Mangrove Squeeze(47)

She couldn't stay long at the hot dog; that was clear. So what were her options? She could leave Key West, abandon Florida; a long retreat, she imagined, would be adequate to keep her safe. But goddamit, she didn't want to leave. She liked it here. The homemade boats, plywood painted lavender and green. The old Cuban guys playing dominoes in shady doorways. The funk and the geeks that made it feel like home. It was bad enough that fear of crime made you have to lock your bicycle; she was damned if fear of crime would make her give up the whole entire archipelago of Keys.

But if she stayed, what then? The cops could not be counted on. Her boss, for all his cheap cigars and city- room gruffness, quailed in the face of a real story as though it were a fatal infection. Which, perhaps, it was. Who, then, had the guts to risk contamination? Pineapple and Fred.

And maybe Aaron. But Suki hated the idea of involving him. What she'd liked about him from the start was precisely that he did not seem tough, did not have the Key West thorniness engendered by the climate and the transience, a passive hardness that defeated joy by expecting... not the worst, exactly, but just not much of anything. A cuticle around the heart like around the leaves of tropic plants. Aaron seemed free of it. His gaze was unguarded. He was actually trying to accomplish something here, and, amazingly enough, he seemed to believe in the value of his efforts. A long siege in the hot sun would probably simmer the tenderness and the belief right out of him.

Suki rolled over, faced the little fridge. Through the cracking propane hose she caught a faint whiff of the tracer gas they mix in with the fuel. Across the way, Fred's snoring had changed from a steady, almost restful purr to a syncopated rasping, a sort of nasal jazz. She couldn't stay here very long. But could she bring herself to go to Aaron's place? If he asked again, that is?

She tried to banish the possibility; it wouldn't go away. She imagined a hot bath. She imagined a window with a curtain on it, moving in a yellow breeze. She imagined Aaron's curly hair, the earnest tilt he gave to his head when he was puzzling something out. She could see herself at Aaron's place, it was pointless to deny it. And for just a fleeting second she admitted something else as well. She could see herself, maybe sometime far from now when all of this was settled, in Aaron's arms.





Chapter 23


"Ya see," said Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia, "this is the part I don't like."

"Which part?" Aaron said.

It was morning at the Paradiso. Long shadows sprouted from the palms. A few old people were walking laps around the pool, none of them could exactly straighten out their knees. The pock of tennis balls echoed between the buildings of the complex; the tinny plunk of golf balls issued forth from the putting green.

Aaron had slept badly once again, he'd awakened in a sweat. He needed to do more for Suki and he had no idea what he should do. He woke up with the thought that mafiya was Mafia. That's what old man Bert had said, and it seemed that Bert should know. Besides, who else could Aaron talk to? Who'd had more practice keeping secrets? So he'd roused his father with a cup of tea and off they'd gone.

"The part I don't like," the retired mobster was replying now, "is this burglary bullshit. The part where the dead guy, what's his name?"

"Lazslo."

"Where Lazslo, they make it look like it's a robbery."

"You don't believe it?" said Aaron.

"Come on," said Bert, his silver eyebrows arching skyward. "On that night of all the nights? They rubbed him out. Course they did. But the way they did it—chicken-shit. No class."

Sam Katz was gradually waking up. In the mornings his mind came back to him in jigsaw pieces that slowly combined to make a map. Some days the map had rougher seams than other days. He said, "You cut somebody's throat. There's a classy way to do it?"

Bert petted his dog, which was splayed out like a Chinese duck on the metal table where the three of them were sitting. "My people," he said, "when they were faced with the unfortunate necessity of someone he had to be rubbed out, at least we tried to make a lesson of it, a learning experience. We left a calling card. A symbol. Bag a fish. The guy's tongue. Whatever. Sometimes, okay, the symbols got a little, like, mysterious. One guy he was found frozen in a car trunk wit' a candelabra on his head. Don't ask me. But the point is we didn't bullshit, make it look like something which it wasn't."

Sam ran a hand through the little pillows of his Einstein hair. "So maybe," he said, "these people aren't so much like your people after all."

Bert thought that over, tugged on the placket of his shirt. The shirt was somewhere between pink and red, the color of watermelon, in a shiny material that looked wet. "Similarities and differences," he said at last. "This robbery bullshit, okay, that's a difference. But the guy shoots his mouth off and gets dead, that's the same."