"Even so—" said Suki.
"What's the favor?" Piney asked.
Suki breathed deep through her battered throat. "I would dearly love," she said, "some clean clothes and a toothbrush and a lipstick."
Aaron, alone in his room, was dazed when he got off the phone with Donald Egan.
There was too much he didn't understand, too much he had to swallow all at once. Lazslo Kalynin had been murdered. Egan had learned of it from a contact in the coroner's office. The news reminded the publisher that Suki had been leaning on him to do an investigative story about the T-shirt shops and the shadowy foreigners who ran them. Organized crime, she'd suggested. Russian Mafia. Crazy stuff. Egan had pooh-poohed it, called it paranoid and xenophobic. Now Lazslo was dead and Suki was AWOL. Probably there was no connection, no connection whatsoever. But Egan thought that since Aaron seemed to be a friend, seemed to be concerned, he should be aware at least.
So now he was aware, and felt the burden of awareness.
He put the phone down and paced. Pacing, he felt the ache between his shoulder blades travel up and down his spine. He paced to his bed and sat a moment. The bed ejected him and he paced some more. Unaware of choosing a direction, he paced through the door of his room and down the hallway to the kitchen, and through the kitchen to the office.
He found himself leaning against the front desk counter, where the ancient chihuahua was still reclining with its nose against the bell. The old men were still playing gin.
Bert's stack of quarters had grown, Sam's had dwindled. Sam threw a picture card and Bert quickly scooped it up.
"Shit!" said Sam. He glanced at Aaron. "He playing jacks, or clubs?"
Then he looked at his son more closely. There was a tightness around his mouth and a slight twitch beneath the skin at the corner of his right eye. "Aaron, something's wrong," he said. "What is it? Tell me."
Aaron slumped, put more weight onto his elbow. He wasn't quite sure how he'd gotten to the office and he didn't see the point of sharing his worries with the two old men. Talking things over with his father, though—it was a habit of long standing, and old habits dug troughs that survived the deaths of many brain cells; they didn't change just because time juggled the balances of strength and comprehension and stature in the world. Aaron opened his mouth. What came out was a helpless exhalation somewhere between a sigh and a snort. He tried again, said, "It's nothing. It's too complicated."
"Nothing and too complicated," said Sam. "That's two different things."
"Complicated?" said Bert. "Hey, the whole idea of bein' here is that this is supposed to be a simple town."
"That's what I thought," Aaron said. "Till now."
"Till what?" said Sam.
Aaron sucked a deep breath in, blew it through his teeth. "Till I tried to have a bowl of pasta with a woman, and a guy I decided I was jealous of got killed, and the woman disappeared, and everybody started whispering about a Russian Mafia."
Bert shrank down just a little at the final word, raised his cards a few inches higher. Sam didn't notice. He dropped his own hand; he'd forgotten he'd been playing gin. He said, "Mafia? Whaddya know. Bert was Mafia."
His friend said nothing, just cinched together his silver brows and shot a look at Sam.
Sam said, "What? You told me yourself. I'm not supposed to say?"
To no one in particular, Bert said, "Everything else, the man forgets. This he has to remember."
"Who could forget a thing like that?" said Sam.
"Okay, okay," said Bert. "But it's not the kinda thing ya hang a sign."
Aaron stood there. He squeezed the counter, tested its solidity. He looked through the window at the hibiscus hedge, the familiar rustling palms. The veneers of his universe were coming unglued, he needed some assurance that the planet he inhabited at that moment was still the same one that he'd lived on all his life. At last he said, "Bert—you're a mafioso?"
"Used to be," admitted Bert. He looked down but could not quite squelch a piece of smile at one end of his mouth. "They called me Bert the Shirt. Knew how ta dress, ya know? But I been outa that game a long time now."
Aaron tried his best to look worldly and unshockable. His father playing gin with a gangster. Soviet desperadoes getting their throats cut half a dozen blocks away. Okay, no problem. Casually he said, "Know anything about the Russians?"
Bert reached out to pet his dog, short pale hairs rained down from its knobby head. "Not really. I was already out when they were comin' in. But ya think about it, how different could it be?"
"I have no idea," said Aaron.