Mangrove Squeeze (6 page)

"Alert," Sam echoed. He said it wistfully.

"Tell ya what," said Bert. He reached into his top-stitched and monogrammed chest pocket, produced a silver pen, wrote a phone number on a cocktail napkin. "Call me if ya like. We'll have a conversation, play gin rummy. For now I gotta go."

Slowly, stiffly, he began to rise, and Sam saw that he had a tiny ancient chihuahua in his lap. He couldn't help pointing at the creature and saying, "You know, I saw you stroking, I was thinking—"

Bert said, "I saw what you were thinking, and I really didn't give a shit. One good thing about getting old. Ya rub your crotch, who cares? Your crotch don't even care." Still not entirely free of his chair, he held forth the little dog. "This is Don Giovanni. Shake Sam's hand, Giovanni."

The geriatric animal made a monumental effort to lift a scrawny paw. Wanting to save it the trouble, Sam reached down and gently grasped its foreleg. The bones felt more like a bird than a dog. The creature's fur was sparse and faded, its drooping and enormous whiskers insecurely anchored at the scaly edges of a dry and twitching nose. Cataracts whitened both its eyes, milky film cascading over the bulbous and weirdly gleaming irises.

Sam said, "That's the oldest dog I ever saw."

Bert said, "And what are we, spring chickens?"

Erect now, finally, he hugged the dog against his tummy and strolled leisurely away.

The couple from Michigan, as happened not infrequently, cut short their stay at Mangrove Arms.

Maybe it was the pecan shells that the woman who did the breakfast had neglected to remove from the muffins. Maybe it was the tiny pellets of black rubber that shot inexplicably from the jets of the hot tub. Maybe it was a superstitious fleeing from the broken mirror of the medicine cabinet that had come unstuck from the wall and shattered in their bathroom sink. In any case, the Karrs had booked for six nights but left after three, signing off on their credit card and saying a somewhat embarrassed goodbye before moving on to spend the rest of their vacation at a real hotel.

Their early departure put Aaron in a sulk, and he sat for a while at the front desk, brooding. The sulk was not about money. Aaron had done his projections; he was losing money not much faster than he'd planned for; he could afford to lose considerably more. But it galled and baffled him to be working day in and day out at something that very possibly might fail.

He'd never failed at anything before. School had come easily. Sports had not, but still, with his father's help he'd turned his very mediocre talents into pitching records that still stood at Merrick Junior High. Quick and eager, he'd shined at summer jobs. Wall Street he'd figured out in half a dozen years—the phrases, the logical illogic, the perfect ties. In each arena, he'd defined the challenge, made something of a game of it, and psyched it out. Satisfying.

But what about now? Here was a simple machine—two small wood houses on a shady street in a town that millions of people paid money to visit. Why was he having such a damned tough time getting this machine to fly?

Brooding, turning the problem this way and that, he did not hear skipping footsteps coming up the porch stairs, and he was taken by surprise when Suki Sperakis walked into the office. She took advantage of his inattention, studied him a moment before he raised his eyes. She said, "You're not having your best day." It was not a question.

Aaron looked at her—the rich black hair, the wide violet eyes—and tried to smile. "It shows that much?"

She said, "Jews, Greeks, Italians. All those Mediterraneans, they can't hide their moods worth a damn."

He said, "You're here about the ad?"

"I'm here," she said, "to say I was unfair to you the other day."

"Hey," he said, "forget it. I guess I came on like a pushy jerk."

"No," she said. "You were being very nice. Civilized. A bowl of pasta—civilized. And I just didn't get it. It isn't what I'm used to."

Aaron looked at her. Her hair had been swept back by the momentum of her bike ride, the strands of her throat were tanned and mobile where they vanished under the thin cloth of her blouse. He said, "What are you used to, Suki?"

She gave a brief and mirthless laugh. "This town? Imbeciles passing through. Drunks trying to be clever. Losers wanting to keep you down."

"That's too bad," said Aaron.

"What's too bad," said Suki, "is that it makes you tough, leathery. Sun does it to your skin, the jerks do it to your heart."

Aaron wasn't sure if he should answer that. He was new here, didn't know the rules. But he heard himself saying, "Maybe not as tough as you think you have to be."

Suki looked down, hid her unlikely blue eyes behind their faintly dusted lids, as though by not seeing she could take a break from being seen. "Maybe not," she admitted. "Unless I really work at it. And sometimes I work at it too hard. Like when a nice guy offers me a plate of macaroni and I jump right down his throat."

Aaron had to laugh. "Plate of macaroni?"

"Hey," said Suki, "I'm from Jersey. Bowl of pasta— that's New York. Jersey they say plate of macaroni."

There was a pause. They looked at each other across the front desk counter. The look went on just long enough to be a little dangerous. Aaron remembered to inhale and the breath caught in his throat. He said, "I have a klutzy question, Suki. This Lazslo you had lunch with, you involved with him or not?"

The mention of the name brought a hardness back to Suki's face; her lips, which had been slightly parted, pressed together like the shells of a threatened oyster. "Involved?" she said. She seemed to think it over. "Funny word. Discreet. But vague."

Aaron said, "Look, you don't have to answer. I don't have any right to ask."

Suki said, "You might say I'm involved. You might say I'm getting more involved. It's anything but a romance, though."

Aaron ran his hand along the varnished surface of the counter, said, "Okay, I guess I deserve a riddle for an answer."

Suki bit her upper lip. "Aaron," she said, "I'm not playing games with you. It's just not something I can talk about. Not yet."

He pursed his lips and nodded. Jealousy pinched down again. It was idiotic but there it was. She saw his eyes receding.

She moved closer to the counter then. The move was sudden, headlong, like the dash of a scared kid on a diving board who wants to fly and fall and get it over with. Quick as a jab, her hand swung up above the polished wood. There was a piece of paper in it, warm and crinkled. "My numbers," she whispered. "Call me if you want to share a plate of macaroni."

She pushed the paper toward him and she smiled with relief. There; she'd done it She'd opened herself and didn't feel wounded, softened herself and it hadn't hurt at all. In fact she felt tickled and playful and new. Her boldness doubled back and made her braver, and she amazed herself by leaning across the counter and kissing Aaron on the cheek.

It happened so fast that he wasn't sure it had happened at all; the feel of her lips was so light that he couldn't quite tell if they had touched his skin or only charged some air between them.

In an instant she had pulled away. Her eyes slid off his and found respite in the silver bell between them on the counter. It was polished like an apple, attached like a trophy to a base of fine dark wood. Pleased with herself, she smartly rapped the little top hat of its ringer.

Long after she'd spun away and skipped along the porch, after she'd climbed onto her bike and ridden past the ragged man who held the
parking
sign, Aaron was still hearing the fugitive echoes of its high bright tone.

"You ask a lot of questions," said Lazslo Kalynin.

"I'm interested," said Suki. "I want to know you better."

It was well into the evening. They'd had a fancy dinner and now they were sitting in his Caddy. The car was parked on the promenade up near the airport, its front grille almost touching the seawall, facing out toward the flat, moonstruck waters of the Florida Straits. The weather was cool, too cool to put the top down, but Lazslo had the top down anyway. Wasn't that the whole point of an American convertible?

He gestured extravagantly so that the open collar of his shirt splayed wide, revealing wisps of chest hair. "You want to know me," he said, "you should know how I make love."

Suki let that pass. "The stores," she said. "You're so young to be in charge of all those stores."

Lazslo shrugged. It was something he'd seen people do when they wanted to look modest. On him it didn't work.

"And the rents," she said. "Eight locations in a five-block area. The volume has to be phenomenal."

Lazslo's arm was draped now over the white leather seat in back of Suki. He let it fall against her shoulder. Laconically, he said, "Everyone likes T-shirts."

She wriggled out from under his hand. "Some people think it's impossible. Some people think it can't be what it seems."

Miffed at her retreat, he said, "Some people are assholes."

"Envy," Suki said. "Maybe they just envy your success. But they say all kinds of crazy things. Money laundering. Russian Mafia."

Lazslo gave a harsh, clipped laugh that flew up from the topless car and was quickly blotted by the night. "Russian Mafia!" he scoffed. "There's no such thing as the Russian Mafia."

Suki swiveled in her seat, showed Lazslo her eyes, whose blue was thinned to an indistinct but compelling pallor in the moonlight. "That's what the Sicilians said for decades," she purred. "Even got the FBI to believe them for a long, long time."

Lazslo swiveled too, so that his knee was pressing hers, lightly prying her thighs apart. "But the Sicilians," he said, "the Russians. Completely different cultures."

Suki, with an effort, let her leg stay where it was. "Really?" she said. "How so?"

Lazslo felt the warmth of her knee through his jeans, let himself imagine there was no clothing between them. "The Sicilian mob," he said, "they started off as a defense against outsiders, conquerors. Sicilians trusted other Sicilians and hated everybody else."

"And the Russians?" Suki said.

Lazslo leaned forward, gestured as if her breasts were in his hands. "For Russians, the enemy was always other Russians. The state. Over here the goody-goodies, over there the crooks, the liars, the power-crazy. Insiders, outsiders, there was no one you could trust. Old Soviets, they carry suspiciousness inside them like a virus. So how could the Russians ever organize like the Sicilians?"

Suki said, "So they must've found some other way to organize."

Lazslo leaned back, his groin pushed forward underneath the steering wheel. "They organized—" he said. And then he stopped. The stop was as jarring and abrupt as interrupted sex, and carried in its wake the same gamy confusion. Lazslo noticed all at once the chilliness of the evening, felt the heat and avidity coursing off him. Desire was making him stupid. He was showing off, being just as careless as Ivan Cherkassky said he was.

"How should I know how they organized, if they organized?" he said. He tried to smile, it came out a grimace. He tried to look sexy, it came out both carnivorous and pleading. He said, "And that's the bedtime story for tonight. Now, are you coming home with me?"

Slowly, she moved her knee away and shook her head. "I'm not that fast, Lazslo. I told you that."

Lazslo said, "I'm not that patient. I told you that."

Suki shrugged, using nothing but her eyebrows. She said, "Your basic standoff."

His gaze hardened. He looked at her breasts, he looked at her lap. It was rude and he knew it was rude. He started the car, took a bleak solace in the angry rasp of the engine turning over. He backed hard off the promenade, prideful of the Caddy's elephantine leaning. Without looking at Suki, he said, "Maybe I won't call you anymore." He threw it into drive, burned rubber as he careened onto A-1 A.

Suki said nothing. If he didn't call, didn't continue to chase her, she was off the hook. Her lunatic crusade, which she'd never exactly decided to pursue, but which somehow seemed to have called her, recruited her, would go away, dissolve, before any damage had been done, before anyone but her knew that it had ever been conceived.

But they both knew he would call again.

He wanted her. He wanted to break down her resistance and then to arch above her, sweaty and triumphant, and have her damp compliant face admit to him that she'd been crazy to resist. And there was something else as well, something that tugged and plucked at Lazslo, though he couldn't name it, something that transfigured ordinary lust and made its object an obsession. He knew, deep down, that she was trouble.

"Fred," said Pineapple, "ya know what I sometimes wonder about?"

They were strolling through the mangroves that stretched back from the hot dog, looking at the sky. Winter nights there in the marsh could be quite wonderful. No mosquitoes in the winter. Egrets stayed so still that it was sometimes many minutes before you noticed they were there. In winter the mangrove leaves gave off a clean and wholesome smell, a smell of salt and wax.

"No, Piney," said the patient Fred, wiggling his can of beer. "What do you sometimes wonder about?"