Sunburn(11)

" '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.