The Godfather Returns (43 page)

“Speaking of excellent sources,” he said, “I want you to know something. They tried to kill your brother.”

“Who tried to kill my brother?”

“Louie Russo. Fuckface.”

“My brothers are dead.”

“A while ago. I just learned about it.”

“Which brother?”

It unnerved Geraci that Michael could call Hagen
my brother
one moment and say
My brothers are dead
the next. “Fredo. It was a botched hit, and Russo called it off. Remember Labor Day?”

Geraci didn’t need to say which Labor Day. Michael nodded.

“After Pete’s kid’s wedding, Fredo wound up in a motel in Canada. With—I don’t know how to say this—with another man. The button guys were supposed to make it look like Fredo killed himself out of shame or what-have-you. I’d tell you that it was a setup, a frame-up, except for a few things.”

The problem with Michael’s poker face was that when he put it on, you noticed it.

“First,” Geraci said, “when Russo’s men got to the motel, Fredo was gone but there was still someone there—a salesman; nice job, wife, kids—and he’s naked on the bed. Second, the button guys open the door, and the salesman pulls a gun and shoots them. The gun’s a Colt Peacemaker with the serial number filed off. It may have been Fredo’s gun, maybe not, but he definitely lost a gun on that trip—Figaro told me that—and Fredo loved those Colts. Anyway, the salesman kills one guy, wounds the other. Next day, someone chloroforms a nurse, slits the wounded guy’s throat, then buries the knife in his eye up to the hilt and leaves it there. The day after
that,
the salesman goes to meet with his lawyer, and that’s the last anybody ever sees him. Other than his hands, that is, which someone chopped off and mailed to his wife.”

“You’re saying Don Russo covered his tracks.”

“I’m saying that, yes.”

“Why didn’t they come after Fredo again?”

“The idea was to embarrass the Family. You named Fredo
sotto capo,
and right after that it turns out he’s queer. I’m not saying he was, all right? I’m just giving you information.”

Michael nodded.

“If they made it look like he offed himself,” Geraci said, “that would’ve been the end of it. No revenge, no nothing. Our organization is hurt, and they benefit. They were mad about Las Vegas. They thought of it as their turf. But then after . . . you know. The crash.
My
crash. It wasn’t necessary anymore, at least for a while. I can’t prove it, but it stands to reason that Russo was behind the tragedy with your brother. Fredo was out in L.A. half the time, and L.A. was where he betrayed us.” Geraci raised his eyebrows, shrugged. “L.A. equals Chicago, right?”

It was no secret among the made members of the Family that Michael had ordered his own brother killed.

“How do you know so much?” Michael said. “How did you learn these things?”

“I’ve got a guy,” Geraci said. “Somebody inside the FBI.”

“The FBI?” Michael said, clearly impressed. The FBI—the director’s peccadillos notwithstanding—was considered incorruptible.

“The gun Fredo was arrested with in L.A. when he killed that dog? Also a Colt with its serial number filed off. In the lab they were able to use acid and bring the number back up. Same with the gun from Windsor. They were both part of a shipment that our guy in Reno got and sold to nonexistent people. Thank God not to Gerald O’Malley. Oh, and one more thing.”

Geraci reached in his coat pocket for the closest thing he had to a concealed weapon—a cigarette lighter: jeweled, made in Milan, engraved
CHRISTMAS
1954
.
He tossed it to Michael.

“Recognize this?”

Michael’s face reddened. He turned the lighter over in his small, perfectly manicured hand, then made a fist, covering it. Almost covering it.

“The salesman said it belonged to the other guy,” Geraci said. “Listen, Michael, I feel awful about this. If you want me to go after Russo, say the word and it’s done. I’ll come at him with everything we got.”

Michael turned to face the window. For several blocks he tapped the fist with the lighter in it against his chin.

Geraci was bluffing. He didn’t have anyone in the FBI. He’d heard those Colts all came from the same dealer and hoped that was right. He’d gotten the lighter from Russo, who’d gotten it from the salesman’s killer.

But Geraci was serious about going after Russo. He’d had peace in his
regime
for five years. He had a hell of a war chest. The last few years, Cesare Indelicato, the Sicilian
capo di tutti capi,
had been providing Geraci not only with heroin and other drugs but also personnel. Geraci had a whole crew of zips now, over in Bushwick, there on Knickerbocker Avenue, and he’d been setting up some of the legal immigrants with jobs in pizza parlors all over the Midwest, quietly tossing dough and making a little of it until the time may come for them to do Nick Geraci a favor. Men like that, living as law-abiding good neighbors for years in Kenosha, Cleveland Heights, or Youngstown, could go on “vacation,” do a job on somebody, come home, and nobody would ever in a million years connect them to some dead gangster eight hundred miles away. If Richie Two Guns was as good as he seemed, Geraci was confident the Corleones could cripple the Chicago outfit and make those animals answerable to the New York Families again. And, of course, Geraci could in the process cover his tracks for his role in manipulating Fredo to betray his brother. Better to do it on Michael’s say-so (with Michael having to answer to the Commission for it) than for Geraci to worry about whether to do it later.

“Thank you just the same,” Michael finally said. “But as I told you, I’m retired.”

The car stopped. They were back on First Avenue, in front of the Roach’s bar. Geraci wondered if Michael had really been thinking all that time or if he’d simply waited until the end of the drive to answer.

Nick Geraci held out his left hand, palm down, in front of his chest and held his right underneath, pointing at the bottom of his palm.
“Qui sotto non ci piove.”
Under here you won’t be rained on.
“Un giorno avrai bisogno di me.”
One day you’ll need me.

An old expression. Tessio would say it when pledging his protection, and Michael must have heard his father say it, too.

“I appreciate that, Fausto,” Michael said.

“Don’t mention it.”

Michael smiled. A chill went through Nick Geraci.

“You thought I was going to kill you,” Michael said, “didn’t you?”

“I think everyone’s trying to kill me all the fucking time,” Geraci said. “Force of habit.”

“That’s probably why you’re still alive.”

How did he mean that? That it was probably why no one had ever killed him or why Michael wasn’t killing him now? Geraci wasn’t about to ask for a clarification.

“Anyway, Michael, what reason would I have to think you were going to kill me?” Geraci said. “Like you said, you’re retired. Good luck to you in your new life.”

Michael still had the lighter in his fist.

They kissed and embraced, and Geraci watched the limo pull away. When he walked inside the bar, his men had somehow known to gather, a good thirty or forty of them. Shaking, Nick Geraci went upstairs and slumped in a big leather chair in the corner. His men followed. He slipped his wedding ring onto the little finger of his right hand, and his men lined up to kiss it.

Chapter 23

M
R.
F
ONTANE!
Have you been promised a job in the Shea administration?”

The lobby of Constitution Hall was full of reporters. Johnny Fontane was sitting behind a table on a crowded dais, flanked by a dozen stars of stage and screen. There would be many more onstage tomorrow. They were making history. No one he’d asked to perform at the inaugural ball for Jimmy Shea had said no. If the Russians dropped the bomb on Washington, there’d be little left of show business but school plays, rock music, and stag films. “A
jo
b
?” Johnny said, in mock horror. “I became a saloon singer so I’d never have to
have
a job.”

This got a decent laugh. He wanted them to think the answer might be yes. The Ambassador had talked about setting Fontane up to run for office. Jimmy himself—at Fontane’s place in Vegas, on a break from going at it with Rita Duvall, who was also on the podium now—had suggested making Fontane the ambassador to Italy. Or how about some little tropical paradise with blue skies and limitless pussy? He and Johnny had both been pretty drunk at that point.

“What does it say about the Shea presidency,” a voice shouted, “that the inaugural ball is being produced by someone like yourself with reputed Mafia ties?”

Johnny couldn’t believe it. When was this shit going to stop?

The jerk-off who asked the question was with a paper in New York. Johnny had punched him out once. The out-of-court settlement had been ten grand and worth every cent.

Bobby Chadwick—the brother-in-law of the president-elect—leaned over his mike. “By someone
like
Johnny Fontane? Forgive me if you’re a correspondent from the planet Uranus and unfamiliar with our ways, but here on Earth, it’s safe to say there’s nobody
like
Johnny Fontane.”

He got a laugh, too, but the laughter subsided and the other reporters still looked at Johnny for an answer. If this had been a restaurant or a nightclub, Johnny could have merely arched an eyebrow and this jerk-off would have been out on his ass.

“
Reputed
is a word lazy reporters use so they can make things up,” Johnny said. “Let me give you some facts. There are more than five million Americans of Italian descent. According to a report the U.S. Senate put out two years ago, there are at most four thousand people associated with the quote-unquote Mafia. I’ll do the math for you, buddy-boy. That’s thirteen-hundred-to-one odds. You’re more likely to get eaten by a bear. Yet every time somebody whose name ends with a vowel gets ahead, bigots like you ask if we’re in the Mob.”

“
Are
you in the Mob?”

Well, he’d walked into that one. “I’m not even going to dignify a question that ignorant.”

“I could be wrong,” said Sir Oliver Smith-Christmas, the distinguished British actor, seated at the edge of the podium, “but aren’t you confusing the sort of gentlemen who oftentimes own American nightclubs with those like my friend Mr. Fontane, who simply perform in them? Where is a nightclub singer to perform if not in a nightclub?”

“Ollie makes a good point,” Johnny Fontane said. “Once the big-band era was over—”

“Isn’t it a fact that the late Vito Corleone was your godfather?” the reporter said.

Not that kind of godfather, you stupid fuck.
“He stood for my baptism, yes. He was a friend of my parents.”

“Does President-elect Shea have ties to organized crime?” another reporter asked. “Michael Corleone, who was among those called to testify before the Senate two years ago, served as a member of the transition—”

“Why don’t you ask that to Michael Corleone, huh?” Johnny said. “Better yet, why don’t you ask all the sick kids Mr. Corleone’s hospital and charities have helped? Look, folks, this is an exciting time for our country. I think I can speak for everyone up here when I say that we’re behind President Shea one hundred percent. But let’s keep the questions a little more on the subject of the inaugural ball itself, all right?”

“You grew up in New York,” the jerk-off shouted, “but you’re friendly with Louie Russo in Chicago and Ignazio Pignatelli in Los Angeles.” The shithead pronounced it
Pig-natelli,
rather than
Peenyatelli.
“Pignatelli’s sister is listed as a shareholder in the new record label you started. My question is, is it possible to transfer your membership—”

“Don’t make me come down from here and show you some manners,” Johnny said.

“Are you going to have me whacked? That’s the Mafia word for it, right? Whacked?”

“Now, how the fuck would I know that?” Johnny said. Obviously, everyone knew that, but that wasn’t the point.

A murmur went through the room.

“How on
earth,
” Johnny rephrased it, “would I know that?”

After Kay Corleone left her husband and left Nevada, she landed a teaching job at a first-rate boarding school in Maine. She and her children lived in a stone cottage on the grounds of the school. Michael didn’t like it, but she needed a job, not financially but as a means of creating an identity separate from all she’d been with him. She’d applied only to schools thousands of miles from Lake Tahoe. She hadn’t expected Michael to fight so hard for custody and had been even more surprised when out of the blue he told her he’d looked into the school where she was teaching and decided that the children’s education would be best served by going there. Kay had no idea what changed his mind. He claimed he simply realized he was using the kids as pawns in the divorce and putting his feelings ahead of what they really needed. She wanted to believe that. She’d curbed her impulse to tell him that if he’d paid more attention to his heart than his cold mind, he might not have found himself in this mess in the first place.

Michael didn’t see Tony and Mary often. When he did, he usually picked them up in his plane and flew them to New York for a weekend of frenzied activity: ice-skating, carriage rides, museums, movies, the zoo—everything he could cram in. They’d come home exhausted. For weeks afterward, Mary, who was seven now and worshiped her father, would tell endless stories about their time together. Tony, who was nine, rarely talked about him at all.

When Michael first told Kay his schedule was tight and asked her to take the kids to New York herself this time, she’d said it was impossible. When he told her about the inaugural ball and said Kay could go, too, she declined. Washington had a lot of bad memories for her. Though she hoped he’d find a way to make it work so he could take Mary and Tony. And, no, having some button man come to Maine and drive them to New York was not an option.

Everything changed when Kay heard about Jules Segal. He’d been her doctor in Nevada. She’d recommended him to a friend who’d moved there and learned that he’d been shot more than a year ago—the victim of a botched burglary, according to the newspapers.

So now, the day of the ball, Kay waited in a room at the Essex House, in a suite overlooking Central Park. The kids were watching TV. They didn’t have a set at home anymore. Seeing them transfixed by it here confirmed for her that this had been a good idea. She looked at her watch. He was late. Some things never changed.

Finally, she heard voices in the hall. Michael and—of course!—Al Neri opened the door.

“Why isn’t he dressed?” Michael asked, pointing at Tony. Michael already had his tux on.

“I’m not
going
to your stupid ball,” Tony said.

Kay had been so distracted that she hadn’t noticed that Tony had taken off his suit and changed back into the blue shirt and chinos he wore to school every day.

Mary leapt from the bed to go hug her father. “I’m going!” Mary said. “Don’t I look like a beautiful princess? Because that’s who goes to balls is why.”

“You do, sweetheart. You really do. C’mon, Tony. You’re going. You’ll love it.”

Kay told Tony to put his suit back on. The boy snatched it up and trudged to the bathroom, muttering. Neri sat down on the sofa, apparently content with the cartoon program that was on. Mary twirled around, showing off her dress. Kay told her to go watch the rest of the show on TV, she needed to have a word alone with Daddy. Then she steered Michael into the adjoining bedroom and closed the door.

“I did it, Kay. I’ve retired from—well, from the dangerous aspects of the business I inherited from my father. I promised you that I’d make all my business dealings legitimate, and I’ve done it.”

She frowned. “You made that promise
ten years ago.
” She presumed it was a clumsy ploy to get her to come back to him. Still, she hoped for the kids’ sake he was telling the truth. Sooner or later, he was going to be killed or go to jail, and she hated to think how it would affect Tony and Mary when he did. “I’m happy for you, though, Michael. I really am.”

“You look great, Kay. Maine, teaching: it’s really agreeing with you.”

“Michael, I have to ask you something. I want you to tell me the truth.”

In a split second, his face became an expressionless mask.

“Did you have Jules Segal killed?”

“No.”

No hesitation. Just
no.
Isn’t that exactly what a liar would do when the answer is
ye
s
?

“I don’t think I believe you,” Kay said.

“I told you a long time ago not to ask me about my business, Kay.”

“This isn’t your business, it’s
our
business. You had Dr. Segal killed because of me, didn’t you? Because of the—”

“Don’t say it.” At least now he had an expression on his face. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Abortion. Are you going to slap me again?” The way he had when she’d told him: the slap that had ended their marriage, in a different hotel, but in Washington, where he was about to go.

“No, Kay,” he said. “I’m not.”

“Because if that
burglary
was your handiwork—”

“I don’t want to talk about this subject.”

“—you should know that it wasn’t him.”

“Kay, stop it. We both know that when you—when that happened, he was the doctor you went to. We own that hospital, Kay.”

“So it shouldn’t have been too hard to get my records and see that I had a miscarriage.”

“Oh, sure. You flew to Las Vegas so you could have a miscarriage, and the attending doctor just happened to be the same man who performed the abortions every time Fredo—”

Her stomach felt like it had been twisted by a pair of strong hands. “Oh, God, Michael. I
knew
it. I knew it. You just . . . I was so
angry.
I was
scared.
It was terrible to live in fear of what might happen to you, but I realized there was nothing I was more afraid of than you—”

“Me? I have protected this family,
our
family, ahead of anything and everything else.”

“Michael, you married into another kind of family a long time before we started ours. Even your first wife was your second wife. I was your third.”

“Nothing could have ever happened to you. Or our children. Nothing ever will.”

“Come on, Michael. Our house in Nevada was attacked, like some target in a war zone. Did you promise
Apollonia
nothing would ever happen to her, too? I suppose we should count our blessings we weren’t blown to smithereens.”

“Kay—”

“And what do you mean,
Nothing ever wil
l
? What sort of
protection,
what kind of
goons
do you command in your capacity as a legitimate businessman?
Legitimate businessman.
We’ll see. Do you really expect me to believe that anything about you has changed, that anything about you will
ever
change? Calling yourself
legitimate
won’t change what you’ve done.”

He kept his eyes on her as he reached into his jacket pocket. For a terrible moment she thought he was reaching for a gun or a knife. He took out a cigarette and lit it.

“Are you through?” he said.

“You don’t
understand.
I’m not
like
you, Michael. I could have never killed our . . . our son. I flew to Las Vegas to help organize a fund-raiser for the art museum, and right after I got there I had a miscarriage. I didn’t have any word from you for
two weeks
after that happened.
Two weeks.
No woman should have to live through that alone. I decided to leave you. I had other reasons, bigger reasons, all the reasons we’ve talked about, but that was the last straw. I knew you’d never give me a divorce. So I told you I’d had an abortion. I wanted to hurt you, and I told a lie to do it. I wanted to see that look on your face, and I saw it. I wanted to see what you’d do, and you hit me.”

Michael lowered his head and, very slightly, nodded.

“Jules Segal was my
regular doctor,
Michael. Do you really think that
anybody,
especially him, a man who knew who you are as well as anyone in Las Vegas, would have performed an abortion on the wife of a—of a man in your position? Segal wouldn’t have . . . I don’t know . . . lit a cigarette without your blessing. I never in my wildest dreams, my wildest nightmares, thought you’d send your goons—”

“We need to go,” Michael said. “I’m going.” He turned and went into the other room. “Come on, Mary, Tony. Who wants to go for an airplane ride?”

Mary shouted that she did, she did, and Tony didn’t say anything, but within moments her children had both kissed her and said their good-byes. No one turned off the television.

Kay Corleone—an accessory to murder before the fact—collapsed onto the bed.

She had no one to blame but herself. Michael was a killer. She’d fallen in love with him not in spite of that but—as he told her about what he’d done in the war—because of it. She knew in her heart that he’d killed those two men in the restaurant. She knew about a lot of other killings, too, and pretended not to. She married him and
changed religion
s
—leaving one that allowed divorce for one that prohibited it—so that she could go to confession and try to live with herself for loving a killer. When she’d finally worn Tom Hagen down and gotten him to tell her that the house in Lake Tahoe had in fact been torched and bulldozed because the FBI had bugged the beams and foundation, she’d actually thought,
This is the last straw.
But no. She’d stayed. She’d rebuilt. When men with machine guns opened fire and nearly killed her children, she left the house but stayed with him. Not until he abandoned her when she lost the baby
and
hit her
and
killed his own brother did she do what a truly innocent person would have done years ago.