"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 pushed him down. Absently, he noticed that his gun was still in his hand. He slid it along the sheet and tucked it under a pillow. "Drink, Joey?" He motioned toward a low table where the dirty dinner dishes were scattered and a two-thirds empty bottle of Jack Daniel's was standing like a monument. On the dresser next to the table, the television flashed the eleven o'clock news with the sound turned off.
Joey shook his head, settled into a vinyl chair, and took a moment to rearrange his damp trouser leg so the wet part wouldn't lie against his thigh. "You're a selfish prick, you know that, Gino?"
Gino absorbed the comment like an exhausted heavyweight eating one more jab. "You come here just to tell me that?"
"I come here to get you outta my town and outta my life. But first, we talk. You coulda got me killed the other week. You even give a shit about that?"
Gino wrapped his meaty hands around the edge of the mattress and looked down between his knees. "I'm sorry, kid. I was in a bind."
"In a bind?" Joey pulled himself forward by the arms of his chair. "In a bind? You fucking jerk. You're in a bind, so the whole resta the world can go to hell? What if Bert dropped dead? What if Sandra was with me?"
Gino took a deep breath that seemed to cost him a lot of effort. He couldn't help looking back over his shoulder at Vicki. Girlfriends were not supposed to hear this kind of thing. It messed with their respect. "Listen, kid, I'm sorry. I fucked up. 'Zat what you wanna hear me say?"
"Yeah, Gino, that's exactly what I wanna hear you say. And now that you've said it, I want some explanations. Like why the fuck are you still here? You almost get me killed so you can run away, then you don't even manage to run away."
"Joey, Joey," said Gino, in a tone the younger brother knew well. It was the tone he used when he wanted to make it clear that he, Gino, was the planner, the thinker, and Joey, like an army grunt, had neither reason nor right to ask the why of things. "There's more to it than you know about."
"Wanna bet?" Joey snapped. "It's about three million dollars in Colombian emeralds that disappeared from Coconut Grove."
A wave of slow surprise moved across Gino's swollen face. It pulled at his mouth and made him mumble. "Ponte tell ya that? Bert tell ya?"
"Never mind. But now I want your side of it. From the top."
Gino crossed his legs, uncrossed them, slapped his knee, and grunted. "Sure you don't want a drink?"
"You have one, Gino. You need it. I don't."
The older brother got up and lumbered toward the bourbon bottle. Joey looked at Vicki, lying just at the fringe of a yellow pool of lamplight. In some ways, oddly, she looked better than she had before. She'd washed the tease out of her hair, and while it was now lank, thin, and coarse as straw, at least it looked like part of her. Without the foot-high helmet on her head, her features looked less pinched, and without their labored paint job, her eyes even had a kind of softness. Her mouth seemed calm, though Joey could not tell if she had broken through to some extreme form of patience or had become quietly deranged.
Gino returned with three fingers of Jack Daniel's in a smudged glass and sat down heavily on the bed. Either he sighed or some air came out of the mattress. "Awright, Joey," he began. "Awright. Now the first thing ya gotta know is that nunna this was my idea." He swigged half his drink. "But O.K. There were these two guys, Vinnie Fish and Frankie Bread. They were, like, a little bit attached to my crew, a little bit attached to Ponte, but it was, ya know, a vague kinda thing, nothing really solid. Ya follow?"
"Yeah, Gino. I follow."
"Well," Gino continued, "these guys knew about the stones, they knew about the drop. So they come to me, they wanna be partners, and Joey, I swear to God, I tell 'em it is a very fucked-up idea. I tell 'em no way. But these guys, Vinnie and Frank, they're like very persuasive guys. They say, look, who's Ponte gonna suspect-his own paisans or the fucking spicks? It's a piece a cake, they say. Lift the stones, Ponte decides the Colombians fucked him, and that's the end of it."
Dried salt made Joey's scalp itch and he gave it a luxurious scratch. "Then wha'd they need you for?"
Gino drank. "They figured they'd walk away with like a million and a half each. How can they spend that kinda money without it lookin', ya know…? So the deal was this: They cut me in, I get them made, so then it looks like they're earning good with us, and that's where the cash is coming from."
Joey tapped his fingers on the blond wood arms of his chair. "Except Ponte doesn't believe it was the Colombians."
Gino tugged at the lapel of his bathrobe and gave a bitter laugh. "Ain't that fucking sad? I mean, what's the fucking world coming to when a guy would trust the spicks before his own friends? Who knows, maybe Vinnie and Frank fucked up. Maybe they left a trace, maybe they acted guilty. I dunno. I wasn't in on that part of it." He lifted his glass and, unwilling to admit it was empty, turned it upward until he was looking through the bottom of it as if it were a telescope. Then he got up and plodded toward the table.
Vicki looked at his wide back and spoke for the first time. It was not the voice of someone who had found the key to perfect patience. "Bring the bottle, Gino, you'll save steps."
"Shut up, Vicki," he said without turning around. But he took her advice.
"So what part are you in on, Gino?"
Gino sat down and poured himself another bourbon before he answered. He stashed the bottle between his thighs, and the neck protruded unattractively. "Vinnie and Frank got whacked. You know that, right?"
Joey nodded.
"Well, before they did, we made up a place where they would leave the emeralds. My part of the job was to pick 'em up, bring 'em to New York, and get 'em sold."
Joey realized quite suddenly that the flickering, voiceless images from the television were driving him nuts. He got up, turned the set off, and paced the room. "Gino, lemme make sure I got this right. Your partners get clipped. Which obviously means that Ponte knows what's what. And you still come down here to cop the stones? You gotta be a total asshole."
The older brother hunched forward, looking more than ever like a tired fighter who puts his head down and bulls off the ropes for one last and desperate offensive flurry. "Joey, tree million bucks, and no one left to split it with-could you just walk away and leave that sittin' onna table? Huh?" He sipped bourbon. "So O.K., things ain't workin' out so good, now I gotta sit here and get insulted. All of a sudden it's O.K., it's safe to dump on Gino. Even you, Joey, you're the big man all of a sudden. But what if it worked? Would I be an asshole then? Bullshit. I'd be a hero."
"Some hero," said Vicki. It didn't seem like she'd meant to speak. It just came out like an ill-timed fart.
"Shut up, you bitch. Yeah Joey, I'd be a hero, and we both know it. I'd lay some money on Pop, I'd spread some around, I'd take on some new guys, and even if, sometime downa road, Ponte figured things out, you think he'd have the balls to touch me? Nan. I'd be too big by then."
Joey reached out and grabbed his brother by the arms. "Gino, there ain't gonna be no then. Can't you see that?" He gave Gino a shake, but the bigger man seemed to have gone limp; it was like shaking a bag of cotton. "So where're the emeralds now?"
Gino looked down and said nothing. Vicki cracked the silence with a tittering and demented little laugh. "He don't know," she said.
Joey was not aware of starting to pace again but found himself treading the narrow runway between the dresser and the foot of the bed. "You don't know?"
"I do know," Gino protested. He half swiveled and looked at Vicki with a face full of loathing. Then he added, in a softer voice, "I just couldn't find em."
"Couldn't find 'em when?"
Gino was seeking distraction in the bourbon bottle between his thighs, toying with it like a masturbating chimp. "The night I set up you and Bert," he said. "This is what I'm tryin' to tell ya, Joey. I didn't do it so I could run, I did it so I could cop the stones."
"But you didn't cop the stones."
Gino shook his head forlornly and came as close as Joey had ever seen to looking embarrassed. "I couldn't find the fucking place. Then I ran outta time. I barely made it back here aheada Ponte. Maybe I shoulda just said the hell with it and bolted. But tree million dollars! I wasn't ready to walk away."
Joey suddenly felt very tired. It was the kind of melting fatigue in which the most familiar things no longer seem familiar. Was this fat drunk guy in the bathrobe a relative of his, someone he was supposed to care about? This woman under the sheet-who the hell was she? "So Gino," he said very slowly, "where — are-the emeralds?"
Gino opened his mouth, then abruptly stopped himself, like a card player who realizes he is on the brink of throwing in what could yet be a winning hand. "Joey, I ain't sure I oughta tell ya."
Joey sucked his teeth, crossed his arms, and leaned back against the dresser. "Gino, asshole, you're a walking dead man because of those fucking emeralds. You don't see that?"
"What kinda split you looking for, Joey?"
"Split? Split? You think this is about a split? Jesus Christ, Gino, you really are a putz." Joey looked at his watch on its arrogantly inexpensive plastic band. "Look, it's late. I don't need this shit. Either you tell me what I need to know in the next thirty seconds, or I'm outta here and you're on your own."
Gino stared at the carpet but found no answers there. Vicki's foot moved under the sheet and kicked him in the kidney. "Awright, awright. Supposedly the stones are stashed at this place called Sand Key Marina. It's about ten, twelve miles up, and that's all I know about it. Drove me bullshit tryin' to find it. There's no signs, no streetlights, you like go down these tiny roads that turn into gravel and then dead-end at these swamps. Over and over again, fucking swamps. Mosquitoes. Fire-flies. Things croaking. Anyway, there's an old wreck of a fishing boat at this marina. Just, like, tied up there, ya know, it can't be used no more. It's called the Osprey. So Vinnie and Frank, they scoped it out, and they put the stones in this wreck, under a plank inside with like a little X marked on it. And that's as much as I know, I swear to God."
Joey nibbled a thumbnail and glanced at the dirty dinner dishes. "You got cash?"
Gino nodded.
"Gimme a thousand."
"Wha' for?"
"I don't know yet," Joey said. "I gotta think."
Gino leaned over, put die Jack Daniel's on a night table, took a wad of bills out of a drawer, and gave his kid brother some money.
"Tomorrow at midnight," Joey said, "go down to the basement, up the service ramp, around the pool, and out to the dock. No luggage, no nothing."
"What about my stuff?" said Vicki.
"Shut up," said Gino.
And Joey left. He saw no one in the elevator or in the basement kitchen, and when he encountered a security guard on the private beach, he just walked past him like he owned the joint and went out to his boat.