by Mario Puzo
15.
Cork goofed around, spinning his hat on a fingertip, making a saltshaker stand up at an impossible angle, and in general serving as the entertainment for Sonny and Sandra, and Sandra’s little cousin Lucille, a twelve-year-old who had succumbed to an instant infatuation with Cork at the first sight of him, an infatuation that manifested itself in irrepressible giggles and a dopey batting of her eyes. The four of them were seated in the corner booth of Nicola’s Soda Fountain and Candy Shop, in front of a plate-glass window that looked out on Arthur Avenue, half a block from where Sandra lived with her grandmother, and where, as they talked and drank their sodas and watched Cork performing for them, they all knew Mrs. Columbo was sitting by her window and watching them with eyesight that Sandra claimed would put an eagle to shame.
“Is that her?” Cork asked. He got up and leaned over the table close to the window, and waved in the direction of Sandra’s building.
Lucille squealed and covered her mouth, and Sonny, laughing, pushed Cork down. Sonny and Sandra were seated on one side of the booth, across from Cork and Lucille. Out of sight, under the table, Sonny held Sandra’s hand, his fingers entwined with hers. “Cut it out,” Sonny said. “You’re gonna get her in trouble.”
“Why?” Cork shouted, his face a mask of incredulity. “I’m only being a good lad and waving politely!”
Sandra, who had been quiet throughout the whole carefully arranged meeting, from the time Cork and Sonny met her and Lucille on her front stoop and escorted them to Nicola’s and bought them each sodas, opened her purse, looked at a silver timepiece, and said, softly, “We have to go now, Sonny. I promised my grandmother I’d help her with the laundry.”
“Aw,” Lucille said, “do we have to go already?”
“Hey! Johnny, Nino!” Sonny called to Johnny Fontane and Nino Valenti, who had just pushed through the front door. “Come over here,” he said.
Johnny and Nino were both good-looking boys, a few years older than Cork and Sonny. Johnny was thin and ethereal in comparison to Nino, who was the more muscular of the two. Lucille folded her hands on the table and beamed at them.
“I want you to meet Sandra and her little cousin Lucille,” Sonny said as Johnny and Nino approached the table.
At the word little, Lucille cast a quick dark glare at Sonny.
“We’re very pleased to meet you,” Johnny said, speaking for Nino.
“We are most certainly,” Nino said. He added, squaring off angrily in front of Cork, whom he’d known for as long as he’d known Sonny and his family, “Who’s this mug?”
Cork gave Nino a playful shove. The girls, apparently relieved that Nino wasn’t really angry, laughed at the joke.
“Hey, Sandra,” Johnny said, “you’re too beautiful to be giving a half portion like Sonny the time of day.”
“Yap, yap, yap,” Sonny said.
Nino said, “Don’t pay any attention to Johnny. He thinks he’s the next Rudy Valentino. I keep telling him he’s too skinny.” He poked Johnny in the ribs, and Johnny swatted his hand away.
“Sonny,” Johnny said, “you should bring Sandra to see us at the Breslin. It’s a swank little club. You’ll like it.”
“It’s a hole in the wall,” Nino said, “but, hey, they’re actually gonna pay us with real money.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Johnny said. “He’s a twit, but he can play the mandolin pretty good.”
“When this guy don’t ruin everything by trying to sing,” Nino said, putting his arm around Johnny’s shoulder.
“I know the Breslin,” Cork said. “It’s a hotel on Broadway and Twenty-Ninth.”
“That’s the place,” Nino said. “We’re playin’ the bar.”
“It’s a club,” Johnny said, looking honestly frustrated. “Don’t listen to a word this guy says.”
Under the table, Sandra squeezed Sonny’s hand. “We really have to go,” she said. “I don’t want to get my grandmother mad.”
“All right, you cafon’…” Sonny slid out of the booth. Once he was on his feet, he grabbed Johnny around the neck in a playful headlock. “Hey,” he said, “if my father’s your godfather, what’s that make me? Your godbrother?”
“It makes you a crazy man,” Johnny said, wrestling free of Sonny.
Nino, who had wandered over to the soda fountain, called to Sonny, “Tell your father maybe he wants to come see us at the Breslin. The pasta primavera’s pretty good.”
“Only time my pop goes out to restaurants,” Sonny answered, “is on business. Otherwise,” he added, looking at Sandra, “he prefers to eat at home.”
Cork moved to the door and put his hand on the knob. “Come on, Sonny,” he said, “I gotta go too.”
On the street with the girls, Cork flirted with Lucille, to her delight, while Sonny and Sandra walked side by side quietly. All around them, people hurried across the pavement or scurried by them on the sidewalk, moving quickly to get out of the bitter cold. Potentially lethal icicles hung from the rooftops and fire escapes of several apartment buildings, and the sidewalks here and there were bejeweled with the shattered remains of an icicle that had broken loose. Sonny’s bare hands were pushed deep in his coat pockets. As he walked he leaned toward Sandra so that his arm brushed against her. “What do you think I could do,” Sonny asked as they approached Sandra’s building, “to get your grandmother to let me take you out to dinner?”
Sandra said, “She won’t allow it, Sonny. I’m sorry.” She moved close, as if she might lift her head to him for a kiss—and then she took Lucille by the hand and pulled her up the steps. The girls waved good-bye, and then they were gone, swallowed up by the building’s red brick walls.
“She’s a beauty,” Cork said, walking back to his car with Sonny. “So,” he added, “you gonna marry her?”
Sonny said, “It’d make my family happy. Jeez!” he yelled, turning up his collar and pulling his cap down. “It’s cold as hell out, ain’t it?”
“Cold as a witch’s tit in a brass brassiere,” Cork said.
“Want to stop by home with me? My mom’ll be happy to see you.”
“Nah,” Cork said. “It’s been years since I’ve been by. You should come around and see Eileen and Caitlin, though. Caitlin keeps askin’ for you.”
“Eileen’s probably busy with the bakery.”
“Ah,” Cork said, “isn’t she furious with me now? I’m scared to go around myself anymore.”
“Why?” Sonny asked. “What did you do?”
Cork sighed and then wrapped himself up in his arms, as if the cold was finally getting to him. “She read something in the paper about the stickup, and it said one of the guys had an Irish accent. Then I showed up the same day with money for her and Caitlin. She threw it in my face and started bawlin’. Jaysus,” he sighed, “she’s got herself convinced I’m gonna wind up dead in the gutter.”
“But you didn’t tell her nothin’, did you?”
“She ain’t stupid, Sonny. I’m not workin’ any job she knows of, and I come around with a few hundred for her. She knows the score.”
“But she don’t know about me or anything?”
“Course not,” Cork said. “I mean, she knows you’re a bloody thief for sure, but she don’t know any of the particulars.”
Cork’s Nash was parked in front of a fire hydrant on the corner of 189th, its front right tire on the curb. Sonny pointed to the fire hydrant and said, “Ain’t you got no respect for the law?”
“Listen, Sonny,” Cork said. “I’ve been thinking about something you said to me a while ago, and you’re right. We’ve got to go one way or the other.”
“What are you talking about?” Sonny got into the Nash and pulled the door closed behind him. It was like stepping into an icebox. “V’fancul’!” he said. “Turn on the heat!”
Cork started the car and revved the engine. “I’m not sayin’ I’m not happy with the money we’re making,” he said, watching the temperature gauge, “but it’s penny ante compared to
what guys like your father are pullin’ in.”
“So? My father’s got an organization he’s been building since before either of us was born. You can’t make the comparison.” Sonny gave Cork a funny look, as if to ask what the hell he was getting at.
“Sure,” Cork said. “But what I’m sayin’ is, if—like you said—you went to him and told him you wanted to be part of his organization, then maybe you could bring us all in with you.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sonny said. “Cork… For all I know, I tell my father what we’ve been doing and I’ll be the first guy he kills.”
“Ah,” Cork said. He turned on the heat. “You could be right.” He shoved Sonny. “He wants you to be an automobile tycoon,” he said. “Sonny Corleone, captain of industry.”
“Yeah, but I’ve missed work two days already this week.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cork said, and he pulled the Nash out onto the street. “I promise you, Sonny, Leo won’t fire you.”
Sonny thought about that and then grinned. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
The film reel on the projector wobbled as the machine whirred and hummed and cast across the darkened hotel room a scratchy black-and-white image of a short, plump young woman with long black hair sucking a headless man’s dick. The guy in the film stood with his legs spread and his hands on his hips, and though the frame of the shot cut off his head, he was clearly a young guy, his taut white skin heavily muscled. On a couch next to the projector, one of Chez Hollywood’s camera girls sat in Giuseppe Mariposa’s lap. With one hand Giuseppe played with the camera girl’s breasts, while in his other hand he held a fat cigar, its smoke wafting up into the stream of light from the projector. Next to Giuseppe and the camera girl, Phillip Tattaglia had his hand under the slip of one of his whores, while another of his girls knelt on the floor between his legs, her head buried in his lap. They were all in their underwear, everyone except the singer from Chez Hollywood with the striking platinum blond hair and the two young guys seated by the hotel room door, both of whom were wearing blue pin-striped suits, a matching set of hatchet men. Giuseppe had taken the singer to the hotel on a date, and now she waited fully dressed in a chair across from the couch looking tense and fidgety, her dark eyes shooting to the door every few minutes, as if she was considering bolting.
“Watch this,” Tattaglia said as the stag-film scene was about to culminate. “All over her!” he shouted, and he shook Giuseppe’s shoulder. “What do you think?” he asked the girl with her head in his lap. He pushed her away and straightened himself out, and then asked the girl under his arm the same question. “What do you think?” he said. “Is she good?” He was asking about the girl in the stag film.
“I couldn’t tell you,” the girl beside him answered in a smoky voice. “You’d have to ask the guy, in my opinion.”
Giuseppe laughed at that and pinched the girl’s cheek. “You got a smart one here,” he said to Tattaglia. On-screen, two more guys entered the frame and went about undressing the girl, whose face was now suddenly clean and freshly made up.
“Joe,” Tattaglia said, “movies like this, they’re gonna be big. I can make ’em for almost nothing and sell them to every Rotary Club in the country for plenty of dough.”
“You think rubes will buy this kind of thing?” Mariposa asked, his eyes fastened to the screen, his hand lingering under the camera girl’s bra.
“People been buyin’ this kind of thing since the beginning of time,” Tattaglia said. “We already make a good buck selling pictures. Movies like these, I tell you, Joe, movies like these are gonna be big.”
“So where do I come in?”
“Financing. Distribution. That kind of thing,” Tattaglia said.
Giuseppe was puffing on his cigar and thinking over the proposition when someone knocked on the hotel room door and the two hatchet men, startled, jumped up in unison.
“Go ahead and get it,” Giuseppe said, meaning get the door. He pushed the camera girl off his lap.
The kid cracked the door an inch and then pulled it open the rest of the way. A swatch of bright light washed over half the room as Emilio Barzini stepped out of the hall, holding his hat in his hands.
“Close that,” Joe barked, and the kid quickly shut the door.
“Joe,” Emilio said. He took a few steps into the dark room, cast a glance at the stag film, and then looked back to the couch. “You wanted to see me?”
Giuseppe pulled his pants on and fastened his belt. He stubbed out his cigar in a cut-glass ashtray on the table in front of him. To the others he said, “I’ll be right back.” He stepped around the couch and through a partially opened door into an attached room.
Emilio shielded his eyes against the flickering bright light of the projector as he crossed the room to join Giuseppe, who turned on the overhead lights in the second room before he closed the door. Emilio glanced at a king-size bed bracketed by gleaming mahogany end tables, both of which were decorated with fat vases brimming with a bright array of cut flowers. Across from the bed, a matching mahogany vanity table with an adjustable mirror and a floral upholstered bench was set up catty-corner beside a long dresser. Giuseppe pulled the bench out with his foot, took a seat, and crossed his arms over his chest. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt that accentuated the muscles of his shoulders and arms. He was almost youthful, even with the white hair and the creases and lines etched through his face. “Listen, Emilio,” he said, starting out calmly, though the calm was obviously willed. “We lost more than six grand this last stickup.” He opened his hands. “And we still don’t know who they are, these bastards! They rob me, they disappear for months, they rob me again. Basta!” he said. “No more. I want these guys, and I want them dead.”
“Joe,” Emilio said. He tossed his hat on the dresser and took a seat on the edge of the bed. “We think it’s the Irish now,” he said. “We’re leaning on everybody.”
“And the micks don’t know nothin’?” Giuseppe said. “Nobody knows nothin’?”
“Joe—”
“Don’t ‘Joe’!” Giuseppe yelled. “Nobody knows fuckin’ nothin’!” he shouted, emphasizing “nothin’ ” by overturning the vanity, toppling it into the wall, where its mirror shattered, throwing shards of glass into the plush carpeting.
“Joe,” Emilio said, evenly, “it’s not the Corleone family, and it’s not Tessio. We been watching them. And one of the stickup guys has an Irish accent.”
“I don’t care about this bullshit anymore,” Giuseppe said. He righted the vanity. “Look at this mess.” He gestured to the glass strewn across the carpeting and glared at Emilio as if he had been the one who smashed the mirror. “I called you because I got a job,” he said. “I want you to see that fucking olive oil salesman, that fancy talking bag of wind, and you tell him that he either takes care of whoever it is giving me headaches, or I’m holding him personally responsible. Understand? I’m tired of this son of a bitch looking down his nose at me.” Giuseppe stooped to pick up a shard of glass. He held it up and looked at his own reflection, at the white hair and the wrinkles etched around his eyes. “You tell Vito Corleone,” he said, “starting today, starting right this minute, every cent I lose to these bastards, he owes me. It comes out of his pocket. You make that very clear to him. You got it, Emilio? Either he puts an end to it, or he pays for it. That’s the deal. I told him nicely to take care of this and he gave me the high hat. Now this is the deal. One way or another, he takes care of it, or else. You understand what I’m saying, Emilio?”
Emilio retrieved his hat from the dresser. “You’re the boss, Giuseppe,” he said. “That’s what you want me to do, I’m on my way.”
“That’s right,” Giuseppe said. “I’m the boss. You just deliver my message.”
Emilio put his hat on and started for the door.
“Hey,” Giuseppe said, relaxing a bit now, as if after having delivered his decree he felt better. “You don’t have to run,” he said. “You want the canary out ther
e?” he asked. “I’m tired of her. She acts like she’s got a broom stuck up her ass.”
“I better go take care of your business,” Emilio said. He tipped his hat to Giuseppe and left.
Giuseppe frowned at the mess of glass and his own fragmented reflection looking back at him. He stared at himself, at the broken, puzzle-like image, as if something in the picture confused or bothered him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He turned off the light and joined the others in the dark, where the long-haired girl on-screen was now in bed with three guys. He watched standing, cast a single quick look at the canary, who was sitting rigid and quiet with her hands in her lap, and then he joined Tattaglia and the girls on the couch.
16.
Vito crossed the pedestrian bridge connecting the Criminal Courts Building to the Tombs. Outside, beyond the line of tall windows that looked down on Franklin Street, the sidewalks were crowded with New Yorkers in heavy overcoats, many of whom, Vito guessed, had business with the courts or were visiting friends and family locked up in the Tombs. Vito had never seen the inside of a jail cell, nor had he ever been a defendant in a criminal trial—though he was always keenly aware of the possibility of both. On his way to the bridge, he had traversed the tall corridors of the Criminal Courts Building, meeting the eyes of the cops and the lawyers, the pezzonovante in their pin-striped suits carrying fancy leather attachés, while the cop he was following, who had been handsomely paid off, had kept his eyes largely on the ground. He’d walked Vito quickly past the swinging doors of a large courtroom, where Vito had caught a quick glance of a black-robed judge seated on his gleaming wood throne. The courtroom had reminded Vito of a church, and the judge, of a priest. Something in Vito had felt anger at the sight of the judge, maybe even something more than anger, maybe fury—as if the judge was responsible for all the cruelty and inhumanity in the world, for the murder of women and children everywhere, from Sicily to Manhattan. Vito couldn’t have put into words why he felt this flash of anger, this desire to kick open the courtroom’s swinging doors and pull the judge down from his perch—and all anyone observing him would have seen was a slow closing and opening of his eyes, as if he had taken a moment to rest as he walked past the courtroom and toward the two wide doors that opened onto the pedestrian bridge.