"She didn't say anything," Arty protested. "All she did was ask me if—"
He cut himself off, annoyed that he felt pressured to explain, compelled to justify himself. "Look," he resumed, "a few hours ago we thought we were gonna get killed. Will ya cut us a little slack on that?"
There was a silence, a long one. Moonlight turned metallic as it filtered through the screens. A cool breeze carried the smell of damp sand. Arty struggled to reclaim the fragile calm that was the hangover of panic.
"Vincente, Joey, we're all on the same side. Let's not arg—"
"But look what you're askin' us to believe," Joey cut in. His face was taut, the slight cleft in his chin grew deeper, darker.
"Gino told people about the book," insisted Arty. "That's why my place was trashed, that's why my office was rifled. You have a better explanation?"
"Be careful, Arty," Joey said. "What you're saying, it's like an insult—"
"Joey, who you talkin' for?" The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, up from the floor, down from the ceiling. "You talkin' for yourself, Joey? Or d'ya think you're talkin' for me?"
The young man didn't answer, just stared at his father, his teeth clamped tight.
Vincente reached up slowly, stiffly, to straighten a necktie that he wasn't wearing. "G'ahead, Ahty. I'm listening."
The writer leaned forward on his hassock, put his elbows on his knees. "Vincente," he said, "d'you remember, the first time we ever talked, you asked me if I ever spilled a secret? The question, the way you asked it, it scared the shit outa me. But I told you the truth. And it's still the truth."
The Godfather listened in perfect stillness. His skin was drawn and waxy; over his cheekbones the flesh was yellowish and in the hollows it was gray.
"And right at the start," Arty continued, "I told you something too. I told you it was a strange thing about a book, at some point a book becomes a public thing, everybody's property, and no matter who you are, how powerful, you couldn't pick the moment when that happened. You remember that, Vincente?"
The old man nodded almost imperceptibly. He licked his cracked lips but his mouth had no moisture in it; flesh rasped over flesh and no part could comfort any other.
"So what I'm saying now," the ghostwriter went on, "is that our book, the word of it, is out. Why else would someone steal my notebooks? What good are they to anybody?"
The Godfather said nothing. He sat very straight, his hands on his knees; the posture was Egyptian.
"I don't know what's going on with Gino," Arty said. "Debbi didn't tell me anything. You told me, Joey—you told me there was a problem in your family, remember? Gino's the problem—for all of us. Am I wrong?"
Arty fell silent. Joey paced. Outside, the wind scratched out island sounds and transported smells of tepid ocean.
Vincente Delgatto was a man who could not be lied to, nor was he capable of closing himself to what was true. He sat there very still, and the truth of Gino's final betrayal seeped through his tissues like swallowed poison. The old man took in a deep breath. It wheezed through his nostrils then came out as a groan. "My son," he said. There was love and bitterness and bafflement and self mockery in the words. He said them again: "My son."
He got up from the couch, tried not to let it show how much he needed to use his arms to help his legs to lift him. He moved slowly toward Arty, his hands extended. Arty rose, and the Godfather took him in his arms, didn't kiss him, but laid his grizzled cheek against the ghostwriter's, did that on both sides. "Ahty," he said, "the trouble I've caused you, fuhguve me, please."
He stepped away, did half a pirouette between the hassock and the sofa, seemed momentarily to have lost the sense of where he was. Then he added, less to Arty than to himself, "I hope to Christ I have the strength to make it right. Joey, I'm tired. Take your father home."
40
Just before eight the next morning, Debbi Martini, dressed in a purple leotard with black tights underneath it, her neck wrapped in a pink scarf against the early chill, approached the bicycle that Arty had leaned against Joey Goldman's house the evening before and climbed aboard. It was an act of considerable courage.
She'd never owned a bicycle. Many Queens kids didn't. Traffic was dangerous, bikes were easy to steal. She tried to remember the last time she'd been on a bike. She thought it was when she was eleven. She remembered that the sidewalk squares had seemed to slip by dizzyingly fast beneath her and that it felt great when the air flew past her ears. She remembered, too, that she'd forgotten to put her feet down when she stopped, had hovered for a moment till gravity noticed her, then had tipped slowly, almost gracefully, into a scraped and bleeding heap at curbside.