Sunburn (31 page)

He did not aim. He shot. The gun's report silenced the world. Bugs ceased buzzing, frogs held their baffled breath. The bullet smashed through Gino's ribs, punctured his heart, exited through a small hole in his side.

For a moment the dead man hung suspended. His expression was bewildered, the eyes affronted, blaming, like the eyes of a caught fish. Stiff-legged, he tumbled forward with a splash. Warm water covered him halfway up his thick torso and he instantly began to sink, undiscoverable, into the muck among the mangrove roots.

Starlight rained down. The swamp noises started in again. For a long moment no one moved. Then Joey Goldman went toward his slain half-brother, touched his subsiding form with a mad mix of hate and grief and love and horror. Debbi's shoulders hitched and trembled, though she made no sound. Arty stared at Vincente. The old man looked very thin and brittle in the moonlight, his long gray face still and archaic as a statue. The hand that held the gun hung limp, as if forgotten, disowned, at his side.

Then Arty saw it start to move. It moved slowly, in a lazy, looping, arcing motion that was bringing the muzzle around to the Godfather's ear.

The ghostwriter yanked his feet out of the marl, strained and slogged and lunged to Vincente's side, threw himself against the old man's lifted arm. The gun deafeningly discharged as the two of them went tumbling to the oozing ground.

They lay there together in the muck, salt in their eyes, thunder in their ears, their brains subsumed by a weirdly serene curiosity as to where the bullet had struck. They waited for pain, kept a vigil for injury. Feeling no seep of blood, aware of no wounds opening their flesh to the shallow sea, they slowly pulled themselves out of the mire and stood exhausted in their sodden clothes.

Meanwhile a strange lucidity, the lucidity of disaster, came over Joey Goldman.

He picked up his father's .38, threw it as far as he could throw into the ocean. Then he moved to the Thunderbird, climbed in, drove it chassis deep into the water, wiped the steering wheel and door handles with his handkerchief. The car would be found, he knew, and he knew it didn't matter. Gino had never rented a car in his own name in his life. It was a point of pride with him. Let that be my brother's epitaph, the surviving son reflected bitterly: He never thought he had to pay, and he was always right except for once.

The ride back to Key West was a despondent one, a funeral. No one spoke until they'd left the highway and were on the sleepy streets of Old Town. Then Joey said, "Pop, what you did, you had no choice, we all know that. Arty and Debbi, you saved them."

The Godfather said nothing, sat there blank as death. Streetlamps flicked sporadic light across his ashen face, it was like a sheet was being raised and lowered over him.

On Nassau Lane, Joey stopped. Arty and Debbi slipped out of the Caddy. No one said a word to anybody.

Inside the dark cottage, Ben Hawkins and Mark Sutton heard the vehicle's sudden approach, the opening and closing of doors. They heard the car drive off; then, in the deepened silence, they heard footsteps moving up the path. They struck their marksman's posture, held their pistols in front of them, left hands bracing right wrists.

Depleted, numb, Arty Magnus pushed open his front door, gestured Debbi in ahead of him. They were just across the threshold when Mark Sutton screamed out, "Freeze!"

Arty had thought he was all out of adrenaline, that his burned-out nerves could no longer carry messages of panic. Still, by the kind of ancient stamina that makes a chased deer resilient beyond all reason, he jerked alert again, his hands shot up, his heart hammered.

Ben Hawkins switched on a light, hid his disappointment at finding no kidnapper, no invader, only a terrified and ravaged couple. He appraised them. Debbi Martini's red hair was wild, stalled rivulets of mascara stained her cheeks, her legs were caked with gray muck. Arty Magnus's shorts and shirt were damp and gritty, his neck was streaked with slime. "You look like you've had a rough night," the agent said.

Arty dropped his hands. "It's no business of yours. What the hell are you doing here?"

Mark Sutton had lowered his gun and was leaning against the kitchen doorway. "This is a crime scene," he said. "We have a right to be here."

"What's the crime?" said Arty.

Sutton gestured vaguely toward the yanked-out phone wires. Then Ben Hawkins produced a tatter of pink silk. "Who did this, Miss Martini? Looks like someone who's pretty mad at you."

Debbi pursed her lips. "Maybe I caught it in the fan," she said.

Hawkins frowned. Mark Sutton flexed his muscles against the doorframe.

"Listen," the younger agent said, "someone was here tonight. Someone pulled your phone. You come back looking like you've been through a war. Just what the hell went on?"

Arty and Debbi, side by side, kept silent.

"There's only one person you could be protecting," said Ben Hawkins.

"Only you can't protect him," said Mark Sutton. "You're in too deep for that. You, Magnus, you've done nothing but lie to us. You work for Delgatto; you're his flunky. Under RICO, you're an associate, an associate who lies. And you, Miss Martini, you're in dutch up to your eyeballs. You have a cup of coffee with a criminal, you go to jail. Ever seen a women's jail, Miss Martini? Ever seen the guards?"

Sutton hammered away, and suddenly Arty felt hugely tired, worn down, weary almost past the bounds of caring. Why—by what rule and at what grim cost—was he so stubbornly intent on shielding Vincente? Who was Vincente, this old man whose very existence seemed such an affront to all things lawful and legitimate? Who was this Godfather who had filled Arty with his story, who had become a sort of formidable roommate in his skin? Arty was a law-abiding person and he'd just been witness to a killing. He knew where the subsiding body was, could lead these legitimate men to it. And maybe then—

His musings, and Sutton's tirade, were ended by a stark emphatic gesture from Debbi. She fired out a skinny arm, pointed a long red fingernail at the ratty metal table. "Tour notebook, Arty. It isn't there. These sneaks took it. I'll bet you anything they took it."

Arty looked at the bare place on the tabletop; then he looked at Sutton. The young agent tried to hold his face together, but beneath the skin it crawled like soil shot through with slugs. Arty moved toward the kitchen. Sutton blocked the doorway with his squat hard body.

"Get out of my way, please. I live here."

Sutton shot an imploring glance at Hawkins; Hawkins had no help to give. The muscular agent suddenly looked absurdly young, unripe, a swollen child with a badge. Sulkily, he stepped aside at last.

Arty saw the stained and moisture-fattened notebook on the counter and could not repress a small and cockeyed smile.

"Well," he said. "Well."

Mark Sutton, as if afraid of being cornered, had moved to the middle of the living room. He turned on Arty and said, "Don't think that changes anything. You're still—"

"I think it changes everything," said Arty. "Your fingerprints all over a journalist's private files? It won't look good in the papers, Sutton. First Amendment violation. Harassment. Entry on extremely shaky grounds. They don't like that kind of news in Washington."

"Listen, friend," said Arty. "You say you can make trouble for us. I know I can make trouble for you. You don't, I won't."

Sutton bit his lip, tightened down his muscles. Outside, crickets rasped, breeze made the foliage sizzle. Debbi and Arty locked eyes, the stare was an embrace.

"Take the deal, Mark," Ben Hawkins said at last, and it almost seemed that there was a note of vindication in his voice. "This gets out, trust me, your great career goes right in the shithouse."

A few weeks later, Arty and Debbi, in shorts and T-shirts and grimy sneakers, were silently working in the crammed lush garden in back of Arty's cottage.

It was early March. For human beings, the weather was barely changed from a month before, but for plants it was a different era. Winter things were dying back under the rough kiss of the higher sun. Tender flowers bowed their heads, kitchen herbs turned woody and ran to seed. It was time to trim, to prune, to strip away the things whose time had passed and to open up the light to the oleanders, the allamanda, the thick-skinned beauties that flourished in the steaming orgy of subtropical summer.

But Debbi didn't like to prune. It hurt her to snip off stems that still had green on them, to sever twigs in which the sap still ran. She looked over at Arty, on his hands and knees in a bed of leggy moribund impatiens. It didn't seem to bother him to uproot the dying plants, though she knew how much he loved them. Why didn't it? It had to do, she supposed, with an acceptance of things being lost, a faith that other things, as good or better, would grow up in their place.

She resolved to be more stalwart in her trimming. Still, as if with a mind of their own, her shears kept sliding toward the merest edges of the plants, kept trying to spare a few more leaves. With a secret consternation she looked down at the paltry pile of her cuttings.

Then the air rumbled behind her. Wizened arms came down around her shoulders; spotted ungloved hands wrapped over hers on the handles of the shears, guided the blades down along the helpless stem. Vincente said, "A good gardener can't afford to be so tenderhearted."

She looked over her shoulder at the old man. The sun was behind him, it glared bright yellow at the edge of his unraveling straw hat. He wore his old thick gardening trousers, his rumpled blue work shirt was dampened here and there with sweat, his red bandanna was loosely tied around his neck.

Together, they clipped the branch whose time was over. Then the Godfather whispered, "Debbi, maybe you'd like some iced tea, something. I'd like a little time alone wit' Ahty."

She nodded, shook bits of twig and leaf from her red hair, and headed for the cottage.

Vincente walked slowly to the flower bed, dropped to his knees in the dirt next to his friend. Without a word he started pulling up spent flowers, shaking the rich imported soil off their frizzy roots. "Look the way the sun bleaches 'em out," he said, holding up a yellow stem. "Most things, sun makes 'em darker green. I'll never understand it."

Arty just nodded, gave a little smile, threw another exhausted plant on the pile. Since Gino's death, Vincente had hardly come out of his room at Joey's house, had hardly eaten, hardly spoken. Even now his eyes were distant, glazed, his voice thick and sluggish from disuse; Arty didn't want to push him, wanted to let him return at his own pace to the world of living people.

The Godfather plucked a tortured flower and said, "I'm goin' back ta New Yawk soon, Ahty. That's why I came over, ta tell ya that. I just tol' Bert, now I'm tellin' you."

"How's he doing?" Arty asked.

"Much better," said Vincente. "Gettin' some weight back on." He shook his head. "Pneumonia at his age. Two weeks inna hospital, drivin' everybody crazy sneakin' in the dog. The kinda friend he is, it humbles me, it's the way people oughta be."

Arty churned dirt with long bare fingers. Sunshine burned his neck and sweat trickled down inside his shirt. "New York," he said after a moment. "You really wanna go back?"

The old man took a breath before he answered. "Wit' Messina indicted onna Carbone thing, it's like chaos up there. I feel I got an obligation."

The ghostwriter nodded, wiped a hand on his shorts so he could scratch his neck. He looked sideways at the old man and said, "Vincente, what about our book?"

The Godfather swallowed. His Adam's apple looked painfully large and hard as bone as it rode up and down inside his stringy neck. He started to say something, then just shook his head. He looked away a moment, tried again. "It's no good, Ahty. It's too dangerous."

"Messina's going away," the younger man said. "Who else knows? Who would care?"

Vincente clawed lightly, slowly, at the sunbaked dirt. "Nah," he said, "it isn't really that. It's that . . . Ahty, when we stahted this thing, you and me, I thought I knew somethin', I had somethin' ta say, somethin' worth passin' along. The way it's ended up—" He broke off, absently sculpted a hole in the ground.

Arty kept his hands busy as well, didn't confront the dark tunnels of the Godfather's eyes. "Vincente," he said, "listen. I'm a washout when it comes to writing books, but a couple things I understand. You don't write a book to tell what you know; you write a book to find out what you know."

The old man cocked his head, gazed out hard from under the frayed brim of his straw hat. His lips worked, the hollows of his cheeks pulsed in and out. "I'm gonna miss talkin' wit' you, Ahty. Airin' things out. Gonna miss it." He ran the back of his hand across his forehead. "But now lemme ask you a question."

The Godfather scrabbled in the dirt, gathered up the fuzzy tendrils of a root. "Come on, Ahty. Ya think I don't see? Few weeks ago, Debbi was hardly at the house at all. She was here wit' you. Last weeks or so she's around a lot. Ya have a falling out? Someone havin' second thoughts?"