For some minutes Joey sliced ahead through the sameness of the waves, and from moment to moment a change was coming over him. There is a wide-awake drunkenness that comes from doing something new and finding that it is not impossible. In the grip of that brave giddiness, nothing seems impossible, and people look for ways to prove this joyful lunacy to themselves. They take dares, jump from rooftop to rooftop, surpass themselves and usually survive but sometimes die excited. Joey suddenly remembered a conversation he'd had up north, sitting over an espresso with his buddy Sal. Joey, you're gonna be like all alone down there, Sal had warned. Maybe I like that idea, Joey had said, with swagger, but in his own mind the accent was on the maybe. But here he was, in a boat, in the ocean, at night, without even experience for company, about as alone as a person can be, and whaddya know, he did like it. He liked it the way some people like icy showers or large amounts of hot sauce. It set him up. It got him ready. Ready for what? He couldn't have said and it didn't matter. Just ready. Ready was enough.
A few minutes before eleven o'clock, Joey climbed onto the private dock of the Flagler House with two lines in his hand, and tied four different attempts at knots in each of them. Then he took a moment to get his land legs back and look at the hotel. The building was long, squat, and heavy, a checkerboard of lights turned on and lights turned off. A cool blue glow hovered over the swimming pool, and on the palm-strewn beach torches were still burning, the remnants of a Caribbean Night cookout or some such entertainment. Joey did not yet have a plan of approach. Something inside him knew that in a place where most people arrive by car, rented cars no less, the man who arrives by boat is marked as special and should stroll in like he owns the joint. But he could not be sure that Charlie Ponte had not put a lookout in the lobby; or that his thugs outside didn't have a sight line to the elevators, or that Ponte hadn't bribed someone on the staff to do his watching for him. Getting caught consorting with Gino- with Dr. Greenbaum-would no doubt win him another and final trip to Mount Trashmore.
So Joey slowly and vigilantly walked the length of the pier. On the beach, busboys were still clearing chafing dishes from long tables whose cloths were splattered with barbecue grease and melted sherbet. Their soiled uniforms tinged orange by torchlight, they loaded the glinting pans onto trolleys and wheeled them away. Joey watched where they went: along a narrow concrete path that lost itself in a clutch of palms, then reappeared at the back end of the poolside bar and curved off again toward what seemed to be a descending ramp near the far end of the building.
Discreetly, trying to look like any other tourist who hoped not to appear lost, bored, or caged, Joey meandered toward the ramp. Skirting the pool, he heard vapid hotel lounge music filtering through beaded curtains; under the thatched roof of the poolside bar, a blender, sounding very much like a tiny, frenzied outboard, was frothing up some dubious milk shake of a cocktail for what seemed to be the only couple left outside. The bartender gave Joey a friendly nod, an offer of conviviality in sympathy for his being all alone. Joey smiled the shy smile of a passerby who knows that he will be forgotten the moment he has passed.
At the head of the ramp, there was a pair of ocher- painted limestone posts, and on the right-hand post was a sign that said Staff Only. Joey paused. His pants legs were damp from the ocean spray; his left sneaker was wet. His thick black hair had been blown tautly back by the wind and was coarsened by the airborne salt. His hands still tingled from the vibration of the boat's wheel, and he still didn't know what he'd say to his brother.
He started down the incline.
At the base of it was a set of swinging doors, their brushed-steel surface marred from the push of trolleys and the banging of trays. Joey went through and found himself in a long narrow hallway lit by bare bulbs in yellow wire baskets. On the left, through a broad open doorway, was the kitchen; above the din of pans and dishes clattering, the singsong of Spanish banter rang between the cinder-block walls. Joey slipped past, walking quick and silent to where the corridor turned right and led to a bank of elevators. Unfortunately, a room service waiter was already there. He was thin and blond, had a cart in front of him with a champagne bucket on it, and was dressed, absurdly, in a tuxedo. Joey caught him picking his nose, which seemed to make the waiter feel defensive.
'May I help you?' he asked accusingly.
Joey opened his mouth well before an idea had sparked. But he was cruising on that insane and blessed sense of readiness, and he said the first thing that came into his mind. 'Mafia.'
'Excuse me?' said the waiter. His pale eyebrows lifted, he swallowed so that his bow tie did a little dance, and he seemed by reflex to be wiping his thumb on the satin stripe of his pants leg.
'The linens, the labor situation,' Joey said. 'It's like, ya know, a spot check. They treatin' ya right, or what?'
'Oh, fine,' said the waiter. 'Fine.' He looked down at the napkins on his cart. He hoped he hadn't grabbed a frayed one.
The elevator arrived. The employee stood aside for Joey to enter first, though it was unclear whether he did this out of protocol or to avoid showing his back. He rolled his cart out, very quickly, at the second floor, and Joey continued to the fourth, the top. Gino had a list for hotel rooms, as he had for everything. Top floor, water side-that was the best, and so that, of course, was what Gino had bragged he had. Only the best for Joey's older brother. The best of every-thing, so he could remind himself that he was doing good.
— 30 -
'Who is it?' said Gino Delgatto, in the rough yet somehow mousy voice of a man who has his door double- locked, with the night chain on, and his sweaty hand wrapped around the warm butt of a gun he clutches by habit but in whose power to protect him he has stopped believing.
'It's me. It's Joey.'
There was a long pause. Gino had now been holed up in his room for almost two full weeks, and his life had become so radically uneventful, his mind and body so muddily torpid, that the channels in his brain had silted over. Any piece of information now struck him as dauntingly new; any decision, such as when and for whom to open his door, required all the concentration he could possibly muster.
'Whaddya want?' he said at last.
'I wanna save your sorry ass. Lemme in.'
Again there was a pause.
'You alone?'
'Totally.'
There was a sound like surrender in the dry slide of the dead bolt, the cheerless tinkle of the night chain. Gino opened the door just wide enough for a man to slip through, and stood there framed for a moment in the slice of yellow light. He was wearing a hotel bathrobe and he looked like hell. He'd put on ten pounds during his days of doing nothing but eating and drinking, and the increment was enough to push his barely handsome features over the border into brutishness. His fattened cheeks rose into little pads that accentuated the piggishness of his eyes. His nose seemed somehow to have softened and broadened, and was spreading across his face like melting clay. Deep lines at the edges of his mouth gave his jaw the slightly spooky, hinged look of a puppet's, and his skin had the stretched oiliness of someone who is thoroughly constipated. But he was still strong. He grabbed Joey by the arm and yanked him into the room so that the two men were standing chest to chest. Was Gino giving his half brother a hug, or just trying to get the door shut and double-locked as fast as possible?
'Anyone see you?' he asked. Their faces were close and Joey smelled the bourbon.
'No one that matters.'
'How'd ya manage?'
'I came by boat.'
Gino stepped back and took a moment to process this new fact. He seemed to see in it an opportunity to get on top of the situation by his time-honored tactic of patronizing Joey. But for this he needed an ally, so he shot a facetious glance at Vicki. She was lying in bed, the sheet pulled up so that only the top acre of her chest was exposed. She'd been leafing through a fashion magazine, which she now placed facedown on top of her boobs; the bent spine made a kind of tent for her cleavage. Gino's glance was meant to say, Ain't he clever-for a nobody? and while he was flashing that look at Vicki, he said to Joey, 'Fuck you know about driving a boat?'
'Enough to get heah. It needed doing and I did it, didn't I, Gino?'
Gino sat slowly on the edge of the bed, as if something in Joey's tone had grabbed him by the shoulders and
