Sunburn (12 page)

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.

"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.

Vincente took a sip of wine. "The way I see it," he said, "aut'ority, there's like three ways ya can think about it. First way, there shouldn't
be
any aut'ority. It should be like . . . whaddya call it when there's nobody in charge?"

"Anarchy?" said Arty.

"Right, yeah. Anarchy. A very appealing idea, let's face it. But more when you're young than when you're old. You're young, ya figure, Hey, great, nobody's tellin' me what ta do, I can play the mandolin, pull my pants down, get laid, travel—terrific. But then ya get ta realize it wouldn't work. People, ya leave 'em alone ta do what they want, they go ta these crazy extremes. Some guys, they'd get too greedy, they'd want money, power, more alla time. Other guys, they'd be just as happy sittin' home jerkin' off. Pretty soon the greedy bastards would be runnin' everything, tellin'a happy jerk-offs what ta do, an' it wouldn't be that different from like it is now. Am I right?"

Arty looked up from his notes and only nodded.

"Have a piece a cheese," the Godfather told him. "Put a pepper on top, 's good that way. ... So the next way wit' aut'ority, ya just accept it like it is. This is what most people do, right? Cop pulls y'over for speeding—ya don't look out the winda and say, Wait a second, who the fuck are you? IRS says Pay us—ya don't tell 'em they should kiss your ass. Y'accept it."

"Not because you want to," Arty could not help putting in. "Because they have the power."

Vincente sipped wine, moved his skinny haunches to the edge of his chair, and raised a finger. "Right, they have the power. Exactly. And at some point, ya have to make a choice. Ya have ta decide which of two pains innee ass is less of a pain innee ass—t'accept that they have the power, or ta look for ways ta get around it. And what that decision rides on is whether, down deep, ya believe that whosever in charge has any fuckin' right ta be. . . . Y'ever been ta Sicily?"

Arty nibbled cheese, shook his head. Wind moved the shrubs that the floodlights were embedded in; shadows danced across the patio and over the surface of the pool.

"Sicily is like . . . how can I describe it? Sicily is a little like New Jersey. Ya know how New Yawk and Pennsylvania are always fightin' over who gets ta dump their gahbidge in New Jersey? It's like nobody gives a fuck what Jersey wants, right? Well, that's how it was wit' Sicily, on'y people weren't dumpin' gahbidge, they were dumpin' churches, fortresses, castles. Lemme tell ya somethin': Sicily is fuckin' beautiful. On'y problem is it ain't Sicilian.

"Say you're goin' down a road by the ocean. Over here, there's a beautiful temple, a ruin. But it ain't Sicilian, it's Greek. Over there, onna water, there's a big-ass fort. But it ain't Sicilian, it's Moorish. Up onna hill there's a mansion, a fuckin' palace. But it wasn't built for a Sicilian, it was built for some French fuck who once gave the King a Spain a blow job. Ya get the picture? We're talkin' thousands a years a this bullshit. So the Sicilian, he's got this very old habit a thinkin', Hey, wait a second—who put these sons a bitches in charge?"

The Godfather paused, Arty made bold to pour him more wine. Palm fronds rustled, a parched exotic sound.

"OK," Vincente resumed, "so ya don't believe in anarchy, ya don't respect the aut'ority that's there—wha' does that leave? Ya
become
the aut'ority. Unofficially, of course.
Cosa nostra
. Ya know what that means, Ahty?
Our thing
. That's all it means. It don't mean, This guy, ya break his knees. It don't mean, That guy, he goes inna river. It means
our thing
, the thing we keep no matter what, the thing these fuckin' Greeks and Moors and Spaniards can't fuck with."

Arty scrawled, flipped a page, and scrawled some more, his private shorthand getting ever more minimal with velocity and finger fatigue. He waited for the Godfather to continue, but the old man just reached forward rather daintily, put a slice of roasted pepper on top of a slab of cheese, and started nibbling. Arty was deciding whether he would challenge him—point out, say, that New York was not Palermo or that the nation where Vincente had made his career had never been invaded—when Bert the Shirt came steaming through the doorway from the living room, his dog nestled in his arms, Joey and Sandra following behind.