The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  “Bad people,” Francesca said, “never think they’re the sort of person who did the things they did. I’ve got news for you, you whore. You’re not what you think you are. None of us are. You’re what you did, nothing more. You act like a whore, you’re a whore. I have to go.”

  “Wait, don’t,” the woman said. “There’s something else I have to tell you. As bad as what I already said, this might be even worse. I think it’s even worse.”

  “You don’t impress me as someone who knows the difference between good and bad.”

  “It’s about your family.”

  “I know that look,” Kathy said. “Don’t think I don’t know that look.”

  “Help me bandage my hand,” Francesca said.

  “You need to see a doctor,” Kathy said. “What happened that-”

  “Help me.”

  After years of petty conflict and drifting affection, the sisters felt a shock of understanding shoot through them. They’d had their differences the past few years, but the bond they had as twins never went anywhere. Summoned, it obeyed. There is nothing more complicated and less so than family, nothing easier to understand and at the same time unknowable. With twins, that all goes double.

  Francesca didn’t explain any of the particulars to Kathy, yet Kathy understood what she needed to understand. She helped Francesca with her hand, helped her get dressed, listened to her instructions about Sonny (get dinner at Eastern Market Lunch, he loves that, loves the market, too, but dress warm, it’s supposed to snow later tonight). Kathy tried to soothe her but not counterproductively so.

  Francesca kissed Sonny and grabbed the keys to Billy’s Dual-Ghia. They had only one car (though it cost more than two nice ones), and of course it was his, the selfish prick, a big fancy custom-built thing he was ordinarily reluctant to let her drive. At least he’d left it for her today so she could go pick up Kathy at the train station.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Kathy called as Francesca slammed the apartment door behind her.

  “Maybe I am you,” Francesca shouted back.

  When she got there, since only Billy himself was allowed to use the parking garage, she had to circle round and round the building, looking for a space. Her tightly wrapped hand throbbed. Pain shot through it each time she had to shift. The pain wasn’t exactly unpleasant. It was somehow keeping her from crying. The last thing she wanted to allow herself to do was cry.

  She banged her unbandaged fist on the leather-wrapped wheel, trying to quell her anger. It only made it worse. You are what you do, nothing more. Francesca was disgusted to be the kind of person who’d look for a legal parking space at a time like this. She growled, feral as a cornered wolf, and whipped the car into an empty space in a loading zone.

  She strode but did not run up the steps to the Department of Justice.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Van Arsdale,” said the receptionist in Billy’s office. “Mr. Van Arsdale is in an off-site meeting with the attorney general. I don’t expect them back until tomorrow.”

  Which Francesca knew. She was supposed to meet Billy at a bar he and his friends from work liked, down by the river in Georgetown, then go out for dinner and a movie. “Billy needed some files,” Francesca said. “He forgot them. He told me right where to look.”

  The next thing Francesca knew, she was alone in Billy’s office, going where the whore had told her to go, looking where the whore had told her to look: in the backmost file in the top drawer. The file was thick and battered; the handwritten label-Billy’s handwriting-read Insurance.

  Francesca couldn’t be seen going through it, not there. She tucked it under her arm, thanked the receptionist, and left. She went back to the car. It had not been towed. It had not been ticketed. A good omen, she thought, with no sincere hope it would be.

  Inside the folder, as the whore had promised, was information about her family. Newspaper clippings that anyone might have kept, but from papers all over the country. Hundreds of carefully arranged and catalogued snapshots, including quite a few Francesca had taken with her own camera, even before Billy had met her: photos of everyone in her family, but especially those on her father’s side. There was the picture of her uncles and grandfather at Aunt Connie’s wedding that used to be on their dresser and had supposedly been lost in one of their moves. There were four notebooks, the same kind Francesca had been required to use for her freshman English themes, filled with notes about her family, and a several-page typewritten summary of the contents of those notebooks. She tried to figure out when he’d started doing this. The first began in December 1955, the day after they first made love. It wasn’t about that; it was everything that happened at Grandma Carmela’s house, not a journal of any sort, but notes, as if from a class. They weren’t faked. There were things in there only Billy could have known, rendered in handwriting that was unmistakably his (right down to the cursive-style capital A’s and M’s that he’d used then and replaced with printed style a few years later).

  Can’t you see Billy’s just here to experience a gen-u-ine Mafia Christmas?

  Billy told his whore blonde from Sarasota that he had this file. He probably showed it to her. They probably had a good laugh about it, naked in a hotel room overlooking Dupont Circle.

  Dizzy, she collapsed, falling sideways against the gearshift and not caring. She let herself cry. That made nothing better. She wanted to do something, not sit in her cheating husband’s fancy car, crying like some helpless woman.

  She was not some helpless woman.

  She was a Corleone.

  She was the daughter of a great warrior king, Santino Corleone.

  By the time she noticed she was murmuring “Daddy, help me” over and over, she’d been doing it awhile.

  A Capitol Police traffic cop stopped to write her a ticket, but when Francesca sat up-her face contorted in anguish, her hair and eyes wild-the cop put the summons book away. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. He turned and walked the other way, shaking his head.

  In a dark parking lot down by the Potomac River, Francesca waited in her husband’s red car, watching the bar across the street, where she was supposed to meet Billy. She’d been there for a long time, long enough to read every speculation, half-truth, and condescending comment in that hateful file. She wasn’t wearing a watch, and the clock in the Ghia kept lousy time. There had been a handful of aspirin in her purse (next to the kitchen knife, a wedding present from Fredo Corleone and Deanna Dunn), but they’d worn off. Her hand was throbbing worse than ever. But the emotional and physical pain were working together to keep her from passing out, the way two deadly poisons in the bloodstream can keep a person alive.

  Maybe an hour ago, Billy had gone into the bar with several other young lawyers. He hadn’t seen her. If he had, they’d have probably had this out already. She wouldn’t really have used that knife (would she?), and she wasn’t above making a scene. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Every moment since then, she’d been a moment away from getting out of the car. She would have, she thought, if she knew what she was going to do or even what she wanted.

  She kept going back and forth between wishing she hadn’t brought the knife at all and fearing that she couldn’t possibly do this with her left hand.

  She kept thinking about her tough and funny little boy, which made her alternately more and then less inclined to act.

  She kept thinking that if only she could calm down, she’d think better.

  She realized, now, that this was as absurd as thinking that if only her father were here for her, her whole life would be different and better.

  She thought she might soften when she saw Billy again, but when he finally came out of the bar, alone and unsteady on his feet, turning up the collar of his coat against the cold, the opposite happened.

  Insurance.

  Her heart raced. Her hand hurt so badly she whimpered like a dying animal. Billy turned the corner and started up a steep, narrow cobblestone alley toward M Street. She knew what
he was doing. He was a rich boy who’d bought this fancy car because it was what Johnny Fontane, Bobby Chadwick, and Danny Shea drove, but he was also too cheap to hail a cab if it meant having to ride around an unnecessary block. On M Street, he’d be able to get one that wouldn’t have to turn around.

  Francesca turned on the ignition. It was a fast car, that Dual-Ghia, one of the fastest made. A perfect hybrid of Italian engineering and American flamboyance.

  In the blink of an eye and a few agonizing thrusts of the gearshift, Francesca had it rocketing up that alley.

  Billy turned, shielding his eyes from the glare of the headlights. She braced her arms against the big, faux-wood steering wheel. Billy was directly in front of her. There was a split-second flash of what might have been a smile, and she hit him. On impact, his shoes exploded off his feet, his legs buckled, his torso whipped forward, and his head slammed into the hood as hard as if he’d dove from ten stories above. The car fishtailed but kept going. She slowed down but did not slam on the brakes. Billy stayed on the hood as if he were imbedded there.

  Francesca grabbed the folder and jumped out of the car. She closed the door as if nothing unusual had just happened and, without hesitating, walked away from the car.

  She wasn’t hurt. No one seemed to have seen her. The only thing she felt was awe. She wasn’t screaming or crying. She’d had the mental strength to go through with this and the physical strength to brace herself against the wheel, even with a badly injured hand. The hand was killing her now, but on impact she hadn’t felt a thing.

  About fifty yards from the wreck she saw one of his shoes but didn’t even break stride.

  She told herself not to look. But as she was about to turn onto M Street, she couldn’t help but look back.

  From the top of the hill, the damage to the car didn’t look bad at all. Billy was still on the hood, motionless. A pool of blood was spreading across the cobblestones. At first she couldn’t tell where all that blood was coming from, until she realized that his legs were not crumpled underneath the front bumper. Far behind the car, under the alley’s lone streetlight, lay the severed bottom half of his body.

  She felt no remorse whatsoever.

  The walk home might have taken her a minute or a day, Francesca couldn’t have said. All the way home, enduring the pain in her hand and the almost as severe pain from the lurches her heart made every time she heard a siren, she didn’t look behind her, not once.

  Kathy was at the table, lost in her writing, and Sonny was asleep in his room.

  Francesca sat heavily down on the sofa.

  “Did Billy call?”

  “I don’t know,” Kathy said, not looking up. “I unplugged the phone to work. I hope you weren’t worried. Sonny was a blast. A doll. Everything went great. How’s your hand?”

  “Remember when I found out Billy was cheating on me, and you said I should kill him? Well, I did it.”

  Kathy started to laugh, then looked closer at her sister and, eyes wide, stifled it. She rushed over to the sofa. “Oh, my God, you-”

  “Look at this,” Francesca said, extending the folder to her sister.

  “Tell me everything,” Kathy said. “Tell me everything fast.”

  The police showed up about an hour after Francesca did, maybe five minutes after Kathy got on the bus that would take her to Union Station and the night’s last train back to New York. There was no trace of her in Francesca’s apartment. Kathy hadn’t even told her mother and her mother’s fiancé, Stan the Liquor Man, that she’d gone to Washington for fear Sandra would immediately start laying on the guilt about how long it had been since Kathy had come to see them in Florida.

  When the police gave Francesca the news, she ran down the hall to her bedroom, screaming in not-quite-mock hysteria. She hit the wall with the palm of her left hand-hard but of course not hard enough to hurt anything. Still, the noise it made was convincing. When they caught up to her, there was a hole in the wall and Francesca’s hand was, in their opinion, broken and starting to swell. The ice that had in fact just brought the swelling down dramatically had been flushed down the toilet.

  Miraculously, Sonny slept through all of this. After the police left, and after the doctor sent over by Danny Shea’s secretary left, too, Francesca unplugged the telephone and stood over her son’s bed and watched him sleep, his golden football helmet on the pillow beside him.

  She would have to tell him. She would call Kathy in New York, and Kathy would call everyone else: their mother, even Billy’s brother and his parents. But Francesca would, somehow, have to shoulder the burden of telling Sonny.

  She went back out to the kitchen and took the file out from behind her pots and pans, where she’d hidden it. She paged through it again, marveling that anyone would betray his own family like this. And for what? His career? He was rich. Francesca’s family had connections. Her family could have been Billy’s insurance.

  Francesca knew what it was to grow up without a father. She did not know what it was like to grow up with a father who was willing to destroy his own family.

  She still felt no remorse.

  For now, she’d tell Sonny that Daddy had had an accident and was in Heaven with baby Carmela. But someday, she vowed, she’d tell the boy the truth.

  She plugged the phone back in and called Kathy to tell her what had happened. As part of the plan she’d worked out a few hours before, Kathy had told Francesca to betray nothing on the phone, in case Billy had had them bugged. Kathy and Francesca had a fake conversation about what happened and a real one about who Kathy should call.

  It was getting close to dawn. It would be late in Nevada now, too. Even so, Francesca called. He’d want to know.

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

  The next day-as Kathy had predicted-the secretary at Billy’s office mentioned that Francesca had come by to get a file for Billy. There was nothing incriminating or unusual about this. She hadn’t left the office angry or distraught. Billy had several different files at home, and Francesca produced them. The one marked Insurance was a personal file of Billy’s. No one outside her immediate family ever asked to see it.

  Francesca’s whereabouts after the trip to the Justice Department were easy to prove. The counter people at Eastern Market Lunch said that of course they’d seen Francesca and little Sonny there the night before.

  The people in the apartment upstairs said they’d seen Francesca and Sonny come home not long after dark. For at least two hours after that there had been typing coming steadily from below.

  Francesca confirmed this. She said that she’d been writing a letter to her sister in New York, which she’d mailed not long before the police arrived. She said this in the presence of the best criminal defense lawyer in New York (an arrangement quietly made by Tom Hagen). A few days later, Kathy (by now ably represented by the same lawyer) said she’d received the letter but had thrown it away. As several friends and relatives (including their mother, Sandra) could and did attest, the twins had grown apart in recent years. One happy consequence of this unhappy story would be the way it served to bring the twins together again, as close as they’d ever been.

  The steering wheel and gearshift of the Dual-Ghia seemed to have been wiped of fingerprints (the effect of Francesca’s Ace bandage, actually). Still, detectives identified four sets of prints. Three came from the members of the family for which this was the only car-Billy, Francesca, and Sonny Van Arsdale (Kathy had both kept her gloves on for the short drive from Union Station to her sister’s apartment and remembered that she’d kept them on). The fourth set-found in both the front seat and back-came from a woman with whom Billy Van Arsdale had had an ongoing affair.

  The police were able to find several people who’d seen this woman on the very afternoon of Billy’s death, checking into a hotel on Dupont Circle and leaving in tears approximately ninety minutes later. The woman had confessed to several people in her office that Billy had ended his relationsh
ip with her that day. Several months before, she’d confessed to many of these same friends that Billy had impregnated her and coerced her into having an abortion.

  When detectives questioned her about this, she was openly distraught. They arrested her and charged her with second-degree murder.

  Book IX. Summer 1962

  Chapter 32

  C ARMINE MARINO’S ARREST turned out to be the international incident that everyone involved with his trip to Cuba had feared.

  The scope of what the CIA was trying to do in Cuba came as a shock to President Shea. Publicly, he made it clear that the United States would cooperate in any way it could to bring Marino, an Italian national, to justice (for its part, the Italian government said that it had several Carmine Marinos on record, but none matching the description of the notorious killer). Marino had been living in the United States for six years. The Cuban dictator said that he held President Shea personally responsible. The Soviet premier issued no public statement on the matter, but he did come to Havana for the double’s lavish funeral.

  Privately, President Shea spent many long hours meeting with his national security team and screaming at his CIA director. But before the president got the chance to confront his father with his suspicions of the old man’s involvement in the matter, the Ambassador had a massive stroke. He’d live for several more years, but he’d had his last conversation.

  Marino’s affiliation with what the newspapers had never stopped calling “the Corleone crime family” was easy enough to document. Even the papers still controlled by the Family had little choice but to follow suit with their competitors and investigate the many rumors that the young gangster had not acted alone.

  In public, the attorney general scoffed at any notion of a connection between the federal government and what he was now calling “the Mafia.” In a private meeting with his staff, he unveiled an aggressive new plan to prosecute organized crime. Billy Van Arsdale was irreplaceable, he told them, but their efforts would be dedicated to his memory.