Sunburn(34)

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.





21


"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.