"Jeez, Bert," Sal Giordano said. "Wit' the way things are, the edginess, like, about what happened ta Carbone—"
Bert remembered another of the things he used to be very good at: pausing. He could put a lot of weight, a lot of nuance, into a pause. Now he poured sugar into his espresso, stirred it slowly with a tiny spoon. His pause was saying, I ain't worried, Sal. I know y'aren't wimping out on me.
After a moment the young man said, "Sit tight, lemme see what I can do." He went to the pay phone at the back of the store.
Bert, suddenly hungry, signaled for the waiter and ordered up a sfaglatella. He fed pieces of the hard crust to his dog.
Ten minutes later, Sal came lumbering back. "Here's the deal," he said. "I'll take ya to Brooklyn, leave ya wit' a friend a mine. He'll drive ya ta Staten Island, get ya together wit' a friend a his. That guy'll get ya inta the San Pietro. After dat, you're on your own."
Bert grabbed a napkin from the steel dispenser and dabbed the powdered sugar from his lips. "When'a we staht?" he said.
"Whenever you're ready," said Sal Giordano.
"I'm ready now," the old man told him, and he slid his skinny haunches across the vinyl booth.
42
It had been many years since Arty Magnus gave someone a ride on the crosspiece of his bike, and doing so now pulled him back to the heartbreaking sensuality of the endless days of boyhood summers: the feel of a girl leaning fearlessly against his arm, the smell of her hair blowing in his face and tickling his nose, a smudge of dirt at the back of her knee, the sticky taste of a Creamsicle at the corners of her mouth.
"Debbi," he said, his long legs pumping, "this is great."
She swiveled as well as she could on the hard metal tubing and smiled at him. Her red hair and her green eyes looked so nice that Arty's breath caught. A woman you really liked looked prettier after you'd been to bed with her; a woman you didn't, did not. This was one of the ways a man knew if he might be falling in love.
They rode under rustling palms and leafless poincianas, skirted the cemetery, and dodged the skulking, furtive cats, the flat dogs sunning themselves next to the tires of parked cars. When they got to Joey Goldman's house, Arty regretfully put on the brakes. The bike slowed, leaned, and Debbi hopped off onto the sidewalk. Arty regarded her in her black tights and purple leotard.
"You left your scarf at my house," he said.
"I guess I'll have to come back for it sometime."
"Tonight?"
She bit her lower lip, looked up the gravel driveway at the airy house. "I don't know," she said. "I'm still a guest and all."
"Then wangle me a dinner invitation. I want to look at you."
She kissed him on the cheek and headed up the lawn. He turned his bike around and pointed it toward work.
He rode off slowly and with dignity; then, when he was safely out of sight, he popped a wheelie, cut some swooping slaloms, and reached as high as he could reach to knock wood against the overhanging boughs of banyan trees and frangipani.
———
The sky above lower Manhattan was the swirly, smeary white of paint that needed mixing. Somewhere in the glary clouds, sleet was waiting to happen, but for now the air was dry, though sharp with the blue smells of ice and invisible winter lightning.
Bert d'Ambrosia, his dog nestled in his solar plexus, sat in the vast cabin of the Staten Island ferry, in the sullen company of the friend of a friend who was serving as his escort. The guy had a mousy chin and a twitch that pulled his left eye down like a window-shade; he didn't want to talk, seemed deeply put out at being asked to do someone a favor. So Bert looked through the dirty Plexiglas at the surging gray water of the harbor. He'd spent the last three hours being driven from Mafia enclave to Mafia enclave around the boroughs of the city. He'd been to Bensonhurst, he'd been to Todd Hill. He'd been through tunnels, over bridges; now he was on a ship that stank of cheap hotdogs, thin burned coffee, and the caustic stuff they use to mop up floors when someone pukes. All this to go eight blocks from where he'd started. A helluva way to do business, he thought.
The boat neared the towering shore, and without a word the escort got up to go back to his car.
The ferry docked, the pilings groaned. Bert was driven in moody silence past Wall Street, up through Chinatown, into the shrinking precinct of Little Italy. They passed Umberto's Clam House, where Crazy Joey Gallo ended face down in the linguine. They passed Salvatore's Neapolitan, favored by Nino Carti for its air-dried braciole. Bert's heart was pounding. It had been a long time since the ancient muscle pumped like this around its bypassed valves. It wasn't fear that did it, it was the promise of action, the coming alive of memory. He looked around. Fire escapes. Big cheeses hung in storefronts in harnesses of rope. These things seemed suddenly uncanny, surreal. Bert licked his lips, ran a hand through his white hair with its glints of pink and bronze. He felt jumpy as a wire with its insulation freshly snipped.