"It's never been like this before," Yates whimpered. "I've always paid. Bruno knows that."
Ponte looked at his goons. "And what's Bruno, the fucking credit bureau? Ray, you're poison. You bet on a horse, the horse falls down. You bet on a fighter, he pisses blood. Now you're inta me for forty-somethin' and I hear you're betting on a fucking painter. This is a new one on me. How the fuck you bet on a painter?"
Bruno and Sal obediently chuckled. Sal held the other bonito by its tail and tried not to let it drip on his shoe as it defrosted.
Yates sat. Drops of spray were wetting his back, and he could not shake the image of the shark rising up on its tail and biting his ass off. "It's not a bet. I own these paintings."
"Yeah. So?"
"Week and a half from now, they'll be sold. Sotheby's. New York. They're worth a lot of money. Hundreds of thousands."
Charlie Ponte looked down through the open grid beneath his feet and sadly shook his head. When he spoke again, it was to Sal and Bruno. "He's holdin' out on me. I hate that. Turn 'im upside down."
Sal put aside the thawing fish and the two goons grabbed Ray Yates. The debtor wriggled but not much: There was nowhere to go but two stories down to a stone floor or into the fishbowl with the shark. They hoisted him then turned him like a roast, laid him out so that his upper thighs were across the rail and his torso was hovering in space. His hands gripped the top of the shark tank, he wondered if the ragged teeth would flash and hack his fingers off. He pulled his face back as far as he could from the roiling water, but still he smelled fish blood and an awful musk. Ponte moved alongside and spoke to him calmly.
"Ray, I hate a guy that sells me short. You think I'm stupid? You think I don't read the paper? Those paintings ain't worth what you say. Who knows if they're gonna sell at all? You lost again, Ray. You're fucked."
Yates's back was cramping, his eyes were starting to tear. "I'll get the money," he rasped. It was all he could think of to say.
"Yeah? How?"
If people were punished for thoughts, the world would be a jail. Yates held himself above the shark tank and looked down at the water. The silhouette of the grotesque and hungry hammerhead snaked through it like the shadow of death. There seemed one way and one way only for Yates to get the money, and in that moment of infinite fear and infinite selfishness there was no doubt that he would cash in Augie Silver's life to save his own, the only question was the nerve and tact it took to do the deal.
"I thought… I thought he was dead," the gambler stammered.
"Yeah," said Ponte. "I know that's what you thought." He leaned back against the railing, calmly lit a cigarette. "Like usual you were wrong."
"I could end up being right."
"Fuck's that supposed to mean?"
Yates's voice was soft. "Mr. Ponte, you take the money. From the paintings. Keep all of it."
For a moment Ponte said nothing. His expression was midway between offended and amused. He took a puff of his cigarette then threw it into the shark tank. Then his upper hp abruptly pulled back and he pummeled Ray Yates in the kidney. The blow sent a searing pain up his back and a hot surge through his tubing.
"You mizzable fuck," the mobster said. He pointed at Yates as at a species of lizard and spoke to his boys. "The legitimate world. There it is. No self-control. No balls. Won't even clean up its own messes." He turned his attention back to the writhing debtor. "Scumbag, you think you can hire me, just like that, to kill for you?"
Ray Yates tried to breathe. The air smelled like the inside of a fish and there seemed to be big splinters underneath his ribs. But he had somehow moved past fear, fallen through the bottom of it into some horrid but clear place that was like already being dead. "You're gonna kill, Mr. Ponte," he said, in a voice grown weirdly even, weirdly certain. "You kill me, you get nothing. You kill him-"
The debtor's words were swallowed up in a watery mayhem. At a nod from Charlie Ponte, Sal had thrown the second fish into the tank. The hammerhead rocketed up to meet it, its appalling face came so close to Ray Yates's that he could see the bilious color of its yellow eye, the bent, in-sloping arrowheads of its vile teeth, could hear the sickening crush and grinding of its jaws. A wave flew up around the thrusting shark, it arced and billowed like a wake thrown off a boat. It drenched Ray Yates as the shark plunged downward, and by the time the gambler could see and hear again, his tormentors were gone and he was left to scramble down from his precarious perch alone.
32
Key West is justly famous for its sunsets, but most people do not realize that its moonrises are at certain seasons equally sublime. In summer, the waxing moon migrates toward the southern sky. When full, it emerges powdery salmon from the flat and open waters of the Florida Straits. Those waters, in the humid, windless dusks of June, take on an unearthly texture, part mirror, part soup, and dully gleam like brushed aluminum. If one is very lucky, one can sometimes see the very first flash of light as it peeks above the tabletop horizon. The mottled moon takes a long time to climb out of the ocean, and once it has, its color changes, lightens every moment, like a big wet yellow dog as it shakes itself and dries.
Saturday the twelfth was the full-moon evening, and Augie Silver, feeling spry and restless, took it in his head that he wanted to go to see it. "Come on," he said to Reuben an hour or so before the great event. "We'll throw an easel in the car. I'll sketch awhile, and who knows-it might be one of life's great moonrises."
They were in the backyard. Augie had been reading and Reuben was picking up the sticky brown pods that fell from the poinciana tree. "I think maybe it is cloudy," the housekeeper said. But it wasn't cloudy. It was perfectly clear, albeit with the electric shimmer of a summer haze.
Augie looked at him. "You don't want to go?"
This was difficult for Reuben to answer. He wanted to do whatever Augie liked. But his mission was to keep the painter safe. Then again it was hard to protect someone if he could not know he needed to be protected. Nervously, the young man wiped his hands on his apron. "We can go. Only-"
"Only what?"
"Only, Nina-"
"It's late night at the gallery. We'll be back way before her. Maybe we'll bring home stone crab for dinner."
So Reuben loaded the old Saab. He laid Augie's easel and pad across the back seat. He put in a cooler of mineral water in case Augie got thirsty, some fruit in case he got hungry. He put in a jacket, though a jacket was unthinkable in the unyielding mugginess. He noticed nothing unusual on Olivia Street. Dogs lolled next to car tires. Bicycles went past. Here and there clean undented convertibles were parked, their frivolous colors, tinted glass, and lack of rust marking them as rentals. The palms were still and limp, even the Mother-in-law tree was silent.
It was seven-thirty when they set out, Reuben driving, slowly. The light was soft, the roads were quiet. What traffic there was, was mainly heading the other way-downtown, west, toward the gaudier, commoner spectacle of sunset. On White Street, old Cubans sat on mesh chairs in front of empty stores and slid dominoes across the cardboard boxes that served as make-shift tables. On Atlantic Boulevard the pink and aqua condos stood like blocks of giant candy. Australian pines lined the wetlands, looking dejected and enduring, like people who are always moaning and complaining yet will outlive all their friends. The air smelled of frangipani.
"You know," said Augie, "sometimes I forget how much I love this town."
"Is a nice town," Reuben said, without taking his eyes from the road. He leaned slightly forward over the steering wheel. He regarded driving as a grave adventure that required all his concentration. He took no notice of the turquoise convertible with tinted glass that stayed a steady hundred yards behind him, moving at a sightseer's pace with its top up.