He lay awake a long time and let life proceed without him. He'd heard Debbi leave her room and close the door behind her. He heard Joey and Sandra as they went about their morning routines. He heard the sounds a house makes: the whoosh and drips of plumbing, the bells and buzzers of appliances, the inevitable creaks and groans of wood and hinges.
When he was sure that everyone had gone, he arose, put on backless slippers and an old robe of burgundy silk, and shuffled out to the garden. He sat with his back to the sun, let it warm his shoulders.
He thought about his helplessness.
It was a raw line of thought, mean, vulgar, and tactless, and he hated it. Helplessness was what he'd struggled his whole life to avoid, and he used to be able to kid himself he'd done a pretty good job of avoiding it. The helplessness of the poor, the helplessness of the immigrant, the helplessness of the neighborhood schmo without an education—those specters he'd conquered. As a young man, he'd grabbed fiercely, sometimes violently, for the things young men believed could safeguard them from impotence, spare them from humiliation—respect, money, power—and all those things had come to him.
Yet what had he really accomplished except to arrive at a higher, more chastening realm of helplessness? A realm where associates were enemies. A realm where family members schemed, where legal heirs connived like . . . like bastards. A realm where there were no small disappointments, only tragedies. A realm where the final helplessness consisted of being unable to ask for help.
Vincente sat. Sunlight played on the blue water of the pool, breeze shook the mottled leaves of the aralia hedge. He did not believe in sin and retribution, at least he didn't think he did. Still, he could not help feeling that what was happening to him now was some grim comeuppance for unforgiven things done long ago. For the first time in many years the Godfather thought hard and unguardedly about the violence of his youth.
The young Vincente Delgatto had been tough, remorseless—a stringy and quick-handed street guy with a dangling cigarette and a dimpled fedora. He'd intimidated people, grabbed their lapels, thrown them against the hoods of Stutzes and Packards. He'd killed. Twice. Miserable people, loathsome, not worth mourning. Still, they bled, they twitched as they died, their fingers grabbed at empty air, groping blindly for something to hold on to, something to stop their dead slide down to hell.
The Godfather shuddered. Overhead, a flight of ibis went by, a lone osprey circled. Violence. It was appalling, but at least, Vincente reflected, it was not a lie. Believing that violence could be outgrown, put aside—that was the lie, the lie he'd lived by for decades now. He'd told himself that violence had been a tool, a stratagem that set him up, established him, and which he was now in a position to forswear. He could become a diplomat, a peacemaker even, and the violence would seep out of his life, be filtered away by time until the remembered blood ran clear and clean as water.
Only it didn't work that way; he saw that now. Brutality was a virus, once it entered a life it stayed there; it lurked in the organs, it waited with a patient malice, it could take over any time. Vincente sniffed the clement air scented with limestone and chlorine and flowers, and he realized there had never been a moment when his life was not a violent life, that even in the absence of fists and bullets there was the simmering violence of jealousies and grudges, of plots and hatreds, of betrayals and memories that made jagged tearing cuts like rusty knives.
In his top left dresser drawer, back behind his socks and handkerchiefs, the old man kept a gun. It was a thuggish weapon, a snub-nosed .38; he'd had it for many years and never fired it. Suddenly he felt a morbid sniggering compulsion like the sick tug that pulls a former drunk back into the tavern. He wanted to heft the gun, to hold it in his hand. If peace, for him, was sham and pretense, if serenity was something he'd murdered half a century ago, then he might as well embrace the soul and emblem of the violence he realized now he couldn't flee.
He stood up in his robe and slippers, felt the unwholesome excitement of a child left home alone to play with matches or to masturbate. He took a deep breath that did not come easily into his constricted chest; then he padded slowly but with resolve through the sunshine toward the empty house.
41
Gino Delgatto, being dull, coarse, and sluggish, dealt with captivity better than most.
After four days in the cramped and smelly office of the seafood warehouse, he'd fallen into a numb docility, almost a bestial contentment. His skin was oily under his stubble beard, ingrown hairs put red splotches on his throat, but he didn't really notice. The swelling under his eyes had subsided; his smashed nose, like a failed souffle, had become resigned to its flatness and only hurt now when he sneezed. His clothes were wrinkled and dirty, his underwear foul, his armpits stank, and he didn't much care. Time passed and he was still alive. He played poker with the Fabretti thugs who watched over him in shifts. His captors had started taking pity on him; they brought him egg sandwiches, pizza, gave him bourbon now and again. He slept when he could and listened to the insane ringing of the metal building he was caged in.