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  But that was another thing about being on vacation— now that breakfast was over, he had no idea what his next activity should be, or what it would accomplish.

  For a moment, he stood there indecisive, slowly wobbling like a bothered compass. Finally an ancient instinct steered him toward the water and he joined the stream that brainlessly headed down Duval, vaguely aware that in so doing, he had become a part of the tourist show, a big, burly, lonely guy, still in Northern pants, his only friend a fussy and unlikely little dog.

  *

  "The beach?" Big Al Marracotta had said dismissively. "Who needs it? Sand in your crack? Riffraff all around. No place to get a cocktail. .. Come on. Right here we got the pool, the swim-up bar. Beautiful."

  Katy Sansone had pouted but decided not to argue. If she was ever going to have her way about anything, she had to pick her battles. Besides, could she explain to him how she felt about the difference between the ocean and the pool? Something vast and alive as opposed to something filtered and contained? Something full of mystery and romance compared with something tourists' children peed in? A blue and infinite horizon instead of a view of the lanai rooms behind the towel kiosk and the row of lounge chairs? She felt those things but she knew she wouldn't explain them very well, and Big Al would look at her like she was crazy.

  So she'd sighed, pulled on her thong, settled it between her buttocks, slipped into a shift, and gone down to the pool.

  Big Al at least was happy there, as usual.

  He had a boxer-style bathing suit with a mesh cup that left him room to breathe. A Knicks cap kept the sun out of his eyes. He could look at the water cascading down women's cleavages as they pulled themselves out of the pool. Katy let him rest his knuckles against her bare hip, as long as he was careful not to leave some bizarre handprint of a tan line on her butt.

  Sunshine and near-nudity. For Big Al this was heaven. He lay back on his lounge till he was good and sweaty, then waded, thigh-deep, into the pool. Tepid water. Beautiful. The sun had made him thirsty. "Cocktail?"

  Katy squinted toward him. She doubted it was noon and she didn't want a drink. Problem was, it was hard to say no without a reason, and reasons to say no got only harder to find.

  She joined him in the pool. They waded to the bar.

  Water reached her navel and Big Al Marracotta's nipples. He ordered pina coladas.

  When the drinks were made, he squinted down, pushed aside the paper umbrella, and sucked his cocktail through a straw. Then, almost boyishly, he smiled at the sweetness of it, the cloy of coconut, the slushiness of pineapple. Smiled as though he had a virgin conscience and not a problem in the world.

  *

  In fact he had at least one quite serious problem; he just didn't know it yet.

  His problem was that, at that very moment, Benny Franco, the guy he'd left in charge of the fish market in his absence, was having his rights read to him as he was bundled into a government Plymouth and carted off to the Metropolitan Correction Center.

  In New York, Benny's arrest was regarded as a slight surprise. There'd been rumors, speculation. The feds had been looking pretty closely at his pre-seafood careers in paving and trash carting. Had noted certain patterns—a consistent lack of gusto in the bidding process if Benny was involved; a tendency of determined competitors to undergo misfortune. These patterns did not place Benny in a flattering light.

  But no one had expected the indictment to come down quite so soon; and even though Benny Franco would be out on bail before the sun went down, his arrest was a nuisance. It didn't do to have a guy who'd just been indicted on racketeering charges running, even temporarily, such a visible enterprise as the wholesale fish market. The connection might lead people wrongly to imagine that their seafood was tainted by the raunchy hands of organized crime.

  This, at least, was the position taken by Carlo Ganucci, the gaunt and ancient consigliere of the Calabrese family. "Don't look right," he said to Tony Eggs Salento, the capo di tutti capi, as they sat on folding chairs in the back room of their social club on Prince Street. "Guy's name gets inna paper. Place of employment: Fulton Fish. People like put two and two together."

  "Fuck is Big Al at?" Tony Eggs demanded. He was an old-style boss, though he'd risen to the top only recently, as the flashy, newer-style bosses became celebrities and, one by one, were put away forever. Tony Eggs knew enough to stay in the background. He didn't go to nightclubs and wasn't photogenic. He wore undistinguished suits and plain white shirts and let hair grow out of his ears and nose. He was so somber and so glum that nobody was jealous of his power. He was known for being starkly fair and unforgiving, and he had a work ethic like the guy who beat the drum in Roman galleys.

  "Flahda," said the consigliere. The skin on his face was pale and paper-thin. You could see his skull move when he talked. "Took vacation."

  "Vacation," said Tony Eggs with contempt. To him there was a dark satisfaction and a grim responsibility in a mobster's work. Since when did mobsters take vacation?

  "Ya want we call 'im home? Might take a day or two to find 'im."

  Tony Eggs pulled on his face. It was a long and fleshy face and it stretched considerably as he pulled it. "Who else we got could run the show awhile?"

  Ganucci thought it over. Not that there were many people to choose from; not anymore. But it could be a headache if they put in the wrong guy, someone who was not respected.

  The boss tugged his chin, fretted with the short black hairs protruding from his nostrils, and answered his own question. "There's Nicky."

  "That's true," Ganucci said. "'Course, ya fired him before."

  "Never said he wasn't good at what he did."

  There was a pause, then the consigliere said, "Well, ya don't mind my sayin' so, I never quite understood why ya took it away from him then."

  Tony Eggs leaned far back in his chair, interwove his fingers, stretched them inside out so that the knuckles cracked. "He liked it too much. Capice?"

  Ganucci wasn't sure he did.

  "He bragged about it," the boss went on. "Strutted. Gettin' in his mind like a fuckin' movie star. When I heard he's goin' ta Gotti's tailor, I said, basta, that's it."

  Traffic noise filtered in from the street. In the front room of the club someone was shuffling cards.

  The consigliere cleared his throat. "Tony," he said. "Nicky liked the job too much before. It worry you at all that maybe he'll remember just how much he liked it?"

  The boss pulled on an earlobe.

  "Ya know," the ancient counselor went on. "Like maybe make a problem between him and Al?"

  Tony shrugged. In the shrug was the patient, durable malice that comes with disapproval. "No one put a gun to Big Al's head," he said, "and tol' 'im that he hadda take vacation."

  9

  Al Tuschman finally got into bathing trunks and sat out by the pool at Paradise. Sitting there, his dog splayed out in the shade beneath his lounge, he felt torn between looking at everything and looking at absolutely nothing.

  He could not help noticing that everyone but him was rubbing someone else. Over by the deep end of the pool, two men were taking turns rubbing sunscreen on each other's shoulders; Al scared himself by acknowledging a certain elegance in their gleaming skins and leanly muscled arms. Nearer the hot tub, a topless woman was doing something mysterious and sensual to another woman's feet; he could faintly hear the rubbed woman occasionally chanting.

  Then there was the naked threesome. Two women, one guy. Breasts everywhere; a tanned, confusing minefield of breasts. The threesome had towels draped carelessly about their loins, but face it, they were naked. They spoke a foreign language, which heightened Al Tuschman's feeling that he had somehow stumbled into one of those slow and moody European films that he never understood. Decadence: Good or bad? Seemed pretty pleasant—so why did someone always blow his brains out at the end? The threesome talked softly but with animation. They giggled a lot. Were they witty or slaphappy? Sophisticated or just plain crazy? And was Al
a bourgeois prude, or was what he was feeling a thin mask for envy, pure and simple?

  There was neither profit nor resolution to these thoughts, but at least they kept Al occupied while Chop Parilla, not fifty yards away on the far side of a frail reed fence, was hijacking the tow truck that had come to fetch his car.

  It was an impulsive maneuver, totally unplanned.

  Chop and Squid had been staked out in the shade, sitting in the Jag. Squid wore a paper hat and a white apron that looped around his neck and tied at the waist; it was the look he needed for his next assault on Big Al's sanity. While they were waiting for an opportunity to put this next phase into effect, the flatbed from Sun Motors in Miami pulled up.

  The driver—lanky, sweating, and with a shirttail out— parked next to the ravaged Lexus, then went into the hotel office.

  Chop eyed the spotless stamped aluminum of the flatbed. Then he turned to Squid, his face flushed and his voice breathy. "If he's here for the Lex, I'm stealin' it."

  Squid frowned so vigorously that the paper hat shifted behind his pointy ears. "Stealin' cars," he said, "that ain't the job."

  "Look the opportunity," Chop argued.

  Squid maintained a solid silence.

  "It ain't botherin' the job," Chop pleaded. "Take two minutes."

  Squid swallowed; his Adam's apple shuttled up and down. He said, "How long it takes, that ain't the point. It's fuckin' with my concentration. Ya wanna do somethin' right, ya do one thing at a time."

  Chop drummed on the steering wheel and sucked his teeth as he watched the driver come back from the office, a key now dangling from his hand. The driver opened the Lexus' door, quickly stepped back at the stench. He shook his head and reached in just long enough to put the car in neutral, then climbed into his truck and maneuvered it into a position from which he could winch the pillaged vehicle onto the flatbed.

  Parilla was stewing. Whose gig was this anyway, and why was he suddenly taking orders from Squid? He squirmed as the greased piston lifted and the flatbed tilted down; he plucked the damp shirt from his armpits as the driver came around from the cab and grabbed the towing cables with their awesome hooks. Finally he said, "Wit' all due respect to your fuckin' concentration, fuck you, it's meant to be, I'm goin' for it."

  Squid just rolled his bulging eyes. Chop reached across and moved his gun from the glove box to the waistband of his pants.

  He waited until the driver had laid down on the gravel to attach the cables to the Lexus, until he was helpless and in shadow.

  Then he sprang from the Jag, walking quickly but not running. He dropped to his knees next to the prone driver, down at the level of axle grease and undercoating and the smell of tires. He hid his revolver with his body as he freed it from his pants, and stuck the muzzle of it in the driver's ear.

  Softly he said, "Don't make a sound and don't move a muscle."

  The driver flinched, then went rigid as a fish beached in sunshine.

  "This is my car you're fuckin' with," Chop whispered.

  "You make mistake, I think," the driver managed. "I have order to pick up this car."

  Chop pushed the gun a little harder. "You don't understand. All cars are my cars. What's your name?"

  "Ernesto."

  "You a Teamster, Ernesto?"

  "Si."

  "Good. I get along with Teamsters." He put some fresh pressure on the muzzle and dug a knee into the small of the prone man's back. "This can be easy or this can be hard, Ernesto. How would you like it to be?"

  The driver didn't have much breath left. "Eassy," he wheezed.

  "Good man. Tell ya what. I'm gonna give you three hundred dollars and hurt you just enough to make you a fuckin' hero. That okay with you, Ernesto?"

  "Hokay."

  "Now be a pro. Jack the fuckin' car up and let's get onna road."

  Squid Berman watched them pull away. Chop was good, he had to admit it. The gun never showed. Anybody passing would have figured he was down there helping. The whole move was crisp, efficient, practiced. Now Chop would call his boys in Hialeah for a pickup. The flatbed would drive down some deserted road. Chop would give the driver his cash, a black eye, and a shallow slice that would hardly need stitches. Neat.

  Neat but conventional, thought Squid, pulling on his knuckles, straightening his apron. A formula. The work of a craftsman, not an artist. He resettled his paper hat behind his ears and refocused his attention on the entrance of Paradise.

  What he himself was doing with this caper was on a whole different level, of course. The level of real invention, true improvisation. It was jazz to other guys' whistling. Did Chop realize that? he wondered. Did anybody?

  *

  By the time the afternoon shadows overtook the Conch House pool, Big Al Marracotta had had four pina coladas, and was in the grip of a salacious mix of wooziness and lust. His shoulders were sunburned, and he liked the heat. The cup of his bathing suit was damp, and he liked the cool. He liked the thighs of other men's wives and girlfriends as they scissored and lifted on their lounges, he liked the bare nearness of Katy's pinkened behind, and he was ready to go upstairs awhile.

  Up in their suite, before he'd even got out of his wet trunks, he went straight to his satchel of tapes. He riffled through the black plastic boxes, lips pursed as he considered. Discipline? Chinese? Finally he said to Katy, "Feel a little . . . futuristic?"

  She looked at him a moment before she answered. Drained and mellowed by the sun, she made an effort to think kindly of him, and gently of herself for falling in with him. She tried to remember his good points. That twinkle in the eye. A certain generosity that every now and then seemed separate from strutting or control. An unflagging and unthinking zest that amused her and that she envied. Who wouldn't? She managed a somewhat weary smile and went off to the bathroom.

  She returned looking like a sunburned outtake from Barbarella. Reinforced conic bra in space-age silver. Strapped and shiny panties that suggested something gladiatorial. Arm-cinching bracelets from which dangled disks resembling electrodes.

  "You are something else," Big Al said, flicking his tongue between the gap in his front teeth.

  The movie was called Sex Trek. Its premise was that the future would be a very phallic era, and that technological advances would largely focus on bold new designs in marital aids.

  Leaning back on stacked-up pillows, his hand on Katy's thigh and his eyes glued to the screen, Big Al Marracotta said, "Jesus, will ya look at that? Solar-powered. Gets 'er everywhere at once!"

  Katy looked from the TV to the stymied golden light captured in the curtained window, and wondered if they'd finish up in time to see the sunset.

  10

  Dusk. Al Tuschman stood in the outdoor shower, which was framed in thatch and ended at his knees. He soaped his armpits, watched sudsy water slide off the slatted boards beneath his feet. The light was soft and violet; the air was the same temperature as his skin and smelled of fruits and flowers.

  Al shampooed his coarse, curly hair and finally let his mind acknowledge what his body already knew: Key West was getting to him. All that bare skin. All that rubbing. All those pretty sunburned necks and unfettered pendant breasts with tan lines halfway down them. The lack of hurry. The lack of purpose, except for the staunchly unembarrassed purpose of feeling good. Happiness as mission. All this had been sexing him up from the moment he arrived.

  Now he no longer had excuses for failing to get out there and do something about it. He had his bearings. He was rested. This was the evening he would do the bars and try to meet a woman.

  He rinsed, turned off the shower, and stepped into the bathroom, where he dried himself and shaved. Shaving, he appraised his face. The pits and bumps of adolescent acne; the scattered crescent scars of energetic youth. The very first gray hairs just now sprouting at the temples. A face that had seen some life, that had some life to offer in return. It worked for him on the sales floor.

  But in bars? In bars the salesman tended to get shy. Flinched somet
imes at soulful stares. Needed help to jump-start conversations. Sometimes drank too much to loosen up, then got morose instead of suave. Or, very occasionally, suave till he couldn't stand himself. Still, a person had to try. . . .

  He dressed. Pulled on snug pants that showed the contours of his athlete's legs while revealing nothing of the aches and creaks. A tight blue shirt, the creases where it had been folded soon stretched and steamed away by the bulk of his chest. Chain; rings; loafers. A last tousle of his hair, and he was ready. He put Fifi's leash on, waved to annoy the dozing desk clerk as he passed the office, and headed out to start the evening with some solid food.

  Squid Berman, still, with obsessive patience, waiting in the Jag, watched him head off down Elizabeth Street, teased himself with the danger implicit in the tough guy's wide shoulders and his rolling gait. He sat tight until he saw Big Al round the corner.

  Then, opening a cooler in the backseat, he grabbed a shopping bag, smoothed his apron and straightened out his paper hat, and walked through the gate of Paradise as if he owned the place.

  He went into the office and told the clerk he had a delivery for the gentleman who just went out.

  The clerk blinked himself out of his catnap, studs quivering on his eyebrow. "I'll hold it for him here."

  "He asked me special to leave it by his door," said Squid.

  "That really isn't necessary."

  "It is."

  "Is what?"

  "Necessary."

  There was a momentary standoff.

  "What I'm delivering," Squid resumed, "it needs, very important, it needs, uh, moonlight."

  "Moonlight?"

  "Orchid. Very rare. Expensive. Real expensive. Needs moonlight or it dies. In minutes. Said I should leave it in the moonlight by his door."

  The clerk furrowed his brow. The wrinkles went all up his shaved head.

  "So please," Squid said, "point me to the room. You wanna be responsible it dies? Come on, it's too long in the bag already."

  The clerk frowned at the bag, which, oddly, made a sudden paper sound, a scratch. He wondered why it was always the least classy guests who made the most trouble, then sighed and did as he was asked.