The Godfather returns

Chapter 14

THAT SPRING, after months of negotiation, the Commission finally agreed to meet. Its first order of business would be to add Chicago ’s Louie Russo as its eighth member. Next would be the formal approval of the peace agreement. The heads of all twenty-four Families were invited. Every effort would be made to ensure that this time, peace would last.

Michael Corleone flew to New York on the red-eye, accompanied only by three bodyguards. Hagen, a declared candidate for the U.S. Senate, could not be a part of this. Since every important item of business had already been decided, for today, what Michael needed at his side was not a brilliant strategist but rather a man whose very presence suggested stability and respect for tradition. Clemenza was the perfect consigliere for such an occasion.

Michael had no intention of ever choosing a permanent consigliere. The job required an elusive set of contradictory skills. A schemer who’s also loyal. A Machiavellian negotiator who’s also guileless. A driven man with no personal ambition. The plan had been for Vito to be the last to hold the job. A CEO has a board and a battalion of lawyers. The president has a staff, a cabinet, judges whose places on the bench they owe to him, and the control of the world’s mightiest army. The Corleone organization would develop in the open and along such lines.

Clemenza picked them up at the airport himself. The very sight of the fat man was reassuring. He’d quit chewing toothpicks and gone back to cigars. All that had changed about him since Michael was a boy was that now he walked with a cane.

They drove into Manhattan, stopping at a bakery on Mulberry for a box of pastries, then on to the apartment on West Ninety-third where the Corleones were holding a Bocchicchio hostage-some baby-faced third cousin who’d gotten in from Sicily yesterday. He was playing dominos with Frankie Pants, Little Joe Bono, and Richie “Two Guns” Nobilio-Clemenza’s men. Kid couldn’t have been more than fifteen. They stood. Michael and Pete embraced and kissed each in turn. In halting English, the kid, whose name was Carmine Marino, addressed Michael as “Don Corleone” and thanked him for the chance to see America. The only window in the apartment was blackened with what looked like tar. “Prego,” Michael said. “Fa niente.”

“You didn’t bring coffee?” said Richie Two Guns, opening the box.

“Make coffee, you lazy fuck,” Clemenza said. “Or go downstairs to some deli. Good bakery can be hard to find, but you can get coffee anyplace. What, I’m supposed to slosh coffee all over my clean car while I drive it up here and deliver it to you, half spilled and cold?”

Clemenza winked, gave Frankie’s shoulders a quick rub, set out the pastries, and, like a tour guide, pointed out some of their finer points.

The peace talks started at two. By now, each Family coming to the table was holding a Bocchicchio hostage. The hostages went willingly. It was how the Bocchicchios made their money. If, for example, anything happened to Michael or Clemenza, one of their men would kill this boy. No Bocchicchio would rest until the boy’s murder was avenged-not on his killer but rather on those who’d harmed the killer’s associates. The Bocchicchios were the most single-mindedly vengeful clan Sicily had ever seen, wholly undeterred by prison or death. There was no defense against them. Bocchicchio insurance was better than a hundred bodyguards. The men who came to the table would do so with just their consiglieres.

Back in the car, Michael asked Clemenza how old he thought that baby-faced Bocchicchio kid was.

“Carmine?” The fat man considered this for a long time. “I’m not so good at this no more. All of a sudden everybody seems like a kid to me.”

“He looked like he was all of fifteen.”

“I hear there ain’t a whole lot of Bocchicchios left,” Clemenza said. “On the other hand, at my age, sometimes you look like you’re only fifteen. No disrespect or nothin’.”

“Of course.” Fifteen. When Michael was fifteen, he’d stood up at the dinner table, looked his father in the eye, and said he’d rather die than grow up to be a man like him. What happened after that still gave Michael chills, all these years later. Without that moment of stupid, boyish pride, Michael wondered, would he himself even be in this business? “I wouldn’t have thought,” Michael said, “that a kid that young would even be allowed to fly here alone.”

“I don’t know about that,” Clemenza said, “but he didn’t fly. He came over on a boat, along with most of the other hostages. In steerage. They still have that on boats? Whatever the cheapest one’s called. I doubt if the Bocchicchios are even paying him. Lot of times, they just send over shoestring relatives who want to come live in America. We’re paying a king’s ransom for this, y’know, but how they spread the wealth? Forget about it.”

Clemenza shook his big, sad head. They crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge and headed north.

“So tell me,” Michael said after a long silence. “What were those rumors you heard about Fredo?”

“What rumors?” Pete said.

Michael stared straight ahead at the road.

“I told you,” Pete said. “Drinking too much, and the rest of it comes from bad sources.”

Michael took a deep breath. “Did you hear that he’s a homosexual?”

“What’s wrong with you? You think that’s what I heard?”

“The man he beat up in San Francisco was a homosexual.”

“Don’t mean he wasn’t also a robber. A guy can be a robber and a queer both. If everybody who killed a queer turned queer, there’d be a lot of queers out there.”

Fredo’s story was that he’d been out for a walk to clear his head after Molinari’s funeral and stopped for a drink. A kid from the bar followed him to his hotel and later broke into his room to rob him. Fredo beat the kid up and he died. It was a ridiculous story-why, for example, didn’t the kid just rob Fredo on the street? Why wait until it was necessary to pick the lock on the door to Fredo’s room? On top of that, the kid’s parents had recently died and left him almost thirty thousand dollars-no fortune, but why was he robbing anyone? Hagen -acting strictly as a lawyer-had managed to keep the matter out of the newspapers and see to it that no charges were filed, but he’d returned from San Francisco with several matters of concern.

“So you’re sure you never heard that?” Michael said.

“I never said I never heard it. I said it came from bad sources. If I was to start believing everything I hear from bad sources, I’d never-” he said. “Jesus Christ, Mikey. This is your brother. He may have done some stupid shit and beat up a fag and all, but I can’t believe you think he maybe is one. This is Fredo we’re talking about, right? Curly hair, yay tall? Spends all his money on abortions and jewels, married to a fucking movie star-is that the guy you mean? I tell you what I got from a good source. That doctor you guys have out there? Segal? He told me that even after Fredo started up with Deanna Dunn, he knocked up a showgirl. Marguerite something. French, as in va-va-voom. Does that sound like fag behavior to you?”

Michael remained blank.

He’d given Fredo a chance to distinguish himself, and what happened? More boozing. More knocked-up showgirls. Michael wasn’t sure what Fredo was trying to prove by running off and marrying that Hollywood puttana. Though if anything can make a man more of a man, it’s marriage. Also, there’s a certain public image value right now to having a Corleone married to a movie star, even one whose best screen years were behind her. So he had to give Fredo that.

“Want to know something?” Pete said. “I’m going to tell you something whether you like it or not. It was you your pop worried about. In that way. For a while there.”

Michael leaned over and turned on the radio. Clemenza wasn’t telling him anything that Michael hadn’t heard directly from his father. For miles, neither Michael nor Clemenza spoke.

“Bocchicchios,” Clemenza finally said.

“What?” Michael said. They’d been silent long enough that Michael had progressed through several dozen other topics. “What about them?”

“What a fucking thing they got going, that’s all. How would a person-especially guys as dumb as your typical Bocchicchio-ever even think up a service like that?”

“If something’s your destiny, maybe you don’t need to think,” Michael said. “You just need to listen.”

“Listen how do you mean?”

“If anyone I know ever found his destiny, it’s you, Pete.”

Clemenza furrowed his brow and considered this. Then his face broke into a grin. “Hark!” he said. “I think I hear destiny calling!” He arched his eyebrows in mock surprise and cupped his hand around his left ear, as if straining to hear some noise coming from the woods. “Pete,” he said in a stage whisper. “Pull over and take a leak.”

Nick Geraci remembered the crash and everything up to the point where he’d gone into shock and passed out in the water. There was probably a way of finding out now whose fingers he’d pried off and broken, but he hoped he’d never know.

He’d been unconscious the whole time he’d been in the hospital and for several days after that. When he finally woke up, he found himself in a lemon yellow room so tiny the twin bed he was in nearly filled it. His leg was in a cast and rigged to a pulley screwed to a beam in the ceiling. Light streamed in from a pair of French doors, beyond which there seemed to be a balcony. This was no hospital, but he was hooked up to all kinds of hospital equipment. He stared at the ceiling, trying to reconstruct the events that had brought him here. Wherever here was.

Many, many doctors are Jewish, of course, but when the first person Geraci saw after he woke up in that room was an obviously Jewish-looking old man with a stethoscope, Geraci assumed-ridiculously, he knew even at the time, but also, as it turned out, correctly-that wherever he was, it was by the grace of his godfather, Vincent “the Jew” Forlenza.

“He’s awake, geniuses,” the doctor called back over his shoulder. From the next room came the sound of chairs sliding back from a table and someone dialing a phone.

“Who are you?” Geraci muttered. “Where am I?”

“I’m nobody,” the doctor said. “I’m not even here, and, if I were to venture a guess, neither are you.”

“How long have I been here?”

The doctor sighed and gave Geraci a series of quick tests and a rundown on his injuries. Geraci, reading between the lines, guessed (once again correctly) that he’d been in this room for less than a week. What hurt the most was Geraci’s ribs, but he’d broken them enough times to know it was nothing. Same with the nose. The doctor took Geraci’s leg out of traction. “The only thing I’m worried about long term,” the doctor said, “is that concussion. Not your first, was it?

“I boxed,” Geraci said.

“So you did,” said the doctor. “And, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, not that well.”

“You saw me fight?”

“I never saw you before in my life,” the doctor said. “Whoever you are, you’ve had about the last concussion you’re going to be able to take and not become a drooling moron.”

“So you’re saying I’m not a drooling moron now? That’s great news, Doc.”

“I’m not saying anything,” the doctor said. “Though I will say, your ability to heal borders on the extraordinary.”

“Runs in the family,” Geraci said. “My dad was given last rites after a speedboat wreck, and a month later he came one ball short of bowling a 300.”

“Not to mention the time he got shot in the gut on a Friday and he was back driving his truck that Monday.”

“You know about that?”

“I don’t know about anything.” He shrugged in concession. “Don’t worry.” He tapped Geraci’s cast with the capped tip of a fountain pen. “Medicine, I know.”

He told Geraci not to move and left.

Geraci smelled doughnuts. Presti’s. Another ridiculous assumption; who can tell the aroma of one doughnut shop from another? Even if he was in Cleveland someplace, the last place he’d have expected to be was Little Italy. Too obvious. But minutes later, Geraci heard the sound of a man laboring up a staircase. The door opened, and into Geraci’s little room limped Laughing Sal Narducci, arm extended, clutching a big bag from Presti’s. “Taste of home?” he asked. “C’mon. Take two.”

Nick Geraci obeyed.

The men in the other room slid a chair behind Laughing Sal and he sat. He explained things. Geraci had been taken to a third-floor apartment in Cleveland ’s Little Italy, only a few blocks from the narrow house where he’d grown up. No one outside Don Forlenza’s most trusted men knew Geraci was here. The idea had been entirely Don Forlenza’s, a snap decision he’d made out of concern that even if the crash was nobody’s fault, either his organization or his godson might take the blame. “I don’t gotta tell you,” Narducci told him, “a lot of men in our tradition, if one of their friends has a heart attack they start plotting revenge against God.”

“You were there, Sal. You know how Frank… how Don Falcone was about that fight.”

“How he was,” Narducci said. “True! Hell of a punch by a man sitting down.”

You’re welcome, Geraci thought. “No, I mean the boxing match. He insisted-”

“His guy won, you know that? His fighter paid five to one. Frank hadn’t of died, would’ve been his lucky day.”

“My family,” Nick said. “My wife and-”

“Charlotte and your girls are fine,” Sal said. “Your old man’s still… y’know. Your old man. Piss and vinegar, right? He don’t talk so much, but far as we know, he’s fine, too.”

“Do they know I’m fine?”

“Fine,” Narducci repeated. “I don’t know. Are you fine?”

“I will be soon,” Geraci said. “A man who was probably a doctor said that in his professional opinion I’m not a drooling moron.”

“ Moron,” Narducci said. “What do doctors know? So look. Tell me. What happened up there that made you say sabotage?”

“I never said that.”

Narducci winced. “I sort of think you maybe did.”

“Huh,” Geraci said. “I have no memory of that. None at all.”

“None at all. On your radio you never did? To the control tower? This ring a bell?”

“No,” Geraci lied.

“No? Think hard.”

Geraci had a pretty good idea why Narducci was making such an issue of this. If it had been sabotage, it would mean that somehow someone got onto that island and did it. Even if it came out later who that was, who’d been behind it, Don Forlenza would still take the blame.

Had it been sabotage? So much had gone wrong in those last few moments. Geraci thought he remembered everything, and still he had no real idea what had happened. It was not unlikely that the fault had been entirely his. Knowing the plane was about to go down had made him say and do stupid things. He’d blurted it out. Sabotage. The tower had said, Say again, and he hadn’t. It had been wrong to think of Charlotte and his girls, their sweet faces contorted in pain when they got the news that he’d died. That couldn’t have taken more than a couple seconds, but who knows? Might have been a couple seconds he didn’t have. He couldn’t see the runway, but he’d known he wasn’t far from shore. There was a problem with the artificial horizon, yes, but a lot of things might have caused that. His instruments had told him conflicting things, and he’d gone with what felt right. If you indulge your feelings, his flight instructor had said, they will kill you. The instructor was a former test pilot. Reality, he preached, is absolute. A good pilot never loses sight of this. Geraci was afraid he might have.

“Things went wrong,” Geraci said. “It happened fast.”

Narducci waited. He didn’t move.

“If I said something about sabotage-which I don’t recall, but if I did-I was just thinking out loud. Ruling it out.” Geraci thought he’d finished both doughnuts and was surprised to see one last big bite left. He ate it. “What happened was terrible, but it was nobody’s fault.”

“Nobody’s fault.” Narducci repeated it several more times, blankly. “Well,” he finally said, “that’s good. I got one more question right now.”

“All ears.”

“Tell me about O’Malley. Who knows he’s you? Or could figure it out? Lot of lucky guessers in the world, don’t forget. Lot of guys smarter than you think. Again, take your time. I’m in no hurry. Just the thought of going back down all them stairs…” He shuddered.

It was a short list. It included no one but Narducci, Forlenza, and the top people in the Corleone Family. There was no reason not to recite it. If all Don Forlenza had wanted to do was cover his tracks, Geraci would have been dead already. If Forlenza and his men were going to help Geraci talk his way out of this mess, they’d need some information.

On a narrow road in upstate New York more commonly traveled by tractors and pickup trucks, there came an irregular but persistent stream of Cadillacs and Lincolns. Uniformed police officers directed Clemenza’s car to a pasture behind a white clapboard farmhouse. Judging from the long row of big and precisely parked cars, they were among the last to arrive. If Hagen were still consigliere, Michael would have had to hear that Vito Corleone would have been among the first. That was one way of doing things; Michael’s was another. Even his father had, during his final months, stressed that Michael needed to do things his own way. Clemenza whistled an old folk song and questioned nothing, not even how far he had to walk.

They got out. Behind the house was a catering tent. Next to it, hissing over a pit of coals and rotating on a spit, was a pig large enough to pass for an immature hippo.

Neither Michael nor Clemenza had ever been to one of these, but they approached the house like men who knew what to expect. Michael was fairly sure he did. But he’d also been fairly sure he knew what to expect when he was crouching in that amphibious tractor off the shore of Peleliu, ready to take the beach.

This was not the same thing, he told himself. War was at his back. Peace lay before him.

“Every ten years, eh?” Clemenza tapped his wristwatch. The gesture was a good excuse for him to stop for a moment and catch his wheezing breath. “Like clockwork.”

“Actually,” Michael said, “it’s only been eight.” Despite the Bocchicchio insurance, he scanned the woods for snipers or anyone else who shouldn’t have been there. Habit.

“So next time, it’ll be twelve. Average it out. Hey, get a load of that big fuckin’ pig.”

Michael laughed. “You sure you don’t want to do this permanently?”

Clemenza shook his head and began walking again. “A chi consiglia non vuole il capo.” He who advises doesn’t want to be boss; an old saying. “Nothing against Hagen or Genco, any of them,” he said, “but I’m a guy who helps.”

The rear door opened. They were met by a chorus of greetings, as if from friends at a party. With a quick glance back at the roasting pig, Clemenza clapped his hand on Michael’s shoulder and followed him inside.

Nick Geraci spent weeks in that lemon yellow apartment, waking each morning to the aroma of doughnuts and the sound of women in slippers muttering in Italian and sweeping their stoops. Charlotte and the girls were still doing fine, he was assured, and knew he was recuperating nicely. He was told that Vincent Forlenza and Michael Corleone were doing everything they could to negotiate a deal to bring him home safely. Hardly a day went by without someone telling him how lucky he was to have two godfathers, both of whom loved him.

In all that time Geraci never learned the name of that old doctor or how the man had become beholden to Don Forlenza. It must have been something big. To prepare the body that would be discovered in the ravine down by the river, the doctor had stood by, holding a clipboard with several diagrams, and advised Forlenza’s men as they took some corpse about Geraci’s size and gave it injuries nearly identical to the ones Geraci had. The doctor sewed the contrived wounds himself, imitating the stitch work of the emergency room hacks. Geraci never found out where the corpse had come from. The only question he asked, the day they got him out of there and sent him to Arizona to meet his family, was if they knew the rats would eat that much of the body and if so, how they knew. The face had helpfully been destroyed, he’d heard, and rats were living inside the rotting corpse. Was that just what happened naturally when you hid a body near the river? Or had they done things to make sure?

“What difference does it make?” asked Laughing Sal, beside him in the hearse they were using to take him to the train station.

Geraci shrugged. “Knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”

“There you go!” Narducci said, nodding. “That college-boy angle you play.”

“Something like that.”

“I bet there are some people who aren’t all that crazy about it, that angle.”

“People,” Geraci agreed. “I bet.”

He’d studied the way Narducci used echolalia and silence. He copied it now. People never recognize themselves. Even in a boxing ring, you can knock men out this way.

“Odds are,” Narducci finally said, “nature would have taken its course. But like a lot of things where the odds are in a man’s favor, you still want to make sure.”

Despite how far it was to Arizona, Geraci had refused to fly, not even in a luxurious medical plane that came complete with a hi-fi system and a pretty nurse. No more planes, ever. And so they sent him there in a casket, shipped in a freight car to the same funeral home he’d gone to that summer, after his mother died.

The only part of the trip Geraci had to spend actually inside the casket was the loading and unloading. Onboard, in a car with four other caskets and a crated-up piano, he was able to get out, read, relax, play cards with the two men watching him, and take them for everything they had. He felt sorry for them. He had a place to sleep and they didn’t. He suggested they take the dead people out of some of the other caskets, but they wouldn’t. As a gesture of goodwill, he offered them their money back, and of course they refused. Good Cleveland guys, all the way around.

As the train pulled into Tucson, he told the men good-bye and shut the lid on himself. Two days sleeping in this thing, and the velvet pillow stank. The next face he’d see would either be Charlotte ’s, as he’d been told, or that of some ugly fucker who was about to kill him.

He lay in the dark, utterly still. Soon he heard men speaking Spanish and felt hands grasping the handles and lifting. There was a lot of jostling and banging into walls until Geraci heard someone say “Look out” in English and a moment later he hit the ground, hard. It knocked the wind out of him. The Mexicans exploded in laughter. Geraci put his hands over his mouth and tried to control the little wheezing squeals his lungs made as they fought with his spasmed muscles to fill. So maybe the next face he saw wouldn’t be Charlotte’s or a killer’s.

The men kept laughing and cussed at one another in a mix of English and Spanish. They picked up the casket. Geraci’s breathing returned to something close to normal. He’d banged his head, too, he only then realized. Soon they slid him into what was probably another hearse.

Michael Corleone had sent word that he didn’t blame Geraci for the crash and that after all of Geraci’s hard work these past months, he’d more than earned a few quiet months in the desert with his family. He’d been assured that things were going well, that no one was coming after him. No one was looking for him. Smuggling him out of Cleveland like this had just been a precaution, something to ward off cops and lucky guessers.

Probably all that was true. But it was also just the kind of reassurance a guy heard right before he got clipped.

Still, though Geraci would probably never like Michael Corleone, he did admire him. He had faith in him. Michael would save Nick Geraci, if for no other reason than that he needed him. He needed his loyalty, his ability to make money, his smarts. Michael wanted to transform an organization made up of violent peasant-criminals into a corporation that could take its place in the greatest legal gambling scam ever invented-the New York Stock Exchange. If he was going to succeed, he certainly couldn’t afford to lose a man like Geraci. In the scheme of things, Geraci knew, he was just some mook from Cleveland, a striver who took his lumps, worked hard, went to night school, and had a little success as a small-time attorney and businessman. But compared to most of the guys in this business, Nick Geraci was Albert Einstein.

Even so, Geraci had made mistakes. He should have stood up to Falcone and refused to fly in such weather. He shouldn’t have said he thought the plane had been sabotaged when he’d really had no idea. Crashing: also bad. He certainly shouldn’t have swum away from the wreck as if he were guilty of something. His mistakes had narrowed his options. He had no choice but to play out this hand.

This would be a very elaborate way to kill him, though that hardly ruled it out. He’d heard of more elaborate. He’d participated in more elaborate.

When he’d been forced to kill Tessio, Geraci couldn’t have been more angry at Michael Corleone. But from the moment he’d walked away from Tessio’s open grave site until that trip from the train to wherever he was really going, Geraci truly hadn’t given it another thought.

The hearse stopped. He was unloaded by men who didn’t say a word, which did not seem like a good sign.

Geraci’s head throbbed. He could hardly breathe. It’s not as if caskets have airholes. On the way here, he’d spent maybe one tenth this much time with the lid down. He was going to die choking on his own funk. They’d come to whack him, and he’d already have suffocated. Still, he’d do as he was told. He’d stay inside with the lid closed until Charlotte came to get him.

The men walked him across a cement floor and set him down on something. Definitely cement. This could very well be the back room of the Di Nardo Brothers Funeral Parlor. The night he killed Tessio, that crematory where they took the heads, it had a cement floor, didn’t it?

This could also be a warehouse. A meat locker. Somebody’s two-car garage. Anything.

He heard a door open. A person’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked as they drew near him. A polished cement floor. He held what was left of his breath.

The lid came open.

It was Charlotte.

He sat up and felt oxygen surge through him, tingling as it reached his hands and feet. He could feel air spread up his back and wash over his scalp. Charlotte looked tanned and happy. “You look so good!” she said. She seemed sincere. She did not react at all to his gasping. It slowed. Only then did he notice Barb and Bev standing together against the paneled back wall, obviously frightened, holding a pair of crutches waist high, parallel to the floor.

Charlotte gave him a quick kiss on the lips. It was like she was high on something. Geraci didn’t smell liquor. “Welcome home.”

“Thanks,” he said. Well, not home, but he knew what she meant. Upstairs, a funeral was going on. Muffled chanting. Some prayer or creed. “It’s good to be… back. How are you?”

Geraci held out his arms toward his daughters. They nodded at him but stayed put.

“Busy,” Charlotte said. “But fine.” Softly, she touched the knot on his head where he’d banged it.

Barb was eleven; Bev had just turned nine. Barb was a little blond replica of Charlotte, right down to the new suntan. Bev was a pale, hulking, dark-haired girl, tallest in her class (including the boys) and a full two inches taller than her big sister, who was also tall.

“They got to see a movie getting made out in the desert, and they’ve been talking about it ever since,” Charlotte said, waving the girls toward the casket. “C’mon, girls. Tell him.”

Bev let go of the crutches with one hand so she could point at him. “See?” she said to her sister. “You see? I told you Daddy’s not dead.”

“Not yet, maybe,” Barb said. “But he will be.”

Geraci motioned for Charlotte to help him climb out, but she was oblivious.

“Daddy won’t ever die,” Bev said.

“You’re stupid,” Barb said. “Everybody dies someday.”

“Now, girls,” Charlotte said. “Be nice.”

It was as if she didn’t see the first thing strange about this scene, being brought two thousand miles to the back of a funeral home to retrieve her missing husband from a casket. Upstairs, an organ, God knows why, started playing “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.”

“He will too die,” Barb said. “Everybody does.”

“Not Daddy,” Bev said. “He promised. Didn’t you, Daddy?”

Actually, he had, once. His father had always said that a promise is a debt. Ogni promessa è un debito. It had taken being a father himself-even more than his treacherous professional life-to drive the lesson home.

“Now you see what my days are like,” Charlotte said. She said it cheerfully, though. She didn’t sound like she was trying too hard. She smiled and took his bruised face in her hands and kissed it. Nothing needy or passionate, just an ordinary, slightly lingering marital kiss, the kind a man might enjoy one morning at the breakfast table. It was not the sort of kiss Geraci would ever have expected to receive while sitting in a casket with bandaged ribs and a broken leg-and, who knows, maybe a fresh concussion, too-while a chorus of muffled voices in the room upstairs sang an old Tin Pan Alley song at some poor stiff’s funeral. Though in fairness to Charlotte, perhaps there was no right sort of kiss for an occasion like this.

“Can you give me a hand?” he said. “Getting out?”

“Your dad’s waiting in the car,” she said. “Should I go get him?”

“No.” Naturally, his father couldn’t be bothered to come in and greet him. “I really just need a hand. We can do it.”

They did. The girls came forward, perfectly in step. They’d rehearsed this. They presented him with his crutches as if they were peasants bestowing a humble gift to the king.

Then they cracked up, and for a long time he didn’t do anything much but hold the girls’ embrace. At some point Bev whispered, “You did promise,” and he whispered, “So far, so good.”

“It’s nice to have you back,” Charlotte said.

Outside, the funeral home’s pebbled parking lot would have been big enough for a shopping center. Maybe fifty cars, but his father, Fausto, of course, had the best space, closest to the door. He’d probably come by yesterday, sized up the parking situation, then gotten here hours ago to make sure he got that space. He sat behind the wheel of his idling Oldsmobile, looking straight ahead and listening to Mexican music on the radio. He had the air-conditioner going full blast, probably for no other reason than to create a need for him to wear the old quilted jacket with his union local’s logo on the back. He waited for Nick to finish struggling with the crutches and get situated in the passenger seat even to turn to face him.

“Well, well, well,” said Fausto Geraci, “if it ain’t Eddie Rickenbacker.”

A team of local carpenters had been hired to make long maple tables especially for the peace talks. The tables were arranged in a big rectangle inside a ballroom that had once been the stable. The stain on the tables was dry but so fresh it still smelled. The odor wasn’t too bad until the room also filled with cigar and cigarette smoke. They opened all the windows, but the consigliere from Philly, who had emphysema, and Don Forlenza from Cleveland, who had just about every affliction under the sun, both had to listen from the next room. The temperature outside was forty. Other than Louie Russo, who must have been trying to prove something, the men conducted the entire meeting in their scarves and overcoats.

What everyone at the table agreed to believe for the sake of peace was this: The plane crash in Lake Erie was nobody’s fault. Frank Falcone did in fact bet a hundred grand on that fight at the Cleveland Armory, and he’d insisted on going to see it no matter how bad the storm was. As the plane went down, someone in the tower heard Geraci say the word sabotage, but Geraci was merely thinking aloud in a time of great stress and ruling out sabotage. The thunder and lightning made the radio transmissions difficult to hear. The plane crashed and everyone died on impact except Geraci, who almost did. Don Forlenza learned about the terrible deaths of his recent guests, and he learned that the authorities thought the crash might have been the result of sabotage. Immediately, Don Forlenza made certain that no one in his organization had sabotaged the plane. Then he rescued his injured godson from the hospital. What else was there to do? Had Don Falcone and Don Molinari been killed as a result of sabotage, there was the chance this might be blamed on the Cleveland organization. There was a chance it might be blamed on his godson, who was unconscious-unable to protect himself, unable to answer for himself. Who in this room would not have done the same for his own godson? Also, because Geraci was a member of the Corleone Family, Don Forlenza was concerned that his godson may have been the target of violence by one of the other New York Families. Geraci had regained consciousness. The federal authorities had ruled out sabotage. The crash had been an act of God. Don Corleone had let the other members of the Commission know that the missing pilot was Geraci. As Don Corleone had said then and reasserted now, the fake name on Geraci’s pilot’s license was intended to be a deception to no one but law enforcement officials, no different in kind than the driver’s licenses many of them were carrying now. In this case, the alias had done its job. While every man in this room had known for months that Gerald O’Malley was in fact Fausto Geraci, Jr., the authorities had presumed that O’Malley was the rat-gnawed corpse in that ravine.

What a fitting monument to the four men who died that the discussions initiated to help understand the crash soon expanded themselves to other issues. Soon an agreement for a lasting peace had been struck-an agreement they’d had all come here to ratify.

Much of the official story was true, but no one in that farmhouse believed every word of it.

Though no proof had come to light, there seemed to be little doubt that Louie Russo’s men had penetrated Vincent Forlenza’s little island fortress and sabotaged the plane. After all, the men in that plane did represent all four of Chicago ’s biggest rivals in Las Vegas and the West. The crash had succeeded in making Don Forlenza look like an old fool. The struggles in New York had given Russo an opening, and he’d seized it. He’d forged allegiances with several other Dons-Carlo Tramonti in New Orleans, Bunny Coniglio in Milwaukee, Sammy Drago in Tampa, and the new boss in L.A., Jackie Ping-Pong. When Russo went to Cuba, he stayed in the presidential palace. No one but Russo’s allies relished Chicago ’s return to power, but the consensus was that Russo posed less of a threat with a seat on the Commission than he had as a turf-grabbing outsider. To most of the men at those tables, trying to prove Russo responsible for that crash was unimportant. What mattered was returning their full attention to their own business. Even Butchie Molinari had been persuaded (by Michael Corleone, in fact) to declare publicly that he accepted the official version of the crash and to vow not to seek revenge.

Louie Russo and also his consigliere were not about to deny an accusation that no one had openly made, even if they knew it was false. Russo hadn’t ordered a hit on the men in that plane. If he had his theories about who if anyone had, he wasn’t letting on.

Russo, naturally, knew some things. Jackie Ping-Pong knew some things. Sal Narducci-who because of Forlenza’s health problems sat alone at the head table, as if he were already running Cleveland -knew some other things.

The man Narducci hired to sabotage the plane went on vacation in Las Vegas a few days later and hadn’t been seen since.

(Or, rather, he hadn’t been seen since Al Neri, a man who didn’t know or care about who he killed or why, shot him and buried him in the desert.)

Clemenza knew a lot, but not everything.

Michael Corleone was fairly certain that he’d covered his tracks well enough that no one-neither friend nor enemy, cop nor capo-would ever put it all together.

Who would possibly surmise that not only did Michael order the deaths of Barzini, of Tattaglia, of his own top caporegime Tessio, and of his own sister’s husband-not to mention all the collateral killings those killings unleashed-but that he then negotiated a cease-fire and used that uneasy truce to orchestrate a hit on the men in the airplane, including Nick Geraci, whom he’d recently promoted to capo, and Tony Molinari, a steadfast ally? There were no rumors that either man had betrayed him-largely, of course, because they had not.

Who’d ever figure out what that satchel Fontane delivered was really for? Even Hagen had unquestioningly presumed that it was an investment in the new casino at Lake Tahoe.

From where Michael Corleone sat, tapping that old Swiss watch given to him by Corporal Hank Vogelsong, how could anyone-even someone who’d only read about Jap planes exploding into fireballs, cutting troopships in half-think that a man who’d seen what Michael had seen in the Pacific would kill anyone by ordering a plane crash?

Every morning, Fausto Geraci-it’s Jair-AH-chee, but, what the hell, people’ll say it how they want-was always the first one up. He’d make coffee and go out on the back patio of his little stucco house in his boxer shorts and an undershirt, where he’d sit on an aluminum lawn chair, reading the morning paper and chain-smoking Chesterfield Kings. Once he finished the paper, he’d stare out at his empty swimming pool. Even having his granddaughters in the house for the better part of a school year had had little visible effect on his mood.

Fausto Geraci’s heart was pickled in a bitterness more corrosive than battery acid. He was a man convinced that the world had fucked him over. Years and years of dragging himself out of bed and climbing into the freezing cab of some truck and hauling anything a person could imagine and a lot of things a person wouldn’t want to imagine. Loading and unloading his own trucks, hard work that was taken for granted by everyone who wound up with any goddamned thing he’d ever hauled. Driving what maybe were getaway cars; he wouldn’t know. But he did it. He spent a lifetime standing firm against everyone who was against the Italians, and he stayed loyal to that prick Vinnie Forlenza and his organization. He went to prison for those people. Did he complain, say a word about it? No. To them he was just Fausto the Driver, some quiet ox who worked hard and followed orders. He did all that work for them, jobs that doomed his soul to Hell so long ago even his own wife told him she stopped praying for it, but did they cut him in as an equal? No. He got some money, sure, but they gave Jews and niggers more of a break than they ever gave Fausto Geraci. He was supposed to be grateful for how they set him up in the union. Ha. He was still their puppet. The pay was good but not enough to make up for having to sit at a desk all day and listen to petty complaints from lazy people. Still, he listened, said almost nothing, and did his job. He spent years solving other people’s problems, but who ever gave two shits about Fausto Geraci’s problems, huh? Then after all those years of loyalty, one day: pow. He’s out. They gave his job to someone else (Fausto knew better than to ask why), and they gave Fausto the Driver “early retirement.” Hush money. Go-away money. What did he do? He went away. Loyal to the end. Loyal past the end. Good old Fausto.

And, Jesus Christ, don’t get him started on kids. His daughter was a dried-up old maid schoolteacher who moved from Youngstown to Tucson just to make his life miserable-every night after school she comes by and it’s eat this, don’t eat that, how many cigarettes is that today, Poppa? On and on. And the boy, his namesake? He thought he was better than everybody else. His mother encouraged it, too. Everything came easy for that kid. Married a blonde with tits out to here. Went not just to college but to fucking law school. And that business with the flying? Just another way of showing the world he wasn’t his old man-a hotshot private pilot, see, not some broken-down truck driver. Every breath that ungrateful shit drew was an affront. Even says his name wrong. Ace Geraci. Goddamn. Who’d he think paved his way? Vinnie Forlenza, that’s what he probably thinks. Or those cocksuckers in New York.

When the others started waking up, before they could start bothering him, Fausto got up from his lawn chair and went to the garage. He kept a robe and slippers in there. He’d put them on and work up a sweat doing yard work. On their way to school, Barb and Bev, bless their hearts, would come out and give him a kiss. He wanted to protect those sweet kids from a world that was going to disappoint and then destroy them, but instead he’d just stand there in his robe, holding a hose or a rake, smiling like a happy peasant and waving good-bye.

Then he’d go in and clean himself up and drive across town to Conchita Cruz’s house trailer. She barely spoke English, and he barely spoke, but somehow they’d met in a bar not long after he’d moved here and come to this arrangement. He couldn’t remember how, that’s how relaxed this thing he had with her was. Hair-AH-see, she pronounced his name, which was a fuckload closer than how his own son said it. Sometimes they’d fuck, but more often they’d spend an hour together not asking questions. Just existing. Television’s good for that. Other times there’d be cards, dominos, maybe a foot massage. They’d eat lunch, there or at the diner on the corner, and then he’d kiss her on the forehead. They’d declare no love and make no promises, and she’d go to her second-shift job at the cannery and he’d go for a short drive in the desert. Every day but Sunday, on the same straight stretch of road, he’d stomp on the gas and blow the carbon off his engine-and his heart, too, or so it felt once he buried that speedometer needle in the black space beyond 120. Once he did, he’d ease off the gas, letting his speed and pulse and spirits drop. Then he’d go home, where his sorry-ass namesake and that goddamned Swedish wife would be bickering. When they’d first gotten there, Charlotte had been a model wife, and Nick was humbled by having just fucked up so bad. But a few weeks later, about the time he got that cast off his leg, the bickering started. Even the turning on of the television would touch off some stupid argument. Especially that. Day by day, they behaved more and more like Fausto had with his late wife, another way the boy seemed determined to mock him.

They had nothing to do. Nothing. The amount of time they wasted made Fausto Geraci sick. Charlotte went out and spent Nick’s money on things she didn’t need. Sometimes Nick drove around in a rented car making calls from random pay phones and stopping by this rathole bar and grill he’d muscled into, but most of the time he sat around reading books and talking to the men who came by to give him messages.

One day, Fausto came home and Nick was filling the fucking swimming pool. All it took was a little frown from Fausto, and he went on some long explanation that even though his ma had died in that pool when her cancer-weakened heart gave out, she’d died doing what she loved. She’d never have wanted him to drain the pool. What did that boy know of such things? He wasn’t the one who fished her dead body out of there. Selfish punk. Her wishes, Fausto Geraci’s ass. Nick only wanted to fill the pool so he could use it himself. Sure enough, next day, Fausto came home and not only was the boy floating on an inflatable raft, he was reading some book about Eddie Rickenbacker. More mocking! For weeks he wouldn’t stop with the flying ace stories, the race car driver stories, the lost-at-sea stories, the airline magnate stories. A remarkable man, Fausto Geraci couldn’t deny it: American hero, all that good shit. But you know what? Fuck Eddie Rickenbacker.

Nick treated both his daughters like boys, especially poor Bev, who worshiped her father and would probably grow up to be an old maid gym teacher just like her dried-up shrew of an aunt. He and Charlotte took those kids to everything under the sun: the zoo, the circus, concerts, ball games, movies-like they were trying to make something up to them.

Still and all, those little girls had adapted to their move out here like champs. They’d made friends in the neighborhood, they did good in school, the works. They were happy just being children, but their parents couldn’t see it.

When out of the blue it came time for them to go back to Long Island, it was Charlotte who told him. Apparently his hotshot son couldn’t be bothered with anything having to do with his old man’s feelings. Fausto Geraci snapped. He wasn’t proud of it, but for once he’d spoken his mind. Those girls had transferred schools in the middle of a school year and come here and done just great, and now what? They want those poor kids to transfer back, two months before the school year was even over? What a selfish load of shit! Don’t they know anything about how hard it is for kids to fit in? He wouldn’t stand for it. Let Nick go back. Charlotte, too. God knows, there were more places to blow money in New York than out here. But the girls were staying. Did she think Fausto Geraci, after a life full of taking care of other people’s problems, couldn’t take care of those two little angels for a couple months? Was she really such a stupid cunt that she thought she’d do a better job than he would?

While he was telling her off, he did, yes, break some things, but they were his things. The tears he shed were tears of rage. Now his goddamned kids wanted him to go see a doctor.

That’s what a man gets for speaking the truth. Nothing. Fausto Geraci was a man with nothing good in his life except for his two granddaughters and a Mexican woman who lived in a trailer and barely knew a thing about him. And now the girls were gone. He drove them to the train station himself and saw them off with a big wave and cheerful good-bye. His son and that woman didn’t even look back, and neither did the older girl. But Bev turned around, unhunched her shoulders, and blew him a kiss. What a smile! She should smile more, that Bev.

The trip to the train station had made him miss his lunch with Conchita. He didn’t feel like taking his drive either. He went home to his empty house. He could have been alone anywhere, but he was used to that patio. It was only a matter of time, he thought, before Conchita vanished, too. Fausto Geraci looked out at his pool. One more Chesterfield King, maybe two-three at the most-and then he’d drain that goddamned thing for good.

Historians and biographers have often noted that every bold decision of Michael Corleone’s formative years was made in opposition to his father. Joining the Marines. Marrying a woman like Kay Adams. Joining the family business while Vito Corleone was in a coma and helpless to prevent it. Entering the narcotics trade. Some sources have even suggested that Michael Corleone used his father’s death as an excuse to go to war with the Barzinis and the Tattaglias sooner than Vito Corleone had thought prudent.

The first breach in this pattern may have been Michael’s decision to keep Nick Geraci alive. Whatever one might say about the consequences of that decision, it was exactly what his father would have done, for four reasons.

First, naming Geraci the capo of Tessio’s old regime had, as Michael expected, put to rest any lingering resentment over Tessio’s unfortunately necessary execution. He was popular with the men on the street, who had no idea he was O’Malley, who merely thought he’d been in Tucson opening up new business ventures, which Geraci in fact had done. The Corleones had a few shylocks up and running, owned a bar and grill and a police captain, and had tapped into a source for marijuana that was protected by a former president of Mexico.

Second, every reason to be wary of Geraci had been tempered or eliminated. Even if Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco never sent someone to kill him, he’d be worried about it, which would rein in his aggressiveness. He seemed deeply, sincerely grateful to Michael for ensuring his protection after Forlenza’s ridiculous kidnapping stunt, setting him up in Tucson, and engineering his return to New York. And now that Narducci was poised to take over in Cleveland, Geraci’s ties to Forlenza were of little concern.

Third, Geraci was a great earner. His every human transaction leaked gold.

Fourth, Michael Corleone needed peace. His organization was not the U.S. Marine Corps. He had neither enough nor good enough personnel to wage war indefinitely. Keeping Geraci alive helped Michael cement the perception that Louie Russo was to blame for that crash, a key component of the peace agreement formalized at that first summit meeting in upstate New York.

So why the need for a second meeting? Why the need to hold such meetings annually? And why hold them in the same location?

The men who assembled for the first time in that white clapboard farmhouse certainly had no compelling reason to agree to reconvene there the following year (and, indeed, the 1957 meeting, by all accounts, was a routine affair, almost certainly unnecessary, a historical footnote to the 1956 meeting and the fateful one in the spring of 1958). The issues they had come to discuss and resolve had been discussed and resolved. The peace struck that day was historic and enduring; to this day, there has not been an outbreak of violence between Families comparable to the 1955-1956 war (or to the two that preceded it, either, the Five Families War of the 1940s and the Castellammarese War of 1933). There was no precedent for scheduling such a meeting; all previous summit meetings had been convened only in direct response to existing problems.

The decision to hold these meetings annually was made not at the 1956 meeting but soon thereafter. None of it would have happened if it weren’t for the sudden turn in the weather and, more so, that gargantuan pig.

Michael had intended to leave immediately after all the business had been transacted. But for hours, the windows had been open. For hours, the aroma of that roasting pig had wafted in, working its succulent magic. Clemenza-like most everyone else there-was hardly the sort of man who’d leave on a long drive without having a slice or six. The garlic bread was good enough to make grown men weep, if not these particular grown men. Still: great bread. Also there was pie. A humble but inviting feast on what, propitiously, turned out to be the first warm day of spring. Men lingered. To have done otherwise would have been an infamità.

Michael Corleone felt an icy hand on the back of his neck. “I can’t eat pork,” Russo said. His voice was barely lower than Michael’s three-year-old daughter’s. “Breaks my heart. But if I eat it,” he tapped his chest, “it’ll break it worse. A word with you before I go?”

They went for a walk together across the lawn as the other men dug in. Russo’s consigliere went to get the car.

“I didn’t want to say this back there. I’m new. The new man should shut up and listen.”

Michael nodded. Russo had actually talked plenty at the meeting.

“I’m not an educated man such as yourself,” he said in that odd, high voice, “but I’m confused about something. When you were talking at the end there about change, you lost me.”

“I have no interest in telling others how to run their business. But there will come a time when others will take control of street crime, the way Italians took over from the Irish and the Jews. Just look at the Negroes, who in some cities are gaining more power every day.”

“Not Chicago.”

“In any case, I see no point in our amassing greater power and prosperity if we don’t use it to move out of the shadows and into the light. And that’s what I intend to do.”

Laughter echoed in the dusk. Sitting on a big rock beside the tent, Pete Clemenza and Joe Zaluchi, related through the marriage of their children, were holding court and telling stories.

“You’re losing me again with the shadows and light.”

Michael started to explain.

“No, no, no,” Russo said. “Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.”

Michael did not apologize or acknowledge the petty outburst, which was shocking in a Don, even one from Chicago.

“I’ll put it to you like this,” Russo said. “You talk about how one day our kids can be congressmen, senators, even president, yet we got fellas like that on our payrolls.”

“Never a president,” Michael said, thinking of the Ambassador, and thinking not yet.

“Not yet,” Russo said. “Don’t look at me like that. I know you talked to Mickey Shea. You think you’re the only one he’s making deals with?”

Several Dons were looking their way. The last thing Michael needed was to have anyone think he was plotting something. “We should get back,” he said.

“I’m not getting back, remember?” Russo said. “I’m going. Look, all I’m trying to say is that, at least in Chicago, we elect who we want, and once they’re in office we get out of them what we want to get out of them. Even the ones we don’t control are controlled by someone.”

Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid, Michael Corleone thought but did not say.

“Why, then,” said Russo, “would we wish this on our children? Why would we want for them to be puppets? We ain’t naive, you know, none of us, yet some of us got this big naive dream. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it one bit.”

The men under the tent were calling for them.

Michael smiled. “No man is beyond the control of others, Don Russo. Not even us.”

“Just wanted to say my piece,” Russo said. “Oh, and also-”

“Hey, Mike!” Clemenza called. “When you get a chance, we need you for something.”

“Yes?” Michael said to Russo.

“Real quick,” Russo said. “I want to clear the air and be done with it. I’m sure you know that Capone sent my brother Willie and another guy to help Maranzano out, back when him and your father were havin’ it out.”

So this was what the walk had really been about.

“So I’ve been told,” Michael said. The help had been a contract on Vito Corleone. The only part of Willie “the Icepick” Russo that had made it back to Chicago was his severed head.

“I blame Capone. I want you to know that. It wasn’t none of his business, the problems in New York.” Russo extended his soft and tiny hand. “Your father just did what he had to do.”

Michael accepted the handshake, which became an embrace, sealed with a kiss, and Don Russo got into his idling car.

“Where’d Don Russo go?” Clemenza asked when Michael got back to the tent. It must have almost killed Pete not to be able to call him “Fuckface” to the other Dons.

“He can’t eat pork,” Michael said.

“I thought Vinnie Forlenza was our token Jew,” Zaluchi said.

“Enough!” Forlenza said from his wheelchair. “If it wasn’t for the Jews I sent to Las Vegas, most of you bums wouldn’t have a pot to piss in.”

“We’d have even more money than they made us,” said Sammy Drago, the Don of Tampa, “if we had a dime for every time we hadda hear you tell us about ’em.”

Forlenza waved him off in disgust. “Hey, Joe. You called for a vote, let’s vote.”

Blissed out on barbecue and good company, Pete had said they ought to hold these things every year, and Joe Zaluchi had raised a glass in assent and pushed for a postmeeting vote. All but one of the Commission members were still there. The vote was unanimous.

Not long before he returned to New York, Nick Geraci met Fredo Corleone in a saloon on the set of Ambush at Durango. It looked real enough if you didn’t look up at the cables and catwalks. Fredo had a part in the movie (“Card Sharp #2”) but wasn’t yet in costume. They sat at a table near the swinging doors. They were the only ones there. Outside, the director, a German with a monocle, yelled at someone because he disliked the color and texture of the mud.

“You see this shit?” Fredo said, throwing the morning paper on the table. MOVIE QUEEN HONEYMOONS HERE WITH HOODLUM HUSBAND, the headline read. The first two paragraphs had innocuous quotes from Deanna Dunn. The third mentioned that Fredo was in the movie, too, “making his screen debut as a bad guy.” After that, the story was a clip job, full of old news that had, over the years, already appeared in papers in New York and was peppered with the word allegedly. There were pictures, though. Fredo was furious they’d dredged up the shot of him sitting on the curb right after Vito had been shot, bawling his eyes out instead of trying to save the old man’s life. “I don’t play the bad guy,” Fredo said. “I catch the bad guy cheating.”

“What’s the point?” Geraci said. “If you call the paper or go down there, then they’ll really have a story. It’ll make things worse. That’s a nice suit, by the way. You have a guy?”

“You said worse? Right? So you agree. This is bad. You don’t get to worse from good or just fine. Not unless you’re already at bad.”

“What do you care?” Geraci said. “It’s the fucking Tucson newspaper.”

“They got all kinds of facts wrong.”

Like the fact that Deanna Dunn qualified as a movie “queen” anymore. She was a lush, and her looks and her career were suffering for it. Geraci figured she’d married Fredo only so she could keep living the high life even when her roles dried up completely.

Outside, the director yelled “Action!” A buckboard wagon hurtled down the dusty street, and Deanna Dunn began screaming.

“That’s in the script,” Fredo said. “Fontane dies and Dee Dee screams.” She was playing the sheriff’s widow. Johnny Fontane was the gunslinging priest.

“You want facts,” Geraci said, “there are better places to go than a newspaper.”

“We got married a month ago. It wasn’t a secret, like it says, and we already took a honeymoon. Weekend in Acapulco at that place with the pink Jeeps that go down to the beach.”

“Short honeymoon.”

“We’re busy people.”

“Hit a nerve, did I?”

“Hey, who wouldn’t want to spend more time on his honeymoon, y’know?”

Geraci wouldn’t, not if he had to be stuck in a hotel room with a woman as militantly self-absorbed as Deanna Dunn. Unless maybe you could make her scream like that in the sack. The director called action on another take. Deanna’s screams sounded even better. “I’ve never been to Acapulco,” Geraci said. “Nice?”

“I don’t know. Sure. It’s like a lot of places, I guess.” Fredo pounded his fist on the table, right on the photo of him getting into a limo at the airport. “Explain this to me, huh? She’s been here three weeks solid, me off and on, now all of a sudden this shit’s news?”

“You married a movie star, Fredo. What did you expect?”

“I married a movie star a month ago.”

“You’re a movie star now yourself, for God’s sake.”

“Aw, that’s just for shits and giggles, the acting. I got like two lines.”

“Still.”

“So why don’t they talk about me as someone with a background in entertainment who’s trying to branch out, huh?”

Geraci recognized Michael Corleone’s words in his brother’s mouth. Michael had gone along with Fredo’s more public image as something useful in helping to make the Corleones legitimate, or at least ostensibly so.

“Look,” Geraci said. “I been reading that paper for months. Trust me, nobody reads it.”

Fredo laughed. A moment later the smile drained from his face. “You meant that as a joke, right?”

Geraci shrugged, but then smiled.

“Coglionatore,” Fredo said, smiling too, punching Geraci’s shoulder affectionately.

Until three weeks ago, when the filming on this movie started, Geraci had barely ever spoken to Fredo. He’d turned out to be a thoroughly likable guy.

“You think all that whiskey’s real?” Fredo said, pointing to the clear, unlabeled bottles behind the rough-hewn bar.

“How would I know? Why don’t you go look?”

Fredo dismissed the notion with a frown and a wave. “Last thing I need.”

Geraci nodded. “Aspirin?”

“Had some.”

“That was some night.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Fredo said, shaking his head and suddenly looking both rueful and amazed. “Anymore, every night is some night.”

Last night, they’d taken their wives and gone out on the town, such as it was. On a whim, they’d headed to Mexico. When they’d gotten there, Deanna Dunn insisted on going to see a donkey show. Charlotte, at least as of this morning, still wasn’t speaking to him. Though she might have been angry because all night, no matter what anyone said about anything, Deanna Dunn brought the conversation back to Deanna Dunn. Geraci started changing the subject arbitrarily, but no matter how ridiculous the changes were, she took it as a cue to tell another Deanna Dunn story. After they got home, Char had accused him of flirting. He’d let it roll off his back. She couldn’t help but be disappointed that the Movie Queen she’d been so excited about hobnobbing with turned out to be a large-headed loudmouth who joked about how her husband didn’t like blow jobs-with Fredo sitting right there, like a man trying to smile through bowel cramps-and who thought that watching a donkey fuck a teenage Indian girl was a hoot. Give Charlotte time, though, and she’d be telling all the hens back in East Islip about her wild night, making herself sound like some jet-setter.

From down the street came a horrible splintering crash. The buckboard.

“Don’t worry,” Fredo said. “That’s in the script, too.”

“Yeah, well,” Geraci said. “Forgive me if I’m a little jumpy about crashes.”

“I don’t have that kind of power,” Fredo said. “You want forgiveness, it’s Mike’s department.”

Geraci tried not to look surprised. He’d never heard Fredo voice any sort of resentment toward his brother. “So Fontane’s here?”

Fredo shook his head. “They flew in some writer to write him out of the picture, can you believe that? It’s his stand-in that’s out there dying.”

Fontane’s inattention to his own production company was getting to be a bigger and bigger problem, but this was the first time he’d ever skipped out on a movie in the middle of shooting. “So that’s all?” Geraci said. “He’s going to get away with that?”

“I don’t want to get into it,” Fredo said. “I got Dee Dee in one ear, my brother in the other, fucking Hagen in the other.”

“You have three ears?”

“Feels like it,” Fredo said. “It ain’t a feeling I’d recommend.”

They got down to business. Geraci had expected Fredo-as he had done other times they’d sat down to meet-to relay messages about Geraci’s operation back in New York. Instead, Fredo gave him the news about the peace talks the day before. It was all set: Geraci was going home.

This, too, was the sort of thing a guy might hear right before he got clipped. But if that’s what was going to happen, why had Mike sent Fredo?

“You okay?” Fredo said. “Your hearing going or something? I’d’ve thought a guy gets news like this he’d be on cloud nine.”

Men from the lighting crew had come in and started to set up a shot. Prop guys scattered sawdust on the floor and set out playing cards, poker chips, dirty glasses, and sheet music for the presumably doomed piano player. “It’s just going to be complicated, that’s all,” Geraci said. “Going home.”

Fredo lowered his voice. “Hey, how are you with the Straccis? I mean, you know, how were you? Before all this down here. I got a reason for asking.”

“I’ve got guys there I work with.” Without the tributes he paid to Black Tony Stracci, the drugs could never land in Jersey and get to New York so smoothly. “What’s your reason?”

“I’ve got this idea. There might be something in it for you. New source of income. Could be one of the best things we ever had. When I talked to Mike, he said no dice, but the more I get to know you, the more I think you and me together can make him come around.”

“I don’t know, Fredo.” Geraci hoped he didn’t show it, but he was shocked. Fredo hardly knew him yet was enlisting him to defy Michael Corleone. “If the Don turned it down-”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of that. I know him like nobody knows him.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Geraci said. This sort of open disloyalty would have been outrageous coming from some neighborhood punk. But from the sotto copo? From the brother of the Don? “I have to be straight with you, though, Fredo. I’m not going to-”

“I appreciate what you’re saying, but hear me out, okay? Okay. So here it is. You’re a lawyer, right? Did you know it’s against the law to bury people in San Francisco?”

Wrong, he wasn’t a lawyer, but Geraci didn’t bother to correct him. Just then, Deanna Dunn burst through the swinging doors.

“Barkeep,” she growled, “gimme a shot of your best red-eye.”

“That’s pretty good,” Geraci said, because it was. She sounded exactly like the actor who played the villain in this movie, a grizzled lout who’d also started out as a boxer.

“Those aren’t real bottles of whiskey,” Fredo said.

“This attachment you have to the real,” she said, “is very cute. Knock it off, will ya?”

“Oh, and yeah,” Fredo said, ignoring his wife and addressing Geraci. “I almost forgot.” He grabbed the lapels of his own suit. “I do have a guy. He’s out in Beverly Hills, but I fly him to Vegas for fittings. He’s Fontane’s guy out there, too, which is how I heard about him.”

“Unlike you,” said Deanna Dunn, “Johnny has to have his pants made special. Otherwise they wouldn’t fit right because his dick’s-”

Fredo smiled wanly. “It’s true.”

“Big one, huh?” Geraci couldn’t believe Fredo was going to let her get away with that.

“That’s what they say,” Fredo said.

“Who’s they?”

“Oh, darling.” Deanna Dunn turned a chair around and straddled it. “Who isn’t they?” She waggled her eyebrows.

Geraci could see in Fredo’s eyes that he was mad, but the smile lingered gruesomely on his face of the underboss.

“I did a picture with Margot Ashton,” said Deanna Dunn, “while she was still married to Johnny. The director-Flynn, that fat Mick slob-was razzing her about being married to a skinny ninety-eight-pound weakling like Johnny Fontane. This was awhile back, you know. So in front of ev-v-v-v-v-verybody, Margot says, real loud, ‘He may be skinny, but his proportions are perfect. Eight pounds Johnny and ninety pounds of cock.’ ”

Fredo exploded in shrill laughter.

“Lovely woman, Miss Ashton,” Geraci said. And you, Miss Dunn, are eight pounds Deanna and ninety pounds of gigantic head.

“Naturally,” Deanna said, “after she said that, I made it my business to see if she’d been exaggerating.”

The only people Geraci had ever seen whose faces could go from joy to despair as swiftly as Fredo Corleone’s were his beautiful daughters’, but only when they were still babies.

“And so it is with great pleasure, in front of all you good people, that I can reveal, at long last, and I do mean long-”

“I should go home,” Geraci said, and he did. He’d hear about the stiffs in San Francisco some other time.

One thing kept bothering Pete Clemenza.

That night at the Castle in the Sand? When they were watching Fontane and Buzz Fratello and Dotty Ames, until Mike got the phone call from Hagen with the news about the plane crash? Why did Mike tap Clemenza on the shoulder to get his attention to leave before he even started talking to Hagen? How did he know they’d be getting up and going?

Not that Clemenza would ever say anything.

But it’s the kind of little thing a guy thinks about a lot. Kind of thing that can make a guy go outside at two in the morning in his silk pajamas, light a good cigar, flip on the floodlights, and wax the living shit out of his Cadillac.

Chapter 15

THE CONGRESSMAN- a former state attorney general, a vigilant opponent of the incursion of the Cosa Nostra into his beloved Silver State, and also, for what it’s worth, a rancher whose property lay downwind of Doomtown-first received his grim diagnosis in the hospital’s newly completed Vito Corleone Wing. When he went back to Washington, he got a second opinion from a specialist. The news was the same: the Big C; lymphatic, inoperable; six months to live. He chose to keep his illness a secret and fight it. If anyone was tough enough to lick the Big C, it was that big ox. A year later and eighty-eight pounds lighter, he died. As so often happens, the person whose constitutional responsibility it was to appoint a successor was a political rival of the deceased. The governor asked Thomas F. Hagen, a prominent Las Vegas attorney and financier, to abandon his long-shot bid for his party’s Senate nomination and accept the appointment to Congress. Mr. Hagen graciously agreed to put aside his plans for the chance to serve the good people of the State of Nevada.

The appointment was unpopular. The issue was less Hagen ’s associates-he was hardly the only politician in that era with such associates-than his brief tenure as a Nevada resident. Also, he was a political novice with no record of public service. Every newspaper in the state, without exception, criticized the choice and gave the controversy prominent coverage. The primary added further complications. The late congressman had been running unopposed. Lawsuits abounded, but the November general election was shaping up as a contest between Tom Hagen and a dead man.

To build power, sometimes one must control those who seem the least powerful. This was the secret of the Corleones’ ability to control judges. Though corruption and venality thrive in all classes of men, the normative judge-the public might be relieved to know-is more honest than the normative human being. In practice, judges are difficult and expensive to control. However. Cases are typically assigned “randomly” by a clerk of court who’s paid no more than, say, a normative Spanish teacher. A person who controls ten percent of such people and a majority of the judges is vastly less powerful than one who’s sewn up most of the clerks and a few strategically placed judges afflicted by cynical natures, bad habits, or dark secrets.

Newspapers work the opposite way. Some reporters can be swayed by a free lunch, a forgiven gambling debt, even a glass of ice-cold beer. But most have a crusading streak and a fixation on whatever strikes them as news that overrides their loyalty to anything. Happily, they are also excitable, eager for newer news, toward which they follow one another like lemmings. To control the news, one needs influence at the top. The public has a short memory. If a story goes away after a few days and is replaced by something new, the public wants not closure to the old but newer details about the new. Or something newer still. Control those who control those who decide how long to cover a story and where it goes in the paper, and you control the news.

After a few days, a magnetic, strange-looking man in black leather and blacker sideburns-a popular music sensation from Mississippi, a white boy screaming Negro songs-came to Las Vegas for the first time. Hagen was supplanted on the front page and in the public’s imagination by gleeful news of the hillbilly sensation’s poor performance and speculation about whether this signaled an end not just to the young hick’s career but also to the whole vulgar, allegedly Communistic fad known as “rock and roll.” The day Hagen was sworn in and flew to Washington to assume his duties, the only mention of him in any Nevada paper was a story by one dogged reporter from Carson City, who, from the wilderness of an inside page, tried to sort out the legal battle over the congressional contest. The late congressman’s party was beset by infighting and injunctions and seemed increasingly unlikely to be able both to pick a candidate and to get that candidate onto the ballot in time. Congressman Hagen was faring better. Though he’d been appointed to office well after the filing deadline for the November ballot, he’d submitted all the necessary petitions and paperwork within a week of the announcement of his appointment. The clerk of the court was quoted as saying that, under the circumstances, the request by Hagen ’s lawyers to grant him the necessary extension promised to be “a routine matter.”

The Dons and their top men were acting more and more like the top men in corporations or governments. This, Hagen knew, was what Michael thought he wanted: to be legitimate. Michael was continuing down this road without Hagen ’s advice. Until it was sought, Hagen would keep his reservations to himself.

Unlike Hagen, Michael had never worked for a corporation. In this business, who gets hurt who hasn’t brought it on himself? It’s rare. But in “legitimate” businesses? Before Hagen had quit to go to work for Vito Corleone, he’d spent his final months as a corporate lawyer working on “acceptable death rates”: How many innocent people would have to die various ways in various crashes of cars manufactured by the firm’s client before the fully expected lawsuits justified the cost of installing safer, more expensive parts. Babies, high school kids, pregnant women, brilliant young white men with high salaries: all researched, all calculated, all written down in the report he filed the day he quit. What did those people do to bring on their deaths?

The government was worse, which Hagen knew long before he took office himself. Remember “Remember the Maine ”? All a big lie concocted so the United States could go to war under false pretenses and the men in charge could make their rich friends richer (including the newspaper moguls who self-servingly spread the lie in the first place). More people died in that trumped-up war than in every Mafia conflict put together. It’s only the negative stereotypes about Italians that make people think they’re a threat to the average Joe. The government, on the other hand, wages nonstop war on the average Joe, and the suckers just eat their bread, go to their circuses, and keep on pretending they live in a democracy-a lie so cherished they can’t grasp the self-evident, that America is run entirely via backroom deals involving the rich. In almost every election, the richer candidate defeats the poorer candidate. When the poorer candidate wins, it’s usually because he’s agreed to be a stooge for people richer than the ones who backed his opponent. Go ahead, try voting the bastards out. See what happens. More to the point: see what doesn’t. That ought to be his slogan: Hagen for Congress. See What Doesn’t Happen.

Hagen doubted that the world had ever seen a better racket than the American government. It’s hard to sue the government, for example, and even if you win, so what? Here’s a million bucks. Then they raise taxes two million. Plus, with businesses, someone somewhere has to buy their crummy product. What are people supposed to do about the government? It’s yours, it’s you, you’re stuck with it, end of story.

For years, Hagen had been working out deals with politicians, looking into their dead eyes and seeing what soulless opportunists those men had become, long before Hagen ever set foot in their offices to explain whatever mutually beneficial arrangement they would have little choice but to accept. These men-and, very occasionally, women-accepted without objection, thanked Hagen, shook his hand, smiled those public-servant smiles, and told him to come back anytime. If Hagen ever looked in the mirror and saw that look in his own eyes, he might just have to put a bullet between them.

He’d never expected to hold elected office outside the state of Nevada (and was reluctant even to do that), and he never would have if not for the unforeseen opportunity provided by his predecessor’s death. The people of Nevada seemed as alarmed to find Tom Hagen in Congress as he was to be there-though less alarmed than his wife, Theresa. The criticism of his appointment, even after it had died down, was too much for her. She was concerned about the effect it would have on the kids. And the idea of being a Washington wife gave her the creeps. “You always seem to get what you want,” she’d told him, “and I know you well enough to know you never wanted this.” He tried to deny it, and she saw through him. She needed time to think about all this. She took the kids and went to spend the summer with her folks at the Jersey shore.

Perhaps it was precisely because Tom Hagen had gone into this so grudgingly that his arrival in Washington was such a shock to his system. As his taxicab crossed the Potomac, it hit him, really, where he was, who he was. As realistic as Hagen was about what went on in that city, the sight of the Lincoln Memorial put a lump in his throat.

That first night in his hotel, when he couldn’t sleep, he initially blamed it on jet lag and coffee, but he flew all the time and drank coffee by the gallon and ordinarily could go to sleep anytime he allowed himself to do so. He pulled back the curtain and saw the lights of the Mall, and felt goose bumps.

He was a millionaire. He was a United States congressman. He started laughing.

Then he got dressed.

The impulse had come from the heart, and he was in the elevator before he thought about what an indefensibly sentimental thing he was about to do.

He knew even as it was happening that this was not a story he could ever tell to anyone.

He crossed Constitution Avenue and stood at the west end of the Reflecting Pool, which smelled like rotten eggs. Lights shone on the water. A couple opposite him held hands and kissed. What tremendous beauty.

He was an orphan, that’s what he was. When he was ten, his mother went blind and then died and his father drank himself to death, and Hagen got stuck in an orphanage and ran away and lived on the street for more than a year before he made friends with Sonny Corleone and Sonny brought him home like a stray puppy. At the time, it had made no sense that Sonny’s father had gone along with this, but Hagen had been too grateful to question anything. After that, it became something Hagen didn’t think about. His mother died of a venereal disease and his father was a violent, rampaging, death-courting drunk. Hagen was an expert about not talking about things or thinking about them a long time before Vito Corleone honed and harnessed those skills.

But that night it suddenly hit him. Vito had been an orphan, too, taken in by the Abbandandos at about the same age as Hagen was taken in by the Corleones. Vito grew up in the same house as the man who would become his consigliere. Vito had re-created a mirror image of that dynamic in his own house, as first Sonny and then Michael used Hagen in that role.

Hagen turned around slowly, arms out, taking it all in, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument. The Capitol and, above it, the seemingly random stars that had somehow aligned for that to be his new place of business. Hagen stayed where he was, at the west end of the pool, both reflected and reflecting, and kept turning around. He didn’t believe in God, an afterlife, or anything mystical, but at that moment he did, without a doubt, feel the presence of the dead, heavy and literal as a block of ice. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The late congressman. Sonny and Vito Corleone. Bridget and Marty Hagen. Those untold thousands of men who’d taken bullets in the head and heart for something bigger than their own immediate families and interests. All the people whose lives had been laid down so that he could have his-so that, for however long, he would find himself here, transformed into some excellent gray-haired stranger named Congressman Thomas F. Hagen.

During his time in Congress, he’d often think back to this moment and the euphoria he’d felt-usually at one of the surprisingly many times people seemed legitimately and even selflessly interested in improving the lives of strangers. Unlike those whose early days in Washington were spent watching their naive idealism swiftly ground to dust, pulverized by the realities of politics and money, Hagen had no ideals to crush. When congressmen he’d last seen when he’d come to bribe them saw him inside the Capitol and introduced themselves, pretending never to have met him, Hagen was only mildly amused. He’d spent his life sitting in an office while people paraded in one by one, asking for favors, so their piggishness barely registered on him, either. On the other hand, while virtue and altruism are in short supply on Capitol Hill, for a man incapable of disillusionment, they’re everywhere.

That first night in Washington, though, his euphoria was finally interrupted when, as he was staring up at the night sky, he felt the barrel of a gun against his ribs. It was a Negro in a white cowboy hat with a bandanna over his face. He wore crepe-soled shoes. Hagen hadn’t heard him coming.

“Hope that watch doesn’t have sentimental value,” the man said.

“It doesn’t,” Hagen said, though it had been an anniversary present from Theresa. Not a milestone anniversary, but he did like the watch. “It’s just a watch.”

“It’s a hell of a nice watch.”

“Thanks. Be sure to point that out to your fence. I like the hat, by the way.”

“Thanks. You’re rich, huh?” he said, handing back Hagen ’s emptied wallet.

“Less so now,” Hagen said. He’d only had a couple hundred dollars on him.

“Sorry about that,” the man said, turning away. “It’s just business, you know?”

“I understand completely,” Hagen called after him. Had the city ever seen a more cheerful mugging victim? “Good luck to you, friend.”

Hagen, being Hagen, had left plenty of time for the drive from Theresa’s parents’ house in Asbury Park down the shore to his party’s national convention in Atlantic City, and it was only after he hit Atlantic City and the traffic was rerouted and snarled that he had any reason to check his watch. He’d replaced the one that had been stolen with a replica of it so he wouldn’t have to say anything to Theresa. But he’d left it on the nightstand. He could picture it. It was right next to his convention credentials. He slammed the steering wheel with the palm of his hand.

It had been ridiculous not to get a hotel in Atlantic City, but he’d been trying to bring Theresa around, and it had been great to see the kids. Even the boys had been glad to see him, shooting baskets in the driveway and talking about girls and cars and even that barbaric, tuneless music they loved. It had all worked out great. Theresa was coming home at the end of the summer- Hagen hadn’t been sure she would-and had even said she would consider showing up at various campaign events, so long as Tom wrangled her an appointment to the board for the proposed new museum of modern art. But he’d underestimated how much the drives back and forth would take out of him, and of course naturally the day the traffic was the worst was the only day he really had to be there, and it also just figured that, spread so thin, he’d forget things. If he hadn’t tried to do so much in such a little time, he’d have traveled with his chief of staff-an unlikable but witheringly efficient young Harvard-educated twit recommended to him by the governor-and Ralph would have made sure he had everything, no matter how distracted his boss had been by running out to the beach for a last-minute swim with his daughter.

Hagen had no idea how long he’d been beating the steering wheel when he caught sight of himself, red-faced and sweating, a heart attack waiting to happen. He took a deep breath. He pulled out a comb and put himself together.

With no parking pass, he took a spot far up the boardwalk from Convention Hall. By the time he got there, he was soaked with sweat, so disheveled that, despite several inventive tactics with different gatekeepers, he failed to talk his way into the hall in time to see Governor James Kav-anaugh Shea’s nominating speech. From the roar of the crowd, it seemed to be going well.

For the first time, Hagen noticed the words carved into the hall’s limestone facade: CONSILIO ET PRUDENTIA. Latin. “Counsel and prudence.” Consiglio. Prudenza.

The way things were going, it wouldn’t surprise Hagen if someday the Mob rented an arena like this for its own business. Shock, yes, but not surprise. If Hagen were still consigliere, his first words of counsel would be that the gatherings of men from various Families-weddings, funerals, title fights, one nightclub’s secret owners trying to impress another’s with the biggest shows, the biggest names-had become too frequent, too public, too glamorous, even the funerals. He’d heard that the meeting in New York had led to an agreement that they’d meet annually. What next? Printed stock certificates? Live television coverage?

From inside, more cheers.

Hagen heaved a sigh, walked across the boardwalk, and took a seat on the bench.

A few hundred yards away, crews scrambled to finish the temporary stage for Johnny Fontane’s outdoor concert later tonight. A film crew set up, too-on the payroll of Fontane’s production company, even though there were no plans to release the footage or to show it anywhere outside Fontane’s house in Beverly Hills. Men unloaded trucks bearing risers and chairs-concessions controlled by the Stracci Family.

What difference did it make if Hagen didn’t actually hear the speech? Who’d even know he’d missed it? What difference did it make that if it weren’t for Tom Hagen and his negotiating skills, this convention would probably have been held in Chicago? Other people got the credit, and, in the end, that was how Hagen liked it. It was against his nature to take credit for things, the way a man has to do if he wants the saps who think we live in a democracy to vote for him.

He mopped his brow, wrung his handkerchief, and mopped it again. Hagen had done the negotiations, but the plan had been Michael Corleone’s, and this-holding the convention in Atlantic City -had been its master stroke. It brought everything together. The Straccis controlled the party machine in this state. But Black Tony (who’d been dying his hair jet black since he was a kid) lacked connections outside New Jersey and had been most grateful for the full cooperation of the Corleone-controlled politicians. The Straccis further benefited because they controlled the linen services and the waste removal in Atlantic City, as well as the illegal casinos in the Jersey Palisades. This had cemented a friendship between the Corleones and Don Stracci, enabling Ace Geraci’s regime to use the Stracci docks for the smuggling operation that had bankrolled so much of what came thereafter.

Governor Jimmy Shea got credit for bringing the convention and all its economic benefits to New Jersey. He got to make a big speech live on all three networks, prime-time TV, without having to go to the expense of being also-ran in the primaries. In return for these favors, his brother Danny (who didn’t know on whose behalf his father was intervening) helped curtail the prosecution of any of the Families in the recent killings. And (again via the Ambassador) Jimmy Shea agreed not to oppose a measure that would legalize gambling in Atlantic City. Now, with a good speech, Jimmy Shea had the chance to lay the groundwork for becoming-whether he knew it or not-the first American president ever to owe his election to the Cosa Nostra.

He’d know it eventually, that was for certain.

From inside the hall came an eruption of applause. A muffled brass band played “Into the Wild Blue Yonder.”

This evening was the valedictory to the peace. Hagen had been the point man for it all, but at its culminating moment, where did he find himself? On a bench, across the boardwalk, outside looking in. He’d never even set foot inside Convention Hall. It housed the world’s largest pipe organ, he’d been told. Every year, it hosted the Miss America pageant, which Hagen had seen, on TV. No doubt the only difference between Miss Alabama ’s positions on opportunity (it’s knocking!), children (they’re the future!), education (for it!), the keys to a good life (hard work! churchgoing! family!), and world peace (possible in our lifetime!) and those of Governor Shea was that Shea didn’t have to say it in high heels and a bathing suit.

What the hell. Why should Hagen care?

Hagen walked to the hotel where the Ambassador had rented the main ballroom, figuring that he’d be early but with any luck he’d be able to grab a drink. A blue velvet banner with a union logo on it welcomed the delegates, but the Ambassador had quietly paid for everything. The place was already surprisingly crowded. Jimmy Shea had finished his speech, and a steadily increasing tide of people swept into the room, raving about how inspirational the governor had been, lamenting that it was too bad he’d been giving the nominating speech instead of the acceptance, that maybe Shea-young, attractive, a war hero-would stand a chance in November, unlike that dull scold from Ohio that the party was running as a sacrificial lamb.

Hagen knew that some of these people were plants, paid to talk up Shea’s speech, no matter how he’d done. He also knew that Shea’s war heroism, while genuine, had been exaggerated in the public’s mind by the amount and nature of the news coverage it had received at the time, coverage Hagen had personally orchestrated. And he also knew, even in his brief time in Washington, that the “dull scold from Ohio ” was an honorable and formidable man. What being young and attractive had to do with being president, Hagen had no idea. Hagen got a double scotch and water and scanned the room for people whose hand it was prudent for him to go shake. Just then there was a commotion at the door, including gleeful screams. Hagen turned, and as he did a hand pounded him on the shoulder.

“My congressman!” said Fredo Corleone, wearing a white dinner jacket. “Hey, fella, if I promise to vote for you, can I have your autograph?”

Hagen put his mouth by Fredo’s ear. “What are you doing here? How’s Ma?”

Fredo was drunk. He jerked a thumb toward the doors.

It had not been Shea who entered, as Hagen had presumed, but Johnny Fontane, complete with a sizable entourage.

“I came with Johnny,” Fredo said.

“And Ma?” Two weeks ago Carmela Corleone had been rushed to the hospital for what had turned out to be a blood clot in her brain. At first, she hadn’t been expected to make it, but she’d rallied. The last time Hagen had been there, Fredo had assured him he’d stay in New York and oversee things, but here he was: here.

“She’s fine,” Fredo said. “She’s home.”

“I know she’s home. Why aren’t you home with her?”

“Believe me, I’m just in the way up there.”

Hagen doubted that. Connie Corleone had left Ed Federici and jetted off to Europe with some drunken playboy and had only sent a telegram and flowers. Carmela’s aunt had died earlier that year. Mike and Kay had been there for a while but had had to go back to Nevada. They’d hired a nurse. The only family Carmela had up there was Sonny’s daughter Kathy, who lived in a dormitory at Barnard.

Hagen nodded toward the back of Fontane’s entourage-Gussie Cic-ero, a club owner in L.A. and an associate of Jackie Ping-Pong, and two men from the Chicago outfit. “So what are they doing here?”

“They came with Johnny, too.”

“Come again?”

“Gussie was married to Margot Ashton before Johnny was married to her, remember? And now they’re friends of mine. Relax, Tommy. It’s a party, y’know. Christ almighty, did you see that speech?”

Fredo had credentials to the convention? “You saw it?”

“On TV. We were up in the penthouse where Gussie and Johnny are staying. Jimmy and Danny were up there last night, too. Wild. Hoo boy. You should have come by.”

He hadn’t been invited, hadn’t had any idea. “Jimmy and Danny Shea?”

“Who we talking about? Of course Jimmy and Danny Shea.”

Hagen knew he should have this conversation later. After all the bad publicity right after his appointment, being seen in public, here, saying anything more than hello, couldn’t be good.

“Where are you staying?”

“So are those the biggest you’ve ever seen, or what?” Fredo nodded toward Annie McGowan and her famously enormous breasts. She was the blonde walking right behind Fontane, next to the comic Fontane called Numbnuts, whom she’d replaced as Johnny’s opening act but who was somehow still a part of Fontane’s entourage. Annie McGowan had superseded the aging Mae West as the person whose name people used in big-breasted-woman jokes.

“I should go, Fredo.”

“You ever meet her?”

“Once,” Hagen said. “She wouldn’t remember me.”

Finally Jimmy Shea made his entrance, flanked by his father and brother. The room exploded in applause and a recorded version of “Into the Wild Blue Yonder.”

“Shea and Hagen in 1960!” Fredo yelled.

As far as Hagen could tell, Fredo was drowned out.

Hagen slipped away. By now the room was packed. He tried to shake hands with the right people, but it was tough. He did what he could, but there were more than a few times he extended his hand toward someone he thought he recognized as a senator or congressman or top aide and got a blank stare in return. He tried to find members of the Nevada delegation-the only people, presumably, who’d have noticed he wasn’t there. The only one he saw was a schoolteacher from Beatty, wherever that was.

“Gateway to Death Valley,” she said, shouting over the din.

“Oh, right,” he said. They brag about that in Beatty?

“Mines,” she said, “that’s what we have there. Though several have closed.”

“That’s why we need to vote the bastards out,” Hagen blurted out.

She frowned. Maybe it was the word bastards, maybe because he was one of the bastards she’d like to vote out, but before he could apologize, her face brightened. “You’re wonderful!” she screamed in obvious delight.

It took Hagen a second to realize that behind him Governor Shea was drawing near, using his big smile like a snowplow. Shea directed the smile at the teacher, gave her a thumbs-up, said, “Thank you, good to see you,” and patted her on the shoulder. Then the governor shook Hagen ’s hand-they’d never met-and before his grip even eased he was moving his eyes to the next person in the crowd. That was it. But the postcoital look on the schoolteacher’s face gave Hagen an immediate lesson about politics. Being young and attractive had nothing to do with being president but a lot to do with getting elected.

Hagen leaned toward her ear. “So I take it you saw Governor Shea’s speech?”

“One hears a speech,” she said, frowning again.

“Right,” he said.

She put her mouth next to Hagen ’s ear. “Allow me to save you some time, sir,” she said. “I’ve never crossed party lines in my life, but I’m doing so in November, to vote against you.”

She pulled back from him, batting her eyes to underscore the sarcasm.

What was he supposed to say, Lady, my opponent’s dead? “Well, okay,” he said, patting her on the shoulder, unconsciously mimicking Shea. “Good to see you.”

Hagen slithered through the crowd. Packed as the ballroom was, there was hardly anyone in line at the bar. Nearly everyone was gawking at the many celebrities.

Fontane, Shea, and Annie McGowan had climbed up on a table. Fontane and Shea were arm in arm and Annie was off to the side, her hands clasped in front of her, fig-leaf style. The Ambassador, standing on the floor beside them, stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. It was hard for Hagen to look at him and not think of him standing naked and sunburned in his swimming pool. Fontane asked everyone to please join in as they sang “ America the Beautiful.”

A few years ago, Hagen had taken Andrew to FAO Schwartz to see Annie McGowan, back when Andrew was still little and her puppet show, Jojo, Mrs. Cheese amp; Annie, was just starting. Last year, about the time Annie left Danny Shea (who was married anyway) and she and Johnny Fontane became an item, she’d quit her TV show to become a singer.

Shea climbed down from the table, waving. Fontane and Annie stayed, belting out a show tune that originally had celebrated another state and now sported lyrics extolling the virtues of New Jersey.

Hagen pulled out the index card on which his chief of staff had-in tiny, perfect handwriting-listed what parties to attend tonight, including meticulous directions, names of people to see, even conversational prompts. Screw it. He’d seen enough, had enough. Hagen was going back to Asbury Park to see his family.

On his way out, he saw Fredo sitting in the lobby, talking with the two Chicago guys and a man in a plaid coat, Morty Whiteshoes, who worked mostly in Miami.

“You leaving, Tom?” Fredo called out.

Tom motioned for him to stay seated. “Catch you later tonight.”

“No, hold on,” Fredo said, excusing himself. “I’ll walk with you. Be right back, guys.”

Fredo fell in beside him on the crowded boardwalk. Hagen walked faster than he would have needed to.

“I need to ask you something.”

“It’s taken care of,” Hagen said, presuming this was about the mess last year in San Francisco. “Forgotten, okay? So forget it.”

“Look, did Mike ever say anything to you about this idea I had?” Fredo said. “This vision really, where we’d get a law passed so you couldn’t bury nobody in New York -any of the boroughs and Long Island, too?”

“Keep it down.” Instinctively Hagen looked around.

“I don’t mean that kind of body burying,” Fredo said. “I’m talking about regular, you know? Everybody. You get a zoning thing passed so that-”

“No,” Hagen said. “You know I’m out of that end of things. Listen, I really have to go.” He cut in front of Fredo and walked backward, hoping to put an end to this. “Tell Deanna I said hello, all right?”

Fredo stopped and looked puzzled. Though it might have been the sunglasses. Hagen couldn’t see his eyes.

“Deanna,” Hagen said. “Your wife. Ring any bells?”

Fredo nodded. “Tell Theresa and the kids I love them,” he said. “Don’t forget, okay?”

There was something about the way he said it that Hagen didn’t like. He pulled him aside, into an alley. “You okay, Fredo?”

Fredo looked down and shrugged, like one of Hagen ’s sulky teenage boys.

“Do you want to tell me more about what happened in San Francisco?”

Fredo looked up and took off his sunglasses. “Fuck you, okay? I’m not answerable to you, Tommy.”

“What sort of twisted Hollywood bullshit have you gotten yourself into, Fredo?”

“What did I just say? I don’t have to answer to you, all right?”

“Why the hell are all of Fontane’s friends either sleeping with women he used to sleep with or else used to sleep with the women he’s sleeping with?”

“Say what now?”

Hagen repeated himself.

“That’s low, Tommy.”

It was. “Forget it,” Hagen said.

“No, I know you,” Fredo said, closing in on Hagen, backing him against the wall of the alley. “You don’t forget jack shit. You’ll keep turning it over in your mind until you think you got a solution, even if there is no solution, or the solution’s so simple you couldn’t stand it because then you wouldn’t get to think about it over”-and here he jabbed Hagen in the breastbone-“and over”-again-“and over”-and again-“and over again.”

Hagen had his back against a sooty brick wall. Fredo had been a violent little kid for a while, and then that part of him just disappeared. Until he beat up that queer in San Francisco.

“I should go,” Hagen said. “All right? I need to go.”

“You think you’re so fucking smart.” He gave Hagan’s chest a little shove. “Don’t you?”

“C’mon, Fredo. Easy, huh?”

“Answer me.”

“Do you have a gun, Fredo?”

“What’s wrong, you afraid of me?”

“Always have been,” Hagen said.

Fredo laughed, low and mirthless. He reached up, open-handed, and gave Hagen ’s cheek something harder than a pat and softer than a slap. “Look, Tommy,” Fredo said. “It’s not complicated.”

What isn’t? Hagen pursed his lips and nodded. “It’s not, huh?”

“It’s not.” Fredo had onions and red wine on his breath. He’d missed a spot on his neck, shaving. “See, when you’re a pussy hound like Johnny? And all your friends are pussy hounds, too? It’s bound to happen. Believe me. There’s only so much quality pussy on Earth, and eventually the numbers catch up with a guy. You know?”

“In theory,” Hagen said, “yeah. Sure. I know.”

Fredo stepped backward and put his sunglasses back on. “Next time you talk to Mike,” he said, “tell him I got a few more of the details worked out on my idea, all right?”

“C’mon, Fredo. Like I said, I’m out-”

“Just go, goddamn it.” Fredo pointed vaguely toward the ocean. “You need to go, go.”

That night, when Tom Hagen got back to Theresa’s parents’ house in Asbury Park, his sons were rolling around on the tiny front yard, fighting.

He got out of the car. The fight was, apparently, about a girl, someone Andrew had liked first and Frank had kissed. Hagen let it go on for a while, but when he saw Theresa coming through the front door onto the porch he stuck his fingers in his mouth, whistled, then walked into the middle of the fight and separated them. He ordered them to get in the car and then went inside and got his watch. Gianna was watching a TV Western with her grandparents. He picked her up and piled everyone into the car to go get ice cream. “Mom and Dad have ice cream here,” Theresa said, but Tom shot her a look and she went along.

They got to the Dairy Duchess out by the highway just as it closed. Tom Hagen went around to the back door and slipped the owner a fifty, and a few moments later the Hagen family was sitting together at a sticky green picnic table under a yellow vapor light: a family. Gianna-nothing if not her father’s daughter-ate her cone as fastidiously as a charm-school headmistress, not spilling so much as a sprinkle. Theresa’s sundae melted as she dabbed at Andrew’s puffy face with a spit-dampened paper napkin. Andrew had something with a brownie inside. Frank wolfed down a banana split in a red plastic boat-shaped dish. Tom just had coffee.

When everyone had finished, Tom Hagen rose and stood at the head of the table and told them they were going to spend the rest of the summer in Washington, as a family. Before school started, they’d all drive back to Nevada together, as a family. When he lost the election to a dead man, as he felt fairly certain he would, they would confront that, too, and how?

Gianna’s hand shot up. “As a family!”

“Attagirl,” he said, kissing her on top of her red head. “I know this hasn’t been easy on any of you. I know that the papers have said some crazy things, and I know people have said things to your face that are worse. But we’re in this together. For now, I am a United States congressman. It’s an honor, a privilege, a miracle, really. An experience I want you all to remember for the rest of your lives. Our lives.”

His children turned to look at Theresa. She took a deep breath and nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “And I’m sorry I haven’t been-”

“No need,” Tom said, waving her off. “I understand completely.”

He didn’t so much forget to tell Theresa and the kids that Fredo loved them as he never found the right moment to do it.

The next day, they got in the car together and drove to D.C. By the time they got there, Ralph had moved Hagen ’s things into a bigger suite and drafted an intern to act as a tour guide. They saw every monument, got behind-the-scenes tours of the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. They went to every museum, and Theresa, who had an art history degree from Syracuse, seemed happier than she’d been in years. Tom and the boys played basketball at the congressional gym and got haircuts from the congressional barber.

Ralph even arranged a visit to the Oval Office, as a family, to meet the president. Better yet, Princess, the president’s collie and a relative of the dog who played Lassie on TV, had given birth to a litter of puppies and the Hagens were going to get one. They walked from their hotel together and were caught without umbrellas in a downpour. In the picture taken by the official White House photographer, the Hagens, as diminished-looking as a family of dripping wet cats, stand flanking the president, who looks like a man trying to smile through an untimely bowel spasm. Little Gianna holds up the puppy-Elvis, they ended up calling it-grimacing, her eyes on the airborne green bean-sized puppy turd that seems destined for the president’s coffee cup.

Tom ordered the biggest print of the photo he could get. The whole family thought it was hilarious. When they went back to Las Vegas, he hung it over the mantelpiece, superseding the Picasso lithograph Theresa had paid a mint for, which looked better in the dining room anyway.

Hagen ’s defeat was one of the most lopsided in the history of the state of Nevada -by far the most decisive victory the dead had ever exacted from the living, at least at the polls.

Again and again-whether at meetings of the Kiwanis, Rotary International, the United Mineworkers, the teachers union, or the Cattlemen’s Association of Nevada- Hagen had proven to be a stiff, humorless, and unpopular speaker. He was an observant Irish-Catholic lawyer in a state run by Baptists and agnostic cowboys. The first time Hagen had really seen his new home state was when he began campaigning in it. There were transients in flea-bitten rescue missions who’d spent more time in Nevada than Tom Hagen. His debate with the congressman’s fierce and tiny widow had been a hideous mistake but one Hagen had made out of desperation, a last-ditch effort, since all indications, even at that point, pointed to him as a hopeless long shot. The same poker-faced persuasiveness Hagen had deployed so effectively in delivering hundreds of unrefusable offers came across on TV as frankly reptilian. Nevada has more species of lizards than any state in America. It’s a place that knows reptilian when it sees it.

Days before the election, a Las Vegas newspaper reported that Congressman Hagen had not only been the attorney for reputed mobster Vito “the Godfather” Corleone, as was widely known, but also his unofficial ward, which was not. According to the story, Vito’s surviving children sometimes even called Hagen their “brother.” Hagen denied nothing. He cited himself as one of the thousands of charitable efforts made by members of the Corleone family, along with the largest wing of the biggest hospital in Nevada and the upcoming art museum, which would soon be the best in the country west of the Rockies and east of California. He showed the reporter a copy of the Saturday Evening Post article in which the Vito Corleone Foundation was called one of the best new philanthropies of the 1950s and a spread in Life that featured Michael Corleone’s heroism during World War II. Hagen pointed out that the Corleones, whom the reporter seemed to regard as criminals, had never, to a person, been convicted of a crime of any sort, not even jaywalking. She asked him about the several times they’d been charged with crimes, especially the late Santino Corleone. Hagen handed her a copy of the U.S. Constitution and recommended that she read the part about being presumed innocent until proven guilty. The story pointed out that this turn of phrase appears nowhere in that document.

It was unclear if the reporter or her editor had gotten a tip about Hagen ’s origins. If they had, it could have come from several different people. Friends and neighbors Hagen had known growing up. Fontane, who’d never liked Hagen. The Chicago outfit, who’d been furious about Hagen ’s appointment. Maybe even-given the crazy way he’d been acting lately-Fredo. It was not inconceivable that the reporter might have figured it out for herself. However it had happened, neither Hagen nor Michael chose to waste any time trying to figure out such a puzzle, at least for now. What was the point? Even without that article, Hagen had been destined to lose the election, and badly.

Soon afterward, though, back in Washington, a different small puzzle was solved, a more trivial injustice redressed. The culmination of several weeks of the right people asking the right questions came when a red-and-black Cadillac with New York plates pulled up in front of a tenement building near the Anacostia River. Snow fell. Two white men got out of the car, a short one in a shiny suit and a tall one in a gray duster. They went straight to the front door, and almost without breaking stride the man in the duster kicked it open. A moment later, there came a gunshot. This was a neighborhood where gunshots were as common as lizards in Nevada. The man in the shiny suit came out of the building first, carrying a white ten-gallon hat under his arm like a football. Behind him, with Hagen ’s old wristwatch balled into his fist, came the man in the duster. Upstairs, the mugger-who’d liked the watch too much to sell it-was splayed unconscious on his cold linoleum floor. He’d been brutally kayoed by the tall man, a journeyman heavyweight boxer named Elwood Cusik, whose married girlfriend’s abortion had been arranged-in a sterile New York hospital, no less-by a man with various reasons to be loyal to Ace Geraci. The short man-Cosimo “Momo the Roach” Barone, Sally Tessio’s nephew-had fired a.38 into the Negro’s thieving hand, as a lesson. The thief hadn’t woken up. Cusik, who’d never done a job like this before, lifted the thief’s unmaimed hand and checked his pulse. Seemed normal. Same with his breathing. The thief’s injuries were the sort that could have been easily avoided by anyone who never robbed anyone. Presuming the man regained consciousness before he bled to death, and unless he had any plans to take up typing or the piano, he’d be fine.

“So who’s the wristwatch belong to?” asked Cusik, trying it on in the car.

Momo the Roach didn’t answer. He flipped down the visor and checked his exoskeleton-hard shellacked hair in the mirror. They were out of the city before the boxer said anything else.

“The hat belongs to the same guy as the watch or someone else?”

“Try that on, too, why don’t you?” the Roach said.

Cusik shrugged and obeyed. The hat fit perfectly. “What do you think?” he said.

The Roach shook his head. “It’s you,” he said. “Listen, Tex, do me a favor, see if you can shut up as good as you throw a punch.”

Again Cusik shrugged and obeyed.

The thief-crumpled on the floor of a tiny room in a part of the world where people were slow to call the police and the police were even slower to respond-did in fact bleed to death. Call it business. Call it destiny. Call it the law of unintended consequences. Whichever. Why should Tom Hagen care? A man does things, and it sets other things in motion. A dead man doesn’t have to mean anything. Few do.

Chapter 16

THE MOMENT she first glimpsed the island of Sicily, Kay Corleone gasped.

Michael looked up from the book he was reading- Peyton Place, which Kay had bought after her mother, Deanna Dunn, and several women from the Las Vegas Junior League had all recommended it, though she’d finished it hours ago and thought it was lousy. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Kay said. “My God. You never told me how beautiful it is.”

He set the book down and leaned across Kay, toward the window. “It is beautiful.”

A ridge of snowcapped mountains ringed the walled city of Palermo, visible from the air as a bounty of spires and carved stone and scrolled balconies. It was February, but the Mediterranean was impossibly blue and crested with the gold of the sun, the smoothness of the surface of the water marred only by what seemed the tiniest of vibration, like that of a glass of wine atop a softly playing radio. The runway was on a spit of land northwest of the city. Among the countless things Michael had said to dissuade Kay from coming here on their vacation was that, statistically, this was one of the most dangerous airports in the world. Most of the time, he himself flew into Rome and took a train and ferry here. As the plane banked low, over the water, so close to a small gray fishing boat she could see the men’s unshaven faces, Kay-who’d been to Europe before, but always by sea-was thrilled she’d insisted they fly all the way here.

Only when the plane’s shadow appeared on the boulders of the coastline did a hot pang of panic shoot through her-my babies!-but a pang was all it was. Seconds later, they touched down, a little harder than a person might like but an essentially uneventful landing.

“After all these years,” Kay marveled, “here I am in Sicily for the first time.”

“Birthplace of Venus,” Michael said, rubbing her thigh. “Goddess of love.”

For Kay’s whole adult life, she’d been hearing about all the things that were and weren’t Sicilian, all the things she could never understand because she wasn’t Sicilian. Michael had been here numerous times on business and had even, for three years, lived here. The least he could do was show her the place: a week’s worth of sightseeing and a second week holed up in a romantic resort carved into a mountainside near Taormina. He owed her that much. At least that much.

As the plane taxied toward the terminal, Kay noticed a precisely parked row of tiny Italian cars in the grass infield. Beside the cars, thirty or so people, many with bread or flowers tucked under their arms, stood behind a waist-high rope, smiling and waving at the arriving plane. In front of the rope were four uniformed carabinieri, two with gleaming silver swords on their shoulders, two with their swords sheathed and machine guns held across their chests.

“People you know?” Kay said.

She’d been joking, but Michael nodded. “Friends,” he said. “Friends of friends, really. There’s supposed to be a surprise party at a restaurant on the beach at Mondello.”

She gave him a look.

“I know,” he said.

“I thought we had an understanding.”

“We do. I’m not the one surprising you. No more surprises from me, that’s the deal. As far as the portion of the world I don’t control, you’re going to have to take it up with God.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Was he making a crack about her becoming Catholic?

“Nothing,” he said. “Look, I wasn’t sure it was going to happen. I let you know about it as soon as I saw that it was. It would have been just as much a surprise if the surprise party I told you about ended up not happening, right?”

She shook her head and patted his knee. He did need a vacation. Her, too. She put her hand on his thigh. “We can’t even check into the hotel and take a shower first?”

“If that’s what you really want,” he said, which was a way he had of saying no. “Try to look surprised, at any rate. For their benefit.”

When the plane stopped, the carabinieri without machine guns sheathed their swords, too, and hurried across the tarmac. A stewardess told the passengers to keep their seats.

“What’s going on?” Kay whispered.

“No idea.” Michael swiveled his head, almost imperceptibly but enough to make eye contact with Al Neri, two rows behind them. That Michael had agreed to go on this vacation with only one bodyguard (albeit his best and most trusted one) seemed to be a clear sign that things had gotten better. And, true to Michael’s word, they’d been on airplanes or in airports for almost two whole days, and it really had been as if Neri weren’t there.

The hatch opened. The steps came down. The head stewardess and the carabinieri had a conversation that, though she’d like to think she understood Italian, Kay couldn’t quite make out.

The stewardess turned and faced the passengers. “May I have your attention?” she said in perfect English. “Would Mr. and Mrs. Michael Corleone please identify yourselves?”

She had less of an accent than most of Michael’s employees. She’d even Americanized the pronunciation of Corleone.

Neri stood and walked toward the front of the plane. The stewardess asked if he was Mr. Corleone, and Neri didn’t say anything.

Only after he passed Michael and Kay did Michael raise his hand. Kay followed suit.

Kay kept her lips still. “Surprise,” she muttered.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Michael said. “Just logistics.”

Neri started speaking with the stewardess in Italian-something about protection and about how Michael Corleone was an important man in America and something about rudeness and hospitality, all in hushed enough voices that Kay still couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then Neri turned toward Michael and Kay and made a patting gesture-there, there. Michael nodded. The stewardess asked that Mr. and Mrs. Corleone remain seated until the other passengers disembarked. Neri took an empty seat toward the front of the plane and stayed there.

“What’s going on?” Kay whispered.

“It’s going to be fine,” Michael said.

“That wasn’t what I asked you.”

When everyone else had left the plane, the two carabinieri came on board. Neri intercepted them. They had a quick whispered conversation, then proceeded down the aisle and stood next to Michael and Kay.

In Italian, Michael welcomed them. One of the men seemed to know him. Michael gestured for them to have a seat. They remained standing. They explained that reliable sources had indicated that the welcoming party in Mondello was not certainly but quite possibly a trap, that it would be inadvisable for him and his wife to set foot on Sicilian soil at this time.

“ ‘Reliable sources’?” Michael repeated, in Italian.

The men’s faces were implacable. “Yes,” the one who seemed to know him said in English.

Michael glanced at Neri, who mouthed the word Chicago . What could he possibly have meant by that? Maybe he’d mouthed something else, someone’s name.

Michael got up and nodded toward the front of the plane. The carabinieri followed him, and they resumed their discussion there, in whispers, out of her earshot. Kay didn’t know whether to be terrified or furious. Outside, the waving people milled around, gesturing toward the airplane in various demonstrative ways. Several got into their cars and drove away. Kay pulled down her window shade. Finally, Michael clapped the two carabinieri on their backs. “Bene,” he said, no longer whispering. “A che ora è il prossimo volo per Roma?”

The carabinieri who’d seemed to know him beamed. “We are pleasurable to report,” said one, again in English, “that you are upon it.” And with that, the men left.

Not only were Michael and Kay and Neri already on the next flight to Rome, it turned out to be a private flight, too. The stewardesses claimed it had been supposed to happen anyway, though they struggled to explain why.

“Deadhead,” Michael said. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”

“I beg your pardon?” said the stewardess with the perfect English.

“Nell ’inglese la parole è deadhead.”

“Deadhead,” she said. “Why, thank you.” She seemed offended that he’d resorted to Italian. She and the other stewardesses cleaned the cabin and left.

“This is so like you,” Kay said to Michael. “You never wanted to go to Sicily, and now you’re getting your way.”

“Kay,” he said, “you can’t be serious.”

“Think of your mother,” she said, thinking of the trunk full of gifts sitting somewhere in the airplane. Preparing it had been her reason to live for months, the reason-everyone agreed, even the doctors-that she’d recovered so well from her brush with death.

“I’ll have it unloaded,” he said. “I know people who can get it all to the right people.”

“Of course you do.”

“Kay.”

“I feel awful, flying all the way here and leaving the kids. For what? For nothing.”

Michael didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He’d wanted to go someplace and take the kids. That kind of vacation would have been a vacation for him. The hardest thing he’d have had to do was sit still to be buried in the sand. Kay’d have spent her time tending to Anthony and Mary, which she loved doing but was not a vacation. For two years she’d selflessly done what Michael needed her to do. She’d had to raise the kids almost as if she were a widow (including holding them though hours of inconsolable crying the year he’d been so caught up in whatever he was trying to do in Cuba that he never even came home for Christmas). She still hadn’t gone back to teaching and was starting to fear she never would. On her own, she’d coordinated the move to Las Vegas. Then she’d taken on the even bigger job of designing and overseeing the construction of the whole complex in Lake Tahoe: their house, a bandstand for entertaining, and preliminary architecturally harmonious plans for houses for the Hagens, for Connie and Ed Federici, for Fredo and Deanna Dunn, for Al Neri, even a little bungalow for guests. Kay had been surprised by how much she’d enjoyed building a house, actually: the countless details and decisions, the chance to undertake the ultimate shopping spree, all for the greater good of her whole family. Still, it was work. She’d asked almost nothing from Michael except to go where she’d wanted to go on vacation, just the two of them.

“What are we going to do now,” Kay said, “turn around and go home?”

“We don’t have to go home. This kind of thing, if you’ll recall, was a part of why I didn’t want to go with you to Sicily.”

“For God’s sake, Michael. This is a murder threat we’re running away from.”

“We’re not running.”

“Right. We’re flying.”

“That’s not what I mean. And it’s not so much a threat as a precaution. Look, Kay, if there’s one thing I’ve been completely… what’s the word I’m looking for? Steadfast. Right. If there’s one thing I’ve been steadfast about, it’s been protecting my family.”

Kay looked away and didn’t say anything. He was steadfast about everything, actually. His good traits and his bad. It was the best and the worst thing about him.

“Those men,” he said, “the carabinieri? One of them is Calogero Tommasino, the son of an old friend of my father’s. I’ve had dealings with his father and with him, too. I trust him. We’re certainly in no danger now and probably wouldn’t have been at all. Again, just a precaution. Please understand. And you at any rate would never have been in any danger, obviously. It’s the code not to-” He stopped himself.

“Harm the wives or children,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Which no doubt goes double in Sicily, which I can’t of course hope to understand, can I, because I’m not Sicilian?”

Michael didn’t answer her. He looked like hell. Maybe it was just the flight. She couldn’t admit it now, but if she’d really understood the ordeal involved in flying from Las Vegas to Palermo, she’d have probably gone along with going to Hawaii or Acapulco.

The pilots got back on board. Neri went up to the cabin to talk to them. Moments later he took a seat, far away from Kay and Michael. The cars and people were gone from the tarmac. The plane took off.

“You actually wouldn’t understand,” Michael finally said. “How could you?”

“Oh, Christ,” Kay said. She got up and sat far away from Michael. Twice in a matter of moments he’d provoked her to use the Lord’s name in vain.

He let her go.

But she knew it would work, eventually, her silence. Just because he so expertly wielded silence as a weapon didn’t mean that he was invulnerable to it himself, especially from her. She sat on the right side of the plane and patiently watched the Italian coast ease by.

After about an hour he came to her. “Is this seat taken?” he said.

“So’d you finish your book?”

“I did,” he said. “I thought it was good, actually. A nice escape.”

“If you say so.” The book he’d taken to read was Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, which Kay had given him for Christmas. He kept nodding off. Not long after she’d finished her book, he’d picked it up, and she’d taken his. Kay thought The Last Hurrah was the best thing she’d ever read about city politics. She was appalled he hadn’t loved it. “And, yes, the seat’s taken.”

“Kay,” he said. “The reason you wouldn’t understand is because I didn’t-” He closed his eyes. Maybe this, too, his struggling for words, had to do with the long flight, but there was something about him now that seemed more shaken up than exhausted. “Because,” he said, “it’s true that… that I haven’t been entirely, you know…” He let out what started as a frustrated sigh and finished as a soft, agonized moan.

“Michael,” she said.

“I want to tell you some things,” he said. “I have to tell you some things.”

Most of the time, she looked at him and hardly recognized the man she’d fallen in love with. He’d had his face smashed, then fixed. His hair was shot through with gray, and-though she told herself it was her imagination-he’d become a dead ringer for his father. But there was the same look in his eyes now as he’d had years ago, on a New Hampshire golf course on a warm starry night, when he told her what he’d done during the war, things he’d never told anyone, and he’d sobbed in her arms. Angry as she’d been, suddenly she just melted.

“I’d like that,” she said, her voice quavering. “Thank you.” She patted the seat beside her.

He sat. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she said, taking his hand. “No apologies. Just talk to me.”

They stayed in Rome only long enough to sleep off the jet lag and have a magnificent meal at a restaurant Kay had been to years before with her parents. The next day, with Michael still asleep upstairs, she spoke to the hotel concierge herself and arranged a reservation at a resort in the Swiss Alps. He helped her rent a plane, too, for Michael to fly them there, which she knew he’d love. She’d never been to the Alps, but when they’d flown over them on the way here, she’d promised herself she’d go someday. Turned out, someday would be tomorrow.

When she finished, she turned and saw Al Neri, sitting in a leather chair across the lobby, smoking and chomping a sweet roll. She shook her head and he nodded. She told the concierge she’d been mistaken. She needed two rooms. Preferably not adjoining. He sighed and made an exasperated gesture but dialed the phone and was able to change the reservation.

Kay got an espresso from the hotel bar. The hotel had a glassed-in courtyard, and on her way to get a table, a man about her age whistled at her. A younger man next to him raised an eyebrow and called her beautiful. She tried not to react, but she was a happy woman and in truth they’d made her happier. She was only thirty-two years old. Yes, they were Italian, but it was still nice to think of herself as a woman able to summon blurted compliments from strange men.

She took a seat by herself, bathed in that pink-yellow light so distinct to Rome.

The day Michael had proposed to her, he’d warned Kay that they couldn’t be equal partners. Kay had protested; clearly Michael’s father confided in his mother, no? True, Michael had said, but his mother’s first loyalty had always been to his father, for forty years. If things worked out as well with them, Michael had said, maybe someday he’d tell her a few things she didn’t really want to hear. Turned out, that someday had been yesterday.

Kay should probably be furious, frightened, or at least unmoored. She wasn’t. Despite or maybe even because of the things Michael had told her, Kay couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this happy. It was irrational as hell, but then again all happiness was irrational.

Her husband was a murderer. He’d fled to Sicily not because he had been unjustly accused of murdering those two men-the police captain and the dope kingpin-but because he’d shot them, one in the head, the other in the heart and throat. Three years after those killings, Michael came back to America. When he and Kay got together, he confessed that he’d been with a woman, yes, while he was gone, but only because he never thought he’d see Kay again, and at any rate not for six months. What he’d failed to mention until yesterday was that the woman, a teenage peasant girl named Apollonia, had been his wife. The reason it had been six months was because six months earlier she’d been blown sky high in a booby-trapped Alfa Romeo.

His brother Sonny did not die in a car wreck. He’d been shot to hamburger at a tollbooth.

Everything that Tom Hagen had told her two years ago-that Michael had ordered the deaths of Carlo, Tessio, Barzini, Tattaglia, and a host of related others-was true. The day Hagen had told her those things-and told her that if Michael ever found out about it Hagen would be a dead man-had felt like the worst day of her life.

Yesterday, when Michael had trusted her enough to tell her those things himself, had hardly been a good day. But it hadn’t been the worst day of her life. No one could have been happy to have heard that those things had happened, but she was, she realized, elated that he’d told her about them. Kay was shocked but not surprised. A wife knows things. Kay knew who Michael was. From the time they’d first met, he’d been the perfect mix of good boy and bad boy. At Connie’s wedding, Kay had blamed the strong red wine for her euphoric light-headedness, but what had really done it was Michael’s deadpan explanation of his family’s business. Afterward, when he dragged her into a family photo-six years before they got married-Kay felt like she’d been yanked into the cast of a Shakespeare play. She’d acted reluctant, but it was acting. She’d loved it.

If she was honest, she had to admit that she had her own secrets, ones she still hadn’t confessed to Michael. During his years in hiding she’d had a long affair with her history professor at Mount Holyoke (she’d never thought she’d see Michael again, either) that Michael still didn’t know about. Deanna Dunn had told her things about Fredo that Kay would never dare mention to Michael. And Kay never had let on that Hagen had told her anything.

Kay had fallen in love with Michael the night he’d told her about the horror of those Pacific islands-buddies decapitated, incinerated, rotting in hot mud. He’d told her about the men he’d killed. The raw male violence of it-and the strength this man had shown, not just to survive that but, in her arms, to allow himself to confide in her-had frankly excited her. He’d murdered men there, too, and it had excited her. If Kay had been able to fall in love with a man who’d killed men for his country (to fall in love with him, Kay knew, not in spite of this but because of it), how shocked could she be that he’d killed and had men killed in defense of his own blood?

Kay was older now, of course. She was a mother. That changed everything-everything but the way she felt now. She finished her coffee. Her heart raced.

She went back upstairs (she heard Neri following but didn’t turn to watch), chained the door behind her, drew open the curtains, and flooded the room with light. Michael stirred but didn’t wake. Kay got undressed and burrowed under the covers next to him.

“We’re going to the Alps,” she whispered. Her heart was going even faster.

“I don’t ski,” he said.

“We’re not going skiing,” she said. “I’m not sure we’ll even leave the room.”

“Except for Mass, obviously.”

He wasn’t mocking her. “Not even that,” she said. “I don’t have to go every day.” Only as she said it did she realize she suddenly didn’t feel the need to go every day, either.

She gave him the details. They’d take a little plane he’d fly himself. They’d stay a week, then go home early, get the kids, and go to Disneyland. She’d cabled a travel agent she knew in New York, and arrangements had been made for that trip, too. He seemed amazed she’d salvaged their vacation so fast.

“You underestimate me,” she said. “Do you have any idea how far ahead of schedule we are on things at Lake Tahoe?”

“I’m really going to fly over the Alps?”

“I thought you’d love it,” she said. “If it’s too challenging or-”

“I do,” he said. “I love it.” He squeezed her hip. She squirmed in warm, carnal assent.

This was always where things had been the best for them, in bed. It was not at all unlikely he’d get her pregnant. The way she felt now, for the first time in a long time, that wouldn’t have been unwelcome. Lately, in the rare times they’d made love at all, Michael had been on top or she had, and they’d stayed in the position where they’d started, executing the act like some grim household errand. This time, as they had when they arrived, too, they did it the way Kay liked best, switching positions often, him on top, then her, then she turned around and faced away from him, her eyes clenched closed, grinding into him, happy enough that it might have been enough, just that. But he surprised her by not coming. He rose from the bed and lifted her onto the marble sink. The cold stone sent jagged shivers through her, and she looped her arms around his neck. She threw back her head. Michael’s hands slid over the curves of her breasts and trailed lightly across her ribs and she shivered again, harder this time. Perfect height. When she could feel how close he was, she put her fingertips gently to his sweat-slicked chest. She didn’t have to say anything. He knew to stop and pull out, and she hurried to the bed and got on all fours. As Michael entered her, she heard a growl escape from her throat. The sun on her skin seemed baking, burning, scorching. The sheets had come loose from the corners, revealing the bare striped mattress beneath. Kay’s arms gave out, and her face fell against the wadded sheets. The next thing she knew, so fast she was barely aware of how it happened, she was on top of him again. He was pulling her hard into him, and the look on his face, his openness, his vulnerability, his ardor and attention to her, to what she liked and how she liked it, that was what did it for her. It was painful, more like electroshock than orgasm, and she felt like she was giving off sunlight-like it was radiating off of her, a haze of undulating waves. Somewhere in the trembling rills of aftershocks she felt his spasms below her, far below her. And at some other point-it could have been ten seconds or ten years-Kay felt herself tumbling exhausted onto the sodden mattress.

It hadn’t been painful at all, of course.

Michael blew gently on her dripping back. He touched her, lightly, a single finger. He traced the words I love you. Over and over. Her breathing and her beating heart finally slowed. Suddenly, a torrent of words came out of her, a long and grateful expression of love. Only when she stopped did she realize she’d said it all in Italian.

“Where the hell did you learn all that?” Michael said, laughing in amazement.

“No idea whatsoever,” she said in English, rolling over and kissing him. “That was-”

He put a finger to her lips. They smiled. He was right. No need for words.

Mary wore her new Mickey Mouse ears, Cinderella dress, and Davy Crockett moccasins everywhere, every day. She was three years old and thought the bear she’d danced with was real. Anthony went around belting out note-perfect renditions of the songs that had been featured at various rides and attractions. He had the spooky ability to hear a song once and perform it. This had caused him no small amount of trouble at his kindergarten, but Kay was sure this skill would bode well for the boy in the long run. In fact her father, an opera buff, planned to hire someone to give Anthony singing lessons for his next birthday. They were lucky kids, Kay supposed, but she felt even luckier to have them.

Could Michael possibly know how much he was missing by being gone so much? But he loved them, too. He’d taken an obvious, visceral delight taking them to Disneyland. Anytime Michael was home, he absolutely doted on Mary. Anthony was harder for him, but it was unabashed love for Anthony that made Michael’s befuddled regard of his son so heartbreaking. Several days after their vacation, Michael had to go to New York, both for business and to see how his mother-who’d had a few complications but was back home again-was getting along. As he was packing, he called Kay to their bedroom window. Anthony had dug a big hole behind the swing set and was standing over it, alone, head down, praying.

“It’s a funeral for his coonskin cap,” Kay explained.

“You’re kidding.”

“Don’t be angry,” she said.

“I’m not angry. I’m-” He couldn’t seem to come up with a word for what he was.

“I think it’s sort of sweet.”

“That cap cost four dollars.”

“Unless there’s something more you’re not telling me, we can afford four dollars.”

He paused. Obviously there were other things he wasn’t able to tell her. They both knew that. “That’s not the point. The four dollars. Obviously.”

“Oh, really? So what is your point?”

Anthony was burying the cap, Kay knew, less out of sympathy for a dead raccoon than because several months ago on TV he’d seen a senator from Tennessee wearing such a hat, campaigning for president and denouncing Michael Corleone, among others, by name. Buying the cap had been Michael’s idea, not Anthony’s. Anthony rarely seemed able to tell his father what he did or didn’t want, and Michael meant well but was oblivious. This whole matter wasn’t something Kay wanted to get into with Michael, not right now.

Michael sighed, resigned. “Think that’s real raccoon fur he’s burying?” he asked. “Or rabbit?” She kissed the top of his head. He forced a chuckle and went outside and joined Anthony. Kay watched. They stood on opposite sides of the hole from each other. Anthony looked down and didn’t seem to be saying anything. At a certain point, he broke into “Ave Maria.” Michael heard him out. He could have hardly looked more uncomfortable if he’d learned his son was actually a little green man from Mars.

It was while Michael was on that trip to New York that their half-finished house at Lake Tahoe burned down. Tom Hagen, who was back working as the family lawyer, walked over to give her the news. There had been a lightning storm. The insurance should cover everything, he assured her. There had been no damage to the foundation. Kay had done such a good job of making all the decisions that they could simply hire a few extra crews and rebuild in no time. Also, there was a mansion in Reno, a castle really, that used to belong to a railroad baron; it was being torn down to make way for a modern hotel, and Kay could have any of the fixtures she wanted. Once Kay saw this place, Hagen said, she’d end up thinking the fire was a blessing in disguise. Hagen knew she’d been hoping to move this summer, so he’d talked to the head contractor, who seemed to think it was still possible to be done by Labor Day.

“You talked to him? Before he talked to me? Or you talked to me?”

“He’s our contractor, too. For our house up there, too.”

“Does Michael know?”

“He does.”

She frowned and put her hands on her hips and stood in the doorway and did not invite him in. As of today, she’d realized she wasn’t pregnant. As of this moment, it was happy news.

“I didn’t actually talk to him,” Hagen said. “I left a message.”

“With Carmela?”

“Of course not.” He left it at that. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

“Don’t bet on it.”

“We’re looking into things, okay?” he said. “But, you know, rigging up a lightning storm, you have to admit, that’s pretty much God’s territory.”

“And we know it was lightning?”

“We know it was lightning.”

“And how do we know it was lightning? Did anyone see it?”

“I know you’re upset, Kay. I’d be upset, too. I am upset, and so is everyone up there.”

“Did anyone see it?”

Behind her, Mary started crying. Anthony dropped to his knees, threw out his arms, and burst into a song first introduced to the world by a melancholy cartoon jalopy named Dudley.