Mangrove Squeeze(58)

He put his fork down for a moment and looked at Suki's face. Her unlikely blue eyes were toned down to slate gray in the dimness, her lips stayed just slightly parted, as though she herself was speaking, as if listening had a breath and a language of its own. Looking at her, it seemed suddenly to Aaron that it had been a long, long time since he'd really spoken with anyone.

"One thing bugs me, though," he said, refilling both their glasses. "I don't think I ever made her understand."

"Understand?" said Suki. "Or want the same thing you did?"

"Okay, okay, fair enough. But there's one conversation I remember, it still frustrates me no end .. . But wait a second, you don't wanna hear this."

"I do," said Suki. "Really."

"Really? . . . Well ... I guess it was one of those conversations that couples sort of have a thousand times, and then one night they really have it. I said, 'Okay, that little B&B we always talk about, let's go for it, let's do it now.' She looked at me like I was nuts. 'Now?' she said. 'Not now. Much later, when we retire.' 'When's that?' I said. 'Come on, let's leave our jobs, leave Manhattan ...' And she freaked of course, turned the whole thing upside down. 'Why are you so frightened by success?' 'Frightened by success?!' I said. 'I'm frightened, yeah. Wanna know what scares me? What scares me is that I'm barely forty, and I don't want the whole rest of my life to consist of a few dumb things I already know I'm good at. T-bills. Matching my socks to my tie. Which cross-town streets to take. Twenty years from now I know nothing but those same few things? I wanna do some things I'm bad at. Hammer boards and see them crack. Plant shrubs and watch them die... "'

"And she said—?"

Aaron pushed some pasta around his plate. "She told me I was having a midlife crisis."

With a vehemence that surprised them both, Suki said, "Now that's an evil deadly phrase."

Aaron had to smile. "It is, now that you mention it."

Suki got more Mediterranean; her arms came up, her shoulders dimpled as she gestured. "Someone wants to change his life, it must just be a nervous breakdown. Give it a label and stop listening. Otherwise ... otherwise, change might get contagious too, and wouldn't that be terrifying?"

Aaron sipped wine. "You sound like someone who's heard that stuff herself."

"Something like it," Suki said. "A long time ago. You had a midlife crisis. I was a dropout. Same kind of thing, I guess. A tag that's in style to explain away the crazies and the misfits who don't want what other people want. Hey, face it—there's gotta be something wrong with someone who doesn't want a house with a garage and a baby dressed in Gap and the kind of job that gets you frequent- flyer miles."

Aaron said, "So when you left that, was it hard?"

"Leaving Jersey? Hard?! Pfuh. I was a kid. Parts of it were hard, I guess. Hard to tell my folks I wasn't gonna finish college. That was a big deal to them. Slinging all that hash to help with the tuition. The rest? I didn't really have a life yet. What did I have to leave? You—you had a lot."

"Seemed that way at the time," admitted Aaron. He reached up, scratched his neck. He looked at Suki. The kitchen was not romantic. The light was flat and neutral, there were no cut flowers on the table. He said, "But it doesn't matter what you leave. It only matters what you find."

"I'll drink to that," said Suki.

She raised her glass. They clinked. The glasses were not crystal, there was no one to clear away the dishes and leave them staring soulfully at one another. They looked at one another anyway, until Aaron was defeated by her improbable blue eyes and dropped his glance. And if the kitchen hadn't been so unromantic, and if the threat of murderous Russians wasn't looming over their emotions, it might have dawned on them to reflect on how extraordinary it was, how quaint and ripe with promise, that they were sharing a roof and sharing food and telling stories, and weren't lovers yet.





The big school windows of the Island Frigate office had a crisscross pattern of iron bars in front of them, and Tarzan Abramowitz was briefly stymied in his determination to break in.

He stood a moment on the metal landing, his crowbar tapping edgily against his thigh, the strap of a leather satchel paralleling the wide suspender on his shoulder. Above and behind him, the light of a bright orange street lamp was swallowed up by the leaves of a banyan tree; below him the street was quiet. He cursed the windows and worked his crowbar between the door frame and the door.

The process lacked subtlety, but Key West break-ins didn't require a great deal of finesse. Alarms were few; back alleys were many; police response time was on an island schedule. Tarzan got a grip and started prying with his beefy arms. Paint twanged off the jamb, you could see a lot of different colors beneath the present gray. The molding bowed and started breaking free, and then the bar bit deeper, down to where the wood was too sodden and decayed to splinter, but could be scraped away, grated almost, like a raw potato. Abramowitz grunted and squeezed, and when the door fell open the lock was still intact, just not attached to anything.