"Yes. And a lot of Augie's works are being offered."
Augie said nothing. He'd had paintings auctioned before, and he didn't see that it had much to do with him. What did it matter if old forgotten canvases from the gallery's holdings and from collections in New York were shuffled around in exchange for cash? He was on to other things, it was the new work that he cared about.
Nina was not quite so placid. "The auction's in ten days, Claire, and we only find out now?"
The agent groped for some high ground. "I tried calling weeks ago," she said. "You never got back."
Augie didn't have the stomach for a squabble. "Really," he said, "what's the difference?"
Kip Cunningham, who would not accept the notion that mere bankruptcy cast the slightest doubt on his expertise in business, could not help chiming in. "It's just, you know, better not to advertise a fresh supply-"
Augie shushed him with a small wave of his hand. "I totally understand," he said. "And frankly, it's all the same to me if people find out today or next month or never. I'm painting to paint, not to get talked about."
"But what if people ask?" Kip blurted.
Augie sipped his Guinness, let a bit slide frothily past his gullet. His body was working again, his pipes were flowing, his mouth was tasting, and there was a sacred delight in this that overwhelmed all petty and non-visceral concerns. "If they ask," he blithely said, "I'll tell them."
Kip and Claire, still allies in debt, if little else, zoomed in quickly on each other's eyes.
"It might be better-" the agent began.
Nina cut her off. It is a weighty thing to know another person's moves so well that a single phrase can bring on rage, can create the bitter certainty that one is being manipulated, bullied, used. For Nina the awareness was especially galling because she could still remember, though the recollection baffled her, when she had wanted to be Claire Steiger: tough, assured, no one's fool, a creature of the city. Amazing, Nina thought, the number of false starts and wrong desires that could be crammed into something as short as a lifetime. "Surely you're not going to suggest he lie?" she said.
"No, of course not," the agent waffled. "But for example-"
"Claire," said Augie Silver, "I'm much too superstitious not to tell the truth. The little talent I have, I'm not going to jinx it by denying it. Look, you don't want people to know I'm working, just keep people away from me. You can do that, can't you?"
"The press? Nobody can do that, Augie," said Claire Steiger. "You know that."
The painter shrugged and sipped his stout. He looked up at the sky, pulled in a chestful of jasmine-scented air, felt his body in the love seat, and savored the nearness of his wife's hip next to his. Claire Steiger, whose skill it was to make people want things, understood that Augie no longer wanted anything she could do for him or sell him, and this was very frustrating. You could not manipulate someone who truly didn't care. You could only go around him, or over him, or find some way to remove him from the loop. The agent stole a quick glance at her husband and saw a flat dead desperation in his eyes that she prayed to God was not reflected in her own.
31
There is something about being ushered into a dark Lincoln full of mafiosi that makes a person feel sick to his stomach.
There are a lot of ways they can kill you right there in the car, and none of them are pretty. Piano wire around the neck. Ice pick through the base of the skull. A point-blank shot that singes skin in the instant before it stops the heart. Ray Yates tasted bile. He was no dummy, he knew what the shrinks said about compulsive gambling and the death wish. They were wrong. He gambled for excitement. O.K., maybe humiliation had something to do with it. Maybe he got off on the pang of losing, that confirming disappointment that was bracing as a pinch on the scrotum. But you had to be alive to feel that. This was something the shrinks seem to have overlooked.
"Take 'im tuh duh gahbidge?" Bruno asked.
The man in the front passenger seat considered. He was a small neat man, with short gray hair that was too perfect and crescent sacs the color of liver beneath his eyes. "Nah, take 'im tuh duh shahk."
There was another goon in the back seat with Ray Yates. At this he smiled and sucked wet air between his teeth and gums. "Yeah, Mr. Ponte, great. Been a while since we fed the shahk."
The Lincoln lumbered slowly out of the alley, wound its way through the narrow cobbled downtown streets. Barefoot dirt-bags in droopy-ass jeans wandered here and there among tourists wearing short shorts the colors of lemons and limes. A guy went by on a unicycle with flashing lights among the spokes. This, Yates thought, was the town he'd wanted to fit in with. A town of easy eccentricity, funk without violence, harmless farting around. How had he managed to turn it sinister for himself?
The big car passed a Do Not Enter sign, then turned down a passageway barely wider than itself, and Yates, who'd thought he knew every byway in Key West, lost track of where he was. The car stopped. He was ordered out, there was barely room to squeeze. Bruno turned the lock on a green-painted metal door that was the only break in a wall of crumbly brick.
"We got keys," the other thug explained. He smiled, sucked his teeth. "We got keys for everywhere. Get the fuck inside."
He gave Yates a push into the dark building, and the first thing the debtor noticed was the smell of fish. Not dead fish; live fish, the slime and seaweed smell of live fish swimming in aerated saltwater. Someone hit a light switch. Revealed was a room of buckets and mops, ladders and freezers. At the far end was a metal staircase, the top of which could not be seen.
"Sal," said Charlie Ponte to the thug who sucked his teeth, "grab some fucking fish."
Sal went to a freezer. Bruno pushed Ray Yates toward the stairs. Heavy feet made a dismal ringing sound on the steel steps, a clamor that bounced off the walls of the closed aquarium and came back sounding drowned.
The stairs went up two stories and ended at another door. Bruno opened it and grinned. Then he shoved Yates through. The talk-show host found himself standing on a metal grid, maybe six feet square. Around the platform, waist high, was a railing, and beyond the railing, two feet away and one foot down, was the lip of the vast tank that held the aquarium's prize attraction, an eleven-foot hammerhead called Ripper. The tank was dark. A murderous silence hovered over it. It smelled like blood and clams. The others piled in behind Ray Yates. The thug called Sal was carrying two frozen bonito, maybe ten pounds each. There was a small spotlight on the feeding platform; Charlie Ponte turned it on.
"Sal," he said, "trow our friend a fish."
Sal tossed one of the bonito, and before it hit the water, the shark exploded through the surface, its monstrous sideways dildo of a head thrashing, its unspeakable mouth wide open to reveal its double rows of razor teeth. Sharks are not neat eaters. They don't bite cleanly, they tear, they shred, the sharp chaotic hell of their mouths reduces food to strings and tatters. Ray Yates watched the frozen fish disintegrate. The shark thumped the water for more. Salt spray flew above the tank, roiled water viscously lapped.
"Get up onna fucking railing, Ray," Charlie Ponte said.
Yates didn't move. Ponte walked slowly up to him and backhanded him hard across the cheek. Then he nodded to his boys. They lifted the debtor by the armpits and sat him on the rail. He held it, white-knuckled, fighting vertigo. The shark was circling at his back. The rough texture of its silver skin glinted in the light, the obscene gashes of its gill slits sucked and spilled out water.
"Ray," said Ponte, "you're like very close to being dead. You know that, right?"
Yates swallowed, nodded. The railing was cool, it chilled his bowels.
"And why?" Ponte continued. His voice was just slightly louder now, it came through the splashing and sliced roughly through the dark building with its secret nighttime life of fish. "Because you're a weak piece a shit. No control. A fucking bed wetter."