The Godfather's Revenge (38 page)

Again, he had been studying her tan lines, particularly the ones the bottom had left. Also the curve of her hips, the way her bush was much more sparse than he’d remembered. He shook his head.

She apparently misinterpreted this as his dismay over her complaints about money. “I
know
what you’re thinking,” she said.

“I’m not thinking anything,” he said. Because what could he say, that he was wondering if her bush was going bald? Did that happen to women? It occurred to him that she was the oldest woman he’d ever seen naked. “I’m listening. My undivided attention.”

Charlotte sat up now, leaning toward him on the bed. “I know that you think I’m fixated on material things, that money’s what I think about all the time, but it’s not. I’ve been here almost twenty-four hours, and this is the first time I’ve mentioned money, OK? Think about it. All the times when we talked on the phone, when did I ask you about money if you didn’t bring it up first? Never. Not once. But I’ve got news for you. We’re broke, Nick. Our savings are gone. I’ve had to borrow money from my dad. I understand that people are watching me, that sending someone to the house with a big envelope every week isn’t—”

“I don’t have anyone I can send,” Nick said. “Much less anything to put in those theoretical envelopes. I really thought it would work with the life insurance,” by which he meant getting him declared dead and collecting and then repaying it if he ever surfaced: it had seemed like the greatest interest-free-loan scam this side of the Teamsters’ pension fund. “But there are other things I can work out for us. There’s some stocks you can sell, or the girls can. I can get word to them how to do it. Plus, my dad can wire money to the girls, too.”

“You’re going to throw this back in my face.” She grabbed the sheets and pulled them up to her throat, covering herself. “I can tell by the way you’re looking at me.”

“When did I ever say that all you care about is money?”

“Countless times.”

“Honestly, I can’t think of a single time,” Nick said.

“Please.”

“Maybe a few times,” he said, “but not countless. But look. Get it straight. I didn’t
disappear.
Both times I was gone, you knew where I was, and if you didn’t know
exactly
where, it was for your own protection. I’m sorry for what was hard about this for you, I’ve told you that a million times, but none of this is a surprise to you, Char. There’s nothing about my life you didn’t know about long before we got married. I’m never going to become one of these hypocrites who think that instead of what they do they’re going to pretend they’re really J. Paul Getty or a black-sheep Rockefeller or something. You’re married to a soldier, end of discussion. I know you, Char. I know you’d
rather
be married to a soldier than some pencil-necked empty suit. And you know as well as I do that there are times a soldier’s going to be gone.”

“You call what you’ve been through gone? It’s been beyond gone. You’re legally dead, or you would be, if people on Michael Corleone’s payroll hadn’t gummed up the process.”

Nick asked if that was what her lawyer had said, if he had any specifics.

“Not that he can pin on anyone. But he’s sure, and so am I. As you say, there’s nothing about your life I haven’t known for a long time.”

Nick got up and ordered them room service. He ordered eggs Benedict for her without asking. It was what she’d ordered the first morning of their honeymoon. At a level just below conscious thought, he presumed this would all register with her—his taking charge, his remembering. It became conscious only when he hung up and she stood up and kissed him.

“Whatever happened to retire?” she said, her voice thick with yearning. “That you’d retire? Key West, we talked about. Maybe Miami Beach. New Orleans, I don’t know about. But soldiers do retire, right?”

“I’m forty-seven years old,” he said. “You want me to retire and do what? Mope around the house? Your father worked until he was what, ninety?”

“Seventy-one. He was a master carpenter, Nick. A lot of them never really retire at all.”

“Same in my line of work. Question: you don’t know about New Orleans why? What makes you so quick to judge New Orleans? You been here less than a day, Char. Keep an open mind. You’ll love it, believe me. The place grows on you.”

“What, like mold? It’s damp here, everywhere. You’re not honestly thinking of staying here, are you? Permanently?”

“It’s the damp season. Key West is damp, too, you know. I like this place better than Key West, I can tell you that.”

“Key West is a different kind of damp than this. New Orleans seems like the proverbial great place to visit.”

He laughed. “As opposed to home, right?”

Charlotte used to joke that East Islip was a great place to live but you wouldn’t want to visit there. “Exactly,” she said. “As opposed to home.”

“Get dressed,” he said. He’d had her meet him here, but he was staying at a house Carlo Tramonti was letting him borrow and maybe even buy. “I got something I want to show you.”

She brightened. “Really?” she said. “Can I read it?”

“Read what?”

“Your book.”

“My what?”

“Your book.”

His mind had been on the house and whether she’d like it, and so at first he really hadn’t known what she was talking about. But it came back to him now. In a moment of weakness last night, under the cover of darkness and alcohol, he’d confessed to her that he was writing a book. He couldn’t recall what had prompted this. Probably it was because, when they first started dating, she’d been a secretary for a publishing company. Nick had gotten to know her indirectly, via her boss, who was having some financial problems. Charlotte had actually moved to New York from western Pennsylvania to become a writer herself, which was ironic because, unlike him, she barely read books anymore. Still, it was probably natural that when a man and a woman reunite or are having trouble or both, they hearken back to the time they fell in love.

Maybe Nick had been trying to win her back, even though she was already here.

More and more, it became apparent to him that he should stop drinking.

“Well?” she said.

“You can read it when it’s finished,” Nick said. “Which will be soon.”

ONLY A FEW WEEKS EARLIER, NICK HAD SAILED TO
Sicily, but he hadn’t stayed long. Charlotte had been to Sicily, too, but not recently. Nick had made sure that Lucadello knew where he was, so that, as per his orders from his superiors, he’d feel duty-bound to feed this information to the Corleones. In due time.

The two snapshots of Charlotte had been taken during a family vacation three years ago. Over the course of Nick’s fugitive years, they’d become holy objects to him. He’d kept them pristine, and he’d have sacrificed them for little else but to help reunite him with her. The third photo was recent. The woman in the photo was wearing a blond wig to look like Charlotte. Her name was Gabriella. She’d met Nick at a café in Taormina, and they’d walked to the hotel together. The photographer was waiting for them. She tilted her face away from the camera. He made them walk to the door three times just to make sure he had what he needed. The photographer was a distant cousin on Nick’s father’s side, a wing of the family that Fausto had looked up when he’d last visited the island, the maneuver that sent Nick into hiding in the first place. Gabriella was his wife. No one else seemed to be watching them. She hurried into her brother’s car and shed the wig. She and her husband, whose name was Sebastiano D’Andrea, were staying in a hotel across town.

Nick checked in and paid in advance for the room: a week, cash. He overtipped the bellman who carried his suitcase to his room. For a couple days, Nick made a point of being seen around town, chatting up barmen and shopkeepers. He said he was an American businessman looking to buy a secluded vacation hideaway, and he went to see a few properties to make this look good.

Sebastiano developed the photos himself, in the bathtub. Nick picked the one he liked best. Gabriella helped him with the note, to make sure it sounded like a native speaker. Sebastiano made some connections at Nick’s hotel with the bartender and the head chambermaid, then they all drove back to Palermo together. The next day, Nick sailed for America.

Later, when Nick gave the word, Sebastiano had mailed the note. In short order, both the bartender and the chambermaid gave Sebastiano a description of the men who’d come around asking about a bearded American and his blond wife, flashing the same photo of Nick and Gabriella entering the hotel that Sebastiano had already shown them. The Calabrians were not guests there. The bartender and the maid owed them nothing.

The Calabrians had been recommended for the job by a zip in Nobilio’s crew. What Tommy Neri hadn’t known was that, a few years earlier, these same Calabrians had killed the zip’s uncle. According to Momo Barone, the zip’s chance at revenge had been more important to him than any loyalty he owed to Michael Corleone.

The zip’s father—the brother of the dead uncle—had the grim pleasure of overseeing the ambush and shipping pieces of them to America.

WHAT NICK TOOK CHARLOTTE TO SEE WAS THEIR
house, which also seemed to him the kind of place newlyweds would live: a modest shotgun affair on Dauphine Street, freshly painted and with a new screened-in porch and window air conditioners, a few blocks east of the French Quarter. “I have to admit,” Charlotte said, enchanted despite herself, it seemed, “that this seems like the very definition of a quiet little place away from it all. Or at least, away from
all that.
”

In a remarkably short time, she settled in.

In no time, she and Nick again became something like themselves.

The Tramontis owned the whole block, and the one next to it as well, and everyone in every house had some connection to them. Charlotte didn’t know this at first, and by the time she made friends with some of the other wives in the neighborhood, by the time she’d have been able to put two and two together, she was back to her old self. She knew what she knew, and she didn’t talk about it. She kept the house spotless. She took perverse pleasure in the Sisyphean task of beating back the tide of unfamiliar vermin: little green frogs and lizards; swarms of flies, bees, wasps, and mosquitoes, too many for the frogs and lizards to repel; the unavoidable, euphemistically named palmetto bugs; pamphlet-wielding evangelicals in ties and short-sleeved white shirts. It was a way of keeping her mind off other worries.

She and Nick bickered about nothing serious all the time and never got truly angry about anything. She encouraged Nick with his writing and told him how it made the house a home to hear the clacking of that typewriter, however infrequent it was. He kept the pages and his notes and carbons locked in a steel Confederate States of America footlocker he’d bought in an antiques store on Canal Street. He brought her home a color television set with teakwood cabinetry and a nineteen-inch screen—the biggest there was. She told him that, knowing how much he hated TV, it was a gesture that meant a lot. She bought him books about how to write books. In her spare time—which she pretended was not all the time—she took out his little reel-to-reel tape recorder and sat on the sofa with an electric fan trained on her. She closed her eyes and sipped sweet tea and bravely talked to her daughters about nothing at all until the end of the tape started flapping from the take-up reel. Then she mailed the tapes to strangers, who forwarded them to her girls, her babies.

NICK GERACI’S JOURNEY TO NEW ORLEANS HAD
been brokered initially by Spratling, the former Mexican jewelry tycoon, who’d merely put out some feelers, and to a greater extent by the one-eyed man he’d once known as Ike Rosen.

The CIA agent had shown up in Taxco. Geraci was having lunch alone, enchiladas suizas and a cold beer, in a rooftop café overlooking the cathedral, reading the
New York Times.
“Ever try the iguana?” said the agent. “I hear it’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac.”

Geraci set down the paper. It took a moment to recognize him without the eye patch. The last time they’d spoken had been outside Geraci’s house in East Islip, the meeting that had sent Nick into hiding in the first place. “Tastes like chicken,” Geraci said. “Take a load off, why don’t you?”

“The beard’s a nice touch.”

“So’s the eye,” Nick said. “What do you want from me?”

“Did you really think no one was watching you?” Lucadello said. “Do you really think that you could have gotten anywhere if we didn’t want to let you go?”

Geraci certainly did. He’d seen enough of these vainglorious bumblers to think the
I
in CIA was a big joke. Then again, Lucadello had found him here, somehow.

When the waiter came, Lucadello, in fluent Spanish, discussed the way the iguana was prepared and cooked and what all went into the sauce and then ordered it.

“I asked you,” Geraci said. “What do you want?”

“You had electricity down in your cave,” Lucadello said. “Even a TV for a while. There was an antenna. There were electrical bills. I really hate to burst your balloon about your
daring escape
, because, swear to God, it was just so cute, but”—he winked the glass eye—“we had an eye on you the whole way. You hid underneath a house your godfather owned. When you came out, you went straight to the town where you grew up, you called your father, and he drove you to Mexico. Understandably, this threw some of your associates for a loop, but please understand: I do this for a
living.
”