The payphone outside the Quick Chek on Tonnelle Avenue had been there since 1987 and worked the way a payphone that had been there since 1987 worked, which was to say it took the quarter slowly and gave dial tone slowly and connected slowly and was perfect for a man who did not want a call to feel rushed.
Vinnie had stopped at the Quick Chek for a pack of gum he did not need. He had parked the Cadillac four spaces away from the door at an angle that put the trunk between the phone and the street. He had been at the phone for twenty seconds before he picked up the receiver. The tan minivan that had been a tan minivan was somewhere east of him today. The car that had been the car this morning was now a maroon Buick. There was always a car. The car would not see the phone from where the car was going to be parked, because Tommy had taken the long route up Bergen and the car had taken the long route up Bergen with him, and Vinnie was at the Quick Chek alone in a Cadillac that the car did not currently know was here.
He dialed.
Three rings.
"Elena Moretti."
"It's me. From the parking lot."
A half-second pause.
"Hi."
"I'm thinking about that restaurant."
"The restaurant."
"The good one. Thursday."
Another half-second pause. She was, on her end, doing the small thing her mouth did when she was running an instruction through twice to make sure she had heard it.
"What time."
"Late lunch. Two."
"It's going to be a long lunch."
"It's going to be a long lunch."
"All right."
"And Elena."
"Yeah."
"You drive."
"I drive."
"Long way. Take 78 the slow way, not the turnpike. You'll feel like you're going the wrong direction for a long time. You're not. Just keep going."
"All right."
"I love you."
"I love you too."
He hung up.
Walked back to the Cadillac. Got in. Drove the gum back to the house. Tommy was at the curb across the street pretending to read the Star-Ledger in the older Cadillac. The maroon Buick was around the corner pretending to be a maroon Buick parked nowhere in particular. The system did not warm and did not need to. Vinnie went inside. Made coffee. Read the deposition transcript the lawyer was now FedExing him on a weekly basis. Was at the kitchen table at six in the evening when the phone rang and Conte's bookkeeper's voice told him the West Caldwell vending paperwork had come back from the state.
Two more days went by like that.
On Thursday at quarter to eight in the morning Vinnie left the Marchetti house in a coat and a pair of sneakers — the sneakers were a small choice, sneakers were what a man wore when he was going to do a thing that required walking — and got in his own Cadillac. Tommy was at the curb in the older one. Vinnie waved at Tommy through the windshield and pulled out of the drive. The maroon Buick that was today a brown Chevrolet pulled out from a side street and followed at sixty yards.
He took 78 West.
He took it for thirty miles. The brown Chevrolet took it for thirty miles. At the Phillipsburg exit he came off — not the rest area before the bridge but the Phillipsburg exit proper — and went into the parking lot of a small two-story office building that housed a State Farm agency and a chiropractor and a place that sold orthopedic shoes. He parked. Got out. Locked the Cadillac. Walked to the corner of the building. The brown Chevrolet had pulled into the same lot at the far end and the two men inside were doing the polite thing of pretending to read a map.
He went into the State Farm office.
He used the bathroom in the back. He came out of the bathroom and went out the back door of the State Farm office, which the agent had left propped open with a copy of the previous week's Express-Times, because the agent's brother-in-law was a man Vinnie had known since 1984 and had asked a small favor of in the form of propping a door tomorrow at quarter to nine. He crossed a small back lot. Came out on the next street up. A Ford Taurus he did not own was parked at a meter that had been fed for him. The keys were in a small magnetic case under the rear wheel well.
He got in. Started the engine. Pulled out.
The brown Chevrolet, at the far end of the State Farm lot around the corner, did not know any of this had happened, because the brown Chevrolet was sitting where the brown Chevrolet was sitting looking at a Cadillac that was going to keep sitting in that lot until Tommy came to retrieve it at four o'clock in the afternoon.
He took the Taurus across the bridge into Easton and then north on 611 toward Wind Gap for forty minutes through the small slow Pennsylvania towns where the speed limit was thirty-five and people stopped at four-way stops in the order they had arrived in. The morning sun was on his left side. The radio was off because he wanted to think.
The diner was on a county road outside of Stroudsburg. He had picked it because a banker friend of the lawyer's had a cousin who owned it and had once told the lawyer over a Christmas party drink that the diner had two pay-in-cash booths in the back that the cousin used for the kind of personal conversations you had when your wife was at the kind of dinner where she would be coming home tired.
Elena's Honda was in the lot when he pulled in at five to two.
She had taken the back booth and had a cup of tea in front of her and a magazine open she was not reading.
He slid in across from her.
She did not stand up. She did not speak. She put her left hand across the formica with her palm up. He put his right hand in it. They held hands across the table for a quiet second.
"You drove," he said.
"I drove."
"Long way."
"Long way."
"You're a good driver."
"I am."
The waitress came over and Vinnie ordered a coffee and a hamburger and the waitress went away. Elena ordered nothing else. The diner had three other tables occupied. A man in a feed cap reading the Pocono Record. A young couple sharing a milkshake at one in the afternoon, which meant either honeymooners or trouble. An older woman alone with a book.
Elena watched him drink the coffee for a minute before she said anything.
"How hot."
"Not hot the way you're thinking."
"How hot the way I'm not thinking."
"There's a thing the office does when they lose a source. They — they look at everybody around the source for a couple of months until they figure out either the source got himself caught or somebody caught the source. They're going through the rolodex. I'm in the rolodex. That's all. It'll pass. They'll find a different thing to look at."
"How long."
"Eight weeks. Maybe twelve."
She nodded.
"Should I be concerned."
"Not about me. About — about the fact of the situation. About what it does to the way we — to the way we have to be, for a while."
"Vincent."
"Yeah."
"Did somebody die who didn't have to die."
He looked at her.
He did not answer for a beat too long.
"I didn't do it."
"That wasn't my question."
"Yes."
"Somebody."
"Somebody."
She took her hand back. Put it around the tea cup. The tea cup was empty. The waitress had not been back. Elena did not move the cup.
"Vincent."
"Elena."
"I'm not — I'm not asking you to give me names. I'm not asking you to put words in this booth that put either of us in a worse place than we're in. I'm telling you — I cannot — be at the wrong distance from this thing, and find out about it later from a federal agent. If a thing is happening that I should know is happening — even if I can't know the details — you have to tell me it happened. Otherwise I'm walking into a meeting on the fifteenth of next month and the first piece of paper they hand me has a name on it that I should have been ready for and I'm — I'm going to do something — I'm going to do something incorrect with my face. And then we're done."
"I understand."
"Tell me you understand."
"I understand, Elena."
The waitress came with the hamburger. Set it down. Refilled his coffee. Asked if Elena wanted anything. Elena ordered tea. The waitress took the tea cup and went away.
He took two bites of the hamburger.
"There was a thing about ten days ago. With somebody from the family. Not a Marchetti. A — an older man, who had been doing a thing for a long time that the family discovered. The family handled it. The family handled it the way the family handles those things. I was not present. I was not consulted. The first I heard of it was a phone call from Tommy after."
She listened.
"I would have known it was coming," he said, "for about ten days before it happened, because I had been watching the man do the thing for a year and the man had been getting worse at hiding the thing for a year. I did not tell anybody what I had been watching. I did not influence what happened. I kept my own people out of any business with him for the last six months of his life because I didn't want any of us standing too close when the thing happened."
"That's — that's why you switched off the Bayonne pickup."
"That's why."
"You knew."
"I had a feeling."
"That's not a feeling. That's a — that's a prediction."
"It's a feeling, Elena. A feeling I let myself trust further than other men trust feelings."
She did not say anything to that.
The waitress brought the tea. Elena lifted the cup. Set it back down without drinking. She looked at his hand on the coffee cup for a long second and then back up at his face.
"I'm going to have to see that file at some point."
"You'll have to recuse."
"I'll have to recuse."
"You'll be fine, Elena."
"I know I'll be fine. I'm telling you what it costs me."
"I know what it costs you."
"You don't, actually. But that's okay for now."
She picked the tea up. Drank.
They stayed in the booth for another hour and a half. She told him about her sister's wedding being moved from August to October because of a venue thing. He told her about the framers at the lot. She told him about a book she was reading about Italian-American mothers that he was not going to read but that he wrote the title of down on a napkin. He told her the foreman with the bad knee had a daughter who had been accepted to Rutgers on scholarship and was going to be the first in her family. She told him she was tired. He said he could see that. They held hands again under the table when there were no patrons close enough to see them.
When they left they paid in cash. They walked out together but she got into her car first and pulled away first and did not wave through the windshield. He stood in the parking lot for thirty seconds after her taillights turned at the county road. Then he got into the Taurus and drove back the way he had come.
At the State Farm office he switched back into the Cadillac in the front lot. The brown Chevrolet, which had at some point been replaced by a green Plymouth that had been replaced by a different brown Chevrolet, was in the same lot at the far end the way a different car than the morning car always was. He drove the Cadillac home. The car followed at sixty yards. He stopped at the Quick Chek on Tonnelle Avenue on the way to buy a pack of gum he did not need. The car waited across the street.
In the kitchen at home he put the pack of gum in the drawer next to the takeout menus and the Christmas card he had not thrown out.
He went into the garden.
The tomato plant was sixteen inches.
The first three tomatoes on it were green and small and round and were going to be red in about three weeks.
He pulled the weeds at the base of the plant by hand and did not turn on the back porch light.
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