Laurence Shames - Florida straits

"At the other extreme," Zack continued, "we get a few very rich people down here. New Yorkers. Bostonians. People who own large pieces of downtown Toronto. They've already done St. Barth's, Mustique bores them, now they're slumming closer to home. They wear pastels. They weigh, on average, sixty pounds less than the poor people. The women are flat-chested, the men have no behinds, but they look good in their clothes. These are not our customers either. The rich are squeamish about time-sharing. It nauseates them to think, the week before, someone with less money was sitting on their toilet.

"No," said Zack, standing up next to the Parrot Beach model and gazing down like a god at a fresh- imagined world, "our buyer is somewhere in between. We want the guy who's like fifty-five, on his second or third wife. He's a dry cleaner, a sales manager, he's making like sixty, seventy grand, and he thinks he's upper crust because he has expensive golf clubs and a Ralph Lauren shirt. He acts like he doesn't give a shit about the gifts you get for taking the tour, but if you look closely, you can see him toting it up: meal voucher, forty dollars; passes to the Treasure Museum-"

"Treasure Museum?" Joey cut in.

"Yeah, the Clem Sanders Treasure Museum. Clem's a salvor. Fucking rich by now-he's one of the partners in the property. Anyway, the passes are worth twelve bucks, so that makes fifty-two. Tour takes two hours, that works out to twenty-six bucks an hour: Is my time worth more or less than twenty-six bucks an hour? That's our boy, Joey. He's got some money in the bank, he'll go the extra twenty dollars a week to rent a T-Bird instead of a compact, but he can't stop wondering if his life is worth twenty-six bucks an hour. You get it?"

Joey sat there. He was dazed. He wasn't sure if he got it or not. It seemed to him that only when he entered the Parrot Beach office had he truly left Queens. Before that, he was carrying his neighborhood around with him, as if he had taken the little stash of things he knew about and packed it in the car along with his black loafers and alpaca cardigans. Now all of a sudden he'd been plunked down in a vast new borough, the neighborhood of American salesmanship. It was a different place.

"So you gonna, like, try me out?" The question was a little weak, almost as if Joey was hoping Zack would say no.

"No tryout, Joey. You want the job, you got the job. Around here it's sink or swim. You fuck up, we won't have to fire you. You'll make no money, feel like a horse's ass, get disgusted with the whole thing, and stop showing up. Here." Zack bent down, opened a desk drawer, and threw a pink shirt at Joey. "This is what you wear."

He caught the shirt by reflex, but then looked down at it as though it were a thing unclean. It was the color of cotton candy and had the same ribbed cuffs that looked so annoyingly perfect on Zack Davidson's well-tanned and lightly freckled arms. "Shit," he said, "I gotta dress up like some wimpy-looking prissy-ass WASP?" Then it occurred to him that maybe he'd gotten a little too personal. "No offense."

"What offense?" said Zack, resuming his chair and leaning it back on its hind legs. "You think I'm a WASP? That's a crack-up. I'm a Jew, man, Litvak trash from Newark, New Jersey, the lowest of the low. They fucked our name up at Ellis Island. Should've been Davidovich, something like that. But Joey, remember. Social class. Appearances. Reading people. Study up, my friend. It's gonna be the key to your success in this business."

Getting Sal Giordano on the telephone was not a simple process. He was paranoid about wiretaps and refused to have a phone at his apartment. You could leave a coded message for him at Perretti's luncheonette on Astoria Boulevard, and if you got lucky he might even be there when you called. But he wouldn't actually talk on the old rotary pay phone in the green- painted alcove at the end of Perretti's counter, because that phone could be tapped as well. The most Sal would do was say hello, give a few one-word answers, and arrange a conversation on a different phone. To be safe, however, this other phone had to be away from the immediate neighborhood and couldn't be used too often. This meant there had to be several choices. So Sal had to figure out which phone he wanted to use that day, how long it would take him to reach it, given traffic and weather, and then hope the box hadn't been vandalized by the time he got there. Crime paid, but convenient it was not.

On an afternoon toward the middle of February, after trying morning and evening, from home and from downtown, for several days, Joey finally managed to connect with his old friend. "Sal!"

"Joey!" said the gruff, familiar voice. "Where are you, man?"

"Key West, like I said I would be." For Sal, the question had been first and foremost a part of his routine security check on telephones, and so the next and more radical part of Joey's answer did not immediately sink in. "In a deli next to where I work. Where're you?"

"Me?" Sal said. "Inna parking lot of the Airline Diner, out near La Guardia. 'Scuse me if I gotta yell. Lotta fuckin' planes going by. Hey, wait a second. Did you say where you work?"

"You picked up on that, huh?" said Joey. "Unbefuckinglievable, huh? Yeah, I got a job."

"Doing what?" Sal yelled, above the whine of a landing jet.

"Real estate. Sort of. I stand onna corner and con people into going to look at these condos. Time-snare, they call it. Starting to make a little bit of money."

"Joey, that's great," Sal said, and though he meant it, he could not keep out of his voice some of the same doubt and sourness that had crept in when his younger pal had first said he was heading south. It had to do with watching someone you care about go someplace you know that you will never follow. "So you haven't taken over the rackets yet?"

Joey laughed into the phone. "Hey, I tried. Fact, I got some stories, Sal, you'll shit. Probably I'll try again sometime. But ya know, what I was tryin' to do, it was too much too soon. The rules down here, the traditions, everything's different. Up north the money comes outta the street, down here it comes outta the water."

"Fuck does that mean?" shouted Sal Giordano.

"That's what I gotta figure out before I try again," said Joey. "And inna meantime I'm hooking tourists for forty bucks a couple. How are things up there?"

Sal hesitated as a plane screamed past. "Up here it's like eighteen degrees, old ladies are falling down onnee ice, and I'm freezing my nuts off."

"I'm not asking for the weather report, Sal. How're things?"

Sal hesitated again, though this time there was no airplane. "Not great, Joey. It's a very tense time up here. Very tense."

"The cops?"

"Nah, not the cops. Cops are pretty much leaving us alone. It's among our own people. There's a lotta mistrust, lotta bad feeling. Some guys have been disappearing. People are talking like maybe there's gonna be war."

" 'Zis about Charlie Ponte's emeralds?"

"Fuck you know about that?" Sal asked, and even though he was talking to his adopted kid brother, the former runt who never won a fight and was never entrusted with any but the dullest and most trivial errands, such was the mood of wariness among members of the Queens and Brooklyn Mafia families that he could not quite squelch a note of suspicion. "You know more than you did when you was up here."

"I got a friend down here," Joey said. It sounded like, and was, a boast. "You remember a guy named Bert the Shirt?"

"Sure I do," said Sal, above the jet noise. "Good man. But wait, ain't he the guy that dropped dead onna courthouse steps?"

"Yup. He kicked the bucket. But they brought him back, and the Pope let him retire. People still look to him on Florida business, though."