Mangrove Squeeze(8)

"And distribution?" Aaron said. He'd never before thought of it as a sexy word.

"They get dropped off at groceries, bookstores," Suki said. "How many end up as rain hats, bike-basket liners? No one has a clue."

"You shouldn't admit that to advertisers," Aaron said.

"Hey," said Suki, "I'm from Jersey. Someone asks me a question, they almost always get an answer."

Aaron hesitated, wished he hadn't. Without momentum he was lost. Fact was, he wasn't very suave, and what nerve he'd ever had with women had in recent times dried up from disuse. Flow was everything; rhythm bypassed fears, made things that were excruciatingly difficult seem in that instant easy, inevitable even. In the last heartbeat that he could possibly have said it, Aaron said, "Then I'll ask you something else. Any chance you can stay for lunch?"

He'd barely finished speaking when he understood that something had gone inscrutably and entirely wrong. Suki's face slammed shut, she hugged her satchel tight against her side. With a hardness that surprised them both, she said, "It's a little early in the day to get hit on."

Wounded, baffled, Aaron said, "Was I hitting on you? I thought I was offering you a bowl of pasta."

Suki looked down, seemed equally confused. She said, "I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that. Except there are so many jerks in this town—"

"And I'm probably just one more of them."

She raised her eyes. "I didn't say that. I don't think it. Look, I have a date for lunch."

"Oh," said Aaron, and for an absurd instant his face clouded with jealousy, was taken over by an impulse from a part of the brain too ancient to learn manners or even common sense.

Suki saw the look, surprised herself by feeling that she wanted to explain. "I don't mean a date date. I'm having lunch with Lazslo."

She said it like it was a name that everyone in town would know. Aaron didn't. Now he couldn't tell if he was jealous because Suki was having lunch with this guy or because apparently he mattered in Key West and Aaron didn't and maybe never would. He said, "Who's Lazslo?"

"You'll know when I know," Suki answered.

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

She looked down at her watch. "I have to go. Listen, what I said, it was just a reflex thing. Don't hold it against me."

Aaron nodded but he felt a sorrow in his stomach, the pointless sorrow that comes from losing something before you ever had it. "And what about the ad?"

"Another time," she said. "Next time."

She turned and headed for the door. Aaron watched her go and listened to her footsteps on the porch. They made a syncopated, shuffling sound, the rhythm of a happy kid skipping.





Chapter 4


That evening, sitting on his deck and watching the early winter dusk go from pink to purple to slate above the flat water of the Gulf, Gennady Markov sipped his frozen vodka and casually announced: "The mayor is a feelthy peeg."

He said it without rancor, without indignation or even mild censure; in fact the mayor's puny venality amused him.

"Feelthy peeg is good," said Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky. He said it without pleasure, even though he was dipping a cracker into a mound of caviar whose grains softly twinkled in the failing light. "With feelthy peeg, nobody looks too close, you know what you must do."

Markov turned to his nephew. Lazslo, dressed in denim, and with a big silver belt buckle between his navel and his groin, was also holding a glass of liquor, but he found it rank and sour, he touched it to his lips but didn't drink.

"He came again today, Luzhka," the older man said. "Always I am surprise. Never I remember how short he is, how his pants fall on his shoes. I always think maybe he is paperboy or something."

Markov laughed. Cherkassky did not. Lazslo made a show of joining in but his thoughts were somewhere else.

His uncle continued. "He say 'Hello, Meester Markov.' I say 'Hello, Meester Mayor.' Then he start in with some crazy nonsense with the stores—how you say, the backsets?—"

"Setbacks," Lazslo put in absently, though he wasn't really listening. He was thinking about his lunch with Suki Sperakis and wondering if there would come a time when she would go to bed with him. Usually, yes or no, he could tell right away, he didn't waste time. A woman liked his car, his clothes, was aroused when he was recognized in places, fawned on. Or not. He could tell. But with this one it was different.

"Setbacks, yes," said Markov. "So many feet from street, so many feet from next guy. Mayor say, 'Is wiolation.' I say, 'Meester Mayor, just tell me what you want.' He say, 'racks on sidewalk, block people walking. Is other wiolation.' I say, 'Meester Mayor, we are not children here. Please, say what you are asking.'"