Sunburn (25 page)

Just before eight the next morning, Debbi Martini, dressed in a purple leotard with black tights underneath it, her neck wrapped in a pink scarf against the early chill, approached the bicycle that Arty had leaned against Joey Goldman's house the evening before and climbed aboard. It was an act of considerable courage.

She'd never owned a bicycle. Many Queens kids didn't. Traffic was dangerous, bikes were easy to steal. She tried to remember the last time she'd been on a bike. She thought it was when she was eleven. She remembered that the sidewalk squares had seemed to slip by dizzyingly fast beneath her and that it felt great when the air flew past her ears. She remembered, too, that she'd forgotten to put her feet down when she stopped, had hovered for a moment till gravity noticed her, then had tipped slowly, almost gracefully, into a scraped and bleeding heap at curbside.

Now she climbed onto Arty's high broad seat, bit her lower lip, and launched herself down the driveway. She felt perilously tall, tall and wobbly as on the top step of a ladder. She reached the street, yanked the handlebars to turn, kicked out a skinny leg for balance, and was on her way to Nassau Lane. Arty had a bum ankle and needed to go to work. The least she could do was bring him his bicycle.

The morning was cloudless; stamped tin roofs gleamed like rubbed coins and threw angled shadows that were so precise they seemed painted on the street. Doves sang on telephone wires; dogs lolled, their paws clicking on the quiet pavements; hibiscus flowers yawned themselves awake. Debbi pedaled and grew more confident, she leaned into turns and let one hand dangle jauntily at her side. She smiled as she rode; the air tickled her gums and she almost let herself imagine that maybe she was on her way to make love with Arty, this tall nice guy who asked her things about herself and remembered what she'd said.

Arty at that moment was placing his coffee mug at the edge of the bathroom sink and stepping gingerly over the low sill into the shower. Random spurts and dribbles spilled out of his corroded showerhead. Some of the water hit his flank, some clattered against the lumpy-painted stall. He soaped his armpits and sleepily hummed.

Debbi skirted the cemetery, its blockish crypts shamed by the life-drenched promise of the morning. Palm fronds swayed and lifted, revealing yellow coconuts clustered close as giant grapes. She bounced down cobblestone lanes patched with tar and recalled the feel of Arty's hands around her face. She pedaled and she teased herself by pretending, just pretending, that maybe she was bold enough to appear at Arty's door and seduce him by the light of day.

Arty was shaving in the shower. There was no mirror; the process was one of memory and guesswork. He fingered his sideburns, traced out where they ended. He stretched his upper lip to trim beneath his nostrils. He craned his neck to shave under his chin; he nicked himself above the Adam's apple and didn't even realize it.

Debbi swooped into Nassau Lane, her red hair blown back from biking, her purple leotard just slightly damp with exercise and adventure. She coasted the last twenty yards to Arty's cottage, then attempted a bravura finish to the ride: Rather than hitting the brakes, she tried to stop herself by hooking a Christmas palm with her elbow as she scudded by. It was like trying to do-si-do a partner made of stone. The front wheel jackknifed as the bicycle pivoted around the tree; Debbi hugged the trunk like a koala to keep from falling.

She took a moment to regain her dignity before going to the damaged door.

Arty was brushing his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror when he heard the knock. He'd put a piece of toilet paper on his cut neck. He'd wrapped a towel around his waist; water was still dripping down his legs. Perhaps he should have felt fear at the approach of an unexpected visitor, but fear was a habit he hadn't yet learned, and the knock did not sound sinister. He rinsed his mouth and headed toward the living room.

They saw each other through the screen.

"Hi," said Debbi, as Arty pushed open the door. "I brought your bike."

Arty was a person who woke up blank, had to reclaim his life slowly every morning. "I forgot it wasn't here," he said. "Come in. Have some coffee."

She put one foot over the threshold, hesitated. "You're not dressed."

He looked down at his towel, noticed he was still holding his toothbrush, remembered he still had toilet paper on his neck. He shrugged. She shrugged and came in anyway.

She followed him through the living room into the narrow kitchen. She looked with rueful understanding at his small coffeemaker that had dripped two humble cups, a bachelor's dose of morning brew. She watched him, the long muscles in his back, as he reached into a high cupboard and produced a chipped blue mug. Her legs were tingling, maybe from the ride; her hands felt cold and electric, perhaps the aftermath of clutching handlebars.

She said, "Arty."

She said it just as he was reaching for the coffeepot. He didn't turn toward her right away, just looked over his shoulder. Then her eyes swiveled him around. He put the cup down on the counter. For a long moment she studied him. His arms and face were tan, his body was surprisingly pale. His chest was smooth except for a little tuft of hair along his breastbone; the tuft glistened, still damp from the shower.

Her hand reached out on its own to touch it.

Arty's arms went around her and pulled her snug against him.

The Godfather woke up from a fitful sleep with a dull headache so evenly diffused across his skull that it seemed it must have been spreading all his life. His temples surged with tiny tides; thumbs seemed to be pressing on his eyeballs. The soft pillow felt cruel against the back of his head; there was grit, corrosion, in the knob at the top of his spine.

He lay awake a long time and let life proceed without him. He'd heard Debbi leave her room and close the door behind her. He heard Joey and Sandra as they went about their morning routines. He heard the sounds a house makes: the whoosh and drips of plumbing, the bells and buzzers of appliances, the inevitable creaks and groans of wood and hinges.

When he was sure that everyone had gone, he arose, put on backless slippers and an old robe of burgundy silk, and shuffled out to the garden. He sat with his back to the sun, let it warm his shoulders.

He thought about his helplessness.

It was a raw line of thought, mean, vulgar, and tactless, and he hated it. Helplessness was what he'd struggled his whole life to avoid, and he used to be able to kid himself he'd done a pretty good job of avoiding it. The helplessness of the poor, the helplessness of the immigrant, the helplessness of the neighborhood schmo without an education—those specters he'd conquered. As a young man, he'd grabbed fiercely, sometimes violently, for the things young men believed could safeguard them from impotence, spare them from humiliation—respect, money, power—and all those things had come to him.

Yet what had he really accomplished except to arrive at a higher, more chastening realm of helplessness? A realm where associates were enemies. A realm where family members schemed, where legal heirs connived like . . . like bastards. A realm where there were no small disappointments, only tragedies. A realm where the final helplessness consisted of being unable to ask for help.

Vincente sat. Sunlight played on the blue water of the pool, breeze shook the mottled leaves of the aralia hedge. He did not believe in sin and retribution, at least he didn't think he did. Still, he could not help feeling that what was happening to him now was some grim comeuppance for unforgiven things done long ago. For the first time in many years the Godfather thought hard and unguardedly about the violence of his youth.

The young Vincente Delgatto had been tough, remorseless—a stringy and quick-handed street guy with a dangling cigarette and a dimpled fedora. He'd intimidated people, grabbed their lapels, thrown them against the hoods of Stutzes and Packards. He'd killed. Twice. Miserable people, loathsome, not worth mourning. Still, they bled, they twitched as they died, their fingers grabbed at empty air, groping blindly for something to hold on to, something to stop their dead slide down to hell.

The Godfather shuddered. Overhead, a flight of ibis went by, a lone osprey circled. Violence. It was appalling, but at least, Vincente reflected, it was not a lie. Believing that violence could be outgrown, put aside—that was the lie, the lie he'd lived by for decades now. He'd told himself that violence had been a tool, a stratagem that set him up, established him, and which he was now in a position to forswear. He could become a diplomat, a peacemaker even, and the violence would seep out of his life, be filtered away by time until the remembered blood ran clear and clean as water.

Only it didn't work that way; he saw that now. Brutality was a virus, once it entered a life it stayed there; it lurked in the organs, it waited with a patient malice, it could take over any time. Vincente sniffed the clement air scented with limestone and chlorine and flowers, and he realized there had never been a moment when his life was not a violent life, that even in the absence of fists and bullets there was the simmering violence of jealousies and grudges, of plots and hatreds, of betrayals and memories that made jagged tearing cuts like rusty knives.

In his top left dresser drawer, back behind his socks and handkerchiefs, the old man kept a gun. It was a thuggish weapon, a snub-nosed .38; he'd had it for many years and never fired it. Suddenly he felt a morbid sniggering compulsion like the sick tug that pulls a former drunk back into the tavern. He wanted to heft the gun, to hold it in his hand. If peace, for him, was sham and pretense, if serenity was something he'd murdered half a century ago, then he might as well embrace the soul and emblem of the violence he realized now he couldn't flee.

He stood up in his robe and slippers, felt the unwholesome excitement of a child left home alone to play with matches or to masturbate. He took a deep breath that did not come easily into his constricted chest; then he padded slowly but with resolve through the sunshine toward the empty house.

Gino Delgatto, being dull, coarse, and sluggish, dealt with captivity better than most.

After four days in the cramped and smelly office of the seafood warehouse, he'd fallen into a numb docility, almost a bestial contentment. His skin was oily under his stubble beard, ingrown hairs put red splotches on his throat, but he didn't really notice. The swelling under his eyes had subsided; his smashed nose, like a failed souffle, had become resigned to its flatness and only hurt now when he sneezed. His clothes were wrinkled and dirty, his underwear foul, his armpits stank, and he didn't much care. Time passed and he was still alive. He played poker with the Fabretti thugs who watched over him in shifts. His captors had started taking pity on him; they brought him egg sandwiches, pizza, gave him bourbon now and again. He slept when he could and listened to the insane ringing of the metal building he was caged in.

On the fifth morning of his imprisonment, something happened that was outside the drab routine: Pretty Boy came storming in, bellied up against him, and backhanded him hard across the cheek. Flesh tore inside his mouth as it was crushed against his teeth.

"Some fuckin' tip we get from you, crumb-fuck," said the thug on speed. "Fuckin' tip coulda fucked us all."

Gino didn't know what he was talking about. He stood there, one eye tearing, waiting for more information or more punishment.

Messina and Bo filed silently in. Bo took the lid off a container of coffee. Messina, wearing a dark gray coat over a dark gray turtleneck, moved slowly to the metal desk and leaned against the edge of it. He frowned, took a fleck of something off his tongue, then said to Gino, "The pencil. The guy that's writing for your father. D'you know he's working with the Feds?"

Gino's survival reflexes had come alive. He made a point of looking even more flabbergasted than in fact he was.

"We checked his office," Messina went on. "Know what we found? FBI business card. Agent Mark J. Sutton, of the so-called elite O.C. squad."

A gust rattled the warehouse, made it sing around its rivets. "I had no idea," Gino whined. "I swear on my mother."

Bo slurped coffee; his manic partner went to the Venetian blind and let his fingernails play its slats as if it were a xylophone. After a moment Messina said, "Gino, you've been causing us a lotta worry. First you worry us about that fuckin' union. Then you worry us about your old man's book. Now you worry us about the Feds. That's a lotta worry, Gino."

The prisoner signaled his remorse by putting on his most hangdog expression and staring at the floor. Messina wrapped the panels of his bulky coat more snugly around himself; worry made him cold.

"So you know what we're gonna do, Gino?" the doleful boss resumed.

Gino didn't know, but he had some ideas. The East River was maybe fifty yards from where he stood; this time of year it was cold enough to stop a person's heart well before he drowned. The captive swallowed, sucked his lower lip, and waited for sentence to be pronounced.

Messina hunched his shoulders and buried his thin chapped hands deeper in the pockets of his coat. He glanced morosely up from under his furrowed brow and said, "We're gonna let you go."

———

"Bert!" said Sal Giordano, sliding bulkily out of his booth at the
pasticceria
on Carmine Street. "Bert the Shirt! Good Christ Almighty!" The loyal Pugliese soldier, his eyes squeezed almost shut with grinning, lumbered around the table, grabbed the old man by the arms, and beamed at him as though he was a dear and long-lost uncle.

It was exactly the kind of exuberant and showy greeting that Bert had hoped to find on his journey north, but it came a day too late. The foreignness of the city, the archaicness of his being there, had already sunk too deeply into him. He felt self-conscious, felt like he was sleepwalking. He managed only a soft hello.

"What brings ya ta New Yawk?" Sal asked him.

By way of answer, Bert glanced quickly toward the empty place where Sal had been sitting.