The Family Corleone

by Ed Falco

  “Yes,” Sonny said. “It’s my gang. I did all the planning. It’s all my doing, Pop.”

  Vito took a step back. He looked down to the concrete floor and ran his fingers though his hair—and then his hand shot out and smacked Sonny across the face, knocking him back and bloodying his lip. He cursed Sonny in Italian and grabbed him by the throat. “You put your life in danger? You put your friends’ lives in danger? You act like cowboys? My son? Is this what I taught you? Is this what you learned from me?”

  “Mr. Corleone,” Cork said, “Sonny didn’t—”

  Cork went silent when Sonny raised his hand. The gesture was so exactly like Vito’s, and the result so precisely the same, that none of the men in the room could have failed to notice.

  “Pop,” Sonny said. “Can we talk alone, please?”

  Vito abruptly let Sonny loose as if he were tossing away trash, and Sonny had to take a few quick steps back to keep from falling. In Italian, Vito told Clemenza to give him a few minutes.

  Sonny followed Vito through the warehouse, past a flatbed pickup with its hood open and engine parts spread around on the floor, past more crates of olive oil, over the grease-stained concrete floor, and out a back door into a wide cobblestone alleyway where a line of delivery trucks was parked under a latticework of black fire escapes. A cold wind blew through the alley, swirling bits of dust and trash and wimpling the tarps over the stake-bed trucks. Vito stood with his back to Sonny, looking down the length of the alley and out to Baxter Street. He had left his overcoat in the warehouse, and he pulled his jacket tight and hunched his shoulders as he folded his arms over his chest. Sonny leaned against the warehouse door as he watched his father’s back. He felt tired suddenly, and he let his head fall back and knock into the metal of the door. On one of the fire escapes across from him, he noticed a battered child’s toy, a plush tiger with its neck ripped open, spilling tufts of white stuffing into the wind.

  “Pop,” Sonny said, and then he couldn’t think of what he wanted to say next. He watched the wind mussing his father’s hair and he had a crazy urge to fix it for him, to comb it back in place with his fingers.

  When Vito turned around, his face was unforgiving. He watched Sonny in silence and then pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed blood from Sonny’s lip and chin.

  Sonny hadn’t realized he was bleeding until he saw the handkerchief come away from his face red with blood. He touched his lip roughly and winced a little at the pain. “Pop,” he said and hesitated. He couldn’t seem to get any words out beyond the easy and familiar “Pop.”

  “How could you do this to us,” Vito asked, “to your mother and father, to your family?”

  “Pop,” Sonny said again. “Pop,” he repeated. “I know who you are. I’ve known for years. Hell, Pop, everybody knows who you are.”

  “And who is that?” Vito asked. “Who is it you think I am?”

  “I don’t want to be a working schmuck,” Sonny said, “getting his hands covered with grease for a few bucks a day. I want to be respected like you,” he said. “I want to be feared, like you.”

  “I ask you again,” Vito said, and he took a step closer to Sonny as the wind blew though his hair, making him look like a wild man. “Who is it you think I am?”

  “You’re a gangster,” Sonny said. “Until repeal, your trucks were runnin’ hooch. You’re into gambling and shylocking and you’re big in the unions.” Sonny clasped his hands together and shook them for emphasis. “I know what everybody knows, Pop.”

  “You know what everybody knows,” Vito repeated. He turned his head to the sky and ran his fingers through his hair, working against the wind to push it back in place.

  “Pop,” Sonny said. He saw hurt in his father’s eyes and he wished he could take back what he’d just said, or else say something to make his father understand that he respected him for who he was—but no words came to mind and he could think of nothing to do or say to make the moment easier.

  “You’re mistaken,” Vito said, still looking at the sky, “if you think I’m a common gangster.” He was quiet another second before he finally turned his eyes to Sonny. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “I admit, yes, I get my hands dirty working with the likes of Giuseppe Mariposa—but I am not a man like Giuseppe, and if that’s what you think, you’re wrong.”

  “Ah, Pop,” Sonny said, and he walked past his father and turned around in a circle before facing him again. “I’m so tired of this with you always pretending to be somebody you’re not. I know you do it for our sake, but I’m sorry,” he said, “I know what you do. I know who you are. You run numbers and gambling in most of the Bronx. You’re in the unions and protection, and you have the olive oil business.” Sonny folded his hands in front of him as if in prayer. “I’m sorry, Pop,” he said, “but I know who you are and what you do.”

  “You think you know,” Vito said. He moved into a space between two trucks, out of the wind, and waited for Sonny to follow. “But you don’t know anything,” he continued once Sonny was standing opposite him again. “It’s not a secret, the dirty parts of my business. But I’m not a gangster like you’re making me out to be. I’m no Al Capone. I’m no Giuseppe Mariposa, with his drugs and women and murder. A man like me, I couldn’t get to where I am without getting my hands dirty, Sonny. That’s the way it is, and I accept the consequences. But it doesn’t have to be like that for you. It won’t be like that for you.” Vito put a hand around the back of Sonny’s neck. “Put this out of your mind, this gangster business,” he said. “This is not why I worked so hard, so that my son could be a gangster. I won’t allow it, Sonny.”

  Sonny’s chin dropped to his chest and he closed his eyes. The black tarps over the trucks on either side of him whipped and snapped in the wind. In the little space between the trucks where he stood with his father, the cold seemed to come up from under the chassis, biting at his feet and calves. On the street, a steady stream of cars and trucks drove by, their engines grumbling as drivers shifted gears. Sonny put his hand over Vito’s hand on the back of his neck. “Pop,” he said, “I saw Tessio and Clemenza kill Tom’s father. I saw you there with them.”

  Vito yanked his hand away from Sonny’s neck and then grasped him roughly by the chin and made him look up. “What are you talking about?” he asked. When Sonny didn’t answer immediately, he squeezed his jaw hard enough to start Sonny’s lip bleeding again. “What are you talking about?” he repeated.

  “I saw you,” Sonny said, still not meeting his father’s eyes, looking past him and through him. “I followed you. I hid on a fire escape across the alley and I had a view into the back room of some beer joint by the piers. I saw Clemenza pull a pillowcase over Henry Hagen’s head, and I saw Tessio go at him with a crowbar.”

  “You dreamed it,” Vito said, as if urging this explanation on Sonny. “You dreamed it, Sonny.”

  “No,” Sonny said, and when he finally looked at his father he saw that Vito’s face was pale. “No,” he repeated, “I didn’t dream it, and you’re not an upstanding civic figure, Pop. You’re a mob guy. You kill people when you have to, and they fear you for that. Listen to me,” he said. “I’m no grease monkey, and I’m no automotive tycoon. I want to work for you. I want to be a part of your organization.”

  Vito seemed frozen in place as he watched his son. Slowly, the color came back into his face and his grip on Sonny’s jaw loosened. When he finally let him go, his hands dropped to his sides, and then he shoved them deep into his pants pockets. “Go inside and get Clemenza,” he said, as if nothing out of the usual had just transpired.

  “Pop—”

  Vito raised his hand to Sonny. “Do as I say. Send Clemenza out to me.”

  Sonny watched his father’s face and saw nothing at all that he could read in his expression. “Okay, Pop,” he said. “What do I tell Clemenza?”

  Vito looked amazed. “Is this too difficult a job for you?” he asked. “Go inside. Find Clemenza. Send him out for me. You wait inside
with the others.”

  “Sure,” Sonny answered. He slipped through the metal door and disappeared into the warehouse.

  Alone in the alley, Vito went to the first truck in the line and got into the cab. He started the engine, checked the heat gauge, and turned the rearview mirror to him, meaning to straighten out his hair, but instead he wound up staring at the eyes staring back at him. There wasn’t a thought in his head. His eyes looked to him like the eyes of an old man, watery and bloodshot from the wind, with a crow’s nest of wrinkles emanating out to his temples. He watched his own eyes, and it was as if there were two of him in the cab, two sets of his own eyes, staring at each other as if each was a mystery to the other. When Clemenza banged on the door, it startled him. He rolled down the window. “Send Tessio home,” he said. “Let him take Eddie and Ken with him.”

  “What happened with Sonny?” Clemenza asked.

  Vito ignored the question. “Tie up Sonny with the others,” he said, “and don’t be gentle with him, capisc’? I want you to scare them. Make them think maybe we got no choice but to kill them, because of Giuseppe. Tell me who pisses his pants first.”

  “And you want me to do this to Sonny, too?”

  “Don’t make me repeat myself,” Vito said. He saw the needle budge on the heat gauge. He turned on the fan and put the truck in gear.

  “Where are you going?” Clemenza asked.

  “I’ll be back in a half hour,” Vito answered. He rolled up the window and pulled the truck out into the traffic on Baxter Street.

  Willie O’Rourke held a gray tumbler pigeon cradled in the palm of his left hand while he inspected its feathers, combing through them gently. He was kneeling just outside the pigeon coop, the rooftop ledge to his back and the roof door to his right, in front of him. Through the wire mesh of the coop, he could see the door and a canvas and wood beach chair set up alongside it, where he had been sitting in the cold a few minutes earlier, watching a tugboat pull a freighter up the river. The tumbler was one of his favorites, a gray with a coal-black mask. In flight it would break suddenly from the flock and seem to fall before catching itself and flying again with the others. When the birds flew, he watched and waited for this tumbling that gave the breed its name—and his heart still jumped a little every time. Willie finished inspecting the bird and put it back inside the coop with the others before he went about spreading fresh straw to help keep the flock from freezing in the bitter cold. When he was done, he sat on the roof ledge huddled inside his overcoat, curled up against a biting wind that blew along the avenue and over the rooftops.

  With the wind whistling in his ears, he allowed himself a moment to think. Donnie lay dead to the world in the bedroom below him, defeated by his blindness and by Kelly’s death. Doc Flaherty said he was depressed and that in time he’d get over it, but Willie found that doubtful. Donnie barely spoke at all anymore, and he was wasting away. Everyone thought it was the blindness that took the heart out of him, but Willie didn’t think so. Donnie had seemed furious for a time at the loss of his sight, and then he lapsed into sullenness—but it was the news of Kelly’s death, and the manner of her death, that had seemed to knock the last of the life out of him. He hadn’t spoken a dozen words in all the time since it happened. He lay there day and night, silent in the dark of his bedroom. The only difference Willie could see between Donnie and a corpse was that Donnie happened to be breathing.

  When Willie pulled himself up from the ledge and turned around, he found Luca Brasi sitting with his back to him in the beach chair, one of his boys, gun drawn, guarding the roof door. At first Willie was confused at the sight, since he hadn’t heard a thing, and then he realized the roar of the wind explained it. All he could see of Luca was his back and the top of his fedora and a white scarf that wrapped around his neck, but there was no doubting that it was Luca Brasi. The man’s bulk made the beach chair look like a piece of toy furniture—and then there was his boy at the door, the one Willie’d shot in the hand. He recognized him from the bank stickup.

  Willie glanced once at the black loops of the fire escape ladder on the other side of the roof and then back to the figure at the door, who was standing with his hands together dangling over his lap, a bright silver revolver that looked like something out of a Tom Mix western held loosely in a gloved hand. “What do you want?” he shouted at Luca’s back, over the wind.

  Luca lifted himself from the chair and turned around with one hand holding the collar of his overcoat at the neck and the other in his coat pocket.

  Willie didn’t realize he was moving backward until he bumped against the ledge. Luca’s face was gray and corpse-like, and one side was lower than the other, like someone who’d had a stroke. “Jesus Christ,” Willie said, and laughed. “You look like fuckin’ Boris Karloff in Frankenstein.” He touched his eyebrows. “Especially the monkey forehead,” he added.

  Luca ran his fingers over the drooping side of his face, as if considering Willie’s appraisal.

  “What do you want?” Willie asked. “Haven’t you done enough? You already blinded Donnie and killed Kelly, you fuckin’ scumbag.”

  “But you’re the one—took the shots at me,” Luca said, and he put his hands in his pockets again. “You’re the one who—said you won’t miss next time.” Luca glanced quickly to Paulie at the door, as if he had just remembered that he was there. “I can’t help but notice,” he went on, turning back to Willie, “there hasn’t been—a next time. What happened? Did your—boys get nervous?”

  “Fuck you,” Willie said, and he walked up to Luca until he was standing in front of him. “Fuck you and your dead mother and your burned-up baby and all your sick wop degenerate friends. And fuck Kelly too for ever having had anything to do with you.”

  Luca’s hands shot out of his pockets and took Willie by the neck. He lifted him up as if he were a doll and held him in the air. Willie’s arms and legs flailed weakly as he kicked and punched at Luca, landing blows as powerless and ineffectual as a child’s. Luca tightened his grip around Willie’s neck until Willie was seconds away from losing consciousness, and then he dropped him to the ground, where he landed on all fours, choking and gasping for air.

  “They are pretty,” Luca said, looking over Willie to the pigeon coop. “The birds. The way they fly,” he added. “They are pretty.” He knelt beside Willie and whispered, “You know why—I’m going to kill you—Willie? Because you’re a lousy shot.” He watched as Willie unbuttoned his overcoat and tried to pull it off, as if that would somehow help him breathe, and then he picked him up by his shirt collar and the seat of his pants, carried him to the ledge, and heaved him into the air over Tenth Avenue. At the top of the arc, for the briefest of moments, with his arms spread and his black overcoat flapping around him against the blue of the sky, Willie looked as though he might take off and fly away. Then he dropped and disappeared, and Luca covered his face with his hands before he turned and found Paulie holding the roof door open, waiting for him.

  Vito pulled the truck into the alley behind the warehouse, parked it at the back of the line, and cut the engine. The day was cold and windy under a blue sky pockmarked with tufts of white clouds. He was just back from a short trip to the East River, where he’d parked in a quiet spot under the Williamsburg Bridge and spent twenty minutes watching sunlight on the blue-gray surface of the water. He’d replayed the conversation with Sonny, a few lines of which repeated again and again, You’re a gangster, you’re a mob guy, you kill people, and a sea swell of turbulence threatened him, something rising out of the bottom of his stomach that made his fingers twitch, that made him blink and shudder. He waited in the truck and watched the water until a peaceful, deliberate anger tamped down whatever it was inside him threatening to erupt. There had been a moment watching the water when he thought he might have felt tears welling, but he hadn’t shed a tear out of fear or anger or pain since he’d left Sicily, and he didn’t in the cab of the truck looking out at the river. Something about the water itself calmed hi
m, something that came to him through a thousand years of ancestors who turned to the water for sustenance. In the hold of an ocean liner, a boy among strangers, he’d watched the ocean day and night on his journey to America. Unable to bury his family properly, he’d buried them in his mind. He’d watched the ocean and waited, calmly, for whatever he would need to do next. In the cab of his truck, under the traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge, close to the river, he waited again. Sonny was a boy. He knew nothing. His blood, yes, Vito’s blood—but too foolish to understand the choice he was making, too young and not smart enough. So, Vito had finally said to himself, every man has his own destiny, each word, spoken aloud, tinged with a mix of anger and acceptance, and he’d started the engine and drove back to Hester Street.

  On the way to his office, inside the warehouse, he shouted for Clemenza, and the name bounced off the high ceiling as Vito closed his office door behind him and took a seat at his desk. From one of the drawers he pulled out a bottle of Strega and a tumbler, and he poured himself a drink. The office was bare: thin wooden walls painted a muted green, a desk with a scattering of papers and pencils spread across a fake wood veneer, a few chairs lined against the walls, a metal hall tree behind the desk, a cheap filing cabinet next to the hall tree. Vito did all his real work at home, in his study, and spent hardly any time in this office. He glanced around at the tawdry surroundings and was filled with disgust. When Clemenza came through the door, Vito asked, before Clemenza had a chance to sit down, “Who pissed his pants?”

  “Eh,” Clemenza said, and pulled a chair up to the desk.

  “Don’t sit down,” Vito said.

  Clemenza pushed the chair aside. “Nobody pissed his pants, Vito,” he said. “They’re tough kids.”

  “Good,” Vito said, “at least there’s that.” He lifted the glass of Strega to his lips and held it there a moment, as if he had forgotten what he was doing. He looked over the tumbler and past Clemenza, his eyes focused on nothing.