Sunburn (7 page)

The Godfather stared at him and seemed to be deciding whether he had just been fibbed to. "I think ya do," he rasped, "but OK, it all makes sense. Ya wanna write books, you're scared ta write books, the chance ta write a book jumps up and bites ya innee ass, y'act like ya don't notice. This is why ya still work for a newspaper."

Arty said nothing. If he felt insulted, he'd missed the one clean moment to hit back; after that it would just be whining. He looked off toward the baby palms, felt a sudden ludicrous compassion for their struggle up toward daylight, their wispy nakedness before the wind, their helpless patience with the whims of rain.

"I'm askin' ya to work with me," the Godfather resumed. "Tell my story. Be my whaddyacallit, my ghostwriter."

Arty's feet shuffled in the mulch. A mushroom smell came up from the scratched at earth. His mouth fell open, but all that came out was a strangled aah, a doctor's office sound.

"Fair enough," said the Godfather, and he reached up toward his tie. It could not have been any straighter or any snugger, but he toyed with it anyway, smoothed it down inside his buttoned jacket. He turned a few inches toward the younger man, laid his ebony walking stick across his lap. "Ahty, lemme tell ya a coupla things about how I do business. I don't pressure nobody, I don't get nobody involved that doesn't want to be involved. Ya wanna say no ta me, ya can. No hard feelings. That's the God's honest truth."

Arty looked past the web of brows and wrinkles into the sockets of Vincente's eyes. "I believe it," he said.

Vincente raised a finger. "Believe this too: If we do make a deal, the deal is sacred; it lives as long as we do. Know that. It isn't something you walk away from, some lawyer gets you out of. Any doubts at all, be safe, say no."

Arty's hands were damp, he rubbed them on his pants legs. A man came down the aisle with a hand truck full of poison. The mist went off in one section of the nursery and came on in another; a fresh green smell wafted over from where the watering had started.

"So here's what I'm thinkin'," the Godfather went on. "Five thousan' a month, for as long as it takes. Ya keep your job, it's better that way. The thing is, nobody can know we're doin' this—nobody. 'Cept my sons, I think they got a right ta know. And my friend Bert, he'll figure it out. But no one else. Our secret, Ahty. Y'unnerstand?"

"But a book isn't—"

Vincente fiddled with his tie again. "Nothin' comes out till I'm dead. Which, let's face it, doesn't figure ta be that long. After that, Ahty, y'own it, ya do what ya want." He paused, gave a hissing grunt. " 'Course, if it's like everything else I done in my fuckin' life, it'll turn out no good innee end. But you, maybe you'll make it good, maybe you'll make a fuckin' fortune on it."

A cloud crossed the sun. Under the black mesh net the dappled light went gray and flat, a cool breeze made the baby palm fronds scrape and rattle in their pots.

"Coupla hours," the Godfather said, "I'm flyin' a New Yawk, a week, a month, I don't know for how long. Think it over while I'm gone, will ya do that for me?"

Arty nodded. He reminded himself he could still say no.

Vincente slowly swiveled on the slatted bench to face him, you could see the knobby thinness of his bent leg underneath his woolen pants. "Ahty," he said softly, "I'm like stranglin' inside, I'm like chokin' on shit and bile and secrets and things I think are wrong. What I'm askin' ya, I'm askin' ya ta help me get ridda that shit, y'unnerstand?"

The ghostwriter nodded, swallowed. The sun came back, picked out twenty different kinds of green: waxy, dusty, bluish, silver.

The Godfather turned away, sat facing straight ahead, his hands propped on his walking stick. "Go now," he said. "I wanna sit here a few minutes, smell things, look at people work." He lifted a hand just enough to make a small embracing gesture toward the foliage, the burlap bags, the clay pots stained with wet. "I love it here," he said. "I had my way, I'd spend a lotta time, this is where I'd sit."

Two

12

The Godfather recoiled.

He waved his hands in a fending gesture, leaned far back, and pulled his face away as if shrinking from a bad smell. "Ahty, no," he said. "No tape recorder."

"But Vincente," said Arty Magnus, "it'd make things so much—"

"Ahty, fuhget about it. A tape recorder, believe me, it's like a loaded gun."

Arty Magnus looked down at his switched-off Panasonic. Tiny, cheap, held together with duct tape and powered by batteries no bigger than suppositories, to him it did not look like a deadly weapon. But, he reminded himself, it didn't matter how it looked to him: He was a ghostwriter now; it was his job to see with different eyes, to learn to speak in another person's voice, to describe the contours and the rules and the terrors of someone else's world. "OK, Vincente, no tape recorder."

It was early February. The Godfather had returned to Key West the day before. He'd been in New York about two weeks, during which time the FBI had monitored his movements. But the Bureau's top priority had become the rubout of Emilio Carbone, and nothing had been found to link Vincente to that murder, or to anything else that might make the careers of prosecutors or of agents. Unharassed, he'd chartered himself a plane and flown back down to Florida.

He'd called Arty at his office and just said, Well?

Arty had decided to answer terseness with terseness; he'd made no mention of the hell of ambivalence he'd been living in, no mention of the insomnia, the death of appetite and flight of concentration, the weak-kneed giddiness as of the stroll to the end of the diving board when you know there are two ways down but one of them has come to seem impossibly wimpy. He'd just said, When do we start?

So now it was dusk and they were sitting on Joey Goldman's patio, glasses of wine at their elbows, a plate of olives and celery between them. The smell of chlorine came up from the pool, giving a perky tang to the sweet depleted smells of flowers closing for the night. A dragonfly flew past, its wings glinted a dull silver and in the stillness you could faintly hear their papery buzz.

Arty put his tape recorder back into his canvas bag, spirited it away with a slight embarrassment, as if it were a rejected sex toy. "OK," he said again, producing instead a water-stained notebook with a blue cardboard cover and a ninety-nine-cent pen snugged into the spirals of its binding. "So I'll take notes."

But the Godfather wasn't crazy about that idea either. He reached up to fidget with a tie that wasn't there, scratched his stringy throat instead. "Notes? Ya gotta take notes?"

The ghostwriter choked back exasperation. "Vincente, try to understand. This thing we're doing, it might take a year, two years, it might come out eight hundred pages. I can't remember--"

"My business," Vincente said, "we remembered. Sometimes for decades we remembered."

"I'm sorry," Arty said. "I'm not that smart."

The Godfather paused, sipped some wine, glanced at his new associate's wide-spaced hazel eyes, and wondered if the guy was already being a wiseass; decided no, he was just looking for a way to do his job. Fair enough. The older man made the conciliatory gesture of offering the plate of celery and olives. " 'Course," he admitted, "fuckin' problem was, sometimes different guys remembered different. Then there was a misunderstanding like, somebody got hurt. Notes—maybe notes coulda saved a coupla guys."

Arty didn't push, he ate an olive.

"On'y thing bothers me," Vincente went on, "ya got these notes, they exist like, like evidence. Evidence a what, don't ask me. But say somebody gets ahold of 'em, say some crazy way they get subpoenaed?"

Arty had a pit in his mouth and didn't know what to do with it. He was trying to grasp the dangers in Vincente's world, looked for words to describe the jungle alertness, the unrelenting wartime suspicion that was called for in it. He fished the pit out of his mouth, put it on the edge of the plate, hoped that was the right thing to do. "They can't be subpoenaed," he said. "First amendment. I don't have to give them up; I wouldn't give them up."

"School, they teach ya that at school?" Vincente asked.

Now it was Arty who had to decide if the other man was getting in a dig. Maybe he had sounded a little too Columbia, a little righteous and shrill with untried certitude on that one. He just nodded.

But when the Godfather spoke again, his tone was empty of sarcasm. "I like that, a school that teaches ya not ta bend over, ya don't gotta spread your cheeks just 'cause the fuckin' government . . . What if someone steals 'em?"

"Hm?"

"The notes. Say somebody steals 'em."

Arty groped toward an answer. "My handwriting is so bad," he said, "I have this sort of personal shorthand, used it for years—" He broke off, realizing that his reassurance was beside the point. "Vincente," he ventured, "can I say something here?"

The Godfather made a steeple of his hands and nodded.

Arty leaned low across the metal table. He was wearing khaki shorts, and his bare shins were against the edge of it. "You wanna write a book," he said. "Sooner or later, that becomes a very public thing. A separate thing. Old cliché, it becomes like a child, you can't control it anymore. You see what I'm saying?"

Vincente nodded. He had sons, he knew what it was to watch his offshoots become unruly and at moments unrecognizable.

"So OK," Arty resumed. "Now everything you've been saying, it's with this habit, this obsession, to keep things private. And I think you have to understand that if we do this thing, at some point it's gonna get away from us, it has to, and I don't care who you are, there's no guarantee you can pick the moment when it happens. You sure you wanna chance it?"

Crickets were rasping. From inside the house came the flat ring of tap water spilling into the pasta pot.

Vincente answered the question by going on as if it had never been asked. "Another thing," he said. "The ground rules heah, we gotta get 'em settled. First off, I ain't rattin' anybody out. I ain't takin' bread outa anybody's mouth. What I want, it ain't gossip, it ain't this guy clipped that guy, this other guy drove the car. No. It's the tradition, the reasons. So mostly what I'll talk about is myself. Maybe some other old guys, dead guys. Maybe some guys inna can for life. Which means a lotta things could change inna middle. Ya know, a guy keels over, I can talk about him. A guy gets mercy parole, he's onna street again, we take 'im out. Outa the story, I mean. It's gotta be, ya know, loose."

Arty Magnus had begun to scrawl some things in his notebook. But now he paused to scratch an ear, then left his pen hand suspended in midair. The Godfather regarded him.

"I'm bein' a pain innee ass?" he said.

The ghostwriter felt a quick jolt of that jumpy freedom and was on the brink of answering.

The Godfather spared him by going on. "Ahty, you could tell me. A book, fuck all I know about writin' a book? Am I makin' it impossible?"

Arty Magnus considered. An ever-changing, wildly disorganized, presumably posthumous oral memoir by a paranoid recluse who spoke in coded fragments and whose entire life had been dedicated to covering his traces. Was this impossible? Any more so than the dozen other books he had thought to write and never written? "No," he said. "Not impossible. Just a little difficult."

Vincente made a hissing grunt, picked up a celery spear, pointed it at the other man. "You want out, Ahty? Last time I'm askin'."

Reluctance and thrall stretched the ghostwriter from either end, thinned him out like taffy. In the midst of faint panic, he reminded himself he could still stroll back to the end of the diving board that had the stairs attached. Who, after all, was watching? Who would ever know?

"No," he said. "I don't want out. I said I'd do it, let's do it."

The Godfather smiled. It wasn't much of a smile but it was more of one than Arty had yet seen. The full lips pulled back a little from the long teeth stained with half a century of coffee and red wine, the thin flesh of the grizzled cheeks bunched up into crescent wrinkles. Something eased in his high and narrow shoulders; inside his open collar his neck appeared to seat itself more comfortably in his chest. "So we've stahted," he said.

"Yeah," said Arty, "we've started."

The Godfather's smile didn't broaden but it softened, became the tired, parched, but grateful smile of a man moving past the worst part of a fever. "Ya wrote stuff down."

"A few lines," Arty said.

Vincente nodded. A few lines, nothing really, but something quietly amazing had taken place: his lifelong flow of secrets had been reversed. It was as surprising in its way as a river running backward. "I feel better, Ahty. Thank you."

He produced from nowhere an envelope stuffed with hundred dollar bills and placed it softly on the table next to the dish of celery and olives.

Mark Sutton wore his shirts just a little bit too tight, to show the muscles in his chest. He wore wide ties and put big knots in them to point up the thickness of his neck. He stood now, short legs slightly apart, veins protruding here and there, before Ben Hawkins's desk. "What's the supe wanna see us about?" he asked.

Hawkins was serenely trimming his fingernails, pushing down cuticles with the flat end of the file. He looked up languidly and said, "He wants to chew our ass about Carbone."

"Carbone?" said Sutton. His voice got high, he went into the pinched tenor of the wrongly accused. "Our target's Delgatto. What the hell's Carbone got to do—"

The fastidious Hawkins kept working on his nails. "Mark," he said softly, "how old are you?"

Sutton shuffled his feet and admitted with due shame that he was twenty-seven.