She wriggled out from under his hand. "Some people think it's impossible. Some people think it can't be what it seems."
Miffed at her retreat, he said, "Some people are assholes."
"Envy," Suki said. "Maybe they just envy your success. But they say all kinds of crazy things. Money laundering. Russian Mafia."
Lazslo gave a harsh, clipped laugh that flew up from the topless car and was quickly blotted by the night. "Russian Mafia!" he scoffed. "There's no such thing as the Russian Mafia."
Suki swiveled in her seat, showed Lazslo her eyes, whose blue was thinned to an indistinct but compelling pallor in the moonlight. "That's what the Sicilians said for decades," she purred. "Even got the FBI to believe them for a long, long time."
Lazslo swiveled too, so that his knee was pressing hers, lightly prying her thighs apart. "But the Sicilians," he said, "the Russians. Completely different cultures."
Suki, with an effort, let her leg stay where it was. "Really?" she said. "How so?"
Lazslo felt the warmth of her knee through his jeans, let himself imagine there was no clothing between them. "The Sicilian mob," he said, "they started off as a defense against outsiders, conquerors. Sicilians trusted other Sicilians and hated everybody else."
"And the Russians?" Suki said.
Lazslo leaned forward, gestured as if her breasts were in his hands. "For Russians, the enemy was always other Russians. The state. Over here the goody-goodies, over there the crooks, the liars, the power-crazy. Insiders, outsiders, there was no one you could trust. Old Soviets, they carry suspiciousness inside them like a virus. So how could the Russians ever organize like the Sicilians?"
Suki said, "So they must've found some other way to organize."
Lazslo leaned back, his groin pushed forward underneath the steering wheel. "They organized—" he said. And then he stopped. The stop was as jarring and abrupt as interrupted sex, and carried in its wake the same gamy confusion. Lazslo noticed all at once the chilliness of the evening, felt the heat and avidity coursing off him. Desire was making him stupid. He was showing off, being just as careless as Ivan Cherkassky said he was.
"How should I know how they organized, if they organized?" he said. He tried to smile, it came out a grimace. He tried to look sexy, it came out both carnivorous and pleading. He said, "And that's the bedtime story for tonight. Now, are you coming home with me?"
Slowly, she moved her knee away and shook her head. "I'm not that fast, Lazslo. I told you that."
Lazslo said, "I'm not that patient. I told you that."
Suki shrugged, using nothing but her eyebrows. She said, "Your basic standoff."
His gaze hardened. He looked at her breasts, he looked at her lap. It was rude and he knew it was rude. He started the car, took a bleak solace in the angry rasp of the engine turning over. He backed hard off the promenade, prideful of the Caddy's elephantine leaning. Without looking at Suki, he said, "Maybe I won't call you anymore." He threw it into drive, burned rubber as he careened onto A-1 A.
Suki said nothing. If he didn't call, didn't continue to chase her, she was off the hook. Her lunatic crusade, which she'd never exactly decided to pursue, but which somehow seemed to have called her, recruited her, would go away, dissolve, before any damage had been done, before anyone but her knew that it had ever been conceived.
But they both knew he would call again.
He wanted her. He wanted to break down her resistance and then to arch above her, sweaty and triumphant, and have her damp compliant face admit to him that she'd been crazy to resist. And there was something else as well, something that tugged and plucked at Lazslo, though he couldn't name it, something that transfigured ordinary lust and made its object an obsession. He knew, deep down, that she was trouble.
Chapter 7
"Fred," said Pineapple, "ya know what I sometimes wonder about?"
They were strolling through the mangroves that stretched back from the hot dog, looking at the sky. Winter nights there in the marsh could be quite wonderful. No mosquitoes in the winter. Egrets stayed so still that it was sometimes many minutes before you noticed they were there. In winter the mangrove leaves gave off a clean and wholesome smell, a smell of salt and wax.
"No, Piney," said the patient Fred, wiggling his can of beer. "What do you sometimes wonder about?"
Winter stars were wonderful too. The stars seemed closer then, they had a roundness, like they were shiny indentations punched in tin. Satellites etched their courses among the whirling constellations, and if you watched long enough, you saw them return in the exact same places.