Mangrove Squeeze(53)

He was heading for the doorway to bring coffee to the waiting customers, when Suki said, "So should I cook or should I make up rooms?"

Finally he heard her, and looked up. Without question she was recuperating well, but she had a ways to go. There was still a heaviness around her eyes, her ravaged neck was still discolored. Aaron said, "Look, you're not indentured labor."

"I'll cook," she said.

"You're here to rest."

"Rest," she said, with breezy contempt. "I work. I'm Greek, I grew up in my father's diner. Plato's."

Aaron said, "I'm not even sure it's a good idea you came downstairs."

Sam Katz said, "Your father's name is Plato?"

"My father's name is George."

"Plato sounds more Greek," Sam said.

"Voila'," said Suki, then stepped toward Aaron and reached out to take the tray. "You go make up the rooms."

"But the guests—"

Suki said, "I've done this job, Aaron. Hostessed. Waitressed. I'll talk to them, tell them what a fabulous time they're gonna have."

"What if someone recognizes—"

She lowered her voice. "These are tourists, Aaron. Tourists don't know diddly. Besides, I'm dead. Remember? Now go make up the rooms."

He hesitated just a moment, leaning so far forward that his toes began to hurt. They were staring at each other across the coffee cups, the milk. He handed her the tray and the two of them went off in opposite directions.

When they'd gone, Sam Katz sat alone in the kitchen and sipped his cooling tea.

He thought about the old country and he smiled. He didn't really remember the old country, not at all, but at some point what pretended to be memory became instead a sense of what was right and fitting; nostalgia as a softer word for morality.

Sam liked it that a man and woman worked together side by side. Helpmates. That old word. Work, and purpose. It was nice, thought Sam, nodding to himself. It was the basis of good things. He finished his tea, fished the wedge of lemon from the bottom of the cup, and puckered up contentedly as he nibbled along the inside of the rind.





Bert the Shirt's mornings tended to be slow and lonely.

He woke up earlier than most people; there was nothing to do and nobody to talk to. In monogrammed pajamas that had grown too large, he wandered around the apartment still cluttered with his dead wife's fancy lamps and gewgaws, and he rationed his activities to fill the time. One by one, he counted out the dog's pills and his own; he counted them again. He made old-fashioned oatmeal, not the instant kind. And he always read the paper thoroughly, from the headlines to the classifieds. This morning he did not like what he saw.

He finished up his cereal, took Don Giovanni for an only partially successful walk on Smathers Beach, then drove down to the Mangrove Arms to strategize.

He gathered everyone around a wire-mesh table in the courtyard, made sure that the hotel guests—arrayed on lounges in their garish bathing suits, their skins already blossoming a pebbly irritated pink—were out of earshot. Then he spread open the paper, pointed. "This here," he said, "it like changes the whole complexion a the thing."

The others read the article.

Suki felt the columns of type sticking in her throat. Her brief sense of belonging here at Mangrove Arms imploded; her belief that she could help now loomed up as fake and selfish. She should not have come; it was reckless and unfair. She'd been foolish to imagine she could dodge the threat against her, and now she was a threat to others, to everyone around her.

Bert's voice snapped her back into the practical. "Wit'out this," he said, "we coulda stood and waited. Pressure was off. Time was on our side."

"And now?" said Suki.

Bert pushed his lips out, stroked his dog. "A job half- done," he said. "That doesn't sit so well wit' guys like this ... I think we gotta get more active like, aggressive."

"Aggressive?" Aaron said. They were two old men, a youngish man who was not tough, and a woman who'd already come close enough to dying. Against a Mafia, just how aggressive were they supposed to be?

"Like learn more what we're up against at least," said Bert. "How they do things. Who's in charge."

Suki said, "The uncle. He's in charge."

Bert's chihuahua was splayed out on the table and the mesh was stamping a waffle pattern in the short fur of its belly. The old mafioso lightly drummed his fingers on the steel. "And how do we know this?" he asked.

Suki started to answer, then realized that all she knew was what she'd heard, and what she'd heard had been rumors passed along by people no less remote than she. The slyness of Bert's question sank in around the table, and suddenly, louder than necessary and off the beat, Sam Katz said, "Aha!"