Mangrove Squeeze (16 page)

"Then I guess I'm gonna win," said Bert.

"It isn't fair," said Sam.

"How sweet it is," said Bert, and he reached out to pet his dog for luck.

"No way," said Suki. "Forget about it."

It was late afternoon. Inside the hot dog the light was getting slanty and yellow, motes of dust gleamed golden against the dull chrome of the counters. Pineapple was moving with his bedroll toward the ripped screen door. "We sleep outside a lot of the time," he said. "Really. Don't we, Fred?"

"Yeah," said Fred, halfheartedly. In October they did, or April. But this was January. Sunsets were early and the ground was cold by midnight. Sometimes a low silver mist, just barely visible, curled up from the salt puddles in the moonlight. Noses ran. Fred's knees were still stiff from the night before.

Pineapple said, "You'll have more room. A little privacy."

"I don't need more room," said Suki, though, looking around the wiener she had to admit it would be very cramped for three. A face next to the propane fridge. A backside folded to fit under the sink. The leaning sack of trash, at least, would have to go. "I can sleep up on the counter."

"You roll over," said Fred, "it's the 'kraut on one side and a long drop on the other."

"It's all settled," said Pineapple, though the truth was that neither he nor Fred was moving toward the screen door all that fast.

"Look," Suki said. "Why not wait till nighttime to decide? See how cold it gets."

Fred looked hopefully at Piney. Piney just tugged lightly at his scraggly beard.

Suki took advantage of their hesitation. "Good," she said. "And in the meantime, could I ask someone to do me a big favor?"

"Name it," Piney said.

Her mouth began to open but then she seemed to think again. "No," she said. "Forget it. It isn't fair to ask."

"What?" said Piney.

Suki had been standing. She plopped down now on the edge of the dinette chair, leaned an elbow on her knee. She said. "What if they have someone watching my apartment? To see if I come home."

Piney said, "Why would they expect you home? You're supposed to be ... ya know ..."

Fred said, "Even Lazslo thought you were ... ya know—"

"Even so—" said Suki.

"What's the favor?" Piney asked.

Suki breathed deep through her battered throat. "I would dearly love," she said, "some clean clothes and a toothbrush and a lipstick."

Aaron, alone in his room, was dazed when he got off the phone with Donald Egan.

There was too much he didn't understand, too much he had to swallow all at once. Lazslo Kalynin had been murdered. Egan had learned of it from a contact in the coroner's office. The news reminded the publisher that Suki had been leaning on him to do an investigative story about the T-shirt shops and the shadowy foreigners who ran them. Organized crime, she'd suggested. Russian Mafia. Crazy stuff. Egan had pooh-poohed it, called it paranoid and xenophobic. Now Lazslo was dead and Suki was AWOL. Probably there was no connection, no connection whatsoever. But Egan thought that since Aaron seemed to be a friend, seemed to be concerned, he should be aware at least.

So now he was aware, and felt the burden of awareness.

He put the phone down and paced. Pacing, he felt the ache between his shoulder blades travel up and down his spine. He paced to his bed and sat a moment. The bed ejected him and he paced some more. Unaware of choosing a direction, he paced through the door of his room and down the hallway to the kitchen, and through the kitchen to the office.

He found himself leaning against the front desk counter, where the ancient chihuahua was still reclining with its nose against the bell. The old men were still playing gin.

Bert's stack of quarters had grown, Sam's had dwindled. Sam threw a picture card and Bert quickly scooped it up.

"Shit!" said Sam. He glanced at Aaron. "He playing jacks, or clubs?"

Then he looked at his son more closely. There was a tightness around his mouth and a slight twitch beneath the skin at the corner of his right eye. "Aaron, something's wrong," he said. "What is it? Tell me."

Aaron slumped, put more weight onto his elbow. He wasn't quite sure how he'd gotten to the office and he didn't see the point of sharing his worries with the two old men. Talking things over with his father, though—it was a habit of long standing, and old habits dug troughs that survived the deaths of many brain cells; they didn't change just because time juggled the balances of strength and comprehension and stature in the world. Aaron opened his mouth. What came out was a helpless exhalation somewhere between a sigh and a snort. He tried again, said, "It's nothing. It's too complicated."

"Nothing and too complicated," said Sam. "That's two different things."

"Complicated?" said Bert. "Hey, the whole idea of bein' here is that this is supposed to be a simple town."

"That's what I thought," Aaron said. "Till now."

"Till what?" said Sam.

Aaron sucked a deep breath in, blew it through his teeth. "Till I tried to have a bowl of pasta with a woman, and a guy I decided I was jealous of got killed, and the woman disappeared, and everybody started whispering about a Russian Mafia."

Bert shrank down just a little at the final word, raised his cards a few inches higher. Sam didn't notice. He dropped his own hand; he'd forgotten he'd been playing gin. He said, "Mafia? Whaddya know. Bert was Mafia."

His friend said nothing, just cinched together his silver brows and shot a look at Sam.

Sam said, "What? You told me yourself. I'm not supposed to say?"

To no one in particular, Bert said, "Everything else, the man forgets. This he has to remember."

"Who could forget a thing like that?" said Sam.

"Okay, okay," said Bert. "But it's not the kinda thing ya hang a sign."

Aaron stood there. He squeezed the counter, tested its solidity. He looked through the window at the hibiscus hedge, the familiar rustling palms. The veneers of his universe were coming unglued, he needed some assurance that the planet he inhabited at that moment was still the same one that he'd lived on all his life. At last he said, "Bert—you're a mafioso?"

"Used to be," admitted Bert. He looked down but could not quite squelch a piece of smile at one end of his mouth. "They called me Bert the Shirt. Knew how ta dress, ya know? But I been outa that game a long time now."

Aaron tried his best to look worldly and unshockable. His father playing gin with a gangster. Soviet desperadoes getting their throats cut half a dozen blocks away. Okay, no problem. Casually he said, "Know anything about the Russians?"

Bert reached out to pet his dog, short pale hairs rained down from its knobby head. "Not really. I was already out when they were comin' in. But ya think about it, how different could it be?"

"I have no idea," said Aaron.

"Customs," said Bert. "Cultures. I'm sure there's differences. But the basics are the basics. Gotta be. Loyalty. Secrecy. Revenge."

Sam said, "Revenge?"

"Can't hold the thing together wit'out revenge. Pretty basic, that."

Aaron nodded, but then his attention was diverted by his father, who was squinting upward toward the ceiling, pulling lightly on his translucent tufts of Einstein hair. "Shit," he said at last. "My Russian's going too."

"What, Pop?"

"I was trying to remember the Russian word for mafia."

Aaron said, "I think the Russian word for mafia is
mafiya
."

Bert lifted half an eyebrow, reached out to pet his dog. "See dat?" he said. "Same word and everything. How different could they be?"

The worst crimes that Pineapple had ever committed were vagrancy, loitering, and, back before he'd sworn off alcohol, the occasional bout of public drunkenness. He never stole. In this he differed from Fred, who was not above slipping a couple of Slim-Jims into his pocket if the prong that held the packages was concealed by the lip of the convenience-store counter, or glomming some cigarettes if, by luck, the wire rack was left briefly unattended. Piney didn't do that. He had a superstitious dread of doing wrong and getting caught; a dread that in more solid citizens was recognized as virtue.

Still, he knew very well what it was to feel like a criminal. He understood the vague shame that descended when a storekeeper, his hard stare righteous and rude, dogged him as he made his way up and down the aisles. He knew the fugitive edginess that resulted from a cop car going by, the passenger-side cop giving him a long smirking glance as he sat there on the curb. The feeling was like confronting a blank demerit sheet that hinted nonetheless at grievous faults; a floating guilt waiting only for some act to be attached to.

He felt those things now, as he leaned his rusted bicycle with its corroded metal basket against the picket fence in front of Suki's house.

It was dusk. The street lamps were just coming on. They buzzed slightly and their salmon-colored light was brittle and metallic against the plush blue of the fading sky. Daytime flowers were closing up, their edges crinkly, like eyelids at the cusp of sleep. A few people were about, doing the things that people who lived in houses did. A woman on skates trailed a pair of cocker spaniels on a leash. Another woman carried a bag of groceries, a bouquet of lettuces poking out the top. Half a block away, a man parked his car and then emerged, his posture saying he had every right to be there.

Feeling like an intruder and a thief, Pineapple unlatched the gate that gave onto the walkway that led to Suki's porch. On either side of the wooden stairs, shrubbery beds were planted with crotons and jasmine; their dense foliage swallowed up the light, and partly masked Piney as he climbed the steps. Still, he felt like eyes were on his back as he made his way along the porch to the apartment on the ground floor left. He could not help looking over his shoulder as he skulked along, and the furtive gesture only made him feel more furtive.

As Suki had described, her door was flanked by rows of flower pots—pansies, basil, blue daze. Bending quickly, ducking his head below the level of the shrubs, Piney lifted the third pot on the right. Beneath it were a few crumbles of soft dirt and a house key. The key gleamed slightly and Pineapple found it terrifying. He hated keys—the guilty summaries of all things owned and guarded. He was here at Suki's request; he was doing her a favor. Still, to seize somebody else's key and open up a door to someone's home—the enormity of it made his mouth go dry.

His hand trembled as he fitted the key to the lock. It seemed to him that the click of the bolt could be heard all over the neighborhood. He opened the door no wider than he had to, and as soon as he had squeezed through he shut it firmly behind him. He was standing in her living room.

Vacant for only a single day, the apartment had the exaggerated stillness of a place long uninhabited. Echoes had settled. Nothing hummed. The pictures on the walls seemed lonesome, like paintings at a closed museum. The place was very dim but Piney didn't want to turn a light on.

He felt his way to Suki's bedroom, found her closet door. A plastic shopping bag caught his eye; randomly he started filling it with clothes and shoes. He moved on to her bureau, filled another sack. Suki needed under-things; Piney plucked at bras and panties. He'd been with a woman a few times in his life, though not in many years. Lacy cups and silky briefs were, for him, too foreign to be titillating; obscure artifacts from some other dimension. He crammed them into the shopping bag and slunk on toward the bathroom, grabbed her toothbrush and some lipsticks, tossed in jars and tubes and vials of things he didn't know the names of.

By now his heart was hammering and his armpits were wet. A bum in someone else's house clutching bags of someone else's things. A thief, what else? He didn't fear the Russian Mafia. He feared the neighbors, and their righteous and remorseless dogs. Someone would see him. Someone would shout. The police would come and Piney would be hurt and handcuffed before he could explain.

He breathed deep, tried without success to stretch his cramping ribs. He pressed the shopping bags against his chest then reasoned he would look less guilty if he held them by the handles.

He moved back through the living room and toward the door. With the lonesome pictures looking on, he opened it a crack. The dusk had deepened and the street lamps had grown more acid bright, they threw hard-edged shadows of fences and palms, lined the porch with dark bars that stretched out from the newels of the railing. Somewhere a television was blaring; somewhere a big dog barked.

Piney held his breath, stepped outside, and locked the door behind him as quietly as he could. He pocketed the dreadful key; it was cold against his leg.

Planks creaked underfoot as he crept along the porch. His bike still leaned against the fence; he looked longingly toward it, his means of escape from the blame of locks and back into the safety of the unowned streets. A cat slunk out from underneath a car. He kept the shopping bags below the level of the shrubbery.

He reached the stairs. There were three of them, painted lumpy gray. A shadow slashed across them, and then there was a swath of naked light. Piney yearned to jump the steps and run but that would look suspicious. He moved deliberately, his eyes straight forward. His right foot was in midair, descending toward the concrete walkway, when a crouched dark form sprang up from the bushes and rammed him with a shoulder.