Florida Straits

by SKLA

  Zack said nothing, as if he assumed that Joey meant the dinner party was by way of thank-you.

  Joey fiddled with the steaks. "So Zack, I'd like to give you a quarter-million dollars."

  Zack was swallowing some wine, and he took an extra second to make sure it went down. Joey did not sound like he was kidding. He did not sound like he was drunk. Zack couldn't even stammer, but just stood there with his throat closed tight, Valpolicella pooling on either side of the constriction.

  "There's just one more little thing I need you to do for me," Joey resumed, "and if that works out, we're in."

  Zack still could not speak, and there was growing in him the heady and not totally unpleasant conviction that whatever Joey was talking about, it could not possibly be legal. The odd satisfaction Zack took from this made him wonder if maybe he was drunk; it made him wonder, too, if maybe he'd known all along that Joey was a desperado, and if it was this whiff of the outlaw that had drawn Zack to him.

  "You're serious?" Zack choked out at last.

  "Serious as diabetes," said Joey.

  "Wha'do I gotta do?" As Joey had been groping for a toehold in normalcy, so Zack in that moment was getting on terms with the possibility of crime, and it was as if the boundary between their two positions was nothing more dramatic than a faint chalk line dabbed on rotting boards.

  Joey poked a filet. "Set up a meeting with Clem Sanders and, ya know, sort of ease the way with him."

  Zack shifted his feet, looked up at the sky. He was relieved yet somehow let down that he was not being asked to drive a getaway car or carry a satchel through a border check. "That's all?"

  Joey flipped a steak, admired the grill lines etched across it, and nodded.

  "Joey," said Zack, "I talk to Clem all the time. You don't have to pay me to talk to Clem."

  "This is business."

  Zack sipped some wine and found himself at a loss once more. Unlike Joey, he was unaccustomed to feeling out of his depth. He didn't improvise as well, couldn't fall in with a new cadence quite as readily.

  Joey peeked at the underside of a filet, then looked toward the little group sitting by the pool. Bert, he noticed, had given Claire the high honor of holding Don Giovanni in her lap. "Sandra," Joey hollered over, "you ready with the salad and the broccoli?"

  She waved yes, and jogged with her small neat steps toward the kitchen.

  Zack cleared his throat. "This thing you wanna talk to Clem about," he said. "Is it, ya know, against the law?"

  "I'm not really sure," said Joey, heaping the steaks onto the platter. Zack could only admire his blitheness, his certainty that it was not worth overcooking a filet mignon to discuss a mere question of legality. "That's one of the things we have to talk to him about."

  Zack nodded, and Sandra bustled by with a salad bowl you could've bathed a baby in. Then she made a second pass with an avalanche of broccoli. Joey turned off the grill. "So you'll do it?" he said to Zack.

  "Sure," Zack said. "But it's really not worth—"

  Joey dropped his voice another notch to cut him off. "And lemme ask ya one more thing, while we're here, ya know, the two of us. In your experience with women, are they all such nuts about salad, about vegetables?"

  — 40 —

  "I get half," said Clem Sanders.

  It was Monday lunchtime, and they were sitting in his office at the Treasure Museum. The office was a big room with barred windows, lined with glass display cases filled with old coins, ancient jewelry, corroded pistols, pieces of silver robbed of their luster and fused together by salt water and time so that they resembled crude models of the atom. Behind Clem Sanders's chair was a wall covered with photographs of himself outsmiling various dignitaries and local celebrities, none of whom Joey recognized.

  "Come on, Clem," said Zack Davidson, "take a quarter. It's not like you really have to go hunting. Joey here can pretty much pinpoint the spot for you."

  Sanders folded his hands as if in prayer and cocked his head at the sympathetic angle an undertaker or a southern politician strikes when he is about to tell you he wishes to God there were more he could do for you, but there isn't. His face was deeply lined and seemed sunburned right down to the bone, just slightly redder than the color of dark-meat chicken. The pigment seemed to have been bleached out of his blue eyes, leaving them pale as hospital paint. He wore a green jumpsuit open at the neck, and nestled in his gray chest hair was a Spanish doubloon on a leather string. His hands were huge and crinkled, his voice a honeyed drawl fashioned for coaxing funds out of greedy but skeptical investors. " 'Taint the huntin' that's involved," he said gently. "It's the precedent."

  Joey spoke not to him but to Zack. "It's too much. I wanted to keep it local, but we're gonna hafta shop it in Miami."

  He started to rise, and as he did so, the neatly rolled nautical chart that had been laid across his lap rustled with a crisp sound like new-printed money. Clem Sanders could not pull his eyes away from the precious tube of paper. He squinted as if trying to pierce it with his gaze, to locate the treasure that, in his view and under the law, was as much his as anybody else's. "Now hol' on a minute," he purred. "I didn't say we couldn't negotiate."

  "So negotiate," said Joey. He sat back down but stayed near the edge of the seat.

  Sanders tugged absently at the doubloon around his neck. "If it's like you say, if you've got the location, then I s'pose I could live with sixty-forty."

  Joey frowned. "Clem, you know what I do for a living, right? I stand out onna street corner and I give people a pitch to go see Parrot Beach. One a the things I tell 'em, I say, free passes to the Treasure Museum, Clem Sanders, greatest treasure hunter of all time."

  "Thank you kindly."

  "Yeah, well, I'm not sayin' I believe it, I'm sayin' it's parta my pitch. But hey, if it's true, it's gonna take you half a day to do this job. Maybe less. Are you gonna tell me you won't take a million dollars for three, four hours' work? I'm willing to cut you in for a third, no more."

  Sanders looked at the ceiling, then exhaled past lips that were permanently cracked and crevassed by the sun. He glanced at Zack, fingered his doubloon, then lightly slapped his desk. "Shoot—why not? You got a deal."

  Now, Joey had been an observer at certain low-level sit-downs in New York. The people running those meetings had been observers at midlevel sit-downs, and the people running the midlevel gatherings had been present at certain congresses of the big boys. What filtered down from the top was a style based on rigorous restraint. One did not show emotion at the striking of a bargain. It was unmanly to smile, dangerous to gloat. So Joey kept his face and voice as neutral as he could.

  "Good," he said, watching light stream through the barred windows of the treasure room. "Now there's just a couple other things. We're partners, I'm gonna be totally up front, 'cause I don't want any headaches after. These emeralds, the way they got there, it's not, like, totally—"

  Clem Sanders held an enormous pink palm in Joey's face as if fending off the evil eye or some terrible contagion, and at the same time he let out a deep defensive noise: Bup, bup, bup, BUPPPP.

  "Hol' on," he said. "I don' need to know, I don' wanna know, and besides, hit don't make no difference. No difference a'tall."

  "None?" asked Zack, with a lifted eyebrow. Still hovering between salesmanship and crime, his voice hinted at a secret disappointment that he wasn't well on his way to outlawhood.

  "None," purred Clem. "By law. The ocean, gents, it's like a baptism. Cleans away everything. Old secrets, old errors, old sins. All gone. Stick somethin' in the ocean"—he cupped his hands, then slowly lifted them in a sacramental gesture as of rising from murky depths into the virginal light of day—"it comes out reborn."

  At this, despite his best efforts to remain becomingly stone-faced, Joey could not help smiling. Innocent emeralds. Free of the taint of Gino. Cleansed of the reek of Mount Trashmore. Redeemed from the horror of fleeing rodents and the threat of getting whacked. Or so he needed to believe.


  "That's terrific," Joey said. "But listen. You don't wanna know the reasons why, that's fine. But ya gotta understand it's very important that everything is out innee open heah. Ya know, like public, so people can see it's onnee up and up."

  Now it was Clem Sanders's turn to blow the stoic act. He grinned and in fact could not help chuckling. Not for nothing was he widely regarded as Key West's most undaunted self-promoter. "Son," he said, "this is gonna be the most public damn thing you ever saw. Everything I do is public. First off, if I'm goin' out, I call the papers, tease 'em along. Then I get the cable people. Plus I got friends at the networks. They'll send crews down from Miami 'cause they know I'll deliver, I'll come cruisin' in in time for the midday news, twelve o'clock local edition. If there's a find, I radio right away, the coast guard sends boats, sometimes helicopters, guardian angels like, to hover over us. Every cop in Key West meets us at the dock. City cops. County cops. State cops. Marine cops. Fuckin' IRS is there. The mayor shows up to get his picture taken with me. Then we all hop into armored cars and ride in a televised motorcade straight into the bank vault. That public enough for you?"

  Joey nodded, savoring a moment of perfect contentment as he imagined Charlie Ponte's thugs, their almost matching blue suits soaked with sweat, their hemorrhoids on fire from endless weeks of sitting in the car, leaning against the hoods of their Lincolns and watching helplessly as an army of police brought their boss's emeralds to the bank.

  "Sounds fine," he said. "But me, ya know, I wanna be left out of the public part."

  Sanders gave a worldly shrug. He'd seen it all. Some people craved the spotlight, some had compelling reasons for staying out of sight. "We can set it up any way you like. Basically, it's a legal partnership. With shares. You pay in a certain amount to underwrite the costs, then you get your split. I'll retain a third, the rest is up to you."

  "And the costs?" Zack Davidson asked.

  Clem Sanders toyed with his doubloon and picked an easy number. "If it's as quick and dirty as you say, call it fifteen thousand. Five thou a share up front."

  Joey had already decided. "Fine. I want it one third in Zack's name and one third in my brother's. Gino Delgatto."

  The world's greatest treasure hunter smiled past cracked lips. "I'll have the papers drawn up." His bleached eyes had once again become glued to the tube of paper on Joey's lap.

  "How long does it take?" asked Joey.

  "The papers?" said Sanders. "About a week."

  "No good," said Joey. Ponte's goons might be dumb, but how much longer would they stake out a hotel that Gino had already escaped from? "How 'bout you get the stones tomorrow?"

  Sanders let out a slow whistle. Young guys, northerners especially, always seemed in such a hurry. Sanders usually was not. Most of the stuff he went after had been lying on the bottom of the ocean for two, three hundred years—what was the rush? "We are hot to trot, ain't we?"

  "Yeah, we are," said Joey. "By noon tomorrow— yes or no?"

  Sanders cocked his head, toyed with his doubloon. "Well, the boats are ready, I can raise a crew. I s'pose we could go out tomorrow, weather permitting. But you know, boys, nothing happens till I get the ten thousand for two thirds of the shares."

  "No problem," said Joey, and Zack could not help flashing him the kind of look that partners in a negotiation should not flash each other while talks are under way. "Get the papers drawn up, I'll be back with the cash in a coupla hours."

  "Cash," said Sanders. The word brought forth a most benevolent expression. "O.K. Dawn tomorrow, calm seas, we hunt."

  Joey and Zack got up to leave. Sanders pointed to the rolled-up nautical chart in Joey's hand.

  "May as well leave that here so's I can study up," he said.

  Joey sent back a smile every bit as trustworthy as the treasure hunter's own. "Study it later, Clem. After the papers are signed."

  — 41 —

  Hot April sunshine poured in through the open top of the old Caddy, shafts of it splattering into rainbows as they sliced through the facets of the spiderweb windshield. Joey was buoyant as he drove away from Clem Sanders's office and out toward the weird migrant sand of Smathers Beach. He gingerly fondled is hot steering wheel, he tapped his left foot as he drove. He felt like he finally had the different pieces of his life perfectly lined up. The new part, the Florida part, that was right where it should be: he was wheeling and dealing in a way that fit the climate, he was about to pull his fortune, or at least the start of it, out of the water. The old part, the neighborhood part, well, he was on his way to dip one last time into its deep pockets and to use the proceeds to put it behind him once and for all.

  The legit world—Joey Goldman thought as he turned onto A1A and wove through its wobbly traffic of bicycles and mopeds—it really had its advantages. Like the way it was so neatly set up to lubricate the making of money, like how easily guys with angles on the right side of the chalk line could operate. Still, the old neighborhood way had its advantages too. For instance, in the borrowing of funds. In the neighborhood way, you didn't fill out forms, you didn't mortgage your house, you didn't wait. You told someone what you needed, and either he peeled off the bills or he told you forget about it. But Bert wouldn't tell him forget about it. Of this Joey was sure. He was on a salesman's roll and no one was going to say no to him.

  He drove through the gate of the Paradiso condominium like he owned a triplex there. He looked for his friend around the pool, he looked for him in the screened gazebo where the old men played gin. Only as an afterthought did it occur to Joey that maybe Bert was in his apartment. In Key West on a sunny afternoon, you just didn't expect to find anyone inside.

  But sure enough the old mafioso was at home. He came to the door dressed in a subdued shirt of maroon silk, no piping, no monogram, and it took Joey a few seconds to realize it was pajamas. "Hey, Bert, you O.K.?"

  "Whaddya mean? I'm fine. Guy can't stay in his fucking apartment without it's, like, a problem? Dog ain't feelin' so great, is all. Come on in."

  He led the way under a crystal chandelier and into a living room that had too much furniture and too little blank space. The place seemed like an old lady still lived there. There were clocks on pedestals, lamps like statues. The drapes had loops in them so you couldn't tell if they slid sideways or up and down.

  Don Giovanni's dog bed was a kingly purple velvet, and it lay on the carpet next to Bert's well-rubbed recliner. Bert sat, motioning Joey onto a brocade sofa, and Joey wasted no time on chitchat.

  "Ten grand," he said. "In a week, maybe less, I'll give ya back fifteen."

  Bert did one of his better pauses, his eyes exploring the edges of the room, his soft mouth flubbering around between amusement and offense. When he finally spoke, it wasn't to Joey but to the dog. "You hear this, Giovanni? At my age, now he's makin' me a fucking shylock. Joey, what is this bullshit? I lend ya ten, ya gimme back ten."

  "Bert, hey, this is business."

  "For you maybe. Me, I ain't got no business, and I don't want any."

  Joey tried a different tack, a tack that made him smile in spite of himself. "Bert, what the fuck, the money that comes back is gonna be Gino's money anyway."

  The old man rubbed the arms of his chair and checked to see that his dog was still in place. "You wanna explain that?"

  "Not now. I ain't got time."

  Bert sighed. Then he spilled himself out of the recliner and walked toward the bedroom. Don Giovanni struggled up out of the velvet bed and followed. The dog was brittle, its knees were shot; it bounced along like a car with no shocks. Joey saw Bert walk around a neatly made bed covered with a fancy gold and white spread. He came back with a bundle of hundreds thick as a steak and handed it to Joey. "Here ya go, kid," he said. "Give it back when ya can."

  Joey took the money and flushed. Bert's trust excited him and he could barely squeeze out a thank-you.

  The old man stood over him and waved away the attempt. "The money, kid, fuck the money, it's nothin', it's shit. I ain't worri
ed about the money. But I gotta tell ya, Joey, I'm a little worried about you. Ya sure ya know what you're doin' heah?"

  Joey was sitting on the very edge of the brocade sofa, his shins against a marble coffee table. He was leaning forward, and he was pumped with a heat that the Paradiso's central air-conditioning couldn't quite siphon off. He didn't want to hear about Bert's concern, just like he hadn't wanted to hear about Sal's. They meant well, sure, but what good did it do? "Bert, listen," he said, "I appreciate—"

  "Ya know what worries me?" Bert interrupted. "It's like in a checkers game, a guy gets so fuckin' happy he sees a chance to double-jump that he don't notice he's gonna get triple-jumped right back. Ya hear what I'm sayin', Joey? You're a little too happy as far as I'm concerned."

  Joey's head suddenly felt very heavy, and for a couple of seconds he let it dangle buzzardlike between his shoulders. "Bert, what can I tell ya? I've thought this through the best I can."

  The old man went back to his recliner, but didn't settle in, just perched on the front of it. The dog went back to its velvet bed and collapsed, exhausted from its jaunt to the bedroom. "Okay, Joey, okay. But listen, there's somethin' you oughta know. Maybe it means somethin', maybe it don't. I went by the Flagler House last night for sunset. No Lincolns."

  Joey pursed his lips and tried to figure out if he was surprised to hear this. Usually when something went wrong, he more or less expected it. "You sure?"

  Bert stroked the soft placket of his pajama top. "I watched for half, three quarters of an hour. They're gone, Joey."

  Joey said nothing, and Bert went on as if thinking aloud. "They gotta know by now that Gino got away. It's been, what, four days, five?"

  Joey propped his elbows on his knees and looked around for an empty place where he could rest his eyes and think. But everywhere he looked, there was a candy dish, a figurine, a souvenir ashtray. "Maybe this means, like, they're backin' off."

  "Could be," said Bert. The comment wasn't meant to be convincing.

  Joey looked down at the marble coffee table. The grain running through it reminded him of bloodshot eyes. "I mean," he said, "they probably went up to Miami, ya know, to sit down and decide their next move."