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with a lot of distinguished work in his file; he had no one to impress. Still, it was hard, probably impossible, to be the second guy to beg off. He scowled at Frank Padrino, then looked with dim distaste at the gung-ho and irritating Sutton. A case I don't believe in, the veteran agent thought, with a pushy child for a partner. For this I put on a fresh suit on a Sunday morning?

7
    As the meeting was breaking up in Queens, the Godfather was planting impatiens in Key West.
    On his knees on the white gravel, he leaned into the narrow flower bed and his skinny slack haunches in their baggy pants stuck up in the air. He didn't wear gloves. A lot of people, he thought, they said they liked to garden, but what they really liked was to look at flowers while sipping a gin with clean hands. How could you garden with gloves on? How could you feel things in detail? How could you know how firm a stem was, how much dirt to shake off where the root ball ended?
    Vincente dug a little hole, scratched it out like a terrier, and decided that the problem was that nowadays, what with the price of real estate, gardening was only for the wealthy, the refined. Didn't used to be that way. In Sicily everybody gardened. Hell, in Queens in the old days everybody gardened. Who gardened now? Wetback gardeners mostly, digging without gusto in other people's dirt, being badly paid by clean-handed bankers and brokers in Westchester. The same bankers and brokers who looked down on people like Vincente. Why? Not because they were outlaws. Hell no, there was brotherhood and grudging admiration about that. No, they looked down on the Sicilians because the Sicilians got their hands dirty and made their money on things with strong aromas. Fish. Garbage. Could you imagine a WASP banker showing up at Fulton Street at 4 a.m . to put on slimy rubber boots and get into the freezer with twenty tons of cod? Could you picture a Jew broker climbing a mountain of table scraps, Kotex, and gull shit to bring his coffee grounds and lamb chop bones to the dump? No. Those were jobs for wops, for dagos. Those were jobs for people who didn't go to twenty years of school and weren't afraid to get some honest stink up their nostrils and kind of liked the idea of getting elbow deep in smelly, gritty, wormy life, elbow deep in dirt.
    Not, Vincente thought, that this Key West stuff could really be called dirt. Key West had no dirt, only coral limestone, nubbly gray rock that didn't weigh much and had holes in it. You wanted dirt, you went to the store and bought it in a bag. Imported. A luxury item. Hell, even in Queens there was dirt. . . . Gently, the Godfather turned over a cluster of blood-red flowers and squeezed them out of their tiny plastic pot. He placed them in the hole he had dug, snugged them in with the flat of his hand. Then he took stock. He had about a dozen pots of impatiens to go, maybe eight more feet of border, and only a quarter bag of topsoil.
    Still on his knees, he looked back over his shoulder and yelled across the pool. "Dirt, Joey. We're gonna need more dirt."
    His son was sitting under the patio umbrella, eating cantaloupe and looking at the Sunday Sentinel, making sure the Paradise Properties listings had not been garbled beyond all recognition. "Have some breakfast, Pop," he said. "Dirt, later on, we'll get more dirt."
    Vincente considered. He didn't like to stop in the middle of a job, it went against him. But the prospect of resting let him realize that his knees were hurting from the gravel, the hinge at the bottom of his back was complaining. So OK, he would take a break. He started to stand up, then realized with shame and some surprise that it wasn't going to be a simple or a graceful process. He pretended to be puttering, stacking up the empty pots; he didn't want his son to realize that his head was swimming or to see how long it took him to regain his feet. He stalled; at length he rose. Then he dusted himself off and strolled around the pool to