"Loyal till he quits," put in Mulvane.
"I got no problem with that," said Joey. "I
mean, all we did, we gave 'im a job. The Silvers, they practically
became his family, ya know, took over from the asshole family and
became the good family. We all know how that works. He did the
right thing."
There was a pause for drinking and
reflecting, mostly drinking. The sounds of shaken ice and barroom
blather came forward as the old industrial air conditioner
shuddered, coughed, then shut down for a rest. Mulvane finished his
ale with an appreciation that bordered on reverence and pushed his
mug forward for another.
"But wait a second," Arty Magnus said. "Can
we cut to the chase scene here? The cake—you said the Cuban lad was
all excited about a cake. Was it poisoned?"
"Sent a slice down to the lab," the
detective said, but his eyes were searching for the bartender and
he wasn't going any farther till his warm and empty glass was
replaced with an iced and filled one.
When it was, he licked the foam then
casually announced, "Yeah, it was fulla poison. Nasty shit too.
Sugar. Butter. Cholesterol, enough to make your heart slam shut. A
regular time bomb. I took it home, ate it with the wife and
lads."
*
"Painting again?" said Claire Steiger.
"Augie, I think that's terrific. Only—"
"Only what, Claire?" Augie said.
She shifted in her poolside chair. It was
early evening. She and Kip had arrived in Key West barely an hour
before. They'd checked into the Flagler House, showered and
changed, and now were straining the muscles of their faces to look
congenial, to make it seem like this ferocious guarding of their
interests was a social call, almost a pilgrimage. A fading light
shimmered in the gummy air above the pool. Overhead, the palm
fronds hung dark and limp, they sifted the wan gleam of a hazy
dusk.
"Only maybe it would be better," the agent
said, "if people didn't find that out just yet."
Nina, sitting on the love seat with her
husband, pursed her lips. She was over feeling qualms about her gut
mistrust of almost anything her former mentor said. "Why, Claire?"
she asked. "Why does it matter?"
The dealer's brown eyes were soft, her full
lips managed a smile, but she could not quite hold back her hand
from reaching for another bit of brie, of which she'd told herself
she'd have no more. She slipped the fat cheese into her mouth and
shot a quick glance at her husband. He'd arched an eyebrow perhaps
a quarter-inch then dived into his gin. Certain things you could
count on in life: Round Jewish women reached for food at moments of
exasperation, angular WASP men grabbed at cocktails. The couple
swallowed their respective medicines and then the wife went on.
"Augie, Nina—there's a big auction at Sotheby's ten days from
now."
"The Solstice Show," said Nina.
"Yes. And a lot of Augie's works are being
offered."
Augie said nothing. He'd had paintings
auctioned before, and he didn't see that it had much to do with
him. What did it matter if old forgotten canvases from the
gallery's holdings and from collections in New York were shuffled
around in exchange for cash? He was on to other things, it was the
new work that he cared about.
Nina was not quite so placid. "The auction's
in ten days, Claire, and we only find out now?"
The agent groped for some high ground. "I
tried calling weeks ago," she said. "You never got back."
Augie didn't have the stomach for a
squabble. "Really," he said, "what's the difference?"
Kip Cunningham, who would not accept the
notion that mere bankruptcy cast the slightest doubt on his
expertise in business, could not help chiming in. "It's just, you
know, better not to advertise a fresh supply—"
Augie shushed him with a small wave of his
hand. "I totally understand," he said. "And frankly, it's all the
same to me if people find out today or next month or never. I'm
painting to paint, not to get talked about."
"But what if people ask?" Kip blurted.
Augie sipped his Guinness, let a bit slide
frothily past his gullet. His body was working again, his pipes
were flowing, his mouth was tasting, and there was a sacred delight
in this that overwhelmed all petty and non-visceral concerns. "If
they ask," he blithely said, "I'll tell them."
Kip and Claire, still allies in debt, if
little else, zoomed in quickly on each other's eyes.
"It might be better—" the agent began.
Nina cut her off. It is a weighty thing to
know another person's moves so well that a single phrase can bring
on rage, can create the bitter certainty that one is being
manipulated, bullied, used. For Nina the awareness was especially
galling because she could still remember, though the recollection
baffled her, when she had wanted to be Claire Steiger: tough,
assured, no one's fool, a creature of the city. Amazing, Nina
thought, the number of false starts and wrong desires that could be
crammed into something as short as a lifetime. "Surely you're not
going to suggest he lie?" she said.
"No, of course not," the agent waffled. "But
for example—"
"Claire," said Augie Silver, "I'm much too
superstitious not to tell the truth. The little talent I have, I'm
not going to jinx it by denying it. Look, you don't want people to
know I'm working, just keep people away from me. You can do that,
can't you?"
"The press? Nobody can do that, Augie," said
Claire Steiger. "You know that."
The painter shrugged and sipped his stout.
He looked up at the sky, pulled in a chestful of jasmine-scented
air, felt his body in the love seat, and savored the nearness of
his wife's hip next to his. Claire Steiger, whose skill it was to
make people want things, understood that Augie no longer wanted
anything she could do for him or sell him, and this was very
frustrating. You could not manipulate someone who truly didn't
care. You could only go around him, or over him, or find some way
to remove him from the loop. The agent stole a quick glance at her
husband and saw a flat dead desperation in his eyes that she prayed
to God was not reflected in her own.
There is something about being ushered into
a dark Lincoln full of mafiosi that makes a person feel sick to his
stomach.
There are a lot of ways they can kill you
right there in the car, and none of them are pretty. Piano wire
around the neck. Ice pick through the base of the skull. A
point-blank shot that singes skin in the instant before it stops
the heart. Ray Yates tasted bile. He was no dummy, he knew what the
shrinks said about compulsive gambling and the death wish. They
were wrong. He gambled for excitement. O.K., maybe humiliation had
something to do with it. Maybe he got off on the pang of losing,
that confirming disappointment that was bracing as a pinch on the
scrotum. But you had to be alive to feel that. This was something
the shrinks seem to have overlooked.
"Take 'im tuh duh gahbidge?" Bruno
asked.
The man in the front passenger seat
considered. He was a small neat man, with short gray hair that was
too perfect and crescent sacs the color of liver beneath his eyes.
"Nah, take 'im tuh duh shahk."
There was another goon in the back seat with
Ray Yates. At this he smiled and sucked wet air between his teeth
and gums. "Yeah, Mr. Ponte, great. Been a while since we fed the
shahk."
The Lincoln lumbered slowly out of the
alley, wound its way through the narrow cobbled downtown streets.
Barefoot dirt-bags in droopy-ass jeans wandered here and there
among tourists wearing short shorts the colors of lemons and limes.
A guy went by on a unicycle with flashing lights among the spokes.
This, Yates thought, was the town he'd wanted to fit in with. A
town of easy eccentricity, funk without violence, harmless farting
around. How had he managed to turn it sinister for himself?
The big car passed a Do Not Enter sign, then
turned down a passageway barely wider than itself, and Yates, who'd
thought he knew every byway in Key West, lost track of where he
was. The car stopped. He was ordered out, there was barely room to
squeeze. Bruno turned the lock on a green-painted metal door that
was the only break in a wall of crumbly brick.
"We got keys," the other thug explained. He
smiled, sucked his teeth. "We got keys for everywhere. Get the fuck
inside."
He gave Yates a push into the dark building,
and the first thing the debtor noticed was the smell of fish. Not
dead fish; live fish, the slime and seaweed smell of live fish
swimming in aerated saltwater. Someone hit a light switch. Revealed
was a room of buckets and mops, ladders and freezers. At the far
end was a metal staircase, the top of which could not be seen.
"Sal," said Charlie Ponte to the thug who
sucked his teeth, "grab some fucking fish."
Sal went to a freezer. Bruno pushed Ray
Yates toward the stairs. Heavy feet made a dismal ringing sound on
the steel steps, a clamor that bounced off the walls of the closed
aquarium and came back sounding drowned.
The stairs went up two stories and ended at
another door. Bruno opened it and grinned. Then he shoved Yates
through. The talk-show host found himself standing on a metal grid,
maybe six feet square. Around the platform, waist high, was a
railing, and beyond the railing, two feet away and one foot down,
was the lip of the vast tank that held the aquarium's prize
attraction, an eleven-foot hammerhead called Ripper. The tank was
dark. A murderous silence hovered over it. It smelled like blood
and clams. The others piled in behind Ray Yates. The thug called
Sal was carrying two frozen bonito, maybe ten pounds each. There
was a small spotlight on the feeding platform; Charlie Ponte turned
it on.
"Sal," he said, "trow our friend a
fish."
Sal tossed one of the bonito, and before it
hit the water, the shark exploded through the surface, its
monstrous sideways dildo of a head thrashing, its unspeakable mouth
wide open to reveal its double rows of razor teeth. Sharks are not
neat eaters. They don't bite cleanly, they tear, they shred, the
sharp chaotic hell of their mouths reduces food to strings and
tatters. Ray Yates watched the frozen fish disintegrate. The shark
thumped the water for more. Salt spray flew above the tank, roiled
water viscously lapped.
"Get up onna fucking railing, Ray," Charlie
Ponte said.
Yates didn't move. Ponte walked slowly up to
him and backhanded him hard across the cheek. Then he nodded to his
boys. They lifted the debtor by the armpits and sat him on the
rail. He held it, white-knuckled, fighting vertigo. The shark was
circling at his back. The rough texture of its silver skin glinted
in the light, the obscene gashes of its gill slits sucked and
spilled out water.
"Ray," said Ponte, "you're like very close
to being dead. You know that, right?"
Yates swallowed, nodded. The railing was
cool, it chilled his bowels.
"And why?" Ponte continued. His voice was
just slightly louder now, it came through the splashing and sliced
roughly through the dark building with its secret nighttime life of
fish. "Because you're a weak piece a shit. No control. A fucking
bed wetter."
"It's never been like this before," Yates
whimpered. "I've always paid. Bruno knows that."
Ponte looked at his goons. "And what's
Bruno, the fucking credit bureau? Ray, you're poison. You bet on a
horse, the horse falls down. You bet on a fighter, he pisses blood.
Now you're inta me for forty-somethin' and I hear you're betting on
a fucking painter. This is a new one on me. How the fuck you bet on
a painter?"
Bruno and Sal obediently chuckled. Sal held
the other bonito by its tail and tried not to let it drip on his
shoe as it defrosted.
Yates sat. Drops of spray were wetting his
back, and he could not shake the image of the shark rising up on
its tail and biting his ass off. "It's not a bet. I own these
paintings."
"Yeah. So?"
"Week and a half from now, they'll be sold.
Sotheby's. New York. They're worth a lot of money. Hundreds of
thousands."
Charlie Ponte looked down through the open
grid beneath his feet and sadly shook his head. When he spoke
again, it was to Sal and Bruno. "He's holdin' out on me. I hate
that. Turn 'im upside down."
Sal put aside the thawing fish and the two
goons grabbed Ray Yates. The debtor wriggled but not much: There
was nowhere to go but two stories down to a stone floor or into the
fishbowl with the shark. They hoisted him then turned him like a
roast, laid him out so that his upper thighs were across the rail
and his torso was hovering in space. His hands gripped the top of
the shark tank, he wondered if the ragged teeth would flash and
hack his fingers off. He pulled his face back as far as he could
from the roiling water, but still he smelled fish blood and an
awful musk. Ponte moved alongside and spoke to him calmly.
"Ray, I hate a guy that sells me short. You
think I'm stupid? You think I don't read the paper? Those paintings
ain't worth what you say. Who knows if they're gonna sell at all?
You lost again, Ray. You're fucked."
Yates's back was cramping, his eyes were
starting to tear. "I'll get the money," he rasped. It was all he
could think of to say.
"Yeah? How?"
If people were punished for thoughts, the
world would be a jail. Yates held himself above the shark tank and
looked down at the water. The silhouette of the grotesque and
hungry hammerhead snaked through it like the shadow of death. There
seemed one way and one way only for Yates to get the money, and in
that moment of infinite fear and infinite selfishness there was no
doubt that he would cash in Augie Silver's life to save his own,
the only question was the nerve and tact it took to do the
deal.