Mangrove Squeeze

by SKLA

  Cherkassky leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. Uncertainty was poison to him; he felt he had to test Markov somehow, elicit some reaction he could read. Sucking in his face, he said, "Now that you are back, Gennady, there is some bad news I must tell you."

  Markov sat with the stony calm of someone who's already heard the worst news he will ever hear, been visited by a calamity that could not be topped.

  "The woman is alive," Cherkassky said.

  This took a moment to sink in. Markov's eyes went soupy, and he stared unseeing through the picture window at the still canal and the mint-green house beyond it. The woman? Alive? Impossible. "Ludmila?"

  Cherkassky blinked. His eyebrows crept together but his voice was less suspicious than confused. "Ludmila?"

  Markov scratched his belly, dragged his tongue along his flubbery lips. "I only mean," he said, "what woman? What woman is alive?"

  Cherkassky turned away. Too late, he realized that opening this subject had been a mistake, that Markov's goading passivity had pushed him toward a misplay. He steeled himself and said, "The woman that Lazslo was supposed to kill."

  Lazslo. The name itself, in memory, had taken on for Markov an echo of the mythic, nearly the sacred. He hid his deep offense at Cherkassky's mention of it. He hid, as well, the unexpected ambivalence he felt at learning that his nephew's last squeeze was still alive. She was dangerous, of course, an awful liability; yet she was also a link to the dear passionate departed. Lazslo had desired her, and part of Markov was glad she still existed. He said, "Never the boy was meant to be a killer. I told you that, Ivan."

  Cherkassky pulled on the pitted crescent of his face and made a huge concession. "And perhaps you were right, Gennady ... But now the job needs finishing. Surely you agree."

  Markov pushed his tongue against his teeth, said nothing.

  Cherkassky paused, then launched into the effort of smiling. His eyes twitched at the outside corners. Skin crawled at his hairline. His lips stretched briefly, their surface shiny and dry as cellophane. He said, "And surely you understand we are together till the end. Are we friends again, Gennady?"

  Markov drummed his chair arms. "Of course, Ivan," he said. "How could we ever be anything but friends?"

  Chapter 34

  Nick Sorrento, the maitre d' at Lucia's, had a suave but modest smile, a manner that was confident yet deferential, and just a hint of an Italian accent.

  Or at least he did when customers were present. But now it was five p.m. and the door was locked. The floor was being mopped, the bar was being polished. The evening's flowers were being divvied up into many little vases, and Sorrento, in an accent direct from an Italian neighborhood in Queens, was screaming at the top of his lungs, "Where the fuck's the reservation book?"

  Yussel Lupinski, the busboy from Minsk, kept his mop in steady motion, and stared down at the red and golden highlights in the hardwood floor. The reservation book was in his pants. One end of it was tickling his pubic hair and the other was poking past his belt but was covered by his apron. He stayed hunched over so the corners wouldn't show.

  "We are really fucked wit'out that book!" Sorrento screamed. "Fucking chaos! Fucking madhouse!"

  Swaying on his mop like a hockey player on his stick, Yussel skated back toward the kitchen. The book's edges dug into the lymph nodes in his groin.

  Nick Sorrento rummaged through the shelves beneath his podium. "I find the asshole moved that book I'm gonna fire his sorry ass."

  Yussel mopped straight through the swinging kitchen door. He mopped past the ranges and the ovens and the dishwashers with their big round wire racks, to the side exit where the garbage was put out. Tarzan Abramowitz was waiting in the alley. He took the book and bounded off.

  Lupinski went back to his mopping.

  Sorrento kept on screaming. By five-thirty he was so hoarse he could barely croak out a buona sera.

  But by six-fifteen the reservation book had miraculously been found, underneath some menus at the end of a banquette, where Yussel Lupinski had been setting tables. Sorrento looked daggers at the quiet busboy as he handed it over with no expression on his pallid face.

  "Wait," said Sam Katz, "again it's making noises." He yanked out his hearing aid, started fiddling with it in his lap.

  Aaron rolled his eyes. It was dusk, and he was giving Fred a lift back to the hot dog. Fred was in the backseat and his bike was mostly in the trunk, its front tire hanging out and spinning slowly, last light glinting off the spokes. Aaron said to his father, "If you'd stop taking it apart and putting it back together..."

  "What?"

  They'd passed the airport, were rounding the curve where the mangroves were fenced in. "Either that," said Aaron, "or you just don't want to listen."

  "I'm listening, I'm listening," said Sam, still twisting and turning the little gizmo in his hands.

  "All right, then," Aaron said. "This infiltration nonsense, just get it off your mind."

  "What?"

  Fred said, "Hey Aaron, how about we stop for ice cream?"

  "Ice cream, yeah," Sam said.

  Fred slapped his knee. "I knew it! I had a grandmother was exactly the same. Deaf as a post till someone mentioned ice cream."

  Sam put the hearing aid back in. "Better now. Must be something from the airport. We really going for ice cream?"

  "Pop," said Aaron, "this infiltration craziness, I really want you to forget about it."

  "Don't tell your father what to do."

  They'd reached the place where the mangroves gapped and a narrow path led back to the hot dog. Aaron pulled off the road.

  "Basic respect," Sam went on. "I'm not so old I shouldn't be allowed to make my own mistakes."

  "But there's mistakes and there's mistakes," said Aaron. "Some mistakes you don't recover from."

  Sam looked out the window. Color was fading from the water and the sky. It was time for that to happen and Sam was not saddened by the change. He said, "Aaron, worst case, what? My life is worth so much?"

  "To me it is, okay?"

  Leaning forward in the backseat, Fred said, "Ninety- eight cents."

  Aaron said, "Excuse me?"

  "Something I heard a long, long time ago," said Fred. "Really made an impression. Take the chemicals and stuff from a human body, it's worth ninety-eight cents. Maybe three bucks by now... Wanna come in for a beer?"

  "Not a beer," said Sam. "Some ice cream maybe?"

  "Can't help ya there," said Fred.

  "Another time," said Aaron, and as Fred climbed out and lifted his old bike from the trunk, he looked through the windshield at the darkening ocean and the thickening sky. Young and unresigned, he saw with fear and sorrow the closing jaws of mortality in the sealing of the seam between them.

  Tarzan Abramowitz leaned over Ivan Cherkassky's shoulder and failed to notice that the older man was shrinking from his nearness, from his breath. The killer peered down at the photocopied page from Lucia's reservation book, and said, "Jesus Christ, where to start I can't tell nothing."

  Cherkassky just pulled hard on his scooped-out face; in the exaggerated shadows from the desk lamp, it looked like pieces of nose and chin might come off in his hand. He studied the names and numbers and check marks and cross outs on the sheet of paper, looking for some logical pattern that would make everything come clear. He found instead the same carelessness and disorganization that so often irritated him in America.

  "Too he doodles," the thin man said at last, pointing to spirals and solar systems at the corner of the page.

  "Is boring job," said Abramowitz. "Stand there, have to smile."

  "Smile, feh," Cherkassky said. "And look, sometimes there is phone number, sometimes there is not."

  There were thirty-two tables at Lucia's, and eleven of them, according to the reservation book, had turned at eight p.m. on the evening that Suki was supposed to have died. There were reservations under Cardenas and Berman, Woods and Pescatello, under Robertson and under Katz; these had contact numbers
written next to them. Two tables, regulars presumably, were booked by first name only. Some reservations had hotel names appended, with initials duly noted so that the concierge might get his kickback. In all, there were six tables booked for two, one three, three fours, and a six. The maitre d' had scratched off each name as the tables had been filled; no note was made of parties that were incomplete.

  Abramowitz said, "Is useless, so many people."

  Cherkassky picked up a fountain pen. It was silver and engraved and wrote with elegant precision. He started crossing people out "Is not so many. Hotels, forget hotels. Tourists. Tourists matter nothing."

  That left eight tables.

  He put question marks next to the regulars. "These," he said. "Only first name. Local people. Maybe her friends. We eliminate the others to find out."

  Now it was down to six parties with phone numbers written down. "These you call," Cherkassky said.

  "Call?" said Abramowitz. The prospect made him uncomfortable. He was handy with a knife or crowbar or wire, but talking was not what he was good at.

  "Is bad too many people see you," said Cherkassky. "You call from pay phone and ask for her."

  "Ask for her? But—"

  "Someone will be afraid," Cherkassky said. "Will be afraid and make mistake. You will hear. One thing in America you can depend. Someone will be careless, will trust too much. Will make mistake."

  Chapter 35

  "You gay?" said Sam Katz to the realtor who was driving them around Key Haven the next morning.

  Sam was sitting in the backseat. He leaned forward and spread his elbows near Bert's shoulders, his eyes meeting the young man's in the rearview mirror.

  The realtor had short moussed platinum hair above jet black eyebrows. He had a diamond stud in his right ear and wore a shirt of polka-dotted silk. "Well yes," he said, "I am."

  "Very nice," said Sam. "We're gay too. Been together, what is it now, honey—forty years?"

  Bert stroked the chihuahua in his lap and stifled a grimace. "Fawty-one."

  "Forty-one years," the realtor said. "Me, I've been lucky if a relationship lasts the weekend. And you've been out all that time?"

  "Out?" said Sam.

  Reluctantly, Bert picked up the thread. "New Yawk. Ya know, the Village. No one gave a shit."

  "Here neither," said the realtor.

  "Except my father," Sam rolled on. "I thought he'd plotz. My boy, my Sam, a faygela. Took years before—"

  "Sam," Bert cut him off, "this gentleman doesn't really wanna hear the story of our lives."

  "Au contraire," the realtor said. "I'll bet you were at Stonewall. It's like a link to history."

  "There," said Sam. "You see? Now where was I?... Forty years he does this to me, makes me lose my train of thought..."

  It was a weekday and the streets were as quiet as a suburb anywhere. Houses crouched behind hedges of buttonwood and jasmine, awnings threw parallelograms of shade across mute windows. Here and there a yard crew worked, a pool man stood beside his truck and wrapped himself in underwater vacuum-cleaner hose.

  The realtor turned around in gravel cul-de-sacs, leaned low across the steering wheel as he pointed out his listings. At length the three of them were standing in the kitchen of a pink stucco cottage, when Bert said, "I'm curious about the neighborhood. Who lives up here?"

  The faucet in the sink was dripping. The realtor discreetly tried to make it stop. "Very mixed," he said. "Better- off Conch families—big move up for them. Professionals, doctors from the hospital. Snowbirds who don't like the noise in Old Town."

  "Ah," said Bert, picking lint from the dog that was hanging from his hand. "We heard there were some Russians lived up here. The guys with all the T-shirts."

  "Markov," said the realtor, with an insider's quiet certainty. "Very wealthy man. A few others. Very quiet, keep to themselves. Live out farther toward the point."

  "Maybe we should look out there," Bert said.

  "Pricey," warned the realtor.

  Sam Katz had been looking in the microwave, checking where the rays came out. Such a simple invention; he wished he'd thought of it. He said, "Two pensions, no babies. Pricey doesn't matter."

  So they got back in the car and headed toward the Gulf. The lots got bigger, the houses sprouted breezeways, guest wings. When swaths of open water appeared past barricades on dead-end streets, Bert said, "Ya mind we swing by Markov's place? I hear it's a helluva house."

  The realtor turned left, then right, then pointed toward a large establishment that looked confused. Brick pillars guarded both ends of a horseshoe gravel driveway. Trellises of bougainvillea were squandered on a huge garage. An orange tile roof was slashed open by a stone chimney. The informality of a shady porch slammed into the pomp of an entranceway with columns.

  "What helluva house?" said Sam Katz. "Borax. A mishmosh."

  Confidentially, the realtor said, "Money can't buy taste."

  "And happiness can't buy money," said Bert. "Ya got anything on this street?"

  The realtor put on the brakes, considered. "This street, no. Closest thing, around the corner. On a side canal. Eccentric little house."

  "We're on the eccentric side ourselves," said Sam.

  "Kitsch with attitude," the realtor said. "Between us, sort of homo barocco."

  So they went around the corner and pulled into the driveway of a mint-green house that seemed to have been built by someone with a fetish for tile. A tile walkway led to the front door, which in turn was framed in tile. The entryway floor was tile in a sunburst pattern. The countertops were tile, a wide band of tile went all around the kitchen like a belt A path of tile meandered through the living room; Bert put his dog down and the creature's tiny claws made a bone-dry ticking sound. The tile flowed beneath the sliding glass back door to form a tile patio that extended halfway to the seawall.

  Sam Katz ran his hand along a coffee table topped in tile and said, "Looks like the men's room in Grand Central."

  "Easy to keep clean," said the realtor. "No mildew. Good if you have a problem with mold."

  "Problem wit' mold," said Bert the Shirt, "I'd be dead ten times already." He gestured all around himself. "Who else is onna street, across the way?"

  "Don't know," said the realtor. "But it's mostly owner- occupied. Very quiet, I assure you."

  Bert said to Sam, "Take it for a month?"

  Sam said, "We haven't seen the bedroom, the bath."

  Bert rolled his eyes. "Okay, Sam. Go look at the bathroom."

  Sam followed a line of tile down the hallway. Bert lightly drummed his fingers on a mosaic-sided hutch.

  After a moment Sam's voice came reverberating as though from a dormitory shower. "Tile," he reported. "Tile up the poopik."

  "We'll take it for a month," Bert said to the realtor.

  Lieutenant Gary Stubbs sat in his cramped and dingy office, watching water droplets dribble from his ancient air conditioner and arc gently to the floor.

  Before him on his scratched-up desk were two manila envelopes, which together comprised what he'd come to think of as the Dead Russians in Paradise file. Lazslo Kalynin. Throat cut in a purported burglary. Except no one but the department politicians believed it. Burglars in this town were crack heads, coke fiends. They were strung out and they were amateurs. They left fingerprints, and if they had to kill someone, they hacked him thirty, forty times, poking till they found an artery. Kalynin's killers had made no errors and their killing was as neat as surgery.

  Then there was Jane Doe of the Russian undergarments. Not a clue on her, other than two lungsful of saltwater, proving that she'd gone down breathing. Suicide was possible, though that long thin bruise across her chest didn't go with suicide. Besides, who drowned themselves with shoes on?

  Stubbs shuffled the folders, laid them side by side, put a palm on each of them. He wanted the two dead Russians to be connected, and then again he didn't want them to. Connecting them might turn two unsolved cases into only one, and he might feel only half as bad
. Then again, police work was about the possible, and if the two stiffs were connected, that argued that there was in fact a Mafia involved, and if there was a Mafia Stubbs might very well be stymied altogether and end up feeling twice as bad.

  He got up from his desk and paced. He was hungry. He thought about the coffee-sodden weight of a donut. Then he remembered something that he'd only half-noticed before. He opened the Lazslo Kalynin folder. The body had been found by a housekeeper. The cop who'd first arrived at the crime scene was Carol Lopez.

  He raised her on the radio and asked her to meet him at the morgue in half an hour.

  "Little hard to tell without the nose," said Lopez, when Ludmila had been slid out on her slab. "But yeah, height, shape, I'd lay a bet that's her."

  Stubbs looked down at the blue skin, the matted tangled hair. "She say anything you remember? Anything at all?"

  Lopez pushed her hat back with her forearm. "Barely spoke English. Said hello and pointed. I sent her home."

  "Very upset?" said Stubbs.

  "No," said Lopez. "Not that showed."

  "Maybe she saw something she shouldn't have seen."

  Carol Lopez shrugged. "Wonder what got the nose."

  "Grab a donut?" said the homicide detective.

  An attendant slid the corpse back into place. The slab locked in like a file drawer.

  Stubbs said mostly to himself, "Maybe I'll see if Markov can ID the body. Gimme an excuse to talk to him again at least."

  Chapter 36

  The Mangrove Arms was strangely quiet.

  The woman who occasionally appeared to do the breakfast had straightened up and left. The few guests had had their fresh-squeezed juice and their muffins and their sliced papaya, and had gone out to sightsee or were lazily baking at the edge of the pool. Aaron and Suki—faces close, arms intertwined—had been nailing down a puckered runner on a stairway, and now they took a break for coffee.