“So who’s the wristwatch belong to?” asked Cusik, trying it on in the car.
Momo the Roach didn’t answer. He flipped down the visor and checked his exoskeleton-hard shellacked hair in the mirror. They were out of the city before the boxer said anything else.
“The hat belongs to the same guy as the watch or someone else?”
“Try that on, too, why don’t you?” the Roach said.
Cusik shrugged and obeyed. The hat fit perfectly. “What do you think?” he said.
The Roach shook his head. “It’s you,” he said. “Listen, Tex, do me a favor, see if you can shut up as good as you throw a punch.”
Again Cusik shrugged and obeyed.
The thief-crumpled on the floor of a tiny room in a part of the world where people were slow to call the police and the police were even slower to respond-did in fact bleed to death. Call it business. Call it destiny. Call it the law of unintended consequences. Whichever. Why should Tom Hagen care? A man does things, and it sets other things in motion. A dead man doesn’t have to mean anything. Few do.
Chapter 16
T HE MOMENT she first glimpsed the island of Sicily, Kay Corleone gasped.
Michael looked up from the book he was reading- Peyton Place, which Kay had bought after her mother, Deanna Dunn, and several women from the Las Vegas Junior League had all recommended it, though she’d finished it hours ago and thought it was lousy. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Kay said. “My God. You never told me how beautiful it is.”
He set the book down and leaned across Kay, toward the window. “It is beautiful.”
A ridge of snowcapped mountains ringed the walled city of Palermo, visible from the air as a bounty of spires and carved stone and scrolled balconies. It was February, but the Mediterranean was impossibly blue and crested with the gold of the sun, the smoothness of the surface of the water marred only by what seemed the tiniest of vibration, like that of a glass of wine atop a softly playing radio. The runway was on a spit of land northwest of the city. Among the countless things Michael had said to dissuade Kay from coming here on their vacation was that, statistically, this was one of the most dangerous airports in the world. Most of the time, he himself flew into Rome and took a train and ferry here. As the plane banked low, over the water, so close to a small gray fishing boat she could see the men’s unshaven faces, Kay-who’d been to Europe before, but always by sea-was thrilled she’d insisted they fly all the way here.
Only when the plane’s shadow appeared on the boulders of the coastline did a hot pang of panic shoot through her-my babies!-but a pang was all it was. Seconds later, they touched down, a little harder than a person might like but an essentially uneventful landing.
“After all these years,” Kay marveled, “here I am in Sicily for the first time.”
“Birthplace of Venus,” Michael said, rubbing her thigh. “Goddess of love.”
For Kay’s whole adult life, she’d been hearing about all the things that were and weren’t Sicilian, all the things she could never understand because she wasn’t Sicilian. Michael had been here numerous times on business and had even, for three years, lived here. The least he could do was show her the place: a week’s worth of sightseeing and a second week holed up in a romantic resort carved into a mountainside near Taormina. He owed her that much. At least that much.
As the plane taxied toward the terminal, Kay noticed a precisely parked row of tiny Italian cars in the grass infield. Beside the cars, thirty or so people, many with bread or flowers tucked under their arms, stood behind a waist-high rope, smiling and waving at the arriving plane. In front of the rope were four uniformed carabinieri, two with gleaming silver swords on their shoulders, two with their swords sheathed and machine guns held across their chests.
“People you know?” Kay said.
She’d been joking, but Michael nodded. “Friends,” he said. “Friends of friends, really. There’s supposed to be a surprise party at a restaurant on the beach at Mondello.”
She gave him a look.
“I know,” he said.
“I thought we had an understanding.”
“We do. I’m not the one surprising you. No more surprises from me, that’s the deal. As far as the portion of the world I don’t control, you’re going to have to take it up with God.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Was he making a crack about her becoming Catholic?
“Nothing,” he said. “Look, I wasn’t sure it was going to happen. I let you know about it as soon as I saw that it was. It would have been just as much a surprise if the surprise party I told you about ended up not happening, right?”
She shook her head and patted his knee. He did need a vacation. Her, too. She put her hand on his thigh. “We can’t even check into the hotel and take a shower first?”
“If that’s what you really want,” he said, which was a way he had of saying no. “Try to look surprised, at any rate. For their benefit.”
When the plane stopped, the carabinieri without machine guns sheathed their swords, too, and hurried across the tarmac. A stewardess told the passengers to keep their seats.
“What’s going on?” Kay whispered.
“No idea.” Michael swiveled his head, almost imperceptibly but enough to make eye contact with Al Neri, two rows behind them. That Michael had agreed to go on this vacation with only one bodyguard (albeit his best and most trusted one) seemed to be a clear sign that things had gotten better. And, true to Michael’s word, they’d been on airplanes or in airports for almost two whole days, and it really had been as if Neri weren’t there.
The hatch opened. The steps came down. The head stewardess and the carabinieri had a conversation that, though she’d like to think she understood Italian, Kay couldn’t quite make out.
The stewardess turned and faced the passengers. “May I have your attention?” she said in perfect English. “Would Mr. and Mrs. Michael Corleone please identify yourselves?”
She had less of an accent than most of Michael’s employees. She’d even Americanized the pronunciation of Corleone.
Neri stood and walked toward the front of the plane. The stewardess asked if he was Mr. Corleone, and Neri didn’t say anything.
Only after he passed Michael and Kay did Michael raise his hand. Kay followed suit.
Kay kept her lips still. “Surprise,” she muttered.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Michael said. “Just logistics.”
Neri started speaking with the stewardess in Italian-something about protection and about how Michael Corleone was an important man in America and something about rudeness and hospitality, all in hushed enough voices that Kay still couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then Neri turned toward Michael and Kay and made a patting gesture-there, there. Michael nodded. The stewardess asked that Mr. and Mrs. Corleone remain seated until the other passengers disembarked. Neri took an empty seat toward the front of the plane and stayed there.
“What’s going on?” Kay whispered.
“It’s going to be fine,” Michael said.
“That wasn’t what I asked you.”
When everyone else had left the plane, the two carabinieri came on board. Neri intercepted them. They had a quick whispered conversation, then proceeded down the aisle and stood next to Michael and Kay.
In Italian, Michael welcomed them. One of the men seemed to know him. Michael gestured for them to have a seat. They remained standing. They explained that reliable sources had indicated that the welcoming party in Mondello was not certainly but quite possibly a trap, that it would be inadvisable for him and his wife to set foot on Sicilian soil at this time.
“ ‘Reliable sources’?” Michael repeated, in Italian.
The men’s faces were implacable. “Yes,” the one who seemed to know him said in English.
Michael glanced at Neri, who mouthed the word Chicago . What could he possibly have meant by that? Maybe he’d mouthed something else, someone’s na
me.
Michael got up and nodded toward the front of the plane. The carabinieri followed him, and they resumed their discussion there, in whispers, out of her earshot. Kay didn’t know whether to be terrified or furious. Outside, the waving people milled around, gesturing toward the airplane in various demonstrative ways. Several got into their cars and drove away. Kay pulled down her window shade. Finally, Michael clapped the two carabinieri on their backs. “Bene,” he said, no longer whispering. “A che ora è il prossimo volo per Roma?”
The carabinieri who’d seemed to know him beamed. “We are pleasurable to report,” said one, again in English, “that you are upon it.” And with that, the men left.
Not only were Michael and Kay and Neri already on the next flight to Rome, it turned out to be a private flight, too. The stewardesses claimed it had been supposed to happen anyway, though they struggled to explain why.
“Deadhead,” Michael said. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”
“I beg your pardon?” said the stewardess with the perfect English.
“Nell ’inglese la parole è deadhead.”
“Deadhead,” she said. “Why, thank you.” She seemed offended that he’d resorted to Italian. She and the other stewardesses cleaned the cabin and left.
“This is so like you,” Kay said to Michael. “You never wanted to go to Sicily, and now you’re getting your way.”
“Kay,” he said, “you can’t be serious.”
“Think of your mother,” she said, thinking of the trunk full of gifts sitting somewhere in the airplane. Preparing it had been her reason to live for months, the reason-everyone agreed, even the doctors-that she’d recovered so well from her brush with death.
“I’ll have it unloaded,” he said. “I know people who can get it all to the right people.”
“Of course you do.”
“Kay.”
“I feel awful, flying all the way here and leaving the kids. For what? For nothing.”
Michael didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He’d wanted to go someplace and take the kids. That kind of vacation would have been a vacation for him. The hardest thing he’d have had to do was sit still to be buried in the sand. Kay’d have spent her time tending to Anthony and Mary, which she loved doing but was not a vacation. For two years she’d selflessly done what Michael needed her to do. She’d had to raise the kids almost as if she were a widow (including holding them though hours of inconsolable crying the year he’d been so caught up in whatever he was trying to do in Cuba that he never even came home for Christmas). She still hadn’t gone back to teaching and was starting to fear she never would. On her own, she’d coordinated the move to Las Vegas. Then she’d taken on the even bigger job of designing and overseeing the construction of the whole complex in Lake Tahoe: their house, a bandstand for entertaining, and preliminary architecturally harmonious plans for houses for the Hagens, for Connie and Ed Federici, for Fredo and Deanna Dunn, for Al Neri, even a little bungalow for guests. Kay had been surprised by how much she’d enjoyed building a house, actually: the countless details and decisions, the chance to undertake the ultimate shopping spree, all for the greater good of her whole family. Still, it was work. She’d asked almost nothing from Michael except to go where she’d wanted to go on vacation, just the two of them.
“What are we going to do now,” Kay said, “turn around and go home?”
“We don’t have to go home. This kind of thing, if you’ll recall, was a part of why I didn’t want to go with you to Sicily.”
“For God’s sake, Michael. This is a murder threat we’re running away from.”
“We’re not running.”
“Right. We’re flying.”
“That’s not what I mean. And it’s not so much a threat as a precaution. Look, Kay, if there’s one thing I’ve been completely… what’s the word I’m looking for? Steadfast. Right. If there’s one thing I’ve been steadfast about, it’s been protecting my family.”
Kay looked away and didn’t say anything. He was steadfast about everything, actually. His good traits and his bad. It was the best and the worst thing about him.
“Those men,” he said, “the carabinieri? One of them is Calogero Tommasino, the son of an old friend of my father’s. I’ve had dealings with his father and with him, too. I trust him. We’re certainly in no danger now and probably wouldn’t have been at all. Again, just a precaution. Please understand. And you at any rate would never have been in any danger, obviously. It’s the code not to-” He stopped himself.
“Harm the wives or children,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Which no doubt goes double in Sicily, which I can’t of course hope to understand, can I, because I’m not Sicilian?”
Michael didn’t answer her. He looked like hell. Maybe it was just the flight. She couldn’t admit it now, but if she’d really understood the ordeal involved in flying from Las Vegas to Palermo, she’d have probably gone along with going to Hawaii or Acapulco.
The pilots got back on board. Neri went up to the cabin to talk to them. Moments later he took a seat, far away from Kay and Michael. The cars and people were gone from the tarmac. The plane took off.
“You actually wouldn’t understand,” Michael finally said. “How could you?”
“Oh, Christ,” Kay said. She got up and sat far away from Michael. Twice in a matter of moments he’d provoked her to use the Lord’s name in vain.
He let her go.
But she knew it would work, eventually, her silence. Just because he so expertly wielded silence as a weapon didn’t mean that he was invulnerable to it himself, especially from her. She sat on the right side of the plane and patiently watched the Italian coast ease by.
After about an hour he came to her. “Is this seat taken?” he said.
“So’d you finish your book?”
“I did,” he said. “I thought it was good, actually. A nice escape.”
“If you say so.” The book he’d taken to read was Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, which Kay had given him for Christmas. He kept nodding off. Not long after she’d finished her book, he’d picked it up, and she’d taken his. Kay thought The Last Hurrah was the best thing she’d ever read about city politics. She was appalled he hadn’t loved it. “And, yes, the seat’s taken.”
“Kay,” he said. “The reason you wouldn’t understand is because I didn’t-” He closed his eyes. Maybe this, too, his struggling for words, had to do with the long flight, but there was something about him now that seemed more shaken up than exhausted. “Because,” he said, “it’s true that… that I haven’t been entirely, you know…” He let out what started as a frustrated sigh and finished as a soft, agonized moan.
“Michael,” she said.
“I want to tell you some things,” he said. “I have to tell you some things.”
Most of the time, she looked at him and hardly recognized the man she’d fallen in love with. He’d had his face smashed, then fixed. His hair was shot through with gray, and-though she told herself it was her imagination-he’d become a dead ringer for his father. But there was the same look in his eyes now as he’d had years ago, on a New Hampshire golf course on a warm starry night, when he told her what he’d done during the war, things he’d never told anyone, and he’d sobbed in her arms. Angry as she’d been, suddenly she just melted.
“I’d like that,” she said, her voice quavering. “Thank you.” She patted the seat beside her.
He sat. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” she said, taking his hand. “No apologies. Just talk to me.”
They stayed in Rome only long enough to sleep off the jet lag and have a magnificent meal at a restaurant Kay had been to years before with her parents. The next day, with Michael still asleep upstairs, she spoke to the hotel concierge herself and arranged a reservation at a resort in the Swiss Alps. He helped her rent a plane, too, for Michael to fly them there, which she knew he’d love. She’d never been to the Alps, but when they’d flown
over them on the way here, she’d promised herself she’d go someday. Turned out, someday would be tomorrow.
When she finished, she turned and saw Al Neri, sitting in a leather chair across the lobby, smoking and chomping a sweet roll. She shook her head and he nodded. She told the concierge she’d been mistaken. She needed two rooms. Preferably not adjoining. He sighed and made an exasperated gesture but dialed the phone and was able to change the reservation.
Kay got an espresso from the hotel bar. The hotel had a glassed-in courtyard, and on her way to get a table, a man about her age whistled at her. A younger man next to him raised an eyebrow and called her beautiful. She tried not to react, but she was a happy woman and in truth they’d made her happier. She was only thirty-two years old. Yes, they were Italian, but it was still nice to think of herself as a woman able to summon blurted compliments from strange men.
She took a seat by herself, bathed in that pink-yellow light so distinct to Rome.
The day Michael had proposed to her, he’d warned Kay that they couldn’t be equal partners. Kay had protested; clearly Michael’s father confided in his mother, no? True, Michael had said, but his mother’s first loyalty had always been to his father, for forty years. If things worked out as well with them, Michael had said, maybe someday he’d tell her a few things she didn’t really want to hear. Turned out, that someday had been yesterday.
Kay should probably be furious, frightened, or at least unmoored. She wasn’t. Despite or maybe even because of the things Michael had told her, Kay couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this happy. It was irrational as hell, but then again all happiness was irrational.
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