The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  They got out. Behind the house was a catering tent. Next to it, hissing over a pit of coals and rotating on a spit, was a pig large enough to pass for an immature hippo.

  Neither Michael nor Clemenza had ever been to one of these, but they approached the house like men who knew what to expect. Michael was fairly sure he did. But he’d also been fairly sure he knew what to expect when he was crouching in that amphibious tractor off the shore of Peleliu, ready to take the beach.

  This was not the same thing, he told himself. War was at his back. Peace lay before him.

  “Every ten years, eh?” Clemenza tapped his wristwatch. The gesture was a good excuse for him to stop for a moment and catch his wheezing breath. “Like clockwork.”

  “Actually,” Michael said, “it’s only been eight.” Despite the Bocchicchio insurance, he scanned the woods for snipers or anyone else who shouldn’t have been there. Habit.

  “So next time, it’ll be twelve. Average it out. Hey, get a load of that big fuckin’ pig.”

  Michael laughed. “You sure you don’t want to do this permanently?”

  Clemenza shook his head and began walking again. “A chi consiglia non vuole il capo.” He who advises doesn’t want to be boss; an old saying. “Nothing against Hagen or Genco, any of them,” he said, “but I’m a guy who helps.”

  The rear door opened. They were met by a chorus of greetings, as if from friends at a party. With a quick glance back at the roasting pig, Clemenza clapped his hand on Michael’s shoulder and followed him inside.

  Nick Geraci spent weeks in that lemon yellow apartment, waking each morning to the aroma of doughnuts and the sound of women in slippers muttering in Italian and sweeping their stoops. Charlotte and the girls were still doing fine, he was assured, and knew he was recuperating nicely. He was told that Vincent Forlenza and Michael Corleone were doing everything they could to negotiate a deal to bring him home safely. Hardly a day went by without someone telling him how lucky he was to have two godfathers, both of whom loved him.

  In all that time Geraci never learned the name of that old doctor or how the man had become beholden to Don Forlenza. It must have been something big. To prepare the body that would be discovered in the ravine down by the river, the doctor had stood by, holding a clipboard with several diagrams, and advised Forlenza’s men as they took some corpse about Geraci’s size and gave it injuries nearly identical to the ones Geraci had. The doctor sewed the contrived wounds himself, imitating the stitch work of the emergency room hacks. Geraci never found out where the corpse had come from. The only question he asked, the day they got him out of there and sent him to Arizona to meet his family, was if they knew the rats would eat that much of the body and if so, how they knew. The face had helpfully been destroyed, he’d heard, and rats were living inside the rotting corpse. Was that just what happened naturally when you hid a body near the river? Or had they done things to make sure?

  “What difference does it make?” asked Laughing Sal, beside him in the hearse they were using to take him to the train station.

  Geraci shrugged. “Knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”

  “There you go!” Narducci said, nodding. “That college-boy angle you play.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I bet there are some people who aren’t all that crazy about it, that angle.”

  “People,” Geraci agreed. “I bet.”

  He’d studied the way Narducci used echolalia and silence. He copied it now. People never recognize themselves. Even in a boxing ring, you can knock men out this way.

  “Odds are,” Narducci finally said, “nature would have taken its course. But like a lot of things where the odds are in a man’s favor, you still want to make sure.”

  Despite how far it was to Arizona, Geraci had refused to fly, not even in a luxurious medical plane that came complete with a hi-fi system and a pretty nurse. No more planes, ever. And so they sent him there in a casket, shipped in a freight car to the same funeral home he’d gone to that summer, after his mother died.

  The only part of the trip Geraci had to spend actually inside the casket was the loading and unloading. Onboard, in a car with four other caskets and a crated-up piano, he was able to get out, read, relax, play cards with the two men watching him, and take them for everything they had. He felt sorry for them. He had a place to sleep and they didn’t. He suggested they take the dead people out of some of the other caskets, but they wouldn’t. As a gesture of goodwill, he offered them their money back, and of course they refused. Good Cleveland guys, all the way around.

  As the train pulled into Tucson, he told the men good-bye and shut the lid on himself. Two days sleeping in this thing, and the velvet pillow stank. The next face he’d see would either be Charlotte ’s, as he’d been told, or that of some ugly fucker who was about to kill him.

  He lay in the dark, utterly still. Soon he heard men speaking Spanish and felt hands grasping the handles and lifting. There was a lot of jostling and banging into walls until Geraci heard someone say “Look out” in English and a moment later he hit the ground, hard. It knocked the wind out of him. The Mexicans exploded in laughter. Geraci put his hands over his mouth and tried to control the little wheezing squeals his lungs made as they fought with his spasmed muscles to fill. So maybe the next face he saw wouldn’t be Charlotte’s or a killer’s.

  The men kept laughing and cussed at one another in a mix of English and Spanish. They picked up the casket. Geraci’s breathing returned to something close to normal. He’d banged his head, too, he only then realized. Soon they slid him into what was probably another hearse.

  Michael Corleone had sent word that he didn’t blame Geraci for the crash and that after all of Geraci’s hard work these past months, he’d more than earned a few quiet months in the desert with his family. He’d been assured that things were going well, that no one was coming after him. No one was looking for him. Smuggling him out of Cleveland like this had just been a precaution, something to ward off cops and lucky guessers.

  Probably all that was true. But it was also just the kind of reassurance a guy heard right before he got clipped.

  Still, though Geraci would probably never like Michael Corleone, he did admire him. He had faith in him. Michael would save Nick Geraci, if for no other reason than that he needed him. He needed his loyalty, his ability to make money, his smarts. Michael wanted to transform an organization made up of violent peasant-criminals into a corporation that could take its place in the greatest legal gambling scam ever invented-the New York Stock Exchange. If he was going to succeed, he certainly couldn’t afford to lose a man like Geraci. In the scheme of things, Geraci knew, he was just some mook from Cleveland, a striver who took his lumps, worked hard, went to night school, and had a little success as a small-time attorney and businessman. But compared to most of the guys in this business, Nick Geraci was Albert Einstein.

  Even so, Geraci had made mistakes. He should have stood up to Falcone and refused to fly in such weather. He shouldn’t have said he thought the plane had been sabotaged when he’d really had no idea. Crashing: also bad. He certainly shouldn’t have swum away from the wreck as if he were guilty of something. His mistakes had narrowed his options. He had no choice but to play out this hand.

  This would be a very elaborate way to kill him, though that hardly ruled it out. He’d heard of more elaborate. He’d participated in more elaborate.

  When he’d been forced to kill Tessio, Geraci couldn’t have been more angry at Michael Corleone. But from the moment he’d walked away from Tessio’s open grave site until that trip from the train to wherever he was really going, Geraci truly hadn’t given it another thought.

  The hearse stopped. He was unloaded by men who didn’t say a word, which did not seem like a good sign.

  Geraci’s head throbbed. He could hardly breathe. It’s not as if caskets have airholes. On the way here, he’d spent maybe one tenth this much time with the lid down. He was going to die choking on his ow
n funk. They’d come to whack him, and he’d already have suffocated. Still, he’d do as he was told. He’d stay inside with the lid closed until Charlotte came to get him.

  The men walked him across a cement floor and set him down on something. Definitely cement. This could very well be the back room of the Di Nardo Brothers Funeral Parlor. The night he killed Tessio, that crematory where they took the heads, it had a cement floor, didn’t it?

  This could also be a warehouse. A meat locker. Somebody’s two-car garage. Anything.

  He heard a door open. A person’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked as they drew near him. A polished cement floor. He held what was left of his breath.

  The lid came open.

  It was Charlotte.

  He sat up and felt oxygen surge through him, tingling as it reached his hands and feet. He could feel air spread up his back and wash over his scalp. Charlotte looked tanned and happy. “You look so good!” she said. She seemed sincere. She did not react at all to his gasping. It slowed. Only then did he notice Barb and Bev standing together against the paneled back wall, obviously frightened, holding a pair of crutches waist high, parallel to the floor.

  Charlotte gave him a quick kiss on the lips. It was like she was high on something. Geraci didn’t smell liquor. “Welcome home.”

  “Thanks,” he said. Well, not home, but he knew what she meant. Upstairs, a funeral was going on. Muffled chanting. Some prayer or creed. “It’s good to be… back. How are you?”

  Geraci held out his arms toward his daughters. They nodded at him but stayed put.

  “Busy,” Charlotte said. “But fine.” Softly, she touched the knot on his head where he’d banged it.

  Barb was eleven; Bev had just turned nine. Barb was a little blond replica of Charlotte, right down to the new suntan. Bev was a pale, hulking, dark-haired girl, tallest in her class (including the boys) and a full two inches taller than her big sister, who was also tall.

  “They got to see a movie getting made out in the desert, and they’ve been talking about it ever since,” Charlotte said, waving the girls toward the casket. “C’mon, girls. Tell him.”

  Bev let go of the crutches with one hand so she could point at him. “See?” she said to her sister. “You see? I told you Daddy’s not dead.”

  “Not yet, maybe,” Barb said. “But he will be.”

  Geraci motioned for Charlotte to help him climb out, but she was oblivious.

  “Daddy won’t ever die,” Bev said.

  “You’re stupid,” Barb said. “Everybody dies someday.”

  “Now, girls,” Charlotte said. “Be nice.”

  It was as if she didn’t see the first thing strange about this scene, being brought two thousand miles to the back of a funeral home to retrieve her missing husband from a casket. Upstairs, an organ, God knows why, started playing “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.”

  “He will too die,” Barb said. “Everybody does.”

  “Not Daddy,” Bev said. “He promised. Didn’t you, Daddy?”

  Actually, he had, once. His father had always said that a promise is a debt. Ogni promessa è un debito. It had taken being a father himself-even more than his treacherous professional life-to drive the lesson home.

  “Now you see what my days are like,” Charlotte said. She said it cheerfully, though. She didn’t sound like she was trying too hard. She smiled and took his bruised face in her hands and kissed it. Nothing needy or passionate, just an ordinary, slightly lingering marital kiss, the kind a man might enjoy one morning at the breakfast table. It was not the sort of kiss Geraci would ever have expected to receive while sitting in a casket with bandaged ribs and a broken leg-and, who knows, maybe a fresh concussion, too-while a chorus of muffled voices in the room upstairs sang an old Tin Pan Alley song at some poor stiff’s funeral. Though in fairness to Charlotte, perhaps there was no right sort of kiss for an occasion like this.

  “Can you give me a hand?” he said. “Getting out?”

  “Your dad’s waiting in the car,” she said. “Should I go get him?”

  “No.” Naturally, his father couldn’t be bothered to come in and greet him. “I really just need a hand. We can do it.”

  They did. The girls came forward, perfectly in step. They’d rehearsed this. They presented him with his crutches as if they were peasants bestowing a humble gift to the king.

  Then they cracked up, and for a long time he didn’t do anything much but hold the girls’ embrace. At some point Bev whispered, “You did promise,” and he whispered, “So far, so good.”

  “It’s nice to have you back,” Charlotte said.

  Outside, the funeral home’s pebbled parking lot would have been big enough for a shopping center. Maybe fifty cars, but his father, Fausto, of course, had the best space, closest to the door. He’d probably come by yesterday, sized up the parking situation, then gotten here hours ago to make sure he got that space. He sat behind the wheel of his idling Oldsmobile, looking straight ahead and listening to Mexican music on the radio. He had the air-conditioner going full blast, probably for no other reason than to create a need for him to wear the old quilted jacket with his union local’s logo on the back. He waited for Nick to finish struggling with the crutches and get situated in the passenger seat even to turn to face him.

  “Well, well, well,” said Fausto Geraci, “if it ain’t Eddie Rickenbacker.”

  A team of local carpenters had been hired to make long maple tables especially for the peace talks. The tables were arranged in a big rectangle inside a ballroom that had once been the stable. The stain on the tables was dry but so fresh it still smelled. The odor wasn’t too bad until the room also filled with cigar and cigarette smoke. They opened all the windows, but the consigliere from Philly, who had emphysema, and Don Forlenza from Cleveland, who had just about every affliction under the sun, both had to listen from the next room. The temperature outside was forty. Other than Louie Russo, who must have been trying to prove something, the men conducted the entire meeting in their scarves and overcoats.

  What everyone at the table agreed to believe for the sake of peace was this: The plane crash in Lake Erie was nobody’s fault. Frank Falcone did in fact bet a hundred grand on that fight at the Cleveland Armory, and he’d insisted on going to see it no matter how bad the storm was. As the plane went down, someone in the tower heard Geraci say the word sabotage, but Geraci was merely thinking aloud in a time of great stress and ruling out sabotage. The thunder and lightning made the radio transmissions difficult to hear. The plane crashed and everyone died on impact except Geraci, who almost did. Don Forlenza learned about the terrible deaths of his recent guests, and he learned that the authorities thought the crash might have been the result of sabotage. Immediately, Don Forlenza made certain that no one in his organization had sabotaged the plane. Then he rescued his injured godson from the hospital. What else was there to do? Had Don Falcone and Don Molinari been killed as a result of sabotage, there was the chance this might be blamed on the Cleveland organization. There was a chance it might be blamed on his godson, who was unconscious-unable to protect himself, unable to answer for himself. Who in this room would not have done the same for his own godson? Also, because Geraci was a member of the Corleone Family, Don Forlenza was concerned that his godson may have been the target of violence by one of the other New York Families. Geraci had regained consciousness. The federal authorities had ruled out sabotage. The crash had been an act of God. Don Corleone had let the other members of the Commission know that the missing pilot was Geraci. As Don Corleone had said then and reasserted now, the fake name on Geraci’s pilot’s license was intended to be a deception to no one but law enforcement officials, no different in kind than the driver’s licenses many of them were carrying now. In this case, the alias had done its job. While every man in this room had known for months that Gerald O’Malley was in fact Fausto Geraci, Jr., the authorities had presumed that O’Malley was the rat-gnawed corpse in that ravine.

  What a fitting monumen
t to the four men who died that the discussions initiated to help understand the crash soon expanded themselves to other issues. Soon an agreement for a lasting peace had been struck-an agreement they’d had all come here to ratify.

  Much of the official story was true, but no one in that farmhouse believed every word of it.

  Though no proof had come to light, there seemed to be little doubt that Louie Russo’s men had penetrated Vincent Forlenza’s little island fortress and sabotaged the plane. After all, the men in that plane did represent all four of Chicago ’s biggest rivals in Las Vegas and the West. The crash had succeeded in making Don Forlenza look like an old fool. The struggles in New York had given Russo an opening, and he’d seized it. He’d forged allegiances with several other Dons-Carlo Tramonti in New Orleans, Bunny Coniglio in Milwaukee, Sammy Drago in Tampa, and the new boss in L.A., Jackie Ping-Pong. When Russo went to Cuba, he stayed in the presidential palace. No one but Russo’s allies relished Chicago ’s return to power, but the consensus was that Russo posed less of a threat with a seat on the Commission than he had as a turf-grabbing outsider. To most of the men at those tables, trying to prove Russo responsible for that crash was unimportant. What mattered was returning their full attention to their own business. Even Butchie Molinari had been persuaded (by Michael Corleone, in fact) to declare publicly that he accepted the official version of the crash and to vow not to seek revenge.

  Louie Russo and also his consigliere were not about to deny an accusation that no one had openly made, even if they knew it was false. Russo hadn’t ordered a hit on the men in that plane. If he had his theories about who if anyone had, he wasn’t letting on.