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 mish-moshed 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."