the old man’s patronizing tone, plus it struck him as pretty late in the game for an interview about his qualifications. He said, “Look, I’ve been hired to do a job. The job’ll get done. Just point me where I’m going and I’ll go.”

  The feisty tone if not the words themselves seemed to reassure the old man. He harrumphed a couple times, drummed his fingers on the splintery veneers of a navigation table, and reached into a drawer that held a sheaf of papers. “Alright,” he said. “Alright. Here’s your registration. The boat’s flagged in the Bahamas. At least this piece of paper says it is. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting out of Havana. People have been paid off. Any questions so far?”

  Nicky in fact had a number of questions, though none that he could ask. The first question was why the hell was he doing this in the first place? He knew, he knew: he was doing it to save Phoebe’s truck. But why? Was he head over heels in love with Phoebe, or was this just some lunatic spasm of self-sacrifice and gallantry, trying to prove to himself that he was a good guy, after all? Next question: If things went wrong, as he didn’t doubt they would, how wrong would they go? Prison, probably. If he went to prison, what would Phoebe think? Would she visit? Bring him Sno-Cones? Be there when he got out?

  The old man was saying, “And here’s your GPS. You get out past El Morro, punch in the waypoint for Sand Key Light. That’s it. Get across the Gulf Stream, cruise a couple more hours, you’ll see the rendezvous boats a few hundred yards outside the reef.”

  Which was true, except that in the carefully laid plan of the Benavides, uncle and nephew, the rendezvous would be with Customs boats, not fishing skiffs.

  He went on, “You’ll transfer the cigars, they’ll guide you into Key West.”

  True again, though the guiding would be in handcuffs.

  The old man turned his back on Nicky. Then, suddenly almost solicitous, as if being tweaked by some small remaining shred of conscience, he added, “I trust you’re being fairly paid?”

  “More than fairly,” Nicky said, and almost managed a facetious smile. “The whole arrangement’s more than fair.”

  The old man seemed happy to hear it. “Good,” he said, and, belatedly, he finally reached out for a handshake. His ancient arm did not move forward smoothly, but rather in discrete small jerks as the sinews of his shoulder clicked and grated. “Good luck, then,” he said. “I wish you calm seas.”

  23.

  When the call came in, Teddy Meara was watching porn in the crummy room he rented on Truman Avenue. The video was just getting to a really good part and he was somewhat distracted when he picked up the phone. It took him a moment to realize it was Benavides on the line.

  “Jefe!” he said, a little off the beat and with a chorus of muffled grunts and slaps and screeches in the background.

  “What the hell’s going on there?” asked the Cuban boss.

  “Nothing, nothing,” Meara said, as he fumbled for the remote and paused the video, leaving several porn stars suspended in improbable positions and with rather tortured and preposterous looks on their faces. “What’s up, Jefe?”

  Benavides winced at the irritating word but reminded himself that he was almost finished with Teddy Meara, he wouldn’t have to listen to his stupid voice much longer. He said, “Good news, Teddy. Everything’s arranged. I’m sending you your boat.”

  The message didn’t seem to register at first.

  Meara had waited months to hear it, but now that the words had finally been uttered, he felt suddenly confused, flustered, frightened, overwhelmed. He thought about the sleepy Customs base where, shift after shift, week after week, he’d basically been bored to death. He pictured the two snug notches of the impound bays. They’d been empty for as long as Meara had worked at Customs; they’d held nothing but innocent water. Soon one of those bays would be glutted with a captured smuggling boat and it would be Meara’s job to sneak aboard all by himself, armed only with a tiny chisel and a complicated key, to extract some unknown treasure from a hidden safe, then to slip undetected off the boat and to exit suavely from the base with said treasure hanging down his pants leg.

  The job had seemed so simple up until that very moment—the moment when he finally understood that he would have to step up, perform, and earn his pay. Now, when it was far too late to walk away, he saw that this was a caper that called for grace, poise, nonchalance, and he realized with humiliation and secret terror that he was totally the wrong guy for the task. Faced with the difficulty of it, he suddenly saw himself with awful clarity for what he was, a small-timer, an odd-jobs kind of guy. He should be stripping cars somewhere, not trying this razzle-dazzle James Bond shit. For a long moment he wrestled with his cowardice and shame and could not speak.

  Finally, Benavides said, “Teddy? Teddy, you there?”

  “Yes, Jefe, I’m here.”

  “Okay. Should be late tonight. Two or three a.m., I’d guess. Probably best if you do your part before dawn tomorrow.”

  Numbly, Meara echoed, “Okay. Dawn tomorrow.”

  “I’ll see you in Miami. At the restaurant.”

  “Okay. At the restaurant.”

  “Oh, and Teddy, one more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t watch too much porn tonight. Get some sleep.”

  Phoebe’s clunker of a bicycle rattled over roots and coral nubs as she rode away from the mangrove clearing toward the ocean promenade. Her concern about Nicky’s disappearance had hour by hour been festering toward panic, and now that it was night and there was still no word of him, her nerves were shredded as she pedaled hard toward town. The speed of her ride whipped up a soft moist breeze that tickled her scalp through her short magenta hair but she was too preoccupied to take any pleasure from it. She was on a mission to find the old man, Bert, the person who’d inflicted Charlie Ponte on her little group of friends.

  She looked for him at the Clove Hitch. If she’d known his rather brittle habits better, she needn’t have wasted her time. It was the hour when he frequented the Eclipse. That’s where she found him, sitting alone at the upholstered bar in a shirt with a printed pattern of martini glasses on it, nursing a cocktail, cradling his small dog in his lap. He turned as she walked in and smiled as she headed toward him. “Phoebe,” he said. �
��Can I buy you a drink?”

  She didn’t want a drink and she didn’t smile back. Her skin was flushed with exertion and there was an angry set to her jaw. Below her tattooed wrists her hands kept curling and uncurling. Bert said, “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  All she could manage to say at that moment was, “That Charlie guy. Your buddy Charlie.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s Mafia, isn’t he?”

  “Sorry, that’s not something you can ask me.”

  “Well, he came back. To Nicky’s. Now Nicky’s gone. Just like that. I don’t know where he is.”

  This was a lot for the old man to process all at once. He said, “Phoebe, okay, slow down a minute.”

  She didn’t slow down. She couldn’t. Her voice was full of blame when she blurted out, “Why did you do this, Bert? Why did you introduce them? Why did you let this happen?”

  The old man could have gotten defensive then but he didn’t. He felt sorry. He felt abashed. But mainly he felt confused. He didn’t know exactly what he’d done that was wrong but he was ready to accept that he shouldn’t have done it. At his age he wasn’t always clear what he was doing or what the consequences were. His intentions were good but what the hell did that matter? He said, “Phoebe, please, help me understand what’s going on here. I meant no harm, I swear to God. Tell me about it a little slower and I’ll try to make it right.”

  Gradually calming, Phoebe explained the situation as clearly as she could.

  Bert listened intently then said, “That son of a bitch. I told him not to get Nicky involved.”

  “Involved in what?”

  Embarrassed and still a bit muddled, Bert stroked his dog and looked down at the bar. “I don’t exactly know.”

  Phoebe drew a deep breath and let it out very slowly. “You told your buddy not to get Nicky involved in something, but you don’t know what the something is?”