Sunburn (18 page)

He was stupefied but not quite out. His eyes had closed but he was conscious enough to taste snot and blood at the back of his throat and to realize he was still alive. It no longer bothered him to be hurt; in some unspeakable way he liked it, it confirmed him. As for being despised, humiliated, loathed, he had sunk to a place where those things lost their sting, he was as indifferent to them as a roach.

He lay there, woozy, playing possum. Amid the maddening ring of the building he picked up scraps of talk, a confusion of gruff voices.
Bullshitting us
, somebody said.
His own father—that fuckin' skunk. . . . Vincente Delgatto, the last guy inna world. . . . But Jesus Christ, with what he knows. . . . Gotta think, gotta think. . . .

Footsteps came toward Gino; Gino didn't budge. The office door was opened, people stepped over his twisted legs. Someone spit on him while going by, and he neither knew nor cared which one of them it was.

Early the next morning, in Key West, Bert d'Ambrosia, wearing a teal-blue suit of weightless Chinese silk, was walking his aged chihuahua on the beach.

Over the Florida Straits, the huge sun was going from orange to yellow as it sliced upward through a wisp of purple cloud; the lightly rippled water was moving from indigo to turquoise on its way to milky green. From moment to moment, the air dried out and warmed, came to feel like day, but underfoot the nubbly coral still held the cool and damp of night: the old man felt the tickling refreshment of it through his sneakers.

He meandered a few yards from the water's edge, and now he watched discreetly as his tiny dog hunkered down to do its business. These last few days, since flaxseed had become a regular part of its diet, the chihuahua's approach to the process was almost blase, and Bert, his relief on the dog's behalf not entirely free of envy, had considered blending a bit of the elixir into his own rations. So far he'd refrained; flaxseed seemed as foreign to his dignity as to his time-honored recipe for meatballs. But as he noted the satisfaction with which Don Giovanni kicked sand and pebbles onto his leavings, as he observed the long-absent lightness in the little creature's step, he felt himself increasingly tempted. The seeds were simmered in olive oil. How bad could they be?

He strolled up the beach and onto the broad promenade that flanked A1A. As was his custom, he sat down on the seawall and watched the early joggers and the power walkers and the roller bladers. They went by in their lime-green shorts, their headbands that made them look like Indians, their humming skates or fancy shoes with waffle bottoms and reflecting tape. Some of them carried little dumbbells; some had tiny radios strapped around their arms like blood-pressure cuffs. Many of them smiled at Bert or waved. They didn't know his name; he didn't know theirs. But for them he was part of the scenery: the old man with the wild shirts and the ancient stiff-legged dog. In his stillness, his predictability, he'd become a feature along their path, like a mailbox or an odd-shaped tree; he took a quiet pleasure from believing that if he was no longer there, some of them would notice, a few would wonder where he was.

He sat there watching, and then one skater caught his eye from perhaps a hundred yards away. He studied her as she approached. She wore a shocking-pink leotard over shiny black bike shorts; she had big boobs that jiggled a bit as she swooped and jerked for balance. Hockey player's knee pads gave an elephantine aspect to her skinny legs; fingerless gloves let her long red nails poke through. Her ankles turned in like the tires of a car with a broken axle, her eyes were fixed on the hard and lacerating pavement, ferocious concentration made her tongue stick out the corner of her mouth.

She was quite close before he realized it was Debbi.

He yelled out a greeting, but she had headphones on and didn't hear. What made her stop was that she recognized Don Giovanni, who was doing an aimless little dance in the shadow of the seawall. She grated to a halt, flapping her arms like a landing pelican, swept the headset off, and said hello. Twin suns shone in her big sunglasses, sweat glistened on her freckled chest.

"Gorgeous morning," said Bert. It was a treat to have someone to chat with, but he didn't want her to feel obligated. He tried to understand younger people, keep up with what seemed to them important. He made a gesture like urging a baby bird to fly. "Hey," he said, "don't let me mess up your workout."

Debbi mopped her forehead, did a little two-step to keep her footing. "Never used, these skates. She bought two pairs, for her and Joey. Joey wouldn't try, said he'd look ridiculous."

Bert thought that in this instance Joey was right, but he kept the opinion to himself. Instead, he said, "Well, first time, you're doin' very good."

Debbi surprised herself by not deflecting the compliment. She smiled, then, very gingerly, she spun halfway around so her back was to the ocean. She put a hand on Bert's shoulder and was lowering herself to sit, when her skates started spinning and she had to kick like a roadrunner to stay even with herself. When she was settled, she heaved a sigh and said, "Ain't easy, Bert. Day one of the clean-out-and-shape-up program."

Bert indulged himself in a prerogative of age. "Your shape looks pretty good ta me," he said.

She shook her head. "Awful truth? I got a mushy behind, my arms are so puny I can hardly open a jelly jar, and if I don't get serious about my pecs, by the time I'm forty I'm gonna be carryin' my chest around in a wheel barrel."

Out of delicacy, Bert looked away. The runners tramped by, the walkers pumped their little dumbbells; morning traffic grew gradually thicker on the road. After a moment he said, "Debbi, how come you're alla time so tough on yourself?"

She reached down and scratched Don Giovanni behind his outsized ears; the dog whimpered softly in appreciation. She didn't seem to want to answer, and Bert thought maybe he'd gotten a little personal for seven-thirty in the morning. He looked for a way to change the subject, then remembered something that allowed him to. "Hey, I thought youse were leavin' already."

As an attempt to lighten things up, the comment failed. Debbi scissored her feet, let her skates scratch on the rough pavement. "We did," she said to the sidewalk. "I'm back."

The sun was getting white by now, it toasted Bert's shoulders through the teal-blue silk. "And Gino?"

Debbi fiddled with her knee pad. "Gino ... I don't really know where Gino is."

This didn't sound quite right, and Bert pondered it a moment. He was interrupted in his pondering by two short toots on a car horn, followed by a shouting of his name.

He looked up to see Ben Hawkins making his daily rounds, driving by very slowly in his Bureau car with tinted glass, sunlight fracturing into starbursts on the lenses of his Ray Bans. The agent gave a delicate little finger-wiggling wave, an insinuating
Remember me
? sort of gesture. Bert waved back in a way that said
Drop dead
. Mark Sutton, crouching on the backseat near the small vent window, balanced his motor-driven camera on a bean bag and, undetected, fired off half a dozen frames of the old mobster sitting there with Debbi.

It was getting hot. The Shirt plucked moistening silk away from his collarbones. Hawkins's pass had succeeded in annoying him. "Little town like this," he said, "island, like, on'y problem is, it don't take much for the place ta feel crowded."

Debbi thought briefly, guiltily, of the pleasure of Gino's absence, and said, "Funny—for me the town feels a lot less crowded all of a sudden." She petted the chihuahua one last time, then put a hand on Bert's shoulder and began the slow and dicey process of rising from the seawall.

She pushed off on a skate and lurched away. Her knees turned inward, her arms flailed for equilibrium, her narrow butt stuck out behind her, seeming not quite part of either legs or torso, a province on its own. She twitched and wobbled as though the earth were moving underneath her, and Bert could not suppress an ungallant image of the old circus trick in which a poodle dances on a beach ball. He watched her till she was lost in the general blur of runners and walkers, and then he reminded himself to wonder just what the hell had become of Gino, what kind of mess he'd blundered into this time.

The forklifts had started in at 6
a.m.

They made a droning, buzzing sound as they wheeled in and out of the tall aisles of boxed seafood; the drone rose to a shrill whine as the forks strained to lift the heavy pallets from the stacks. The engines ran on propane, and the exhaust carried a sweetly nauseating smell, a mix of bakery and farts.

The fumes crept under the door of the office where Gino Delgatto, his ankles tied to the legs of a desk, was trying to get a little sleep on the freezing floor, while the thugs in pearl-gray suits took turns napping in squeaky chairs. The propane exhaust mingled with the baked electric smell of the space heater; there seemed to be no room left for oxygen. The prisoner strained for air; each breath hurt as it whistled through his broken nose. Greenish purple bruises were spreading under both his eyes, the lids were puffy. He dozed off and on as the winter wind slammed in from the river and made the warehouse sing a warped note, like a shaken sheet of tin.

Around eight Aldo Messina returned, along with Pretty Boy and Bo. Bo, freshly shaved, looked uglier than before, the scar along his jawbone buffed to a high luster. Pretty Boy's morning bennies were just kicking in, he was getting antsier by the moment. The three men carried big containers of coffee; they brought coffee for their colleagues in the pearl-gray suits but not for Gino. This was a small thing, but it made the captive want to weep with tender pity for himself. He badly wanted some coffee. And aside from that, being denied what everyone else had, being excluded from the morning ritual—it rubbed his nose in his isolation, made him realize how disconnected he'd become from all things comforting, familiar.

Bo untied the captive's ankles and he got stiffly to his feet. Pretty Boy grabbed his chin and examined the discolored face with the eye of a specialist. Messina moved slowly toward the desk and leaned against it.

Today the boss was wearing a black turtleneck that deepened the funereal gloom of his gaze. He warmed his delicate hands around his coffee cup, huddled over it like a refugee. He took a sip, then got down to business. "Gino," he said calmly, "after careful consideration, after sleeping on it, I've come to the conclusion you're a fuckin' liar. You're going in the river."

After all the bad smells of the last day or so, the aroma of other people's coffee was pushing Gino beyond despair. That and the fear of death made his puffy eyes fill up. "I ain't lyin'," he whined. "How could I make up somethin' like that?"

Messina sipped his coffee. "I thought about that," he said. "I thought you were probably too stupid to make it up. That was a point in your favor." "So—"

"But I've known your father a lotta years," the somber boss continued. "That was a big point against you. Very big point."

The manic Pretty Boy snapped his fingers. "Bottom line, Gino: Kiss your hairy ass goo'bye."

Messina told him to shut up; then there was a pause. Everyone but Gino drank coffee. The forklifts buzzed and the building rang. In his mind, Gino scratched and groped like a cornered mouse, still looking for some gap in the world, some hole in the baseboard, to escape through. "I ain't sayin' take my word for it," he rasped at last. "Check it out."

Pretty Boy's coffee cup had been halfway to his mouth when Gino spoke. Now, instead of drinking, he gave in to a twitch and flung it in the captive's face. The hot liquid stung Gino's eyes; he managed to lap a few sweet drops as they trickled down. Then Pretty Boy grabbed him by the shirt and shook him hard. "Crumbfuck," he said. "Disgusting asshole. Wantin' ta get your own father clipped."

The words bored through Gino's ears like cemetery worms. Somehow, until that moment, he had managed to hide from himself the full monstrousness of his betrayal. He'd been maneuvering, stalling, improvising blindly: Did the fleeing rabbit take time to wonder what was being trampled in its flight? With his tormentor's mitts still on him, Gino squeezed out miserably, "Hey, I never said that. All I said, I said y'oughta stop this book."

Aldo Messina sat in his fretful calm and sipped his coffee. "So what do we do? We break your old man's pencil?"

Pretty Boy backed off. Forklifts droned.

"First sign of a stupid person," Aldo Messina went on. "Know what it is, Gino? No sense of the big picture. It would hurt me to clip your old man, it really would. But OK, say we did it. The upshot? War. The Puglieses—they're not what they were, face it, Gino, but they're gonna sit still while the padrone gets whacked? The Commission—on toppa what happened to my predecessor, they're gonna accept it that now the top guy disappears? War, Gino. And for what? We go to war over a half-ass tip from a little twat like you?"

Gino blinked some coffee from his eyelashes. He took furtive looks at Pretty Boy and Bo and the thugs in the pearl-gray suits. Their hands were clenching and unclenching; they were getting ready for some exercise. The prisoner scratched and groped, and suddenly he thought he saw a crack in the wall, a place that maybe he could wriggle into and be safe. "So OK, yeah," he said. "Just break his pencil."