Mangrove Squeeze (20 page)

Clam kicked himself a little farther out and scored some shrimp. He was just jiggling them into his pouch when he saw an angelfish whose iridescent blue flashed a weird magenta against some car upholstery.

For just an instant it did not compute that there was something off about car upholstery, a dashboard, a steering wheel at the bottom of the ocean. Clam blinked inside his mask and held his breath. Current carried him past the windshield and directly over the Caddy's hood ornament, its chrome not yet corroded. The drowned logo finally persuaded him that something very unusual was going on. He raised his head and called his buddy.

They swam around the car together, stood on the sodden boot, agreed that it was really there.

Not much happened on Big Coppitt. When something did happen, and it happened to
you,
you played it up, because it made you briefly a celebrity. Pete and Clam put their shrimp in the cooler, smoked a joint, then headed to the bar at Egret Key, to tell everyone what they had found.

The sunken Cadillac spawned theories all up and down the bar. Better ditched than repo'd, one suggestion went. Or someone stole it then got scared. Or a jilted girlfriend trashed it for revenge.

"Y'oughta call the paper," someone said.

Discreetly, the sober bartender advised, "I was you, I'd call the cops."

Clam sucked some beer. He didn't really like to deal with cops, but probably the bartender was right. Civic duty and all. Maybe a reward. He looked at Pete. "Any more shit in the truck?"

Pete shook his head. "Clean," he said. "We smoked it all."

And so by nine o'clock the Monroe County sheriffs had run the tag on Lazslo's sunken Caddy, and by eleven the car had been dredged up from the bottom, wet sand streaming from its doors; and by seven the next morning the whole thing was in the paper: Unsolved sinking of the car of the victim of an unsolved murder. Unsolved puzzle as to how the car got a dozen miles from the body of its owner.

For almost everyone who read the story, it was a head-scratcher but no more, just one more instance of the kind of loony and inscrutable misadventures that happened in the Keys. You slapped the paper then went back to your breakfast.

Some few people took the story much more seriously, however. Some few people were surprised and disappointed and very much annoyed that there was no mention whatsoever of a woman's body in the trunk.

Sergei "Tarzan" Abramowitz, the muscular young man who always wore suspenders, paced athletically along the length of Ivan Cherkassky's sofa. The ridge above his eyes was furrowed; tangled hair bounced against his neck. He moved his heavy jaw and spoke in Russian. "That
prozhny vorchnoi
," he snarled, calling the dead Lazslo an eliminatory organ of low social status, "he screwed it up but good."

Cherkassky didn't answer right away. He crossed his skinny legs, gazed out the picture window at the yellow morning light, and wondered briefly if Abramowitz's gait was naturally that springy or if it was one more way of showing off. At last he said, "You're sure? You're absolutely sure?"

Tarzan's walk became more acrobatic still, his knees flexed, his thigh muscles bulged, it seemed he might do a back flip any moment. "Ivan Fyodorovich, I am sure. Practically the last words of that out-of-wedlock child who has sex with his mother. We are holding him down. He says Why? Why? I did my job, I swear. The knife, we bring it closer. He says, The bitch is dead, she's dead. The blade is now against his neck. He tries to shrink, he cries, the cockroach with no testicles. The car, he says. Even now the car goes down, she disappears forever. I did my job, I swear."

Ivan Cherkassky hunkered forward across his knobby knees. His scooped-out melon face seemed to grow a little hollower, chin and forehead cinching in with concentration. "The car," he said. "Who helps him? Who makes it disappear?"

Tarzan pivoted, fisted hands swinging low against his legs. "This he did not say."

Resignedly, Cherkassky nodded. "Of course not. Because it would be good to know."

The young man in suspenders burst forward once again like a sprinter from the blocks. "Yes," he said. "It would."

"And the girl—you think she lives?"

"If she is not in trunk, I fear she does."

"
Pyutchni streshkaya!"
Cherkassky murmured in disgust. "Still we must clean up after this ragpicker who is incontinent."

"You want I find the girl?" said Tarzan.

"She cannot live," Cherkassky said. "Is clear."

"
A flotl defioreski khrichevskov!"
Tarzan hissed. "I find her, I send her to meet Lazslo, they have oral sex in hell."

At the Mangrove Arms that morning, things got too busy too early for anyone to read the paper.

At eight
a.m
. Suki was leaning over her widow's walk railing, peeling an orange and looking through the leaf curtain to the street, when she saw a taxi pull up and disgorge a pale and harried-looking couple.

Barely had the couple bumped their luggage up the porch steps when another taxi approached from the opposite direction, dropping off another pair of white and rumpled visitors.

From anything that Suki had so far seen or heard, two couples arriving at the Mangrove Arms on the same morning was a record. Without thinking about it very much, she stepped inside and went downstairs to see if she could help.

She found Aaron bustling around the kitchen. He was slapping coffee cups onto a tray, his hair was wet, and he was sweating. "Town's packed," he said without looking up at her. "Business finally trickling down to me. Last resort No reservations. Not ready for the rush."

Two couples. To Suki it didn't seem like that much of a rush, but she kept it to herself. She said, "What can I do to help?"

Aaron, frantic, didn't seem to hear her. He arced around his father, who was sitting calmly, sipping tea. Pouring milk into a pitcher, Aaron rambled. "Beds unmade. Towels balled up in the dryer. Drop cloths in the hallway. Paint chips."

"So what should I do?" said Suki.

Aaron's hands were not quite steady, milk splashed on the floor. "The breakfast person, out sick again. Not the hemorrhaging tattoo this time. The bellybutton. Pierced. Abcessed. Dripping she said."

He was heading for the doorway to bring coffee to the waiting customers, when Suki said, "So should I cook or should I make up rooms?"

Finally he heard her, and looked up. Without question she was recuperating well, but she had a ways to go. There was still a heaviness around her eyes, her ravaged neck was still discolored. Aaron said, "Look, you're not indentured labor."

"I'll cook," she said.

"You're here to rest."

"Rest," she said, with breezy contempt. "I work. I'm Greek, I grew up in my father's diner. Plato's."

Aaron said, "I'm not even sure it's a good idea you came downstairs."

Sam Katz said, "Your father's name is Plato?"

"My father's name is George."

"Plato sounds more Greek," Sam said.

"Voila'," said Suki, then stepped toward Aaron and reached out to take the tray. "You go make up the rooms."

"But the guests—"

Suki said, "I've done this job, Aaron. Hostessed. Waitressed. I'll talk to them, tell them what a fabulous time they're gonna have."

"What if someone recognizes—"

She lowered her voice. "These are tourists, Aaron. Tourists don't know diddly. Besides, I'm dead. Remember? Now go make up the rooms."

He hesitated just a moment, leaning so far forward that his toes began to hurt. They were staring at each other across the coffee cups, the milk. He handed her the tray and the two of them went off in opposite directions.

When they'd gone, Sam Katz sat alone in the kitchen and sipped his cooling tea.

He thought about the old country and he smiled. He didn't really remember the old country, not at all, but at some point what pretended to be memory became instead a sense of what was right and fitting; nostalgia as a softer word for morality.

Sam liked it that a man and woman worked together side by side. Helpmates. That old word. Work, and purpose. It was nice, thought Sam, nodding to himself. It was the basis of good things. He finished his tea, fished the wedge of lemon from the bottom of the cup, and puckered up contentedly as he nibbled along the inside of the rind.

Bert the Shirt's mornings tended to be slow and lonely.

He woke up earlier than most people; there was nothing to do and nobody to talk to. In monogrammed pajamas that had grown too large, he wandered around the apartment still cluttered with his dead wife's fancy lamps and gewgaws, and he rationed his activities to fill the time. One by one, he counted out the dog's pills and his own; he counted them again. He made old-fashioned oatmeal, not the instant kind. And he always read the paper thoroughly, from the headlines to the classifieds. This morning he did not like what he saw.

He finished up his cereal, took Don Giovanni for an only partially successful walk on Smathers Beach, then drove down to the Mangrove Arms to strategize.

He gathered everyone around a wire-mesh table in the courtyard, made sure that the hotel guests—arrayed on lounges in their garish bathing suits, their skins already blossoming a pebbly irritated pink—were out of earshot. Then he spread open the paper, pointed. "This here," he said, "it like changes the whole complexion a the thing."

The others read the article.

Suki felt the columns of type sticking in her throat. Her brief sense of belonging here at Mangrove Arms imploded; her belief that she could help now loomed up as fake and selfish. She should not have come; it was reckless and unfair. She'd been foolish to imagine she could dodge the threat against her, and now she was a threat to others, to everyone around her.

Bert's voice snapped her back into the practical. "Wit'out this," he said, "we coulda stood and waited. Pressure was off. Time was on our side."

"And now?" said Suki.

Bert pushed his lips out, stroked his dog. "A job half-done," he said. "That doesn't sit so well wit' guys like this ... I think we gotta get more active like, aggressive."

"Aggressive?" Aaron said. They were two old men, a youngish man who was not tough, and a woman who'd already come close enough to dying. Against a Mafia, just how aggressive were they supposed to be?

"Like learn more what we're up against at least," said Bert. "How they do things. Who's in charge."

Suki said, "The uncle. He's in charge."

Bert's chihuahua was splayed out on the table and the mesh was stamping a waffle pattern in the short fur of its belly. The old mafioso lightly drummed his fingers on the steel. "And how do we know this?" he asked.

Suki started to answer, then realized that all she knew was what she'd heard, and what she'd heard had been rumors passed along by people no less remote than she. The slyness of Bert's question sank in around the table, and suddenly, louder than necessary and off the beat, Sam Katz said, "Aha!"

Suki put in without confidence, "It's just the way it seems."

"Exactly," Bert said. "Just like it used to seem like Luciano ran Havana, when really it was Lansky. Or the way it looked like Fat Tony was boss of the Genovese family when really it was Vinnie Chin."

Aaron raised his eyes from the unplanted shrubs strewn along his property, their thwarted roots poking through the burlap swaddling. "So you're saying—"

"I'm saying," Bert went on, "that unless the head guy is a knucklehead egomaniac like Gotti, he don't want it should look to all the world like he's in charge. Old Sicilian saying: Ya got the biggest balls, ya don't need the tallest antlers. 'Scuse me."

"No problem," Suki said. "But then who—?"

Bert shrugged and petted his dog, little diamonds of whose abdomen seemed to be slipping through the table's metal mesh like strands of melting cheese. "I have no idea," he said. "I'm only saying don't trust the way things seem or you'll get confused before y'even start."

"I'm confused," said Sam, and he fiddled with his hearing aid.

"Ya think about it though," Bert resumed, "a hit on his own nephew? Flesh and blood, they usually get some extra slack."

"Flesh and blood," said Sam. "How could anybody do that?"

"So say it's not the uncle," Suki said. "Who else... ?"

Bert stroked his waffled dog, raised his shoulders almost to his long and fleshy earlobes. "Maybe we never find 'at out," he said. "Wit'out we infiltrate."

"Infiltrate?" said Sam.

" Ya know, like get inside."

"I know what infiltrate means. But how—?"

"Hey," said Bert, "we're talkin' just, like hypot'etical heah. Just thinkin' things through."

Sam looked a little disappointed, tugged his Einstein hair. "Infiltrate," he murmured. "Spies, like."