It wasn’t the crazies or cripples, the winos or crackheads, that sickened him about life at the Fiorella, it was the idea of lives that had stopped. Of people who’d fallen over the edge and weren’t coming back. They slumped in the lobby, paralyzed by the television’s buzzing, unblinking eye, chain-smoking and dropping butts on the tiles, butts nobody bothered to sweep up, sixteen hours a day.
One evening, Harry’d seen a red-skinned infant, a week out of the hospital, tops. It hung at its mother’s breast, wailing at the world from the bottom of its tiny lungs. Harry couldn’t stop thinking about that kid. What were the odds it wasn’t going to die in a place exactly like this one, or worse?
With the blinds shut and a chair wedged under the doorknob, Harry calmed in the cool grey of his room. He sank into the rut of the mattress, smoking a Dutch cigarette, the evening ahead unfolding like a movie in his mind. He floated back to Manfred’s hotel through the neon-lit mob, and took directions from the Dutchman. Money in hand after the job, he saw himself sweating out the dawn in some Greyhound station.
He rolled out of the mattress and peeled off his shirt. He dropped to the floor, squeezed off fifty pushups. Harry struck some poses for the mirror, shoulder flex, biceps flex, side view. Jailhouse muscles. He shot a sneer at the mirror, then two jabs and a right, mumbling curses at his reflection. Starting another combination, his left went long and whacked the mirror flush. The mirror shattered.
He ran cold water over his knuckles and lay down again. He thought he was too wound up to sleep, but before long he lapsed into a dream. He was eating a sandwich in a glassed-in café, his eyes traveling over the gardening column of a newspaper. There was a photograph of a tulip, but the caption claimed it was a rhododendron. Harry had no idea what a rhododendron looked like, but the flower in the picture was a fucking tulip if he ever saw one. A guy he thought he knew started knocking on the window, pounding so hard Harry was scared the pane would come crashing in like the mirror had, and then he was awake and somebody outside was hammering on the door.
Harry said, “What time is it?”
“Time for you to either pay up or get the fuck out,” a voice said, and Harry listened as feet shuffled away from the door and down the hall.
There wasn’t much to pack, underwear and socks, some toilet things he threw into a bag, crunching shards on his way out. He took the back exit to an alley, then cut through to the street and into the first sluggish trickle of the throng on Ocean Drive.
If he’d been looped in the afternoon, by the time Harry got back to Manfred’s room the Dutchman was in a fullon frenzy. One hand on his waist, one wrist flapping a faggot burlesque, the whites of his eyes laced with ruptured capillaries that shone pink in the half-light.
The air conditioner was still blasting, and the refrigerated air roiled with cigarette stink and a new offender, a musky cologne Manfred had slathered on. Somebody’d been dispatched to the liquor store. The Ballantine bottle sat drained on a nightstand, but there was a fresh one riding shotgun.
“Okay,” Harry said, “where am I going?”
“You know, Harry, you must never fix those teeth. The gaps, I find them terribly hot.” He brought out a twogram vial. It brimmed. “Tootski?”
Harry glared.
“Do a little bump with your uncle. Harry, for old times.”
Harry turned in his bottom lip. The last thing he needed was a toot. A hit, a bump, a blast. He wiped his palms on his jeans. “You know what, Manfred? I’ll take a drink.”
The bathroom door was open, and the shower was running. Steam humidified the room, and a whiff of the hotel’s brand of shampoo churned in the gumbo of odors. Harry stifled a gag.
He swallowed Manfred’s stingy measure, grabbed the fifth and poured a shot that’d loosen the knot in his gut. The vial was uncapped again, and Manfred held a heaping spoonful under Harry’s left nostril. Harry passed. Manfred pumped the coke into his own head.
“What I need from you is the package and the address, and I need to get this over. I don’t feel good about committing another felony three days out of the joint, and I’d just as soon put it behind me. You know what I’m saying?”
Harry was desperate to get out of the room before whoever it was, the juvie boy-toy, he guessed, climbed out of the shower, but it was already too late. The water quit splashing and he heard the clack of plastic, hooks sliding along the curtain rod. A second later, out stepped a blonde making a show of covering her body with a towel. Two things Harry noticed: her skin tone, basted to a succulent bronze, and her nipples, peaked, brown, peeping over the edge of the towel. How full of changeups could one degenerate Dutchman be?
“Har-ry,” he said, drawing out both syllables like he was calling him from another room, “This is Jennifer.” The old queen pronounced the J like it was a Y, Yennifer. He knew the difference, but he was way past the point of caring.
She played it cute, this chick, making no attempt to pull the towel higher. She took a few things from a suitcase, then glancing at Harry, she went back into the bathroom and clicked the door shut.
“You yum yum,” Manfred slurred. “Shore you can’t spend a few more minutes with your uncle? And Yenny?” He cupped his hand over Harry’s crotch and gave his balls a squeeze.
Harry gave him an easy shove and said, “Will you give it a rest? Are we gonna do this deal, or what?”
Jennifer warbled a Patsy Cline tune from behind the door, way off key. Manfred weaved a circular path toward the closet, really gone, and turned around clutching a double-bagged bundle the size of a bar of soap. He stopped to freshen his drink, and handed Harry the package. “One ounce,” he said. He had one eye closed. The other pinwheeled Harry into focus. “One thousand dollars.”
“What’s the guy expecting to pay?”
“You be a do-right nephew. You don’t fuck around.”
“What’d you say I’m getting paid for this?”
“Come on, Harry. Leo told you the deal. Two hundred bucks.”
Small potatoes all around. Manfred must’ve been doing somebody a favor. Somebody besides Harry. This was embarrassing.
“One more question, uncle. What’s to stop me from beating town with your cash? Seriously?”
Manfred tried to give the impression that he had that angle covered, but Harry saw the possibility was just dawning on him. He blinked twice and said through a squint, “Tragic. Positively tragic. You have no idea how deeply wounded is your uncle.”
He considered. “Of course. There is nothing to prevent you from this terrible deed, nothing but your conscience.” He admired Harry through a single, loving eye. “Dear, dear boy. You would never do such a thing in a thousand years. You don’t have it in you.”
It was a postcard Miami evening. Palm trees rippled with the breeze, the scent of salt water on the air.
At the wheel of Manfred’s rented Mustang, Harry hadn’t counted on this traffic: Tourists captained convertibles idling alongside hot rods cranking brass-brittle Latin tunes; family wagons stuffed with dusky chiquitas, lacquered and spritzed for a night of clubbing. Waiting through three light changes at Espanola, Harry saw the same valet jog past him twice, once coming, once going, and it took half an hour to drive ten blocks.
Traffic didn’t start to flow till Harry hit the mid-20s, rolling past hotels that lodged legitimate Manfreds. He cruised into the 40s, where non-divorced Manfreds lingered whole seasons. From there it was another ten or fifteen minutes, prowling a hushed suburb, before Harry had to pay attention to the street signs. The address wound up being an efficiency motel designed in the classic South Florida style, an L-shaped two-level affair that boxed a drained pool and parking spaces.