Mangrove Squeeze

by SKLA

  Vacant for only a single day, the apartment had the exaggerated stillness of a place long uninhabited. Echoes had settled. Nothing hummed. The pictures on the walls seemed lonesome, like paintings at a closed museum. The place was very dim but Piney didn't want to turn a light on.

  He felt his way to Suki's bedroom, found her closet door. A plastic shopping bag caught his eye; randomly he started filling it with clothes and shoes. He moved on to her bureau, filled another sack. Suki needed under-things; Piney plucked at bras and panties. He'd been with a woman a few times in his life, though not in many years. Lacy cups and silky briefs were, for him, too foreign to be titillating; obscure artifacts from some other dimension. He crammed them into the shopping bag and slunk on toward the bathroom, grabbed her toothbrush and some lipsticks, tossed in jars and tubes and vials of things he didn't know the names of.

  By now his heart was hammering and his armpits were wet. A bum in someone else's house clutching bags of someone else's things. A thief, what else? He didn't fear the Russian Mafia. He feared the neighbors, and their righteous and remorseless dogs. Someone would see him. Someone would shout. The police would come and Piney would be hurt and handcuffed before he could explain.

  He breathed deep, tried without success to stretch his cramping ribs. He pressed the shopping bags against his chest then reasoned he would look less guilty if he held them by the handles.

  He moved back through the living room and toward the door. With the lonesome pictures looking on, he opened it a crack. The dusk had deepened and the street lamps had grown more acid bright, they threw hard-edged shadows of fences and palms, lined the porch with dark bars that stretched out from the newels of the railing. Somewhere a television was blaring; somewhere a big dog barked.

  Piney held his breath, stepped outside, and locked the door behind him as quietly as he could. He pocketed the dreadful key; it was cold against his leg.

  Planks creaked underfoot as he crept along the porch. His bike still leaned against the fence; he looked longingly toward it, his means of escape from the blame of locks and back into the safety of the unowned streets. A cat slunk out from underneath a car. He kept the shopping bags below the level of the shrubbery.

  He reached the stairs. There were three of them, painted lumpy gray. A shadow slashed across them, and then there was a swath of naked light. Piney yearned to jump the steps and run but that would look suspicious. He moved deliberately, his eyes straight forward. His right foot was in midair, descending toward the concrete walkway, when a crouched dark form sprang up from the bushes and rammed him with a shoulder.

  Piney grunted as his chest compressed and his body warped into a boomerang shape. His fingers opened up and Suki's things went flying, bras and blouses and lipsticks skittering across the yard or catching on low branches, hanging there like laundry. Piney crumpled then tumbled to the ground ahead of his attacker, and in the damp and wormy dirt at the edge of the shrubs, he did what he had long ago learned to do when someone was about to beat on him. He curled up like a baby, his bent arms cradling his face and skull, his guts and groin tucked in as far as the geography of his skinny frame allowed. He lay there and waited for the fists and feet or the knife or gun butt to start punishing his back and sides.

  Gennady Petrovich Markov lay back on his feather pillows, pulled his satin sheet up snug beneath his sagging chin, and tried to quell the feeling that his bed was tipping over. If he sought balance by opening his eyes to gaze at some fixed point, he saw sickening undulations along the creases where the walls and ceiling met. If he closed his eyes to stop the rocking, he saw the murdered Lazslo. Vapors of rancid vodka were seeping from his pores and souring the room. He belched and tasted juices like the stink of the morgue.

  Silently, he started once again to weep. In his drunkenness, his grief became not just a feeling but an object with weight and a geography. He pictured it as a sort of dark dense hub with many avenues leading out from it, like roads from the center of a city. His fevered mind sought to name these avenues, so that he might pick one to travel on. But all the roads save one stayed dim and featureless. The only pathway he could name was vengeance.

  Ivan Fyodorovich had had his nephew killed. Of that he was nearly certain. Lazslo's vitality had made him dangerous. His transgression was that he had taken some joy in life, had had warm blood and thick semen in his tubing. The police, in their lazy embrace of the obvious, might see his murder as a side effect of robbery; and that was just as well. A Russian slain by Russians. What had the American authorities to do with that?

  But if it was an affair among Russians alone, what role was left for him, Gennady Markov? He blinked wetly and considered. His life had been one dereliction after another. Dereliction of party, of country. Betrayal of the early promise of his own career in science, of the wisdom of equations, their capsules of insight as spare and beautiful as proverbs. He had always been a shirker and a coward. He knew that about himself, more or less accepted it, and went about his business; self-respect was not required for good digestion. But his handsome, avid nephew had been the only person he loved. To let his murder go unrevenged—even for a man like him, that might be one dereliction too many.

  So what would he do? Ivan Fyodorovich, who despised him as only an old friend could, believed he would recant his rash words of that afternoon, and apologize.

  Well, maybe he would. Apologize and reclaim his old buffoonish mildness and bide his time. He had less to care about now; Cherkassky had been kind enough to point that out. He could afford to wait. He didn't have a plan, but he had certain knowledge that his superior did not have, certain technical skills that might earn him the last word.

  He would wait, and remember the bloodless Lazslo on the slab, and pick a time when he could make more trouble for Cherkassky than such a careful man should ever have to face.

  Chapter 21

  Piney, resigned and braced, lay there for a long moment on the moist cool ground, his knees drawn up, the air growing stale in his unflexing lungs. Heartbeats slammed by, crickets marked the time, and he was almost as baffled as relieved when the dreaded kicks and slashes failed to start.

  Holding his tuck, he took a deep but guarded breath that smelled of grass and stone, then moved his forearm just enough to catch a sideways look at the man who'd knocked him down and now was kneeling over him. Harsh and jagged shadows played over the man, but even so, he did not look very big or very mean or very angry. His arms hung at his sides and his hands were not balled into fists. His face looked almost as scared as Piney knew his own must look. Very tentatively, he started to uncradle.

  Aaron Katz looked down, saw the scraggly beard, the slot of a mouth. Trying hard to sound commanding, to keep the quaver out of his voice, he said, "Who the hell are you?"

  Piney did not presume to get up from the ground, but lay there among the broken shadows of the shrubs. "Name's Pineapple," he said.

  "Why are you here? What are you doing?"

  Piney blinked and squirmed. He almost started to answer, then remembered that Suki was supposed to be dead. This complicated things a lot. "You a Russian?" he asked the man who hovered over him.

  "What are you talking about?" said Aaron. "What do you know about Russians?"

  Piney didn't answer but he knew he'd made things worse.

  Aaron said, "Look, do you tell me why the hell you're here, or do I call the cops?"

  Pineapple flicked a dry tongue over dry lips, glanced around himself at the ladies' garments that festooned the yard. He'd been caught red-handed with sacks of skirts and panties and lipstick. The authorities would frown on this and the nature of the crime would not earn him the respect of the other guys in the lockup. He said, "Please don't call the cops. I ain't done nothing wrong."

  Aaron hesitated, sighed, said, "Let's start over then. Why are you here?"

  "Mind if I sit up?"

  Aaron said nothing and Piney raised himself. Absently he began retrieving clothes and cosmetics and putting them back in th
e bags. Finally he said, "I can't tell you why I'm here, okay? But I'm not a thief. I have a key."

  "Plenty of thieves have keys," said Aaron. But he was watching Piney put things into the shopping bag, and there was something in the almost dainty care he took that told him this man was not a burglar.

  There was a pause. Aaron became acutely aware of the dampness of the earth beneath his knees. His own pulse was just now getting back to normal, the adrenaline just retreating from the edges of his twitchy muscles. He was surprised at himself for coming here, shocked at his nerve in staking out the bushes when he'd seen the sneaking figure on the porch, amazed that he'd had the chutzpah to bowl him over.

  Finally he said, "Listen, I'm not looking to make trouble for you. I'm a friend of the woman that lives here."

  Pineapple was freeing a bra whose strap had caught on a croton branch. "So am I," he said.

  Aaron thought this doubtful. Key West was a loose town, and the climate had a way of leveling things out between the citizens and the vagrants, but there were limits here, as everywhere. He let it slide. "I'd really like to find her."

  "Why?"

  Aaron wondered what a tougher guy would say to that. "You're not the one to ask the questions," he said.

  Piney just kept putting Suki's things back into the bags.

  "Because she was supposed to meet me for dinner last night," Aaron said, "and she didn't show, and I'm worried. Okay?"

  The moon had risen, it poured a milky brightness on the stamped tin panels of the roofs and threw a cool light that nibbled at the shadows from the street lamps. The woman with the cocker spaniels skated past, saw two men kneeling in the yard surrounded by assorted female garments. It didn't register as that unusual, she kept on skating.

  Piney said, "You had a date with her? What's your name?"

  "Aaron."

  Pineapple remembered something then. He remembered the day, back before he and Suki had ever spoken, when she'd come out of a guest house on the corner of Whitehead and Rebecca, and rode past him as he sat there on the curb, and he noticed that her face had changed since the time that she'd gone in. "Aaron, can I ask you where you live?"

  He told him.

  "She likes you," Piney said.

  "She does?"

  Piney tucked the last of her things back into the shopping bags. "You sure you're not a Russian? You swear to God?"

  "Swear," said Aaron.

  Stiffly, Piney rose up from the ground. "I wish I knew what I should do."

  "She's okay?" said Aaron, still kneeling on the cool ground. "You know that she's okay?"

  Piney probed his eyes. At last he said, "She's okay, sort of. Follow me. I hope I'm doing right."

  "Oh, Christ," said Suki, "I look like hell."

  Though the truth was that, in the dim and flickering light of three candles spread around the hot dog, she didn't look like much of anything. It could vaguely be seen that the fabric of her dress was puckered where it had been ripped and sewn. The swelling in her cheek was softened by the dimness, and the discolorations on her throat were the same deep greenish lavender as the rest of the shadows.

  Aaron said, "Pineapple told me what happened. God Almighty."

  Suki shook her head. "Lazslo. You hated his guts from the first time I mentioned him. Good judge of character."

  Aaron said, "I was jealous, that's all. You've spoken to the cops?"

  Suki looked away, blew air between her lips. "Don't know why I bothered. Their theory is I got attacked, my attacker got unlucky. By coincidence. The rest is my imagination."

  "Bozo cops are on the take," said Fred. He was perched atop the propane fridge, and the under-lighting from the candles gave his face the smudges and furrows of a miner's face.

  "Possible," said Suki. "Or maybe just your basic Key West blindness. Big things only happen from Miami north. Down here we're puny even in our criminals."

  Aaron rubbed his chin. He hadn't got around to shaving that day and the sound of beard filled the small space of the hot dog. He said, "So what'll you do?"

  Suki didn't have a good answer so she changed the subject. "Hey, I never apologized for standing you up ... I stood you up and you looked for me. I can't believe it."

  "Why not?"

  She looked at Aaron but then went back to the question before. "I guess I'll hide," she said. "Till I figure something out."

  Aaron glanced around the wiener. "Hide here?"

  "Here or sneak out of town and go back to Jersey. And that, I'd just as soon get strangled."

  Pineapple was leaning against the pronged rotisserie. He said, "You stay right here as long as you want."

  Suki shot back, "Not if it means you guys sleep outside."

  Aaron pressed his lips together, twined and untwined his fingers. Life was a matter of holding back or plunging in. It was like that at each and every moment, but there were only rare occasions when the choice came quite so clear. He looked at Suki from under his eyebrows and finally he said, "I've got a whole empty guest house."

  It took Suki a moment to realize what was being offered. She bit her lip, the upper one. She said, "I couldn't do that."

  Aaron stood there in the candlelight, still tasting the words in his mouth. The words were dangerous and tasted salty.

  "It's your business," Suki said, "your livelihood."

  Aaron could not hold back a squirt of nervous laughter. "Believe me, it bears only very faint resemblance to a business."

  "Thank you but forget about it, there's no way."

  "Electricity. Hot showers."

  Suki gazed off through the service window, gave in to a brief fantasy of endless suds cascading over her skin, a warm stream drumming on the tense place at the top of her spine. But then her aching throat clamped down, a thwarted sigh squeezed through it. "Aaron," she said, "it's not about hot showers. Don't you understand? They want me dead. I'm trouble."

  "I do understand," he said, and meant it, though the truth was that the understanding, like a blood-red stain on cotton, was seeping into him only gradually.

  They locked eyes and then she looked away. "I'm staying here. I have friends here."

  Aaron did not take time to think about his customers' reaction to shoeless vagrants wandering the premises. He said, "Your friends could visit ... Besides—I'm not a friend?"

  Suki started to smile but then it was erased. "What you are, Aaron ... I don't know what you are, and to tell the truth it sort of scares me."

  Aaron drank that in but didn't answer.

  Suki said, "It isn't fair to pull you into this."

  Aaron had been hearing his own voice bouncing off the hot dog's fiber walls. "Sounds to me," he said, "like I'm asking to be pulled in."

  Suki lifted her gaze toward him. Her irises had candles in them, and her face was a puzzle of bruise and shadow. She said, "Aaron, like your old man says, you are a mensch. But no, I'm staying here."

  Chapter 22

  Aaron chose the route along the ocean and drove home very slowly.

  It was a mild night, clear but with that loamy greenhouse moistness that is always there in southern Florida. A swelling moon obscured the stars around it; the farther constellations burned a winter blue. Some of the palms hung limp and black while others tossed seemingly at random in little disconnected scraps of breeze. Aaron drove and tried to figure out the faint but chafing sense of failure that had come upon him.

  He'd managed to find Suki, but the fact that he'd found her had done her no good at all. Her situation was the same as if he'd done nothing whatsoever. He'd tried to get involved, but he couldn't help feeling that he hadn't tried quite hard enough; worse, he couldn't quite deny an abashing and ambivalent relief that his offer had been refused. Maybe at bottom he'd been doing nothing more than trying to trick his conscience, sidestep some inchoate blame.

  But blame for what? How much did a person have to do? He had a father who needed watching and an anemic business that required constant care and feeding. He wasn't sleeping with Suk
i, they had no history together; he'd made her no promises, owed her no allegiance. Why should he adopt this lunatic jeopardy in which she'd placed herself? And yet...

  And yet, in some unreasonable and undodgeable way, he felt responsible. Not because of anything he'd done. That was the bitch of it. He was not only blameless but incidental. He'd been cruising along and, like the guy who sees a crawling turtle in the middle of the road, was confronted by a clear and necessary duty. Such duties fell across the paths of decent people all the time. But usually the rescues required were small and quick—ease the tied-up dog tangled in its leash, save the bird being harried by a cat. Luck of the draw that the charge which fell to Aaron involved not a turtle or a sparrow but a human being; and not just any human being, but a woman he happened to find beautiful.

  He drove, and he did not remember turning right on White Street.

  Once on White, he could have taken Truman to head downtown, but when he got to Truman he didn't turn. His hands and feet realized before his mind did that he was heading back to Suki's.

  He didn't know why he was going there, except perhaps to allay, if only for a moment, the shameful feeling that he was letting himself off too easily. He would see again the thick shrubs where he'd been brave enough to wait in ambush, the ratty patch of lawn on which he'd tackled poor Pineapple. He turned right on Newton Street.

  From a distance off, he looked at Suki's house, the unlit windows, the dark porch under ginger-breaded eaves.

  But then his attention was diverted by something he just barely glimpsed on the opposite side of the street. An elbow. An elbow propped on the window frame of a car parked across from Suki's house. The car was a poor choice for stealth—an electric blue Camaro, some non- production color, with a molded skirt stuck onto the bottom of the frame. It hunkered just outside the main splash of orange brightness from a street lamp.