Mangrove Squeeze (25 page)

Cherkassky smoothed his shirt and headed for the entryway, determined to be as conciliatory and gracious as his old comrade would let him be. Opening the door, he slightly raised his hands in a gesture that was for him expansive, and said, "Gennady Petrovich, how good to see you up and out."

Markov stood in the doorway and did an absurd little pantomime of a man just freed from prison or the hospital, flared nostrils gulping in air, fat spread arms embracing the landscape, wattly chin quivering as it turned up toward the sky.

Reassured by these fresh signs of buffoonery, Cherkassky said, "Come in, come in. Tell me how you have been."

"How I have been?" said Markov, when he'd moved into the living room and settled deeply into the softest chair. "I've been drunk. I've been weeping. I've been angry. Maybe I am better now."

Cherkassky studied him. But Markov didn't want to be studied, and a buffoonish yet melancholy grin was as good a mask as any. The thin man said, "Maybe?"

Markov shrugged, lightly drummed his fingers on the chair arms.

Cherkassky studied him some more. He wanted to be delicate but he did not believe in coddling. He said, "So you are ready to get back to work?"

Markov flashed a bland and fleeting smirk, and shrugged again.

Cherkassky squirmed in response. He was accustomed to hearing Markov talk too much, blab out whatever was on his mind or in his sloppy sentimental heart. These inscrutable smiles, these stubborn silences unsettled him, as Markov knew they would.

"A new shipment needs preparing," Cherkassky said. "Libya. Twenty kilos, oxide form. Sent in pigment canisters. You can do?"

Yet again the fat man shrugged and smiled. Yes, he could do it. Take metallic plutonium, bind it to oxygen with strong acid and electric current. Easy, if you knew how. And that was his edge. He was on terms with the atom. Plutonium—people feared it like they feared whatever they did not understand. Science fiction and propaganda made them think it was much more mysterious and dangerous than it was. In fact you could carry plutonium in your briefcase; you could hold it in your hand. Do anything but breathe it in. Markov's special knowledge made him serene; his serenity made the other man fretful and fidgety.

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?"

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."

"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—"