Sunburn

by Laurence Shames

  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.

  13

  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.

  That seemed to end the conversation as far as Hawkins was concerned. He stood up in no great hurry, slipped into his suit jacket, and led the way to Harvey Manheim's office.

  Frank Padrino was already inside. He looked feverish; the tops of his squashed ears were flaming red. In New York it had been a week of alternating snow and thaw, a week of slush. Everyone was coming down with something.

  "Almost three weeks, guys," Manheim said, when everyone was seated. With him, the problem was the throat. His voice was hoarse, and it brayed when he reached for emphasis. "And whadda we got on the Carbone hit? What we got, we got the DA pretending he just can't understand why we haven't solved it yet. We got the tabloids reporting every day that there's nothing to report. I've been eating shit for the whole squad. So what gives?"

  Mark Sutton sniffled. Aha, Ben Hawkins thought, even the young and muscle-bound got colds.

  Then Frank Padrino spoke through the blockage in his nose. "We know who ordered it," he said. "Aldo Messina. It's a power play within the Fabretti family."

  "That's your theory," said Manheim. "But Messina wasn't a shooter, he was watching boxing in Atlantic City. Everybody saw him."

  Padrino coughed into his fist. "We'll trace it back to him."

  "Yeah?" barked Manheim. "When?"

  "Harvey, look," said Padrino. "The shooters expect to be rewarded. The reward won't be enough. It never is. There'll be a grudge. Sooner or later—"

  The supervisor rapped his pipe against his metal desk, it made a sharp thin ugly sound, a sound like the pain of an ulcer. "Sooner or later isn't good enough. Where's Delgatto?"

  "We tailed Delgatto for two weeks," said Mark Sutton.

  "We lived with him," said Hawkins. "There wasn't the slightest indication—"

  Manheim rasped on as though
he hadn't heard. "And where's the old man now?"

  "He's back in Florida," Hawkins said. "Where he was when the hit—"

  The supervisor folded his hands and leaned far forward over them. "Doesn't it strike you as awfully convenient that just when everybody needs an alibi, old man Delgatto makes sure he's seen fifteen hundred miles—"

  "Harvey," Hawkins said, "he's got family there— an illegitimate son who's not connected. His legit son, Gino, who is connected, he's been down there too. Like we told you, the old man's wife—"

  "Fuck's his wife got to do with it?" said Manheim, his voice cracking like a French horn badly played. "I think Delgatto's behind it. I think he made the call. I think we're not talking RICO now, we're talking murder one."

  "Big stretch," said Frank Padrino. "Carbone's death, where's the benefit to Delgatto?"

  "Carbone was moving in on things," said Manheim. "Restaurants, trucking, a couple of important unions—"

  Frank Padrino was shaking his head. "Harvey, it doesn't wash. Carbone, OK, Delgatto had his beefs with him, but he was a known quantity, they could work together. Messina, he's younger, more ambitious, crazier. Net-net, he's a much bigger problem for Delgatto."

  Harvey Manheim swiveled in his chair, looked out the dirty windows at the huffing smokestacks, the rusting skeletons of groaning bridges. When he swiveled back again, he had a bleak wry look on his face. "Question, guys: Why are we sitting here talking about Delgatto's problem? I wanna talk about my problems. I have two: Delgatto's one, Carbone's the other."

  Mark Sutton chewed his lower lip, felt a twinge of pleasure in his groin. Something sparked behind his eyes and suddenly the path was revealed to him; he could picture promotions, commendations, a handshake from the Director. "So if we could find a way to put the two problems together—" he intoned.

  "Then I'd only have one," said Manheim. "And wouldn't that be nice."

  "But Harvey—" said Frank Padrino.

  The supervisor cut him off. "Frank, you wanna keep looking at the Fabretti family, fine, you keep your crew on that." He fixed Mark Sutton with a soupy stare. "But it is the working assumption of the Bureau that Vincente Delgatto is linked to the murder of Emilio Carbone. Ben, Mark, your job is to find that link. Got it?"

  Ben Hawkins tugged skeptically on the points of his natty glenplaid vest. Suddenly his own throat felt sore, his eyes were itchy. Oh, well, he thought, a break from winter wouldn't be the toughest thing to take. It would be nice to feel some good hot sunshine on his chest. "So I guess that means you're sending us to Florida."

  Manheim hesitated. It killed him that his charges should be warm while he was cold, that they should sniff salt breezes while he sniffed Dristan nasal spray. "Yeah," he said at last, his voice thick with phlegm and with resentment, "I'm sending you to Florida."

  14

  Gino and his bim had left Key West the day before Vincente did, the morning of the day, as it happened, that Emilio Carbone was whacked in Brooklyn.

  Debbi had left with a freckled sunburn, twelve Key limes in a plastic bag, and a slowly ripening inclination to dump the boyfriend. Gino had departed with unfinished Florida business, a festering frustration about an undone deal, and neither awareness nor concern that yet another large-breasted small-hipped female was working up the confidence to kiss him off.

  Now, three days after the Godfather's return, the two of them were back as well. They'd come by way of Miami, where Gino went once again to see a guy. He'd dropped Debbi off at a cafe in South Beach. She'd sipped a Negroni and watched the models, crossed and uncrossed her skinny legs and tried out different positions for her hands, and pretended she was a model, while the real ones slunk past with their be-ribboned shih tzus, their sheepdogs buzz-cut for the tropics.

  Arrived in Key West, they checked into the Flagler House just before sunset, had a shower, a room-service cocktail on the oceanfront balcony, and went unannounced to Joey Goldman's house.

  Joey was watching the evening news. The news was that the economy was a little up and a little down. As if he didn't know it: Real estate sputtered, his listings ran week after week in the paper, everybody looked and nobody bought. It was really Sandra's end of the business, the housecleaning and rentals side, that kept the steady money coming in. Short hair, simple clothes, a soft voice, down-to-earth ideas that worked; thank God his wife was practical.

  Joey was surprised to hear the bell ring. He swung his bare feet off the wicker hassock and went to answer it. In the dim light his half-brother was glutting the doorframe like a feedlot steer, Debbi squeezed off to the side like a cat that had wandered into the stall.

  "Gino," Joey said. "I didn't know you were in town."

  "Yeah," said Gino, by way of explanation. "I'm heah. Pop around?" He leaned close. Joey smelled aftershave, bourbon, and cheese spread.

  "He's onna patio, talkin' with a guy."

  "Yeah? What guy?"

  "Guy you met," said Joey, standing aside as Gino barged into the living room, Debbi following. "Arty. The editor guy."

  But Gino was not much interested in the editor guy. "Ah," he said. "I gotta talk to Pop."

  "Pop wants ta talk ta us," said Joey.

  "What about?" said Gino.

  "I think I know, but I'm gonna let him tell it, he wants ta tell us both together. Hello, Debbi."

  "Hi, Joey," said the bim. The traveling had knocked her hair down, it lay flat this time, was parted in the middle, and framed her face the way girls' hair used to frame their faces, following the lines of their jaw, in high school. The tan from her last visit was already gone, the only remnants some pink spots where she had peeled. Hoping for some company, some talk, she asked, "Is Sandra here?"

  "Nah," said Joey, "she's at a benefit. Guy who works for us. Got burned, needs skin, more operations. "

  Gino wasn't much interested in the guy who got burned. He pointed his stomach toward the patio and charged off after it, Joey and Debbi trailed behind because they didn't know what else to do.

  Outside, seated at the metal table softly lit by floodlights tucked tastefully into shrubbery, the Godfather was talking to his ghostwriter.

  "So Ahty," he was saying, "I'm depending on you ta say this nice, make it elegant like, polished, ya know, so it moves people, but the first thing we gotta get across is tha' Sicily, the people, the whole island—what we gotta tell 'em is tha' Sicily, from the beginning a time, has been fucked right up dee ass."

  Arty was dutifully scrawling in his notebook Sicily fucked in ass when Gino burst through the vacant doorway like a fat sprinter straining toward the finish line. "Hi, Pop," he said. "I gotta talk ta ya."

  Vincente paused, blinked, reached toward the low metal table as if to ground himself, and raked his hand slowly across its cool top. He had been, if not serene, at least crawling toward serenity, beginning to skim grievances from his stuffed heart, starting to excise rancid memories from his cluttered brain. And now here was Gino, blustery, urgent, loud, insistent on reversing the flow, cramming more crap through his father's eyes and ears. The old man could not keep a sudden weariness out of his voice.

  "Gino," he said. "When ja get back?"

  "Just a while ago. Can I see ya, Pop?"

  "Say hello t'Ahty," Vincente said. It shamed him that he still had to coach his thirty-six-year-old son in manners.

  Gino said a grudging hello, then stood there leaning forward, damp under the arms, shifting weight from foot to foot. Joey and Debbi were standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, as if to steady themselves in the turbulence left by Gino's passage. "I'll talk ta you and your brother," the Godfather announced.

  "But Pop," said Gino, "what I gotta talk about, it's important, maybe just the two of us—"

  Vincente had begun the slow and stately process of rising from his chair. Halfway up, he said, "Gino, he's your brother. We're guests in his house. Ya don't leave 'im out. Besides, I got somethin' to tell yuhs." He straightened gradually, and only standing could he see around his bulky firstborn. "O
h, hullo, Debbi," he said.

  She was opening her mouth to answer when Gino wheeled and said to her, "You stay out heah wit' Ahty."

  He slammed back toward the doorway. Joey and Debbi flew off in different directions, like bowling pins. Joey backed inside; Vincente excused himself and walked slowly toward the house.

  In the sudden and disarming absence of the father and his sons, the world grew oddly peaceful. Debbi dropped into the Godfather's chair, she and Arty sat a moment in a silence that was both awkward and delicious, a respite from the noise and tumult that pulsed off Gino like hot blood around a boil. A breeze riffled through the hedges, carried smells of coconut husks and seaweed, moved the shrubs in which the floodlights were embedded so that shadows danced around the pool.

  Finally Debbi put on a slightly bent half smile and said, "So I guess that just leaves us unimportant people."

  "Looks that way," said Arty Magnus. He would have said more if he could think of more to say, but he couldn't just then, and Debbi took his terseness to mean that maybe she had offended him.

  "I guess I shouldn't put you in that category," she said.

  "It's an OK category to me."

  "But you're a friend of Mr. Delgatto's."

  "This makes me important?"

  Debbie gave her head a tilt, pursed her lips, and lifted a plucked red eyebrow.

  Arty went on. "You're a friend of two Mr. Delgattos."

  That wasn't something the girlfriend especially wanted to be reminded of. She pulled her green eyes away a moment, then changed the subject. "You still working for the paper?"

  Arty saw her looking at the stained blue notebook on the metal table. No one could handpick the moment when a book became a public thing, and it made him nervous that she noticed it. "Not tonight," he said. Then he changed the subject. "But what about you, Debbi. Up in New York, whadda you do?"