Mangrove Squeeze (31 page)

Cherkassky considered. His paranoia was not of the jumpy sort; he was not prey to sudden delusory panics. His anxieties, rather, were the result of rigorous constructs whose careful architecture made them all the more obsessing. He was building such a construct now.

His new neighbors—they'd been probing and intrusive from the start. Weirdly observant; gauchely open, even for Americans; intrigued that he was Russian. They showed up at the edge of his life and seemed, like germs, to be testing the membrane for a way inside. Why?

"If they spy on us," he reasoned, "is probably because they work with girl."

Abramowitz closed the circle. "And if they work with girl, then probably is same Katz from hotel."

Cherkassky pulled on his pitted face. "But hotel," he said. "Too public. Many people. I don't like it we go to hotel unless we know for sure."

Abramowitz was pacing hard now, fists swinging near his knees. He loved momentum, not details. He said, "But we will never know for sure unless—"

"The old Katz," Cherkassky interrupted. "This is how we will know for sure."

"But—" said Abramowitz.

"He wants to spy on us," Cherkassky said. "We'll let him."

"Let him?" The voice was squeezed and shrill.

"Let him," said Cherkassky. "Good and close we'll let him spy."

Lieutenant Gary Stubbs dunked his donut in his coffee then watched the coffee run back out of the shiny little chambers in the dough.

"Dave," he thought aloud in the direction of the young man behind the counter, "why would a guy who is not simple or obviously insane go into a park full of mangroves with a shovel and a wagon?"

Dunkin' Dave adjusted the angle of his paper hat, wiped his hands on his turned-down apron. "To bury something."

"Wagon's empty," said the cop.

"Well, then to dig something up," the donut man suggested.

"Wagon's empty when he comes out, too."

"Couldn't find it maybe."

"Find what?" asked the cop.

The man behind the counter shrugged. "Or maybe changed his mind."

"How come?"

"Saw you watching maybe."

"Me," said Stubbs, "I'm in the Little Hamaca parking lot. In the shade. Tailed him very carefully."

The donut man topped up the detective's coffee, poured himself a cup. "Comes back to what it was he went there for."

"Square one," said Stubbs. He took a bite of donut, washed it down with coffee. "Money? Guy's got much better places for stashing money. A body? Whose? And why not let it rot right where it is?"

"You got a weird job, man. Rotting bodies alla time."

"So what would he be digging up?" said Stubbs.

"You're sure he's not a nut?"

"I'm sure he's acting nervous."

"Lotta guys act nervous," said the donut man. "Too much caffeine. Too much sugar."

"This guy's nervous like the FBI is on the way."

"Is it?" asked the donut man. He smiled with his eyebrows. The FBI went through a lot of donuts.

"'Cause why?" said Stubbs. "'Cause some Russian's wandering around with a wagon and a shovel?"

"He's Russian?" echoed Dave.

"You didn't hear that part," said Stubbs.

"You got a weird job," said the donut man. Then he added, "Little Hamaca, you said it was?"

"Yeah."

"Russian. Be weird it had something to do with those old missiles and shit."

"Missiles?"

"From the sixties. Khrushchev. Cuba. Remember?... Kennedy dead a million years and Castro still hanging on. Amazing, huh? Hey, the FBI comes down, you let me know. I'll bake some extra glazed."

Bert and Sam heated up some soup for lunch, and then they had a nap. But when they woke up Bert was restless.

Once again it came down to routine—the routine that for years had mollified his loneliness and had sufficed, no less well than most people's routines of work or play, as a proxy of actual purpose.

In the late afternoons, as the sun was slouching toward the Gulf, he walked his dog on Smathers Beach. He saw people there—the same locals season after season, arrayed against a background of tourists, who, in their sunburned and slightly desperate variety, also stayed essentially the same. He made chitchat when the opportunity presented; when it did not, he murmured secretly to his chihuahua, and looked, as at a spouse's face, at the soothing variations in a scene viewed every day: the sun at one corner or another of a certain building as the months advanced; the tide line encroaching or receding according to whether the breeze was north or south.

Freshly awake now in the dead suburban silence of Key Haven, Bert yearned for that routine, and ascribed his yearning to his dog.

"Ah," he said, to the small blind creature that was curled up on the tile floor, "I bet you miss the beach. I know ya do. Tell ya what. I'll shave, I'll dress. We'll get in the car."

He invited Sam, of course. But Sam didn't want to go. He'd already launched into a project of his own.

He was fiddling with his yellow Walkman; transistors and transducers and tiny clips were laid out on a tile table. "Think I'll stay right here."

Bert was not without misgivings about leaving his housemate alone. "Come on," he urged. "A change a scene."

Sam shook his head so that light flashed through his Einstein hair. "My memory," he said, "everything's a change of scene. I'm fine here, Bert. Go have your walk."

Bert could think of nothing more to say that would not be wounding to Sam's dignity. So he found his car keys and he left.

Tarzan Abramowitz, keeping an eye on the intersection where the bridge crossed over the canal, saw him go, saw that there was only one person in the old beige car.

After a while, Sam Katz took a glass of seltzer and his reassembled Walkman and a Benny Goodman tape outside to the patio. The sun was getting low, it threw packets of glare that skipped like stones from crest to crest of the wavelets in the green canal; a rising tide brought the smell of iodine.

Sam watched the gray house across the way and worked to keep his thoughts right there, to concentrate so that he might be of help to Aaron. Aaron and the woman who worked side by side on the ground with him, and whom he seemed to like so much. He tried to keep his thoughts on the two of them, on their safety, but his thoughts kept trying, like eggs on a countertop, to roll away and smash.

He sipped his seltzer, he listened to music, and then he saw his scoop-faced neighbor come through the sliding door that led out from his kitchen.

The Russian, stiff-legged and pale, slowly walked beyond the shade of his awnings and continued down his swath of lawn toward the seawall. Sam watched him coming nearer and could not react; his attention had locked down like a cramping muscle, had grown entirely rigid. He simply stared as his neighbor approached, now squeezing forth a morbid smile that seemed to cause him pain.

"Mr. Katz," he said, across the width of the canal, "I was wondering you would like to come by for a glass of tea."

Sam saw lips move. He swept off his headphones and stuck his hearing aid back in. "What?"

Cherkassky repeated his offer.

For a moment Sam was too excited to answer. An invitation! A glass of tea! He would get inside, get to know these Russians. He would find things out, be of help to Aaron, and even Bert would be impressed.

"Yes," he said at last. "With pleasure."

Excited, puffed up with purpose, he rose. In a trance of newfound usefulness, he walked straight through the tiled house and out the door. It never occurred to him to leave a note where he was going.

When Bert got home the sun was down, and though there was still a multicolored gleaming in the sky, the day had lost the power to penetrate indoors, and the tiled house was dark. Bert called out, "Sam? ...
Sam
..." But even before he'd heard the grimly answering silence, he knew that Sam was gone.

He turned on a lamp. It threw a meager and depressing pool of yellow, and he turned on another. He went from room to room, flipping every switch, and at some point he realized that the hand that held his dog was trembling. It was trembling not so much with fear as with shame. It had been his mission to look after Sam, to keep him out of trouble. He'd abdicated that responsibility in favor of a selfish preference of his own. Now Sam could be lost and wandering somewhere, could have blundered into something he'd never figure out, could be lying at the bottom of the Gulf. Bert had failed him, failed himself. What was left in the world when one old man couldn't look out for another?

He put his dog down on the floor. Dejected by contagion, the chihuahua dragged its paws across the mosaic pathway then curled up in a heap.

Bert went to look outside. The patio was lavender in the dusk. Half a glass of seltzer and Sam's cheery yellow Walkman were sitting on the table; there was something dreadful in the way they'd been left behind. Bert walked down the small lawn, felt his stomach knotting as he neared the still canal. He half expected to see a body there, face-down, bloating, white hair streaming out like weeds. But in the failing light he saw nothing in the water except a smudged reflection of the sky. Across the way, the gray house of the Russian was entirely dark and silent.

With burdened steps Bert walked up through the yard and back inside. The lamplight seemed grainy and sulfurous and horrid after the velvet outdoor glow. He paced; the dog tracked his pacing with its dry and scaly nose. He tried to think of some way to undo his dereliction, to redeem his falling-short. Search the streets? Blunder after him? Alone, his chance of finding Sam was slim to none, and he came to understand that he only compounded his fault with each moment that he stalled.

At length he did the thing he least wanted in the whole wide world to do. He went to the phone to call Aaron, and to tell him that, because of his own negligence, his father had gone AWOL.

"I'm sorry," said Bert, when Sam's son had arrived. "I'm sorry."

Aaron bit his lip. It was a habit of Suki's he was already picking up. He put his hand on the old man's arm. He wasn't quite sure if he did it to offer comfort, or forgiveness, or if it was a distant way of touching his own father. "No apologies," he said. "Let's just figure where he might've gone."

Bert sat down on the sofa. His dog splayed out across his lap and the dreary light from a rented bulb was washing over them. "He got really taken up, obsessed like, with the neighbor just across the way."

"Across the way?" said Aaron. "I thought that Markov—"

"Markov lives around the corner," Bert explained. "Much bigger house. Fancy. But Markov, we're not so sure he's the boss no more."

Aaron said, "I don't think I—"

"'S complicated," said Bert, and, wearily, he started standing up again. It took a while. When he was sure of his balance, he said, "Come on, I'll explain things as we go."

They went through the tiled doorway, Bert holding his chihuahua like the chihuahua was a loaf of bread. Outside, fronds hung limp and black. Crickets rasped; the sound rose to a crescendo, then abruptly stopped, precise as any orchestra. During the lull, Bert said, "The guy across the way, he could be the real boss maybe. Fits a certain pattern, like. Your old man, somehow he picked up on it."

They were walking toward the bridge that went over the canal. Aaron's legs were twitchy yet leaden, his steps awkward as they tried to adapt to Bert's resolved but plodding pace; and in some way this lack of flow, this trudging heaviness, connected with the stricken understanding that his father might be dead. Walking should be easy; suddenly it wasn't. Nothing was easy. With the loss of a father came a terrible exposure, a shocking grasp of one's nakedness, of one's secret but perennial unreadiness as a person in the world. Past forty, well-to-do, new lover of a lovely woman, Aaron suddenly felt green, unformed. He struggled to remember something, anything, that he knew with confidence of life. Nothing came to him. He said to Bert, "So what's the pattern?"

"Guy lays low," Bert said. "Normal house. Doesn't show off. Showin' off, luxury, that's for other people."

They walked. A plump moon topped the palms. Bert wheezed a little as he went and the dog's breath came in quick and labored snorts.

"Bein' the boss," the old mobster continued, "it's not about luxury. It's about responsibility."

They reached the small rainbow of a bridge that arced over the canal. Bert needed to rest a moment before they went across. "And he was kind to the dog," he said. "Gave him water."

Stripped of certainties, seeking to rebuild comprehension brick by brick, Aaron said, "The guy kills people."

Bert said calmly, "A boss will do what he has to do. Be a ruthless prick when necessary. Give a thirsty dog a drink a water. It's not about cruelty and it's not about kindness. It's about knowing. Knowing what you have to do and doing it no matter what."

At the crest of the bridge Aaron breathed deep of iodine and sunken weeds. On the next street over, the sickly glow of televisions played on shaded windows. They trudged toward Ivan Cherkassky's house. The blue Camaro was gone from the driveway. Windows were closed, curtains were drawn and there was no light at the edges. The place was as blank and silent as though it had been sealed up for a year.