Tony came back to Satriale's on Thursday at half past nine in the morning.
Vinnie was at the round table with Silvio and a coffee Brian had set down without being asked when the bell did its sound. Vinnie did not turn around. Silvio's eyes lifted half an inch over the Star-Ledger and then dropped back down to the Star-Ledger and Silvio said, in a voice the table heard and nobody else did, Marchetti, sit still.
Vinnie sat still.
Tony walked the length of the deli the way Tony walked the length of the deli. He had lost about eight pounds. The blue shirt was looser at the collar than the blue shirt should have been. His face was the face of a man who had spent six days on a couch sweating into furniture his wife was not going to forgive easily. He nodded at the old guys at the front counter. He said Hey, kid to the kid behind the case. He got to the round table and pulled out the chair that was always his and sat down.
"Sil."
"T."
"Marchetti."
"Tony. Good to see you up."
"Yeah."
Brian was already at the counter pouring a coffee. He brought it over without being asked the way he brought Tony's coffee. He set it down. Walked away.
Tony did not pick the coffee up.
"Sil."
"Yeah."
"In the back."
Silvio folded the paper. Set it on the table. Stood up. He did not look at Vinnie. The two of them went into the back room behind the counter the way the two of them went into the back room behind the counter, and the door did the thing it did where it did not seal at the bottom because the carpet had been the wrong thickness since 1986.
The conversation in the back room lasted forty minutes.
You couldn't make out the words. The words came through the gap under the door as the cadence of two men talking very quietly about a thing they were not going to talk loudly about. Tony's voice did not rise once. Silvio's voice did not rise once. There were long pauses in the conversation that were the kind of pauses you got when one of the two men in the conversation was choosing his next sentence the way a man chose a knife from a drawer.
Vinnie sat at the round table for the forty minutes. He drank his coffee. He read the Star-Ledger business section, the same six paragraphs five times. The kid behind the case waited on the two new customers who came in and left. The old guys at the counter went silent for the back-room time and resumed their argument about the horse only when the back-room time was over.
The door opened.
Tony came out first. He did not look at the round table on the way past. He went straight to the front and through it. The bell did its sound. He was gone.
Silvio came out fifteen seconds later.
He sat down at the round table across from Vinnie. Put his glasses on. Picked up the paper. Did not open it.
"Marchetti."
"Sil."
"You eatin' or what."
"I had a sfogliatella at home."
"You shouldn't eat the sfogliatella at home. It's wrong at home. The shell is supposed to shatter on a man's coat at a deli. That's the point of it."
"I know it is."
"You eatin'?"
"I'm not hungry, Sil."
Silvio looked at him over the top of the glasses.
"All right."
A beat.
"Marchetti."
"Yeah."
"You're gonna hear some things, the next couple weeks. Don't react to any of them. Hear them. File them. Don't tell me what you heard. I'll already know."
"Understood."
"And — Marchetti."
"Yeah."
"Make yourself less available."
"What's that mean."
"It means don't be at Satriale's for two weeks. It means take a long weekend with that woman of yours if she can get out of work. It means be in Newark, at your lot, with paint on your shoes, where any man in a brown suit who comes looking for you can find you, but won't, because he doesn't know which lot." Silvio took his glasses off. Folded them. Set them on the Star-Ledger. "T's not going to want you around for what comes next. That's not a punishment. That's a credit. Some people you want around for everything. Some people you protect from things. He's protecting you."
"Tell him thank you."
"He knows."
Silvio put the glasses back on. Picked up the paper. Opened it. Found his place.
The conversation was over.
Vinnie stood up. Buttoned his coat. Did not finish the coffee. Brian, who had been standing at the slicer slicing nothing in particular for the last five minutes, raised a hand without looking up. Vinnie said Brian. Brian said Marchetti.
He went out the door. The bell did its sound.
In the Cadillac at the curb Tommy was reading the same Star-Ledger he had been reading every morning of his adult life. He looked up when Vinnie got in.
"Where to."
"Newark."
"The lot."
"The lot."
Tommy put the paper on the dash. Pulled out. The Cadillac took the avenue south.
At the lot the foreman was at the trailer with two of his framers and a man from the local DiPietro had sent over. The man from the local was looking at the new placard on the trailer the way a man looked at a placard a foreman had asked him to look at, with the kind of attention that meant the man was going to find a problem.
Vinnie walked the perimeter while they argued. The concrete was past the cure window. The framing had started on the east end. The wood smelled like wood. The framers had a radio on, the country station out of Allentown that drifted in clearer at midday than it had any right to.
Tommy followed at ten feet behind him.
At the back corner, where the brick wall came up at the lot line — the wall Vinnie had stood at in February at ten of eleven at night looking at the rust on the chain link and the bad drain — Vinnie stopped. Tommy stopped behind him at ten feet.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"Walk up here."
Tommy walked up.
They stood at the brick wall.
"You wanted to ask me something the other day. You didn't ask. About Pussy."
A pause.
"I wanted to ask."
"Ask now."
Tommy looked at the wall. He did the thing he did with his jaw when he was deciding whether to say a thing he had not yet decided whether he was allowed to say.
"You knew something was wrong with him. Before any of the rest of us did. The Bayonne thing — when you switched off the joint pickup — you didn't want any of our paper anywhere near his paper. Then you wouldn't be in the same room. Then you started watching him at Satriale's the way a man watches a guy at a card table he doesn't trust. That was December, Vinnie. December. You been watching this man fall for six months."
"I had a feeling."
"That's not a feeling."
"I had a stronger feeling than I'm gonna call it for you."
"Where'd the feeling come from."
"Tommy."
"I'm asking."
"It came from watching a man sweat the way a man sweats when he's got two bosses. I watched him do it at Satriale's last June and I never stopped watching it after. He was thicker around the middle than a guy who'd had stomach surgery should've been thicker. He was looking past me when he was talking to me. He was paying for things he shouldn't have been able to pay for. There were twenty small things, Tommy. There weren't ten big ones. There were twenty small ones, and twenty small ones, when they're all pointing the same direction, are a big one."
Tommy listened.
"I should've told you," Vinnie said. "I should have told you sooner. I made you handle a man for six months without telling you my feeling about him. That was wrong. The reason I didn't tell you was — because if I was wrong, you carry it. If I was wrong, you say a thing to a man about a feeling I had, and then nobody ever trusts your word again. I didn't want you carrying my feeling."
"That's a lot of words, Vinnie."
"I know."
"You're tellin' me you didn't tell me to protect me."
"Yeah."
Tommy looked at the wall some more.
Then he turned and looked at Vinnie.
"That's why I follow you."
"What is."
"That you'd carry a feeling alone for six months because if you said it out loud and you were wrong, my word would be the word that got broken. That's not a thing other guys do. Other guys would've told me at hour one and let me handle the rough end of it." He almost smiled. He did not smile. "You're a different kind of guy."
"Tony says it too."
"Tony's right."
The framers' radio across the lot moved from a country song into a country song. The foreman with the bad knee waved at Vinnie from the trailer door. Vinnie waved back. The foreman went back inside.
Tommy stayed at the wall.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"I'm gonna ask you to do a thing tonight."
"Yeah."
"After dark. Drive past Pussy's house."
"What for."
"I want to know if his wife's lights are on."
A pause.
"Vinnie."
"I just want to know if the lights are on, Tommy. I don't want to know anything else. I'm not going to ask you anything else. Pull up the block, look at the windows, drive away. That's the whole job."
"All right."
"And Tommy."
"Yeah."
"Don't tell me what you see. Call me and say the lights are on or the lights are off. That's it. Don't tell me anything else. I don't want to know anything else."
"All right."
He nodded.
They walked back across the lot toward the trailer. The foreman with the bad knee was holding up a piece of paper at the door. The man from the local was nodding the way men nodded when a thing had just been settled in a way they would later claim to be fine with. The wood smelled like wood. The radio played another country song that was the same country song.
Tommy called Vinnie at nine forty-six that night from a pay phone two blocks from a house in Saddle River.
He said The lights are on.
He hung up.
Vinnie sat at the kitchen table with the receiver in his hand for ten seconds before he put it back in the cradle.
He went into the garden in the dark with a flashlight and pulled the weed that had come up next to the four-inch tomato plant that was now eight inches and had set its first flower.
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