Mangrove Squeeze (33 page)

Skin itching, forehead dappled with sweat and bugs, he thought once more of giving up. Maybe his father had wandered back to the tiled house by now. Maybe this should all be left to the police. But he pressed ahead, not content until he'd counted every room; and then, at the very far end of the guest wing, visible in slices through the slats of a blind that was not quite snugly closed, he saw Gennady Markov, working in his lab, alone, his big face intent over an enamel tub.

Aaron froze, his breath arrested. Weirdly, his first reaction was one of deep nostalgia. A scientist at work. His father. The same concentration that made the tongue flick at the corners of the mouth. The same saving single-mindedness that held the world at bay. Good or evil, there was beauty in a scientist at work...

But what was Markov doing? Aaron wrestled with leaves and branches, leaned as near to the window as he dared. He saw canisters; electric coils; a fine gray gravel with a consistency like lentils. The gravel gleamed dully. It might have been some peculiar form of silver, some odd stuff to be transformed by a jeweler or a dentist. Then a dreadful thought occurred to Aaron: Plutonium? Was it possible? Suki had told him that Lazslo hinted at it. The source of the huge sums that needed laundering. Weapons for rogue nations. Bombs for lunatics. Being cooked up
here?
—in peaceable Key West, a few miles from the bars, from Duval Street, from the Mangrove Arms?

Aaron fell back, dizzy and suddenly exhausted. Through the slats, Markov's image blurred. Everything blurred. Aaron's search for Sam blurred against the enormity of nuclear material. His love for Suki blurred against the terror of what she had discovered. His sense of his own new life—small, quiet, accomplishment measured nail by nail—blurred against the sick size of the schemes that people found themselves embroiled in.

Puny and shaken under the stars, too rattled even to remember to stay in the shade of the shrubbery, Aaron turned at last and walked away.

Befuddled, driving all but blind, he made it back to the Mangrove Arms just as Gary Stubbs and Donald Egan were coming down the front porch steps.

It scared Aaron to see the cop there. His stomach burned. For the moment he forgot about weapons crossing borders and thought only of intimate losses. With effort he said, "Suki?"

"Suki's okay," said Stubbs. "She's fine. She called about your father."

Aaron said, "You know something?"

Stubbs shook his head.

"You'll help?"

Stubbs nodded.

Aaron glanced with vague recognition and no warmth at Egan. The editor's cigar was glowing in the dark. In his fat soft hand he held some papers. "Tomorrow early," he said, waving them toward Aaron. "Special edition."

"Special edition what?"

"Talk to Suki," said the cop. "She's waiting for you."

The two visitors continued down the stairs.

Aaron said to their backs, "Wait. Markov."

Stubbs stopped walking, looked across his shoulder. "What about him?"

"He has a lab."

"A lab?"

"I saw him working."

Stubbs said, "So?"

"Lazslo used to talk about atomic stuff. Brag about it."

The cop and the editor shared a look. Egan said, "Jesus Christ, I should put that in the article."

Aaron blew. He hadn't had a fight since junior high and now he felt an impulse to shove the newspaperman down the last few stairs. "Fuck your article," he said. "These are people's lives. Who gives a shit about your article?"

Stubbs said calmly, "Can't go break into his house without a warrant. Couldn't get a warrant with what we have so far."

Aaron said, "What the hell's it take? Another person dead? My father? Suki? All of us?"

Stubbs said nothing, waited for Aaron to calm down.

Aaron didn't calm down. "And Markov's not the real boss anyway," he said. "The real boss lives around the corner. I think that's who my father's with."

"How you know all this?" said Stubbs.

"I know it... " Aaron said, and then he stopped. He stopped because the beginnings of tears—tears of worry, of frustration—were pressing like thumbs at the backs of his eyes. He choked them down like he was swallowing a rock. "I know it because I've been out there on the fucking streets, Lieutenant. Not waiting for a fucking warrant."

Stubbs grimaced and continued down the stairs. Egan followed.

Aaron went up into the office, where he took a slow deep breath and tried to remember how to recognize his world.

He looked around. He knew every potted palm and every promo propped up on its cardboard easel, but now it all looked strange to him, removed, as though his looming grief had built a warping membrane around him. Only vaguely he saw the slashed counter, the silver bell that needed buffing. In that moment it was someone else's hotel.

He went through the doorway behind the counter, took in the odd proportions of a commercial kitchen, the outsize pots and pans. Steel counters more like something from a hospital.

He moved on to the sitting room. In his exhaustion he noticed bizarre things: fringes on the bottom of upholstery, fringes at the ends of a rug.

Then he saw Suki. She was sitting on the sofa where they'd first held each other, at the soft edge of an arc of lamplight. Seeing her did not dispel the warping film but she moved somehow to Aaron's side of it.

"You okay?" she asked. She looked closely at him. His shoes were coated with dirt and his clothing was specked with sap and spider webs.

His lips moved but he couldn't speak. He stared at her. It was too dim to discern the color of her eyes, but their blue was absolutely present to him. Her shoulders were covered but he saw them.

She got up from the settee, didn't hug him with her arms, just stood against him, warm. She took him by the hand and led him to the room that had become their room. "He'll be okay," she said.

Aaron nodded, stared at her. Fear had jumbled time for them. As in some gaudy fantasy of traveling through bent and viscous space, the clock had sometimes raced like an exerted heart, and other times had stalled. The long wait to be lovers shrank down to a pendant and excruciating moment long ago. Their instant as a couple could be called forever, since the future might be snuffed out any second.

She led him to the bed that had become their bed. She began undoing the buttons on his shirt. "I really think he'll be okay," she said again.

Aaron nodded, and he started to cry. Time was all mixed up; Suki was already burned deep into him, suddenly abiding as the world around them grew jittery and abrupt and blurred. Lovers for one day, he cried in her arms as easily as if they'd been together, helpmates, many years.

Next morning, very early, too early for most people to be having conversations, Piney said, "Fred, ya know what I sometimes wonder about?"

The first yellow sun was starting to dry the nighttime dampness of the mangrove leaves. In the clearing by the hot dog, the flat cracked stones were beginning to get warm; lethargic lizards crawled up on them to bask. Fred, his eyes half-closed, was drinking coffee from a dented tin cup. He didn't answer.

Piney looked down at his rubbed-up hands, said, "Time."

"Oh Christ," said Fred. He lit a cigarette, squinted against the phosphorous that smarted in his eyes, and wondered if he'd go to work that day, if he'd bother with the seven-thirty shape-up. He glanced over at his shovel. It was leaning against the service window of the hot dog, next to Piney's
PARKING
sign. Tools of the trade.

"Think about it," Pineapple went on.

"Why?" said Fred, and picked tobacco off his tongue.

"Say there was no such thing as time," Piney said, undaunted in the sunshine that grew whiter every moment "Does that mean nothing would happen or everything would happen all at once?"

Fred sucked his cigarette. "Who gives a rat's ass?"

"You in a bad mood, Fred?"

"'Bout like usual."

"I'm goin' downtown then," Piney said. "Take my sign, make a little money."

"'Bout time," Fred opined.

"Ya see?" said Piney.

"See what?"

"Time. Ya can't help but think about it."

Fred shook his head, looked off at an osprey circling over Cow Key Channel.

"At work, where I sit, there on the curb," said Piney, "I can lean back and look around the banyan tree, see Suki's balcony... Last couple days I haven't seen her though."

Fred gave a crude guffaw. "Course you haven't, Piney. Betcha anything she's shacked up with the rich guy, the owner, by now."

As blandly as he could, Piney said, "Think so?"

"Waya the world, friend," said Fred, and sucked deeply on his cigarette. "Rich guy gets the broad."

"Don't call her that," said Piney, and he looked away.

Fred chased his eyes to needle him. "You got a crush on her," he said. "Ain't this what I been sayin' all along?" He took a last drag on his smoke then doused it in a shrinking puddle, savoring the sizzle as the small fire was extinguished.

Donald Egan—his staff on indefinite leave, his publication schedule suspended due to vandalism—had worked through the night to write and lay out and print and fold a four-page special edition.

Not long after dawn, he bundled the papers with heavy plastic strapping, and horsed them into the trunk and the backseat of his car. The ink was still fresh; it smelled of acetone, you could almost see it seeping deeper into the newsprint.

Egan sucked a stogie as he drove the quiet morning streets of a town that stayed up late and slept late too. His pulse pounded with unaccustomed exertion as he carried the papers into empty grocery stores, guest houses that smelled achingly of coffee, laundromats with one lone dryer spinning.

He was bleary-eyed and unshaven and happier than he'd been for as long as he could remember. There was ink in the folds of his knuckles, and he'd written something that maybe could matter. He felt like a newspaperman again.

Not that most people got excited about his banner headline: "A Russian Mafia on Duval Street???"

Who cared? Not the tourists, as long as the sun was still hot, the beer cold and the music loud. And even the locals, glutted with malfeasance, weary of greed and scandal, mostly shrugged and snorted. More crooks; a next wave of carpetbaggers. What else was new?

In certain places, though, the
Frigate's
special edition was very major news. One of those places was the T-shirt shop, at the back of which Sam Katz was being held.

The young man who opened the store at nine
a.m
. had found the papers leaning up against the door. He picked them up as he undid the double locks. He did not read English very well and he didn't care for reading anyway. He was about to throw the bundle in the trash when the headline caught his eye. "Russian Mafia" he could understand. The headline made him feel momentarily important and he could not suppress a stupid smile.

He went to the back of the store and knocked three times, then twice more after pausing, on the door that led to the stock room.

Tarzan Abramowitz opened up. He'd slept on the cot surrounded by leaning stacks of cardboard boxes, and he was standing in his underwear. Muscles twitched in his legs though his eyes were still narrow with sleep. Scratching his hairy stomach, he took the paper back to his cot and haltingly he read.

Sam Katz watched him read.

Sam's ankles were still taped to the high and backless stool. His spine had gone through several phases of pain, cramping, and fatigue, and by now he had caved into an Sshaped slump that hardly hurt at all. His sunken chest had compressed down onto his old man's little paunch; somewhere along the way he'd wet his pants. He'd known when he was doing it and he didn't care that much; squeamishness was a luxury that only the young and healthy could afford.

Through the night he'd dozed and awakened, dozed and awakened, feverish dreams resolving into no less feverish thoughts. At some point he understood that, no matter what he said or didn't say, his captors had to kill him. Obviously they did. He tried to get his mind around the idea of being killed. It seemed a crazy way to go. Old Jews, if they made it past the years when the driven ones dropped dead at their desks from heart attacks, died of cancer, diabetes. What kind of
mishegoss
was kidnapping and murder? Nothing in his life had pointed that way, not that it mattered.

If he could believe in an afterlife he would be quite content. He didn't ask for harp music, wings, nothing like that. He'd only like to be able to look down now and then and see how things were going for his son. Did things work out with Suki? The guest house—did he ever manage to turn it around? Sam wanted to keep track of those things. His own story was over. That was fine, fair enough. It had been an okay story. But it made him sad to leave Aaron's story in the middle.