square, with a rumpled bed, a television set, a chair that skin stuck to when sweaty, and a tiny balcony that Gino was now afraid to go out on. Vicki went back upstairs, stopping only at the hotel pharmacy to buy some fresh cosmetics and a stack of magazines.
By day five Gino was drinking bourbon with his breakfast grapefruit and talking back to game-show hosts. He could barely bring himself to touch his girlfriend, and she could barely stand to be touched, but there was nothing else to do. Outside, the sun moved across the sky, glared through the windows, turned the walls orange at sunset. Food arrived. Sleep came fitfully.
'Gino, this is really fucking crazy,' Vicki said, lying naked and bored after a passionless poke. 'I mean, like psychotic. When can we get outta here?'
He lifted himself on an elbow, scratched his hairy belly, and swirled his Jack Daniel's in the smudged glass. He couldn't bring himself to say so, but he didn't think they'd ever get out of there, unless he came up with a plan. And after a week of thinking about it night and day, while drinking, while screwing, while dreaming frenzied and terrifying dreams, he didn't have so much as a shred of an idea.
'So Joey,' Sandra asked, 'what's really going on with Gino?'
They were in bed at the compound. A light breeze puffed out the curtains and a waning moon threw just enough light so that dim stripes were cast across the quilt by the slatted blinds.
'You really wanna know?'
A week before, she hadn't wanted to, or maybe it had just seemed to her that Joey didn't want to tell her. Couples must conspire to hide things from one another; it's too difficult for either party to do alone. Joey had come home clearly shaken and reeking of garbage. Sandra said she'd been worried, had called the hospital, didn't know Vicki's last name, asked about a young woman who'd been knocked through a window by a moped; the emergency room had handled no such case, and Sandra had felt like a fool. Joey said that Gino had lied, it was one of Gino's crazy schemes. And that was all he said. Sandra, as happened not infrequently, was faced with the choice of pressing or changing the subject. But where was the line between pressing and nagging? So she asked him if he wanted some crab claws. He wasn't hungry. He'd put his clothes in the trash, taken a long shower, and sat up drinking the wine meant for dinner while Sandra had gone to sleep.
'You really wanna know?' Joey asked again now. It seemed to Sandra that this time there was more hope than hesitation in his voice.
'Is it bad?'
'It's really bad.'
'Are you involved, Joey?'
'Not by choice-hell no.'
'Then tell me.'
So he did. He propped himself up on pillows and absently smoothed the creases in the quilt as he talked. The breeze coming through the window was cool and made him grateful for the warmth of Sandra's body next to him. She gave off a nice smell of talcum powder and hand cream.
'So now he's holed up in his room,' Joey concluded, 'and Ponte is just waiting for a chance to kill 'im. Where the emeralds are, if he's got 'em, I haven't got a clue. What he was up to while me and Bert were kidnapped, why he didn't just blow town, I got no waya knowin'. I've tried calling him like a dozen times already. The switchboard just takes messages. I've gone past the hotel, just to scope it out. The Lincolns are always there. Pontes goons wave at me and laugh, like it's a big goddamn joke. I don't go inna hotel, of course. I mean, that crazy I'm not.'
'Joey,' Sandra said, 'there's nothing you can do.'
But he went on as if he hadn't heard. 'Ya know what gets me, Sandra? What gets me is that, for all these years, Gino passed for smart. I mean, I believed it. Sure, I bitched, I argued, but basically I bought it. Gino, the guy with big ideas. Gino, the guy who gets things done. Is that pathetic or what? I mean, look at this guy. What the hell was on his mind? And selfish. Jesus Christ Almighty, is he selfish. I mean, he coulda got me killed. He coulda got Bert killed. And what if you came along, Sandra? I mean, you coulda come for the ride.' Joey slapped at the quilt and exhaled ferociously, as if trying to dig some family germ out of the very bottom of his lungs. 'The fucking guy thinks of no one but himself.'
Sandra snuggled closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder. 'Joey, those are all the reasons why you have to wash your hands of this.'
He pulled away, not in anger but only because her touch was too much a threat to his resolve. 'No, Sandra, those are all the reasons I can't wash my handsa this. I walk away, and what happens? Gino gets killed. So now he's dead, but he's still the guy who had the big ideas, the guy who was doing things. And me, what am I? I'm still little Joey, the nobody, the guy who don't know nothin', can't do nothin', and sits by like a jerk, like a worm, while his brother gets whacked.'
'But Joey, you didn't make the problem.'
'Sandra, that's true, and it means nothing. Listen, I been thinkin' about this all week. If Gino gets killed, it's like the clock stops, nothing can change no more. To my old man he's still the golden boy. In his own mind he's still the big shot.'
'But Joey, if he's dead-'
'The only way I can ever get rid of the fucking guy, the only way I can really be done with him, is to save his life. You see what I'm saying, Sandra? I wanna be able to say to him, 'Gino, you fucked up, I saved your ass. You were dead, I brought you back to life. So here, schmuck, here's your life. Take it and get outta my face.' Sandra, ya can't say that to a dead man, can ya?'
Part III
— 27 -
'Joey,' said Zack Davidson, 'we gotta talk.'
It was nine o'clock on a bright blue morning on Duval Street, and Joey Goldman was not surprised. In fact, the only thing he found surprising about his job these days was that he still had one. If he'd been running Parrot Beach, he'd have fired himself some weeks before.
He followed Zack up the shady pathway to the office. Study up, his colleague had told him at their first meeting. Learn to read people, to recognize the subtle signs by which they identify their peers, their social equals. Learn how to look in order to get the ones who could help you on your side. This was a fundamental requirement of salesmanship, by which Zack Davidson meant survival. So now, as Zack strolled ahead of him, Joey studied his smugly casual khaki shorts and had to acknowledge that in picking out the ones he himself was wearing, he'd overlooked certain details, missed certain nuances. Zack's shorts were of a dull twill with no sheen whatsoever; Joey's were polished in a manner that suggested too much processing. Zack's were not rumpled, exactly, but just mussed enough to create the impression that they had never seen the inside of a closet and spent their off-hours on the back of a bedroom chair; Joey's had a crisp crease that made them look less like shorts, pure and simple, and more like an amputated pair of chinos. So O.K., Joey admitted, he didn't yet have the act down perfectly, but he was getting there, he was learning. He wondered how much of it he'd remember, or what good it could possibly do him, now that he was about to get canned.
Inside, the two men skirted the scale model of the condo complex. Joey glanced at it with a pained fondness, as if it were the shrunken but living embodiment of a memory. The sweet little buildings with their tiny pastel shutters; the plastic windblown palms and the swimming pool whose blue Saran Wrap shimmered like real water; the happy owners, littler than Barbies and Kens, laid out on their lounges or standing at the painted edge of the ocean: these things, for Joey, had come to seem the perfect picture of the easy life of Florida, the life whose private, uneventful, and unspectacular appeal was daily getting through to him, and which was being royally screwed up for him by Gino and the long reach of the old neighborhood. He was almost beyond feeling angry about it. Almost. At least he was not surprised Joey tries to do something on his own; Gino undoes it, basically by declining to notice that it might by some chance matter, and by dwarfing it with something so much bigger, flashier,
