Lazslo was watching her rise, enjoying the flex of her butt as she straightened her knees, measuring the weight of her chest as she lifted her shoulders. "You're what?" he said.
She rounded the coffee table, got the big piece of glass safely between them. "You've been a gracious host," she said. "Delicious dinner."
Lazslo sat there, tipsy, blinking, watching her recede across the living room, past the kitchen with its undone dishes, moving inexorably toward the door. He felt suddenly foolish with his thighs so far apart, and he was almost too baffled to be angry. His titillation had followed every zig and zag of hers—except that his had been real, and had left him unsatisfied but drained. He rubbed his jaw and, with the thwarted certainty of the foreigner who thought he knew the rules, he said, "An American woman, she comes to your place, she spends the night with you."
Suki's hand was on the doorknob. She looked back across her shoulder. "Call me un-American," she said. "I hope we'll talk again soon."
Chapter 11
Next morning at the Mangrove Arms, Aaron Katz was in such a buoyant mood that not even finding a drowned and bloated fruit rat in the pool skimmer could put a damper on his spirits.
He vacuumed the pool, scrubbed the line of scum around the edges of the hot tub. He watered the impatiens; plucked a troubling number of yellow leaves from the hibiscus plants.
He looked in on his father, who was sitting at the front desk with his eyes closed, his yellow Walkman cradled in his hands, his headphones threaded through his silver hair and an expression of untethered ecstasy on his thin-skinned face.
He checked on the tattooed woman who did the breakfast, who seemed this morning to be trying some odd experiment with giant pancakes.
The Mangrove Arms was still the Mangrove Arms— badly installed runners still puckered on the stairs, crooked sconces still flicked off and on in accordance with the inscrutable whim of distant switches—but today Aaron was seduced again by the charm, the promise of the place, the very idea of it. It continued eating money, guests were few and happy guests were fewer, and yet it seemed in spite of everything that things were working out. He had a date that evening. His father had a new friend, someone to visit. Life was opening up. Key West, this transient place whose heart was hidden under mounds of promotional brochures and tacky T-shirts and empty bottles, was embracing him.
Standing in the kitchen amid the sweet carbon smell of sticking pancakes, he poured himself a cup of coffee. He'd had one sip when the house phone rang. He picked it up, said, "Front desk."
An unhappy and abashed male voice said, "Uh, well, yeah, it's about the toilet."
Aaron put the coffee down. Undaunted, or daunted only slightly, he started rolling up his sleeves and tried to remember where he'd put the plunger. "I'll be right there," he said.
On Key Haven the mood was altogether darker.
The Belorussian housekeeper had unscrewed the false bottoms from the vases, had gotten on her scooter and brought the tapes to Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky. Grim- faced, expressionless, perched with a disembodied lightness on one end of his undented sofa, Cherkassky had reviewed them, had listened to the incriminating passages a second time, a third. He'd summoned Gennady Markov to his home and, together, they listened to them yet again.
"You see?" the thin man said. "You see what comes from being too easy with this boy?"
Lazslo's uncle said nothing, just looked out the window at the still canal, the silly mint-green house across the way.
"Reckless," Ivan Fyodorovich hammered on. "Careless. I told you, Gennady. And now this."
Markov laced together his fat fingers, worked them nervously. "Maybe you make too much of it, Ivan. It was idle boasting, talk to get her clothes—"
"Stop being stupid," said the scoop-faced man. "Stop making excuses. It does not matter why he said these things. He said them. To this woman. You know what has to happen."
Markov chewed his knuckles. He tried to think of some other way but he knew there was no other way. Absurdly, it grieved him that Lazslo didn't get to sleep with her before she had to die.
As if tracking his old comrade's thoughts, Cherkassky took them one step farther. "He must do it himself," he said.
Markov gripped the arms of his chair as if bracing for a car crash. "No!" he said. "There are others who could—"
"He made the mess," Cherkassky implacably replied. "He must clean the mess. A lesson every child should learn."
"Child, yes," said his uncle. "Child, Ivan. This boy is not a killer. To make him do this is big mistake. It will change him. It will coarsen him."