Sunburn (24 page)

Pretty Boy leaned in toward the new notebook and started in again. "
Remember the as .. . ast—"

"
Asterisk
," Messina hissed.

"
Asterisk
," parroted Pretty Boy. "Fuck's an asterisk?"

"It's, like, inna sky," said Bo. "A little planet, like."

His partner wasn't listening. "
Asterisk. When in doubt, break the scene
. Look, I don't see where any a dis has ta do wit' Vincente Delgatto, and I don't see where dis guy comes off thinkin' he's a writer. Y'ask me, he comes off like a fuckin' nut. Mosta what he writes, ya can't even make out what he's writin'."

"That's what worries me," said Messina. He put his hand on the stained and moisture-fattened notebook, ran a delicate finger across the page as though it were written in Braille. "Could be some kind of code. Look the way he prints one line, a heading like, then scrawls all this other bullshit underneath it."

"Code, no code, who gives a shit," said Pretty Boy, "long's we got the books?"

"We got the books, yeah," Aldo Messina said. "But so what? The problem with writers is it's hard to stop 'em writing. And we still don't have the writer."

"No fault a mine," said Pretty Boy, a note of whining resentment in his voice. He got up from the table and started pacing, it was like the amphetamines pinched him on the scrotum if he sat still more than a few moments at a time. He went to a pool table where no one ever shot pool and rolled the cue ball off three cushions. "I still say we shoulda clipped 'im. Shit. I'm gettin' frustrated, like. I keep gettin' sent ta do a job, then I don't get ta do the fuckin' job."

"Bo did right," Aldo Messina said with finality.

The philosophic thug modestly lowered his eyes. The table they were sitting at had a gutter for poker chips and change; Bo quietly swept lint into it.

Now Messina started pacing, circled wide of Pretty Boy; they were like planes around an airport. The dour boss made a circuit or two, then moved to the table and sat down again. Next to the stacked up notebooks that had been stolen from Arty Magnus was a small piece of cardboard. He toyed with it; it was a business card. It said Mark J. Sutton, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. It had shaken out of the back of Arty's Rolodex when the thugs had rifled his office.

Pretty Boy watched his boss fondling the card and said, "The fuck's workin' both sides a da street, I say dat's alla more reason—"

"Look," said Bo, "he's workin' wit' the Feds, the Feds are gonna be protecting 'im. He coulda been wired. He coulda had a whaddyacallit, one of those things, they know exactly where he is. We take 'im out, boom, they got us."

"OK, OK," said Pretty Boy. "But inna meantime, the skinny fuck has gotta go."

"Yeah, he does," agreed Messina. "But in the meantime, Bo did right."

This grated on Pretty Boy's nerves. "Bo did right," he said. "Bo did right. So give Bo a fuckin' medal. But there's still this scumbag writer—"

"The situation's a little more complicated than we thought," Messina said. He pursed his lips, furrowed his bleak tense forehead into a map of perfect pessimism. "But hey—isn't that the way fuckin' life is?"

———

Arty Magnus had not had time or inclination to straighten up his trashed bedroom. A lamp still lay on the floor and seemed to be groping after its shade, like a man who had lost his hat. Dresser drawers still stood half open; shirt and sweater sleeves hung out at urgent angles, waving mutely, frantically, for help.

The ghostwriter was sprawled across his bed now, his head and his ankle up on pillows, a bag of ice hanging down on both sides of his foot like a cocker spaniel's ears. He lay there and he thought. He thought about Debbi: the shock of finding her face next to his, the salt taste of her mouth. His hands, however briefly, had held her jawbone, his fingers reached behind her ears; such intimacy, felt fresh, was astonishing, uncanny. He closed his eyes and imagined he was her lover.

The idyll didn't last long. It was shattered by other preoccupations, by thoughts and worries ruder than slaps and as frightening as a scream in the night. Someone was after Arty. After him. It was an odd phrase, primitive; it suggested a ritual hunt, a ceaseless stalking. Which was precisely how Arty felt: like his steps were being dogged, his range of movement shrinking. He was running out of room, and Key West, this tiny island that had never seemed too small before, suddenly felt confining as a rowboat and as devoid of hiding places.

He lay there on his bed. A mild breeze puffed through the screens, moonlight dusted the tangled foliage outside. He remembered when he'd agreed to become the Godfather's ghost, the earnest charade he'd gone through, telling himself he was free to say no. He should have said no, he knew that now; probably he'd known it all along. Yet regret was strangely absent from the mix of fear and anger he was feeling. He'd known from the start there'd be some crazy thrall to this business of harboring someone else's story, some lunatic pull into the mad logic and morbid righteousness of gangsters. He'd accepted the danger, in a distant, abstract sort of way, and he'd expected a strict and brittle fairness in return. Vincente's eyes had promised him that, had led him to believe he was entering a realm where justice was severe but simple, ruthless but unerring, a realm where, if you told the truth, and kept up your end of the bargain, you would be safe. What had gone wrong?

He thought. He had no answers, but he had suspicions that started off as vapors then took on human shape, like evil genies, and the more he thought the madder he got. He was surprised at his own grit when, around ten-thirty, he called Joey Goldman and said they had to talk, right now, at his cottage, and to bring along Vincente.

"Giovanni," said Bert the Shirt, "what the hell are we doin' here?"

The chihuahua looked up from its ashtray-ful of dog food mixed with flaxseed. It blinked its enormous eyes that were milky with cataracts, then went back to its tardy dinner.

Bert got up from the foot of the hotel bed and strolled over to the window. Down the side street, past the darkened theater marquees, he saw the lights and billboards of Times Square. A gigantic ad for color film showed a ski jumper flying off the sign and heading skyward; endless news briefs spelled out in bulbs wrapped themselves around an alabaster building. At sidewalk level, dented wire trash cans lay tumbled in the gutters; homeless people hunkered down on slabs of cardboard tucked into doorways; patches of filthy snow survived in places reached by neither sun nor shovel. The retired mobster put his hand on the cold glass; it left a print in frost.

It had not been a good day for Bert the Shirt. After the disaster of Perretti's, he'd had himself driven to the Airline Diner, near La Guardia, a sometime hangout for old family friends. He was discreetly told that Tony Matera hadn't been around in weeks, and Sal Giordano came in occasionally but seemed to be spending more time in the Village. So Bert directed the Haitian cabbie to Manhattan, where he poked his head into a couple of linguine joints, then made inquiries at a
pasticceria
three steps down from the sidewalk on Carmine Street. There he learned with a sinking heart that he'd missed Sal by maybe twenty minutes; he'd been coming in most days for morning coffee— morning, for Sal, commencing around noon.

Bert's cab fare was nearing a hundred twenty dollars by then, and he knew he had caught a cold. He'd caught it at the airport; he knew the precise instant it happened: as he trudged coatless, with a sweaty back, to the taxi line. The cold was under his right shoulder blade; he felt it knotted there, radiating out to chest, throat, stomach. He'd told the driver to head uptown; he wanted to get a hotel room and lie down.

Manhattan hotels did not take dogs, even dogs in carriers, and after being turned down twice, Bert ditched the chihuahua's cage at curbside and held the little creature under his coat; white hairs the length of eyelashes had come off on his mohair suit. He checked into a semidump called the Stafford, was shown to this room, whose water-stained wallpaper was like a foulard tie one wouldn't wear. He'd gotten comfortable, then decided to work the phone.

It was at that point he realized he had no one to call. No wife, no girlfriends. No buddies, no colleagues. No business associates, no people he'd been asked to send regards to. No one. What he felt at realizing this was not loneliness, exactly, but a dislocation so intense that it was itself a kind of death, a numbing transport to a realm of silent shadows, a sphere where there were movements but no events. He felt like he'd outlived all things familiar; he felt like he'd outlived himself, was watching his mortal shell from some great distance.

He was slightly lightheaded; he was probably running a fever. He took a nap, slept too long, woke up around 8
p.m.
Now it was nearly eleven and he was thoroughly disoriented in time as well as place. He stood at the frosty window, looking with recognition but no connection at the narrow slice of nighttime city.

Then he sneezed. It was a racking sneeze that squeezed his chest and burned his eyes, and it was echoed by a tiny sneeze from floor level, a chihuahua sneeze followed by a snort and a shake of droopy whiskers. Dog and master sniffled, crinkled up their noses, and looked earnestly at each other with glazed and rheumy eyes.

Arty was sitting in the middle of his living room, on an ancient vinyl hassock whose splitting seams leaked oily straw. He'd put his bag of ice away; his ankle was just barely swollen, his bare instep faintly discolored with a purplish tinge like that of spoiled meat. "I'm trying to be logical," he was saying. "I'm trying not to be paranoid. But really, what else could it be?"

Neither Joey nor Vincente answered right away. Joey had been perched on the edge of a wicker chair. Now he sprang up and walked the length of a worn hemp rug; his stride took him almost to the ratty table from which the notebooks had been stolen. Vincente sat far back on the rattan settee. He sat very still and barely seemed to be breathing. His black eyes had settled deep into their bony sockets, his brows hung down like mossy eaves to hide them.

"Debbi had no business saying anything," Joey said at last. He said it not to Arty but to his father; it had the flat and basic sound of a family closing ranks, turning its doors and windows inward toward some somber courtyard where visitors were not allowed.

"She
didn't
say anything," Arty protested. "All she did was ask me if—"

He cut himself off, annoyed that he felt pressured to explain, compelled to justify himself. "Look," he resumed, "a few hours ago we thought we were gonna get killed. Will ya cut us a little slack on that?"

There was a silence, a long one. Moonlight turned metallic as it filtered through the screens. A cool breeze carried the smell of damp sand. Arty struggled to reclaim the fragile calm that was the hangover of panic.

"Vincente, Joey, we're all on the same side. Let's not arg—"

"But look what you're askin' us to believe," Joey cut in. His face was taut, the slight cleft in his chin grew deeper, darker.

"Gino told people about the book," insisted Arty. "That's why my place was trashed, that's why my office was rifled. You have a better explanation?"

"Be careful, Arty," Joey said. "What you're saying, it's like an insult—"

"Joey, who you talkin' for?" The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, up from the floor, down from the ceiling. "You talkin' for yourself, Joey? Or d'ya think you're talkin' for me?"

The young man didn't answer, just stared at his father, his teeth clamped tight.

Vincente reached up slowly, stiffly, to straighten a necktie that he wasn't wearing. "G'ahead, Ahty. I'm listening."

The writer leaned forward on his hassock, put his elbows on his knees. "Vincente," he said, "d'you remember, the first time we ever talked, you asked me if I ever spilled a secret? The question, the way you asked it, it scared the shit outa me. But I told you the truth. And it's still the truth."

The Godfather listened in perfect stillness. His skin was drawn and waxy; over his cheekbones the flesh was yellowish and in the hollows it was gray.

"And right at the start," Arty continued, "I told you something too. I told you it was a strange thing about a book, at some point a book becomes a public thing, everybody's property, and no matter who you are, how powerful, you couldn't pick the moment when that happened. You remember that, Vincente?"

The old man nodded almost imperceptibly. He licked his cracked lips but his mouth had no moisture in it; flesh rasped over flesh and no part could comfort any other.

"So what I'm saying now," the ghostwriter went on, "is that our book, the word of it, is out. Why else would someone steal my notebooks? What good are they to anybody?"

The Godfather said nothing. He sat very straight, his hands on his knees; the posture was Egyptian.

"I don't know what's going on with Gino," Arty said. "Debbi didn't tell me anything.
You
told me, Joey—you told me there was a problem in your family, remember? Gino's the problem—for all of us. Am I wrong?"

Arty fell silent. Joey paced. Outside, the wind scratched out island sounds and transported smells of tepid ocean.

Vincente Delgatto was a man who could not be lied to, nor was he capable of closing himself to what was true. He sat there very still, and the truth of Gino's final betrayal seeped through his tissues like swallowed poison. The old man took in a deep breath. It wheezed through his nostrils then came out as a groan. "My son," he said. There was love and bitterness and bafflement and self mockery in the words. He said them again: "My son."

He got up from the couch, tried not to let it show how much he needed to use his arms to help his legs to lift him. He moved slowly toward Arty, his hands extended. Arty rose, and the Godfather took him in his arms, didn't kiss him, but laid his grizzled cheek against the ghostwriter's, did that on both sides. "Ahty," he said, "the trouble I've caused you, fuhguve me, please."

He stepped away, did half a pirouette between the hassock and the sofa, seemed momentarily to have lost the sense of where he was. Then he added, less to Arty than to himself, "I hope to Christ I have the strength to make it right. Joey, I'm tired. Take your father home."