"Headquarters," said Bert, and gave an indulgent little smile. Sam tended to get carried away. Also, people who lived together came to mimic one another, and Bert just barely noticed that Sam was beginning to talk Brooklyn. "You don't think Markov's place is headquarters?"
Sam tugged his Einstein hair. "How should I know? You're the one says don't trust how it looks."
Don Giovanni started sniffing the ground and moving in a tiny circle, like he was dancing on a beach ball. "I did say that," conceded Bert.
Heightening sun beat down. The dog hunkered into a hopeful, straining squat, tail lifted, sides pumping like a bellows. Sam said, "I think we gotta try again to get to know our neighbor."
The dog squeezed. Its skin sucked in around its ribs like leather on a drying carcass. It crouched down lower, nearly scraping its chapped asshole on the pavement. Nothing happened. Bert said, "We just go barging in his house? I don't see it, Sam."
The two men stood over the clogged chihuahua like doting uncles above a newborn. The dog lifted up its blind eyes toward them. Looking for help? Sympathy? A miracle? Sam said, "An excuse. An excuse is what we need."
The dog made one last push, then gave up, embarrassed and exhausted. Disingenuously, it pretended to kick some dirt on its nonexistent leavings. It panted. Moved to pity, Bert bent low and swept the little creature into his hands.
Sam said, "Dog looks very, very thirsty."
"No he don't," said Bert. "Just tired, disappointed."
Sam glanced off toward the dull gray house with the snazzy blue Camaro in the driveway. "Thirsty is what I'm saying. I'm saying he needs some water right away."
Chapter 41
At the Mangrove Arms, daylight quelled the ancient fear of a night that stuck forever in the groove, but did nothing to dispel the uneasy riddles of the gently roughed-up office, the mute puddles of unfinished wine.
The woman who did the breakfast had put hot muffins on a table near the pool, had rolled out the urn of coffee and the pitchers of juice. Now she was back in the kitchen, cleaning up—and cleaning up more slowly than she needed to, because a voice was telling her she shouldn't leave. Something wasn't right. Aaron was always up by now, making lists, looking for a hammer, losing his coffee in odd places as he bustled around.
His bustling was important, thought the breakfast woman; it somehow neutralized the sort of ghosts that lived in old hotels, that took the form of molds and mildews and creaking doors but whose true substance was failure and sorrow and heartbreaks past remedy. Aaron's bustling subdued those ghosts, shamed them into silence. Without his activity, they clamored, hummed, and the woman who did the breakfast didn't like the sound at all.
So she stood at the sink and made bustling noises of her own, washing mixing bowls and muffin tins. Water rang on metal and she didn't hear the footsteps coming up behind her.
She scoured, she rinsed; the steps grew nearer until, less by hearing than by some vaguer sense of closeness, she became aware of them and swiveled. Her breath caught, her fingers sprang open, a muffin tin clattered to the floor.
"Jeez," she said, "you scared me."
"Sorry," Aaron said.
She looked at him. She was the sort of person who noticed odd details she couldn't always put into words. She noticed that Aaron's arms seemed longer because his shoulders had dropped down farther from his ears. His eyes seemed farther apart because his forehead was less crinkled. She said, "Hey, what happened here last night?"
Aaron blinked at her, had to suppress an unbecoming adolescent grin. He didn't see that it was any of her business. He said, "Excuse me?" He poured himself a cup of coffee.
"The office," said the woman who did the breakfast.
"Office?" He went to look.
He stood mystified before the mess—the toppled plants, the tossed papers just dense enough to grab the eye. A weirdly considerate malice seemed to have been at work; or perhaps the invasion was at bottom a message. Aaron righted the pots, noted the mean damage to his beautiful varnished counter—and only then remembered last night's sharp insistent ringing of the front desk bell.
By reflex he'd started getting up from the settee to answer it. Suki's arms and eyes had sought to hold him where he was. For a heartbeat he was unsure what he should do. But by his next breath several things had been not so much decided as finally understood. They were lovers and had been for a while. The tardy act of making love would be not the initiation, but an unhurried catching-up, a celebration of what already was; and there was nothing in the world important enough to delay that celebration further.
Death itself could be ringing the bell—he didn't have to answer.