Sunburn Read online

  They all met on the lawn, under the frangipani tree. Gino kissed his father on both cheeks, shook hands with Joey, gave Sandra a hug she didn't want. Then he stood back, glanced up at the sky, and spread his arms in a mock-hearty gesture, the gesture of a lounge comedian telling his audience that life is wonderful now that he's onstage. "Florida," he said. "Beautiful."

  He dropped his hands, folded up the smile. So much for Florida. "Come on, let's go in. I gotta pee like a racehorse."

  He started for the house, then noticed that slightly awkward glances and attempts at greetings were passing between his family and his traveling companion. "Oh yeah," he said, "this is Debbi. You'll like 'er, she's a good kid."

  Inside, Gino trundled off to the bathroom, seeming to make a point of seeing nothing on the way. But Debbi took everything in; she turned her head this direction, that direction, her enormous hat tracking like a radar dish. "This is so nice," she said, looking at the louvered windows, the ceiling fans, the white wicker furniture sparsely arrayed along the pale bare wooden floor. "So airy."

  Sandra decided she liked her.

  "Can I get ya something?" Joey asked. "You guys had lunch?"

  Gino, coming back up the corridor, one hand still fussing with his fly, answered for her. "Nah, nothin', Joey. We just stopped by ta say hello. We gotta go get checked in, have a shower."

  "Where you staying?" Sandra asked.

  Gino welcomed the question, the chance to make it clear that for him there could only be one place. "Flagler House. Oceanfront. The best."

  Sandra and Joey shared a look. The last time Gino had been in Key West, he'd misplaced a fraudulently rented Thunderbird, run up an eleven-thousand dollar tab at Flagler House on someone else's Gold Card, then bolted by water in the middle of the night. But there was a lot of turnover in the hotel business, it was a universe of forgotten faces, and Gino would no doubt have a different piece of plastic and a different name this time.

  "So you'll come have dinner later," the older brother said. "You'll be my guests."

  "We thought we'd all have dinner heah," said Joey.

  "Nah," said Gino, "come on, let Sandra outa the kitchen for a change."

  "We don't cook inna kitchen," Joey said. "I grill out onna patio."

  But Gino hadn't waited for an answer. He was heading for the door. A jolt and a breeze pulsed out behind him, like when a truck slams past on the highway. He blew by Debbi and she started to follow; then she stopped and walked up to Vincente. For the first time she removed her sunglasses. Her eyes were a green that was almost blue, and even though her hair was all up in her hat the old man knew she was a redhead. Joey's mother had been a redhead.

  "Mr. Delgatto," Debbi said, "I just want to tell you I was very sorry to hear about your wife."

  The Godfather took her hand in both of his and shook it warmly. "Thank you, dear, that's nice a ya ta say."

  Gino started up the rented T-Bird. Joey, standing in the doorway, said, "Nice car. The license and the credit card—they match this time?"

  The visitor gave a serene thumbs-up. As soon as the bimbo had got in he floored it in reverse and spit some gravel onto Joey's lawn.

  "Kids," said Vincente. "You never had any, didja, Bert?"

  "Nah," said Bert the Shirt. "My wife. Her insides. Nah."

  "And the girlfriends? No slips wit' the girlfriends?"

  They were on the beach across the road from the Paradiso condo, where Bert lived. They sat in folding chairs and looked out at the ocean. If you had to talk about the past this was the place to do it because the ocean was a wide flat bath of forgiveness and forgetfulness, it took the sharp edges off memories like it did off stones. Here an old man could recall things with acceptance, with affection, and with less pain than he feared would be there.

  "A million years ago," Bert said, "yeah, I had a slip or two wit' girlfriends. But ya know, it wasn't like wit' you and Thelma. I wasn't in love wit' them, they weren't in love wit' me. No one wanted a kid. But ya know somethin', Vincente? Those years, OK, I did what guys did, but the truth is I was much happier home wit' my wife."

  "I wasn't," said the Godfather. "I guess that's a shitty thing to say, Rosa barely cold. Not her fault. She was a good soul, she tried. But happy at home? Nah. Bored stiff at home. The saints, the candles, the sewing kit always out. I envy you, Bert."

  Envy was a hard thing to answer, so Bert the Shirt just looked out at the ocean. The sun was very low, there was just enough haze so you could bear to glance at it, and a gleam like grayish-green aluminum was coming off the water. Absently, Bert stroked the geriatric chihuahua curled up in his lap; short white dog hairs came off on his blue silk shirt shot through with silver threads.

  "Fuckin' dog," he said at last. "Fuckin' Don Giovanni is the closest thing I got ta kids. Just as well. Two-pound piece a crap is so much aggravation, I can't imagine—"

  "Yeah," Vincente cut in. "Wit' kids there's a lotta aggravation. But more'n 'at, there's mystery. Lotta mystery."

  He paused. A skinny cloud slid across the sun, the sun seemed to be dropping through it like a shiny quarter going through a slot.

  "Like my two boys, go figure. Joey—you're right, Bert, I really loved his mother. She's the woman I shoulda spent my life with. But fuck me, I didn't. So Joey wants ta be everything different from what I am. This thing of ours, he wants no part of it— and I don't blame him, it's turned to shit. He's got a terrific wife, he's true to her, it makes him happy. What I'm sayin', everything I've done, everything I am, he wants ta be the opposite."

  Bert petted the dog that weakly quivered in his lap. Vincente had his black shoes on and he was nuzzling the beach with them, like he was secretly wiggling his toes in the coarse coral sand.

  "Then there's Gino," he went on. "Gino thinks he's doin' exactly what I want 'im to, probably thinks he's just like me. But Bert, I gotta tell ya: I look at Gino, I get a pain in my gut. I look inna mirror, wha' do I see? I'm a old man. My skin don't fit, my ears hang down. I'm ugly. Brutto. It don't bother me. I done a lot, I felt a lot, I know how I got to this. I look at Gino, I don't know what I'm lookin' at. He don't think, he don't feel, he took the life that was handed to 'im and never for a second looked outside it. Either he ain't really like me, or I been kiddin' myself a lotta years. Ya see what I'm sayin'?"

  "Yeah, Vincente, yeah," said Bert. "It's like a whaddyacallit, one a them things that cuts both ways, paragram, paragon, somethin' like that. Joey, he ain't like you onna surface, but inna bones, he is. He's got some spine, some independence to 'im. Gino, the surface is there, but you go below it— and wha'? Ya fall tru' the bottom, ya slip out his asshole, I dunno."

  "Bert, hey, he's still my son."

  "Sorry, Vincente. On'y—"

  "And the bitch of it?" the Godfather went on. "It's my fault. My fault, I mean, that my two boys, they gotta turn themselves inside out, go through contortions like, either to be like me or not be like me. If they understood better why I did the things I did—"

  "Vincente," said Bert. "Hey, fuck do I know? But sons, I'm not sure sons ever understand."

  The Godfather chose not to be soothed. "Like wit' Joey," he went on. "Deep down, probably he thinks I'm a skirt-chaser and a bully. OK, old days, he ain't far wrong. But God as my witness, Bert, that ain't the whole story. Things we did, we had reasons. Joey don't know the reasons. Gino don't know the reasons."

  Bert didn't say anything for a while, he was watching the sun go down. This was a thing with him. He cherished the moment when the flattened orange ball would squeeze onto the horizon, it always struck him as a kind of victory, an omen, though of nothing in particular, when the sky was clear and he was in the right place to confirm that the day had ended, the sun had sunk into the ocean. He watched it settle halfway in, a fat man wading belly deep; then he said, "So Vincente, tell 'em the reasons."

  The Godfather made a hissing grunt. Except for a dubiously lifted eyebrow he was motionless in his beach chair, but it seemed to Bert the Shirt that he was wri
ggling, writhing, like fingers, fists, were poking at him from within.

  Bert's dog had fallen asleep, was making a soft wheezing snore in his lap. "Ya wanna do it," the family friend said gently, "there's gotta be a way ta do it, Vincente. A way ta say what's on your mind but still keep the secrets secret."

  6

  Ben Hawkins, the only black agent working organized crime in the New York office of the FBI, was wearing a neat conservative business suit because he always wore a neat conservative business suit to the office, but that didn't mean he was happy to be there. It was a January Sunday, 9 a.m., 12 degrees outside. There was dirty frost on the windows. Lavender steam poured out of the Con Ed smokestacks and blew flat away on an arctic wind whooshing down from Canada. Hawkins had been with this squad for sixteen years, the coarse hair on his temples had grown gray in service to this squad, and he knew there was no damn reason this meeting had to be held on Sunday morning, except that the supervisor, Harvey Manheim, was getting grief from the higher-ups and thought it his duty to spread the grief around.

  Now Manheim strolled into the conference room, nodded, sprayed hellos among the fifteen, eighteen agents there assembled. He had slightly bulging eyes and the deep-hinged mouth of a ventriloquist's dummy; he wore a tweed jacket and corduroy pants and carried, as always, his unlit pipe. He took up his position at a small lectern at the front of the room, between two big easels that held organizational charts of the five New York Mob families. "Gentlemen," he said, "thanks for coming. We're here for an update."

  Outside, a gust of polar air rattled the windows. An agent named Frank Padrino could not help muttering, "What's to update, Harvey?"

  He shouldn't have said it. It played right into the supervisor's hand.

  "What's to update?" Manheim parroted. "Nothing's to update. That's the point. How long's Vincente Delgatto been in place now? Coming up on three years. And what do we have on him? Nothing."

  "He hasn't made a wrong move," came a voice from the back of the room.

  "He hasn't made any moves," another agent said. "It's like some kind of Mafia gridlock out there."

  Manheim ignored the comments. "And do you recall," he went on, "the confident line we gave the press when Carti was put away—that we could now prosecute any leader?"

  Ben Hawkins shifted in his chair. He was tall, not fat but ample in his flesh, ambiguous in his features, with a narrow-bridged nose and almond eyes that nearly wrapped around his head. "We didn't say that, Harvey," he ventured. "You did."

  The supervisor raised a professorial finger. "The Bureau said it. And now the Bureau has to make good on it."

  He paused a moment to let the institutional weight of this sink in. Then he pointed to Padrino, who had the thick neck and squashed nose of an aging fullback and who knew the Mob better than the Mob knew itself. "Frank, what's going on right now—this gridlock, if you will—what do you make of it?"

  Padrino pursed his lips, put a finger on his chin. "No one really knows how strong Delgatto is," he said. "He's the Godfather, yeah, but what does that mean these days? The only other family with a legitimate boss is the Fabrettis, with Emilio Carbone. The official bosses, Delgatto's contemporaries, are mostly in jail. Some of them have figured out they're gonna die there. So why should the younger hoods accept this old man that's been forced on them?"

  Manheim liked what he was hearing; it was taking the discussion where he wanted it to go. "So you're saying they'll move against him—"

  "I'm saying they might," Padrino corrected. "In the meantime, Delgatto is probably too weak to really lead, too strong to topple. So everybody's waiting."

  "Not the other gangs," said Manheim. "The Asians. The Latins. They're already sniffing weakness."

  "Yeah," Padrino conceded, "that's already happening."

  The supervisor hugged the lectern, caressed his unlit pipe. "All the more reason we should intervene now," he said, "before there's a full-scale bloodbath."

  Ben Hawkins had small ears, ears that, like the rest of him, were as gray as they were brown, a color like that of tree bark. Those ears had become acutely tuned to political nuance in meetings such as this. He could generally tell when a conclusion had been rehearsed, had existed in advance of the evidence that supposedly led to it. "Intervene how, Harvey?"

  "Preempt a power play," the supervisor said, "by taking Delgatto off the street ourselves. We give the prosecutors a week, ten days, to cross the t's and dot the i's; we can arrest him anytime. Probably get bail set around six million."

  "Arrest him for what?" asked another agent.

  "RICO conspiracy," said Manheim.

  He said it with an attempt at granite certitude, but the slightest hint of apology still came through, and the words were met with the sort of embarrassed silence that follows an all too public fart. A long moment passed; a draft went through the room like shaved ice blown across the windowsills.

  " 'Zat all?" asked Ben Hawkins. "RICO conspiracy? Aka guilt by association? Was I absent that day, or do I seem to remember that was kicked out of the Constitution?"

  Manheim said nothing.

  Frank Padrino said, "Jesus, Harvey, those cases are such bullshit. Lawyers' delight."

  Manheim crossed his ankles; his hinged mouth chewed out words. "Gentlemen, we're here to enforce laws, not have opinions. You don't have to like RICO—"

  "But juries have to," Hawkins interrupted. "And they don't."

  "Shit," said Padrino. "Without Mondello turning, even Carti might've walked on RICO, and Carti was guilty as sin. Now you've got Delgatto. He's a little old man, he looks like a guy who alters pants. You'd have a very tough time proving he's personally committed a crime in forty years. The jury won't go for it. We'll look ridiculous."

  Manheim ran a hand through his thinning hair and called up the pale and tentative candor allowed to the middle manager. "Guys," he said, "listen. Strictly between ourselves, I don't like this either. But I got the DA on my ass. He hasn't had a lot of headlines lately, he's suffering withdrawal. He wants us to come up with a way to grab the Godfather. It's that simple. And let me tell you something: For the guys who find a way to do it and to make it stick, it's going to be a career maker."

  A hush descended. Career-maker. The word had magic in it, it warmed the room like the red coils of a toaster. The younger agents squirmed in their chairs as though with thoughts of sex. One of them, a square-jawed fellow named Mark Sutton, with all of six months on the squad, didn't so much speak as ooze forth words from the simmering bubbling well of his ambition. 'There's gotta be a way," he said.

  "You bet there is," Manheim said approvingly.

  "It isn't RICO," said Ben Hawkins. "RICO won't stick."

  "So we'll find a better way," said Sutton. He said it with the shrill annoying confidence of the young, and Hawkins, his own face caught in an involuntary wince, took a moment to study him. The young agent's hair was too perfect; it looked sprayed, like the hair of a sportscaster. His face had the neat and regular features of a recruiting poster and exuded about as much humanity. He wasn't big—in fact, he looked like he'd barely made the height requirement—but he worked out hard; you could see the telltale bulges between his shoulders and his neck.

  "A better way," said Harvey Manheim. He leaned across the lectern and zeroed in on Sutton. He'd found his boy. "Yes. Let's get right on it."

  "Small detail you ought to know," Frank Padrino put in dryly. "Delgatto's down in Florida. Miami agents made him at the airport a couple weeks ago."

  A suspicious, worried look flashed across Harvey Manheim's face. Was he the last to know? Would it count against him that he was? "What the hell's he down there for?"

  Padrino shrugged. "His wife died a few weeks ago. Maybe he's just resting."

  Manheim frowned. You couldn't indict a man for resting or for mourning. He struggled to stay on the offensive. "Listen—Florida, Flushing, I don't care. Let's get the background going, be ready to jump on him when he comes north. Frank, you work with Sutton—"


  "Jeez, Harvey," said Padrino, "I'm finally getting some penetration into the Fabrettis—"

  "OK, OK," the supervisor said. "Then Ben, you and Mark, you're partners on this."

  It happened so fast that Hawkins could do nothing but blink. He was fifty-three years old, easing toward retirement with a lot of distinguished work in his file; he had no one to impress. Still, it was hard, probably impossible, to be the second guy to beg off. He scowled at Frank Padrino, then looked with dim distaste at the gung-ho and irritating Sutton. A case I don't believe in, the veteran agent thought, with a pushy child for a partner. For this I put on a fresh suit on a Sunday morning?

  7

  As the meeting was breaking up in Queens, the Godfather was planting impatiens in Key West.

  On his knees on the white gravel, he leaned into the narrow flower bed and his skinny slack haunches in their baggy pants stuck up in the air. He didn't wear gloves. A lot of people, he thought, they said they liked to garden, but what they really liked was to look at flowers while sipping a gin with clean hands. How could you garden with gloves on? How could you feel things in detail? How could you know how firm a stem was, how much dirt to shake off where the root ball ended?

  Vincente dug a little hole, scratched it out like a terrier, and decided that the problem was that nowadays, what with the price of real estate, gardening was only for the wealthy, the refined. Didn't used to be that way. In Sicily everybody gardened. Hell, in Queens in the old days everybody gardened. Who gardened now? Wetback gardeners mostly, digging without gusto in other people's dirt, being badly paid by clean-handed bankers and brokers in Westchester. The same bankers and brokers who looked down on people like Vincente. Why? Not because they were outlaws. Hell no, there was brotherhood and grudging admiration about that. No, they looked down on the Sicilians because the Sicilians got their hands dirty and made their money on things with strong aromas. Fish. Garbage. Could you imagine a WASP banker showing up at Fulton Street at 4 a.m. to put on slimy rubber boots and get into the freezer with twenty tons of cod? Could you picture a Jew broker climbing a mountain of table scraps, Kotex, and gull shit to bring his coffee grounds and lamb chop bones to the dump? No. Those were jobs for wops, for dagos. Those were jobs for people who didn't go to twenty years of school and weren't afraid to get some honest stink up their nostrils and kind of liked the idea of getting elbow deep in smelly, gritty, wormy life, elbow deep in dirt.