Tropical Depression Read online

  "Just that," the Indian tried again, "I'm not used to—"

  He stalled, he spluttered, and suddenly Murray understood.

  "Ah, I get it," the Bra King said. "You'd feel more comfortable if I was being a selfish prick. Right?"

  "I'd know more where I stood," admitted Tommy.

  Murray pulled himself out of his seat, did a bear-like little dance along the tilted deck. "Well, I am. Okay? I'm doing this for me. But it's not about money, Tommy. Thank God, money I don't need. I need a project. The truth? I'm bored outa my mind down here, I'm going off my gourd."

  Tommy said, "I've noticed."

  Murray started snapping his fingers. "I'm used to action. Deals. Phones ringing. Guys saying it's life or death, they have to talk to me."

  "So that's what you want," said Tommy, "have a vacation then go back up north."

  Murray pictured snow shovels, his second wife. "Did I say that's what I want? I said that's what I'm used to. I'm not going back."

  Frigate birds wheeled overhead, a cruise ship bellowed as it entered the harbor.

  Murray sat back down, resumed. "Listen, I have an idea. Whaddya say I ask some questions, look into getting you recognized? It seems too involved, we drop it. It seems doable, you let me help."

  "Who you gonna ask?" said Tommy.

  The question took Murray by surprise. He was winging it, hadn't got that far in his manic scheming. He said the first thing that occurred to him. "LaRue, I guess."

  "LaRue? He's the last person—"

  "Who else do I know in politics?" said the Bra King. "Look, it's just a few questions. Rules. Procedures."

  "I fucking hate LaRue."

  "I've picked up on that," said Murray. "You don't have to talk to him. I will. I won't even say it's about you."

  The Indian frowned down at stale water dotted with beer cans and slicks of rotting weed. "I got a bad feeling about this," he said.

  "I got a terrific feeling about it," said the Bra King. "Look, lemme talk to him, that'll be my project. You're worried about me horning in? Don't worry, here's the deal: I try to get you recognized. It happens, that's it, I back off, my part's over, you do what you want. Deal?"

  The Indian crossed his arms, looked out across the harbor that was swollen with currents, seamed with wakes. A flight of ibis flapped by, he watched their gawky progress. When he turned toward Murray his face was settled, composed, and deeply solemn. "No deal," he said. "I get recognized, we're partners. All the way."

  "I'm not asking for—"

  "Shut up just one second, Murray. Partners. Yes or no?"

  12

  "This is in reference to a Native American?" said Barney LaRue.

  It was four p.m. They were talking in the old cypress house on Eaton Street where the senator kept an office. Golden light slanted in through French doors that backed onto the garden, it gave a sacramental aspect to the table on which LaRue lay naked save for a small towel draped across his oiled buttocks. Pascal was giving him a massage.

  "An Indian, right," said Murray. "Native American, whatever." He sat on the edge of a vinyl chair, hands dangling between his knees. He was a little nervous. He didn't know from politics and he was unaccustomed to negotiating with naked men.

  "This Indian," said the senator. "What's his name?"

  Murray cleared his throat. "I'd rather not say for now."

  The politician just slightly raised his head of lavish silver hair. The sheen on his skin revealed to Murray a pale thin scar between his jawbone and his ears, the place where flesh had been snipped, pulled taut, and sutured back together. "Why the hell not?"

  Murray fidgeted. He couldn't very well say Because he hates your fucking guts. Instead, he said, "He's private, shy. And if nothing comes of this, he'd rather have it be like nothing ever happened."

  "Nothing comes of what?" said LaRue impatiently. "What's the story on this bashful Indian?"

  Pascal pummeled the senator's back, a hollow oomphing sound squeezed forth from his chest.

  "He's the last surviving member of his tribe," the Bra King said.

  The senator winced as the masseur's thumb all but disappeared between his glistening shoulder blades. "Not quite so deep there, Pascal." Turning his attention back to Murray, he said, "You know, about as many people claim to be the last member of their tribe as claim to be descended from the Romanovs. It's this odd prestige in having all your relatives be dead."

  "I think this guy's for real," said Murray.

  LaRue didn't answer for a moment, just let himself be knuckled. Murray looked at Pascal. Pascal had thick black eyebrows and blond hair with dark roots. He worked in a tiny undershirt that showed most of his lean smooth chest. Something was shining on his left nipple, and after a moment Murray realized it was a silver stud in the shape of a dog bone.

  "So say he is," the politician said at last. "What's he want from the government? Freeze his sperm? Name a rest area after him?"

  "He says there's a tribal island—"

  "Aha!" said the senator, lifting up just slightly on an oiled elbow. "Let me guess. Miami Beach? Key Largo, maybe?"

  "Nah," said Murray. "Nothing like that. A tiny little island, four, five miles off the highway, no one lives there, nothing's on it."

  Pascal pressed an elbow into his patron's lower spine. A coo of tormented pleasure escaped the senator's well-formed lips. "And the Indian has decided this island should be his."

  Murray nodded.

  "How old's this individual?"

  Murray shrugged. "Forty-four, forty-six."

  "Forty-six. And one morning he wakes up to the sacredness of tribal heritage and real estate."

  "He's always known the situation with the tribe," said Murray. "He hasn't done anything about it 'cause, no offense, he thinks the government would screw 'im."

  LaRue squirmed beneath his slipping towel, could not suppress a fleeting smile. "Of course the government would screw him. The government would have to screw him. Case like this succeeds, it spawns a dozen more. Tax rolls shrink. Businesses complain. Country can't afford to keep handing out these private franchi—"

  He broke off mid-word, his brain having caught up with his mouth and discovered an idea suddenly shining bright as a dime in the street. For a moment he lay still, letting the notion ripen until it twinged his loins, then he shoved Pascal aside with a fist to his unyielding stomach, and, with surprising grace and quickness, spun to a sitting position on the table, deftly rearranging his towel so that Murray saw no more than a coy flash of silver pubic hair. "And you're this Indian's attorney?"

  "Me?" said Murray. "No. I was in the garment industry, remember?"

  "Of course," said LaRue, though he hadn't remembered. All he remembered about Murray was that he was a lousy poker player who couldn't hold his liquor and couldn't keep his mouth shut. A harmless buffoon. A pushover. "But he has a lawyer," the politician gently probed. "Advisers."

  The Bra King sat there in the other man's office, surrounded by diplomas and certificates and photos of the powerful. He suddenly felt uneasy, exposed, as if by some macabre transference he'd become the naked one. He cleared his throat, said softly, "Just me. For now at least."

  "I see. And if he's recognized, and gets this island, what's he want to do with it?"

  Murray squirmed, his rear end made an inelegant sound against the vinyl seat. "I'd rather not say for now."

  That was answer enough for Barney LaRue. He nodded solemnly, squelched a grin and put on a most compassionate expression. He leaned slightly forward, gleamed like a big basted bird in the softening light. Murray could not help noticing a subtle surge of pink along his neck, a tawny flush where the jaw met the ear. "Florida's Indians," the senator intoned. "Grave historic wrongs to be corrected. What can I do to help?"

  *****

  As soon as Murray was out the door, Barney LaRue cinched his towel around his waist, went to his desk and dialed the number of a waterside restaurant in Coconut Grove.

  "Hello, Martinelli's," sai
d an unctuous voice on the other end of the line.

  "Do you have stringozzi?" asked LaRue.

  "No, sir. No stringozzi."

  "Then let me have the shark."

  "How you like it, sir?"

  "In a suit. A sharkskin suit."

  "Hold on a minute, I'll put you through."

  The line went silent. LaRue drummed manicured fingers against his blotter, looked past the French doors to the jasmine and hibiscus in the garden.

  Finally a gruff voice said, "Yeah?"

  "Charlie? Barney. These passwords, Charlie, they're asinine."

  "Maybe I should start wit' a prayer and a pledge allegiance," said the mobster. He swivelled in the enormous chair that dominated his office-fortress at the back of Martinelli's, looked through narrow windows of bulletproof glass at the smeared red and green channel markers of the Intracoastal. "Whaddaya want?"

  "You always assume I want something," said the senator.

  "You always do," said Ponte.

  "Actually, I'm calling to make you rich."

  "I'm rich already. Course, I'm a little less rich from dealing with certain deadbeat politicians."

  "I'm gonna make that up to you, Charlie. More than make it up."

  "I'm listening."

  LaRue paused, let his oiled back slide deliciously against the leather of his chair. "I think maybe first we should talk about price."

  "Price?!" The single percussive syllable came popping through the phone. "You have the fucking balls—"

  "No scenes, Charlie," LaRue interrupted. "No tears. What I'm offering, it's the bargain of the ages."

  The mobster tapped a hard shoe against the floor, felt a tightness in his throat.

  "All I want," the senator resumed, "is, oh, say fifty thousand if you're interested, another two hundred when the deal is done, and let's say five percent of everything when you open your casino."

  "Casino?" Ponte said. He said it softly, wistfully, the word hung in the air like a whore's perfume on a muggy night. "Bahney, ya told me just the other day—"

  "Forget what I told you the other day. And forget about the gambling bill. You know what would happen if the legislature passed that bill? Caesar's, Harrah's, all the big boys—"

  "I'd hold my own with them."

  "I'm sure you would," purred LaRue. "But who needs the competition? What I'm offering now is ten times better."

  Ponte said, "So offer it."

  LaRue leaned back, watched purple shadows swallow up his garden. "What if I told you there was a tribe of Indians—"

  "We been through this bullshit wit' the Indians," Ponte cut him off. "The Seminoles, the Miccosukkees, they got their deals in place."

  "A tribe of Indians," LaRue went calmly on, "a new tribe of Indians, that needed your expertise, and yours alone, to open a casino a short boat ride from Key West. You grasp the possibilities of that, my friend?"

  In his office scented with seafood and garlic, Charlie Ponte indulged himself in a secret and tentative smile. He grasped the possibilities. Craps tables, slots, cocktail waitresses in fishnet stockings. A take in the tens of millions, easy. A big hotel, of course. Call girls. A lending service for the compulsives. "So what's the story on this tribe?"

  "Well," said LaRue, "officially speaking, it's not a tribe just yet."

  Ponte stashed the smile. "So you're jerkin' me around like usual."

  "The tribe is just now seeking recognition. A representative was just here, Charlie, to ask my help. It's very much in your interest that I give it. That's why you're going to front me fifty thousand dollars."

  "Pigs get fed," said Ponte. "Hogs get slaughtered."

  LaRue ignored the bromide. "You see," he said, "if the state opposes the petition, it can be tied up in the courts for years, forever. If I can persuade my colleagues to let it pass, you could have your tribe in a month or two. I'll personally deliver it."

  The mobster ran his tongue along his gums, sucked his pointy teeth. "And how many more assholes I gotta buy off then?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "How many fuckin' Indians to split the pie? What about lawyers? Consultants? Other backers? Tell me what I'm walkin' into here."

  The senator paused, purred, caressed his own smooth anointed chest. "Charlie," he said, "here's what I believe you people call the beauty part. The tribe, Charlie? It's exactly one guy."

  Ponte swivelled, squinted at the Intracoastal lights. He wanted badly to believe he'd heard right. "One little Indian?" he whispered.

  "One little Indian," confirmed LaRue. "With one little Jew running interference for him. No lawyers, Charlie. No other backers. Just this one pushover lunatic who doesn't know jack shit about politics or gambling or any other goddam thing, as far as I can tell."

  Ponte flushed with happiness, sweated at the hairline, spun in his chair until he was tangled in the phone cord. "One little Indian," he murmured. "One little Jew." Then a sobering thought occurred to him. "Bahney, this Indian, he trust you any more than the Indian wit' the seashells?"

  "This Indian doesn't have to trust me. This Indian needs me."

  "Poor bastard," Ponte said.

  LaRue chuckled. Then something occurred to him. Key West was not exactly awash in Indians. "Be funny if it was the same damn Redskin."

  "Not so funny if he's stubborn as you say and you can't persuade his ass."

  "On this he'll persuade himself," said the senator with smiling confidence. "So we do business, Charlie? I get my fifty thousand?"

  "One little Indian," Ponte said again. "Jesus, Bahney, either you're fuckin' me big time or you're almost makin' this too easy."

  TWO

  13

  Some weeks later, at the beginning of February, Murray and Tommy, counterbalanced by a very large and enthusiastic woman from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, were bouncing along on the low gunwale of a very old skiff as it plied the shallow waters between Key West and the ancestral Matalatchee homeland, a place denoted on modern charts as nothing more than a nameless smear ringed by the tiny dots that indicated mangroves, but known to Tommy as Kilicumba, "the dry place in the wet."

  The craft was piloted by an old acquaintance of Tommy's, an ageless, grizzled Cuban sponger and fisherman named Flaco, who carried in his head a full-color chart of the shoals and channels of the backcountry and who saw in the water things that no one else saw. Flaco didn't like to share his knowledge, which was, after all, his livelihood. This disinclination had given him a long-standing habit of silence, a way of peering narrow-eyed at the horizon as though there were nothing in the world to say.

  But that didn't stop Murray from talking.

  He looked around the woman from Washington, through the pellucid emerald water to the sandy bottom dotted here and there with tufts of turtle grass, and he said above the whine of the outboard, "Beautiful, beautiful. Water's so clear, you'd think it's a foot deep."

  "It is a foot deep," Tommy said.

  "Beefteen eenches," Flaco muttered grudgingly. He stared at the horizon, sinewy strands of flesh hanging from his unshaved chin.

  Murray stared too, saw golden flats where egrets stood, azure fingers of deeper water where tides had scoured away the sand. In the distance, low and featureless mangrove islands seemed to float above the surface, to hover atop a silver vacancy as though nested in metallic wool. Murray saw those islands plain enough, but the island that he pictured was one that wasn't there. Tommy's island, he felt somehow sure, would be very different, would gleam with sugar-white beaches, undulate with arching palms. Freshets of cool water would come cascading over shining rocks, ripe mangoes and papayas would fall from shading trees onto soil so luxuriant that it would not bruise the fruit.

  "Lotta bugs in the mangroves," Tommy said to the woman from Indian Affairs. "Good thing you're dressed for it."

  Her name was Estelle Grau, and in fact all she needed was a neckerchief to be dressed like a perfect scoutmaster. She wore crisp creased khaki pants and matching long-sleeve shirt, orange boots la
ced up above the ankles, and a pith helmet with a chin strap. On her knee was a waterproof clipboard, and around her neck a Leica camera. "Field work," she said, in a happy husky voice. "It's what I like. Mosquitoes, I imagine."

  "Mosquitoes mostly," Tommy said. "Six, eight kinds. Spiders, land and water. Scorpions, of course. Ants—red, green, black. Sometimes hornets, not always. A pretty iridescent fly the Indians call wakita malti."

  "What a lovely name," said Estelle. "What's it mean?"

  "Scratch till you bleed."

  Murray looked down at his bare arms, at the hem of his Bermuda shorts halfway down his tender thighs, at his insteps pink and naked in his boat shoes. He noticed quite suddenly that even Tommy and Flaco were covered up.

  "Snakes?" asked the woman down from Washington, in the calm tone of the naturalist.

  "Some swimming rattlers," Tommy said. "A few coral snakes and cottonmouths. But not many. The alligators eat the rats, don't leave 'em much to feed on."

  "Alligators?" Murray said. His tone was not that of the naturalist.

  "Small ones," said the Indian. "Four, five feet. They don't bother you unless you step in a gator hole."

  Murray smiled, nodded.

  " 'Course," continued Tommy, "gator holes are pretty hard to see. Small, ya know, just like little puddles. Lotta times, leaves are floatin' on 'em, they look just like the ground. Hard to get your leg back sometimes."

  Murray looked at his legs, imagined himself with only one. Morbidly, he turned the thought into an ad idea: Pegleg Pete, in which the lame but virile Bra King would command a galleonful of buxom pirates in lingerie ...

  In the meantime, the little boat droned on, scudding through the muddy spots left by fleeing stingrays, past the channel-edges where patient barracuda waited motionless, invisible to everyone but Flaco.

  At length they neared an island that was slightly larger than some they had passed, a shade taller than most perhaps, but basically looked like all the others. Tangled mangroves waded out along an indistinct shoreline. Cormorants perched on low branches and spread their pterodactyl wings to dry. There were no palms, no beach, no hint of fresh water; no crests of land poked out above the mat of shrubbery, and the closest thing to a harbor was a vague cove where current had made a dent in the vegetation.