Mangrove Squeeze (26 page)

"Sam," Bert cut him off, "this gentleman doesn't really wanna hear the story of our lives."

"
Au contraire
," the realtor said. "I'll bet you were at Stonewall. It's like a link to history."

"There," said Sam. "You see? Now where was I?... Forty years he does this to me, makes me lose my train of thought..."

It was a weekday and the streets were as quiet as a suburb anywhere. Houses crouched behind hedges of buttonwood and jasmine, awnings threw parallelograms of shade across mute windows. Here and there a yard crew worked, a pool man stood beside his truck and wrapped himself in underwater vacuum-cleaner hose.

The realtor turned around in gravel cul-de-sacs, leaned low across the steering wheel as he pointed out his listings. At length the three of them were standing in the kitchen of a pink stucco cottage, when Bert said, "I'm curious about the neighborhood. Who lives up here?"

The faucet in the sink was dripping. The realtor discreetly tried to make it stop. "Very mixed," he said. "Better-off Conch families—big move up for them. Professionals, doctors from the hospital. Snowbirds who don't like the noise in Old Town."

"Ah," said Bert, picking lint from the dog that was hanging from his hand. "We heard there were some Russians lived up here. The guys with all the T-shirts."

"Markov," said the realtor, with an insider's quiet certainty. "Very wealthy man. A few others. Very quiet, keep to themselves. Live out farther toward the point."

"Maybe we should look out there," Bert said.

"Pricey," warned the realtor.

Sam Katz had been looking in the microwave, checking where the rays came out. Such a simple invention; he wished he'd thought of it. He said, "Two pensions, no babies. Pricey doesn't matter."

So they got back in the car and headed toward the Gulf. The lots got bigger, the houses sprouted breezeways, guest wings. When swaths of open water appeared past barricades on dead-end streets, Bert said, "Ya mind we swing by Markov's place? I hear it's a helluva house."

The realtor turned left, then right, then pointed toward a large establishment that looked confused. Brick pillars guarded both ends of a horseshoe gravel driveway. Trellises of bougainvillea were squandered on a huge garage. An orange tile roof was slashed open by a stone chimney. The informality of a shady porch slammed into the pomp of an entranceway with columns.

"What helluva house?" said Sam Katz. "Borax. A mishmosh."

Confidentially, the realtor said, "Money can't buy taste."

"And happiness can't buy money," said Bert. "Ya got anything on this street?"

The realtor put on the brakes, considered. "This street, no. Closest thing, around the corner. On a side canal. Eccentric little house."

"We're on the eccentric side ourselves," said Sam.

"Kitsch with attitude," the realtor said. "Between us, sort of homo barocco."

So they went around the corner and pulled into the driveway of a mint-green house that seemed to have been built by someone with a fetish for tile. A tile walkway led to the front door, which in turn was framed in tile. The entryway floor was tile in a sunburst pattern. The countertops were tile, a wide band of tile went all around the kitchen like a belt A path of tile meandered through the living room; Bert put his dog down and the creature's tiny claws made a bone-dry ticking sound. The tile flowed beneath the sliding glass back door to form a tile patio that extended halfway to the seawall.

Sam Katz ran his hand along a coffee table topped in tile and said, "Looks like the men's room in Grand Central."

"Easy to keep clean," said the realtor. "No mildew. Good if you have a problem with mold."

"Problem wit' mold," said Bert the Shirt, "I'd be dead ten times already." He gestured all around himself. "Who else is onna street, across the way?"

"Don't know," said the realtor. "But it's mostly owner-occupied. Very quiet, I assure you."

Bert said to Sam, "Take it for a month?"

Sam said, "We haven't seen the bedroom, the bath."

Bert rolled his eyes. "Okay, Sam. Go look at the bathroom."

Sam followed a line of tile down the hallway. Bert lightly drummed his fingers on a mosaic-sided hutch.

After a moment Sam's voice came reverberating as though from a dormitory shower. "Tile," he reported. "Tile up the
poopik
."

"We'll take it for a month," Bert said to the realtor.

Lieutenant Gary Stubbs sat in his cramped and dingy office, watching water droplets dribble from his ancient air conditioner and arc gently to the floor.

Before him on his scratched-up desk were two manila envelopes, which together comprised what he'd come to think of as the Dead Russians in Paradise file. Lazslo Kalynin. Throat cut in a purported burglary. Except no one but the department politicians believed it. Burglars in this town were crack heads, coke fiends. They were strung out and they were amateurs. They left fingerprints, and if they had to kill someone, they hacked him thirty, forty times, poking till they found an artery. Kalynin's killers had made no errors and their killing was as neat as surgery.

Then there was Jane Doe of the Russian undergarments. Not a clue on her, other than two lungsful of saltwater, proving that she'd gone down breathing. Suicide was possible, though that long thin bruise across her chest didn't go with suicide. Besides, who drowned themselves with shoes on?

Stubbs shuffled the folders, laid them side by side, put a palm on each of them. He wanted the two dead Russians to be connected, and then again he didn't want them to. Connecting them might turn two unsolved cases into only one, and he might feel only half as bad. Then again, police work was about the possible, and if the two stiffs were connected, that argued that there was in fact a Mafia involved, and if there was a Mafia Stubbs might very well be stymied altogether and end up feeling twice as bad.

He got up from his desk and paced. He was hungry. He thought about the coffee-sodden weight of a donut. Then he remembered something that he'd only half-noticed before. He opened the Lazslo Kalynin folder. The body had been found by a housekeeper. The cop who'd first arrived at the crime scene was Carol Lopez.

He raised her on the radio and asked her to meet him at the morgue in half an hour.

"Little hard to tell without the nose," said Lopez, when Ludmila had been slid out on her slab. "But yeah, height, shape, I'd lay a bet that's her."

Stubbs looked down at the blue skin, the matted tangled hair. "She say anything you remember? Anything at all?"

Lopez pushed her hat back with her forearm. "Barely spoke English. Said hello and pointed. I sent her home."

"Very upset?" said Stubbs.

"No," said Lopez. "Not that showed."

"Maybe she saw something she shouldn't have seen."

Carol Lopez shrugged. "Wonder what got the nose."

"Grab a donut?" said the homicide detective.

An attendant slid the corpse back into place. The slab locked in like a file drawer.

Stubbs said mostly to himself, "Maybe I'll see if Markov can ID the body. Gimme an excuse to talk to him again at least."

The Mangrove Arms was strangely quiet.

The woman who occasionally appeared to do the breakfast had straightened up and left. The few guests had had their fresh-squeezed juice and their muffins and their sliced papaya, and had gone out to sightsee or were lazily baking at the edge of the pool. Aaron and Suki—faces close, arms intertwined—had been nailing down a puckered runner on a stairway, and now they took a break for coffee.

They sat down in the unromantic kitchen, and Suki counted Band-Aids on Aaron's hands. "Only four today," she said.

"Getting better with the hammer." He tried to smile but it didn't quite work. He looked at her. The undaunted gleam was back in her unlikely eyes. Her bruises were healed and her tanned neck flowed down to rosewood shoulders. They were alone and it should have been wonderful, but Aaron was fretful and preoccupied.

Suki, in his house and not his lover, could not help wondering if it was because he regretted inviting her to stay. She sipped some coffee, hid her face behind the cup. "Something wrong?"

"Wrong?" said Aaron. A pathetic evasion. Even in business he'd never got comfortable with fibbing. "Guess I miss my father. Can't help being worried."

Suki wrestled with an impulse. She wanted to put her hand on his. But touch was not a simple thing. Between a man and woman who were not lovers, it could easily go wrong, or go too right; a gift of comfort could seem too bold, a gesture of solace could cross over into awkwardness. She held her coffee mug and the moment slipped away.

Aaron said, "You think it's weird? How close we are?"

"I think it's great," said Suki. "I can't imagine wanting family in my face, but the two of you, I think it's great."

Aaron drank some coffee, glanced at the outsize pots and pans hanging from their racks. "Growing up," he said, "all my friends, their fathers worked too hard. Never around. Or around and exhausted. Everyone felt gypped. I didn't. My father was around. We did things. He taught me stuff."

"My old man taught me stuff too," said Suki. "Pour boiling water on roast beef if people said it was too rare. Check dinner rolls for bite marks before putting them in the next guy's basket... Wha'd he teach you?"

Aaron pushed his lips out, searched for a way to sum up the oblique and scattered and half-learned lessons of a childhood. Finally he said, "He taught me to make the most of what I had."

"Example?"

Aaron pondered, looked out the French doors to the glaring water of the pool. "Pitching."

"Pitching?"

"Pitching. Baseball. I was a skinny kid. Smallish. Weak. But I loved to play. I wanted to pitch. My father said, 'We'll study up.' We watched the little guys, the Whitey Fords, the Bobby Shantzes. So great, watching Whitey Ford with my father's arm around my shoulder. My father said, 'Aha! Mechanics and control! You don't have to be a
shtarker
—'"

"
Shtarker?
" Suki said.

"Strong guy. Yiddish." Aaron got up from his chair, measured empty space around himself. He went into an exaggerated slow-motion windup that looked more like martial arts than baseball.

"'Look,' he told me, 'the power, it all comes from the middle. Not the arm. And the pitch—a million miles an hour it doesn't have to be. Location. Pinpoint. That's what we'll work on.'"

Aaron's arm was back now, his shoulders turned as though he were about to chuck a spear. "And we did," he went on. "And I pitched. Little League. Junior High. Was I great? No. Lack of talent takes you just so far. But I had excellent control."

He was just going into his delivery when he saw the misshapen mango muffin on the counter. With hardly a hitch in his motion, he picked it up in battered fingers. Then his arm came forward, pulled by the uncoiling of his middle, and the muffin flew across the room and landed cleanly in the garbage can.

Suki said, "Strike three."

And the telephone rang.

Aaron, slightly abashed at finding himself in the middle of the kitchen with muffin crumbs between his fingers, let it ring another time then moved to answer it. Out of Little-League mode and back in somber adulthood, he said, "Good morning, Mangrove Arms."

There was a brief but ragged silence on the other end, a beat with some clumsy fraction added. Then a male voice echoed, "Mangrove Arms?"

There was something odd about the voice, a stilted precision that Aaron could not place at first. "Yes, Mangrove Arms," he said. "May I help you?"

Again, a pause with jarring syncopation. Then the single careful word: "Hotel?"

A rolling cramp climbed up Aaron's back. His spine was registering the wrongness even as his brain was denying that anything was wrong, claiming only that Key West was a city of misdialed numbers, of people who were lost, of drunken fingers that couldn't find the buttons. But that careful voice—the h had too much breath; the o was too perfectly round. This was someone laboring to hide an accent. Perhaps a Russian accent. Aaron swallowed, turned his too-revealing face away from Suki, urged a steadfast neutrality on his tightening throat. "Hotel, yes. Bed and breakfast. May I help you?"

A final mistimed pause, then he heard a click.

He held the receiver an extra moment then replaced it slowly in the cradle. He put off turning around because he didn't know what he would say to the woman the Russian Mafia was looking for.

When he finally met Suki's eyes, the coffee cup was at her mouth, it made a kind of veil. Looking at her, he felt the thwarted helplessness that turned people reckless, that drove them to acts of flamboyant but unhelpful martyrdom. His father was out there somewhere, blundering through the world; Suki was in here, hidden only by some scraps of hedge and a rotting picket fence; and he, to mask his own anxieties, was clowning, combing through boyhood for clues about what it was to be a man. He was in the prime of life and not devoid of courage. But what did it take to protect another person, to keep somebody safe? Did only freaks of opportunity make heroes, or did heroism call for things he couldn't see because he didn't have them?