The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  They looked into each other’s eyes. Hers grew wide, as if she’d just found an earring she’d lost. She was right, she wasn’t a pro. They don’t look at you like that.

  “My life,” she said, “it is so fucking complicated.”

  “Everybody thinks that,” Fredo said. “Probably you’re right, though. About you.”

  This Rita had a crooked grin.

  “Oh?” she said. “And what about you, eh?”

  “I can’t complain,” he said. “Though I still do. I guess I got it all under control, though.”

  “You think so?” With her index finger she touched his bare rib cage and did a little screwdriver thing.

  They kissed again. Her mouth was sour from all that champagne, but he stayed with it.

  “Fray-die Cor-le-o-ne,” she said.

  If this hadn’t been three in the morning, it would have occurred to him right away that it was stupid to run the risk that someday this girl would blab about how she was bare-ass naked in front of Fredo Corleone and he paid her two grand not to fuck her. Why was he in any hurry to get upstairs? Anything worth being there for was over. “At your service,” he said.

  “You dirty rat,” she said. She said it weird.

  “Say what?”

  “Nothing,” she said. She sighed heavily and reached for the doorknob. “See you in the funny papers, okay?”

  Oh, right. She’d been doing an impression of some movie gangster. He put his hand on her hand. “Stay,” he said.

  She screwed up that funny lopsided mouth. “I don’t know,” she said. “Will you take your money back?”

  “I never paid you for that,” he said. “I paid you to give Johnny Fontane nightmares.”

  She seemed deep in thought about this. “So I could just give him his money back, yes?”

  Fredo smiled. “Perfect,” he said. “Tell him, you know, the thing I paid you to tell him. You want me to write it down or you got it?”

  “Hands down,” she said. “Best I ever had. Got it.”

  “And then tell him to take his money back,” he said, “it was that good.”

  “I’m not sure about this,” she said. “Maybe-tomorrow? We could start over. A date or something?”

  “Today’s tomorrow, baby.”

  She still looked deep in thought. She put her finger in her mouth and sucked on it and ran it slowly down Fredo’s bare chest from his neck to his belt buckle. She kept her hand there.

  “I love sex.” She said it like an admission of defeat. Her voice was small, too, not the husky voices people always talk about with French girls. She was still slurring her words. “It’s bad, you know, but like a man I love it.”

  For a moment, the line-like a man I love it-went through Fredo like an electric shock. Though of course she didn’t mean it the way, for a split second, he was afraid she did. Then he snapped out of it and grabbed onto those little tits with both hands.

  She moaned, but now she did sound like a pro. Trying too hard. It couldn’t feel that good, her tits.

  They moved to the bed, and she undid his belt and yanked at his pants and his underwear. Fredo fell back on the bed. She stood over him and reached back to unzip her dress.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  She turned around for him to do it.

  “Keep it on,” he said. “It’s dynamite.”

  She shrugged and sat down beside him on the bed. They kissed for a while and she put her hand on his cock. He could have blamed it on all the drinking he’d done today-this morning and who knows how much he had waiting at the Detroit airport, though nothing since then. And also how tired he was, the jet lag. He didn’t, didn’t, didn’t want to think about the other thing. That never happened. And anyway he’d knocked up better showgirls than this here, in his sleep. Now that he was thinking about it, of course, he was doomed. So, okay, don’t think about my cock, he thought. He thought about her, kissing her and grabbing her tits and how great it would be to fuck her with that shiny dress on, which could happen in like ten seconds if he could just stop thinking about all the things he was thinking about. If he could just stop thinking at all. He really needed to go easier on the booze.

  She dropped to her knees and took him in her mouth so fast he couldn’t say no. A terrible shiver went through him. “No,” he said, tugging her up to him by her armpits.

  She looked hurt.

  “I don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t be sore, okay? Come on and kiss me.”

  She obeyed. He did keep her hand on him and tugged her flowered Sears underpants down and did the same for her. They kissed some more.

  “How about you get on your knees?”

  She sighed. She looked like she was losing her patience. She looked like a girl at work.

  “No,” he said. “Like I said.” Then he tried to sound more tender. It wasn’t anything she’d done wrong. She seemed like a good egg who’d been willing to fuck him for nothing, probably because she’d heard rumors he was a dangerous gangster, but also because he’d been nice to her when he maybe didn’t have to. He positioned her on her knees and hiked up her red dress and grabbed himself and with the other hand groped for her cunt. She reached back to help him. Something about the vulnerability of that gesture made him go rock hard in her hand, and he was in, and he was going for it from thrust number one. He had to act and not think. He grabbed onto her hips, curling his fingers in by the bones. He told her to beg him for it. She started chanting about how badly she wanted it and not to stop and then just, over and over, big man, big man, big man, and he closed his eyes and sped up, as fast as he had the strength to go.

  His body tensed and he cried out.

  “Pull out,” she said, panting. “Big man. Pull out.” In that squeaky voice. “Big man.”

  He didn’t. He ground his hips in a twitchy circle against her muscular dancer’s ass, oozing what little he had left into her. After that, his prick was so sensitive it hurt and he had to pull it out. It would have been sexy, dribbling little wet pearls onto her ass and that red dress. What could be better than that? He couldn’t have said why he didn’t do it.

  That’s not true. He knew. He liked knocking them up. He couldn’t have said why.

  Though that wasn’t the whole truth either.

  He flopped on his back. He closed his eyes and hit his head with the heel of his hand, a half-dozen little staccato blows. With every fiber of his being, he hated himself.

  Rita rolled onto her side and into a ball. Naturally, she started crying again.

  He got up and went to the windows and threw the curtains open.

  Better. He did love that neon light. It wouldn’t be dark much longer.

  The phone rang again. He took it in the den. He told Figaro to keep his pants on, he’d be right up. Figaro said it was good they’d decided to drive up and not stay in L.A. because there was some news Fredo would probably want to hear about in person, and Fredo asked Figaro if he was deaf. He said he’d be right up, okay?

  Fredo got another clean linen handkerchief, the best money could buy, and lay back down on the bed beside Rita. “Hey, darlin’,” he said. Like a cowboy. “Hey, beautiful.”

  She blew her nose and was spooky quiet.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said. He checked his watch-a habit he’d gotten into as a kid-and managed to shower and shave in less than five minutes. He put on a robe so thick it always felt to him like football shoulder pads and came back out, and she was still there.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He could have done without that. He wanted her to leave, yes, and right away, but he didn’t want to feel like a shit about it. She wasn’t crying, though, which was something.

  “That was sure fast,” she said. “The shower.”

  “I know where everything is by now.” It was what he always said when people said that.

  “I should go. I’m sorry. I know I should go.”

  “Stay as long as you want,” he said. “I’m sorry as hell, but I’ve-”
>
  “Got business,” she said. “I know. I’m sorry.” She dabbed her eyes and pointed to the bathroom. “I’ll hurry.”

  She did not, at least, say tee-tee. While she was in there he threw on some clothes and called downstairs to arrange and pay for her cab.

  Twelve excruciating minutes later she came out with her hair combed and her face pink from being scrubbed and her lipstick on and smelling of some kind of perfume that she must have had on when she got here. She wore it thick. There weren’t a lot of things he found more disgusting than thick perfume. He turned on the television and herded her into the hall.

  “We got a deal, right?” he said as he pushed the button for the elevator.

  “We do.” She held up her right palm. “I am,” she said grimly, “a girl of my word.” She forced a smile. “You’re presuming I wouldn’t say that anyway. Hands down.”

  What the fuck was there to say about that? He thought he should probably ask her for her number, but usually that only made things worse.

  The elevator showed up and put him out of the misery of his silence. He patted her back as she stepped on.

  “Good luck,” she said, “with your business.” She blew him a kiss. “Cor-le-on-e.”

  He watched the doors close. He looked at himself in the distortion of the buffed brass doors. There wasn’t much to see. He hit the button for the sixth floor, planted his hands against the cool of the metal, and hung his weary head. Who said life was easy? Yet here he stood. He’d made his mistakes, like anybody, and lived to tell about it, unlike a lot of people he knew.

  The doors opened and he got in.

  People thought of him as a nice enough guy who was also weak and a fuckup, he knew that. But how many guys could have withstood a day like today and held up any better than Frederico Corleone, eh? He’d woken up in the middle of a really bad decision he couldn’t let himself think any more about, not even knowing where he was, not even what fucking country. Yet he still managed by dawn’s early light to haul ass out of there, and by some miraculous instinct in the right direction, too. Okay, he left his gun behind, but in another country, so you had to think that was the end of that. He maybe fucked up a little bit at customs, but for Christ’s sake the oranges weren’t even his, and the drink he’d had was just an eye-opener, and dropping Joe Zaluchi’s name had been a calculated risk. Just as easily, it could have gotten Fredo waved through. But, okay, it hadn’t. That said, how many guys could have stayed as cool as he had after the pinch? He walked that white line like a champ. The rubes in customs were in awe of him. Two encores, perfect every time. He didn’t say anything he didn’t have to say, didn’t even call in some lawyer. Dumb clucks let him go still thinking he was Carl Frederick, assistant manager of the Castle in the Sand Trailer Park (which, on paper, he was; he’d driven by it but never been there).

  In the end, the only reason people thought Mike was so brilliant and Fredo was such a fuckup was that Mike wanted to build some big empire and all Fredo wanted was to have a good time and to have a little piece of the business that was his alone. Something bigger than a trailer park but smaller than General Motors. What the hell was wrong with that, huh? Yet even that was more than Mike would give him. Instead, he gave Fredo a fucking title. Underboss. Sotto capo. Might as well have made him Court Jester. Tit on a Mule. Vice President.

  He got off on the sixth floor and used his passkey to enter the dummy room. This whole arrangement here? Fredo’s idea. People loved it, and other people claimed to have thought of it. He’d heard that other casinos were copying it. Big deal. Who needs credit for shit? But still.

  “A drink, sir?” asked the bartender on the secret landing.

  “Nah,” Fredo said. “Just a cold beer, okay?”

  Probably he should take the stairs. Chance to get the blood flowing. But he was beat and the beer felt good and cold in his hand and so he waited for this elevator to come, too.

  When it did, Figaro and Capra and two of the new New York guys came rolling out. They did not look like men who had come from the happy event they’d come from. This couldn’t be attributed to Figaro learning that he’d missed out on his big night. This was the first one ever outside New York, so he’d have never guessed and nobody would have told him.

  “Goddamn,” Figaro said. “We were about to send a search party. Actually, we are the search party. Where you been?”

  “You call me in my room twenty times, you fucking want to know where I been?”

  “No, I mean, what took so long? There were only a few people left when we got there, but now there’s nobody. Excepting Rocco. He’s waiting for you.”

  The news Fredo was supposed to hear in person.

  “My family?” Fredo said.

  Figaro shook his head. “Nothin’ like that. You should really just go up and see Rocco.”

  “Nobody nobody up there?” Fredo asked. “Or just not-so-many-guys nobody up there? Other than Rocco, I mean.”

  Capra-whose real name was Gaetano Paternostro, which was too much of a mouthful and also too regal for this baby-faced country boy-stopped Figaro before he could answer and asked him what Fredo just said, which Fredo had had it up to here with. Fredo was fluent, and this fucking barber might as well have been some mayo-slurping yutz from Ohio. As a bookie, the barber might have been a good earner, but so far it was hard for Fredo to see what beyond that Mike saw in the guy.

  “I asked our friend the barber of epic flatulence,” Fredo said in Sicilian dialect, “how many of our other friends remained upstairs in the banquet hall.”

  Capra laughed. “Non lo so. Cinque o forse sei.”

  Fredo nodded. He’d stop up anyway. What was the point of driving up tonight instead of flying up tomorrow if he didn’t even make an appearance? “Look,” he said to Figaro. “Why you think it took me so long?”

  “You think if I knew I’d fucking ask? C’mon, Fredo. I’m given a job, I do a job. With all due respect, please, non rompermi i coglioni, eh?”

  Capra and the other two men had gone to the bar. Coffee all around.

  “I’m not busting your balls.” Fredo arched an eyebrow. “You mean you didn’t hear her? In the background there?”

  “You gotta be kiddin’ me.” Since it had been the gist of his excuse this morning, too.

  “French girl. Dancer, I forgot to ask where. I ran into her on the way up, one thing led to another, you know how it goes. Che fica.”

  Figaro was bald, ten years older than Fredo, and probably did not, hookers aside, know how it goes. He shook his head. “You fuckin’ guy. You goin’ for some kind of record?”

  Someone had shut off the motor that made the ballroom rotate. The air was thick with smoke and spilled booze. At a table covered with a dirty white tablecloth sat four old guys from what had used to be Tessio’s regime, playing dominos. Two of them were the DiMiceli brothers, one of whom (Fredo couldn’t keep them straight) had a boy, Eddie, who had gotten initiated that night. He didn’t know the other two. Fredo wasn’t real good on the Brooklyn guys.

  Slumped alone in an aquamarine armchair was Rocco Lampone, staring out the window and muttering something to himself. Décor aside, it was as if Fredo had walked into one of those joints in Gowanus where the regulars show up first thing in the morning for a chipped mug full of brandy-laced coffee and either sit there in silent misery or else pick petty fights about what’s on the jukebox or what the world’s coming to.

  “Hey-hey!” shouted one of the DiMicelis. “If it ain’t our underboss.”

  Fredo waited for someone to make more of a joke about this. He hadn’t asked for the title. He knew men thought he was weak. He knew they weren’t clear on his responsibilities or Michael’s reasons for creating the job. Missing the thing tonight wouldn’t help matters. But the men at the table only nodded and grunted their hellos.

  Rocco motioned Fredo over. Next to him by the window was an empty metal chair. Outside, a brassy jazz combo on a makeshift stage on the rooftop below played a tune from that famo
us musical about Negroes. The whole rooftop swarmed with people, though there was no one in the swimming pool. A couple dozen slot machines, four blackjack tables, and two craps tables had been carted up here. There were several full bars and a breakfast buffet.

  “What the fuck?” asked Fredo, pointing.

  “Where you been?”

  “ Detroit. Los Angeles. Missed my plane. Long story.”

  “It’s one I heard. Where you been since you got back here? To the hotel? And made me wait here like I’m-” Rocco rubbed his ruined knee. “And made me wait. Here. For you.”

  One of the men playing dominos cackled. Fredo looked over his shoulder. The cackling guy rubbed the bald head of an unamused guy, who sat still and took it.

  “Seriously,” Fredo said, “what’s going on down there?”

  “Sit down. Please.” Rocco had never been much of a talker. It was clear from the look on his face that he hadn’t figured out either what he had to say or how he was going to say it.

  Fredo sat. “Is it Ma?” he blurted.

  “No.” Rocco shook his head. “There was an accident,” he said. “Friends of ours. It looks I would say bad.”

  On the rickety stage, the mayor of Las Vegas-a former Ziegfield dancer herself, a terrific old broad, Fredo thought, who still had some of her looks-adjusted the fluorescent orange sash over the huge, impractical tits of the laughing brunette Hal Mitchell had, apparently after no competition at all, named Miss Atomic Bomb. The tiara was an even tougher fit. Miss Atomic Bomb had done her hair up in some great shellacked mass vaguely in the shape of a mushroom cloud. The mayor tried to put it on her from the front, which was impossible without leaning into her tits, so she tried it from behind and kept dropping it. The mayor stopped and handed the brunette her tiara. Miss Atomic Bomb had to crown herself. She was undaunted. This was a very happy young woman. Her bathing suit was cut so low you could just about see her belly button. The trombonist struck up the band. Miss Atomic Bomb stepped to the microphone and started singing “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”