The phone rang at eleven thirty-two.
Vinnie had been reading the same paragraph of the deposition transcript for ten minutes without absorbing any of it and the phone was his excuse to set it down. He picked up on the second ring.
"Marchetti."
"Vinnie. It's done."
Tommy. From a payphone, by the background — traffic on a wide road, a truck shifting somewhere.
"What."
"Richie."
Vinnie set the deposition transcript on the desk.
"Tell me."
"Janice shot him."
"Janice."
"Janice. At their house. Two in the chest. He's dead. Tony's there. Silvio's there. They got two cars in the driveway and the body's going somewhere it isn't gonna be seen."
The room kept being a room. The clock above the stove down the hall ticked. The deposition transcript on the desk had a coffee ring on the corner of page nine that Vinnie was looking at without seeing it.
"What happened."
"Word from the kid Tony brought to help — Richie hit her. Open hand, then closed. Twice. They were arguing about — I don't even fucking know, the kid said Janice said something about the way he ate dinner. He hit her. She went to the bedroom, came back with Tony's father's gun from the dresser drawer she'd been keeping it in since she moved in, and put two in him at the kitchen table. The kid said Janice was making a sandwich after she did it. A sandwich, Vinnie. He said Janice was at the counter with the mayonnaise."
Vinnie closed his eyes.
He opened them.
"You're at a payphone."
"Yeah."
"Get to the office. Take the long way. Don't drive past any of Richie's people's houses. Don't drive past the Soprano residence. Don't drive past Satriale's. Go through Newark. Come up Bloomfield."
"Done."
"And Tommy — "
"Yeah."
"Don't tell Conte. Don't tell Carlo. Don't tell anyone. The official story is Richie skipped town because the heat from Beansie was coming back around. We hear that story tomorrow and we believe it. Tomorrow afternoon we start almost believing it."
"Yeah."
"And Tommy — drive careful."
"Yeah."
He hung up.
He sat at the desk with both hands flat on the wood until his hands stopped shaking, which was not for some time. He had not noticed they had started shaking. He had not asked them to shake. They had decided to do it on their own and he had not been a man with a vote.
The system warmed.
He let it.
[Threat resolved: Aprile, R. Cause: third-party domestic action. Marchetti exposure: zero. Political alignment maintained. SP awarded: 80.]
He acknowledged it and let it close.
He did not feel relief.
He did not feel grief.
He felt the kind of nothing that sat in a chest where a thing had been a knot for a long time and was now a space where a knot had been, and the muscles around the empty place did not know what to do with themselves, and for the next hour they were going to be sore in a way that wasn't quite pain.
He got up.
He turned out the desk lamp.
He went into the kitchen, opened the back door, and stood on the step.
The yard was dark. The spruce where the dove had been last August was a black shape against a slightly less black sky. The garden patch along the fence — Sal's strip, the eight by twenty rectangle Sal had turned over every spring for twenty-two years and Vinnie had not turned this year because the garden had not been on his mind — was wet from a rain that had come through at eight o'clock and gone by eight-thirty. He went down the step in his slippers.
He stood at the edge of the garden.
The tomato plants from last summer were gone. The soil where they had been was matted with the dead vine he had not pulled in October. A weed he could not name in the dark had come up at the corner against the post. The Roma plants Sal had grown for twenty years had reseeded themselves — three small starters, two of them an inch high, one of them four inches and already trying to be a plant on the strength of the warm week they had just had.
He squatted next to the four-inch one.
He did not touch it. He looked at it for a while.
Then he stood up. The cold came through the slippers and into his feet and reminded him he had a body. He walked back up the step and into the kitchen and shut the door.
He made coffee for the morning he was about to start whether or not he wanted to.
At five-fifteen the phone in the study rang.
"Marchetti."
"Sil."
"Sil."
"Saturday. Two o'clock. Satriale's. Tony wants the table."
"Who else."
"You. Me. T. Paulie. Christopher. Carlo from the salvage yard who I think you've met. Anybody else, T decides Friday."
"I'll be there."
"And Marchetti."
"Yeah."
"Wear a tie."
"What kind of tie."
"The kind a man wears to a meeting he's getting something at."
He hung up.
Vinnie sat at the desk in the dark. The first thin gray was at the window. The coffee in the kitchen smelled all the way to the back of the house. Outside on the step the four-inch tomato plant did not know any of this and was setting its second pair of true leaves anyway.
He stood up. Went to make the coffee mean something.
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