The Godfather returns

Chapter 3

FOUR MONTHS LATER, early Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend, Michael Corleone lay in his bed in Las Vegas, his wife beside him, his two kids right down the hall, all of them sound asleep. Yesterday in Detroit, at the wedding of the daughter of his late father’s oldest friend, Michael had given the merest nod toward Sal Narducci, a man he barely knew, putting in motion a plan designed to hurt every formidable rival the Corleones still had. If it worked, Michael would emerge blameless. If it worked, it would bring lasting peace to the American underworld. The final bloody victory of the Corleone Family was at hand. A trace of a smile flickered on Michael Corleone’s surgically repaired face. His breathing was even and deep. Otherwise, he was motionless, untroubled, basking in the cool air of his new home, enjoying the sleep of the righteous. Outside, even in the pale morning light, the desert baked.

Near the oily banks of the Detroit River, two lumpy men in silk short-sleeved shirts-one aquamarine, the other Day-Glo orange-emerged from the guest cottage of an estate belonging to Joe Zaluchi, the Don of Detroit, the man who’d saved his city from the arbitrary violence of the Purple Gang. The one in orange was Frank Falcone, formerly of Chicago and now the head of organized crime in Los Angeles. The one in aquamarine, Tony Molinari, was his counterpart in San Francisco. Behind them came two men in overcoats, each carrying two suitcases, each suitcase containing, among other things, a tux worn to last night’s Clemenza-Zaluchi nuptials. The surface of the water was awash in dead fish. From the barn-sized garage, a limo came to get them. When the limo pulled out onto the street, a police car followed it. The cop was on Zaluchi’s payroll.

At Detroit City Airport, they turned down a dirt access road and drove alongside a fence until they got to a gate marked EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY. The police car stopped. The limo kept going, right onto the tarmac. The silk-shirted men got out, sipping coffee from paper cups. Their bodyguards practiced karate moves.

A plane taxied toward them, bearing the logo of a meatpacking concern in which Michael Corleone had a silent, controlling interest. The logo featured the profile of a lion. The name on the pilot’s birth certificate was Fausto Dominick Geraci, Jr., but the license clipped to the visor read “Gerald O’Malley.” The flight plan he’d turned in was blank. Geraci had a guy in the tower. At airports all over America, Geraci had the use of planes that did not on paper belong to him.

Under his seat was a satchel full of cash. Storm clouds filled the western sky.

Across the river, just outside Windsor, the door to Room 14 of the Happy Wanderer Motor Inn opened just a crack. Framed there was Fredo Corleone, his brother’s new appointed sotto capo, a man shaped like a bowling pin and dressed in last night’s rumpled shirt and tux pants. He looked out to the parking lot. He didn’t see anyone walking around. He waited for a piece of junk car to chug by. It was loud enough to wake a person up. Fredo was aware of some stirring on the bed behind him, but the last thing he was going to do was look back.

Finally the coast was clear. He pulled a porkpie hat low, over his eyes, eased the door closed behind him, and hurried around the corner, down an embankment, and across a drive-in theater, filthy with discarded cups and popcorn buckets. The buckets were adorned with fat blue clowns-heads cocked, faces contorted into gruesome, knowing smiles. The hat wasn’t his. Maybe it belonged to the man in that room or else came from one of Fredo’s many stops last night. It may have even belonged to one of his bodyguards. They were new, strangers to him. His head pounded. He patted his shirt pockets, his pants pockets. He’d left his smokes back in the room. His lighter, too. The lighter was a present from Mike: jeweled, from Milan. It was engraved CHRISTMAS 1954 but with no name, of course. Never put your name on anything, his old man always said. Fredo didn’t even break stride. Fuck it. He jumped a muddy ditch and jogged across the parking lot of an apartment building. He’d hidden the car, a Lincoln that Zaluchi had lent him, behind a trash incinerator. The coat of his tux was balled up in the backseat, along with a yellow satin shirt, which wasn’t his, and a whiskey bottle, which was.

He got in. He took a drink and tossed the bottle onto the passenger seat. It may, he thought, be time to take a break from the booze. And the other thing. Jesus. How can a thing you want so bad seem so repulsive right after you do it? He’d quit that, too. No more after-hours clubs. No more paying for it from junkies too messed up to know whose dick they sucked. Easy enough to start today, heading home to Vegas, where he was a known ladies’ man, where the town was so small he couldn’t get the other thing anyway. He put the car in gear and drove away as if he were someone’s pious Canadian grandpa on the way to Mass. Though he did-at a stoplight-finish off the whiskey. He hit the main drag and sped up. At this pace, he’d make the plane to Vegas, easy. It started to rain. Only when he flicked on the wipers did he notice that there was a piece of paper under the passenger-side blade, a handbill or something.

Back in the darkness of Room 14 of the Happy Wanderer, the naked man on the bed awoke. He was a restaurant supply salesman from Dearborn, married, two kids. He moved the pillow from his crotch and rose. He smelled his fingertips. He rubbed his eyes. “ Troy?” he called. “Hey, Troy? Oh, hell. Not again. Troy?” Then he saw the lighter. He saw Troy ’s gun. Troy struck him as the kind of guy who’d carry a gun, but not this kind. This was a cowboy gun, a Colt.45, its grip and trigger covered with white adhesive tape. The naked man had never touched a real gun before. He sat back down on the bed. He felt faint. He was a diabetic. Somewhere, there should be oranges. He remembered Troy giving a bartender fifty bucks to go to the kitchen and get a bag of oranges. He ate three right at the bar, while Troy walked to the door and looked out into the street, waiting until he’d finished eating and the peels were gone. The man could not remember what happened to the rest of the oranges.

His heart revved and sweat poured out of him. He called the front desk and asked for room service. “Where you think you are,” said the desk clerk, “the Ritz?” Good question. Where was he? He wanted to ask, but first he had to do something about his blood sugar. Was there any food at all? he asked. A vending machine or something? Any way he could get the clerk to bring him, let’s just say, a candy bar? “Your legs busted?” the clerk asked. The man said he’d pay five bucks for a candy bar to be delivered to his room. The clerk said he’d be right there.

The man needed to call his wife. This had happened before. He’d said it was with a secretary, a woman. He’d promised his wife it wouldn’t happen again. He started to dial, then realized he’d need the clerk for an outside line. The clerk must have been off getting the candy.

The man had a good job, great wife, great kids, nice house. He was a newly initiated Rotarian. Yet here he was, after a night with some street tough, doing those things, waking up on a Sunday morning in a place like this.

He got up again to look for the oranges. No luck. He saw his pants but not his yellow shirt. He couldn’t find his porkpie hat. He didn’t know the name of the dive where he’d left his car. He’d have to take a cab home, shirtless, then have his wife drive him around seedy neighborhoods, looking for it. It’d be easier to just buy a new car.

He picked up the gun.

The Colt felt even heavier than it looked. He ran his finger along the barrel. He opened his mouth. He rested the end of the gun on his tongue and held it there.

He heard the squeal of tires outside. It was a big car, he could tell from the sound of the slamming door. It must be Troy. Coming back for him. Then a second car door slammed.

Two men.

They’d come all the way from Chicago. They weren’t coming for him, though the naked man didn’t know that. They’d been following him for hours, which he also didn’t know. The naked man pulled the Colt out of his mouth, stood, and trained it on the door. “See you in Hell,” he whispered. He’d heard someone say it in a movie. He wasn’t a tough guy, but with his fingers curled around the pearly butt of that six-shooter he sure as hell felt like it.

In Hollywood, Florida, under the carport of the coral-colored house where she’d lived since her father, Sonny, died in that car wreck (she had no reason to believe it was anything other than what she’d been told), Francesca Corleone honked the horn of her mother’s station wagon for a good ten seconds. “Stop it,” said her twin sister, Kathy, sprawled across the backseat, reading some French novel, in French. Kathy was headed off to Barnard. She wanted to be a surgeon. Francesca was going to Florida State, in Tallahassee, and wanted, mostly, to be on with it: out of the house, on her own. Though with all this horrible business in New York and how that side of the family had gotten the family name in the papers, even if it was all lies, this might not be the easiest time to start a new life. Kathy had wanted to go to school in New York, partially to be close to all their family up there. Now, of course, everyone had moved away except for Grandma Carmela and their horrible Aunt Connie. Apparently Uncle Carlo had simply disappeared-one of those jerks who went out for cigarettes and never came back: a lousy thing to do, even for a creep like him, but Francesca had to admit that anyone married to Aunt Connie would have had to consider it. Kathy, especially up there, would probably get asked every day, even by her professors, if she was any relation to those notorious gangsters, the Corleones. If the past few months in Hollywood were any indication, Francesca would have to be braced for this, too, even in Tallahassee.

Her mother, the controlling shrew, was driving them both. Driving! To New York! Thank God Francesca would get dropped off first. She honked again.

“That’s very annoying,” said Kathy.

“As if you’re really reading that book.”

Kathy answered in what was either French or fake French.

Francesca hadn’t taken a language and planned to evade the issue either by taking Italian-which, in truth, she didn’t know all that well-or by majoring in something with no language requirement. “We’re Italian,” Francesca said. “Why aren’t you learning Italian?”

“Sei una fregna per sicuro,” Kathy answered.

“Nice mouth.”

Kathy shrugged.

“You can swear in Italian,” Francesca said, “but you can’t read Italian.”

“I can’t read at all unless you shut up.”

Their mother was next door at their grandparents’ house, and had been there for ages, laying down last-minute care-and-feeding instructions for Francesca’s brothers, Frank, fifteen, and Chip, ten. Chip’s real name was Santino Jr., and, until he had come home from baseball practice one day this summer and announced that he would henceforth answer only to “Chip,” had been called Tino. Francesca could probably do that. She could go to college and take on another name. Fran Collins. Franny Taylor. Frances Wilson. She could, but she wouldn’t. They’d already Americanized the pronunciation, from Cor-le-o-nay to Cor-lee-own, and that was change enough. She was proud of her name, proud to be Italian. She was proud that her father had rebelled against his gangster father and brothers and become a legitimate businessman. Anyway, Francesca’s name would change in good time, when she found a husband.

Francesca honked again. What was taking so long in there? Nonna and Poppa would ignore every word Francesca’s mother said. Those boys got away with murder, especially Frankie, especially once the football thing started. Francesca honked once more. “You’re making it much easier,” said Kathy, and Francesca finished the sentence: “-for you to leave. I know.” Kathy sighed as only an American girl can. Moments later, she stroked the back of Francesca’s hair, softly. The twins had never in their eighteen years spent a night apart.

Hal Mitchell’s Castle in the Sand Hotel and Casino never closed. Neither, these days, did Johnny Fontane, who’d done his two shows (eight and midnight) and been up all night, showing the swells and pallies a good time, then, for luck (since he had a session today), to his suite, where there were two chicks. One was a blond French girl who danced at the casino across the way and said she’d had one line (“Gosh, look!”) in that Mickey Rooney picture they’d filmed here last year, the one where Mickey’s a prospector in the desert and there’s a bomb test and the dose of radiation he gets makes it so any slot machine he touches pays off (there’s no scene with wiseguys beating the shit out of Mickey Rooney). The other one was a luscious brunette with a C-section scar who was probably paid to be there (fine by him; by Johnny’s stars, the worthiest of human attainments was to be a professional). When he’d asked, a total gentleman about it, if either of them had a problem going to bed-y’know? all three of them?-they’d laughed and started to strip. The brunette, who’d said her name was Eve, had a flair for it, knowing just when it was the blonde’s turn to suck Johnny’s dick (when she saw the size of it, she grinned and whispered, “Gosh, look!”) or when it was her turn to do it up against that fountain in the middle of the room while the blonde rubbed his back. Eve knew the perfect time to push Johnny down on his back and maneuver the blonde onto his cock and for the first time in the whole deal to start pawing the blonde’s tits and kissing her, which sent Johnny off in a matter of seconds. It was a gift. A lot of women didn’t have it. The blonde-her name was Rita, short for Marguerite; he never forgot their names in the morning-was still there, asleep, when he’d left to come up here to the roof, to the pool. He hated men who tested the water with their pinky toe. He tossed off his heavy robe and jumped into the deep end. When the shock wore off, he went under again, holding his breath and counting to two hundred.

His head pounded, and not from the depth of the water. He didn’t drink as much as people thought, at least not anymore. The secret? Go from table to table, joint to joint, leaving half-finished drinks everywhere, which no one notices, while at the same time accepting every new one that comes his way, which everyone notices. Any poor mook who tried to match him drink for drink got folded into the back of a cab and sent home, courtesy of Johnny Fontane. He controlled his drinking. He controlled what he did and who he did it with.

He surfaced. He swam a couple laps to limber up, then took a deep breath and went under again. He repeated the drill three more times and got out. At the end of the deck, on the far edge of the roof, was a billboard: HAVE A BLAST! BEST VIEW OF THE BOMB IN LAS VEGAS! Underneath a painting of a purple-orange mushroom cloud, on movable letters, was a time, tomorrow morning. Early tomorrow morning. Johnny had heard they were going to set up a bar, a breakfast buffet, even crown some broad Miss Atomic Bombshell. What sort of sucker would get up at dawn to watch a bomb go off sixty miles away? Maybe they think they’ll start to glow and set off the slot machines. People want to pay to watch a bomb, they ought to go see Johnny’s last picture. He grabbed his robe and took the stairs two at a time, down to his room.

She was gone. Rita. Good kid. The room still smelled like whiskey, smokes, and pussy. The statue of the naked lady in the fountain, whose outflung arm had seemed at the time like it was made to hold on to, needed repairs. He got dressed and-just to make sure he didn’t nod off on the way to L.A.-took one of the little green pills Dr. Jules Segal had prescribed.

Johnny Fontane emerged into the brutal sunlight of the Castle’s VIP parking lot and did not flinch. He grabbed his lapels, so sharp they could cut meat, straightened his jacket, and climbed into his new red Thunderbird. The cops here knew this car. He had that ’Bird going over a hundred before he even left town. He checked his watch. In a couple hours, the musicians would start trickling into the studio. They’d spend an hour tuning and gassing, then for another hour or so Eddie Neils, his musical director this time out, would have them rehearsing. Johnny should make it in time. Lay down the first few tracks, get to the airport by six, hop on the charter along with Falcone and Gussie Cicero, and be back here in plenty of time for the private show he said he’d do for Michael Corleone.

It wasn’t until four in the morning-after he arrived, exhausted, at the guest suites at the Vista del Mar Golf and Racquet Club-that Tom Hagen realized he’d forgotten his racquet. The pro shop didn’t open until nine, the same time Hagen was supposed to meet the Ambassador on Court 14. Hagen couldn’t bear to be late. He asked the desk clerk if he might borrow a racquet, and the clerk looked at him as though he’d tracked mud on the lobby’s white carpeting. He told the man he had an early court time and asked if there was any way to get in the pro shop now, and the clerk shook his head and said he didn’t have a key. Hagen asked if there was anything that could be done, either now or at some time before eight-thirty tomorrow, and the clerk apologized and said no. Hagen took out two hundred-dollar bills and told the clerk he’d be grateful if there was anything humanly possible that could be done, and the man just smirked.

Hagen had begun yesterday in his own bed in Las Vegas, then, before dawn, flown with Michael Corleone to Detroit, first for a meeting with Joe Zaluchi on his daughter’s wedding day, then the wedding itself, an appearance at the reception, and finally a flight back to Vegas. Mike had been able to go home and go to sleep. Hagen went to the office for an hour of paperwork and then a quick stop home, to change and to kiss his sleeping daughter, Gianna, who’d just turned two, and his wife, Theresa, who’d become an art collector and was excited about a Jackson Pollock that had just arrived from her dealer in New York. His boys, Frank and Andrew, were teenagers, each behind a closed door in a bedroom strewn with science fiction paperbacks and records by Negroes, both of them unkissable now.

As Tom Hagen packed his tennis gear, Theresa walked around their new house holding the gorgeous, paint-splattered thing in front of various white walls. She’d taken advantage of the move to Las Vegas and the expanses of blank surfaces to go on a buying spree. The paintings were worth several times more than the house itself. He loved being married to a woman with taste. “What about opposite the red Rothko in the center hallway?” she called.

“What about the bedroom?” he said.

“You think?” she said.

“Just a thought,” he said. He met her gaze and cocked an eyebrow to indicate that it wasn’t the location of the painting he was talking about.

She sighed. “Maybe you’re right.” She set down the painting and took his hand.

Marriage.

But he’d been far too tired, and things hadn’t gone particularly well.

Hagen was no longer the Corleone consigliere, but with the death of Vito Corleone-who’d succeeded Hagen in the job-and with Tessio dead, too, and Clemenza in the process of taking over in New York, Michael needed an experienced hand. He was waiting to announce a new consigliere until he felt sure the war with the Barzinis and Tattaglias was definitely over. Michael had something up his sleeve, but all Hagen had been able to figure out was that it had something to do with Cleveland. In the meantime, Hagen was still doing his old job and trying to move on to his next thing, too. He was forty-five years old, older than either of his parents had been when they’d died and definitely too old for this shit.

Now he rose to the knock of the room service he’d had the foresight to order before going to bed. He downed the first cup of coffee before the door closed behind the bellboy. Weak. The way it was everywhere out here. Hagen congratulated himself for guessing beforehand that he’d need two carafes. He took the first one out on the balcony. Eight A.M., the sun barely over the mountains, and already it was baking hot. Who needed a sauna? By the time Hagen finished the first pot of coffee-ten minutes, give or take-the robe that had come with the room was soaked.

Hagen shaved, showered, dressed in his tennis clothes, and was standing outside the pro shop at eight-thirty, waiting for someone to arrive. After a few interminable minutes, he went back to the desk. A different clerk said that the manager was here now and he’d page him.

Hagen went back outside the pro shop. The wait was excruciating. If there was one thing he’d learned from Vito Corleone-and what hadn’t he learned from him?-it was promptness. He paced back and forth and dared not go to the men’s room for fear he’d miss the manager or some other arriving employee. When finally someone came to open up-a Slavic woman who looked more like a masseuse than a manager or club pro-it was nine on the dot.

Hagen grabbed a racquet, slapped two hundred dollars on the front counter, and told her to keep the change.

“We don’t take cash,” she said. “You have to sign for it.”

“Where do I sign?”

“Are you a member? I don’t recognize you.”

“I’m a guest of Ambassador Shea’s.”

“He needs to be the one to sign for it. Him or a family member or his valet.” She pronounced it to rhyme with mallet.

Hagen took out another hundred and said that if she could find it in her heart to straighten all this out, there was more than enough money here for the racquet and her time.

She looked at him the same way last night’s clerk had, but she took the money.

Hagen thought his bladder would burst, but by now it was five after nine. He tore the cardboard off the racquet and broke into a dead sprint. Those exact words occurred to him-dead sprint.

When he got to Court 14, ten minutes late, there was no one there. He was so rarely late that he had no idea what to do. Had the Ambassador already been here and left? Was he late, too? How long should Hagen wait? Would it make sense to go take a leak and come back? He looked around. A lot of bushes, but this wasn’t the sort of place where a guy ought to be pissing in the bushes. So he stood there, hopping from foot to foot, holding it. Surely, the Ambassador had come and gone. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he ran to the nearest men’s room. When he got back to the Court 14, a note was pinned to the net. Ambassador Shea-unable to play tennis this a.m. Late brunch? 2. Poolside. A man will pick you up.

The note didn’t say where.

Kay Corleone pointed back toward the road to the Las Vegas airport. “He missed our turn,” she said. “Michael, we missed our turn.”

Next to her in the backseat of their new yellow Cadillac, Michael shook his head.

Kay frowned. “We’re driving all the way to Los Angeles? Are you out of your mind?”

It was their fifth anniversary. She and the kids and even her mother and Baptist pastor father had already been to Mass. Michael had business tonight, before, during, and after the private show Johnny Fontane was doing as a favor for the Teamsters. But he’d promised her that the whole day up until then would be one long date-like old times, only better.

Michael shook his head. “We’re not driving. And we’re not going to Los Angeles.”

Kay turned around in her seat, looking back toward the road not taken, then turned to her husband. Abruptly, she had what felt like a block of ice in her guts. “Michael,” she said. “Forgive me, but I think this marriage has withstood about all the surprises that-” She made circles with her hands, like a sports official signaling improper movement of some sort.

He smiled. “This will be a good surprise,” he said. “I promise.”

Soon they came to Lake Mead, near a dock with a seaplane moored to the end. The plane was registered to Johnny Fontane’s movie production company, though neither Fontane nor anyone who worked there knew anything about it.

“Surprise number one,” Michael said, pointing to the plane.

“Oh, brother,” she said. “ ‘Number one’? You’ve counted them up. You really should have become a mathematics professor.” The illicit thrill she’d once gotten from what he’d become instead had waned enough that she might actually have meant this.

They got out of the car.

“That’s counting,” he said. “At most accounting. Not mathematics.” He held out his hand toward the dock. “M’lady.”

Kay wanted to say she was afraid but did not, could not. She had no reason whatsoever to think that he might do her harm.

“Surprise number two-”

“Michael.”

“-is that I’m flying.”

Her eyes widened.

“I started pilot training in the Marines,” he said, “before I was, you know.” Sent to fight in 120-degree heat for tunnel-riddled coral islands ladled with a maggoty stew of mud and corpses. “For some reason flying relaxes me,” he said. “I’ve been taking lessons.”

Kay exhaled. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath. She hadn’t realized that, in all those unaccounted-for hours the past few weeks, she was afraid he was having an affair. That’s not true. What she was afraid of was worse. “It’s good you have a hobby,” she ventured. “Everyone needs a hobby. Your father had his garden. Other men have golf.”

“Golf,” he said. “Hmm. You don’t have a hobby, do you?”

“I don’t,” she said.

“There’s always golf.” He was wearing a tailored sport coat and a stark white shirt with no necktie. He hadn’t slicked his hair. A light wind tousled it.

“Actually,” she said, “what would you think if I went back to teaching?”

“That’s a job,” Michael said. “You don’t need a job. Who’d watch Mary and Anthony?”

“I wouldn’t start until we’re settled. By then your mother will be here and she could do it. Carmela would be thrilled to do it.” Though Kay actually dreaded hearing what her mother-in-law would say about Kay working outside the home. “Really, all it would be is a hobby.”

“Do you want a job?” Michael said.

She looked away. A job wasn’t exactly the point.

“Let me think about it.” His father wouldn’t have approved, but he was not his father. Michael had once, like his father, been married to a nice Italian girl, but Kay did not know that and was not that girl. What concerned Michael was security, even though it was part of the code that the risks to her were slight. Michael put a hand on her arm and gave it a gentle squeeze.

Kay put her hand on top of his. She took a deep breath. “Well, look,” she said. “I’m not getting in that contraption. At least not until you tell me where we’re going.”

Michael shrugged. “Tahoe,” he said. A grin flickered on his face. “ Lake Tahoe.” He gestured to the seaplane. “Obviously.”

She’d told him once she’d love to go there. She hadn’t thought he’d been listening.

He opened the door to the plane. Kay got in. As she did, her dress both hiked up and stretched taut across her ass. Michael felt a wild impulse to grab her hips from behind but instead just let his eyes linger. There was nothing better, nothing sexier, than looking at your wife like this without her knowing it.

“Now, the only tricky part about floatplanes,” Michael said as he got in and started the engine, “is that they sometimes flip.”

“Flip?!” Kay said.

“Rarely.” He stuck out his lower lip, as if to indicate the lightning-strike unlikelihood of such a thing. “And if a floatplane flips, guess what? It floats.”

Kay regarded him. “That’s comforting.”

“I do love you,” he said. “You know that, right?”

She tried for the expressionlessness Michael had mastered all too well. “That’s also comforting.”

Their takeoff was so smooth that Kay felt her every muscle relax. She hadn’t been aware that they were clenched. She had no idea for how long.

Chapter 4

OVER LAKE ERIE , the small plane flew into the teeth of a thunderstorm. The cabin was hot, which suited Nick Geraci just fine. The other men in the plane were sweating just as much as he was. The bodyguards had already blamed it on the heat. Tough guys. He’d been one of them, once, written off as a big dumb ox, both relied upon and disposable.

“I thought the storm was behind us,” said Frank Falcone, one of the silk-shirted men, the one in orange, the one who didn’t know who the pilot really was.

“You said a mouthful,” said the one in aquamarine, Tony Molinari, who did know.

The hits on the top men in the Barzini, Tattaglia, and Corleone crime syndicates had aroused the interest of law enforcement everywhere, from local-yokel hard-ons to the FBI (though the agency’s director, supposedly because the Corleones had something on him, continued to maintain that the so-called Mafia was a myth). For most of the summer, even corner-bar shylocks had had to close things down. The other two New York Dons, Ottilio “Leo the Milkman” Cuneo and Anthony “Black Tony” Stracci, had overseen a cease-fire. Whether this would mean an end to the war, no one knew.

“Excuse me, but I meant the real storm,” said Falcone. “The storm out there. The fucking storm.”

Molinari shook his head. “Jokes are wasted on you, my friend.”

Their bodyguards, noticeably more pale now, looked down at the floor of the plane. “Lake effect,” said Geraci. “The way it works is that the air and the water are sharply different temperatures.” He tried to make his voice sound the way a pilot’s would, in a movie where the pilot was the lead. He relaxed his grip. “That’s what makes it possible for storms to come from any direction, and all of a sudden. Keeps things interesting, eh?”

Molinari put a hand on Geraci’s shoulder. “Thank you, Mister fucking Science.”

“You’re welcome, sir,” Geraci said.

Falcone had been a top connection guy in Chicago -buying politicians, judges, and cops-and now ran his own thing in Los Angeles. Molinari had a four-star dockside restaurant in San Francisco, plus a piece of anything there he wanted a piece of. According to the briefing Michael had given Geraci, Falcone and Molinari had always had their differences, particularly when it came to the New York Families. Falcone saw them as snobbish, Molinari as recklessly violent. Molinari had also felt a personal attachment to the late Vito Corleone that Falcone had never shared. But the last few years, the two West Coast Dons had forged a wary, effective allegiance, particularly in organizing the importation and distribution of narcotics from the Philippines and Mexico (another reason, Michael did not have to say, that Geraci was being sent to meet them). Until Michael had taken over the Corleone Family, they’d been the two youngest Dons in America.

“O’Malley, eh?” said Falcone.

Geraci nosed the plane up through the thunderhead, seeking better air. He knew what Falcone meant: the name on his pilot’s license. The flight was obviously challenging enough that Falcone accepted it when Geraci didn’t answer. It’s not the eyes that see, it’s the brain. As Michael had predicted, Falcone put an Irish name together with a broad-shouldered, fair-haired Sicilian, a man he naturally presumed worked for the Cleveland operation, and what he saw was an Irishman. Why not? Cleveland worked with so many Jews, Irish, and Negroes that the men in it called it the Combination. People outside of it called its Don, Vincent Forlenza, “the Jew.”

It was a necessary deception. Rattlesnake Island was not an easy place to get to. Falcone might not have boarded a plane owned by the Corleones. Don Forlenza had hoped to come to the wedding, but his health had precluded it.

The plane finally rose above the clouds. The men were bathed in blinding sunlight.

“So, O’Malley,” Falcone said, “you’re from Cleveland, huh?”

“Yes, sir, born and raised.” Misleading, but true.

“Guess our DiMaggio and his Yanks were too much for the Indians this year.”

“We’ll get you next year,” Geraci said.

Molinari started talking about watching DiMaggio play for the San Francisco Seals and how even then he was a god among men. Over the years Molinari had made a bundle fixing Seals games, but never once the whole time DiMaggio had been there. “People have these ideas about Italians, am I right, O’Malley?”

“I’m not sure I have any ideas at all, sir.”

“We got us a cacasangue,” Falcone said.

“Pardon me?” Geraci said, though he knew full well what the word meant.

“Smart-ass,” said Falcone’s bodyguard.

“Wiiiiise guy, eh?” said Geraci, in the manner of Curly from the Three Stooges.

Molinari and the two bodyguards laughed. “That’s pretty good,” Molinari said. Geraci obliged him with a perfect nyuck-nuck-nyuck laugh. This, too, amused everyone but Falcone.

The conversation was sporadic, inhibited by the bumpy flight and the name on Geraci’s pilot’s license. They talked for a while about restaurants and then about the title fight at the Cleveland Armory that they were planning to attend tonight instead of going to Vegas to see Fontane-an invitation-only show, courtesy of Michael Corleone, to kick off a Teamsters convention. They talked, too, about The Untouchables, which they both liked, though partly because they found it funny. Geraci had heard it on the radio and been irritated by the stereotypical straight-arrow cops and spaghetti-slurping, bloodthirsty Italians. He’d never seen the television show, though. He was a reader. He’d sworn never to own a television set, but last year, Charlotte and the girls had worn him down. He knew a guy-Geraci always knew a guy or had a guy-and one day a truck pulled up and two men in suits unloaded the biggest one anybody made. Before long, Charlotte was serving meals on TV trays. Saturday became “TV dinner night,” an abomination Geraci was glad his mother never lived to see. Geraci would’ve liked to drag that television to the curb, but a man must pick his battles. A week later, a contractor Geraci knew pulled a crew off the parking garage they were building in Queens and had them dig up the wild mulberry bushes behind Geraci’s in-ground swimming pool. A couple weeks after that, Geraci had his own little house back there, his den: a refuge from the noise and the zombie feeling he got when he used that goddamned television to watch anything but sports.

Geraci nosed the plane down into the clouds. “We’re beginning our descent.”

The plane was bucking. The passengers eyed every strut, every bolt, every screw and rivet, as if they expected it all to break apart.

Geraci tried to trust his instruments and not his eye or his anxieties. He breathed evenly. Soon the shit-brown surface of the lake came into view.

“ Rattlesnake Island,” said Molinari, pointing. “Right?”

“Roger that,” said Geraci, using the voice again. “That’s pilot talk, fellas.”

“We’re landing on that?” Falcone said. “That fucking little landing strip?”

The island was only forty-some acres, a fifteenth the size of New York ’s Central Park, and most of it, from the air, seemed to be taken up by a golf course and an alarmingly small landing strip. A long dock protruded north from Rattlesnake Island so far it was practically in Canadian waters, which of course, during Prohibition, had been useful. The privately owned island was so tangentially a part of the United States that it issued its own postage stamps.

“It’s a lot bigger than it looks from up here,” Geraci said, though he wasn’t so sure about that. Not only had he never landed on the island; even though his padrino for all intents and purposes owned it, Geraci had never been there.

Molinari patted Falcone’s hand. “Relax, my friend,” Molinari said.

Falcone nodded, sat back in his seat, and tried to coax a last drop of coffee from his cup.

Moments before they were about to touch down, the plane caught a downdraft, as if it had been slapped out of the sky by a giant hand. It plummeted toward the surface of the lake. Geraci could see the froth of the waves. He pulled up, got control, leveled the wings, buzzed a cabin near the shore.

“Oooo-kay,” Geraci said, yanking back the stick. “Let’s try that again.”

“Jesus, kid,” Molinari said, though he was only a few years older than Geraci. Softly, Geraci muttered the Twenty-third Psalm, in Latin. When he got to the part about fearing no evil, instead of “for Thou art with me,” he said, “for I am the toughest motherfucker in the valley.”

Falcone laughed. “Never heard that in Latin.”

“You know Latin?” Molinari said.

“I studied to be a priest,” said Falcone.

“Yeah, for about a week. Don’t distract the pilot, Frank.”

Geraci flashed a thumbs-up.

He found a pocket of smooth air, and his second attempt to land was improbably soft. Only now, the flight over, did one of the bodyguards start to vomit. Geraci caught a whiff of it and stifled the gag it provoked. Then the other bodyguard threw up on himself. Moments later, men in yellow slickers appeared on the end of the runway to meet them.

Geraci sucked fresh air from his window, and his passengers got out. Men opened umbrellas for them, put chocks behind the wheels, lashed down the wings, and took all but one of the suitcases. A big black carriage, lined in red velvet and drawn by white horses, waited for them onshore, to carry them up the hill-a hundred-yard journey, tops.

Geraci watched the Dons and their puke-stained men rush to get into the carriage. Once they were inside the lodge, Geraci lugged his suitcase up the hill alone, opened the cellar doors, and disappeared down the steps, into the remains of what was once a thriving casino, past the bandstand and the cobwebby bar to the dressing room. He flicked on the light. The rear wall was made out of the kind of sliding steel door he associated with automotive garages in Brooklyn, but otherwise the room looked like a high-roller suite in Vegas: king-sized bed, red velvet everywhere, elevated bathtub. Behind the steel door was a room full of canned goods, gas masks, oxygen canisters, generators, a water-treatment system, a ham radio, and a bank vault. Underneath, carved into the bedrock, was a gigantic fuel oil tank and, supposedly, other rooms and more supplies. So long as Don Forlenza had any warning at all, whatever happened-if the state police staged a raid, if strange men came to kill him, if the Russians dropped the bomb-he could hide down here for years. Forlenza controlled the union that worked the salt mine under the lake near Cleveland; rumor had it that a crew did nothing day and night but dig tunnels to and from Rattlesnake Island. Geraci had to laugh. A kid like him, son of a truck driver, standing inside the kind of place a regular person would never even hear about. He carried the bag of money into the other room. He set it down in front of the vault.

He stood there, staring at the bag.

Money was an illusion. The leather of the bag had more inherent value than the thousands of little slips of paper inside it. “Money” is nothing more than thousands of markers, drawn up by a government that couldn’t cover one percent of what it had out on the street. Best racket in the world: the government puts out all the markers it wants and passes laws so they can never be called in. From what Geraci understood, those slips of paper represented a month’s worth of the skim from a Las Vegas casino in which both the Corleones and Forlenza had points, along with a sizable gift in consideration of Don Forlenza’s hospitality and influence. Those stacks of bills represented the labors of hundreds of men, reduced to scrip, to wampum, exchanged for the negotiating power of a few, the actions of fewer yet. Worthless paper that Don Forlenza would accept unthinkingly. Just markers.

Minchionaggine, his father would say. You think too much.

Fredo rolled down the window and handed the customs agent his driver’s license. “Nothing to declare.”

“Are those oranges?”

“Are what oranges?”

“In the backseat. On the floor there.”

Sure enough, there they were: a mesh bag of Van Arsdale oranges. They weren’t his oranges per se. Fredo wouldn’t eat an orange if it were the last fucking morsel of food on earth.

“Sir, could you just pull your vehicle over to that lane there? Next to that man in the white uniform?”

“You can have the oranges. Keep ’em, toss ’em, I don’t care. They’re not mine.” His father had been buying oranges the day Fredo saw him get shot. One of the bullets pulverized an orange on the way into the old man’s gut. A lot of things from that day were fuzzy. Fredo remembered fumbling with his gun. He remembered watching the men run away up Ninth Avenue, leaving Fredo unfired upon, too insignificant for even a single bullet. He remembered that orange. He did not remember failing to check to see if his father was dead and instead sitting on the curb weeping, even though the picture of him doing so had won the photographer all kinds of prizes. “I forgot they were even there.”

“Mr. Frederick.” The agent was studying Fredo’s driver’s license. It was under a fake name, Carl Frederick, but it was real, right from the Nevada DMV. “How much have you had to drink this morning?”

Fredo shook his head. “Over there, huh? By that guy?”

“Yes, sir. If you will, please.”

Two men dressed like Detroit cops were making their way toward the man in white. Fredo pulled over and reached around to the backseat, grabbing the yellow shirt and draping it over the whiskey bottle. The man in white asked him to please step away from the car.

This was more or less exactly how it had happened to his brother Sonny. If this was a setup and they were there to kill him, the only chance he had was to reach under the seat, right now, get his gun, and come out of the car shooting. But what if they were for real? In which case he’d have killed a cop or two and might as well be dead. Though Mike had gotten away with it.

Think.

“Sir,” said the man. “Now, please.”

If they were for real and they found the gun there, he’d get arrested. Which someone, probably Zaluchi, could fix. No way to get rid of the gun now anyway.

Fredo palmed one of the oranges. He opened the door and got out slowly. No sudden moves. He flipped the orange to the man in white and braced himself for death. The man just stepped aside. The cops grabbed Fredo by the arms before the orange hit the ground.

“Shouldn’t you fellas be Mounties?” Fredo’s eyes darted, looking for the men with tommy guns.

“You’re coming into the United States, sir. Please come this way.”

“You know, that car?” Fredo said. “It’s Mr. Joe Zaluchi’s, who as you probably know is a pretty important businessman in Detroit.”

Their grip loosened, but only a little. They took him behind the roadside A-frame customs building. Fredo’s heart knocked against his rib cage. He kept looking around for the men with guns, listening for the sounds of cocking hammers, inserted clips. He considered shaking himself free and making a run for it. Just as he was about to, the men pointed to a line on the ground and asked him to walk it.

They were real. They weren’t going to kill him. Probably.

“Mr. Zaluchi is kind of eager to get his car back,” Fredo said.

“With your arms out like this, sir,” said one of the cops. He said out in that funny Canadian way. That accent always struck Fredo as comical.

“Sure you’re not a Mountie?” Fredo asked, but he did as he was told.

So far as he could tell, he walked the line perfectly, but these jokers were unimpressed. They had him recite the alphabet backward, which he did perfectly. He looked at his watch.

“If you fellas give me your names,” he said, “I’m sure Mr. Zaluchi would be happy to make a donation to your retirement fund or something. Whatever he does, I’ll do, too.”

Each man cocked his head, the way dogs do.

Fredo was getting the giggles.

“Is something funny, Mr. Frederick?”

Fredo shook his head. Betrayed by his own nerves, he tried, literally, to wipe the smile from his face. Nothing was funny.

“I apologize if I misunderstood, sir,” one of them said. “Did you offer us a bribe?”

He frowned. “Wasn’t the word I used donation?”

“That was the word all right,” said the other one. “I think Bob thought you were proposing a sort of quid pro quo.”

A cop learns some lawyer words, he gets assigned to cream puff duty at the border. Cream puff duty: the thought forced the corners of his mouth up, though he was furious at himself, not amused. Cream puff. Not Fredo Corleone, who’d knocked up half the showgirls in Vegas and was on his way back there to take care of the other half. He took a deep breath. He was not going to laugh. “I don’t want no trouble. I don’t want to assume anything, but”-and here he had to fight the giggles again-“did I pass the test or not?”

They exchanged a look.

The man in white came around the corner of the building. Here it comes, Fredo thought. But he wasn’t carrying Fredo’s gun. Instead, he had that wet, mangled piece of paper, the handbill, spread out on a clipboard, dabbing at it with a handkerchief. “Mr. Frederick?” he said. “Can you explain this?”

“What’s that?” Fredo said. Which was when he remembered: he’d left his gun back in the room. “I never seen that.”

The man put his face close to the note. “It’s signed ‘Forgive me, Fredo,’ ” he read. “Who’s Fredo?”

Which he pronounced to rhyme with guido.

Which caused Fredo, finally, to erupt in laughter.

The warm-ups his doctor had prescribed took half an hour, tops, but Johnny Fontane was taking no chances. He started them in the desert, stopped in Barstow for a steaming mug of tea with honey and lemon, and was going through the regimen of humming and ululations for maybe the fiftieth time when he blew through a red light a couple blocks from the National Records Tower. An LAPD motorcycle cop swung behind him. They came to a stop together, near the back entrance of the building. Phil Ornstein-second in command at National-stood alone at the curb, pacing, smoking.

Johnny ran his fingers through his thinning hair, grabbed his hat from the seat beside him, and got out of the car. “Take care of this,” Johnny said, jerking a thumb toward the cop. “Will ya, Philly?”

“Got that right.” Phil put out his cigarette. “We thought you were driving down here after your midnight show. There’s a room at the Ambassador Hotel we paid for and you never checked into.”

The cop took off his helmet. “You’re Johnny Fontane,” he said, “aren’t you?”

Without breaking stride, Johnny turned, flashed a million-dollar grin, made his fingers into six-shooters, winked, and fired off a few imaginary shots.

Phil, on his way to talk to the cop, stopped, sighed, and ran his fingers through his hair.

“The wife and I loved your last picture,” the cop said.

It had been a Western, a real piece of shit. As if anyone would believe a guy like him on a horse, saving decent folk from desperados. Johnny gave the cop the autograph he wanted, right on the back of his ticket pad.

“Making records again, huh?” the cop asked.

“Trying to,” Johnny said.

“My wife always used to love your records.”

That’s why none of the record companies in New York would give him a contract-no singer who’d ever been more popular with women than men (said some pezzonovante at Worldwide Artists) had ever managed to change that. But what Johnny hated even more was the past tense: not loves but used to love. Movies were fine, though even now, with his own production company and an Academy Award (currently swaddled in his daughter’s toy crib at his ex’s house), the people who ran things out here still made him feel like some dumb Guinea who’d crashed the party. The long waits on the set bored him silly, and he’d had about enough of smart-asses calling him One-Take Johnny. From here on, if he could get the right part, swell, but he was moving on. It just wasn’t where his heart was. He wasn’t really an actor, not really a hoofer, not really a teenster idol or even a crooner. He was Johnny Fontane, saloon singer-a good one and, if he gave it his all, which this contract with National gave him the chance to do, maybe one of the best who’d ever lived. Maybe the best. Why not? It’s hell when the person you know you are isn’t the person people see when they look at you. Not that he was going to say anything. You don’t say anything bad to or about anyone who’s been loyal to you. “What’s your wife’s name?” Johnny asked.

“Irene.”

“You and Irene ever get over to Vegas?”

The cop shook his head. “We’ve talked about it.”

“You got to see it to believe it. Look, I’m at the Castle in the Sand all month. Classy joint. You want to come, I’ll get you in.”

The cop thanked him.

“Fucking guy,” he said to Phil in the elevator up to the studio. “Bet he pulls over all your talent, eh? Bet he’s got an autograph collection that’d fill a garage.”

“You’re a cynical man, Mr. Fontane.”

“Loosen up, Philly, you’re too serious.” Though Johnny caught sight of his own mug in the shiny steel walls of the elevator, and he looked nothing if not serious. He took off his hat, ran his fingers through his hair, and replaced it. “Everything all set?”

“For over an hour now,” Phil said. “There’s just one thing. Hear me out, okay?”

Johnny poker-faced him and said nothing, but he’d listen. It was Phil Ornstein who-after every other major label had passed-had given Johnny a seven-year contract (for lousy dough, but so what? dough wasn’t an issue). It was Phil Ornstein who had insisted that Johnny Fontane’s voice was back and that his public image as a boozing, brawling thug was both unwarranted and would only enhance sales.

“I know you wanted Eddie Neils for musical director, and if that’s what you really want, fine, we’ll try it.”

Johnny hit the stop button on the elevator. Eddie Neils had arranged and recorded Johnny the last time he’d had any hits. Johnny went to his house and wouldn’t leave until the old man gave him an audition right in his marble-floored hallway, among statues of eagles and naked people, and, when Johnny overcame the shitty acoustics and sounded like a little bit of something, Eddie had finally agreed to work with him again.

“You’re telling me Eddie’s not here?”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Phil said, tapping his gut. “Bleeding ulcer. Had to go to the hospital last night. He’ll be fine. But-”

“He’s not here.”

“He’s not. Right. Here’s the thing, though. He was never our choice for you anyhow.”

That Phil was classy enough to say for you instead of for your comeback wasn’t lost on Johnny. “You always wanted the other guy,” Johnny said. “The kid. Trombone man.”

“Yes. Cy Milner. He’s not a kid. He’s forty, forty-five years old. We took the liberty of hiring him to write a couple new charts.”

Milner had been a ’bone man with Les Halley, but after Johnny had left the band. They’d never met. “Since when? Since yesterday?”

“Since yesterday. He works fast. He’s a legend for the fast-working.”

The kid’s a legend, and I’m One-Take Johnny. “What about the charts Eddie already did?”

“We can use those, too. Either way.”

Phil ran his hands through the hair he mostly didn’t have. He was the sort of man who unconsciously took on other people’s mannerisms.

“What do you think I am, difficult?” Johnny yanked the stop button. “C’mon, Philly. I’m a pro. We’ll give old Cy a whirl, try some things, see if we can kick up a little magic, eh?”

“Thank you, Johnny.”

“I always liked a Jew with manners.”

“Fuck you, Johnny.”

“And guts.”

Johnny got off the elevator and strode down the hall toward 1A, the only studio big enough for the string setup he wanted. He burst through the doors and made a beeline to the gray-blond man across the room. He had on a British tweed suit and horn-rimmed glasses, one lens so thick it made the eye look funny. Broad-shouldered, like someone who’d played football, not what you expected from a man with a baton. He looked like a kindly headmaster from some movie. Johnny and Cy Milner made each other’s acquaintance with the bare minimum exchange of words. Johnny jerked a thumb toward the microphone, and Milner nodded.

Milner mumbled directions to his engineer and then took the podium. The musicians reached for their instruments. Milner took off his coat, raised his brawny arms, and flicked his baton. Johnny was in front of the mike and ready to go.

“C’mon, gents,” he said. But that was all he said.

Johnny hit the song hard from the first note, and the orchestra-Eddie Neils’s people every one-surged lushly behind him. It was like old times. He felt himself riding over the top of the song. He could still do this. Just like riding a bicycle.

When they finished, the people in the booth clapped soundlessly.

Milner sat down at a stool. Johnny asked him what he thought. Milner said he was thinking. Johnny asked if he thought they should do it again. Milner said nothing. He just stood and raised his arms. They did it again. Milner sat back down and started making notes.

“What are you doing?”

Milner shook his head but said nothing else. Johnny looked at Phil, who got the message and brought them all into the booth together.

“We’re getting rid of two thirds of the orchestra,” Milner said.

Not “we should” or “maybe we should”; just the flat statement. Johnny snapped. This was exactly the kind of orchestra he’d used on his biggest hits, exactly the sound people yearned for.

Milner stood his ground, expressionless, absorbing Johnny’s tirade.

Finally Milner handed Phil a slip of paper. On it was the list of people to take off the clock and send home. Phil arched an eyebrow, then pointed at himself. Milner said he didn’t care who did it.

“Hell,” Johnny said. “Do what you need to do.” He sat down heavily on a leather chair.

Milner was the one who sent the men packing. Johnny sat and looked over the list of songs he’d chosen, compared the charts Neils had done and the ones Milner had done. Milner’s were written fast, dotted with sloppily filled notes. There was nothing like the old days about this.

Moments later, Johnny was back behind the microphone, staring down at the sheet music on the stand in front of him. Milner’s this time. An old Cole Porter number that he’d recorded once before, way back when. He wanted to both kill this Milner and hug him. He’d love to prove the man wrong. He prayed that the man was right.

People who’d seen Johnny Fontane in clubs, or even those who’d seen him record ten years ago, wouldn’t have recognized the coiled, brooding man now breathing evenly behind the microphone. The remaining musicians took their places. The engineer wanted a mike check. Just as they were getting ready, some kid came in and asked where he should put Mr. Fontane’s tea. Johnny pointed but did not talk, rocked slowly in place but did not otherwise move, kept his eyes fixed on the music but did not really look at it. This all took only a few moments, but to Johnny it felt like hours and also like no time at all. He closed his eyes. The last time he’d sung this song, his voice had been as clear as rainwater and, as far as he was concerned, about as interesting.

Johnny was hardly aware of the song starting. His breath control was so built up from all that time in the pool, he was barely aware he was singing. The arrangement was everywhere and nowhere, kicking in when he wanted it, staying out of his way without needing to learn how. One verse in, and all Johnny was aware of was that bum in the song, trying to use pretty words and jokes to convince himself he could survive without the woman who’d left him. By the time Johnny hit the first chorus, he was that bum. He wasn’t singing to the other people who might be hearing him, in the studio, on the radio, in the privacy of their living room with a bottle of whiskey emptying out far faster than it should. He was singing to and for himself, telling truths so private they could burn holes through stone. There was nothing that anyone who really heard the music could do except look upon all the pretty words and false fronts lost love inspired, upon all the blame lavished on everyone who did the right thing and left you, and despair.

The song finished.

Milner lowered the baton and looked to the engineer, who nodded. The people in the studio-even the diminished band-burst into applause. Milner headed toward the booth.

Johnny stood back from the microphone. He looked around at the smiling faces of all these yes-men. Milner returned from the booth and started repositioning microphones. He said nothing. You’d swear the guy was Sicilian, for how little he said, and how much.

“No,” Johnny said. “Thank you all very much, but no. You fellas were great, but I can do better. Let’s give it a shot, okay?”

Milner repositioned another mike.

“That eighth bar, Cy,” Johnny said. “Can you do that up like Puccini?”

Milner fished a wrinkled piece of paper from his shirt pocket, a dry- cleaning receipt it looked like, and sat down at the piano bench, noodled around a bit, scribbled a few notes, gave a few brief directions to various men in the band.

Johnny wouldn’t be working with Eddie Neils anytime soon.

He’d been somewhere, gone somewhere, singing that song, and he could go there again, he was absolutely sure of it, and go deeper, and then do it a dozen more times. He could fill a whole long-playing record with songs that took people out of their lives, and deeper into them, and-it came to him, in a flash-sequence the songs the way Les Halley did back when Johnny was his singer, only all together on a record, so that everything plays off of everything else, in a way and to an extent that nobody, not even the best jazz cats, had ever quite done before.

Phil Ornstein kept congratulating everyone. Philly wasn’t going to be happy to have them spend the whole session on just this one song, but too bad. Johnny Fontane would defy you to show him a record shop where people walked in asking about the new releases from National Records. It was the songs they wanted. It was the singers.

Milner climbed to the podium. His glasses made it look like his regular eye was on the orchestra and his huge eye was on Johnny. Johnny looked down, and again they began.

Eight bars in, Puccini’s ghost somehow cracked the song open even farther, and Johnny filled his lungs with air and swam right in.

Michael and Kay spent the first hour of the flight in relative silence. Once Kay marveled about the startling beauty of the desert, comparing it to the work of abstract painters Michael knew he should know. He pretended to, and she talked about art for a while, and he sat there wondering why, about something so trivial, he hadn’t just been honest.

Michael asked about the move. Kay considered telling him about the day last week when the Clemenzas had shown up at his parents’ old house, which they’d already bought, and found Carmela Corleone standing at the window of her late husband’s office, a room she’d hardly set foot in over the years. She was drunk and mumbling prayers in Latin. This is my home, she’d announced. I’m not moving to no desert. He’d hear about that soon enough. Who was she kidding? He must already know. “It’s going fine,” Kay said. “Connie’s been a big help.”

Even that neutral comment was loaded. Michael didn’t react to the mention of his sister, but he knew Connie still blamed him for the death of her husband, Carlo, even though an assistant D.A. he knew from Guadalcanal had charged a Barzini button man with the murder.

“Strange,” Kay said after another long silence. “Flying over the desert in a seaplane.”

In every direction, desolate, unpopulated sand and scrub stretched to the horizon. Eventually shapes that turned out to be mountains emerged from the haze to the north.

“How are the kids getting along?” Michael finally asked.

“You saw them this morning,” Kay said. Mary, who was two, had cried and chanted, “Daddy, Daddy,” as they’d left. Anthony, who this time next year would start kindergarten, was sitting under a box on the floor, watching television through a hole. It was a program in which clay figures confront life’s problems: the temptation not to share one’s red wagon or the virtues of admitting one’s role in the shattering of Mom’s sewing lamp. Safe to say the little clay boy would never have to contend with two of his uncles being murdered. His cardigan-sweatered clay daddy would never be called an “alleged underworld figure” in The New York Times. His svelte clay grandfather was unlikely to drop dead at his feet. “How did you think they were?”

“They seemed to be making out fine. Do they have friends yet? In the neighborhood?”

“I’m still unpacking, Michael. I haven’t had time-”

“Right,” he said. “I’m not being critical.”

He was close enough to Reno airspace to check in.

“Your parents had a nice trip?” he said.

“They did.” Her father had taught theology at Dartmouth long enough to have a small pension from that, too, augmenting the one he’d been drawing since he’d retired as a pastor five years before. He and Kay’s mother had bought a travel trailer and planned to see America. They’d arrived yesterday, to help Kay get the house together and see their grandkids. “They said the trailer park was so nice they might never leave.” The Castle in the Sand had its own trailer park.

“They’re welcome to stay there as long as they like.”

“That was a joke,” she said. “So what do you have planned? What’s to do in Tahoe?”

“What would you say to dinner and a movie?”

“It’s not even eleven o’clock.”

“Lunch and a movie. A matinee. There’s got to be a matinee we can catch.”

“Okay. Oh, God, Michael, look! It’s beautiful!”

The lake, much bigger than Kay had imagined, was dotted with fishing boats and ringed by mountains. Around most of it, thick dark pine forest extended to the banks. The surface of the water looked as smooth as a lacquered table.

“It is,” he said. “I’ve never seen a more beautiful place.”

He glanced at her. She was swiveling around in her seat, craning her neck to see the splendor into which they were descending. She seemed happy.

Michael came in low, near the shore, and landed the plane not far from a dock and boathouse. There seemed to be nothing else around but woods and a clearing nearby, where a point of land jutted into the lake.

“This is pretty far from the town part,” Kay said.

“I know a great place for lunch,” he said, “right near here.”

As the plane approached the dock, three men in dark suits emerged from the woods.

Kay drew in a breath and pulled back in her seat. The men came out on the dock, and she called her husband’s name.

Michael shook his head. The implication was clear: Don’t worry. They work for me.

The men climbed out onto the floats and tethered the plane to the dock. The one in charge was Tommy Neri, Al’s nephew. Al-who, in his old NYPD uniform, had emptied a service revolver into Don Emilio Barzini’s chest, and who, with a steak knife taken right from the man’s kitchen, had disemboweled Phillip Tattaglia’s top button man and urinated into the man’s steaming body cavity-was in charge of security for all of the Family-controlled hotels. Like Al, Tommy had been a New York cop. All three looked to be barely out of high school. They said almost nothing and headed back into the woods.

As they did, Kay faced Michael at the foot of the dock. There was both a world of things to say about that and nothing whatsoever.

“Wait right here,” Michael said. He touched the side of his face where it had once been crushed, which he did, probably unconsciously, when he was nervous. For years after that cop had punched him, he’d done nothing, blowing his nose constantly and talking about his ruined looks until finally, for Kay’s sake, he’d had it fixed, after which he’d looked better, but not exactly like before, never again exactly like himself. She had never once told him this.

He walked to the door of the boathouse, reached up onto a ledge, found a key, and went in.

Kay both did and didn’t want to ask whose boathouse this was. What stopped her wasn’t fear of the answer. It was fear of Michael not wanting to be asked.

A moment later, he emerged, thrusting a dozen roses toward her. She moved backward a step. Then she reached forward and accepted them. They kissed.

“Happy anniversary,” Michael said.

“I thought this trip was my present.”

“All part of the same package.”

He ducked back into the boathouse and came out carrying a striped beach blanket and a huge picnic basket covered with a red-checked tablecloth. Two long loaves of Italian bread poked out of the basket, like crossed swords. “Voilà!” he said. With his head, he pointed toward the clearing. “Lunch at the beach.”

Kay led. She set down her flowers and spread out the blanket.

They sat down Indian-style, facing each other. They were both overcome by hunger, and they dug in. At one point Michael dangled a bunch of grapes over Kay’s head.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll bite.” She bit off a grape.

“Nicely done,” Michael said.

She looked into the woods but could not see the men. “That wasn’t what I meant. That wasn’t only what I meant.” She paused. But why not ask? It wasn’t a question about business. He’d brought her here on a date. For their anniversary. “Where’d this food come from?”

He pointed across the lake. “I had it delivered.”

“Whose land is this?”

“This land? Here?”

She frowned.

“Oh,” he said. “I guess it’s yours.”

“You guess?”

“It’s yours.” He stood. He pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket. It was a photostat of the deed. Like everything they owned, it had her name on it and not his. “Happy anniversary,” he said.

Kay picked up her roses. That they could afford this, on top of the house in Las Vegas, both appalled her and thrilled her. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time,” she said.

Michael knew he shouldn’t have called this land an anniversary pres-ent, too. He was overdoing it. “Your last present,” he said. He put his right hand on an imaginary Bible and raised his left. “I swear. No more surprises.”

She looked up at him. She ate a strawberry. “You bought land here without telling me?”

He shook his head. “I have an interest in a real estate company that bought it. It’s an investment. I was thinking we could develop the land here, for us. For the family.”

“For the family?”

“Right.”

“Define family,” she said.

He turned around and faced the lake. “Kay, you have to trust me. Things are in a delicate place right now, but nothing’s changed.”

Everything has changed. But she knew better than to say this. “You move us to Las Vegas and then, before we even unpack, you move us again, up here?”

“Fredo already had things set up for us in Las Vegas. But in the long run Lake Tahoe is a better opportunity. For us, Kay. You can work with the architect, build your dream house. It may take a year, even two. Take your time. Get it right. The kids can grow up swimming in this lake, exploring the woods, riding horses, skiing.” He turned to face her. “The day I asked you to marry me, Kay, I said that if everything went right, our businesses would be completely legitimate in five years.”

“I remember,” she said, though this was the first time they’d spoken of this since then.

“That still holds. We’ve had to make some adjustments, it’s true, and not everything went right. I hadn’t counted on losing my father. There were other things, too. A person can’t expect everything in a plan that features human beings to go right. But”-he held up his index finger-“but: We’re close. Despite some setbacks, Kay, we are very, very close.” He smiled and went down on his knees. “ Las Vegas already has a certain reputation. In any version of this plan, we’ll retain our hotel and casino businesses there. But Lake Tahoe is different. This is a place that can work for us all, indefinitely. We have enough land here to build any kind of house you want. My mother, your folks if they want. Anybody who wants to be here, there’s room.”

He did not mention his sister or his brother. Kay knew him well enough to be sure this was probably not an accident.

“I can fly the seaplane in and out of here, and any size jet can fly into Reno, which is just up the road. Carson City is less than an hour from here. San Francisco is three.”

“ Carson City?”

“The capital.”

“I thought Reno was the capital.”

“Everyone thinks that. It’s Carson City.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve been there on business, to the capitol building itself. You want me to prove it?”

“Sure.”

“It’s Carson City, Kay, believe me. How do you propose I prove it?”

“You’re the one who proposed proving it.”

He picked up an egg. He held it like a dart and flicked it at her.

She caught it and in the same motion threw it back at him. She missed. It sailed past him and two-hopped into the lake, and he laughed.

“It’s nice to see you like this,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t explain it.”

He sat down beside her. “There’s a lot I can’t explain, too, Kay. But I have a vision. It’s the same vision I always had, only now it’s a hell of a lot closer to reality, with our children growing up more the way you did than I did, all-American kids who can grow up to be anything they want. You grew up in a small town; so will they. You went to a good college; so can they.”

“You went to one, too. You went to a better one.”

“You finished. They won’t need to leave for any reason, and certainly not to help with my business. They won’t be influenced by me the way I was by my father, and living here will be a part of that. We’re distancing the family-”

Kay arched an eyebrow.

“Define it however you want, all right? The family. Our family. Ourselves. We’re distancing ourselves from all the”-he picked up a half-empty milk bottle and chugged the rest of it-“from let’s just say New York. That alone is going to chart a new course for us. Our holdings in the state of Nevada -this isn’t a very populated state, Kay, not yet-our holdings here will give us a means of reorganizing my business in ways that would have been impossible in New York. We’re already done with the hardest part of this. Mark my words: five years from now, the Corleone Family should be every bit as legitimate as Standard Oil.”

“Should be,” Kay repeated.

He sighed. If this was what she was like as a teacher, her students had been both lucky and doomed. “I apologize for it not being one hundred percent certain. What in life is?”

“Family, right?”

Michael chose to take that as playful. “What else can I do? Walk away? Even if I could do that and not make a widow out of you, what then? Take a job selling shoes while I go to night school and finish college? People depend on me, Kay, and while you and the kids come first and always will, I have other people to consider, too. Fredo, Connie, my mother, and that’s just the immediate family, not the business. We sold the olive oil company because we needed a sizable and completely government-approved amount of cash, but even after that we still have controlling interests in all kinds of other completely legitimate businesses: factories, commercial real estate, dozens of restaurants and a chain of hamburger joints, various newspapers and radio stations and booking agencies, a movie studio, even a Wall Street investment firm. Our interests in gambling and lending money can all be operated where it’s legal. As for what we spend to help get politicians elected-that’s no different from what any big corporation or labor union does. I suppose I could stop and sit back and watch it all fall apart, watch us lose everything. Or.” He raised an index finger. “Or. Instead, I could take a few more calculated risks and try to bring about a plan that’s already, I would say, eighty percent implemented. You know I can’t tell you the specifics of it, but I will tell you this, Kay: if you can just have faith in me, five years from now, we’ll be sitting on this very spot, watching our kids-Mary and Anthony and maybe a couple more-swimming in the lake, and Tom Hagen, my brother Tom, will be two months away from getting himself elected governor of the great state of Nevada, and the name Corleone will have started to mean the same sort of thing to most Americans as the names Rockefeller and Carnegie. I want to do great things, Kay. Great things. And the main reason for that, first and foremost, is you and the kids.”

They gathered up their lunch. Michael whistled, and Tommy Neri came out of the woods. He said he and the guys had already eaten, but a snack would be great, thanks.

Michael showed Kay into the boathouse. Inside was a Chris-Craft, aquamarine with spruce panels. He extended an arm. Kay got in. She expected Tommy Neri to follow her, but he released the boat and stayed behind.

“I was wondering,” Michael said, backing the boat out into the lake. “What’s the traditional fifth-anniversary present, anyway?”

“Wood. Which reminds me.” She pulled a card out of her purse and handed it to him.

“Really?” he said. “Wood?”

“Really,” she said. “Open that.”

Michael smiled and pointed at the tree-lined banks of the lake. “Behold,” he said. “Wood.”

“Open the card,” she said.

When he did, a brochure tumbled out. He picked it up.

“Behold,” she said. “Woods.”

It was from the pro shop of a country club in Las Vegas.

“Woods and irons both. I got you a set of golf clubs,” she said. She squeezed his right bicep. “You have to go in to get measured for them.”

“Golf, huh?”

“You don’t like it? You don’t want to take it up?”

“I do,” he said, rubbing the side of his face. “It’s perfect. Golf. Like any all-American executive. I love it. I do.”

Michael put the boat into gear, and they started across the lake to town. Kay slid next to him on the bench seat, and he looped his arm around her. He opened the throttle all the way. She lay her head on his shoulder and kept it there for the twenty-minute trip.

“Thank you,” she said when they got to shore. “I love the lot. I love your plan.” She leaned toward him. “And-” She kissed him. Michael did not usually like to show his emotions in public, but something in her kiss shot right through him, and as she started to pull away he pulled her back toward him and kept kissing her, harder now.

When they finally separated, breathless, they heard applause. It was two teenage boys onshore. They were each with a girl. The girls apologized. “They’re retards,” one said.

“Can’t take them anywhere,” said the other.

They were all dressed as if they’d just come from church.

“No apologies necessary,” Michael said. “Say, is there a movie theater around here?”

There was, and they got directions. The boys lagged behind the girls, laughing and punching each other on the arm.

“I was going to say-” Kay said.

“You love me,” Michael said.

“You’re as bad as those boys,” she said. “And you love me, too.”

The theater was closed. The picture they were showing was one produced by Johnny Fontane’s production company, which was sixty percent owned by a privately held Delaware-chartered corporation in which the stock was held by fronts for the Corleone Family. At some point, Michael would (for a purchase price of symbolic money) buy the whole shebang. That’s if there was anything worth buying. The company had once been fairly profitable. This picture, like most of the recent ones, did not star Johnny Fontane. Michael rapped on the window.

“It’s closed, Michael.”

He shook his head. He knocked harder. Before long, a bald man in a cowboy shirt and dungarees came into the lobby and mouthed that they were closed. Michael shook his head and knocked on the door again. The man came to the door. “Sorry, mister. Sundays all we got is the one show at seven-thirty.”

Michael motioned for the man to open the door, and he did.

“I understand,” Michael said. “It’s just that my wife and I are on a date, and this”-he turned and glanced at the movie poster-“Dirk Sanders, he’s just about her favorite movie star in the world, isn’t that right, honey?”

“Oh, yes, that’s right.”

“Well, you can see it tonight. Seven-thirty.”

Michael looked at the man’s left hand. “You see, though, we need to be home by seven-thirty, and this, today, is our anniversary. Our fifth. You know how it is, right?”

“I’m the owner,” he said, “not a projectionist.”

“Which makes your time all the more worthwhile. I wouldn’t expect you to do a favor like this for a total stranger. You know how to operate the projector, though, am I right?”

“Of course I do.”

“Could I just have a word with you, then? Alone? Just for a second?”

The man rolled his eyes, but Kay could tell there was something in Michael’s cold stare that affected the man. He let Michael in. They exchanged some whispered words. Moments later, Michael and Kay sat in the middle of the theater as the movie started. “What did you say to him?”

“Turns out we have some mutual friends.”

A few minutes in, as the lead characters literally bumped into each other in a Technicolor soundstage version of Paris, the theater owner brought them two sodas and a bucket of fresh popcorn. The man and the woman in the movie took an instant dislike to each other, signaling the dull inevitability of their falling in love. Soon Kay and Michael began making out in the dark, like kids. They couldn’t leave, not after getting the owner to show the movie just for them. They kept at it. Things escalated. “Behold,” Kay whispered, grabbing his cock. “Wood.”

Michael burst out laughing.

“Shhh,” Kay said.

“We’re alone,” Michael said. “All alone.”

A year ago, one of the two men pacing near the ticket counter at Gate 10B of the Detroit City Airport was a barber on Court Street in Brooklyn who made book on the side, reporting to a guy who reported to a guy who reported to Pete Clemenza. The other one had been a goat farmer in Sicily, near Prizzi. In the intervening years, loyalty and battlefield promotions and a frank shortage of labor had caused them to come up through the ranks more swiftly than a person could in times of peace. The barber was third generation, with terrible Italian; the goatherd still struggled with English. Their flight to Las Vegas was boarding now. There was no sign of Fredo Corleone. The goatherd held a phantom telephone to his ear. The barber sighed and nodded. What choice did he have? He went to a pay phone and started dumping quarters into it.

“Service,” said the voice in Las Vegas. Rumor had it that the girls at the phone service, this one and the one in Brooklyn, were nieces of Rocco Lampone’s, all of them gorgeous, but no one ever saw them or knew for sure.

“This is Mr. Barber calling,” he said.

“Yes, sir. And your message, Mr. Barber?”

“Our luggage,” he said, “has been misplaced.” He almost said lost, but lost would have been taken as killed. “It won’t be on the scheduled flight.”

“Yes, sir. Is that all?”

Is that all? When Don Corleone hears that Fredo’s new bodyguards lost him in a casino somewhere in the wilds of Detroit, yes, that’ll be all, all right. “Just say that me and Mr.-” The barber blanked. Goat in Italian was what? He put his hand over the phone. The goatherd was across the hall, getting coffee. “Come si dice ‘goat’?”

“La capra,” said the goatherd, shaking his head.

As if, growing up on Court Street, the barber had ever seen a goat, had ever had an occasion to learn that fucking word. “Mr. Capra and me are looking for it. We hope to be on the next flight out, luggage and all.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Sandra Corleone parked her Roadmaster wagon on the grass near Francesca’s dormitory.

“Oh, Ma,” Francesca said. She slipped into her stylish new raincoat. “You’re not going to park here, are you?”

All the other cars were squeezed onto the pavement of the street and the loading zone.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Sandra said, turning off the car and reaching into the backseat to wake Kathy. As if on cue, two other cars followed her lead. “People have to park somewhere.”

They opened the gate of the wagon, and Kathy loaded Francesca and Sandra up with boxes, which were all from the liquor store her mother’s fiancé owned. Most of the other kids had moving company boxes or steamer trunks. Kathy took only a table fan and Francesca’s Bakelite radio. “Someone has to get the door,” she said.

The front doors were wide open. Kathy punched the elevator for them. Already, their mother was drenched in sweat. She set her boxes down in the elevator. “I’m fine,” she said, too winded to say anything more. She was thirty-seven, ancient, and had gained a lot of weight since they’d moved to Florida.

“I can’t believe you’re making Ma carry the heavy stuff,” Francesca said.

“I’m not feeling that great.” Kathy smirked. “I can’t believe you’re wearing a raincoat.”

“You never know when it might rain,” Francesca said. Kathy knew full well it was the dress code. Francesca was wearing Capri pants. Female students in anything other than a dress were required to cover themselves. Most, Francesca had been told during orientation, chose raincoats. The dress code probably didn’t apply on moving day, but Francesca wasn’t taking any chances. She was the kind of person who followed rules.

When they got to Francesca’s room, Kathy set down the fan and the radio, flopped down on the bare twin bed, curled up, grabbed her abdomen, and moaned.

Francesca rolled her eyes. Because she rarely got cramps, she was skeptical about her sister’s ongoing problems with them. But complaining about it was as useless as Kathy was.

“Where are the sheets?” Sandra said.

“On the other bed,” Francesca said.

“Not those.” She pulled out a nail file and started slicing open boxes. Francesca made a trip by herself. When she got back upstairs the bed was made with pink sheets, and Kathy was propped up on the pillows from both beds, the fan trained on her, her eyes closed, a wet washcloth draped on her forehead, sipping a Coke through a straw, listening to jazz on the radio.

“Where’d you get the soda?”

“The dorm mother came by with them,” Sandra said. “To welcome you.”

“I said I was you,” Kathy murmured.

Francesca was, for a split second, furious. But it probably wasn’t a bad idea. It was just a soda. And as for Kathy’s pretending to be Francesca, it was efficient and would hardly cause trouble in the long run. Just like Kathy herself. “Thanks,” Francesca said.

Kathy waved a hand. “Don’t mention it.”

“I won’t. You going to share that Coke?”

“That’s Charles Mingus there.”

“Wonderful. You going to share that Coke?”

Kathy handed it to her. “Charles Mingus plays bass. Wild, huh?”

Francesca took out the straw and drank as much of the soda as she could, hoping to finish it, but the fizz in her nose overcame her. She handed the bottle back to her sister.

On the next trip down, her mother stuck her head into the common living room, grabbed a delicate-looking wooden chair, and motioned Francesca down a dark hall to the side door. Classes didn’t start until Tuesday, and, thanks to her mother, Francesca had already broken two cardinal rules from orientation-Never leave the side door open and Never take furniture from the living room. Other girls and their parents immediately benefited from this, too, of course.

Her mother took three heavy boxes and could barely walk. Francesca set her load down on the steps to the side door, waiting for her mother to catch up.

“Why couldn’t you have gone to a girls’ school?” called Sandra Corleone, breathing heavily, pointing with her head toward the next building, where dozens of young men and their parents were moving in. Her mother was a loud talker. “Like your sister is?”

Her mother’s sundress was so drenched with sweat that in places Francesca could see her dark-colored bra and underpants. She was not a slim woman, but her underwear seemed unnecessarily gigantic. “How are you possibly going to unload Kathy’s stuff all by yourself?”

“Don’t worry about Kathy. She’ll be fine. You know, no one said the boys’ dormitory would be right next door.” Her voice grew even louder. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

People were looking, Francesca was sure. Francesca was tempted to correct her and say men’s dormitory, except that that would have made things worse.

On the next trip, her mother took a lighter load. Still, by the time they got to the side door, she was huffing and puffing and had to stop. She plopped down on that wooden chair, which made a splintery sound. People are supposed to move to Florida and be out in the sun all the time and slim down so they’ll look good in tennis clothes and at the beach. Her mother was getting bigger all the time. This summer, Francesca had caught Stan the Liquor Man pinching her mother on the ass and saying he liked her caboose. Francesca shuddered.

“How can you possibly be cold?” her mother asked.

“I’m not.”

“Are you sick?”

She looked at her mother, who was practically having a heatstroke in that straining chair. “No,” Francesca said. “I’m fine.”

“Right next door,” her mother repeated, pointing at the men’s dorm with her thumb this time. “Can you believe it? Because I can’t.”

Why she was talking so loud, who knew?

“So why didn’t you want to go to a girls’ school?”

She said this loud enough that Francesca was sure people in the men’s dorm could hear. “This is a good school, Ma, all right?” She extended a hand to help her mother up. “C’mon.”

When they got to Barnard, Francesca knew, all Kathy would hear was “Why did you have to go so far from home?” Anything Francesca did was found wanting for not being enough like what Kathy did and vice versa. Before the homecoming dance, her mother had pulled Francesca aside to extol the virtues of Kathy’s date, whom she later that night dumped. Then Francesca asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. The next day, her mother started listing all the things wrong with him. He’s changed, Sandra said. Anyone with eyes can see that.

Francesca took another trip by herself. It was only then that she noticed how many doors were festooned with Greek letters. Her mother and Kathy had talked her out of coming up the week before, in time for sorority rush, her mother because she had her heart set on the convenience of making one big hoop-de-doo car trip and Kathy because she said sororities were great for WASPs, sluts, or dumb blondes, but not for any sister of hers, who already had a family and who certainly didn’t need to pretend she was the sister of a bunch of slutty blonde WASPs. Francesca had said that cinched it, she was rushing. But she hadn’t. Only now did it occur to her that the friendships made last week might already mark Francesca as a loser, an outcast: as different.

By the time she got back to her room, her mother had opened her boxes and suitcases and begun putting things away. She’d also produced a small Madonna print and a set of red bull horns, neither of which Francesca would leave up after her mother left. “You don’t need to do that,” Francesca told her.

“Bah,” Sandra said. “It’s no problem.”

“Really,” Francesca said. “I can take care of it.”

Kathy laughed. “Why not just tell her you don’t like her going through your stuff?”

“I don’t like you going through my stuff, Ma.”

“I go through your stuff at home. Stuff? I hope this good school here will teach you not to talk like a dirty beatnik. And anyway, what are you trying to hide from me, eh?”

“Nothing.” Beatnik? “And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not at home.”

Sandra looked up as if startled by a loud noise.

Then she sat herself down at Francesca’s desk and burst into tears.

“Now you’ve done it,” Kathy said, sitting up.

“You’re not helping any.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Kathy said, and of course she was right: it’s not just yawning and laughter that can be contagious.

The twins teared up, then began to cry, too. They all three huddled together on the bed. It had been a terrible year. Grandpa Vito’s funeral, which had been rough on everyone. Then Uncle Carlo’s bizarre disappearance. Chip, the sweetest one in the family, getting called a name at school, snapping, and breaking the kid’s skull with his thermos. Yet there was only one other time the three of them had ever been like this: united, embracing, sobbing. The girls had been in Mr. Chromos’s math class. The principal came to get them and took them to his office without telling them why. Their mother was in there, her face red and puffy. She said, “It’s your father, there’s been an accident.” They all fell onto the principal’s smelly orange couch and sobbed for who knows how long. Now, sobbing together again, they must have thought of that day, too. Their sobs got louder, their breathing more ragged, their embrace tighter.

Finally they calmed and released their grasp. Sandra took a breath and said, “I only wish-” She couldn’t say the rest of it.

A sharp knock came at the door. Francesca looked up, expecting this to be the true first impression her dorm mother would have of her. Instead it was a couple, he in a powder blue suit and she in a poodle-cut hairdo, both smiling and sporting HELLO, MY NAME IS name tags.

“Excuse us,” said the man, whose name tag read BOB. “Is this Room 322?”

The number was painted in black on the door. His index finger was actually touching it.

“Yes, pardon us,” said the woman. They both had an extremely thick southern accent. Her nametag read BARBARA SUE (“BABS”). She was looking past them to the Madonna and frowning. “If y’all’d like us to come back later-”

“This is her room,” the man said, stepping aside and gently pushing a dark-skinned girl across the threshold. The girl kept her eyes on her Mary Janes.

“I believe we’re interrupting,” the woman said.

“Are we interrupting?” the man asked.

Sandra Corleone blew her nose. Kathy wiped her face on Francesca’s pillow. Francesca used her hand. “No,” she said. “No. Sorry. Come in.”

“Fantastic,” the man said. “I’m Reverend Kimball, this is my wife, Mrs. Kimball, this is our daughter Suzy. With a Z. Not short for Suzanne. Just Suzy. Say hello, Suzy.”

“Hello,” the girl said, and then looked back down at her shoes.

“We’re Baptist.” The man nodded toward the Madonna. “We have Catholics in Foley, though, the next town over. I played golf once with their leader. Father Ron.”

Francesca introduced herself and her family-pronouncing it Cor-lee-own, which even her mother did lately-and braced for a question about her name. It didn’t come.

Suzy looked from one sister to the other, visibly confused.

“Yes, we’re twins,” Kathy said. “That one’s your roommate. I go to another school.”

“Are you identical?” Suzy asked.

“No,” Kathy said.

Suzy looked even more confused.

“She’s kidding,” Francesca said. “Of course we’re identical.”

The man had noticed the bull horns. He touched them. Sure enough, they were real. “Suzy is an Indian,” he said, “like you folks.”

“She’s adopted,” whispered the woman.

“But not a Seminole,” he said, and laughed so loud everyone else in the room jumped.

“I don’t follow you,” Sandra said.

With a whiny sigh, the man stopped laughing. Suzy sat at what would be her desk and stared at its Formica top. Francesca wanted to give her flowers, wine, chocolate, whatever it would take to make her smile.

“ Florida State,” the man said. “They’re the Seminoles.” He pantomimed throwing a football. He laughed again, even louder, and stopped laughing, even more abruptly.

“Naturally they are,” Sandra said. “No, I mean about being an Indian. We’re Italian.”

The man and the woman exchanged a look. “Interesting,” he said. Inner-esting.

“Yes,” said his wife. “That’s different.”

Francesca apologized and said her mom and sister had to go but she’d be back in just a sec to help Suzy with her stuff.

Her mother flinched slightly at stuff, but of course did not correct Francesca in front of the Kimballs.

Francesca and Kathy held hands on the way out to the car. Neither one of them could, or needed to, say a word.

“Want me to drive, Ma?”

Sandra opened her purse, took out a handkerchief and her keys, tossed the keys to Kathy.

“Don’t get pregnant,” Kathy said.

Their mother let this go, did not even express feigned decorous shock.

I won’t become a WASP either, Francesca thought. Or a dumb blonde. Or anyone else’s sister. She squeezed Kathy’s hand. “Don’t wreck your eyes reading,” Francesca said.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Kathy said.

“Maybe I am you,” Francesca said.

It was an old joke. They’d always wondered how their mother had kept them straight as babies, always presumed they’d been mixed up a few times until they were old enough to assert their own identities.

They kissed each other on both cheeks, the way men would, and Kathy got into the car.

As Francesca hugged her mother good-bye, Sandra managed it at last. “I only wish,” she whispered, “that your father could be here to see this.” Sandra stepped back, triumphant. She looked from one daughter to the other. “His college girls.” She blew her nose. It was very loud.

“Pop never liked us to cry,” Francesca said.

“Who likes to see his family cry?” Kathy said.

“He wasn’t exactly one for tears himself,” Francesca said, wiping her face on the sleeve of her raincoat.

“Are you kidding?” her mother said. “Sonny? He was the biggest baby of us all. At movies he’d cry. Corny old Italian songs made him blubber like a baby. Don’t you remember?”

Seven years later, and Francesca was already starting not to.

She watched the Roadmaster nose its way through the clogged, narrow, palm-lined drive. As the car pulled around the corner, Francesca silently mouthed the word good-bye. She had no way of knowing this for sure, but she’d have bet her life her sister did the same.

Chapter 5

NICK GERACI heard footsteps coming from across the darkness of the abandoned casino. A heavy limping man in squeaky shoes. “Sorry to hear about your ma, kid,” a voice called.

Geraci stood. It was Laughing Sal Narducci, Forlenza’s ancient consigliere, dressed in a mohair sweater with diamond-shaped panels. When Geraci was growing up, Narducci was one of those guys you saw sitting out in front of the Italian-American Social Club, smoking harsh black cigars. The nickname was inevitable. A local amusement park had this motorized mannequin woman at the gate called Laughing Sal. Its recorded laughter sounded like some woman who’d just had the best sex of her life. Every Sally, every Salvatore in Cleveland, and half the Als and Sarahs, got called Laughing Sal.

“Thanks,” Geraci said. “She’d been sick a long time. It was kind of a mercy.”

Narducci embraced him. As he let go, he gave Geraci a few quick pats, though of course Falcone and Molinari’s bodyguards had frisked him back in Detroit. Then Narducci opened the wall. Laughing Sal saw the bag, lifted it, and nodded. “ Arizona didn’t help her none, huh?” He put the bag down without even opening it, as if he could count money purely by weight. A half million in hundreds weighs ten and a quarter pounds. “Bein’ away from this fucking weather?”

“That definitely helped,” Geraci said. “She liked it there. She had a pool and everything. She was always a big swimmer.”

Narducci closed the wall. “Her people were from by the sea, you know. Milazzo, same as mine. Me, I can’t swim farther than from here to the far side of a whiskey glass. Ever been?”

“To the far side of a whiskey glass?”

“Milazzo. Sicily.”

“ Sicily yes, Milazzo I never quite made it to,” he said. He’d been in Palermo only last week, working out minor personnel issues with the Indelicato clan.

Narducci put a hand on Geraci’s shoulder. “Well, like they say, she’s in a better place.”

“Like they say,” Geraci said.

“Jesus Christ, look at you.” Narducci squeezed Geraci’s biceps, as if they were fruit he might buy. “Ace Geraci! Looks like you could still go twenty rounds in the Garden.”

“Nah,” Geraci said. “Probably just ten, eleven.”

Narducci laughed. “You know how much money I lost on you over the years? A bundle, my friend. A bundle.”

“Should have bet against me. That’s what I usually did.”

“I tried that,” Narducci said. “Then you’d always win. And your father? How’s he?”

“Getting by.” Fausto Geraci, Sr., had been a truck driver and a Teamsters official. Connected but never inducted, he’d driven cars and done various favors for the Jew. “He’s got my sister there.” And the Mexican woman on the other side of Tucson he thinks no one knows about. “He’ll be fine. He misses going to work, if you want to know the truth.”

“Retirement don’t suit some people. But he should give it time, the retirement.”

Not a problem Nick Geraci ever expected to face. You come in alive, Vito Corleone had said at Geraci’s initiation, and you go out dead. “We ready?” Geraci said.

“Ready.” Narducci slapped him on the ass and escorted him back through the casino. Geraci looked for an exit route, a flight of stairs. Just in case.

“How long since that casino was in business?” Geraci asked.

“Back in the Italian navy days,” Narducci said, meaning the fleet of speedboats they’d operated on the Great Lakes during Prohibition. “Now we got these ships. Best things to have. No local fuck has the resources to raid ships. Plus, your guests are stuck out on the lake all night. Give ’em a show, set up a few rooms with some girls, then drop ’em back off at their cars. You’ve taken all their money, and they’re happy you did it.”

The Stracci Family had huge secret casinos in the Jersey Palisades, but as far as Geraci knew, none of the Families in New York had gambling ships like that. Maybe he’d look into developing a few, once the peace was solid and things cooled down.

“Other than legal joints in Vegas and Havana, we’re out of the on-land stuff altogether,” Narducci said. “Except down in West Virginia, which don’t really count. You can buy off that whole state for less than the heating bill on this place here.”

He ushered Geraci into a dank room and pulled open the door to an old cage elevator.

“Relax, kid,” Narducci said. “Who’s going to kill you here?”

“I get any more relaxed,” Geraci said, “I’ll need you to tuck me in and read me a story.”

They got in. Narducci smiled and hit the button. He’d called it right, though; it was how Geraci had been trained: elevators are death traps.

“Changing the subject,” Narducci said, “I gotta ask. How’d a big cafone like you get through law school?”

“I know people.” He’d done it on his own steam, night school, busted his ass. He still had a few classes to go. But Nick Geraci knew the right answers to things. “I have friends.”

“Friends,” Narducci repeated. “Attaboy.” He put his hands on Geraci’s shoulders and gave him a quick rub, the way a cornerman might.

The door opened. Geraci braced himself. They stepped into a dark, carpeted hallway crowded with chairs and settees and little carved tables that were probably worth a mint. At the end of the hall was a bright marble-floored room. A young redheaded nurse pushed Vincent “the Jew” Forlenza toward them in a wheelchair. Narducci left to go get Falcone and Molinari.

“Padrino,” said Geraci. “How are you feeling?” His speech and probably brain were fine, but he wasn’t going to walk again.

“Eh,” Forlenza said. “What do doctors know?”

Geraci kissed Forlenza on each cheek and then on his ring. Forlenza had stood as godfather at his christening.

“You’ve done well, Fausto,” Forlenza said. “I hear good things.”

“Thank you, Godfather,” Geraci said. “We hit a rough patch, but we’re making progress.”

Forlenza smirked. His disapproval might have been gentle, but it registered; a Sicilian doesn’t have the American faith in progress, doesn’t use the word the way Geraci just had.

Forlenza motioned to a round table by the window. The storm raged even stronger now. The nurse pushed Forlenza to the table. Geraci continued to stand.

Narducci returned, accompanied by the other Dons and their bodyguards, who’d freshened up from their airsickness episode but still seemed shaky. Frank Falcone entered with a heavy-lidded stare, bovine in its blankness. It told the whole story. Molinari had, as planned, told him who Geraci was. Falcone pointed at the paintings of men in jodhpurs and pale stout women in tiaras. “People you know, Don Forlenza?”

“Came with the place. Anthony, Frank. Let me introduce you to an amico nostro.” A friend of ours. A friend of mine was just an associate. A friend of ours was a made guy. “Fausto Dominick Geraci, Jr.”

“Call me Nick,” Geraci said to Falcone and Molinari.

“A good Cleveland boy,” Forlenza said, “Ace, we used to call him, who now does business in New York. He is also, I am proud to say, my godson.”

“We met,” Falcone said. “More or less.”

“Eh, Frank. I’m sure you can indulge a man’s pride in his godson.”

Falcone shrugged. “Of course.”

“Gentlemen,” Geraci said, “I bring you greetings from Don Corleone.”

Forlenza looked at the guards and pointed to Geraci. “Go ahead, do your job.”

Geraci presented himself to be frisked, though of course they’d done it to him back in Detroit, too. One more time today and we’ll be going steady, he thought. This search was state of the art, complete with a hand inside his shirt and under the band of his underpants, looking for recording devices. As they finished, two white-haired waiters in bow ties brought out a crystal tray of biscotti all’uovo, small bowls of strawberries and orange wedges, and steaming glass mugs of cappuccino. They set a silver bell beside Forlenza and left.

“They came with the place, too.” Forlenza took a sip of his cappuccino. “Before we get started,” he said, “you must all understand that the decision to invite an emissary from Don Corleone was mine alone.”

Geraci doubted this but had no way of knowing for certain.

“No offense, Vincent,” said Falcone, “or, what’s-your-face? Geraci. No offense, but I still can’t get used to calling that little pezzonovante Michael Don Corleone.” Falcone had ties with the Barzini Family and also with a Hollywood union guy named Billy Goff whom the Corleones had supposedly clipped. On top of which, he had made his bones in Chicago, under Capone.

“Frank,” said Molinari. “Please. This accomplishes nothing.”

Forlenza asked them to sit, and they did. Narducci sat in a leather armchair a few feet away. The bodyguards took seats on a sofa against the far wall. As they all watched, the nurse, without a cue, turned and walked out of the room.

Falcone gave a low whistle. “It’s that white uniform. You could put any dame in one of those, I’d want to bend her over a gurney, hike it up, and screw her silly. Every time I go to the hospital, my dick gets so hard and stays so hard they got to give me extra blood.”

“Frank,” said Molinari.

“What? Jokes are fucking wasted on you, my friend.”

Forlenza asked Molinari and Falcone about the wedding of Joe Zaluchi’s daughter and Pete Clemenza’s son, who wasn’t in the business per se (he built shopping centers). They also asked how it was that a Cleveland boy had come to fall in with the Corleones. Geraci said that after his boxing career didn’t work out, he was stuck in New York with a wife and kids, and his godfather made some calls. Some expression returned to Falcone’s face. Forlenza cleared his throat in a way everyone understood as a call to order, took a long drink of water, and began.

“Sangu sciura sangu,” he said. “Blood cries for blood. This has been the undoing of our tradition in Sicily. An endless spiral of vendettas has left our friends there less powerful than any time in a century. Yet here in America we are flourishing as never before. There is enough money, enough power, for everyone. We have legal operations in Cuba and, particularly in the case of the Families represented here, Nevada. The amount we can make from this is, if I may be honest, limited only by our imaginations and-” he held up one finger-“and by our unfortunate tradition of riding the runaway train of vendetta to oblivion.”

Forlenza looked toward the high white ceiling and continued in Sicilian, which Geraci understood though couldn’t really speak. “Perhaps there are men in this room who know who is responsible for the killings in New York.” He gave Geraci, Falcone, and Molinari each a glance of precisely equivalent duration, then took a long, strategic sip of his cappuccino. “Emilio Barzini, a great man and one of my oldest, dearest friends, has been killed. Phillip Tattaglia is dead.” Forlenza paused to eat one of the tiny biscotti, underscoring all that was implied in his lack of any encomium to describe the weak and whiny Don Tattaglia. “Michael Corleone’s oldest, wisest caporegime, Tessio, was killed. Don Corleone’s brother-in-law, the father of his baby godson, was killed. Five other amici nostri, dead. What happened? Maybe one of you knows. I for one do not. My sources tell me that Barzini and Tattaglia, frustrated by the weak protection their narcotics business got from the Corleones’ judges and politicians, went after the Corleones and were killed in return. Perhaps. Others say Michael Corleone killed Barzini and Tattaglia so he could transfer his base of operation west and have it not seem to be a move made out of weakness. A possibility, no question. Could it be that we are witnessing revenge for the deaths seven years ago of the eldest sons of Vito Corleone and Phillip Tattaglia? Why not? In such matters, seven years can be but the flick of a fish’s tail. Or”-and here he took another cookie and took his time munching it-“perhaps-who knows?-this is all a plot by Don Stracci and Don Cuneo, whose families have never had the power held by either the Barzinis or the Corleones, to seize control of New York. Their quick negotiations for peace have, in the minds of many people, added force to this speculation. Even the newspapers are adopting this wild guess and promulgating it to the stupid masses as fact.”

This inspired knowing chuckles. The newspaper stories were plants. The Straccis’ power base was New Jersey, and the Cuneos ran upstate New York (and the biggest milk company in the region, which was how Ottilio Cuneo had become “Leo the Milkman”). Neither was believed to be powerful or ambitious enough to make an attack on the three stronger families.

“Or maybe,” Falcone said in English, “who knows? The Corleones killed ’em all.”

Falcone, Geraci was fairly certain, would have been surprised to learn that his angry hyperbole was one hundred percent correct.

“Even their own men?” Molinari said. Though a friend of the Corleones, Molinari, too, almost certainly did not know what had really happened in New York. “C’mon, Frank.”

Falcone shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m like Vincent, I can’t unravel this fuckin’ thing. I hear people talkin’, that’s all. But a lot of what I hear is that even though Don Vito, may he rest in peace, pledged on his life that he would not avenge his son’s death, what’s-his-face-”

“Santino,” Geraci said.

“Another country heard from.” He raised his cappuccino cup in a mock toast. “Thanks, O’Malley. Yeah: Santino. He said he wouldn’t avenge it or even look into it. The way we understood it was that his Family wouldn’t do that, but, see, it was all a bunch of fucking double-talk. All he meant was that he personally wouldn’t do it. Vito stepped down so that Michael could plot revenge and carry it out as soon as the old man died.”

“Forgive me,” Geraci said. “It’s not double-talk. It didn’t happen that way.”

“Look, Vincent,” Falcone said, “why are the Corleones the only New York Family represented here, huh? Why am I having a sit-down with you two and someone else’s wet-behind-the-ears soldato? Even your consigliere’s not at the table.”

“No one ever called it a sit-down,” Molinari said. “It’s just a few friends talking is all. The weather clears, maybe Don Forlenza will loan us some clubs, we can grab some golf-”

“Very comfortable chair,” said Narducci, rubbing its arms.

“-or take a boat and go fishing,” Molinari continued. “Maybe have a cocktail with your nurse friend and a lovely afternoon of buttfucking.”

Falcone frowned. “I don’t do that-there. In culo? Did somebody say I did that?”

“Hit a nerve, did I?” Molinari said.

Don Forlenza drained his cappuccino and set his mug down so hard it shattered. No one at the table reacted. At first no one made any attempt to pick up the mess.

A door opened. The bodyguards leapt to their feet and faced it. Two of Forlenza’s men entered. Laughing Sal motioned for them to go. They went.

“We are not clever little policemen trying to solve crimes,” Forlenza said. He said “solve crimes” as if it were a fresh cat turd in his mouth and switched back to Sicilian. “I have my own problems and so, I gather”-he motioned toward Falcone and Molinari-“do you. If I have trouble in Cleveland, this affects no one in New York. No one there is concerned. The trouble is mine, as it should be. Yet if New York has problems, too often this, of no concern whatsoever to me, becomes my problem. The papers are filled with speculation. The police have questioned and harassed friends of ours far from the scenes of those crimes in New York-even our partners, people handling the money, running the businesses, fronting the investments. Some in Washington are pressuring the FBI to take agents away from their war on communism and send them after us and our interests. Senators are threatening to hold hearings. Even our legitimate businesses may be targeted by the IRS. I have grandchildren going to college, buying their first houses, and the complications I have had to endure simply to get my own money to them-”

He took a drink of water. They watched his hand as he set the glass down carefully.

“Well, you know. Millions of dollars of lost business, and it must be the same for you.”

Falcone began making a little sculpture out of cookies, strawberries, orange rinds, and nearby shards of glass.

“Our concerns,” said Forlenza, “are four.” He thrust out his left hand to say this, ready to tick off those reasons. It was a pet gesture. Forlenza had four reasons for anything. Four reasons Jews were misunderstood. Four reasons why, all pride aside, Joe Louis would have knocked out Rocky Marciano. Four reasons veal was better than sirloin. If Don Forlenza had been born with two extra fingers, he would have had six reasons for everything.

“First,” he said, returning to English, his right index finger bending back his left, “ New York. Helping them understand that this thing of ours can stand up to anything but infighting, that we all win the uneasy peace we have achieved simply by observing it.”

This met with nods of agreement all around, even from Geraci.

“Second”-middle finger-“ Las Vegas. Seven years ago, we sat in a fancy bank building in New York City and agreed that Las Vegas would be open for business for us all. A city of the future, where any Family could operate. Yet now the Corleones have set up headquarters there-”

Geraci started to talk, but Forlenza wagged a finger at him.

“-and the Chicago outfit all of a sudden thinks it’s in charge of enforcement there.”

“Fuckface,” muttered Narducci, a faraway look in his eyes.

“For your information,” Falcone said, now adding strawberries and more glass to his pile, “he don’t like to be called that.” Luigi Russo, who ran things in Chicago, preferred to be called Louie. He’d gotten his more colorful nickname (which the newspapers were forced to shorten to “the Face”) from a hooker who claimed the only sex he wanted was to stick his big nose up her cunt. Her decapitated body washed up on the Michigan side of the lake; her head was never found.

“Speaking of which,” Forlenza said, “third”-ring finger-“ Chicago.”

Geraci glanced at Falcone, whose operation was once just a branch of the Chicago outfit. No reaction. Every piece of glass that had been on the table was in front of him now.

“When we all met seven years ago, Chicago wasn’t even invited,” Forlenza said. “Can you imagine?”

Once, eager to direct Capone’s growth away from them, the New York Families had agreed that everything west of Chicago belonged to Chicago. There was still enough Cleveland in Nick Geraci to recognize this as a plan that could have made sense only to a New Yorker. Capone fell; brutal chaos followed. L.A. and San Francisco split off. Moe Greene, from New York, had a dream that became Las Vegas, which was designated an open city with no say from Chicago. After Greene was killed, the Corleones took over his casino and built the Castle in the Sand, but the most powerful force in the city was a coalition of the midwestern Families, led by Detroit and Cleveland. Chicago had points in that coalition (as did the Corleone Family, but only a few), and Louie Russo had made noises about wanting more control of it. Chicago was unified again and getting stronger by the day. With New York in turmoil, many saw Russo as the most powerful figure in American organized crime.

Forlenza shook his head in disbelief. “The New York Families said they’d given up trying to civilize Chicago. Back then, people called them our black sheep. Our mad dogs.”

“Our castrated chickens,” said Molinari, referring to the literal translation of Capone.

“Bunch of animals,” said Laughing Sal.

Falcone patted his pile on either side, shoring it up. It stood about two hands high. He leaned his face toward it as if he were trying to catch his reflection in the larger shards.

“And fourth”-pinkie-“drugs.” At that word, Forlenza slumped back in his wheelchair. He looked exhausted.

“Drugs?” Molinari said.

“Oh, boy,” said Narducci.

“Not this again,” said Falcone.

Geraci tried not to react at all.

“An old riddle, yes,” Forlenza said, “but one still unsolved. It is the biggest threat to our thing. Yes, if we don’t control it, others will, and we may lose power, but if-”

“If we do,” Falcone interrupted, “not that we aren’t already, the cops supposedly won’t look the other way like they do with gambling, women, unions, and so forth. C’mon, Vincent. Learn some new songs, huh? Look around. This little booze smuggler’s paradise”-a thunderclap boomed, in perfect synch with paradise-“that was your thing. You’ve done well, and salu’. But for men of my generation, it’s narcotics. For the next one, who knows?”

Narducci muttered something that Geraci heard as “Martian hookers.”

“Many of us,” Forlenza said, “when we took our oaths swore-swore, on our Family’s saint-that we would not be involved with narcotics.” He pointed to Falcone’s heap of cookies, fruit, and glass. “What are you doing?”

“Something to do is all,” he said. “Look, Vincent, I love you like you was my godfather, I do, but you need to live in the present day. Out west, we got it all set up, foolproof, layers and layers of guys between all the suckers who use it-your niggers, your Mexicans, your artistic types, your hotshots-and the people who sell it to ’em and the people who sell it to them. And so forth. The way we do anything else, and it works fine. The cops or whatever, they can slow it down a bit, especially in troubled times like this here, but the number of things that’d have to go wrong for them to get any of us in legal problems? Forget it. Not a chance.”

The Cleveland Family, Geraci knew, had some dealings in narcotics but contented itself with tributes and left most of the profits to the Negroes, the Irish, and the miscellaneous. After Prohibition, Cleveland had simply taken its next best things, gambling and unions, and expanded those. It wasn’t an organization open to new ideas or even new men. Geraci’s father said it had been more than ten years since Cleveland had initiated a new member.

Forlenza forged ahead, repeating himself: booze was different-cops drank and didn’t really want to break that up-but drugs were something else.

As Falcone reached down, got a piece of glass from the floor, and held it up toward the chandelier, Molinari diplomatically pointed out that Forlenza might be slightly naive about the makeup of today’s young street cop.

“That’s it,” Forlenza said. He stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The waiters returned. He pointed at the glass and cookies. “Take that away.”

“Did I say I wanted that taken away?” Falcone set down the shard and looked at the waiters. “Take it away and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

Chicago, right there, Geraci thought. Chicago in a fucking nutshell.

The waiters stood still. The one on the right-a Slavic-looking man with thick gray hair-had gone as white as his shirt. The one on the left, a man with a fringe of white hair and a tire black moustache, faced Forlenza, his head slightly bowed.

“Take it away,” Forlenza said.

“Just try it.” Falcone took the last biscotto and placed it like a cherry atop his pile.

“I got a grandkid going to some expensive school,” Narducci said. “Makes sculptures kind of like that. You two should meet.”

“Oh yeah?” Falcone swiveled in his chair to look at him. “Where at?”

“Where you going to meet or where does he go to school?”

“School.”

Narducci shrugged. “I just pay for it. To me, one kindergarten’s the same as another.”

Falcone leapt from his chair, and as he lunged toward the old consigliere, Geraci, still seated, hit Falcone squarely on the chin. His head snapped back. He staggered and fell.

The bodyguards rushed the table. Geraci stood. Time seemed to slow down. Amateurs had such bad footwork, he expected this to be over fast.

Molinari burst out laughing. Amazingly, a beat later, from the floor, so did Falcone. The bodyguards stopped. Geraci didn’t move.

“Kindergarten,” Molinari said. “That’s pretty funny.”

Falcone stood, rubbing his jaw. “Nice punch, O’Malley. Sittin’ down. Wow.”

“Instinct,” Geraci said. Narducci didn’t even say thank you. “Sorry. You all right?”

Falcone shrugged. “Forget about it.”

“What were you going to do,” Molinari said, “beat up an old man?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Falcone said, and now everyone laughed. Geraci took his seat, and the bodyguards took theirs. “I don’t give a fuck,” said Falcone. “Take it.”

The two visibly grateful waiters rushed to obey. The one with the dyed moustache even had the poise to return a moment later and refill everyone’s water glass.

“Blow their head off with what, Frank?” Forlenza asked.

“Figure of speech,” said Falcone, which got another big laugh.

Geraci had been looking for an opening, a chance to say what he’d come there to say, and this seemed like the time. He made eye contact with his godfather.

Forlenza nodded.

Again he cleared his throat as a call to order, and in the pause this created took a regally unhurried drink of water.

“Gentlemen,” Forlenza said. “Our guest unfortunately needs to go.” By which, everyone understood, he meant, should leave before certain things are discussed, not has somewhere else to be. “But he has come a long, long way, and before he leaves, he’d like to say a few words.”

Geraci, in addressing his superiors, stood. He thanked Don Forlenza and promised that his words would be few. “Though I am flattered to have been allowed at this table,” Geraci said, “Don Falcone is correct. This is not my place. As you point out”-indicating Falcone and thinking of Tessio, who always stressed the natural advantages of being underestimated-“I’m just someone’s wet-behind-the-ears soldato.” A lie, but one Falcone had initiated.

Narducci’s echolalia had grown so faint that this time Geraci couldn’t guess at what he said.

“The Corleone organization,” Geraci said, “is not, I assure you, a threat to any of you. Michael Corleone wants peace. He’s determined that this cease-fire become permanent and has taken measures to achieve it. He never had any intention of running Las Vegas. After three or four years in this interim location, the Corleone Family will relocate to Lake Tahoe. Actually, it will cease to exist. Our New York operation will continue in some form, but everything in Lake Tahoe will be run by Michael Corleone like the affairs of any American business magnate-Carnegie, Ford, Hughes, whomever.”

“Law school,” Narducci said, presumably triggered by whomever.

“The Corleone Family,” said Geraci, “will not in the future initiate any more members.” Tonight, in other words, to be construed as the pres-ent. “Michael Corleone will retire from our way of life, and he will do so in a manner that will both be respectful of other organizations and, if anyone chooses, also provide a model for any of us who wishes to take a similar path.” He pushed his chair in. “Gentlemen, unless you have any questions or concerns…?”

He waited a moment. Falcone and Forlenza both looked at Molinari, who ever so slowly blinked. A known friend of the Corleones, he was prepared to elaborate and the more appropriate person to do so.

“In that case,” Geraci said, “I’m going to go check on the weather, in case we-”

“Fuck the weather,” Falcone said. He had a hundred grand on the fight. “When it’s time to go, hotshot, we’re going.”

Narducci muttered something that sounded like “acts of God.”

“Fuck God,” Falcone said. “Don’t take this wrong, Vincent, but I’m not getting stuck-”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” Geraci said, and left.

Tom Hagen went back to his room to wait. He tossed his unused three-hundred-dollar tennis racquet onto the bed. He kept on his tennis shirt and changed from shorts into chinos, from sneakers into loafers. On the two different golf courses he could see from the air-conditioned splendor of his room, foursomes of brightly dressed men laughed and drank cocktails on the vast expanse of green where a few decades earlier there had been only cactus and sand, where anyone out there at midday would have been roasting, starving, dying of thirst, gleeful buzzards circling overhead. Instead, servants on golf carts bore cold beer and fresh towels. It reminded Hagen of the stories he’d read about ancient Rome, where the emperors cooled their palaces in the summertime by having slaves haul untold tons of heavy, melting snow down from the mountaintops. More slaves stood beside the mounds of snow night and day, drenched in sweat and waving big papyrus fans. For a king, no corner of the earth is inhospitable.

Hagen told the front desk to call him whenever a car came for him. He left a wake-up call for 1:45.

It came. He awoke famished. Hagen hated late lunches. Two o’clock came and went. Hagen called down and was told, “No, sir, there still hasn’t been anyone asking for you.”

He hung up the phone and stared at it, willing it to ring. Like a stupid kid waiting for his sweetheart to call. He picked up the phone again and had the operator connect him with Mike’s office. No answer. He tried Mike’s home number. If the meeting with the Ambassador were about anything of lesser stakes, Hagen would already have been on a plane home. Kay’s father answered. Michael and Kay had gone out for their anniversary lunch. Hagen had forgotten. He’d catch up with Mike later. Then he called home to say he’d gotten in okay and everything was fine, and Theresa was crying because Garbanzo, their arthritic dachshund, had run away. The kids had made flyers and posted them in the neighborhood and now were out looking for their pet. What if the dog wandered out into the desert? Think of all the ways it could die then: coyotes, cougars, snakes, thirst. There was an atomic bomb test tomorrow; think of that. Hagen tried to calm her down. He reassured her that an arthritic dachshund probably couldn’t have made it out of the subdivision, much less the sixty-some miles to that test site.

Hagen looked at the racquet, available for twenty bucks at any hardware store and not nearly as good as the one he had at home. In his mind’s eye, he saw his brother Sonny, outraged at this show of disrespect, ordering everything on the room service menu, eating what he wanted and pissing over all the rest, then smashing up the racquet and the room, too, sticking the Ambassador with the damages-we don’t take cash, you have to sign for it-and heading home. Hagen ’s stomach growled. He smiled. He missed Sonny.

The phone rang. His driver was here.

Hagen went down, but there was no car there. He asked the parking attendant. No cars for a while now, he said. Hagen ’s head pounded. He’d forgotten his sunglasses. Squinting was painful. Back in the lobby, he saw a Negro in a tuxedo. He’d pulled up on the other side of the building, in an optic-white-roofed, six-seater golf cart. It was after two-thirty.

“This may be the biggest golf cart I’ve ever seen.” Hagen shielded his eyes from the glare off the vehicle’s white skin.

“Thank you, sir,” said the driver, clearly someone who’d been told in his training not to make eye contact with his employers or their associates except when spoken to.

The ride across the golf course, through a maze of tennis courts, and across another golf course took about fifteen minutes, during which each of them averted his eyes from the other.

When the Ambassador had first gone into business with Vito Corleone, his name had been Mickey Shea. Now he was known in the newspapers as M. Corbett Shea. No one called him Mickey. Close friends and family, even his wife, called him Corbett. To everyone else, he was the Ambassador. His father had left County Cork, settled in Baltimore, and opened a saloon across the street from the one Babe Ruth’s dad owned. The oldest of six children, Mickey Shea grew up working hard-scrubbing floors, lugging boxes, shoveling manure from the street and snow from the alley. But his life, especially compared to other Irish kids’ in the neighborhood, was a comfortable one. Soon, though, his parents began sampling too much of their own wares. They lost everything. His mother became the rare woman who chooses a gun to kill herself, opening wide to wrap her mouth around the barrels of a sawed-off shotgun taken from the shelf under the cash register. Mickey, snow shovel in hand, was the one who discovered her near-headless body in the alley behind the bar. His father just kept drinking until that, too, did the job.

Mickey joined the army at seventeen and soon became a supply sergeant. It was there, not (as legend had it) on the streets of Baltimore, that he learned that there were the rules and then there was what people do. The black market, lucrative in peacetime, proved to be a license to print money once the United States entered the war. The week after the armistice, Sergeant Shea rigged himself an honorable discharge. He was a millionaire, most of it in cash. He went to New York and opened a tavern in the Tenderloin district. Being both Irish and a fine negotiator, he quickly forged useful bonds with the police and, more important, Irish street gangs like the Marginals and the Gophers. He bought a few warehouses near the piers, a solid investment that helped him keep his import-export skills sharp. And that might have been that, if not for Prohibition. Shea was God’s perfect bootlegger. He owned warehouses. He employed dockworkers. He knew how to move goods outside the law. He had friends in two eastern cities and people in Canada, former supply sergeants from the RAF with whom he’d done business and remained friendly. And not only did he run a tavern, he ran one known as a cops’ bar. Nearly overnight, that tavern became an ice cream parlor and its basement was gutted, remodeled, and reopened as a speakeasy. The cops, his former regulars, were now paid to drink there for free-money well spent, since the place got a word-of-mouth reputation as one safe from raids. Before Shea knew it, that basement was a who’s who of Manhattan swells-opera divas and Broadway stars, newspaper publishers and their star columnists, flashy lawyers and florid aldermen, even presidents of banks and titans of Wall Street. Shea bought the building next door and tunneled through to its basement, almost tripling the size of the place. A full orchestra played there every night. It was as brazen an operation as existed anywhere in America.

But Mickey Shea was a man who had seen things. During the war, men like him could get rich, but there was a whole tier of rich and powerful people above that, people who hadn’t had to get their hands dirty setting up a swap of morphine and girlie pictures for blood and generators, who’d never had to work the room slapping the backs of men they’d bribed. He’d used his connections with the cops in lower Manhattan to help keep the converted olive oil trucks from getting stopped on the way to his warehouses (and to keep those warehouses from getting raided), but what were those men in those trucks doing that he couldn’t do? Why was he getting only the warehousing money and the money from the speakeasy when he could just as easily-more easily-bring the stuff down and sell it himself? So men in Canada set him up with a fleet of speedboats and retrofitted syrup trucks. Soon the men in the olive oil trucks were blowing up his boats and his trucks-often with Shea’s men still inconveniently inside. Shea got cops to get other cops to get other cops to look out for his people, a corridor of sheriffs, judges, and beat cops all the way from Quebec to Manhattan, which helped but didn’t solve things.

One day, Genco Abbandando- Hagen ’s predecessor as consigliere and the man Shea thought owned Genco Pura Olive Oil-contacted a police captain on Shea’s payroll and set up a meeting between Mickey Shea and Vito Corleone. They met at the lunch counter of an Italian grocery store in Hell’s Kitchen, only six blocks from Shea’s warehouses but someplace he’d never been. He hated spicy food and refused to eat anything but bread and sauceless noodles. When the meal was finished, Don Corleone explained that the men running those converted trucks were only leasing them from Genco Pura, then let the implications of this sink in. He spoke of the wastefulness of free-market competition, and here, too, Mickey Shea was a quick study. Don Corleone told Mickey Shea that he believed that someone with so many friends (he did not have to say in City Hall and on Wall Street and especially among the Irish-dominated ranks of law enforcement) must be a great man, someone it would be profitable to know. Mickey Shea’s friends became friends of the Corleone Family. Shea was instrumental in building up Don Corleone’s political and legal connections, ultimately his biggest source of power. Don Corleone was instrumental in amassing for Shea so much wealth-at such great reserve both from any bloodshed and from the overt display of muscle necessary to prevent it-that even before the death of that great cash cow Prohibition, Shea was able to sever all traceable ties to the sources of his wealth and reinvent himself in the public eye as a blue blood: M. Corbett Shea, president of a brokerage house, part owner of a baseball team, and much-photographed philanthropist (the country’s many Corbett Halls, Corbett Auditoriums, and Corbett Public Libraries were funded by the Ambassador). His children went to Lawrenceville and then to Princeton. Their service in the war was packaged in national magazines as heroism. He served as the ambassador to Canada for the last six weeks of a lame-duck president’s term-not long enough to move his family but long enough to get the title. His oldest daughter was married to a Rockefeller. His oldest son was now governor of the great state of New Jersey.

The Ambassador would have no way of knowing that it had been Tom Hagen, while Genco was still consigliere, who’d taken care of that wartime news coverage.

And even though the Ambassador thought he’d bought his ambassadorship-which was mostly true-it was Hagen who, behind the scenes, had secured it.

It was Vito Corleone who’d taught Hagen the power of staying silent about such matters.

Motorized iron gates glided open. The driver stopped the golf cart in front of a house made of stone blocks, designed like a half-scale replica of an English castle. A crew of Mexicans was laying sod and planting cactus. Shirtless, leather-skinned blond men on scaffolding were antiquing the stones with narrow brushes. Hagen thought his head would explode.

“This way, sir.” The driver still made no eye contact.

Hagen, squinting, wondering if three hundred more bucks could get him four aspirin and a pair of shades, headed up the front walk.

“No, sir. This way.”

Hagen looked up. The man was standing in the rocks of the unfinished yard. The driver took him around the side of the house to the pool, as if Hagen couldn’t be trusted to go through the house. Hagen checked his watch. Almost three. He would have to catch a later plane home.

In the backyard, the pool was shaped like the letter P, a circle spliced onto a single lane for lap swimming. Around the perimeter of the circular part were seven identical white marble angels. The Ambassador sat at a stone table, shouting into a white telephone. A platter of meats and cheeses was set out. In front of the Ambassador was a plate smeared with mustard and strewn with crumbs. This arrogant fuckjob had already eaten. Plus he was stark naked (which might have thrown Hagen except that the last meeting he’d had with the Ambassador had taken place in the steam room of the Princeton Club). His skin was the color of rare prime rib. His chest and back were hairless as a fetal pig’s. He didn’t have sunglasses on either.

“Hi ho!” he shouted at Hagen, though he was still on the phone.

Hagen nodded. “Mr. Ambassador.”

The Ambassador motioned for Hagen to sit down, which he did, and to eat up, which he did not. “Already ate,” Hagen mouthed, and he made a wincing gesture that indicated he was sorry for the misunderstanding.

The Ambassador lowered his voice but kept on talking, cryptically, but the conversation seemed personal, not business. At one point he put his hand over the receiver and asked Hagen if he’d brought trunks. Hagen shook his head. “Too bad,” the Ambassador said.

Naturally. Only a pezzonovante could sit there in his fluorescent altogether. Not that Hagen would have stripped naked and gone for a dip. The point, of course, was Shea’s rude semiassertion that he couldn’t.

Finally, the Ambassador got off the phone.

“Hey hey! It’s the Irish consigliere.” Cahn-sig-lee-airy.

Hagen wondered if the Ambassador really didn’t know how to pronounce the word or if the mispronunciation was willful, a joke on the “Irish” part of it.

“German-Irish,” Hagen corrected.

“Nobody’s perfect,” said the Ambassador.

“And I’m just a lawyer,” Hagen said.

“Even worse,” the Ambassador said-a strange thing to say, Hagen thought, for a man who’d sent four children to law school. “Drink?”

“Ice water,” Hagen said. Said, not asked. In public, the Ambassador was a famously charming man. The lack of any apology had to be both on purpose and purposeful.

“Nothing stronger?”

“Ice water will be fine.” As a chaser to a fistful of aspirin. “Heavy on the ice.”

“I quit boozing, too,” the Ambassador said, “other than a nip of Pernod from time to time.” He raised an iced half-empty glass. “Prune juice. Want some?” When Hagen shook his head, the Ambassador shouted for water. “My father went the same way as yours, you know? Drink. Curse of our people.”

A young Negro woman in a French maid costume brought out a silver pitcher of ice water and one small crystal class. Hagen downed his water and refilled the glass himself. “Sorry to have missed you on the court,” he said, pantomiming a ground stroke. “I’ve been hearing for years you have quite a game.”

The Ambassador looked at him as if he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“From other people,” Hagen said.

The Ambassador nodded, slapped together another sandwich, stood, waved for Hagen to follow him, walked to the side of the pool, and sat down on the top step of the shallow end of the circular part. His prick lolled in the water, half submerged before him. He tapped it, absently.

“I’m fine right here, sir,” Hagen said. “In the shade. If you don’t mind.”

“You’re missing out.” He held the sandwich in his teeth and made a show of splash-sprinkling water on himself, then bit off a chunk. As if it could see this, Hagen ’s stomach growled. “Refreshing,” the Ambassador said.

The Ambassador finished his sandwich. Hagen asked about his family. The Ambassador went on and on about them, especially Danny (Daniel Brendan Shea, former law clerk to a U.S. Supreme Court justice and now the assistant attorney general of the state of New York) and Danny’s big brother, Jimmy (James Kavanaugh Shea, governor of New Jersey). Danny, whose wedding last year, to a direct descendant of Paul Revere, had been a highlight of the Newport social season, was screwing a TV star, the hostess of a puppet show Hagen ’s girls watched. And Jimmy. The governor. Though only in his first term, he was already inspiring talk about a run for the presidency. The Ambassador did not ask about Hagen ’s family.

The Ambassador went on to ask about several of the men’s mutual associates and acquaintances. Hovering between and among their every chatty word were the recent events in New York. But neither man spoke the names of any of the dead-Tessio, Tattaglia, Barzini, nobody. Neither Hagen nor the Ambassador spoke specifically of those events, or had to.

The Ambassador stood, knee deep on a step of the pool, and stretched. He was a tall man, a giant by the standards of men of his generation. He’d claimed to have licked Babe Ruth in a fistfight when they were kids; this was a lie, but with the Babe dead for years now and the Ambassador standing there in his aging, ropy-penised glory, the story contained its own sort of truth. The Ambassador dove forward and began swimming laps. After ten he stopped.

“Fountain of youth, fella,” he said, not as breathless as Hagen would have thought. “Swear to you. Swear to fucking God.”

Had it not been for the beating sun, his headache, his irritation at being trifled with by the Ambassador, and his need to get home tonight, Hagen might have let things drag out.

“So, Mr. Ambassador. Do we have a deal?”

“Ho ho! You get right to the point there, don’t you?”

Hagen glanced at his watch. It was pushing four. “I’m like that.”

The Ambassador got out of the pool. How the woman in the maid outfit knew to appear from out of nowhere with a towel and a thick robe, Hagen couldn’t imagine. Hagen followed the Ambassador into a glassed-in porch, which was, thank God, both dark and air-conditioned.

“You flatter me. You and Mike do. Or rather you people flatter Danny.” He paused for Hagen to catch his implication. “I can’t really call off the investigation. You must know that. And Danny certainly can’t. Even if he could, it’s a local matter. New York City, not state.”

All of which Hagen correctly understood to mean the opposite. What that little turn of phrase about Danny meant was that the Ambassador had rigged it so that nothing came directly from his office, nothing could be traced back to him.

“We wouldn’t want anything called off,” Hagen said. “It’s important that justice be served. Moving forward, getting back to business without the disruption these false accusations have caused, that’s in the best interest of all involved.”

“Hard to argue with that,” said the Ambassador, nodding. They had a deal, presuming Hagen had come through.

“And you, sir, flatter me,” Hagen said. “Or rather, our business connections. As I’m sure you’re aware, many people have a say in choosing a person to give the nominating speech at the national convention next year. We’ve spoken to people, it’s true. The convention is set for Atlantic City. That’s definite now.”

“Definite?”

Hagen nodded.

The old man shot a fist into the air, an oddly boyish gesture. This was terrific news for him, of course. Now, even if the more delicate aspects of this deal fell through, Governor Shea would, at minimum, be able to take credit for bringing the convention-and the conventioneers and their money-to his state.

“The location is a helpful sign,” Hagen agreed. “Having the governor of the host state deliver the nominating speech will strike a lot of people as a good idea. After that, who knows?”

After that, Hagen said, as if the speech were sure to happen, which the Ambassador now understood that it was.

“Theoretically speaking,” the Ambassador said. “Once Jimmy gives the speech-”

Hagen nodded. The list of ifs was long. “I’m a careful but optimistic man, sir. Let’s just call it a long haul to 1960.”

Haul being the operative word. If the most important ifs went right, the labor unions the Corleones controlled would support James Kavanaugh Shea’s bid for the White House.

“Rumor has it,” said the Ambassador, escorting Hagen though the house now and to the waiting golf cart, “you have political aspirations yourself.”

“You know how it is, sir,” Hagen said. “This is America. Land of opportunity. Any boy can grow up to be president.”

The Ambassador laughed like hell, handed him a cigar, and sent him on his way. “You’ll go far,” he shouted after him, as if Tom Hagen’s life up to now had been nothing, nowhere.

Chapter 6

IT WOULD BE YEARS before anyone outside the Chicago outfit learned that Louie Russo had ordered a hit on Fredo Corleone. Russo had nothing against Fredo per se. It is a meaningless coincidence that the attempt to kill him came a few months after Russo’s estranged son (and namesake) moved to Paris and began his life as an openly gay man. That said, Russo Jr. did live in Las Vegas for a year, and he was the indirect source of his father’s intelligence on Fredo Corleone’s occasional proclivities. The killers were supposed to wait until they found Fredo in bed with another man-ideally near dawn, so it would seem more incriminating-then make it look as if Fredo had shot the other guy and then himself. This sordid scene would humiliate and weaken Michael Corleone-who’d just named his brother sotto capo, to the dismay of many in his own organization-without Chicago getting blamed for anything or having to fear any reprisals. It wasn’t only violent reprisals Russo was trying to avoid, either. He desperately wanted a seat on the Commission, La Cosa Nostra ’s ruling body-something that he’d never get if it became known that he’d killed a made member of another Family without first getting the Commission’s approval. It might have all worked, too, if, after slipping the phony suicide note under the windshield wiper of Fredo’s borrowed car, one of the killers hadn’t had a violent colon spasm and been forced to stop at a filling station men’s room.

Fredo Corleone would live another four years, though he never found out what happened. He might have figured it out if he hadn’t turned on the windshield wipers and mangled the phony note. The ink had bled, and all that was legible was “Forgive me, Fredo.” Fredo presumed the note had been from that desperate faggot salesman from last night, asking for forgiveness-which, in Fredo’s experience, those sick people were always doing.

As for the cops, they took him inside the white A-frame building alongside the customs booths, gave him a handwriting test, which he took, and started asking a lot of questions, which he refused to answer without a lawyer present. He mentioned that though he was from out of town, his good friend Mr. Joe Zaluchi could probably recommend an attorney. The handwriting didn’t match, and a police captain on Zaluchi’s payroll materialized and said he’d take everything from here. Everyone but the captain still thought they were dealing with an assistant trailer park manager from Nevada named Carl Frederick who was that rare drunk made more agile and articulate by a few stiff belts.

Fredo said he had to make a couple quick phone calls, and the captain told the other men they could go. Fredo took a seat behind a desk like he owned the place and called the airport to have them page his bodyguards, who would have expected him there an hour ago. The captain sat down at a desk across the room and started eating the confiscated oranges. There was a battered radio on the filing cabinet next to him, and he turned it on. A bouncy Perry Como song came blaring out and Fredo frowned and the captain turned it down and mouthed, “Sorry.”

Fredo kept waiting, but neither Figaro, which is what he called the barber, or the goatherd came to the phone. He hung up and had the operator connect him with Joe Zaluchi. There was no listing, of course. The captain was sipping coffee and going at those oranges like crazy, averting his eyes, giving Fredo his privacy.

“Sir?” Fredo said. “You don’t by any chance know how I can get in touch with Joe Z.?”

“No idea,” the captain said, winking. He’d loved the sir. “What do you need?”

“I borrowed a car from him. I already missed one flight. If I take time to drop the car off back in Grosse Pointe, I’ll never-”

The captain waved him off. “Leave it here. The airport’s on my way to where I’m going. I’ll give you a lift. I’ll take care of things with the car later.”

That would have been suspicious, except that the guy had been at the wedding yesterday.

“Thanks,” Fredo said, and tried the airport once more. Again, nothing. He called the phone service in Las Vegas. “It’s Mr. E.,” he said-short for “Mister Entertainment.” “Anybody asks, tell ’em I missed my plane but I’ll be on the next one, guaranteed, all right?”

Fredo would certainly have figured everything out if he hadn’t told the captain to turn down the radio. When the song finished, the news came on. Among the top stories: police were investigating a homicide at a motel in Windsor. A restaurant supply salesman from Dearborn claimed that the door to his room had been broken down by two armed intruders, both of whom he had shot with a Colt.45. One intruder had died; the other-Oscar Gionfriddo, age forty, a vending machine supplier from Joliet, Illinois -was in critical condition at Salvation Army Grace Hospital. The dead man’s identity had not yet been released. The shooter said that the gun belonged to a friend. “I never fired a gun before in my life,” the man said. His voice cracked. “I can’t believe my luck.” He came off more like a winner of the Irish Sweepstakes than someone who’d just killed one, maybe two men.

The captain, of course, had no reason to think anything of it, and the radio was far too soft for Fredo to hear from across the room.

The phone rang. The captain answered. It was the bodyguard, the barber. Figaro. Fredo told him he’d be right there.

“All set,” Fredo told the captain.

“You got everything? Well, except these.” His mouth was full of orange. “You can’t take these. A gun’s easier to bring into the country than a piece of fruit, isn’t that something?”

A gun.

Neri had said that the whole crate of Colt Peacemakers was untraceable. Still, it couldn’t be good, leaving the gun behind. It made Fredo look like a fool. Worse, he was left without a gun. He considered asking the captain for one but didn’t want to push his luck.

“I got everything,” Fredo said, heading toward the door.

They got into the captain’s unmarked car. The radio came on, full blast. “And now, more music!” The captain turned it down and again apologized. It was an old song: the big-band sound of Les Halley and His New Haven Ravens, featuring the vocal stylings of Johnny “ Memory Lane ” Fontane. One of their last sessions together, the deejay said, “before he left the world of platters for movieola matters.”

“My wife,” said the captain, pointing at the radio, “always used to love this record.”

Fredo nodded. “Everyone’s wife did. That’s how a lot of ’em got to be someone’s wife. Songs like this here.”

“Hard to imagine how much pussy a guy like that must get.”

“Oh, I can imagine,” Fredo said. “It doesn’t hurt that John’s a hell of a great guy, either.”

“You know Johnny Fontane?”

“Personal friends,” Fredo said, shrugging.

They didn’t say anything more until the song was over.

“Personal friends, huh?” asked the captain.

“Personal friends. Matter of fact, my dad was his godfather.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.”

“Let me ask you something, then,” said the captain. “Is it true he’s got a dick the size of your arm?”

“How the fuck would I know a thing like that?”

“I don’t know. Sauna or something. It’s just a rumor I heard, and I figured-”

“What are you,” Fredo asked, “a fruit?”

The captain rolled his eyes and turned on his siren. They drove the rest of the way to the airport like that, a hundred miles an hour and not talking.

Chapter 7

PHIL ORNSTEIN’S corner office on the forty-first floor was lined with gold records and pictures of Philly’s frankly unattractive family but none of famous people, which was either an affectation or a reason to love the guy. He ushered Johnny Fontane behind his stainless steel desk. “Take as long as you’d like,” he said, though he couldn’t have meant that. Milner was getting the band squared away for the next number. Johnny dialed the number to his old house.

Halfway through, he stopped. Ginny and the girls had no idea he was in L.A. If he didn’t call, they’d be none the wiser. He was calling to apologize for not seeing them while he was in town, but the only thing that made the call necessary was the call itself.

He took out the pep pills, considered the label, then took one out and swallowed it dry.

Shit. What was he, some schoolboy segaiolo, afraid to ask out the prom queen? He’d known Ginny, his ex, ever since they were ten. The literal girl next door. He redialed.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Hello, my life,” Ginny said. She managed to say that in a way that was sweet and sarcastic at the same time. There’s nothing like a Brooklyn girl. “Where are you?”

“God, it’s great to hear your voice,” Johnny said. “What are you doing?”

They’d just gotten back from May Company, she told him. His oldest daughter had purchased her first brassiere.

“You can’t be serious,” Johnny said.

“When’s the last time you saw her?” Ginny said.

He’d had good-paying gigs in Atlantic City and at private clubs in the Jersey Palisades and the one Louie Russo had outside Chicago. He’d done a picture on location in New Orleans. The early scenes of it were shot here, on soundstages. Probably then. “Memorial Day?”

“Rhetorical question,” she said. “So where are you now?”

“Remember that one Labor Day, I don’t know what year,” he said. “We rented that place at Cape May, and we all went to that clambake?”

“No,” she said.

“You’re kidding,” he said. He could hear his girls in the background, arguing.

“Of course I’m kidding. Those were the times of my life. Back when I didn’t exist.”

Les Halley had insisted that Johnny pretend he was single so that the bobby-soxers would all keep screaming. “That was never my idea,” he said.

“And you had your floozy across town so that every time you went out for cigarettes-”

“Remember when I burnt my hands trying to cook that corn and-”

“And then burnt them again on those firecrackers.”

“True.” He had to laugh.

“There’s a block party tomorrow,” she said. “We have to make pie. You want to come?”

“To the party?”

“You’re in town, right? You sound so close.”

He cradled the phone against his shoulder and covered his eyes with both hands. “No,” he said. “I’m not. It’s just a good connection.”

“Oh,” she said. “Your loss. I’m making chicken scarpariello, too. Same recipe your ma showed me. Actually, the girls are. If they don’t kill each other first. They’re at that age.”

Johnny loved them, but as far as he could tell they’d always been at that age.

She asked if he wanted to talk to them. He said he did, but only his younger daughter would get on the phone. Philly came in, tapping his watch.

“Tell your mother,” Johnny said, “that I’ll do my best to make it to the party tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said. She’d convey the message-she was that kind of kid-but there was a note in her voice that made it clear she knew he’d never show.

The green pills had been prescribed by Jules Segal, the same doctor who’d diagnosed the warts on Johnny’s vocal cords and referred him to the specialist who shaved them off, an operation that made it possible for Johnny to get back into good voice and into the studio, a diagnosis two specialists had missed. Point being, there were a thousand Hollywood quacks whose interest in the human body had dwindled to the fleshy parts of their starlets du jour and the finer points of their own backswings, getting rich by handing out pills and taking care of girls in trouble, and then there was Segal, who had the same kind of rep but turned out to be a first-rate doctor, good enough to be chief of surgery at the new hospital the Corleones were building in Las Vegas. So why was it that every time Johnny popped another of those pills-still in line with the dosage recommended on the side of the bottle, never more-he went off by himself?

Johnny shook it off, like a dog with an itch in its ear. He’d be fine, really. Both under control and not. Which was okay, which suited the task at hand. He was getting by on four pills, twenty cups of tea, a pot of coffee, a ham sandwich, and no sleep. In the space between his scalp and skull, microscopic ants danced some hepcat thing like the hucklebuck. The aching in the big muscles on top of his thighs, whatever they were called, sharpened almost by the minute. But Johnny stayed on his feet, too spent even to fall to the floor for a nap. At the same time, he had too much energy. He couldn’t help but take each piece of barely perceptible direction he got from that brilliant lummox Milner and do his level best to put it in play.

He’d have given anything to stop.

He’d have given anything to make this feeling last forever.

He’d come here thinking he’d lay down half a long-playing record. A few minutes into the session, he realized he’d be doing well to finish one song to both his and Cy Milner’s satisfaction. Yet, minutes before he’d have to catch a plane back to Vegas, he found himself doing the third song of the day so well he got to the end without stopping or being stopped.

As he finished, he opened his eyes and saw Jackie Ping-Pong and Gussie Cicero standing inside the far door to the studio. How long they’d been there, Johnny had no idea.

Milner had already whipped out a pad of paper. As a conductor, he was laconic and fluid, but he wrote charts the way a stray dog eats a pork chop. He was oblivious to anything else in the studio, even the intern standing next to him with a bottle of soda and a fistful of pencils.

Johnny sat on his stool and lit a cigarette. “Mo-o-om! Da-a-ad!” Johnny called, looking first to Milner and then Ornstein, then pointing at Ping-Pong and Gussie. “My ride’s here. Don’t wait up!” His legs felt impossibly heavy. Finally he looked up and waved Gussie and Ping-Pong over.

“My friend!” Jackie said, waddling toward him. He was a hugely fat man, just an acquaintance, really. “You’re looking like a million bucks. You sound even better.”

Johnny knew he looked like death on toast. “What’s better than a million bucks?”

“A million bucks and a blow job,” said Gussie Cicero, a pally from way back.

“Wrong,” Johnny said. “If a chick knows you got a million, she’ll blow you for free.”

“Those free blow jobs are the most expensive kind.”

That cracked Johnny up. He slapped Cicero on the back. “Well, if I look like a million bucks,” Johnny said, “you two look like a shit I took this morning.”

Johnny stood and let Ping-Pong and Cicero embrace him. For years Johnny had assumed that Jackie’s nickname had come from his bulging eyes, but not long ago Frank Falcone told him Jackie’s eyes hadn’t done that until years after he got the nickname, which had actually come about because of his name, Ignazio Pignatelli. Gussie Cicero owned the swankiest supper club in L.A. Johnny hadn’t played there since the time his voice went out onstage and Variety wrote it up like it was an occasion for the whole staff to break out the Crown Royal and dance on Johnny’s fresh grave. Gussie and Johnny had remained friends, though.

“Frank Falcone sends his regards,” Gussie said. Gussie was said to be a made guy in the L.A. organization, which was connected somehow with Chicago.

“He’s not coming?” Johnny said.

“Mr. Falcone came down with something,” Ping-Pong said. His meaty fist clutched a new-looking satchel. He was Falcone’s underboss. Johnny couldn’t have said just what an underboss did. Johnny tried not to know more about that kind of thing than he had to. “Other than his regards, he also sends this.”

“Nice,” said Johnny.

“I’ll get you one,” Ping-Pong said, “quick as I can get it made and shipped over from Sicily. I got a guy there, works like a dog and makes ten of these a year. Virgin leather, best there is. Want me to send it to the Castle in the Sand? Your home? Which?”

Fontane had been working on some kind of joke on the virgin part of virgin leather, but he was just too frazzled. Nothing clicked. “This one isn’t mine?”

“I’ll get you one.”

“Kidding, Jack.”

“I’m not offering, I’m telling you. All right? But this one here,” he said, handing it to Johnny, “is for Mike Corleone, capisc’?”

Meaning: Enough with the ragging and Whatever you do, kid, don’t fucking open it.

The bag, packed tight, was heavy as a bowling ball. Johnny gave it a little shake, like a kid at Christmas, then held it up to his ear, making a show of seeing if it was ticking.

“Funny guy.” Ping-Pong narrowed his eyes in his fat face and just stood there, apparently until he was satisfied that Johnny had gotten the message. “I must express my regrets also,” Ping-Pong finally said. “I have to see to some personal family matters.”

“No sweat,” Johnny said. So I’m your fucking bagman now? But he just stood there, absorbing the indignity like acid into cheap cement.

“It’s our loss, not seeing you,” Ping-Pong said. “You’re sounding great, John.”

Milner kept writing. The musicians filed out. Johnny said his good-byes and headed out with Gussie and Ping-Pong. A Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow was idling by the back door.

“Where’s the queen?” Johnny said.

“Excuse me?” Ping-Pong frowned, as if he took it that he was being called a fag.

“He means of England,” Gussie said. “He’s joking.”

Ping-Pong shook his head in a kids-today way that Johnny could have done without.

“The car’s mine, Johnny,” Gussie said.

A black Lincoln pulled up. Ping-Pong and his men got in and sped off.

As they did, Johnny caught a flash of metal out of the corner of his eye and jerked out of the way. He stumbled and fell against the side of the Rolls.

It hadn’t been a bullet.

Johnny wasn’t exactly sure why he’d thought it might be.

“Nice catch,” Gussie said. “You all right?”

Johnny reached down to pick up Cicero ’s car keys. “Long day,” Johnny said.

“All you had to say,” Gussie said, “was no thanks.”

“No thanks what?”

“No thanks you didn’t want to drive my fucking Rolls-Royce.”

Johnny tossed him his keys. “No thanks I don’t want to drive your fucking Rolls-Royce.”

“See? Is that so hard?”

“I didn’t hear you, okay? I’m bushed, brother.” The sun was about to set. Johnny couldn’t have said how long it had been since he’d had an honest-to-God night’s sleep.

Gussie gave Johnny a hug and said it had been a privilege to hear him sing. They got in and headed for the airport. Johnny started spinning the dial on Gussie’s radio, checking out the competition. All around the dial were fads. Rock and roll. Fast-talking disc jockeys. Mambo: another fad. Weepy girl singers: yet another. Johnny never once came across his own voice. Maybe the other record companies were right. Maybe the kind of record Johnny Fontane was trying to make didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance. He kept spinning the dial. Gussie must have picked up on how jangled Johnny’s nerves were and for most of the ride there had the decency not to say anything until they were getting off the freeway for the airport.

“What’s the difference,” Gussie said, “between Margot Ashton and a Rolls-Royce?”

Margot had been Fontane’s second wife, Gussie’s first. Fontane had left Ginny for Margot. It wasn’t enough that Margot stole his heart; she took everything, even his self-respect. One time, he showed up on the set of a movie she was doing and the director put him to work cooking spaghetti. Without a word of complaint Fontane tied on an apron and did it. Love. Fucking love. “Not everyone’s been inside a Rolls-Royce,” Johnny said.

“You heard that?”

“Everyone’s heard that. You know, with different fancy cars and different sluts.”

“Sluts don’t come much more different,” Gussie said, “than Margot Ashton.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, pal-o’-mine. A slut’s a slut.”

Gussie made a wrong turn, toward the commercial flights.

“You made a wrong turn,” Johnny said, pointing to the road to the private hangars.

Gussie shook his head. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not going either. Frank didn’t want you to be sore, but, you know, a whole airplane, just for one guy-”

He reached into his breast pocket, for a gun. But no, not a gun. Johnny was wrong. Gussie pulled out an envelope. “It’s commercial, but it’s first class.”

Johnny took the plane ticket. His flight left in fifteen minutes. “You’re really not going?”

“Actually,” Gussie said, “I was never invited.”

“Of course you’re invited. I’m inviting you.”

“It’s okay,” Gussie said. “Gina and I got plans.” Gina was the girl he’d married after he’d been dumped by Margot Ashton. Ashton had married an Arab sheik after that and already divorced him, too. “Our fifth anniversary, if you can believe it,” he said, stopping the car. Skycaps practically ran to help, seeing a Rolls, imagining big bags and bigger tips. “Next weekend, though, she and I got tickets to come up there and see you.”

“You bought tickets?”

“A bargain at any price, if you sound half as good as today.”

“I catch you on anything but a comp list for any show I ever do, it’s your ass, pally.”

There was a crowd, maybe twenty people, all different ages. He told the skycaps he didn’t have any bags except just this little one here, but he duked them anyway, twenty apiece. Two men in sky blue sport coats rushed to meet him and help him through the crowd, which caught everyone’s attention, even in a place like L.A. The crowd snowballed, surging behind him all the way to the gate. Against his better judgment, Johnny handed the satchel to one of the airline guys so that he could sign quick, illegible autographs, including one some dame wanted right on her face. He duked the two airline guys fifty.

When he boarded the plane, there was applause. He waved and smiled but did not remove his sunglasses. He took his seat. He put the bag on the floor between his legs. Under different circumstances he’d have been after that redheaded stewardess with the big tits, but all he asked her for was a pillow, a bourbon rocks, and a hot tea with honey. He looked at the satchel. Another sort of guy would open it now. Johnny couldn’t have given a shit.

It took her forever to bring the drinks. “We don’t have honey,” she said.

“No tea, either, looks like.”

“I’m heating the water right now.”

She turned around. He looked down at the satchel. He opened it.

It was jammed with cash, of course. On top was an unsigned, typewritten note that said, “Told you not to look.” The o’s in look had dots inside; underneath was an upside-down smile.

Johnny wadded the note up. He saw the redhead coming with the tea and downed half his bourbon. He chewed ice as she set the tea down. He made his left hand into a pistol, pointed it at her, winked, and made a little clucking sound. She blushed.

By the time the redhead passed through the cabin getting everything squared away for takeoff, he’d finished the bourbon and the tea and was sound asleep.

Chapter 8

YOU WERE at the Tri Delt ice cream social, right?” said the honey-voiced blonde in line in front of Francesca Corleone as she took her food: cling peaches on cottage cheese and a wilted leaf of iceberg lettuce. This, plus sweet tea, was the entirety of the girl’s dinner.

Behind Francesca, Suzy Kimball kept her eyes on her tray and hummed.

“That wasn’t me,” Francesca said. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh.” This was where a normal person would introduce herself. Instead, the girl turned around and went back to her chirpy giggling with the girls she’d come with.

There were many other girls in line at the dining hall who did not have Greek letters on their clothing, other girls who weren’t whispering among themselves, who weren’t cowering underneath their raincoats as upperclassmen came in. These girls existed, but Francesca didn’t see them. What she noticed was Suzy, the quiet dark-skinned girl behind her, choosing the food Francesca chose, following Francesca to a table by the window.

“You know,” said a deep voice behind Francesca, “this used to be a girls’ school.”

Francesca turned around. At the next table was a tanned young man in a seersucker suit. He clutched a wooden replica of a rocket ship. Pushed up in his curly blond hair was a pair of sunglasses, the kind pilots wore.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“ Florida College for Women.” His white teeth revealed a crooked smile. “Until right after the war. Sorry for eavesdropping. I was just there helping my little brother move in. It’s good that your mother’s protective. She really loves you. You’re lucky.”

His own mother couldn’t wait to get him and his brother out of the house, he said. He finally set the rocket ship down.

Francesca felt dizzy, awash in the smell of blooming tea olive bushes.

He’d turned away from a group of people-upperclassmen, from the looks of them, including the blonde with the peaches-to talk to her. There was something about this boy, both awkward and smooth, in the way he couldn’t stop talking. Finally he apologized for not introducing himself. “I’m Billy Van Arsdale.” He extended his hand.

This was her big chance. Fran Collins. Franny Taylor. Frances Wilson. Francie Roberts. As she reached out her hand, she realized her palms were sweaty. Not just sweaty: drenched. But she was committed. No stopping now. In a panic, she took Billy’s hand in her somewhat less damp fingertips, turned it, and kissed it on the knuckles.

Billy’s dinner companions broke out laughing.

“Francesca Corleone,” she said, barely in a whisper and, despite herself, pronouncing all four syllables of her last name, in her best Italian. She tried to smile, as if she’d meant the kiss as a joke. “So, um. What’s the story with the spaceship?”

“That,” Billy said, “is a really lovely name.”

“She’s Italian,” blurted Suzy Kimball, bright-eyed, as if she were in class and it was the first time all term she’d known the right answer. She was saying it to Billy’s whole table. “They’re big kissers, the Italian people. I thought it was Corle-own, not Corle-oney. Which is it?”

Francesca couldn’t bear to say anything, couldn’t take her eyes off Billy.

Someone at the other table said, “Mamma mia, where’s-a da mozzarella?” which inspired more laughter. Billy ignored them. “Welcome to FSU. If I can ever do anything-”

“Here it goes,” said one of the men at his table.

“Honey,” said the girl with the cling peaches, “you are incorrigible.”

“-don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Corleone, huh?” said the mozzarella boy. He held up an invisible tommy gun and made ack-ack sounds. “You any relation?” someone said.

“You guys are jerks,” Billy said. “Don’t be ridiculous. They’re jerks,” Billy said to Francesca. “Anyway, I have to run, but if you need anything, I’m in the book. Under ‘W.B.’ ”

“Yes, dahling,” Cling Peaches said, “William Brewster Van Ahhhsdale the Third.”

Billy rolled his eyes, gave Francesca’s shoulder a gentle squeeze, grabbed his wooden rocket, flicked his sunglasses into place, and left. Francesca expected the people at the other table to keep needling her, but they lost interest and went back to talking to one another.

“I’m sorry,” Suzy mumbled. She was quivering like an abused house pet.

What could Francesca say? “You’re right. I am.” Italian. “We are.” Big kissers. There were worse things to be, no? “Forget it. Say my name any way you want.”

Suzy looked up, then covered her mouth. “You should see yourself.”

“See myself why?” Francesca said.

A thunderclap sounded.

Suzy shook her head, but Francesca knew. She could still feel Billy’s touch.

After dinner, they worked on their room. Suzy’s clothes were more like uniforms: nearly identical skirts and blouses, utterly identical bras, socks, and underpants. They agreed to make more room by bunking their beds, and Francesca said Suzy could pick. She picked the bottom. Who picks the bottom? The rain stopped. The dorm mother herded everyone out, handed them small white candles, and marched them across campus to freshman convocation. The marching band played as they entered the football stadium. A misty rain began. There were rows and rows of white wooden folding chairs. Suzy and Francesca sat near the back. The swarthy ones. She had to find a way to distance herself from this girl and not be a bad person.

On a platform at the fifty-yard line, some dean welcomed them. Then he introduced the university president, a lugubrious man in a black robe. The dean sat down, and only then did Francesca notice, in the seat beside the dean, that blue seersucker suit, that blond hair, and even from across the field those white teeth. For a moment, she thought it must be a delusion. The heat. Then Suzy dug her elbow into Francesca’s side and pointed.

“It’s William Brewster Van Arsdale the Third!” she said.

“That was a joke,” Francesca said.

“You have that look on your face again,” Suzy said.

Francesca tried to cock her eyebrow the way Deanna Dunn had in that movie a few years back where she played a killer.

Billy spent the duration of the president’s remarks making notes on index cards. Francesca spent it telling herself that in a world of stupid crushes, this was plainly the stupidest.

The president tugged at his sashes. He told them to look right and look left and that one of those people wouldn’t make it to graduation and to make sure that one person wasn’t you, then he directed jumper-clad Spirit Leaders at the ends of the aisles to start lighting everyone’s candles. Thunder sounded. He said it was now his pleasure to introduce the student body president. “Of course, anyone out there who ever ate any fresh Florida fruit is already a faithful friend of his family.” The president paused to chuckle and call attention to how pleased he was at his own alliteration. “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. William Brewster Van Arsdale.”

“I thought you said that was a joke?” Suzy said.

Francesca shrugged. Van Arsdale Citrus?

Billy came to the podium, waving. He pulled out the rocket ship from inside his jacket. As he did, the rain began to fall harder. Billy forged on. The rocket was a prop for him to talk about the coming space age in which the students here would live their exciting lives. Candles flickered out. People started to leave. Abruptly, in that Florida way, the skies opened. Francesca buttoned her raincoat. The band ran for cover. Moments later, water filled the track around the field. Billy tucked the rocket back into his jacket and whipped his index cards into the wind. “Our formal education,” he shouted, “should stay in balance with the important things we’ve already learned. Love. Family. Common sense. C’mon, everybody, let’s have enough sense to come in out of the rain!”

By the time he said it, most everyone had. Except Francesca, who just sat there.

She was kidding herself. It was ridiculous. It was obvious to her now that, in the dining hall, he’d been up to one of two things. Either he was trying to be a do-gooder, reaching out to the two weird-looking ethnic girls. Or else he’d been making fun of her.

She watched him jog alongside the dean and the robed president, sharing a golf umbrella.

Of course he was the sort of person for whom a big umbrella would just materialize.

Francesca, the last person sitting, cast off her wet candle and put her head in her hands.

She should go home. Not her dorm. Home home.

As she always did in her darkest moments, she tried to picture the face of her father. Every time, it got just a little bit more difficult. He struck the poses and smiled the smiles he had in photographs. Was it really Daddy she saw now, or was it just that picture of him at Aunt Connie’s wedding, where it seemed like he’d managed to drape his arms over every adult in the family, where he was happy and in love with Ma and looking out for everyone? Francesca and Kathy had been off to the side, dancing with Johnny Fontane, a character who now seemed as unreal to her as Mickey Mouse. For that moment anyway, things had worked.

She bent over and let the rain pelt her. Francesca knew in her heart she no longer really remembered the sound of her father’s voice. And, really, on this count too, she was kidding herself: reading much too much into the old-fashioned haircuts, the tuxedos and the dresses and Uncle Mike’s wonderful Marine Corps uniform and its ill-fitting cap, tricked like some dumb girl by the natural-seeming smiles on the faces of dead people, by skillful photography, by some freak accident of misleading light. Things had never worked. Who doesn’t know that? There were other family photographs, ones Francesca usually chose not to think about. The one of her Uncle Fredo sitting on the curb, sobbing. The one of Grandpa Vito hiding his face from the photographer that The New York Times had used for his obituary. The Polaroid of her mother, sitting with her shirt off in Stan the Liquor Man’s Naugahyde office chair, which Kathy had found hidden next to a huge rubber penis in a hollowed-out corner of their mother’s box spring. The scalloped-edged one, where her father was clubbing a tuna to death somewhere off the coast of Sicily, smiling like a boy on Christmas morning.

Are you any relation? What would Francesca have said if Billy hadn’t told his friends not to be ridiculous? She had no idea.

There were so many reasons to love storms. Francesca Corleone might or might not have been crying. She had no intention of leaving the field until the last fat drop fell.

Chapter 9

ANYONE WATCHING Michael Corleone land the plane on Lake Mead -the drivers of those two Cadillacs, for example, standing at the end of the dock and holding ropes-might have thought he’d done this hundreds of times instead of maybe twenty. Kay, asleep in the seat beside him, didn’t even stir-not until Tommy Neri and the two young guys squeezed into the back with him broke out in applause.

Kay sat bolt upright, eyes wide in panic. “My babies!”

Michael laughed. A beat later, he regretted it. It had struck him funny, her needless panic, and kind of touching, too. With anyone else, he wouldn’t have reacted without thinking. Kay was the only person in the world who could make him act against his own nature.

“Sorry, Mrs. C.,” Tommy said. “Should’ve seen it, though. Your husband’s a natural. I’ll admit it now, I was a little edgy about it. I didn’t go on a regular airplane until last year.”

Kay rubbed her eyes.

“I wasn’t laughing at you,” Michael said. “You okay?”

“They do float,” Kay said to Tommy. “Floatplanes. Though sometimes they also flip.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What were you dreaming about?” Michael said.

She put her hand to her chest, as if to still a racing heart. “I’m fine. We’re home?”

“Well, we’re back at Lake Mead.”

“That’s what I meant. What do you think I meant, the mall back in Long Beach?”

Michael hated it that the notion of home had any shred of ambiguity. He also hated having even a tiny quarrel in front of people who weren’t that close to him. He didn’t answer her until he got the plane to the dock. “No,” he said. “That’s not what I thought you meant.”

Kay unbuckled her seat belt and elbowed past the men. She’d been sore since Michael had swung back by their property to pick up the men for the ride back. She got into the back of their car, the yellow one with the black roof.

Michael told the men to give his regards to Fredo and Pete Clemenza-the red Cadillac was Fredo’s; it was supposed to go meet their respective planes-and that he’d be at the Castle in the Sand no later than six-thirty.

He got in back beside Kay.

“A date,” she said. “Like old times. All day until late tonight. That was what you said.”

“I needed to get them back here somehow. You slept through it all anyway.”

She shrugged. It was not a conciliatory shrug. There were two kinds of wives in this way of life. Once, he’d been married to the other kind. In the end, a wife like Apollonia, which is also to say a wife like his mother, a Sicilian girl who went along with every word her husband said, wouldn’t have suited him and certainly not his children, not in America.

Still, he couldn’t stand for this, not in front of others. Even his most loyal men should not see the head of their Family commit any weakness, however petty.

“Business,” Michael said. Code, in their marriage, for this is not up for discussion.

“You’re right,” she said. “Of course.”

They rode home with cowboy songs on the radio.

Kay’s parents had parked in the driveway. Across the street, in front of the construction site that was supposed to be Michael’s sister Connie’s house, was a gray Plymouth. Some kind of cop-both because of the kind of car it was and because if it had been anyone but a cop, Al Neri’s crew would have already taken care of it.

From inside his house came the sound, the noise, of some keening opera, Michael couldn’t have said which one. Unlike the old Moustache Petes, Michael had never felt the need to affect an interest in opera. The music in the house was all Kay’s.

Kay winced and then rolled her eyes. “It’s Dad,” she said.

Her chilly relationship with her parents baffled Michael. They’d been in her corner for everything she’d wanted to do. Federal agents had once come into the same study where her father wrote his sermons to call Michael a gangster and a murderer, yet when she decided to marry him, they hadn’t hesitated to give their blessing. He was about to say something-tilting, as married people do, at the windmills of the immutable-when it occurred to him: the record player they’d brought with them from New York couldn’t possibly have been this loud. The sound was coming from the hi-fi in Michael’s den.

“He’s in my den,” Michael said.

“He’s losing his hearing, among other things,” Kay said. “Be nice.”

“He’s in my den,” Michael repeated.

She straightened her skirt and pointed to the backyard, where her mother was pushing Mary on the swing set. Michael nodded and went inside.

He climbed the stairs and crossed through his bedroom. The den was a nightmare of orange and brown, with molded plastic chairs and pole lamps with bulbs spraying inefficient light. Two redheaded children he’d never seen before were playing on the carpet with Tonka dump trucks. Thornton Adams sat behind Michael’s blond Danish modern desk. Anthony sat on his lap. Each had his eyes closed and his head back like some beatific stained-glass Jesus. Michael crossed the room and flicked the knob on the wall-mounted reel-to-reel tape deck.

Anthony’s startled look was so much like Kay’s had been a few minutes before that Michael’s heart hurt. The kids on the carpet stood and ran away.

“ Thornton,” Michael said.

“I took the liberty of-”

“Forget it,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“Are we in lots and lots of trouble?” Anthony said.

The boy’s upper lip trembled, and his eyes were wide. Michael had spanked the boy maybe three times ever. Anyone who thinks he can explain everything human beings do can wise up simply by having a kid or two. “No, sport,” Michael said. “You’re not in trouble.” He picked Anthony up and gave him a hug. “You like that? That music?”

“I told Grandpa that we weren’t supposed-”

“It’s all right,” Michael said. “What was it you were listening to?”

“Tell him, Tony,” Thornton said, putting his thick black-rimmed glasses back on.

“It’s Puccini.”

“He’s an Italian,” Thornton said. “Or was one.” He chuckled. “Quite dead, of course.”

“I’m aware of that,” Michael said.

“Say again?”

Michael raised his voice. “Puccini’s dead. You eat? Want me to make you something?”

“Agnes has a casserole going,” Thornton said. “It involves beans.”

Michael smelled nothing. What could be baking that smelled like nothing?

“Puccini’s dead?” Anthony said, ashen.

Michael tousled his son’s hair. “He had a good life, Puccini,” Michael said, though he didn’t know a thing about Puccini’s life. He could feel his son relax. “Who are the other kids?”

“Your neighbors,” Thornton said. “Their backyard and yours touch. They seemed like they were already friends with Tony and Mary. C’mon, Tony. We should go. Sorry if I-”

Michael just gave his father-in-law a look, which proved to be more than enough. He set his son down, closed the door, and was alone.

The shower in the next room started. Kay. Michael got his tux. It was the one he’d been married in (he’d worn his other one last night), though the pants could stand to be let out. He sneaked a peek at Kay through the glass shower door and went back into his den to change.

Fredo had meant well, which probably someday ought to be his brother’s epitaph. That car, for example. It was a truly great car, with a golden grille and sabre-spoke wheels. Michael still thought Fredo was a bungler for buying such flashy cars, but look around: out West, would a plain black sedan have blended in better than the lovely, finned thing down in Michael’s driveway? Or this hi-fi rig. The same kind they used in recording studios, Fredo claimed. Took up a whole wall. Who needed this in his home? For all Michael knew it really was the coming thing, but he’d never been one to waste time listening to recorded music.

He sat down at his desk, fully aware of how exhausted he was. Two days in New York, a day in Detroit, then the time difference and the concentration for the flight to Lake Mead and back. And he still had what promised to be a long night in front of him: meetings at the Castle in the Sand, the impending news from Rattlesnake Island, an appearance at the Fontane show, and the thing after that. The ceremony. Michael ran a finger absently around the perimeter of that big ceramic ashtray with a mermaid on a ridged island in the middle. It had belonged to Pop. The crack where the ashtray had been glued back together was still visible. Michael lit a cigarette with his big table lighter, six inches tall and shaped like a lion. He drummed his fingers on that hideous blond desk and thought of golf. Golf was a brilliant idea, both a sport and a pastime, both a way to relax and a means of doing business. Custom clubs. Perfect.

He fell asleep so soundly he could have stayed like that, hunched over and dead to the world, for the rest of the night.

He snapped awake. “I’m not asleep,” he said.

It had been Kay’s hand on his shoulder. “I saw you peeking,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s when you stop peeking that I’ll worry.”

“So why’d you change? Where are you going?”

She frowned. “To see Johnny Fontane, of course. C’mon. Let’s go.”

“To see Fontane?”

“It’s like when you live in New York and can go up in the Statue of Liberty but never do. Johnny Fontane’s been singing at your casino-”

“We’re just partners in it.”

“-for weeks now. We could go anytime but we never do. Do you realize it’s been ten years since I heard him sing at your sister’s wedding? That was the first, last, and only time.”

Then she laughed.

“You should see your face,” she said. “Right, right, business, you have business. Go on, go. Go. I’m taking Mom and Dad and the kids to dinner at this steak place that just opened.”

“I thought your mother had a casserole going.”

“Have you tasted my mother’s casseroles?”

Michael kissed her. He thanked her for a great day and a great life, too. “Don’t wait up,” he said. “I’ll be late.”

“You always are.” Kay smiled as she said it, but they both knew it wasn’t a joke.

“Good fwight?” asked Hal Mitchell, dressed in golf clothes. Flight. The sarge had trouble with his l’s and r’s. He’d been razzed about it during the war, since most of the passwords had had l’s in them to trip up the Japs. The men loved him, though. No one ever called him Sergeant Fudd to his face.

“Uneventful,” Michael said, hugging his old brother in arms. “The best kind.”

Behind Mitchell, already there of course, was Tom Hagen. Hagen and the white-haired cowboy stood. The bald man in the wheelchair extended his hand to be shaken. Michael was the only one wearing a tux. It wasn’t sundown yet, but there’d be no real chance to change.

Mitchell’s office walls were covered with photos of celebrities, save a twelve-year-old snapshot of Sergeant Mitchell, PFC Corleone, and several Marines who never made it home, posing in front of a burned-out Jap tank on the beach at Guadalcanal. The office overlooked the main entrance to the Castle in the Sand. The marquee said WELCOME AMERICAN LABOR!; Fontane’s name would go back up tomorrow. On the stone plaza below, union officials arrived steadily for the convention that would start tomorrow, as did other friends of the Corleone Family.

Mitchell offered Michael the seat behind his desk, though Michael would have none of it. The man in the wheelchair was the president of a Las Vegas bank. The white-haired man in the cowboy hat was a lawyer, in private practice now after a term as state attorney general and then many years as the chairman of the Nevada Republican Party. On paper, these two men, Mitchell, and a real estate holding company controlled by Tom Hagen were the casino’s four biggest stockholders. Michael’s construction company was, on paper, sixth, behind his brother, Fredo, who-in a risk that had inspired much debate within the Corleone Family and the Nevada Gaming Commission alike-had used his own name. Fredo was also supposed to be here.

“Fredo Corleone sends his regrets,” Hagen said. “His flight was unavoidably delayed.”

Michael only nodded. There was nothing more to say, not in the presence of people outside the Family and most certainly not in this room, which was bugged.

The meeting lasted about an hour. It was not purely theater-neither the bank president nor the cowboy lawyer had any idea that law enforcement officials were listening in-and it didn’t differ in kind from any meeting of the top shareholders of any privately held corporation: purchasing matters, personnel matters, assessments of the effectiveness of current marketing and advertising efforts. There was discussion of Mitchell’s idea to hold A-bomb picnics on the roof. Privately, Michael wondered what kind of idiot would go up to the roof at some ungodly hour and pay ten bucks to hear a lounge act that was free downstairs, all to view a puff of smoke they could easily see from their rooms. But he didn’t say anything. His mind was on the next two meetings. The most spirited debate in this one concerned what to call the new casino in Lake Tahoe. Hal’s idea-Hal Mitchell’s Castle in the Clouds-emerged as the consensus choice.

When they finished, Mitchell said he hoped he’d see everyone and their wives at the Fontane VIP show. Johnny was their new partner, after all, with a ten percent share in the Castle in the Clouds. The other men said they wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Hagen waited for them to leave and then made a quick phone call to Louie Russo.

“Don Russo is on his way to the Chuckwagon now,” Hagen said to Michael.

They started down the back stairs.

“What’s the deal with Fredo?” Michael said.

“He’ll get in early tomorrow,” Hagen said. “He’s fine. There’s two good men with him.”

“You mean to tell me that barber and that kid off the boat, the goat farmer-”

“Right.”

Michael shook his head. The barber was supposed to get straightened out tonight, after the Fontane show. It was to be a surprise-that’s how initiations were done-but he was on tap. “So why’d Fredo miss the plane, huh?”

“I don’t know. People miss planes, I guess.”

“You don’t.”

“I actually did,” he said. “Today, in fact.”

“Yet here you are, on time.”

Hagen didn’t say anything. He’d always been soft on Fredo.

“So how’d that go?” Michael said. “ Palm Springs.”

“Just what you and I discussed. We’re on target there.”

They crossed the lobby to a café, the Chuckwagon, that was open only for breakfast. Michael had a key. He and Hagen took a seat at a table in the corner. Moments later, one of Hal Mitchell’s assistants let Russo and two of his men into the café and relocked the door behind them. Russo was a pale man with a bad rug, gigantic sunglasses, and tiny hands. He made a beeline to the wall switches and turned off all the lights. His men closed the curtains.

“Hey, you brought your Mick consigliere.” He had a high, girlish voice. “That’s cute.”

“Welcome to the Castle in the Sand, Don Russo.” Hagen stood, his overly wide smile the only trace of his insincerity.

Michael didn’t say anything until Russo’s men retreated across the room and sat down on stools at the counter.

“I assure you, Don Russo,” Michael said, pointing at the light fixture above him, “we’ve paid our electric bill.”

“The dark’s better,” Russo said, tapping his sunglasses, the size of which made his nose seem even more like a penis than it might have otherwise. “Some punk tried to shoot me through the window of a candy store. The glass cut my eyes. I can see good, but most of the time, the light’s still painful.”

“Of course,” Michael said. “We only want you to be comfortable.”

“I can tell it bothers you,” Russo said, taking a seat at the table, “that I turned all the lights off and closed the curtains without sayin’ nothin’. Right? So now you know how it feels.”

“How what feels?” Hagen said.

“C’mon, Irish. You know what I mean, and your boss does, too. You New Yorkers are all alike. You people made a deal. Everything west of Chicago is Chicago. Soon as you realize there is anything west of Chicago, you backpedal. Capone gets what’s coming to him, and you think that syphilitic Neapolitan shitweasel is Chicago. The rest of us? We’re nothing. You put together that Commission, and are we a part of it? No. Moe Greene takes all that New York money and builds up Las Vegas. We’re not consulted. You just up and call this an open city. Which you know what I think? I think great. Open works in Miami. Works in Havana, and I hope to God it stays that way. And it’s workin’ maybe best of all here. But why does it have to be so disrespectful? We weren’t so much as asked. That’s my point. Yet we went along with it. We weren’t in no position to argue. We had a few years where, forget about it, nothin’ was organized good. What happened was-I don’t want to say you took advantage, but we lost out. Fine. Vegas is working out perfect as is. In Chicago, everything’s under control. In New York, for a while you had blood running in the streets and all that bit, but from what I hear you got peace again. I pray that’s true. My point is this. During your troubles, did I think, Hey, time to take advantage of my friends in New York ? No. I stayed out of it. I don’t want you to hold a parade for me or nothin’, but Christ. What do I get for the respect I gave you during your hour of need? You move the headquarters of your whole thing here. Here! Which is supposed to be open and, if you want to be technical about it, is rightly ours. I’m not stupid, all right? But I’m not a lawyer like Irish here, and I didn’t go to no fucking Ivy League school neither. So help me out. Tell me why I should stand for this.”

Louie Russo supposedly had an IQ of 90, but he was a genius at reading people. The glasses made it difficult to read him in return.

“I appreciate your candor, Don Russo,” Michael said. “There’s nothing I appreciate more than an honest man.”

Russo grunted.

“I don’t know where you’re getting your information,” Michael said, “but it’s not true. We have no plans to run Las Vegas. We’re only here temporarily. I have land on Lake Tahoe, and once we complete some construction there, that’s where we’ll go, permanently.”

“Last I checked,” Russo said, “Tahoe’s west of Chicago, too.”

Michael shrugged. “When the time comes, that won’t be of any concern to you.”

“It’s of concern to me now.”

“It doesn’t need to be,” Michael said. “In the future, we won’t be initiating any more members. I’m gradually splitting off from everything we had in New York. The businesses I’ll be running here will be legal. I look forward to your cooperation-or at least your lack of interference-as we get things to that point. As you know-you mention my time at Dartmouth -I never planned to take part in my father’s business. It’s not what he wanted either. As I say, it’s only temporary. We’ll be opening a new casino in Lake Tahoe, and we’re planning on running it so clean that an army of cops, IRS agents, and Gaming Commission men could live there night and day.”

Russo laughed. “Good fucking luck!”

“I’ll have to take that as sincerity,” Michael said, standing, “because we need to go. My apologies. It’s our pleasure to have you as our guests. We look forward to seeing you tonight.”

Tom Hagen opened the door to the basement office of Enzo Aguello, an old friend of the Corleone Family and now the casino’s head pastry chef. All three men inside-the two established capos, Rocco Lampone and Pete Clemenza, as well as the head of protection, Al Neri-had been together yesterday in Detroit, at Pete’s son’s wedding. Every eye in the room was bloodshot. Lampone was only thirty but looked ten years older. He’d used a cane ever since he’d been shipped home from North Africa with a Purple Heart and no left kneecap. Clemenza gasped from the effort of getting out of his chair. Hagen always thought of him as one of those ageless fat men, but now he just looked old. He must have been about seventy.

They could have met in a suite upstairs, but Enzo’s office had the advantages of being humble, close to the food, and one hundred percent secure-a cinder-block bunker that, with the best equipment money could buy, Neri had swept for bugs. Neri took his place in the hall, closing the door behind him.

“Where’s Fredo?” Clemenza said.

Mike shook his head.

“He’s fine,” Hagen said. “His plane’s late. Storms in Detroit. He’ll be in tomorrow.”

Clemenza and Lampone looked at each other. They sat down on hard metal folding chairs around Enzo’s gunmetal gray desk.

“I wasn’t gonna say nothin’,” Clemenza said, “but I hear weird fucking things about Fredo, I hate to say.” Fredo’s new bodyguards had come from Clemenza’s regime.

“What do you mean?” Mike said.

Clemenza waved him off. “Believe me, it’s too flaky and ridiculous to talk about, and from what I hear it comes from junkies and niggers, so you can ignore ninety-nine percent of it right there. But the thing is, we all know he’s-” Clemenza grimaced, as if he were enduring a gas pang. “Well, I ain’t one to preach the abstemious life, but he’s got a problem with the juice.”

“Abstemious?” Mike arched his eyebrows. “Where’d you learn that word?”

“I sent my fucking kid to that same fancy school you went to, Mike, that was how I heard about it.” He winked. “Only unlike you he finished it up.”

“He says abstemious? Out loud?”

“How else you say things? You know what else I learned about that word? It’s one of just two words in the whole English language that uses all five vowels and in order.”

“What’s the other one?”

“How the fuck should I know what the other one is? A minute ago, you thought I was too fucking dumb to know how to use even one of them.”

Everyone laughed, and the men got to work.

The little time Hagen had spent as a corporate lawyer, for a meeting half this important and ten percent as detailed, there would have been a squadron of secretaries, scribbling like mad, and still half of what was said would have been lost or distorted. These men of course wrote down nothing and, as tired as they were, could be counted upon to remember everything. They spent three hours chewing through old business, new business, grilled calamari, and pasta e fagioli.

They discussed the toll the war with the Barzinis and Tattaglias had taken on the Family’s business interests. They discussed the accommodations made for the wife and family of Tessio, that saddest and unlikeliest of traitors, friend and partner of Vito Corleone since their youth, and the medical, funeral, and family financial needs of the organization’s other casualties. They discussed the triumph of the erroneous but widely held opinion-among the NYPD and the newspapers, among other crime families, among nearly everyone outside the Corleone Family-that both Tessio and the wife-beating brute Carlo, Mike’s brother-in-law and the de facto murderer of his brother Sonny, had been killed by men dispatched by Barzini or Tattaglia. On top of this, the Corleone Family’s man in the New York D.A.’s office (a classmate of Mike’s at Dartmouth) planned to bring a series of indictments this week charging members of the Tattaglia Family with the murder of Emilio Barzini and charging members of the Barzini Family with the murder of Phillip Tattaglia. Even if, as was likely, these arrests didn’t result in convictions, the FBI would consider the matter closed and stay out of it. Local cops-hundreds of whom had suffered from the lost income as much as any shylock-were happiest with business as usual. The short attention span of the public would soon swerve back, as it reliably does, to bread and circuses. All in all, the current cease-fire stood to be a genuine peace.

“Every ten years,” Clemenza said, shrugging. “We have these things and then we get back to work.” He’d found a whole box of toothpicks in Enzo’s desk and was chewing up a new one every couple minutes. The other men all had cigars or cigarettes going. Clemenza’s doctor had told him to stop smoking. He was trying. “Like clockwork. This one’s my fourth.”

Everyone had, over the years, heard this theory of Clemenza’s. No one said anything.

“So,” Clemenza said. “You think that’s what we got, Mike? Peace?” He even brandished the toothpick like a cigar. “Do we need to call for a meeting of the Commission?”

Michael nodded, more in concentration than assertion. Hagen knew that Michael had failed to present the Commission with a list of the men being initiated tonight. Probably the last thing he’d have wanted was for the Commission to meet. But his face registered nothing. “Rocco?” he said, bowing his head, extending his palm: after you.

That long pause- Hagen noted, impressed-made it look as if Michael were giving the question serious thought and then consulting with a trusted aide. If Sonny had lived and been in charge now, he’d have just blurted out what he thought and been proud of his decisiveness. Michael had inherited and honed his father’s ability to create consensus.

Rocco Lampone took a long puff on his cigar. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, ain’t it? How do we know the war’s over unless someone comes out and says it, huh?”

Michael knitted his fingers together and said nothing, his face utterly blank. The Commission functioned as an executive committee for America ’s twenty-four crime families, with the heads of the top seven or eight Families approving the names of new members, new capos, and new bosses (these were nearly always approved) and arbitrating only the most intractable conflicts. It met as infrequently as possible.

“I’d say yeah,” Lampone finally said, “we got a peace. We got the word of, what? Joe Zaluchi, that’s a given. Molinari, Leo the Milkman, Black Tony Stracci. All but Molinari are on the Commission, right? Forlenza’s leaning our way, right? Any word yet from the Ace?”

“Not yet,” Hagen said. “Geraci’s supposed to call in after they get to that fight.”

“That’s a sure thing,” Rocco said. “Geraci, not the fight. The fight, I like that half-breed nigger lefty, what a sweet cross he’s got. Ain’t even human how fast and smooth it is.”

Clemenza slapped the top of the metal desk four times and arched his eyebrows.

“Anyway, Forlenza makes five,” Rocco said. “We still think Paulie Fortunato’s the new Don of the Barzinis?”

“We do,” Hagen said.

“Then six. He’s a reasonable man, and in addition to that he’s closer to Cleveland than Barzini was. In other words, he’ll do what the Jew does. So that just leaves the other ones.” In lieu of pronouncing the name Tattaglia, Rocco made a filthy Sicilian gesture. His differences with the Tattaglias were personal, visceral, complicated, and many. He’d been the one who burst in on Phillip Tattaglia, surprising him in a bungalow off Sunrise Highway, out on Long Island. Tattaglia was standing there naked except for his gartered silk socks, a hairy man in his seventies, with this teenage prostitute spread out on the bed in front of him, squeezing back tears while he tried to jack off into her open mouth. Lampone put four rounds into the man’s soft gut. The Tattaglias’ organization was in shambles, and the man who’d taken over, Phillip Tattaglia’s brother Rico, had come out of a comfortable retirement in Miami. It seemed unlikely a man like that would have the stomach for more vendettas, but a Tattaglia was still a Tattaglia.

When Mike said nothing, Lampone frowned like a determined schoolkid working to please the teacher. Mike was the youngest man in the room, the youngest Don in America, yet all the others were straining to prove themselves to him. He stood and walked to the place on the wall where a window would have been if there had been a window. “What do you think, Tom?”

“No Commission meeting,” Hagen said, “not if we can avoid it.” Hagen, as Vito’s consigliere, was the only one of them ever to attend such a meeting. He was also the only one ever to attend an even more rare meeting of all the Families, which is what a call for a meeting of the Commission would snowball into. “Reason being, three Commission members have died this year. With that many new men, if they meet, they’ll have to figure out whether to add Louie Russo. No matter what anyone thinks of him personally, with Chicago what it is, they have to say yes. They don’t meet, they can keep him on the hook and say they’ll get to it next time they do meet. Once they meet, Russo’s got to be a part of it, which means a lot of different things could happen. Unpredictable things.”

“Older that guy gets,” Clemenza said, “the more his nose looks like a pecker.”

This made Mike smile. Clemenza had had the same knack with Vito, though, truth be told, it had been a hell of a lot easier to get a smile out of Vito than it was Mike.

“When he got the nickname, his nose was just big,” Clemenza said, inserting toothpick number nine into his little round mouth. “Now the end’s red and shaped exactly like a dickhead. And those eyebrows? Pubic hair. Am I right? All he needs is a vein to stand out on the side of his nose, and Fuckface’ll get thrown in the joint for indecent exposure. Shit, they got Capone for tax evasion.” He shook his head. “Pantywaist arrests”-and here Clemenza grabbed his balls and put on a good Chicago accent-“it’s da Chiacahgo way.”

Everyone laughed, even Hagen, though he privately believed that the reason Irish and Jewish gangsters had managed to move from most-wanted lists to ambassadorships was that they (like Hagen himself) paid their taxes, to a point anyway. It was understandable that many Sicilians, whose distrust of a central government had run through their veins for centuries, did not. And it was also true that theirs was a cash business with nothing of importance written down. A hundred IRS agents working around the clock for a hundred years couldn’t figure out one percent of what went on. Still: Governments were no different from anyone or anything wielding great power. They wanted what was theirs. You had to wet their beak. Or kill them.

They discussed a host of practical matters that had to be addressed so that the Family and its interests could again become fully operational. Only near the end did Michael discuss the ambitious long-term plans that he and his father, in the months Vito had spent as Michael’s consigliere, had envisioned. Hagen let everyone know about his discussions with the Ambassador and the Family’s role in James Kavanaugh Shea’s plan for the White House in 1960. They already knew about Hagen ’s own, not-unrelated plan: to run for the Senate next year and lose (that senator was in the Corleones’ pocket anyway), then use the legitimacy garnered by a respectable loss to make it easy for the governor to appoint him to a cabinet position. By 1960, Hagen could run for governor and win. Which brought Michael to the last order of business.

“Before we take care of our shorthandedness in other areas, we need to fix it at the top. First, there’s the matter of Tessio’s old regime. Any thoughts before I make my choice?”

They shook their heads. The choice was obvious: Geraci would be a popular pick, especially among those who resented what had happened with Tessio. True, there had been grumbling about him from some of the older men in New York. He was Tessio’s protégé, but Tessio had betrayed the Family. There was the issue of a narcotics operation Geraci had been allowed to have (though it was still only a rumor). There was his age (though he was older than Michael). He was from Cleveland. He had a college degree and a few law school classes. Hagen had first heard of him when Paulie Gatto had him beat up the punks who’d assaulted Amerigo Bonasera’s daughter. Three years later, after Gatto was killed, Geraci had been Pete’s second choice to take over as top button man, after Rocco. Rocco had made the most of that opportunity and was now a capo, but Geraci was Michael’s type of guy. He was also one of the best earners the family had ever had. There were other options, older guys like the Di-Miceli brothers, or maybe Eddie Paradise. Solid, loyal men, but not in the same league with the Ace.

“My only words of wisdom on this subject,” Pete said, “are that if Christ himself was ready to get promoted to capo, you’d hear complaints. I been around a long time, and I never seen a guy who can earn like this Geraci. Kid can swallow a nickel and shit a banded stack of Clevelands. I don’t know him in and out, but what I do know is good. He’s impressed me.”

Michael nodded. “Anything else?”

“Quick thing on Eddie Paradise,” Rocco said.

“Yes?” Michael said.

Rocco shrugged. “He’s a good man. Paid his dues. People know him.”

“All right,” Michael said. “Any other words on the subject?”

“Eddie’s my wife’s cousin is all,” Rocco said. “When she asks me if I vouched for him, well-you’re all married, you all got families. Nah, no other words.”

“Vouching duly noted,” Michael said. “All right. My choice is Fausto Geraci.”

This was greeted with hearty approval. Hagen had never heard anyone else call Geraci Fausto, but Michael rarely called anyone by his street name, a quirk he’d picked up from the old man. Sonny had been the opposite. He’d know someone for years, pull jobs with him, eat dinner in his home, and most of the time he didn’t know the guy’s last name until he saw it printed in the bulletin at a wedding or a funeral.

“Which brings me to you, Tom,” Michael said. “Your job, that is.”

Hagen nodded.

Michael looked to Pete and Rocco. “With Tom involved more in politics, we need to move him out of certain things. Since stepping down as consigliere-”

Hagen had not been consulted and had not sought change.

“-Tom has remained a trusted adviser, as anyone’s legal counsel should be. That’s how it’s going to stay. But it leaves a void as consigliere. Tom has done an excellent job, and my father-” Michael turned up the palm of his hand. Words couldn’t do justice to the late Don’s greatness. “I don’t see a clear successor. For the next year or so, I’ll be spreading the responsibilities of consigliere to all the capos and also you, Tom, when it’s appropriate.”

The failure to mention Fredo was no accident, Hagen thought.

“However,” Michael said. He let the pause linger. “There are situations where I need to be represented along with my consigliere-Commission meetings and the like. There’s no one I’d rather have at my side on such occasions than my father’s oldest friend, Pete Clemenza.”

Hagen applauded and slapped Pete on the back. Clemenza said he’d be honored. Rocco gave him a bear hug. Clemenza called out for Neri to have Enzo grab some strega for a toast. Hagen smiled. That was another thing: once men like Clemenza were gone, the important toasts would no longer be made with strega or homemade grappa. It would be Jack Daniel’s or Johnnie Walker. Before long they’d be in boardrooms clanking mugs of weak coffee.

Enzo, it turned out, had a bottle of strega in his desk drawer. He joined them for the toast. “May we live our lives so that when we die we are smiling,” Clemenza said, “and everyone else is crying like a fucking baby.”

They were about to leave when there was a knock on the door.

“Sorry, fellas,” Neri said, opening the door. “Seemed like you was wrapping up and-”

Johnny Fontane, carrying a fancy leather satchel, elbowed past him and, in a voice barely above a whisper, said something that sounded like “How’re your birds, fellas?” Neri scowled. He wasn’t the sort of man one elbowed past, not even a pezzonovante pretty boy like Fontane.

“We was just talking about you,” Clemenza said. “That statue you busted, up in your room there, you know that thing cost three grand?”

“You got a good deal on it,” Fontane said. “I’d have guessed five.”

He’d never been close to Michael, but he presumed to cross the room and, with his free arm, embrace him. Michael did not react. He said nothing.

Hagen had no use for show business people.

Hal Mitchell appeared in the doorway, now in his tux, too, breathless and apologizing. “It’s just that the opening act’s already on and-”

“First thing.” Fontane lifted the satchel as high as he could reach. “Here’s this.” He dropped it. It landed hard on the desk in front of Michael. It sounded like money. “Airmail from Frank Falcone. He sends his regrets, and so does Mr. Pignatelli.”

Presumably it was a “loan” from the pension fund of the Hollywood unions Falcone controlled-an investment in the Castle in the Clouds.

Michael remained seated. He looked at the satchel. Other than that, he was motionless. His expression couldn’t have been more blank if he’d spent all afternoon dead.

A vein in the singer’s temple began to twitch.

Michael ran his finger around the rim of his empty glass.

The other men kept still, letting Fontane and Mike stare each other down and waiting for Fontane to say what the second thing was. It seemed unthinkable that this, such a small favor in return for all that had been done on his behalf, would have provoked such a childish outburst.

Hagen would never understand Fontane’s lack of gratitude. Ten years ago, on Connie’s wedding day, Hagen had walked away with two favors to carry out: getting Enzo Aguello his American citizenship and getting Johnny the part in that war movie. Since then, Enzo had been a faithful friend, even standing unarmed at the hospital alongside Michael when two cars full of men had come to kill Vito, an act of bravery that probably saved the Don’s life. What had Johnny Fontane ever given back to the Corleones?

No one had put a gun to Johnny’s head to sign a contract with the Les Halley Orchestra, yet Vito Corleone had to send a man to put a gun to Halley’s to get him out of it. The Corleones had gotten Jack Woltz to cast him in that war picture, which Johnny would have had in the first place if he hadn’t sport-fucked a starlet Woltz was in love with. Hagen shuddered. After the murders of so many people, how was it possible that what stayed with him in his nightmares was Luca taking a machete and hacking off the head of Woltz’s racehorse? Something Hagen hadn’t even seen. And something Johnny didn’t even know about, since Woltz, as expected, had hushed it up. Another gift from the Corleones: the blessings of ignorance. The Corleones had even bought Fontane an Academy Award. All those favors, and this was how he acted?

The silence in the room thickened.

Fontane shifted his weight from foot to foot. Did he really think he could win a battle of nerves with Michael Corleone?

Finally, Fontane let out a deep breath. “All right, but here’s the second thing.” He pointed to his throat. “I’m sorry as hell, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go on.”

All Michael said was “Is that right?”

Clemenza pursed his lips and flicked a softened toothpick past Fontane’s ear. “I thought Fredo’s doctor friend fixed that. Your throat. The Jew surgeon, what’s-his-face. Jules Stein.”

“Segal,” Johnny corrected. “He did.” He looked around the room. “Which reminds me. You guys seen Fredo? I got something for him. A present. A present from me.”

“His plane was delayed,” Hagen said.

Fontane shrugged. “It’ll wait, I guess,” he said. “Look, fellas, you know me. I’m a pro.” The stage whisper made him seem like one of those women who do it to make men come closer. “My voice is good, but my throat?” He shook his head. “Not a hundred percent. Even so, I been doing these shows here, filling up the joint. Today I had a terrific recording session in L.A. Sometimes you just know. Here’s the rub. On the plane back here, I fell asleep. When I woke up, my throat? Awful sore. So I was thinking-”

“Your first mistake right there,” Clemenza said.

“-I should gargle some salt water and hit the hay. I’m no good like this. Numbnuts could go long.” Morrie “Numbnuts” Streator was Fontane’s long-suffering opening act, a comic he’d rescued from the Catskills. “He’s on now. He’s killin’ ’em. Ask the sarge.”

No one did. The issue here wasn’t how much the guests were enjoying the blue jokes.

“I took the liberty,” Fontane said, “of calling Buzz Fratello. He and Dotty don’t have a show tonight. They could do it. Step in for me. In fact, they’re on their way over right now.”

“Yeah?” said Clemenza, impressed. “The more I see that Buzz, the more I like him.”

“No can do, Johnny,” Hal said. He had not been invited to come in the room and, like Neri, had remained just outside the doorway. “Buzz Fratello and Dotty Ames are under contract across the way.” Meaning the Kasbah, which the Chicago outfit controlled. “Exclusively.”

“They don’t start there until next weekend. This thing’s just a private show, right? A party. It’s no different than someone singing in one of the lounges afterward. We all do that.”

Michael remained still, his eyes on Fontane. After a very long time, Michael reached up and flicked his fingertips backhanded against his own jawbone, a gesture so identical to the late Don’s it gave Hagen chills.

“Mike,” Fontane said. “Michael.” He was getting nowhere. You had to hand it to the guy, though. A different sort of person would have turned around and looked at the other people in the room, trying to read anything he could from the less inscrutable faces. He might even have made a wisecrack-Fontane’s nature, most of the time. But Johnny held his spot. “Don Corleone. I have the greatest respect for you. I mean that. But this? This is just one show.”

Michael folded his hands on the desk. He didn’t even blink. Finally he cleared his throat. After the long stillness, it had the effect of a gunshot.

“What you do,” Michael said, “is of no concern to me. Get out.”

Chapter 10

FRANK FALCONE had a hundred grand on that fight at the Cleveland Armory. He was going to be ringside, he told Nick Geraci, even if it meant Geraci swimming to shore with Falcone lashed to his back. Don Forlenza offered the services of one of his boats. Laughing Sal Narducci pointed out that the bigger ones were already at the fight. There was nothing left but fishing boats unfit to go that far in open water during a storm.

It was not a long flight: maybe fifteen minutes. Geraci told them not to worry, he’d flown in conditions a hundred times worse than this-which of course he had not-and he went to ready the plane. He radioed the tower at Burke Lakefront Airport, which issued a staunch warning not to take off. He pretended not to hear.

The twin-engine airplane carrying Tony Molinari, Frank Falcone, Richard “the Ape” Aspromonte, Lefty Mancuso, and their pilot, officially listed as Gerald O’Malley, lifted off from Rattlesnake Island and into the dark sky. From the moment they were airborne, the flight was a struggle. He was so preoccupied with the challenges the storm threw his way that he wasn’t at all sure if there was anything wrong with the fuel. Probably there wasn’t. He’d checked both tanks before takeoff. He switched to the other tank not so much as a precaution but because he needed to focus on other things. As he strained though the soupy sky to see the lights of Cleveland, he thought he heard the engine sputtering, and without thinking he switched the tanks again and blurted something to the tower about sabotage, which, under these conditions, would have been difficult to assess for a pilot ten times more experienced than Nick Geraci.

The plane made its hapless approach toward Cleveland. The pilot’s last words to the tower were “Sono fottuto.” Translation: “I’m fucked.”

Then, a mile from shore, the plane plowed into the frothy brown chop of Lake Erie.

Geraci had been hit hard playing football in school, much harder in the ring. Once, at Lake Havasu, he’d been in a speedboat driven by his father and slammed into an aluminum dock. The hardest tackle, the most brutal punch, and that speedboat crash he’d somehow survived combined would have felt about half as bad as smacking into Lake Erie in an airplane.

The plane flipped. What felt like a moment later, Geraci was underwater. His door was jammed. He worked his legs free and started stomping a bigger hole in the glass of the windshield. The water was completely black. As he tried to get through the hole, a hand grabbed his arm. It was too dark to know whose hand it was. He tried to pull the man with him, through the hole in the windshield, to safety. The man was stuck. If Geraci hung on, they’d both die. He was about out of breath. The grip was strong, digging deep into the flesh of his arm. Geraci pried off the fingers, feeling and hearing the bones actually break.

Geraci swam free of the sinking wreck. He used the sound of the pounding rain to find the surface. His lungs spasmed and his Adam’s apple bucked. A tingling feeling shot down his arms. He felt a twinge, almost a draining feeling, at the top of his skull. He’d never make it to the top. He was going to breathe water. This was it. Have a good last thought, something worthy, but all he could think of was this filthy water, near home, and how this was where he was going to die. He kept swimming. His mother had loved to swim. His mother! Ah. That was a good last thought. He loved her. She was a good mother, a good woman. He could see her. She was younger than when he’d last seen her. Now she was sipping a martini and reading a movie magazine beside the public pool in his old neighborhood. She was dead, too.

Johnny Fontane, along with his very special guests Buzz Fratello and the lovely and talented Miss Dotty Ames, finished their boffo show at the Beautiful Oasis Room at the Castle in the Sand with a lengthy and hilarious medley of songs about booze, performed for a crowd that didn’t yet know thing one about the crash. It was a crowd, invitation only, largely made up of Teamsters officials from all over America, along with their wives (or more youthful simulacra). Michael Corleone had also, as an olive branch, invited a few select others-food, lodging, and a thousand dollars worth of chips, all on the house. Because it was a private party, even those who were ordinarily unable to set foot in Las Vegas were able to attend. For example: right by the stage was Don Molinari’s brother Butchie (who’d done time for hijacking and extortion) and several other top men from San Francisco. In the men’s room, trying to urinate and cursing inventively at his prick in Italian, was Carlo Tramonti (manslaughter; grand theft; arson; insurance fraud), the boss of New Orleans and a rising power in Havana. There was at least one member representing each of the other New York Families, each accompanied by women and bodyguards. The pale man in the gigantic sunglasses in the booth all the way in the back was Chicago’s Louie “the Face” Russo (possession of stolen goods; aggravated assault; bribing a federal agent), believed by some members of the FBI to be “in line for the still vacant position of ‘capo di tutti i capi’ of the entire so-called La Cosa Nostra.” Together, the appearance of all these people had provided enough cover to fly in several of the Corleones’ own associates from New York without arousing suspicion. Also noteworthy-particularly since they were right by the stage and had come in for so much good-hearted innuendo-laden needling-were those blushing, happy honeymooners, the former Miss Susan Zaluchi and her new husband, Ray Clemenza. C’mon, folks: Put your hands together. Let’s hear it for ’em.

In his own black velvet booth, Michael Corleone leaned back and took a long drag of his cigarette. He looked at his watch. It was Swiss, more than fifty years old. It had once belonged to a marine named Vogelsong, who’d used his dying breath to say he wanted Michael to have it.

By now, if everything had gone right, everyone on that airplane should be dead.

Michael had seen planes crash. Up close. It was all too easy for him to picture the terror on the men’s faces as the plane went down. He shook his head. He didn’t want to think about it.

Instead, he’d think about this: His plan had worked. He’d had setbacks, collateral damage, and midcourse corrections, but in the end, all had worked.

Now the Commission could meet. Hagen was wrong: no agreement would last unless it involved Chicago, but no peace involving Chicago would be in the Corleones’ best interest unless Louie Russo came to the table motivated. This crash should motivate him plenty.

Michael had probably never smoked a whole cigarette so fast or enjoyed one more. He lit another and inhaled deeply.

He’d done what he needed to do. Period. Because of that, he’d sleep just fine. After all this was wrapped up in a month or so, he’d take a vacation and sleep twelve hours a day. Had he ever, as an adult, taken a vacation? Those years he’d spent hiding in Sicily were a lot of things, but a vacation? No. During the war, he’d taken liberty- Hawaii, New Zealand. But a family vacation? Never. He and Kay and the kids should go to Acapulco. Maybe see Hawaii again, at peace. Why not? Clown around with Anthony and Mary the way Pop always made time to do, get buried in the sand, rub oil on Kay’s sexy back, maybe see if he could get her pregnant again. He’d wear flowery shirts and dance the mambo.

Michael lifted his half-full water glass. We did it, Pop, he thought. We won.

“God almighty,” Clemenza said, red-faced from laughter and pointing a fat thumb at Fratello, who was racing around the stage like some frantic pillhead. “He’s something, eh?”

“Something,” Michael said.

Fontane had held back, doing quiet numbers and joking around in the ones that would have made him push his voice, but the brilliance he exuded even when he wasn’t trying-maybe especially then-was a thing of beauty. He was a punk, but he was an artist, too. Michael couldn’t be talked to the way Fontane had this afternoon, but by the same token he couldn’t stay mad at the guy.

Fratello? An embarrassment. Here was a guy who’d knocked around for years as “the cafone on the saxophone.” Then he’d put down the sax, started singing like a Negro but with a mamma-mia Italian accent, married a leggy blonde half his age, and bam: Buzz Fratello and Dotty Ames, stars of The Starbright Soap Variety Hour.

Fratello finished the set by sprinting across the stage, diving to the floor, sliding ten feet or so through Dotty’s legs, coming to a stop perfectly timed so he could roll over, look up at her crotch, and rub his eyes in comic disbelief. Fontane cracked up. Dotty helped Buzz up, and they all took a bow. The crowd rose to its feet. The singers left the stage. The ovation continued. The orchestra members kept the fanfare going; clearly, there would be an encore.

Michael felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Phone,” Hal Mitchell whispered. “It’s Tom.”

Michael nodded and put out his cigarette. Showtime. He glanced at Louie Russo’s table. Someone was whispering something in his ear, too, and when Michael made eye contact with the whisperer, the man looked away. Michael reached over and tapped Clemenza.

Seconds later-as the orchestra launched into a vampy take on “Mala Femmina” and Buzz, Dotty, and Fontane locked arms and gamboled back onstage for their encore-some of the implications of what may or may not have happened on Lake Erie, sketchy as the details were, must have dawned on Louie Russo. But by the time he peered over his sunglasses at the black velvet booth in the corner, it was empty. Even the candle had been blown out.

Nick Geraci’s head broke the surface. He gasped for air, and it surged down his arms and legs, and then he screamed. It was the first time he felt the excruciating pain from his cracked ribs and broken leg.

About a hundred yards away, a flaming oil slick marked the spot where the plane had smashed into Lake Erie. Bobbing in the middle of it were one of the wings, a big chunk of the side of the fuselage with the painted lion logo on it, and the upper half of what turned out to be Frank Falcone’s corpse.

Geraci wasn’t sure what had happened or whose fault it had been, though the pain and adrenaline made it hard to think clearly. He was tethered to reason only by his conviction that if everyone back there was dead, he might as well be. Rescue could mean death.

Through the rain he could see the haze of the Cleveland skyline. He swam away from it. North. Back to Rattlesnake Island, to Canada, a passing boat. Someplace where he could buy himself some time to work things out. Someplace where he’d have a shot at controlling his own fate. His leg felt like it was on fire with pain and his cracked ribs made it almost impossible to breathe, yet by the time the Coast Guard speedboat spotted him, Geraci was about a quarter mile from the crash site, in extreme shock, unconscious, his lungs filling with water, going down.

Concealed behind the parapets of the highest of the Castle in the Sand’s three Moorish towers and encased in a spire of mirrored glass was an unnamed, revolving ballroom where the ceremony would be held.

“I bet you’re smelling printer’s ink right now,” said Clemenza, giving Michael a gentle elbow. “You can about taste it, am I right? In the back of your throat, eh? Like oil, but worse.”

The reflection of Michael in the shiny brass elevator doors was sipping a crystal goblet of ice water. He looked like a put-together, invulnerable, slick-haired man of respect, with the wind at his back and the world by the balls.

“I’m tellin’ you,” Clemenza said. “I don’t think I ever seen your old man so-”

Michael nodded.

“Waterworks,” Clemenza said. “Only time in all the years I ever saw him like that.”

Clemenza had been the one who’d brought Michael to be straightened out, a few weeks after he returned to America from his exile in Sicily. The killings of Sollozzo and McCluskey, which had served to make his bones, had happened three years earlier. Clemenza had had tickets to a Dodgers game he’d gotten from a friend he had with the team. Second row, right behind the plate. It was the first game Michael had seen since they started letting Negroes play. He’d had no idea that this had happened, or when. He’d spent seven of the last eight years away from America, fighting and killing and in constant danger of being killed. He’d missed things. He hadn’t even been to his brother’s funeral. The Dodgers beat Chicago, 4-1.

On the way home, they stopped at what, when Michael left the country, had been the offices of a daily newspaper. One of Clemenza’s shylocks had, for the usual reasons, found himself in possession of the building. Clemenza said he needed to take a look at the place to figure out whether to rent it, sell it, or torch it. All of which was true.

When they entered the huge empty room where the printing press had been, there, in the pale late-summer light, sitting behind a long table, its blue paint peeling, were Tessio and Michael’s father. On the table were a tapered candle, a holy card, a pistol, and a knife. Michael knew what was coming: they were initiating him into the Family. After all that had happened, this was just a formality. It had been Michael’s own idea to kill those men-the man who’d arranged the hit on Vito Corleone and the crooked cop who, when he came to the hospital to finish the job, had had to settle for smashing Michael’s face. It had been his brother Sonny’s job, as acting Don, to okay those killings (Tessio had objected, saying it would be like “bringing a guy up from the minors to pitch in the World Series”). Later, Vito claimed he’d never wanted this life for Michael, but it had always been obvious he thought no one else could ever be good enough. At Michael’s initiation, his father mumbled a few unintelligible words before his shoulders started heaving. He began to sob. Clemenza followed suit. Tessio finished the job, in a combination of Sicilian and English, with saturnine eloquence. Afterward, they killed two bottles of Chianti. Vito couldn’t stop weeping. The smell of ink and grease registered on Michael, but somehow not the intensity of it. The next day, his clothes stank so badly they had to go in the trash. A week later, the building burned to the ground. Lightning, ruled the fire marshal. A month after that, the guy quit the fire department and moved to Florida. Now he fronted money-laundering operations down there-liquor stores, vending machines, real estate-and was engaged to Sonny’s widow, Sandra.

The elevator doors opened. Michael and Pete boarded it and rode it together to the top.

“Forlenza’d never clip his own godson.” Clemenza-who, on Michael’s orders, had killed Carlo Rizzi, the father of Michael’s own godson-sucked three olives off his toothpick and kept the pick in the corner of his mouth. “I also don’t think it’s possible a guy from another outfit could set foot on that fucking island without the Jew knowing about it,” Clemenza said. “I say accident.”

The best information Hagen had been able to get was that there had been one survivor. This had not been confirmed. If the survivor was one of the two Dons or one of their men, it would look better. If it was Geraci, what would happen next was hard to figure. It might or might not be possible to pass him off as some private pilot named O’Malley with no connection to the Corleone Family. Also, it was going to be nearly impossible to learn what he knew or had been able to figure out. And then there was the matter of the thunderstorm. The storm might take the blame for everything, which would keep the crash from having its full effect. But Michael was already plotting how he might use any uncertainty over the cause of the crash to his advantage. “Accidents don’t happen,” Michael said, “to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”

“So sabotage?”

“I don’t know. I agree, Don Forlenza wouldn’t kill his own godson, even if he had a reason to. As far as we know, he didn’t have a reason. But I’m not so sure it’s impossible to sneak onto that island somehow.”

“If not Forlenza-”

Michael shrugged and arched an eyebrow and kept his eyes fixed on Pete’s.

“La testa di cazzo.” Clemenza pulled out the elevator’s emergency stop knob with one hand, pounding the wall with the other. “Russo.”

Michael nodded, as if in thought. “One airplane,” he said, “and who gets hurt? They hit us, they hit Molinari, they hit their own guy Falcone, a reckless man who maybe they thought had stepped too far out on his own, and it all looks like Forlenza ordered it. Their four biggest competitors not just here, in Las Vegas, but in the western half of the country.”

“ ‘Everything west of Chicago is Chicago,’ ” Clemenza said, mocking. “Quello stronzo.”

“If you’re right,” Michael said, “turd only scratches the surface of what that guy is.” He shook his head in a way he was sure looked sincerely rueful.

Clemenza filled his fat cheeks with air, exhaled slowly, then pushed the button in. When the elevator doors opened, a few dozen people were already there, scattered throughout the ballroom. Clemenza patted Michael on the back. “Don’t let that shit ruin this thing here,” he whispered. “Enjoy it, okay? You went to all that trouble to have your face fixed where that cop fucked it up. Show it off a little. Smile.”

Michael had lied.

Not lied exactly. More like: he’d led a horse to water, and Pete Clemenza had bent over and drunk. If Pete blamed Russo that fast, he wouldn’t be alone.

The truth was that Michael Corleone had sought to hurt all four of his biggest rivals in the West. That was the easy part. The hard part had been to do it without taking the blame. By orchestrating the incident so that not another living soul knew all of what he’d done (not Hagen, not Pete, nobody), he might have done that, too.

Frank Falcone was a menace. Ever since Michael had had Moe Greene killed, Falcone had been the biggest roadblock to the Corleones’ expansion into Las Vegas. Pignatelli would be more obedient to Chicago than Falcone was, yet because of his business relationship with the Corleones-both his involvement in the Castle in the Clouds and the satchel of cash he’d had Johnny Fontane deliver as a tribute for killing Falcone-he posed no threat.

Tony Molinari was a longtime ally, true, but his increasing wariness about Michael’s setting up a base of operations in Lake Tahoe, a couple hundred miles from San Francisco, was a problem destined to escalate. Unfortunately, he’d become a cancer best removed now.

Forlenza was an old man. Disgracing him while he was still alive was better than killing him. He’d been bragging to the other Dons for years about his little island fortress. He’d get all or part of the blame for the crash. Even if no one came after him for revenge, there would be pressure from his own men for him to step down. Sal Narducci-who’d struck a deal with Michael Corleone and overseen the sabotage of the plane-would become Don. After waiting for the job for twenty years, he was a good bet to keep his mouth shut about how he finally got it. Installing Narducci as Don would also sever Cleveland ’s ties to the Barzinis.

The best part of the plan was what it would do to Chicago. It would be impossible to prove that Russo had been behind it and equally impossible to disprove it. But once Michael let the members of the Commission know that the dead pilot O’Malley had really been his new capo, all the right people would consider who’d had the most to gain.

Would Forlenza kill his own godson? No.

Would Michael Corleone kill his new hotshot capo? Who could imagine?

That left Chicago.

Michael had managed to hit Chicago without killing a single one of Russo’s men. Michael would thus not have to worry about Russo seeking revenge. The only tangible loss Russo would suffer was that now he’d come to the peace table dealing from a position of weakness. But that was all Michael needed.

The most difficult decision Michael had made was to kill Geraci.

Without question, Geraci had done a brilliant job with the drug business, but his aggressiveness was an issue. His ambition was boundless, larger than even he himself understood. Though he’d been unswervingly loyal, his connection to Forlenza would always be a concern. He’d always be sore about Tessio. And when Michael had made Fredo sotto capo, Geraci had asked him, in public, if he’d lost his mind. They’d been at dinner at Patsy’s. No one else had been at the table. No one else had heard. Geraci had apologized. But few Dons would tolerate such disrespect. It might have seemed petty, but it convinced Michael Corleone that all the smaller concerns about him were well founded and destined to grow more severe.

Still, only the last justified having Geraci killed. Even that might have been forgiven. There had been no betrayal. Geraci’s assets easily outweighed his liabilities. Michael liked him.

Sacrificing Fausto Geraci, Jr., was not what Vito Corleone would have done.

It was, rather, the act of a marine who’d seen at least a thousand good men die, seemingly at random: a necessary evil swapped for the chance to achieve a greater good.

It was a perfect plan, unless it was true that one of the men had survived.

Clemenza had lied, too.

Michael’s initiation was not the only time he’d seen the Don like that. Still frail from his own gunshot wounds, Vito had returned home from burying Santino so wracked with grief it haunted everyone who’d seen it. Michael hadn’t seen it. The people who had-Michael’s mother, his sister and her husband, his brothers, Tom and Fredo, and Pete Clemenza, who, soon after the sobbing started, embraced his friend and went home, leaving the family to themselves-carried with them the image of that broken man and the sounds of his horrible wails. They had never spoken of it, not to one another and certainly not to anyone who hadn’t been there, not even Michael.

Several people who’d been at the Fontane show made an appearance in the rotating ballroom. A reception, that’s all it seemed to be. There was no discernible mass exodus of the union officials, orchestra members, or women. As far as any of the thirteen new men might have been able to tell, one moment those other people were there. The next, made members of the Corleone Family were carrying two long tables, already covered with white linen tablecloths, to the center of the parquet dance floor, and every single one of the outsiders was gone.

Someone hit the lights.

Throughout the room, men put hands on the shoulders of the inductees and in hoarse whispers congratulated them (there would have been fourteen if Fredo hadn’t made Figaro miss his plane). These were men the new guys had looked up to for years-running their neighborhoods, dressed in tailored suits and holding forth in barbershops and at lunch counters and on empty peach crates in front of certain garages, driv-ing fancy cars and fucking fancier women, dispensing favors and looking out for their own, running a court of last resort for a maligned people who needed one, operating in a world that, back then, had seemed mysterious, powerful, and unattainable. Outside the dark ballroom, oblivious tourists swam in the rooftop pool.

When the ballroom lights came back up, the table was set: thirteen place settings, each with a votive candle, a holy card, a dagger, and-in a gesture meant to denote the Family’s expansion into the Wild West (Fredo’s idea, in other words)-a gleaming, unloaded Colt.45.

The thirteen new men were shown to their places. The others-fifty-two of them were able to make it, some who’d been at the show, some who’d slipped into town and into the Castle in the Sand just for this-sat in the chairs around the circle.

Michael Corleone sat with the rest of his men. He milked the silence. He was not a superstitious man, but he worked with superstitious men and he knew that they were counting and recounting the number of men in the middle and not liking it that the number kept being thirteen. But the risk of letting them dwell on that pointless coincidence seemed worth the reward of letting the men at the tables stew in their barely concealed anxiety. To a person, they were transparently trying, and failing, to look as if this were just another moment in their lives. They knew who he was and that he was in charge of this, and so it was comical to watch them try not to look at him. He could hear the voice of Sergeant Bradshaw, his old DI: Your fool deniiiies fear. A maRINE is unafraid to admit fear. Your fool scoffs at danger. Your fool ignorrrrrres danger. In the face of danger, a… MARINE… IGNORES… NOTHING.

At last Michael stood.

“Let me tell you the story of a boy,” he said, approaching the tables. “He was born one thousand, one hundred and forty years ago in the Sicilian countryside, near the town of Corleone. His childhood was one of wealth and happiness, until, at the age of twelve, the Arab hordes, on their way north through the mountains, slaughtered the boy’s parents. The boy, hiding in a clay pot, peeked out and saw the blade of a scimitar decapitate his mother, and from the dead lips of her severed head she shouted words of love to her only son. These murders were acts of savagery. The Arabs were protecting nothing, avenging nothing. They did not so much as pick a tomato from the vine, a grape from the field, or an olive from the grove. They killed for the sake of killing and proceeded north toward their objective, Palermo.”

Michael took a cigar from the breast pocket of his tuxedo jacket. More than one of the men at the tables rubbed their damp palms against the sides of their thighs.

“The boy’s name,” said Michael, “was Leolucas.” Michael paused to light the cigar and let the importance of the name sink in. “Though only twelve years old, he managed not only to run his family’s estate but also to work the land as long and as hard as someone twice his age. But as the years passed, he heard, in the solitude of the fields, a summons to his one true destiny. He sold his assets, gave his money to the poor, and became a monk. After many years, he returned to the village of his youth, where he performed countless selfless acts and was beloved by all who knew him. He died peacefully in his bed at the age of one hundred.”

“Cent’anni!” shouted Clemenza. Every man who had a drink knocked it back.

“Five hundred years later,” Michael said, circling the men at the tables, “the intercession of Leolucas protected the town of Corleone from an outbreak of the Black Plague. And in 1860, more than a thousand years after his death, Leolucas avenged the murders of his parents by appearing as a tower of white flame before the occupying army of the Bourbon French, spooking them from Corleone and into the hands of Garibaldi, who drove them from Sicily altogether. These miracles, and many others at the site of his tomb, were affirmed by the Holy Father in Rome. Leo-lucas is now and forever-” Michael took a regal puff of his cigar, strode to one of the tables, and took the holy card from in front of Tommy Neri, who was one of the thirteen. He kissed the card and set it back down. “-the patron saint of Corleone. Gentlemen?”

He made a sweeping motion with his hand. Each of the thirteen kissed the pasteboard image of St. Leolucas.

“Only a few years after the terrifying appearance of Saint Leolucas in the tower of flame,” Michael said, “in a cottage adjoining the fields once owned and tilled by the sainted Leolucas, another boy was born. His childhood was also happy, until, also at the age of twelve, men came to kill his father. The murder was accomplished with three blasts from a lupara. His mother was stabbed. Gutted, like an animal. Mortally wounded, she, too, managed to shout words of love to her son. The boy escaped. The murderers came after him, knowing that someday he would try to kill them. That man’s name-” Michael took another long draw off the cigar. He felt his own destiny flow through him. “-was Vito Andolini. He immigrated, alone, to the cold shores of America, where, to keep the murderers from finding him, he changed his surname, adopting the name of his hometown. It was one of the few sentimental gestures he ever made, all having to do in some way with la famiglia”-and here he smacked his chest with his fist-“with his beloved figliolanza”-and here he touched his chin. “He worked hard, helped his friends, built an empire, and never harbored an immodest thought. One day he did indeed return to Sicily and avenge the death of his parents. Vito Corleone, who earlier this year died peacefully in his beloved garden, was my father. I, Michael Corleone, am his son. But”-and he indicated the men in the outer circle-“these men of honor, too, are la famiglia Corleone. If you wish to be with us, we invite you to be reborn as such.”

Michael took his seat. Fredo had been meant to perform the next part. Despite what people like Nick Geraci thought, Michael’s installation of his older brother as sotto capo had been more a means of encouragement than a job. Fredo had been given a few narrowly defined responsibilities, a small crew of reliable but mediocre men, a whorehouse in the desert, and some symbolic responsibilities, which he was discharging with his usual inconsistency. Michael was resigned to this. No matter how hard you beat a donkey, it will never become a racehorse.

Clemenza planted his cane on the floor, grunted loudly, and stood.

Undoubtedly, each of the thirteen already understood the formalities of this arrangement. But there were conventions to observe. Clemenza began by explaining the structure of the Family. Michael Corleone was the Godfather, whose authority is absolute. Frederico Corleone was the sotto capo. Rocco Lampone and himself, Pete Clemenza, were the caporegimes. Clemenza made no mention of the role of consigliere. This had been the case since the death of Genco Abbandando, first because Hagen, who was not Sicilian, could never participate in, observe, or even be mentioned in these ceremonies, then because during Vito’s brief stint as consigliere, the books had remained closed. Clemenza made no mention of Nick Geraci at all.

“Before you join us,” Clemenza said, “you gotta be clear on some things.” He switched to Sicilian and continued, hobbling around the perimeter of the thirteen. “This thing we have is not a thing of business. It is a thing of honor. If you agree to join, this thing of ours must come before country. It must come before God. It must come before your own wife, your own mother, your own children. If you are summoned and your mother is on her deathbed, you will kiss her fevered brow and leave to do the bidding of your superiors.”

He stopped in front of the chair where he’d started. He leaned forward on his cane, so far it seemed he might topple over. “Do you understand? Do you agree?”

The men unhesitatingly gave their assent.

In return, Clemenza nodded slowly and sat.

Michael again stood and, as if to compensate for Clemenza’s frailty, approached the tables with great, vigorous strides. He’d had too much to eat, too much to drink, too much to do, and too little sleep. Acid rose in his throat.

“There are,” he said, “two laws you must obey without question. You must never betray the secrets of this society, observing the ancient tradition of omertà. The penalty for violating this law is death. You must never violate the wife or children of another member. The penalty for violating this law is death. Do you vow, with your very life, to keep these laws?”

They did.

The older men would have noted the absence of a third law, sworn in every initiation Vito Corleone had performed: You must never get involved in the narcotics trade. No one said anything about this, not even a murmur.

“You come in alive,” Michael said, “and you go out dead.”

The day I asked you to marry me, Kay, I said our businesses would be legitimate in five years.

Michael approached Tommy Neri. “The instruments by which you live and die are the gun”-here Michael bit down on the cigar and picked up the Colt with one hand-“and the knife.” He picked up the dagger with the other. He set the weapons back down in front of Tommy, crossed over each other.

“Do you agree,” Michael said, “that, when called upon, you will use the gun and the knife to help this Family?”

“Yes, Godfather.”

Michael took a puff on his cigar and used it to light Tommy Neri’s votive candle. Then he pointed to Tommy’s right hand. Tommy extended it. Michael picked up the dagger, pricked Tommy’s trigger finger, folded it into his palm, and squeezed his fist hard, careful to apply the pressure away from the wound and thus increase the amount of blood.

One by one, the other twelve men gave the same answer and submitted to the same ritual.

Michael returned to the end of the table. He tapped Tommy’s closed fist. Tommy opened it, then brought both hands together, the bloody right and the clean left, turned his palms up and cupped them. Michael picked up the holy card of Saint Leolucas, lit it with the votive candle, and dropped it into Tommy Neri’s hands. “Back and forth,” he whispered.

Tommy juggled the flaming saint from hand to hand.

“If you ever betray your friends,” Michael said, “you will burn.” He blew a small puff of cigar smoke into Tommy’s unflinching face. “Like the picture of our beloved patron saint now burns your bloodied palm. Do you agree to this?”

“Yes, Godfather.”

Michael watched the card turn fully to ash. Then, tenderly as a lover, he rubbed the ash into Tommy’s palms, then kissed him, softly, on each cheek.

One by one, the other twelve men submitted to the same ritual and gave the same answer.

“You are now qualified men,” Michael finally said, “Gli uomini qualificati. Gentlemen, please introduce yourself to your brothers.”

The room exploded in a cacophony of congratulations, popping champagne corks, Italian toasts and benedictions. The men in the outer circle maintained their positions to ensure that the new members did in fact dutifully go around the room introducing themselves, kissing the cheeks of every man in the outer circle, missing no one. Michael had already kissed them. He ducked out the back door and down the stairs. He knew that what might greet him at home was news of the escalation of his troubles. But there was a chance his day was over. There was a chance he could get some rest and fight his fights with a clear head tomorrow. Already, he felt better, getting out of that room, away from the smoke and the liquor fumes. The only kisses he wanted were from his wife, his son, his daughter.

You go out dead.

He made it to the car. While he waited for Al Neri to collect the empty pistols and catch up to him, Michael felt his stomach lurch. For a moment he fought it. Then he dropped to his knees and vomited. It all came up-the strega, the whiskey, the food Enzo had prepared so lovingly, everything from the picnic, and what looked like every last kernel of the movie popcorn.

“You okay, boss?” The pistols clanked against one another in the pillowcase Neri was using to carry them, like Jacob Marley’s chains in the production of A Christmas Carol Michael had been in as a kid. Neri was the chief of security here, but humping down fifteen flights of stairs and through various lobbies and hallways with a pillowcase full of thirteen pistols? Christ.

“Oh, yeah,” Michael said. He was drenched in sweat. He managed, however unsteadily, to stand up. He’d ripped the knee of his tux pants. “I’m perfect. Let’s go.”

The daggers that had been used to cut the men’s trigger fingers were theirs to keep. They were dazzling, jewel-handled things that had cost the Family nothing. Nick Geraci had a guy.

Chapter 11

FREDO CORLEONE whipped his rented Chevrolet up the drive and slammed on the brakes under the valet parking overhang. In back, Figaro woke up cursing in English, Capra in Sicilian. “See you up there, fellas,” Fredo said, hopping out. He peeled off a twenty for the valet, then saw that he was a regular and paused. “Just curious. What’s the biggest tip you ever got?”

The man looked at him funny. “A hundred,” he said. “Once.”

Fontane, Fredo thought. He just knew it. He peeled off two hundred. “Find me a good spot, okay, and get those bums out of the back first. So whose record did I break?”

“Yours, sir,” the valet said. “Just last week.”

Fredo laughed, went inside, and broke into a jog. Three in the morning, but inside the Castle in the Sand about the only way a person would know it wasn’t a more decent hour was the presence of hypnotized women in housecoats and curlers, cigarettes dangling from the corners of their grim, unmade mouths, feeding coins into the slot machines as if it were a part of making supper for an ungrateful family. Not a lot of people run through casinos, but none of those dames, and no one at the blackjack tables either, so much as looked up. The pit bosses looked, of course, and so did the eye in the sky if there was anyone up there, but these were men who’d seen Fredo Corleone hurry past them before, which is another way of saying that if anyone not associated with the security cameras or the Nevada Gaming Commission asked them if they’d seen Mr. Corleone go by, they’d have frowned and said “Who?”

He lived in a suite on the third floor-five rooms, including a den with a bar and a tournament-sized pool table. He’d been gone for two weeks, attending to business in New York and trying to help his mother get squared away for the move west. As soon as he opened the door, he knew in his gut that something was wrong. The first concrete thing he noticed was that the curtains were drawn and the place was inky dark. Fredo never closed his curtains, and he never turned off his television set, even when it went to the test pattern, even when he left town. When he slept during the day, he used one of those masks. He jumped back into the hall, out of the line of fire, and reached into his jacket for his gun.

No gun. That gorgeous Colt Peacemaker, the gun that had brought down ten thousand desperadoes in a thousand dusty movies, lost somewhere in the wilds of greater Detroit.

At the other end of the hall a door opened and some old frump in a hairnet and a housecoat came out, carrying a tin cup full of coins and an actual horseshoe. Behind her trailed some milquetoast in an undershirt, Bermuda shorts, and a shiny white cowboy hat he must have bought earlier that day. Fredo froze. There was no noise at all from his room. The frump must have seen Fredo crouching outside a door down the hall, but she kept her head down and headed straight for the stairs. The husband waved, his face contorted into a desperate rictus.

The stairwell door closed.

Fredo counted to ten. “Hello?” he called. “Who’s in there?”

He should have gone and gotten security. But he was exhausted and not thinking straight. He just wanted to grab a quick shower and get up to the ballroom. He did not want to be the candyass who called hotel security because some new maid hadn’t been told never to shut Mr. Corleone’s curtains or turn off his television set.

There was no noise at all. That had to be it, he thought: a new maid. As he walked in and reached for the light, the thought struck him that this was exactly the moment when guys got a slug right between the eyes, when they let down their guard and thought, Ah, fuck it, it’s nothing.

The instant he flicked the switch, the toilet flushed. His heart nearly knocked the meat from his ribs, but before he had a chance to run or duck or even shout “Who’s there?,” out of the open door of the bathroom came a naked woman, platinum blond. She screamed.

“My God,” she said. “You scared the crap out of me!”

Zee crap. Thick French accent. It sounded real. Fredo closed the hallway door behind him and felt his heart slow down a little. “Do I know you?”

She walked toward him and smiled. Her bush was jet black, though her eyebrows were also blond. “I’ve been waiting for you do you know how long?”

“Seriously, sweetheart. Who are you? What the hell is going on here? Who let you in?”

“Since five o’clock in the afternoon,” she said. She pointed to the champagne bucket next to his bed. “The ice, it finished melting hours ago.” She shrugged, which made her little tits bounce. She had dull red nipples so big around they practically covered the whole business. “I’m sorry, but the bottle, it is empty now, too.”

The accent was real. She was also slurring her words.

“Honey,” he said. “I don’t think you know who you’re dealing with, okay?”

“I think I might.” I sink. She jutted one of her hips and stuck out a pouty lower lip. “You’re Fredo Corleone, yes?” Fraid.

“Why don’t you start by telling me who you are?”

She extended her hand and giggled. “My name is Rita. Marguerite. But”-she dipped a naked shoulder, shy now-“I use Rita now.”

Fredo didn’t shake her hand. “Hello, Rita. The reason I shouldn’t have you thrown in jail for breaking and entering is what?”

“It’s not enough that a naked woman is waiting in your room to make love to you, huh?”

“I’m losing my patience with you, doll.”

“Ah!” She threw back her head, exasperated. “You are no fun. Johnny Fontane sent me, all right? I am”-she laughed, as if at a rueful private joke-“I am a present for you, no? Johnny said, you know, that I was to be naked and in your bed, waiting.” She blushed. “But a girl, she drinks the champagne, she’s going to have to tee-tee.”

Tee-tee? “That was real nice of Mr. Fontane, but it’s awful late, you’re awful drunk, and I’m awful tired, on top of which I still got one more thing to do tonight. This morning. Whatever. You should go, hon. If you need a cab or something, I got it.”

She nodded, turned around, and went to get her clothes, which she’d folded so neatly on the nightstand it broke his heart. She had nice muscular legs. First he’d noticed it.

He went into his closet to grab his own change of clothes. When he came back the only thing she’d managed to put on was a flowery cotton bra. He’d never understand that. You’d think they’d always cover up their snatch first, since that’s usually what came off last, but leave a woman alone to get dressed, and most of them start with the bra. She had her head in her hands, and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, crying.

Drunk broads, he thought, shaking his head.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Sorry, nothin’,” Fredo said. “Look, it’s not any sort of, I don’t know-” He put his hand on her cheek. She looked up at him. Real tears, and she was fighting them. She looked mad at herself. “You’re a beautiful girl, okay? It’s just that it’s late, and I got someplace to be. It’s business. I mean, I guess if you really want to wait here, I-”

She shook her head. “You do not understand.” She wiped her face with her underpants. They matched the bra. He caught a glimpse of the label: Sears. “I don’t do this. I mean-” She rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling. “I mean, I do this, just not-” She let out a deep breath. “I’m a dancer, okay? I’m in a show, now, a tasteful one, too. Not even topless. This was supposed to be-a lark. That’s the word, yes? A dare I made to myself. I’m not a-”

Fredo got her a handkerchief. He’d been with a lot of broads since he’d moved to Las Vegas, and the one thing he’d learned about their crying is that it was always better to shut up and give them a nice handkerchief than to tell them everything would be okay.

He sat down next to her. He needed to get going. He ran his hand over her back. The little bit of her round ass he could see had skin tighter and smoother than most women, even really young ones, managed to have on their faces. Got to hand it to dancers, their bottom halves were something else. Finally, he just couldn’t take any more time for this. Johnny was just trying to be a good guy, but it was probably true he’d done her first and turned her head all around and gotten her to agree to do something that she wouldn’t have done in a million years back in whatever village in France she came from. “I got an idea,” he said.

She looked up at him. It looked like she’d gotten the tears under control.

“How much did Johnny pay you to come up here?”

“A thousand dollars.”

“Wait right here.”

Fredo went into the den, pulled back the hinged oil painting replica of the Mona Lisa, opened his safe, and got out two thousand-dollar bills. She’d probably never seen one of these before in her life, much less two. The government had hardly bothered to design it. The back just said ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS. And Cleveland on the front? What the fuck had Cleveland ever done? He folded the bills in half, came back out, and pressed them into her hand.

“Keep the thousand you already got,” he said, “and keep these, too. You don’t gotta feel bad you’re a whore, right, because how can you be a whore if we don’t, you know?”

“Fuck?” she said.

There was a hopeful tone in her voice that confused Fredo, as if fucking would cheer her up or something. He’d been trying not to even say fuck, since she was all bent out of shape about maybe being a fucking hooker. “Sure,” he said. “If we don’t fuck. Just one catch.”

She nodded, taking the money and slipping it into a pocket in the red dress beside her.

“All you have to do is go back to Johnny and, when he asks you how it was”-and he would, Fredo knew, that was just how Johnny was-“you got to promise to tell him”-Fredo paused to wink and flash her a grin-“that I was hands down the best you ever had.”

“Hands down,” she repeated, slipping on her underpants now. She seemed sad about it. “All right.”

“Attagirl,” he said.

The phone rang. It was Figaro, which is what he’d been calling the new bodyguard, whose name it embarrassed him not to be able to keep straight. Yes, Fredo said. He was fine.

As he watched her get dressed, he took off his shoes and socks and shirt.

He’d be up in no time, he said. Figaro said there were still guys up there. Fredo said that was good. Was Michael still there? He wasn’t. “Too bad.” Relieved, Fredo hung up.

He had stopped wearing undershirts a long time ago, after that one movie. After that, a guy wears an undershirt and these modern girls think he’s just off the boat. Only after he was standing there bare-chested in just his pants did it occur to him that if he was half the gentleman he was pretending to be, he’d either have waited for her to go or else himself gone into another room. Her dress was red satin. Somehow, with it on, seeing her like that and knowing about the cheap underwear underneath, he felt differently about her. He felt something.

“That’s a nice painting,” she said. She pointed to the Madonna in the small pine frame over his bed. The painting that had come with the room was a huge thing with an Indian on a white horse, slumped in the saddle, watching the sun set. “Did you paint it?”

“What? No.”

“Do you know the artist?”

“It’s just a painting, okay?”

“I had a long time to look at it. That model, she has no vanity. It’s a good piece.”

“A good piece?”

“I studied art.” She looked down. Her toenail polish was chipped. “A long time ago.”

“It is a good piece,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, grabbing her purse.

“Okay,” he said, walking her to the door.

She pulled out a cigarette. He reached in his pocket. “Shit,” he said. “I lost my lighter.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, tucking the cigarette behind his ear.

“Not really,” he said. He gave her back the cigarette. “Not my brand, honey.”

She leaned toward him. It had all the makings of a peck on the cheek, but something else Fredo had learned about these girls on the make in the west, a lot of things at three in the morning that have the look of something that would make sense by the rules of three in the afternoon turn into things the men asleep in their beds on Long Island would never believe. Her lips parted. His tongue obeyed, driving into her little wet mouth, sliding his hands through her coarse platinum hair. A tiny gasp came out of her that seemed to startle them both.

They looked into each other’s eyes. Hers grew wide, as if she’d just found an earring she’d lost. She was right, she wasn’t a pro. They don’t look at you like that.

“My life,” she said, “it is so fucking complicated.”

“Everybody thinks that,” Fredo said. “Probably you’re right, though. About you.”

This Rita had a crooked grin.

“Oh?” she said. “And what about you, eh?”

“I can’t complain,” he said. “Though I still do. I guess I got it all under control, though.”

“You think so?” With her index finger she touched his bare rib cage and did a little screwdriver thing.

They kissed again. Her mouth was sour from all that champagne, but he stayed with it.

“Fray-die Cor-le-o-ne,” she said.

If this hadn’t been three in the morning, it would have occurred to him right away that it was stupid to run the risk that someday this girl would blab about how she was bare-ass naked in front of Fredo Corleone and he paid her two grand not to fuck her. Why was he in any hurry to get upstairs? Anything worth being there for was over. “At your service,” he said.

“You dirty rat,” she said. She said it weird.

“Say what?”

“Nothing,” she said. She sighed heavily and reached for the doorknob. “See you in the funny papers, okay?”

Oh, right. She’d been doing an impression of some movie gangster. He put his hand on her hand. “Stay,” he said.

She screwed up that funny lopsided mouth. “I don’t know,” she said. “Will you take your money back?”

“I never paid you for that,” he said. “I paid you to give Johnny Fontane nightmares.”

She seemed deep in thought about this. “So I could just give him his money back, yes?”

Fredo smiled. “Perfect,” he said. “Tell him, you know, the thing I paid you to tell him. You want me to write it down or you got it?”

“Hands down,” she said. “Best I ever had. Got it.”

“And then tell him to take his money back,” he said, “it was that good.”

“I’m not sure about this,” she said. “Maybe-tomorrow? We could start over. A date or something?”

“Today’s tomorrow, baby.”

She still looked deep in thought. She put her finger in her mouth and sucked on it and ran it slowly down Fredo’s bare chest from his neck to his belt buckle. She kept her hand there.

“I love sex.” She said it like an admission of defeat. Her voice was small, too, not the husky voices people always talk about with French girls. She was still slurring her words. “It’s bad, you know, but like a man I love it.”

For a moment, the line-like a man I love it-went through Fredo like an electric shock. Though of course she didn’t mean it the way, for a split second, he was afraid she did. Then he snapped out of it and grabbed onto those little tits with both hands.

She moaned, but now she did sound like a pro. Trying too hard. It couldn’t feel that good, her tits.

They moved to the bed, and she undid his belt and yanked at his pants and his underwear. Fredo fell back on the bed. She stood over him and reached back to unzip her dress.

“Don’t,” he said.

She turned around for him to do it.

“Keep it on,” he said. “It’s dynamite.”

She shrugged and sat down beside him on the bed. They kissed for a while and she put her hand on his cock. He could have blamed it on all the drinking he’d done today-this morning and who knows how much he had waiting at the Detroit airport, though nothing since then. And also how tired he was, the jet lag. He didn’t, didn’t, didn’t want to think about the other thing. That never happened. And anyway he’d knocked up better showgirls than this here, in his sleep. Now that he was thinking about it, of course, he was doomed. So, okay, don’t think about my cock, he thought. He thought about her, kissing her and grabbing her tits and how great it would be to fuck her with that shiny dress on, which could happen in like ten seconds if he could just stop thinking about all the things he was thinking about. If he could just stop thinking at all. He really needed to go easier on the booze.

She dropped to her knees and took him in her mouth so fast he couldn’t say no. A terrible shiver went through him. “No,” he said, tugging her up to him by her armpits.

She looked hurt.

“I don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t be sore, okay? Come on and kiss me.”

She obeyed. He did keep her hand on him and tugged her flowered Sears underpants down and did the same for her. They kissed some more.

“How about you get on your knees?”

She sighed. She looked like she was losing her patience. She looked like a girl at work.

“No,” he said. “Like I said.” Then he tried to sound more tender. It wasn’t anything she’d done wrong. She seemed like a good egg who’d been willing to fuck him for nothing, probably because she’d heard rumors he was a dangerous gangster, but also because he’d been nice to her when he maybe didn’t have to. He positioned her on her knees and hiked up her red dress and grabbed himself and with the other hand groped for her cunt. She reached back to help him. Something about the vulnerability of that gesture made him go rock hard in her hand, and he was in, and he was going for it from thrust number one. He had to act and not think. He grabbed onto her hips, curling his fingers in by the bones. He told her to beg him for it. She started chanting about how badly she wanted it and not to stop and then just, over and over, big man, big man, big man, and he closed his eyes and sped up, as fast as he had the strength to go.

His body tensed and he cried out.

“Pull out,” she said, panting. “Big man. Pull out.” In that squeaky voice. “Big man.”

He didn’t. He ground his hips in a twitchy circle against her muscular dancer’s ass, oozing what little he had left into her. After that, his prick was so sensitive it hurt and he had to pull it out. It would have been sexy, dribbling little wet pearls onto her ass and that red dress. What could be better than that? He couldn’t have said why he didn’t do it.

That’s not true. He knew. He liked knocking them up. He couldn’t have said why.

Though that wasn’t the whole truth either.

He flopped on his back. He closed his eyes and hit his head with the heel of his hand, a half-dozen little staccato blows. With every fiber of his being, he hated himself.

Rita rolled onto her side and into a ball. Naturally, she started crying again.

He got up and went to the windows and threw the curtains open.

Better. He did love that neon light. It wouldn’t be dark much longer.

The phone rang again. He took it in the den. He told Figaro to keep his pants on, he’d be right up. Figaro said it was good they’d decided to drive up and not stay in L.A. because there was some news Fredo would probably want to hear about in person, and Fredo asked Figaro if he was deaf. He said he’d be right up, okay?

Fredo got another clean linen handkerchief, the best money could buy, and lay back down on the bed beside Rita. “Hey, darlin’,” he said. Like a cowboy. “Hey, beautiful.”

She blew her nose and was spooky quiet.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. He checked his watch-a habit he’d gotten into as a kid-and managed to shower and shave in less than five minutes. He put on a robe so thick it always felt to him like football shoulder pads and came back out, and she was still there.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He could have done without that. He wanted her to leave, yes, and right away, but he didn’t want to feel like a shit about it. She wasn’t crying, though, which was something.

“That was sure fast,” she said. “The shower.”

“I know where everything is by now.” It was what he always said when people said that.

“I should go. I’m sorry. I know I should go.”

“Stay as long as you want,” he said. “I’m sorry as hell, but I’ve-”

“Got business,” she said. “I know. I’m sorry.” She dabbed her eyes and pointed to the bathroom. “I’ll hurry.”

She did not, at least, say tee-tee. While she was in there he threw on some clothes and called downstairs to arrange and pay for her cab.

Twelve excruciating minutes later she came out with her hair combed and her face pink from being scrubbed and her lipstick on and smelling of some kind of perfume that she must have had on when she got here. She wore it thick. There weren’t a lot of things he found more disgusting than thick perfume. He turned on the television and herded her into the hall.

“We got a deal, right?” he said as he pushed the button for the elevator.

“We do.” She held up her right palm. “I am,” she said grimly, “a girl of my word.” She forced a smile. “You’re presuming I wouldn’t say that anyway. Hands down.”

What the fuck was there to say about that? He thought he should probably ask her for her number, but usually that only made things worse.

The elevator showed up and put him out of the misery of his silence. He patted her back as she stepped on.

“Good luck,” she said, “with your business.” She blew him a kiss. “Cor-le-on-e.”

He watched the doors close. He looked at himself in the distortion of the buffed brass doors. There wasn’t much to see. He hit the button for the sixth floor, planted his hands against the cool of the metal, and hung his weary head. Who said life was easy? Yet here he stood. He’d made his mistakes, like anybody, and lived to tell about it, unlike a lot of people he knew.

The doors opened and he got in.

People thought of him as a nice enough guy who was also weak and a fuckup, he knew that. But how many guys could have withstood a day like today and held up any better than Frederico Corleone, eh? He’d woken up in the middle of a really bad decision he couldn’t let himself think any more about, not even knowing where he was, not even what fucking country. Yet he still managed by dawn’s early light to haul ass out of there, and by some miraculous instinct in the right direction, too. Okay, he left his gun behind, but in another country, so you had to think that was the end of that. He maybe fucked up a little bit at customs, but for Christ’s sake the oranges weren’t even his, and the drink he’d had was just an eye-opener, and dropping Joe Zaluchi’s name had been a calculated risk. Just as easily, it could have gotten Fredo waved through. But, okay, it hadn’t. That said, how many guys could have stayed as cool as he had after the pinch? He walked that white line like a champ. The rubes in customs were in awe of him. Two encores, perfect every time. He didn’t say anything he didn’t have to say, didn’t even call in some lawyer. Dumb clucks let him go still thinking he was Carl Frederick, assistant manager of the Castle in the Sand Trailer Park (which, on paper, he was; he’d driven by it but never been there).

In the end, the only reason people thought Mike was so brilliant and Fredo was such a fuckup was that Mike wanted to build some big empire and all Fredo wanted was to have a good time and to have a little piece of the business that was his alone. Something bigger than a trailer park but smaller than General Motors. What the hell was wrong with that, huh? Yet even that was more than Mike would give him. Instead, he gave Fredo a fucking title. Underboss. Sotto capo. Might as well have made him Court Jester. Tit on a Mule. Vice President.

He got off on the sixth floor and used his passkey to enter the dummy room. This whole arrangement here? Fredo’s idea. People loved it, and other people claimed to have thought of it. He’d heard that other casinos were copying it. Big deal. Who needs credit for shit? But still.

“A drink, sir?” asked the bartender on the secret landing.

“Nah,” Fredo said. “Just a cold beer, okay?”

Probably he should take the stairs. Chance to get the blood flowing. But he was beat and the beer felt good and cold in his hand and so he waited for this elevator to come, too.

When it did, Figaro and Capra and two of the new New York guys came rolling out. They did not look like men who had come from the happy event they’d come from. This couldn’t be attributed to Figaro learning that he’d missed out on his big night. This was the first one ever outside New York, so he’d have never guessed and nobody would have told him.

“Goddamn,” Figaro said. “We were about to send a search party. Actually, we are the search party. Where you been?”

“You call me in my room twenty times, you fucking want to know where I been?”

“No, I mean, what took so long? There were only a few people left when we got there, but now there’s nobody. Excepting Rocco. He’s waiting for you.”

The news Fredo was supposed to hear in person.

“My family?” Fredo said.

Figaro shook his head. “Nothin’ like that. You should really just go up and see Rocco.”

“Nobody nobody up there?” Fredo asked. “Or just not-so-many-guys nobody up there? Other than Rocco, I mean.”

Capra-whose real name was Gaetano Paternostro, which was too much of a mouthful and also too regal for this baby-faced country boy-stopped Figaro before he could answer and asked him what Fredo just said, which Fredo had had it up to here with. Fredo was fluent, and this fucking barber might as well have been some mayo-slurping yutz from Ohio. As a bookie, the barber might have been a good earner, but so far it was hard for Fredo to see what beyond that Mike saw in the guy.

“I asked our friend the barber of epic flatulence,” Fredo said in Sicilian dialect, “how many of our other friends remained upstairs in the banquet hall.”

Capra laughed. “Non lo so. Cinque o forse sei.”

Fredo nodded. He’d stop up anyway. What was the point of driving up tonight instead of flying up tomorrow if he didn’t even make an appearance? “Look,” he said to Figaro. “Why you think it took me so long?”

“You think if I knew I’d fucking ask? C’mon, Fredo. I’m given a job, I do a job. With all due respect, please, non rompermi i coglioni, eh?”

Capra and the other two men had gone to the bar. Coffee all around.

“I’m not busting your balls.” Fredo arched an eyebrow. “You mean you didn’t hear her? In the background there?”

“You gotta be kiddin’ me.” Since it had been the gist of his excuse this morning, too.

“French girl. Dancer, I forgot to ask where. I ran into her on the way up, one thing led to another, you know how it goes. Che fica.”

Figaro was bald, ten years older than Fredo, and probably did not, hookers aside, know how it goes. He shook his head. “You fuckin’ guy. You goin’ for some kind of record?”

Someone had shut off the motor that made the ballroom rotate. The air was thick with smoke and spilled booze. At a table covered with a dirty white tablecloth sat four old guys from what had used to be Tessio’s regime, playing dominos. Two of them were the DiMiceli brothers, one of whom (Fredo couldn’t keep them straight) had a boy, Eddie, who had gotten initiated that night. He didn’t know the other two. Fredo wasn’t real good on the Brooklyn guys.

Slumped alone in an aquamarine armchair was Rocco Lampone, staring out the window and muttering something to himself. Décor aside, it was as if Fredo had walked into one of those joints in Gowanus where the regulars show up first thing in the morning for a chipped mug full of brandy-laced coffee and either sit there in silent misery or else pick petty fights about what’s on the jukebox or what the world’s coming to.

“Hey-hey!” shouted one of the DiMicelis. “If it ain’t our underboss.”

Fredo waited for someone to make more of a joke about this. He hadn’t asked for the title. He knew men thought he was weak. He knew they weren’t clear on his responsibilities or Michael’s reasons for creating the job. Missing the thing tonight wouldn’t help matters. But the men at the table only nodded and grunted their hellos.

Rocco motioned Fredo over. Next to him by the window was an empty metal chair. Outside, a brassy jazz combo on a makeshift stage on the rooftop below played a tune from that famous musical about Negroes. The whole rooftop swarmed with people, though there was no one in the swimming pool. A couple dozen slot machines, four blackjack tables, and two craps tables had been carted up here. There were several full bars and a breakfast buffet.

“What the fuck?” asked Fredo, pointing.

“Where you been?”

“ Detroit. Los Angeles. Missed my plane. Long story.”

“It’s one I heard. Where you been since you got back here? To the hotel? And made me wait here like I’m-” Rocco rubbed his ruined knee. “And made me wait. Here. For you.”

One of the men playing dominos cackled. Fredo looked over his shoulder. The cackling guy rubbed the bald head of an unamused guy, who sat still and took it.

“Seriously,” Fredo said, “what’s going on down there?”

“Sit down. Please.” Rocco had never been much of a talker. It was clear from the look on his face that he hadn’t figured out either what he had to say or how he was going to say it.

Fredo sat. “Is it Ma?” he blurted.

“No.” Rocco shook his head. “There was an accident,” he said. “Friends of ours. It looks I would say bad.”

On the rickety stage, the mayor of Las Vegas-a former Ziegfield dancer herself, a terrific old broad, Fredo thought, who still had some of her looks-adjusted the fluorescent orange sash over the huge, impractical tits of the laughing brunette Hal Mitchell had, apparently after no competition at all, named Miss Atomic Bomb. The tiara was an even tougher fit. Miss Atomic Bomb had done her hair up in some great shellacked mass vaguely in the shape of a mushroom cloud. The mayor tried to put it on her from the front, which was impossible without leaning into her tits, so she tried it from behind and kept dropping it. The mayor stopped and handed the brunette her tiara. Miss Atomic Bomb had to crown herself. She was undaunted. This was a very happy young woman. Her bathing suit was cut so low you could just about see her belly button. The trombonist struck up the band. Miss Atomic Bomb stepped to the microphone and started singing “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

The gaming tables were packed. Every slot machine was in use. Scattered everywhere were people on chaise lounges and at picnic tables, working on paper plates heaped with eggs.

Fredo had gotten all the way down here-entourage in tow, even in his own hotel: Figaro and Capra plus those two guys from New York, his shadows until whatever happened because of those deaths in Cleveland happened-before he had any idea what was going on.

Miss Atomic Bomb, who bounced as she sang and was smiling so wide and with such apparent sincerity that any reasonable person would have wanted to slap her or break her heart, started singing “Take the A Train,” only with new lyrics. “Drop the A-Bomb.”

Fredo was all for coaxing pigeons out of their rooms early and often, but he’d seen enough. He cocked his head toward the exit, and his bone-tired bodyguards looked at him like he was Jesus bearing chocolates.

Just then, for no perceptible reason, everything got quiet. The band stopped, the drone of the guests’ babble seemed to be sucked inside their throats, and the faint sounds of traffic from the street below made themselves known by ceasing to be. Fredo looked up, and there it was: a puffball of white smoke in the northeastern sky.

And then sound returned.

That was it?

Everywhere on the roof, people lounged and gambled. Slot machine zombies kept their eyes steadfastly on the spinning fruit decals. The beauty queen seemed to be the only person applauding. And then:

A blast of heat that felt like standing inside a raging dryer vent lined with sunlamps snapped his head back. Fredo shielded his eyes with both hands.

Seconds earlier, on a salt flat sixty-five miles away, there had been a place called Doomtown-a cluster of ordinary but variously constructed American homes (no two alike), each filled with the aroma of one of the various, ordinary American meals (no two alike) cooling on the dining room table, each table surrounded by human figures dressed variously in brand-new JC Penney clothing. In and around Doomtown, at various distances from the fifty-foot tower that was the town’s epicenter, were dozens of individually penned and oddly quiet pigs. As two hundred American soldiers watched, crouched in trenches they’d dug themselves a mile from the outskirts of Doomtown, the U.S. government detonated a twenty-nine-kiloton bomb. In the first second after that, the houses, mannequins, food, and pigs nearest the tower became flame, wind, and dust. Farther away, as government cameras whirred, siding ignited and debris pulverized lawn jockeys and decapitated mannequins of smiling babies in disintegrating high chairs. Flaming pigs ran screaming in irregular paths and exploded. Another half second passed, and that was all dust, too. In the half second after that, a hot wind worse than twenty harnessed hurricanes leveled most of the rest of the town. Grit-it could have been anything: sand, salt, glass, particles of steel or wood or uranium, bonemeal from pigs killed only because their skin superficially resembled that of the humans so eager to study what remained of it-shot with supersonic speed through Thanksgiving dinner, shiny automobiles, plastic fathers with real tobacco in their pipes, solid-state monitoring equipment, brick walls, everything.

The trenches collapsed. The soldiers were buried alive, but all survived-for now.

Most of the pigs farther than a thousand yards from the tower survived but were so badly burned men shot them long before anyone got around to whipping out the Geiger counters.

The Hagens would never find their arthritic dachshund, Garbanzo. Just as well.

The main stage was really Doomtown: officially classified and yet-because those houses (built by a certain Las Vegas contractor) and even that food (flown in fresh from a certain San Francisco food wholesaler) had to come from someplace-something more than a rumor and less than an open secret.

The rooftop of Hal Mitchell’s Castle in the Sand was just the lounge act. In the time it took Fredo Corleone to think to cover his eyes with both hands until the time his hands met his face, the intense heat waned. After that, some kind of dust fell, too small to see and barely big enough to feel. It was roundly ignored. People kept gambling and barely moved.

“This can’t be good,” Fredo said.

“This shit here, you mean?” said the barber, motioning to the dust, to the very air.

The young goatherd had his tongue out, almost as if he were catching snowflakes.

“The Reds want you to think this shit’s something,” the barber said, “but that’s just a conspiracy to make the U.S. stop all this testing so that the Russians can catch up to us. Believe me. This is nothing. Dust. Less than nothing. ’S go.”

“Nothing,” murmured Fredo, whisking the invisible dust from his shirtsleeves.

Directly above, two of the huge mirrored windows in the ballroom concealed by the casino’s top parapet were gone. The old domino players from the Patrick Henry Social Club stood there in full view and jowly disbelief. Fredo didn’t look up. Why would he? The windows had imploded. Every shard of broken glass had been sucked inward.