Ben Hawkins saw him sneak past, understood what he was up to, and said mildly, "I don't think you want to do that, Mark."
Sutton ignored him. Back in the kitchen, he switched on his flashlight and felt a rude excitement, the arousal of a boy with a pocketful of filthy pictures. He riffled through the damp and wavy pages of Arty Magnus's scrawl, at first reading only the headings, which struck him as peculiar. History of Sicily. Courage to Judge. Gardening in Queens. He had no doubt that these puzzling phrases were somehow coded, that beneath them, in the all but illegible squiggles and loops of Arty's writing, would be all sorts of implicating hints: names of criminals, dates of crimes, places where the bodies were buried.
Straining his eyes around the thin beam of the flashlight, Sutton struggled to read, decipher, memorize. Time flew now, the young agent was wholly caught up in his work. He knew that somewhere beyond the old man's musings and complaints and gropings after sense, bound up in the tangled knots of the ghostwriter's scribble, were the forbidden secrets whose discovery would establish him as a rising star, a man with a brilliant future.
49
The unmarked road soon became a mangrove tunnel.
Tangled boughs arched overhead; rubbery vines clutched at them and dangled down. Frogs croaked. Mosquitoes buzzed. Lizards clung to rocks and stumps, puffing out their ruby throats. The only sign of human presence was here and there a bleached-out beer can, a shattered soda bottle.
The beam of Joey's headlights was swallowed up by foliage and moths. He drove on slowly, the car rocked over chunks of pitted limestone and through fetid puddles that stank of sulfur.
The ground grew softer, spongy, as he drove, phased without boundary into inches-deep sea. Water squished from porous rock as from sodden moss. He looped around an encroaching web of mangrove roots, and when he straightened out again his headlights found the red gleam of a car's reflectors a hundred yards ahead. He tried to go faster; his wheels spun in the muck, he felt the chassis sinking. He eased off, cruised forward slowly as a docking ship.
They reached the dark car. It was a Thunderbird. There was no one in it. Vincente was out the door before Joey could speak, clambering through the rooty seeping swamp in his soft and slick-soled loafers.
Mangrove leaves drank up the moonlight, but here and there waves of brightness poured through like milk. In the gleaming patches there was water coated with pollen, tiny crabs nipping sideways over stones. Joey trailed his father as the old man pressed on through the marl. Wetness covered his shoe tops; the canopy of foliage cracked open to show a starry sky.
By its pallid light, Vincente Delgatto, himself still unseen and unheard from fifty feet away, saw his firstborn son standing calf-deep in slimy water, holding a moonlit gun on Debbi Martini and Arty Magnus. The tableau suggested a macabre wedding. In the silvery glow, Debbi looked like a bride, her skin lucent through her tear-streaked makeup; close at her side, Arty, his hands clenching and unclenching, had the posture of a nervous groom. Before them, Gino stood like a devil's priest who would bind them together for eternity.
The Godfather trudged on, dragging his feet through the sucking morass. The heavy air around him moved and pulsed as it got ready to carry sound. In a voice that was low and ancient and commanding, he said, "Gino, put the gun away."
His son's head snapped around like that of a boxer who's been jabbed; his eyes searched for the voice in the broken moonlight. Then he said, "Stay the fuck outa this, Pop. Don't come any closer."
Vincente kept coming. Each step through the slime took all his strength; one of his shoes was pulled off in the mud; he continued on without it. "Put it down, I said."
Gino licked his lips. Mosquitoes were flying in his ears, his eyes, he swatted at them with a gloved hand. "Mind your fuckin' business, Pop. These people gotta die."
The Godfather moved forward. Crabs scampered in front of him, toads leaped on floating leaves. He was twenty feet away. "They ain't done nothin' wrong," he said.
Gino laughed. It was a bitter mocking laugh, diabolical, forsaken. "You still think that's how it works, old man?"
Vincente dragged himself on. Hot blood pounded in his head, green streamers streaked behind his eyes. "Yeah, Gino, I do."
"You're wrong as shit," said his firstborn, waving blindly at mosquitoes.
"Gino," said his father. "Please." He trudged inexorably forward. Joey appeared at his shoulder. Arty and Debbi looked stiff and frail as glass in the cool white moonlight.
"Right, wrong—you're fuckin' nuts, old man."
"Don't hurt them, Gino. There's no reason."
"Pop, you just don't fuckin' get it, do you?"