So this was what the walk had really been about.
“So I’ve been told,” Michael said. The help had been a contract on Vito Corleone. The only part of Willie “the Icepick” Russo that had made it back to Chicago was his severed head.
“I blame Capone. I want you to know that. It wasn’t none of his business, the problems in New York.” Russo extended his soft and tiny hand. “Your father just did what he had to do.”
Michael accepted the handshake, which became an embrace, sealed with a kiss, and Don Russo got into his idling car.
“Where’d Don Russo go?” Clemenza asked when Michael got back to the tent. It must have almost killed Pete not to be able to call him “Fuckface” to the other Dons.
“He can’t eat pork,” Michael said.
“I thought Vinnie Forlenza was our token Jew,” Zaluchi said.
“Enough!” Forlenza said from his wheelchair. “If it wasn’t for the Jews I sent to Las Vegas, most of you bums wouldn’t have a pot to piss in.”
“We’d have even more money than they made us,” said Sammy Drago, the Don of Tampa, “if we had a dime for every time we hadda hear you tell us about ’em.”
Forlenza waved him off in disgust. “Hey, Joe. You called for a vote, let’s vote.”
Blissed out on barbecue and good company, Pete had said they ought to hold these things every year, and Joe Zaluchi had raised a glass in assent and pushed for a postmeeting vote. All but one of the Commission members were still there. The vote was unanimous.
Not long before he returned to New York, Nick Geraci met Fredo Corleone in a saloon on the set of Ambush at Durango. It looked real enough if you didn’t look up at the cables and catwalks. Fredo had a part in the movie (“Card Sharp #2”) but wasn’t yet in costume. They sat at a table near the swinging doors. They were the only ones there. Outside, the director, a German with a monocle, yelled at someone because he disliked the color and texture of the mud.
“You see this shit?” Fredo said, throwing the morning paper on the table. MOVIE QUEEN HONEYMOONS HERE WITH HOODLUM HUSBAND, the headline read. The first two paragraphs had innocuous quotes from Deanna Dunn. The third mentioned that Fredo was in the movie, too, “making his screen debut as a bad guy.” After that, the story was a clip job, full of old news that had, over the years, already appeared in papers in New York and was peppered with the word allegedly. There were pictures, though. Fredo was furious they’d dredged up the shot of him sitting on the curb right after Vito had been shot, bawling his eyes out instead of trying to save the old man’s life. “I don’t play the bad guy,” Fredo said. “I catch the bad guy cheating.”
“What’s the point?” Geraci said. “If you call the paper or go down there, then they’ll really have a story. It’ll make things worse. That’s a nice suit, by the way. You have a guy?”
“You said worse? Right? So you agree. This is bad. You don’t get to worse from good or just fine. Not unless you’re already at bad.”
“What do you care?” Geraci said. “It’s the fucking Tucson newspaper.”
“They got all kinds of facts wrong.”
Like the fact that Deanna Dunn qualified as a movie “queen” anymore. She was a lush, and her looks and her career were suffering for it. Geraci figured she’d married Fredo only so she could keep living the high life even when her roles dried up completely.
Outside, the director yelled “Action!” A buckboard wagon hurtled down the dusty street, and Deanna Dunn began screaming.
“That’s in the script,” Fredo said. “Fontane dies and Dee Dee screams.” She was playing the sheriff’s widow. Johnny Fontane was the gunslinging priest.
“You want facts,” Geraci said, “there are better places to go than a newspaper.”
“We got married a month ago. It wasn’t a secret, like it says, and we already took a honeymoon. Weekend in Acapulco at that place with the pink Jeeps that go down to the beach.”
“Short honeymoon.”
“We’re busy people.”
“Hit a nerve, did I?”
“Hey, who wouldn’t want to spend more time on his honeymoon, y’know?”
Geraci wouldn’t, not if he had to be stuck in a hotel room with a woman as militantly self-absorbed as Deanna Dunn. Unless maybe you could make her scream like that in the sack. The director called action on another take. Deanna’s screams sounded even better. “I’ve never been to Acapulco,” Geraci said. “Nice?”
“I don’t know. Sure. It’s like a lot of places, I guess.” Fredo pounded his fist on the table, right on the photo of him getting into a limo at the airport. “Explain this to me, huh? She’s been here three weeks solid, me off and on, now all of a sudden this shit’s news?”
“You married a movie star, Fredo. What did you expect?”
“I married a movie star a month ago.”
“You’re a movie star now yourself, for God’s sake.”
“Aw, that’s just for shits and giggles, the acting. I got like two lines.”
“Still.”
“So why don’t they talk about me as someone with a background in entertainment who’s trying to branch out, huh?”
Geraci recognized Michael Corleone’s words in his brother’s mouth. Michael had gone along with Fredo’s more public image as something useful in helping to make the Corleones legitimate, or at least ostensibly so.
“Look,” Geraci said. “I been reading that paper for months. Trust me, nobody reads it.”
Fredo laughed. A moment later the smile drained from his face. “You meant that as a joke, right?”
Geraci shrugged, but then smiled.
“Coglionatore,” Fredo said, smiling too, punching Geraci’s shoulder affectionately.
Until three weeks ago, when the filming on this movie started, Geraci had barely ever spoken to Fredo. He’d turned out to be a thoroughly likable guy.
“You think all that whiskey’s real?” Fredo said, pointing to the clear, unlabeled bottles behind the rough-hewn bar.
“How would I know? Why don’t you go look?”
Fredo dismissed the notion with a frown and a wave. “Last thing I need.”
Geraci nodded. “Aspirin?”
“Had some.”
“That was some night.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Fredo said, shaking his head and suddenly looking both rueful and amazed. “Anymore, every night is some night.”
Last night, they’d taken their wives and gone out on the town, such as it was. On a whim, they’d headed to Mexico. When they’d gotten there, Deanna Dunn insisted on going to see a donkey show. Charlotte, at least as of this morning, still wasn’t speaking to him. Though she might have been angry because all night, no matter what anyone said about anything, Deanna Dunn brought the conversation back to Deanna Dunn. Geraci started changing the subject arbitrarily, but no matter how ridiculous the changes were, she took it as a cue to tell another Deanna Dunn story. After they got home, Char had accused him of flirting. He’d let it roll off his back. She couldn’t help but be disappointed that the Movie Queen she’d been so excited about hobnobbing with turned out to be a large-headed loudmouth who joked about how her husband didn’t like blow jobs-with Fredo sitting right there, like a man trying to smile through bowel cramps-and who thought that watching a donkey fuck a teenage Indian girl was a hoot. Give Charlotte time, though, and she’d be telling all the hens back in East Islip about her wild night, making herself sound like some jet-setter.
From down the street came a horrible splintering crash. The buckboard.
“Don’t worry,” Fredo said. “That’s in the script, too.”
“Yeah, well,” Geraci said. “Forgive me if I’m a little jumpy about crashes.”
“I don’t have that kind of power,” Fredo said. “You want forgiveness, it’s Mike’s department.”
Geraci tried not to look surprised. He’d never heard Fredo voice any sort of resentment toward his brother. “So Fontane’s here?”
Fredo shook hi
s head. “They flew in some writer to write him out of the picture, can you believe that? It’s his stand-in that’s out there dying.”
Fontane’s inattention to his own production company was getting to be a bigger and bigger problem, but this was the first time he’d ever skipped out on a movie in the middle of shooting. “So that’s all?” Geraci said. “He’s going to get away with that?”
“I don’t want to get into it,” Fredo said. “I got Dee Dee in one ear, my brother in the other, fucking Hagen in the other.”
“You have three ears?”
“Feels like it,” Fredo said. “It ain’t a feeling I’d recommend.”
They got down to business. Geraci had expected Fredo-as he had done other times they’d sat down to meet-to relay messages about Geraci’s operation back in New York. Instead, Fredo gave him the news about the peace talks the day before. It was all set: Geraci was going home.
This, too, was the sort of thing a guy might hear right before he got clipped. But if that’s what was going to happen, why had Mike sent Fredo?
“You okay?” Fredo said. “Your hearing going or something? I’d’ve thought a guy gets news like this he’d be on cloud nine.”
Men from the lighting crew had come in and started to set up a shot. Prop guys scattered sawdust on the floor and set out playing cards, poker chips, dirty glasses, and sheet music for the presumably doomed piano player. “It’s just going to be complicated, that’s all,” Geraci said. “Going home.”
Fredo lowered his voice. “Hey, how are you with the Straccis? I mean, you know, how were you? Before all this down here. I got a reason for asking.”
“I’ve got guys there I work with.” Without the tributes he paid to Black Tony Stracci, the drugs could never land in Jersey and get to New York so smoothly. “What’s your reason?”
“I’ve got this idea. There might be something in it for you. New source of income. Could be one of the best things we ever had. When I talked to Mike, he said no dice, but the more I get to know you, the more I think you and me together can make him come around.”
“I don’t know, Fredo.” Geraci hoped he didn’t show it, but he was shocked. Fredo hardly knew him yet was enlisting him to defy Michael Corleone. “If the Don turned it down-”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of that. I know him like nobody knows him.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Geraci said. This sort of open disloyalty would have been outrageous coming from some neighborhood punk. But from the sotto copo? From the brother of the Don? “I have to be straight with you, though, Fredo. I’m not going to-”
“I appreciate what you’re saying, but hear me out, okay? Okay. So here it is. You’re a lawyer, right? Did you know it’s against the law to bury people in San Francisco?”
Wrong, he wasn’t a lawyer, but Geraci didn’t bother to correct him. Just then, Deanna Dunn burst through the swinging doors.
“Barkeep,” she growled, “gimme a shot of your best red-eye.”
“That’s pretty good,” Geraci said, because it was. She sounded exactly like the actor who played the villain in this movie, a grizzled lout who’d also started out as a boxer.
“Those aren’t real bottles of whiskey,” Fredo said.
“This attachment you have to the real,” she said, “is very cute. Knock it off, will ya?”
“Oh, and yeah,” Fredo said, ignoring his wife and addressing Geraci. “I almost forgot.” He grabbed the lapels of his own suit. “I do have a guy. He’s out in Beverly Hills, but I fly him to Vegas for fittings. He’s Fontane’s guy out there, too, which is how I heard about him.”
“Unlike you,” said Deanna Dunn, “Johnny has to have his pants made special. Otherwise they wouldn’t fit right because his dick’s-”
Fredo smiled wanly. “It’s true.”
“Big one, huh?” Geraci couldn’t believe Fredo was going to let her get away with that.
“That’s what they say,” Fredo said.
“Who’s they?”
“Oh, darling.” Deanna Dunn turned a chair around and straddled it. “Who isn’t they?” She waggled her eyebrows.
Geraci could see in Fredo’s eyes that he was mad, but the smile lingered gruesomely on his face of the underboss.
“I did a picture with Margot Ashton,” said Deanna Dunn, “while she was still married to Johnny. The director-Flynn, that fat Mick slob-was razzing her about being married to a skinny ninety-eight-pound weakling like Johnny Fontane. This was awhile back, you know. So in front of ev-v-v-v-v-verybody, Margot says, real loud, ‘He may be skinny, but his proportions are perfect. Eight pounds Johnny and ninety pounds of cock.’ ”
Fredo exploded in shrill laughter.
“Lovely woman, Miss Ashton,” Geraci said. And you, Miss Dunn, are eight pounds Deanna and ninety pounds of gigantic head.
“Naturally,” Deanna said, “after she said that, I made it my business to see if she’d been exaggerating.”
The only people Geraci had ever seen whose faces could go from joy to despair as swiftly as Fredo Corleone’s were his beautiful daughters’, but only when they were still babies.
“And so it is with great pleasure, in front of all you good people, that I can reveal, at long last, and I do mean long-”
“I should go home,” Geraci said, and he did. He’d hear about the stiffs in San Francisco some other time.
One thing kept bothering Pete Clemenza.
That night at the Castle in the Sand? When they were watching Fontane and Buzz Fratello and Dotty Ames, until Mike got the phone call from Hagen with the news about the plane crash? Why did Mike tap Clemenza on the shoulder to get his attention to leave before he even started talking to Hagen? How did he know they’d be getting up and going?
Not that Clemenza would ever say anything.
But it’s the kind of little thing a guy thinks about a lot. Kind of thing that can make a guy go outside at two in the morning in his silk pajamas, light a good cigar, flip on the floodlights, and wax the living shit out of his Cadillac.
Chapter 15
T HE CONGRESSMAN- a former state attorney general, a vigilant opponent of the incursion of the Cosa Nostra into his beloved Silver State, and also, for what it’s worth, a rancher whose property lay downwind of Doomtown-first received his grim diagnosis in the hospital’s newly completed Vito Corleone Wing. When he went back to Washington, he got a second opinion from a specialist. The news was the same: the Big C; lymphatic, inoperable; six months to live. He chose to keep his illness a secret and fight it. If anyone was tough enough to lick the Big C, it was that big ox. A year later and eighty-eight pounds lighter, he died. As so often happens, the person whose constitutional responsibility it was to appoint a successor was a political rival of the deceased. The governor asked Thomas F. Hagen, a prominent Las Vegas attorney and financier, to abandon his long-shot bid for his party’s Senate nomination and accept the appointment to Congress. Mr. Hagen graciously agreed to put aside his plans for the chance to serve the good people of the State of Nevada.
The appointment was unpopular. The issue was less Hagen ’s associates-he was hardly the only politician in that era with such associates-than his brief tenure as a Nevada resident. Also, he was a political novice with no record of public service. Every newspaper in the state, without exception, criticized the choice and gave the controversy prominent coverage. The primary added further complications. The late congressman had been running unopposed. Lawsuits abounded, but the November general election was shaping up as a contest between Tom Hagen and a dead man.
To build power, sometimes one must control those who seem the least powerful. This was the secret of the Corleones’ ability to control judges. Though corruption and venality thrive in all classes of men, the normative judge-the public might be relieved to know-is more honest than the normative human being. In practice, judges are difficult and expensive to control. However. Cases are typically assigned “randomly” by a clerk of court who’s paid no more
than, say, a normative Spanish teacher. A person who controls ten percent of such people and a majority of the judges is vastly less powerful than one who’s sewn up most of the clerks and a few strategically placed judges afflicted by cynical natures, bad habits, or dark secrets.
Newspapers work the opposite way. Some reporters can be swayed by a free lunch, a forgiven gambling debt, even a glass of ice-cold beer. But most have a crusading streak and a fixation on whatever strikes them as news that overrides their loyalty to anything. Happily, they are also excitable, eager for newer news, toward which they follow one another like lemmings. To control the news, one needs influence at the top. The public has a short memory. If a story goes away after a few days and is replaced by something new, the public wants not closure to the old but newer details about the new. Or something newer still. Control those who control those who decide how long to cover a story and where it goes in the paper, and you control the news.
After a few days, a magnetic, strange-looking man in black leather and blacker sideburns-a popular music sensation from Mississippi, a white boy screaming Negro songs-came to Las Vegas for the first time. Hagen was supplanted on the front page and in the public’s imagination by gleeful news of the hillbilly sensation’s poor performance and speculation about whether this signaled an end not just to the young hick’s career but also to the whole vulgar, allegedly Communistic fad known as “rock and roll.” The day Hagen was sworn in and flew to Washington to assume his duties, the only mention of him in any Nevada paper was a story by one dogged reporter from Carson City, who, from the wilderness of an inside page, tried to sort out the legal battle over the congressional contest. The late congressman’s party was beset by infighting and injunctions and seemed increasingly unlikely to be able both to pick a candidate and to get that candidate onto the ballot in time. Congressman Hagen was faring better. Though he’d been appointed to office well after the filing deadline for the November ballot, he’d submitted all the necessary petitions and paperwork within a week of the announcement of his appointment. The clerk of the court was quoted as saying that, under the circumstances, the request by Hagen ’s lawyers to grant him the necessary extension promised to be “a routine matter.”
The Godfather returns Page 27
