by SKLA
Aaron took his foot off the accelerator, crept along as slowly as he dared. He didn't have the nerve to turn his head, but as he passed the parked car he saw out of the corner of his eye a dark suspender cinched down on a muscular and shirtless shoulder, a tangle of unruly hair falling on a massive neck.
Praying that his face had not been noticed, hoping that his leg would not slam down on the gas and draw attention, Aaron kept on. Hands damp around the steering wheel, he hung a left on Eisenhower Drive and headed home to the Mangrove Arms, trying not to imagine what might have happened had the strongman from the T-shirt shop staked out Suki's place an hour sooner.
Pineapple waited until he thought Suki was asleep, then quietly started gathering up the edges of his bedroll.
Sitting, he tucked his pillow in among the folds, then tried to stand without shouldering the sauerkraut steamer or stepping on Fred, who was snoring with his head beneath the sink. Stepping barefoot over Suki, who'd been given the choice spot next to the propane fridge, he opened the screen door as gently as he could and escaped down the piled cinder blocks into the uncluttered night, to sleep among the mangrove roots and the animate puddles that survived somehow in every hollow.
When he had gone, Suki let her eyes spring open.
From floor level, she looked at the moonlit rusted legs of the single dinette chair, the dust-caked recesses at the base of the idle appliances. She had a pillow and two blankets and a sleeping pad. She was not uncomfortable but she was getting more disheartened every minute. What was gnawing at her was the gradual understanding that, strangled, half-drowned, and rescued, she was not at the end of her trials but only the beginning.
Terror had come and gone and probably would come again—but terror was a fast emotion, and mercifully impossible to remember fully. What confronted her now was a slower and more grinding dilemma: How did she continue her life in the face of what had happened?
She couldn't stay long at the hot dog; that was clear. So what were her options? She could leave Key West, abandon Florida; a long retreat, she imagined, would be adequate to keep her safe. But goddamit, she didn't want to leave. She liked it here. The homemade boats, plywood painted lavender and green. The old Cuban guys playing dominoes in shady doorways. The funk and the geeks that made it feel like home. It was bad enough that fear of crime made you have to lock your bicycle; she was damned if fear of crime would make her give up the whole entire archipelago of Keys.
But if she stayed, what then? The cops could not be counted on. Her boss, for all his cheap cigars and city- room gruffness, quailed in the face of a real story as though it were a fatal infection. Which, perhaps, it was. Who, then, had the guts to risk contamination? Pineapple and Fred.
And maybe Aaron. But Suki hated the idea of involving him. What she'd liked about him from the start was precisely that he did not seem tough, did not have the Key West thorniness engendered by the climate and the transience, a passive hardness that defeated joy by expecting... not the worst, exactly, but just not much of anything. A cuticle around the heart like around the leaves of tropic plants. Aaron seemed free of it. His gaze was unguarded. He was actually trying to accomplish something here, and, amazingly enough, he seemed to believe in the value of his efforts. A long siege in the hot sun would probably simmer the tenderness and the belief right out of him.
Suki rolled over, faced the little fridge. Through the cracking propane hose she caught a faint whiff of the tracer gas they mix in with the fuel. Across the way, Fred's snoring had changed from a steady, almost restful purr to a syncopated rasping, a sort of nasal jazz. She couldn't stay here very long. But could she bring herself to go to Aaron's place? If he asked again, that is?
She tried to banish the possibility; it wouldn't go away. She imagined a hot bath. She imagined a window with a curtain on it, moving in a yellow breeze. She imagined Aaron's curly hair, the earnest tilt he gave to his head when he was puzzling something out. She could see herself at Aaron's place, it was pointless to deny it. And for just a fleeting second she admitted something else as well. She could see herself, maybe sometime far from now when all of this was settled, in Aaron's arms.
Chapter 23
"Ya see," said Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia, "this is the part I don't like."
"Which part?" Aaron said.
It was morning at the Paradiso. Long shadows sprouted from the palms. A few old people were walking laps around the pool, none of them could exactly straighten out their knees. The pock of tennis balls echoed between the buildings of the complex; the tinny plunk of golf balls issued forth from the putting green.
Aaron had slept badly once again, he'd awakened in a sweat. He needed to do more for Suki and he had no idea what he should do. He woke up with the thought that mafiya was Mafia. That's what old man Bert had said, and it seemed that Bert should know. Besides, who else could Aaron talk to? Who'd had more practice keeping secrets? So he'd roused his father with a cup of tea and off they'd gone.
"The part I don't like," the retired mobster was replying now, "is this burglary bullshit. The part where the dead guy, what's his name?"
"Lazslo."
"Where Lazslo, they make it look like it's a robbery."
"You don't believe it?" said Aaron.
"Come on," said Bert, his silver eyebrows arching skyward. "On that night of all the nights? They rubbed him out. Course they did. But the way they did it—chicken-shit. No class."
Sam Katz was gradually waking up. In the mornings his mind came back to him in jigsaw pieces that slowly combined to make a map. Some days the map had rougher seams than other days. He said, "You cut somebody's throat. There's a classy way to do it?"
Bert petted his dog, which was splayed out like a Chinese duck on the metal table where the three of them were sitting. "My people," he said, "when they were faced with the unfortunate necessity of someone he had to be rubbed out, at least we tried to make a lesson of it, a learning experience. We left a calling card. A symbol. Bag a fish. The guy's tongue. Whatever. Sometimes, okay, the symbols got a little, like, mysterious. One guy he was found frozen in a car trunk wit' a candelabra on his head. Don't ask me. But the point is we didn't bullshit, make it look like something which it wasn't."
Sam ran a hand through the little pillows of his Einstein hair. "So maybe," he said, "these people aren't so much like your people after all."
Bert thought that over, tugged on the placket of his shirt. The shirt was somewhere between pink and red, the color of watermelon, in a shiny material that looked wet. "Similarities and differences," he said at last. "This robbery bullshit, okay, that's a difference. But the guy shoots his mouth off and gets dead, that's the same."
Aaron's mouth was very dry. His hairline itched. He said, "So where does that leave Suki?"
Bert frowned. He petted his chihuahua and watched short and brittle hairs flutter off its back and float in swaths of sunshine. "Aaron," he said, "remember that jerkoff, what's his name, he said something bad about God and the Moslems were gonna kill 'im and then they backed off and made him famous 'stead of dead? Well, if these people are anything like my people, it isn't gonna work like that. They follow through. Have to. Credibility. Ya know. If she's been sentenced, well, it isn't good."
"She's not a threat to them," said Aaron.
"They probably would disagree," said Bert.
"The cops, her own newspaper—no one'll listen to her," Aaron said. "She couldn't hurt them if she tried."
"And who's gonna tell the Russians that?" asked Bert. "Who's gonna convince them?"
Aaron's voice was getting ready to answer but then he began to see the problem.
"The person who tells them," Bert went on, "he knows the same stuff she does. Same knowledge, same sentence. Capeesh?"
There was a silence. People did their laps around the pool. A curse came from the tennis court.
Bert leaned lower across the metal table, his watermelon- colored shirt stretched along his skinny chest. He put his hand on Aaron's wrist, sai
d, "Wit' due respect to your father here, I'm gonna talk like you were my own son. My world, Aaron, any world I guess, we had to learn that nobody could save nobody else. Hard thing, but true. Eh?"
He held Aaron's eyes till Aaron reluctantly nodded. Then he went on.
"Somebody got sentenced—Mafia, cancer, what the hell's the difference how it happens?—we had to learn to say goo'bye. Say it in our heart, wit' no words coming out and nothing showing on our face. Y'unnerstand? Shitty sometimes, but there it is. Ya see?"
He stared at Aaron till the younger man looked off, his smarting eyes stung further by the glare from the pool. "I see."
Driving away, Aaron said, "Pop, you understand what's going on?"
Sam Katz didn't answer right away. There was a certain bleak equity in what was happening to his brain. As he remembered less, he cared less, there was a balance to it. But there were moments when he had to care, and then it took a monumental effort to keep the understanding in proportion. "I think I do," he said at last. "But Aaron, is it me, or is this all a little crazy?"
"It isn't you, Pop," Aaron said.
They cruised up Smathers Beach. Vending trucks were already selling french fries, sno-cones. It was a carefree place. You could take a parachute ride hitched to a motor- boat and float weightlessly above the twinkling ocean.
After a moment Aaron said, "Bert's telling me to walk away. Whadda you think, Pop?"
Sam was slipping but he'd seen a lot of life and raised a son and he still knew things that Aaron didn't know. He said, "He's not telling you to walk away. He's saying it's okay if you walk away. He's giving you permission, freeing you."
Aaron drove and rubbed his cheeks. "And whadda you say?"
Sam looked out the window. The ocean was on his side of the car. "Isn't home the other way?"
"Yeah, it is," said Aaron. They were driving past the airport, the fenced-in stand of mangroves at the east end of the runway.
Sam said, "Wait a second. My hearing aid, it's acting funny. Funny noises, like."
He pulled out the device, squinted at it, turned it over and over in his hand. Aaron said, "If you'd stop experimenting on it—"
"What?" He put the hearing aid back in. "Better now," he said. "About this girl, this Suki, she have anybody else could do a better job of helping her?"
Aaron didn't answer.
Sam looked out the window. The island was curving, the ocean scouring through toward Cow Key Channel. "We going where she is?"
Aaron didn't move his eyes. "I guess that's where I'm heading."
His father watched the water and the wheeling sky. Then he reached across the car and put a hand on Aaron's shoulder. "I'm proud of you," he said. "The whole thing's crazy but I'm proud of you."
Suki was washing her hair in a bucket.
Aaron had walked in from the road and was standing in the shadows of the foliage. He saw her before she noticed him, and the whole scene reminded him of something from another century. A driftwood fire burning. The dented pail lifted up on rocks. Thin suds being wrung out of her hair in sunshine.
He entered the clearing. She looked up and saw him. They both had tired eyes, there was an intimacy in the heavy lids, the shadowed sockets. The bruise on Suki's face had mellowed to a pale chartreuse; you had to look twice to see the marks on her neck. He said good morning.
She wrung her hair, water streamed onto her shoulder. "You're always showing up when I'm at my very worst."
Aaron said, "I don't think you have a very worst."
Suki tried to smile at the compliment but her lips wouldn't budge and, absurdly, the back of her throat closed down.
Aaron pawed the stony ground. "I'm here to bring you home. Do I have to drag you or will you come along?"
Suki tilted her head. Drops of water slapped into the bucket. Looking down, she said, "You don't have to do this."
"Oh yes I do."
She tossed damp hair across her shoulder and searched his sleepy face. After a moment she said, "You slept as bad as I did."
"Maybe worse."
"I'll get my things," she said.
Chapter 24
A couple of mornings later, two old Soviets were brooding in their separate houses on Key Haven, thinking thoughts that wound around each other like strands of oily rope.
Gennady Markov had wriggled higher on his feather pillows and reached out for the cup of coffee that his housekeeper presented. He'd taken a couple of small but noisy sips when he noticed with surprise that, for the first morning in what seemed a long, long time, he didn't have a headache.
Gingerly he let his eyelids open wider. His mind seemed clear, although it was the illusive clarity that reflects off the bottom of a long hangover—a morbid compromise between his recent grief and rage, and the pathetic geniality of his life before. He felt almost cheerful, with the bleak cheer of the nihilist. Somehow, overnight, it had gotten through to him that nothing mattered. Blood and consequences had been drained from life; what was left was, so to speak, schematic. Thrusts and parries. Attacks and defenses. The hellish triumph of laughing last.
Laughing last—God knew that people kept on living for the sake of paltrier satisfactions. Markov thought about it and worked his shoulder blades deeper into the yielding pillows.
At the same moment, Ivan Cherkassky, Markov's only friend and now his mortal enemy, was perching weightlessly on the edge of his sofa, drinking tea and fretting.
With Lazslo dead and Gennady in an ugly sulk, the illicit empire that he managed in Key West seemed, quite suddenly, overwhelmingly complex and burdensome.
There were bribes to dole out, phony immigration papers to distribute. There was the irksome necessity of filling Lazslo's mock-important job. There was a network of informers to monitor—busboys, housekeepers, taxi drivers, clerks. Money in need of laundering kept flowing in; couriers in mirrored sunglasses shuttled here and there among the rogue nations of the world.
Keeping an unwritten record of it all was a staggering task—though that was not the aspect of the business that troubled Cherkassky this morning. He'd been an upper- level bureaucrat under Brezhnev; nothing could throw him in terms of covering a trail. Rather, it was the human element that burdened him—that made him, uncharacteristically, second-guess his wisdom in having Lazslo killed.
Emotions! he thought with disgust. Damned, wretched, ludicrous emotions. All he'd ever wanted from life was rationality and predictability and calm. But emotions always intruded. Not one's own emotions, of course, which were easily enough controlled, but the whims and unreasonableness of others. Now it was Gennady, getting sullen and neurotic over the loss of his misbegotten nephew. His reaction was much more virulent than Cherkassky had imagined; much more virulent than made any sense at all.
Gennady Markov, too, was just then thinking about his murdered ward, and his own reaction to his death. He understood that the real-life Lazslo—the Lazslo whose strong forearm he used to stroke, whose open shirts delighted him—was already fading, becoming shimmery and insubstantial, like a distant ship sliding down the curve of the world. He was ceasing to be a person and becoming little more than a marker in a game.
A game, Markov reflected, that he was losing. Why? He sipped coffee, peered at the dampened light that filtered through the curtains, and tried to recapture a scientific attitude, a set of mind that swept away the nonessentials and cut through to what was crucial. Why was Cherkassky decisive and effective and he himself ridiculous? Why was Cherkassky master of his fate and he himself a victim?
There were a thousand differences between the two of them, of course. But the difference that underlay all others and that determined their relative positions seemed to be precisely this: Cherkassky was capable of killing. He saw his own survival as infinitely more legitimate than the survival of all others, and therefore he put no limits on his actions. That, finally, was his advantage.
It followed, therefore, as logically as a geometric proof, that he, Gennady, if he ever hoped to pull even in this g
ame, must also kill. Moreover, if he wanted not just to equal his old comrade but surpass him, he could do so by killing not through the agency of others, but with his own two hands. The thought terrified and warmed him, he tossed aside his satin sheet.
Cherkassky, thin and rigid on his sofa, moved just slightly to avoid the shifting sun. Yes, he mused, Gennady was taking it stupidly hard. And this was bad, because Gennady still had something that Cherkassky badly needed: expertise in physics. Gennady knew how neutrons would behave, how isotopes would decay, one element into another. He knew how to mix and store and transport the treasure that the two old friends had smuggled out of Russia—sheathed in exotic foils and concealed in the hollowed out innards of a car shipped through Miami—and that represented Cherkassky's ultimate security.
His ultimate security—and yet Gennady Markov, scientist and hysteric, knew how to make it work, while he, Cherkassky, bureaucrat and planner, did not. How had he allowed himself to land in such a grotesquely dependent position? An appalling situation.
An appalling situation, echoed Markov, thinking of his long subservience. But now, with the serene pleasure of someone who has just worked out an elegant equation, he'd found the way to be an equal.
But who should he kill? Sadly, since Cherkassky cared for no one, there was nobody whose demise would wound him as deeply as Lazslo's had hurt him. Then again, Cherkassky being as he was, the most potent poison to be used against him would be not grief but paranoia. Destroy his peace of mind. Commit a murder that he would know, deep down, was in fact a killing aimed at him.
Fine—but who should be the corpse?
Leaning on his feather pillows, Markov looked down at his hands. They were white; they were plump; they were soft. And he could not help admitting something to himself. He was desperate, he was damned, perhaps he was on his way to going mad, but he was still fundamentally a weakling and a coward. Whoever he killed would have to be somebody easy.