Mangrove Squeeze (22 page)

Moving deliberately, his eyes set now on the water, Markov put the heels of his hands against the corners of the table and pushed as hard as he could.

The far edge caught Ludmila in the chest and she started going over. Her shoulders shot back, the front legs of her chair pulled free of the stones, her chopped gray hair stood on end as it broke the plane of the seawall. For an endless moment she teetered there above the Gulf, thick arms pin-wheeling for balance, squat thighs flailing for the ground.

Terrified she would not fall, Markov bumped her once again.

The vodka bottle tumbled, the glasses clattered to the ground. Ludmila's hardened hands grabbed the table's edge and the absurdest sort of equilibrium was briefly reached. Her feet were kicking inside the square black shoes, she tried to claw and slither her way onto the surface of the table as if the table was a lifeboat. Her tongue stuck out, she grunted, she wobbled like a bowling pin but would not fall, and Markov, straining, sweating, horrified, at length realized that the only way to end the grotesque and ludicrous stalemate was to lift the whole damn table and throw it in on top of her.

He upended it and shoved, and Ludmila, still cradled in her chair, somersaulted backward and entered the water like a scuba diver.

The table landed flat atop her splash, sealed it like a manhole cover. She disappeared immediately.

Then she surfaced a dozen feet away.

Her coarse wide skirt had filled with air, she'd become her own pontoon. She bobbed, she flailed, but the more she struggled, the more her skirt deflated, sea encroaching as air leaked out, until the material began to undulate like the body of a squid, and the fast water grabbed her as if it were armed with hooks, and her single unheard scream ended in a gurgle as she was carried out and down.

Gennady Markov stood at the edge of the seawall, panting and sweating as the body was trundled northward and then submerged. He felt no remorse, but a deep discouragement. If it was this exhausting to murder even a weak old woman, how could he ever hope to equal the efficiency of Cherkassky and his minions?

Ludmila had kicked off one of her square black shoes, it lay derelict and mute against the cool white stones. Markov picked it up, along with the glasses and the uncapped vodka bottle that was lying on its side. There was a shallow pool of liquor that had not spilled out, and he drank it as he strolled back to the house.

"So Aaron," Suki said, trying to steer the conversation clear of Russians and tactics and dread, "when did you first hatch this dream of owning a guest house?"

The two of them were having dinner—bowls of pasta, finally—in the kitchen of the Mangrove Arms. Aaron had a forkful of fusilli halfway to his face. He thought a moment, then said, "I didn't hatch it. I caught it."

"Caught it?"

The kitchen was not romantic. Its surfaces were mostly stainless steel, per the Board of Health. Outsize pots and pans hung from hooks above the counters; it was hard to stop seeing the big aluminum sink and huge black iron range.

"Dreams are catchy," Aaron said. "Contagious as the flu."

"So who'd you catch it from?"

"I was afraid you'd ask me that. My wife," he said. "Ex-wife."

Suki nodded. Most people, by her age, had an ex-spouse or two. They'd had chicken pox, broken bones, crashed a car, been married. What had Suki had? Some boyfriends who in retrospect were clearly jerks and one measly attempted murder. Just occasionally she wondered what she'd missed. She sipped some wine. "She wanted a guest house?"

"No. She only pretended she did. Very convincingly. That was the problem."

Suki ate some pasta. They'd made it together. Aaron chopped the garlic, she shredded the basil. The kitchen was not romantic but it was nice to be cooking side by side, their elbows close and fingers busy as good smells wafted up between them.

Aaron blotted his lips. He hadn't intended to go on, but he heard himself say, "It's a thing with city people, a safety valve. The fantasy of escape, of change."

Suki sipped some wine. "But most people stay. And stay the same."

Aaron nodded, ate.

Suki said, "You sorry?"

"Sorry?"

"About your marriage. Leaving."

He ran a hand through his hair. Suki watched the curls wrap around his fingers, one by one. "No," he said. "Not at all."

He put his fork down for a moment and looked at Suki's face. Her unlikely blue eyes were toned down to slate gray in the dimness, her lips stayed just slightly parted, as though she herself was speaking, as if listening had a breath and a language of its own. Looking at her, it seemed suddenly to Aaron that it had been a long, long time since he'd really spoken with anyone.

"One thing bugs me, though," he said, refilling both their glasses. "I don't think I ever made her understand."

"Understand?" said Suki. "Or want the same thing you did?"

"Okay, okay, fair enough. But there's one conversation I remember, it still frustrates me no end .. . But wait a second, you don't wanna hear this."

"I do," said Suki. "Really."

"Really? . . . Well ... I guess it was one of those conversations that couples sort of have a thousand times, and then one night they
really
have it. I said, 'Okay, that little B&B we always talk about, let's go for it, let's do it now.' She looked at me like I was nuts. 'Now?' she said. 'Not now. Much later, when we retire.' 'When's that?' I said. 'Come on, let's leave our jobs, leave Manhattan ...' And she freaked of course, turned the whole thing upside down. 'Why are you so frightened by success?' 'Frightened by success?!' I said. 'I'm frightened, yeah. Wanna know what scares me? What scares me is that I'm barely forty, and I don't want the whole rest of my life to consist of a few dumb things I already know I'm good at. T-bills. Matching my socks to my tie. Which cross-town streets to take. Twenty years from now I know nothing but those same few things? I wanna do some things I'm bad at. Hammer boards and see them crack. Plant shrubs and watch them die... "'

"And she said—?"

Aaron pushed some pasta around his plate. "She told me I was having a midlife crisis."

With a vehemence that surprised them both, Suki said, "Now that's an evil deadly phrase."

Aaron had to smile. "It is, now that you mention it."

Suki got more Mediterranean; her arms came up, her shoulders dimpled as she gestured. "Someone wants to change his life, it must just be a nervous breakdown. Give it a label and stop listening. Otherwise ... otherwise, change might get contagious too, and wouldn't that be terrifying?"

Aaron sipped wine. "You sound like someone who's heard that stuff herself."

"Something like it," Suki said. "A long time ago. You had a midlife crisis. I was a dropout. Same kind of thing, I guess. A tag that's in style to explain away the crazies and the misfits who don't want what other people want. Hey, face it—there's gotta be something wrong with someone who doesn't want a house with a garage and a baby dressed in Gap and the kind of job that gets you frequent-flyer miles."

Aaron said, "So when you left that, was it hard?"

"Leaving Jersey? Hard?! Pfuh. I was a kid. Parts of it were hard, I guess. Hard to tell my folks I wasn't gonna finish college. That was a big deal to them. Slinging all that hash to help with the tuition. The rest? I didn't really have a life yet. What did I have to leave? You—you had a lot."

"Seemed that way at the time," admitted Aaron. He reached up, scratched his neck. He looked at Suki. The kitchen was not romantic. The light was flat and neutral, there were no cut flowers on the table. He said, "But it doesn't matter what you leave. It only matters what you find."

"I'll drink to that," said Suki.

She raised her glass. They clinked. The glasses were not crystal, there was no one to clear away the dishes and leave them staring soulfully at one another. They looked at one another anyway, until Aaron was defeated by her improbable blue eyes and dropped his glance. And if the kitchen hadn't been so unromantic, and if the threat of murderous Russians wasn't looming over their emotions, it might have dawned on them to reflect on how extraordinary it was, how quaint and ripe with promise, that they were sharing a roof and sharing food and telling stories, and weren't lovers yet.

The big school windows of the
Island Frigate
office had a crisscross pattern of iron bars in front of them, and Tarzan Abramowitz was briefly stymied in his determination to break in.

He stood a moment on the metal landing, his crowbar tapping edgily against his thigh, the strap of a leather satchel paralleling the wide suspender on his shoulder. Above and behind him, the light of a bright orange street lamp was swallowed up by the leaves of a banyan tree; below him the street was quiet. He cursed the windows and worked his crowbar between the door frame and the door.

The process lacked subtlety, but Key West breakins didn't require a great deal of finesse. Alarms were few; back alleys were many; police response time was on an island schedule. Tarzan got a grip and started prying with his beefy arms. Paint twanged off the jamb, you could see a lot of different colors beneath the present gray. The molding bowed and started breaking free, and then the bar bit deeper, down to where the wood was too sodden and decayed to splinter, but could be scraped away, grated almost, like a raw potato. Abramowitz grunted and squeezed, and when the door fell open the lock was still intact, just not attached to anything.

Inside, the office was dark save for the sickly glow of a computer monitor that Peter Haas, the restaurant reviewer, had neglected to turn off. His screensaver had flying toasters on it and these annoyed Tarzan Abramowitz. He smashed the computer with his crowbar. The toasters shattered along with the glass and left behind a fugitive green glow that seemed to come from nowhere, that hovered in the air like fog then flashed and faded like a lightning bug smeared against a sidewalk.

He turned his flashlight on and tried to determine which desk belonged to the woman who could not live.

On one desk he found a cupful of cigars; he cleared the surface with his elbow, monitor, smokes and all. At another he found drawers full of old Playbills, which he dumped out on the floor. Finally he turned his beam on a desk that was topped with little stacks of invoices and proofs of ads. He scanned it quickly for a note pad, an appointment book. Finding nothing that gave an immediate hint of Suki's whereabouts, he started stuffing things— business cards, receipts, her Rolodex—into the leather satchel.

Then, without particular hurry, he headed for the sundered door. Halfway there he stopped, like a man who's forgotten his hat. He'd decided to smash one more computer. He cocked his crowbar and savored the shatter, then walked unharassed down the metal stairway and around the corner to his blue Camaro.

"Look," said Officer Carol Lopez, "it's just a breakin. Why you wanna talk to homicide?"

"Just a breakin," Donald Egan murmured.

It was morning. He'd arrived at work with a double Cuban coffee in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. He'd seen the front door hanging open just a crack, and his first thought was,
Good, someone came in early for a change
; he wouldn't have to rearrange his hands, he could simply push through with his shoulder. That's when he noticed that both halves of the lock were sticking to the door, and the door frame had been hollowed out.

"It isn't just a breakin," the editor went on. "That's the point."

Lopez was a woman but she had the same flat but spreading ass that male cops always had. Maybe it was the pants they made them wear, or maybe the weight of the holster on the hips. "If it's not a breakin—" she began.

"There's nothing here worth stealing," the editor interrupted. "No cash, no drugs, no television sets—"

"A grudge then?" said the cop. "A controversy? Like a white trash letter to the editor?"

"Getting warmer," Egan said.

"Still. A grudge, I don't see where that's homicide."

Egan patted the empty pocket of his shirt. He badly wanted a cigar. He squatted down and combed through the rubble around his desk—the papers and folders and dangling wires—until he found one. Straightening up, he said, "I think it's connected to an unsolved murder on your books. Lazslo Kalynin."

Lopez used her forearm to push her hat back farther from her brow. "Lazslo Kalynin. I saw that stiff. Wasn't pretty. But the connection, there you lose me."

Donald Egan lit up, pulled cigar smoke deeper down his lungs than cigar smoke was supposed to go. He looked around his trashed premises as the vapor hit his bloodstream. Smashed monitors glowered back at him like vacant eye sockets, and he knew his leveraged business was going down the tubes. Yet in that moment, with the rank nipple of tobacco tickling his gums and the narcotic sting of smoke scratching at his passageways, this failed and disappointed man was almost happy. This was the beauty, the near-salvation, of addiction. With sudden calm, he said, "I know I lose you there. This is why I want to talk to homicide."