He was bleary-eyed and unshaven and happier than he'd been for as long as he could remember. There was ink in the folds of his knuckles, and he'd written something that maybe could matter. He felt like a newspaperman again.
Not that most people got excited about his banner headline: "A Russian Mafia on Duval Street???"
Who cared? Not the tourists, as long as the sun was still hot, the beer cold and the music loud. And even the locals, glutted with malfeasance, weary of greed and scandal, mostly shrugged and snorted. More crooks; a next wave of carpetbaggers. What else was new?
In certain places, though, the Frigate's special edition was very major news. One of those places was the T-shirt shop, at the back of which Sam Katz was being held.
The young man who opened the store at nine a.m. had found the papers leaning up against the door. He picked them up as he undid the double locks. He did not read English very well and he didn't care for reading anyway. He was about to throw the bundle in the trash when the headline caught his eye. "Russian Mafia" he could understand. The headline made him feel momentarily important and he could not suppress a stupid smile.
He went to the back of the store and knocked three times, then twice more after pausing, on the door that led to the stock room.
Tarzan Abramowitz opened up. He'd slept on the cot surrounded by leaning stacks of cardboard boxes, and he was standing in his underwear. Muscles twitched in his legs though his eyes were still narrow with sleep. Scratching his hairy stomach, he took the paper back to his cot and haltingly he read.
Sam Katz watched him read.
Sam's ankles were still taped to the high and backless stool. His spine had gone through several phases of pain, cramping, and fatigue, and by now he had caved into an S-shaped slump that hardly hurt at all. His sunken chest had compressed down onto his old man's little paunch; somewhere along the way he'd wet his pants. He'd known when he was doing it and he didn't care that much; squeamishness was a luxury that only the young and healthy could afford.
Through the night he'd dozed and awakened, dozed and awakened, feverish dreams resolving into no less feverish thoughts. At some point he understood that, no matter what he said or didn't say, his captors had to kill him. Obviously they did. He tried to get his mind around the idea of being killed. It seemed a crazy way to go. Old Jews, if they made it past the years when the driven ones dropped dead at their desks from heart attacks, died of cancer, diabetes. What kind of mishegoss was kidnapping and murder? Nothing in his life had pointed that way, not that it mattered.
If he could believe in an afterlife he would be quite content. He didn't ask for harp music, wings, nothing like that. He'd only like to be able to look down now and then and see how things were going for his son. Did things work out with Suki? The guest house—did he ever manage to turn it around? Sam wanted to keep track of those things. His own story was over. That was fine, fair enough. It had been an okay story. But it made him sad to leave Aaron's story in the middle.
He watched Tarzan Abramowitz read, wondered vaguely what he was reading.
The young man's hips moved as he read, and he seemed to gain momentum as he went, lips moving faster, thick fingers fumbling to turn the soggy page. After a time he slapped the paper down and climbed into his pants, clamped suspenders to the waistband. He moved toward Sam's stool, but only to make sure the tape was still secure around his ankles and across his mouth.
Then he left, the paper underneath his arm. Sam sat there, slumped and patient, removed already from the world, the bare light bulb shining yellow on his brittle tufts of sparse white hair.
Chapter 48
"You see?" hissed Ivan Cherkassky, pointing at the paper, slapping it. "You see?"
Gennady Markov didn't answer. He'd been roused out from under his satin quilts for this emergency, had barely taken time for coffee. He was still mulling over what he'd been told to read. He tried to settle deeper into Cherkassky's sofa, but the cushions lacked the squishy thickness of his own, and he found that he could not get comfortable. He squirmed.
Cherkassky was perched on the very edge of an austere and narrow chair. His lumpy face was blanched and taut, the lumps were shiny as boils. "Your nephew," he said disgustedly. "With his big mouth and his schwantz for a brain."
Tarzan Abramowitz was doing laps behind the sofa. Without breaking stride he snickered.
"His schwantz," Cherkassky hammered, "what it makes him tell that woman, it brings the FBI."
Markov winced by reflex at his colleague's words but then found to his surprise that they no longer hurt He could say what he wanted about Lazslo; the nerve had died. Caring was finished, and what was left was stubbornness and spite and a pointless insistence on the last word.