Sunburn (6 page)

"You're educated," said Vincente. "Bright. Ya don't like it, ya could do other things."

Arty drank some wine. He hazily remembered being told as a child that he had to tell the truth, and as long as he did so he would not be punished. This was one of the disastrous childhood lessons that adults had to unlearn, and in unlearning it grow sad and dead at heart; in the Godfather's rumbling voice and unflinching tunnel eyes was a brutal reassertion of that lesson, a defiant claim that in his small world the rule still held. "Yeah," the guest admitted. "I could."

"Like someone tells ya somethin', confidential like. It's a whaddyacallit, an ethical thing, ya can't tell nobody, right?"

"That's right," said the editor.

The Godfather nodded, considered. Slowly he leaned forward, picked up the wine bottle, and refilled Arty's glass. He poured a splash into his own and raised it in a silent toast. It took him a long time to settle back against his seat, and when he'd done so he fixed the guest from under the ledge of his eyebrows. "So Ahty," he rumbled. "Y'ever tell?"

The editor felt pinned in his chair, felt as though leather straps had suddenly bound his wrists and ankles. He stared down the chute of the Godfather's eyes. He knew absolutely that he was being judged, and yet he had no difficulty with his answer. "No," he said. "Never."

Vincente held the stare a moment longer, seemed to be harboring Arty's words in the deep whorls of his old man's ears, testing them for an echo that might yet prove false. Satisfied, he did not relax his vigilance but redoubled it. There then came one of those dizzying moments that changes everything, that cleaves time once and for all into before and after. The Godfather had been introduced only as Vincente, Gino only as Gino; the weighty name Delgatto had never yet been spoken. The evening had been a charade of innocence, of not saying what was known. Now the Godfather was calling off the farce, bestowing on Arty the flattering and perilous gift of candor.

"My business too," he rasped. "Lotta secrets. All secrets, my business. Lotta things ya don't wanna tell. Lotta things ya wanna tell and can't."

Joey and Sandra came out of the kitchen. Joey carried a tray with an espresso pot and cups and a plate of pignolia cookies. Sandra held an enormous bowl of fruit salad: pineapple, papaya, mango, tangerine. But the little dinner party had got away from them somehow, words and glances had been rerouted; their own dining room seemed strange, as if in their brief absence someone had rearranged the furniture. Coffee was sipped, dessert nibbled, but conversation sputtered, chairs no longer felt comfortable, and it came as a relief when Gino slapped down his cup and said abruptly, "Who wants a cigar?"

Arty Magnus had not smoked a cigar since college. The last one had inflamed his sinuses and given him a two-day case of heartburn. But now he bravely rose with the other men and passed through the wide unadorned doorway to the patio. The moon was bright, you couldn't quite see colors but you could tell the red impatiens from the pink; the air was still, a second moon was floating in the pool.

Gino held a lighter in his fat cupped hands. There was something ancient in the act of sharing the offered flame.

Through the kitchen window, Sandra saw four red points shining through the silver moonlight, the cigar tips of the Godfather, his two unmatching sons, and the nice new fellow who was being drawn into their circle.

"Dog's constipated," said Bert the Shirt.

"Who isn't?" said the Godfather.

They were standing on Smathers Beach in the half hour before the sun went down. Vincente's black shoes and Bert's white sneakers scratched against the nubbly limestone that passed for sand. In the green water, three or four miles from shore, a couple of sailboats were scudding by; farther out, beyond the reef, a shadowy freighter was riding up the Gulf Stream.

But Bert wasn't looking at the water, he was watching his straining chihuahua squatting in the knobby coral. The dog was hunkered down on its hind legs, its back was arched, it was trying so hard to pass a stool that it was quivering all over. Its little white rat's tail was pumping hopefully, the tiny pink button of its asshole was pressing outward like a flower about to open. But nothing happened, and the clogged dog stared up through its milky eyes at its master, seemed to implore an assistance that no mortal being could provide.

"Fuckin' age," said Bert the Shirt. He gave his head a slow shake; his white hair with its glints of bronze and pink caught the sunlight different ways. "Poor dog don't even jerk off no more. Used to be he'd lick 'is balls. Once, twice a week he'd hump a table leg, try ta fuck a squeak toy. Ya know, he showed some zip. Now? Two fuckin' bites a dog food, a heart pill, drops in 'is eyes. His big thrill? He can pee onna rug, I don't yell at him no more. Some fuckin' life, huh?"

Vincente didn't answer. He was looking out at the ghostly freighter, at the tired sun suspended in its slow plunge to the sea. "
Omerta
, Bert," he said. "The honorable silence. Ya think it counts for anything? Ya think it means shit anymore?"

Bert didn't miss a beat. Since his brief death he had trouble staying on track, but making transitions had never been easier for him. "Since that mizzable fuck Valachi spilled his guts? On TV no less? Remember those little black and white sets, big box, little picture, by the time they warmed up the show was over? Ya think about it, what's left to be silent about? Like there's someone out there, he's been in a coma forty years, he don't know there's a Mafia? The movies, the books. Now I read where they're sayin' Edgar Hoover was some kinda nutcase Nazi faggot. Liked ta put a helmet on, have people tie 'im up and call 'im Edna. So who ya gonna believe?"

"Ain't a question a who ya believe," the Godfather said. "It's a question a doin' the right thing."

"Who's arguin'? But Vincente, can we talk heah? You and me, we're old, I mean, speakin' whaddyacallit, figurative, the dog can't shit and we can't lick our balls no more. Least I can't. But hey, one good thing about gettin' old, ya don't have to pretend no more; there's no reason ya can't just lay things out, say, Here it is, take it or leave it, kiss my ass. So like even with this code of honor bullshit—hey, I believed in it, you believe in it, but how many guys really believed in it? It just gave them an excuse—"

"It don't matter," said Vincente, "what the other guys believe."

Bert fell silent. Don Giovanni gave up on a bowel movement. The dog lifted slowly out of its arthritic crouch, kicked weakly at the coral knobs, and was again defeated, failing now to cover a mess it had failed to make. Its pale whiskers hung dejected, its expression was chagrined. "Nah," the Shirt said finally, "I guess it don't."

The sun hit the horizon; its reflection joined with it and gave it the shape of a stubby candle, a squat pillar of flame. The air was the same temperature as skin, if it wasn't for light salty puffs coming off the water, you could forget that it was there. " 'S'pleasant here, ain't it?" said the Godfather. He said it as though he'd just that moment noticed.

"Very."

"Peaceful like. Simple. Makes ya feel like, hey, what's the big deal if an old man says some things, eases his mind?"

Bert the Shirt said nothing, just watched the sun slip into the Straits, savored the small victory of being alive and in that place to see it.

The Godfather said, "So why can't I do it? Why do I feel like there's some nasty fuck out there"— he paused and tapped his scrawny chest—"or maybe inside here, that isn't gonna let me?"

———

The next morning Arty Magnus was sitting at his desk, his back to the dribbling, droning air conditioner, his feet propped comfortably between his telephone and his computer terminal. He was reading that day's
Sentinel
, counting typos, mismatched pronouns, yawning in his soul at the flat gray dullness of the merely factual, the smothering monotony of what was called the news. How was it possible that, in a world so full of nuance, nuance in the paper was as rare as cats that swam, that in a town so full of humor, the paper's occasional attempts at levity fell flat as pounded veal?

Thinking about it made Arty groggy. He got up to fetch another cup of coffee.

On the way back from the dispenser, he decided to hang out awhile by the AP teletype. It was an old machine, archaic, a clunky-looking workhorse on a graceless pedestal, but Arty liked the way it chattered, how it filled up endless rolls of yellow paper with its untiring monologue. For an outfit like the Sentinel, the wire was the only pipeline from the drear world north of mile marker twenty; it carried epochal dispatches from places like the UN, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C., portentous accounts of coups, disasters, the fall of the West, which would then be reduced to fourline items that ran next to the police blotter in the column
other news.

Arty sipped his coffee and watched the yellow paper fill up with ink.

.

.

This one Arty read.

The gist of it was that Emilio Carbone, fifty-nine, boss of the Fabretti family, was midway through a plate of calamari rings at a seafood joint in Sheepshead Bay when three gunmen walked calmly through the swinging kitchen doors and shot him eleven times in the liver and the lungs. Also killed was fifty-six-year-old under-boss Rudy Catini. The restaurant was full but no one seemed to get a good look at the shooters. An FBI expert said that the very public nature of the killings meant one of two things: Either the hit was sanctioned by the other families or it was carried out by a renegade faction whose clear aim was to intimidate. The rubout, stated the source, was "a sign of weakness, not strength, further evidence of the Mafia's desperate condition."

Arty sipped his coffee and wondered if Vincente yet knew. Or if Vincente, for that matter, between planting flowers and pruning shrubbery, between strolling on the beach and eating with his family, had pronounced sentence on Carbone. Who knew what strings the old man pulled, how ruthless he might be, how he really operated? What would it be like, Arty wondered, to pick up the phone like you were ordering a pizza, but instead you ordered someone killed?

He was back in his office when, three quarters of an hour later, Marge Fogarty, the silver-haired copy editor and keeper of the three-button switchboard, called to tell him a man was on the line for him but wouldn't give a name.

Arty put his pencil down. He knew it was the Godfather, knew it with the placid certainty that sometimes tells a batter when a curve is coming, a gambler when an ace is going to fall. He picked up the receiver, saying nothing till he heard the inquisitive Marge drop out of the circuit.

"Hello?"

"Ahty, I wanna talk ta ya. Can ya meet me for a little while?"

The editor, a reluctant sort of person, didn't answer for a moment. He was playing a game with himself. He knew he would say yes, but it dawned on him that he should take the time to wonder if he would say yes of his own free will or if he was already slipping into some sort of nameless perilous thrall. It was important, he felt, to be clear about that now, because the thrall could only deepen with involvement, become an atmosphere, a fact of nature, a gravity you forgot about but that was always tugging. He persuaded himself that he could say no, then said, "Sure."

"The nursery," said the Godfather. "Plants, we both like plants. Whaddya say, we meet at the nursery, have a little talk?"

Arty Magnus locked his old fat-tire bicycle, wiped some sweat off his neck, ran a hand through his damp and frizzy hair.

It was a weekday morning and the nursery wasn't crowded, it had the brisk backstage atmosphere that pertained when only the professionals were around. Here and there workers went by with shears, with trowels, with atomizer bottles. People carried trees, it looked bizarre when all you saw was feet beneath a walking poinciana. Under the bird netting, the light was soft and cool. One quadrant of the yard was being misted; a lavender fog hung over it.

Midway down an aisle of buttonwood and bougainvillea, the Godfather was sitting on a slatted bench. He was wearing a gray suit that was much too warm for the weather; you could see the texture of the wool. Cinched tightly around his shrunken neck was a wide tie of burgundy silk. He sat with great stillness, his veiny spotted hands resting on an ebony walking stick with a scalloped silver knob on top. He saw Arty and lightly patted the bench next to him, a grandfatherly gesture, beckoning a child to sit down, to pass some time with him.

Arty sat. The Godfather slowly waved a hand across the greenery, breathed deeply of the flowers and the peat. "I love this," he said. "Florida changes ya, don't it? I first saw this place, it was too plain for me. Now it's perfect."