Sunburn (17 page)

Arty pricked up his ears; he'd stopped believing it ever would.

"Someone fucks up inna legit world, the legit world decides how ta judge it. Someone fucks up in our world, we decide. We judge hard, very hard, but we judge fair. And we judge accordin' to what we think is right and wrong. What I'm sayin', we don't dodge th' obligation, we don't go runnin' ta lawyers, we don't hide behind robes and flags and fancy words and mumbo jumbo. We judge. And lemme tell ya somethin', Ahty, I ain't braggin', but that takes balls. Someone needs punishing, we don't leave it to a buncha strangers—we punish. We clean our own house; we don't ask for help. Takes nerve."

The old man stabbed the air with his index finger, cleared his throat, and reached for his wine. He took a hurried shallow sip and then continued.

"And this is how it's gotta be. Ya know why, Ahty? Because
gli amici degli amici
, the whole network, like, it's just a big outgrowt' a the family. Ya got a problem in your family, ya run to a cop? Ya think a cop has any fuckin' business nosin' in when it's a question a fa—"

The old man broke off suddenly, the last fragment tailed away in a slow and labored whistling hiss. Arty kept on scratching out his notes, and when he finally looked up he saw Vincente bent and slouching in his chair, as limp as if he had no bones. His eyes were dull and distant, his neck was frail and stringy inside his shirt. Arty had seen him run out of gas before, but never this abruptly; he had no way of knowing that the old man, in his meanderings, had fallen into a thought as into a muddy ditch with chill and fetid water at the bottom.

"Go ahead, Vincente," the ghostwriter coaxed. "What you were saying, it was—"

"It was bullshit," the old man said bitterly. "I don't know what the fuck I'm talkin' about." He picked up his wineglass, twirled it by the stem, put it aside without drinking. He looked past Arty at the blue gleam of the pool, stared off at the dead heavens and seemed to want to be there.

Arty put his pen down, sipped wine, and discreetly observed Vincente in his funk. It made him wonder about the boundaries of a ghostwriter's job. Where did his duties and his privileges begin and end? Should he only listen, or should he probe? Concern himself only with his subject's words, or with his moods, his quirks, his sadnesses? Be a scribe, an employee, or presume to believe that by dint of the affection that comes from paying close attention he could perhaps become a friend?

"Vincente," he said softly, "is there more we wanna talk about?"

The Godfather stared away a moment longer and then just shook his head. Arty had the feeling that he didn't speak because he was afraid that if he spoke he would begin to cry.

"Call it a night then?"

The old man nodded. Arty closed his notebook, then scooted forward in his seat, put his elbows on his bare knees, and said, "Vincente, maybe it isn't the perfect time, but can I tell you something before I go?"

By way of answer, Vincente only cocked his head. There was something resigned and automatic, priest-like, in the gesture. He might be weary, he might be crammed full of evil stuff, but he would listen, it was his job to listen; he would never have the luxury to stop his ears.

"Two guys from the FBI came to my office," Arty said. "They wanted to talk about you."

Vincente raised a finger to a bushy eyebrow, scratched it lightly, nodded. "Thanks for tellin' me, Ahty. Lotta guys, they wouldn'ta had the balls ta tell me."

"Why not?"

The Godfather seemed to find the question amusing. He braced his wrists against the arms of his chair and squirmed to a less forlorn position. "I like you, Ahty," he said. "It's a dumb question, but I like ya for askin' it. Ya really don't know?"

Arty said nothing.

"Lotta guys," Vincente went on, "they'd think it was dangerous if the Feds were on to them and I knew it. They'd think I'd see them as a whaddyacallit, a liability, that I'd doubt them, ya know, be worried that they'd turn on me. . . . That never even occurred to you, did it, Ahty?"

The ghostwriter just shook his head.

"A clear conscience," said the Godfather. He said it wistfully. "Fuckin' amazing. . . . You think the best about people, don't'cha, Ahty?"

The younger man just shrugged.

The Godfather mulled a moment, then said, "Mus' make ya a lousy journalist."

The ghostwriter stood up. It was time to go; he left Vincente with a small gift of candor. "Little secret?" he said. "I am a lousy journalist."

It was snowing in New York, a thin wet snow that was white against the streetlights but turned gray and glassy by the time it squashed itself on the windshields of the cars. From the Verrazano Bridge, the Manhattan skyline was a ghostly smudge. It was the middle of the night. There should have been no traffic, but cars still crawled behind trucks spreading salt and sand between the stanchions; the delay juiced up Pretty Boy's crankiness to the level of psychosis.

"I feel like I got fuckin' curry in my bladder," he said.

"The pills," said Bo. "They're burnin' y'up inside."

"Ya know what's wrong with this fuckin' country?" said Pretty Boy. "Too fuckin' big. Little country, Puerto Rico like, we'd be home already."

"Puerto Rico ain't a country."

"Fuck you too, Bo. I'm sicka you."

On the Brooklyn side they turned off toward the west, following the Belt Parkway as it wound around the crammed, offended shoreline. They exited at Red Hook and slid down steep cobbled streets toward the warehouses and the docks. Disused railroad tracks were everywhere, they arced and looped among the paving stones, standing out like scars. The wet snow made them slick as polished marble, and the Lincoln fishtailed now and then, its rear end whipping crazily. Gino Delgatto, slightly blue and barely conscious, flopped around the trunk like a caught fish in the bottom of a boat.

At the docks, Pretty Boy maneuvered through the narrow opening of a high metal gate and drove to a hangar-like steel building that backed onto the river. He pulled through an open portal to a loading dock, and there, finally, he stopped the car.

He got out, stretched, and opened the trunk. He saw Gino lying curled around the spare tire.

The captive struggled to turn over, his red-rimmed eyes blinking spastically against the sudden light. His arms were still cuffed behind him, his legs were trussed up like a veal. Pretty Boy produced a switchblade and cut the ropes around his thighs and ankles. "Get up, shit-head," he commanded.

But with the bonds removed, Gino's legs were no more mobile than before.

Bo reached down and turned him by the ankles; the stiff body pivoted on its hipbones but stayed in the shape of a chair. Finally the two Fabretti thugs grabbed Gino by the armpits and settled him like a dummy on the lip of the trunk. Pretty Boy yanked the duct tape off his face; it came away with a sound like ripping cloth. Then, for no reason in particular, he backhanded him hard across the cheek and said, "Welcome ta New Yawk."

The blow did Gino good, seemed to aid his circulation. He turned his head a little, tried to point his toes. "Wouldya take the cuffs off?" he asked.

Pretty Boy shrugged and fished the key out of his pocket. Gino's freed hands fell limp at his sides. He had no feeling from the shoulders down.

"We're gonna walk now, Gino," said Bo. "Ya ready ta walk?"

By way of answer, Gino leaned forward on the edge of the trunk, tried to get his feet out under him, and proceeded to keel over onto the cement floor. The floor was very cold; it stank of diesel drippings and the juice of very stale shrimp. He struggled to his knees. The thugs yanked him upright and now, somehow, he was walking between them.

They walked him up a short flight of steps to the level of the loading platform, then through a broad doorway to the main chamber of the warehouse. It was vast, high-ceilinged, dimly lit by bare bulbs; through its silence there seemed to seep a low and ceaseless ringing as the steel sang against its rivets. Boxes of iced seafood—salmon, flounder, lobster tails—were stacked on pallets fifteen feet up; the place smelled of ocean, dust, and damp cardboard. Far away, down a towering aisle of fish, a yellow light gleamed through Venetian blinds in an office window.

Gino trudged that way, still trying to wake up, struggling to reenter the world and reclaim his own skin. Hands, feet, brain—nothing felt like his any more, it was as if he'd already died. And as if other things had died with him: old loyalties, bonds, his last remaining shreds of decency or caring. He'd died and now he'd been slapped back into being, but not quite as a person, simply as a blob of life, a dollop of animate goo driven solely by the sublimely pointless instinct to preserve itself.

Bo knocked on the office window. Someone used the muzzle of a gun to part the blinds for a look; then the door was opened from inside.

Pretty Boy shoved Gino through. In the yellow light the captive saw three men. Two of them were bullnecked bodyguards in pearl-gray suits. The other was Aldo Messina, new boss of the Fabretti family.

He was a thin, gray, doleful man, quietly, methodically ruthless, a planner and a worrier. His concave face seemed hollowed out with fretting, his cheeks pinched in around his gums, his black eyes threw shadows on themselves. He wore a gray turtleneck sweater and stood huddled in a corner near a space heater, rubbing his delicate hands together. The heater's coils put a red glow on his face and made him hard to look at. " 'Lo Gino," he said softly.

" 'Lo, Aldo," said the captive.

Messina raised a delicate finger, a pianist's finger. "First mistake," he said. "It isn't Aldo anymore, Gino. It's Mr. Messina. Got that?"

Gino looked down at the floor and nodded.

Messina approached him and pushed his chin up with a lightly balled fist. "So say it, Gino."

The prisoner hesitated, swallowed. This business of a name—it was a small submission but a bitter one. He tightened his face, pulled back as though the other man's penis were being forced into his mouth. "Mr. Messina."

"Better," said the boss. With a ghoulish slowness, he stepped back, brought his bloodless form nearer to the heat. "So Gino, you've been meddling in our affairs in Florida. That isn't smart, Gino."

"Your old man, Gino, I have to tell you, I really looked up to him. He was a diplomat, a reasonable person. I can't believe he'd pick such a stupid time and a stupid way to try taking something back from us. I take over. I can't show weakness. That's basic. And he tries to grab a union from me? Almost makes me wonder if it was really his idea."

Gino shuffled his feet. He wasn't thinking, exactly; what was going on in his reclaimed brain was something more primitive than that, something like the coded firing of neurons that tells a hunted animal when to zig and when to zag. "My old man, truth is, he ain't sharp like he was, he's losin' it. He's old."

Messina rubbed his hands together near the heater and considered. "Possible," he said. "But Gino, scumbag, what's your excuse?"

Gino sucked some air and realized quite suddenly that the office stank of fish. "I ain't got an excuse," he admitted. "What I got is information."

"That's why you're here instead of at the bottom of the ocean," said Messina.

"Where he fuckin' oughta be," blurted Pretty Boy.

Messina softly told him to shut up. "So Gino, let's have the goods."

The captive reached deep for another spoonful of nerve. "First let's talk about what it's worth."

The boss looked up from the heater; red rays played on his sallow face. He nodded vaguely toward the big thugs in the pearl-gray suits. "Your bargaining position," he said. "It's not worth much."

"I ain't askin' much," said Gino.

Messina kept silent, made the other man bid.

"Absolution, that's all," said Gino. "This whole thing, like it never happened."

A gust of snowy wind made the vast steel warehouse sing around its rivets. "And in return I get some gossip about a book," Messina said.

"It ain't just a book," said Gino. "It's a fuckin' time bomb. It's ten times worse than Valachi, it's worse than any ratout—"

"So who's writing it?"

"We got a deal?"

Quietly, Messina said, "For now."

Gino felt his bowels go liquid. Suddenly he was giddy. He'd schemed, he'd lied, he'd wriggled; the grim concentration of the chase had masked his terror. Now he'd played every card but the last one and he had no idea if it had done him any good at all. "Fuck's that mean?" he whined.

"The water was warmer in Florida, Gino."

The captive swallowed; his saliva tasted of fish and bile. The walls of the office seemed to be tipping in; he had the feeling that the Fabretti thugs were looming over him on every side like brownstones about to topple. He couldn't breathe, and when he tried to get his lips ready to make words, his face contorted into a sickly smirk, the horrid glower of an idiot child doing something cruel and senseless. Yet on the brink of foulest treason, he could not quite summon up the guts to be direct. He smirked, and in a glozing whisper he said, "OK, the book. Ya mean, all this stuff about my old man losin' it, ya still ain't figured it out by now?"

The room went silent save for the insane feint ringing of the metal walls. Then there was the dry sound of Aldo Messina rubbing his hands together in front of the heater. A long moment passed amid the stink of fish and the grainy yellow office light. Finally the boss who had admired Vincente Delgatto said very calmly, "Somebody hit 'im for that. Hit 'im hard."

The thugs in the pearl-gray suits passed a look, deciding who would administer the beating. One of them moved toward Gino and sized him up. He took his time, measured out the distance between his own fist and Gino's gut, and then he walloped him in the soft place underneath the ribs. The blow carried through almost to the backbone. Air popped out of Gino as from a bottle of warm champagne. He doubled over; the thug's jerked knee caught him in the left eye socket and spun him backward. His adversary grabbed him as he twirled; Gino's head bobbed like a buoy in the ocean, but the next punch landed flush on his nose and crushed it. The prisoner stumbled back, and Pretty Boy could not resist the urge to trip him. Falling, Gino slammed his head against the doorframe, then crumpled half sitting on the floor.