Zack told Joey many things, but he failed to get across how different water looks at night. Mainly, it disappears.
Joey realized this while edging the skiff out of Garrison Bight, just after ten P.M. on an evening without a moon. The shadings and dapplings had vanished from the surface, and all that remained was a featureless blackness shot through here and there with green flashes of phosphorescence. Was Joey even seeing those green flashes? He couldn't be sure, because they looked so much like what happened inside your head when you pressed on your eyeballs. Another thing Joey couldn't be sure of was where the coastline was. In daylight it had been so clear; now the boundary where land met water seemed unhealthily approximate. That flasher over there-was it a buoy or a traffic light? That dark bulk getting closer to him- was it another boat or a stray shred of North America?
Joey Goldman squinted, leaned so far forward that his head was almost caught between the top of the windshield and the front edge of the Bimini, and squeezed the steering wheel in his sweaty palms. Go under the bridge and hang a left, Zack had told him. It sounded so easy, as easy as driving the Caddy to the grocery store for a carton of milk. But Joey hadn't figured on the eddies that formed near the bridge, the swirling rushes that rendered the wheel almost as useless as if it had come off in his hands, and that spat him broadside, as though in distaste, between the stanchions.
Stay between the red and green markers, Zack had instructed, but Joey hadn't realized that at night, with only starlight on them, red and green channel markers look very much alike. Joey had expected two ranks of beacons, pointing the way as clearly as the reflectors on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. What he found was a seemingly random array of unlit pilings hammered into muck, winding through grass flats and scattered coral heads. He throttled back, rubbed his eyes, and took a thin comfort from the sound of his engine. The motor noise sounded a lot like a car; it had become the only thing still linking him to the world of the familiar.
He picked his way to the mouth of the harbor, where the vast Atlantic collides with the huge gyre of the Gulf, and the clapping currents raise ripples whose foamy tops stand in the air like cake frosting. Joey didn't understand why the boat was bouncing so much all of a sudden, why every instant his knees had to find a different angle to stand at. He didn't grasp why he was going more sidewise than forward. He fed more gas to plow through the rip; warm spray hit him in the eye and a big splash soaked his sneaker.
Then he was past the harbor entrance and out into the Florida Straits.
Here the water was empty and the shoreline black with the drooping shapes of the Australian pines. Small waves were pushed toward Joey by the breeze, and the boat did belly flops over them, the hull taking off like a low-launched rocket, then smacking back down with a spanking sound, the engine whining as the prop lifted into the foam, then stabbed back into the solider water below.
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.