really gets my attention, a look I recognize. It's a look-how can I describe it? — it's not hostile, it's not even strong, but it's defiant, it tells you he doesn't care who you are, what he needs from you, you're out of bounds. And right away I know that whoever beat him up is in his family. I just know it. Look, he's obviously gay. Lotta old-style Cubans, a maricon, they get ugly, it's like a blot onna family honor. I understand something about families, trust me on that. The closer they are, the harder it is to be different. So I feel for the kid. I look at Sandra. Sandra looks at me. The kid is hired and he works out great. Reliable. Honest. Loyal.'
'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.
31
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
