Pussy was already in the back when Vinnie walked in.
The kid behind the deli case nodded. The two old guys at the front counter looked up and back at their papers. Vinnie ordered coffee he wasn't going to drink and a sandwich he wasn't going to eat and carried both to the round table where Pussy Bonpensiero was lifting himself out of the chair with both palms on the table the way he always lifted himself out of a chair lately.
"Vinnie."
"Sal."
"How you doin'."
"Good. You?"
"Eh. The back."
"The back."
"What can you do."
Pussy sat down again. Vinnie sat across. The two old guys at the counter resumed their argument about who had gone to whose funeral in 1981. Pussy unfolded a yellow legal pad. Two columns, hand-printed. Numbers and acronyms.
"Bayonne. Pier four. The twenty-eighth, six in the morning. Two of yours, one of mine. Containers from the Liberian boat — the manifest says scrap metal, which is mostly true. Customs is paid. Longshore is paid. We unload onto three trucks, your two go to your transfer station in Kearny, mine goes to the yard on Tonnelle. Receipts at the gate, signed by your foreman. Easy day."
"Easy day."
"Six AM is the window. If we miss six we miss the slack tide and the bonded inspector comes back at nine."
"Six AM."
"Right."
Pussy slid the pad across. Vinnie looked at it. The handwriting was Pussy's — Vinnie had seen Pussy's handwriting on tribute receipts a hundred times at the back of Satriale's. The numbers were clean. There was nothing operational on the page that the inspector wouldn't have already. The whole thing was being staged to look like a thing in case anyone was watching it. Pussy had built it that way without being told to.
The thought moved through Vinnie's head before he caught it, and once he caught it he wished he hadn't. Pussy had built it that way because Pussy was thinking the way a man thought when somebody else was watching. The way Pussy had been thinking for a year now.
He folded the pad in half and slid it back.
"My foreman'll be at the gate by quarter to six."
"Good."
The system warmed. He felt it the way he had been feeling it lately — a low pressure behind the eyes, the way a thunderstorm comes through a sinus before it arrives in the sky. He thought the word scan. The system asked for the cost. He let it have the cost. He kept his face on Pussy's.
The readout opened in the upper-left periphery of his vision and stalled there.
[Subject: Bonpensiero, S. Scanning — error, retry — scanning —]
The taste of pennies climbed the back of his throat.
He kept his hands around the coffee. The retry caught.
[Subject: Bonpensiero, S. Compromise probability: 78%. Stress markers elevated. Note: function Lv.1 — confirm via behavior.]
Pussy was talking. Something about his wife wanting the kitchen redone. Vinnie nodded. Pussy laughed a laugh that turned halfway through into a wheeze and ended with a hand against his sternum.
The system note hung for a beat longer than it should have, then collapsed. Vinnie's left nostril ticked. He brushed it with the back of a knuckle. Nothing came away. The pressure receded slow as a tide. He held the table edge with the inside of his thumb to anchor himself.
Multitasking. He had always been good at it. The transmigrator had read Excel and Bloomberg at the same time for fourteen years. The mob boss had been raised by a man who could count tribute and watch the door at once. They were getting better at sharing the same skull every month, and the system was just one more screen.
He took a sip of coffee he didn't want.
"Carla wants what, granite?"
"Granite, marble — I don't know. Some kind of stone you gotta polish. Forty-eight hundred a slab."
"Jesus."
"Don't tell my wife it bothers me. I told her it's fine."
"I won't tell your wife."
Pussy laughed again. This time it didn't turn into a wheeze.
Vinnie watched him without watching him. The 78%. The stress markers. The way Pussy's left hand kept finding the table edge and the right hand kept finding his stomach. None of it was new. The system had not told him anything he hadn't been telling himself since the day he had seen a man in his head whose name was Salvatore Bonpensiero standing on a boat with a face that was about to know.
The pennies were still on the back of his tongue.
"Hey, Vinnie."
It was Paulie. Paulie had come in without the bell — he must have come in through the back. Paulie did that sometimes.
"Paulie."
"Sal."
"Walnuts."
Paulie pulled out the chair without asking and sat down on it backwards, arms folded across the chair-back, the way a man sits when he wants to take up more of the room than the chair is offering him. He was wearing his short-sleeved leisure shirt in February which was its own argument with the weather.
"You believe my mother."
"What'd she do, Paulie."
"She told the priest at Saint Anthony's that I haven't called her in three weeks. I called her Wednesday. Wednesday I was on the phone with her for forty-five minutes about a leak in her dishwasher. So now Father Felix calls me — Father Felix calls me — at nine in the morning, on a Tuesday, with this face on him through the phone like I've been beating somebody."
Pussy laughed. Vinnie laughed too. Paulie's mother stories were always like this — a small grievance inflated by Paulie's instinct for theater into a five-act tragedy. Vinnie laughed at the right beats. He laughed when he was supposed to. He didn't have to fake it because Paulie was actually funny.
"What'd you tell him."
"I told him I'm tithing eight hundred dollars this Easter. He said God bless you, Paulie. God bless you, Paulie. I said God bless me too, Father. Then I called my mother and I said Ma — Ma — don't tell the priest things, the priest tells me, I have to call him back, I have a business to run."
"And she said?"
"She said I love you, Paulie."
"That's a win."
"It's not a win, it's a deposit. I'll pay it next month."
Paulie smacked his hand on the table once. The salt shaker hopped.
Vinnie's pennies retreated. The system, having delivered its number and its caveat, went quiet.
"What're you eatin'?"
"Sandwich."
"You didn't open it."
"I'm not hungry, Paulie."
"Then give it here, I'm hungry. Sal, you hungry?"
"I'm always hungry."
"This is why you got the back, Sal."
Paulie peeled the paper off the sandwich. He ate half standing up.
Vinnie finished his coffee. Pussy stood with the same two-palmed lift. They shook hands. Pussy's hand was warm. The room was cold. Vinnie filed that and kept his face exactly where it had been.
"Twenty-eighth."
"Twenty-eighth."
"Quarter to six."
"Quarter to six."
Pussy went out the front. The bell did its small flat sound. Paulie watched him go and shook his head with a piece of bread in his mouth.
"That fuckin' guy."
"What about him."
"Nothin'. He's just — he's just not himself lately."
"He's got the back."
"He's got something."
Paulie looked at Vinnie. Paulie had the eyes of a man who had killed people and forgotten their names and remembered his mother's birthday every year. There were times when Paulie looked at Vinnie and Vinnie remembered that Paulie had killed people.
Vinnie didn't move his face.
"Maybe it's the kitchen."
"Maybe it's the kitchen."
Paulie laughed and finished the sandwich.
Outside, in the Cadillac, Vinnie sat for a second with his hand on the door handle before he closed the door.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"On the twenty-eighth — the Bayonne thing. Anything our drivers see, anything they hear, anything they pick up off the radio in those trucks — I want it written down on a piece of paper that night, by them, in pencil, and on my desk by nine the next morning."
"Pencil."
"Pencil."
"Done."
"And Tommy."
"Yeah."
"Tell them to use the radios as little as possible."
Reading more than one of my novels? Good news — one Patreon, all of them.
patreon.com/TheFinex5
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰
― DECREE ―
More chapters reign FREE upon unwrittenrealm.com.
The throne acknowledges.
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰