Mangrove Squeeze(11)

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?