In a remarkably short time, she settled in.
In no time, she and Nick again became something like themselves.
The Tramontis owned the whole block, and the one next to it as well, and everyone in every house had some connection to them. Charlotte didn’t know this at first, and by the time she made friends with some of the other wives in the neighborhood, by the time she’d have been able to put two and two together, she was back to her old self. She knew what she knew, and she didn’t talk about it. She kept the house spotless. She took perverse pleasure in the Sisyphean task of beating back the tide of unfamiliar vermin: little green frogs and lizards; swarms of flies, bees, wasps, and mosquitoes, too many for the frogs and lizards to repel; the unavoidable, euphemistically named palmetto bugs; pamphlet-wielding evangelicals in ties and short-sleeved white shirts. It was a way of keeping her mind off other worries.
She and Nick bickered about nothing serious all the time and never got truly angry about anything. She encouraged Nick with his writing and told him how it made the house a home to hear the clacking of that typewriter, however infrequent it was. He kept the pages and his notes and carbons locked in a steel Confederate States of America footlocker he’d bought in an antiques store on Canal Street. He brought her home a color television set with teakwood cabinetry and a nineteen-inch screen—the biggest there was. She told him that, knowing how much he hated TV, it was a gesture that meant a lot. She bought him books about how to write books. In her spare time—which she pretended was not all the time—she took out his little reel-to-reel tape recorder and sat on the sofa with an electric fan trained on her. She closed her eyes and sipped sweet tea and bravely talked to her daughters about nothing at all until the end of the tape started flapping from the take-up reel. Then she mailed the tapes to strangers, who forwarded them to her girls, her babies.
NICK GERACI’S JOURNEY TO NEW ORLEANS HAD been brokered initially by Spratling, the former Mexican jewelry tycoon, who’d merely put out some feelers, and to a greater extent by the one-eyed man he’d once known as Ike Rosen.
The CIA agent had shown up in Taxco. Geraci was having lunch alone, enchiladas suizas and a cold beer, in a rooftop café overlooking the cathedral, reading the New York Times. “Ever try the iguana?” said the agent. “I hear it’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac.”
Geraci set down the paper. It took a moment to recognize him without the eye patch. The last time they’d spoken had been outside Geraci’s house in East Islip, the meeting that had sent Nick into hiding in the first place. “Tastes like chicken,” Geraci said. “Take a load off, why don’t you?”
“The beard’s a nice touch.”
“So’s the eye,” Nick said. “What do you want from me?”
“Did you really think no one was watching you?” Lucadello said. “Do you really think that you could have gotten anywhere if we didn’t want to let you go?”
Geraci certainly did. He’d seen enough of these vainglorious bumblers to think the I in CIA was a big joke. Then again, Lucadello had found him here, somehow.
When the waiter came, Lucadello, in fluent Spanish, discussed the way the iguana was prepared and cooked and what all went into the sauce and then ordered it.
“I asked you,” Geraci said. “What do you want?”
“You had electricity down in your cave,” Lucadello said. “Even a TV for a while. There was an antenna. There were electrical bills. I really hate to burst your balloon about your daring escape, because, swear to God, it was just so cute, but”—he winked the glass eye—“we had an eye on you the whole way. You hid underneath a house your godfather owned. When you came out, you went straight to the town where you grew up, you called your father, and he drove you to Mexico. Understandably, this threw some of your associates for a loop, but please understand: I do this for a living.”
“Congratulations,” Geraci said. “Your mother must be very proud. So what next?”
“My supervisors think you’re going to kill yourself, can you believe that? That’s why I’m here. You fit the profile. The odds are off the charts.”
“The profile?”
“Don’t take offense. I fit it, too. Men who live by a code who are trapped, who perceive that there is no chance of escape or of resuming their regular lives, have a seventy-one percent chance of attempting suicide. Those who try have a truly amazing eighty-seven percent chance of success. But I told him, them—my supervisors, that is—that you won’t do it. Like me, you’re in that other twenty-nine percent. You’re too egotistical. You’re the kind of man who keeps looking at a problem, even an insoluble one, thinking he can fix it. My supervisors disagreed. They sent me here to give you a ray of hope, to make you think you really might be able to see your family again, resume your life, et cetera. So, here I am. To help you.”
“You’re from the federal government, and you’re here to help me. Funny guy.”
“I considered killing you,” Lucadello said, “and opted for this instead, if that’s any consolation.”
“It was you who sent that kid to find me,” Geraci said.
“What kid?” Lucadello said. “The one in the rug?”
So now we’ve each killed a Bocchicchio, Nick thought. The CIA hit Carmine in Cuba so Carmine wouldn’t talk, Nick was sure of it. Carmine would never have talked. “What rug?” Geraci said.
“Let me be completely straight with you,” Lucadello said. “My supervisors want you dead. But it’s no good to them if you do it yourself. Also, as you probably know, your…I don’t know what you’d call him…your supervisor wants you dead, too. He wants revenge. He’ll take it as a slap in the face if anyone else does the job for him. The solution here’s pretty elegant, from where we stand. Mr. Corleone has you killed, and then we pin it on him. That way, you’re gone, and Mr. Corleone is served up to our friends at the FBI—a gift, a peace offering, a make-good for any bad feelings about those camps you and I helped put together, call it what you will. For personal reasons I’m not going to get into, I’d prefer that this didn’t happen. Which is neither here nor there. I’m also a man who follows orders. In this regard, too, maybe you’re like me. My orders are to find you. I’ve found you. Here you are. My orders are to then tell Mr. Corleone exactly where you are. This I will do as well. Forgive me if I think out loud. I suppose I could get into Mexico City sometime tomorrow. Then a day to figure out what flight I want to take, another day to get it approved—government red tape, right? You have no idea. Then there’s another day to travel, say maybe a day or two to get in to see such a busy man as Mr. Corleone. At the point that I talk to him, one hundred percent of what I tell him will be true. To the best of my knowledge, you are in this lovely place. Taxco. After that, I imagine it will take another two or three days for the job to get assigned and for the person or persons assigned to do it to travel all the way here. That’s what, a week? A week plus? I’m not telling you anything you couldn’t figure out yourself. I’m not telling you anything specific. Five to ten days or who knows, maybe more. I don’t know how such things work—hits, vendettas, how fast they happen. I’m just thinking aloud, as I said. Oh. Also. As per my orders, I’m pleased to be able to tell you that we’re working on it so that you can see your family again. This is the ray of hope we’re providing you so that you don’t blow your brains out. Blowing your brains out has the highest success rate of any kind of suicide, which I mention apropos of nothing.”
“You’re a wealth of interesting information,” Geraci said. He tapped the folded-up New York Times on the table. “If you and I ate lunch together more often, I could cancel my subscription to the paper.”
“I think that’s in the cards,” Lucadello said. “A few more lunches like this.”
His iguana came, and he liked the sauce but quickly lost patience with all the little bones.
“Furthermore,” Lucadello said, pushing the half-eaten entrée aside, “if for no particular reason you happen to leave here and go somewhere else, we’ll know about that, too, a
nd here again, I will follow orders. I will personally confirm where you are, although it’s possible that a colleague of mine may contact you to achieve said confirmation, and then as soon as is practical, your new location will be conveyed by some means to Mr. Corleone.”
“What you’re saying is that you don’t want Michael Corleone to kill me.”
“I’m saying that I’m following orders.”
“And that you’re not going to kill me, either, or have me killed.”
“Who can predict the future?”
“You’re going to keep me running, and you’re going to keep them running after me. That’s what you’re saying, right? How long can that last?”
“Piece of advice.” Now Lucadello tapped the folded-up paper. “If you’re so fixated on the future, maybe you should buy a different newspaper. One that runs horoscopes. I could ask you the same sort of things, you know? I could ask you how long you intend to sit around all day listening to records and picking on kids half your age. I could ask you how long it’s going to take you to work out a scheme to fix your unfixable situation. I could ask you to guess how high a priority this matter will be for my supervisors once the next big world crisis arises, which it will, just a matter of time. I could ask you to guess how long the average field operative stays in the field before the wise men make it clear that there’s a desk in his immediate future. But I don’t ask you these things, because I’m not here to discuss the future. This,” and he reached up and rapped on his glass eye with his index finger, “is not a crystal ball.”
Geraci pointed to the iguana with his fork and arched his eyebrows. “You’re not going to finish that?”
Lucadello slid it to him.
“I’ve got two more questions,” Geraci said, pulling iguana vertebrae from his mouth. His hands shook, just a little. “Neither of them require you to use, as you’ve said, a crystal ball. Question number one is why you don’t get rid of me and make it look like a suicide, or just send someone to do the job and then vanish. I’d be surprised if you lacked the expertise. And question number two is—”
“—why am I telling you all this? Right?”
Nick shrugged and reached for a tortilla.
“I need you to trust me,” Lucadello said, sitting back in his chair. “And I know you don’t. You’d be a fool if you did. We worked together well when we were training those men in New Jersey, but you don’t even know my name. You don’t know if maybe I’ve gone off the reservation on this. You don’t know if maybe I’m not even with the company anymore. For all you know, I’m a crazy one-eyed freelance mercenary with sociopathic tendencies. I’m not, of course. The eye notwithstanding. I’m being this candid with you because candor and truth accelerate the creation of trust, not for any other reason. If I can, in fact, build a little trust, my thinking is, it snowballs. You take the information I give you, and you see that it’s the truth, and you act accordingly. The more you can take what I say at face value, the more predictable your reaction will be. That’s what I want. In addition, I don’t have any good reason not to be this candid with you. In the eyes of a lot of important people, you’re a dead man, or destined to be one soon, by your own hand or someone else’s. Nothing in your profile suggests that you’re remotely likely to cooperate with the FBI or go making wild accusations to these folks,” he said, again tapping the newspaper.
Geraci spit out a few more iguana bones into his napkin and signaled for the waiter to bring him another beer.
“It’s your other question that really interests me,” Lucadello said. “What a fascinating glimpse into the way you think. Because this is where we’re so different, you and me. We each have this code, but mine is written down. Mine is the law of the land. I’m not going to have a job done on you for the simple reason that I have no legal means of doing so. It’s against the law. I’m not a lawbreaker, period. It’s amazing to me that you don’t understand that, Nick. Don’t you see? I’m one of the good guys. The white hats. We shave, we love God, we sleep well at night, and in the end, we get the girl.” He laughed. “Which is fortunate, I guess, in case that lizard really is an aphrodisiac.”
“Good luck to you,” Geraci said. “Lot of pretty girls in town. Whether they’ll be eager to fuck a one-eyed good guy in a cheap suit, time will tell.”
Lucadello tossed money on the table—regulations prevented Geraci from picking up his tab—and he stood and bent over toward Geraci’s ear. “Don’t get fancy,” Lucadello said. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, vaffanculo. Up your ass.”
Geraci nodded. “I know what it means, paisan’.”
NOT LONG AFTER NICK ARRIVED IN NEW ORLEANS, he met with Carlo “the Whale” Tramonti for the one and only time, at the Don’s vast hunting preserve he had in the bayous west of New Orleans. Augie the Midget, who would be Nick’s contact here, drove him, in a yellow Cadillac with the brake and gas pedals modified so that he could reach them.
Augie and Nick sat outside a decaying antebellum mansion on tulip-backed metal chairs, as a wild peccary Carlo Tramonti himself had shot with a machine gun rotated on a spit. He’d shot the thing up enough that he’d needed baling wire to keep the carcass from falling apart. The mansion itself had been part of a sugar and timber plantation and had been unoccupied for years until Carlo bought it for what he vaguely called “tax reasons.” Carlo was in charge of the grilling of the pig, too. Augie did most of the talking. Their brother Joe had an easel set up and was painting the scene—pig in the foreground, mansion behind it, no people, and, unlike today, a raging black storm bearing down. Carlo was constantly getting up and down to baste the pig or inject it with gigantic hypodermic needles, marinades and spices he said were family secrets.
In the distance there was almost constant shooting. “Target practice,” Augie said.
“Isn’t that rifle fire?” Geraci said.
“We got a firing range. It’s all farther away than you think. Don’t worry nothin’ about it. Coffee?”
“Is it the kind with chicory in it?”
Carlo chuckled.
“It’s got family secrets in it, too,” Augie explained, pouring them each a mug. “Our own blend. We’re importers. It’s roasted in a warehouse not far from the place you’re stayin’ at.”
“For which you have my deep and sincere gratitude.” Nick raised the mug in a toast. “The house and this delicious coffee both.”
“We thank you, too,” Joe said, looking up from his canvas.
Nick had recently overseen a simple problem for him, vending machines and jukeboxes from some distant source cropping up in several businesses out by the interstate. “Glad to be of service,” Geraci said.
The men all lit up cigars. Joe and Carlo stopped what they’d been doing, and they all sat down together.
“We just want to be clear on some things,” Augie said, “so there ain’t misunderstandings later. First and foremost is sanctuary. That’s what you got with us now, the term we use for it. We don’t grant this too often—in fact, I can’t remember the last time. We can promise you that in your time here we won’t grant it to nobody else, either, meaning no friends of yours from New York or nowhere else will be showing up unannounced. Or showing up at all, if they’re showing us the proper respect. As for the issue of your couriers or contacts, what have you, my brothers and I talked it over, and we can grant you that, too.”
“Thank you,” Geraci said. Momo Barone and Renzo Sacripante had found men they trusted to do this.
“What you should do,” Augie said, “is give us three days’ notice. Either me or Joe here’ll assign someone to escort ’em around while they’re here, meaning never out of their sight, meaning never. They need to piss, they got company doin’ it. You got secrets, unfortunately these men’ll hear ’em. They’ll be trustworthy, don’t worry about that there. This might not be what you see as an ideal situation, but it’s how it’s got to be. Speak now if you got problems.”
Nick shook his head.
Carlo Tramonti
reached over and put a hand on Nick’s shoulder, squeezing it the way a grandfather marvels at his grandson’s muscles. “You seem like a nice fella,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get to be friends. Right now, we ain’t friends yet. Right now, we’re men with common interests. We need to take care of the disrespect Michael Corleone has shown us. The situation I had with the government, it would have never happened if old Bud Payton was president, the way nature intended, which is water over the bridge and under the dam, OK? We accept that. What our beef is with Mr. Corleone is none of your concern. We won’t ask nothing from you in connection with it. My advice to you is, the less curious you are about it, the better. We want you to know this, however: I did business with Vito Corleone, I worked with him in certain things, and I see you, Mr. Nick, as someone more in that vein. Someone we’d be happy to work with. We pledge our support for you to take over as boss of that Family—if, God forbid, anything happened to Mr. Corleone. If anything did happen, who else even could take over? We looked into it some, the answer is nobody. You’d ride through the streets of Brooklyn like a hero to the rescue. We’ve got two conditions. One is that you never say a word about anything you see in Louisiana outside Louisiana. Two is that you do some work for us while you’re here. Simple things, things that pay the bills, more or less along the lines of how you helped out my brother. Shouldn’t be nothin’ for a man of your talents.”
Nick agreed to everything.
He and the three Tramonti brothers embraced. To celebrate, they hacked off a few chunks of the pig above its shoulder and started eating while bloody juice crackled on the coals below, the bulk of the pig still turning on the spit.
Afterward, Augie and Nick boarded one of those boats with the enormous fans in the back: swampers, they’re called. The men were a ridiculous pair: side by side on a swamper, dressed in suits, representing the two extremes of how tall a normal Italian-American might be expected to grow.
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