He took up residence in Norma Correzente's second apartment. She brought him a carton of paperback novels. He read them and watched old movies on TV. He did not go out even when it would have been safe to go out They made sex regularly. It was like being in a very plush jail. Ten weeks after the contract with Dan Vittorio had, been fulfilled, she killed the rabbit.
Bracken left town again.
He was in Palm Springs, and the phone connection was very bad.
"Mr. Bracken?"
"Yes. Talk louder, please." Bracken was dressed in sweaty tennis whites; the girl on the bed wore only her skin. Tennis racket dangled from one hand. She swished at the air with it idly watching Bracken with the nearly expressionless eyes of experienced desire.
"This is Benito Torreos, Mr. Bracken.
"Yes. "
"You did a job for my Don seven months ago. You remember?"
"Yes." New sweat began to crawl down his back.
"He wants to see you. He's dying."
Bracken thought carefully, knowing his life almost certainly depended on his next words. He did not see what he had done as a double-cross: he had fulfilled two separate and exclusive contracts, and had been able to vacation from then until now on his earnings. But the old man would see it as a cross, a stain on his pride and good faith. He was a man with a belly.
"Why does he want to see me?"
"To ask a question."
The connection was very bad, and Bracken knew that to simply replace the instrument in its cradle would likely mean death. The family has a long arm. It was either to go Vito or run, and the connection was very bad.
"How is Mrs. Correzente?" He asked politely.
"Dead," Benny Torreos said flatly. "She died last month, in childbirth."
The bedroom was gothic shades of white on white — rug, walls, ceiling, curtains, even the sky beyond the windows. A steady drizzle was falling outside the Graymoor. Don Vito, shrunken to the size of a jockey twisted from the back of his horse, lay immured in his deathbed, which was also white.
He lifted one hand to Bracken. It shook briefly in the air, then dropped to the snowy coverlet again. There was a soft click as Torreos left them, closing the door to rejoin the relatives in the front room. The women out there were dressed in black, and shawled. Even the business suits of their men seemed old fashioned, as if death had dragged Sicily back into the fabric of the clothes and of the wearers by force.
Bracken went to the bed. The old man's face had fallen away to a skull. There was a sour smell that seemed to come from the folds of his flesh. His mouth had been twisted down cruelly on the left side, and the left hand was claw-fingered and frozen.
"Bracken," Correzente said. His voice was blurred and cottony. The operative side of his face lifted in a grotesque smile while the other side remained impassive. "I must tell you."
"Benny said you had a question."
"Yes." The word came out yeth. "But I must… tell you."
"Tell me what?"
"They told me you did a good job. You do. You have killed my wife and me."
"I did my job."
"Pride", the old man said, and smiled apologetically. "Pride…
He seemed to gather himself. "She promised to be a good wife, a dutiful wife. She said she had been taking pills but these pills were no more. She said she would bear me a son.
"We made love together. But I am old. She asked if it was too much for me." The skull smile again. "Should I tell my chastened wife that I am no more a man? No, I say. No too much.
"We make love more. And I, I have a stroke. A little blood vessel up here" — he tapped his head gravely- "goes pop, like a balloon. The doctor comes and says, No more, Vito. You will kill yourself. And I say, yes, more. Until I have put a child in her."
"Pride…
"Then the doctor say, You have done this. You have made a baby at seventy-eight. He say, I would give you a cigar, Vito, but you must smoke no more cigars. "
Bracken shifted his legs. The whiteness of the room was oppressive, creeping.
"I am overjoyed. I am a man, much man. I have a belly. The house is filled with my family. We have, oh, the word is for much food —"
"Banquet," Bracken said.
"Yes. and I sit at the head of the table, then rise. My wife, she rises. I toast her with wine and tell them. I say, I have given my belly to my wife!" "I am the happiness of the world. I am beyond laughings and dirty jokes. I give her money for the wheels and tables. I give her what she wants. Then one night, we argue. Much hard words pass. And then… I have this. Pain. One eye goes blind. She saw it and screamed. She runs for the telephone in the living room with her belly before her. I try to call but am down a dark hole. when I wake up, they tell me she has fallen on the steps going down from hen to the living room. They tell me she is in the hospital. Then they tell me. . " The hand rose again. "Fut." Don Vito said. The dreadful smile came and went.
Correzente was visibly tired now. His eyes closed, then opened slowly, as if weighted.
"You see?" he whispered. "The irony?"
"Benny said you had a question." Bracken said.
The dead face looked up at him steadily. "The baby lives," he said. "They tell me this. In a glass house."
"Incubator."
"They say the baby has pretty blue eyes.
Bracken said nothing.
"You made one of Norma's eyes black. But they were brown. And then is no blue-eyed Sicilian."
"Benny said you had a question," Bracken said.
"I have ask my question. My doctor say, it's genes. I do not know genes. I only know what a dying man lies in bed and thinks. How she was prideful and how she could wait."
Bracken looked down at him, his mind a thousand miles away. He thought of the blonde, how she served, the brown flesh of her legs below the blinding white of her skirt, the flickering glimpse of her panties, the fan of her hair on the pillow, her trained tennis muscles.
"How stupid you are," he said to the old man, softly. He leaned forward, breathing in the scent of Correzente's doom. "Death has made you senile. I have my own belly. Do you think I would take my own leavings?"
A line of spittle was making a slow trek down from the corner of the old man's mouth to his chin.
"The baby's eyes will go brown. Too bad you won't see it. Goodbye, stupid old man." He got up. The room was white and full of death. He left and went back to Palm Springs.