Sunburn by Laurence Shames Read Free Book Online Page A

and clinking. Arty made a move to rise and help; Joey pushed him by the shoulders back into his chair.
    So he sat and sipped his wine. He took the liberty of pouring more for Debbi, whose glass did not seem to stay full for long. Gino unwrapped a cigar, put it in his mouth unlit; he leaned back in his chair so that his shirt stretched open between the buttons and revealed little ovals of belly hair. The Godfather slowly and grandly wiped his lips on a corner of his napkin, reached up to straighten a tie he wasn't wearing. Then he said to Arty, "Newspaper business—ya like it?"
    After the small talk and the mumbling, the editor was a little nonplussed to be asked a real question, and a touchy one. "Not much," he fumbled. "No."
    The Godfather nodded, considered. At his back was a sweep of bare white wall broken up by louvered windows. Early moonlight filtered in, threw dim stripes on the floor. "Why ya do it then?"
    Arty could not hold back a quick nervous laugh. He heard it from the wrong side of his ears and realized he was a little drunker than he'd thought. He realized something else as well: He was looking at Vincente, past the folds and wrinkles that, depending on how hard you dared to look, either hid his eyes or lured you farther into them, and all at once he understood that the man's power, his leadership, lay in the fact that he could not be fibbed to, or not for long; he would draw out truth like salt drew water out of fruit. Arty felt fear and reassurance together, a sort of jumpy freedom. "It's my living," he said.
    "You're educated," said Vincente. "Bright. Ya don't like it, ya could do other things."
    Arty drank some wine. He hazily remembered being told as a child that he had to tell the truth, and as long as he did so he would not be punished. This was one of the disastrous childhood lessons that adults had to unlearn, and in unlearning it grow sad and dead at heart; in the Godfather's rumbling voice and unflinching tunnel eyes was a brutal reassertion of that lesson, a defiant claim that in his small world the rule still held. "Yeah," the guest admitted. "I could."
    "It's not that easy to switch," Debbi Martini put in. "Even with my job—"
    "Your job." Gino cut her off. "Dogs' toenails. Besides, you ain't educated."
    She reddened. It was hard to tell if it was pique, or alcoholic flush, or sunburn growing ripe.
    "Secrets," Vincente said to Arty. "Newspaper business, I'd think you'd have ta keep a lotta secrets."
    "Sometimes," Arty said.
    "Like someone tells ya somethin', confidential like. It's a whaddyacallit, an ethical thing, ya can't tell nobody, right?"
    "That's right," said the editor.
    The Godfather nodded, considered. Slowly he leaned forward, picked up the wine bottle, and refilled Arty's glass. He poured a splash into his own and raised it in a silent toast. It took him a long time to settle back against his seat, and when he'd done so he fixed the guest from under the ledge of his eyebrows. "So Ahty," he rumbled. "Y'ever tell?"
    The editor felt pinned in his chair, felt as though leather straps had suddenly bound his wrists and ankles. He stared down the chute of the Godfather's eyes. He knew absolutely that he was being judged, and yet he had no difficulty with his answer. "No," he said. "Never."
    Vincente held the stare a moment longer, seemed to be harboring Arty's words in the deep whorls of his old man's ears, testing them for an echo that might yet prove false. Satisfied, he did not relax his vigilance but redoubled it. There then came one of those dizzying moments that changes everything, that cleaves time once and for all into before and after. The Godfather had been introduced only as Vincente, Gino only as Gino; the weighty name Delgatto had never yet been spoken. The evening had been a charade of innocence, of not saying what was known. Now the Godfather was calling off the farce, bestowing on Arty the flattering and perilous gift of candor.
    "My business too," he rasped. "Lotta secrets.