Reuben, moving soundlessly and with his low-slung self-effacing geisha's grace, appeared near the two men and offered them something cold to drink. 'A beer?' he said. 'A glass of wine?'
'And there's the cake,' said Clayton Phipps. 'It's apricot.'
'Ah,' said Augie. He seemed to be considering. 'Will you have some?'
'Me?' said Phipps, as if he was being singled out in a crowded room. 'No, I've just had lunch. I brought it for you.'
Augie pursed his lips, pulled his eyebrows together. A lot went into a man's decision about whether to have a piece of cake. Was he hungry? Would the sweetness be too cloying in the heat? Did he want the coffee the cake cried out for? Reuben leaned far forward on the balls of his feet, so far forward that he had to flex his toes as hard as he could to keep from falling over. For one mad instant it seemed to him that he should throw himself on Clayton Phipps's neck, wrestle him to the ground, and unmask him at once as the would-be killer. But he waited. He didn't want to make a scene in front of Augie; besides, if Augie said no to cake there would be no emergency.
The painter frowned through to the end of his deliberations. Then he said, 'Yes, I think I'll have a piece. A small one.' He paused a half-beat, then added, 'Sure you won't join me, Clay?'
Phipps shook his head and Reuben didn't like the shadowy smile that slithered quickly across his face.
The young man glided back to the house and paced around the kitchen. He took a knife and cut through the string around the bakery box. He opened the package and looked inside. He saw a neat arrangement of apricot halves, round and orange as just-risen moons, overlaid with a glaze like tinted glass and bordered with a butter-rich marzipan crust. Reuben liked sweets. His mouth, one of the body parts that didn't know what was good for it, watered perversely even as his mind recoiled. He shook his head and swallowed, then brought down the top of the box like the lid of a coffin. He got the stepstool and put the cake on the highest shelf of the least-used cabinet, hid it like a gun from a curious child. He put a bottle of mineral water and two glasses on a tray and went outside again.
'The cake,' he announced, 'I'm sorry, you can't have any.' He poured water for Augie and Phipps, handed them their glasses.
'Whaddya mean, I can't have any?' Augie asked. His body had readied itself for cake, the taste buds were prepared, the passageways open, and now, goddamn it, he wanted something sweet.
'The cake, it will make you sick,' said Reuben. He spoke to Augie but looked at Phipps, and Phipps seemed unable to stay still in his chair.
'Reuben,' Augie said, 'I'd like a piece of cake.'
The young man balanced his tray, bit his lower lip. 'The cake, I didn't want to say this, is full of bugs.'
'That's impossible,' blurted Clay Phipps, who suddenly seemed far more exasperated than was called for by a spoiled cake. 'I just bought it. It's from Jean Claude's. It's-'
'It's the tropics,' Augie interrupted with a shrug. O.K., he'd live without the cake. 'There are bugs here.'
'Well, damnit,' said Clay Phipps, 'there shouldn't be! Not in a fancy cake from a fancy baker. I'll bring it back.'
This, Reuben had not counted on. But for Phipps to take the cake away was out of the question. The cake was very important. The cake was evidence. It would end the danger to Augie and would prove that Nina was not crazy.
'I'm sorry,' Reuben said. 'The cake, I put it in the garbage. The compactor. The cake it is squished.'
Phipps tisked, threw a damp leg over the opposite knee. Reuben turned back toward the kitchen, wondering if he had seen, along with Phipps's exasperation, a hint of something like relief that the cake had been destroyed. But Augie saw only his visitor's annoyance. He watched him writhe and sweat, and gently mused on how easily rattled people were before they got on terms with death.
'It's nothing, Clay,' he softly said, and he put a hand across the other man's forearm.
'But it was a gift,' the visitor said miserably, and immediately wished he hadn't used the word. It was a gift like Augie's paintings had been gifts, and he, Clay Phipps, was always doing just the wrong thing where gifts were concerned, gifts always seemed to be the litmus test that pointed up his smallness, the unintentional and unchangeable lack of generosity that was poisoning his life. Gift. The word and Augie's all-forgiving touch made him feel as loathsome as a serpent, and as spiteful. He sipped his mineral water, mopped his forehead, and wished that he was home, alone.
29
June was a slow time in Key West, slow for culture as for everything else, and from week to week Ray Yates had a tougher job finding guests and events to fill up time on Culture Cocktail. The seasonal people had gone north, taking with them to the Vineyard or to Provincetown their harpsichords, their loose-leaf binders of lesbian love poems. Road shows didn't come south in June, and no booking agent who wanted to keep a has-been pop act would send them to this off-season purgatory of heat, humidity, and empty seats. So Yates muddled through with the occasional self-published author, a psychic or two, and the local impresarios who spoke with relentless enthusiasm about the upcoming winter season, a million years away.
Still, the talk-show host loved going to the studio, loved it even more of late. It was a haven, a cloister, a funkily pristine cell sealed off from the world of loan sharks and mildew, losing bets and sudden hammering downpours. The studio walls were soundproofed, heavily padded in vinyl like a Barcalounger all around. The lights were recessed and soft as stars. Wires were taped down, chair casters always oiled; nothing raided, nothing squeaked. Intercourse with the universe beyond was blessedly one-way: Yates's voice went fluently forth and nothing came back in. It was safe, it was controlled, and the host had come to crave his time in the studio like a therapy junkie craves his time on the couch, as the only respite from the mayhem and disquiet of his other waking hours.
And now Yates was just finishing the show. The guests had left; he was wrapping up with an improvised and not terribly persuasive ramble on the pleasures of the rainy season. He glanced up at the clock above the engineer's window, and in one crammed and befuddling instant he saw two things: He saw that it was twenty seconds before seven, and he saw that Bruno had invaded the production booth.
The huge thug stood there behind the triple-thick glass, his massive arms crossed over his breakfront of a chest. He had commandeered the engineer's headset, the earpieces drew attention to the way his neck tapered to his head. The quailing engineer, a trouper, managed to hit the switch that started Yates's theme music, and Bruno's face took on an expression that was uncomprehending yet transfixed, it bore the smallbrained ecstasy of an ape at the opera.
The ecstasy didn't last long.
'Yo, crumbfuck.' Bruno said it through the intercom, and at the moment the barking voice bounced off the soft walls Ray Yates's cloister was desecrated, his safe haven was spoiled forever.
The violation made Yates mad; he mustered a flash of feistiness that felt heroic but vanished as quickly as a hot pee in a cold ocean, chilled to nothing by his fear.
'We got a meeting tuh go tuh,' Bruno barked. 'Ya ready?'
It was buggy in the vacant lot at dusk, but Roberto Natchez, dressed in black, didn't seem to notice. Mosquitoes buzzed unharassed around his hair, landed on his neck and bit; tropical roaches the size of mice slithered among ground-hugging vines and over red-veined roots the thickness and consistency of garden hoses. Fetid puddles between jagged chunks of ancient coral sent forth a nasty smell of sulfur. Undaunted, the poet continued on his mission. In one hand he held a wire cage, in the other a bag of popcorn.
He found a small clearing, knelt, and set his trap.
He sprinkled some kernels to draw his prey to the first chamber of the cage. A more generous helping lured the quarry to the second, narrower compartment. The mother lode of popcorn was piled temptingly on the far side of a small spring-loaded platform attached to the trip wire that would slam the door.
Content with his snare, Natchez retreated to the shadow of his building and waited. It was time, he had decided, to put theory into practice. Credos, manifestos were necessary, of course; they provided the rigorous logic
