Tommy was at the side door at eleven-twelve.
Vinnie had been at the kitchen table with a deposition transcript the lawyer had sent over for the morning's pre-meeting and a half-glass of water that had been a full glass an hour ago. He heard the Cadillac come up the drive before the side-door bell rang. He had the inside light on before the bell could be rung twice.
Tommy stepped in. He kept his coat on. He took the chair he always took.
"Pour me one of whatever you got."
That was its own statement.
Vinnie went to the cabinet over the refrigerator where the bottle Enzo had given him last December lived, twelve-year, and poured two fingers into a tumbler and set it on the table. Tommy did not pick it up.
"He went to Junior."
Vinnie sat down across from him.
"Tell me."
"Wednesday. Wednesday or Thursday. He drove out to the house in Belleville and he sat down with Junior in the kitchen for two hours and he laid out the whole thing. Take T out. Take the family back to the old way. Richie would be street boss. Junior would be the name, the authority, the godfather, the consigliere principale — whatever made him feel like a man. Richie would do the work."
"And."
"And Junior said no."
Vinnie's pulse, which had spiked at the word Junior and stayed up through the word house, came down a single notch and stayed where it landed. He picked up the water glass. Drank.
"How do we know."
"Junior's nephew on his wife's side cleans the house. The kid was upstairs the whole time. Doesn't speak Italian but he can count the number of times a man slams a hand on a kitchen table and the number of times a different man says no. The kid went home and told his mother. His mother is married to Enzo's cousin. Enzo called me at seven-thirty."
"Why did Junior say no."
"Because Junior's seventy-three years old, on house arrest, with a federal monitor on his ankle and lung cancer he hasn't told anybody about yet that two of his doctors have told two of his nieces about. Because he tried this once before and his sister killed his brother for him and now his sister is in the nursing home shitting herself and won't see him. Because he ain't crazy enough anymore to be that kind of crazy."
"Did Junior tell Tony."
"That's the question. Word is he didn't. Word is he sat down at the table after Richie left and told his nephew on his wife's side to forget the next two hours had happened, and then he didn't pick up the phone the whole rest of the night."
"Which means."
"Which means Richie went out the door of Junior's house thinking he had a maybe. Junior never said no the way no gets said. Junior said I'll think on it the way a man says I'll think on it when he means no but is too polite to say so to a man who ran somebody over with a car." Tommy picked up the tumbler. Drank half of it. Set it down. "Richie's gonna come back at him. And when Junior says no the second time, Richie's gonna know it was no the first time."
"And then."
"And then we don't know."
The whiskey worked through Tommy's shoulders. Vinnie watched it. Tommy was not a man who needed the whiskey to think. Tommy was a man who used the whiskey to put down a load he had carried into the room.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"From now until we hear otherwise — every driver of ours stays inside our own perimeter. Reroute anything that goes within five miles of any street Richie's people park on. Cancel any delivery that needs to go through Belleville or out to Boonton. Conte's brother-in-law doesn't drive anywhere alone. Carlo at the auto body — close at five, don't be the last car in the lot. Conte takes the late shift at the yard with one of the senior drivers. Nobody alone, anywhere, for the next ten days."
"Ten days is a lot of disruption."
"Ten days is fine. The Newark lot foreman runs the lot. The hotel contract starts July first — that's six weeks. The bank line is open. We can absorb ten days."
"All right."
"And Tommy."
"Yeah."
"You sleep at the office for a week. Tomorrow you go home, get clothes, come back. Conte will set up the cot. Pay yourself an extra grand for the inconvenience. Don't argue with me."
"Vinnie — "
"Don't argue with me."
Tommy did not argue with him.
He finished the whiskey. Set the tumbler on the table on the same wet ring it had made. Stood up.
"He'll come for somebody, Vinnie."
"He won't come for us."
"You're sure."
"He'll come for his sister. Then he'll come for his sister-in-law. Then he'll come for the man who told his sister to leave him. Then he'll come for the guy with the worst Italian he ever met. Somewhere in there he'll get cornered, and then he won't have to come for anybody because somebody will come for him."
Tommy looked at him.
"You see all that."
"I see the pattern."
"You see the pattern."
"Yeah."
"All right, Vinnie."
He went out. The side-door bell did its small sound on closing because Tommy did not let it slam.
Vinnie stayed at the table.
He poured himself one finger out of Tommy's tumbler into a clean glass — one finger, no more, the kind of measure Sal would have done at this table on this kind of night before Vinnie's time in the kitchen had started — and drank it standing at the sink. Set the glass in the basin. Rinsed it. Set it upside down on the drying rack.
He went to the study, took the yellow legal pad off the desk, brought it back to the kitchen, set it on the counter.
He did not write on it.
He sat at the table with his hand on the closed pad and listened to the clock above the stove. The clock ticked twelve times. Then the clock ticked twelve more times. Then it ticked one more time and Vinnie stood up, turned off the kitchen light, and went up the stairs to a bed he knew he was not going to sleep in.
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