James Burke: A Morning for Flamingos

"Are you mad about something?"

"No, why?"

"You sound like you've got a beef."

"I'd already promised Paul to take him to the camp today. Then last night I got a message at one of my clubs about your deal. So I'm kind of mixing up business with a family trip. Which means I'm breaking one of my own rules, and I don't like that. But I don't go back on my word, either."

"I'll get dressed and pick up my money."

"Jess'll drive you."

"You think I'm going to leave town?" I tried to smile.

"No offense, Dave, but anyone who does business with me does it in a controlled environment. Anyone ." He raised his eyebrows. They looked like grease-pencil lines drawn on his olive skin.

We ate cereal and toast and drank coffee in the glass-enclosed breakfast room while the Negro houseman helped Paul get dressed. The early sun had grown pale and wispy in the east, and clouds that were as black as oil smoke were forming in a bank over the Gulf.

"It might be a rough day for a fishing trip," I said.

"It'll blow over," he said.

He fiddled with his watchband, tinked his coffee spoon nervously against his saucer, looked out at the darkening line across the southern horizon. Then he said, "You know where Kim might be?"

"No."

"The manager at my club said she didn't come into work yesterday and she doesn't answer her phone. She didn't call you?"

"Why would she call me?"

"Because she digs you."

He fluttered his fingers on the tablecloth. "I'd better send a car out to her place," he said. His eyes were narrowed, and they looked out through the glass and roved around the backyard. "Maybe she split. Eventually most of them do. I thought she might be different."

"Don't worry about her. She's probably all right," I said.

One of Tony's bodyguards, a black-haired man of about twenty-five, came into the kitchen for coffee. He was barefoot and bare-chested, and his beltless brown slacks hung down low on his flat stomach. He looked at us without speaking, then filled his cup.

"Put a shirt on when you walk around the house," Tony said.

The man walked back into the dining room without answering.

"It's a frigging zoo," Tony said. "I treat people with respect, I pay them decent wages, and they try to wipe their frigging feet on me. You know, I got a cousin runs a lot of action in Panama City. His wife tells him one day he's a drag, he's overweight, he's got bad breath, he's got a putz the size of a Vienna sausage, that the only thing he ever did for her was crush her two feet into the mattress every night. So she dumps him and starts making it with this county judge who's on the pad with the____________________family in Tampa. Except she and the judge both get juiced out of their minds one night, and both of them get busted while she's blowing the judge in her Porsche behind his nightclub. She gets out of jail in the morning, hung over and trembling and her picture on the front page of the Panama City newspaper, and then she goes home and finds out my cousin had her Porsche towed back to her house, and she thinks maybe something's going right after all, my cousin's going to forgive her and square the sodomy charge with the city. Except she sees the Porsche is sitting flat on its springs because my cousin had a cement truck fill it up with concrete. I ought to take lessons from him."

He looked again at the sky and at the trees blowing in the yard. He opened his mouth and scratched the tautness of his cheek with his fingernail.

"What's eating you, Tony?" I said.

"Nothing."

"You haven't gotten back into pharmaceuticals, have you?" I smiled at him.

"I'm cool," he said.

"You don't have to go into this deal. Let it slide if it doesn't feel right," I said.

I watched his face. His eyes still roved the backyard. Back out, partner, I thought.

"I already committed you for fifty large," he said. "If you don't take it, I have to."

"I have to call Bootsie."

"I'll do it for you. While you go for your money with Jess. Nobody needs to know where we're going today, Dave."

"All right," I said. And there went my opportunity to tip Minos through the phone tap. Then I began to realize what was really on Tony's mind.

"I guess your little girl misses you," he said.

"Yes."

"After today it looks like you'll have everything you need to make your investors happy."

"I guess I will."

"To tell you the truth, Dave, I don't think I want to get into distribution over in Southwest Louisiana. There're too many potential problems there, conflicts with the Houston crowd. I don't need it."

"Suit yourself."

He didn't answer.

"I'll brush my teeth, then I'll be ready to go with Jess," I said.

He nodded and made lines on the tablecloth with his cereal spoon. Through the glass the southern sky was as dark as gunmetal, and white veins of lightning pulsated and trembled in the clouds.

I brushed my teeth, rinsed my mouth, and spit into the lavatory. Too bad, Tony, I thought. I didn't know you were a closet Rotarian.

I had seen his kind before. They come into AA and unload some terrible moral guilt, or perhaps the whole travesty of their lives: then they begin to feel better. The ego begins to reassert itself, the tongue licks across the lips for maybe another try at the dirty boogie, and they decide to deep-six the people who've witnessed their moment of weakness and need.

So I had become Tony's disposable confessor. Wrong way to think, Tony, I thought. You commit the crime, you do the time. One way or another, you do the time.

Jess drove me to the bus depot, where I picked up the fifty thousand dollars the DEA had put in a locker for me. For a moment I thought I was going to lose Jess so I could phone Minos.

"I've had a knot in my bowels for two days," he said, gripping his belt buckle with his fist and frowning with his whole face.

"Go use the men's room and I'll get a cup of coffee. We've got time."

He thought about it and bent his knees slightly as though he were breaking wind.

"No, there's piss all over the toilet seats. I'll wait," he said. "Besides, Tony's acting weird again. When Tony gets weird, he needs somebody around him."

"Weird about what?"

"Late last night he says to me, 'It's all ending, it's all ending.' I say, 'What the fuck does that mean, Tony?'" Two Catholic nuns in black habits walked past us. "He wouldn't answer me. He just walks off and stands in the middle of the dark tennis court like a statue. He stood out there half an hour."

Back at the house Jess and one of the gatemen began loading fishing rods, food, and camping gear into the Lincoln and the Cadillac. A soft rain clicked on the trees in the yard. I told Tony I was going into my bedroom to pack an overnight bag; then I locked my bathroom door, took down my khakis, and taped the miniaturized recorder inside my thigh. I could activate it by simply dropping my hand and appearing to scratch my leg.

What an absurdity, I thought: I had invested all this energy and effort in nailing a man who had nothing to do with my life, who had never harmed me, who lived on the raw edges of narcotic madness. The story about Tony that Jess had told me in the bus depot was no mystery. Psychologists sometimes call it a world destruction fantasy. The recovering addict and drunk are suddenly cut off from their source: they have no fire escape, and the building is burning down. They wake in the middle of the night with a nameless terror and drag it with them like a gargoyle on a chain into their waking hours. Sometimes they can't breathe; then-hearts race, blood veins dilate in the brain, a pressure band forms on one side of the head as though someone were tightening a machinist's vise into the bone. The only image that will adequately describe the fear is right out of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine: The beast is climbing up out of the sea, and the edges of the sky are blackening like an enormous sheet of dry paper held against a flame.