"Forty percent." Tommy was reading off a printout. "Up. Six months."
Enzo, opposite him at the desk, glasses on the chain around his neck, blew across an espresso he hadn't touched yet. "Numbers like that, you make enemies."
"We already had enemies," Vinnie said.
He'd cleared Sal's old desk down to the leather blotter and laid out three stacks of paper across it: revenue by line of business, head count and cost per crew member, and a one-page summary Tommy had typed up himself, single-spaced, two typos in the first paragraph. Recieved. Seperate. Vinnie had circled them both with a pencil and slid the page back across earlier without comment and Tommy had laughed once, low, and said, "I'll get the kid in the office to do the next one." Now the typoed page sat between them like a peace offering nobody was offended by.
The window behind the desk was open two inches. Cicadas. The hum of the AC unit in the dining room. Jersey City summer.
Enzo finally tasted the espresso. Made a face that wasn't quite a complaint. "It's bitter."
"I'll talk to the kid in the office about that too," Tommy said.
Enzo waved him off and drank it anyway.
Vinnie pulled the revenue sheet to the center. "Walk me through it."
Tommy walked him through it. Waste management was the engine — long-haul contracts on three industrial corridors, a fourth in negotiation. The auto body piece had cleared its second quarter clean. The auto body's books were almost legitimate; the laundering they did through inflated parts pricing was small enough that the IRS would have to be looking specifically at them to find it, and the IRS wasn't. Sports book was steady, no growth, the way Vinnie wanted it. Two new vending placements at union halls. Two old loan books closed out with nobody buried for it.
"Forty percent up," Tommy said again. "Your father did thirty-eight in '95. That was his best year ever."
Vinnie touched the Omega.
"It's a number," Enzo said.
"It's a number," Vinnie agreed.
"And numbers like that make enemies." Enzo set his cup down. The cup made the smallest sound on the saucer. "Tommy, tell him what you came to tell him."
Tommy lit a cigarette. He always wanted one when Enzo was being Enzo at him. "Couple things. First — Ralphie Fortunato's been mouthing off at the social club. Says we're not earners anymore, we're accountants. Says the old man would've put a bullet in someone by now over the East Newark thing."
"The East Newark thing didn't need a bullet."
"I know. I'm telling you what he's saying."
"Who's listening?"
"Two, three of the old guys. Marco's guys, originally. They're not going to do anything, Vinnie. They're going to grumble in a basement. But they're grumbling."
Vinnie considered Marco Ferrante for the first time in two months. Marco was in Florida, on a pension Vinnie paid him every July, alive instead of dead because Vinnie had wanted it that way. Marco had eaten the deal and gone south and the eating of the deal had created a soft fault line that ran through the old guard, and Ralphie Fortunato standing in the back of the Lupo Social Club bitching about accountants was the fault line breathing.
"Keep him on the contracts that need a face," Vinnie said. "Send him to do the hard sit-downs. Make him feel useful. If he wants to be the guy who scares people, let him scare some people who deserve it. He'll quiet down."
Tommy nodded.
"What else."
"New York. Somebody asked Carlo at the shop how much you're kicking up to Tony now. Casual. Like, Hey, business must be good over there, huh? Carlo handled it."
"Lupertazzi?"
"Don't know. Carlo didn't recognize the guy. Could've been anybody."
"Anybody from Lupertazzi."
"Yeah."
Vinnie wrote two words on the corner of the typoed page. Carlo. Lookout. Tommy saw him write it.
"And the third thing."
Tommy took a long pull on the cigarette. "Sedan. Brown four-door, two antennas. Sat outside the Marchetti lot three days last week. Different driver Friday than Tuesday. I didn't see it Monday or Tuesday this week but the maintenance guy who opens up at six says it's back this morning."
"FBI."
"I'd assume FBI."
"Anything to look at?"
"On the lot? No. We're clean on the lot. They can sit out there till winter and they'll watch us pick up garbage."
"Good."
Enzo turned his espresso cup a quarter turn on the saucer. The morning light off the window hit the cup and shifted. "Sal had a sedan out front for two years once. '87 to '89. Federal agent, retired now, owns a deli in West Orange. The agent never got anything. He still came to Sal's funeral."
Vinnie looked at him.
"Wait them out," Enzo said. "Be boring. Be expensive to surveil. They'll find someone interesting."
"That's the plan."
"Then that's the plan."
Vinnie pulled the head count sheet over and they spent twenty minutes on it, line by line, who was earning, who was sliding, who needed to be moved. Then Vinnie pushed the papers to the side and put both hands flat on the desk.
"I want to tell you both something. Where I'm thinking long."
Tommy ground his cigarette into the ashtray. Enzo's hands folded in his lap.
"Five years," Vinnie said. "I want the legit side to be the majority of what we make. Waste management, the construction company I'm going to start next year, the auto bodies. Real revenue. Real books. The other stuff stays — the sports book, the loan book, the muscle. But the other stuff becomes the insurance. Not the engine."
Tommy made a face Vinnie had been waiting for him to make. "Tribute."
"Tribute keeps going. Same number, generated differently. The tribute looks the same on Tony's end."
"They don't let you walk away, Vinnie. You know that."
"I'm not walking away. I'm changing what the business is. I'll still be there. I'll still kiss the ring."
"They don't always know the difference."
"They will if I show them."
Tommy looked at Enzo. Enzo had been quiet for a long minute. Now he spoke, careful, the way he always spoke when he wanted his words counted.
"It's possible," he said. "If you're patient. If you're lucky."
"That's all I needed to hear."
"There's one more thing." Enzo took off his glasses, folded them. Looked at Vinnie directly. "Your father wanted this too."
Vinnie kept his hands flat on the desk.
"He told me once. After the thing with the Genovese kid in '91. He said, Enzo, I want my son to inherit a business, not a prison sentence. He didn't know how to get there. He didn't have the head for it. But he wanted it." Enzo put his glasses back on. "I thought you should know."
Vinnie touched the Omega.
The cicadas in the yard kept going. The AC kept humming. Tommy looked at the ground, gave them the moment.
"Thank you, Enzo," Vinnie said.
"Niente."
They wrapped up after that. Tommy gathered the papers. Enzo finished the bitter espresso without further comment. Vinnie walked them both to the door, shook Enzo's hand, clapped Tommy on the shoulder, watched them get into their separate cars.
When the cars were gone he walked around the side of the house to Sal's garden.
He'd planted tomatoes in April. Romas and beefsteaks, two of each, in a strip of dirt against the south fence where Sal had grown nothing for thirty years because Sal had hated dirt. The plants were knee-high now. Two of them had small green fruit on the lower branches, hard as marbles. They wouldn't ripen until August.
He stood looking at them. Sal wanted out. The man whose face Vinnie wore had wanted out. He hadn't known how. He'd died before he'd figured it out. He'd been carried out of a parking lot on Tonelle Avenue with a sandwich half-finished on the passenger seat.
Vinnie knelt and pulled a weed from the base of the larger Roma. The roots came up clean.
[SYSTEM: Strategic coherence stable. Long-game viable. Patience required.]
He read it without looking up. Acknowledged it. Pulled another weed. Sometime around dusk a mourning dove started somewhere in the spruce at the property line and the cicadas got quieter for an hour and then came back, and he was still there.
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― DECREE ―
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