Laurence Shames - Florida straits

"No?" said Steve. He lifted an eyebrow toward their bungalow, and in that instant the house appeared not just small but miniature, a scale model of a place where people could maybe make a life. "Joey, every time I turn around, you got more people crammed in there."

"We do?"

Steve just dragged on his cigarette and blew smoke out his nose. "Come on, Joey, let's be fair."

"Fair," said Joey. "O.K." He straightened up, then sucked in a deep breath scented with jasmine and chlorine. He reached for Sandra, touched her arm to stop the electricity from oozing out his fingertips, and walked with her between the pool and the hot tub, Tony and Bruno following behind. Palm fronds scratched lightly overhead, the high sun slashed through in punishing slices. Joey's stomach didn't feel right, it felt like stale but icy air was swirling around inside it.

The sliding door to their bungalow was open wide, and through it came a sort of cool dim humming threat, a threat like that of a too quiet jungle. Joey swept off his sunglasses as he crossed the threshold. There were more people than he expected, more faces than he could process at once.

Charlie Ponte's Miami thugs and divers were glutting up the living room. Thick thighs were thrown over the arms of chairs, big white shirts with dark stains in the armpits were arrayed next to wet suits against the walls. There was a stink of clashing after-shaves and dry-cleaning fluid being sweated out of fabric too long in contact with damp skin. The thugs regarded Joey with an indifference more wilting than active menace.

In the Florida room, the louvered windows were still cranked shut, and a furtive, illicit twilight was being enforced against the day. Charlie Ponte, his silver jacket splotched with moisture, his hair restored to its usual neatness, was perched in the wicker seat where Sandra had been tied. Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia, dressed for the occasion in nubbly black linen, a burgundy monogram on his breast pocket, rested on the settee, his chihuahua serene yet vigilant in his lap.

Next to him sat Gino Delgatto, nervously crossing and uncrossing his legs. Joey's half brother did not look healthy. His skin was yellowish and he hadn't dropped the weight he'd put on while holed up at the Flagler House. His eyes were gradually disappearing under pads of excess skin, his fatty chin had lost the squareness that brought him to the brink of being handsome.

You had to look beneath the fat to see how he resembled his and Joey's father.

Vincente Delgatto was sitting with a perfect stillness that was the emblem of his dignity and his authority. He was lean, dry, with a long crescent face and a crinkled stringy neck that no longer filled his stiff collar. He wasn't dressed for Florida. He wore a gray pinstripe suit and a red silk tie with a massive double Windsor knot. He had a broad straight nose that came down directly from his forehead, and his teeth were long and veined with brown, stained by half a century of cigars, espresso, and red wine.

Joey stared at him through the strange striped dimness cast by the louvered windows. His legs felt disconnected from him, he wondered if his brain had come unmoored from getting hit too many times then being cast out in the throbbing sun. He didn't quite recognize his own voice. "Pop?"

Bert the Shirt, a man who had been dead, seemed to recognize the moment after which a person could not be pulled back from oblivion, helplessness, or paralyzing confusion. "I called him, Joey," he blurted. "Last night."

"The fucking old lady," Charlie Ponte grumbled. "He's always in my face down heah, always stickin' his nose in."

"What could I tell ya?" Bert stroked his dog and addressed this to the room at large. "I tried to do the right thing."

"Pop," said Joey.

The old man gave the smallest nod, the smallest lift to his thick brows, whose tangled black and silver strands gave a look of stark realism to his deep but filmy eyes.

"Awright, awright. I ain't got all day," said Charlie Ponte. "I'm givin' the kid a chance t'explain things. So go 'head, let 'im explain."

Joey was still standing numbly in the archway. He looked down and saw that Sandra, silent, alert, practical Sandra, had slid a kitchen chair in next to him. He sat.

But Charlie Ponte, having ordered Joey to speak, now decided he wasn't quite ready to give up the floor. He ignored Joey, ignored Gino, ignored Bert, and spoke only to the patriarch. "But Vincent, remember, you and me, we got an agreement. We can sit here and make nice, but if I don't get satisfaction from this meeting-"

Ponte stopped talking because it was one of those statements that could not be finished. But then the Miami Boss made the mistake of thinking back over the whole story of the heisted emeralds, the irritating trips down the Keys, the waiting, the disappointments, the manpower wasted, the putrid and futile evening with the garbage, and he launched into a slow burn.

"Because I'm tellin' you, Vincent, the aggravation I been getting, the bullshit I been putting up with, and for what? From who? From this nobody, this jerk, this little faggot with a pink shirt on, this fucking clown-"

"Cholly, he's my son."

The short and simple words, the way the old man said them, stopped Charlie Ponte cold. Acknowledging the bastard, proclaiming the tie. This changed things. Kinship. It was in the blood, sure, but that was only half of it. It also hinged on what people said to each other, or didn't say, what they were proud of and what they kept buried. All of a sudden Ponte was less sure he knew who he was dealing with.

"The agreement," Delgatto senior went on, in a voice that was low but carried, that seemed to be everywhere at once, like a rumble underground, "it stands. Ya don't get satisfaction, ya do what ya gotta do. No retaliation. I shouldn't've agreed, but I did. I didn't know. My son Gino, he fucked up bad. Didn't ya, Gino?"

Gino nodded miserably. His fat chin was down on his chest, and his shirt was stretching open between the buttons.

"Only thing I ask," the patriarch concluded, "is ya give Joey a fair shot at workin' things out."

Ponte pursed his lips and nodded Joey swallowed, looked at his father. The old man met his gaze and Joey took away from the exchange a hit of that undaunted readiness, the anyplace, anytime preparedness he'd felt that first time alone in a boat, alone on the ocean, alone in the night. His head cleared, the situation was clean as a razor. Either he would save himself or he would not.

"O.K.," he began. "O.K."

But immediately he stopped. He swiveled on the plastic seat of his kitchen chair and looked back over is shoulder. "Sandra. Where's Sandra? I want you here, baby."

In the Florida room there was a shuffling of feet, a disapproving rearrangement of limbs. You didn't invite broads to a sit-down. But it was Joey's meeting now, it made his hair itch to realize he could do what he wanted. Bruno carried a chair for Sandra. She made no sound as she sat. Her hands were motionless in her lap and her posture was breathtaking.

"Right," said Joey. "O.K. Yeah… Now, Mr. Ponte, your emeralds are gone, you saw that for yourself. They're inna vault by now, there's nothing to be done." It was a dicey opening, it already cast the Miami Boss in the role of the guy who'd lost. Ponte looked down between his knees and tugged at a thumbnail. "So let's like go over how it got to that.

"The two guys that ain't around no more," Joey went on, "Vinnie Fish and Frankie Bread-they grabbed the stones from Coconut Grove, and my brother Gino was in with them. Weren't ya, Gino?"

Gino looked down and nodded, his fat chin coming up like a high collar as he did so.

"So the deal was this," Joey said. "Vinnie and Frankie, they stashed the stones on a junky old fishing boat, then they took the boat out and sank it. The idea, ya know, was to let some time pass, let things cool off some, then the three of them would salvage the wreck and walk away with the money. Ain't that right, Gino?"