What was he going to do later on, have Michael whacked for it? No. For one thing, who the fuck would take over? The Corleones were already weak at the top. If someone took Michael out, there was no Plan B. Plan B was oblivion.
Even if there had been a Plan B, going in that direction went against Eddie’s reasonable, loyal nature.
Thus: what he did was, he met with the Don in private, once tempers had cooled. Michael even left his tower and ventured out to Brooklyn, to meet with Eddie at the Carroll Gardens Hunt Club. That this happened on Eddie’s turf was in and of itself an important, unspoken apology (the only kind Eddie could hope for, since bosses don’t and shouldn’t apologize). Michael and Eddie went up to the roof, to work things out man to man. It was a cold night, but the rooftop was Michael’s idea and Eddie wasn’t about to get picky about what part of his social club they should use for their sit-down. Momo came along. People made a big, fat, hairy deal out of that later, but at the time it had seemed only natural. Michael probably would have brought some kind of a second, as well—a consigliere, an underboss—if the cupboard hadn’t been more or less bare. It wasn’t just the defection of Geraci and the troubles Tom Hagen was having. For example, the late Rocco Lampone—who’d been married to one of Eddie’s cousins—would have come in pretty handy at times like this, except that for who knows what reason Michael had used him to take out Hyman Roth. Who sends a capo to do a hit like that? Not to mention a suicide mission. Nobody Eddie Paradise ever heard of.
But that was the past.
Here in the present, Eddie Paradise took full responsibility for everything that had gone wrong. He wanted Michael Corleone to be clear on that.
“By the same token,” Eddie told him, “those cops were from Homicide, and not my captain. My captain couldn’t have seen that coming, not a chance. The cops we had on sentry weren’t really there to keep out other cops. Or at least not other detectives, officers, cars coming in there with their sirens blaring and all that. That don’t mean the buck don’t stop here. It stops. Period. I want you to understand that. My only point is that it’s also possible once in a while to do everything right and still have things go wrong.”
“Life is one disappointing cocksucker,” sighed Momo Barone, shrugging at the hopelessness of it all.
Michael considered this and then glared at Eddie.
Cold as it was up here, no one was shivering. Eddie felt as if he were cooking in the boiling oil of his boss’s disapproval.
“You can do this job, Eddie,” Michael said. “You’re new, and I’ve been patient with you while you learned the ropes. But I have to tell you, the time for improvement is now. I’m not happy about what happened at that meeting, with the cops barging in and hauling Tom away in handcuffs. But I’m also not interested in going back over what went wrong. I’m interested in making sure that everything goes right from here on out.”
Eddie nodded. This was why Michael needed him. The coglioni around them lived in the past. Michael, on the other hand, was a planner, concerned with from here on out. Eddie took what was right here and did with it what he could. “Thank you,” he said.
“I’m not going to tell you how to do the nuts and bolts of your job, Ed,” Michael said. “If I thought you needed help like that, you wouldn’t have your job. I’d have never promoted you.”
Also, Eddie thought, because everything he knew about the nuts and bolts of being a capo he’d learned from his father or Tom Hagen, neither of whom had ever been one.
“You got to admit, though, we’re earning pretty good,” Eddie said. “We got all these pressures on us, as you know, closin’ in on us from the Feds right on down, and yet the numbers you’re seeing from us, in most areas of our business, are as good as they’ve ever been, considering.”
“Considering,” Michael repeated flatly.
Eddie took it as a criticism, but maybe a fair one.
“To me,” Michael said, “that’s symptomatic of another problem. That’s symptomatic of what we need to talk about.”
Eddie and Momo exchanged a look. Symptomatic. Fucking college boy. “What other problem?” Eddie said.
“This fascination with money,” Michael said. “The poisonous flowers of greed. I understand that this is how other Families work, but please understand, Eddie: it’s not what my father built. This isn’t our tradition, Ed, and it’s not what I’m interested in seeing this Family become. My father believed that America was a land of opportunity, but he also brilliantly saw the hypocrisy and the cynicism that bloomed in darkness, right underneath such patriotic slogans. You’re a pragmatic man, Eddie. A realistic man. My father would have appreciated that in you. He would have liked you.”
Eddie realized that he was smiling only when he glanced at Momo and saw the Roach roll his eyes.
“What my father tried to build,” Michael continued, “what he succeeded at building, was a realistic organization based on mutual interests, one that provided services people wanted and profited from the goodwill that came from that. Money is a by-product of a business like that, not an end in itself. Nobody forces anyone to come to a bookie or a shylock. They go out of free will, and they’re grateful for the service. That’s paramount. That’s everything. The profits are incidental. The profits are a by-product of good relationships, a good reputation that spreads by word of mouth and causes other people to come to us, seeking our services. The same principle applies to people in positions of power. Nobody forces any of those people to come to us and ask for our assistance in getting into those positions. Or in staying in those positions. Or in thriving in those positions. We help people do all of this, but it’s their choice. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Eddie folded his arms. “I understand what you’re telling me, but I’m maybe a bit shaky about why.”
Michael stood. He was considerably taller than Eddie but not really a tall man, per se. Yet the boss had a way of standing up during a conversation that made him seem like a giant. He commanded a room. Up here on the roof, he practically commanded the dark night sky.
“Money,” Michael said, “cheapens everything. As soon as you reduce the business of our tradition to mere money, you’re reducing us all to common criminals. This you cannot do. Money is a by-product of doing business the right way, and, once earned, it’s the means to other ends, be that expansion of the scope of our businesses or even just creature comforts for you and your wife and your children—like your wife’s new ermine stole or the new boat you have moored out in Sheepshead Bay.”
A throb of fear shot through Eddie, though a split second later he was over it. It was a boss’s job to know things like this, or be able to know them, and Eddie knew he had to learn to get to that point, and that Michael Corleone was an ideal teacher.
“People who want our protection can pay us for that protection—which is fine, cash for services rendered—but the danger is that if your first impulse is the money you’re getting, you may miss out on other things we can get that are worth more than money, or that can lead to more money. There are times when providing protection for free can lead to more profits than anything else. It’s a balance, of course, and it takes time to learn it. It doesn’t come to anyone naturally.”
Eddie nodded. Momo rubbed a hand across his mouth. Eddie and Momo had been soldiers coming up, as Nick Geraci had been where Eddie was now. Eddie doubted that Vito or Michael Corleone had ever sat Nick Geraci down for a talk like this. And he knew Momo was thinking the same thing.
“You’re also,” Michael said, “leaving us vulnerable in other ways. When either you,” he said, looking at Eddie, “or the men that you supervise,” he said, patting Momo lightly on his hardened, slicked-back hair, from which the Roach flinched, “when anyone in your regime goes to speak with men on our payroll, to take care of those obligations, you must understand that what you’re doing may seem to be about money, but it’s not. Nobody involved in this aspect of our business should be unclear on this. As soon as any of these relations
hips come to be about money, as soon as what you’re handing out is a bribe instead of a tribute, what you’ll find is that people you thought you could trust instead believe that they can sell themselves or their services to the highest bidder.”
“Which if they do that,” Eddie said, “we can take care of it, I promise you.”
“You see?” Michael said. “You’re missing the point. I don’t want you to have to take care of it. I don’t want it to come to that. When it comes to that, you’ve painted yourself into a corner. You have to act, but every one of those acts, again, leaves us vulnerable. Eddie, you, a practical man, must understand that there’s no future in leaving behind a messy trail of pistol-whipped union leaders and kneecapped politicians.”
Again with the future, Eddie thought.
“I understand,” Eddie said. “We’ll get it done.”
They discussed a few other more specific matters—including, as they were wrapping up, the way Eddie had been using the public-relations firm in which he’d become a silent partner. Eddie had been afraid for a while to say anything about this, but increasingly afraid that he’d kept Michael in the dark, too. To Eddie’s relief, Michael approved. They discussed a few other ideas on how to make use of this.
When Michael left, as far as Eddie Paradise could tell, he and the boss had never been on better terms.
WHAT EDDIE WOULD HAVE LIKED TO USE HIS P.R. people for was to get the word out about the significance of where that meeting had been held. Twenty or so of Eddie’s own men and everybody in Michael’s inner circle knew what was happening, but afterward, nobody seemed to be talking about it. All that really seemed to be on the grapevine was a lot of tongue-wagging about why Eddie had brought Momo with him, the implication being that he was too weak to meet with the boss himself. There was no way for Eddie to set the record straight without looking defensive about the Roach and like he was tooting his own horn about Michael coming to see him. It bugged him, but Eddie had to let it rest.
He decided that the time was right to do something really bold, something everyone would understand as a symbol of pride and strength. He started putting out feelers, making it quietly known that he was in the market for a lion. He got books out of the library to help with the feeding and caring issues, when the time came. He even got a maintenance man over from the Bronx Zoo to look at the cage in the basement.
A literal meat eater, in the basement of his social club. A lion. Corleone: lion-hearted. Eddie had a good feeling about how all that would play out. He’d be a legend.
He got to work rebuilding the relationships with the metaphorical meat eaters under his supervision, taking care of as many of them as he could. So many little things were going wrong, he was starting to get the feeling that there might be a rat somewhere around him. On the other hand, he was afraid he was getting paranoid. The need for the fresh newspapers, the fresh socks, the fresh soap: he knew what people said, and he wasn’t going to give them more to say. Still, paranoid or not, it seemed like a smart play for him to employ the personal touch in retraining all of the men in his regime that he trusted to go make payments.
Michael had bolstered Eddie’s confidence enough that he felt comfortable putting the boss’s message in his own words.
“Let me explain something to you, all right?” he said to a young guy Momo had helped develop, a big, strapping Sicilian kid who maybe, come to think of it, had never had anyone sit him down and explain the American ways of doing things. “This thing of ours,” Eddie said, “it looks like it’s got to do with money. You do jobs, you kick a cut to the guy above you, who kicks a cut to the next guy, et cetera and so forth, and the guys at the very top take care of things with the cops and keep the arrests and the jail time and the other complications to a minimum. Simple, right? And on some level it is. Everybody talks all the time about money, so you’d be forgiven if you thought that was the point. But it ain’t the point. It’s about favors. It’s like that joke, maybe you heard it. A little boy and a little girl are sittin’ in the bathtub takin’ a bath. The girl looks at the boy’s prick and asks if she can touch it. Hell, no, the boy says. Look what happened to yours! Oh yeah? says the girl, pointin’ to her pussy. Well, my ma told me that with one of these, I can get as many of those little things as I want. See, in our world, money’s just a prick. But favors—givin’ favors out, callin’ ’em in, everything—favors are pussy.”
INITIALLY, THE INFORMATION THAT PLACED NICK Geraci in Taormina had looked especially good—as so many of the other tips had. Initially.
Charlotte Geraci was seen boarding the train that went from New York to Montreal. She was seen getting off the train at Saratoga Springs. She was seen checking into the Adelphi Hotel, seen taking a cab from there to the Skidmore College campus to watch her daughter Barb’s graduation. After the ceremony, she was seen entering a restaurant on Caroline Street, carrying two big gift-wrapped boxes (one, it would turn out, containing a brunette wig and a change of clothes), and she was seen going into a private party room. Barb Geraci and Charlotte’s parents and several of Barb’s friends were in there already.
Two men sat by the window in the bar across the street and saw no sign of Barb Geraci’s father. They were locals, highly recommended, associated with the racetrack and a Corleone-operated casino there that had once been Hyman Roth’s.
When the party finished, there was no sign of Charlotte, either. The men had lost her. They asked around as best they could but didn’t find the first useful clue. She hadn’t checked out of her room at the Adelphi, but she’d left the key in the room and had paid in advance. Wherever she’d gone, it hadn’t been by train; they had friends at the Saratoga station with an eye cocked. The younger and more handsome of the men approached Barb Geraci in a bar, celebrating with friends, and, without setting off any alarms, figured out that she sincerely thought her mother had gone home. But there was no sign of Charlotte Geraci there, either.
A week later, Tommy Neri received an anonymous letter at his social club. It was postmarked Taormina. Inside was a typed note in Italian that said Charlotte had checked into a hotel there, on the east coast of Sicily. The hotel was one known for its security and discretion. Enclosed were three snapshots: Charlotte at a table at Café Wunderbar, one of her at the ruins of the Greek theater there, standing over a pit once used to house lions, and a grainy one of Nick and her, clearly taken with a telephoto lens, walking into the hotel. Nick Geraci had a full beard—something he’d grown only after he’d gone into hiding. A police detective Tommy had in his pocket dusted the photos for prints but found nothing.
Soon, a simply coded classified ad in the Daily News also indicated that Geraci was in Taormina. Tommy Scootch didn’t know Joe Lucadello from the man in the moon except as “our source,” which was what his capo Richie Nobilio called him. But based on previous information Lucadello had provided, the Corleones had sent Tommy or men he supervised to Taxco, Mexico City, Veracruz, Guatemala, and Panama. Every time, they’d found evidence that Geraci had been in these places, but never Geraci himself. Tommy was getting blamed for this, that somehow he wasn’t taking the right precautions, that someone around him was tipping Geraci off. Tommy had actually been more excited about the Taormina information before the anonymous letter was corroborated.
As per his uncle Al’s advice (which he imagined to be Michael Corleone’s orders, since they’d come via Al and not Richie), the men Tommy Scootch sent to Taormina were unaffiliated with Cesare Indelicato, who was a friend of Michael’s but perhaps (no one seemed sure of this) even more of a friend to Geraci. Following a suggestion by one of Nobilio’s zips, Tommy had hired two freelancers from Calabria. The men sent word to Tommy that there was no one by Geraci’s name at that hotel, which was no surprise, since no one expected him to be using his own name. But a hotel bartender said he’d definitely seen the bearded American and the blond woman in those photos. A chambermaid said they’d stayed on the third floor but checked out. Several merchants and baristas in town remembered
seeing the American with the beard and the shakes. He’d been looking to buy or rent a villa in the countryside, the more secluded, the better. He hadn’t been seen in town for a while now, so maybe he’d found one.
That was the last anyone heard from the Calabrians.
By the time Tommy himself made it to Sicily, the men had disappeared. A few days later, their rented Fiat was discovered in an untended lemon grove outside Savoca. There was blood in the backseat and the trunk but no sign of the men. When Tommy Scootch returned home—empty-handed, once again—a small crate was waiting for him at his social club. It had been shipped from Messina, just up the coast from Savoca, although the return address—someone’s idea of a joke—was that of Michael Corleone’s penthouse apartment. Wrapped in plastic and packed in dry ice were the men’s severed, badly beaten heads. Also inside were their hands and feet and a postcard of Mount Etna. On the back—using a fairly new portable Olivetti typewriter, the same brand as had been used to write the letter, with similar ribbon wear—someone had typed, in English, “Had a good time. Wish you were here.”
Maybe some misfortune had befallen Charlotte Geraci. But it seemed more likely she’d joined her husband, wherever he was. Their daughters seemed not to know, but they also didn’t seem as upset about the situation as a person might have imagined.
Clearly, someone was tipping Geraci off.
He was getting enough warning that he seemed to be toying with Tommy Scootch now instead of killing him. If Indelicato had sided with Geraci, Michael Corleone realized, the worst of this problem was yet to come. But the best guess was that the rat was someone watching Tommy or getting information about his travel plans. Yet the reservations were made by secretaries in various Corleone-controlled companies, calling various travel agencies and (unbeknownst to them) using a different assumed name each time. To be safe, it was necessary to consider everyone in Tommy’s orbit, particularly the other men in Nobilio’s regime, as a potential rat, but nothing had been found. That kind of scrutiny made men edgy, which made the urgency to find Geraci greater than it had been already.
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