important thing to do, concentrate, although Bremen’s heart was not in it. He disliked melodrama.
Vanni Fucci’s thoughts jumped around like an insect on a hot griddle. He was in some turmoil, although his emotions were not touched by the dumping of Chico’s body or the probability that this stranger would have to be killed as well. It was just that he, Vanni Fucci, did not want to have to do the killing.
Fucci was a thief. Bremen caught enough images and shreds of images to glean the difference. In what seemed to be a long career as a thief—Bremen caught an image of Fucci in a mirror with long sideburns and the polyester leisure suit of the seventies—Vanni Fucci had never fired his gun at a person except for that time when Donni Capaletto, his so-called partner, had tried to rip him off after the Glendale Jeweler job and Fucci had taken away the punk’s .45 automatic and shot him in the kneecap with it. His own gun. But Fucci had been angry. That wasn’t a professional thing to do. And Vanni Fucci prided himself on being a professional.
Bremen blinked, fought back nausea at trying to read these flittering shards on the sea of Fucci’s turbulent thoughts, and closed his eyes again.
Bremen learned more than he wanted to know about being a gangster in this last decade of the century. He glimpsed Vanni Fucci’s deep and burning desire to be made, gleaned what “to be made” meant to a petty Italian gangster, and then Bremen shook his head at the mean lowness of it all. The teenage years running messages for Hesso and selling cigarettes out of the back of Big Ernie’s hijacked trucks; the first job—that liquor mart on the south side of Newark—and the slow acceptance into the circle of tough, shrewd, but poorly educated men. Bremen caught glimpses of Fucci’s deep satisfaction at that acceptance by these men, these stupid, mean, violent, selfish, and arrogant men, and Bremen caught deeper glimpses of Vanni Fucci’s ultimate loyalty to himself. In the end, Bremen saw, Fucci was loyal
It had not been Fucci who pulled the trigger, but Don Leoni’s son-in-law, Bert Cappi, a twenty-six-year-old punk who thought of himself as the next incarnation of Frank Sinatra. Cappi had been hired as a singer by Tartugian as a favor to Don Leoni, and even though the patrons booed and even the bartenders objected, Tartugian kept the kid on, knowing that Cappi was a spy even while Tartugian continued to rake off the top of the south-side numbers collections, trusting Cappi to place his musical career above his loyalty to his uncle.
Cappi hadn’t done that. Bremen caught a glimpse of Vanni Fucci waiting in the alley while Cappi went in to talk to Chico Tartugian after the last show. The three .22 shots had been short and flat, leaving no echo. Fucci had lighted a cigarette and waited another minute before going in with the shower curtain and the chains. The kid had made Tartugian kneel in the shower stall in his private bathroom, just as Don Leoni had instructed. There was no mess that thirty seconds of running the water wouldn’t clean up.
“What the
Bremen looked at him. “Fishing,” he said … or thought he said.
Vanni Fucci just shook his head in disgust and turned the music up. “Fucking civilian.”
They were passing through a town now, something larger than the few villages in the Everglades that they had passed through before, and Bremen had to shut his eyes at the onslaught of neurobabble. It was especially bad passing the trailer parks, the mobile-home villages, the retirement condominiums. There, the rasp of the thoughts of the elderly struck Bremen’s scoured consciousness with the unpleasant force of listening to an old person next door hawk up his morning’s chestful of phlegm.
Not always in words, frequently not in words, the anxieties and sadnesses and surlinesses of old age and frailty and abandonment struck Bremen as the Cadillac moved slowly down the now widened highway. Thursday, he discovered, was pinochle night in most of the trailer parks and condominiums, in this town and the next they traveled through. But hours of daylight and pain and heavy Florida heat lay ahead for so many of these people before the humid coolness of the evening and the safety of the community center. Televisions flickered in a thousand thousand mobile homes and condos, air conditioners hummed, as the retired and discarded rested their bones and waited out the day’s heat in the hopes of another evening with a dwindling circle of friends.
Bremen saw in a sudden, out-of-context flash of Vanni Fucci’s choppy musings that the thief was angry at God. Terribly angry at God.
His younger brother, Bremen saw, with the same dark hair and dark eyes, but more handsome in a quiet way.
Bremen blinked and shook his head to escape the neurobabble of the trailer park they were passing. He did not think Vanni Fucci was going to kill him. Not yet. Fucci did not want the aggravation, was already wishing that he’d left this dazed fuck behind on the island. Or had brought Roachclip along. Roachclip woulda whacked this crazy fuck right from the skiff and never looked back.
Bremen thought of clever strategies. Using what he’d gleaned already, he could start talking to Vanni Fucci, say that he—Bremen—had also been sent south by Don Leoni, that he knew Bert Cappi had whacked Chico Tartugian and—hey!—it was all right with him. Don Leoni just wanted a confirmation, that was all. Bremen imagined himself answering questions. Roachclip? Yeah, sure, he knew the crazy little Puerto Rican fuck. He remembered the night Roachclip had taken out the two Armansi brothers—the big one with the plastic leg left over from World War II and the skinny younger one with his sharkskin suit. Roachclip hadn’t used a gun or a knife, just that fucking lead pipe he carried around in the trunk, coming up behind the Armansi brothers after driving them to the meeting place in the Bronx and then bashing their skulls in right there on the street, right in front of that Polish babushka with her fat white face and black scarf, her little plastic shopping bag from the fucking old country spilling oranges onto the slushy pavement.…
Bremen shook his head. He would not do that.
They had passed through lake country and into ranch-land where egrets followed cattle, watching for insects stirred up by bovine hooves, when suddenly Vanni Fucci pulled over by a roadside phone, lifted the pistol until the muzzle was inches from Bremen’s eyes, and said softly, “You fucking move outta the fucking car, and I swear to Christ I’ll kill you here. You unnerstand?”
Bremen nodded.
The phone conversation, while not audible, was easy to overhear. People tended to concentrate heavily on language while on the phone.
