The coffee was from a roaster on Newark Avenue that Eddie Sciorra's wife had told Vinnie about between Christmas and New Year's and Vinnie had ordered a pound on the way home from the lawyer's office and now there was a bag on the counter that was a third gone. He had filled the percolator at five forty-five. He stood at the kitchen window in the dark while it climbed and looked at the back garden where the tomato plants had been pulled up in October and the soil had been turned and was bare.
The phone did not ring at six.
It did not ring at six-fifteen.
The percolator clicked. He poured. He sat at the table in the dark with the cup and the Star-Ledger he had brought in from the porch wet. He read the front page and the second page and put the paper down before the third because Monday's Ledger was a Monday's Ledger. Elena was at her apartment in Newark because the first day back from holidays was a circus on her side and she had taken the seven thirty bus in from her own door, and she would be back tomorrow night. Her dresses were in his closet. Two of them. Her gray coat was on the hook by the back door.
The ring was not on the counter because the ring was on her finger one hundred and twelve miles away, currently being unrecognized by an assistant district attorney named Caitlin who would not look at it and not ask about it until Wednesday.
He drank the coffee.
Tommy was at the side door at seven-twenty.
"Boss."
"Tommy."
"You driving or am I."
"You. I want to read on the way."
"It's gonna rain. Take the umbrella."
He took the umbrella.
The yard at Jersey City had been re-paved over the holiday weekend. New striping on the truck bays. Sal Conte had done it on his own dime and not told Vinnie until he saw it. Vinnie made a note on the back of an envelope to bonus Conte twelve hundred for the asphalt and add another five for the foreman bait-and-switch.
He sat down at the desk in the corner of the office at five of nine with the coffee in the travel mug that Elena had given him for Christmas and pulled the legal pad with the four columns from the third drawer.
Tommy came in at nine with a different yellow pad.
"Q1."
"Q1."
"What are we looking at."
Vinnie counted them down off his fingers.
"One. Newark East Ward Municipal. First pickup Monday next week. The trucks are ready. Conte's gone over the routes with me four times. I'm gonna ride along the first run, sit shotgun, be visible to the city inspector on the route Monday. It matters more that the inspector sees the principal in the cab than that the principal does anything. Two. Verrazzano. Eddie's pipeline is decent — three kitchen rehabs through February, two driveway jobs, a small commercial fit-out in West Caldwell. None of it is enormous. All of it is paid. I'm gonna sit with Eddie at the yard the second Friday of every month at eleven for ninety minutes. That's the structure. Three. Hotel chain. Beth Halloran wants a quarterly call. I'm putting it on the calendar for the second Tuesday of the month at two. Four. Two new bids I want us to chase by April. The Hoboken municipal yard contract opens in March. Their incumbent guy got caught skimming on a snow-removal sub. We're gonna bid. Second is — and this one's a stretch — the New Jersey State Hospital system has a regional waste-management RFP that opens in May. Eight facilities. The right size for us if we sub the South Jersey runs out. I want a paper on the State Hospital thing on my desk by March one."
Tommy was writing.
"Five. Internal. First Thursday of every month, social club, eight to ten, jacket. We agreed. I'll be there this week. Carmine'll be there. Ralphie'll be there. I want the new yard kid there once a quarter starting in April."
"You wearing the suit?"
"Jacket and slacks. Not the suit. Suit reads wrong at the social club. The suit reads bank."
"Right."
"Six. Tony's thing. The lawyer came back on it the week before Christmas. He says no on the structure as Tony proposed it — it gets the company a sub-investigation from the building inspector inside of eighteen months. He has a counter-structure that gets the same money to the same place through Verrazzano's payroll line as a labor cost on a separately-bidded sub. Clean on the surface, clean on the audit if anybody bothers to do one. I'm gonna sit with Tony at Satriale's this Thursday morning and walk him through it. If he wants to do it, we do it. If he doesn't, we don't, and he doesn't lose face because the lawyer's letter says it's about structure not about partnership."
"Tony's gonna want to do it."
"Tony's gonna want to do it. He's gonna want me to tell him whether I want to do it."
"Do you."
"I want to do it small. The lawyer's structure caps it at twelve grand a quarter. That's small enough that nobody at the federal building wakes up about it. That's the version I'll bring."
"All right."
"Seven. Last one. We don't get into anybody else's mess this year. Ralphie's mess. Whoever's mess at the Bing. Whoever's mess at the social club that isn't ours. We stay at the lot. We pour concrete. We pick up garbage. We file paper. If somebody asks us to get into a mess that isn't ours, the answer is I got the East Ward Monday until June, and then it's I got the Hoboken bid through August, and then it's I got the State Hospital paper through December. We'll have the alibi calendar built into the calendar."
Tommy stopped writing.
"Vinnie."
"Yeah."
"You been thinking about this."
"I been thinking about this since November."
"That's almost ten weeks."
"Yeah."
"Most of it while you were planning a wedding."
"The wedding's planning itself. Elena's mother runs that. I been thinking about the year."
Tommy did the half-smile he did when his boss had said the thing that made Tommy's job for the next eleven months either possible or not. The half-smile said possible.
He took the pad with him to his desk. Started on the State Hospital research.
Vinnie sat with the coffee for ten more minutes after Tommy left the room.
He opened the system on the desk.
The Enhanced Stat Display was where he had left it last week. He clicked through to the forecast page he hadn't run since Halloween.
[Forecast Window: 12 months from current date.]
[Major events approaching: — Cifaretto integration into DiMeo capo structure: Q1-Q2. — Sciorra (T.) employment incident, Bada Bing-adjacent: Q1. — Aprile (Jackie Jr.) decline arc: Q3-Q4. — Soprano (M.) Columbia social integration: Q1-Q4 ongoing.]
[Recommended posture: Minimum direct involvement in DiMeo internal escalations. Concentrate organizational reputation on legitimate prime contracts and consistent tribute. Maintain Tony Soprano information pipeline at current cadence. Do not introduce new alliances inside DiMeo above current trust threshold (52).]
[SP cost: 0. (Routine forecast — passive.)]
He read it twice.
He closed the system.
He sat back in the chair.
Cifaretto. Tracee. Jackie Jr. He knew all three names. He knew the shapes of the things attached to them in a world that no longer existed and that he had partly unmade. He knew that there was a girl who worked at the Bing whose last name he had never bothered to memorize when he had watched the show because she was on for a season and a half and then she was not on, and that her not being on was a thing that happened in a room with Ralph Cifaretto in it that Vinnie, in his other life, had watched on his couch eating Chinese food.
He did not know whether he could save her.
He knew that trying would put him in a room with Ralph Cifaretto, which would put him in a story he had spent two years engineering himself out of.
He took the legal pad with the seven Q1 lines on it. Turned to a fresh page.
Wrote one line.
Find out her name.
Capped the pen. Set it down.
The phone rang on the office line.
"Marchetti."
"Vinnie. Eddie."
"Eddie."
"That Cedar Grove kitchen — the one we walked in September."
"Yeah."
"Homeowner's husband's name is Frank Cifaretto. He's the brother of a guy I think you're gonna want to know about. Brother lives in Newark. They had Thanksgiving at the Cedar Grove house. The wife mentioned the brother twice while I was setting tile. The brother's name is Ralph."
A long silence on Vinnie's end.
"Eddie."
"Yeah."
"Thank you for the call."
"You want me to finish the kitchen?"
"Finish the kitchen, Eddie."
"All right, Vinnie."
He hung up.
He looked at the line on the yellow pad.
He picked the pen back up. Wrote a second line under the first.
Don't pull the Cedar Grove crew. Finish the work. Be invisible at the house. Tell Eddie nothing.
Capped the pen.
Stood up.
Went to the window.
The rain Tommy had predicted had started. It was hitting the chain-link at the back of the yard at an angle. Conte was out at one of the trucks in his coat, talking to a driver. The new yard kid was at the gate with a clipboard, getting wet, doing the morning manifest the way Vinnie had asked him to do it for the last two weeks.
Vinnie touched the Saint Michael medal under his shirt.
Took his hand off it.
The phone rang again on the office line. Different ring. The other line. Tony's line.
He let it ring twice. Then he picked it up.
"Marchetti."
"Vinnie. Tony. Thursday at Satriale's. Bring the lawyer's paper."
"Eight?"
"Eight. Bring the cheap pen. I'm not gonna sign anything but I'm gonna read it."
"All right, Tony."
"And Vin."
"Yeah."
"Carmela liked her."
He smiled at the wall above the phone.
"Tell Carmela the feeling was mutual."
"I'm not telling her that. She doesn't need help."
"Tell her anyway."
"Beat it."
He hung up.
The rain on the chain-link kept coming at its angle.
He sat back down.
Opened the yellow pad.
Started on the State Hospital paper.
Reading more than one of my novels? Good news — one Patreon, all of them.
patreon.com/TheFinex5
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰
― DECREE ―
More chapters reign FREE upon unwrittenrealm.com.
The throne acknowledges.
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰