The rich boy Francesca loved calmly served black coffee to a two-time Oscar-winning actress. Francesca’s grandmother sang a Christmas carol-not a hymn, but one about Santa Claus. Francesca’s dead father had been both a murderer and murdered. Uncle Fredo slouched against the doorframe, staring at his shoes. He looked like he’d eaten some bad clams. Behind him, as if someone had given a signal, came an explosion of flashbulbs. Francesca expected to see men with visors and big cameras jostling for position, shooting them as if from the edge of the red carpet. Fredo didn’t even look up.
From the next room, over shouted thank-yous and the shredding of gift wrap, came the voice of her mother-the voice that had been lying to Francesca all her life.
“If you people don’t hurry up,” Sandra called, “you’re going to miss Christmas.”
“Christmas!” cried Deanna Dunn, hurrying past Uncle Fredo. Deanna Dunn was not tall. She’d only come off that way standing next to Uncle Fredo, who was short, and because she had a tall woman’s walk and also a colossal head. The eye is passive. Only the brain can see. “How marvelous!”
Book IV. 1956 – 1957
Chapter 14
T HAT SPRING, after months of negotiation, the Commission finally agreed to meet. Its first order of business would be to add Chicago ’s Louie Russo as its eighth member. Next would be the formal approval of the peace agreement. The heads of all twenty-four Families were invited. Every effort would be made to ensure that this time, peace would last.
Michael Corleone flew to New York on the red-eye, accompanied only by three bodyguards. Hagen, a declared candidate for the U.S. Senate, could not be a part of this. Since every important item of business had already been decided, for today, what Michael needed at his side was not a brilliant strategist but rather a man whose very presence suggested stability and respect for tradition. Clemenza was the perfect consigliere for such an occasion.
Michael had no intention of ever choosing a permanent consigliere. The job required an elusive set of contradictory skills. A schemer who’s also loyal. A Machiavellian negotiator who’s also guileless. A driven man with no personal ambition. The plan had been for Vito to be the last to hold the job. A CEO has a board and a battalion of lawyers. The president has a staff, a cabinet, judges whose places on the bench they owe to him, and the control of the world’s mightiest army. The Corleone organization would develop in the open and along such lines.
Clemenza picked them up at the airport himself. The very sight of the fat man was reassuring. He’d quit chewing toothpicks and gone back to cigars. All that had changed about him since Michael was a boy was that now he walked with a cane.
They drove into Manhattan, stopping at a bakery on Mulberry for a box of pastries, then on to the apartment on West Ninety-third where the Corleones were holding a Bocchicchio hostage-some baby-faced third cousin who’d gotten in from Sicily yesterday. He was playing dominos with Frankie Pants, Little Joe Bono, and Richie “Two Guns” Nobilio-Clemenza’s men. Kid couldn’t have been more than fifteen. They stood. Michael and Pete embraced and kissed each in turn. In halting English, the kid, whose name was Carmine Marino, addressed Michael as “Don Corleone” and thanked him for the chance to see America. The only window in the apartment was blackened with what looked like tar. “Prego,” Michael said. “Fa niente.”
“You didn’t bring coffee?” said Richie Two Guns, opening the box.
“Make coffee, you lazy fuck,” Clemenza said. “Or go downstairs to some deli. Good bakery can be hard to find, but you can get coffee anyplace. What, I’m supposed to slosh coffee all over my clean car while I drive it up here and deliver it to you, half spilled and cold?”
Clemenza winked, gave Frankie’s shoulders a quick rub, set out the pastries, and, like a tour guide, pointed out some of their finer points.
The peace talks started at two. By now, each Family coming to the table was holding a Bocchicchio hostage. The hostages went willingly. It was how the Bocchicchios made their money. If, for example, anything happened to Michael or Clemenza, one of their men would kill this boy. No Bocchicchio would rest until the boy’s murder was avenged-not on his killer but rather on those who’d harmed the killer’s associates. The Bocchicchios were the most single-mindedly vengeful clan Sicily had ever seen, wholly undeterred by prison or death. There was no defense against them. Bocchicchio insurance was better than a hundred bodyguards. The men who came to the table would do so with just their consiglieres.
Back in the car, Michael asked Clemenza how old he thought that baby-faced Bocchicchio kid was.
“Carmine?” The fat man considered this for a long time. “I’m not so good at this no more. All of a sudden everybody seems like a kid to me.”
“He looked like he was all of fifteen.”
“I hear there ain’t a whole lot of Bocchicchios left,” Clemenza said. “On the other hand, at my age, sometimes you look like you’re only fifteen. No disrespect or nothin’.”
“Of course.” Fifteen. When Michael was fifteen, he’d stood up at the dinner table, looked his father in the eye, and said he’d rather die than grow up to be a man like him. What happened after that still gave Michael chills, all these years later. Without that moment of stupid, boyish pride, Michael wondered, would he himself even be in this business? “I wouldn’t have thought,” Michael said, “that a kid that young would even be allowed to fly here alone.”
“I don’t know about that,” Clemenza said, “but he didn’t fly. He came over on a boat, along with most of the other hostages. In steerage. They still have that on boats? Whatever the cheapest one’s called. I doubt if the Bocchicchios are even paying him. Lot of times, they just send over shoestring relatives who want to come live in America. We’re paying a king’s ransom for this, y’know, but how they spread the wealth? Forget about it.”
Clemenza shook his big, sad head. They crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge and headed north.
“So tell me,” Michael said after a long silence. “What were those rumors you heard about Fredo?”
“What rumors?” Pete said.
Michael stared straight ahead at the road.
“I told you,” Pete said. “Drinking too much, and the rest of it comes from bad sources.”
Michael took a deep breath. “Did you hear that he’s a homosexual?”
“What’s wrong with you? You think that’s what I heard?”
“The man he beat up in San Francisco was a homosexual.”
“Don’t mean he wasn’t also a robber. A guy can be a robber and a queer both. If everybody who killed a queer turned queer, there’d be a lot of queers out there.”
Fredo’s story was that he’d been out for a walk to clear his head after Molinari’s funeral and stopped for a drink. A kid from the bar followed him to his hotel and later broke into his room to rob him. Fredo beat the kid up and he died. It was a ridiculous story-why, for example, didn’t the kid just rob Fredo on the street? Why wait until it was necessary to pick the lock on the door to Fredo’s room? On top of that, the kid’s parents had recently died and left him almost thirty thousand dollars-no fortune, but why was he robbing anyone? Hagen -acting strictly as a lawyer-had managed to keep the matter out of the newspapers and see to it that no charges were filed, but he’d returned from San Francisco with several matters of concern.
“So you’re sure you never heard that?” Michael said.
“I never said I never heard it. I said it came from bad sources. If I was to start believing everything I hear from bad sources, I’d never-” he said. “Jesus Christ, Mikey. This is your brother. He may have done some stupid shit and beat up a fag and all, but I can’t believe you think he maybe is one. This is Fredo we’re talking about, right? Curly hair, yay tall? Spends all his money on abortions and jewels, married to a fucking movie star-is that the guy you mean? I tell you what I got from a good source. That doctor you guys have out there? Segal? He told me that even after Fredo started up with Deanna Dunn, he knocked up a showgirl. Marguerite somethi
ng. French, as in va-va-voom. Does that sound like fag behavior to you?”
Michael remained blank.
He’d given Fredo a chance to distinguish himself, and what happened? More boozing. More knocked-up showgirls. Michael wasn’t sure what Fredo was trying to prove by running off and marrying that Hollywood puttana. Though if anything can make a man more of a man, it’s marriage. Also, there’s a certain public image value right now to having a Corleone married to a movie star, even one whose best screen years were behind her. So he had to give Fredo that.
“Want to know something?” Pete said. “I’m going to tell you something whether you like it or not. It was you your pop worried about. In that way. For a while there.”
Michael leaned over and turned on the radio. Clemenza wasn’t telling him anything that Michael hadn’t heard directly from his father. For miles, neither Michael nor Clemenza spoke.
“Bocchicchios,” Clemenza finally said.
“What?” Michael said. They’d been silent long enough that Michael had progressed through several dozen other topics. “What about them?”
“What a fucking thing they got going, that’s all. How would a person-especially guys as dumb as your typical Bocchicchio-ever even think up a service like that?”
“If something’s your destiny, maybe you don’t need to think,” Michael said. “You just need to listen.”
“Listen how do you mean?”
“If anyone I know ever found his destiny, it’s you, Pete.”
Clemenza furrowed his brow and considered this. Then his face broke into a grin. “Hark!” he said. “I think I hear destiny calling!” He arched his eyebrows in mock surprise and cupped his hand around his left ear, as if straining to hear some noise coming from the woods. “Pete,” he said in a stage whisper. “Pull over and take a leak.”
Nick Geraci remembered the crash and everything up to the point where he’d gone into shock and passed out in the water. There was probably a way of finding out now whose fingers he’d pried off and broken, but he hoped he’d never know.
He’d been unconscious the whole time he’d been in the hospital and for several days after that. When he finally woke up, he found himself in a lemon yellow room so tiny the twin bed he was in nearly filled it. His leg was in a cast and rigged to a pulley screwed to a beam in the ceiling. Light streamed in from a pair of French doors, beyond which there seemed to be a balcony. This was no hospital, but he was hooked up to all kinds of hospital equipment. He stared at the ceiling, trying to reconstruct the events that had brought him here. Wherever here was.
Many, many doctors are Jewish, of course, but when the first person Geraci saw after he woke up in that room was an obviously Jewish-looking old man with a stethoscope, Geraci assumed-ridiculously, he knew even at the time, but also, as it turned out, correctly-that wherever he was, it was by the grace of his godfather, Vincent “the Jew” Forlenza.
“He’s awake, geniuses,” the doctor called back over his shoulder. From the next room came the sound of chairs sliding back from a table and someone dialing a phone.
“Who are you?” Geraci muttered. “Where am I?”
“I’m nobody,” the doctor said. “I’m not even here, and, if I were to venture a guess, neither are you.”
“How long have I been here?”
The doctor sighed and gave Geraci a series of quick tests and a rundown on his injuries. Geraci, reading between the lines, guessed (once again correctly) that he’d been in this room for less than a week. What hurt the most was Geraci’s ribs, but he’d broken them enough times to know it was nothing. Same with the nose. The doctor took Geraci’s leg out of traction. “The only thing I’m worried about long term,” the doctor said, “is that concussion. Not your first, was it?
“I boxed,” Geraci said.
“So you did,” said the doctor. “And, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, not that well.”
“You saw me fight?”
“I never saw you before in my life,” the doctor said. “Whoever you are, you’ve had about the last concussion you’re going to be able to take and not become a drooling moron.”
“So you’re saying I’m not a drooling moron now? That’s great news, Doc.”
“I’m not saying anything,” the doctor said. “Though I will say, your ability to heal borders on the extraordinary.”
“Runs in the family,” Geraci said. “My dad was given last rites after a speedboat wreck, and a month later he came one ball short of bowling a 300.”
“Not to mention the time he got shot in the gut on a Friday and he was back driving his truck that Monday.”
“You know about that?”
“I don’t know about anything.” He shrugged in concession. “Don’t worry.” He tapped Geraci’s cast with the capped tip of a fountain pen. “Medicine, I know.”
He told Geraci not to move and left.
Geraci smelled doughnuts. Presti’s. Another ridiculous assumption; who can tell the aroma of one doughnut shop from another? Even if he was in Cleveland someplace, the last place he’d have expected to be was Little Italy. Too obvious. But minutes later, Geraci heard the sound of a man laboring up a staircase. The door opened, and into Geraci’s little room limped Laughing Sal Narducci, arm extended, clutching a big bag from Presti’s. “Taste of home?” he asked. “C’mon. Take two.”
Nick Geraci obeyed.
The men in the other room slid a chair behind Laughing Sal and he sat. He explained things. Geraci had been taken to a third-floor apartment in Cleveland ’s Little Italy, only a few blocks from the narrow house where he’d grown up. No one outside Don Forlenza’s most trusted men knew Geraci was here. The idea had been entirely Don Forlenza’s, a snap decision he’d made out of concern that even if the crash was nobody’s fault, either his organization or his godson might take the blame. “I don’t gotta tell you,” Narducci told him, “a lot of men in our tradition, if one of their friends has a heart attack they start plotting revenge against God.”
“You were there, Sal. You know how Frank… how Don Falcone was about that fight.”
“How he was,” Narducci said. “True! Hell of a punch by a man sitting down.”
You’re welcome, Geraci thought. “No, I mean the boxing match. He insisted-”
“His guy won, you know that? His fighter paid five to one. Frank hadn’t of died, would’ve been his lucky day.”
“My family,” Nick said. “My wife and-”
“Charlotte and your girls are fine,” Sal said. “Your old man’s still… y’know. Your old man. Piss and vinegar, right? He don’t talk so much, but far as we know, he’s fine, too.”
“Do they know I’m fine?”
“Fine,” Narducci repeated. “I don’t know. Are you fine?”
“I will be soon,” Geraci said. “A man who was probably a doctor said that in his professional opinion I’m not a drooling moron.”
“ Moron,” Narducci said. “What do doctors know? So look. Tell me. What happened up there that made you say sabotage?”
“I never said that.”
Narducci winced. “I sort of think you maybe did.”
“Huh,” Geraci said. “I have no memory of that. None at all.”
“None at all. On your radio you never did? To the control tower? This ring a bell?”
“No,” Geraci lied.
“No? Think hard.”
Geraci had a pretty good idea why Narducci was making such an issue of this. If it had been sabotage, it would mean that somehow someone got onto that island and did it. Even if it came out later who that was, who’d been behind it, Don Forlenza would still take the blame.
Had it been sabotage? So much had gone wrong in those last few moments. Geraci thought he remembered everything, and still he had no real idea what had happened. It was not unlikely that the fault had been entirely his. Knowing the plane was about to go down had made him say and do stupid things. He’d blurted it out. Sabotage. The tower had said, Say again, and he hadn’t. It
had been wrong to think of Charlotte and his girls, their sweet faces contorted in pain when they got the news that he’d died. That couldn’t have taken more than a couple seconds, but who knows? Might have been a couple seconds he didn’t have. He couldn’t see the runway, but he’d known he wasn’t far from shore. There was a problem with the artificial horizon, yes, but a lot of things might have caused that. His instruments had told him conflicting things, and he’d gone with what felt right. If you indulge your feelings, his flight instructor had said, they will kill you. The instructor was a former test pilot. Reality, he preached, is absolute. A good pilot never loses sight of this. Geraci was afraid he might have.
“Things went wrong,” Geraci said. “It happened fast.”
Narducci waited. He didn’t move.
“If I said something about sabotage-which I don’t recall, but if I did-I was just thinking out loud. Ruling it out.” Geraci thought he’d finished both doughnuts and was surprised to see one last big bite left. He ate it. “What happened was terrible, but it was nobody’s fault.”
“Nobody’s fault.” Narducci repeated it several more times, blankly. “Well,” he finally said, “that’s good. I got one more question right now.”
“All ears.”
“Tell me about O’Malley. Who knows he’s you? Or could figure it out? Lot of lucky guessers in the world, don’t forget. Lot of guys smarter than you think. Again, take your time. I’m in no hurry. Just the thought of going back down all them stairs…” He shuddered.
It was a short list. It included no one but Narducci, Forlenza, and the top people in the Corleone Family. There was no reason not to recite it. If all Don Forlenza had wanted to do was cover his tracks, Geraci would have been dead already. If Forlenza and his men were going to help Geraci talk his way out of this mess, they’d need some information.
On a narrow road in upstate New York more commonly traveled by tractors and pickup trucks, there came an irregular but persistent stream of Cadillacs and Lincolns. Uniformed police officers directed Clemenza’s car to a pasture behind a white clapboard farmhouse. Judging from the long row of big and precisely parked cars, they were among the last to arrive. If Hagen were still consigliere, Michael would have had to hear that Vito Corleone would have been among the first. That was one way of doing things; Michael’s was another. Even his father had, during his final months, stressed that Michael needed to do things his own way. Clemenza whistled an old folk song and questioned nothing, not even how far he had to walk.
The Godfather returns Page 24