The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  “Sogball,” Johnny said, handing Lisa a monogrammed handkerchief.

  Lisa frowned.

  “You soak a roll of toilet paper in the sink or the toilet for a while, then bombs away. I almost got kicked out of school once for dropping a sogball on a nun.”

  A total lie. He was trying to make light of the situation. The doll had made her cry, the boots hurt her feet, and sogballs and eggs rained on his parade.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Fontane,” said the young detective. “There’s a few bad eggs in every crowd. You should’ve seen what happened to Joe DiMaggio.”

  Johnny bent his head to Lisa’s ear. “You see?” he said. “Every Italian.”

  “Bad eggs?” Lisa smiled at the detective.

  “Geez,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “What did happen to Joe DiMaggio?” Johnny said.

  One of the other walkalongs cuffed the kid on the shoulder about where the egg had hit. “Nothing, really, sir,” he said. “Dodger fans.”

  They were well past the reviewing stand now.

  Johnny kept smiling and waving and did the math in his head. If the crowd was even five deep, that was, say, a thousand people per block, each side. So two thousand—conservatively, since people watched from windows, too, including at least one sogball-hurling mezza sega Johnny wasn’t going to count. So: two thousand a block, thirty-five blocks up Fifth, call the people on Seventy-ninth gravy. Seventy thousand. Versus: a dozen-plus cocksuckers, a few turds from the press, and two or three quote-unquote bad eggs. Double that number, to account for various isolated crackpots in the crowd. Seventy, total—tops. Thus, conservatively, ninety-nine-point-nine percent of New Yorkers have no quarrel with Johnny Fontane.

  At the end of the parade route, there was another, smaller VIP tent. Images of Christopher Columbus’s ships were stenciled on the sides. An American flag and an Italian flag flanked the podium.

  Johnny and Lisa went inside. Johnny wasn’t much of a beer drinker, but he took an iced Moretti to wash down four more aspirin. The Sicilian clowns came in with the puppets slung over their shoulders and grabbed beer, too.

  “Thank you, Daddy.” Lisa hugged him. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “You sure you’re not—”

  “Like Detective Vaccarello said. Bad eggs. And I learned a new word and also something about your childhood. Sogball. But, seriously, Daddy, seeing the way everyone looks at you, seeing you through their eyes, it was really…” She hugged him again. “Amazing.”

  She’d learned another word somehow, the kid detective’s name.

  “How’re your feet? I can get you a taxi.”

  “You don’t want me to stay for the press conference?” Seeing his face, she laughed. “Gotcha. I have a music history exam I need to study for, anyway. But, no, I don’t need a ride. Detective Vaccarello, Steve, said he’d take me.”

  Steve? As if on cue, the detective introduced himself.

  Disapproval throbbed on the tip of Johnny’s tongue. But it was just a ride. Johnny settled for giving Detective Vaccarello a silent, heavy-lidded stare.

  Sometimes it was useful that people thought they knew things about the friends Johnny Fontane had. He let the detective think about that for a while, then thanked him for his help and kissed Lisa good-bye.

  The VIP tent was filling up with reporters. Johnny posed for pictures with nuns and old friends and chomped at the bit to get moving. Finally, the bald parade official took the podium. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I present to you a man who needs no introduction, a native New Yorker and a father of three lovely girls including one who was able to join him here today; a man who is a star of stage and screen and a hit maker extraordinaire, including my personal favorite LP, The Last Lonely Midnight; a man who has won an Oscar, a Golden Globe, the West Chicago Knights of Columbus’s Humanitarian of the Year Award, and other honors too numerous to mention; a man who also happens to be a third-generation Italian-American, with ancestors from Sicilia and Napoli. It’s my very special honor to present, the grand marshal of the 1963 Columbus Day Parade, Mr. John Fontane.”

  Between the TV lights and the cacophony of the questions, Johnny felt like he was getting hit with the hot winds of a sirocco.

  He waited for it to die down a little, then tapped the microphone with one finger. He cleared his throat. Miraculously, they shut up.

  “America,” said Johnny Fontane, smiling that wide, frozen smile one last time. “What a beee-yoo-tiful Italian word.”

  Then he winked, bowed, and left the podium.

  CHAPTER 10

  Friends and family gathered on the huge rooftop garden to wish Michael Corleone a happy birthday. It wasn’t a party, per se, although Connie had baked a cake and the little Hagen girls had made decorations out of construction paper. Several of the men who’d come by for business had stuck around. A few more people stopped by on their way home from the parade.

  The cake sat on a table beside a modest stack of presents. It was a chocolate fudge sheet cake shot through with espresso and Grand Marnier—a specialty of Connie’s. Knowing that Michael wasn’t big on birthdays, she’d written Cent’anni! on the cake instead, though she was a better baker than decorator. Several guests asked, in whispers, why the cake said Cemetery!

  Francesca’s little boy kept begging to be allowed to unwrap his great-uncle’s presents. Michael was still upstairs, meeting with Tom Hagen and Richie Two-Guns, but Al Neri had come down to tell Connie that Michael knew they were waiting and would be down in a minute. Little Sonny kept asking if it had been a minute yet.

  The garden was Connie Corleone’s attempt to recreate the one their father had so lovingly tended behind the house in Long Beach. Connie—whose use of her maiden name seemed now to have foreshadowed this even more vain attempt to reclaim her innocence—had made a pilgrimage to the original, which the new owners (civilians, not even Italians) had allowed to fall into heartbreaking disarray. She’d diagrammed what was left to see, taking countless snapshots of the sagging grape arbor, measuring the distance between the ailing fig trees, and paying the new owners an exorbitant price for the statue of the Holy Virgin, even though it was identical to ones that could be bought cheaply on any commercial street in Bay Ridge or Bensonhurst. An epic amount of time and money had gone into the new garden, including reinforcing the building so that the many tons of new dirt didn’t cave in the roof and bury the Hagens. Yet the more the garden came to resemble the original, the more it became a monstrous parody of the ordered sanctuary where Connie’s wedding reception had taken place, where Vito, fanning himself with a sweat-stained straw hat, had sat in the shade of the grape arbor and taught Michael the nuances of the business. The rooftop version of the arbor had been blown down last month in a thunderstorm. Repairs were ongoing. The whole project had the feel of something that would never be finished.

  Connie rushed around rechecking details she’d checked again and again already—napkins, forks, whether her lighter worked so she could fire up the cake’s big red candle, whether her sons looked presentable. She was a brassy woman a few degrees shy of attractive, with vigilantly dyed black hair and an incongruous girlish habit of flipping it away from her face. She’d changed her clothes several times today and now wore a jade-green cocktail dress more appropriate for dinner at the Stork Club than a modest cake-and-coffee get-together for her brother’s odd-numbered birthday.

  Amused by this display of nervous energy, the twins stood at opposite ends of the little crowd, sipping glasses of wine, Francesca’s white and Kathy’s red. Even as toddlers they’d refused to dress alike, and for years they’d seemed as different as identical twins could be. Kathy had been an honor student; Francesca was popular. Kathy was a chain-smoking bohemian, Francesca a good Catholic girl. Kathy had a Ph.D. in continental literature from a university in London; Francesca had dropped out of Florida State to marry a rich boy. But now that they were a little older and once again under the same roof, they’d come to re
alize their differences might have been more willful than real. Lately, Kathy splurged on clothes from the same designer the First Lady used, and Francesca seemed to always have her nose in a novel (recent favorites included Emma, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Sergio Lupo’s An Immigrant’s Tale, and, especially, Lampedusa’s The Leopard ). Each twin wore her hair in a stylish bob. Each was devoted to her work: Kathy taught freshman composition and continental literature in translation at City College, and Francesca was, in essence, the face of the Vito Corleone Foundation, keeping the foundation’s good works quietly but persistently in the news. The twins had differences, of course, beyond their taste in wine. Kathy needed glasses; Francesca did not. Kathy was, discreetly, cutting an erotic swath through her neck of the groves of academe, while Francesca had been on only two clumsy kissless dates since her husband died. Kathy was slim and slightly dried-up-looking. Francesca, perhaps as a result of her pregnancies (Sonny and the baby who had died), had full womanly hips and a round behind. Her breasts had swollen to D cups. She’d see them in the mirror and avert her eyes. She gave Kathy all her button-up blouses.

  But the twins both understood, without ever having talked about it, the source of their aunt’s anxiety. Connie had known Johnny Fontane all her life, even before he was famous, yet the prospect of his coming over for a brief business meeting with her brother still reduced her to behaving like some skittish bobby-soxer. The twins hadn’t met Johnny before. They were looking forward to it, but within reason. Kathy was just naturally unexcitable and difficult to impress. As for Francesca, her late husband’s wealth and position in the attorney general’s office had allowed her to meet all measure of the powerful and the famous. On the other hand, Francesca had been lucky enough to see Fontane perform at the inaugural ball. She doubted there was any woman who’d seen Johnny Fontane that night—a feral, vulnerable man in a swallowtail coat and a voice like no one else—and been unmoved. Francesca had seen Elvis perform, and also James Brown. She’d seen Mario Lanza at Carnegie Hall, Louis Armstrong at the Copa in Miami, and Frank Sinatra at the Sands in Las Vegas, but Fontane’s twenty-two-minute set was the best thing she’d ever seen onstage.

  It was not necessarily the memory of that night that was giving Francesca goose bumps, though. It was cold for October—colder still up there on the roof.

  SIX MEN WERE CRAMMED IN THE SMOKE-FILLED, walnut-paneled private study off Michael Corleone’s bedroom. Michael Corleone and Tom Hagen sat at a partners’ desk that nearly filled the room. Everyone else stood—Al Neri behind Michael, and, near the door, Richie “Two-Guns” Nobilio and Tommy Neri, Al’s nephew. Nobilio was wrapping up his discussion of opening up the books, the pros and cons of the men proposed for initiation into the Corleone Family. The reputation of these men preceded them. The presentation was a sacrament as routine as any performed in church (where Richie, unlike the rest of them, was active and sometimes even played the organ). At tonight’s Commission meeting, Michael’s presentation of these same names would be brisk and even more of a formality.

  Richie Two-Guns was bug-eyed, acne-scarred, and greyhound-thin, with slicked-back hair and a taste for garish clothes he must have thought made him look tough. Leather, mohair, sharkskin, guayaberas, sometimes even cowboy boots. He was proving to be one of the great talents the Corleone Family had ever developed. He’d grown up down the street from Peter Clemenza in the Bronx, and as a boy he’d buzzed around the fat man like a swift, unkillable fly, begging for the chance to do anything, anything at all. Clemenza knew how to turn an insect like that into a sleek and deadly hornet. Nobilio got his nickname from an incident in his young-buck days. He’d taken an unloaded gun to kill a man—a highway official who processed contract bids, a cog in Robert Moses’s vast and crooked empire, and one of the last pieces in the puzzle that was the greater New York cement monopoly. The man was working late in his office. A former captain of the Harvard swimming team, he was almost twice Nobilio’s size. Richie pulled the trigger of his empty silencer-equipped Colt Woodsman twice, realized it was empty, and without missing a beat, punched the larger man and started rifling through his desk. By the time the guy got to his feet, Nobilio had found a .32 Davis behind a whiskey bottle in the bottom drawer. He emptied it into the man’s broad chest and got away clean. For a while people called him Richie Lucky and Richie Two-Guns, interchangeably. Two-Guns was what stuck. Nobilio laughed it off and even started telling (an embellished, greatly self-mocking version of ) the story on himself. All the way around, his humility had served him well. When Frankie Pantangeli was tabbed to take over for Clemenza, a different sort of man would have harbored a grudge. Richie seemed to have thought nothing of it. He’d kept his head down and not only continued to get his work done but also expanded the Family’s holdings in Rhode Island and Fort Lauderdale. When Frankie did himself in, Richie Two-Guns was the obvious choice to take over—particularly since he’d been trained by Clemenza. Deaths, betrayals, and jail sentences had left the organization shorthanded, and Nobilio’s ability to find talent and develop it was proving to be as good as, if not better than, the fat man’s. In the years since Clemenza’s death, his legend had only grown, but the fact remained that he’d handpicked for promotion such eventual traitors as Paulie Gatto and Nick Geraci. On the mean streets of New York, Peter Clemenza had attained gangland sainthood, but in this dark and smoky room, despite everyone’s affection for him, the fat man’s legacy was that of a man who was all too human.

  “If that’s all,” Michael said, looking at his watch, “I need to get going.” He looked at Tommy Neri, aka Tommy Scootch, who’d just gotten back from a long trip out of town, and back at Nobilio. “Any other news for me?”

  Richie Two-Guns made eye contact with Tommy, then grimaced and shook his head. “Not really. Scootch, you want to kind of give us an update?”

  Tommy took a step toward the desk. Despite his thinning, prematurely gray hair, he looked like a nervous schoolkid called upon to give the book report he thought was due tomorrow. Organizing the hunt for Nick Geraci was the biggest job ever given to him. All things being equal, Michael thought it best to kill traitors with their closest associates, but Donnie Bags wasn’t up to the job physically, Carmine Marino was dead, Momo Barone was still in prison at the time, and Eddie Paradise had his hands full getting up to speed as capo. Dino DiMiceli had started out by taking two good men and flying into Cleveland to look for leads there. When their rental car got precisely ten miles down the road, the bomb wired to its odometer went off; all three were killed instantly; one of DiMiceli’s arms landed in a public swimming pool a quarter mile away. As for Willie Binaggio, he was a chain-smoker, so it was possible that his house really did burn down by accident, as the fire marshal had ruled. No one Willie B. worked with believed that. That’s when Al asked Michael to give the job to Tommy.

  Scootch took a deep breath and began. “Paradise wasn’t using Donnie Bags as a driver—he was the, uh, traitor’s guy—so I asked if I could have him. He’s clean, I think, but if he ain’t, I got him,” and he pointed toward an imaginary front seat, “where I can keep my eye on him.”

  Michael nodded, impressed at the initiative. Donnie Serio—known as Donnie Bags because of the colostomy bag he’d needed since the time he was shot in the gut—was some kind of cousin to Geraci. That didn’t make Bags a traitor, too, but it had still been smart to draw him away from his old regime and put him where, if the need came, Tommy could pull the trigger on him at a moment’s notice. “Good,” Michael said.

  “The other men in that crew check out good, which for all I know is what Dino and Willie B. thought, too. But I just wanted to make sure, so I started from scratch on that.”

  Michael nodded.

  The traces of a grin flickered on Tommy’s face. “In addition,” he said, “I did like you asked and had another conversation with the father, Fausto. In Arizona there. Tried to reason with him, right? But goddamn. He’s one of them silent, old-country Sicilians. Coglioni quadrati, y’know? I get the feeling
that if we killed him for what he knows but won’t say, it’d be the happiest day of his life. He’s got a new Mexican wife who don’t speak English, so that’s a dead end, and they ain’t been married long anyway. On the other hand, there’s the wife and the daughters of the disgraziato. If I turn up the flame on them three—”

  Michael shook his head. Fausto Geraci had been a cugin’ striver in Cleveland for Vinnie Forlenza’s outfit, but the other members of Nick Geraci’s family were off-limits for anything but surveillance and questioning.

  “Right, right, right, of course,” Tommy said. “Of course, sure. Also, um, I followed through on those new tips you gave me from your source,” Tommy said, looking at Hagen.

  Both Michael and Hagen perked up. This was news.

  “You went down there?” Hagen said.

  “Just got back,” Tommy said. “The person in question ain’t in that town Taxco.” He pronounced it Tax-co instead of Tahs-co. “He was there, or at least some of the people we talked to recognized his picture. He was down there passing himself off as a book writer. Thing is, he didn’t leave in a hurry or nothin’. He had plenty of time to pack up all his things in the apartment he had, but nobody saw him leave or knew anything about it. One day he just vanished. My thinking was, somebody tipped him off. But this fella Spratling, an American businessman who knows everybody down there, he says that’s just Mexico for you.”

  “Tipped him off?” Hagen said. “How so?”

  “That, I don’t know,” Tommy said. “But it stands to reason that if he does have somebody tipping him off, he’ll eventually risk coming back to the U.S. If he does that, we’ll find him. We got an eye on his family, plus, in any city where we have friends, it’s certain that our friends know the situation and how grateful we’d be for their help. The word’s out—quiet, you know, but real effective. This guy can’t hide in spider holes or in the mountains south of the border and such, not forever. Especially not this guy. He’s got a medical condition he’s been keeping under wraps. This Parkinson’s disease, what it does is, it makes you shake, it maybe makes you forget things, and also it makes it so it’s rough to get dressed—you know, ’cause of the buttons and the shakes and whatnot. Or at least that’s what he was complaining about to his regular doctor, back before he, uh—not the doctor—before he disappeared.”