Cherkassky, thin and rigid on his sofa, moved just slightly to avoid the shifting sun. Yes, he mused, Gennady was taking it stupidly hard. And this was bad, because Gennady still had something that Cherkassky badly needed: expertise in physics. Gennady knew how neutrons would behave, how isotopes would decay, one element into another. He knew how to mix and store and transport the treasure that the two old friends had smuggled out of Russia—sheathed in exotic foils and concealed in the hollowed out innards of a car shipped through Miami—and that represented Cherkassky's ultimate security.
His ultimate security—and yet Gennady Markov, scientist and hysteric, knew how to make it work, while he, Cherkassky, bureaucrat and planner, did not. How had he allowed himself to land in such a grotesquely dependent position? An appalling situation.
An appalling situation, echoed Markov, thinking of his long subservience. But now, with the serene pleasure of someone who has just worked out an elegant equation, he'd found the way to be an equal.
But who should he kill? Sadly, since Cherkassky cared for no one, there was nobody whose demise would wound him as deeply as Lazslo's had hurt him. Then again, Cherkassky being as he was, the most potent poison to be used against him would be not grief but paranoia. Destroy his peace of mind. Commit a murder that he would know, deep down, was in fact a killing aimed at him.
Fine—but who should be the corpse?
Leaning on his feather pillows, Markov looked down at his hands. They were white; they were plump; they were soft. And he could not help admitting something to himself. He was desperate, he was damned, perhaps he was on his way to going mad, but he was still fundamentally a weakling and a coward. Whoever he killed would have to be somebody easy.
Still, picking a victim gave him something to think about, and the act of thinking summoned back the immoderate appetite that had been strangely absent these past few days. He decided on berries and sour cream for breakfast. Eggs to follow. Cinnamon toast alongside. He rang for the housekeeper to bring it.
Unblessed and untroubled by appetite, Ivan Cherkassky shook his head at the absurdity of being hostage to Gennady's expertise. It was a big problem.
Or maybe not. Probably Gennady would come around, put aside his grief and his offense, slide fatly into his old persona as a shallow and gluttonous clown. He lacked the strength to hold a grudge, would be seduced away from sorrow and purpose by every slab of beef or wedge of fragrant Camembert.
Still, it was a nuisance to have to worry about, and Cherkassky sighed as he sat there on his undented sofa. He looked through his window at the frivolous and stupid mint-green house on the other side of the canal, and he marveled at how different life must seem to different people.
The green house was a rental. Sometimes it was empty and sometimes crammed to bursting with vacationers. When the opportunity offered, Cherkassky studied the tourists like an anthropologist among the savages.
They were always laughing, these primitives in pastels and plaids. They laughed when meat caught fire in the barbecue. They laughed as they jumped into the canal wearing fins that made them look like hairy ducks. Their obese children laughed with their mouths full of food, and everybody kept on laughing well into the night.
It was a mystery. Was everything so funny, or did laughing simply take the place of thinking for these people?— these people whose every chuckle revealed an unexamined trust that everything would turn out fine, that life would not betray them. So barbarous and unevolved, that brainless trust. So typically American.
Chapter 25
Suki's room at Mangrove Arms was in a turret that was above the second floor but wasn't quite the third.
It was hexagon-shaped and had a sloping ceiling; triangles of roof came slicing down and met the walls at wavy seams that crazed the paint. The bathroom floor sagged beneath a claw-foot tub that had lost some puzzle pieces of enamel. The white muslin curtains had been worn down to a perfect thinness by years of sun and wind and washing to remove the salt.
The bed was squeaky and soft, and Suki, somewhat to her own befuddlement, slept in it alone.
A peculiar situation. What had brought her to Aaron's place was a weird mix of danger and attraction, decency and need. But survival took precedence over romance, and now that she was here, a polite and caring but ultimately false reticence was taking root between the two of them. Bruised and exhausted, Suki felt unlovely; afraid and under siege, she dreaded the humiliating error of mistaking gratitude for desire.
As for Aaron, he was trying to be gallant, and gallantry meant you couldn't exploit the role of rescuer to win the role of lover. He had offered her a haven, and could not live with the idea of either of them feeling that the offer came with strings.