She wrung her hair, water streamed onto her shoulder. "You're always showing up when I'm at my very worst."
Aaron said, "I don't think you have a very worst."
Suki tried to smile at the compliment but her lips wouldn't budge and, absurdly, the back of her throat closed down.
Aaron pawed the stony ground. "I'm here to bring you home. Do I have to drag you or will you come along?"
Suki tilted her head. Drops of water slapped into the bucket. Looking down, she said, "You don't have to do this."
"Oh yes I do."
She tossed damp hair across her shoulder and searched his sleepy face. After a moment she said, "You slept as bad as I did."
"Maybe worse."
"I'll get my things," she said.
Chapter 24
A couple of mornings later, two old Soviets were brooding in their separate houses on Key Haven, thinking thoughts that wound around each other like strands of oily rope.
Gennady Markov had wriggled higher on his feather pillows and reached out for the cup of coffee that his housekeeper presented. He'd taken a couple of small but noisy sips when he noticed with surprise that, for the first morning in what seemed a long, long time, he didn't have a headache.
Gingerly he let his eyelids open wider. His mind seemed clear, although it was the illusive clarity that reflects off the bottom of a long hangover—a morbid compromise between his recent grief and rage, and the pathetic geniality of his life before. He felt almost cheerful, with the bleak cheer of the nihilist. Somehow, overnight, it had gotten through to him that nothing mattered. Blood and consequences had been drained from life; what was left was, so to speak, schematic. Thrusts and parries. Attacks and defenses. The hellish triumph of laughing last.
Laughing last—God knew that people kept on living for the sake of paltrier satisfactions. Markov thought about it and worked his shoulder blades deeper into the yielding pillows.
At the same moment, Ivan Cherkassky, Markov's only friend and now his mortal enemy, was perching weightlessly on the edge of his sofa, drinking tea and fretting.
With Lazslo dead and Gennady in an ugly sulk, the illicit empire that he managed in Key West seemed, quite suddenly, overwhelmingly complex and burdensome.
There were bribes to dole out, phony immigration papers to distribute. There was the irksome necessity of filling Lazslo's mock-important job. There was a network of informers to monitor—busboys, housekeepers, taxi drivers, clerks. Money in need of laundering kept flowing in; couriers in mirrored sunglasses shuttled here and there among the rogue nations of the world.
Keeping an unwritten record of it all was a staggering task—though that was not the aspect of the business that troubled Cherkassky this morning. He'd been an upper- level bureaucrat under Brezhnev; nothing could throw him in terms of covering a trail. Rather, it was the human element that burdened him—that made him, uncharacteristically, second-guess his wisdom in having Lazslo killed.
Emotions! he thought with disgust. Damned, wretched, ludicrous emotions. All he'd ever wanted from life was rationality and predictability and calm. But emotions always intruded. Not one's own emotions, of course, which were easily enough controlled, but the whims and unreasonableness of others. Now it was Gennady, getting sullen and neurotic over the loss of his misbegotten nephew. His reaction was much more virulent than Cherkassky had imagined; much more virulent than made any sense at all.
Gennady Markov, too, was just then thinking about his murdered ward, and his own reaction to his death. He understood that the real-life Lazslo—the Lazslo whose strong forearm he used to stroke, whose open shirts delighted him—was already fading, becoming shimmery and insubstantial, like a distant ship sliding down the curve of the world. He was ceasing to be a person and becoming little more than a marker in a game.
A game, Markov reflected, that he was losing. Why? He sipped coffee, peered at the dampened light that filtered through the curtains, and tried to recapture a scientific attitude, a set of mind that swept away the nonessentials and cut through to what was crucial. Why was Cherkassky decisive and effective and he himself ridiculous? Why was Cherkassky master of his fate and he himself a victim?
There were a thousand differences between the two of them, of course. But the difference that underlay all others and that determined their relative positions seemed to be precisely this: Cherkassky was capable of killing. He saw his own survival as infinitely more legitimate than the survival of all others, and therefore he put no limits on his actions. That, finally, was his advantage.
It followed, therefore, as logically as a geometric proof, that he, Gennady, if he ever hoped to pull even in this game, must also kill. Moreover, if he wanted not just to equal his old comrade but surpass him, he could do so by killing not through the agency of others, but with his own two hands. The thought terrified and warmed him, he tossed aside his satin sheet.