Mangrove Squeeze

by SKLA

  They got out of the cab and walked into the mangroves. The air smelled of iodine and the limestone rocks were warm beneath their feet. Not much more than twenty yards in, with the road noise already swallowed up in foliage and the light sliced into jungle patterns by overhanging boughs,

  Suki caught her first glimpse of the hot dog. She saw the service window cut into the swelling roll, the squiggles of mustard embossed on the frank. "It's adorable," she said.

  Pineapple and Fred just looked at one another.

  With Piney leading, they climbed the cinder blocks that led to the ripped screen door on the side. Suki entered, saw the sauerkraut steamer and the pronged rotisserie, her hosts' bedrolls and their eating kits. Then, in a broken mirror hanging from a peg above the sink, she saw herself.

  She wished she hadn't. Her spirit had found its own mood, independent of her body, and except for the raw ache in her throat and the bruises on her ribs, she'd been feeling pretty good. She'd had no way of knowing just how abused she looked. Her nicked cheek had gotten puffy, the little cuts congealed into a warm knot whose swelling reached to the outside corner of her eye. She'd bled just slightly from a small wound at the back of her scalp, and her hair was stuck to the blood like a bandage. The handprints on her neck had smudged and spread and darkened to a queasy unnatural violet.

  She felt herself starting to cry. It wasn't from pain, and wasn't from vanity, but rather, from pity for the woman in the mirror, who seemed like someone else, the sort of universal victim that Suki never imagined she would be. But she didn't want to cry, she didn't see the point. She bit her lip and choked back the impulse that was riding up her ravaged gullet. The effort made her ears ring but her voice was almost normal when she said, "I've got to get cleaned up."

  "No running water," Piney said. "But we've got a barrel and a basin. Works pretty good."

  Suki nodded, tore her eyes away from the broken mirror. "Any chance of a needle and thread?"

  * * *

  "Has Suki come in?" asked Aaron Katz.

  He was sitting in the kitchen at the Mangrove Arms, a damp cordless phone pressed against his ear. In front of him was a plate of cold eggs he hadn't got around to eating and a lukewarm cup of coffee he pecked at now and then.

  "No," said a voice that was harried and impatient even through the drawl. "She should have but she hasn't."

  "Do you know if she's out selling?"

  Donald Egan fiddled with his cheap cigar, rounded the ash against the edge of the ashtray. "I wish I knew what my staff was doing. I wish my staff knew what my staff was doing. Is this about an ad?"

  "It's a personal call," said Aaron.

  Egan looked around the converted classroom that was his office. It was almost eleven, and not one of his underpaid employees had come in. The computers were switched off, vacant desks were topped with random scraps of paper and winding chains of paper clips. Wanting badly to believe that it was true, he said, "This is a place of business. We try to discourage personal calls."

  "I'm afraid she might be in trouble," Aaron said.

  "Wouldn't surprise me," the publisher blithely answered. He didn't know exactly what he meant by it. It was just the sort of thing he said to show that he was worldly and tough-minded, like a real newspaperman had to be.

  Aaron didn't remember standing up but he was pacing now, his coffee sloshing in the mug. "I mean real trouble. Like danger. Don't you even give a shit?"

  Too late as usual, Egan's humanity woke up. He said, "Look, if you have reason to believe-"

  Aaron Katz hung up on him, slid his coffee mug along the table. He paced some more and his burgeoning frustration and responsibility surprised him, filled him with a reckless prideful need to act.

  He found that he was headed for the door. He didn't know where he was going or what he'd do, just that he had to feel like he was helping, doing something, if only wandering blindly through a town he was still learning, on an uninvited crusade to help a woman whom he barely knew.

  Chapter 17

  "Attempted murder?" said the sergeant who answered the phone for Key West's one-man homicide squad. "We're kind of busy with a successful one right now. 'Zit an emergency?"

  This struck Suki as an odd question, and she was less sure than ever that calling the local cops was really such a good idea. "I'm supposed to be dead," she said.

  "Is it a domestic situation?" asked the cop.

  "I've learned a good way to avoid domestic violence," Suki said. "I live alone."

  "Are you in danger at this moment?"

  "I wish I knew."

  "Don't we all. Hold on a minute." He vanished from the line.

  Suki was standing at a pay phone whose base was sunk in a square hole in concrete just inside the seawall. She looked down at the ocean. Tiny birds were pecking bubbles at the shoreline; farther out, egrets were stalking, their necks as fast as snakes. She'd sewn her dress and washed her hair, and now she felt it drying in the sun.

  After a while another voice came on the line. "Lieutenant Stubbs," it said. "Can I help you?"

  Suki repeated her complaint.

  "Attempted murder is a very heavy charge," said Stubbs. "Are we talking battery? Are you saying someone hit you?"

  "I'm saying someone strangled me, gave me up for dead, then tried to drown me in a car."

  "Sounds like more than battery."

  "Thank you."

  "And your assailant, you know him?"

  "Thought I did. Yes."

  "His name?"

  "Lazslo."

  "Lazslo?"

  "Lazslo Kalynin. Runs the T-shirt shops."

  There was a pause. Suki heard a scratching sound as the phone was rubbed against a shirt. When Stubbs came on again, he said, "Where are you? I'll come talk with you in person."

  "I'm at a pay phone," Suki said.

  "Where do you live?" said Stubbs.

  "I live on Newton Street, but I'm afraid to go there. I'm staying with some friends."

  "And where do they live?" Stubbs asked, with a patience that did not come naturally.

  Suki hesitated, looked out at the ocean. Pelicans were diving, then shaking water off their heads like dogs. "Lieutenant, look," she said, "the place they live, it's not exactly legal. I wouldn't want to cause them any—"

  "Lady," said Stubbs, "this is homicide, not the building department. Just tell me where you'll be in fifteen minutes."

  Lieutenant Gary Stubbs was leaning back against the sauerkraut steamer, a pocket-size spiral notebook in his hand. He didn't wear a uniform, but a rumpled khaki suit that creased up like a concertina behind the knees and at the elbows. He was more thickly built than was ideal for the climate, with a bullish neck that always chafed against his collar. He had a squashed nose and shadowed jowls that never looked quite shaved. He riffled backward through his notes and said, "Let's make sure I have this right. You met him in the course of selling ads?"

  "That's right," said Suki. "Six, eight weeks ago." She was sitting in the hot dog's only chair, a fifties dinette job with rusted legs and a torn red vinyl seat. Fred and Pineapple, congenitally shy of cops, had gone for a stroll by the ocean.

  "And he was interested in you. Romantically."

  "Apparently," she said.

  "But what you wanted from him—"

  "Look, Lieutenant," Suki interrupted. "It was dumb. I told you that. I thought if I could get a really down-and-dirty story about the T-shirt shops—"

  "They'd fold their tents and go away," said Stubbs, "and Duval Street would be a funky locals' drag again."

  "That was the fantasy, I guess," said Suki.

  "And in the meantime," said the cop, "you could stop selling ads for a living."

  "Exactly. Be a reporter instead."

  "That's a move up?" asked Stubbs.

  "Everything's relative. To me it is."

  "Lois Lane."

  Suki gestured upward toward the concave wiener in the roll. "Except when I needed rescuing I got Pineapple and Fred instead of
Superman. And things blew up before I could file my story."

  "Your story," said Stubbs, frowning at his notes. He leaned more heavily against the steamer, shifted the cross of his ankles. "That's the part that sort of loses me. Russian gangsters? Money laundering?"

  "Those stores," said Suki, "the rents they pay. They can't be making money."

  "I've heard that theory before," said Stubbs. "Look, Ms. Sperakis, no offense but you're a typical Key Wester. You can't stand change. Whenever something comes along—"

  "This isn't just something coming along, Lieutenant. This isn't a McDonald's where there used to be a fritter stand. This is organized crime. The things he said to me—"

  "While trying to seduce you, Ms. Sperakis. Let's be frank, okay? Men have been known to fling an awful lot of bullshit while trying to seduce a woman."

  "Let's be frank, Lieutenant: Every woman past the age of twelve is well aware of that... And for a while, yeah, he was bullshitting, I totally agree. But then it changed. He was opening up, cleaning out—"

  "Ms. Sperakis," said the cop, "did he ever say to you, 'I, Lazslo Kalynin, am a member of the Russian Mafia'?"

  "Well no, of course he—"

  "Did he ever say, 'My uncle is a mobster. These stores are fronts for something else'?"

  "Of course he wouldn't 've—"

  "He was talking headlines, generalities. Bragging. Trying to sound interesting."

  "He succeeded. He said they had plutonium."

  "Plutonium? He told you that?"

  "He hinted at it."

  "Hinted. Ah."

  Suki hesitated, bit her lip. Then she leaned far forward on her dinette chair and wrapped both hands around her battered violet throat. "Lieutenant," she said, "if I wasn't onto something, why did this happen to me?"

  The homicide detective looked away a moment, ran an index finger back and forth beneath his nose. "Ms. Sperakis—"

  "And stop calling me Ms. Sperakis. My name is Suki."

  "Suki," he said, and he blew air between his teeth. "If I knew why people hurt people I could show them how to stop, and then I'd win the Nobel Prize and could retire."

  "This happened because he'd said too much to me and I think you should call the FBI."

  "The FBI?" said Stubbs, and despite himself he gave a mirthless and percussive laugh. "The FBI? Suki, jam- packed 747s are falling from the sky, large public buildings are being blown off their foundations, small wars are being fought against skinhead lunatics in Idaho and Texas, and I'm supposed to call the FBI because you don't like the T-shirt shops?"

  Suki stewed a minute, her swollen face throbbed underneath her eye. Then she said, "You call me typical because I don't like change? I call you typical because you don't believe the outside world could really touch this place, that anything big could happen—"

  He shushed her with a raise of his hand, said, "Suki, let's not argue ... On a slightly different subject, do you believe in karma?"

  "Karma?" she said, and she twisted up her mouth. Okay, this was Key West, but still, you didn't expect to be talking karma with a cop. "I'm like most people, I guess. I believe in it when it proves me right."

  "Lazslo Kalynin was killed sometime last night."

  "What?"

  "Burglary. Looks like he came home at the wrong time, got his throat cut."

  Suki swallowed, searched her heart for sympathy or vindication. She found neither, just hollowness and bafflement. "Burglary," she said. "Funny coincidence."

  "Place was ransacked. Jewelry missing, wallet taken. Seems like there was a pretty good fight. He had lacerations on his face, contusions on his ribs and shins, a deep bruise in his groin."

  "I did that," said Suki.

  "Good shot," said the cop.

  "Look, anyone can fake a burglary."

  "His uncle came down to identify the body," said the cop. "Cried like a baby. Almost fainted."

  "So what does that prove?" Suki said. "Mobsters don't faint? Criminals don't cry?... Look, he talked too much, they killed him. Isn't that—?"

  "Suki, listen," said the cop. "I'm sorry for what happened to you, but the person who attacked you is dead, and his death is being treated as a burglary gone wrong. End of story."

  Suki swiveled on the dinette seat, raked fingers through her thick black hair, looked disgustedly away. She expelled a deep and angry sigh and said, "I knew I shouldn't've called the goddam locals."

  It was meant to sting, and it did. Stubbs's pink face took on the red of steak, his neck swelled against his cinching collar. For a moment his face sucked inward like he was swallowing his teeth, but the seditious words escaped. Softly, with an anguished wryness, he said, "You don't think I agree with you?"

  There was a silence. Suki turned toward him once more. His flush was gradually subsiding but his hands were white as they squeezed the metal counter.

  He went on, "It goes no farther, right? The department is a goddam mess. Politics. Butt covering. PR. They want it murmured there's a Mafia in town? Something they couldn't possibly handle? I'm homicide, Suki, not administration. I don't decide what things get called. Motive: burglary. Officially, that's the story."

  Suki's stare grabbed out for his eyes. "And unofficially?"

  He looked down at his feet. "There is no unofficially. So what'll you do from here?"

  "I don't know. I'm afraid to go home."

  "I'll bring you home," Stubbs offered.

  "And what then? What happens when they find out Lazslo botched his job and the woman he spilled his guts to is still alive and talking? What then, Lieutenant?"

  Stubbs didn't answer.

  Suki settled back against the rusty dinette chair, gestured toward the pronged rotisserie, the little propane fridge. "With the protection of the Key West cops I guess I'll stay right here."

  Stubbs looked around at the torn screen door, the leaning sack of garbage with some un-nameable fluid dampening its bottom. "Look," he said, "you can't stay—"

  Suki said, "And if you can't do anything to help me, at least keep it to yourself that I'm alive."

  The lieutenant sucked his teeth, pocketed his notebook, pushed his bulky body up from the sauerkraut steamer. He stepped over Pineapple's bedroll and headed for the door. "This job really sucks sometimes," he said. "You never heard me say this but I'll see what I can do."

  Chapter 18

  By early afternoon, Gennady Petrovich Markov had polished off a quart of vodka, and though his stomach burned and his living room swayed under him and his eyes pulsed in and out of focus, his mind evinced a stubborn and perverse refusal to be drunk.

  With ruthless clarity he saw his nephew stretched out on the gurney, bloodless and just faintly blue, his sundered neck appalling, his face as waxy and pearlescent as a squid. He smelled the stink that tried to cover death, the antiseptics and preservatives. He heard the voices of the cops and coroner, gruff and clumsy in their sympathies in spite of all their practice. He kept drinking. His ears rang and his vision blurred but the things he didn't want to think about just got more cruelly vivid.

  Around two o'clock Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky came by to offer his condolences. Silently, he slipped into the living room; silently, he sat at the end of the sofa, his slight stiff body barely denting the cushion. The two men stared blankly at one another, and after a moment Cherkassky said, "A terrible thing. I am sorry."

  Markov was hunkered in an enormous leather armchair, sunk so deep that it was hard to tell where the chair ended and its occupant began. He tried to fix his gaze on his old comrade, but nothing would hold its proper shape. Cherkassky's waferish body rippled as in reflecting water. His scooped-out face shrank inward like a drying apple. Markov said to him, "You are not sorry. You hated him."

  Cherkassky took no umbrage, just strove to be precise. "I did not hate him. He worried me. He was too careless, too American."

  "And so you had him killed."

  "You think I did this thing?" Cherkassky said, his voice rising by just the slightest increment.
"In this wiolent country of drugs and guns and shooting while you change a tire on your car, you think I did this thing?"

  Markov seemed to bloat up in his chair, his fingertips clawed the arc of brass tacks that pinned down the upholstery. "You made him kill the girl. That was punishment enough."

  "Yes, it was," Cherkassky said. "For him."

  "For him? What is it you are saying, Ivan?"

  Cherkassky turned away a moment, looked through the window and across the garden to the Gulf, to mangrove islands hovering on pillows of distant glare. "I am saying nothing. Only I agree. To kill the girl, that was punishment enough."

  With difficulty, Gennady Markov reached across his heaving chest, retrieved the glass of vodka from the table next to him. He drank. He said, "Ivan, if you have done this thing, to punish me, no matter why, I will never forgive you. Never. You will be my enemy till one of us is dead."

  Cherkassky listened. His scooped-out face wobbled in Markov's vision but its expression didn't change. After a moment, he said, "Gennady, you are sad, you are drunk. I understand and I take no offense at what you say, these accusations. Tomorrow you will apologize and of course, as we are old friends, I will accept."

  Markov tried to turn away. The ripples of his shirt twisted up across his belly and his bottom squeaked against the leather seat, but he couldn't really move. He stayed silent and looked down at the floor.

  "And I will tell you one more thing," Cherkassky softly said. "You will not hear it now but when you are ready you will hear it. This terrible thing that has happened, it is a grief that will end, and that will spare you far more heartache than it caused. Believe me, I know. Life will become much easier for you, Gennady. You will have one less thing to care about."

  Aaron Katz was unaccustomed to wandering the streets.

  He worked day and night. He was organized and disciplined. He went to places when he had a reason to go to them, and unlike many in Key West, he usually went to them directly.