The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  For example: If only Michael hadn’t decided in August to make his brother, Fredo, his underboss, a position the Corleones had never used and that Michael intended as symbolic, a way of bringing Fredo, a good-hearted bumbler, back into the fold. If only Michael had let the top people in his organization-rather than no one at all-know it was only symbolic.

  Or: If only Geraci had been from New York and not Cleveland. If only he hadn’t had such ties to Don Forlenza. If only he’d been less ambitious. If only he hadn’t, upon getting the news that Michael had appointed Fredo sotto capo, respectfully asked Michael if he’d lost his mind. If only his subsequent apology had made his intemperate remark go away.

  If only Fredo had known his new job was symbolic, he might not have been so driven to have a piece of action that was all his. He might not have tried to create his own city of the dead in the swamps of New Jersey. He might have lived to celebrate his forty-fourth birthday.

  If only Tom Hagen had been more involved with all aspects of the Family business, instead of being removed as consigliere so that he could try to become the governor of Nevada.

  If only, twenty years ago in Cleveland, after Don Forlenza had been shot for the second time but before his first heart attack, he hadn’t anointed a man his own age as his successor. If only one of Forlenza’s many afflictions had killed him. If only Sal Narducci, a man of moderate ambition otherwise, hadn’t had to spend two decades ready to take over any minute now.

  If only Vito Corleone hadn’t observed Narducci serving as consigliere at a dozen Commission meetings. If only, not long before Vito’s death, he hadn’t suggested to his son that installing Narducci as Don, rather than waiting for nature to take its course, would eliminate the Barzini Family’s biggest ally outside New York.

  Change one or two of those things, and-who knows?-maybe, as you read this, Nick Geraci and Michael Corleone would be out there somewhere, side by side, two leathery old goats beside a swimming pool in Arizona, toasting a life well lived, eyeing a couple sixty-something babes across the way, and busting out the Viagra.

  History is a lot of things, but one thing it’s not is inevitable.

  Vito Corleone often said that every man has but one destiny. His own life was a powerful contradiction of his own cherished aphorism. Yes, he fled Sicily when men came to kill him. Yes, when a young neighborhood tough named Pete Clemenza asked him to hide a cache of guns, Vito had little choice but to comply. And, yes, when Vito committed his first crime in America, the theft of an expensive rug, he thought at the time that he was just helping Clemenza move it. All of these things had found him. This is not unusual. Bad things find everyone. Some might call this destiny. Others might call it chance. Tomato, tomahto. But Vito’s involvement in his next crimes-hijacking trucks along with Clemenza and another young tough from Hell’s Kitchen by the name of Tessio-had been a willful act. When they invited Vito to join their band of thieves, he could have said no. Saying yes, choosing to become a predatory criminal, sent him down one path. Saying no would have sent him down another, perhaps a family business his three sons would have been able to join without first becoming murderers.

  Vito was a skillful, intuitive mathematician, a brilliant assessor of probability, and a man of vision. Believing in something as irrational and unimaginative as destiny was out of character. It was beneath him.

  Still, what human being is above rationalizing the worst thing he ever did? Who among us, if directly and indirectly responsible for the killing of hundreds of people, including one of his own children, might not tell himself a lie, something that, unexamined, might even seem profound?

  Both Nick Geraci and Michael Corleone were young, smart, creative, careful, and tough. Each had a gift for reinventing himself, at contriving to be underestimated and then taking advantage of it. It has often been said that they were too similar and destined to become enemies. It has often been said that wars are waged to create peace. It has often been said that the earth is flat and that this way demons lie. Wisdom is a thing rarely said (the late Vito Corleone often said) and less often heard.

  Michael Corleone and Nick Geraci might certainly have made other choices. Better things could easily have happened. They were by no means destined to destroy each other.

  Chapter 2

  T HE CREMATORY was owned by none other than Amerigo Bonasera. Neri had his own key. He and Geraci went right in the front door, and stripped out of their bloody clothes and into the best of what they could find in a back room. Geraci was a big man. The closest thing to a fit was a linen suit the color of baby shit and two sizes too small. Bonasera was semiretired, living most of the time in Miami Beach. His son-in-law took the suitcase and the wad of bloody clothes from Neri and didn’t say a word.

  One of Geraci’s men drove him home. It wasn’t even midnight. Charlotte was still wide awake, sitting up in bed, doing the Times crossword puzzle. She was good at crossword puzzles but did them only when something was eating at her.

  Nick Geraci stood at the foot of their bed. He knew how he looked in that suit. He cocked his head, arched his eyebrows in a way he hoped was comical, and thrust out his arms the way a vaudevillian would as he said “Ta-da!”

  His wife did not laugh or even smile. The “gangland-style slayings” of Phillip Tattaglia and Emilio Barzini had been on the television news. She tossed the Times aside.

  “Long day,” Geraci said. “Long story, okay, Char? Let’s leave it at that.”

  He watched her size him up. He watched her face go slowly slack, watched her make herself not say she wasn’t going anywhere, watched her swallow her desire to ask to hear the story. She didn’t say a word.

  Nick Geraci got undressed, tossing the suit over a chair. In the time it took him to piss, brush his teeth, and put on his pajamas, Charlotte managed to make the suit disappear (Geraci never saw it again), turn off the lights, get back into bed, and pretend to have fallen asleep.

  In New Hampshire, in her parents’ house, Kay Corleone lay next to her sleeping children in the same double bed she’d had as a girl, trying to concentrate on the Dostoyevsky novel in her hands, dogged by the questions she hadn’t asked, and knew she couldn’t ask, about why Michael had not only suggested this visit but picked the dates.

  In Las Vegas, in a darkened hotel suite on the top floor of the first high-rise in Las Vegas, the Castle in the Sand, home of the buck-fifty steak dinner and the nickel cup of coffee, Connie Corleone Rizzi clutched her newly baptized baby boy to her breast and stared out beyond the lights of the city. The last light of day drained from the desert. She was happy. Connie was not, as a rule, a happy person. She had not had an easy day, getting up so early for that flight and then having to contend the whole way with her six-year-old son Victor’s epic squirming and resourceful misbehavior while her mother, Carmela, barely lifted a finger to help and just nattered on and on about how this trip had made her miss Mass. But the baby-Michael Francis Rizzi, christened yesterday, named after her brother Mike, who’d stood as the boy’s godfather-had been a perfect angel, sleeping and cooing and burrowing that little nose into her. Somewhere over the Rocky Mountains, for the first time, he had laughed. Now, every time she blew on his forehead, he’d do it again. It was a sign, she thought. Babies bring their own luck. The move out here would be a new start for everybody. Carlo would change. He had changed. He hadn’t hit her once since she’d gotten pregnant with this baby. Mike was going to give Carlo a lot more responsibility in the family business now. Carlo had been supposed to make the flight, too, to look at houses and help shop for other things they’d need, but at the last minute Mike had said he needed Carlo to stay. Business. Neither her father nor any of her brothers had ever done that before, made Carlo feel like he mattered. She moved her infant son to her other breast and stroked his soft, fine hair. He smiled. She blew on his forehead. He laughed, and she did, too.

  In the next room, Vincent started jumping on the bed, which he’d been told countless times not to do. The phone rang. Connie sm
iled. That would be Carlo. She let Victor answer.

  “Mo-om!” the boy called. “It’s Uncle To-om!” Hagen.

  Connie stood. The baby began to scream.

  On the street below, draped in a long black shawl, Carmela Corleone emerged from the hotel, head down, shielding her eyes from the glare of the neon lights, muttering to herself in Italian. She started down the Strip. It was after nine, too late for services anywhere, especially on a Monday, but in a town with all these wedding chapels, how hard could it be for a determined widow to find a priest? Or at least a man of the cloth. If all else failed, a quiet and holy place where she might escape these garish lights and fall to her knees and seek intervention on behalf of the souls of the damned, humbly beseeching the Virgin Mary, as she did every day, one suffering mother to another.

  Book II. September 1955

  Chapter 3

  F OUR MONTHS LATER, early Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend, Michael Corleone lay in his bed in Las Vegas, his wife beside him, his two kids right down the hall, all of them sound asleep. Yesterday in Detroit, at the wedding of the daughter of his late father’s oldest friend, Michael had given the merest nod toward Sal Narducci, a man he barely knew, putting in motion a plan designed to hurt every formidable rival the Corleones still had. If it worked, Michael would emerge blameless. If it worked, it would bring lasting peace to the American underworld. The final bloody victory of the Corleone Family was at hand. A trace of a smile flickered on Michael Corleone’s surgically repaired face. His breathing was even and deep. Otherwise, he was motionless, untroubled, basking in the cool air of his new home, enjoying the sleep of the righteous. Outside, even in the pale morning light, the desert baked.

  Near the oily banks of the Detroit River, two lumpy men in silk short-sleeved shirts-one aquamarine, the other Day-Glo orange-emerged from the guest cottage of an estate belonging to Joe Zaluchi, the Don of Detroit, the man who’d saved his city from the arbitrary violence of the Purple Gang. The one in orange was Frank Falcone, formerly of Chicago and now the head of organized crime in Los Angeles. The one in aquamarine, Tony Molinari, was his counterpart in San Francisco. Behind them came two men in overcoats, each carrying two suitcases, each suitcase containing, among other things, a tux worn to last night’s Clemenza-Zaluchi nuptials. The surface of the water was awash in dead fish. From the barn-sized garage, a limo came to get them. When the limo pulled out onto the street, a police car followed it. The cop was on Zaluchi’s payroll.

  At Detroit City Airport, they turned down a dirt access road and drove alongside a fence until they got to a gate marked EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY. The police car stopped. The limo kept going, right onto the tarmac. The silk-shirted men got out, sipping coffee from paper cups. Their bodyguards practiced karate moves.

  A plane taxied toward them, bearing the logo of a meatpacking concern in which Michael Corleone had a silent, controlling interest. The logo featured the profile of a lion. The name on the pilot’s birth certificate was Fausto Dominick Geraci, Jr., but the license clipped to the visor read “Gerald O’Malley.” The flight plan he’d turned in was blank. Geraci had a guy in the tower. At airports all over America, Geraci had the use of planes that did not on paper belong to him.

  Under his seat was a satchel full of cash. Storm clouds filled the western sky.

  Across the river, just outside Windsor, the door to Room 14 of the Happy Wanderer Motor Inn opened just a crack. Framed there was Fredo Corleone, his brother’s new appointed sotto capo, a man shaped like a bowling pin and dressed in last night’s rumpled shirt and tux pants. He looked out to the parking lot. He didn’t see anyone walking around. He waited for a piece of junk car to chug by. It was loud enough to wake a person up. Fredo was aware of some stirring on the bed behind him, but the last thing he was going to do was look back.

  Finally the coast was clear. He pulled a porkpie hat low, over his eyes, eased the door closed behind him, and hurried around the corner, down an embankment, and across a drive-in theater, filthy with discarded cups and popcorn buckets. The buckets were adorned with fat blue clowns-heads cocked, faces contorted into gruesome, knowing smiles. The hat wasn’t his. Maybe it belonged to the man in that room or else came from one of Fredo’s many stops last night. It may have even belonged to one of his bodyguards. They were new, strangers to him. His head pounded. He patted his shirt pockets, his pants pockets. He’d left his smokes back in the room. His lighter, too. The lighter was a present from Mike: jeweled, from Milan. It was engraved CHRISTMAS 1954 but with no name, of course. Never put your name on anything, his old man always said. Fredo didn’t even break stride. Fuck it. He jumped a muddy ditch and jogged across the parking lot of an apartment building. He’d hidden the car, a Lincoln that Zaluchi had lent him, behind a trash incinerator. The coat of his tux was balled up in the backseat, along with a yellow satin shirt, which wasn’t his, and a whiskey bottle, which was.

  He got in. He took a drink and tossed the bottle onto the passenger seat. It may, he thought, be time to take a break from the booze. And the other thing. Jesus. How can a thing you want so bad seem so repulsive right after you do it? He’d quit that, too. No more after-hours clubs. No more paying for it from junkies too messed up to know whose dick they sucked. Easy enough to start today, heading home to Vegas, where he was a known ladies’ man, where the town was so small he couldn’t get the other thing anyway. He put the car in gear and drove away as if he were someone’s pious Canadian grandpa on the way to Mass. Though he did-at a stoplight-finish off the whiskey. He hit the main drag and sped up. At this pace, he’d make the plane to Vegas, easy. It started to rain. Only when he flicked on the wipers did he notice that there was a piece of paper under the passenger-side blade, a handbill or something.

  Back in the darkness of Room 14 of the Happy Wanderer, the naked man on the bed awoke. He was a restaurant supply salesman from Dearborn, married, two kids. He moved the pillow from his crotch and rose. He smelled his fingertips. He rubbed his eyes. “ Troy?” he called. “Hey, Troy? Oh, hell. Not again. Troy?” Then he saw the lighter. He saw Troy ’s gun. Troy struck him as the kind of guy who’d carry a gun, but not this kind. This was a cowboy gun, a Colt.45, its grip and trigger covered with white adhesive tape. The naked man had never touched a real gun before. He sat back down on the bed. He felt faint. He was a diabetic. Somewhere, there should be oranges. He remembered Troy giving a bartender fifty bucks to go to the kitchen and get a bag of oranges. He ate three right at the bar, while Troy walked to the door and looked out into the street, waiting until he’d finished eating and the peels were gone. The man could not remember what happened to the rest of the oranges.

  His heart revved and sweat poured out of him. He called the front desk and asked for room service. “Where you think you are,” said the desk clerk, “the Ritz?” Good question. Where was he? He wanted to ask, but first he had to do something about his blood sugar. Was there any food at all? he asked. A vending machine or something? Any way he could get the clerk to bring him, let’s just say, a candy bar? “Your legs busted?” the clerk asked. The man said he’d pay five bucks for a candy bar to be delivered to his room. The clerk said he’d be right there.

  The man needed to call his wife. This had happened before. He’d said it was with a secretary, a woman. He’d promised his wife it wouldn’t happen again. He started to dial, then realized he’d need the clerk for an outside line. The clerk must have been off getting the candy.

  The man had a good job, great wife, great kids, nice house. He was a newly initiated Rotarian. Yet here he was, after a night with some street tough, doing those things, waking up on a Sunday morning in a place like this.

  He got up again to look for the oranges. No luck. He saw his pants but not his yellow shirt. He couldn’t find his porkpie hat. He didn’t know the name of the dive where he’d left his car. He’d have to take a cab home, shirtless, then have his wife drive him around seedy neighborhoods, looking for it. It’d be easier to just buy a new car.

 
; He picked up the gun.

  The Colt felt even heavier than it looked. He ran his finger along the barrel. He opened his mouth. He rested the end of the gun on his tongue and held it there.

  He heard the squeal of tires outside. It was a big car, he could tell from the sound of the slamming door. It must be Troy. Coming back for him. Then a second car door slammed.

  Two men.

  They’d come all the way from Chicago. They weren’t coming for him, though the naked man didn’t know that. They’d been following him for hours, which he also didn’t know. The naked man pulled the Colt out of his mouth, stood, and trained it on the door. “See you in Hell,” he whispered. He’d heard someone say it in a movie. He wasn’t a tough guy, but with his fingers curled around the pearly butt of that six-shooter he sure as hell felt like it.

  In Hollywood, Florida, under the carport of the coral-colored house where she’d lived since her father, Sonny, died in that car wreck (she had no reason to believe it was anything other than what she’d been told), Francesca Corleone honked the horn of her mother’s station wagon for a good ten seconds. “Stop it,” said her twin sister, Kathy, sprawled across the backseat, reading some French novel, in French. Kathy was headed off to Barnard. She wanted to be a surgeon. Francesca was going to Florida State, in Tallahassee, and wanted, mostly, to be on with it: out of the house, on her own. Though with all this horrible business in New York and how that side of the family had gotten the family name in the papers, even if it was all lies, this might not be the easiest time to start a new life. Kathy had wanted to go to school in New York, partially to be close to all their family up there. Now, of course, everyone had moved away except for Grandma Carmela and their horrible Aunt Connie. Apparently Uncle Carlo had simply disappeared-one of those jerks who went out for cigarettes and never came back: a lousy thing to do, even for a creep like him, but Francesca had to admit that anyone married to Aunt Connie would have had to consider it. Kathy, especially up there, would probably get asked every day, even by her professors, if she was any relation to those notorious gangsters, the Corleones. If the past few months in Hollywood were any indication, Francesca would have to be braced for this, too, even in Tallahassee.