“It would be easy for us to be on the same side,” Geraci said. “The kind of revenge you’re going after is penny-ante compared to the kind of game I’m playing, and it’s a game I can cut you in on. You know? Because that’s how you avenge Carmine’s death. Do you understand?”
Clearly, this dumb-as-a-post kid did not.
“I didn’t kill Carmine,” Geraci said. “I’m not the one responsible for killing Carmine, and so your business here is all in vain. In fact, it could be entirely finished if you’d just tell me three simple things. Three simple things and you go back to Saint Louis.”
“I’m not from Saint Louis.”
“That’s a good boy! But where you’re from is unfortunately not a question that’s on our final exam here. So here we go. Question number one: how’d you get here?”
“How’d I get here?”
“All right, good. You understand. Yes, how’d you get here?”
He thought about it a while. “Bus,” he said. “Plane to Mexico City, then bus.”
Geraci smiled. “I see an A coming. I bet your mama’s gonna love it, you getting an A. Because I know she ain’t the one who put you up to this. But those people, you think they’ll be the slightest comfort to your mama when she’s bawling her eyes out, howling like a broken animal, throwing herself on the coffin as you get lowered into the cold ground? The way Carmine’s mother did at his funeral, which I noticed you did not attend, even though, as you so eloquently put it,” Geraci said, patting him on his bloody cheek, “you are his blood.”
A flicker of self-doubt or maybe grief went across the young man’s soft face. Carmine’s mother had of course done no such thing.
“Question number two: who knows you’re here?”
The kid wiped his face with the sleeve of his black shirt, as if the blood were snot. “I need a towel.”
“Wrong answer. That’s a tough one, though. We’ll come back to it. Question number three: How’d you find me?”
The kid spat pink blood on Geraci’s white shirt, for which Geraci administered another blunt-force head trauma. The kid crashed into a potted plant. Geraci flicked his hand quickly, as if it were wet.
“I don’t know you, kid, and, I’ll be honest, I don’t care what happens to you, but I still…well, you know? Where does it end? What, really, is the point of you killing me? Or of me killing you? What’s it accomplish? I know I’m asking a lot of questions. Give this a long think. Did you know I was a professional heavyweight boxer? I was. I KO’d a guy who later on gave Joe Louis fits. Keep thinking. I’ll wait right here.”
The kid again popped up. He kept his feet much better this time, but another half dozen blows and he was back on the tile floor, his blood muddying the dirt from the toppled plant.
“I’ll tell you,” he said.
“That’s a good boy,” Geraci said.
The kid again rose. “When you tell me who killed Carmine.”
Raise the dead! shouted the jazz man. The song finished.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Geraci said.
Minutes later, he was rolling the boy up in the rug.
ON THE WAY BACK FROM THE VALLEY OF PUTREFYING garbage, Nick Geraci stopped for a drink. The doctor who’d treated him back in New York had said that many people with Geraci’s condition develop an aversion to alcohol, even the smell of it. So far, this was a symptom Geraci had dodged. He’d never been a heavy drinker, but he did drink less now, afraid each sip might be the last.
Many of the same people who’d been gathered around Spratling when he was telling the eagle story were gathered around him still.
The cold bottled beer Geraci ordered felt good in his swollen hands.
Iggy the writer started to tell a story, but Spratling interrupted. He wasn’t a man who liked to lose the floor. “Speaking of predators taken into captivity and brought against their will to the wilds of Latin America,” Spratling said, provoking a laugh, even from Iggy, “when I was up in New Orleans last week I heard the most amazing story. There’s a gangster there, a handsome but quite ruthless fellow named Carlo ‘the Whale’ Tramonti, who runs everything in Louisiana. Perhaps you’ve heard of a colorful political boss up there, our late and lamented Kingfish? Hmm? Well, the Kingfish was Mr. Tramonti’s errand boy. He was the go-between in a deal between Mr. Tramonti and another gangster in New York, in which slot machines and other nonindigenous vices came down to the bayou. Mr. Tramonti got his nickname not because he’s fat but because it’s a creature much bigger than a kingfish. A whale is.”
The other gangster, Geraci knew, had been Vito Corleone.
Geraci had always heard that Tramonti’s nickname came from his organization’s success at swallowing everything up. The New Orleans Family was the oldest in the U.S.; under Tramonti, it supposedly had become the richest as well.
A fresh martini arrived for Spratling. “So,” he said, taking it straight from the waiter’s hand and downing half. “Apparently, Mr. Tramonti, an Italian-born gentleman, never quite managed to become a U.S. citizen, although he did have a passport from Colombia, which I doubt he could spell and where he certainly had never been. One day, there the Whale is, in his top-secret office out by the airport, dressed in a silk suit and, God knows, cooking up evil plans, when there’s a knock on the door. Guess who it is, huh? Take a guess who’s gone into the whaling business.”
Nick Geraci smiled and took a long drink of his beer. He’d learned a long time ago—in a gym in Cleveland that smelled of camphor and wet wool and the stale sweat of ghosts—how to let a fight come to him.
BOOK II
CHAPTER 6
On Columbus Day, in the darkest hour of the early morning, forty floors above a dead-end cul-de-sac on the eastern lip of Manhattan, in a penthouse bedroom that overlooked the FDR Drive, the East River, and Roosevelt Island, Michael Corleone began to scream.
Moments later, there was what sounded like a struggle of some kind: thumping and banging and breaking glass, then the sound of something, or someone, falling to the floor.
At the opposite end of the penthouse suite, Al Neri—who slept in the nude when Michael’s kids weren’t around, which was most of the time—leaped out of bed, pressed a button he’d had installed on his nightstand, grabbed a long steel flashlight, and ran down the hall toward his boss. The screaming was new, and so was the sound of fighting, but these nighttime episodes were not unprecedented. The likely culprit was Michael’s diabetes. Or maybe it was Michael and Rita Duvall, finally having that first big fight; she’d been in L.A. shooting a game show, but maybe it had wrapped early. Realistically, Neri had secured this building so well that there wasn’t a Chinaman’s chance that anyone had broken in. Still, when a guy’s running bare-assed down a hallway toward strange noises in the dead of night, a guy thinks things. Those fucking Bocchicchios. That cocksucker Geraci. The bodyguard’s face was as calm as that of some civilian out taking the family dog for a brisk walk.
Michael’s heavy bedroom door was locked from the inside. Neri had arranged it so that it took a special key to open. The screaming had stopped. Neri pounded on the door. “Hey, boss!” No sound at all from inside. On instinct, Neri tried to kick the door open, slamming the heel of his bare foot against it. Then, cursing, he ran back to his room for the key.
ONE FLIGHT DOWN, LIGHTS BEGAN TO COME ON, first in Connie Corleone’s bedroom and, soon after that, in the bedrooms of Connie’s two sons, as well as in the suite at the other end of the building, where Kathy and Francesca lived, the grown twin daughters of Sonny Corleone, Michael’s late brother. Francesca’s six-year-old son, also called Sonny, did not stir. He was a holy terror when he was awake, but he’d always been a heavy sleeper. Everyone else gathered in the enormous kitchen that Connie had put in this spring, after Michael bought the whole building and moved most of what was left of his family into the top three floors. Theirs had always been a family that slept with the windows open.
Connie double-checked the locks. Francesca dialed a special nu
mber, and a guard in a war room off the lobby said everything was under control. “Everything’s under control,” Francesca said to her aunt. Connie nodded grimly and started coffee.
Francesca stared at the cradled phone. Under control.
Connie asked her boys if they wanted some eggs or to go back to bed—it was a Saturday, so she didn’t care either way—and the boys said eggs. The boys asked what that noise was and their mother said it was the television. Francesca tried to make eye contact with Connie, but she looked away.
In the next room, Connie’s boy Victor—a sullen mess, even by the standards of fourteen-year-old American boys—put James Brown’s “Night Train” on the record player, full blast. Her eight-year-old, Little Mike—an angel, though he worshipped Victor—started dancing crazily around the room. Ordinarily, this would have gotten a rise out of Connie, whose hatred of such music had fanned the flames of Victor’s love of it. But all Connie did was light a cigarette and sigh. Victor pretended to be a prizefighter, training, and Little Mike copied that, too.
Below, on the thirty-eighth floor, where the Hagens lived, Tom and Theresa and their two young daughters slept, far enough from the commotion to be excluded from it. Their sons’ rooms were empty.
Michael’s ex-wife Kay was living in Maine (yes, he had hit her, but only once, when she lied about her miscarriage and told him she’d had an abortion; the punch—and his consequent remorse—had gotten her the divorce he’d have never allowed otherwise, a cunning deception Michael Corleone would never uncover). Michael’s two children, Anthony, twelve, and Mary, ten, were living in Maine as well, attending a first-rate boarding school where Kay now taught. Michael hadn’t seen them in months—such a source of pain and even shame that it was rare for anyone on these top three floors to mention them. Once a week, Connie sent Anthony and Mary letters, small presents, and various Italian sweets, but she didn’t make a show of it.
Michael’s parents, Vito and Carmela, were dead of natural causes, resting in peace in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, next to his brother Sonny (supposedly killed in a car wreck, though he’d actually been shot by Tattaglia gunmen at a tollbooth on the Jones Beach Causeway), and Francesca’s prematurely born daughter Carmela, who’d lived only one day.
Not far away was Connie’s husband Carlo (garroted on Michael’s orders, revenge for Carlo’s role in Sonny’s murder, though the killing had been pinned on the Barzini Family).
Francesca’s husband, Billy (William Brewster Van Arsdale III), was buried in his family’s plot in Florida.
Michael’s brother Fredo had gone fishing four years ago and was presumed drowned. The internal gases that make corpses float do not always form in water as cold as Lake Tahoe. His widow, the actress Deanna Dunn (from whom he’d been estranged), had purchased a headstone for him at a cemetery in Beverly Hills, but the ground beneath it was unturned.
Now, rising from below in the private elevator that served only the top three floors, came three armed and trusted security guards.
This forgettably ugly building did not look from the outside like the fortress it was. No passerby would have guessed that it contained a platoon of inconspicuously deployed guards and a small fortune’s worth of electronic security devices, much of which came from the same people who supply the same devices to the CIA. This was not a building passersby would even notice: covered in white cladding, its balconies functional and unadorned. Anyone’s eye would, in fact, have been drawn across the street to a block of lovely century-old four-story brick walk-ups. Nothing in the building’s design would draw the eye up to the slightly more ornate post-Deco three-story penthouse and rooftop garden, which sat atop the building almost like a separate structure. In New York, only tourists look up, and this was hardly a neighborhood that drew tourists: Yorkville, a portion of Manhattan unserved by the subway, all but unmentioned in guidebooks, a residential neighborhood, mostly German but for years a harmonious mix of Irish, Jews, and Italians, too. Except for the sound of the traffic on the FDR and the garbage trucks on the next block, it was quiet at night, especially forty floors up.
MOST OF THE TIME.
“Boss?” Neri called, almost tenderly. He saw the three guards coming and motioned for them to position themselves and watch his back. Then he opened the door and inched inside, flashlight raised. His reflexes were so good, he was as deadly with that thing as most men were with a gun. He hadn’t turned it on since he was a rookie cop, but it had been put to repeated good use. He used it to kill some Harlem pimp who had cut up a woman and was raping a twelve-year-old girl. When witnesses said Neri caved in the guy’s skull after he was already knocked cold, Neri’s superiors, frustrated over years of being unable to control him, had him charged with manslaughter. The Corleones heard about the case. They pulled strings, and the charges were dropped. Neri took the flashlight from the evidence room, quit the force, and went to work for Michael Corleone, a fresh start he was grateful to get and that he repaid with unswerving loyalty. It was a decision he never regretted. Not once, not even when he was called upon to kill poor Fredo.
Neri flicked on the light switch.
The bed was empty. A heap of blankets and sheets were on the floor. Beside it was a broken juice glass.
“Mike?” Neri said.
On the other side of the bed, something moved.
Michael Corleone rose, slowly, rubbing his head.
“Madonn’,” Neri said. “You scared me there. You OK?”
“I’m fine.” Michael pointed at the flashlight. “Whatever you do, don’t shine that thing in my eyes, huh?”
Neri lowered it. The Don was drenched with sweat and pale as moonlight. He sure as fuck didn’t look fine.
“You, uh…alone?” Neri craned his neck, looking around for who or what must surely be here. He strode to Michael’s bathroom. Nothing unusual. “It sounded like—”
“Al, I’m fine. Thank you for your concern, all right?”
If it was Rita, he wouldn’t be hiding anything. Rita had been here for his spells before.
“So it was your sugar?” Neri said. The diabetes. The juice glass: it added up, to some degree. “Want me to get you some pills or fruit or something?”
“It’s not that. It’s nothing. Got it?”
Neri nodded. “Watch them satin sheets,” he said, pointing. “Slippery as hell.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Michael said, and cracked a faint smile.
Neri couldn’t imagine it was possible that the sounds he’d heard came from only one man, but contradicting Michael Corleone went against his nature. “Happy birthday, by the way.”
“Bake me a cake if you want,” Michael said, “but otherwise shut up about all that, huh?”
He sat down heavily on the bed. At least part of the reason he’d become something of a folk hero in New York was that he was thought of as movie-star handsome, but in the middle of the night and up close he was an old forty-three. His left cheek sagged unevenly, the result of plastic surgery he’d had to fix his face from when that police captain had crushed it. His hair had gone abruptly white—dashing, maybe, in the right light, but this was not the right light. He was thirsty all the time, and he urinated with excruciating slowness, like an old man. Once, Rita—Miss Marguerite Duvall, the actress Michael was seeing off and on—had let it slip to Neri that Michael had problems in the sack. Happens to everybody, Neri had told her, which he’d said out of loyalty; knock on wood, it hadn’t happened to him, except when he was drunk, which he hadn’t been since back when he was on the Force.
“No can do on the cake,” Neri said. “You’ll have to wait for whatever Connie bakes you. Want coffee?”
“What time is it?”
Neri glanced at the clock on Michael’s nightstand. “Pushing five. Probably you should try to go back to sleep, I guess.” Tonight, for the first time since the Godfather’s return to New York more than a year ago, there would be a meeting of the Commission, La Cosa Nostra’s ruling body. Preparations for the meeting h
ad taken up most of Michael’s time for weeks now.
Michael rubbed his face. “What the hell,” he said, evenly and from behind his hands.
It was hard to tell how he meant that. Either: What in the hell just happened? Or: What the hell, sure, go ahead and make coffee.
Neri turned and padded down the hall. What the hell. Even if Mike went back to sleep, Neri wasn’t going to. And he sure wasn’t going to drink the percolated swill Connie made in the big kitchen downstairs. Neri didn’t cook, but he was particular about his coffee.
Neri ushered the guards back onto the elevator, unselfconscious of his nakedness. “False alarm, boys,” he said but did not believe. “Nothing to see.”
CHAPTER 7
Johnny Fontane flew into New York the day before the parade. He and Lisa, his oldest daughter, went out for a quiet dinner at a tiny Italian place up in Harlem where they had a bucatini all’ amatriciana as good as his sainted mother’s, may she rest in peace, and where in order to get in you have to buy a table, the way you buy real estate—unless of course you know somebody or are somebody. Lisa—who’d once seemed mortified by her father’s celebrity—clearly loved it: the attention, every morsel of the food, the flowers that magically showed up for her, the works. She was a sophomore at Juilliard. At first, Johnny had been against his daughter going off to New York alone, a girl her age. But Juilliard was Juilliard, and shy as Lisa was, onstage behind a piano, her hunched shoulders straightened, the long black hair she hid behind fell away from her face, and as her delicate hands danced over the keys, a kind of light came shining forth. Johnny had promised himself he’d look out for her. He saw her every time he came to New York, which he made sure was often. She’d dragged him to places he’d have never gone otherwise, like a strangely moving production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony, where all the world’s a crazy whorehouse, and he’d taken her to prizefights and jazz clubs. They were closer now that she’d moved away than the whole time since he’d split with Ginny, and they were all living more or less in L.A. Lisa was coming out of her shell, even away from the piano, which was unnerving for Johnny to watch, but it was also nice. The Lisa of a couple years ago certainly wouldn’t have wanted to march alongside him in the parade.
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