by Mario Puzo
Vito said, “Think, Sonny. Please. Use your head.” He clapped his hands over Sonny’s face, gave him a shake, and let him go. “What good does Emilio Barzini dead do for us? Then we’re fighting Carmine Barzini and the Rosato brothers—and Mariposa.” When Sonny didn’t answer, Vito continued: “With Emilio alive and Mariposa dead, when we finish dividing up Mariposa’s territories—there will be five families, and we’ll be the strongest of the five. That’s our goal. That’s what we need to be thinking about—not killing Emilio.”
“Forgive me, Pop,” Sonny said, “but if we went after all of them, we could be the only family.”
“Again,” Vito said, “think. Even if we could win such a war, what happens after? The newspapers will make us out as monsters. We make bitter enemies of the relatives of the men we kill.” Vito leaned into Sonny and put his hands on his shoulders. “Sonny,” he said, “Sicilians never forget and they never forgive. This is a truth you must always keep in mind. I want to win this war so that we can have a long peace afterward and die surrounded by our families, in our own beds. I want Michael and Fredo and Tom to go into legitimate businesses, so that they can be rich and prosperous—and unlike me and now you, Sonny, they won’t always have to worry about who will be trying to kill them next. Do you understand, Sonny? Do you understand what it is that I want for this family?”
Sonny said, “Yeah, Pop, I understand.”
“Good,” Vito said, and gently brushed Sonny’s hair back off his forehead. When a door opened behind them, Vito touched Sonny’s shoulder and pointed to the light switch by the door.
Sonny turned on the lights and Clemenza entered the room.
To Sonny, Vito said, “There’s much to do in the coming days.” He touched Sonny’s arm again. “We must be on guard for treachery.” He hesitated and appeared to be caught in a moment of indecision. “I’m going to leave now,” he said, and glanced once toward Sonny and quickly looked away, almost as if he was afraid to meet his eyes. “Treachery,” he said again, softly, whispering a warning to himself, and then he raised a finger and nodded to Clemenza and Sonny, as if to emphasize the warning. “Listen to Clemenza,” he said to Sonny, and he left the room.
“What’s going on?” Sonny asked.
“Aspett’,” Clemenza said, and he closed the door gently behind Vito, as if being careful not to make too much noise. “Sit down.” He pointed to the two facing chairs where Sonny had sat a few minutes earlier with his father.
“Sure,” Sonny said. He took a seat and crossed his legs, making himself comfortable. “What’s this about?”
Clemenza was wearing his typical baggy, rumpled suit with a bright-yellow tie so crisp and clean that it had to be brand-new. He plopped himself down in the chair across from Sonny, grunted with the pleasure of taking the weight off his feet, and took a black pistol out of one jacket pocket and a silvery silencer out of the other. He held up the silencer. “You know what this is?”
Sonny gave Clemenza a look. Of course he knew it was a silencer. “What’s this about?” he asked again.
“Personally, I don’t like silencers,” Clemenza said. He went about attaching the heavy metal tube to the barrel of the gun as he spoke. “I prefer a big, noisy gun,” he said, “better to scare anybody gets ideas. Big bang, everybody scatters, you walk away.”
Sonny laughed and clasped his hands behind his neck. He leaned back and waited for Clemenza to get around to whatever it was he wanted to say.
Clemenza fiddled with the silencer. He was having trouble getting it attached. “This is about Bobby Corcoran,” he said, finally.
“Ah,” Sonny said, and he glanced behind him, out the window, as if he was looking for something that he’d just remembered he’d lost. “I can’t figure it,” he said when he turned back to Clemenza—and the way he said it made it sound like a question.
“What’s there to figure?” Clemenza answered.
Sonny said, “I don’t know what the hell to think, Uncle Pete.” He was immediately embarrassed at having fallen back to his childhood way of addressing Clemenza, and he tried to rush past the moment by speaking quickly. “I know Bobby shot Pop,” he said, “I saw it like everybody else, but…”
“But you can’t believe it,” Clemenza said, as if he knew what Sonny was thinking.
“Yeah,” Sonny said. “It’s—” He looked away again, not knowing what else to say.
“Listen, Sonny,” Clemenza said, and he went back to fiddling with the gun, loosening and tightening the silencer, checking that it was properly fitted to the barrel. “I understand,” he said, “that you’ve grown up with this kid Bobby, that you’ve known him all your life…” He paused and nodded, as if he had just explained something to himself satisfactorily. “But Bobby Corcoran has got to go,” he said. “He shot your father.” He twisted the silencer one last time, till it fit snug to the barrel, and then he handed the gun to Sonny.
Sonny took the pistol and dropped it in his lap, as if putting it aside. “Bobby’s parents,” he said, quietly, “they both died when he was a baby, from the flu.”
Clemenza nodded and was silent.
“His sister and her daughter, they’re all he’s got. And Bobby, he’s all they got.”
Again Clemenza was silent.
“Bobby’s sister, Eileen,” Sonny went on, “her husband, Jimmy Gibson, one of Mariposa’s goons killed him in a strike riot.”
“Who killed him?” Clemenza asked.
“One of Mariposa’s goons.”
“Is that what you heard?”
“Yeah. That’s what I heard.”
“Because that’s what some people wanted you to hear.”
“You know different?”
“If it’s got to do with the unions,” Clemenza said, “we know about it.” He sighed and glanced up at the ceiling, where a line of light coming from beyond the window moved slowly from right to left. “Pete Murray killed Jimmy Gibson,” he said. “He clocked him with a lead pipe. There was some kind of bad blood between them—I forget the whole story—but Pete didn’t want it to get around that he’d killed one of his own, so he worked a deal with Mariposa. Pete Murray was on Mariposa’s payroll since forever. It was how Giuseppe kept his thumb on the Irish.”
“Jesus,” Sonny said. He looked down at the gun and silencer in his lap.
“Listen, Sonny,” Clemenza said, and then, just as Vito had done earlier, he put his hand on Sonny’s knee. “This is a tough business. The cops, the army…,” he said, and he appeared to be struggling for words. “Put a uniform on somebody, tell ’em you got to kill this other guy because he’s the bad guy, you got to kill him—and then anybody can pull the trigger. But in this business, sometimes you got to kill people who maybe they’re your friends.” He stopped and shrugged, as if he were taking a moment to think about this himself. “That’s the way it is in this business. Sometimes maybe it’s even people you love and you got to do it. That’s just the way it is,” he repeated, “in this business.” He picked up the gun from Sonny’s lap and handed it to him. “It’s time for you to make your bones,” he said. “Bobby Corcoran’s got to go, and you got to be the one to do it. He shot your father, Santino. That’s the long and short of it. He’s got to go and you got to do it.”
Sonny dropped the gun into his lap again and peered down at it as if he were looking at a mystery. When finally he picked it up, it was black and heavy in his hands, the silencer adding extra weight. He was still staring at it when he heard the door close and realized that Clemenza had left the room. He shook his head as if he refused to believe what was happening, though the gun was there, in his hand, solid and heavy. Alone in the sudden quiet, he closed a fist around the butt of the gun. In a series of movements that uncannily matched Vito’s only minutes earlier, he leaned forward, hung his head, ran the fingers of his free hand through his hair, and then held his head in his hands, the butt of the gun cold against his temple. He touched his finger to the trigger and then sat there motionless in the quiet.
Fredo woke to darkness, his head buried in pillows and his knees pulled to his chest. He didn’t know where he was for a minute, and then the excitement of the previous day came back to him and he knew he was in his own bed and he remembered the parade and that his father had been shot but that he’d be okay. He’d seen him. Mama had let him and Michael get a peek at him before she pulled them back and sent them upstairs to their room, away from all the commotion in the house. Pop’s arm was in a sling, but he looked okay—and then no one would tell him anything more about what had happened. He tried to listen at the door, but Mama was in the room with them, making them both, him and Michael, do their schoolwork, and keeping them from hearing anything. They couldn’t even turn on the radio, and Mama wouldn’t let Michael talk about it, and then he fell asleep. Still, he knew there’d been shooting at the parade and Pop had been hit in the shoulder. As he lay in bed letting the day’s events come back to him, Fredo found himself getting angry again because he’d been unlucky enough to miss the whole thing. If he’d been there, maybe he could have protected his father. Maybe he could have kept him from getting shot. He might have thrown himself over his father, or knocked him out of the way of the bullet. He wished he had been there. He wished he’d had the chance to show his father and everybody else that he wasn’t just a kid. If he’d had the chance to save his father from being shot, everybody’d see. He was fifteen now. He wasn’t a kid anymore.
When finally Fredo turned over, pulling his head out of the pillows, he was groggy with sleep. Across the room, Michael’s covers were tented over his knees and light was seeping out around the edges. “Michael, what are you doing?” Fredo whispered. “You reading under there?”
“Yeah,” Michael’s voice came back, muffled. Then he peeled the covers back and stuck his head out. “I sneaked a newspaper from downstairs,” he said, and he showed Fredo a copy of the Mirror. On the cover was a picture of a little kid lying on the sidewalk, his arm hanging over the curb, and over the picture was the huge headline: “Gangland Massacre!”
“Holy cow!” Fredo said, and leapt out of his bed and onto Michael’s. “What’s it say?” He snatched the paper and the flashlight away from Michael.
“It says Pop’s a gangster. It says he’s a big shot in the Mafia.”
Fredo turned the page and saw a picture of his father being pushed into a paddy wagon. “Pop says there’s no such thing as the Mafia,” he said, and then he saw a picture of Richie Gatto on his face in the street, his arms and legs twisted, blood all around him. “That’s Richie,” he said, softly.
“Yeah,” Michael said. “Richie’s dead.”
“Richie’s dead?” Fredo said. “Did you see him get shot?” he asked, and then he dropped the newspaper as the bedroom door opened.
“What are you two doing?” Carmella demanded. She came into the bedroom wearing a blue robe over a white nightgown, her hair unpinned and falling to her shoulders. “Where did you get this?” She picked up the newspaper from the bed, folded it in half, and held it to her breast as if trying to hide it.
“Michael snuck it up from downstairs,” Fredo said.
Michael gave Fredo a look and then turned to his mother and nodded.
“Did you read it?” she asked.
“Michael did,” Fredo said. “Is Richie really dead?”
Carmella crossed herself and was silent, though her expression and the tears that came to her eyes were answer enough.
Fredo said, “But Pop’s okay, right?”
“Didn’t you see him yourself?” Carmella stuffed the folded newspaper into the pocket of her robe and then took Fredo by the arm and led him back to his bed. To Michael she said, “You can’t believe what you read in the newspapers.”
Michael said, “They say Pop’s a big shot in the Mafia. Is that true?”
“The Mafia,” Carmella said, pulling her robe tight. “Everything with Italians, it’s always the Mafia. Would a Mafia know congressmen like your father does?”
Michael pushed his hair off his forehead and seemed to think about this. “I’m not doing my report on Congress,” he said. “I changed my mind.”
“What are you talking about, Michael? All the work you’ve done!”
“I’ll find another subject.” Michael settled himself into his bed, pulling the covers up over him.
Carmella took a step back. She shook her head at Michael, as if disappointed in him. She wiped tears from her eyes. “I hear another sound from in here,” she said to Fredo, “I’ll tell your father.” She said it halfheartedly and then hesitated, watching her boys.
When she left the room, pulling the bedroom door closed behind her, she found Tom waiting at the head of the stairs. “Madon’!” she said, joining him. “Isn’t anybody sleeping tonight?”
Tom sat down on the top step and Carmella joined him. “Are the boys upset?” he asked.
“They know Richie’s dead,” she answered, and she pulled the Mirror from the pocket of her robe and looked at the picture of the dead child on the cover.
Tom took the newspaper from her. “I should be out on Long Island with the rest of the men.” He rolled the paper into a tight little tube and tapped the edge of the step with it. “They leave me here with the boys.”
“Per caritá!” Carmella said. “God forbid you’re out there too.”
“Sonny’s out there,” Tom said, and at that Carmella turned away. “Sonny wouldn’t let me fight,” he went on, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. He sounded as though he might be talking to himself. “He held me down like I was a kid.”
“Sonny was looking out for you,” Carmella said. She gazed off into the distance. “Sonny’s always looked out for you.”
“I know that,” Tom said. “I’d like to return the favor, now I’m grown. Sonny could use a little looking after himself now.”
Carmella took Tom’s hand and held it in both of hers. Her eyes filled again with tears.
“Mama,” Tom said. “I want to be there to help. I want to help the family.”
Carmella squeezed Tom’s hand. “Pray for them,” she said. “Pray for Vito and Sonny. It’s all in God’s hands,” she said. “Everything.”
26.
Luca parked on Tenth Street next to the river and walked past a line of shacks with wood and various junk piled on their makeshift roofs. The night was chilly, and a thin mist of smoke floated up from a crooked stovepipe sticking out of the last shack in the row. It was after two in the morning, and Luca was alone on the street. To one side of him were the shacks, and to the other, the river. He pulled his jacket tight and continued up the block, the shuffle of his footsteps the only sound other than wind over the water. When he turned the corner, JoJo and Paulie were waiting outside a busted door. They leaned against a brick wall, JoJo with a cigarette dangling from his lips, Paulie tapping the ash off a fat cigar.
“Are you sure—they’re in there?” Luca asked when he reached the boys.
“They already took some shots at us,” Paulie said, and he stuck the cigar in his mouth.
“We’re sittin’ ducks in there,” JoJo added. “Take a look.” He gestured to the door.
“What is this—place?”
“Slaughterhouse.”
Luca snorted. “Just like micks. Makin’ their stand—in a slaughterhouse. It’s only two of them?”
“Yeah, it’s the Donnellys,” Paulie said, the cigar still in his mouth.
“We chased ’em here,” JoJo said.
“They figure they just got to hold out a couple more hours.” Paulie chewed on his cigar.
“Then the workers start showing up,” JoJo said, finishing Paulie’s thought for him.
Luca peeked into the slaughterhouse. The floor was mostly empty, with a web of hooks dangling over conveyor belts. Catwalks crisscrossed the building, midway up the walls. “Where are they?” he asked.
“Somewhere up there,” JoJo said. “Poke your head in, they’ll start shooting at you.”
“You got�
�no idea?”
“They’re moving around,” Paulie said. “They got the advantage up there.”
Luca looked into the slaughterhouse again and found a ladder against a near wall that led up to the catwalks. “There another—way in?”
“Other side of the building,” JoJo said. “Vinnie’s over there.”
Luca pulled a .38 out of his shoulder holster. “Go with Vinnie—When you’re ready—bust in firing. Don’t have to aim at nothing—don’t have to hit nothing.” Luca checked his gun. “Just make sure—you’re shooting up—not across—so you don’t hit me.”
“You want us to keep them distracted,” JoJo said, “and you come at ’em from this side?”
Luca snatched the cigar out of Paulie’s mouth and stubbed it out against the wall. “Go on,” he said to both of them. “Hurry up. I’m startin’ to get tired.”
When the boys were out of sight, Luca took a second pistol from his jacket pocket and looked it over. It was a new gun, a .357 Magnum with a black cylinder and long barrel. He removed a bullet from one of the chambers, popped it back in, and then looked into the slaughterhouse again. The interior of the building was dimly lit by a series of lights hanging from the ceiling. They cast a puzzle of shadows over the walls and floor. While he watched, a door on the opposite side of the building flew open and a storm of muzzle flashes sparked out of the darkness. Up on the catwalks, Luca spotted more barrel flashes coming from opposite sides of the building, and he made a dash for the ladder. He was already up on the catwalk and halfway across the space between him and a pile of crates barricading one of the Donnellys when Rick yelled from the other side of the building, warning Billy of Luca’s approach. Billy managed to get off two shots, the second of which hit Luca in the chest, over his heart, nearly knocking the wind out of him. It felt like a big man landing a solid punch, though it wasn’t enough to bring him down, and a second later Luca was on top of Billy, knocking the gun out of his hand and wrapping his arm around his neck so that he couldn’t speak or make a sound other than a panicked guttural rumble. Luca gave himself a minute to recover as he held Billy in front of him like a shield.