Sunburn Page 2

  "Try Delgatto," Joey said. "Vincente Delgatto."

  "Holy shit," said Magnus.

  Joey lifted an eyebrow. The momentary hardness had gone out of his face, was replaced by a wry look, a little bit self-mocking but tempered by years of settling into the oddness of his beginnings and making a life that by now felt hardly odd at all. "So whaddya think?" he said. " 'Zere a book there?"

  "Jesus Christ," said Magnus.

  "Well, do me a favor," Joey said. "Fuhget we talked about it. It's a very dumb idea."

  "It isn't dumb—"

  "It's impossible. It's against everything the old guy thinks is right. He'd never do it. It's just tavern talk."

  "But—"

  "Nah, I shouldn'ta brought it up. I guess I figured, Hey, you work for the paper, you probably know guys who write books."

  Magnus put his bottle down and twisted it against his soggy coaster. The noise of the bar flooded in on him, surrounded him like puffs of cotton, both buffered him and kept him pinned. "Guys who write books," he said. "Yeah, I know a few."

  3

  "OK, ya don't want religious, fine, it don't have to be religious. But I'm tellin' ya, really, somethin's gotta go there. A birdbath, a Cupid, a fountain, somethin'. The way it is, it's like . . . naked."

  Sandra Dugan nodded, smiled politely, and let her father-in-law continue with his decorating advice. They were standing out on the patio, which was, in feet, somewhat radically austere. An expanse of chalky flagstone gave onto an apron of pale blue tile around the pool; on the far side were clustered a few simple lounges. A modest iron table and chairs hunkered under a broad umbrella. Beyond the flagstones, there was no lawn, just white gravel; palms sprouted wherever there was earth for them to root. Aralia and oleander hedges framed the property, and here and there herbs and flowers sprouted in clay pots that reminded Sandra of the French Riviera, a place she had never been.

  "And ovah heah," the Godfather was saying, "this empty corner, look, ya put a little love seat, ya have a guy build a trellis for ya, better still an arbor, like. Ya put grapes. Beautiful. Ya sit inna love seat, ya look up at grapes. Fabulous."

  Sandra nodded. She wondered if she could possibly explain to Vincente that what she really enjoyed looking at was air. This, for a girl who'd grown up in cramped and cluttered Queens apartments, was the great novelty, the design breakthrough. Air. Not hassocks, drapes, or doilies. Not torch lamps, end tables, or souvenir ashtrays stuffed with crumpled butts. Not weird-shaped glasses with pink spiral stems, not decanters filled with colored water, not radiator covers with little octagons. . . .

  "Or even, like, heah," Vincente said, "when you first come out the house. There's no drama to it, it's boom, all of a sudden you're onna patio. But maybe, some kinda archway like—"

  They heard the front door open.

  "Joey's home," said Sandra.

  "Yeah," said his father, "you'll talk to Joey, you'll decide what kinda statues."

  ———

  Later, in bed, Sandra said, "Joey, I hate to complain, but it's getting to me, it's been almost two weeks, your father is driving me a little bit bananas. "

  Joey swallowed his first impulse, which was to stand up for blood no matter what. Married just short of three years, he still sometimes had to remind himself who his life's true ally was. He exhaled slowly, stroked his wife's short blond hair.

  "I know he means well," she went on, "but he's got this way about him. Like he knows what you want better than you know what you want. He's sweet but he's bossy."

  "Force a habit," Joey said. "He's the Boss."

  "Not in my house, he isn't," Sandra said.

  Joey leaned back on his pillow and pondered this. He knew his wife was right, and it was a breathtaking notion: They were the grownups here, this was their place; they owned it and they ran it. True, the old man might occasionally conduct his coded business on their phone, might now and then commandeer the study to receive an emissary from New York or Miami, but it was still their house, it lay beyond his father's power like an embassy lay beyond the power of the country it was standing in.

  "Joey, try to understand. I just don't like someone telling me I need more furniture. I don't like someone telling me I need a carpet. It's my dining room, I don't want a stupid chandelier—"

  "Sandra," Joey interrupted. "Coupla days, Gino'll be down. "It'll take some a the pressure off."

  Her green eyes glinted a faint silver in the dimness. "Gino? Take the pressure off? That'd be a first."

  Sandra, on a roll, was right again. Had Gino Delgatto, Joey's older, legitimate half-brother, ever in his life made anything easier for anybody? Not that Joey could remember. Gino was a schemer, and not bright enough to keep his scheming simple. He pulled other people in, used them. Last time he'd been in Key West, he'd almost gotten Joey whacked. True, that misbegotten caper had bankrolled Joey in his new, civilian, perfectly legal career—but that hadn't been any thanks to his big brother.

  "I just mean," Joey said, "Pop'll have someone else around, other things to talk about."

  Outside, a light breeze made the palm fronds rattle, moved the thin curtains around the open bedroom windows. Moonlight filtered in. The air smelled of jasmine and cool sand.

  "What kind of other things?" asked Sandra. "Hm?"

  "Gino. Why's he really coming down? He's doing business in Florida again?"

  "Sandra, hey, his mother just died. He wants ta spend some time wit' his father. 'Zat so hard t'understand?"

  Joey didn't say it loudly, didn't get up on an elbow, but there was enough of a rasp in his voice to let Sandra know he shared her qualms about Gino's visit. It let her know, as well, that his restraint was about exhausted, that the reflex to stand up for blood might now be triggered by a single syllable. Sandra simply snuggled up against her husband's shoulder. When a marriage works, it is in no small part because a woman and a man have come to recognize in precise measure when enough has been said.

  But while Sandra had griped and was now serene, Joey was less so. He blinked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath, let it out so it puffed his cheeks. "Sandra," he said, "don'cha know why Pop is askin' ya these things? About carpets, statues, furniture?"

  "He isn't asking me, Joey. He's telling me what—"

  "He wants to buy us something. A housewarming, like. He's tryin'a figure out what you want. ... I know him, Sandra. Innee old days, he woulda took me aside and handed me cash. But money, ya gotta understand, money is a gift but it's also control, a way ta remind ya who ya gotta go to ta get it. Now he's tryin' ta do somethin' different. Somethin' for both of us. For the house. It's like his way a sayin', OK, ya got your own life now."

  There was a silence. Shadows of palm trees played on the bedroom curtains.

  "Now I feel like an ungrateful bitch."

  "Nah, there's no reason for you to feel like that. Pop, he doesn't make it easy. I mean, someone else, he'd just say, 'Hey, I'd like ta get ya somethin',' you'd say 'Thank you,' and that'd be it. Wit' my old man, it's more complicated. His way, I guess he thinks it's more elegant, more dignified. More somethin'. It's like he's talkin' a different language. A language from a different time. T'understand it, I guess ya gotta know 'im a lotta years."

  He paused. He pursed his lips, considered what he'd just explained to Sandra, and realized that he'd also just explained it to himself, but incompletely. He worked his arm under his wife's blond head, then added, "An' ya gotta give 'im the benefit a the doubt. I guess what I'm sayin', ya gotta love 'im."

  4

  The offices of the Key West Sentinel, like everything else about the paper, were shabby, cheap, and disheveled.

  They were located on the second floor of an unhistoric building on a cheesy block of obnoxious Duval Street. To get to them, you squeezed into a corridor between a T-shirt shop and another T-shirt shop, then went up a narrow stairway that not infrequently smelled of urine or of barf. Behind a frosted glass door with flaking letters on it, a suite of tiny rooms snaked away. Dampnes
s lived in the ancient wooden floor, it felt unwholesomely spongy underfoot; light came from egg-box fluorescents that made eyes nervous. Certain privileged cubbyholes had windows, certain privileged windows were equipped with archaic air conditioners. These air conditioners no longer refrigerated; they only dribbled condensation on the rotting floor and threw the same air back at you. Their real value lay in their pulsing, rumbling whine, a strangely restful noise that muted the bad amplified music, unmufflered motorcycles, and drunken cackles from the street.

  It was around eight when Arty Magnus returned from the Eclipse Saloon. No one was working late, because at a paper like the Sentinel no one ever did. He went to his desk, switched on the AC and his obsolete computer, and opened up the bag of pretzels he'd brought for dinner. He hooked into the database, typed in the name delgatto, vincente, and started eating.

  The database went back ten years, and the oldest reference to Delgatto was from The New York Times of December 20, 1985.

  Frankie Scalera, aged boss of the Pugliese family and for a decade the head of the New York Mafia, had recently been rubbed out, and organized crime experts were analyzing the likely shape of the post-Scalera Mob. The new Godfather, it was broadly agreed, was Nino Carti, a preening thug of violent charisma. Carti lacked finesse, but he was young, broad-shouldered, and cocky; he represented, in the words of one FBI source, "the Mob's last best hope to rejuvenate itself." Carti's under-boss would be Tommy Mondello, regarded by Mob watchers as an uninspired choice. Mondello wasn't bright, nor was he showy. One state attorney dismissed him as "a glorified bodyguard" whose main qualification was that he would be no threat to Carti's leadership.

  More interesting, in the experts' view, was the promotion to consigliere of Vincente Delgatto.

  Delgatto was sixty-three at the time—almost two decades older than his new bosses—and there was much conjecture about the meaning of this wide disparity. One investigator saw Delgatto's selection merely as "a sop to the old men" and claimed he would be a figurehead with no real power. Another expert said, however, that while Delgatto's position might indeed be a symbolic one, the symbol was significant; it indicated that the "Sicilian Mob was not ready to abandon altogether its traditions of respect and relative restraint, to sink wholly into the depths of random violence and dog-eat-dog."

  This discussion, in the short term, turned out to be academic, because the Mafia, for the next three years or so, was Nino Carti, period.

  Arty Magnus, his back to the dribbling air conditioner, munched pretzels, skimmed through hundreds of Carti cites, and remembered the cult of personality that had prevailed through the late eighties. Carti made all the decisions; Carti hogged all the headlines. Carti was a one-man show.

  But the flamboyant Godfather's fame was also his undoing. By 1989, the Feds and New York State had put together a blue-ribbon task force whose single mandate was to make an airtight case against this brazen gangster whose continued freedom was a needling embarrassment. "We want him badly," said an unnamed prosecutor, when the 116 count indictment was finally announced. "He's made it so the machine can hardly run without him, and if we put him away, that's our best chance to destroy the entire enterprise."

  Carti told the press, "I wish the suits good luck."

  Then, in early 1991, as the still cocky Godfather was waiting to go on trial, the unthinkable occurred. The Daily News, with its great gift for succinctness, put it best in a front-page headline: mondello rats out carti. The nearly invisible under-boss, picked solely for his dumb and doglike loyalty, had contemplated those counts of murder and extortion in which he was also an accused and cut himself a deal.

  Over the next months, the gambits of prosecutors and defense attorneys dominated the New York local news, but when it became clear that Nino Carti was going away, probably for life, the journalists' attention returned to the Mafia's battered state and uncertain future. The database showed a steeply rising number of references to delgatto, vincente. Arty Magnus ate his pretzels, rubbed his itchy eyes, and delved.

  who's next? asked the Post on September 18, 1991, the day after Nino Carti's sentencing. The gist of the article was that there now existed an unprecedented power vacuum at the top of the Mob. Vincente Delgatto, sixty-nine, was the highest-ranking member of the Pugliese family not in custody, but sources quoted in the article doubted that he would ever see the solemn interfamily ceremony that signaled the coronation of a Godfather. "He's a competent administrator," said one Mob watcher, "but an old man with old ideas who no longer inspires fear. His moment has passed." Warned another expert, "There are four other Mafia families in New York, and if they see this as an opportunity to wrest power from the Puglieses, it won't be pretty."

  But the gang war hinted at in the Post didn't happen—at least not right away—and an article in the Times a couple of weeks later suggested why. Prosecutors were crowing about the broader applications of the RICO case they had built against Carti. Having firmly established the Mafia as "an ongoing criminal enterprise," authorities could now bring charges against anyone who headed that enterprise. Boasted one FBI source, "The way it is now, it's like a shooting gallery. The first duck that pops up is the first duck that gets nailed."

  Given this situation, it became ever clearer that the Mob was floundering. Hierarchies were breaking down; lines of jurisdiction were blurring. And the Mafia's lack of leadership was costing it. sicilians losing ground to chinese gangs in garment district, reported the Times in March of'92. irish toughs flex muscles on the docks, said the Post in April.

  Then, in May, Newsday scooped the competition and surprised the experts by reporting that, at a subdued and formal sit-down at a social club in Queens, Vincente Delgatto, seventy, had in fact been ratified as capo di tutti capi.

  Details of the ceremony were lacking, of course. But the reporter's unnamed source did offer the following analysis: "The Mob needs a boss. Delgatto knows that, everybody knows it. What's unusual, though, is that, typically, bosses have been driven by greed, blood lust, ego. Delgatto seems to be accepting the crown out of duty. It's become a lousy job."

  Taking his cue from this remark, the reporter dubbed the new leader "The Reluctant Godfather."

  Arty Magnus looked up from the screen and said the phrase aloud. His voice sounded a little strange in the empty office. That's good newspaper work, he thought: Get the story first and be the first to put a spin on it. Reluctant Godfather. Smart.

  He blinked, his eyelids felt rough as they ground together and almost stuck, and he realized quite suddenly that he was fried. He looked at his watch; it was nearly midnight.

  He felt suddenly jittery and suddenly depleted: midnight under fluorescent lights with a green computer screen in front of him and nothing but three beers and a bag of pretzels in his skinny gut. He yawned, got up from his desk, and stretched. He switched things off, headed for the door, and on the way downstairs he was laughing at himself for the wise, well-meaning, patronizing way he'd been trying to tell Joey Goldman there was a snowball's chance in hell that his old man had a story.

  The editor unchained his ancient fat-tire bicycle and climbed aboard.

  The Reluctant Godfather. The nickname was still rattling around inside his head, and he added to it another phrase, a private joke, a distorted echo: The Reluctant Writer. He tried to chuckle over that one, but nothing resembling a laugh came out. He pedaled off down Duval Street. Slurred and whiny music still spilled out of mostly empty bars; here and there couples strolled, leaned against each other, purred and giggled. Being tourists, they were trying much too hard to have a good time, there was something bleak about the effort, but Arty Magnus grudgingly acknowledged that maybe, just maybe, they were succeeding. The word reluctant would not let go of him. He rode home tiredly, wondering all the way if maybe he was just a reluctant sort of guy.

  5

  Two days later, a gorgeous Saturday, Gino Delgatto showed up in Joey Goldman's driveway with a bimbo on his arm.

  This should not have been surpr
ising; Gino always traveled with a bimbo, sported one like a Brit carries an umbrella, would have felt as at sea without one as a musician on the road without the comfort of his cello. Certain things about Gino's bimbos varied, others always stayed the same. Hair color might be blond or red or black, but it was always the kind of hair that looked immaculate on beauty parlor day and then got wilder and spikier through the week. Eyes might be any shape and any hue but were always graced with unlikely lashes and surmounted by brows plucked slenderer than anchovies. Chests were always prominent, the rest of the torso seeming to fall back from the boobs as in some trick of exaggerated perspective; hips tended to be slim, buttocks flat, the whole tail section suggesting something of the mermaid.

  Of this particular bimbo, not much could at first be seen. She was wearing big round sunglasses that covered her from the middle of the forehead to below the cheekbone, and a vast sun hat that carried its own eclipse as she moved toward the front door.

  As for Gino, he'd gained some weight he didn't need. His sheeny pants were creased between his beefy thighs from sitting on the plane, he walked like the material was crawling up his ass. He squinted in the sun, or maybe he was smiling; pads of fat crinkled at the corners of his flat black eyes, his full lips spread and the flesh stacked up in his pudgy cheeks.

  It shouldn't have been surprising that he brought a bimbo, but he hadn't said anything about it, and as Joey, Sandra, and Vincente stood there in the doorway, a slight strain on their faces hinted that maybe they were a little bit surprised.

  Sandra thought: His mother just died; he's here to see his father; he's such a jerk.

  Vincente thought: Gino, he's my firstborn; I love him, but he reminds me of the worst and saddest things about myself when I was young.

  Joey thought: My big brother; it kills him that I have a house big enough for him to have a room in; he worked it out so there's no way he can stay here.