Mangrove Squeeze

by SKLA

  Still, picking a victim gave him something to think about, and the act of thinking summoned back the immoderate appetite that had been strangely absent these past few days. He decided on berries and sour cream for breakfast. Eggs to follow. Cinnamon toast alongside. He rang for the housekeeper to bring it.

  Unblessed and untroubled by appetite, Ivan Cherkassky shook his head at the absurdity of being hostage to Gennady's expertise. It was a big problem.

  Or maybe not. Probably Gennady would come around, put aside his grief and his offense, slide fatly into his old persona as a shallow and gluttonous clown. He lacked the strength to hold a grudge, would be seduced away from sorrow and purpose by every slab of beef or wedge of fragrant Camembert.

  Still, it was a nuisance to have to worry about, and Cherkassky sighed as he sat there on his undented sofa. He looked through his window at the frivolous and stupid mint-green house on the other side of the canal, and he marveled at how different life must seem to different people.

  The green house was a rental. Sometimes it was empty and sometimes crammed to bursting with vacationers. When the opportunity offered, Cherkassky studied the tourists like an anthropologist among the savages.

  They were always laughing, these primitives in pastels and plaids. They laughed when meat caught fire in the barbecue. They laughed as they jumped into the canal wearing fins that made them look like hairy ducks. Their obese children laughed with their mouths full of food, and everybody kept on laughing well into the night.

  It was a mystery. Was everything so funny, or did laughing simply take the place of thinking for these people?— these people whose every chuckle revealed an unexamined trust that everything would turn out fine, that life would not betray them. So barbarous and unevolved, that brainless trust. So typically American.

  Chapter 25

  Suki's room at Mangrove Arms was in a turret that was above the second floor but wasn't quite the third.

  It was hexagon-shaped and had a sloping ceiling; triangles of roof came slicing down and met the walls at wavy seams that crazed the paint. The bathroom floor sagged beneath a claw-foot tub that had lost some puzzle pieces of enamel. The white muslin curtains had been worn down to a perfect thinness by years of sun and wind and washing to remove the salt.

  The bed was squeaky and soft, and Suki, somewhat to her own befuddlement, slept in it alone.

  A peculiar situation. What had brought her to Aaron's place was a weird mix of danger and attraction, decency and need. But survival took precedence over romance, and now that she was here, a polite and caring but ultimately false reticence was taking root between the two of them. Bruised and exhausted, Suki felt unlovely; afraid and under siege, she dreaded the humiliating error of mistaking gratitude for desire.

  As for Aaron, he was trying to be gallant, and gallantry meant you couldn't exploit the role of rescuer to win the role of lover. He had offered her a haven, and could not live with the idea of either of them feeling that the offer came with strings.

  So he kept his distance, and Suki healed herself through a series of prodigious sleeps. Hour by hour, her bruises faded and shrank inward like evaporating puddles. Pain lost its sear, became abstract, a lesson.

  Between stretches of oblivion, she spent much of her time out on the widow's walk that wrapped around her little tower. The walkway's planks were grooved and burnished with ancient footsteps. The drooping foliage of a fig tree tickled its railings, and light came through in patches and dabs. The widow's walk was a serene place, out in the world and yet removed, above it, and in its cozy shadows, mostly hidden from the courtyard and the street, she could reflect almost calmly on her situation.

  Her problems had not even begun to be solved; that, she had no choice but to acknowledge. She couldn't hide forever in her turret. Nor could she emerge while her enemies were at large. She was only stealing time.

  Still, there was a certain peace in being cloistered away and given up for dead. No one bothered to hunt the dead, and eventually the dead were all forgotten. In the meantime, she was as comfortable as any threatened damsel, and safe beneath the munchkin ceiling of her room.

  Or so it seemed for the short space of a couple days.

  Pete and Clam weren't trying to make trouble. They were stoned and harmless guys, locals from Big Coppitt, and all they were trying to do was round up shrimp.

  They'd gone out on the evening just before the moon was full, when shrimp were running through every cut and channel in the lower Keys. Shrimp coursed under bridges, steering with spit and flicks of their tails; shrimp traced out the curves of beaches, funneling and tumbling in their millions. Catching them was easy; took no more than a flashlight and a net, a mask and snorkel if you wanted to get fancy. The big shrimp you could eat and the little ones were bait.

  So Pete and Clam smoked a joint as they waited for dusk to settle and the moon to get some height, then they piled in Pete's truck, crossed the highway, and smoked another as they drove a bumpy road that wound and scratched through mangroves, until they reached their shrimping spot. They saw tire tracks and the remnants of a campfire in the little clearing that gave onto the water, but made nothing of it at the time. Other locals used the spot for fishing. Kids got hand jobs there. Tire tracks were nothing that unusual. It didn't really register that the tracks went straight into the ocean.

  They started shrimping. Pete waded in thigh-deep, and his flashlight beam almost immediately discovered translucent clouds of shrimp, their bodies so sheer that he might have looked right through them except for their stalked unearthly eyes that wiggled like paired periscopes and gleamed an orangy pink. He snagged them with a net and dumped them into a mesh bag he carried on his shoulder.

  Clam used a different method. He put on fins and a mask, and he rigged his flashlight through the mask straps so that it sat behind his ear like a giant cigarette. He waded out maybe thirty yards, then pan-caked into a lazy float, his net poised at his side as his beacon shone straight down. Swimming after shrimp was no more productive than just standing there, but Clam was pretty ripped and felt like looking through the water. A baby bonnet shark slipped past, its head flat as a catfish. A sergeant-major scudded by, its yellow stripes almost disappearing against the sand, its black bars disconnected.

  Clam kicked himself a little farther out and scored some shrimp. He was just jiggling them into his pouch when he saw an angelfish whose iridescent blue flashed a weird magenta against some car upholstery.

  For just an instant it did not compute that there was something off about car upholstery, a dashboard, a steering wheel at the bottom of the ocean. Clam blinked inside his mask and held his breath. Current carried him past the windshield and directly over the Caddy's hood ornament, its chrome not yet corroded. The drowned logo finally persuaded him that something very unusual was going on. He raised his head and called his buddy.

  They swam around the car together, stood on the sodden boot, agreed that it was really there.

  Not much happened on Big Coppitt. When something did happen, and it happened to you, you played it up, because it made you briefly a celebrity. Pete and Clam put their shrimp in the cooler, smoked a joint, then headed to the bar at Egret Key, to tell everyone what they had found.

  The sunken Cadillac spawned theories all up and down the bar. Better ditched than repo'd, one suggestion went. Or someone stole it then got scared. Or a jilted girlfriend trashed it for revenge.

  "Y'oughta call the paper," someone said.

  Discreetly, the sober bartender advised, "I was you, I'd call the cops."

  Clam sucked some beer. He didn't really like to deal with cops, but probably the bartender was right. Civic duty and all. Maybe a reward. He looked at Pete. "Any more shit in the truck?"

  Pete shook his head. "Clean," he said. "We smoked it all."

  And so by nine o'clock the Monroe County sheriffs had run the tag on Lazslo's sunken Caddy, and by eleven the car had been dredged up from the bottom, wet sand streaming from its doors; and by seve
n the next morning the whole thing was in the paper: Unsolved sinking of the car of the victim of an unsolved murder. Unsolved puzzle as to how the car got a dozen miles from the body of its owner.

  For almost everyone who read the story, it was a head-scratcher but no more, just one more instance of the kind of loony and inscrutable misadventures that happened in the Keys. You slapped the paper then went back to your breakfast.

  Some few people took the story much more seriously, however. Some few people were surprised and disappointed and very much annoyed that there was no mention whatsoever of a woman's body in the trunk.

  Chapter 26

  Sergei "Tarzan" Abramowitz, the muscular young man who always wore suspenders, paced athletically along the length of Ivan Cherkassky's sofa. The ridge above his eyes was furrowed; tangled hair bounced against his neck. He moved his heavy jaw and spoke in Russian. "That prozhny vorchnoi," he snarled, calling the dead Lazslo an eliminatory organ of low social status, "he screwed it up but good."

  Cherkassky didn't answer right away. He crossed his skinny legs, gazed out the picture window at the yellow morning light, and wondered briefly if Abramowitz's gait was naturally that springy or if it was one more way of showing off. At last he said, "You're sure? You're absolutely sure?"

  Tarzan's walk became more acrobatic still, his knees flexed, his thigh muscles bulged, it seemed he might do a back flip any moment. "Ivan Fyodorovich, I am sure. Practically the last words of that out-of-wedlock child who has sex with his mother. We are holding him down. He says Why? Why? I did my job, I swear. The knife, we bring it closer. He says, The bitch is dead, she's dead. The blade is now against his neck. He tries to shrink, he cries, the cockroach with no testicles. The car, he says. Even now the car goes down, she disappears forever. I did my job, I swear."

  Ivan Cherkassky hunkered forward across his knobby knees. His scooped-out melon face seemed to grow a little hollower, chin and forehead cinching in with concentration. "The car," he said. "Who helps him? Who makes it disappear?"

  Tarzan pivoted, fisted hands swinging low against his legs. "This he did not say."

  Resignedly, Cherkassky nodded. "Of course not. Because it would be good to know."

  The young man in suspenders burst forward once again like a sprinter from the blocks. "Yes," he said. "It would."

  "And the girl—you think she lives?"

  "If she is not in trunk, I fear she does."

  "Pyutchni streshkaya!" Cherkassky murmured in disgust. "Still we must clean up after this ragpicker who is incontinent."

  "You want I find the girl?" said Tarzan.

  "She cannot live," Cherkassky said. "Is clear."

  "A flotl defioreski khrichevskov!" Tarzan hissed. "I find her, I send her to meet Lazslo, they have oral sex in hell."

  At the Mangrove Arms that morning, things got too busy too early for anyone to read the paper.

  At eight a.m. Suki was leaning over her widow's walk railing, peeling an orange and looking through the leaf curtain to the street, when she saw a taxi pull up and disgorge a pale and harried-looking couple.

  Barely had the couple bumped their luggage up the porch steps when another taxi approached from the opposite direction, dropping off another pair of white and rumpled visitors.

  From anything that Suki had so far seen or heard, two couples arriving at the Mangrove Arms on the same morning was a record. Without thinking about it very much, she stepped inside and went downstairs to see if she could help.

  She found Aaron bustling around the kitchen. He was slapping coffee cups onto a tray, his hair was wet, and he was sweating. "Town's packed," he said without looking up at her. "Business finally trickling down to me. Last resort No reservations. Not ready for the rush."

  Two couples. To Suki it didn't seem like that much of a rush, but she kept it to herself. She said, "What can I do to help?"

  Aaron, frantic, didn't seem to hear her. He arced around his father, who was sitting calmly, sipping tea. Pouring milk into a pitcher, Aaron rambled. "Beds unmade. Towels balled up in the dryer. Drop cloths in the hallway. Paint chips."

  "So what should I do?" said Suki.

  Aaron's hands were not quite steady, milk splashed on the floor. "The breakfast person, out sick again. Not the hemorrhaging tattoo this time. The bellybutton. Pierced. Abcessed. Dripping she said."

  He was heading for the doorway to bring coffee to the waiting customers, when Suki said, "So should I cook or should I make up rooms?"

  Finally he heard her, and looked up. Without question she was recuperating well, but she had a ways to go. There was still a heaviness around her eyes, her ravaged neck was still discolored. Aaron said, "Look, you're not indentured labor."

  "I'll cook," she said.

  "You're here to rest."

  "Rest," she said, with breezy contempt. "I work. I'm Greek, I grew up in my father's diner. Plato's."

  Aaron said, "I'm not even sure it's a good idea you came downstairs."

  Sam Katz said, "Your father's name is Plato?"

  "My father's name is George."

  "Plato sounds more Greek," Sam said.

  "Voila'," said Suki, then stepped toward Aaron and reached out to take the tray. "You go make up the rooms."

  "But the guests—"

  Suki said, "I've done this job, Aaron. Hostessed. Waitressed. I'll talk to them, tell them what a fabulous time they're gonna have."

  "What if someone recognizes—"

  She lowered her voice. "These are tourists, Aaron. Tourists don't know diddly. Besides, I'm dead. Remember? Now go make up the rooms."

  He hesitated just a moment, leaning so far forward that his toes began to hurt. They were staring at each other across the coffee cups, the milk. He handed her the tray and the two of them went off in opposite directions.

  When they'd gone, Sam Katz sat alone in the kitchen and sipped his cooling tea.

  He thought about the old country and he smiled. He didn't really remember the old country, not at all, but at some point what pretended to be memory became instead a sense of what was right and fitting; nostalgia as a softer word for morality.

  Sam liked it that a man and woman worked together side by side. Helpmates. That old word. Work, and purpose. It was nice, thought Sam, nodding to himself. It was the basis of good things. He finished his tea, fished the wedge of lemon from the bottom of the cup, and puckered up contentedly as he nibbled along the inside of the rind.

  Bert the Shirt's mornings tended to be slow and lonely.

  He woke up earlier than most people; there was nothing to do and nobody to talk to. In monogrammed pajamas that had grown too large, he wandered around the apartment still cluttered with his dead wife's fancy lamps and gewgaws, and he rationed his activities to fill the time. One by one, he counted out the dog's pills and his own; he counted them again. He made old-fashioned oatmeal, not the instant kind. And he always read the paper thoroughly, from the headlines to the classifieds. This morning he did not like what he saw.

  He finished up his cereal, took Don Giovanni for an only partially successful walk on Smathers Beach, then drove down to the Mangrove Arms to strategize.

  He gathered everyone around a wire-mesh table in the courtyard, made sure that the hotel guests—arrayed on lounges in their garish bathing suits, their skins already blossoming a pebbly irritated pink—were out of earshot. Then he spread open the paper, pointed. "This here," he said, "it like changes the whole complexion a the thing."

  The others read the article.

  Suki felt the columns of type sticking in her throat. Her brief sense of belonging here at Mangrove Arms imploded; her belief that she could help now loomed up as fake and selfish. She should not have come; it was reckless and unfair. She'd been foolish to imagine she could dodge the threat against her, and now she was a threat to others, to everyone around her.

  Bert's voice snapped her back into the practical. "Wit'out this," he said, "we coulda stood and waited. Pressure was off. Time was on our side."

&
nbsp; "And now?" said Suki.

  Bert pushed his lips out, stroked his dog. "A job half- done," he said. "That doesn't sit so well wit' guys like this ... I think we gotta get more active like, aggressive."

  "Aggressive?" Aaron said. They were two old men, a youngish man who was not tough, and a woman who'd already come close enough to dying. Against a Mafia, just how aggressive were they supposed to be?

  "Like learn more what we're up against at least," said Bert. "How they do things. Who's in charge."

  Suki said, "The uncle. He's in charge."

  Bert's chihuahua was splayed out on the table and the mesh was stamping a waffle pattern in the short fur of its belly. The old mafioso lightly drummed his fingers on the steel. "And how do we know this?" he asked.

  Suki started to answer, then realized that all she knew was what she'd heard, and what she'd heard had been rumors passed along by people no less remote than she. The slyness of Bert's question sank in around the table, and suddenly, louder than necessary and off the beat, Sam Katz said, "Aha!"

  Suki put in without confidence, "It's just the way it seems."

  "Exactly," Bert said. "Just like it used to seem like Luciano ran Havana, when really it was Lansky. Or the way it looked like Fat Tony was boss of the Genovese family when really it was Vinnie Chin."

  Aaron raised his eyes from the unplanted shrubs strewn along his property, their thwarted roots poking through the burlap swaddling. "So you're saying—"

  "I'm saying," Bert went on, "that unless the head guy is a knucklehead egomaniac like Gotti, he don't want it should look to all the world like he's in charge. Old Sicilian saying: Ya got the biggest balls, ya don't need the tallest antlers. 'Scuse me."

  "No problem," Suki said. "But then who—?"

  Bert shrugged and petted his dog, little diamonds of whose abdomen seemed to be slipping through the table's metal mesh like strands of melting cheese. "I have no idea," he said. "I'm only saying don't trust the way things seem or you'll get confused before y'even start."