He broke off, slowly waved the gun, put it softly on the metal table. Arty's eyes followed it down, and he was visited by an ugly thought. Perhaps Vincente really was just a criminal and nothing more, as mean and vulgar and unredeemed as Mark Sutton made him out to be. Could there be any virtue in standing up for such a man, any goodness or even any sense in sacrificing others on the crooked altar of promises made to him?
Vincente was looking off toward the west, at the fading clouds. His tunnel eyes were out of focus. After a time he said, "But where was I goin' wit' this?"
Arty put his notebook down, leaned far forward, his forearms on his knees. "Vincente, you OK?"
The old man didn't react right away. Then he put on a masked wry smile, scratched behind an ear. Was he OK? This was not a question he was often asked. Of course he was OK. He was the Boss, the elder, the one who knew. He had to be OK; why bother asking?
Why bother answering? Instead, he said, "Ah, I remember now. The gun. I'm showin' ya the gun because I was thinkin', this book we were doin', it woulda been nice ta leave the gun out of it, like, ya know, it didn't exist, wasn't part a the story. Like we could say Vincente Delgatto wasn't a punk, he was a man wit' some dignity, maybe he knew a couple things. But ya couldn't leave the gun out, Ahty, ya couldn't pretty it up like that—"
"The book we were doing, Vincente?"
The old man pulled up short. His mouth worked a couple of seconds before sound came out. "Before things got all fucked up. Before it got too dangerous."
A yellow light came on just inside the house. Joey, carrying the enormous pasta bowl, appeared in the doorway and told them it was time for dinner. He saw his father's revolver glinting dully on the table and pretended he did not.
When he'd withdrawn, Arty said, "Vincente, you and me, we have a deal. You don't just break it off like that. The deal lives as long as we do, remember?"
The old man's eyes stung, he rolled his tangled brows down to hide them. Talking through that book, easing his mind—it was as close as he was ever going to come to salvation, but he wasn't going to get anybody killed for it. Bitterly, he said, "The deal lives unless it doesn't."
He put his hands on the arms of his chair, and began the arduous process of getting to his feet. Arty closed his notebook and wondered if he'd just been released from his pledges, wondered how he would know honor from treachery, gallantry from treason, beyond the strict bounds of his promise.
Perversely, his gaze was pulled toward one last look at Vincente's thuggish weapon; somehow the Godfather had already stashed it. He must have been wicked quick when he was young, the writer thought.
———
Gino Delgatto, wearing borrowed clothes that didn't fit exactly right, drove his rented T-Bird south on Seven Mile Bridge, on his way to murder Arty Magnus.
The thought of Arty dead didn't trouble him in the least. In fact his own world would seem considerably less cluttered without this skinny brainy Jew outsider who had somehow wormed his way into his father's confidence, was taking money from the old man while seducing him onto a course that could only end in family humiliation and disaster. A book! A public guts-pilling! And meanwhile this nobody is skimming off his five grand every month and getting tighter with Vincente every day, getting to be real buddies, confidants. He had to go.
Still, Gino wished there was someone else to do the killing. He drove under the starry sky between the Atlantic and the Gulf, barreled past the muck-anchored pylons that carried power to Key West at the end of the line, and wished to hell that Pretty Boy and Bo had done the job. It would have been so neat that way; it would have been over with by now.
Who knew about this FBI connection? Who knew even now how far it went? So Messina had thrown it back on Gino. That was the deal—if you could call it a deal. He killed the writer, he was given absolution; he didn't kill the writer, he'd better not buy green bananas. If the writer was wired, if the Feds were watching him, that was Gino's problem; he would take the fall.
Gino chuckled over that one as he drove. Him take the fall? In a world of rat-outs and gut-spillings, him be the only sucker that keeps his mouth shut? Not likely. Worse came to worse, the Feds nailed him murder one, he'd sing; he'd sing so loud they'd think Caruso had come back. The kind of information he could give them . . .
What kind of information could he give them? He was the Godfather's son, OK. But what did he know, what could he tell, that would give the prosecutors a bigger hard-on than a sure conviction on murder one?
Right offhand, Gino couldn't think of anything, and for a single awful moment he doubted he was as important as he liked to think he was. He banished the thought, watched a moonlit pelican fly next to the road. He wouldn't need to cut a deal. The killing would go just fine. To reassure himself, he reached a hand into the pocket that held the nine-millimeter pistol graciously lent by Charlie Ponte. It made him confident that the odds were heavily on his side.