Tommy walked in without taking off his coat.
The kitchen was the warmest room in the house in winter and the only room Tommy ever sat in for serious news, and he stood in it with his coat on and a hand around the mug Vinnie was pouring before Vinnie had finished pouring it. Two o'clock on a Tuesday. The snow from Sunday had thawed and frozen and the driveway was a sheet of pebbled gray.
"They picked up Market Street this morning."
Vinnie set the carafe down.
"All four shops?"
"All four. Two of Richie's guys — kid named Albert who I don't know, and Beansie Gaeta who I do. Walked in around eleven. Walked out around eleven-fifteen with envelopes."
Vinnie picked up his own coffee. Held it. Didn't drink. "What did the shop owners do."
"What were they gonna do? Albert's six-five. Beansie's Beansie. They handed over the same envelopes they used to hand to Marco's guy and they took the new receipt and they're gonna keep handing them until somebody tells them different."
"Who told us."
"Vito at the bakery. Called me forty minutes ago. Apologetic. He didn't know what to do with the envelope, the new guy was already gone, the old guy hadn't come, so he stuck it in his cash drawer and called."
Vinnie nodded. He took the coffee to the kitchen table and sat. Tommy stayed standing for a beat, deciding whether to sit. Sat.
"You knew this was coming," Tommy said.
"I knew something was coming."
"You said give him a piece. Something we could lose. You meant the vending in West Caldwell."
"I meant the vending in West Caldwell."
"He didn't take the vending in West Caldwell."
"No."
The clock above the stove ticked the way it always ticked. Vinnie watched the steam come off Tommy's coffee and made his face do the thing it did when nothing was happening in it. Inside his head he was already doing the math, the way the analyst in him always did when something cost something.
The Market Street shops paid two grand a month, give or take. Sal had set the number in 1984 and the number had not moved since. Two grand was the principle. The actual money was almost nothing. What had been taken was bigger than the money and smaller than the response it deserved.
He picked up the coffee. Drank.
A reach for the System happened the way these reaches happened — internal, no movement, the request shaped in the back of his head and sent in the direction the System lived. The cost registered. The answer came back fast.
[Query — optimal response. Tactical retreat: minor territory. Aggressor accumulates enemies. Wait.]
Twenty-five points of his small reserve. Worth it.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"Pull our people off Market Street. Don't have a confrontation. If our guys show up Friday to collect, the shop owners are going to be in the middle of something they shouldn't be in the middle of. So our guys don't show up Friday."
Tommy's jaw worked. He kept his hands around the mug.
"That's it."
"That's it."
"Two grand a month."
"Two grand a month."
"And we let him have it."
"We let him have it."
Tommy set the mug down. He didn't look angry. Tommy didn't do angry the way men in this life were supposed to do angry. He did the slower thing, where his face went still and his eyes did the math separately from his face. He'd been doing that since he was nineteen years old and a corner-boy in Newark for a man whose name nobody said anymore.
"You know what they're gonna say at the social club."
"I know what they're gonna say at the social club."
"Vinnie folded for two grand."
"I know."
"Ralphie's gonna have a parade."
"Let Ralphie have a parade. Tell him to bring streamers."
A short laugh came out of Tommy that he didn't seem to expect. He shook his head and drank his coffee and set it down again and looked at Vinnie across the table the way the older brother nobody got to choose looks at a younger one.
"You sure about this."
"I'm sure."
"Because if he takes more — "
"Then it's a different conversation. I know."
Tommy nodded. The matter was closed. He was going to make the calls Vinnie wanted him to make. He was going to do it well, the way he did everything, and a part of him was going to walk out of this house with a slightly thinner opinion of the man inside it, and that was the cost. Vinnie had counted that cost too.
He'd kept Christopher's Hollywood paper off his desk for the same reason. He kept everything off his desk that was going to burn.
"There's something else," Vinnie said.
"Yeah."
"Find out where Tony takes coffee on Tuesday mornings. Next week. I want it to look like I'm just passing through."
Tommy's eyes lifted from the mug. The math finished. He nodded once.
"Satriale's. Eight-thirty to ten."
"Tuesday morning."
"Tuesday morning."
"All right."
Tommy got up. He buttoned his coat. He paused at the kitchen door.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine, Tommy."
"You don't look fine."
"I'm fine."
Tommy went out the side door. The Cadillac started up. The driveway crunched under the tires and the sound got smaller and Vinnie sat at the table with his coffee until the coffee was cold.
Then he went to the basement.
The bag was a Sal thing. Heavy, brown, taped at the seam, hanging from a chain bolted through a joist Sal had bolted himself in 1979. The handwraps were on the shelf where Sal had kept them, washed twice ever, stiff at the knuckles. Vinnie didn't put the wraps on. He stripped down to his undershirt and stepped to the bag and started hitting it.
Jab. Jab. Cross. Hook.
The bag absorbed the first round like a bag.
He kept hitting it.
The financial analyst part of him had a number for every punch — that's two grand, that's two grand, that's two grand, that's Ralphie's mouth, that's Beansie Gaeta's hand on Vito's bakery counter — and the host body part of him had a memory of Sal hitting this bag the night of the Genovese kid and the night Tony first wouldn't return his calls and the night Vinnie's mother went into the hospital the second time, and the two parts of him punched together for a while in the basement that smelled like dust and old paint and the iron of the boiler.
His knuckles split somewhere around the third round.
He kept hitting.
The skin on the second knuckle of his right hand was the first to go and the blood was a thin smear on the canvas before he registered it, and he hit the bag with it anyway, and the smear got bigger.
He stopped because his shoulder gave, not because he decided to.
The bag swung. He leaned his forehead against it. His breath came in big ragged pulls. His shirt was soaked through. His hands hung at his sides and the blood from the right one was dripping onto the basement floor in two small slow spots.
He breathed.
After a long minute he straightened. Found the towel on the shelf. Wrapped the right hand. Walked to the phone on the wall by the basement steps.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"Tuesday morning. Satriale's. Nine."
"Done."
"And Tommy — find Carlo this afternoon. Tell him the West Caldwell vending is for sale. Lowball offer. I want a paper trail on it. If anyone ever asks why I didn't fight for Market Street, the answer is I was busy unloading vending machines."
A pause.
"That's smart, Vinnie."
"Just do it."
He hung up. Turned off the basement light. Went up the stairs in the dark with the towel pressed to his right hand and the bag still swinging behind him on its chain.
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― DECREE ―
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