After the small talk and the mumbling, the editor was a little nonplussed to be asked a real question, and a touchy one. "Not much," he fumbled. "No."
The Godfather nodded, considered. At his back was a sweep of bare white wall broken up by louvered windows. Early moonlight filtered in, threw dim stripes on the floor. "Why ya do it then?"
Arty could not hold back a quick nervous laugh. He heard it from the wrong side of his ears and realized he was a little drunker than he'd thought. He realized something else as well: He was looking at Vincente, past the folds and wrinkles that, depending on how hard you dared to look, either hid his eyes or lured you farther into them, and all at once he understood that the man's power, his leadership, lay in the fact that he could not be fibbed to, or not for long; he would draw out truth like salt drew water out of fruit. Arty felt fear and reassurance together, a sort of jumpy freedom. "It's my living," he said.
"You're educated," said Vincente. "Bright. Ya don't like it, ya could do other things."
Arty drank some wine. He hazily remembered being told as a child that he had to tell the truth, and as long as he did so he would not be punished. This was one of the disastrous childhood lessons that adults had to unlearn, and in unlearning it grow sad and dead at heart; in the Godfather's rumbling voice and unflinching tunnel eyes was a brutal reassertion of that lesson, a defiant claim that in his small world the rule still held. "Yeah," the guest admitted. "I could."
"It's not that easy to switch," Debbi Martini put in. "Even with my job—"
"Your job." Gino cut her off. "Dogs' toenails. Besides, you ain't educated."
She reddened. It was hard to tell if it was pique, or alcoholic flush, or sunburn growing ripe.
"Secrets," Vincente said to Arty. "Newspaper business, I'd think you'd have ta keep a lotta secrets."
"Sometimes," Arty said.
"Like someone tells ya somethin', confidential like. It's a whaddyacallit, an ethical thing, ya can't tell nobody, right?"
"That's right," said the editor.
The Godfather nodded, considered. Slowly he leaned forward, picked up the wine bottle, and refilled Arty's glass. He poured a splash into his own and raised it in a silent toast. It took him a long time to settle back against his seat, and when he'd done so he fixed the guest from under the ledge of his eyebrows. "So Ahty," he rumbled. "Y'ever tell?"
The editor felt pinned in his chair, felt as though leather straps had suddenly bound his wrists and ankles. He stared down the chute of the Godfather's eyes. He knew absolutely that he was being judged, and yet he had no difficulty with his answer. "No," he said. "Never."
Vincente held the stare a moment longer, seemed to be harboring Arty's words in the deep whorls of his old man's ears, testing them for an echo that might yet prove false. Satisfied, he did not relax his vigilance but redoubled it. There then came one of those dizzying moments that changes everything, that cleaves time once and for all into before and after. The Godfather had been introduced only as Vincente, Gino only as Gino; the weighty name Delgatto had never yet been spoken. The evening had been a charade of innocence, of not saying what was known. Now the Godfather was calling off the farce, bestowing on Arty the flattering and perilous gift of candor.
"My business too," he rasped. "Lotta secrets. All secrets, my business. Lotta things ya don't wanna tell. Lotta things ya wanna tell and can't."
"Must be difficult," Arty said.
Vincente looked at him hard, decided that he understood.
"Me, I can't keep a secret worth beans," said Debbi.
"Which is why nobody tells you nothin'," Gino said.
Joey and Sandra came out of the kitchen. Joey carried a tray with an espresso pot and cups and a plate of pignolia cookies. Sandra held an enormous bowl of fruit salad: pineapple, papaya, mango, tangerine. But the little dinner party had got away from them somehow, words and glances had been rerouted; their own dining room seemed strange, as if in their brief absence someone had rearranged the furniture. Coffee was sipped, dessert nibbled, but conversation sputtered, chairs no longer felt comfortable, and it came as a relief when Gino slapped down his cup and said abruptly, "Who wants a cigar?"
Arty Magnus had not smoked a cigar since college. The last one had inflamed his sinuses and given him a two-day case of heartburn. But now he bravely rose with the other men and passed through the wide unadorned doorway to the patio. The moon was bright, you couldn't quite see colors but you could tell the red impatiens from the pink; the air was still, a second moon was floating in the pool.