Sunburn (29 page)

Me, no record, never done anything worse than playing hookey, I get probation. Lady judge. She says to me, 'Miss Martini, I think you're innocent. I could let you off, but I don't think I'd be doing you a favor. Probation'll give you a reason to think a little harder.' "

"So you fall in with Gino," Arty could not help saying.

Debbi sighed. "Stupid. I know. But it's not like he said, 'Hi, I'm Mafia, wanna go out?' You don't know at first. By the time ya find out, you're a little bit involved—"

Arty touched her hand. "You don't have to go on with this."

She looked down at the place where they were touching. Loss washed over her like clammy water, she felt it far more intensely than before he'd reached for her, when they'd been separate, guarded. "You don't wanna see me anymore," she said. It was not a question.

"I didn't say that."

She looked off at the water. There were no waves, but small ripples collapsed on the shore and made a soft boiling sound against the rocky sand. "Arty, don't do anything against Vincente because of me. Promise. I couldn't live with that. I made mistakes, I'll pay for them."

"But—"

She shushed him with a long finger placed against his lips. "Maybe you should take me home now."

He looked at her. Her face was soft, the big eyes chastened, the mouth pouting with the knowing irony of someone watching a chance go by, a dream become a perfect absence. He looked at her, and for an instant he imagined that what he felt was merely pity; it was his own loss masquerading as compassion. Then he understood with throat-closing clarity that her chance to change her life was his own best chance as well, her winning-through his own best stretch toward the high victory called happiness. He took her face in his hands and kissed her. Her surprised mouth was not ready to be kissed, the pout ripened to passion only slowly. "Home with me?"

She didn't answer for a moment, then nodded a yes against his neck. Buoyant on the wing of second chances, they headed toward the cottage where Gino waited, his pistol in his lap.

"Yeah, I think about dat sometimes," said Bo the philosophic thug. "In a vague kinda way, I mean. Gettin' old. Feelin' useless. Like ya can't do duh things ya useta do, everything's an effort. Mus' be a bitch. What the fuck can ya do about it?"

"Ain't nothin' ya can do about it," said Bert the Shirt. His half-blind shedding dog was in his lap, twitching in and out of sleep. The silent television threw random splats of color around the room.

Bo squirmed, plucked at his trousers, seemed to be trying to rearrange his guts, get his tubing at a different angle. "Like Pretty Boy," he said. "My partner. He don't think about it. He don't think about nothin'. Sometimes I think he's better off. 'Course, he's all fucked up wit' drugs."

Bert nodded.

Bo winced, just slightly; the spasm made the scarred side of his face hike up like a rising curtain. His pants squeaked as he shifted on the vinyl couch, then he said with delicacy, "You'll be OK a coupla minutes, Bert? I gotta go ta duh bat'room."

Certain things the old man could do as well as ever, maybe better. He kept his voice gruff and natural, his long face perfectly composed. "Sure," he said. "I'll do the dishes."

Bo rose, a little gingerly. Bert got up with him and headed for the kitchen.

He put his dog down on the counter, went to the sink, turned on the water as hard as it would go. He counted to ten, then turned and peeked down the narrow hall, saw that the bathroom door was firmly closed.

He left the water running, picked up his dog. He tiptoed to the living room window that gave onto the fire escape. He opened it wide, used his arms to help lift his legs as he stepped stiffly over the sill.

Out on the rusty landing, he tucked the chihuahua under his arm as though it were a football, then launched himself down the skinny metal stairs. He didn't so much run as fly, as in a dream of spiraling downward, giving in with an ecstatic trust to gravity, pivoting with ease around the frigid railings. The skyline wheeled around him as he spun, and in the freezing air the old man felt light, fearless, giddy. He was closer to eighty than to seventy and he was taking it on the lam.

———

Arty Magnus locked his bike to a Christmas palm, then kept a hand on Debbi's back as they walked through the moonlight to his cottage. He ached for a vacation from the hazards and the clamor of the world, a visit to a small safe universe of making love. They kissed once in front of the torn screen door, then he led her over the scuffed, uneven threshold.

"I can't see a thing," she whispered when the door had shut behind them, blotting out the moonlight. The darkness seemed to call for whispering; it was an intimate, caressing darkness, but if it was sanctuary it was also peril. There were edges to walk into, rugs and wires to trip on.

"Don't have to see," Arty whispered back. "I've had this dump so long, I know which floorboards squeak."

He dropped his notebook on the ratty unseen table, then led his new lover through the bedroom doorway. He found the mattress with his knee, leaned down with the slow precision of a blind man, and grabbed the box of wooden matches he kept on his bedside table. He struck one. It flared to life with a rasp, a hiss, an acrid whiff of phosphorus. He reached the match toward a plain white candle glued with wax to a saucer, and that was when they saw the gun pointing at them from the far side of the bed.

They saw the gun before they saw the person holding it; it hovered gray, glinting, disconnected, as rude and stripped of context as a dildo. Next they saw the thick and hairy hand smeared inside its glove, and only after that the damp and slovenly bulk of Gino Delgatto sprawling in the chair.

The assassin clicked on his flashlight, drilled the beam at Arty's face. "Hello, Romeo," he said. He shifted the beacon toward Debbi, thrust it at her loins, her breasts, slashed at her face with the light as though it were a razor. "Hello, you fuckin' whore. Either a you makes a sound, you're dead."

———

Bert d'Ambrosia, in a monogrammed blue shirt without even a sweater over it, puffed and jogged to the corner of Sullivan and Bleecker, then turned west toward the bar where he hoped Pretty Boy would still be drinking, would by now be drunk. He found the place then paused for breath on the freezing sidewalk; wreaths of steam rose from his head. He petted his dog and went inside.

The tavern was crowded, smoky, dizzying after the blast of cold. The jukebox blared, laughter erupted here and there. Bert nestled the chihuahua against his wizened tummy, tried to shield it from the beery crush of bodies. Squinting against the smoke, he found Pretty Boy sitting near the far end of the bar, exactly where he'd been several hours before. But certain things had changed. Alcohol had conquered pills, and now the handsome thug's posture was hulking, his nervous mouth slack and surly. His high hair seemed to be deflating, whorls of it hung greasily over his forehead.

Bert approached his blind side and was right under his chin before he spoke. "Pretty Boy."

The thug looked at him stupidly. Recognition came on slowly, like an old tube radio warming up. He remembered Bert. They'd even had a drink together. But hadn't that been a different day? "Fuck you doin' heah?"

"Bo sent me. We're goin' back ta Florida."

In front of Pretty Boy was a glass with something brown in it. He took a swallow and said, "Wha'?"

"Word came from Messina. Bo's gettin' the car. Gino's business down there, it didn't go right."

Synapses were slowly coming alive in Pretty Boy. Vindication helped them wake up. "Send a boy ta do a man's job," he said. "We shoulda just did the fuckin' thing ourselves."

"Dat's what Bo says too," ventured Bert the Shirt.

"Yeah?" gloated Pretty Boy. "So now Bo says I was right?"

"Yeah. All along. Messina says so too."

"Fuckin' A." The gratified thug went back to his drink.

"Yeah, Bo tol' me all about it. No reason not to now. I said you were right. Thing like dat, ya don't trust it to somebody else."

Pretty Boy drained his drink, gestured with the empty glass. "I said dat from the start."

"Somethin' 'at important."

"Thing is, it didn't have to be that big a deal, we did it my way from the start."

Bert nodded sagely. "De other way, they made it too complicated, people goin' back and fort'."

"Fuckin' A." Pretty Boy lowered his voice a notch, breathed liquor mist in Bert's face. "My way, I tol' 'em, I said first chance we ice the fuckin' writer, and 'at's the end of it. We don't wait. We don't send fuckin' Gino. Am I right?"

Bert the Shirt summoned up a lifetime's practice in the poker face, the voice revealing nothing. "Yeah," he said. "You're right. . . . Listen, Bo's comin' wit' the car. Ya wanna take a leak or somethin' before we staht?"

This struck Pretty Boy as a good idea. He double-checked that his glass was really empty, then woozily slid down from his barstool and lumbered toward the men's room. Bert held his dog like a football and lowered his head like a fullback. He was on the street again in fifteen seconds.

"You don't go off on your own like that," Ben Hawkins said. "It's not the way it's done."

Mark Sutton looked down at his plate and sulked. He thought he'd done a pretty good day's work, deserved a pat on the back and not a scolding. "Ben," he insisted, "I'm telling you, the guy is this close to turning."

"So what? Who is he, the under-boss? He's a journalist, Mark. A civilian. What's he gonna have?"

"We'll never know unless we work him, will we?"

Hawkins didn't answer. The two men were finishing a late dinner in the dim and dreary restaurant at the Gulfside Inn. The senior agent went back to trimming gristle from his steak.

But then Mark Sutton, giving in suddenly to a slow-brewed exasperation, pushed the remains of his own meal away from him and clattered down his silverware. "Dammit Ben, I'm trying to get something done down here, and you—I always heard you're like a legendary agent, but you just sit there; everything I do, you're negative, you shrug it off—"

The unflappable Hawkins looked at him mildly, knife and fork in hand. "Mark," he said, "I shrug it off because a shrug is what it's worth. The Bureau—listen. Half the time, probably less, you're on a case that's really a case. The other half you're covering butt for someone. We're covering Manheim's butt. That's all we're doing. As soon as Carbone got killed, Delgatto became a sideshow. Face it, Mark. You're getting your bowels in an uproar over a goddam sideshow."

"I think you're wrong."

"I know you do. Which is why we're getting to hate each other's guts. But lemme tell you something. You got a hard-on for a great career, but you're exactly the kind of guy that burns out. You know which guys burn out? The guys who can't tell the real cases from the bullshit."

Sutton rocked his bullish neck. "Look, I got time and trouble invested in this guy. I believe that one more squeeze, a little more pressure on the girlfriend thing, we're gonna get something from him. I wanna get in his face again. You don't want me going off alone, come with me. You still think there's nothing there, I'll back off. Fair enough?"

Hawkins chewed a final piece of steak and thought it over. He nodded yes, then gestured for the waitress. The hyperactive Sutton was already halfway out of his chair when Hawkins thwarted him yet again by asking not for the check but for a cup of coffee and a slice of Key lime pie.

On freezing Bleecker Street, Bert the Shirt slid his skinny haunches across the cold upholstery of a yellow cab. "Go toward the Holland Tunnel," he told the driver.

The taxi roared away, the old man hugged his dog. Now and then he swiveled around with an ancient paranoia about being followed. But who would figure he was heading for the tunnel, and not the airport like he'd come? The cab slipped unharassed through the narrow streets of the Village, past jazz clubs, step-down restaurants, transvestite hookers in fake fur on the corners.

On Varick Street, two blocks above the tunnel, Bert spotted a pay phone under a defunct streetlight. "Stop here," he said. "Wait for me a minute."

The old man left the cab door open so he could look in on his dog. He picked up the icy handset and held it to his ear. Steam came off him as he dialed a number in Key West.

The line went silent. Bert shifted his feet, the cold came up through his shoes. Traffic poured by, taillights leaving red streamers in the misty air. After a moment, Vincente's voice said, "Bert."

"Vincente. I can't talk long. I've seen Gino. He's alive, Vincente."

The Godfather sat in Joey's study. Moonlight smeared itself like butter across the glass block wall. He heard the words and instantly began to cry. It was an odd thin sort of crying. No sound went with it, and the feeling behind it was raw but distant, less an emotion than a memory of something that could be recalled but not recaptured.

"But Vincente, listen," Bert went on, "somethin' ain't right. I found 'im at Messina's club. They were tryin' much too hard ta look like friends. Then Gino turns around and says he don't want me goin' home, seein' you, talkin' t'anybody for a while. They kidnap me, like—"

"So how're you callin?" Vincente cut in.

"I got away. I'll tell ya about it sometime. But inna meantime . . . Vincente, listen. Unless I have this very wrong—I hope I'm wrong, believe me—but how it looks ... I think they made him take a contract on your buddy Ahty."

The line went silent. The Godfather held the phone a few inches from his face and didn't so much think as open old passageways to the flow of remorseless and untamed logic that would lead his colleague Aldo Messina to use one irritant to destroy another. Of course that's what he would do.