The blue sedan was gone.
The gray Buick was gone. The tan minivan was gone. The brown Chevrolet was gone. The green Plymouth — which had taken three full days of careful work for Vinnie to be sure was the same green Plymouth and not three different green Plymouths — was gone.
Garrison Avenue at eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning was a stretch of cracked asphalt with a row of small commercial frontages on each side, a hydrant Sal had been complaining about for two decades, a streetlight that worked on alternate Wednesdays, and the kind of mid-week quiet that meant the people who lived in the apartments above the storefronts had already gone to work and the people who came in for the day had not yet arrived.
There was no car across from the yard that Vinnie did not recognize.
He stood in the office window with a coffee and watched the avenue for ten minutes.
A delivery truck for the bakery two doors down went past. A retired man Vinnie had known by sight since 1996 walked his Yorkie. A young mother with a stroller waited at the corner for the light to change. Two of Conte's drivers came in for the morning routes and went out to the yard with their thermoses.
No car.
The system warmed.
He did not ask anything. It did not say anything urgent. It registered the same thing his eyes were registering, the way a passenger in the car looked out the same windshield as the driver.
[Surveillance baseline restored. Federal observation interval: paused or relocated. Heat trend: declining. Marchetti exposure: low. Recommended posture: maintain current discipline.]
He acknowledged it. Let it close.
He drank the coffee at the window for another five minutes.
Then he went to the desk and started the day's paper.
At ten he had the meeting in the conference room.
The conference room was a generous word for it. It was the front office's back room, with a long table the lawyer had given them used in 1998 and six chairs Conte's wife had picked up at an estate sale. The wall had a framed certificate of formation on it and a framed certificate of compliance from the Department of Environmental Protection and a calendar from the print shop on Bloomfield.
Tommy was at the head of the table by the door. Enzo was in the chair against the wall, the one with the cushion he preferred. Vinnie sat at the far end with the ledger and the lawyer's folder.
"Mid-year."
"Mid-year," Enzo said.
Vinnie opened the folder. The pages were the same pages the lawyer had been preparing for him every six months since 1999 with the format that Vinnie had specified, which was the format he had built spreadsheets in at his desk in 2018 for clients who did not know that he was building them in a format he would still be using twenty-two years later in a different body and a different life with a different last name. The pages had three columns and four sections and were boring. Boring was the goal.
"Revenue."
"Up forty-one percent over January-June 1999. Forty-three over January-June 1998. We project finishing the year up sixty percent on '99."
"Composition."
"Forty percent legitimate-on-paper. That's hotel, construction subsidiary, waste hauling under municipal and commercial contract, and the Rossi share."
"What was it in January."
"Twenty-eight."
"What was it last summer."
"Eighteen."
Enzo, against the wall, was watching the column move on the page Vinnie had turned to face him.
"Heat."
"Down. Surveillance lifted starting last week. The blue sedan was off the curb on the second. The minivan was off on the fourth. We had a green Plymouth that was probably a survey vehicle through the seventh. Nothing since the eighth. Today is the first of August. That's a clean three weeks."
"That's good."
"It means they're regrouping. It doesn't mean they're gone. They lost a major source. They're going to rebuild. We have maybe four months of quiet before a different person at a different agency picks up a different folder."
Tommy was listening with both hands on his coffee cup.
"Territory."
"Stable. Market Street recovered. The two blocks across the avenue from Market Street are integrated. The auto-glass row is in compliance with the new tribute structure. The vending — the new West Caldwell vending, the other side of the Sal-era one we sold — is operational and producing. We have one slow account at the Belleville bakery that I'm going to handle myself this month."
"Crew."
"Twenty-nine. We brought Mannarino in formally on June fifteenth. Conte's cousin's kid wants in, I'm not sure about him, I'd like another month to look. Everybody else is where they were."
"Marriages, kids, hospital."
"DiNardo's wife had a baby in May, a boy, six pounds eight, we sent a basket. Conte's father-in-law passed in June, we sent flowers and Tommy went to the wake. Carlo's daughter started at Seton Hall. Mannarino is single."
Enzo nodded.
"Crew loyalty."
Vinnie hesitated for half a beat. The system warmed in his peripheral the way it warmed when he was about to ask it a thing. He let it stay warm without asking.
"Strong. Ralphie Fortunato hasn't gone to the social club to mutter in eight weeks. I think the bonus structure on operations review fees the lawyer set up has worked. Tommy got the same package. Carlo got the same package. Conte got a different package because Conte is salaried. The discretionary side is real money to a man who works for the kind of money our men work for. Nobody wants to walk away from it."
Tommy did not look up. Tommy was the man at the table who was on the operations review fees and who had not known until the moment Vinnie had said it that the package had been a strategy and not just a thank-you.
"Banker."
"Costanza's happy. He extended us to three-fifty in May. He doesn't want to extend further until the hotel pays for two more quarters. That's fine — three-fifty is more than we need for construction working capital. The construction company is going to be cash-positive in October if the East Ward bid lands. The East Ward decision is end of August."
"Elena."
He looked at Enzo.
Enzo did not lift his eyes off the page in front of him.
"She's good, Enzo. We see each other less. We talk less on phones. The relationship is — the relationship is what it is. I don't know how to describe its category to you."
"You don't have to describe it to me. I asked if she was good. You said she was good."
"She's good."
"Then she's good."
Tommy turned the page in his own folder.
"Anything else."
"Two things."
He capped the pen. Set it on the page.
"One — the next six months are not going to be like the last six. The last six were a fight we won. We didn't win by being smarter. We won because two of the men who would have been our problems took each other out and the third man took himself out and the fourth man — the man across the table from us with the federal car — lost his source. None of that was us. We benefited. We did not cause. That's important. Men who confuse benefiting with causing make the next mistake."
Tommy nodded.
"Two — good times make people careless. I want every man in this organization to be more careful in the second half of this year than they were in the first half. More careful. Not the same. More. The federal car is going to come back to Garrison Avenue. The next major event on the city side is the East Ward decision, and the next federal interest in us is going to come the day a different agent at a different desk gets handed a piece of paper with our LLC on it and a question mark. That paper exists. We just don't know who's holding it yet."
Enzo set his pen down.
He folded his hands on the table. He looked at Vinnie across the length of it for one slow breath.
"Your father said the same thing."
Vinnie did not move.
"In '91. After the Genovese kid. Sat at this table — this table, the actual one. The one Carlo's wife found at the estate sale was the next one. The original one's in my basement, my wife wanted it out. Sal sat at this table and he said Enzo, when you have a good year, that's when the bad year is being put together by the next people. The good year and the bad year always come in a pair. The good year is when you decide what kind of bad year you're going to have. That was in the spring of '91. The bad year started in '93 and ended in '99 and ended with — "
He stopped.
He uncapped his pen. Recapped it. Did not finish the sentence.
Vinnie watched him.
"It ended with what, Enzo."
"It ended with what it ended with."
"Tell me, Enzo."
"You don't need me to tell you. You know."
Tommy had stopped turning pages.
Enzo took a breath that did not arrive in his chest as steadily as he wanted it to. The other men at the table noticed. Enzo did not give them the dignity of noticing he had been noticed.
"Vincent. Your father — Sal — between the spring of '91 and the day he died, your father was building a different life. He was. He was a slow man about it, he was a stubborn man about it, he wasn't doing it the way you're doing it because he didn't have your head for paper. But he was doing it. He told me he was doing it. He told me he wasn't going to be in the life when he was sixty. He was fifty-nine when he died. He was eleven months from when he had told me he wanted to be out. He didn't make it. The man — the man across the river — got him first."
A beat.
"I never told you that on this table."
"You told me at home, Enzo. Last summer."
"I told you at home. I never told you with another man in the room."
"All right."
Enzo nodded once.
He looked at Tommy.
"Tommy, son, you didn't hear that."
"Yes, Enzo."
He looked back at Vinnie.
"The point of the story is what I said to begin with. The good year and the bad year come in a pair. Your father had the good year and ran into the bad year before he could finish what the good year was for. You — you got six months of a good year that wasn't a good year, it was a year of three men taking each other out for you. Now you have an actual good year coming. Twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six months of one. Whatever bad year comes after it is being put together right now by somebody you have not met yet. Take care of the good year. Decide what kind of bad year is coming. The boring word — the one on your dashboard — that word is the right word for the next two years. Tape it everywhere."
Vinnie closed his folder.
He did not say anything.
He nodded once. Then he stood up.
"Meeting's over."
Tommy and Enzo stood. Tommy gathered the pages. Enzo took his pen back. They went out separately, the way they had come in. Vinnie stayed at the head of the table for a minute after they had gone, with his hand flat on the closed folder, and then he picked up the folder and went back to his office.
He did not go straight home.
He had Tommy drop him at the corner of Bloomfield and Roseville at one-thirty. Told Tommy to come back at three. Walked north on Bloomfield in the August sun. The neighborhood was the neighborhood it had always been since before he had been alive in either life. The bakery was the bakery. The shoe repair was the shoe repair. The funeral parlor at the corner where his mother in this life had stood at his father's wake had a different name on the awning that it had had in January of '99 because the old man who had owned it had retired in February and his son was running it now.
He stopped at the ice cream place across from the public library.
He had not been in the ice cream place since he was a child in this body's memory. The kid behind the counter was maybe seventeen and was wearing a paper hat that was the same paper hat the kids behind the counter had been wearing in 1979.
"Chocolate chip."
"Cone or cup."
"Cup."
The kid scooped. Set the cup on the counter. Vinnie paid in singles. Carried the cup outside. Sat on the bench in front of the public library and ate the ice cream with the small plastic spoon while the August one o'clock sun came through the leaves of the maple over the bench.
The chocolate chips were the kind that were a little harder than the cream around them, the way the chocolate chips in chocolate-chip ice cream had been since before he had been born in either of his bodies.
He watched the avenue.
A young woman in a Rutgers t-shirt walked past with a stack of library books pressed against her stomach. An older man with a cane crossed at the crosswalk on the green. A boy on a bicycle rode the long way around the open hydrant Vinnie's father had been complaining about. Two women came out of the funeral parlor across the street in dark clothes and stopped on the sidewalk to embrace and stood there for a long time, embracing.
He thought of the four-inch tomato plant.
He thought of a man at a deli at five of three on a Thursday who had signed a piece of paper and not finished a coffee.
He thought of a woman in a diner in Stroudsburg holding his hand under a formica table.
He thought of his father at this same bench, in a different summer, with a different ice cream — Sal had liked rum raisin, the host body remembered that — and a different worry.
He finished the ice cream. He stood up. He dropped the cup in the trash can next to the bench. He walked the four blocks back to where he had told Tommy to be.
Tommy was there. The Cadillac was idling at the curb. Vinnie got in the back.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"Take me to the lot. I want to walk the second floor."
"It's framed."
"It's framed. I want to walk it before the roofers come on Monday."
"Got it."
The Cadillac pulled out into the avenue. Vinnie watched the funeral parlor get small in the side mirror and watched the two women in dark clothes stop embracing and start walking in opposite directions and watched the boy on the bicycle take a corner he should not have taken and not fall off, and he kept the eyes on the mirror for the length of the avenue because the avenue was where he lived now, in this body, in this life, on this side of the river.
The Cadillac took the corner.
The avenue was gone.
He turned his face forward.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"When we get to the lot — if the foreman with the bad knee is there — tell him I want to walk the second floor with him and not with the framers."
"All right."
"And Tommy."
"Yeah."
"Pull over a minute at the bakery."
"Bread."
"Bread."
"Two loaves."
"Two loaves."
"One for the foreman."
"One for me."
Tommy laughed once. The first time Vinnie had heard Tommy laugh in five weeks.
"Two loaves," Tommy said. "One for the foreman, one for you."
"And get yourself one."
"Three loaves."
"Three loaves."
The Cadillac pulled up to the bakery on Bloomfield Avenue.
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