The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  Johnny couldn’t believe it. When was this shit going to stop?

  The jerk-off who asked the question was with a paper in New York. Johnny had punched him out once. The out-of-court settlement had been ten grand and worth every cent.

  Bobby Chadwick-the brother-in-law of the president-elect-leaned over his mike. “By someone like Johnny Fontane? Forgive me if you’re a correspondent from the planet Uranus and unfamiliar with our ways, but here on Earth, it’s safe to say there’s nobody like Johnny Fontane.”

  He got a laugh, too, but the laughter subsided and the other reporters still looked at Johnny for an answer. If this had been a restaurant or a nightclub, Johnny could have merely arched an eyebrow and this jerk-off would have been out on his ass.

  “Reputed is a word lazy reporters use so they can make things up,” Johnny said. “Let me give you some facts. There are more than five million Americans of Italian descent. According to a report the U.S. Senate put out two years ago, there are at most four thousand people associated with the quote-unquote Mafia. I’ll do the math for you, buddy-boy. That’s thirteen-hundred-to-one odds. You’re more likely to get eaten by a bear. Yet every time somebody whose name ends with a vowel gets ahead, bigots like you ask if we’re in the Mob.”

  “Are you in the Mob?”

  Well, he’d walked into that one. “I’m not even going to dignify a question that ignorant.”

  “I could be wrong,” said Sir Oliver Smith-Christmas, the distinguished British actor, seated at the edge of the podium, “but aren’t you confusing the sort of gentlemen who oftentimes own American nightclubs with those like my friend Mr. Fontane, who simply perform in them? Where is a nightclub singer to perform if not in a nightclub?”

  “Ollie makes a good point,” Johnny Fontane said. “Once the big-band era was over-”

  “Isn’t it a fact that the late Vito Corleone was your godfather?” the reporter said.

  Not that kind of godfather, you stupid fuck. “He stood for my baptism, yes. He was a friend of my parents.”

  “Does President-elect Shea have ties to organized crime?” another reporter asked. “Michael Corleone, who was among those called to testify before the Senate two years ago, served as a member of the transition-”

  “Why don’t you ask that to Michael Corleone, huh?” Johnny said. “Better yet, why don’t you ask all the sick kids Mr. Corleone’s hospital and charities have helped? Look, folks, this is an exciting time for our country. I think I can speak for everyone up here when I say that we’re behind President Shea one hundred percent. But let’s keep the questions a little more on the subject of the inaugural ball itself, all right?”

  “You grew up in New York,” the jerk-off shouted, “but you’re friendly with Louie Russo in Chicago and Ignazio Pignatelli in Los Angeles.” The shithead pronounced it Pig-natelli, rather than Peenyatelli. “Pignatelli’s sister is listed as a shareholder in the new record label you started. My question is, is it possible to transfer your membership-”

  “Don’t make me come down from here and show you some manners,” Johnny said.

  “Are you going to have me whacked? That’s the Mafia word for it, right? Whacked?”

  “Now, how the fuck would I know that?” Johnny said. Obviously, everyone knew that, but that wasn’t the point.

  A murmur went through the room.

  “How on earth,” Johnny rephrased it, “would I know that?”

  After Kay Corleone left her husband and left Nevada, she landed a teaching job at a first-rate boarding school in Maine. She and her children lived in a stone cottage on the grounds of the school. Michael didn’t like it, but she needed a job, not financially but as a means of creating an identity separate from all she’d been with him. She’d applied only to schools thousands of miles from Lake Tahoe. She hadn’t expected Michael to fight so hard for custody and had been even more surprised when out of the blue he told her he’d looked into the school where she was teaching and decided that the children’s education would be best served by going there. Kay had no idea what changed his mind. He claimed he simply realized he was using the kids as pawns in the divorce and putting his feelings ahead of what they really needed. She wanted to believe that. She’d curbed her impulse to tell him that if he’d paid more attention to his heart than his cold mind, he might not have found himself in this mess in the first place.

  Michael didn’t see Tony and Mary often. When he did, he usually picked them up in his plane and flew them to New York for a weekend of frenzied activity: ice-skating, carriage rides, museums, movies, the zoo-everything he could cram in. They’d come home exhausted. For weeks afterward, Mary, who was seven now and worshiped her father, would tell endless stories about their time together. Tony, who was nine, rarely talked about him at all.

  When Michael first told Kay his schedule was tight and asked her to take the kids to New York herself this time, she’d said it was impossible. When he told her about the inaugural ball and said Kay could go, too, she declined. Washington had a lot of bad memories for her. Though she hoped he’d find a way to make it work so he could take Mary and Tony. And, no, having some button man come to Maine and drive them to New York was not an option.

  Everything changed when Kay heard about Jules Segal. He’d been her doctor in Nevada. She’d recommended him to a friend who’d moved there and learned that he’d been shot more than a year ago-the victim of a botched burglary, according to the newspapers.

  So now, the day of the ball, Kay waited in a room at the Essex House, in a suite overlooking Central Park. The kids were watching TV. They didn’t have a set at home anymore. Seeing them transfixed by it here confirmed for her that this had been a good idea. She looked at her watch. He was late. Some things never changed.

  Finally, she heard voices in the hall. Michael and-of course!-Al Neri opened the door.

  “Why isn’t he dressed?” Michael asked, pointing at Tony. Michael already had his tux on.

  “I’m not going to your stupid ball,” Tony said.

  Kay had been so distracted that she hadn’t noticed that Tony had taken off his suit and changed back into the blue shirt and chinos he wore to school every day.

  Mary leapt from the bed to go hug her father. “I’m going!” Mary said. “Don’t I look like a beautiful princess? Because that’s who goes to balls is why.”

  “You do, sweetheart. You really do. C’mon, Tony. You’re going. You’ll love it.”

  Kay told Tony to put his suit back on. The boy snatched it up and trudged to the bathroom, muttering. Neri sat down on the sofa, apparently content with the cartoon program that was on. Mary twirled around, showing off her dress. Kay told her to go watch the rest of the show on TV, she needed to have a word alone with Daddy. Then she steered Michael into the adjoining bedroom and closed the door.

  “I did it, Kay. I’ve retired from-well, from the dangerous aspects of the business I inherited from my father. I promised you that I’d make all my business dealings legitimate, and I’ve done it.”

  She frowned. “You made that promise ten years ago.” She presumed it was a clumsy ploy to get her to come back to him. Still, she hoped for the kids’ sake he was telling the truth. Sooner or later, he was going to be killed or go to jail, and she hated to think how it would affect Tony and Mary when he did. “I’m happy for you, though, Michael. I really am.”

  “You look great, Kay. Maine, teaching: it’s really agreeing with you.”

  “Michael, I have to ask you something. I want you to tell me the truth.”

  In a split second, his face became an expressionless mask.

  “Did you have Jules Segal killed?”

  “No.”

  No hesitation. Just no. Isn’t that exactly what a liar would do when the answer is yes?

  “I don’t think I believe you,” Kay said.

  “I told you a long time ago not to ask me about my business, Kay.”

  “This isn’t your business, it’s our business. You had Dr. Segal killed be
cause of me, didn’t you? Because of the-”

  “Don’t say it.” At least now he had an expression on his face. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Abortion. Are you going to slap me again?” The way he had when she’d told him: the slap that had ended their marriage, in a different hotel, but in Washington, where he was about to go.

  “No, Kay,” he said. “I’m not.”

  “Because if that burglary was your handiwork-”

  “I don’t want to talk about this subject.”

  “-you should know that it wasn’t him.”

  “Kay, stop it. We both know that when you-when that happened, he was the doctor you went to. We own that hospital, Kay.”

  “So it shouldn’t have been too hard to get my records and see that I had a miscarriage.”

  “Oh, sure. You flew to Las Vegas so you could have a miscarriage, and the attending doctor just happened to be the same man who performed the abortions every time Fredo-”

  Her stomach felt like it had been twisted by a pair of strong hands. “Oh, God, Michael. I knew it. I knew it. You just… I was so angry. I was scared. It was terrible to live in fear of what might happen to you, but I realized there was nothing I was more afraid of than you-”

  “Me? I have protected this family, our family, ahead of anything and everything else.”

  “Michael, you married into another kind of family a long time before we started ours. Even your first wife was your second wife. I was your third.”

  “Nothing could have ever happened to you. Or our children. Nothing ever will.”

  “Come on, Michael. Our house in Nevada was attacked, like some target in a war zone. Did you promise Apollonia nothing would ever happen to her, too? I suppose we should count our blessings we weren’t blown to smithereens.”

  “Kay-”

  “And what do you mean, Nothing ever will? What sort of protection, what kind of goons do you command in your capacity as a legitimate businessman? Legitimate businessman. We’ll see. Do you really expect me to believe that anything about you has changed, that anything about you will ever change? Calling yourself legitimate won’t change what you’ve done.”

  He kept his eyes on her as he reached into his jacket pocket. For a terrible moment she thought he was reaching for a gun or a knife. He took out a cigarette and lit it.

  “Are you through?” he said.

  “You don’t understand. I’m not like you, Michael. I could have never killed our… our son. I flew to Las Vegas to help organize a fund-raiser for the art museum, and right after I got there I had a miscarriage. I didn’t have any word from you for two weeks after that happened. Two weeks. No woman should have to live through that alone. I decided to leave you. I had other reasons, bigger reasons, all the reasons we’ve talked about, but that was the last straw. I knew you’d never give me a divorce. So I told you I’d had an abortion. I wanted to hurt you, and I told a lie to do it. I wanted to see that look on your face, and I saw it. I wanted to see what you’d do, and you hit me.”

  Michael lowered his head and, very slightly, nodded.

  “Jules Segal was my regular doctor, Michael. Do you really think that anybody, especially him, a man who knew who you are as well as anyone in Las Vegas, would have performed an abortion on the wife of a-of a man in your position? Segal wouldn’t have… I don’t know… lit a cigarette without your blessing. I never in my wildest dreams, my wildest nightmares, thought you’d send your goons-”

  “We need to go,” Michael said. “I’m going.” He turned and went into the other room. “Come on, Mary, Tony. Who wants to go for an airplane ride?”

  Mary shouted that she did, she did, and Tony didn’t say anything, but within moments her children had both kissed her and said their good-byes. No one turned off the television.

  Kay Corleone-an accessory to murder before the fact-collapsed onto the bed.

  She had no one to blame but herself. Michael was a killer. She’d fallen in love with him not in spite of that but-as he told her about what he’d done in the war-because of it. She knew in her heart that he’d killed those two men in the restaurant. She knew about a lot of other killings, too, and pretended not to. She married him and changed religions-leaving one that allowed divorce for one that prohibited it-so that she could go to confession and try to live with herself for loving a killer. When she’d finally worn Tom Hagen down and gotten him to tell her that the house in Lake Tahoe had in fact been torched and bulldozed because the FBI had bugged the beams and foundation, she’d actually thought, This is the last straw. But no. She’d stayed. She’d rebuilt. When men with machine guns opened fire and nearly killed her children, she left the house but stayed with him. Not until he abandoned her when she lost the baby and hit her and killed his own brother did she do what a truly innocent person would have done years ago.

  A news broadcast came on. The lead story of course was the swearing in of the toothy new president. Kay looked up. In a shot of the crowd, she saw Tom and Theresa Hagen. She put her head back down, profoundly alone, and cried herself to sleep.

  Chapter 24

  D RESSED IN a pink ball gown that barely contained her swollen breasts and clutching a pair of Superman pajamas, Francesca Van Arsdale, six months pregnant with her second child, chased her first one (two-year-old William Brewster Van Arsdale IV, whom they were calling Sonny) through the maze of boxes in their apartment on Capitol Hill. Sonny was naked except for the gold Notre Dame football helmet he’d gotten for Christmas from her brother Frankie. She heard Billy’s Dual-Ghia and looked out the kitchen window. The sight of the woman getting out of Billy’s ridiculously expensive car stopped Francesca in her tracks.

  She dropped the pajamas. It wasn’t the babysitter. It was her. That Woman.

  Francesca braced herself against the kitchen sink. But no. It wasn’t. On second glance, the babysitter was about fifteen and looked no more like the woman Billy had cheated on her with-another member of the Floridians for Shea staff-than would have any other willowy blond beauty who was everything Francesca was not.

  “Ready, Francie?” Billy called, opening the door.

  Sonny, ecstatic, sprinted toward his father and gave him an inadvertent but savage header to the crotch. As Billy moaned and crumpled into a chair, Francesca scooped up the pajamas and then Sonny, too, and gave the girl-the little sister of someone Billy knew from Harvard Law School-an agonizingly thorough set of instructions.

  “You look fantastic,” Billy said, holding the car door open. “Gorgeous.”

  Francesca was quite clear on the fact that she looked like a big pink cow. She struggled to get into that low-slung car with some semblance of dignity. Billy didn’t seem to notice. When she was in, he leaned down and kissed her, chastely at first, and then passionately. When the kiss was over, he thanked her. Thanked her!

  It had been like this for weeks. Her own mother had told her to forget about the affair. Men are going to have their goumadas. You know why surveys say that fifty percent of men cheat on their wives? she’d asked. Because the other fifty are liars. But once in a while, she’d said, you can pretend to be surprised to learn about some woman-which, if you don’t do it too often, can spark enough guilt to make your husband treat you like you were courting. In contrast, Francesca’s sister’s advice had been to kill him. But Kathy had never liked Billy. She was also (despite a string of boyfriends in London, where she was getting her Ph.D. in Continental literature) not a mother. Being a mother changed things more than anyone who was not a mother could possibly imagine. What was Francesca supposed to do, get a divorce? Raise two children alone? So far, her mother seemed to have been dead-on. But Francesca didn’t trust Billy’s newfound devotion. Despite all his penitential tenderness, he’d made love to her maybe twice since she started to show. When she’d been pregnant the first time, Billy had been turned on by it, had wanted to do it all the time.

  “You should see my office, babe,” Billy said. Right after the inaugural address, Daniel Brendan S
hea-the president’s brother and new attorney general-had assembled his staff and had a meeting. This didn’t bode well for Billy working fewer hours than he had during the campaign (though maybe in this case those hours would be more exclusively devoted to work). “It’s small, but it’s on the same floor as Danny’s.”

  “You’re calling him Danny?” You’re calling me babe?

  “That’s what he said to call him.” Billy actually stuck his chest out with pride. This was not a gesture she found endearing, though maybe she once had.

  “On a first-name basis with the attorney general,” she marveled. Did he call That Woman babe, too? “I’m proud of you.”

  Which, despite everything, was true.

  “The third youngest attorney general in the history of the United States,” Billy said. “Before he’s done, don’t be surprised if he’s considered the best one, too. He has an incredible combination of intelligence and-this doesn’t sound like a compliment, but it is-ruthlessness.”

  “Sounds to me,” she said, “like he’s the right man for the job.”

  On the way to the ball, they made quick stops at parties at several different embassies and hotels. As if by magic, Billy knew where to go, where the valet parking would be, the names of the hosts, and how to find them. When Francesca got inside, she had to pee-she always had to pee; it was like having a truck parked on her bladder-and she always guessed wrong about which way the bathroom was. She couldn’t help but be dazzled to be in these ornate mansions-especially the French embassy, which gave her an evil thrill, thinking about how jealous Kathy would be when she heard about it. And everywhere she turned, she saw a famous face or met a powerful person. But at the same time, she was miserable. Strangers kept pawing her, presuming that they could touch her belly, and Billy never once told them to keep their filthy hands to themselves. Her back was killing her. And she felt inadequate and out of place, as she had for most of her marriage. The pregnancy aside-and it was never aside; this kid was going to be a giant-no one looked like her (the Italian embassy was not among their stops). The women were either tall, WASPy, and glamorous, with their hair piled high and sprayed perfectly in place (like That Woman, in other words), or they were Washington wives: elegant matrons in fat pearls who somehow managed to be both unobtrusive and lively.