The Moonlight (34 page)

But not until he was really fed up, until he got over this itch he had for her.

He shouldn’t have married her, that was all—even for her sake.  As his mistress she would have had a longer run.

And, as always when he thought about such things, Sonny was assailed with a sense of personal failure, as if his troubles with women were just further proof that he would never measure up to his father and grandfather.

His father Roberto had always kept a girlfriend tucked away somewhere—a fact of which Sonny had been vaguely aware since he was a teenager—but he had continued to live with his wife right up until the end, and seemed content that it should be so.  If Mamma had even known, she never gave the slightest sign, and Sonny had grown to manhood in an atmosphere of untroubled domestic peace.

If Enrico had ever fooled around, no word of it had ever reached his grandson.  Grandma seemed to have been enough.

A servant in a white jacket came out and wordlessly set a glass of lemonade on the table beside the Don’s chair.  Sonny never even glanced at him.  He was thinking about the Sunday lunches of his youth.

Every Sunday morning, until he was about fourteen years old, Sonny went to mass with his mother and grandmother.  Roberto and Enrico never accompanied them—God, it seemed, was only for women and children.

Grandfather owned a cluster of houses around a neck of beach in Riverside.  He lived with Grandmother in the smallest, his son and his family lived right on the other side of the road, and his daughter and her husband, who was allowed a living in one of Enrico’s legitimate enterprises but was considered too stupid to be included in the Family business, were next door.  The other houses belonged to trusted lieutenants.

And on Sundays, after Saint Catherine’s and a light breakfast, the children would play together until about one o’clock, when everyone would assemble at Grandfather’s for a huge lunch.  It was the gathering of the family, of those who shared Enrico’s blood, and the sense of safety, of belonging, was the most perfect happiness it was possible for Sonny to imagine.

Now, when he ate lunch on Sunday, it was just lunch, nothing more.  A chicken salad sandwich in the middle of the day.  And the person sitting across the table from him was an ex-showgirl of Polish extraction who answered to a name she had invented for herself when she was fifteen.

“How was the funeral?”

Sonny looked up to see Jimmy DeLucia standing over him, wearing a light gray doublebreasted suit with lapels that were a work of art in themselves.  He was smiling—he had made a joke.

Did Jimmy have any doubts?  No, Jimmy worked out at a private gym, screwed his wife at regular intervals and paid attention to business.  No girlfriends, no irregularities, no doubts.  Jimmy should have been the Don.  Jimmy was exactly like Enrico.

“It was very well attended,” Sonny answered.  “All the Families want to know when we’re gonna chop Sal’s killer.  So do I.”

Jimmy dropped a file folder on the table next to the untouched lemonade and sat down.

“That’s everything Spolino’s got,” he said.  “This morning he asked his captain for permission to bust this guy Owings and was turned down.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because the captain’s on our payroll for three bills a week.”

Sonny picked up the file folder and opened it to glance through a page or two.

“You get this from him?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You do good work, Jimmy.  You talk to the Devere broad?”

“Yeah.  I put her on a plane to Atlanta this morning.  She identified Owings from the picture in that file.”

The photograph was fastened with a paperclip to the inside of the file cover.  Sonny looked at it for a second and then threw the folder back on the table.

“She telling the truth?”

“She’s been around, Sonny.  And she knows we’re not the boy scouts.  She told me the truth.”

“Then we hit this Owings creep.  You set it up—just the way I told you.”

But Jimmy didn’t seem very comfortable with that.  He didn’t say anything, but he had that look, as if he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him.

“What’s the matter,” Sonny asked, ready to be angry.  “You still on about me not being involved?  You think I’m a stockbroker or something?”

“It isn’t that, boss.  You want to clip this guy personally, I can understand that.  I just like to be sure it’s the right guy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that Spolino is more interested in somebody else.”

“What somebody else?”

“Some old hood named Charlie Brush.  And I’m telling you, it would be more in character.  Owings is a civilian.”

Now Sonny was angry.

“Did the Devere broad happen to mention that the guy who blew away Sal was in his eighties, Jimmy?  You think she would have missed a little detail like that.”

“No, Sonny.  Okay.”

“No it’s not okay.  Forget about Charlie Brush.  Somebody is pulling Spolino’s chain, that’s all.  I happen to know that Charlie Brush is not involved in this.  Okay?”

“Okay, Sonny.”

“Then set up the hit on Owings, Jimmy.  Owings is our man.  End of story.”

Jimmy stayed a little longer, and they discussed a few other items of routine business.  And then he was alone again, Sonny stared at the glistening surface of his swimming pool with a certain wolfish satisfaction.

He was going to do it.  He was going to take this guy Owings and personally cancel his ticket.

And then honor would be satisfied.

A television set was on in one corner of the room, but the sound was turned off.  Mr. Carboni found he couldn’t follow what the people on television were saying anymore, but he still liked to look at them and the shows gave him a rough idea of the time.  If it was hand puppets and cartoons it was still morning.  The soaps came in the afternoon and were followed by quiz shows.  Then there were the news programs until the nurse came to take him downstairs for dinner.  When it was dark outside his window, all he had to do was look at the television and he would know if he had eaten yet.  If some idiot was having a fight with his wife or chasing around in his car, then he would know he could stop worrying about whether he felt hungry.

When the nurse came and turned off the television set, he knew it was time for him to take a leak and get put to bed.

Right now there was a movie on—he knew it was a movie because he didn’t recognize any of the actors.  God, he hadn’t been to a real movie in fifteen years.  Not since his wife died and his son Arnie had put him in this place.  Fucking nursing home, Jesus.

Arnie was a no good little jerkoff who couldn’t talk about anything except how much money he was making in the car business and how that wife of his couldn’t spend it fast enough.  Maybe if he took a little time off once in a while to stick his dick in her she’d have something else to think about.

Money.  Money, money, money.  What the fuck good did it do him?  Mr. Carboni couldn’t remember how much he had put away, but it was plenty.  Arnie couldn’t wait for him to die.

It was twilight now.  Mr. Carboni’s room was on the ground floor, facing the back patio, and some of the residents were still outside.  Mrs. Kleinman was doing her usual ten laps with the walker, her purse dangling from her wrist as she pushed herself along back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.  One of the men from the other wing was having a cigarette—Mr. Carboni could just see the smoke as it trailed slowly across his window, which he liked left open in the evening just on the off chance of catching a whiff of tobacco.  Jesus, he hadn’t had a cigarette in so long he couldn’t even remember the last one.

In half an hour it would be dark, and the grounds would be deserted.  When she came to put him to bed, the nurse would close his window and turn on the air conditioning so he could freeze to death all night.

The nurse was about fifty, with a nice set of hips.  A set of hips like that inspired a man with ambitions.  George Freihofer at the end of the corridor once claimed that he gave her a hundred bucks one time for a blow job, but that was just a load of shit.  George probably hadn’t seen a hundred dollars all together since he came to this place.

Once, one time, he had decided to put it to the test—hell, what was a hundred dollars?  So, to ease his way into it, he had put his hand on that lovely ass while she was making up his bed and, without missing a beat, she had said, “Now Mr. Carboni, let’s not be naughty.”

She probably thought it was cute, an old man like him copping a feel.  Jesus.  Once was enough.

The guy on television was some big black stud in a tan raincoat he didn’t even seem to take off indoors.  He was either a gangster or a cop.  Mr. Carboni thought maybe a gangster because the piece he carried was a .45 service automatic, a fucking cannon, and no cop would ever walk around lugging that kind of iron.  But on television, who could tell?

Jesus.  Niggers in the police, niggers in the rackets—what was the world coming to?  Back in the old days a spade like that tried to break into any white man’s hustle, he’d end up with his fucking face shot off.  But nothing made any sense these days.  These days even the mobs were crazy—fucking wise guys, made men in the Families yet, went around acting like fucking nigger pimps.

It was the new guys that ruined everything, guys like Roberto’s kid, fucking “Sonny” he liked to be called.  The old Dons would never ’ve put up with all this shit, but Sonny. . .  Fucking candy salesman.

Roberto ’d been a good Don.  Not as good as his father—who could be?—but not bad.  Now Enrico. . .

Mr. Carboni’s eyes clouded for a moment, and he had a lump in his throat the size of an orange as he thought of the old Don.

“I pledge my life to you and yours, onto death. . .”
  That was the way the oath went, the oath he had taken seventy years ago, the oath he had never broken.

He remembered, he remembered. . .

There’s some big nigger guy making trouble—is it the guy from the television?—and the Don is furious.

“I want this
alienato
dead!” Enrico shouted.  “What does he think, this crazy son-of-a-bitch, he can kill anybody?  He thinks we’re a crowd of old ladies or somethin’?  Leo, you see to it—we take this
matto
out!”

And Leo, the underboss, Enrico’s kid brother and right-hand man, shrugs his shoulders like he can’t decide what he wants for dinner.

“It’s a problem,” he says.  “I agree with you, the guy’s a nut case, but he’s smart and he’s got good moves.  He’ll be hard to kill.  Besides, the public is gettin’ tired of all this blood.”

“Who spills blood?”  Enrico digs his fingers into his chest, protesting his innocence.  “Do
I
squash people against the back walls of their own warehouses?  Do
I
cut people’s throats in the back of movie houses?  Who does this?”

“We can’t be sure the movie house was him,” Leo says patiently.  “Besides, that one is not our problem.”

“It was him—you kiddin’?  Who else?  Let me tell you, little brother, don’t worry about ‘the public.’  We pull the plug on Charlie Brush, the town council ’ll probably vote us a medal.”

They are sitting out on the back porch of Don Enrico’s house, because it is summer and there is a slight breeze off the Sound.  The Don, Leo, Lucio Spolino, the Don’s bodyguard and prize hitter, and making a fourth, for the very first time in his life, awed by the presence of these men, is Vito “Fingers” Carboni.

And—that’s right—it ain’t no nigger.  It’s some crazy
Inglese
that’s causing all the trouble.  Some maniac from nowhere.

“I don’t say we don’t do it,” Leo tells him.  “I just say we should be quiet about it.  Nobody wants a big noise.”

So far, only Leo and Don Enrico have spoken.  Now the Don turns his eyes to Lucio Spolino, his expert.

“Well, Lucio?”

Spolino is really impressive.  He is big and solid, but he is quick and moves with an animal grace.  Everyone is afraid of him—perhaps even the Don is a little afraid of him, although his loyalty is unquestioned.  He is that rare thing, a blond Sicilian, and his blue eyes are as cold as death.

At first Spolino seems not to have heard.  He is so still you suspect he is not even breathing.  And then, suddenly, his gaze, which before seemed focused on nothing, falls upon Leo—the effect on Leo is almost the same as if he had been struck in the face.

“He has a friend,” Spolino says, not as a question or even a discovery, but simply as a neutral fact.  “Someone he trusts.”

Leo nods.  He understands now.  “George Patchmore.  We own him.”

Now Spolino nods in answer.

“We reach him through the friend,” he says.  “And then he disappears.”

“And then he disappears.”

And then, somehow, they all disappear.

Mr. Carboni came awake with a start.  As his mind cleared a little he realized, with a twinge of disappointment, that he had been asleep.  He was old again, and Leo, Lucio Spolino, even the Don, they were all just shadows.  He had been dreaming.

But the man on the little sofa, against the wall and at right angles to Mr. Carboni’s chair, sitting where Arnie always sat when he came to visit, he was no shadow.  He was smoking a cigarette, and Mr. Carboni could smell the tobacco—it made his lungs ache with pleasure, even as he felt a pang of warning fear in his belly.