Momo’s chest puffed out slightly before he had time to stifle it; the flattery had hit its mark.
“You, it means he’s serious,” Geraci continued, ticking off choices on his fingers. “Richie Two-Guns, serious. Even one of the Rosatos, or one of those zips we used on the thing with what’s-his-face and the union problems: serious, serious, serious. And, of course, Al Neri—that’d tell you it’s critical.”
“That’s probably why Don Corleone didn’t give it to Al to do, though, don’t you think? He don’t want to look desperate.”
“Maybe,” Geraci said. He paused so that Momo would think he’d given him pause. Geraci had missed Momo. He loved the guy, plain and simple, and not just because anyone this easy to lead by the nose was fun to have around. The Roach was barely sneaking so much as a glance at the .38 now. “But this is fucking oobatz,” Geraci said. “Tommy Scootch? He’s still wet behind the ears. You know I’m right, Roach. No offense, my friend, but mark my words: nepotism’s going to be the death of our whole goddamned way of life.”
For a second, Geraci was afraid Momo would take offense, not at the concept of nepotism but at the big word. It turned out, though, that the Roach had heard it before, probably more than once on the barbed end of an insult. He gave a little snarl, like a dog. “I earned everything I got, all right?”
“I know. That’s true. I said no offense.”
“How’s it any different than what the big shots do? Executives, senators, what have you. Even presidents. Half of ’em got where they got only because of who their people are.”
“More than half, believe me,” Geraci said. “There’s nothing wrong with any of that, in and of itself. It stands to reason, a racehorse sired by a champion has a good shot of becoming a champion, too. Nothing against Tommy, either, who I hear is a good man. My point is just that Michael put Tommy on the job, I guarantee you, because Al was pushing for the kid to have a shot. In the same situation, Roach, when your uncle was watching over you as you were coming up? I can tell you: Michael never took any kind of interest. And Eddie Paradise: just because you were in the joint didn’t mean Michael had to pick him. Every Family I know of has once in a while had a caporegime in Lewisburg or Atlanta or even Sing Sing. Eddie got picked because he was Rocco Lampone’s brother-in-law, and you didn’t get picked because as long as he lives, Michael’s going to hold a grudge against your uncle Sally.”
Momo nodded, deep in thought now.
Geraci paused for a few moments to admire the evenly spaced grill marks of further resentment he’d administered. “Getting back to Tommy, though,” Geraci continued, “if Michael could see past the favoritism, he’d send someone after me who’d worked in my own crew, somebody who knew how I thought and could use it against me.”
“You still think I’m here to settle things with you, don’t you?”
Geraci regarded him and didn’t answer.
Momo sighed and opened two more beers. “A man works hard to prove what he is, but proving what he ain’t? Forget about it, y’know?”
Geraci smiled. He’d heard Momo’s uncle espouse the same homely truth. “I know.”
The Roach unnecessarily smoothed his helmet of shellacked-looking hair. “So how’re you coming back? How’re we gonna work this?”
The nervous gesture was a good sign, too. It meant he realized the risk but was with Nick. Anybody who just wanted out of there so he could go back and line up with Michael would overplay it, trying to look calm. Momo wasn’t doing that. Such a person’s eyes would betray him, too, darting glances at that gun, wondering if Nick was going to use it or if he should lunge for it: his chance to be the big hero and take Geraci out. But Momo seemed to have forgotten the gun was there.
Geraci finished his beer. “The only way I can ever come out of hiding,” he began, “the only way I can step back into my life and get it back to something like normal is if I come back not as capo, which isn’t an option, but as boss of the whole thing.”
Geraci had, he continued, lined up some other useful allies during the time he’d been underground. He didn’t say exactly who—this was not the time for Nick to go into the details of his negotiations with the Tramontis—but he said things to leave Momo with the (accurate) understanding that it was at least one of the other Families that had been involved with the Cuban fiasco. Momo had helped get that operation rolling—he’d met the man in the eye patch who’d called himself Ike Rosen—but he’d been in the joint for all the marching, the target practice, and the skull sessions on that fenced-off farm in New Jersey. The details about the outside help he was trying to get could all wait. But right now, he said, what he needed was to get more allies inside the Corleone Family. This would be a tough job, but it was possible.
The Roach nodded vigorously, like a man asked if he would agree to accept a fortune. The ordinary soldiers and associates had always liked Geraci better than Michael Corleone. Geraci had started on the streets and moved up. He’d earned every dime, every break he got, every promotion. Plus, he was one of the guys. He’d take a drink with you or go to a prizefight or a nightclub. Michael, for the most part, kept to himself and his little inner circle. Now they were in a goddamned white tower, which was perfect. Geraci had spent his adult life in social clubs and the back-room gambling joints. Michael had barely ever set one of his dainty pedicured feet in such a place. Michael was a college dropout, whereas Geraci had a degree and half a law degree, too, yet it was Michael and Hagen, with their superior attitudes, who were distrusted on the street for being quote-unquote college boys. Geraci’s night-school law classes were seen as just another weapon he had at his disposal. His idea of using bankruptcy laws (rather than arson) as the Family’s preferred method of busting out a legitimate business, for example, seemed to the men in the street like a scam refined, and it was this kind of cunning that helped earn Geraci such widespread respect. Yet Tom Hagen, an actual lawyer, struck a lot of men as a garden-variety German-Irish hard-on with a briefcase. All these things afforded Geraci certain advantages, but it was also true that the men had sworn loyalty to the Corleone Family, of which Michael was the Godfather, and most of them had been indoctrinated to believe, for their own good, that this was a fact of life, upon which life depended.
The members and associates of the Corleone Family, to a person, understood that it was more important to be feared and respected than to be loved. Michael Corleone had not come up through the ranks, but he’d amply earned the respect of his men. Geraci had killed men with his bare hands and managed to escape his own death sentence not once but twice (so far), yet it was Michael who inspired more fear within the organization. No one doubted the rumors that he’d had Fredo, his own (lovable) brother, killed for some minor, inscrutable disloyalty. Michael and Hagen had supposedly rigged the last American presidential election, too, the enormity of which had stirred something in the hearts of men who’d considered themselves too cynical to feel awe. Less universally believed were the rumors of the brutality that he’d done to Japs in the war, or the jobs he’d done on various powerful Sicilian Mafiosi during his exile there. Still, the stories got told. With each retelling, the legend grew.
“Even if Michael Corleone the man dies,” Geraci explained to Momo Barone, “there’s the risk that Michael Corleone the legend—a spook, a ghost, something that doesn’t even exist—will live on.”
The Roach was hanging on every word. A man whose interest was remotely insincere would have not forgotten so completely about the presence of that .38.
“I probably have the right friends in place now,” Geraci said, “to see to it there’s a change at the top.” Meaning the killing of Michael Corleone and Tom Hagen. “But for it to work so that the change lets me come home, I need more people on the inside—just a few, not so many that things get out of control. What’s going on with that crew of zips we set up in Bushwick?”
“The Don’s got ’em reporting to Nobilio now.”
Geraci nodded. His business dealings in Sicily had
allowed him to branch out from the narcotics trade and start importing Sicilians, too. Most of them were civilians. Geraci had removed the stones in their pathway to citizenship and kept the hellhounds off their trail. For many of them, he’d used his connections in Cleveland and Chicago to set them up with jobs in restaurants in cities and towns all over the Great Lakes states: never for a fee, always as a favor. Often the jobs even came with an apartment, rent-free for the first few months, just until they got on their feet. But for a few of the Sicilians who’d been involved in the life over there, Geraci had shown them the ropes on how things were done in New York. They’d been fast learners. It might actually be better that they were no longer in the same regime as Momo. “Are they still using that smoke shop on Knickerbocker as an office?” Geraci asked.
“Last I heard. I don’t see those guys too much.”
“That’s about to change,” Nick said. “There’s a couple men there I think we can use.”
“That guy Renzo what’s-his-face,” Momo said, clearly excited to have thought of it.
“Interesting,” Geraci said. “How do you figure?”
Momo’s defense of his choice was animated—and also beside the point. Renzo Sacripante was cut from the same cloth as Geraci: he was good with his fists, had worked his way up, and was a great earner; men below him loved him, men above him feared him, and he’d survived various petty beefs with Michael Corleone—differences that, in fact, seemed to have increased his stature. What was important right now wasn’t the choice, though, but that Momo clearly wanted to be an active participant in making it.
“All good points,” Geraci told the Roach. “So maybe him and a few others. At any rate, the key thing here, the job for the inside men, is going to be to weaken and disgrace Michael and Tom Hagen. Otherwise, even if a few things happened and we did take over, we’d have no real power.” Momo was eating it up each time Geraci said we. “I’d be a weak boss,” Geraci said, “watching my back all the time for the men who miss Saint Michael. Believe me, the other New York Families would smell blood in the water and take advantage.”
“Weaken and disgrace ’em how?” Momo did not so much as glance at the gun.
Geraci explained that this process was already nicely under way. His own ability to elude capture had been a step in the right direction. The petty mayhem he’d been able to orchestrate while in exile had been another (this was by and large a fabrication, but Geraci had heard the rumors, via his father and via his new contacts in New Orleans). The Nevada Gaming Commission’s very public pursuit of Johnny Fontane, repeatedly causing Michael Corleone to be called an “alleged organized-crime figure,” had been a stroke of dumb luck, but what the hell: Geraci would take it.
What had been done already, though, was only a beginning, Geraci said. There were other things. And so he and his loyal soldier had sat on that balcony and discussed various ways, large and small, they might dismantle the legend of Michael Corleone. Scandals and apparent screwups that might encourage the Corleone loyalists to lose enough faith in Michael to accept the truth: that it was Michael who had betrayed Nick. In addition, the bosses of the other Families, particularly the New York Families, needed to see that Nick Geraci would be better to deal with than (weakened, blundering) Michael Corleone, both now and in the future. Then and only then would it be possible to take the next step.
“Revenge,” Momo said.
Machiavelli wrote that a prince must make himself feared in such a manner that he will avoid hatred, even if he does not acquire love.
“Maybe,” Geraci said. He finally reached for the .38 and put it back in his pants. Momo didn’t react. There was nothing more the gun could prove, for now. “But from where I sit,” Geraci said, “I’m inclined to call it justice.”
IN THE WEEKS SINCE COSIMO BARONE HAD RETURNED to Brooklyn, he’d helped set a few small things in motion—including a nerve-frying meeting with two of the zips from Bushwick—but the death of Judy Buchanan and how it could be used was bigger. The opportunity knocking now was loud enough to hear two thousand miles away.
“You need to take care of some things, my friend,” Geraci said, “and fast.”
The Roach, as he had so faithfully done for so many years, listened to Nick Geraci’s instructions, eyes closed in concentration, ready to follow instructions to the letter. It felt good to be back taking orders from Geraci. It felt to the Roach like being where he was supposed to be, a little bit like the way he felt after he’d been with other women and then went to bed with his own sweet wife.
Moments after Momo hung up, the detective called again. He was outside the murdered woman’s building now. “We got cops on the scene here,” he said.
“Detectives?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Not yet.”
“Figure out how to make this your show,” Momo said. “I don’t care how. I don’t need to say where the clues are gonna point to, do I? You don’t need to put lover boy at the scene or nothin’ like that. Just make it look like a contract job, and don’t leave nothin’ to chance, all right?”
“A contract job? You’re not serious.”
This, too, was something Geraci had thought of immediately that Momo might not have come up with given all the time in the world. Even if there were witnesses who saw the two private investigators run off, the killing could still be linked to Hagen. If the case against Hagen stood up in court, fine. If not, that was fine, too. It would hurt him to have been charged in the court of public opinion with the crime of hiring killers to whack his inconvenient mistress.
“Serious as a judge,” Momo said.
“Look,” the detective said. “I been thinking. I can tell you from experience that any time a gal dies, anybody she’s been sleeping with is automatically a suspect. I guarantee you that this mess here is going to take the course you want it to take without me. All I’m trying to say is, I don’t want to get caught in the middle of a thing that’s none of my business.”
This hadn’t apparently troubled him when he’d taken that lunch sack full of cash in appreciation of his passing the job on to a suitable investigator.
“I don’t give a shit what you want.” The Roach had enough dirt on the detective to bury him twice, and they both knew it. “Go in there, now. When you find what you need to find, which I’m confident will happen in no time flat, let me give you the address of where at the present time you’ll be able to find the suspect in question. Anytime in the next hour or so, you’ll be fine. My advice is also to send over a whole fleet of cars, lights on and all that good stuff, loud as shit, OK? Just in the interest of whattayacallit. Safety. Everybody’s safety.”
The Roach hung up and went downstairs to get a glass of water. He drank, closed his eyes, and tried to picture the look on Eddie Paradise’s face when the cops pulled up. Eddie’s big chance to show off in front of all the pezzonovanti—ruined. Embarrassed. Weakened. It’d go through the self-important little prick like God’s perfect stiletto.
Momo opened his eyes.
He was standing right in front of one of Eddie’s World War II posters, the one with the woman with the nice tits, pointing at those red dice. PLEASE DON’T GAMBLE WITH YOUR LIFE! BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY. For the first time, the poster struck him as a big joke. The broad with the tits was in on it, too. Just look at her. Snake eyes on the dice, bedroom eyes on the broad. The Roach put a finger up to her flat, pouty lips. Against her small, porcelain-pale face, his suntanned skin looked almost black. He winked at her. “Shh,” said the Roach.
Then he laughed and went up on the roof to enjoy what was left of the fireworks.
CHAPTER 17
The killing of Judy Buchanan played in Peoria. It became one of those murder cases that—arbitrarily, it would seem—takes on a circus-logic life of its own. It did have all four basic ingredients of such cases. It was frosted with lurid extramarital sex. It had ambitious politicians who used it as a stage. It had a sociopath who was widely presumed to be guilty but who somehow remained free. Mo
st crucial of all, the victim was a strikingly beautiful blonde (that it was dyed was irrelevant), one unknowable enough to be a blank slate upon whom the masses could project their own prejudices, hypocrisies, and fears.
The sidewalk outside the building where Judy Buchanan’s supposed contract murder took place was nearly always crowded and strewn with flowers. (Location, location, location, the old florist on the ground floor muttered each night, counting his money.) Periodically, earnest Protestant ministers in shirtsleeves came there to bellow sweet nothings about the wages of sin. But most of the people on the sidewalk had come to embrace each other and cry crocodile tears suitable for any newscast’s B-roll. Often, these people waved cheaply printed posters of Judy Buchanan’s now-famous head shot (for sale at souvenir stands throughout New York). It was ten years old and was something she’d had taken during her brief, fruitless stab at acting. Any appreciation of the irony of this—blowing up a head shot of a woman whose lovely head had been nearly blown off—seemed lost on most Americans, perhaps like irony in general. Increasingly, the mourners and gawkers waved one of the surveillance photos that had been sent, anonymously, to the NYPD, the FBI, the Justice Department, and a host of newspapers, tabloid and otherwise. The shot of Judy Buchanan in an exquisitely tailored pantsuit, on the train platform in Milwaukee—alone and, in the opinion of many, looking trapped—became an especially popular choice. Once in a while someone would even deploy photos of her mentally retarded son, Philip, who, despite his afflictions and the violent deaths of his parents, seemed always to have a smile for the camera.
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