The Godfather's Revenge (10 page)

“Who said I did? Let’s go.”

As they were tossing Nick’s meager possessions into the trunk of the Starfire, Fausto pointed at the shotgun. “Tell you what, you’re gonna need that where you’re going.”

“What, in Canada?”

“Canada? You mean Mexico.”

Nick shook his head. “Canada first.”

Fausto shrugged. “That’s the long way to Mexico, though. Also, very cold.”

“I’m aware of that. We’re not going to stay. I just need to take care of some things. What did you mean about needing the shotgun where I’m going?”

“Oh, that. In the car, is what I meant. You gonna
ride
shotgun.” The old man cackled at his own joke.

“All due respect, Dad, I think I better drive. Did you sleep at all on the way here?”

“Let me tell you something. You get to be my age, sleep? Forget sleep.” But he put his head down and trudged to the passenger side, mumbling all the way. “You want to drive, drive,” he said. “Let’s get the show on the road.”

In the middle of the front seat was a satchel full of neatly folded road maps. He took one out, apparently at random. Iowa. Fausto read maps less for navigation than the way another man might study
The Power of Positive Thinking,
the way his own son read and reread
The Prince
. Soon, he nodded off.

About an hour later, Fausto snapped awake from what had seemed to be a dead sleep and, without missing a beat, said, “Faster.”

“You want to drive,” Nick said, pulling onto the shoulder, “drive.”

“Attaboy.” Fausto caressed the dashboard. “This baby rides real nice, though, eh?”

THEY WENT TO BUFFALO AND CROSSED INTO CANADA
from there. Nick spent a few hours leaving behind traces of himself. Using different aliases—one he’d used so long he’d even thrown a few fights under that name—he rented an apartment, bought a cheap car, and even had his subscription to
Time
magazine forwarded there. He bought his father a parka and thick snow boots, which had no impact whatsoever on his complaints about the cold. They had dinner in Buffalo, at a steak joint Fausto knew about that he said was frequented by low-level guys connected to the Cuneo Family, so word would get back but not too fast.

Then they headed south.

Soon, America’s heartland was a blur outside the windows of the two-toned Starfire, and so, for Nick Geraci, were the next few weeks. He and his father had all the time in the world to talk, really
talk.
They never did, which suited them both fine. Fausto, who used to insist on driving in silence, not only played the radio but also had somehow worked up an interest in country music. For hours at a time, he’d mutter along with Lefty Frizzell, Marty Robbins, and George Jones, slapping his son’s hand whenever he tried to change the station. On open roads, he kept the speed between 90 and 100. His uncanny ability to sense speed traps failed him only once, outside Denver. Nick cursed and sunk down in his seat, and his father told him to shut up. Fausto flashed an Ohio highway patrolman’s badge he’d gotten somewhere. Moments later they were on their way. Fausto was clairvoyant about when it was better to flash that badge and when it was better yet to flash it with a fifty tucked underneath. Fausto, back up over 80, said that maybe nobody’s out to get him, did he ever think of that? Nick told him he didn’t know the whole story, and Fausto said he’d just gotten the perfect idea for his own tombstone:
HERE LIES FAUSTO THE DRIVER, WHO DIDN’T KNOW THE WHOLE STORY
. When Nick asked his father if he would please just as a favor not drive so fast, Fausto told him that everyone in Italy drove like this, and nobody there ever got in wrecks. Had he ever seen a wreck there? Nick pointed out that they weren’t
in
Italy. Fausto called his son a “goddamned fucking genius,” and for another several hours they said fewer words to one another than they heard sung by Mr. Hank Williams. They had, without a doubt, never been closer.

They chose a nondescript, medium-size motel in Nogales that was walking distance from the border. They got the numbers of two nearby pay phones. Nick would go to one at noon and the other at five and wait for Fausto or anyone else to call. This simple plan in place, the men parted without fanfare, though the old man drove away slowly, which seemed a gesture toward emotion.

In most decent-size border towns there can be found geniuses in the art of forged passports and driver’s licenses. Go into the right bar, don’t ask too many questions, tip well but not like you have anything to prove, and the next thing you know you’ve got two or three good ones from which to choose. Don’t forget, as Nick Geraci did not, to compare the forgeries to the genuine articles.

Conchita’s people were from Taxco, a place Nick Geraci had never heard of. “She says there’s plenty of Americans there,” Fausto said. “Plenty of Canadians, Europeans, coloreds, Germans, the works. You won’t stick out or nothing. A lot of ’em are starving artists and such, so with that beard you’ll be perfect. She’s got a cousin who’s got a friend who knows about an apartment a Canadian fella died in. It’s got books, which I know is your speed. I set it up so they’re holding it for you. Just say you’re Flaco Cruz’s friend, which is the cousin. You want me to get you there? There’s a place I heard about where if you got a truck you can drive across the desert, over the border and back. I can get ahold of a truck.”

“I’ll be fine,” Nick said. “I appreciate it, though.”

“No you don’t.” Fausto said this with something like tenderness, maybe even love.

WHEN NICK GERACI FIRST ARRIVED IN TAXCO, HE’D
kept to himself. Spanish was enough like Italian for him to muddle through. The apartment had come with books, but all of them were in French, even the dime novels. But there was also, alphabetized and in custom-built shelves, a collection of jazz records, many fairly new. Geraci liked jazz but hadn’t paid much attention to what had come along since the big bands. The first things he listened to were records he already knew, Benny Goodman and Les Halley and such. But one day he was flipping through the unfamiliar names and the blonde on the cover of Chet Baker’s
Chet
was such a dead ringer for Charlotte it knocked the breath out of him. He played the record, and he was crazy about it. Char and the night and the music. He started exploring the whole collection. He’d sit in the dark all night, sipping mineral water and listening to Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderly, and Sonny Rollins. Soon, he got a secondhand portable typewriter and plenty of paper, and he let the records repeat as he wrote.

Geraci settled in to the slow, easy rhythms of the town, and day by day he grew more optimistic that no one was pursuing him. He might have been a free man, except that no man with a family can ever be free.

He’d set up regular lines of communication to Charlotte and the girls—phone procedures and a post office box in Tucson where they could send reel-to-reel tapes to each other, which Fausto could then forward. And he began to think about which of the hundreds of men who’d been under his absolute control might be trusted to help him mount an offensive against the soulless prick who’d tried to kill him. He had no shortage of candidates. He was actually more worried about Charlotte. She seemed like she was near the end of her rope, embarrassed by how friends and neighbors looked at her, as lonely as he was but through no fault of her own. She was the rare sort of woman who didn’t talk too much about her feelings, but once she’d broken down and mentioned divorce. He couldn’t really blame her, but he did. He doubted she’d ever really do that, but then again, during his months in hiding, he’d come face-to-face with the cold reality of “ever.”

In the zócalo there was one loud fiesta after another, and eventually it drew Geraci more often out into the streets and among the company of his fellow exiles. When he didn’t volunteer much about himself, they didn’t press him. Geraci had seen the same thing in parts of New York, where people shared not a nationality or a religion but a collective misfit fate. They’d fled or been kicked out of where they’d come from and had come together here, with little in common but that. There was a hairless, egg-shaped Russian composer. A retired Negro ballplayer who owned a restaurant and was married to a Mexican lady who painted huge pictures of herself naked. A Cuban widow whose husband had owned a candy factory in Cienfuegos. A Bulgarian actor who ran a fleet of Volkswagen taxis. Et cetera. Geraci initially kept his distance from two American writers, Wiley Moulton and Wiley’s friend Iggy, not because they were
finocchios
but because they were from New York. But it turned out they’d been living in their own world so long, writing books about made-up things, that they couldn’t tell you who the American president was, much less recognize the bearded, thinner version of the Corleone
capo
whose disappearance had once been news. To them, he was the fake name he’d given them, just some mook with a scraggly beard and the shakes who was trying to write a book and probably kidding himself, but so what? Who’s it hurt?

Most afternoons, holding court in one bar or another, was the emperor of the expats, a haunted-looking Southerner and world-class talker named Spratling. He claimed to be (or have been) bosom buddies with Diego Rivera, John Wayne, Dolores del Rio, and Trotsky. For years, he shared (or claimed to have shared) an apartment in New Orleans with William Faulkner; he claimed to have written a book with “Bill” in which they made fun of the great Sherwood Anderson, a mentor to them both. Spratling had come to Taxco thirty years ago and built the jewelry business from nothing into a multimillion-dollar something, selling pieces he designed himself that people all over the world bought because they looked so traditionally Mexican. During the war, he let private investors into his company. Three years later, he’d lost everything. Now he lived on a chicken ranch south of town, along with twenty-three Great Danes and a pair of boa constrictors, living off the money he made smuggling pre-Columbian art into the hands of private collectors. Geraci liked him. Men like Spratling made men like Nick Geraci possible.

One such afternoon, Spratling launched into a story about a couple from Chicago who’d come down here and tried to teach an eagle to hunt. They bought it in Arkansas for some reason and named it Caligula. They had big plans that they could get it to bring them back iguanas, wild pigs, and small deer. Some of the other newcomers were skeptical. Geraci was not—he’d seen the grandiose thoughts and visions of vainglorious Chicagoans in action—and he made an early exit.

When he got back to the apartment, he went straight to the hi-fi. As he was bent over the record player, dropping the needle on
Mingus Ah Um,
he saw a flash of bright metal behind his horsehair sofa. His right arm shot up to block the knife faster than his brain registered that it
was
a knife. He had his hand around a muscled forearm, and he spun around to face a short, curly-haired young man, all in black, about as wide as he was tall, still clutching a butcher knife. The kid was strong but untrained. Geraci pulled him into a clinch. The kid held on, and Geraci could feel his own muscles twitching and about to give. He pushed the kid away and a split second later landed a clean left hook on the kid’s melon. It sent his legs in the air. His head took a second blow as it smacked hard against the tile floor.

The record skipped a groove but kept going.
Oh, yass!
an ecstatic voice shouted.
Better get hit in yo’ soul!

The young man moaned and rocked slowly from side to side on the floor, stunned but not out.

“Stay down,” Geraci said, picking up the knife. “Whoever the fuck you are, stay down. Who the fuck
are
you? Who sent you?”

Blood ran from the young man’s right ear. He continued to moan.

“I asked you a question.”

The man said something Geraci couldn’t make out.

“Speak up.”

“
Bocchicchio.
”

Nick Geraci let out a gallows chuckle. The first to find him wasn’t the CIA, the FBI, a Corleone assassin, or someone from another Family. No, it was this primitive kid. “You’re not really a Bocchicchio, though, right? A Bocchicchio per se. What’s your name?”

“I am the blood of Carmine Marino.” He said it as if he were reading it off crib notes.

A knife was what a man concerned about getting caught would use. A true Bocchicchio wouldn’t have cared. He would have recognized his own weakness as a close-in fighter and gunned Geraci down, the consequences be hanged, even if that meant the assassin was hanged, too. The Bocchicchios were the most single-mindedly vengeful clan Sicily had ever seen, and once the most powerful. But after a century of unyielding vendettas, there remained few true Bocchicchios. The handful of surviving cousins had had their blood so cooled down by marrying outside the clan that they’d abandoned the family traditions.

As only the very young can, the young man abruptly scrambled to his feet, and Geraci shook his head and flattened him with a right cross. This time at least the kid landed on his ass and not his head.

The record didn’t skip at all. A wailing sax solo handed off to the piano man.

“Stay down.”

“You killed my cousin.” His nose was bleeding now, too.