“It’s everything you say!” Coleman exclaimed. “So I need a joint to dig it completely.”
“I’m onto your scheming ways,” said Serge. “You’re trying to play my emotions from this special moment to introduce the dope culture to this hallowed ground.”
“No, I’m really down with all this. Tiny race-car fans, lifeguards,” said Coleman. “Okay, you got me. Please, just one roach. I can hide between those two Miami office towers.”
“I’ve seen this movie before,” said Serge. “You’ll lose your balance and it’ll turn into a collision of The Hangover and Gulliver’s Travels, grabbing on to the fortieth floor of that bank, taking it down with you into the Atlantic and wiping out Ocean Drive. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but I’m guessing that lying facedown in the water with a soggy joint under an avalanche of fifty thousand Legos won’t play well if you run for office.”
“That’s a lot of Legos.”
“Look around at the total plastic-block hegemony,” said Serge. “It’s like a Lego dirty bomb went off in here. You almost expect to see people start farting Legos . . . Now I’m depressed.”
“Why’s that?”
Serge gestured at the sprawling Florida display. “This is what I could have been doing with my life. Except back when I was working in Legos, they didn’t have all the new parabolic shapes that blow wide open the possibilities for re-creating my state’s history. When I was a kid, I tried to make an Apollo rocket, but it turned out square and I was still immature, so I set all my Legos on fire with gasoline, which they won’t sell you if you’re five, but they don’t expect you to know how to siphon a lawn mower.”
“I promise I’ll keep my balance,” said Coleman. “I can just zip in and out.”
“Coleman, there are baby strollers, which makes this an official no-dope zone. Can you be dependable for once?”
“There aren’t any strollers between the buildings.” Coleman raised his chin toward the opening of opportunity. “And even if I get a little bit tippy and knock over a few blocks, there’s a ton of employees here to put them back together in no time.”
Serge shook his head. “Most people think the Lego corporation assembled a crack team of world-class experts to engineer Mini-Florida on a computer, but I’m not buying it.”
“You aren’t?” asked Coleman.
“It’s way too good.” Serge pointed at a two-story building in Key West. “Examine the meticulous green shutters on Hemingway’s house. No, my money is on a lone-wolf manic type like the famous Latvian Edward Leedskalnin, who single-handedly built the Coral Castle back in the twenties. He operated in secret, moving multi-ton hewn boulders south of Miami, and nobody knows how he did it. Probably happened here as welclass="underline" The Lego people conducting an exhaustive nationwide search among the obsessive-compulsive community. But they had to be selective and stay away from the ones whose entire houses are filled to the ceiling with garbage bags of their own hair. Then they most likely found some cult guru living in a remote Lego ashram south of Pueblo with nineteen wives, offered him unlimited plastic blocks and said, ‘Knock yourself out.’ ”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because we can smell our own type. If I was offered unlimited Legos . . .”—Serge gestured with an upturned palm—“. . . this is what you’d get.”
A cell phone rang. Serge checked the display.
“Who was that?” asked Coleman, inching toward the bank buildings.
Serge jerked him back by his shirt collar. “Put the weed away and follow me . . .”
They strolled around Mini-Florida, past laughing children, harried parents, balloons. It was another brutally hot day, and everyone was in shorts and breezy shirts. Except the man sitting on a bench up ahead; all the other tourists had given him a wide berth. He wore a tweed jacket and rumpled fedora, and his feet were propped up on a shoeshine box made of Legos he’d just purchased from the gift shop. The reason for the wide berth was the loud conversation he was having with himself. Actually, he wasn’t talking to himself but to the invisible shoeshine man buffing his hooves. “There’s another fiver if you put some spit into it, Pee-Wee . . .”
“Mahoney! Over here!”
Mahoney turned to see someone coming up the path, waving. “He’d recognize Serge anywhere,” Mahoney narrated. “And Mahoney could tell by the ten miles of bad road in his face that he was banjo-hitting.”
“You’re talking in the third person again,” said Serge.
“And your sundial needs winding.”
“I know I’m late,” said Serge. “Got hung up on Mini-Florida, and Coleman tried to smoke dope, but the bank tower wouldn’t have withstood his weight.”
“Mahoney took a deep breath of stale air and queer alibis, but by queer he meant a husband who works on the B-and-O Railroad and gets caught by his wife with stained lace panties in the pocket of his conductor’s jacket and swears it was a surprise anniversary gift.”
“Look, I’m here now, okay?” said Serge. “So it’s all good.”
“Mahoney doubted it like a leg-breaker for a loan shark being fed a tale about suddenly having to rent a separate apartment because a conductor’s jacket was left on a chair. But time was ticking like those people with involuntary facial twitches . . .”
“Let’s fast-forward,” said Serge. “Any word on my friend from the Costa Gorda days?”
“Forty lengths out of the money at Aqueduct.”
“That bad?” said Serge.
“Chicago fire.”
“Thanks for trying . . .”
“Java juice on the tube-steak fader?”
“No, I haven’t found out anything yet about the dating bandit.”
Mahoney smiled. “Straight flush to the paint cards.”
Serge raised an eyebrow. “You have a new client and a lead on another scam artist?”
Mahoney slipped Serge a matchbook with scribbling inside.
“Okay.” Serge nodded. “I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”
Mahoney tipped his hat—“Bizzo”—and walked away.
Chapter Seven
MIAMI BEACH
Unlike Serge, and almost everyone else, there was one particular man in Florida who had the kind of looks that were the first thing women noticed upon entering a room.
All women. Every time. Every room.
Smoldering Latin sexuality and charisma. And a regular clotheshorse. He consistently had them lining up in the clubs and social events and produce departments. Just one last blank to fill in. What did he do for a living? The women crossed their fingers: doctor, lawyer, banker? . . . Why, none of the above. He had a trust fund. Ding, ding, ding—we have a winner!
But there was this hitch. And nobody would ever believe it without witnessing it in person. And even then, they’d blame it on a trick of lighting.
It was this: Despite all outward appearances to the contrary, he was, well, to look at it from the opposite end, the luckiest man in the world at cards.
When it came to women, he could effortlessly surround himself with a harem. Closing the deal was another matter entirely. It was always something. Something Florida: category-five hurricanes, red tide blooms, Cuban unrest, election unrest, alligators, mosquitoes, Burmese pythons, brush-fire evacuations, all-purpose outbreaks of criminal weirdness and peripheral aberrant behavior.