The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  The FBI director had not forgotten his meeting with Tom Hagen many years before, when the future congressman had produced that grainy black-and-white image of the director on his knees, fellating his top assistant. His current situation gave grimly comic new meaning to being caught between a rock and a hard place. Still, the director had no choice, for now, but to go along with the attorney general’s bold initiative.

  At the United Nations, the usual sorts of intermediaries-small countries with good educational systems and disbanded armies-were dispatched to conduct negotiations to deport or extradite Carmine Marino either to the supposed country of his birth or to the United States, where he’d been months away from becoming a citizen. At minimum, the negotiators wanted to ensure that Marino was given a swift and fair trial in Cuba. The Cuban government made a big show of meeting with these men, but Marino was of most use to Cuba where he was: safely imprisoned, the sword of justice suspended indefinitely over his bare neck.

  Whether Marino was tortured remains to this day a matter that can spark debate. But by all accounts, he never told anyone anything.

  Soon, other crises, including another, more ominous one between the United States and Cuba, shoved the assassination of the dictator’s double and its thorny aftermath off the pages of the world’s newspapers. It reemerged on the front page of the official state newspaper of Cuba when Carmine Marino tried to escape and was shot. Few American newspapers ran the story anywhere close to the front. It barely rated a mention on TV. In no case was the official story questioned.

  Concealed in a tunnel underneath Madison Square Garden, two hours before Johnny Fontane’s sold-out concert, Michael Corleone, in a new but classically styled tuxedo, waited for his consigliere. Michael lit a cigarette with his brother’s old lighter. This was, he thought, the problem with being early. Waiting.

  Michael’s return to New York had been rumored for months. The men in his and other Families wanted him back. And why not? Those who stayed on Michael’s good side got rich. But it wasn’t just those men who engaged in speculation about Michael’s next move. The public was just as intrigued. The rumors were reported by every newspaper in the city. He had, to his horror, become something of a folk hero. Hundreds of crimes were rumored to be his doing, and he’d never once been charged with any of them. Thugs like Louie Russo and Emilio Barzini were gone, and Michael was still kicking. Most of the Dons in America had been arrested in upstate New York, and Michael-who, common sense decreed, must have been there-wasn’t seen within a thousand miles of the place. Brilliant men in his own Family-Sally Tessio, Nick Geraci-had questioned his authority and were no longer around to question it further.

  He had also, not incidentally, grown into his good looks. His suits were exquisitely tailored. His hair was as perfect and his teeth were as white as the president’s. He was a war hero. He flew his own airplane. If he said Jump, even an icon of cool like Johnny Fontane would say How high? He’d withstood the grief of losing his two likable brothers. He’d loved and lost, twice, and managed to go on. Barely a day went by without the newpapers mentioning or picturing the progress of his new romance with the glamorous Tony award-winning actress Marguerite Duvall. She lived in New York now. Only a matter of time before he did, too, right?

  For savvy New Yorkers, there was another tantalizing matter, the legendary ability of people like Michael Corleone to make urban neighborhoods safer than small Lutheran towns in Iowa. All over the city, developers tried to figure out how to give away property to him, knowing they’d make it up when everything around it appreciated.

  Michael heard Tom Hagen call his name.

  Tom left his bodyguards with Michael’s and came down the tunnel alone. They embraced.

  “You ready?”

  Michael nodded. “It’s just dinner, right?”

  “Just dinner,” Tom said. “Right. It’s this way.”

  They headed toward what was ordinarily the locker room of the basketball team that would come to play the New York Knicks, where the heads of the Five Families of New York and their respective consiglieres were meeting for a catered, celebratory dinner. For the first time, all four of the other Dons-Black Tony, Leo the Milkman, Fat Paulie Fortunato, and the newest one, Ozzie Altobello, who’d taken over for the late Rico Tattaglia, who’d died of natural causes-were friends of the Corleones.

  “C’mon, Mike.” Tom put an arm around him. “Everything’s going to be all right. You tried to do things that had never been done. You tried to do the impossible, and you almost did it. Damn close. You can’t kick yourself over it.”

  “Do I look like I’m kicking myself over it?”

  “Not to the untrained eye.” Tom squeezed his shoulder, in the same tender way Vito Corleone had when he was asking for a favor. “You’re the sort of man who only pays attention to what he doesn’t have. Which is what makes you a great man, but there comes a time when you have to step back and appreciate what you do have.”

  Michael was tempted to say that there wasn’t anything he had that he really wanted. But that was wrong. He knew that. He had two great kids, a brother and a sister who loved him. The memories of a happy childhood. The will to regroup and try again. Untold riches, in the greatest country on earth, which practically demands that a person reinvent himself.

  Tom let his arm drop. They were on the threshold of where the dinner would be.

  “If he’s out there,” Tom said, “we’ll find him.” He did not say Geraci’s name. It was unspeakable now. “No one can hide forever.”

  Michael said that he wasn’t so sure. They’d both heard stories of Mafiosi in Sicily who’d gone underground and weren’t heard from for twenty or even thirty years, and America was a lot bigger place than Sicily.

  “It’s also full of people with a hell of a lot bigger mouths. If he’s out there, I have to believe that we’ll eventually find him.”

  “You have to believe that, huh?”

  “A boy’s gotta have hope, Mikey.”

  From upstairs came the sound of Fontane’s sound check. His big arrogant anthem, the one he’d always professed to hate.

  “I have hope,” Michael said.

  Tom Hagen opened the door.

  The other Dons shouted Michael’s name and, beaming, rushed to greet him.

  In a ballroom-sized cavern underneath the lodge on Rattlesnake Island, where he was prepared to stay as long as he could, Nick Geraci finally finished that two-volume history of Roman warfare, the only books he’d had time to take with him. There were others down there, but they were dime novels and pornos, things Geraci couldn’t bring himself to read even in weak moments. He’d lost track of day and night, but, bored, he went to sleep, and in what functioned for him as morning, he made himself a pot of coffee, took out a notebook, and started to write. Fausto’s Bargain, he’d call it. It would blow the lid off the world of American crime.

  What did he know about writing a book?

  Fuck it. What did anyone know? Begin. That’s what a person needs to know. He began.

  “We live by a code,” he wrote, “which is more than you can say for your government, which I’ve seen enough of from the inside to speak about with some authority. In the time it will take you to read this book, your government will take part in more killings and other crimes than the men in my tradition have done in its seven centuries of existence. Believe me. Probably you won’t. Suit yourself. No disrespect, but that’s what makes you, dear reader, a sucker. On behalf of my former associates, and if I may be so bold also your president, we thank you.”

  He stopped. He couldn’t stay here forever, but arrangements had been made so that he could stay here a hell of a long time. Certainly long enough to write a book.

  Sometimes at night, he thought he could hear drilling-the crew that was digging the tunnel that, supposedly, would one day connect him to Cleveland. Maybe he was imagining things. Maybe by the time they finished, he’d be gone, or dead. His chances weren’t good. Slim and none, and the word on the street was,
slim just got whacked.

  Nick Geraci laughed. Miserable as he was, he had it all over slim.

  Michael Corleone and Francesca Van Arsdale emerged from the elevator into an empty, blindingly white penthouse apartment. Roger Cole followed. Al Neri punched the red button and waited in the elevator. Kathy Corleone had stayed downstairs with little Sonny, in the suite that, if Michael bought the building, was earmarked for the twins.

  The penthouse took up the whole top floor, the fortieth, but it was a small building. Michael strode across the gleaming marble floor to the windows overlooking the East River and Queens. The building was plain, almost ugly, from the outside, tucked behind a bigger building on a cul-de-sac at the end of Seventy-second Street. The lower floors were filled with offices. Security guards were stationed by the elevator to the apartments on the top floors; it would be easy to have those people replaced by men Neri chose himself. And the penthouse required a special key. This place would be more secure than either the complex at Lake Tahoe or the mall in Long Beach. Cole’s own company had gutted and remodeled the apartment, long before Michael told him what he was looking for, so there was no chance of a repeat of the bugging debacle in Tahoe.

  Francesca was gasping at the beauty of the view and the apartment. For weeks, Michael had expected the shock of what happened with Billy to bring her low, but it never happened. He was beginning to realize it never would. She had become, even more than her all-American football-star brother, the closest living embodiment of her father’s single-minded toughness. Killing her husband was just the kind of hotheaded thing Sonny would have done. She’d had no way of knowing that Michael had already taken care of this. Tom Hagen had made Billy an offer he couldn’t refuse. He’d have been a resource for the Corleones, not a nemesis. For a brief, shining moment, they’d had a person inside the Justice Department. And then he’d been cut in half by his own wife, with his own car. Michael would make certain Francesca never learned the truth.

  Michael pointed down the hallway. “The kids’ bedrooms would be…?”

  “Right,” Cole said. “That way.”

  Cole was probably the most famous developer and real estate speculator in New York. Born Ruggero Colombo, he grew up in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement near the Corleones. He often told the heartwarming story of the day Vito Corleone convinced their landlord not to evict the Colombos, ignoring the no-pets clause in the lease (and foregoing the opportunity to rent the apartment for more money to another family) so that little Ruggero could keep his beloved but noisy mongrel puppy (the namesake of Cole’s company, King Properties). Vito also paid for Roger Cole to get his business degree from Fordham. Cole had made Michael Corleone millions-silently at first and now publicly. If Michael had only had more time to develop a few more relationships like the one he had with Cole, he might have been able to stay true to his promise to Kay and his father. It wasn’t too late. He could try again. But for now, he was back.

  “How often do you get to see them?”

  “Who?”

  “Your family,” he said. “Tony and Mary.”

  For a moment, Michael had thought Roger meant his theoretically former business associates. “I’m seeing them tomorrow.”

  The rooms were big for Manhattan, small compared to what they’d had in Tahoe. “They’ll like this, I think.”

  “What about you?” Cole asked. “Do you like it? Because if you don’t I’ve got a couple other places that could work. If you have time.”

  “Who’s the seller?” Michael said.

  Cole smiled. “King Properties, every square foot.”

  Which meant that as Cole’s silent partner Michael already had a piece of it. “And the whole building’s for sale?”

  “Not officially. Just the apartments. But for you, of course.”

  He could draw his family closer to him than ever. Kathy had gotten a teaching job at City College; she and Francesca would live together and raise little Sonny. Connie and her kids would move into the other big suite on that floor. Tom and Theresa could have the whole floor under that. Anyone who moved here, he could make room for them and keep them safe.

  They discussed terms.

  “This is perfect, Roger.”

  Francesca applauded. The men kissed each other on the cheeks. They all headed for the elevator.

  “Once a New Yorker, huh?” Cole said. “I knew you’d come back. Welcome home, my friend!”

  “It’s good to be back,” Michael said, louder than he’d meant to say it. As the elevator doors closed, his hollow words still echoed in the stone hallway of his empty new home.

  Acknowledgments

  Hearty, heartfelt thanks to the following people for their help during the writing of this book: Dottie Ames, Lynn Anderson, Ignazio Apolloni, Rachel Bernstein, Thomas Bligh, Kate Blum, Christine Cabello, Felice Cavallaro, Gina Centrello, Roger Cole, Anthony Corleone, Sanyu Dillon, Deanna Dunn, Magee Finn, Francesca Fontane, Rino Francaviglia, Buzz Fratello, Father Andrew Hagen, Theresa Hagen, Cesare Indelicato, Jr., Jonathan Jao, Jonny “the Pencil” Karp, Barbara (Geraci) Kennedy, J. A. Kriausky, Mike Lauer, Carole Lowenstein, Congresswoman Winifred “Annie” McGowan, Elizabeth McGuire, Daniel Menaker, Kay Michaelson, Hal Mitchell, Moonflower® (née Beverly Geraci), Gene Mydlowski, Tom Nevins, Neil Olson, Leoluca Orlando, Phil Ornstein, Allyson Pearl, Beth Pearson, Thomas Perry, Dr. Katherine (Corleone) Pietralunga, Anthony Puzo, Jillian Quint, Kelle Ruden, Donald “Donnie Bags” Serio, Sir Oliver Smith-Christmas, Willie “the Journeyman” Tonelli, Governor George Van Arsdale, Harriet Wasserman, Don Weisberg, Anthony Ziccardi, and Andy Warhol.

  In addition, the following organizations provided richly appreciated support during the writing of this book: the Corporation of Yaddo, the Hambidge Center for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the World War II Instititute at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. Thank you one and all.

  About The Author

  MARK WINEGARDNER received a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing from George Mason University and published his first book at age twenty-six, while still in graduate school. His books have been chosen as among the best of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, USA Today, and the New York Public Library. His work has appeared in various publications including GQ, Playboy, Family Circle, American Short Fiction, Ladies’ Home Journal, Parents, and The New York Times Magazine. Several of his stories have been chosen as Distinguished Stories of the Year in The Best American Short Stories. He has also served as a board member of the Associated Writing Programs. He is now a professor and director of the creative writing program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.

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