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.