Jesus finally killed the music, took the microphone and began to thank everyone for coming. However, instead of encouraging them all to go and spend their tourist dollars in the UK or, if it was in their power, to vote for Britain in the upcoming election of the World Tourism Capital, he started explaining that the Clearview was no longer a hotel, that it was being refurbished to the highest standards of Miami interior design, and that a whole variety of oceanfront condos would soon be going on the market. Tonight, he said, was their chance to get in early with a down payment and qualify for a 5 percent discount. What was more, they could, if they wanted, get a preview of one of the studios that had been completed early. He raised an arm and pointed toward the only source of light on the upper floor apart from the neon. Our room.
"A representative of Golden Beach Realtors will be happy to show you around and explain our mortgage plans," he said. He then proceeded to make the same speech in Spanish.
What the fuck was going on?
Before I could ask, a woman with pasty makeup, giant pearls, and an unseasonal-looking trouser suit grabbed me by the left bicep and started to drag me away.
"We gotta get to the next show," she said. "Hi, I'm Angela, by the way. Business development assistant witli Golden Beach." She smiled and held out a hand with glittery pink talons in place of fingernails. I shook it, being careful not to impale myself on her claws.
"But—" I had a million objections, none of which seemed to interest her.
"The next show is due to start in ten minutes. There's a barbecue," she said, as though I personally was going to spoil the sausages if I kept her waiting.
She shoved me into a minibus, where my fellow dancers were already waiting in air-conditioned comfort. They were all high on their success, reliving the best moments of the performance, oblivious to my worries about the condo-voting-Alexa-unknown-guy turn that the evening had taken. Little Mary put a Coke bottle in my hand and I took a slug, immediately gagging it up all over Jake's kilt. It was neat, warm whiskey.
I might be able to dance like a Scot, but I couldn't drink like one yet.
5
When we arrived at the next venue, the Latin music on the PA system was immediately replaced by the wail of bagpipes, and we emerged from the minibus like rock stars coptered in backstage at a festival.
This, though, was less Woodstock than woodpile. The sound system had been set up in front of an old, half-ruined bungalow made of unpainted, very porous-looking gray stone. It had a fenced-off yard full of builder's refuse, and tarpaulins draped across the roof. It stood a few yards back from the street behind a parking area that was to be the venue for our dancing and barbecuing. On either side of the bungalow, there were small art deco apartment buildings, and I couldn't see why this house had survived the prettification of the neighborhood. Maybe, I thought, it had belonged to an eccentric millionaire or a mass murderer.
"Oh wow," Mary said, as if the tumbledown shack was a French chateau.
"Don't tell me," I said. "Gloria Estefan was born here."
"No, it's a coral rock house."
I caught Jake's eye. He was as unimpressed as I was.
"It's like eighty years old," Juliana said.
I laughed. Hell, in France, some of the cars aren't much newer,
"That's a really long time for us," Shweeanna the history teacher explained. "This was one of the first houses on the island, when it was just a dune."
"Look, same old promises," Mary said. She pointed to a sign hanging from the fence. It had originally announced that the house would be opening as a museum in December. This missed deadline had been crudely painted over with "April."
"Yeah," Shweeanna said. "They been trying to pull these down for years. Put up some more condos."
"Hey, guys! Showtime!" Angela was beckoning with her claws. "After the dance you can get a bite to eat." She pointed over to the barbecue that had been set up next to the fence on one side of the bungalow. There was already quite a crowd. I recognized lots of people from the Clearview show. It seemed we already had tour groupies.
The bagpipes changed to accordions, and we did our dances again. Fewer of the crowd joined in, no doubt because of the rival attraction of grilled sausages, but the half hour went by quickly, and at the end of it we trooped over to the barbecue. At the far end of the food table, I could see Alexa talking to Elodie. I interrupted their conversation with a kiss on Alexa's bare shoulder.
"Sorry about last night," I said, not for the first time in our relationship.
"I see you weren't too ill to get Elodie from the airport," she said. I detected a note of disapproval.
Elodie looked on, smiling mischievously. She had changed out of her beachwear into a jungle-patterned dress that seemed to be massaging various key parts of her body into shape. It was a good thing, I thought, that Alexa didn't know exactly what had gone on between Elodie and me when we were sharing an apartment.
Jake came over. "Ça va?" he asked Alexa.
"Oui, merci," she replied frostily.
I introduced him to Elodie, but he lost interest as soon as he heard she was French.
"Hey, Paul, I had an idea," he said. "To make more space in the car, I can attach my baggages to the roof."
Alexa suddenly became even more frosty. "You have invited Jake to come in the car?"
"No," I corrected her. "He asked to come along, and I said I'd talk to you about it."
"But you didn't say he couldn't come?"
"What? No. I mean yes." I wasn't sure I'd understood the question.
"Franchement, Paul, I can't believe it."
"What's the problem? I said I'd ask you, that's all. What's wrong with that?"
"You must choose. It is him or me."
Jake, who had provoked a few female outbursts in his time, put a hand on my arm.
"C'est bon, man. I have caused you too many ennuis. I will take the bus."
I thanked him and offered to lend him the money, but even this didn't placate Alexa. Maybe, I thought, she was afraid the bus would break down and we'd find Jake blocking die highway with his thumb sticking out.
I turned to Elodie for support. That was when I noticed diat someone else was observing our conversation. And suddenly I was the one turning frosty. I hadn't recognized him before, because he'd had his blond hair cut and had changed out of his heavy winter clothes into a loud Hawaiian shirt. But I knew that Irish "you're in the shit, Brit" grin of his. It was the bastard from Boston.
"What the fuck's he doing here?" I demanded.
"Who? Oh, Mike?" Alexa asked with innocence as clumsy and unconvincing as my Scottish dancing. "He comes to Florida every winter."
"Oh, really?" I was getting flashbacks of mat innocent expression of hers. I'd seen it quite a few times recendy. Like when she was being just a little too keen to read her e-mails. Shit, was that why she'd kept asking about "whiffy"? "So when did you two have your big reunion, then? Last night?" I asked.
"What are you saying, Paul?"
I didn't need to say anything.
"Huh, you accuse me," she said. "But one could say that you have brought an ex-girlfriend to Miami. She has told me everything that happened between you two in Paris."
Elodie shrugged "sorry" to me, though her smile was anything but apologetic.
"But it didn't—" I heard the cliche alarm ringing in my head, but I had no choice but to press on. "It didn't mean anything really, did it, Elodie? And it was before Alexa and I even met, right?"
"I don't know. When did you two meet?' Elodie was wearing a lost-little-girl look.
Alexa, meanwhile, was as grim as ever.
"Look, Alexa,' I said. "Let's talk calmly about this, away from everyone else. If you say you didn't sleep with the Boston strangler last night, I believe you. And I certainly didn't ship Elodie down here to relive the old days."
"But you are coming to see my underwear tomorrow, right?" Elodie asked. What the hell kind of sabotage was she up to?
Suddenly Jesus
was beside me, trying to dislocate my arm. "You got to dance the last show, dude."
"I'm not doing the last show," I told him. "I've got this Irish jig to sort out."
6
The last show was a twenty-minute minibus drive north.
Jesus had press-ganged me into coming by telling me that the mayor and various city officials were being wined and dined at a big restaurant just out of town. The host was Jesus's boss, the big realtor. He and the mayor often got
208
Dirty Dancing
together, Jesus said, but this was a more important occasion than usual because certain major decisions were about to be made, and Jesus's boss was keen for the decisions to go the right way. Not, of course, that any money would change hands. No way. If things went well, the boss would make sure that Miami would also make the right decision concerning the World Capital of Tourism. Jesus gripped my shoulder as if he needed to squeeze the point home.
By this time, I was almost beyond caring whether London, Paris, or Chernobyl became World Capital of Tourism. Fuck world tourism, fuck international diplomacy, I was thinking, some foreign bastard is trying to shag my girlfriend. Three foreign bastards, if you counted the girls. I tried to call Alexa, but she didn't answer. I left a message saying we needed to talk at the hotel later on.
There was one thing about the competition I did want to ask Jesus, though.
"What was all that about condos back at the Clearview?" I said. "You didn't mention my campaign once."
"Hey, I got to do business, man." He was completely unapologetic.
"If I'd known I was dancing to help sell your apartments I'd have asked for commission. Or an apartment."
"You want a condo? I'll give you the best price," Jesus said. "Your friend Elodie, she is taking one." For some reason this didn't surprise me at all.
We pulled off the highway into a gigantic parking lot and stopped beneath a Godzilla-size plastic palm tree with fairy lights twinkling up its unnaturally straight trunk.
"Less dance," Jesus said, sounding like a Latino David Bowie.
From here on, things got a bit too complicated for my shell-shocked brain.
I was introduced to a big, laughing man who thanked me for doing such great work for his firm over the past year. Jesus's boss thought I was one of his underlings. The boss bracketed Jake, Juliana, and me in his sweaty arms and escorted us over to nod politely in the direction of a long table at which a dozen or so disheveled men were getting drunk. These, it seemed, were the mayor and the dignitaries.
It wasn't until someone hung a collar of flowers round my neck that I noticed the surprising number of indoor palm trees and stuffed parrots decorating the room, and that the waiters and waitresses were all wearing grass skirts. We were in some kind of Pacific Paradise-themed restaurant. The lighting was low, and groups of diners were sitting in intimate, leafy booths around a central stage that was fitted out to look like a campfire, with loudspeakers hidden in the log piles and a varnished plastic pig grinning on a spit. Soft ukulele music was plinking in the air. It reminded me of the bedsprings in Cape May, and I felt a shudder of nostalgia for the wintry north.
"You gotta get changed," Jesus told us.
"Changed?"
"You gotta put on the grass skirts."
"Grass skirts?" we chorused.
"Yeah, they don't want no Scottish dancing here."
"We're not doing a hula dance, Jesus. My job is to promote Britain to that lot over there."
I pointed at the mayor's table and suddenly my heart stopped beating.
One of the so-called dignitaries was grinning in my direction. I'd seen his flat head and lopsided smile before. The image in my memory was a black-and-white newspaper photo, but there was no mistaking the man I'd seen shaking hands with the mayor of Boston. So he and his friends weren't disheveled just because they were drunk. In their case, it was genetic. They were die French engineers. After big-digging my grave up north, they'd come down to shovel merde over me in Miami.
7
Back at the Clearview, I could barely get into my room for people viewing die "show apartment" where I was supposed to be sleeping. Alexa wasn't among them. Jake and Juliana came in with a bottle of whiskey and started evicting the visitors, so presumably if I wanted to sleep there later I'd have to curl up in the shower cubicle.
I wasn't surprised—nothing would have surprised me by then—to find Elodie down on the terrace, having a drink with Jesus, who had recovered his composure after I'd stormed out of the hula club and demanded to be driven back to the hotel.
"Dude, have a whiskey cocktail. We got lots left over." Jesus was eyeing Elodie as if deciding which bit of her to drink.
"Did you know those engineers were coming down here?" I asked her.
"No. What are they doing here?" she said.
I tried to scan her brain for signs of complicity, but she could be totally inscrutable when she wanted.
"I asked one of them," I said. "They're here advising on hurricane protection."
"Good guys, protecting the real estate." Jesus raised his glass in salute.
"But what has that to do with your competition?" Elodie asked.
"Well, who do you think the mayor and his mates are
going to vote for? The guys who can save their city from destruction or the dickhead in a kilt?"
"Poor Paul. Have a drink." Elodie handed me a glass topped with a giant cocktail umbrella and a hunk of pineapple.
"Has Alexa been here?" I asked.
"She came for her luggage," Elodie said.
"Shit. Was she alone?"
"No, she was with that cute guy from Boston. He has a big Chevrolet convertible."
"I bet he fucking does."
"Let her go, dude," Jesus said. "They start giving you shit, they never stop." The rest of his homespun Cuban advice was drowned out by the whooping of a siren. It wasn't the first I'd heard since we got back to the hotel. They all seemed to be close by.
"What's going on?" I asked Jesus. "A drive-by shooting?"
He shrugged.
"No," Elodie chipped in. "There was a problem at the barbecue."
"What happened?" I addressed my question to Jesus, but again he didn't care to comment.
"One of the trucks that came to collect the equipment crashed into the old house," Elodie said. "A couple of people got hurt, right, Jesus?"
"Accident, dude," Jesus said, a little too emphatically.
"The old bungalow? The coral place?" Doubts and denials started to pound in my head. He wouldn't, would he? There were probably millions at stake, and he was an amoral shit, but would he really be that shameless? Everyone knows that his company is dying to demolish the coral house and still he goes through with his plan to total the place? And uses me as an excuse? No way.
Though watching him fidget in his seat, torn between the need to look innocent and the desire to boast, the conclusion was obvious.
"Where are you going, Paul?" Elodie asked.
"Taking my drink for a midnight swim."
I climbed over the low dune and marched across the sand toward the crashing ocean, throwing off my trainers, socks, and floppy white shirt. I was way past worrying about the deposit for the Scottish costumes, which I was probably going to lose anyway, given that Jake had worn one of them, which spelled death for any garment.
A sign on the beach informed me that it was illegal to go onto the sand after nightfall, that nude bathing was banned at all times by city law, and that public alcohol consumption was subject to an automatic fine. But what the hell. I pulled off my boxers and was about to whip off my kilt when I had second thoughts. I felt like trying an experiment. Was it true, I wondered, that the sight of a man with nothing on under his kilt could terrify any enemy? Would that include sharks?
It was while I was floating in the middle of my tartan lifebelt that I saw the flames. They were coming from the window just to the left of the neon Clearview sign. My window. I must admit that my first thought
was, Shit, my luggage.
When I arrived back on Ocean Drive, there was a screaming crowd milling about beneath the blazing facade of the hotel. With no police or fire officers to hold them back, people were staying much too close to the building. Until, that is, the first of the neon tubes popped, showering hot glass over the terrace, at which point there was a stampede across the road for cover.
Jake cannoned into me. He was wearing a pair of white boxer shorts with little heads of Baudelaire on them. In one hand he was carrying a bulging Army Surplus kitbag, in the other a bottle of whiskey that he had presumably saved from the flames.
"Paul, man, let's foot the camp."
"Get out of here? Why?"
"C'etait un accident, man. My cigar, the bed. I mean, what kind of merde do they put in these nonsmoking rooms?"
"But my clothes, my stuff—it's all in the fucking room, Jake."
"No, man. Jesus took out all our baggages before the visits. They were all in the cuisine. Juliana is apporting yours. Come."
As we ran down the street away from the shrieks and the heat, Jake was trying to ask me something. I didn't hear properly till we got to the car.
"Juliana, she comes too with us, no?"
"What?"
"Juliana. She will have no job now."
"Well, Jake, maybe you should have thought of that before you destroyed her bloody workplace."
Juliana came jogging around the corner of the Clearview that was furthest away from the flames, dressed only in her baggy Scottish shirt. She was showing almost as much flesh as when I'd interrupted her shower. The burning bed must really have taken her by surprise. She had my main bag over her shoulder and was clutching the backpack where I kept my passport, driving license, and other valuables.