Nick, on the run for so long, had a bad feeling about this—as he had often, about nearly everything. He was on guard, afraid that he was about to be shot in the head and kicked overboard into the bayou, to be eaten by crocodiles or alligators or whatever it was they had down here. The Creature from the Black Lagoon, maybe. Which is how all this looked, like in that movie: live oaks and dense gnarled pines and groves of cypress trees; Spanish moss and green lily pads and spiky green shoots from something in the palm family and brown-green grasses and plains of dimpled black mud that looked like the sludge at the bottom of a crankcase. And to think guys in New York thought they had it good with Idlewild Airport or those big landfill projects out on Staten Island. The Tramontis had this. Learn these swamps well enough, and a man would never need to use a shovel or have a second thought about the disposal of inconvenient items.
Nick put his arm around Augie and smiled.
Augie clapped a hand on his knee.
The roar of the boat made it hard to talk. Nick couldn’t hear the gunfire anymore, either.
Nick had crapped turds about Augie’s size, he thought. But it was the little angry guys you had to watch out for. How better to get Michael Corleone to lay down and let the Tramontis do whatever the hell they want to do than to deliver Nick Geraci to him?
Instead, though, what happened to Geraci was that, as Augie had promised, he got a tour of the aquatic portions of the property and some of the surrounding area. Oil derricks. Tank farms filled with every variety of petrochemical. A trailer-park brothel. A casino built on a barge, anchored in what looked like the primordial ooze, but in fact only two miles off Highway 61, down a well-maintained and patrolled cement road, built on pylons and paid for by a grant from the federal government.
Seeing all this, coupled with being away from home so long, had rekindled in Nick what he’d believed when he first moved to New York, that New Yorkers lacked imagination about the rest of the world. Most of it seemed to them either beneath contempt or ominous. Moe Green had to get out of New York to think up what was possible in Vegas. Cuba had made people more creative for a while there. Mexico, Geraci thought, had the potential to be the greatest mob haven of all time. Why get all weepy over losing out in Cuba, a little island nothing a hundred miles from Florida, when there was a perfectly good country right across the border, one that already ran on bribes, one that had only scratched the surface of its potential as a source of dope, one that offered up thousands of square miles where anyone who needed to lay low could do so with ease and in a grand style. Hyman Roth and the Kosher Nostra, the California Russian Jews, had run the Mexican national lottery for years. Geraci couldn’t see what was stopping enterprising men like himself from moving in and sewing up the whole country. Maybe it was a Sicilian thing. Cuba was an island just like Sicily, vulnerable and corruptible at the foot of a great, powerful continent. New York was basically a bunch of islands, too. Mexico was something else. Mexico could be a bigger version of Louisiana.
The swamps also reminded Nick of that idea Fredo Corleone had had—to change the zoning so it would be illegal to bury people in the five boroughs of New York and then make millions off the Jersey swampland where the dead would need to be buried after that. Why not? It had never struck Nick as so crazy. The scam had already been pulled once before, by the boys out in San Francisco, which had been where Fredo had thought of it. Nick had helped Fredo with the project for a while—purchasing options on swampland; making inquiries into the stonecutter business—until Michael had whistled the play dead. Reconsidered from the passenger seat of Augie Tramonti’s swamper on an idyllic spring day in Louisiana, more than a thousand miles from New York, Geraci couldn’t remember what Michael and Tom Hagen had thought was wrong with the idea—other than that Fredo had thought of it first.
If Geraci ever got back in power, he vowed, he would make Fredo’s plan work.
He and Augie came fishtailing around a bend. Augie pointed to a dock, reaching into the bayou from a hillock of ground. At the top of it stood a tar-paper church with no glass in its windows. Filthy white children in overalls milled around near the base of a rough-hewn cross. “Leak,” Augie shouted. “Cocktail.”
He gunned the boat. Two Negro men dressed in red doormen’s suits rushed to meet them, and Augie blew past the dock and skidded up onto shore, cackling like a joyriding schoolkid. Nick could hear the gunfire again. The firing range was behind the church.
As they climbed to the crest of the hill they saw about a dozen men on the range and at least that many milling around. Here, in the middle of a vast, miserable swamp, the firing range was a facility so impeccably maintained, it could have hosted an Olympic event. Yet most of the shooters were aiming away from the formal targets toward targets of their own: cans of tomato sauce balanced on fence posts, rotting fruit—things that spewed.
Augie ducked into a gleaming white outhouse. It was the only one in sight; black letters stenciled on the door read WHITES ONLY.
Nick waited.
“Want to shoot?” Augie said when he finished. “We got marksmen you can get lessons from or go up against, if you’re up for a friendly wager of some kind. You want a cocktail, I’ll get you one. There’s a full bar up in that church.”
“I’m fine,” Nick said. “Who are these men? Friends of yours?” Meaning members of the Tramonti Family.
“A few of ’em,” he said. “But we also got navy, we got retired FBI, believe it or not. There’s cops from here and someplace in Florida, some Cuban fellas who don’t talk much, a former airline pilot—we even got a coon-ass country boy who can shoot a mosquito off a frog’s ass a hundred yards away. It’s unbelievable. Unbelievable. You’ve got to see it.”
Nick had never spent much time in the South before—although people kept telling him New Orleans wasn’t the South, it was New Orleans—and he rarely went more than a few hours without, as now, being startled by something he saw. It wasn’t just the heat and the languid speech and manner, or the extreme segregation or clothes that were fashionable two years before, if ever. The South had somehow bred cockroaches as big as his fist—flying cockroaches as big as his fist. The South had bred a numbers runner who took a chicken with him everywhere, along with little cards on which the bird pecked out suggested plays. The South had bred this, too: misfits in the swamp, shooting cans of tomato sauce and arguing in thick accents and a few foreign voices about the government.
“Our thing here has gotten beaucoup bigger,” Augie said. “We hear that you disbanded yours.”
“My what?” Geraci said.
“Your assassin squad, the men you was trainin’ up there in your swamp, in New Jersey, with our friends from the government.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Probably what choice did you have after your boy in Cuba screwed the pooch?”
“How do you know about that?”
Augie slapped him on the back. “Aw, c’mon, brother! We’re in the knowing-things business.”
NICK COULDN’T HAVE BEEN HAPPIER, BACK OUT ON the streets again. He wasn’t known in New Orleans. He didn’t look Italian, didn’t have a New York accent, he shuffled a little bit when he walked, and sometimes his hands shook. He was constantly misread and underestimated, and, despite everything, he couldn’t remember when he’d had more fun. Even if New Orleans hadn’t already been known as the Big Easy, he’d have thought of it that way.
At first, most of the jobs they fed him were small—collections and payments, the nuts and bolts of what made any business thrive. As he had back when he was coming up, he always paid himself a smaller cut than he had coming. Cheating yourself in the short run on behalf of people in authority was always a good move in the long run. It built trust, kept him safe, and sped him along toward bigger jobs and thus more money. Sure enough, in no time the Tramontis asked him to do some freelance troubleshooting. He negotiated the forgiveness of a gambling debt in exchange for an FM radio station and that almost-new nineteen-inch color TV. He fixe
d a problem with the skim from the state’s third-busiest toll bridge. He outlined the mutual benefits of a new profit-sharing plan to a smart young drug dealer in a Negro neighborhood and was kind enough to drop him off afterward at Charity Hospital. He blew up a Corvette in Gretna Parish—nobody hurt, just as a warning to a stranger. Even though Nick had help on the job, he wired the charge himself. Only later, euphoric, did it click that usually his hands shook too much to do anything like that.
What Nick had learned was that nothing helped his symptoms more than physical exertion or, sometimes even more so, the prospect of it. Although when he quit boxing, he’d promised himself (and, more to the point, Charlotte) that he’d never set foot in the ring again, he found a small gym on North Robertson Street and went three times a week. Back in Cleveland, when Nick was a kid, the boxing gyms were full of Italians and Irish and a few Jews, but here it was nearly all Negroes, a few tattooed country white boys, and a cadre of Cuban kids, recently arrived and wizards on the speed bag. Geraci knew more than enough Spanish to get by, but their accents were strange, and they pretended not to understand him. Once he’d been coming to the gym for a while, he started sparring. He could still hurt a man who didn’t know what was coming, but in the ring the kids he fought took it easy on him, and he let them. It was just sport. He never told Charlotte about any of it. She noticed that he’d lost weight and that the muscles in his arms and legs were starting to thicken, and he told her it was from all the walking he was doing. When she looked skeptical, he said it was also from all the great sex, too.
Geraci remembered enough details about how the Corleone Family had operated that he could coordinate his insurgency from a distance, still mostly via Momo Barone. The Roach said that Eddie Paradise was watching him too closely for him to be seen calling from pay phones all the time, and so the Roach set up a secure line at his mother’s house in Bay Ridge. Since he’d always visited her once a day, that raised no suspicions. The most satisfying offensive so far—one that bankrolled several others—took place in the same cemetery where Vito Corleone was buried. In a mausoleum nearby (DANTE read the carved name over the door), the vaults were filled with cash. It was Michael Corleone’s personal piggybank. Two zips—one of whom, under a fake name, was the night watchman—knocked down one wall of the building with the cemetery’s own backhoe and got away with most of the money. The watchman went back to Agrigento to work in the family winery. The other could easily have returned to his job making pizza in Cleveland Heights, but he flashed too much of his new money around, which, to Geraci’s mind, was a form of suicide, nothing he needed to give a second thought.
FOR YEARS, BACK IN EAST ISLIP, CHARLOTTE HAD made little effort to share her husband’s interest in jazz, but they were in New Orleans now, and she’d always said she was a big believer in When in Rome. Now they went to shows together two or three times a week, and it was fun for Nick to see the thrill she got from the way the waiters talked to them, the tables they got, and the free drinks that ominous-looking strangers sent over without a word. This, too, reawakened memories of when they’d first started dating. She was probably overcompensating, Nick thought, for the anxiety she had about “abandoning” their daughters (her word), but still: it was fun. The girls were safe. And they’d be on their own soon anyway.
One day, after Nick and Charlotte had been together in New Orleans a few weeks, they went out onto Lake Pontchartrain on a borrowed boat. The boat had the same name as a famous album by a jazz pianist with a heroin problem. It now belonged to one of Carlo Tramonti’s cousins. Charlotte stripped down to her bikini and was sunbathing on the front deck with the strap in the back unfastened when Nick finally got around to asking her if, that whole time he’d been gone, she’d been true to him.
“I have.” She answered him as if it weren’t a serious question. He wasn’t sure he believed her, but he hadn’t the slightest evidence to the contrary. It took her at least another mile of lake before she finally raised herself up on her elbows, so that he could get a glimpse of her tits, and asked him the same question. Had he been faithful?
He told her he had been.
It was essentially true. Not factual, but true. Nick wondered what drove him, her, and any other otherwise sane people to ask questions like this, when no matter what the answer really was, the only answer anybody in their right mind would give would be yes.
People used to mock Geraci for not going to whores or having a comare, but who gets ahead in life being like everybody else? That’s what he’d always say to the boys. He loved his wife was more like it. Look at her: she was a knockout. A dream. She really was enough for him. Most of the time, it hadn’t been a hardship, fidelity. Friends accused him of being wired differently than other men, and that might have been true. How the fuck would he know? Nobody gets the chance to be other men. A man was stuck being his doomed fucking self.
“Never?” she said.
He anchored the boat, and he told her he loved her.
“Come belowdecks,” he said.
“I’ll do my best,” she said, grabbing him by his stiffening cock and leading him there.
Our thing here has gotten beaucoup bigger, he thought.
CHAPTER 24
The twin-engine plane carrying Al Neri and his nephew landed early in the morning at a private airstrip in the Arizona desert. The airstrip was the one that movie people used when they were coming to Old Tucson to film Westerns. The plane was a charter from Las Vegas, and the pilot seemed to think they were in the movie business. They had done nothing to encourage or discourage this assumption. They were dressed, per Al’s instructions, in snap-brim tams, Windbreakers, sport shirts, and loafers, like golfers whose spikes and clubs were waiting for them somewhere. Tommy’s loose, untucked shirt—he’d lost a lot of weight lately—hung over his gun. All the way from Las Vegas, the pilot had gone on and on about all the stars he’d had in his plane, and Al and Tommy had just let him talk. “Break a leg,” he said as they climbed out. “Or is that just for the theater?”
“Thank you,” Al said. “It was a nice flight.”
“In my neighborhood,” Tommy said, “we said in culo alla balena.”
Al gave him a look.
“I never heard that,” the pilot said. “What’s it mean?”
“Up the whale’s ass.” Tommy caught Al’s eye. “It just means break a leg,” Tommy said. “More or less.”
“What language is that?” the pilot said.
“We’ll see you at six,” Al said, guiding Tommy away.
They started down the blacktopped sidewalk from the airstrip to the car-rental lot a couple hundred yards away. “Talk a little, people forget you,” Al muttered. “Too silent, people remember. Teach people colorful slang, you might as well hand ’em your mug shot and rap sheet as keepsakes.”
“My rap sheet?” Tommy said. “I’m not sure you could call what I got a rap sheet. The only thing that ever stuck to me was that thing with the skim in Reno, which got reduced to time served.”
“That’s not really my point,” Al said.
Tommy had his good qualities—loyalty, doggedness, a great singing voice, devotion to his mother, good in the kitchen in his own right—but intelligence probably wasn’t one of them.
The Mexican at the car-rental lot asked which production they were with and named two as guesses. The Neris didn’t answer him. The Mexican assured them he didn’t sell news to the tabloids. “Seems like good business to me,” said Al Neri.
“I seen you in that one movie, didn’t I?” the Mexican said. “With that guy who always plays the sheriff? It had that actress in it, too, what’s-her-face; the one with the hair and the big tits. It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
Al handed the man cash. “You’re thinking of that other guy,” he said.
Tommy drove. He cranked up the air-conditioning and turned onto a road that would take them into Tucson proper. On the right, as far as the eye could see, were hundreds of derelict airplanes, most of them World War II co
mbat planes.
“Look at this shit, huh?” Tommy said, rubbing his eyes.
“You all right to drive?” Al said.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“The rubbing your eyes, sweating,” Al said. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“I’m fine.” Tommy reached to turn up the already full-blast a/c. “We’re in the fucking desert, Uncle Al. It’s been known to make people fucking sweat. I got some allergies to the plants out here, too. If you recall, when we was living in Nevada, up in Tahoe I’d be fine but down in Vegas I’d start sneezing, my nose would run, itchy eyes, all that.”
It wasn’t just the sweating and the eyes. There was the weight he’d lost, the eternity Tommy spent on the can first thing in the morning. Al knew the signs. “Allergies, huh?” Al said. “Not a taste for smack?”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“Look me in the eye and tell me you ain’t using dope.”
“I ain’t using dope,” Tommy said. “I swear to God.”
“Fuck God,” Al said. “Swear to me.”
“I swear to you, Uncle Al. I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve used it here and there. But using it, no, no fucking way. Not in the ongoing sense of that, and definitely not in the am-I-on-it-now sense. Call Ma, if you don’t believe me about the allergies.”
In the airplane boneyard, there were now rows and rows of B-29 Superfortress bombers, their engines and windows covered with tarps.
Al folded his arms and studied his nephew. There was nothing whatsoever in Tommy’s driving or his manner to suggest he was on dope right now. There was no need to overreact here. All the younger guys seemed to have used it here and there. Al himself, no choirboy, had tried the stuff. “Don’t bullshit me, kid,” Al said. “All I want to know is the last time you used.”
Tommy took a deep breath. “Two days ago.”
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