The Family Corleone (52 page)

The silhouette shook its head and stepped away from the window. “Close the door,” it said, in a voice that seemed to come from someplace far away.

“Clemenza said you wanted to see me.” Sonny closed the door and moved through the shadows to his father, who pulled a pair of chairs together with his good arm. His left arm hung useless in a sling over his chest.

“Sit down.” Vito took a seat and gestured to the chair across from him. “I want to talk to you alone a moment.”

“Sure, Pop.” Sonny took his seat, folded his hands in his lap, and waited.

“In a minute,” Vito said, his voice not much more than a whisper, “Clemenza will join us, but I wanted to have a word with you first.” He leaned forward and hung his head and ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair, and then held his head in his hands.

Sonny had never seen his father like this, and an impulse rushed up to touch him, to lay a hand on his father’s knee in comfort. It was an impulse he didn’t act on but would recall often in the future, this moment with his father in his shadowy unfurnished study when he wanted to reach out and comfort him.

“Santino,” Vito said, and he sat up. “Let me ask you, and I want you to take a moment to consider this: Why do you think Emilio came to us? Why is he betraying Giuseppe Mariposa?”

In his father’s eyes, Sonny read a note of hopefulness, as if Vito deeply wanted him to get this answer right, and so Sonny tried to think about the question—but he came up with nothing, a blank space, a refusal on his mind’s part to do any thinking. “I don’t know, Pop,” he said. “I guess I take him at his word, what he said: He sees you’ll make a better leader now than Mariposa.”

Vito shook his head and the little bit of hope in his eyes disappeared. It was replaced, though, with kindness. “No,” he said, and he laid his good hand on Sonny’s knee, exactly the gesture Sonny had entertained a moment earlier. “A man like Emilio Barzini,” he said, “can never be taken at his word. To understand the truth of things,” he went on, tightening his grip on Sonny’s knee, “you have to judge both the man and the circumstances. You have to use both your brains and your heart. That’s what it’s like in a world where men lie as a matter of course—and there is no other kind of world, Santino, at least not here on earth.”

“So why, then?” Sonny asked, a note of frustration in his voice. “If not what he said, then why?”

“Because,” Vito said, “Emilio planned the parade shootings.” He paused and watched Sonny, looking like exactly what he was: a parent explaining something to his child. “He didn’t plan for it to turn into the massacre that it did, and that was his mistake,” he continued,
“but you can be sure that this was Emilio’s plan. Mariposa was never smart enough to come up with something like this. If it had worked, if I had been killed, along with Luca Brasi—and you, Sonny, killing you would have been part of the plan too—and if this could have all been blamed on the crazy Irish, because everyone knows Italians would never endanger women and children, another man’s innocent family, that this is our code—if even the others’ families, they believed it was the Irish—then the war would have been over, and Joe would be on his way to running everything, with Emilio as his second in command.” Vito got up and wandered to the window, where he looked out at the activity in the courtyard. With his right hand, he slipped the sling over his head and tossed it away, wincing slightly as he opened and closed the fist of his left hand. “Already,” he said, turning to Sonny, “we see the newspapers calling it an Irish vendetta, a bunch of mad-dog Irishmen. These stories are plants from newspapermen on Mariposa’s payroll. But now,” he added, “now that everything has turned out so badly, now Emilio is scared.” Vito took his seat across from Sonny again and leaned close. “He knew that if I survived I would see that Mariposa’s family had to be behind this massacre. He fears now that all the families will turn against him and Giuseppe. With the failure to kill Clemenza and Genco at Angelo’s, with the failure of Capone’s men to kill me, and now with this—With all of this so soon after our agreement to pay his tax—Giuseppe’s word is worth nothing, and now he’s shown that he can be defeated. Emilio’s best chance now is the deal he offered. That’s why he risked his life to come to us with this proposal. And most importantly, Sonny, that’s why,
now
, he can be trusted.”

“If he planned to kill us all, I don’t see why we let him walk away alive.” Sonny knew he should tamp down his anger, should struggle to be as reasonable as his father, but he couldn’t control it. Anger flared at the thought of Emilio planning to kill him and his family, and his only thought, if it could even be called a thought, was the desire to strike back.

Vito said, “Think, Sonny. Please. Use your head.” He clapped his hands over Sonny’s face, gave him a shake, and let him go. “What
good does Emilio Barzini dead do for us? Then we’re fighting Carmine Barzini and the Rosato brothers—and Mariposa.” When Sonny didn’t answer, Vito continued: “With Emilio alive and Mariposa dead, when we finish dividing up Mariposa’s territories—there will be five families, and we’ll be the strongest of the five. That’s our goal. That’s what we need to be thinking about—not killing Emilio.”

“Forgive me, Pop,” Sonny said, “but if we went after all of them, we could be the only family.”

“Again,” Vito said, “think. Even if we could win such a war, what happens after? The newspapers will make us out as monsters. We make bitter enemies of the relatives of the men we kill.” Vito leaned into Sonny and put his hands on his shoulders. “Sonny,” he said, “Sicilians never forget and they never forgive. This is a truth you must always keep in mind. I want to win this war so that we can have a long peace afterward and die surrounded by our families, in our own beds. I want Michael and Fredo and Tom to go into legitimate businesses, so that they can be rich and prosperous—and unlike me and now you, Sonny, they won’t always have to worry about who will be trying to kill them next. Do you understand, Sonny? Do you understand what it is that I want for this family?”

Sonny said, “Yeah, Pop, I understand.”

“Good,” Vito said, and gently brushed Sonny’s hair back off his forehead. When a door opened behind them, Vito touched Sonny’s shoulder and pointed to the light switch by the door.

Sonny turned on the lights and Clemenza entered the room.

To Sonny, Vito said, “There’s much to do in the coming days.” He touched Sonny’s arm again. “We must be on guard for treachery.” He hesitated and appeared to be caught in a moment of indecision. “I’m going to leave now,” he said, and glanced once toward Sonny and quickly looked away, almost as if he was afraid to meet his eyes. “
Treachery
,” he said again, softly, whispering a warning to himself, and then he raised a finger and nodded to Clemenza and Sonny, as if to emphasize the warning. “Listen to Clemenza,” he said to Sonny, and he left the room.

“What’s going on?” Sonny asked.

“
Aspett’
,” Clemenza said, and he closed the door gently behind Vito, as if being careful not to make too much noise. “Sit down.” He pointed to the two facing chairs where Sonny had sat a few minutes earlier with his father.

“Sure,” Sonny said. He took a seat and crossed his legs, making himself comfortable. “What’s this about?”

Clemenza was wearing his typical baggy, rumpled suit with a bright-yellow tie so crisp and clean that it had to be brand-new. He plopped himself down in the chair across from Sonny, grunted with the pleasure of taking the weight off his feet, and took a black pistol out of one jacket pocket and a silvery silencer out of the other. He held up the silencer. “You know what this is?”

Sonny gave Clemenza a look. Of course he knew it was a silencer. “What’s this about?” he asked again.

“Personally, I don’t like silencers,” Clemenza said. He went about attaching the heavy metal tube to the barrel of the gun as he spoke. “I prefer a big, noisy gun,” he said, “better to scare anybody gets ideas. Big bang, everybody scatters, you walk away.”

Sonny laughed and clasped his hands behind his neck. He leaned back and waited for Clemenza to get around to whatever it was he wanted to say.

Clemenza fiddled with the silencer. He was having trouble getting it attached. “This is about Bobby Corcoran,” he said, finally.

“Ah,” Sonny said, and he glanced behind him, out the window, as if he was looking for something that he’d just remembered he’d lost. “I can’t figure it,” he said when he turned back to Clemenza—and the way he said it made it sound like a question.

“What’s there to figure?” Clemenza answered.

Sonny said, “I don’t know what the hell to think, Uncle Pete.” He was immediately embarrassed at having fallen back to his childhood way of addressing Clemenza, and he tried to rush past the moment by speaking quickly. “I know Bobby shot Pop,” he said, “I saw it like everybody else, but…”

“But you can’t believe it,” Clemenza said, as if he knew what Sonny was thinking.

“Yeah,” Sonny said. “It’s—” He looked away again, not knowing what else to say.

“Listen, Sonny,” Clemenza said, and he went back to fiddling with the gun, loosening and tightening the silencer, checking that it was properly fitted to the barrel. “I understand,” he said, “that you’ve grown up with this kid Bobby, that you’ve known him all your life…” He paused and nodded, as if he had just explained something to himself satisfactorily. “But Bobby Corcoran has got to go,” he said. “He shot your father.” He twisted the silencer one last time, till it fit snug to the barrel, and then he handed the gun to Sonny.

Sonny took the pistol and dropped it in his lap, as if putting it aside. “Bobby’s parents,” he said, quietly, “they both died when he was a baby, from the flu.”

Clemenza nodded and was silent.

“His sister and her daughter, they’re all he’s got. And Bobby, he’s all they got.”

Again Clemenza was silent.

“Bobby’s sister, Eileen,” Sonny went on, “her husband, Jimmy Gibson, one of Mariposa’s goons killed him in a strike riot.”

“Who killed him?” Clemenza asked.

“One of Mariposa’s goons.”

“Is that what you heard?”

“Yeah. That’s what I heard.”

“Because that’s what some people wanted you to hear.”

“You know different?”

“If it’s got to do with the unions,” Clemenza said, “we know about it.” He sighed and glanced up at the ceiling, where a line of light coming from beyond the window moved slowly from right to left. “Pete Murray killed Jimmy Gibson,” he said. “He clocked him with a lead pipe. There was some kind of bad blood between them—I forget the whole story—but Pete didn’t want it to get around that he’d killed one of his own, so he worked a deal with Mariposa. Pete Murray was on Mariposa’s payroll since forever. It was how Giuseppe kept his thumb on the Irish.”

“Jesus,” Sonny said. He looked down at the gun and silencer in his lap.

“Listen, Sonny,” Clemenza said, and then, just as Vito had done earlier, he put his hand on Sonny’s knee. “This is a tough business. The cops, the army…,” he said, and he appeared to be struggling for words. “Put a uniform on somebody, tell ’em you got to kill this other guy because he’s the bad guy, you got to kill him—and then anybody can pull the trigger. But in this business, sometimes you got to kill people who maybe they’re your friends.” He stopped and shrugged, as if he were taking a moment to think about this himself. “That’s the way it is in this business. Sometimes maybe it’s even people you love and you got to do it. That’s just the way it is,” he repeated, “in this business.” He picked up the gun from Sonny’s lap and handed it to him. “It’s time for you to make your bones,” he said. “Bobby Corcoran’s got to go, and you got to be the one to do it. He shot your father, Santino. That’s the long and short of it. He’s got to go and you got to do it.”

Sonny dropped the gun into his lap again and peered down at it as if he were looking at a mystery. When finally he picked it up, it was black and heavy in his hands, the silencer adding extra weight. He was still staring at it when he heard the door close and realized that Clemenza had left the room. He shook his head as if he refused to believe what was happening, though the gun was there, in his hand, solid and heavy. Alone in the sudden quiet, he closed a fist around the butt of the gun. In a series of movements that uncannily matched Vito’s only minutes earlier, he leaned forward, hung his head, ran the fingers of his free hand through his hair, and then held his head in his hands, the butt of the gun cold against his temple. He touched his finger to the trigger and then sat there motionless in the quiet.

Fredo woke to darkness, his head buried in pillows and his knees pulled to his chest. He didn’t know where he was for a minute, and then the excitement of the previous day came back to him and he knew he was in his own bed and he remembered the parade and
that his father had been shot but that he’d be okay. He’d seen him. Mama had let him and Michael get a peek at him before she pulled them back and sent them upstairs to their room, away from all the commotion in the house. Pop’s arm was in a sling, but he looked okay—and then no one would tell him anything more about what had happened. He tried to listen at the door, but Mama was in the room with them, making them both, him and Michael, do their schoolwork, and keeping them from hearing anything. They couldn’t even turn on the radio, and Mama wouldn’t let Michael talk about it, and then he fell asleep. Still, he knew there’d been shooting at the parade and Pop had been hit in the shoulder. As he lay in bed letting the day’s events come back to him, Fredo found himself getting angry again because he’d been unlucky enough to miss the whole thing. If he’d been there, maybe he could have protected his father. Maybe he could have kept him from getting shot. He might have thrown himself over his father, or knocked him out of the way of the bullet. He wished he had been there. He wished he’d had the chance to show his father and everybody else that he wasn’t just a kid. If he’d had the chance to save his father from being shot, everybody’d see. He was fifteen now. He wasn’t a kid anymore.

When finally Fredo turned over, pulling his head out of the pillows, he was groggy with sleep. Across the room, Michael’s covers were tented over his knees and light was seeping out around the edges. “Michael, what are you doing?” Fredo whispered. “You reading under there?”