Arty dropped his hands. "It's no business of yours. What the hell are you doing here?"
Mark Sutton had lowered his gun and was leaning against the kitchen doorway. "This is a crime scene," he said. "We have a right to be here."
"What's the crime?" said Arty.
Sutton gestured vaguely toward the yanked-out phone wires. Then Ben Hawkins produced a tatter of pink silk. "Who did this, Miss Martini? Looks like someone who's pretty mad at you."
Debbi pursed her lips. "Maybe I caught it in the fan," she said.
Hawkins frowned. Mark Sutton flexed his muscles against the doorframe.
"Listen," the younger agent said, "someone was here tonight. Someone pulled your phone. You come back looking like you've been through a war. Just what the hell went on?"
Arty and Debbi, side by side, kept silent.
"There's only one person you could be protecting," said Ben Hawkins.
"Only you can't protect him," said Mark Sutton. "You're in too deep for that. You, Magnus, you've done nothing but lie to us. You work for Delgatto; you're his flunky. Under RICO, you're an associate, an associate who lies. And you, Miss Martini, you're in dutch up to your eyeballs. You have a cup of coffee with a criminal, you go to jail. Ever seen a women's jail, Miss Martini? Ever seen the guards?"
Sutton hammered away, and suddenly Arty felt hugely tired, worn down, weary almost past the bounds of caring. Why—by what rule and at what grim cost—was he so stubbornly intent on shielding Vincente? Who was Vincente, this old man whose very existence seemed such an affront to all things lawful and legitimate? Who was this Godfather who had filled Arty with his story, who had become a sort of formidable roommate in his skin? Arty was a law-abiding person and he'd just been witness to a killing. He knew where the subsiding body was, could lead these legitimate men to it. And maybe then—
His musings, and Sutton's tirade, were ended by a stark emphatic gesture from Debbi. She fired out a skinny arm, pointed a long red fingernail at the ratty metal table. "Tour notebook, Arty. It isn't there. These sneaks took it. I'll bet you anything they took it."
Arty looked at the bare place on the tabletop; then he looked at Sutton. The young agent tried to hold his face together, but beneath the skin it crawled like soil shot through with slugs. Arty moved toward the kitchen. Sutton blocked the doorway with his squat hard body.
"Get out of my way, please. I live here."
Sutton shot an imploring glance at Hawkins; Hawkins had no help to give. The muscular agent suddenly looked absurdly young, unripe, a swollen child with a badge. Sulkily, he stepped aside at last.
Arty saw the stained and moisture-fattened notebook on the counter and could not repress a small and cockeyed smile.
"Well," he said. "Well."
Mark Sutton, as if afraid of being cornered, had moved to the middle of the living room. He turned on Arty and said, "Don't think that changes anything. You're still—"
"I think it changes everything," said Arty. "Your fingerprints all over a journalist's private files? It won't look good in the papers, Sutton. First Amendment violation. Harassment. Entry on extremely shaky grounds. They don't like that kind of news in Washington."
Sutton squeezed the back of the settee. "You dare to threaten—"
"You bet I do. Isn't that the way you guys do business? Threats. Leverage. Who's got what on who?"
Sutton's jaw worked but he could find no words. He looked at Hawkins, but the man's dusky face offered him no solace.
"Listen, friend," said Arty. "You say you can make trouble for us. I know I can make trouble for you. You don't, I won't."
Sutton bit his lip, tightened down his muscles. Outside, crickets rasped, breeze made the foliage sizzle. Debbi and Arty locked eyes, the stare was an embrace.
"Take the deal, Mark," Ben Hawkins said at last, and it almost seemed that there was a note of vindication in his voice. "This gets out, trust me, your great career goes right in the shithouse."
51
A few weeks later, Arty and Debbi, in shorts and T-shirts and grimy sneakers, were silently working in the crammed lush garden in back of Arty's cottage.
It was early March. For human beings, the weather was barely changed from a month before, but for plants it was a different era. Winter things were dying back under the rough kiss of the higher sun. Tender flowers bowed their heads, kitchen herbs turned woody and ran to seed. It was time to trim, to prune, to strip away the things whose time had passed and to open up the light to the oleanders, the allamanda, the thick-skinned beauties that flourished in the steaming orgy of subtropical summer.
But Debbi didn't like to prune. It hurt her to snip off stems that still had green on them, to sever twigs in which the sap still ran. She looked over at Arty, on his hands and knees in a bed of leggy moribund impatiens. It didn't seem to bother him to uproot the dying plants, though she knew how much he loved them. Why didn't it? It had to do, she supposed, with an acceptance of things being lost, a faith that other things, as good or better, would grow up in their place.