Mangrove Squeeze (37 page)

At the bottom stair he reached out for her hand. Their fingers twined, nobody dared to stop them. Ivan Cherkassky stepped across and put the muzzle of his gun against her ribs. Aaron felt it. He knew the flesh of her side where the gun was pressing in.

They walked slowly toward the picket gate. Foliage thinned and the noises of Key West intruded. A motorcycle revving somewhere; the bellow of a cruise ship's horn. They saw the blue Camaro at the curb.

Ivan Cherkassky said, "Very nicely, all together now, we get into the car."

In a clumsy cluster they moved across the sidewalk. There were people all around, heartbreakingly oblivious in silly hats and sunburns, licking ice cream, reading maps. No one, so it seemed, paid particular attention to the odd quartet, the couple being escorted to their deaths.

Ivan Cherkassky opened the passenger-side door, bundled Aaron, then Suki, into the backseat, and finally climbed in himself. Markov lumbered around the front of the car to get in behind the wheel. He did not notice a barefoot, ragged man sitting on the curb a little distance away, his beard scraggly and translucent, his face medieval, his mouth a mere dry slot.

Nor did he realize right away that the Camaro's engine was no longer running.

He put the car in drive. Nothing happened. For a moment he was utterly confused. He looked down at the ignition switch and found it vacant.

Cherkassky's pinched voice said to him, "Please, Gennady, why you wait?"

Markov's fat hand fumbled on the floor mat, underneath the seat. "Abramowitz," he muttered. "The key he took."

"Car was running," said Cherkassky.

A siren, faint at first, cut through among the sounds of moped horns and biplanes pulling banners through the sky.

"Big scientist," Cherkassky hissed. "Find a way to start the car!"

Markov sat there sweaty and helpless. "Is bad, Ivan," he said.

Aaron and Suki squeezed each other's fingers, their hips were pressed together on the seat The siren grew louder, its whine began to fill the leafy tunnel of Whitehead Street.

"Fool!" Ivan Cherkassky said. Disgusted, persuaded to the end that only he could do things right, could ensure his own survival, he threw open the Camaro's door, stepped outside, and started walking round to start the car himself.

Piney watched him. Without the others clustered up against him, the skinny Russian could not hide the gun. Pineapple saw it and quick as a crab he scuttled across the warm stone of the curb. By the time the Russian was crossing the front fender, the ragged and devoted man was close enough. He swung his
parking
sign with all his might and caught Cherkassky right behind the knees. The thin man buckled to the shape of a Z. His head clanged on the car's hood, then he slithered off the bright blue paint like egg.

Gennady Markov, baffled, fired blindly through the tinted windshield. Glass shattered; naked daylight, searing white, streamed in through the spiky gaps between the shards. Neither Cherkassky nor his assailant got up from the pavement.

The siren was growing ever louder. Bystanders, oblivious no longer, hunkered behind trees or bolted down side streets. Markov sat behind the wheel of the useless car and he started to whimper dryly. He was totally alone at last. There was no one to take responsibility for him, to prop him up, to tell him what to do. He listened to the siren. He wondered if his blind shot had killed his only comrade and his enemy.

He panicked. He opened his door and he began to run away down Whitehead Street. His shirt was soaked, his weirdly dainty shoes flopped and stretched under his weight. Fatly he ran, twisting his neck and brandishing his gun, using it to clear away a swath of the world wide enough for him to hide in.

Aaron rocked forward in his seat and took off after him. There was no time to think about what it was that called forth courage—whether it was mere circumstance, or love; no time to wonder about the transformation that brought a father's son to readiness on his own. He just took off, running hard and low.

Markov looked back across his shoulder, saw him closing fast. Still lumbering and straining, huffing and off-balance, the Russian fired. Aaron flinched but kept on charging. The shot went wide and low, it raised a long welt in the asphalt.

Aaron sprinted, measured, and a heartbeat later he left his feet, dove headlong at the fat man's churning thighs, and clawed and dragged him to the pavement

Air came out of Markov when he hit the ground. His elbow slammed down on the street; the impact sprung his fingers, and his pistol skidded off just beyond his reach. Moaning, he tried to slink and crawl to it, kicking out his legs like a giant wounded insect. Hand over hand, Aaron climbed up the man the way one scales the last vertiginous reaches of a peak, dug determined fingers deep into his flesh and held on for dear life, for several dear lives, till Gary Stubbs's tardy unmarked car screeched to a halt some three feet from where they lay.

Piney hated keys—those guilty emblems of things coveted and hoarded, things one would get in big trouble for messing with. He could not meet the lieutenant's eyes as he handed over the pilfered key to the electric blue Camaro. But the cop didn't scold him. He patted his shoulder. Then he turned his attention back to the two old Soviets who were spread-eagled across the hot hood of his unmarked Ford.

Cherkassky had a ripening bruise on his forehead; his manner was stoic and sullen. Markov was shaking; his pants were torn. He saw no virtue in enduring pain; in response to the discreet pressure of a thumb behind the ear, he quickly revealed where Sam and Bert were being held.

Stubbs radioed for a beat patrol to go there. The Duval Street cops met Aaron and Suki on the sidewalk, just in front of the same dim and recessed doorway where Aaron had first accosted Tarzan Abramowitz. Together they went in, and Suki took a quiet, chastened satisfaction in being there as the cheesy business was shut down.

Sam Katz, captive in the stockroom, did not immediately understand that he was being liberated.

He hardly noticed when the music in the T-shirt shop was suddenly turned off. Braced for death, he flinched and nearly toppled backward off his high stool as the locked door to his ugly chamber was kicked in. Seeing his son in the vacant frame, his first words were, "It isn't safe here, Aaron. Go away."

"It's okay, Pop. It's okay."

"What?"

"It's safe now," Aaron shouted. Shouting it brought it home to him, and the beginnings of tears burned the corners of his eyes.

"Really?" shouted Sam.

"Really."

Sam got a little happy then. "My gizmo worked. It worked."

"Your gizmo?" Aaron said.

Sam explained as Suki un-taped his ankles. His legs and spine had forgotten how they fit together; for a while Aaron had to hold him up.

Bert, hostage for a shorter time, was in much better shape. He clambered to his feet as soon as he'd been untied; he had the presence to straighten the placket of his shirt He didn't want to intrude on the family reunion, but he wanted very badly to go retrieve his dog.

So the four of them drove to Key Haven.

On the way there they were passed by the ambulance that carried Carol Lopez. The bullet that hit her had shattered a rib, missed her heart by an inch or so, and lodged in her right lung. She was conscious off and on, and she seemed to understand that the rookie cop, her partner for an hour, had been slain. His was the vague sad glory of the soldier killed in his very first foray, who went down with hardly a moment to savor what he'd done or to contemplate exactly why he'd done it. Carol Lopez, by contrast an old campaigner, would soon rejoin the force. With a decoration on her shirt and a dented bullet carried in her pocket, she would be taken seriously at last.

In the crazy tiled house where Bert and Sam had posed as golden age lovers, the chihuahua was still curled around the yellow Walkman. Its blind eyes panned the room when people entered, then it dragged itself along the tiled floor. Its whiskers probed, its tail flicked, and, at the perfect instant, like one half of a long-established dance team, it arched its creaking back to accept its master's hand around its belly.

Sam reclaimed his souped up Walkman, the proof of his abiding competence, with hardly less affection than Bert lavished on his dog. The cassette inside explained much that was otherwise obscure—the circumstances leading to the murder of Lazslo; the pathetic revenge attempted in the killing of Ludmila; Ivan Cherkassky's coolly premeditated plan to eliminate everyone who might testify as to his larger crimes, then to lie and bargain toward clemency.

But the full extent of the Russians' Key West empire could not be grasped until warrants were obtained to search the T-shirt shops. In various stockroom stashes, police found roughly fourteen million dollars in American cash. Paintings from Leningrad and lapis jewelry from the Caucasus. Tiger skins from Siberia; a Faberge egg smuggled out of Moscow; sapphires that had once been worn by czars.

And even
then
, the real root source of all that wealth was not revealed until Pineapple had mustered his nerve and his composure, and asked Lieutenant Gary Stubbs to drive out to the hot dog and look at some things that he and Fred had dug up from the old fallout shelter in the mangroves.

Stubbs had never intended to call in the Feds, not if he could possibly avoid it, but when he saw the stacks of dusty, lead-lined tubes and boxes arrayed around the clearing, he admitted to himself at last that this was something that could not be handled locally. He called the FBI.

Within two hours the experts had descended. Men in what looked like spacesuits opened the metal containers and assayed the substances inside. Plutonium 239. Ninety-seven percent pure; weapons grade. Around seven hundred kilograms in all. Enough to build thirty bombs of the strength that leveled Hiroshima. Or to power three breeder reactors that would keep rogue nations supplied with fissionable goods for a millennium. It was by far the biggest stash of nuclear material ever known to have fallen into private hands.

Fred and Piney were treated with suspicion for a while. They were questioned for a long, long time, though they could tell their story in fifteen seconds: They had a friend in danger from Russians. They saw a fat man who maybe was a Russian in the mangroves with a red wagon and a shovel. He didn't belong there. They thought they should see what he was going to dig up.

The FBI concluded at last that Piney and Fred were not part of the conspiracy.

Huge military trucks arrived to take the plutonium away. It was hard to keep all this a secret, and someone— most likely Donald Egan—leaked the story to the national media.

By nightfall the TV crews had mustered, with their arc lights and satellite hookups and correspondents with sprayed hair, broadcasting live from the clearing near the hot dog and in front of the Mangrove Arms. The publisher of the
Island Frigate
, thrilled to be near the middle of a breaking story, spoke to everyone, told of how the phony article in his paper had forced the Russians' hand.

Suki Sperakis did a couple of interviews then retreated to her old hexagonal turret room, the site of her chaste, confused recuperation. But she and Aaron hid out there together now. With their arms around each other, they watched the bright lights play on the underside of the banyan leaves that tickled the railings of the widow's walk.

Then the lights were turned off, the media packed up and left, and things got relatively quiet.

But Key West, in certain ways, was changed. With the T-shirt shops instantly defunct, there would be a sudden glut of retail space on Duval Street, and rents would plummet accordingly. Local artisans could once again move in. There could be painters' co-ops and handmade sandals, tiny stores that would sell fedoras woven from palm fronds and brightly colored wooden fish. Much of what was offered would be pure kitsch—but authentic, local kitsch—and a hard-core local like Suki could take pleasure and vindication at the change.

Which didn't mean, however, that the new Duval Street would hold a place for her, or that surviving the Russians and bringing them down had solved the more mundane questions of what she would do for her living, how she would spend her time. She wouldn't go back to selling ads. She no longer fantasized about being a reporter; her brush with the media had cured her of that.

"So what
will
you do?" Aaron asked her some days later, as they sat in the unromantic kitchen, drinking coffee. Sam, fixed up with a brand new hearing aid, sipped tea.

"Oh, I don't know," said Suki, perhaps a little coyly. She looked up at the rack of outsize pots and pans, then through the doorway to the courtyard, with its shimmering pool and lounge chairs empty of guests. "Dreams are contagious," she said. "You once told me that, remember?"

Aaron looked at her unlikely eyes, then down into his cup.

"This place could really turn around," she said. "With all the work you've done, the free publicity ... Will you let me be here with you, help?"

They were kissing when the silver service bell rang out from the front desk counter.