Luis smiled a lot. He had a chubby little face, and an infectious Bugs Bunny sort of grin. It was a wonder people didn’t call him El Conejo, which meant “the rabbit” in Spanish. Because actually, he resembled a chubby little rabbit more than he did either a fire hydrant or an armadillo. Women thought Luis was cute. Even some men thought he was cute. “You some sweetheart, baby,” customers would often say to him, which Luis took to mean he had a nice friendly smile and chubby cheeks everybody wanted to pinch. Actually, his customers meant he drove a hard bargain. “You some sweetheart, baby.” And he would slit your throat for a dime. Or get someone else to do it for a nickel.
Luis prided himself on the size of his penis.
He would often ask girls if he was bigger than Johnny Holmes. Johnny Holmes was a porn star who couldn’t act at all, but he had this enormous organ. In the movies Luis had seen with Johnny Holmes in them, Holmes always looked a little soft, as if the damn thing was too long to stay hard all the way to the head. Luis would play a Johnny Holmes movie on the VHS, and ask whichever girl he was with who was bigger, him or Johnny Holmes. They all said he was ten times bigger than Holmes, and also a lot cuter.
On Thursday morning, when the call came from Ernesto Moreno in Calusa, Luis was showing a twenty-year-old black girl a trick with an apple and a handful of cocaine. Luis himself was very light-skinned, but he had a terrific yen for black girls. He also had a terrific yen for apples. Cocaine, he could take or leave, mostly leave. Cocaine was business. The trouble with Al Pacino in that movie Scarface — aside from the fact that he was ugly and wanted to fuck his own sister — was that he mixed business with pleasure. Every time you saw Pacino, he was snorting a bucketful of coke. Luis rarely touched the stuff. But there were a lot of girls who enjoyed coke a lot and Luis always kept some in the house to meet the need. Coke-snorting girls were often very grateful girls, except when every now and then you came across a cheap cunt who needed to be taught a lesson.
Luis spoke with a Spanish accent that a lot of girls thought was cute. Not Hispanic girls. They didn’t think the accent was cute, they thought everybody talked that way. Anglos, though, slender young things in thin little dresses, flitting around the hotel bars, they thought his accent was cute. They also thought he might have some coke. They heard a Spanish accent, they automatically figured coke. Young girls nowadays, you said, “Hello, how do you do?” they answered, “Hi, my name is Cindy, you got any blow?” That was one of the names for cocaine. Blow.
Before he’d come to Miami, even though he was in the business, Amaros hadn’t known there were so many names for cocaine. Americans were so inventive. C, coke, snow, he knew. Happy dust, too, he’d heard it called that and also gold dust. But star dust, no, that was new to him, and so was white lady and nose candy and flake. The names he found most peculiar were Bernice, Corinne, and girl. For cocaine. People calling cocaine Bernice, Corinne, or girl. As if they were equating sniffing a noseful of dope with fucking. Calling the dope girl. Maybe they were fucking when they sniffed the stuff, the looks on their faces, some of them.
He impressed girls with the cobalt thiocyanate trick. Mix it in with the dope, watch it turn blue. The brighter the blue, the better the girl. Always kept three, four kilos in the house, never knew when there’d be a party. The brighter the blue, the better the girl. Luis had his own expression. The better the girl, the better the girl. Meaning you gave a girl good dope, you got good action in return. Except every now and then a cunt got too smart for her own good.
“What you do,” Luis said, “you scoop out the middle of the apple like so.”
The black girl watched him, eyes wide. Her hair was done like Bo Derek’s in the movie 10. She had informed him last night that this particular hairstyle was really African in origin. According to the blacks, everything these days was African in origin. Even the Torah was African in origin. She had sniffed coke like she was a vacuum cleaner, sucked cock the same way. When he asked her was he bigger than Johnny Holmes, she said, “Man, you are bigger than God!”
He worked the apple with a corer.
“What’s that do, what you’re doin’?” the girl asked.
Her name was Omelia. Black people, they made up names, the names were never right on the money. Like Omelia sounded like Amelia, but it wasn’t. He’d balled black girls named Lorenne, Clorissa, Norla — none of them real names at all, just names that sounded like they could be names. He loved black girls with their funky sounding names.
“What we’re doing here,” he said, “is we’re making a hole in the apple here. Right in the center of the apple.”
“What for?” she said.
She was sitting Indian style on a chair at the kitchen table. Knees up, ankles crossed. Naked. High sweat-sheen on her skin.
“Put the dust in it,” he said.
“In where?” Omelia said. “The apple?”
“Right here in the hole,” he said.
“Gonna mess up real good blow,” she said.
“No, give it a good flavor.”
“Who told you that?”
“Trust me,” he said, and poured cocaine into the cored apple. He took a plastic straw from a glass on the counter. He stuck the straw into the apple and then handed the apple across the table to her.
He watched her sniffing coke.
Eyes closed.
Legs slightly parted.
“When you finish,” he said, “I’ll eat the apple.”
“We should put some of this in my hole,” she said, and looked up and giggled.
“You want to do that?” he said.
“Anythin’ you want, man. This is some shit you got here. Where you get such shit, man?”
“I have connections,” he said.
“Purify my hole, shit like this.”
The telephone rang.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I won’t be long.”
“You better not be,” she said. “We got things to try, man.”
He walked into the library, closed the door behind him, and picked up the ringing phone. Through the window, he could see out over Biscayne Bay, southward to Soldier Key. The sky was clear and blue, but it would turn cloudy by afternoon, and then it would rain again.
“Hello?” he said.
“Luis?” the voice on the other end said.
“Yes?” he said.
“Ernesto.”
They talked for almost five minutes.
Their conversation was entirely in Spanish.
Ernesto reported that he and Domingo were now in Calusa and were staying at a motel called the Suncrest.
He said they now had seven different names for Jody Carmody, but they were pretty sure her real name was Jenny Santoro.
Luis asked if the name was Spanish, she hadn’t looked Spanish.
Ernesto told him it was Italian.
Luis said nothing to this. He did not like Italians. He equated Italians with the Mafia, and the Mafia with people who would kill him in a minute to get at his business.
Ernesto told him this was going to be a very difficult job. All these different names now, and nobody else to ask about her.
Luis told him to stay with it.
He told him to contact a man named Martin Klement at a restaurant named Springtime. In Calusa. Tell him they were looking to buy good cocaine. Tell him to ask around. Martin Klement.