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.
'I thought… I thought he was dead,' the gambler stammered.
'Yeah,' said Ponte. 'I know that's what you thought.' He leaned back against the railing, calmly lit a cigarette. 'Like usual you were wrong.'
'I could end up being right.'
'Fuck's that supposed to mean?'
Yates's voice was soft. 'Mr. Ponte, you take the money. From the paintings. Keep all of it.'
For a moment Ponte said nothing. His expression was midway between offended and amused. He took a puff of his cigarette then threw it into the shark tank. Then his upper hp abruptly pulled back and he pummeled Ray Yates in the kidney. The blow sent a searing pain up his back and a hot surge through his tubing.
'You mizzable fuck,' the mobster said. He pointed at Yates as at a species of lizard and spoke to his boys. 'The legitimate world. There it is. No self-control. No balls. Won't even clean up its own messes.' He turned his attention back to the writhing debtor. 'Scumbag, you think you can hire me, just like that, to kill for you?'
Ray Yates tried to breathe. The air smelled like the inside of a fish and there seemed to be big splinters underneath his ribs. But he had somehow moved past fear, fallen through the bottom of it into some horrid but clear place that was like already being dead. 'You're gonna kill, Mr. Ponte,' he said, in a voice grown weirdly even, weirdly certain. 'You kill me, you get nothing. You kill him-'
The debtor's words were swallowed up in a watery mayhem. At a nod from Charlie Ponte, Sal had thrown the second fish into the tank. The hammerhead rocketed up to meet it, its appalling face came so close to Ray Yates's that he could see the bilious color of its yellow eye, the bent, in-sloping arrowheads of its vile teeth, could hear the sickening crush and grinding of its jaws. A wave flew up around the thrusting shark, it arced and billowed like a wake thrown off a boat. It drenched Ray Yates as the shark plunged downward, and by the time the gambler could see and hear again, his tormentors were gone and he was left to scramble down from his precarious perch alone.
32
Key West is justly famous for its sunsets, but most people do not realize that its moonrises are at certain seasons equally sublime. In summer, the waxing moon migrates toward the southern sky. When full, it emerges powdery salmon from the flat and open waters of the Florida Straits. Those waters, in the humid, windless dusks of June, take on an unearthly texture, part mirror, part soup, and dully gleam like brushed aluminum. If one is very lucky, one can sometimes see the very first flash of light as it peeks above the tabletop horizon. The mottled moon takes a long time to climb out of the ocean, and once it has, its color changes, lightens every moment, like a big wet yellow dog as it shakes itself and dries.
Saturday the twelfth was the full-moon evening, and Augie Silver, feeling spry and restless, took it in his head that he wanted to go to see it. 'Come on,' he said to Reuben an hour or so before the great event. 'We'll throw an
