Mangrove Squeeze

by SKLA

  "What if they grabbed 'im?" said Bert the Shirt. "They grab you too, wha' does it accomplish?"

  Aaron had no answer, nor was he persuaded.

  "People like this," old Bert went on, "ya don't go up against 'em without ya got the force, the guns ... Aaron, listen'a me. We go back home, we call the cops—"

  "The cops?" Aaron whispered. "Sirens? Flashing lights? Cops sometimes protect a person right to death. Didn't you once say that, Bert?"

  Bert could not deny it. He stood there in the shadows, moonlight arching over him like a wave about to break.

  "I'm going in. I have to."

  Bert tested Aaron's eyes a long moment then finally let go of his arm. There was affection and farewell in the reluctant ungrasping of his brittle fingers. Sadly the old mobster said, "Yeah, okay, ya do."

  Chapter 45

  "I wish you would've called me sooner," said Lieutenant Gary Stubbs.

  "And what difference would it've made?" said Suki.

  She said it without rancor, but it stung because it was true. Whatever the official story was, whatever the official stance, there were still two dead Russians, no leads, and innocent people under threat. Stubbs's deeper involvement would not have changed a thing. Maybe the killings were linked, and maybe only grisly coincidence connected them. Maybe he was up against a mafia and maybe he was just plain stumped.

  They were standing in the kitchen of the Mangrove Arms. Suki had called the cop just minutes after Aaron left. She didn't know if she was doing right—hadn't known for what seemed like forever if she was doing right. She only knew she couldn't sit there, passive, hidden away like some fairytale damsel, and relatively safe, while Sam was in trouble on her behalf.

  "Still," Stubbs muttered, shaking his head so that his thick and pinkish neck chafed against his collar. "Two old men going off like that..."

  "Look," said Suki, "it was a dumb idea, okay? They wanted to help. But in the meantime—"

  "In the meantime one of them is missing."

  "And it's my fault"

  Stubbs was leaning back against a brushed steel counter, his meaty hands grabbing the cool edge of it. "Nothing's your fault," he said.

  This was not a comfort and Suki didn't answer.

  The lieutenant crossed his arms, stared off at the too-big coffee urn, the tall stacks of breakfast dishes that would always sadly outnumber the guests. Absently, or maybe to redeem himself, he said, "I've been keeping tabs on Markov."

  "Oh?"

  "Took him to ID the Russian woman. Lazslo's housekeeper. I think he got a little nervous."

  "Morgues'll do that, I imagine."

  "At first he sounded very hot to find his nephew's killer. Then I told him that the FBI might be on the way. He sort of lost his passion for justice when I told him that."

  "Is it?" Suki said.

  "Is what?"

  "The FBI. You finally believe me? They're coming down?"

  Stubbs looked away. "They're not coming down."

  "Then—?"

  "Just trying to shake something loose, is all," said Stubbs. "Just trying to scare up a mistake."

  Suki bit her lip, ran a hand through her thick black hair. She looked at the floor a moment and when her eyes returned they were narrow and firm. "Okay," she said, "so let's do that."

  "Do what?" said Stubbs.

  "Pressure them. Scare up a mistake." She didn't seem to notice she'd started moving in a little circle, her sandals scuffing on the kitchen floor.

  The cop said, "I'm not sure I—"

  Suki said, "I've got an idea... What started this whole thing?... The paper. They were scared I was sniffing around their business for the paper."

  "But that was before all this—"

  "So let's put something in the paper now. FBI to investigate allegations. Coming to interview reporter in hiding."

  "Bad idea," said Stubbs, though he said it without conviction. "Besides, your old boss doesn't have the nerve."

  "He had guts once upon a time," said Suki. "I could talk him into it."

  Stubbs was rubbing the bridge of his nose. He said, "It's a lousy time to get them mad. If they do have the old man, they'll connect him with this place, they'll know exactly where you are."

  "Fine," said Suki. "Let them. They'll lose interest in Sam Katz. Look, I'm the one they want. That's why he's in trouble."

  "We don't know for sure that he's in trouble," said the cop.

  "I should be the bait"

  Stubbs didn't like the trade-off: A young woman they definitely wanted dead, for a bewildered old man who might have only wandered to the beach, who might be contentedly sitting under a palm somewhere, talking to himself and throwing crumbs to gulls. He said, "But—"

  "Lieutenant," Suki cut him off. "There's one more piece of information you should have. I'm in love with Aaron. You understand? His father gets hurt instead of me, I couldn't live with that ... Now, could you please go round up Donald Egan for me?"

  "My feet you need to tape?" said Sam. "What, I'm Jackie Robinson, I could run away so fast?"

  "Shut up," said Tarzan Abramowitz, and kept winding shiny silver duct tape around Sam's skinny ankles and the spindly legs of the high stool where they had him sitting.

  "Accordion player," Sam rambled. He was scared, though not as scared as he should have been, and in some outlandish way he was having fun. They hadn't really threatened him yet, just pushed him around a little, gave him a few little bruises maybe, and took away his will. He'd never gotten his glass of tea at his Russian neighbor's house. He'd barely settled in on the sofa when they bundled him out again, threw him in a car. Drove downtown, unpacked him like a shipment in an alley. Shoved him through some thick and blank back door. Now here he was, being taped to this high stool. If he rocked forward he'd keel over on his face like a stilt man. "Ventriloquist," he said.

  "Fuck you say?" muttered Tarzan Abramowitz.

  "What?" said Sam, and he reached up toward his ear. "Oy, I lost my hearing aid. This stool, it's like for a ventriloquist. Ed Sullivan, he had a stool like this. Ventriloquists. Accordion players. Dummies. Talking dummies."

  "Shut up," said Abramowitz, and continued stretching out the tape.

  "Almost the whole roll you're wasting," said Sam. He looked around. His taciturn Russian neighbor was sitting on a canvas cot, expressionless. A bare bulb hung from a wire. Stacks of cardboard boxes lined the room, necks and sleeves of T-shirts squeezed out like they were yelling for help. Music seemed to be playing far away, Sam mostly heard the thumping of the bass and now and then a disconnected twang.

  The young man finished with his taping; Ivan Cherkassky rose and moved toward Sam.

  "Mr. Katz," he said, "we are hoping very much to find someone. We think that you know where she is."

  "What?" said Sam. He could sort of hear, he was mainly stalling.

  The Russian moved in closer; Sam became fascinated by the bumps and craters of his lumpy face, it was like a close-up of the moon. "Suki Sperakis," said Cherkassky. "Where is she, Mr. Katz?"

  Sam heard her name and his adventure stopped being any fun at all. He rocked on his stool. Suki Sperakis. She worked with Aaron in the garden. Side by side, knee to knee they planted things. Maybe they were gardening right now. No, Sam remembered. Now it was nighttime, and his legs were trussed up like a roasting chicken, and, no matter what, he was not supposed to mention Suki Sperakis. Instead he looked toward Tarzan Abramowitz, bare-chested as always, whorls of damp hair escaping from his thick suspenders. Sam said to Cherkassky, "All these shirts, you couldn't give this boy a shirt?"

  Cherkassky fell back a step, walked a little circle. Then, like a crow returning to a bit of carrion, he dove in once again. "You have relations here, Mr. Katz?"

  "Relations?"

  "Brothers? Nephews? Children maybe?"

  Sam didn't like it that he mentioned children. That scared him. Aaron. He shouldn't make trouble for Aaron. He tried to shift on the stool. He couldn't really move. His tailbone poked down betw
een his wizened haunches. It was starting to hurt. Then he remembered his cover. "Children?" he said. "No. Me and Bert ... remember? Forty years already."

  Abramowitz was doing laps among the leaning stacks of cardboard boxes. "You and Bert are shpul na cacavyov" he said.

  "We are not," said Sam.

  "What?" Cherkassky said.

  Sam realized his mistake, backpedaled. Right back he said, "What?"

  Cherkassky stepped away. He nibbled his thumbnail, rubbed his chin. Against the blasting music from the T-shirt shop on the far side of the double-locked door, he said, "That seat, Mr. Katz, it's going to get uncomfortable."

  Sam, uncomfortable, squirmed a little. "What?"

  "Tape his mouth," Cherkassky said, and went back to the cot on which Tarzan would be camping.

  Abramowitz bounded over, ripped tape from the roll. Sam didn't close his lips in time. He tasted bitter glue and felt a puckering draw that pulled the moisture from his tongue.

  Chapter 46

  Aaron Katz longed for the cover of shadow as he scampered low toward the garage. But Gennady Markov's yard was lit up like a carnival, and the only shadow was the one that Aaron's leaning body threw. Gravel crunched beneath his feet and his heart rode up his gullet.

  Inside the garage he paused, heard the hum of electricity and the torrent of blood in his ears. He looked around and nothing made sense. A red wagon. A damp shovel placed separately from the other gardening tools. In one corner, a motor scooter covered with a tarp. He walked over to the car. Its hood was still warm and Aaron had no idea what that meant.

  He moved to the door that led into the house, put his ear against it. He heard nothing. Not his father's rising, falling, ending-with-a-question voice; not anything. He paused. He dried his palm against his pants. He tried the knob. It didn't turn. He gently pushed the door. It moved a fraction of an inch before the bolt collided with its frame.

  Stymied, Aaron now had the misfortune of a little time to think. He had no weapon; he had no plan. He was armed with nothing more than caring. He could leave now. He'd tried the door, flirted with heroics. A retreat would not be shameful.

  But once he'd thought about it, calculated it, Aaron could not retreat. He needed to find Sam or to persuade himself beyond a doubt that Sam wasn't there.

  He left the garage but didn't head back down the driveway. Instead, he crouched low against the shrubbery and began to work his way around the house.

  The thorns of bougainvillea scratched at his arms; his knees complained at their unnatural bend as he sneaked past the pretentious entryway. In the bushes on the far side, spider webs stuck to his face, their makers seeking refuge in his hair. He smelled salt and citrus, and now and then he dared to raise himself just high enough to peek through a brightly lit window.

  He saw luxurious and empty rooms. The waxed mahogany of the silent feasting table. Leather armchairs with no one in them; a fireplace holding cool dead ash.

  He skulked around a corner of the mansion and found the vacant master bedroom, saw corruption in the swollen mounds of pillows, a sensuous perverseness in the satin quilts defiant of the climate.

  He moved on toward what appeared to be a guest wing, its dimmer rooms illumined from a central hallway, its single rank of windows stretching toward the Gulf. Spying through oleanders and buttonwoods, Aaron saw neat beds, uninhabited; reading lamps unread by. Nothing was rumpled; no one was there.

  Skin itching, forehead dappled with sweat and bugs, he thought once more of giving up. Maybe his father had wandered back to the tiled house by now. Maybe this should all be left to the police. But he pressed ahead, not content until he'd counted every room; and then, at the very far end of the guest wing, visible in slices through the slats of a blind that was not quite snugly closed, he saw Gennady Markov, working in his lab, alone, his big face intent over an enamel tub.

  Aaron froze, his breath arrested. Weirdly, his first reaction was one of deep nostalgia. A scientist at work. His father. The same concentration that made the tongue flick at the corners of the mouth. The same saving single- mindedness that held the world at bay. Good or evil, there was beauty in a scientist at work...

  But what was Markov doing? Aaron wrestled with leaves and branches, leaned as near to the window as he dared. He saw canisters; electric coils; a fine gray gravel with a consistency like lentils. The gravel gleamed dully. It might have been some peculiar form of silver, some odd stuff to be transformed by a jeweler or a dentist. Then a dreadful thought occurred to Aaron: Plutonium? Was it possible? Suki had told him that Lazslo hinted at it. The source of the huge sums that needed laundering. Weapons for rogue nations. Bombs for lunatics. Being cooked up here?—in peaceable Key West, a few miles from the bars, from Duval Street, from the Mangrove Arms?

  Aaron fell back, dizzy and suddenly exhausted. Through the slats, Markov's image blurred. Everything blurred. Aaron's search for Sam blurred against the enormity of nuclear material. His love for Suki blurred against the terror of what she had discovered. His sense of his own new life—small, quiet, accomplishment measured nail by nail—blurred against the sick size of the schemes that people found themselves embroiled in.

  Puny and shaken under the stars, too rattled even to remember to stay in the shade of the shrubbery, Aaron turned at last and walked away.

  Befuddled, driving all but blind, he made it back to the Mangrove Arms just as Gary Stubbs and Donald Egan were coming down the front porch steps.

  It scared Aaron to see the cop there. His stomach burned. For the moment he forgot about weapons crossing borders and thought only of intimate losses. With effort he said, "Suki?"

  "Suki's okay," said Stubbs. "She's fine. She called about your father."

  Aaron said, "You know something?"

  Stubbs shook his head.

  "You'll help?"

  Stubbs nodded.

  Aaron glanced with vague recognition and no warmth at Egan. The editor's cigar was glowing in the dark. In his fat soft hand he held some papers. "Tomorrow early," he said, waving them toward Aaron. "Special edition."

  "Special edition what?"

  "Talk to Suki," said the cop. "She's waiting for you."

  The two visitors continued down the stairs.

  Aaron said to their backs, "Wait. Markov."

  Stubbs stopped walking, looked across his shoulder. "What about him?"

  "He has a lab."

  "A lab?"

  "I saw him working."

  Stubbs said, "So?"

  "Lazslo used to talk about atomic stuff. Brag about it."

  The cop and the editor shared a look. Egan said, "Jesus Christ, I should put that in the article."

  Aaron blew. He hadn't had a fight since junior high and now he felt an impulse to shove the newspaperman down the last few stairs. "Fuck your article," he said. "These are people's lives. Who gives a shit about your article?"

  Stubbs said calmly, "Can't go break into his house without a warrant. Couldn't get a warrant with what we have so far."

  Aaron said, "What the hell's it take? Another person dead? My father? Suki? All of us?"

  Stubbs said nothing, waited for Aaron to calm down.

  Aaron didn't calm down. "And Markov's not the real boss anyway," he said. "The real boss lives around the corner. I think that's who my father's with."

  "How you know all this?" said Stubbs.

  "I know it... " Aaron said, and then he stopped. He stopped because the beginnings of tears—tears of worry, of frustration—were pressing like thumbs at the backs of his eyes. He choked them down like he was swallowing a rock. "I know it because I've been out there on the fucking streets, Lieutenant. Not waiting for a fucking warrant."

  Stubbs grimaced and continued down the stairs. Egan followed.

  Aaron went up into the office, where he took a slow deep breath and tried to remember how to recognize his world.

  He looked around. He knew every potted palm and every promo propped up on its cardboard easel, but now it all looked strange to h
im, removed, as though his looming grief had built a warping membrane around him. Only vaguely he saw the slashed counter, the silver bell that needed buffing. In that moment it was someone else's hotel.

  He went through the doorway behind the counter, took in the odd proportions of a commercial kitchen, the outsize pots and pans. Steel counters more like something from a hospital.

  He moved on to the sitting room. In his exhaustion he noticed bizarre things: fringes on the bottom of upholstery, fringes at the ends of a rug.

  Then he saw Suki. She was sitting on the sofa where they'd first held each other, at the soft edge of an arc of lamplight. Seeing her did not dispel the warping film but she moved somehow to Aaron's side of it.

  "You okay?" she asked. She looked closely at him. His shoes were coated with dirt and his clothing was specked with sap and spider webs.

  His lips moved but he couldn't speak. He stared at her. It was too dim to discern the color of her eyes, but their blue was absolutely present to him. Her shoulders were covered but he saw them.

  She got up from the settee, didn't hug him with her arms, just stood against him, warm. She took him by the hand and led him to the room that had become their room. "He'll be okay," she said.

  Aaron nodded, stared at her. Fear had jumbled time for them. As in some gaudy fantasy of traveling through bent and viscous space, the clock had sometimes raced like an exerted heart, and other times had stalled. The long wait to be lovers shrank down to a pendant and excruciating moment long ago. Their instant as a couple could be called forever, since the future might be snuffed out any second.

  She led him to the bed that had become their bed. She began undoing the buttons on his shirt. "I really think he'll be okay," she said again.

  Aaron nodded, and he started to cry. Time was all mixed up; Suki was already burned deep into him, suddenly abiding as the world around them grew jittery and abrupt and blurred. Lovers for one day, he cried in her arms as easily as if they'd been together, helpmates, many years.

  Chapter 47