Mangrove Squeeze (28 page)

Aaron's shirt was clinging to his back, his stare was stuck on the little silver bell on the counter. He paused, like he was looking in his book. "There's no one by that name staying here."

"You go to Lucia's, Mr. Katz?"

"Who is this, please?"

Abramowitz hung up.

Aaron put the phone down, then reached out for the silver bell, didn't ring but squeezed it a long moment, let its coolness and its weight absorb the heat and quaking of his hand.

At the very end of what appeared to be the guest wing of his house, Gennady Markov was working in his lab— mixing a broth of sulfuric acid and iodide salts; doing the prep work, like a chef, for the later concoction of plutonium oxide—when his housekeeper called him on the intercom to tell him a policeman was waiting in the foyer.

The buzzer broke the Russian's concentration, but the news didn't rattle him at all. Key West cops—they cared about parking tickets, cats in trees. Something big and complicated and organized was way beyond them. Why then was he here? Looking for a bribe, no doubt... It did not occur to Markov that the cop was here about Ludmila. He didn't know the body had been found; he hadn't imagined it would
ever
be found. And if it was, so what? No one would connect him with Ludmila's death. Where was the motive? No one but Cherkassky would ever figure it out. Besides, who would care about Ludmila? She was joined to no one, made no difference in the world. Her death meant only that some pillowcases might go unchanged until a new cleaning lady had been found; here and there a cobweb might briefly flourish in a corner.

Markov washed his hands, left the lab, and locked the door, walking calmly down the long hallway toward the foyer.

He recognized Lieutenant Stubbs at once—the wrinkled khaki suit, the concertina creases behind the knees—from the day that Stubbs had brought him to identify the murdered Lazslo. He said, "Ah, Lieutenant, you bring news perhaps of my nephew's killers?"

"No, Mr. Markov, I'm afraid I don't."

"Then—"

"There's been another death."

Markov strove to look shocked but not too shocked. He was a man of the world. He'd been through a lot. His reaction should be dignified, muted.

"A woman," Stubbs went on. "Drowned. We think she's Russian."

"Russian?"

"Labels in her clothes," said Stubbs. "Russian labels."

"Ah," said Markov. He hadn't thought about labels in the murdered woman's clothes, and now for the first time he began to wonder what else he hadn't thought about. Ludmila's absurd red scooter was in his vast garage, covered only with a tarp. Her lost shoe was stuffed into her helmet. He'd thought no one would care.

"And the officer who answered the call about.. . about your nephew," Stubbs continued. "She met his housekeeper. That's who found the body. The officer thinks that's maybe who the murdered woman is."

Markov blinked, a quick shiver ran through the pads of fat beneath his eyes. He hadn't thought about the cops connecting Lazslo with Ludmila. He hadn't realized anyone had seen her.

"Did you know your nephew's housekeeper, Mr. Markov?"

The Russian thought back to the days when he had planned his crime. Drunken days, days of grief and rage amok, wildly incautious days. Now belatedly he groped after caution. "A little. I've met her, yes."

"Her name?"

"I think... Ludmila. Ludmila, yes."

"Last name?"

Markov shrugged.

"You'd know her if you saw her? At the morgue, I mean?"

"I think I would. Not sure."

"I hate to ask you, but—"

Markov, man of the world, waved away the cop's compunction. He realized now how sloppy he'd been, how foolish to imagine that the very puniness of his crime sufficed to make it unsolvable. If returning to the morgue allowed him to lead the cop away from the garage with the dead woman's things so carelessly hidden, from the seawall with the overturned table sunk in the muck at its base, then he was only too happy to return to the morgue.

"Will be painful to see that place again," he said. "But as citizen of course I will help." And he gestured with Old World graciousness for the lieutenant to precede him out the door.

"Aaron," Suki said, "let's not eat in the kitchen tonight, okay?"

He said nothing, just looked up from the pan in which the grouper was sauteing. Suki was holding a pair of candlesticks; he had no idea where she'd found them. Then again, there were cupboards, crannies in the Mangrove Arms he'd never yet got around to opening, and the old hotel was day by day becoming her place as well as his.

"Nicer," she said.

He looked at her and his throat was closing down. Her hair was drying, not dry all the way, it had a sheen like licorice. Her neck was very tan where it joined her shoulders and tucked beneath her blouse. There was a happiness about her that didn't need to smile, that Aaron almost let himself recognize as desire.

"Maybe the coffee table right out here," she said, pointing through the kitchen doorway to a sitting area where no guests ever sat, and where Suki and Aaron had never taken time to rest.

Aaron couldn't speak just then, he nodded and looked back at the stove, down into the pan where the fillets were nestled in beds of shallot and olives and sweet pepper. Something was happening in the muscles above his knees, they kept tightening then letting go. He turned the fish and thought about his stubborn suffocating gallantry. Was it fair to make love to Suki, trapped there as she was? Was she free to open up her arms, or not to?

She was standing in the doorway now. She smiled and her disconcerting upper lip twitched slightly at the corners. "Looks civilized," she said with satisfaction. Aaron saw candlelight licking at the slatted walls behind her.

She moved into the kitchen once again. "Plates?" she said, and Aaron, strangling on his chivalry, could only nod.

He watched her reach up to the high shelf above the counters, her body lengthening as though in a dream of leaping into flight, heels flexing from the floor, hips lifting as back sinews stretched, shoulders tilting to raise one full tan arm in a ballet of the sublimely ordinary.

He turned off the stove and opened the wine.

Tarzan Abramowitz could not bring himself to face Ivan Cherkassky.

He'd failed. He'd spoken with six, eight people, feeling maladroit and foolish the whole way through, and he'd learned nothing about who Suki was supposed to have joined for dinner at Lucia's.

But of course he'd failed. Listening for the tiniest of glitches in a language not his own—it was impossible, ridiculous. Still, the failure embarrassed him, and feeling embarrassed made him mad. He was mad at Cherkassky, though that was an anger he could not afford; so he got mad, instead, at the people he had called.

He sat on a high stool, his feet impatient on the rungs, in the back room of a T-shirt shop on Duval Street. Behind him loomed stacks of open cardboard cartons, and behind that wall of shirts was stashed the more valuable inventory of cash and gems and art—spin-offs of the traffic in fissionable material. Abramowitz had a phone book on his knees, and he was jotting down addresses.

Cherkassky didn't want him to be seen; well, Cherkassky was still as meek as your basic civil servant. He, Abramowitz, was bold. Let people recognize his suspenders and his muscles and his short legs and his hairy back; he didn't care. He wanted to try things his own way now. Confront; intimidate; punish.

He closed the phone book, folded the paper on which he'd written the addresses, and put it in his pocket. Then he sprang out into the deepening dusk to jump into his electric blue Camaro and see what information he could shake loose not with his voice but his hands.

Driving his unmarked police car back to Key Haven from the morgue, Gary Stubbs said, "These two deaths, Mr. Markov—you think they could be related in some way?"

Markov had been looking out the window, still seeing the nose holes in Ludmila's gray face. He swiveled fatly in the seat, gave a world-weary shrug. "You are the policeman, Lieutenant. I only wish to know, no matter what, who killed my nephew."

Stubbs drove. Pelicans flew low along the road, their wings lit from above by orange street lamps. After a moment he went on. "But if they
were
related, why would they be?"

Markov said nothing, just sniffed at his clothes. They stank of chemicals and death, he'd change them before tucking in to his waiting veal chop and his Pomerol.

At a red light, Stubbs said casually, "It's very strange. Another woman disappeared on the night your nephew was killed."

"Another woman?" Markov said.

They were on the ugly highway now. Ragged palms were skinny silhouettes behind a curtain of neon, traffic sneaked in and out of gas stations and furtive bars.

"A woman who knew your nephew pretty well. Was dating him, in fact."

"This I did not know," said Markov.

"Never said you did," said Stubbs, and for just an instant his eyes peeled off the road and fixed his passenger.

For a time they didn't talk, the only sound was the tires sucking dryly at the pavement. Then Stubbs said, "Little town like ours, I guess you've heard some of the crazy rumors about a Russian Mafia."

Markov put on the sad wise hound-like face of a man long disappointed in humanity. "I have," he said. "Is disturbing, of course. Even here is a mistrust of foreigners."

"Everybody's foreign somewhere," said the cop.

"Your nation goes away," Markov complained, "you are foreign everywhere."

Stubbs saved his sympathy. "But Mafias," he said, "they're gonna hurt someone, usually, for starters at least, they hurt their own."

Gennady Markov didn't like where the conversation was yanking him but he had no choice except to follow it along. "This means you think a Russian killed my nephew?"

Stubbs didn't answer the question. Instead he said, "And deaths, disappearances that come in clusters—that's a Mafia kind of thing."

Markov hesitated. For just a heartbeat he almost hoped this bumbling policeman with the wrinkled clothes would solve the crimes, that the loathed authorities would win. He pictured Ivan Cherkassky being carted off to jail, hunched and thin and bitter. It would be nice to see; and, with a mocking useless remorse, Markov realized that he might perhaps have seen it with impunity, had he not given in to the lunatic impulse to push the cleaning lady into the ocean. He'd picked the wrong revenge; he could have simply squealed. But as Ludmila went down, so did his chance of getting off easy. He said, "So you assume now that these murderings, they are related?"

"Just a theory." Stubbs drove. The roadside chaos thinned out, mangroves invaded vacant lots.

Markov pointed a fat finger suddenly. "You miss the turn," he said.

"Ah, so I did," said Stubbs.

Markov didn't like that. Policemen drove the streets every day, they didn't make wrong turns.

Still heading north, Stubbs said, "I was thinking about the FBI."

Markov said nothing.

Stubbs gave forth a little nervous laugh. "Every local cop's worst fear, I guess. You call them in, they take right over. Show you how small-time you are. Make you feel like crap for everything you've missed."

The foolishness of his position was pushing Gennady Markov down into the seat, squeezing him against the door. He'd briefly had the upper hand against Cherkassky, and he'd been too drunk and self-pitying to notice. Now the guilt was equal and the punishment was circling. With disgust he understood that Cherkassky, once again, was right: they were together till the end. Trying to sound sage but not dismissive, he said, "This is really such big matter for the FBI?"

Lieutenant Gary Stubbs had driven far enough and had found a place where he could make a U-turn. His arm across the steering wheel, he glanced at Markov, whose face was awash in the fugitive glare of headlights from the oncoming traffic. "A little while ago," he said, "you wanted to do anything to find who killed your nephew."

He pulled into the southbound lane.

At the Mangrove Arms, wisps of breeze slipped through the porous walls and around the un-square edges of the windows, and flattened and stretched the candle flames. Wax trickled and slowly congealed; shadows billowed up like shaken sheets. Suki and Aaron sat eating dinner, side by side on the edge of the low settee. Their plates were on their knees and their knees were almost touching.

Aaron was saying, "You had a plan when you first moved down here? You knew what you were looking for?"

Suki had sipped some wine, she worked to swallow it before she laughed. "A plan? Me?" Her eyes were wide above the rim of her glass; candle flames danced in her irises. "All I had was a pretty clear idea of what I was running away from. Winter. Brown air. Drizzle and traffic. Feeling like my life was in a tube between the Turnpike and the Parkway."

"Can't have been all bad," Aaron said.

"Wasn't," Suki conceded. Her shoulders lifted and she burgeoned, her presence expanded with promise like rising bread. "But there's a hell of a gap between not all bad, and good."