Sunburn Page 9

  Bert looked at her more closely. Red hair, probably perked up from a bottle. Long fingernails perfect as wax apples. Nose-cone boobs scoring a dramatic but temporary victory over gravity. So far, standard equipment for a woman traveling with the Ginos of this world. Still, there was something in the blue-green eyes that didn't fit the mold. Bimbos' eyes—you could look at them but never into them, they were blank and opaque, like the paint on a car. But Debbi's eyes invited you in; behind the colored part was a room as comfy as a paneled den. "He's got other problems too," confided Bert.

  "Like what?" asked Debbi.

  Bert glanced at the salad bowl, the glistening tomatoes. "You ladies are about to eat," he said. "It ain't the pleasantest subject."

  "Tell me," Debbi said. "Maybe I can help."

  Bert looked at his sneakers, pulled an earlobe. "Well," he said, "ya want the truth, he's constipated somethin' awful. I can't think the last time he had what you could call a successful walk."

  "Poor puppy," Debbi said. She said it to the dog, and the dog lifted up its white and ancient head. It weakly shook its whiskers, a ray of hope seemed to flash in its milky eyes like dim lightning buried in the clouds. The pet groomer reached out and felt the creature's abdomen; it was hard and nubbly as a potato. "There a health food store around?" she asked.

  The old mobster found the question droll. "Debbi, I live on meatballs, sausage. I smoked t'ree packs till I was sixty-five and had a haht attack—"

  "There's one on Southard Street," said Sandra.

  "Get some flaxseed," Debbi told Bert.

  "Flaxseed?"

  "Just ask for it. Take a tablespoon of it, slow-simmer it in a quarter cup of mineral oil—"

  "How 'bout olive oil?" asked the Shirt.

  "Whatever," Debbi said. "Simmer it like half an hour, let it cool, mix it with his dog food."

  Bert was leaning forward now, avid at the prospect of a cure. "Yeah? Then what?"

  "Wait an hour, take him for a nice relaxing stroll, and sing to him."

  "Sing to 'im?" said Bert.

  Debbi petted the dog. "That part I made up. But the rest, really—"

  Bert looked hard at her, took the measure of her wisdom. Then he said, "How you know all this?"

  Debbi felt suddenly bashful and only shrugged.

  "You're a clever kid," Bert told her.

  She looked down at the tiled floor. "No," she said, "I'm really not."

  Certain things you could only do when your hair was white, when your teeth were loose, when the sleeves of your shirts flapped like hung laundry around your shrunken arms. Bert reached out a hand and lifted Debbi's chin. "Don't contradict an old man," he said. "I tol' ya you're a clever kid."

  Out in the garden, the Godfather was trimming bougainvillea. Streamers of the stuff hung over him as he worked, he half disappeared behind a curtain of fuchsia flowers and wicked ocher thorns. Fallen petals lodged in his straw hat that was unraveling at the edges, a line of sweat traced out his backbone beneath the old blue shirt. He was barefoot, he had a red bandanna tied around his stringy neck, and he was too immersed in his task to see or hear Bert the Shirt approaching. He kept right on clipping until his old friend gave a low chuckle and said, "Vincente, Jesus, no offense, but ya look like a real paisan."

  The Godfather brushed aside a strand of vine and turned around. "Bert, what could I tell ya—I am a real paisan."

  He stepped out from the canopy of flowers, put his shears point down in the soft imported dirt, and raked a forearm across his sweating brow. As he did so he felt Bert's eyes on his naked feet, his soiled insteps.

  He shook his head and said, "Poor fuckin' immigrants, huh? They get shoes that pinch, they try ta grow basil onna fuckin' fire escape; they get a job wit'out a window, their wives start wearin' girdles. They tell themselves they're doin' good, but down deep. . . . Ah, screw it. What's up, Bert?"

  "Siddown a minute?"

  Vincente didn't answer, just started walking toward the low table on the patio. It bothered him to take a break, but since his fainting spell it bothered him less. This surprised him, and he thought, Thank God that people—some people—got less pigheaded when the alternative was dropping dead, that they could give some ground without totally losing pleasure in the things they loved to do.

  "The FBI's in town," Bert said when they were seated.

  The Godfather said nothing.

  "Hawkins and some new boy wonder," Bert informed him.

  Vincente nodded. He'd never met Ben Hawkins but he knew who he was. His roving circle of cops and robbers—at the more select levels it was a very small club.

  Bert petted his chihuahua, plucked a ghostly dog hair from his yellow shirt. "They know you're here. They were askin' me 'bout the Carbone thing."

  Still the Godfather said nothing. He put a hand under his nose, smelled soil and sap; the smell pulled him back to ancient summers and memories of greater strength.

  Bert paused, then cleared his throat. "Vincente, I know better than t'ask—"

  "Then don't," said the Godfather, not unkindly. "It's simpler that way."

  Bert looked down at his lap. Vincente glanced over at the bougainvillea. The papery flowers were fluttering in the breeze, the leaves were a lush green but the sound they made was brown and dry.

  "The Feds," the Godfather went on, "they can set me up, arrest me any time. I knew that when I took the job, Bert. The power they have, it's unbelievable."

  "Big power," his friend agreed. "Like the whole fuckin' world's their neighborhood."

  "But I don't want 'em in my face down here," Vincente said. "I don't want 'em botherin' my family. 'Zat too fuckin' much t'ask?"

  Bert stroked his dog reflectively, like the dog was his own chin. "Nah," he said, "it ain't too much. They should at least be whaddyacallit, discreet."

  " 'Course," the Godfather mused, "wit' the Feds, it's tough ta know how much decency t'expect."

  "Hawkins is OK," said Bert the Shirt. "He won't bust your balls wit'out he's got a reason."

  The Godfather toyed with some loose strands of his unraveling straw hat. "And the new guy?"

  Bert smoothed the placket of his shirt. "The trut'? Him I didn't like. He's two things that worry me: young and short. Tries too hard, double. I'm just not sure he'd give a guy an even break."

  "An even break from the Feds?" Vincente said. "Bert, you always were a dreamer."

  20

  Arty Magnus raised his right arm high and let the thin and tortured spray of lukewarm water chase the soap out of his armpit and down his flank.

  His showerhead had annoyed him every day for just over six years now. It was a small, cheap, fake-chrome job to begin with, and over time many of its holes had silted up with minerals. Water squeezed through it painfully, it was like a man with kidney stones. Instead of forceful parallel streams, it hissed out dribs and jets at random angles, a lot of the water missed his body altogether and clattered uselessly against the aluminum stall, which was painted a lumpy, ugly shade of tan, a sort of nuthouse beige. Some years before, something had gone wrong with the floor of the shower; the drain was no longer at its lowest point. Water pooled in a corner, and tropical algae, mold, and fungi often grew there. Sometimes the growths were green, sometimes black—it just depended what spores were in the air. Once the stagnant puddle had turned golden and begun to foam like beer.

  Rinsed now, drying off, Arty looked around and wondered for the thousandth time why he'd stayed so long in the rented four-room transient-looking cottage on Nassau Lane. When he'd first come to Key West, he'd been reluctant to take a more expensive place—the job at the Sentinel was brand-new; what if it didn't pan out? As he became more entrenched in the town, he'd wrestled with the question of buying something. But at first the prices seemed too high, and so he'd hesitated. He'd been tempted when values began to decline, but stalled, waiting for the bottom of the market. Two years into the slump, he was no longer convinced that a house was necessarily such a great investment. Besides, did he rea
lly think he'd stay in Key West that much longer? He was reluctant to commit to it.

  And anyway, in the main he was comfortable where he was. OK, the shower sucked. The frying pans were dented, the coffee cups were chipped, the tines of the forks were snaggled. The maroon Formica dinette had been in appalling taste thirty years ago and time had not redeemed it. But so what? The bedroom got a nice breeze, the garden was open to the southern light, and besides, Arty didn't need luxury. He didn't even like luxury, or, more precisely, luxury had been soured for him because it somehow put him in mind of a goad he had heard too often and never really been able to refute: that he lacked direction, was short on drive, deficient in ambition. He would never find success because he didn't want it bad enough.

  That had been a heavy charge, a terrible accusation, when he'd lived up north. The attitude behind it was almost as good a reason as the weather not to live there anymore.

  The weather, yes. He walked on damp feet to the bedroom and sat down bare-ass on the bed. It was a February dusk, the windows were wide open, and he was about to pull on a winter evening outfit of khaki shorts and a polo shirt, a cotton sweater just in case. He could not resist a quick thought of all those heads-up, savvy folks freezing their ambitious butts off in New York; in the rosy glow of picturing their hunched shoulders and chapped lips, of remembering how much a tweed jacket and woolen topcoat weighed, he could recall with serenity the goads he used to hear. He wasn't very suave at cocktail parties. Well, that was true; while smoother colleagues schmoozed their way to positions at the Times, the Voice, the glossy magazines, he hung back, wasted evenings on people he already knew. He was a washout at the high art of the query letter, not even a contender in the race for fellowships. Maybe most blameworthy of all, he'd had a no-respect job as editor of a neighborhood weekly, a dreary little rag kept afloat by ads for yoga classes and tap-dance lessons, and he'd stuck with it. Why change? The truth was, he didn't believe one job was much different from another.

  This was heresy, of course, and could not go unpunished. His punishment? Condemned to live in a funky four-room cottage in paradise.

  And to live there alone, but that was another story.

  Arty tied his sneakers and went to the living room, one corner of which did service as his study. On a rickety table with rusted metal legs stood a small computer, some ill-assorted pads and papers, and a stack of timeworn spiral notebooks, maybe twenty in all, their covers stained with coffee and liquor, their pages fattened up with dampness. In these notebooks were almost two decades' worth of floundering, false starts, dumb ideas, proof positive of just how much Arty Magnus didn't want success. Sketches, epigrams, first paragraphs of essays, vague outlines of eccentric novels. . . . Then there was one notebook off to the side, separate from the others. This one, by God, would be a book: the story of the Godfather, the story of the end of something.

  Arty reached for it, made sure his ninety-nine-cent pen was clipped into the spiral binding. Then he walked past the sagging rattan sofa, through the front door with its porous screen, and out into the day's last light. As he climbed onto his old fat-tire bike, the gruff jazz of Vincente's speech was already tapping in his ears, though, as ever, he had no idea what rages and remembrances the old man would talk about tonight.

  ———

  As Arty was bicycling through Key West's quiet streets to his appointment with the Godfather, Gino Delgatto was driving his rented T-Bird up the gross ribbon of Dixie Highway to meet with Charlie Ponte. He barreled past South Miami, snaked his way across Coral Cables, and wound at last through the narrow avenues of Coconut Grove to the boss's headquarters on the waterfront.

  The headquarters were at the back of a restaurant called Martinelli's, insulated from intruders by a pair of giant bubbling lobster tanks, a dim and gloomy bar, a barn-like dining room full of people wearing bibs, and an enormous kitchen stocked with short Cubans in tall hats.

  As on previous visits, Gino announced himself to the maitre d', who then signaled to a broken-nosed bouncer on a stool by the cigarette machine. The bouncer led him past the lobsters, past the people eating lobsters, and through the kitchen where the lobsters were prepared. Beyond the brushed-chrome freezers was a locked door that gave onto an anteroom manned by two thugs. The thugs took charge of the guest, patted him down for weapons, then took him through to the boss's inner sanctum.

  This was a big room, but low-ceilinged and almost empty of furniture. Its bare walls threw back a shrill and tinny sound like cheap speakers; dim fluorescent light mixed unpleasantly with a smeared glow that came through very narrow windows of bulletproof glass. Beyond those grudging portals could be seen, distorted, the red and green channel markers of the Intra-coastal. Along the docks, blurry yachts bobbed gently in their slips. A metal door with several locks gave directly onto the catwalk of the wharf, and Ponte's cigarette boat looked like a restless horse tied up right outside.

  "So you're back," said the Miami boss as Gino was led in. The fact seemed to cause him no great happiness. He was a small neat man sitting slouched behind a vast and weighty desk. He had dull gray hair combed mostly forward, Caesar-style; his skin was taut and waxy except for pebbled sacs the color of liver beneath his eyes. He wore no shirt, just a silver jacket with a zipper, it was like something race-car drivers wear. "I said I would be," Gino told him. Ponte pressed his hands together, brought them to his mouth, and blew some air between them. He lifted an eyebrow toward one of the thugs, and the thug brought Gino a chair.

  Sitting, the guest said, "I talked to my father, and it's like I tol' ya: The deal he made, it wasn't wit' the Fabrettis, it was wit' Carbone. It ain't a deal no more."

  Charlie Ponte reached up a hand and rubbed his cheeks. The tugging stretched the sacs beneath his eyes, put a morbid shine on the brown-purple flesh. "No offense, Gino, but I'd be happier hearin' this from your old man direct."

  "Mr. Ponte, he's in mourning for my mother. He's not doin'—"

  Gino's words were lost in the sudden bustle of Ponte rising from his chair. Standing, he was not much taller than sitting down, but there was a dangerous impatience, a violent nervousness in his posture. He paced the width of his desk and back again, then put his knuckles on a corner of it and leaned across them. "Gino, try ta see it my way, huh? I use that union, I pay tribute ta New York. I got no problem wit' that. The system's in place, the money's comin' in, everybody's happy—" "I ain't happy," Gino said. Ponte talked right over him. "And now you're leanin' on me to change everything aroun', risk a beef wit' the Fabrettis—"

  "You don't worry about a beef wit' the Fabrettis,"

  Gino said. "A beef wit' the Fabrettis, that's a New Yawk problem."

  Ponte leaned farther across his desk, and his tone was tinny and mordant. "Yeah? And who settles a New York problem these days?"

  Gino pushed down on the arms of his chair, slid forward on the seat. He was very near the end of his nerve, but he hadn't reached it yet. "You forget, Mr. Ponte? The Puglieses are still the leading family. My father is still capo di tutti capi. We settle New Yawk problems."

  Ponte straightened, turned his back. He went to one of the narrow windows and looked out at the Intra-coastal. For what seemed a long time he watched the boats, the dirty pelicans, the channel markers flashing red and green. When he wheeled again toward his visitor, he had the look of a man who'd swallowed nasty medicine. "OK, Gino," he said, "you win. You say it's back the way it was, fine."

  Gino squeezed the arms of his chair and struggled not to smile. His old man had taught him that it didn't do, was undignified, to smile.

  Ponte raised a finger and went on. "But the Fabrettis—your problem, not mine."

  The visitor gave the slightest nod, the way he'd seen his father do it.

  Charlie Ponte moved back toward his desk; he seemed to think the meeting was over. Gino didn't budge. Ponte dropped into his chair, then finally met the other man's eye.

  "The money, Mr. Ponte?"

  The Miami boss made a harried nervous
gesture, like his time was being wasted on niggling details. "Gino, I need a couple days. I gotta, like, reroute things, retool the machine. You understand."

  Gino had the rare thought that it was now his place to be magnanimous. He gave his head a gentle tilt.

  "Day after tomorra," Ponte said. "Can ya come back then? We'll do the first month's tribute. Thirty thousand."

  Walking out through the kitchen and the restaurant, Gino tried with all his might to hold his face together. He wanted to grin, to cackle, to slap his chest and howl. He'd done well, extremely well; his father would be proud of him if he'd seen how smart and bold he'd been, would admit that he, Gino, had been right about this union bullshit from the start.

  Or maybe he wouldn't. What then?

  Gino, in his glory, strode between the tables and entertained a queasy but intoxicating thought. If the old man didn't come around, it only proved his time had passed, made it obvious that he was no longer fit to lead, that Gino, by dint of balls and independence, had himself become the Man. The notion put an itch in his scalp and a tingle in his pants, and the barn-like dining room swam before his eyes as he bulled past the people who sat there, oblivious in their lobster bibs, sucking legs and claws.

  21

  "Aut'ority," the Godfather was saying. "That's what this whole thing is about—aut'ority."

  "What about it?" Arty asked. They were sitting on the patio. There was a bottle of Chianti and a plate of strong cheese and roasted peppers on the low metal table between them.

  "How ya deal wit' it," Vincente said. "Ya see what I'm gettin' at?"

  "Not yet," the ghostwriter confessed. His notebook was open on his lap; he'd scribbled the word Authority on the top of a fresh page and was looking at it hopefully. He'd been thwarted before in his efforts to put Vincente's raves into something resembling outline form. The Godfather would start off on a promising tack; Arty would give it a heading. Then the old man would carom off onto something totally different, and the heading would sit there unembellished, lonely and inexplicable as a single tree in the middle of a vast and weedy plain.