Suki settled back against the rusty dinette chair, gestured toward the pronged rotisserie, the little propane fridge. "With the protection of the Key West cops I guess I'll stay right here."
Stubbs looked around at the torn screen door, the leaning sack of garbage with some un-nameable fluid dampening its bottom. "Look," he said, "you can't stay—"
Suki said, "And if you can't do anything to help me, at least keep it to yourself that I'm alive."
The lieutenant sucked his teeth, pocketed his notebook, pushed his bulky body up from the sauerkraut steamer. He stepped over Pineapple's bedroll and headed for the door. "This job really sucks sometimes," he said. "You never heard me say this but I'll see what I can do."
Chapter 18
By early afternoon, Gennady Petrovich Markov had polished off a quart of vodka, and though his stomach burned and his living room swayed under him and his eyes pulsed in and out of focus, his mind evinced a stubborn and perverse refusal to be drunk.
With ruthless clarity he saw his nephew stretched out on the gurney, bloodless and just faintly blue, his sundered neck appalling, his face as waxy and pearlescent as a squid. He smelled the stink that tried to cover death, the antiseptics and preservatives. He heard the voices of the cops and coroner, gruff and clumsy in their sympathies in spite of all their practice. He kept drinking. His ears rang and his vision blurred but the things he didn't want to think about just got more cruelly vivid.
Around two o'clock Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky came by to offer his condolences. Silently, he slipped into the living room; silently, he sat at the end of the sofa, his slight stiff body barely denting the cushion. The two men stared blankly at one another, and after a moment Cherkassky said, "A terrible thing. I am sorry."
Markov was hunkered in an enormous leather armchair, sunk so deep that it was hard to tell where the chair ended and its occupant began. He tried to fix his gaze on his old comrade, but nothing would hold its proper shape. Cherkassky's waferish body rippled as in reflecting water. His scooped-out face shrank inward like a drying apple. Markov said to him, "You are not sorry. You hated him."
Cherkassky took no umbrage, just strove to be precise. "I did not hate him. He worried me. He was too careless, too American."
"And so you had him killed."
"You think I did this thing?" Cherkassky said, his voice rising by just the slightest increment. "In this wiolent country of drugs and guns and shooting while you change a tire on your car, you think I did this thing?"
Markov seemed to bloat up in his chair, his fingertips clawed the arc of brass tacks that pinned down the upholstery. "You made him kill the girl. That was punishment enough."
"Yes, it was," Cherkassky said. "For him."
"For him? What is it you are saying, Ivan?"
Cherkassky turned away a moment, looked through the window and across the garden to the Gulf, to mangrove islands hovering on pillows of distant glare. "I am saying nothing. Only I agree. To kill the girl, that was punishment enough."
With difficulty, Gennady Markov reached across his heaving chest, retrieved the glass of vodka from the table next to him. He drank. He said, "Ivan, if you have done this thing, to punish me, no matter why, I will never forgive you. Never. You will be my enemy till one of us is dead."
Cherkassky listened. His scooped-out face wobbled in Markov's vision but its expression didn't change. After a moment, he said, "Gennady, you are sad, you are drunk. I understand and I take no offense at what you say, these accusations. Tomorrow you will apologize and of course, as we are old friends, I will accept."
Markov tried to turn away. The ripples of his shirt twisted up across his belly and his bottom squeaked against the leather seat, but he couldn't really move. He stayed silent and looked down at the floor.
"And I will tell you one more thing," Cherkassky softly said. "You will not hear it now but when you are ready you will hear it. This terrible thing that has happened, it is a grief that will end, and that will spare you far more heartache than it caused. Believe me, I know. Life will become much easier for you, Gennady. You will have one less thing to care about."
Aaron Katz was unaccustomed to wandering the streets.
He worked day and night. He was organized and disciplined. He went to places when he had a reason to go to them, and unlike many in Key West, he usually went to them directly.
But now it was the middle of a working day and he was wandering. He wandered past Hemingway House, tour buses lined up along its slapdash brick wall; past Southernmost Point with its Indians selling conch shells; up to the gay end of Duval Street, past the elegant and well-run and fully booked guest houses such as his would never be.