Mangrove Squeeze (19 page)

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.

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 game, 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.

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.

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 pancaked 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.