The Family Corleone

by Mario Puzo

  “You got any kids?” Benny asked.

  “Kids are nothin’ but trouble,” Joey said.

  “Huh,” Benny said, “I like ’em,” and he continued beside Joey, heading for the Forty-Second Street exit as bits and pieces of conversations bounced off walls and floated up toward the constellations in an impossibly high ceiling.

  “I got nothin’ against kids,” Joey said. “All it is, is, they’re trouble, is all.” He scratched the back of his neck as if something had just bitten him there. “He’s meeting us right outside, right? You sure you can still reco’nize him?”

  “Yeah,” Benny said. “Known him since he was little.”

  “He’s one of Mariposa’s boys? I gotta tell you,” Joey said, “I don’t like it this guy’s gotta call us in all the way from Chicago to take care of his business for him. Fuckin’ Sicilians. Bunch of farmers.”

  “D’you tell Nitti that?”

  “What? That Sicilians are a bunch of farmers?”

  “No. That you don’t like it we’re coming from Chicago to take care of New York business.”

  “No,” Joey said. “Did you tell Al?”

  “Al’s currently unavailable.”

  “This shouldn’t be no trouble,” Benny said. “From what I hear this Corleone is all talk, no muscle.”

  “That’s probably what the Anthonys heard too,” Joey said, and he attacked the back of his neck again, scratching like he was trying to kill something.

  Outside Grand Central, on the sidewalk in front of the Forty-Second Street exit, Carmine Loviero tossed a cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with his toe. “Over here,” he called to Benny. “Eh!”

  Benny was halfway into the motion of lifting his right arm to check his wristwatch when he froze at the sound of Carmine calling him. He looked over to the bulky figure in a pale-blue suit and observed him with obvious confusion before crossing the sidewalk. “Little Carmine!” he said finally. He put his suitcase down and embraced him. “Madre ’Dio! I didn’t recognize you! You must have put on twenty pounds!”

  “More like forty since the last time I saw you,” Carmine said. “Jesus, what was I, fifteen years old?”

  “Yeah, probably. Got to be ten years.” Benny looked over Carmine’s shoulder at the guy standing on the curb behind and to the left of him. “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “This is my buddy JoJo,” Carmine said. “JoJo DiGiorgio. You guys never met?”

  “Nah,” JoJo said. “Never had the pleasure.” He offered Benny his hand.

  Joey Daniello had hung back from the meeting and was watching the three men from beside the entrance to Grand Central. As he leaned against the terminal’s outer wall, his foot resting on his suitcase, his right hand in his pocket, he massaged his forehead with his free hand. He looked like a man suffering from a headache.

  Benny shook hands with JoJo and then turned and waved for Joey to join them. “Joey the Gyp,” he said under his breath to Carmine. “He don’t look like much, but, Madon’! Don’t get him mad. He’s a lunatic.” When Joey joined them, his hand still in his pocket, Benny said, “This is Little Carmine I was telling you about, and this here,” he said, “is JoJo DiGiorgio.”

  Joey nodded to both men. “So is this a reunion,” he asked, “or do we have business needs taking care of?”

  “Business,” JoJo said. To Carmine he said, “Get their suitcases, why don’t you?”

  Carmine looked to JoJo as if he wasn’t sure what was being asked of him. Then he turned to Benny and Joey and said, “Yeah, let me get your suitcases for you.”

  Once Carmine had both suitcases in hand, JoJo stepped out onto the street and waved as if he were calling a cab. He waved with his left hand, his right hand dangling by his jacket pocket, Carmine clear in his peripheral vision, standing there with the suitcases in hand. “Here we are,” JoJo said as a black Buick sedan pulled to the curb.

  “Where we going?” Daniello asked.

  “Mariposa wants to see you,” JoJo said, and he held the back door open for them. “Carmine,” he said, as Benny and Joey slid into the empty backseat, “put the suitcases in the trunk.” Carmine went behind the car to open the trunk as the street-side door opened and Luca Brasi, wrapped in a black trench coat, slid into the car brandishing a .38 Super, which he pushed into Benny’s gut. Vinnie Vaccarelli, in the driver’s seat, spun around and put a pistol in Joey’s face as he quickly frisked him. He pulled one gun out of Joey’s pocket and another out of an ankle holster. Luca yanked a big Colt .45 out from under Benny’s jacket and tossed it into the front seat with Joey’s guns. A second later JoJo was in the passenger seat beside Vinnie and they were weaving through midtown traffic.

  Joey Daniello said to Benny, “Hey, where’s your good pal Little Carmine? Looks like he got lost.”

  Benny, who was sweating, asked Luca in a shaky voice if he could get a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his brow, and Luca nodded.

  Joey was grinning. He looked like he was enjoying himself. “Hey, JoJo,” he said, and he leaned closer to the front seat, “how much you guys pay Benny’s good friend Little Carmine to set us up? I’m curious.”

  “We didn’t pay him nothin’,” JoJo said. He took his hat off and dropped it over the guns on the seat between him and Vinnie. “We convinced him it’d be good for his health to do what we told him.”

  “Oh,” Joey said, and he leaned back in his seat again, his eyes on Luca. To Benny he said, “Hey. At least your pal didn’t sell you out. That’s something.”

  Benny’s face was pale and he appeared to be having trouble breathing. “Relax,” Luca said to him. “We’re not gonna—kill anybody.”

  Joey Daniello laughed. It was a bitter little laugh that didn’t interrupt the stare he had fixed on Luca.

  “Carmine’s on his way back to Jumpin’ Joe right now,” Vinnie said, looking into the rearview. “Maybe they’ll send the cavalry for you.”

  Joey pointed a finger at Luca. “You know who you look like? Really,” he said, “you look like that fuckin’ Frankenstein that Boris Karloff plays in the movie. Did you see that?” He touched his eyebrows. “The way your forehead’s like that,” he said. “Like an ape, you know?” When Luca didn’t answer, he added, “What happened to your face? You have a stroke or something? My grandmother looked like that after she had a stroke.”

  JoJo pointed his gun at Daniello. To Luca he said, “You want me to put a bullet in his face right here, boss?”

  “Put it away,” Luca said.

  “He don’t want you to shoot me in the car,” Joey said. “Why make a mess?” Looking at Luca again, he said, “You probably got a nice place all picked out for us.”

  “Relax,” Luca said to Daniello. “I said we’re not gonna kill anybody.”

  Joey laughed the same bitter laugh. He shook his head, as if disgusted by Luca lying to him. He looked out his window. “All these people on the street,” he said, sounding like he was talking to himself. “They all got things to do. They’re all going someplace.”

  JoJo glanced at Luca, his face screwed up like Daniello might be a little crazy.

  Benny said, “If you’re not killin’ us, what are you doing?”

  JoJo looked to Luca again before he answered. “You’re bringing a message back to Capone and the Chicago Outfit. That’s all. We’re sending out messages today, like Western Union. Little Carmine’s bringing a message to Mariposa, and you’re bringing a message back to the Outfit.”

  “Oh yeah?” Joey said, grinning. “Well, give us the message and you can let us out at the corner. We’ll grab a cab.” When no one answered, he said, “Yeah. A message.”

  On the corner of West Houston and Mercer, Vinnie parked in a dirt alley between a line of warehouses and factories. It was a sunny morning and there were men on the street behind them in lightweight jackets and women in summery dresses. A vein of sunlight penetrated a few feet into the alley and washed over a grimy brick wall. Beyond that it was all shadow. There was no one moving
, but a dirt path on the ground had been beaten into dust with foot traffic. “So we’re here,” Daniello said, as if he recognized the place.

  Luca pulled Benny out of the car and then they all followed the shadowy alley until it ran into a second, wider alley that crossed the first like a T, where a line of shacks was propped up against a windowless brick wall. The shacks were made of cobbled-together scrap wood and junk, and they had stovepipes sticking out of their roofs. A cat lay on the ground outside the tarp doorway of one shack, beside a baby carriage and a soot-blackened metal garbage barrel with a cooking grate over the top of it. The alley was deserted at this time of the morning, when everyone was out looking for work.

  “It’s here,” Vinnie said, and he led the group to a locked door between two of the shacks. He pulled a key from his pocket, struggled with the lock a minute, and then put his shoulder into the door and opened it onto the dank, empty space of what must have once been a factory but was now an echoey shell where pigeons roosted on high windows and spattered the floor with their droppings. The place smelled of mold and dust, and Benny covered his nose with his cap before Vinnie pushed him along toward a rectangular opening in the floor, where a single length of pipe remained from what was once a railing. “This way,” Vinnie said, pointing down the opening to a rickety flight of stairs that disappeared into darkness.

  “I can’t even see nothing down there,” Benny said.

  “Here,” JoJo said. He moved in front of Benny and started down the stairs with a silvery cigarette lighter held out in front of him. At the bottom of the steps, where it was too dark to see, he flipped open the lighter and the red glow of the flame illuminated a flickering red corridor. Every few feet along the hallway there were openings into small rooms with dirt floors and bare brick walls. The walls were damp and clammy, and water dripped from a low ceiling.

  “This is perfect,” Daniello said. “It’s the fuckin’ catycombs down here.”

  “The what?” Vinnie said.

  “It’s this one.” JoJo led the others into one of the spaces.

  “Yeah, what makes this one special?” Daniello asked.

  “This,” JoJo said, and he lowered his cigarette lighter and placed it on an upright brick next to a coil of rope and a roll of black plastic.

  Daniello laughed out loud. “Hey, Boris,” he said to Luca. “I thought you weren’t gonna kill us.”

  Luca put a hand on Joey’s shoulder and said, “I’m not—going to kill you—Mr. Daniello.” He gestured to Vinnie and JoJo, and in the flickering red glow of the cigarette lighter they went about tying up Benny’s and Joey’s hands and feet with lengths of rope that Luca hacked off with a machete he’d pulled out from under his trench coat.

  “A machete?” Joey said, sounding angry for the first time at the sight of the long blade. “What are you, fuckin’ savages?”

  Once they were bound, Luca lifted first Benny and then Joey off the ground against opposite walls, facing each other, where he looped their bound hands over a pair of blackened hooks and left them dangling, their feet inches above the ground. When Luca picked up the machete again, which he had propped up against a wall, Benny said, “Mannaggia la miseria,” plaintively, through a sob.

  “Hey, Benny,” Daniello asked, “how many men you killed?”

  “A few,” Benny said, loud, trying to speak without sobbing.

  “Then shut the fuck up.” To Luca, Joey said, “Hey, Boris,” and when Luca turned to him, he said, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” in the voice of Boris Karloff from the movie. He laughed wildly and tried to repeat the lines again but choked on his own laughter.

  Vinnie said, “Jesus, Daniello. You’re one crazy bastard.”

  Luca buttoned up his trench coat and turned up the collar. He motioned for Vinnie and JoJo to step back in the doorway. He swung the machete brutally and hacked off Benny’s feet, high above the ankles. Blood splashed across the room and poured out onto the floor. Luca stood back to look over his work, and when Benny’s yelps and screams seemed to annoy him, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and jammed it in down the kid’s throat.

  “So—what?” Joey said, calmly, once Benny’s screams were muffled. “You really not gonna kill us? You’re just crippling us? That’s your message?”

  “No,” Luca answered. “I’m—gonna kill—Benny. I don’t like him.” He swung the machete again and sliced off Benny’s hands at the wrists. When the kid’s body hit the ground and he tried to crawl away on his stumps, Luca stepped on his calf and pinned him to the floor. “Looks like—you’ll have to deliver our message—to the Outfit,” he said to Joey. Under his foot, the kid spit out the handkerchief and screamed for help, as if there were a chance someone would hear him in the basement of an abandoned factory, behind a deserted alley, as if it were possible that someone would come to his rescue. Luca leaned over the kid and, with both hands on the hilt, thrust the machete through his back and heart. When he pulled the blade out, there was blood everywhere, on the walls and the dirt floor, all over Luca’s trench coat, and on Joey Daniello still hanging from the wall, on his clothes and on his face. Luca kicked the kid’s body to a corner and then reached into his pocket and pulled out a clean white slip of paper. His bloody hands quickly threatened to render the handwritten note unreadable. He passed it to JoJo. “Read this to—Mr. Daniello,” he said. “This is the—message you’re to—deliver,” he said to Joey. “It’s from Don Corleone, and—it’s intended—for your bosses—in Chicago and—for Capone in Atlanta.” He nodded to JoJo.

  JoJo carried the note across the room and bent down close to the flame of the cigarette lighter. “Dear Mr. Capone,” JoJo said, reading from the note, “now you know how I deal with my enemies.” He coughed, clearing his throat. “Why does a Neapolitan interfere in a quarrel between two Sicilians?” he continued, taking his time with each word. “If you wish me to consider you as a friend, I owe you a service which I will pay on demand.” He pulled the paper close to his face, trying to read through a blood smear. “A man like yourself,” he continued, “must know how much more profitable it is to have a friend who, instead of calling on you for help, takes care of his own affairs and stands ever ready to aid you in some future time of trouble.” He paused and tried to wipe away another blood smear over the last sentence. “If you do not want my friendship,” he read, “so be it. But then I must tell you that the climate in this city is damp, unhealthy for Neapolitans, and you are advised never to visit.” When he was finished, he stood and handed the note back to Luca, who folded it and slipped it into Joey Daniello’s jacket pocket.

  “That’s it?” Joey said. “Just deliver this note?”

  “Can I trust—you to deliver it?” Luca asked.

  “Sure,” Daniello said. “I can deliver your message for you. Sure I can.”

  “Good,” Luca said. He picked up the machete and started for the door. “You know what?” he said, pausing in the doorway. “You know what?” he repeated, approaching Joey. “I’m not so sure—I can trust you.”

  “Yeah, you can trust me,” Daniello said, the words shooting out quick and hurried. “Why wouldn’t I deliver your boss’s message? You can trust me, sure you can.”

  Luca seemed to think about it. “You know that—Frankenstein monster—you were—jabberin’ about? I saw that movie.” He pursed his lips, as if to say he didn’t know what all the fuss was about. “Not much—of a monster—if you ask me.”

  Joey said, “What the hell’s that got to do with anything?”

  Luca turned his back on Daniello, took a step toward the door, and then spun around with the machete like Mel Ott swinging a bat and beheaded Daniello with a quick series of three blows. Daniello’s head rolled across the floor and into the wall under a spray of blood. To JoJo, Luca said, on his way out the door, “Let them—bleed out—wrap up the bodies—get rid of them.” He went back, pulled Don Corleone’s note out of Daniello’s pocket, and handed it to Vinnie. “Put this in—a suitcase with—the kid’s hands—m
ake sure it gets—delivered—to Frank Nitti.” He tossed the machete into the blood-reddened dirt and walked out into the darkness of the corridor.

  22.

  One of Tony Rosato’s men leaned over a sink full of sudsy water in the Twenty-Fifth Street apartment and scrubbed his shirt on a washboard. He was a short, squat kid in his twenties, wearing a sleeveless white undershirt and wrinkled dress pants, his thick head of hair a rumpled mop. Giuseppe had been up for an hour already. From the look of the sunlight through the kitchen windows, it was after ten in the morning. The kid was intent on dragging his shirt over a washboard, a sheet of opaque, corrugated glass in a wood frame, splashing suds over the side of the porcelain sink and onto the linoleum. Giuseppe glanced up and down the hallway outside the kitchen and saw no one moving. After ten o’clock and every one of the idiots working for him was still sleeping, except this idiota washing his shirt in the kitchen sink. Giuseppe looked at the front page of the New York Times, which he had just picked up a moment earlier outside the front door, where he’d found both of Tomasino’s guards asleep in their chairs. He’d picked up the newspaper, closed the door, and come back down the hall to the kitchen, and he hadn’t roused anyone’s attention, not even this moron washing his shirt in the sink. What balls! Washing his shirt in the kitchen where everybody else eats.

  Albert Einstein was on the front page of the Times looking like some ciucc’ in a good suit with a wing collar and a silk tie—and he couldn’t comb his fuckin’ hair.

  “Hey, stupido,” Giuseppe said.

  The kid at the sink jumped, splashing water onto the floor. “Don Mariposa!” He looked at Giuseppe, saw his expression, and held up his shirt. “I spilled wine all over my good shirt,” he said. “The boys was all up late last night playing—”

  “Mezzofinocch’!” Giuseppe said. “I catch you again washing your clothes where the rest of us eat, I’ll put a bullet in your ass. Okay?”

  “Sure,” the kid said, like the idiota he was. He reached into the soapy water and pulled out a rubber stopper. “It won’t happen again, Don Mariposa,” he said, the water draining fast out of the sink, a whirlpool parting the suds.