The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  Ordinarily, even when she was alone, Francesca did not take long looks at herself in the mirror when she was naked. Her mother had told her that only sluts looked in the mirror when they were naked—that what did she think, she was pretty? She wasn’t pretty. She was just another girl, and the sooner she figured that out, the happier life she might lead. The cruel things a mother tells a daughter live until the daughter’s dying breath. They often are a daughter’s dying breath. Yet even if her mother hadn’t said those rotten things, Francesca still couldn’t have imagined that she’d want to watch herself do this. She’d had the chance before, when she and Billy were on vacation in Cuba. She’d either looked away or gotten on top or on her knees. Or flat on her stomach. She liked it that way. But this was different. This was Johnny.

  What was weird about it was how weird it wasn’t—how natural it felt. It had been a long time for her, and Johnny had taken his time.

  His head. Between her legs. Longer than Billy ever had.

  She tried to look up at him, at Johnny, that face, those eyes, but she could not.

  She managed to look at his reflection. At his buttocks, bobbing up and down, small and tight, ridiculous and adorable. And at the back of his head, the little bald spot that bothered him but did not bother her. Watching him like this made the whole thing seem funny and sad and even less real. What a strange thing it is, to be fucked. Because when you see it, like this, it’s not making love. It’s fucking. She hated that word, but that was all she could think of. It was the right word for what she was watching.

  “Fuck me, Johnny,” she heard herself say.

  He replied by slamming into her, hard. The rumors were true: he was huge, the biggest she’d ever had. It hurt, but he was tender, too. It hurt in a good way that was entirely new to her. He filled her so much, there was room for nothing else; with each thrust, he plowed her own juices right out of her.

  “Like that,” she blurted, loud and breathless. She couldn’t have said if she meant I like that or do it like that.

  He didn’t seem to need to know. He was good at this.

  It made her feel sophisticated and tough that she didn’t care about all he’d done to get that way.

  She could have looked in his eyes, should have, but did not. Could not. Wanted to, but no.

  The only eyes Francesca could bear to look into were her own, up there, staring down at her, studying the glimpses she got of her own flopping and defiantly asymmetrical breasts. The woman up there looked more scared than happy. She was bathed in sweat. On the wall behind the bed, above the calf-leather headboard, the huge take-up reel of the hi-fi’s tape player moved grimly round and round.

  The bossa nova music gave way to applause. An announcer’s voice introduced Johnny Fontane. It was the live LP, Fontane Blue. Johnny was fucking her to the sound of his own sweet music. This was not unlike the way Francesca had pictured it. Thousands, maybe millions of people every day enjoyed themselves in the bedroom while Johnny’s music played.

  “Yes,” Francesca said, her voice strange in her own ears. I love you, she thought but had enough sense not to say. Or even to mean. She hated herself for even thinking it. Francesca wanted to be through with that kind of love. “Fuck me.”

  She finally managed to glance up at him. His eyes were closed, his face contorted into a grimace.

  Shaking now, she dug her fingers into Johnny’s shiny, hairless back and pulled him close, blocking her view of what was happening. The last thing on earth she’d expected to happen.

  Life don’t go where you expect, eh?

  Just as she’d imagined, the dream she was having in real life smelled like sweat, manly soap, fine leather, and the bouquet of her own fragrant cunt.

  Another word she hated but was all that she could think of now.

  Cunt.

  She felt a spasm there, as if it had a mind of its own. She shivered. Surprisingly, inevitably, she was about to come.

  BOOK IV

  CHAPTER 21

  It had been nearly three years since Nick Geraci had disappeared. All things being equal, three years was not a remarkably long time to have to wait to exact revenge. Anyone engaged in Geraci’s line of work could without hesitation list several situations that lasted much longer. To cite only one famous example, Don Vito Corleone waited a quarter century to plunge a dagger into the gut of the Sicilian Mafioso responsible for the deaths of his father, his brother Paolo, and, before Vito’s very eyes, his sainted mother. Vito drove the blade into the man’s navel and thrust it upward, sawing through skin and intestine, up to the base of his rib cage and bursting the man’s full stomach with a muted, wet pop: five seconds of grim, bloody, foul-smelling pleasure that a quarter century’s wait must have made only sweeter.

  But other problems the Corleones were having made closing the books on the Geraci problem a priority—even if it was one quite concealed from public view.

  Three years had been enough time to allow Nick Geraci to disappear from the pages of the newspapers as well. He had successfully become old news. Inside certain newsrooms, ascribing fresh mayhem to Nick Geraci had become house slang for saying that there were no suspects, like joking that the boogeyman did it. The general public had long since moved on, seeking new ways to feed its bottomless appetite for bread and circuses. The Judy Buchanan murder had served nicely, but there were so many other delicacies, too, served fresh daily. Egad, Fireball Roberts died in a crash! Cheer up: the World’s Fair is opening! Only…my God, look what’s going on down South with the Negroes! Dogs! Fire hoses! Murder! Young corpses buried in earthen dams! But, wait, kids, look over here: everybody say yeah, yeah, yeah—it’s Beatlemania!

  Take, eat.

  Officially, Nick Geraci was presumed dead. His wife had filed paperwork to make that presumption legal. The only suspense that remained was when, if ever, the body would be found. One theory—that his remains had been encased in a cement pylon at Shea Stadium—had evolved into the popular notion that he was buried under home plate. Announcers sometimes made jokes about this on the air. The bad news is, the Mets were held scoreless again tonight. The good? Nick Geraci can rest in peace. Et cetera.

  For most of the men associated with Geraci’s tradition, however, the thinking was a little different. Here again, disappearing for three years was hardly unknown. Many had pulled off more impressive feats. In Sicily, one Mafia Don vanished for almost twenty years before he turned up, comfortable and perfectly healthy, having never even left the island or relinquished control of his empire.

  Had Geraci been dead, those in the know would have expected someone to take credit for the job, given how much gratitude the feat would have inspired from the Corleones. Had the Corleones themselves done the job, there would surely have been a body.

  There was an additional concern.

  Even three years after Geraci’s disappearance, mishaps within the Corleone organization were often blamed on him—and with none of the whimsicality used to address the New York Mets’ lousy hitting. It was known that Geraci had embedded various Sicilians in pizza parlors all over the Midwest, all of whom were living honest, decent lives, far from places where they might one day be called upon to do a service. No one knew where all of these people were, except Geraci, who supposedly had it all in his head.

  Some of them, though, other people did remember. In fact, those with any sort of criminal experience back in Sicily were offered opportunities in New York with Sacripante or Nobilio. But there were many more out there nobody knew about, and every time a supposedly common truck driver gunned down the men who’d come to hijack his cargo, or a courier taking the Corleones’ share of the Las Vegas skim was garroted and robbed, there was a suspicion that the job had been done by, say, some friendly mook who’d already reentered his quiet life as a pizza chef in some Indiana white-bread no-place.

  Once Geraci was found, there would be no need to torture him to get that list of embedded Sicilians he had in his head. Once that head had three rounds from a .22 rico
cheting through it, scrambling his brains to mush, it wouldn’t matter. The men, wherever they were, could live out their lives in peace, free to become pillars of the community, threats to nobody. Which, in fact, was precisely what most of them were destined to do.

  Even if, dear reader, one such man had been your own father, you would never have known. His surname—yours, now—was probably not his father’s. His given name was probably not the one his mother gave him. As many did, he might have moved on from that first restaurant job to bigger and better things, might have known enough of another language to pass himself off as a Greek, a Spaniard, an Arab, or merely someone who, like so many Americans, doesn’t like to dwell on the past. The past was past, and none of it mattered now because he was an American. His children were Americans. He had escaped the inescapable pull of history merely by pledging allegiance to the flag and to the local sports teams, making money, driving a clean car, keeping a nice lawn, and paying taxes in the name of this person he invented.

  The CIA had a similar program, which it called Most Special Fellows. In the CIA’s case, the men usually came not from Sicily but Yale or one of the service academies. They were rarely used as assassins but rather for darker purposes. They were put in charge of companies kept afloat by the government, made rich despite their lack of dedication or business acumen, and positioned to run for public office or do business in foreign countries when the wise men said it was time. None disappeared. Many, though, did reinvent themselves—children of privilege in the heartland, playing the role of the common man. Millions of voters bought the act. Often, so did the men themselves. At least one and possibly three American presidents have come out of this program.

  In the version of Fausto’s Bargain that was eventually published, there is a scene in which Nick Geraci compares notes on his program and the CIA’s with a one-eyed field agent named Ike Rosen, whose existence the House Select Subcommittee on Assassinations and Regime Changes would later doubt. At that time, a spokesman for the CIA testified that there was no such covert program and denounced Geraci’s memoir as “a mere fiction novel.” Recently, newly declassified documents have proved that the program did exist, though to this day no proof has come to light that there was ever an Ike Rosen.

  In the book, Rosen helps Geraci stay at least one step ahead of his vengeful pursuers. Rosen is actually trying to keep Michael Corleone from getting set up for conspiracy to commit murder—Nick’s murder.

  Even those who stubbornly cling to Geraci’s story concede that if Rosen did exist, he was probably a composite.

  BECAUSE MICHAEL CORLEONE HAD FOR YEARS taken a greater interest in the legitimate businesses, and now because those were the only businesses to which Tom Hagen could minister, those companies were thriving, even in the wake of the Corleones’ other problems. Leaving aside the 1964 World’s Fair, that huge and sacred cash cow, money flowed in from parking lots, funeral homes, pushcarts, bars, restaurants, vending machines, hotels and casinos, construction, and, best of all, commercial real estate—especially that new gold mine, suburban shopping malls. For this, Michael had two partners to thank, both of whom had ties to the Vito Corleone years. Ray Clemenza, Pete’s kid, developed shopping malls all over the country. Roger Cole (born Ruggero Colombo) was one of the most successful real estate developers and investors in New York. His company, King Properties, was named after the beloved dog Roger had as a little boy, which might have been the cause of the Colombos’ eviction, had Vito Corleone not reasoned with their landlord. Not only did Michael have large shares in each man’s business, he hired accountants to monitor their accountants, to make sure nothing remotely illegal came anywhere near these companies’ books or tax returns.

  But the businesses that Nick Geraci had most closely operated were struggling. The Family’s share of the narcotics trade had shrunk dramatically; the operation Geraci had secretly assembled, using the remnants of Sonny Corleone’s regime and in concert with the Sicilian capo di tutti capi, Cesare Indelicato, had now become a partnership with Indelicato and the Stracci Family in New Jersey, which controlled the docks where all the drugs were unloaded. The Straccis took sixty percent of the profits on the U.S. end, where once they’d had only ten, entirely because the capo who ran those docks was a more capable and seasoned leader than anyone the Corleones could have pressed into service.

  The unions under the Corleones’ control did remain so, but several of the union leaders had started to act more like the ones giving the orders rather than taking them. The most visible of the many problems this had triggered was that the Justice Department was now coming after the union bosses, too. This was itself a form of justice, but not one in which the Corleones could take satisfaction.

  The Corleone Family’s greatest asset had always been the network of people it kept on its payroll—meat eaters, they were often called—and it was thus the setbacks on that front that seemed most ominous. Geraci had overseen those payments without serious incident for the seven years before he disappeared. In the years since, as the responsibility for the payments was overseen by Tom Hagen together with the Family’s capos, the structure of the network was intact but damaged. And now Hagen was off that job indefinitely, and it was just the capos—Nobilio and Paradise. Although the problems were greater in scope than could be blamed on one inexperienced capo, Eddie Paradise’s regime was having a particularly hard time getting its portion of the job done right.

  Increasingly, police and public officials who were supposedly bought and paid for didn’t stay that way. They were finding resourceful new ways to take money and ask for more, to double-dip from both the Corleones and a rival, to claim to have done everything they could to perform a favor that didn’t quite work out as planned.

  The money pouring in from the World’s Fair covered a multitude of sins, one of which was the severity of what some had started to call the Meat Eaters’ Rebellion. Like the onset of termite devastation, it was audible but only barely so, visible but only if a person knew where to look, yet unless the situation was addressed soon, the whole structure was destined to become a big pile of sawdust and bug shit.

  EDDIE PARADISE WENT ON ABOUT HIS BUSINESS, BUT he knew what people thought. They thought he was a journeyman, a fat little man who got where he was for lack of better options. A comical figure, who was in way over his head. They called him “the Turtle” sometimes, as in Slow and steady wins the race. It was starting to show up in the newspapers, even in stories by writers who were supposedly on the payroll. Apparently, people had been calling him Eddie the Turtle for a while now behind his back, as if it was an insult. Eddie didn’t like to get caught up in things like this, reacting violently to every insult real and imagined, throwing his weight around and settling scores, on top of which: how was that an insult? The turtle wins the goddamned race. Like the man says, you can look it up. Somewhere along the line, while Eddie wasn’t looking, America had become the sort of place that rooted for the goddamned rabbit. Which: fine. What’s one man going to do, change things? Realistically, no. What could one man do, for example, about the problems with the docks in Red Hook? Once the cargo ships all went to containers, they could dock anywhere, even at nonunion docks, and truck the goods to wherever. It was just a punch Eddie had to roll with. For better and for worse, America itself was changing. It wasn’t just Eddie who thought that. It was in the air, the freedom-scented American air. One example: Eddie had a piece of a nightclub down in Greenwich Village, and recently, when he’d gone down there to meet someone in a back room to iron out something else entirely, he overheard two folk singers talking in the dressing room. One had hit it big and was just visiting. The other, who was performing that night, was an old friend. “America is changing,” the famous one said. “There’s a feeling of destiny, and I’m riding the changes.”

  It stuck in Eddie’s head. In spite of his troubles and the troubles of those around him, despite himself, Eddie Paradise had a feeling of destiny, too. Eddie Paradise’s destiny was to ride the changes
.

  He was not in over his head, no matter what anyone said. Turtles swim, don’t they?

  People thought Momo Barone would have been better at the job and that the only reason Michael didn’t replace Eddie with Momo now was that it would look indecisive. People thought Michael had ordered Eddie to give Momo more responsibility and authority, enough that in the eyes of a lot of people, the Roach was jointly in charge of their regime. People were full of shit. Momo Barone was Eddie’s oldest friend. They were like brothers. Momo was a miserable, grumpy prick, but Eddie could see through all that. He knew the guy. If the shoe had been on the other foot, Momo would have done the same thing. So what did people want from Eddie Paradise: that he’d screw over his oldest friend because people, some people, might see it as a sign of weakness? This made Eddie nuts. No weak man would do that. A weak man clips a strong lieutenant. Only a strong man makes his second-in-command stronger.

  Nonetheless, it was true—there were witnesses—that Michael Corleone, furious right after the raid on that Commission meeting, had told Eddie that if he needed help taking care of business he should ask for it. This was the starting point for a lot of those whispers. Eddie didn’t appreciate getting chewed out like that in front of others, but he’d handled it the way a loyal capo should, especially a new one, who had to expect a little ballbusting to go with the territory, especially after a giambott’ like that. Which was: Eddie stood there and took his medicine like a man.