"Twenty-five percent."
Tommy slid the new sheet across. Coffee rings on the corner, blue ink running through one of the numbers where the kid in the office had crossed something out and rewritten it. Vinnie picked the sheet up and held it under the desk lamp.
The Marchetti Waste Management office had been a yellow-walled square at the back of a yellow-walled building until November, when Vinnie had paid a guy from Bayonne to put up real paneling and hang a real light fixture and replace the carpet that had smelled like Sal's cigars since 1986. Now it looked like a small accounting office. Tommy hated the new chairs. Vinnie wanted clients to sit in real chairs.
"Twenty-five clean," Tommy said. "Up from ten when you took over. The auto bodies are doing what you said they'd do. The Newark route — that one's going to thirty by April if we get the second municipal contract."
Enzo, in the armchair by the radiator, made the small considering sound he made when he was being told something he already knew. He'd come in at nine with two coffees and a sleeve of biscotti from a place in Bloomfield he liked. The biscotti were on a paper napkin on the corner of Vinnie's desk. Vinnie had eaten one. He'd resisted the second. He was failing to keep resisting.
"Push the legal side harder," he said.
Tommy nodded.
"Push it where?"
"Construction. I want the filing done this quarter. Marchetti Construction Holdings, LLC. Newark. Find me a building. Doesn't have to be big. Has to be real."
"You got a foreman in mind?"
"I got two."
"You want me on it?"
"Not directly. Carlo handles intake. You stay clear of the paper."
Tommy nodded again. That was the agreement they'd worked out in October — Tommy stayed off any document that could ever be subpoenaed. He didn't like it. He understood it.
The phone on the corner of the desk rang twice and stopped. Tommy looked at it. It didn't ring again. Wrong number, or the kid in the front office picking up.
Enzo picked the second biscotti off the napkin and put it on Vinnie's blotter. "Eat it. You've been looking at it for ten minutes."
"I'm not looking at it."
"You're looking at it."
Vinnie ate it.
They got through the books. The sports book was still flat — Vinnie wanted it flat — and the loan book was lighter than it had been in October because two of the older balances had cleared, one through pay-off and one through a guy moving to Texas where Vinnie had decided not to chase him. The chasing wasn't worth the noise. The tribute number was right. The tribute would be on Tony's desk on the seventh, the way it always was.
Tommy closed the folder.
"One more thing," he said. He lit a cigarette and Enzo waved his hand at the smoke without comment. "Richie Aprile."
Vinnie's hand stayed where it was on the desk. He didn't react. He had been waiting for this name for a week.
"What about him."
"Out this month. Sixteenth or eighteenth, depending who you ask. Heard it from Larry Boy at the social club, Larry heard it from somebody in Junior's circle. Ten years inside. He's coming home."
"Jackie's brother."
"Jackie's brother."
Enzo's hand went to the bridge of his nose. He pinched it the way he did when something tired him before it had started. "I knew Richie when he was a young man," he said. "He was not a young man one would call patient."
"You're saying he's a problem."
"I'm saying ten years inside doesn't usually make a man patient who wasn't patient before."
Tommy ashed into the small glass tray on the corner of the desk. "He had pieces, Vinnie. Before. Garbage routes in West Caldwell, a piece of the carting council, two pizza shops that were laundromats. Most of that got moved while he was in. Some of it to Tony's guys. Some of it to Junior, before the thing." He let the smoke out. "He's going to want it back."
"Any of it touch us?"
"None of it touches us."
"Good."
"But the carting council touches the Newark corridor."
Vinnie filed that. The carting council was a Lupertazzi-administered association that controlled commercial waste pricing through most of the corridor he was about to push into. If Richie had ever held a seat on it — even a piece of a seat — and tried to climb back into the chair, he'd be standing exactly in the path of the legitimate side Vinnie was trying to grow.
"Walk me through the boundaries," Vinnie said. "Today. Before lunch. I want every contract we hold, every route, every piece of paper that says Marchetti on it. I want it in a folder. If Richie ever shows up across a table from me asking what's mine, I want to put the folder down and let him read it."
"Today."
"Today."
Tommy nodded. Wrote something on the back of the cleaning bill that was the only paper he had on him.
Enzo, finally, smiled. The smile was the small old-man smile that meant he was about to say something funny in his careful way. "Y2K," he said.
"What about it."
"All that panic. The trillion dollars they spent. Then the calendar turned and nothing happened."
"Some people happy about that."
"Some people are. Some people in my parish bought generators. I have a man who bought four hundred pounds of rice in November. He's eating it." Enzo lifted his coffee. "A buon intenditor, poche parole."
Tommy looked at him. "What does that mean?"
"Smart people don't need many words."
"Then how come you keep using so many?"
Vinnie laughed. It surprised him a little. He hadn't laughed at the office in a month. The biscotti crumb on his blotter looked smaller in the laugh than it had before. He brushed it off and looked at the two men on the other side of his desk — old soldier, older priest of nothing — and he thought, I wish all of next year was Y2K. He wished the disaster he could see coming was the disaster nobody else could see. The disaster he could see coming was going to walk into a restaurant in Newark in twelve days with a kiss on each cheek and the air of a man owed something.
"All right," he said. "Tommy — folder by lunch. Enzo — stay a minute, I want to talk to you about something else."
Tommy nodded. Ground his cigarette out, gathered his cleaning bill and the books, and left. The door clicked. The kid in the front office said something. Tommy said something back. The front door opened and closed.
Enzo waited.
"The party," Vinnie said. "There's going to be a welcome home dinner. There always is. Vesuvio or Nuovo Vesuvio or wherever Artie's running the show this winter. I'm going to get an invitation. I'm going to go."
Enzo nodded.
"How do I stand?"
"With your hands folded. You introduce yourself. You mention your father — Richie will remember the name because Richie remembers every name he was ever near. You don't sit at his table. You don't accept his drink. You let Tony's people put you where they put you, and you stay there." Enzo took a slow sip. "And you do not tell him anything about your business."
"Anything."
"Anything. He will ask. He always asks. Smile like a man who isn't smart and say, Mr. Aprile, my guys are doing fine, thank you for asking."
"Smile like a man who isn't smart."
"It's the most useful smile a smart man has."
Vinnie wrote Vesuvio invitation expected on the legal pad and capped the pen and slid the cap on slow. Enzo finished his coffee. Stood. Brushed crumbs off his vest with the back of his hand the way old men do.
At the door he turned.
"Vincent. He's going to want a piece of something of yours. Not because of you. Because of who he is. Give him a small piece. Something that doesn't matter. Something you can lose."
Vinnie nodded.
"What."
"I'll think about it."
"Think about it before the dinner."
"I will."
Enzo left.
Vinnie sat for a minute. Then he picked up the phone and asked the kid in the front office to get him Carlo at the auto body. He needed to talk about a piece of something he could afford to lose.
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