Mangrove Squeeze (5 page)

That's when Lazslo Kalynin came walking in.

Fred was looking toward the door when Lazslo pushed through it. He didn't know who Lazslo was, but he instantly recognized a pissed-off, brooding guy, a guy who needed distraction and a drink. Even in the young face, there was a tightness at the corners of the eyes; the posture was clenched and the lips seemed thinned out, cramped, from too much held inside.

Lazslo walked around to Fred's side of the bar, blindly grabbed a stool on Fred's right. Before he'd even sat, Fred said, "Lemme buy you a beer."

Lazslo blinked at him, his face skeptical and no softer. His hand-tooled wallet was stuffed with twenties and with fifties. His running shoes were up in triple-figures. His belt buckle was real silver and he had real gold chains around his neck. His haircut cost more than everything Fred was wearing. "You're buying
me
a beer?" he said.

Fred either didn't hear the sarcasm or elected to ignore it. He said, "I have money and I see a guy needs a drink, I'm buying that person a drink. That's me, okay?"

Lazslo said, "I need a drink?"

Fred said, "You need somethin', man. You look like a scorpion crawled up your ass and died."

Lazslo gestured at the few damp bills sticking to the bar in front of Fred. "Your money's almost gone, sport."

"And when it is," he said, "that's how I know when to go home. You'll have a beer?"

Lazslo looked away. His face was in the midst of a gradual process that seemed more an easing of gears and cables than of skin and flesh. His forehead slowly smoothed, his eyebrows dropped, blood flowed back to his cheeks. He exhaled deeply, blew away his evening with the old Russians, an evening of whispers, paranoia, endless reminders that the world was lull of enemies. Now here was a stranger, a bum, sensing his funk and his anger and fearlessly approaching, reaching out to him for no good reason in the world, offering a pointless kindness. This was what he loved about America.

The bartender came over, said, "Evening, Lazslo. What'll it be?"

The young man in denim touched Fred on the shoulder. "This gentleman," he said, "is buying me a Bud."

"Nice job on the T-shirt shops," said Donald Egan, publisher and editor of the
Island Frigate.

"Whaddya mean?" asked Suki, looking up without much interest from her cramped and cluttered metal desk.

"They doubled all their advertising. You didn't know?"

Suki went back to her paperwork. She used the computer when she had to, but she preferred the concreteness of the old way, the paper clips and tape and staples. It felt like childhood, a project for a rainy day in Trenton. She had a pencil between her teeth. She didn't answer.

"Lazslo called," Egan went on. "Himself. Doubled everything. All eight stores."

Suki snapped some carbons out of credit card receipts, said nothing.

Egan said, "That's a hefty commission. I thought you'd be more pleased."

Suki looked up. She wasn't smiling. She said, "He wants to get into my pants."

Egan shuffled his feet. He was fifty-eight, and southern. He knew the world had changed and he knew that Key West wasn't western Tennessee, but he didn't think he'd ever get used to young women being quite that frank. Where was the fibbing, the pretense? He mumbled, "Your business, how you sell."

"Thank you, Donald," Suki said. "I knew that."

Her boss started to walk away. There wasn't far to walk. The
Frigate's
offices consisted of a room and a half of what once had been a grade school on Southard Street. One wall remained covered with a scratched old blackboard, eraser ledge and all. A broad wrought iron fire escape was bolted to the frame of a full-length window. And the place, in spite of the passage of years and the illicit smoke of Donald Egan's cheap cigars, still smelled faintly of the powdered disinfectant used to mask the stench of young children throwing up.

Egan, perplexed, now doubled back, and with his hands on his ample hips he stood once more above Suki's desk. "You're doing very nicely for us," he said. "I don't understand why you're not more—"

"I hate the T-shirt shops," she said.

"They're half your income," Egan said.

"That means I have to like them?"

Egan lifted a yellow thumbnail to his teeth. "Look, none of us is thrilled—"

"None of us is thrilled," she interrupted, "that the old locals are being all squeezed out. That none of the quirky little stores can possibly survive. That the whole downtown is just a tacky ugly strip for the cheap bastards who come off the cruise ships, buy a frozen yogurt and a T-shirt with a jerky slogan, and that's their whole impression of Key West."

"Suki. Things change. That's the marketplace. Commercial real estate. Supply and demand."

"Bullshit," Suki said. "There's something cockeyed there and you know it."

"There's no hard evidence," Egan said.

"They can't be making money. Those stores are fronts for something."

"Oh, yeah?" said Egan. "What?"

"How the hell should I know?"

"You see? Speculation. Nothing more ... Besides, the jealousy thing, the prejudice thing—you sure that isn't creeping in? These people are foreigners, immigrants."

"Who cares?" said Suki. "
Sperakis
, Donald. Wretched refuse of the Aegean. Sardine fishermen. Bee farmers. Do I have anything against immigrants? Do I have anything against Russia? Put a well-chilled Stoli in front of me, you'll see what I have against Russia."

"Well then—"

"What I'm against is people laundering money and fucking up my town."

"Libel, Suki. You don't just accuse people of laundering money."

"Especially if they're advertisers," she said.

The publisher said nothing.

Suki put her hands flat on the desk, craned her neck and cocked her chin. "Look, I realize I'm only the cupcake who bats her eyes to sell the space, but I can do arithmetic. Twelve thousand a month for rent—per store. Five, six employees on every shift. A measly eight, ten bucks a shirt..."

"No one knows the details of their business," Egan said. "This is all just speculation."

"Speculation," Suki said. "Exactly. So why don't you assign one of your crack reporters to get past the speculation and find out what the story really is?"

Suki paused for breath, and Don Egan reflected ruefully on his staff. Crack reporters? There was Peter Haas, restaurant reviewer, known to while away an entire afternoon searching for an adjective to describe the texture of a salmon mousse. Chrissie Kline, drama critic who thought everything was smashing. Casper Montero, literary editor, whose flights of metaphor tended to fly right past the limits of human comprehension. These were crack reporters?

Egan got depressed. But Suki wasn't finished. "I mean," she hammered on, "isn't that what newspapers do? Get the story? I mean, is this rag a paper or isn't it?"

The question hit Egan squarely where he lived, and he wished in that moment that Suki wasn't such a damn good seller, that he could afford to fire her.

He carried a notebook, Egan did. He smoked cigars— not the fashionable expensive ones, but the stubby stinkers more proper to the city room. He'd been a real newspaperman once, covered fires and murders as a young man back in Chattanooga; he wanted badly to believe he was a bona fide journalist still. That certainly was his public stance. Over cocktails he spewed forth strong, informed opinions. He wrote editorials graced with slyly damning southern wit, commentaries that seemed courageous until you realized that his targets were always the obvious and safe ones—the buffoonish politicians who never changed, and couldn't sue, and didn't advertise. Where was his nerve when it came to opponents who might fight back?

Cornered, the publisher pulled rank. He leaned in close to Suki. "Listen," he said. "I give you credit for what you do. But you don't run this paper. I do. And this paper isn't taking on the T-shirt shops. Understood?"

Suki bit her lip, the upper one. She looked around the office. There was no one there but the two of them. It was late afternoon and a soft gold light, conspiratorial, was filtering past the trees outside and through the big school window. The dusty chalkboard called up youth, with its desperate passion for fair play, its rambunctious conviction that headlong crusades were not only possible but necessary, the very crux of what a person should do.

"Okay, Donald," Suki said. "I get it. This paper can't afford to piss off the Russians. But give me the satisfaction of admitting one thing, just between the two of us. If you didn't have a mortgage, if you still had the balls, wouldn't you like to? Wouldn't it be satisfying?"

*

"Excuse me," said Sam Katz, softly and politely, to the person on his left. "Could you please tell me where I am?"

The person on his left was also old, and also had white hair, but of a very different sort. This other man's white hair was neatly parted, slicked down with old-fashioned tonic. It glinted with hints of pink and bronze, and topped a tan thin face with bright black eyes above a long but narrow nose. This man looked at Sam a little strangely, but tapped the padded vinyl in front of him and gently said, "A bar. You're in a bar."

Somewhat impatiently, Sam said, "A bar, yes. I see my drink, I see the bottles. A bar. But where?"

The other man tugged lightly on the placket of his shirt, which was made of peacock-blue silk, the seams top-stitched with navy. It appeared he was trying to hold on to his own tenuous certainty. "A bar," he said, "in Key West, Florida."

"Exactly!" said Sam Katz, sounding not only reassured, but vindicated. "Key West, Florida. With my son. Aaron. He left me here to run some errands. That's exactly where I thought I was!"

The other man said, "Good."

"But then," Sam resumed, "just for a second, I thought I was back in Europe. Odessa. Poland. Somewhere."

The other man sipped his orange juice and gin, calmly said, "Poland, no. Not even close to Poland."

Sam said, "I only thought it for a second. Ukraine, maybe."

"Not Ukraine. No. Hm. I wonder why you thought that."

Sam fiddled with his hearing aid, said, "It was like I was hearing a conversation." He splayed his elbows across the upholstered edge of the bar and leaned in closer. "A nasty conversation, I have to tell you, about a woman with large breasts."

The other man said, "Large breasts. Hm. And you were hearing this in Polish?"

"Polish. Russian. Yiddish. Who can tell? I was a kid when I learned it. A lot of the words, they're all mishmoshed together."

"Breasts," mused the other man. "Polish." He sipped his drink. Then he dropped his chin and whispered. "Don't turn around, okay?"

"Okay," said Sam, and promptly turned around. Behind him, maybe twelve feet away, two young fellows were shooting pool. One of them had hair like Elvis, a big silver belt buckle, and gold chains around his neck. The other had an enormous jaw and chunky sculpted muscles; he wore no shirt, just a thick pair of suspenders that crossed between his bulging hairy pecs and rested snugly on the ropy strands that ran from his neck onto his shoulders.

"Russians," whispered the other man. "I couldn't tell ya if they're talking titty, but I'll bet that's what you heard."

Sam kept looking at them. The hairy fellow in suspenders shot. The ball hung but didn't fall. He called the ball
a brozhni vykovskyi
.

"Russian, right?" whispered the man next to Sam.

Sam nodded, relieved. "Means farting masturbater."

"Those guys," the other man said, "they're from the T-shirt stores. The handsome one, that's Lazslo, runs the enterprise, though people say his uncle really heads it. The bruiser who don't bother wit' a shirt, I don't know his name, I think he manages a store."

Sam said, "How you know all this?"

The other man shrugged, pulled lightly at the extravagant wings of his collar. "I hang around. I look around. I talk to people. Hell else I got to do?" He reached out a gnarled and spotted hand. "Bert's the name. Bert d'Ambrosia."

"Sam. Sam Katz."

They shook. There was a pause. Bert said, "You remember Polish, Russian, all these years. That's quite a memory."

Sam blew air past resonating lips. "First things you learn, last things you forget. I remember songs, rhymes, smells. Other than that, my memory's shot."

Bert reached a hand below the edge of the bar. Disconcertingly, he seemed to be stroking his groin. "Funny what goes," he said. "Me, ticker's spastic, pecker's finished. But the feet still move and brain's about as good as ever, which probably isn't all that very. How long's your wife been dead?"

"How you know my wife is dead?"

Bert said, "All old men sitting in a bar at four o'clock, unless they're drunks their wife is dead. Mine's been dead twelve years." He continued stroking his crotch. "Company," he went on. "Company is what you need. Company and conversation, keep your mind alert."