The words bored through Gino's ears like cemetery worms. Somehow, until that moment, he had managed to hide from himself the full monstrousness of his betrayal. He'd been maneuvering, stalling, improvising blindly: Did the fleeing rabbit take time to wonder what was being trampled in its flight? With his tormentor's mitts still on him, Gino squeezed out miserably, "Hey, I never said that. All I said, I said y'oughta stop this book."
Aldo Messina sat in his fretful calm and sipped his coffee. "So what do we do? We break your old man's pencil?"
Pretty Boy backed off. Forklifts droned.
"First sign of a stupid person," Aldo Messina went on. "Know what it is, Gino? No sense of the big picture. It would hurt me to clip your old man, it really would. But OK, say we did it. The upshot? War. The Puglieses—they're not what they were, face it, Gino, but they're gonna sit still while the padrone gets whacked? The Commission—on toppa what happened to my predecessor, they're gonna accept it that now the top guy disappears? War, Gino. And for what? We go to war over a half-ass tip from a little twat like you?"
Gino blinked some coffee from his eyelashes. He took furtive looks at Pretty Boy and Bo and the thugs in the pearl-gray suits. Their hands were clenching and unclenching; they were getting ready for some exercise. The prisoner scratched and groped, and suddenly he thought he saw a crack in the wall, a place that maybe he could wriggle into and be safe. "So OK, yeah," he said. "Just break his pencil."
Pretty Boy wheeled on him again and snarled. "Sahcasm? Now ya got the balls ta give us sahcasm?"
"Da pencil," Gino countered. "Da thing that really writes. Ya see what I'm saying'?"
No one did. The forklifts whined, cold winds pounded the building. Gino went on improvising.
"I never said ya should touch my ol' man." He sounded quite convinced of it by now, a little wounded, indignant even, that he could have been so misunderstood. " 'Course ya can't, I saw dat. What I'm sayin', ya send 'im a message."
The captive reached out desperately for Messina's hooded eyes. The somber boss met his gaze, looked almost curious, and Gino felt a surge of reckless confidence.
"My father, listen, he don't write things down. He's got a guy he's workin' with, a whaddyacallit, a ghostwriter. I seen 'em workin' together wit' my own eyes. Writes everything down in a blue notebook. He's a nobody, this guy. A nothin'. Some skinny Yid, works for the paper down there. I'm tellin' ya, ya wanna kill this book wit'out ya got any headaches, that's the guy ya clip."
The space heater switched on with an electric hum. Messina put his slender hands in front of the red coils. Pretty Boy, pacing, said, "I still say he's bullshitting."
But now Gino was feeling cocky. "I'm bullshitting, ya t'row me inna river, ya cut my fuckin' head off, I don't care. I'm givin' ya straight goods, ya lemme go. What's it cost ya ta check it out? Ya find da guy, his name is Ahty. Ahty Magnus. Tall guy, frizzy hair. Ya see what's what, ya do what ya gotta do. No more Ahty, no more book."
Aldo Messina looked down at his coffee. His dry and worried skin pulled a little tighter as he fretted and planned, calculated and decided. Forklifts droned. A blast of north wind hit the warehouse like a mallet on a gong. Finally, without lifting his melancholy face, the doleful boss rasped out his orders. "Pretty Boy, Bo," he said. "Go home, go to sleep again. This afternoon you're going back to Florida."
31
After breakfast and a shower, Bert d'Ambrosia changed into a loosely woven coral colored pullover, gathered up his hoary dog, and took a slow stroll down the beach, then two blocks inland to Joey Goldman's house. Joey and Sandra were both at work by then; Sandra had taken Debbi along to help out in the office, keep her occupied. For form's sake, the family friend knocked on the front door. Then he crunched across the gravel driveway, skirted the carport, slipped between a rainspout and a row of oleanders, and went into the backyard.
He found the Godfather sitting in the garden: not gardening, just sitting. His chair was in the shade; his unraveling straw hat threw yet a darker shadow on his face. Either he was unsurprised to see Bert or he just wasn't reacting very much. "Pull up a chair," was all he said.
Bert put down the chihuahua and with some effort dragged over one of the lounges from the pool. He perched on the edge of it and didn't speak.
Vincente looked off past the tops of the aralia hedge, watched an osprey circle in the distance. Then he said, "Bert, you're amazing. Somethin's wrong, you always know." He said it with fondness and admiration and a kind of intimate mockery aimed at both of them, as if he were saying, You know; I know; what good does it do to know?