Scavenger Reef (26 page)

"You want to work for bad wages," the
liberator droned on. "You want to call your bosses Mr. and Mrs.
Anglo while they call you—"

"I call them Augie and Nina," Reuben said.
He said it softly but with a delight that exasperated Natchez. He
turned away from the shadowed mirror and looked at his visitor with
quiet fury.

"Well, you tell Augie and Nina that I'm very
busy just now and I'll call them when I can."

Reuben stood his ground. He glanced around
the poet's apartment. It was dusty, dim, starved for sunlight, air,
and furniture polish. Termite droppings flecked the windowsills,
limestone grit put a dull gray coating on the floors. "I won't," he
said.

"You won't what?" said Natchez.

"I won't tell them that. It is too
important. Do you know where Ray Yates is?"

The poet put his hands on his hips, checked
his posture in the mirror, and took a tone as superior as any rich
Anglo could possibly muster. "What gives you the nerve—"

"I ask you a question," Reuben shot right
back. He wasn't trying to mimic Natchez, but he also put his hands
on his hips, and the effect of the two of them standing there was
faintly ludicrous. "Where is Ray Yates?"

Like most bullies, Roberto Natchez was ready
to cave in at the first sign of real resistance. He dropped his
hands and shrugged. "I don't know."

Reuben considered. He had his answer but it
was an empty answer. He looked down at the floor and wished someone
would wash it.

But now suddenly Natchez seemed eager to
volunteer more information. It galled him to be asked a question to
which he did not know the answer; it galled him to have given in to
this fey little spick who spurned his liberator's message. He was
ready to take out his pique on Ray Yates, who wasn't there to
defend himself. "Ray Yates is a very weak person," he said.

Reuben said nothing, just sucked shallowly
at the fetid heavy air. Natchez glanced sideways, tugged at the
placket of his shirt, and orated.

"He lacks self-discipline. And, like many
people of privileged background, he imagines there will always be
someone to fix things for him. Someone to step in and write a check
or make a phone call to some powerful friend who owes a favor."

Reuben stayed quiet and watched a gekko
slink along a cobwebbed baseboard.

"He gambles," Natchez went on. "Heavily.
Your kind employers—Augie and Nina—they know that? I'll bet they
don't. He's a sneak about it. Even I didn't know how heavily he
gambles until a couple of days ago. He's pathetic."

"Last Friday night he rents a car," Reuben
ventured.

"Yes," said Natchez. "To run away. To hide.
He's in trouble with his loan sharks. A mouse in trouble with the
snakes. He's got to stay in a little hole somewhere until he pays
them off."

"How will he pay?" asked Reuben, but he knew
the answer before he'd finished the question. Natchez, smirking,
lifted a heavy eyebrow toward his single Augie Silver canvas.

"It's so perfect," the poet said. "The mouse
will pay the snakes with the money that some vulture will waste on
a picture by a—"

Reuben interrupted to spare himself the pain
and rage of hearing Augie insulted. "You hate everyone," he
said.

It was not a question. Roberto Natchez did
not bother to deny it. Rather, he straightened his back and
appraised himself in the mirror, took his own measure as arbiter of
all things. "I hate weakness," he said. "I hate fakes. I hate
people who think that by fooling themselves they can fool the
world. I hate—" "You hate Augie?" Reuben asked. Natchez paused,
raised a finger in the manner of a preacher, then elected not to
answer. He attempted a small ironic smile, but it stalled halfway
through the muscles of his face and locked into a death's-head
grimace. Reuben could not help falling back a step. The room
suddenly seemed more suffocatingly close than it had been before,
as if the air itself had melted away and left behind some noxious
residue of stinging dust and the infernal swampy vapors of rotting
vegetation. Reuben swallowed, his mouth tasted vile. With effort,
he tore his eyes away from the poet's evilly contorted lips; he had
to look at something else, anything else. His flitting eyes glanced
at bookshelves, sooty windows, then came to rest on a wire cage
standing end-up in a corner of the room.

The poet's gaze caught up with Reuben's, his
grimace was transfigured to a scowl of diabolic pleasure. "I catch
chickens," he explained. He paused, showed teeth, cinched in the
corners of his eyes. "Then I kill them. I wring their necks."

"For food?"

"For moral exercise."

Reuben blinked, recoiled. He felt shaky on
his feet, he groped for some idea or image that would steady him
and pictured the Silvers' yard, a place of sun and breeze and
smells of living things. "Why should a chicken die—" he began.

The poet cut him off, his scowl leavened but
made no less horrible by the beginnings of a twisted grin. He moved
toward Reuben, herded him to the door to be sure he'd get the last
word in. "The same reason a chicken should live," he said. "No
reason. No damn reason at all."

"Bad news," Claire Steiger said, her voice
weary and clenched as it crackled through the speakerphone. "Lousy
news. Peter Brandenburg smells a journalistic coup. He wants to do
an interview with you, peg it to the auction."

Augie was sitting on the sofa sipping tea
and contentedly perspiring. He'd done a good day's work on the
picture of Fred the parrot, the effort had left him feeling blithe
and light. "Was a time," he said, "you would have opened champagne
on news like that."

His agent ignored him. "He wants to fly down
there in the next day or two. Get the piece done fast, to run next
issue. That means it hits the newsstands Sunday night and goes to
subscribers Monday morning. Which means that by the time the
auction starts at ten o'clock, the whole world knows you're
painting again."

Augie said nothing; it was all the same to
him. Nina paced silently near the phone, concentrating less on her
former boss's words than on her tone. There was something in it
that Nina didn't think she'd ever heard before: a grudging
acknowledgment that maybe she could not control events. At this,
Nina felt a kind of triumph; she was not proud of the feeling, nor
did it surprise her. What did surprise her was the flash of
sympathy she felt as well: Take the ability to control things away
from a person like Claire Steiger, and what was left of her?

"I tried to talk him out of it," the dealer
resumed. "He went on a tear about how the critic has to stand above
commerce and blah, blah, blah. It's not like Peter to get so
righteous, so shrill. It's almost like he's being spiteful."

"Why would he be?" asked Nina.

The agent paused, there was a seething
helplessness in the silence. When she spoke again, something had
snapped, her voice was both whiny and ruthless. It made Nina think
of the terrifying girls she had sometimes seen in city playgrounds,
remorseless girls who would fight harder and dirtier than any boy,
biting and kicking and going after eyes with their fingernails and
never saying uncle.

"He's a bitch," Claire said of Brandenburg,
"and I have no idea what's on his mind. But Augie, I'm asking you
one last time, please don't do this interview. Stall. Sandbag. Do
whatever—"

Nina cut her off. "Claire, there'll be other
paintings, other auctions. Why not think about the long term—"

"For me this is the only one that matters,"
Claire Steiger interrupted in turn.

"But if you're representing Augie's
interests?" said his wife.

"That's just how it is," the agent said.
"Don't ask me to explain."

Nina paced, unappeased and unsatisfied.
"Claire," she pressed, "I think you should explain."

For a moment the humid air seemed to
oscillate, pulled first one way then the other by the tug of wills.
But when the agent spoke again, her position had only hardened, her
tone grown still more steely. "Augie, Nina, there will be serious
consequences, dire consequences, if this auction falls flat."

"Consequences for whom?" pressed Nina.

Some static came through the speakerphone,
but the agent didn't answer. Augie and Nina looked at each other,
their eyes grabbed like only the eyes of longtime mates can do,
affirming for the millionth time a concord much profounder than
mere agreement. "Claire," said Augie, "nothing personal, but your
advice doesn't mean that much to me right now. We'll let you
know."

*

Pants are handy things but they never fit
exactly right.

On thick-built men like Joe Mulvane, they
tend to bind around the thighs, the back seam has an annoying
tendency to crawl between the buttocks. When such men sit and lean
forward, say, against a bar, the waistband of their trousers binds
them in the belly, while at the base of their spines an
unattractive gap appears and seems to tug their shirttails out as
well as to create a natural channel for sweat to pour. A belt
doesn't close the trench in back; it only presents a retaining wall
that bites into the flesh below the navel.

About the only benefit a belt provided a man
like Joe Mulvane was that it gave him a place to hang his
beeper—and most of the time he wished the beeper had never been
invented. He was sitting at the Clove Hitch bar having an
end-of-workday beer with Arty Magnus when the goddamn thing went
off. Conversation died in a wide swath all around them; everyone
had a morbid urge to listen in on the latest carnage when a
homicide cop got beeped. Hogfish Mike Curran did a quick turn with
his rag and mopped up condensation in Mulvane's direction. Even the
gulls and pelicans standing on the nearby pilings fell silent for
the moment. But the message was nothing gruesome. It was Augie
Silver saying simply that he thought the two of them should
talk.

The detective went back to
his beer. A week before the summer solstice, the sun was still
white hot at nearly
6
p.m
. and cold beer seemed God's kindest
gift to sweltering humanity.

Arty Magnus, reluctant journalist, felt a
fleeting impulse to attend to the business of his newspaper. "Augie
Silver," he said. "The slightly famous painter with the dead
parrot."

"Yup," said Mulvane, and left it at
that.

Magnus nipped at his gin. He was a stringy
guy, gangly even, and he liked the heat. He liked extremes. If you
lived someplace hot, let it be hot. Let the streets melt, let
exhausted air conditioners explode. "Joe," he said, "can I ask you
a question?"

Mulvane just looked at him without pulling
his lips very far from his beer.

"Augie Silver—there something going on here
I should know about?"

"That's two questions," said Mulvane. He
sucked the last of his brew and stood up so that the gap closed at
the back of his pants and the cloth blotted the sweat that had rim
down. In all, it was not a pleasant sensation. "I'll see ya later,"
said the cop.

*

"If Yates is in bad hock with his loan
shark," reasoned Mulvane, "that's a big problem for him. He might
rather make it a big problem for you."

"He has paintings," Nina said. "And he
rented a turquoise car."

"But in the meantime," the detective said,
"it's the agent who seems antsier than anybody else."

"She has the most to gain," said Nina. "And
I don't see why she's got this shoot-the-moon attitude about this
one auction."

"And then there's the crazy man," the cop
added to the tally. "The chicken slayer. What's his angle?"

"He is evil," Reuben said.

Mulvane nodded. He knew from evil. "But
there's no money motive?"

"His painting is still on the wall," said
Augie. "Reuben saw it. Besides, mere greed would be too bourgeois
for Robert. He'd have to find a way to make it philosophical."

The four of them were sitting in the
backyard near the pool. The sun had slipped below the level of the
trees, the drooping fronds absorbed the last of the day's
battering, and the dappled air that filtered through seemed no
temperature at all. Fat summer clouds towered here and there. Their
bottoms were lavender, they were voluptuous with swelling curves,
and they roamed the sky like sniffing dogs, deliberating as to
where they'd drop their rain.

Mulvane sipped his beer. He felt suddenly
irritable, out of his depth. Conniving art dealers. Philosophical
poets who choked chickens. Key West was a weird town, and the
weirdness extended even to why and how inhabitants got murdered.
Mulvane wanted to bring the discussion back to more familiar
grass-roots criminality.

"The other people on your list," he said.
"Jimmy Gibbs. You know he once killed a man?"

There was a general recoil, but less so than
there would have been a week ago. People could get used to
anything.

"I knew he'd been in trouble," Augie said.
"I didn't know . . ." His voice faltered, he gestured weakly, he
thought about the time he'd spent on the water and at the Clove
Hitch with the gruff, grumpy, always-bitching-and-moaning Jimmy
Gibbs. Damnit, he enjoyed the guy.

"Was a long time ago," Mulvane said. "Almost
thirty years. And supposedly there were some mitigating
circumstances, maybe he was even justified. But still, there are
people who can kill and people who can't." He raised his beer; the
timing made it seem like some macabre toast to homicide. "So who
else?"

He glanced from face to face and Reuben
piped up. "Meester Pheeps. Who brought the cake."

"Right," said Joe Mulvane. "That excellent
poison cake."

"Come on," said Augie, "he's my oldest
friend. And he isn't selling his paintings."

Mulvane put his glass down on the low iron
table in front of him and glanced at the painter from under his
eyebrows. "How do you know?" he asked.