The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  “Three out of four we can do. As for Carmine, I love him, too. He didn’t do anything wrong. He went where he was supposed to, he made a great shot at the target we told him to hit, and he was smart enough to swallow his manly pride and dress like a woman and try to escape that way. If it was up to me, I’d hire him, but… well, all I can say is that it’s out of our hands.”

  Geraci smiled. “Carmine’s mother’s maiden name was Bocchicchio.”

  Even after he explained about the peerless, weirdly mercenary ability of the Bocchicchio clan to exact revenge, Lucadello was unmoved.

  “So who are they going to come after, huh?” Lucadello said. “The United States government?”

  Geraci shook his head. “They’ll take it personally.”

  “Meaning what? Me? Or wait, I know! They’ll go after the president!”

  Abruptly, Geraci started shaking. To steady himself, he crossed the room, grabbed a fistful of Lucadello’s shirt, and pulled him to his feet. “Carmine’s still alive,” he whispered. “Keep him that way, and they won’t come after anybody.”

  Only one gondolier was at work this early, but the gondolas were large. There was plenty of room. As Hagen expected, Russo’s men took their tommy guns on board.

  “Don’t look like that, Irish,” Louie Russo said, taking a seat at the front. “I know you ain’t on the muscle side of things. Hell, you people aren’t even gonna have no muscle side of things. Anyhow, loosen up. Take it from me, you’ll live longer.”

  The gunmen found this pretty funny. The gondolier averted his eyes and didn’t say anything. He began poling them across the fetid, man-made pond. Finally, he and Hagen made eye contact. Almost imperceptibly, the gondolier nodded.

  Hagen had stopped sweating. A sense of peace washed over him. Russo was telling the story of how he had gotten this place, but Hagen wasn’t listening. He studied the tree-lined shore, anticipating the moment they’d get to the halfway point across, bending over enough that no one would notice him unbuckling his belt.

  Halfway across, the gondolier brought his pole out of the water. He’d made tens of thousands of trips across this pond, and it had given him forearms a pile driver might envy. As Hagen straightened up and yanked off his belt, the gondolier swung the pole, unleashing the pent-up anger of a man who’d spent years wanting to do this to every self-important asshole who’d ridden in his gondola. It connected with the skull of one of the gunmen.

  The other whipped around, but before he could get off a shot, he was jerked backward. Tom Hagen’s belt dug into his neck.

  The gondolier grabbed the first dead man’s gun and trained it on Louie Russo.

  The second man kicked and turned purple. Hagen felt his windpipe rupture. The man went still. Tom shoved him to the floor of the boat.

  Russo started to jump, to try to swim for it, but before he got out of the boat the gondolier grabbed him by the back of the shirt and held him fast. His sunglasses fell into the water.

  The tiny-fingered Don started to cry. “I gave you everything you wanted. Now this?”

  “Don’t insult me,” Hagen said. He fished a.22 with a silencer out of the coat pocket of the man he’d killed. The assassin’s tool of choice. His arms tingled from the effort it had taken to garrote a man. “You were going to kill me,” Hagen said, waving the gun in front of Russo.

  “You’re crazy,” Russo whimpered. “That’s just a gun. It don’t mean nothin’.”

  “Even if you weren’t, I don’t care. You gave Roth the idea of getting Fredo to betray the Family, and you set it all up with your people in L.A. You’ve done a hundred other things that give me cause to kill you.”

  “ You?” Russo’s tears muted the effect of his devilish eyes. Snot ran freely from his phallic nose. “Kill me? You’re not in this side of the business, Irish. You were a fucking congressman. You think they’re gonna let you make your bones, Irish? You’re Irish.”

  Tom Hagen’s whole adult life, everyone had gotten him wrong. He was first and foremost a poor Irish kid from the streets. He’d lived under bushes and in tunnels for an entire New York winter and won fistfights with grown men over half a loaf of moldy bread. Hagen raised the pistol. Now it was his turn to smile.

  “If you live in the wolf’s den long enough,” Hagen said, “you learn to howl.”

  He fired. The bullet tore into Russo’s brain, ricocheted around in his skull, and did not make an exit wound, the way a bigger-caliber bullet would have.

  Hagen tossed the gun into the pond.

  He and the gondolier quickly, silently tied weights to the three dead men and threw them overboard. No one saw them. The gondolier took Hagen back to shore and went to work scouring the boat with a bleach solution. He didn’t see any blood, but it paid (well) to play it safe. Hagen drove away in Louie Russo’s own car. The gondolier would swear on the immortal soul of his sainted mother that he’d seen Russo’s car drive away. The car was found two days later in the airport parking lot. The newspapers reported that passengers with any of several aliases known to have been used by Louie the Face had boarded planes that day. None of these leads had turned up an actual person.

  The gunmen had been loyal, trusted Russo soldatos, men it would have been difficult if not impossible for the Corleones to bribe. This gondolier, on the other hand, made less in a year than what Louie Russo’s cuff links cost. Russo and his men were found a month later. They were hardly the only corpses there, either. The acidic pond accelerated decomposition. When the state police had it drained and the top layer of mud excavated, they found bones galore, most of them in weighted gunnysacks, suitcases, and oil drums.

  By then the gondolier had disappeared.

  Neither the authorities nor anyone from the Chicago outfit ever found him. He lived out his days under a different name in a small town in Nevada, running a gun shop and private cemetery on land purchased (with other people’s money) from the federal government, only twenty miles from the windy, irradiated outskirts of Doomtown.

  Joe Lucadello called from a pay phone less than a mile from Geraci’s house and told Michael Corleone everything. The lie he’d told about Russo, the truth he’d told about Michael. The details about the ship that would take Geraci to Sicily. Alone. His wife and kids weren’t going with him, which ought to make things even easier.

  “Sorry we didn’t get it done down there,” Lucadello said, meaning Cuba. “I know you were counting on it.”

  “We’ve lived to fight another day,” Michael said. “What more can a person ask of life?”

  “Quite a bit,” Joe said. “But only if you’re young.”

  At his mansion in Chagrin Falls, Vincent Forlenza awoke in the dark barely able to breathe, with the familiar and excruciating sensation of an elephant standing on his chest. He managed to ring the bell for his nurse. He knew a heart attack when he had one. It wasn’t his first, and with any luck it wouldn’t be the last, either. It wasn’t as bad as the others. More like a baby elephant. Though maybe he was just getting used to it.

  The nurse called for an ambulance. She did what she could and told him he’d be fine. She wasn’t a cardiologist, but she meant what she said. His vital signs were good, considering.

  Vincent Forlenza was a cautious man. God seemed to be having a hard time killing him, and he’d be damned if he was going to make the job easy for mere mortals. His estate here and his lodge on Rattlesnake Island were heavily guarded and fortified. It had been years since Forlenza had gotten into a car or boat without his men checking it thoroughly for bombs. Ordinarily, he had two guys do the job who were known to dislike each other, so they’d each be eager to catch the other betraying his Don. He’d stopped eating anything that wasn’t prepared as he watched. But even Don Forlenza, in his hour of medical need, wouldn’t have thought to question the men who arrived to save his life. Neither did anyone guarding the estate. Neither did the nurse, who noticed nothing unusual in the way the men administered to the old man. There was nothing unusual about the ambulance, eith
er-until it left and, moments later, another one just like it showed up.

  The first ambulance was found the next day, a block from where it had been stolen. Vincent “the Jew” Forlenza was never seen again.

  In the family section of the stadium, Tom and Theresa Hagen and their handsome son Andrew rose for the playing of the national anthem. Tom clamped his hand over his breast and found himself singing along.

  “You usually just mutter,” Theresa said.

  “This is such a great country,” Tom said. “No one should ever just mutter.”

  Frankie Corleone was the smallest man on the entire Notre Dame defense, but on the first play from scrimmage, he shot through the line and hit the Syracuse Orangemen’s gigantic fullback so hard his head snapped back and his body followed. The crowd went wild, but Frankie jogged back to the huddle like he hadn’t done anything unusual.

  “Frankie!” Andrew shouted.

  “My nephew!” Theresa said.

  Tom and Theresa hugged each other, and the fullback made it off the field without the need of a stretcher.

  On the next play, Syracuse tried to pass. The receiver was wide open over the middle. Just as the ball got there, Frankie came out of nowhere and batted the ball away.

  “Woo-hoo!” Theresa yelled. “Go, Frankie!”

  “The Hit Man!” Tom shouted. It was his nephew’s nickname. He didn’t allow himself to give it a second thought.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be cheering for Syracuse, Ma?” Andrew teased her.

  It was a perfect November day for football, crisp and struggling to be sunny. Everyone should see a football game at Notre Dame. The Golden Dome. Touchdown Jesus.

  “This is different,” she said. “This is family.”

  In the Palermo harbor, Michael Corleone sat on the deck of a yacht belonging to his father’s old friend Cesare Indelicato. Michael had never traveled with as many men for security as he had on this trip, but Don Cesare had not taken offense. They were living in troubled times.

  Michael settled in now, comfortable that he would not suffer a double cross, willing to risk the recklessness of being only a few hundred meters away from Geraci when he arrived in Sicily for the satisfaction of watching him taken from the boat by the best assassins in Sicily.

  Michael would have to return to New York. Other than Hagen, the best people the Corleone Family had left posed unacceptable risks because of their ties to Geraci. The next best people were mediocrities like Eddie Paradise and the DiMiceli brothers. Michael would have to run the Family again, every aspect of it. He’d be able to make it look as if he were returning in triumph, he was certain-the elimination of Louie Russo and Vince Forlenza would see to that, at least in the eyes of the top men from the other New York Families. But so much of what Michael had wanted-legitimacy, peace, the love of his wife and children, a life different and better than the one his father lived-was now beyond his reach: for years, perhaps forever.

  The terrible sting of this would not go away by killing Geraci. He knew that.

  There was no pleasure to be taken from such a thing. He knew that, too.

  Still.

  As they waited, Don Cesare-in his brilliantly indirect Sicilian way-was discussing the benefits of membership in a Roman Masonic organization, the name of which, Propaganda Due, he did not utter but which was understood between these men. P2, as it was usually called (though Indelicato did not say this either), was a secret society rumored to be more powerful than the Mafia, the Vatican, the CIA, and the KGB put together. Michael was being proposed for membership, and if all went well, he would be the first American admitted. Not even his father had been considered for this. It was a sign that, even in the wake of the Carmine Marino debacle, the true powers understood that Michael Corleone was destined to resume this role as the most dominant force in the American underworld. Any other man in Michael’s position would have been flattered, and he gamely pretended to be just that.

  Finally the ship came into view. Michael sipped a glass of ice water and kept his eyes on the men Indelicato had positioned at the foot of the pier.

  The ship docked.

  The passengers gradually disembarked.

  There was no sign of Nick Geraci.

  Indelicato nodded to a man on the roof of the yacht, who waved an orange flag, signaling the men on shore to board the ship and look for their target.

  “They’ll find him,” said Don Cesare. “They’re good men, and he has nowhere to go.”

  But soon the ship-to-shore radio crackled with bad news. Their target had apparently eluded them.

  Enraged, Michael used the radio to call the United States.

  He was unable to reach Joe Lucadello, but his assistant assured Michael that nothing had gone wrong. They’d had to use several layers of intermediaries to conceal the man’s identity, but the assistant assured him that, unless the guy jumped off somewhere in the Mediterranean, he was on that ship. “I assure you it was him,” the assistant said. “I have the paperwork right in front of me. Fausto Geraci. Passport, pictures, everything.”

  Whistling a tune his Palermitan mother sang him as a little boy, Fausto Geraci, Sr., disappeared under the ancient stone arch near the dock, into what was once the walled city of Palermo.

  Cesare Indelicato professed to be as flummoxed by the situation as Michael was.

  Chapter 31

  M ICHAEL CORLEONE’S phone rang in the middle of the night. He was still jet-lagged from the punishingly long trip home from Palermo.

  “Sorry to wake you, Uncle Mike. It’s just… there’s been an accident.”

  He could never tell Francesca and Kathy apart, on the phone or in person.

  “Francie!” Kathy Corleone called from the kitchen. She had Billy’s typewriter and several neat piles of books set up on Francesca’s kitchen table-which, only hours after her train arrived in D.C., she’d already com-mandeered so she could work on her dissertation. “Phone!”

  “Who is it?” Francesca asked. She was giving Sonny a haircut on a chair in the bathroom.

  From Kathy’s lips came words Francesca and Billy had agreed would never be spoken in this apartment, the name of the tall blond whore from Floridians for Shea.

  Francesca dropped her scissors. For a crazed moment, she was furious with her sister for this cruel joke, but of course it was no joke. Kathy didn’t even know Billy had had an affair. “Don’t move,” she told Sonny. “Stay right there.”

  The boy must have heard something in his mother’s voice. He froze.

  For most of their lives, Kathy and Francesca had known the most trivial details of each other’s lives. When had that changed? It wasn’t just going away to different colleges, Francesca thought, standing over the black telephone in her bedroom, blood roaring in her ears. Boys, she thought. Men. What of life’s biggest problems are caused by anything else? Francesca wanted to go back into the bathroom, lock the door, take her son in her arms, and hold him tight, willing him not to become one of those charming, selfish sociopaths.

  Instead, she stopped stalling, took a deep breath, and picked up the phone.

  “I’m sorry to call you at your home.” The voice of That Woman sounded as if she’d just stopped crying. It also didn’t sound long distance. “This isn’t easy for me.”

  “Where are you?” Francesca said.

  “Look, it would have been easier for me not to call than to call,” the woman said. “Much easier. I’m only trying to do what’s right.”

  “You’re a little late for that, you whore,” Francesca said. “Don’t lie to me and tell me you’re not in Washington.”

  “I have no intention of lying,” she said. “I wouldn’t put myself through this for anything but the truth.”

  Francesca resisted the urge to hang up. Instinctively, she knew that whatever the woman was about to say, it was something Francesca should hear, and wouldn’t want to. “Hold on,” she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and asked Kathy if she’d go finish up Sonny’s haircut. F
rancesca closed and locked her bedroom door. She slammed the heel of her hand against the plaster wall. She put a hole in it. Kathy called out to see if she was okay. Francesca lied and said she was. She picked up the phone and sat down. “Now talk,” Francesca said. She covered her eyes with her throbbing right hand as if avoiding the sight of a dead dog on the road.

  “To begin with,” the woman said, “you’re right. I’m in Washington. I work in a congressman’s office. When I first moved here, it wasn’t for Billy, it was for this job, but-”

  “Do you really think,” Francesca said, “that you have the right to cry about this?”

  The woman regained her composure and succinctly confessed. She and Billy had started up again not long after Francesca had lost the baby. They’d been at it off and on until lately, when Billy had gotten her pregnant and been so casual about her getting an abortion that she’d gone ahead with it. She was having a hard time living with herself, though, and had decided to quit her job and move back home to Sarasota.

  Francesca clenched her teeth and pressed her swelling hand firmly against the bedpost, trying to use pain to keep the rage that was rising in her from exploding. Not yet. Don’t give this whore the satisfaction.

  The woman said she was calling from her office. She and Billy had gone to a hotel at Dupont Circle on their lunch hour. There-what does it matter how it had happened?-whatever they’d had had come to a tearful end. She claimed that Billy had cried as much as she had.

  “Feel better, do you?” Francesca said between her clenched teeth. “Can you live with yourself now?” She was shaking. If she’d been in the same room with this woman, it would have been nothing to kill her. Knock her down and stomp her pretty skull until it popped like a grape. Better yet, thrust a butcher knife through her heart.

  “Not really,” the woman said. “Listen, say anything to me you want. I deserve it. I really don’t-” More tears. “I mean, I’m not the sort of person who-”