Arty Magnus spread his cheap blue notebook on his lap and hoped his Adam's apple hadn't jumped too much when he swallowed. He was trying his best to look unshockable. He used his front teeth to pull the cap off his ninety-nine-cent pen, pressed his bare shins against the side of the low metal patio table, and was ready to take notes on rubbing people out.
"Murder. 'Zat OK wit' you, Ahty?"
There was something goading, needling, in the way Vincente said it, and for the first time in a long time Arty felt like he was being tested. He had no idea why—though Joey Goldman had taken him aside when he'd arrived and warned him that it might be a difficult evening. Something was going on within the family, he'd said; the less the ghostwriter knew about the messy business, the better off he was. But Vincente was under a lot of strain. He needed care and he needed diversion. Would Arty stay for dinner? It might not be the cheeriest gathering, but Debbi was cooking sausage and peppers. . . .
"Murder," the Godfather repeated. His tone now was not cruel, exactly, but flat with an awful neutrality like that of a desert. "Ya get right down to it, ya cut tru alla bullshit, that's really what da thing hinges on. Murder. Not necessarily ya do it, but ya could do it, you're, like, capable. Ya wouldn't back away from it, an' everybody knows at."
He paused, reached slowly forward toward his glass of garnet wine. The mild air was very still; it had the sweetly tired smell of flowers closing for the night.
Arty said, "So it's the fear—"
Vincente licked his lips, then cut him off. The writer didn't understand the unaccustomed hardness in his voice.
" 'Course it's fear," the old man said. "World runs on fear, ain't ya noticed? But there's fear an'en there's fear. Say I'm gonna beat y'up. You're afraid, it ain't gonna be pleasant, but you'll heal; maybe sometime you'll get even. Say I'm gonna rob ya. You're scared, you're pissed off, but prob'ly you'll make back what I take."
"I kill ya—that's it, the end, it's over. The clock stops. No more chances, ever. Think about it, Ahty. That's fear. Ya kill someone, it'see on'y final act. Ya wanna talk about crime, it'see on'y crime that means a damn. Anything else is just a racket, a caper, pissin' around. A rough game, but a game— at most, a warning. Ya kill someone, that's really the on'y serious move, the on'y punishment."
The Godfather sipped wine, then Arty said, "And sometimes you have to punish." He didn't mean to say it; there was something in the mood that pulled it out of him. He heard the words as though someone else had spoken them; they sounded rude, insinuating, and he couldn't decide if they were more like conspiracy or accusation.
But if the ghostwriter was nervous that he'd overstepped, the Godfather didn't seem to notice. He simply nodded with the weary patience of a teacher who's taught the same lesson too many times. "Sometimes ya have ta judge," he said. "Sometimes ya have ta punish." He looked off to the west. Night was stretching toward the edge of the sky, darkness coming down like a sheet being pulled toward the last corner of a bed. After a moment the old man spoke again; the voice was gravelly and barely audible. "And sometimes, maybe a long time later, and maybe indirectly like, the punisher gets punished."
"Hm?" said Arty.
Vincente didn't answer. He reached for his wine, drank some, then pressed his knuckles against his mouth like he was holding something down. "Fuhget about it," he said at last. "I'm bein' a morbid pain innee ass tonight. Fuhget about it, Ahty. What say we try and find a little lighter subject?"
———
Crouched on the far side of the aralia hedge, armed with a long lens whose casing poked unseen between two knobby stems of the tropical weed, Mark Sutton had captured the meeting on infrared film.
When he walked back to the dark sedan where Ben Hawkins was waiting, he was almost shivering with righteousness and excitement. "That fucking liar," he said.
"Who?" asked Hawkins mildly.
"Magnus," said Sutton, settling into the passenger seat. "Friends with the son, my ass. Ben, he's sitting in there with Delgatto, just the two of them, heads together, sipping wine, talking like best friends. He's taking notes, for chrissake."
"He's a newspaperman," said Hawkins. "It's his job."
"That notebook," Sutton said. "Can you imagine what's in that goddam notebook?"
"Forget about it, Mark," the senior agent told him. "Notebook's off-limits. First Amendment."
"But Ben, he lied to us!"
Hawkins could not work up much indignation. "He wasn't under oath. It wasn't even a formal interview."
"He's hiding something."