Geraci steeled himself for the task at hand and turned to walk back inside.
Then he panicked.
For a moment, he’d forgotten the other task at hand. For a split second—though it had the force of much more time—Geraci even forgot who the dead man had claimed to be.
ONLY MONTHS AFTER HIS DISAPPEARANCE, NICK Geraci had begun to attain the status of myth. Even the great, gray New York Times weighed in, late in the game, with an editorial headlined JUDGE CRATER, AMELIA EARHART, PLEASE MEET ACE GERACI.
Only a few members of the secret society to which Geraci belonged and certain augmented elements of the CIA knew precisely who Geraci was—and even for those people he had become, seemingly overnight, larger than life. They knew about the assassin squad he led and the debacle in Cuba that came from that, though few blamed Geraci. They knew that Michael Corleone had tried to kill him, sacrificing Geraci as a pawn in the young crime boss’s obsessive quest to become a legitimate businessman. They knew that Geraci had found out about this, and they knew that he’d conspired with the bosses of the Cleveland and Chicago organizations in an attempt to get revenge. And they knew that it had almost worked. This conspiracy had been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of dozens of notable men associated with the American Cosa Nostra, including those two bosses themselves—Luigi “Louie” Russo of Chicago (aka “Fuckface,” because of his penis-shaped nose) and Vincent Forlenza of Cleveland (aka “The Jew,” because he had so many Jews in top positions in his syndicate), as well as several top men in the Chicago and Cleveland organizations. Other notable casualties had included the most powerful Jewish mobster in the country (a man named Hyman Roth), the bosses of the Los Angeles and San Francisco syndicates, and an assortment of Corleone Family underbosses and caporegimes, including Rocco Lampone, Frank Pantangeli, and Fredo Corleone. The chaos had forced Michael Corleone to return to New York to more closely oversee his businesses there, both legal and illegal.
The people who knew these things were of course not talking—except among themselves.
As for the FBI, it had an imperfect sense of who Geraci was and what had happened. The Bureau had assigned a fairly large number of agents to the case but had not assumed jurisdiction from the NYPD, reputedly because of a difference of opinion between the Bureau’s director, who believed this to be a local matter and thus in the hands of New York’s finest, and the attorney general, a man half the director’s age but his putative boss, who had ordered the investigation to be a top priority. These things were reported in several sleazy true-crime gazettes and girlie magazines but turned out to be true.
The NYPD’s understanding of the case was more flawed than the FBI’s. It had identified Geraci as the capo di tutti capi, the boss of all bosses, when all he’d ever been was Corleone caporegime acting as boss for the Family’s interests in New York—and even that had been something of a setup. But the investigation had nonetheless provoked dissension within the NYPD, which the press was gleefully exploiting. A faction of the department’s true believers—eyes on promotions or federal appointments—was actually trying to find him. Another faction was occupied by efforts to pin a number of absurdly unrelated cases it wanted to close on the missing crime boss. The faction in ascendancy was pushing to close the investigation and hand it off to the FBI and/or someone in Ohio. Given that Geraci was the literal godson of Cleveland crime lord Vincent Forlenza (who, with less fanfare, was also missing and not technically dead), it was common sense that those responsible for Geraci’s disappearance or demise were based in Cleveland and/or nearby Youngstown, a mob haven. It should be said that not all the police in this faction wanted this case off their desks because they were disinclined to investigate anything related to the brown paper bags of cash that had helped pay for their remodeled basements and their kid’s braces.
The press, especially in New York, could not restrain its glee. For weeks, the front pages were awash with colorful nicknames and wild speculation. One “highly placed gangland source” even claimed that Geraci had disappeared once before, in 1955, that he was actually the pilot of a plane that crashed into Lake Erie and killed the bosses of the San Francisco and Los Angeles crime syndicates. The pilot had been taken to a Cleveland hospital, unconscious, but then vanished, only to be found several months later, rat-gnawed and badly decomposed. The pilot’s name was supposedly Gerald O’Malley, but efforts to learn anything about him failed. At the time, two different papers opined that he might never have existed. That did not prove that Geraci and O’Malley were one and the same. But it was true that in his boxing days, Nick Geraci did use various aliases and participated in various fights of dubious resolution, so in the minds of many, these allegations seemed to fit a pattern.
The word on the street? Nick Geraci’s body was encased somewhere in the fresh cement of the new baseball stadium at Flushing Meadows Park.
Instead—far-fetched as it might seem—the truth was, the most powerful nation on earth had deployed skilled intelligence and law enforcement personnel to conduct a gigantic manhunt for a powerful and resourceful leader of a secret criminal society—a tall, imposing, bearded man with a chronic, withering disease—and somehow failed to find the cave where he was hiding.
GERACI HAD FOUND REFUGE UNDERNEATH LAKE Eerie, in a bomb shelter the size of a ballroom, complete with its own water treatment system and power supply and seemingly endless cache of canned food. Geraci had learned about the place doing some business with Don Forlenza. Most of the people who knew about it either were dead or wouldn’t think to look for him here. On the train from New York, Geraci thought that at any second someone would kill him. He took it past Cleveland to Toledo, where he didn’t know anybody, stole a boat, and, hugging the shore, took it to Rattlesnake Island. The lodge was empty, as it usually was when Forlenza wasn’t there. Geraci disabled the alarm, climbed in a window, ransacked the liquor cabinet, and left a radio tuned to a rock-and-roll station so that it would look like kids had broken into the place. Then he made his way down to the shelter.
The genius of the setup was that it was carved into bedrock underneath a secret guest room, where Geraci had stayed a few times and so knew how to make the hidden door open, and another well-stocked shelter. It was possible that even if people searched the lodge, they’d never find the hidden door. Even if they did, they might never think to look for the other, larger shelter below.
Always at the edge of Geraci’s attention was what might be waiting for him up there, outside his door, what catastrophe might seek him out, how this might end. A pack of strangers in long, dark coats. Or waves of G-men with square jaws, bad suits, and tommy guns—images he realized came from the movies, but where else? He’d never had a run-in with the Feds in his life.
Or maybe just one man. Michael Corleone’s pet killer, Al Neri, smiling and alone.
Or Geraci’s own protégé, Cosimo Barone—Momo the Roach. That was more Michael’s way. He’d had Geraci, as a test of loyalty, kill Sally Tessio—Momo’s uncle, a man who’d been like a father to Nick Geraci.
When, if ever, would Geraci know he could come out? What would force his hand?
For months, no one knew where Nick Geraci was except Nick Geraci.
One of his many difficulties, down in the hole, was that he had no way of knowing what anyone knew. There was a ham radio, but Geraci didn’t know how to use it and was afraid to try, for fear it might send out signals that would tip off his location. There was a TV, hooked up to an antenna on the roof of the lodge. Much as Geraci detested television, he did watch it off and on. There was nothing on the TV news about his situation. There wasn’t much on the TV news that could tell a person what anyone knew about anything. Everything else on TV was just as bad. But then the TV stopped working, too.
When that happened, Geraci braced himself for the other shoe to drop. He dragged a chair to face the heavy steel door and waited there with a shotgun across his lap. If cops of some sort came to get him, they’d announce themselves. He’d
keep the gun trained on them until he saw badges, at which point he’d lay down his weapon and go peacefully. He didn’t want to die. But anyone else, he’d say a little prayer and open fire.
This was if he wasn’t having a bout of tremors and could fire the goddamned thing at all.
Hours passed. He fell asleep. When he woke he realized to his horror that he’d forgotten to wind his watch. He’d allowed himself to depend on television as a backup to winding the watch. He wanted to shoot the TV, but he didn’t want to make any noise. Also, there was a chance it might start to work again. No matter how much you hate TV, the monster lulls you back.
But it didn’t come back on.
In this hole, there was no day, no night, and now no time. It could have been anywhere from two days to two weeks before he put the chair back where it was and gave up his vigil.
He wondered why he hadn’t started making tally marks on the wall, like a hard case in a prison movie, so he’d know how long he’d been down here. His clothes were starting to come apart from the harsh detergent he’d used too much of and the scrub board he’d used with too much force. That and the trouble getting dressed made him start walking around naked. He kept bathing but stopped shaving. A beard might come in handy.
Geraci was a reader. He had a night-school history degree and half a law degree, too, and he prided himself on reading big new biographies and histories. Once he finished the history of Roman warfare he’d brought with him, all he had left were the books that were already there: dime novels, dog-eared pornos, and Machiavelli’s The Prince. He couldn’t bring himself to read the dime novels, and even touching another man’s pornos gave him the creeps (though of course he did, in a few weak moments). He’d already read The Prince, but he reread it several times as a hedge against going nuts. Soon he realized that it wasn’t exactly the right tool for the job.
That was about when he started messing around with the typewriter. It was a hulking old black one. At first, he used it to try to write letters—the Parkinson’s made longhand difficult—but the impossibility of ever sending the letters made him stop. He liked the writing, though. Banging on that old contraption was a good thing to do with his hands. And it gave him something to do with his mind. He started to fool around with what he eventually thought of as a book. His life’s story. If he didn’t make it, it would let his daughters know who he’d been and how he’d lived. If it was good enough to be published, maybe it could provide for them.
He pined for his wife and daughters. Every session at the typewriter, his longing for them crept in. He’d read over what he wrote and cringe. He loved them, but they were human beings, too; he was idealizing them into nothingness. He’d wad up the page, then close his eyes and try to see them. Moments later, all he’d be picturing is Charlotte naked and doing various things in bed, especially that cute maneuver of hers when he made love to her from behind. He’d jerk off and then spend the next however-long time hating himself. Also, she’d done that thing maybe twice. Maybe one time and then just a little bit once more.
Another problem was that he’d get carried away and write exciting, violent passages that felt true as he wrote them but had never happened. By and large, these scenes amused him. It was what people wanted, wasn’t it? But then he’d think that what readers really want are books that give them the inside dope on how things are. Thus, more wadded-up paper, more time wondering just who the fuck he thought he was kidding.
The wadded-up pages far outnumbered the keepers. His supply of typing paper wasn’t going to last, so he started unwadding and using the other sides and brown paper towels, too. He used fresh sheets only when retyping a page he thought was done.
Strike that. They were never done. Invariably, he’d read back over what he thought was done—a day later? a week?—and he’d hate himself all over again. Geraci was a smart man who’d always done well in classes where he’d had to write papers, but it turned out—to his surprise—that writing a book was a pain in the ass.
He loved his title, though: Fausto’s Bargain. By Fausto Dominick Geraci, Jr. He hadn’t decided whether to use Ace, his nickname. It would help people say his name in the Americanized way he preferred. He’d boxed under that name (on those occasions he hadn’t pretended to be somebody else entirely), so some readers might know him for that. Also, Geraci planned to write about his adventures flying planes in the early days of his narcotics operation, which made using Ace a good idea and had, in fact, been partly why the nickname stuck. On the other hand, it might give people the wrong idea. Geraci wouldn’t get on a plane now for anything. Plus, when he typed out Ace, it looked bad. Look at me, I’m Ace! Nobody would want to read that asshole’s book.
And that was just the work the title page took.
Soon, he was reading the dime novels, if only for pointers. He was shocked how good many of them were. Home Is the Sailor. I Am Legend. A Swell-Looking Babe. Cassidy’s Girl. Sweet Slow Death. So good, it was hard to stop and think about how the writers were doing what they were doing and how Geraci might steal from them. Even the worst ones—like Sex Life of a Cop, which turned out to be a porno—seemed better than what Geraci had been churning out, although he was aware that he might be losing his mind.
It was about then that he started hearing things.
The bedrock underneath Lake Erie was honeycombed with salt-mining tunnels. For years, there had been rumors that Forlenza had contracted to have a passageway drilled that would allow someone to walk from here to the mainland, yet even though Geraci sometimes thought he could hear drilling, he wasn’t holding his breath.
He heard what he thought might be footsteps. Off and on, he heard what sounded like furniture being dragged around. Several times, he thought he heard dogs bark. Occasionally, he’d have sworn he could hear rushing water, and he’d stare at the walls, waiting for the lake to burst through and drown him like a rat. Once, Geraci thought he heard Handel’s Messiah, which might have meant that it was Christmas but might also have meant that he was dreaming.
Soon he found himself asleep and dreaming about being asleep, awake and unsure if he might really be asleep.
He might have been down in that hole for a year. Or it might have been six weeks. One morning, he woke up and thought, fuck it, whatever’s up there was better than living no life at all in this rat hole. Or maybe he dreamed it and then woke up, he wasn’t sure. Still, he got out of bed with a sense of mission. He bathed. He did what he could to trim the beard. His shortcomings with the scissors convinced him that trying to cut his shaggy hair would make him look even worse, so he slicked it back with pomade—there was a case of the stuff—and hoped this would not be how he looked in his mug shot. He found a ball of twine and tied together what he had of his book, cursing at the difficulty of making a decent knot. Then he found clothes that weren’t yet reduced to rags, took a deep breath, and submitted to the hell of buttoning and fastening. But he was having a good day, and it came easier than he’d feared. His clothes hung on him loosely.
The two wads of cash he’d brought with him weighed about the same as baseballs. They had the same pleasing heft. In his pants pockets, they bulged out like tumors. He tucked a pistol in his waistband.
Go.
He stood in front of the steel door for what, even by his wrecked internal clock, was a long time. He kept his hand on the handle. Even if he somehow made it out of there, where would he go? Canada was only a few miles away, but he didn’t know shit about Canada. The Ohio shore was closer. He’d thought about it countless times but never settled on a plan.
Just go.
He went. Manuscript in one hand, the other on the butt of the pistol.
His shoes on the metal stairs echoed in the stairwell like thunderclaps. The upper shelter was empty. It gave Geraci that feeling he got when he came back from a vacation and everything in his house was exactly as he’d left it and yet different. The reality of how a thing was didn’t square with how he’d been remembering it.
Geraci flicked
on the light in the hidden guest suite, which was dusty and exactly as he’d left it, however long ago. His mind was pushing him back, but his legs carried him forward. He strode into the abandoned casino that had been down here since Prohibition. The bar was draped in a tarp. The mirror behind the bar was cracked, the bandstand water-damaged. Broken, dust-caked gaming tables were stacked with mundane household clutter too worthless to sell or give away. All just as he’d left it.
Then he heard the sound of running feet—boots—and froze. He set his papers on the bar and slowly pulled out his gun.
“You’re dead!” a shrill voice cried out. A boy’s. “I killed you.”
“You’re dead!” shouted a second boy. “I got you good! I’m telling.”
“If you tell, I’ll kill you for real!”
“If you kill me, my dad will kill you!”
They were running down the stairs, toward Geraci.
“My dad will kill your dad!”
“You think your dad can do anything, but he’s just a dad.”
“My dad can do anything.”
Geraci put the gun back in his waistband, letting his untucked shirttail fall over it.
Two dark-haired boys dressed in cowboy gear came skidding around the corner, both about eight years old, the taller one chasing the shorter one, the taller one wearing a black hat, the shorter boy a white one. They saw Geraci and stopped. The smaller boy slipped on the old ballroom floor, then scrambled to his feet. The taller boy looked like he might be related to Vincent Forlenza—a grandson? great-grandson?—but Geraci couldn’t be sure.
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