Sunburn(33)
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.