Then he fell. A mangrove root had grabbed his foot, twisted it as he tried to step. He toppled onto his side; warm muck slapped against his flank, his cheek. He groaned, then tugged his leg like a bear caught in a trap. It came free but his ankle didn't feel right.
Debbi was crouching over him. Her face was close, mosquitoes swarmed between them. "Go," he said. "Don't wait."
She didn't answer. She didn't go. She put her arms in Arty's armpits and helped him up. For a second he stood on one foot, and in that instant they heard the rustlings behind them, the sharp recoilings of swatted foliage. She threw Arty's arm across her shoulder and they trundled on together.
The ground was getting softer underfoot; there were fewer dry places between the slimy puddles. The mangroves got lower, snakier; flashes of sky broke through here and there, and by the most gradual of increments the woods became a swamp. The puddles merged into an unbroken shallow ooze. The ground beneath melted to an infernal batter, a dense sucking slop like loose cement. Arty's hurt ankle screamed with every step; Debbi's knees ached as she pumped them to lift her sinking feet.
Their progress now was inches at a time. Against the muted splashes of their dire steps, they heard the ever-closer sounds of their pursuers. They heard mumbled curses, gruff breathing fearsome as the wheeze of dragons.
The foul water got deeper, the muck became all-possessing. Debbi sank down past her calves; she struggled to lift herself and tumbled with an awful slowness to a half-sitting posture against a crotch of branches. Arty didn't so much fall with her as reach a certain point of leaning from which he could not deviate. He held a mangrove with both hands, strained every muscle and felt nothing but a stalemate, registered a helplessness more galling than any failure he could ever have imagined.
"Debbi," he whispered, "I'm sorry."
She said nothing. Her eyes were wide, the lashes almost vertical. Tiny lines of blood traced out the scratches on her face.
A flash of blinding light knifed across the swamp. Behind it, two forward-leaning silhouettes could just barely be distinguished. Shoes sucked through the warm morass. One pursuer slowed; the other trudged on with the grim momentum of a dray horse. The beacon panned crazily across the mangroves as the man holding it inexorably approached. Arty's pulse pounded in his neck, he heard blood rushing in his ears. He thought of screaming but went as mute as some toothless thing going down before a lion.
The steps splashed closer, were maybe thirty feet away. The relentless silhouette took on a dreadful bulk and weight. The flashlight pinned Debbi against her branch; lines of black were running down beneath her eyes. Then the beam was turned on Arty. He wriggled like the flash was death itself, there was nowhere he could go.
He didn't know how bullets felt. He waited for them. He swallowed, tasted blood as though his insides were already punctured, gurgling. Then a voice came through the muck.
"What'sa matter, Mr. Magnus, guilty conscience?"
The bright light released his eyes, under-lit the face of the pursuer who was holding it. Arty saw a square jaw, a thickly muscled neck, a halo of sprayed hair.
"Jesus Christ," he hissed.
Ben Hawkins neared; his labored breathing wheezed and whistled amid the sounds of bugs and frogs.
"Bad things are happening," said Mark Sutton. "Maybe worse things are on the way. For you too, Miss Martini. I think maybe you could use some friends. Maybe now you'd like to talk with us."
Part
Four
37
Debbi started up the Cadillac. Its headlights found swarms of milling termites and spiraling moths as she turned the car in front of the limestone boulders at the end of No-Name Key.
Her ruined leggings were rolled up above her knees; her shins were lightly coated with dried limestone muck. She drove barefoot, her cloth shoes thrown in the trunk of the convertible, heavy as if cast in concrete. She'd rubbed away the tear streaks beneath her eyes; left behind was a swirled gray smear. When they reached the little rainbow bridge, she broke the frayed silence with a sudden slaphappy chuckle. "The way you told them off, Arty—that was great."
"Left at the stop sign," Arty said. On Big Pine, crickets and tree frogs sang in the scrubby woods, the anemic gleam of television came through people's windows. "Did I tell them off?"
Debbi flicked the end of the thorn-shredded scarf she still wore around her hair and neck. "Did you? Arty, you were on a rave. What kinda lunatic tactics? . . . What kinda crazy SWAT team mentality? I mean, screaming at them even while they were dragging us outa the mud. ..."
Arty shook his head, scratched a mosquito bite behind his ear, fingered a shallow cut on his neck.
"How's your ankle?" Debbi asked him.
"Throbs a little. No big deal."
"Ice," she said. She'd reached the intersection where Key Deer Boulevard meets U.S. 1, and she pointed the El Dorado toward Key West. The highway was tawdry with bunker like bars crouched in chalky parking lots and dim convenience stores that scraped along on sales of condoms, lotto tickets, and potato chips. After a while, she asked, "Arty, the FBI—why'd they wanna talk to you?"
He swiveled toward her, pressed down in his seat by the weight of secrets, of his promise to Vincente. "I don't think I can tell you that," he said.
She nodded, bit her lip.
A moment passed. Then Arty said, "That Sutton guy, he said maybe trouble was on the way for you too. You have any idea what he meant?"
Debbi kept her eyes on the road and said no. Then her hands fretted over the steering wheel and she glanced at Arty. "Maybe I do. It's not something I wanna talk about."
Arty didn't push; he rested his hurt foot and watched the long loops of the power lines strung next to the highway.
Debbi flicked her scarf. "This is crazy."
"Hm?"
"Here we are, the two of us, we almost die, we're alone on this weird road in the middle of nowhere, and there's all these things we're not supposed to tell each other. Like the secrets matter more than we do."
"Secrets matter," Arty said, though before his dealings with Vincente, he'd never realized quite how much.
"Can I ask one question?"
"Sure."
"Your thing with these guys—does it have to do with Gino?"
The question confused Arty. His connection was with the Godfather. It was the Godfather the Feds were asking about. He couldn't imagine what it had to do with Gino, and he mumbled out a no.
But in his own mind the question raised an altogether different matter—the matter of the odd and itchy twinge he'd felt at the mention of Gino's name. He looked at Debbi. The Caddy's top was still down; each passing streetlight unfurled a sheet of brightness over her, then snapped her into shadow until the next beam found her face. Wispy bangs escaped from the scarf and blew across her forehead; her eyes were soft and tired. Arty was amazed to realize that the archaic and almost forgotten thing he was feeling was jealousy.
He tried to keep his voice casual. "Gino—you worried about him?"
Debbi tapped the steering wheel. "Sure I am." Then she added, "But only like I'd worry about anyone in trouble."
"That's all?"
She crinkled up her eyebrows, began to let herself imagine that maybe Arty was angling for an assurance he didn't think he had the right to come out and ask for. She gave it like a Christmas present. "Gino and me," she said, "we're history. That's over, finished, good riddance. . . . You didn't know that either, Arty?"
Sheepishly, he shook his head.
"Sicilians," said Debbi. She gave a half-indulgent, half-exasperated frown. "Always playing us-and-them, whispering games, divide and conquer. . . . Think about it, Arty. With what you know and what I know, we almost know something. If we could tell each other."
He settled back in the seat, looked ahead at the snaking road that hopped from rock to rock to Key West at the end of the line. Gino was history. Debbi was here. Arty hugged his hurt foot and said, "Yeah, if we could tell each other."
———
/>
Nassau Lane was not much wider than Joey Goldman's car, and when Debbi pulled up in front of Arty's cottage, tree limbs dangled over the convertible and there was barely room left over for cats to slink along the curb. Stars twinkled, were briefly erased by smears of moonlit clouds. Debbi cut the engine, and the sound of rustling fronds flooded in to fill the quiet.
For a moment they just sat there. Then Debbi gave a cockeyed smile and gestured toward her devastated clothing and slightly torn up face. "Do I say thank you for a lovely evening?"
"We saw deer," said Arty.
"True," she said. 'The size of dogs."
Arty made no move to go, and after a pause she added, "Your legs—you'll be OK?"
He nodded, glanced down at his door handle, didn't reach for it. "Ice," he said.
They sat. Moonlight filtered down, hands fidgeted in laps, the faraway perfume of closed flowers came to them. When a man and a woman desired each other and were not lovers, there was no quite graceful way to end an evening, it never quite stopped being high school.
Wistfully, regretfully, Arty said, "Well . . ."and fumbled to open the door.
He looked up from his fumbling to see Debbi's face very close to his, moving toward him, silent, fluid, and mysterious. She kissed him very quickly at the corner of his mouth, at the puzzling cusp between friendly cheeks and amorous lips; then, just as quickly, she withdrew again. Arty, reluctant Arty, saw her retreating, saw her eyes slipping away, her wrapped hair being framed by night and distance, and without an instant's hesitation he reached out both hands to hold her face, to keep it near his own. He kissed her on the mouth, tasted lipstick and salt air.
Then he climbed out of the car, half turned away, and said good night. He felt light and happy but still he limped as he headed for his ravaged front door.
38
"Fuck is this supposed ta mean?" said Pretty Boy. "Juicy pa .. . para ..."
"Paradox," said Aldo Messina, sitting between his minions at a six-sided table covered in green felt.
"Right," said the handsome thug. "Paradox. Surest way to fail: aim higher than anybody realizes. Fuck's 'at supposed ta mean?"
Bo, the philosophic thug, murmured thoughtfully, "I think maybe it means—"
"Or dis?" His partner cut him off. "Common sense—not very common; does that make sense?"
"Dat one's like," said Bo, "ya know, a play on—
"A play on bullshit," said Pretty Boy. Aldo Messina, looking glum and bloodless, pressed the notebook shut, pushed it aside like a plate of food with bugs in it, and grabbed another from the stack.
This was at the Fabretti family headquarters—the San Pietro Social Club on Broome Street in Manhattan. The club had once been a hardware store; it had display windows covered by steel roll-down shutters that had not been opened since the Eisenhower years; its glass front door had been replaced by a metal one with a peephole. There was a small bar with an espresso machine and some bottles of anisette and Scotch. On the walls hung tilted pictures of Italian-American lounge acts: men with pompadours and bedroom eyes, women in sequined evening gowns with cleavage.
Pretty Boy leaned in toward the new notebook and started in again. "Remember the as .. . ast—"
"Asterisk," Messina hissed.
"Asterisk," parroted Pretty Boy. "Fuck's an asterisk?"
"It's, like, inna sky," said Bo. "A little planet, like."
His partner wasn't listening. "Asterisk. When in doubt, break the scene. Look, I don't see where any a dis has ta do wit' Vincente Delgatto, and I don't see where dis guy comes off thinkin' he's a writer. Y'ask me, he comes off like a fuckin' nut. Mosta what he writes, ya can't even make out what he's writin'."
"That's what worries me," said Messina. He put his hand on the stained and moisture-fattened notebook, ran a delicate finger across the page as though it were written in Braille. "Could be some kind of code. Look the way he prints one line, a heading like, then scrawls all this other bullshit underneath it."
"Code, no code, who gives a shit," said Pretty Boy, "long's we got the books?"
"We got the books, yeah," Aldo Messina said. "But so what? The problem with writers is it's hard to stop 'em writing. And we still don't have the writer."
"No fault a mine," said Pretty Boy, a note of whining resentment in his voice. He got up from the table and started pacing, it was like the amphetamines pinched him on the scrotum if he sat still more than a few moments at a time. He went to a pool table where no one ever shot pool and rolled the cue ball off three cushions. "I still say we shoulda clipped 'im. Shit. I'm gettin' frustrated, like. I keep gettin' sent ta do a job, then I don't get ta do the fuckin' job."
"Bo did right," Aldo Messina said with finality.
The philosophic thug modestly lowered his eyes. The table they were sitting at had a gutter for poker chips and change; Bo quietly swept lint into it.
Now Messina started pacing, circled wide of Pretty Boy; they were like planes around an airport. The dour boss made a circuit or two, then moved to the table and sat down again. Next to the stacked up notebooks that had been stolen from Arty Magnus was a small piece of cardboard. He toyed with it; it was a business card. It said Mark J. Sutton, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. It had shaken out of the back of Arty's Rolodex when the thugs had rifled his office.
Pretty Boy watched his boss fondling the card and said, "The fuck's workin' both sides a da street, I say dat's alla more reason—"
"Look," said Bo, "he's workin' wit' the Feds, the Feds are gonna be protecting 'im. He coulda been wired. He coulda had a whaddyacallit, one of those things, they know exactly where he is. We take 'im out, boom, they got us."
"OK, OK," said Pretty Boy. "But inna meantime, the skinny fuck has gotta go."
"Yeah, he does," agreed Messina. "But in the meantime, Bo did right."
This grated on Pretty Boy's nerves. "Bo did right," he said. "Bo did right. So give Bo a fuckin' medal. But there's still this scumbag writer—"
"The situation's a little more complicated than we thought," Messina said. He pursed his lips, furrowed his bleak tense forehead into a map of perfect pessimism. "But hey—isn't that the way fuckin' life is?"
———
Arty Magnus had not had time or inclination to straighten up his trashed bedroom. A lamp still lay on the floor and seemed to be groping after its shade, like a man who had lost his hat. Dresser drawers still stood half open; shirt and sweater sleeves hung out at urgent angles, waving mutely, frantically, for help.
The ghostwriter was sprawled across his bed now, his head and his ankle up on pillows, a bag of ice hanging down on both sides of his foot like a cocker spaniel's ears. He lay there and he thought. He thought about Debbi: the shock of finding her face next to his, the salt taste of her mouth. His hands, however briefly, had held her jawbone, his fingers reached behind her ears; such intimacy, felt fresh, was astonishing, uncanny. He closed his eyes and imagined he was her lover.
The idyll didn't last long. It was shattered by other preoccupations, by thoughts and worries ruder than slaps and as frightening as a scream in the night. Someone was after Arty. After him. It was an odd phrase, primitive; it suggested a ritual hunt, a ceaseless stalking. Which was precisely how Arty felt: like his steps were being dogged, his range of movement shrinking. He was running out of room, and Key West, this tiny island that had never seemed too small before, suddenly felt confining as a rowboat and as devoid of hiding places.
He lay there on his bed. A mild breeze puffed through the screens, moonlight dusted the tangled foliage outside. He remembered when he'd agreed to become the Godfather's ghost, the earnest charade he'd gone through, telling himself he was free to say no. He should have said no, he knew that now; probably he'd known it all along. Yet regret was strangely absent from the mix of fear and anger he was feeling. He'd known from the start there'd be some crazy thrall to this business of harboring someone else's story, some lunatic pull into the mad logic and morbid righteousness of gangsters. He'd ac
cepted the danger, in a distant, abstract sort of way, and he'd expected a strict and brittle fairness in return. Vincente's eyes had promised him that, had led him to believe he was entering a realm where justice was severe but simple, ruthless but unerring, a realm where, if you told the truth, and kept up your end of the bargain, you would be safe. What had gone wrong?
He thought. He had no answers, but he had suspicions that started off as vapors then took on human shape, like evil genies, and the more he thought the madder he got. He was surprised at his own grit when, around ten-thirty, he called Joey Goldman and said they had to talk, right now, at his cottage, and to bring along Vincente.
39
"Giovanni," said Bert the Shirt, "what the hell are we doin' here?"
The chihuahua looked up from its ashtray-ful of dog food mixed with flaxseed. It blinked its enormous eyes that were milky with cataracts, then went back to its tardy dinner.
Bert got up from the foot of the hotel bed and strolled over to the window. Down the side street, past the darkened theater marquees, he saw the lights and billboards of Times Square. A gigantic ad for color film showed a ski jumper flying off the sign and heading skyward; endless news briefs spelled out in bulbs wrapped themselves around an alabaster building. At sidewalk level, dented wire trash cans lay tumbled in the gutters; homeless people hunkered down on slabs of cardboard tucked into doorways; patches of filthy snow survived in places reached by neither sun nor shovel. The retired mobster put his hand on the cold glass; it left a print in frost.
It had not been a good day for Bert the Shirt. After the disaster of Perretti's, he'd had himself driven to the Airline Diner, near La Guardia, a sometime hangout for old family friends. He was discreetly told that Tony Matera hadn't been around in weeks, and Sal Giordano came in occasionally but seemed to be spending more time in the Village. So Bert directed the Haitian cabbie to Manhattan, where he poked his head into a couple of linguine joints, then made inquiries at a pasticceria three steps down from the sidewalk on Carmine Street. There he learned with a sinking heart that he'd missed Sal by maybe twenty minutes; he'd been coming in most days for morning coffee— morning, for Sal, commencing around noon.
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