The Godfather returns

Chapter 28

SO IT WAS that Michael Corleone and Nick Geraci began their final year in business together in a state of perfect Cold War stalemate.

They’d each attacked the other and thought, mistakenly, that the other didn’t know.

They were both frozen by a secret they thought they were harboring, wary at all times of tipping their hands.

They might have been eager to kill each other now, too, but they couldn’t.

It wasn’t safe for Geraci to make a move against Michael (or Russo, for that matter) without the blessings of the Commission, which would be essentially impossible without being on the Commission. Just as important, killing Michael Corleone might also mean killing the most powerful army of on-the-take politicians, judges, union officials, cops, fire marshals, building inspectors, coroners, newspaper and magazine editors, TV news producers, and strategically placed clerk-typists the world has ever known. No one but Michael and Hagen knew everyone the Family had on the payroll and everything about how that operation worked, and Hagen seemed incorruptible. Michael had toyed with Hagen’s dignity, but those two needed each other the way old married people do. Even if Geraci was wrong about this, he was right: the risk of trying to flip Hagen was too great. Maybe one chance in a thousand it’d work, nine hundred ninety-nine it’d get Geraci killed. Even if Geraci did get rid of Michael, it was hard to imagine Hagen-out in Nevada, not even Italian, no chance of taking over the operation-saying, Okay, Nick, here’s how this thing works. Even the indirect access Geraci now had to that machine of connections was too valuable to jeopardize.

As for Michael, he needed Geraci far too much to kill him. Who else could oversee this business in Cuba? Michael needed someone who’d pick the right men, get the job done, and yet after the job was done be disposable: Geraci to a T.

More important, who else would, during this transition phase, seem like a credible boss to the other Dons? Kill Geraci now, and Michael would kill any chance he had of keeping the pledge he’d made to his wife and his father.

His ex-wife. His dead father.

No matter. Divorce and death are terrible things, but a man who uses them to break a promise cannot consider himself a man of honor.

Nick Geraci hadn’t noticed his shaking problem until the day Michael Corleone told him he was the new Boss. It didn’t completely go away after that, but it was barely noticeable, easily explained away (chills, coffee jitters) until that summer, about the time he first went out to New Jersey with Joe Lucadello (whom he believed to be “Agent Ike Rosen”) to visit the swampy tract of land Geraci had found when he and Fredo had been planning Colma East. Whatever the merits of Fredo’s plan, the land had been a steal. Geraci had used the barn for various storage needs and otherwise sat on the property. Anytime he wanted to, he could sell it for twice what he paid.

They all drove there together, Donnie Bags at the wheel and Carmine Marino, the baby-faced zip, also up front. Rosen wore an eye patch and didn’t seem Jewish at all. He’d brought another agent, a tight-jawed WASP whose name was supposedly Doyle Flower. The same congressman who’d told Geraci that Michael never met with anyone on the presidential transition team had spoken about all this with Director Albert Soffet, who’d apparently confirmed that Rosen and Flower were indeed CIA field agents. Nonetheless, Geraci used a trail car, with Eddie Paradise and some muscle, just as a precaution.

They turned down the rutted, muddy road to the barn. Rogue garbage trucks and private citizens had for years been using this place as a dump. The property was pocked with stoves, toilets, and the rusting hulks of cars and farm machinery. That island of debris in the scum pond was a portion of what had once been Ebbets Field.

“Good place to plant your stiffs, I bet,” Rosen said.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Geraci said, which was true. Any recent bodies on the property would have been the work of civilians. Mob guys out here-Stracci’s people, for the most part-knew who owned the place and respected that. “We’re the best boogeyman the cops ever invented. Every time you guys find a body rolled up in a carpet, we get blamed.”

“We’re not cops,” Rosen said.

“My granny had one of those things,” Flower said, meaning Donnie’s colostomy bag.

“You get used to it,” Donnie said. “Probably like your friend’s pirate thing there.”

“Did you shit?” Rosen said. “It smells like shit in here.”

Donnie rounded a bend so hard a flume of mud shot up and was about to say something stupid when Carmine interrupted him. “Is not his shit, that smell. Is New Jersey.”

Flower and Geraci both laughed, which cooled things off. Carmine was a born leader. He was almost thirty but looked ten years younger. He was related to the Bocchicchios on his mother’s side and was also a godson of Cesare Indelicato, the Palermitan Don who’d been Geraci’s partner in the narcotics business from the beginning. The kid had originally come over to be a hostage during the first meeting of all the Families. Five years later, and he was already running a crew of fellow zips over on Knickerbocker Avenue.

Two cars were parked behind the barn. It was broad daylight, but they were both bobbing with illicit coitus.

“The only real problem we have out here,” Geraci said, “as far as the locals go, is this.”

The trail car pulled up behind them. Only Eddie Paradise got out.

“You’re shaking as much as those cars are,” Rosen said. “You okay?”

“Donnie and his fucking air-conditioning,” Geraci said, though it hadn’t been particularly cold in the car. He got out of the car. Moving around helped make the shaking stop.

Carmine got out, too. In one fluid motion, he drew a pistol from the waistband of his pants and fired three hollow-point slugs into the barn siding.

The trespassing cars began to lurch in place; inside, the terrified fornicators clawed at their strewn-about clothing. Carmine fired another shot.

“Four in a row into the broad side of a barn,” Flower said. “Impressive start, friend. I should warn you, though. The tests do get harder.”

Carmine waved as the cars sped away.

They all had a good laugh, even the agents. Geraci’s shaking had stopped.

“Last time he did that,” Donnie said, “the fuckers got stuck in the mud. We went to give ’em a push, but they got out and ran. That was one of the cars getting chopped when a friend of ours got pinched, which I don’t know if you can call a car abandoned by sex perverts stolen.”

Momo the Roach had happened to be in his chop shop when it got raided. He was now doing a stretch for grand theft.

“Tits on that girl in the Ford like no tomorrow,” Agent Flower said.

“Tits like that, and tomorrow can go fuck itself,” Carmine said, by way of agreement.

Rosen nodded, a faraway look in his eyes, muttering, “Not bad, not bad,” and it took Geraci a moment to realize he wasn’t talking about the redhead’s tits but rather sizing up the property.

“How’s it look?” Geraci said.

Rosen kept nodding, too lost in thought to answer. Geraci showed them into the barn. Rosen grunted in appreciation. It only looked dilapidated from the outside. Inside, the building had been fortified by the guy who fabricated armored cars for the Corleone Family.

“Anyone have any paper?” Rosen asked. He held up a pencil.

Flower pulled out a little pad of paper from his shirt pocket.

“Bigger.” Rosen drummed the pencil in midair with a speed Buddy Rich might envy.

“We got a bakery box,” Eddie Paradise said.

Rosen frowned. When he did, you could practically see in there, whatever was behind the patch. “Needs to be paper.”

“Sorry,” Eddie said. “I don’t write things down. That way I don’t lose nothin’.”

Geraci looked in the car and found Bev’s biology notebook. “How’s this?”

Rosen thanked him. He sat on the floor of the barn and drew plans to convert the inside into a gymnasium. He seemed to draw as fast as he could move his hand. He went back outside, found a spot where a barracks could go, and he drew those plans, too. Inspired no doubt by the sight of Carmine and Donnie Bags on the ridge above the scum pond, shooting seagulls and rats, Rosen walked off some measurements and sketched a rifle range.

Donnie was missing everything, but Carmine looked like Buffalo Bill out there, vaporizing gulls in explosions of blood-pinked feathers. Other than those who’d been cops or in the war, most of the men in this business, Geraci included, really couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. The shooting that needed to be done got done at close range. Geraci had never even heard of anyone who’d been killed with a rifle, which was probably what this job down in Cuba would take. Who ever heard of a Mob sniper? That said, who better to go down to Cuba and whack an avowed enemy of freedom than Carmine Marino?

“Damnedest thing you ever saw, eh?” Flower said, elbowing Geraci and nodding at his partner’s manic drawing style.

Rosen handed him Bev’s notebook. The drawings were miraculously neat, given how fast he’d done them. They were easily good enough to build from. The design of the barracks was simple and clean.

“I’m a frustrated architect,” Rosen said, as if in apology.

Geraci said he had a crew that could knock this job out in three days. Rosen frowned and said it was a lot more complicated than that. It turned out there were all kinds of government regulations that made that impossible, for money reasons (Geraci could get it done, but he had the right to make a buck in the process) just as much as security.

That was when Geraci felt sure this whole thing was for real. These clowns really did work for the government.

Rosen took the notebook back and paged through it like a spinster fogging the window of a bridal shop. “I don’t know, though,” Rosen said. “If only the locals weren’t such a problem.”

“Problem how?” Geraci said.

“Taking away the place people shitcan their most inconvenient trash or go to fuck their babysitters,” Flower answered, “definitely gets noticed in a community.”

“Especially in New Jersey,” said Carmine. He’d come back to the car to get more ammo.

“I’m from New Jersey, sir,” Rosen said.

“So then you know,” Carmine said, shrugging and slamming the trunk shut.

“I like you,” Flower said, patting Carmine on the back. “Just the kind of man we need.”

“My back?” Carmine said. “Don’t touch it no more.”

“He’s funny about that,” Geraci said. “The back patting.”

“Funny,” Carmine said. “Many dead men are laughing about this, I think.”

“Now I’m even more sure,” Flower said. “Mr. Marino, you’re at the very top of my list. Between all those dead rats and your attitude, you’re going to be hard to beat.”

Carmine smiled broadly and slapped Flower on the back, and Flower feinted a return slap that stopped short, and they both laughed like hell.

“Only Italian I ever saw who had a thing about being touched,” Rosen muttered, which made Geraci wonder if he was really Italian or if that was what someone who wasn’t Italian would say.

“The locals won’t be a problem,” Geraci said. “Trust me.”

The next day, a sign went up out by the highway, announcing an exclusive new subdivision. DELUXE LOTS ON SALE JUNE 1962! it read underneath. A year away. This should turn whatever curiosity the locals had into a plus. The anticipation might make it worth really developing the place-draining it, hiring lawyers and architects, bribing the planning commission: the usual subdivision drill, no different for a Mafia Don than anybody else.

That night at dinner Nick Geraci started shaking, enough to scare Barb and Bev. Charlotte wanted to call an ambulance. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Coffee jitters.” She said she thought he’d stopped. “That’s the problem,” he said. “I had an espresso at the club this afternoon.” Which he hadn’t. He concentrated on the movement of his hands and jaw as he ate, and the shaking stopped. But when it happened again in the morning, Char said if he didn’t go see a doctor she’d get a knife and stab him in the leg so he wouldn’t have any choice. He said he was fine, it’d pass. She went and got the biggest knife in the kitchen. He smiled and told her he loved her. She wagged it and said she was serious. “Me, too,” he said. He was. He held up his quavering hands. “Be a doll and dial him for me, huh?” Though the moment she set the phone back down he was fine.

His regular doctor prodded him with tools and questions, but he was stumped.

“I wonder if maybe it’s in your head,” he said. “Are you having a tough time at work? Pressure, stress, that sort of thing? Or at home, things okay there?”

“You think I’m a fucking nut, is that what you’re saying?”

He referred Geraci to a specialist.

“If specialist is just another word for shrink, I’ll be back, only not as a patient.”

The doctor said he certainly understood that.

The specialist was supposedly a world-famous neurologist and tiny, barely five feet tall. He diagnosed Geraci with a mild form of Parkinson’s disease, related to getting hit in the head all those times as a boxer and triggered by a serious concussion.

“I didn’t get hit in the head all that often,” Geraci said.

“You boxers are all the same,” the doctor said. “All you remember is what the other guy looked like. Tell me about that concussion, though. Pretty recent, right?”

Geraci hadn’t told the doctor a thing about the plane crash that had nearly killed him. “I guess so,” Geraci said. “If six years ago qualifies as recent.”

“What happened six years ago?”

“I fell down,” Geraci said. “Knocked myself cold. Damnedest thing.”

The doctor looked into Geraci’s eyes with his flashlight gizmo. “Fell down from where?” he asked. “The Empire State Building?”

“Something like that,” Geraci said.

From an upstairs window of the Antica Focacceria, Nick Geraci watched a wiry, moustached man-his friend and business partner Cesare Indelicato-cross the Piazza San Francesco, theoretically alone. The piazza was an oasis of light tucked deeply in a neighborhood of dark, narrow streets in the oldest part of Palermo.

Don Cesare was never really alone. He’d trained his soldatos and bodyguards to blend in. A casual observer wouldn’t have guessed that the young men leaning on Vespas in front of the cathedral were Don Cesare’s men, as were the four milling around outside the restaurant arguing about soccer. A casual observer might have guessed that the nondescript man in the off-the-rack suit walking across the piazza was a history teacher a few years shy of retirement, rather than a hero of the Allied invasion of Sicily and the most powerful Mafia boss in Palermo.

Though it’s also true that Palermo is a city where little is observed casually.

It was three in the afternoon, and the restaurant was closed. The waiter seeing to their table had been approved and searched by Don Cesare’s men, one of whom was stationed in the doorway. There were men downstairs, too, keeping an eye on the cooks and the back door.

Over wine and the restaurant’s legendary beef spleen sandwiches, Geraci and Indelicato discussed various details of their thriving narcotics business. They spoke entirely in English, not as any sort of security measure but because, even after all these years coming to Sicily on business, all these years surrounded by native Sicilians, Geraci’s Italian was atrocious and his Sicilian even worse. He understood it but couldn’t speak it. He couldn’t explain why. A mental block or something.

“It is good to have you in my city, my gigantic friend,” Don Cesare said, finishing his last bite and licking his fingers. “But these matters, I don’t know, I think they are not why you came all this way to speak with me?”

“I brought the family this time,” he said. “My wife and daughters. The older one is off to college in the fall. To university, I guess you’d say. It might be our last family vacation. They’d never been to your beautiful island before, and now they’ve been all over it, at least as best you can in ten days.” They’d have spent more time, but they’d had to come on an ocean liner. Nick Geraci had no intention of ever getting into an airplane again. “I actually never took the time to sightsee before. First time I’ve ever been to Taormina, if you can believe it.”

Don Cesare raised his hands in lamentation. “I own the finest hotel in Taormina. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be there? I would have seen to it that you and your family was treated like royalty.”

“You do so much for me already, Don Cesare, I wouldn’t think of imposing further.”

But Don Cesare wouldn’t let it drop until Geraci promised he’d come back to Taormina no later than next year and stay at Indelicato’s mountaintop resort.

“I do have another reason to see you in person, though, Don Cesare. It involves your young godson Carmine Marino.”

The Don frowned. “He’s all right?”

“He’s doin’ great,” Geraci said. “Possibly the best man I have. Which is why I wanted to talk to you about a job I want to give him. A valuable, important, but very dangerous job.”

Geraci was tempted to confide in him. Indelicato was a valuable, even trusted, ally. More to the point, he was the only person Geraci knew who’d worked with the CIA before. During the war, the Mafia members not banished to Ustica by the Fascists had functioned in Sicily as the Resistance had in France. Indelicato quickly emerged as one of the leaders of this violent, effective underground. Via Lucky Luciano, the deported American Don, Indelicato met with operatives from the OSS-the forerunner of the CIA-to provide intelligence that laid the groundwork for the invasion of the island. It was supposedly Indelicato who came up with the stunt of air-dropping tens of thousands of red handkerchiefs emblazoned with Luciano’s famous script L to alert the Sicilian people-but not the Fascist invaders from the north-to what was coming. The British, who did not collaborate with the Mafia, suffered heavy casualties in their battles to take the eastern third of the island, but on the western two thirds, particularly in the regions that were Mafia strongholds, the Americans profited from superior intelligence and sustained relatively few casualties. After the invasion, in many of the cities occupied by the Americans, the civilians installed as provisional mayors were mafiosi. When the Allies withdrew, most of the mayors stayed. And when the Dons were freed from Ustica, they returned home to find that, courtesy of the USA and the OSS, the political power of the Mafia had increased exponentially. Soon thereafter, Cesare Indelicato was elected to the Italian Parliament and helped spearhead a surprisingly popular movement to secede from Italy and become America’s forty-ninth state.

Ultimately, Geraci decided not to risk it. “I can’t give you any details,” he said. “I can only say that Carmine wants to do the job and that he’d be the leader of the other men I send.”

“You tell me this why? What reason? You want my blessing, how can I do that if I don’t know what I bless, eh?”

“If you tell me to take Carmine off this job, I’ll do it. But I can’t be specific about what we’re doing. What we have to do.”

Don Cesare considered this. “I think you are asking me to approve that my godson Carmine, who sends his mother money home every month, that he go do something where you think he will be killed, eh? If not that, you don’t need to ask me nothing.”

Geraci answered this only with silence.

“And you know he’s related to the Bocchicchio clan? I wouldn’t want to be the man who got blamed for anything that happened to him.”

Don Cesare said this with no conviction, clearly grasping at straws. Geraci knew full well who Carmine Marino’s people were.

In silence, Geraci waited Don Cesare out.

“One question, then,” Don Cesare finally said. “Carmine, he knows as much about this as you, the danger and also the reason for it, and still he want to do it, sì?”

“That’s right. Absolutely he still wants to do it.”

The Don bobbed his head back and forth, as if to show he was thinking about the repercussions of anything he might say. “Carmine is a man,” he said. “He does not need me to tell him what brave deeds he can or cannot do.”

“Thank you, Don Cesare.” Geraci felt the tremors coming on and excused himself to go to the bathroom, though all he really wanted to do was move around and concentrate on the moving so that the shaking would stop. For some reason, very little worked better in this regard than any action he could make his prick do. Urinating was in general handier than the other.

“For many reasons,” Geraci said as he sat back down at the table, “one of which being that Carmine will be in charge, I think it’s best that all the men we put on this job be Sicilians.” Another of the many reasons was that the Sicilians did not have rules against killing cops or government officials.

“You want people,” Indelicato said, “I’ll get you people.”

“I appreciate that. But I can’t risk bringing men in just for this job. I need men who’ve been in the States awhile. I don’t want to use too many of Carmine’s people either, especially, God forbid, if something should happen to the guy. I’m going to call in the pizza men, the best ones. Any objections?”

“If not for a tough job, then when, huh?”

Nearly all the men stashed in the pizza parlors had been directly or indirectly dispatched to America by Cesare Indelicato.

“A lot of those people I don’t know at all,” Geraci said.

“Of course you don’t. They don’t get in trouble, don’t have problems, what’s to know?”

“Exactly. I’ve got guys who’ve been out there seven years. Guys I’ve never laid eyes on. I need your advice, Don Cesare. If you were to recommend, say, the four best men you’ve sent over-best in terms of toughness, character, smarts-who would that be?”

Geraci had expected him to have to think about this awhile, but Don Cesare answered immediately, complete with brief descriptions of the men’s skills. If they were half the men he said they were, Geraci would have no trouble getting this done without sending Carmine.

“There’s another, unrelated matter,” Geraci said. “It involves a traitor in your midst. A man sent here from America. An inconvenient man to our Commission, or so they ruled.”

Geraci couldn’t do it himself, as of course Don Cesare understood. He was a Boss. Such things must be done by others.

The frail Capuchin monk struggled down the stairs to the convent’s catacombs. He had glaucoma and an arthritic hip, but he was determined not to become a burden to the order. He could still do all the tasks he’d done when he first came to Palermo as a young man-from the sublime of tending the garden, preparing meals for his brothers in Christ, and embalming the dead to be interred in the city cemetery next door, to the ridiculous of selling postcards to tourists and picking up the filth they left behind. Soda cans, wine bottles, spent flashbulbs (photography was explicitly forbidden), and even, once, a used prophylactic.

It was after lunch: almost three, when the catacombs would reopen to the public. A German tour group milled around outside the barred iron doors. As the monk descended farther, their vulgar noise receded. He smiled and thanked almighty God for allowing him to recognize that even diminished hearing can be a gift from on high.

At the base of the stairs was a candy wrapper. The monk’s knees cracked as he stooped to pick it up.

In the tunnels before him were the crumbling, finely dressed remains of eight thousand Sicilians. Many were hung from hooks in long rows, their skulls bowed in what the monk liked to think of as humility. Others lay on shelves and tucked into recessed alcoves, floor to ceiling. A few reclined in wooden coffins, heads resting on pillows covered by a film of dust that had once been flesh. In life, they’d been dukes and countesses, cardinals and important priests, military heroes who fought alongside Garibaldi and those who drew their swords against him. Some, including the monk’s own grandfather, had been defiled in their mortal lives by their association with what Sicilians call the Friends. Eight thousand dead: people who paid the order handsomely so that their remains or those of their loved ones could be displayed here. The folly of this was not lost on the old monk. With one exception-La bambina, whose presence the monk had helped arrange-the order had stopped accepting bodies in 1881, eighty years ago, two years after the monk was born. For the most part, these people who’d wanted so badly to be remembered had been forgotten by all but their Creator. Few if any of the children in these catacombs-including an entire chamber filled with them-were mourned by a living soul. The corporeal rot of these eight thousand had been slowed by skilled Capuchin embalmers and by the cool, dry air, but, except for La bambina, rot and earthly oblivion had come nonetheless.

He bore left, scanning the floor for debris or fallen body parts. His grandparents, who came from the tiny town of Corleone, were among those hung vertically. His grandfather wore a green velvet coat (underneath, the gunshot wound in his back gaped open and a steel rod was all that kept the powdery-boned torso from collapsing). His grandmother (an arm had dropped off some time ago and been loosely reattached with wire) wore her wedding dress. When the monk had first arrived, they, like many of the dead, still had faces. For a half century he’d watched the day-by-day disappearance of their eyes and skin. He kissed his fingertips, applied them spider delicately to the foreheads of his ancestors, mumbled a prayer for their souls, and hurried on.

At the end of the tunnel was La bambina, the lovely two-year-old girl who’d died in 1920 and become one of Sicily’s most popular tourist attractions. The doctor who embalmed her had taunted the monks about the new procedure he’d invented. Before anyone learned his secret, he, too, died (from the deadly sin of pride, the monk would tell the younger brothers, though the prosaic cause was a ruptured spleen). The old monk had spent many reflective hours studying the doctor’s pitiful notes and the girl herself, fruitlessly trying to guess what the doctor had done. The baby with the long blond hair in that glass-covered coffin had been in there for forty-one years. She looked as though she’d died a few days ago.

As the monk approached La bambina, his cloudy eyes seemed to be playing tricks on him. Against the wall near the poor babe was a body as well preserved as hers.

He rubbed his eyes. It was a bald man in a raincoat. Diamonds gleamed from the rings on his fingers and the bar across his fat tie. The dead were not interred here wearing jewelry. Then the monk saw the distinct black lines on either side of the man’s mouth and felt a wave of relief.

It was a huge marionette. The jewelry must be fake. An odd prank, but the monk had lived in Palermo a long time and had learned not to be surprised by anything that happened here.

He drew nearer.

The puppet lines beside Laughing Sal Narducci’s mouth were actually rivulets of blood.

The rope used to garrote him-just before noon, when the catacombs closed for lunch-lay on the floor beside the dead man’s shiny shoes.

The monk took in this grim tableau, in this strange and holy place, and something inside his heart broke. A common thief would have taken the jewels. An ordinary killer would have hidden the body, not left it here, in the same chamber with La bambina! The monk shouted a stream of curses at the Friends. Who else would do such a thing? He had devoted his life to paying penance for his family’s violent tradition, but again and again it sought him out. And now, so late in life, this atrocity. It felt cruelly inevitable. Rage filled him like a poison. His curses grew louder.

The brothers who ran to his aid told the authorities that when the beloved old man collapsed and died, his face was as red as the rightmost stripe of the Italian flag.

When, from the killer himself, Cesare Indelicato heard what had happened-on the terrace of his cliffside villa, overlooking the medieval city he essentially ruled-he marveled at God’s bleak sense of humor. Don Cesare had never met the poor monk, but he recognized the man’s name. It had been Don Cesare’s grandfather, Felice Crapisi, who killed the monk’s traitorous grandfather. Even more strangely, Don Cesare had been asked to kill Narducci twice (first by Thomas Hagen, then by Nick Geraci). The trusted soldato he’d sent had killed Narducci only once, yet the bloody poetics of the Creator saw fit to transform that lone killing into two deaths.

Don Cesare thanked the killer and dismissed him.

Alone, shaking his head in wonder and awe, Don Cesare raised a glass of grappa toward Palermo and toward the darkening heavens.

What toast might he give to such a world, such a God, that had made him so happy, so rich, that had rewarded his every duplicitous act while punishing the superstitious little ants down there striving to do good?

What else?

“Salut’,” he cried. He drank.

The toast echoed off the cliff. He heard it again, and again he drank.

Chapter 29

AT THE CORLEONE COMPOUND at Lake Tahoe, Theresa Hagen and Connie Corleone (who’d gone back to using her maiden name) were cooking dinner together, as they did most nights they were both home, which was most nights. They alternated kitchens, by no pattern Michael could see, some nights in his house, others (like tonight) at the Hagens’. There had been a remarkable change in Connie in the two years since she’d stopped trying to be a part of the jet set and come home to serve her brother-just as unmarried relatives have served as de facto first ladies to widowed or bachelor presidents. Theresa was no small part of Connie’s turnaround. She’d become the big sister Connie never had-complete with constant sisterly bickering, true, but they clearly loved each other. Because of Theresa, Connie had taken an interest in art and was helping Theresa raise funds to establish a permanent symphony orchestra in Lake Tahoe. They both held office in the League of Women Voters. The last year or so, Connie had even started dressing much more conservatively. They used the same designer the real first lady did.

In Tom Hagen’s office, the stone cottage behind the house, Tom and Michael were lying low until dinner was ready. Connie’s kids drove Michael nuts, even his godson, Mickey Rizzi, who was six years old and cried constantly. Connie ran things around the house, but Michael could have hired people to do that. Having someone else’s children living in his house made him miss Tony and Mary even more, he thought, than if he’d been rattling around over there alone. Not to mention the Hagen kids, right next door. Gianna Hagen and Mary were the same age, had gone to the same schools, and been best friends. It was impossible to look at Gianna and not feel a pang of yearning for the simple pleasure of reading a bedtime story to his daughter.

He and Tom also had business to discuss, of course. Tom had spoken to the Ambassador about getting Billy more responsibility in his job at the Justice Department; the Ambassador claimed to have spoken to his son Danny, the attorney general, but Tom had his doubts. Billy was apparently still being kept away from anything in the office that might be useful to the Corleones.

There was also the matter of Vincent Forlenza’s trumped-up rationale for killing his long-deported consigliere and the word Nick Geraci had sent that he needed to speak with Michael Corleone, in person, one on one.

“Did Geraci say what it was about?” Michael presumed it had to do with Narducci.

“He didn’t,” Tom said. “He said he could come out here if you’d rather-Aw, shit.”

On the putting green outside Tom’s office, Victor Rizzi-his twelve-year-old nephew, freshly suspended from school for fighting and drinking-executed a flying tackle of Andrew Hagen, seven years older and about to begin his sophomore year at Notre Dame. Andrew-a divinity major who planned to become a priest-was probably not the instigator. Victor came up swinging. Andrew tossed his putter aside and pinned Victor to the green.

Michael cocked an eyebrow.

“Forget it,” Tom said. “Andrew can handle it.”

“It’s not Andrew I’m worried about.”

The Hagens’ alarmed, obedient collie raced to the back door of the house, barking. A moment later, Connie came running out in a filthy apron, screaming at Victor. Andrew used his longer arms to his advantage and essentially handed Victor over to his furious mother.

“Remind you of anybody?” Tom said.

Michael knew Tom must have meant either him or Fredo, but it didn’t seem like something either of them would have done. Also, neither he nor Tom ever spoke Fredo’s name. There were things that had to be done, and you did them, and you never talked about it. You didn’t try to justify them. They can’t be justified.

“You mean me?” Michael said. “When did I ever-”

Tom rolled his eyes. So this had been his attempt to talk about Fredo.

“When did… he ever take on you and Sonny?”

Tom shook his head, gravely. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m getting old.”

A few beats late, Michael realized that Tom hadn’t meant Fredo. He’d meant Carmela, who’d broken up more petty fights in their neighborhood than ten beat cops combined.

“Anyway,” Tom said, “getting Geraci out here’s going to take a while. He’ll have to drive or take a train.”

“I’m supposed to go see the kids the week after next.”

“If you’re going to do it at all,” Hagen said, “I think that’s when. But-”

“I’m going to do it.”

“It could be a trap. Especially in New York, I think.”

“It’s fine,” Michael said. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll be sure Al takes every precaution.”

“What’ll happen when they find out we had the job done on Narducci before they did?”

Sal Narducci hadn’t seemed like the sort of man who’d hold up well if he were tortured. It hadn’t been a chance Michael was willing to take. They could suspect whatever they wanted from Narducci, but they weren’t going to hear it from that horse’s ass’s mouth. “How would they find out?” Michael said. “We contacted the same man they did. Indelicato waited to hear from them, as we told him he would, and then he did the job to our specifications.”

“You’re that confident in Cesare Indelicato? This was the first time I’d ever met the man. He’s worked with Geraci for years.”

“He’s been in business with the Corleone Family for many more years,” Michael said. “If it hadn’t been for the help of my father during the war, Cesare Indelicato would still be hijacking tomato carts. Anyway, what incentive does he have to side with anyone but himself? He was contacted twice, received two tributes, all for one simple job. He won’t give the matter a second thought.”

“After all the bullshit Forlenza fed the Commission about Narducci’s activities in Sicily,” Hagen said, “I’m surprised he didn’t send his own men to do the job. Or at least to contact Don Cesare.”

“Forlenza will just say that Geraci’s from Cleveland-his godson, et cetera-and was going to Sicily on business anyway, which is true. It’s suspicious, but Don Forlenza made no secret of it. He told the Commission that this was how he was going to handle it. Brilliant. It looked like he had nothing to hide.”

“And you’re still certain they do have something to hide.” They meaning Forlenza, Geraci, and Russo.

“What in this life is certain?” Michael said. “I’m certain enough.”

“If it was anyone else,” Hagen said, “I’d say be careful.”

Michael smiled. “If it came from anyone else, I’d take offense.”

“I think I have an idea,” Tom said, “about how to handle things with Russo.”

He was interrupted by Connie banging the dinner gong as if she were seeking rescue, not serving up the evening meal.

When they got to the table, it was a bruised and chastised Victor who led them in grace.

Francesca Van Arsdale had spent all morning making a picnic lunch to surprise her husband, but when she and little Sonny showed up at his office, Billy grumbled about all the tourists on the Mall and how hot it was before he finally thanked her for the gesture and agreed to go. “It’s not as if I’m too busy to get away,” he said.

Billy had probably begun working at the Justice Department with unrealistically high hopes, although, after seven miserable months on the job, he still seemed unready to admit that to himself, much less to his wife. He was only two years out of law school, Francesca reminded him, but that only launched him on some litany of names she didn’t know-people who, like Billy, had been president of law review at Harvard and what glamorous and/or lucrative things those strangers were doing two years later.

“Exactly,” she said, “and someday some other, younger presidents of law review will have you on the same kind of list. ‘Do you know what Senator Van Arsdale-’”

“C’mon, Francie.”

“‘-was doing two years out of law school? Working for the United States Justice Department, that’s what, and not just under any attorney general. No! Under Daniel Brendan Shea! The greatest attorney general in American history and our, y’know, thirty-seventh president or whatever number he’d be.’”

Sonny was jumping around in the grass of the Mall doing the famous Monkey Dance from Jojo, Mrs. Cheese and Annie. Except for the gold football helmet bobbing on the boy’s head, it was a dead-on impression of Jojo. Tourists paused to watch.

“When did he learn to do that?” Billy whispered, spreading out the blanket.

“It’s from TV,” she said. Months ago was the answer. He frowned, either confused or disapproving, Francesca didn’t want to know which. Sonny finished, and bystanders applauded. Francesca firmly told him he couldn’t do an encore like Jojo, because it was time to eat.

They sat down as a family. Why couldn’t he appreciate this? she thought. Why couldn’t he accept this as the point of life and take pleasure in it? Between his unhappiness at work-which he talked about all the time-and their joint unhappiness about losing the baby-which they never really talked about-she was feeling more and more like they had to get out of this godforsaken city. Billy had been so good to her from the time she’d found out about the affair until the night they’d lost the baby, but he’d barely touched her since then. The only time they’d tried to make love, he couldn’t get hard and she was too fragile herself to make it happen for him. He rolled off her, onto his back, and used his hand. When he came, she started crying, though she was also strangely relieved. About half the nights since then, for no apparent reason, he’d spent the night on the couch with the TV test pattern on.

“You don’t understand, Francie,” Billy said. “It’s complicated.” He’d folded several napkins to sit on, even on top of the blanket, so he wouldn’t get his seersucker suit dirty. “All day I sit on my duff in the library,” he said, slapping said duff, “checking other people’s citations. Some of the lawyers who wrote those things are my age, and most of them wouldn’t know a decent English sentence from-I don’t know, the Monkey Dance, but-”

“Monkey Dance!” Sonny cast aide his bologna sandwich, grabbed his football helmet, and shot up, dancing. Billy didn’t even budge. Francesca got up, got Sonny under control, and, with the minor concession of allowing him to keep the helmet on, got him back to eating lunch.

“When I was on law review,” Billy said, “I had people doing this kind of job for me.”

It took her a second to realize he meant the work in the law library, not her efforts to subdue a four-year-old with a Monkey Dance fixation. Billy had people for that, too: her. A normal, healthy four-year-old boy was wearying enough without having to contend with a whiny husband, too. She’d only been eleven when her father died. She knew she’d probably built him up into someone who never existed, but she hadn’t even the vaguest memory of him whining to his wife, not once. “Well, you’re not on law review anymore,” Francesca said, “are you?”

“How can I talk to you about this? You didn’t even finish college. Nobody in your family ever did.”

“That’s ridiculous. Aunt Kay did, and so did Uncle Tom and Aunt Theresa.”

Billy laughed. “They’re not blood, though, are they? Other than Theresa, they’re not even Italian.”

Francesca would have let him have it-verbally, at least-if Sonny hadn’t been sitting right there. “My twin sister finished, and she’s getting her doctorate. My brother Frankie is doing great at Notre Dame, and-”

“Your brother Frankie plays football. What’s the toughest class he’s taking, Theory of Gym Class?”

“That’s low.” Frankie was in fact a phys ed major and had never been good in school. She was proud he was doing as well as he was, even in a gut major. “I’d have finished my degree, too, if you hadn’t-” Sonny was devouring his sandwich now, but Francesca didn’t want to risk saying anything in front of him. “You know.”

Billy shrugged. “Takes two to tango,” he said. “If you took exception to that, you had your chance to have it taken care of.”

A look of horror crossed his face; he immediately realized what he’d said.

“Taken care of!” she said.

“I’m sorry!” He reached out to her, and she pushed his arm away. He spent most of the rest of lunch apologizing. He was a talker. Eventually, he wore her down.

“It’s the job,” Billy said. “It’s gotten to the point that it’s affecting the way I am with you. I need to be making more of a difference in the world, and what it comes down to, I guess, is that I’m not going to be happy until I am. Can you understand that?”

She told him she did understand, as she’d told him before, and told him he really needed to talk to the attorney general and make his unhappiness known, as she’d been saying for weeks. She didn’t understand why he wouldn’t do it. She was raised to believe that if you had a problem, you went to the man at the top. Billy had been raised with all the advantages, so she’d have thought he’d believe in that, too. All she could figure was maybe he was intimidated by Daniel Brendan Shea, though that, too, mystified her. Danny Shea, a pale and scrawny version of his brother, possessed the startled, blinking manner of a man whose eyeglasses have just been yanked from his face, though in fact his eyesight, if not his vision, was perfect.

When they finished eating, he kissed Sonny and then told Francesca that he’d do it: if it was what she wanted, he’d march straight to the attorney general’s office and see if he could talk to Danny Shea.

“I only want you to be happy,” she said, which was a lie. She was starting to want a lot of things beyond the horizons of her entitled husband’s happiness. “Like you said.”

They walked back to the Justice Department together. He carried his sleeping son in one arm and the helmet in the other, with which he hailed a taxi so Francesca wouldn’t have to carry the boy home. Billy kissed her good-bye, but with no more passion than if he were a friend of the family. He did say “Thank you,” but he never did remember what day it was.

The cab merged into the traffic on Constitution. “Happy anniversary,” she whispered.

“What’s that, ma’am?” the cabbie said.

“Nothing,” she said, pulling Sonny closer, willing herself not to cry. “Nothing at all.”

That afternoon, Billy did in fact get in to see Danny Shea. According to the notes taken shorthand by the attorney general’s secretary, what happened was this:

At 15:37, AG [Attorney General Daniel Brendan Shea] fit junior staff attorney Bill V. Airdale [sic] into a ten minute break in his P.M. schedule so long as BVA could accompany AG as he went for his daily run 10X up and down the building’s main stairwell. [Many books about the Sheas include accounts of her trailing behind AG as he held meetings in this manner, though her technique for managing to take shorthand this way has been lost to history.] BVA agreed.

BVA discussed his qualifications for this job and his desire to be involved more with prosecutorial matters that would result in more time in the courtroom and less in the library. BVA wondered if his Harvard degree had anything to do with his present dissatisfactory assignment, seeing as so many top officials in AG’s office were from Princeton. AG categorically denied any such bias, citing several Jews and Negroes from state-supported schools who held high office in the JKS administration, as well as the job with Senator [censored] that AG personally helped secure for Miss [censored] from the University of Miami, whom the AG referred to as BVA’s “girlfriend.” BVA apologized. AG accepted.

BVA nonetheless expressed unhappiness with his current assignment and asked about the possibility of a transfer. AG referred BVA to BVA’s own unit supervisor. BVA expressed disappointment with AG’s reluctance to act personally in the matter, especially given [several heavily censored lines follow; among the few words not blacked out are “Van Arsdale Citrus Co.,” spelled correctly, despite the earlier gaffe with Billy’s name].

AG said he did not understand.

BVA explained that his parents [two more censored lines].

AG expressed surprise, insofar as no such factors had accompanied AG’s decision to hire BVA. AG admitted that MCS [his father, former ambassador to Canada M. Corbett Shea] was the first to urge AG to hire BVA. AG’s understanding was that this had primarily to do with BVA’s excellent record at Harvard but also was aided by BVA’s fine service alongside the aforementioned Miss [censored] during the JKS election campaign.

BVA, somewhat breathless and thus difficult to understand, seemed to express skepticism that family connections hadn’t played a role and couldn’t play a role now.

AG admitted that this was true, but that those connections existed between MCS and the family of BVA’s wife, whose maiden name was [censored].

BVA asked if he’d been “foisted off” on the AG.

AG said it was more complicated than that. While reminding BVA of his sworn responsibilities, vis-à-vis confidentiality, AG said that he was in fact preparing a comprehensive plan to [prosecute] “the [censored name of BVA’s wife’s family] and people like them.”

BVA responded that he fondly hoped for the same thing, and certainly would not pass said information on to his wife or any member of her family.

AG expressed surprise and asked if that was really true.

Exercise session was completed.

BVA said he was committed to doing “anything and everything” to see to it that any crimes being committed by his wife’s family be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and that otherwise his own political future would be [nonexistent]. BVA said he had firsthand knowledge of secret aspects of her family’s illegal activities that could be of use in AG’s comprehensive prosecutorial plan.

AG expressed his pleasure at this news and said he was optimistic he could work something out, vis-à-vis BVA’s proposed reassignment. He handed BVA a fresh white towel and thanked him for his time and candor. Meeting concluded at 15:47 EST.

The airport Michael Corleone used when he came to New York was nearly at the end of Long Island. It had once been a private airport but had been under government control since World War II. Several years before, Nick Geraci, who of course no longer flew, had rigged it so that various planes owned or operated by the Corleone Family could land there.

Michael taxied toward the hangar where Geraci was waiting. He stopped about fifty yards short of it. Geraci walked across the tarmac alone. Al Neri got out and searched him. Geraci took a deep breath and climbed the stairs.

“Leave that door open,” Geraci said to Neri.

Neri glanced at Michael, who nodded. Neri left the door up and positioned himself outside it.

“So that’s how it is between us now?” Michael said.

“What’s how it is?”

“I have you searched,” Michael said, “and you won’t meet with me behind closed doors.”

“The searching, I can’t speak to,” Geraci said, “though I have no argument with it. And since I’m sure the lovely and talented Mr. Al Neri out there is packing one or more deadly weapons, I think it’s clear that my trust in you remains as solid as ever. It’s just… I don’t know if you realize this, but this is the first time I’ve been inside an airplane since… you know.”

Michael did know. He said nothing. He filled out a flight plan for the next leg of his trip.

“Even when I take my kids to Coney Island,” Geraci said, “if a ride leaves the ground, it leaves without me. I’d consider it a personal favor if we could keep the door open and, if you don’t mind too much, while you’re sitting right there, if you could kill the engine.”

Michael had heard about Nick Geraci’s tremors, but this was the first time he’d seen them. They weren’t as bad as he’d imagined.

“We’ll split the difference,” Michael said, finishing the form and tossing it to Neri so he could run it over to the tower. “You keep the door open, and I’ll keep the engine running.”

Did Geraci really think that Michael would take off without Neri? With the door open? That Michael would be so reckless he’d try to pull something like that in an enclosed space with a former heavyweight boxer who, tremors notwithstanding, kept himself in good shape and looked like he could knock Michael Corleone into a brain-damaged tomorrow?

“All right,” Geraci agreed. “Let me just say this, and I’ll go. It’s just something that I wanted you to know about. I don’t know where to start, so I’ll just say it. I’ve worked out a deal for us to get back into Cuba.”

Michael’s surprise was genuine, even though nothing Geraci was saying came as any news. Not the offer from the one-eyed “Jewish” CIA agent, not fenced-off land in New Jersey, guarded by a crew of federal agents and a pack of rottweilers. Not the combustible mix of mercenary Sicilians and aggrieved, once-wealthy Cubans who’d overcome their differences (language, culture, motives, you name it) and an unfortunate stabbing incident (one of Geraci’s men, recuperating nicely back in Toledo, Ohio) and were only a few weeks away from trying to sneak onto the island, in assassin squads of two or three, in the hope that the killing of one man would produce certain desirable results. What shocked Michael was that Nick Geraci was telling him about it at all.

“When you say you’ve worked out a deal for us,” Michael said when Geraci finished, “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Let it mean what you want it to mean. I know you’re out and all that bit, but I’m not in the casino business and you are. I thought you’d be interested to know in advance about the opportunities that might be coming up, and also to be sure you knew about the competition.”

Competition? “Competition for what?”

“Well, this is where, if I’d have known everything that was going on, I’d have come to you right away. I was led to believe that my thing out in Jersey was the whole operation, but I started hearing different things. Come to find out, Sammy Drago down in Tampa’s got something just like it, training right on the beach way south of Miami. That didn’t bother me half as much as when I happen to learn that there’s fifty or so men training at a closed-off part of the navy base in Jacksonville, which I actually use from time to time in my own business. All the wiseguys I could find anything out about at that base are connected to Carlo Tramonti and New Orleans, but-” He turned his trembling palms over and smirked in an of-course way. “Tramonti’s a puppet. Drago’s an empty suit. Put it all together, what’s it spell?” Geraci spelled it out on the fingers and thumb of his left hand, as if he were counting. “R. U. S. S. O.”

Michael presumed that come to find out and I happened to learn were Geraci’s way of covering up his obvious sources for this-either Vincent Forlenza, who was down in Key Biscayne for the winter, or Louie Russo himself.

“Stop right there,” Michael said. “I know that you’re telling me these things out of your respect for me and for our friendship, and for that I’m grateful. But you’ve said too much already. I can’t be a part of this. I appreciate the awkward position that puts you in, but all I can tell you is that in spite of what you may have heard from your godfather in Cleveland, I assure you I’m doing everything I can to move this along so that you can have my seat on the Commission and I can be out altogether. I’m close. We’re close. You and I want the same things. This would be a terrible time to start up any trouble at all with any of the other Families.”

Michael couldn’t tell if Geraci was nodding or trembling.

“I know I don’t need your blessing,” Geraci said, getting up to leave. “I’m just trying to make sure I avoid the opposite. Your curse, I guess.”

Michael would have thought that a move that cravenly defensive was beneath him. “Good luck to you and your men in Cuba,” Michael said. “Say hello to all the things that were stolen from us. Are we clear?”

“Will do,” Geraci said, descending the stars. “And yes.”

A week later, back in Lake Tahoe, Joe Lucadello showed up alone, as promised, in a crummy little boat and tied up to the Corleone dock. Capra and Tommy Neri met him and frisked him and gave Michael the all clear. Michael called Tom Hagen and told him Joe had arrived, then waited until Hagen was already out there before making his own way down the sloping lawn to the aluminum bench at the end of the dock, taking his place in the middle.

“Tom didn’t seem to want to tell me,” Joe said. “Maybe you know, Mike. Who thought up that pizza parlor trick? Because I must say, I’m impressed.”

It had been Geraci’s idea, but Michael couldn’t see anything to gain by telling this to Joe. “Tell me if what Fausto Geraci said is true,” Michael said.

“That always throws me,” Joe said. “No one else calls him that.”

Michael stared his old friend down.

“All right, yes,” he said. “There are others. I mean, I never said there weren’t others.”

“You knew about this, and-”

“No, I didn’t. Not at first. The more I learn about your… whadda-yacallit,” Joe Lucadello said. “Your tradition. The more similarities I see. Secret societies, with vows of silence and a code of honor, et cetera. But this situation here is a way we differ. You seem to have ways of finding out everything you need to know, but in my line of work, nobody knows everything about anything.”

“That’s not acceptable,” Michael said.

“I don’t make the rules. Though, honestly, I don’t think it affects you. You’re part of the project. Once anybody gets the job done, it’s safe to say that everyone on the project will get a big dose of Christmas for their troubles. Plus, our operation is by far the best. They’re not willing to lose a few men if necessary as part of the war on communism, and because of your military training, you are, which gives us an enormous advantage. I don’t know all the ins and outs of the other plans, but I hear stories. They’re talking about going to the radio station where our target gives his speeches to the Cuban people and putting aerosol spray in the air, some hallucinogenic drug called LSD that’ll make him sound crazy. They’re working on ways of poisoning his cigars or shining his shoes with a chemical that’ll seep into his skin and make his hair fall out, beard included, to embarrass him that way. They’ve killed a hundred pigs and monkeys field-testing pills that are supposed to dissolve right away in frozen daiquiris. The newest idea I heard about was having a midget submarine drop a pretty seashell on the reef where the guy goes scuba diving. The seashell will be attached to a bombshell, and when he picks the thing up, he’ll be hamburger. In other words, they’re a bunch of pussies. We’re taking a straightforward route. We’re going to shoot the Commie bastard.”

The men sat silently on the bench for a long time.

“So what’s the deal?” Joe said. “You want to pull the plug? Because the others won’t, I can tell you that.”

“Can you guarantee us that our people will be the first ones in?”

“Guarantee?” Joe said. “What do I look like, Sears and Roebuck? I can tell you that your man Geraci is the best person we have on this, though. He was the first to get his facility organized, and he has the best people. I have it from the top that they’re the most ready to go. I have to be honest with you, I’m wondering if some of your competition here is just taking the money with no intention of doing anything ever. So, yes, I’m confident our people will be first, but I won’t guarantee you the sun will come up in the morning. If and when Geraci’s men are dispatched, I’ll let you know. A promise, not a guarantee.”

“Understood,” Michael said.

They discussed the details of what would happen when the men got to Cuba until Michael was satisfied that he should go ahead and let what was going to happen happen.

“I never thought we’d have men on our side as good as the ones we’re going up against in Cuba,” Joe said. “Not because our men are inferior-they’re not-but because our people just work for money. If something goes wrong, they’re out some cash, a promotion, what have you. But the men that SOB in Cuba has, if they fuck up, they know he’ll kill them. That’s what makes his intelligence so good. But your people?” Joe shook his head in admiration. “With them, we’ve got the best of both worlds.”

Michael didn’t know what else to say but to thank him.

Joe got up to go.

“Whoever thought of the pizza parlor thing, by the way,” he said as Hagen untied the boat for him, “it’s a hell of a good idea. I’m not saying what I’m saying, but we have the same kind of thing. Fairly new. Most Special Fellows, they’re called. Doesn’t matter if I tell you, because, believe me, you’ll never hear about it. The Company sets them up, makes sure they prosper, but for the most part we leave ’em alone for years until we need ’em for something. I’m not involved with it at all, but mark my words, there will come a time when the American president will be a Most Special Fellow. Of course, you won’t know it when it happens.”

As Michael watched the boat pull away, the flicker of a smile played across his face. Already, he knew of at least three such Fellows, including the man who lost to Jimmy Shea in the last election; the son of a senator on the Family’s payroll, now bumbling around in Texas, pretending to be an oilman; and Peter Clemenza’s son Ray, the shopping mall magnate.

“It’s time,” Michael said to Hagen. “Go see Russo. This gives you a reason.”

“You’re sure?”

Michael nodded. “Geraci’s men are either going to succeed or fail, and we have it worked out either way. This news of Joe’s throws us a curve, but it’s nothing we need to worry about. It just means that we need to move forward. The only thing that’s not ready is our canary in the Justice Department, but we know Billy used the chance to betray us as a means of getting the attorney general’s trust. He needs a little more time there before he’ll know enough for it to be worth turning him to our advantage. So, yes. Start with Russo. Presuming you’re ready.”

“I’m ready.”

“It’s a big step.”

“I’ve been waiting for this,” Tom said, “I don’t know how long. A long time.”

“Well, that’s it, then,” Michael said, kissing his older brother on the cheek and then trudging up the lawn to his empty house.

Chapter 30

LESS THAN a year after the facility on Geraci’s land was built, a crew came to tear it down. Your tax dollars at work. Geraci said he had demolition guys who could do the job for a reasonable price, but “Agent Ike Rosen” said they had to do it to certain specifications. Also, there were security issues. The remaining trainees had been sent home, to be called upon when needed to a staging area at a villa in the Bahamas.

Three Cuban expats were the first to be dispatched, apparently on the orders of CIA Director Allen Soffet himself, the logic being that the Cubans knew the country and if something went wrong they’d be better able to disappear than Geraci’s men would. Geraci was furious. He’d wanted a Cuban (for the language and general navigation) and two Sicilians (so the job would get done right the first time). Do it that way, Geraci told his contacts, and nothing will go wrong. The Cubans landed on an unnamed coral island just outside Cuban waters, were picked up in a speedboat that had been seized from the estate of Ernest Hemingway, and were killed on the way to shore, when the boat exploded under suspicious circumstances. The thinking was that the pilot had been a spy for the Cuban government, but everything Geraci heard about it was far from firsthand. Geraci told Agent Rosen he’d told him so. Geraci didn’t want to lose a man, but he also didn’t want one of the other operations to be the ones to murder that thieving dictator, and there seemed to be no reliable way to find out what was going on in those other camps. Why even train his men, Geraci said, if they were only going to send the Cubans to do the job?

About a week later, Rosen told Geraci he’d been authorized to send another three men in, this time on a low-flying seaplane, under the radar, delivered right to a trusted operative who’d be waiting on the beach. Geraci was told he could recommend one man. Geraci insisted on two. One or nothing, the agent said. Geraci picked Carmine. The Sicilian soldato told Geraci not to worry; he was as good as two men, any two.

A few days after that, Geraci was out in his office behind the pool, reading the same two-volume history of Roman warfare that had been defeating him off and on for seven years, when Charlotte knocked on the door. “There was a call.” She was ticked off. The longer they’d been married, the more she seemed to resent taking messages for him, especially from callers who didn’t identify themselves. “Whoever it was, he wanted me to tell you that they’re in. That’s it. ‘They’re in.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

“Yes.” In Cuba, of course. And from where he sat it meant everything.

“How’s that book coming?” she said.

“Books,” Geraci said. “Two volumes. When’s the last time you read anything that wasn’t flashed up on a television screen? And as a matter of fact, I’m making headway.”

It was still dark outside as Tom Hagen left the Palmer House and caught a cab to go see Louie Russo. Theresa was asleep in their hotel room upstairs. Later this morning she had a meeting at the Art Institute of Chicago-some kind of national museum board consortium. Tomorrow they’d drive over to South Bend, to see not just Andrew but also Frankie Corleone, Sonny’s oldest kid, who was starting at middle linebacker for the Fighting Irish and had gotten them tickets for the last home game of the year, against Syracuse, Theresa’s alma mater. Hagen had been looking forward to this weekend for a long time.

Hagen would have rather taken a limo, but he couldn’t risk taking anything so prearranged. The cabbie was classic Chicago, spewing profanity and cheerful complaints about some sports team. Hagen had a lot on his mind. He’d had only two cups of coffee. He was sweating. He didn’t feel nervous, and it wasn’t hot in the car. Probably it had to do with his blood pressure, so high his doctor might not have been joking when he’d said that one day Hagen might just pop, like an engorged tick. The driver kept yapping. Hagen did nothing to discourage it. The more the guy talked, the less he’d remember his passenger.

Russo had a private supper club out in the sticks, almost in Wisconsin. Even against the flow of morning traffic, the drive took more than an hour. It seemed almost as long from the gate and across the expanse of parking lot to the club itself-a white barn made of painted cinder blocks. Though it didn’t seem like much, this place managed to book singers like Johnny Fontane, all the top comics, even the Ice Capades. A sign over the door read HECTOR SANTIAGO, THE KING OF RUMBA! The shows were never advertised but always sold out. Next to the barn was a square pond about the size of four city blocks and surrounded by pine trees. The water was barely visible and black as tar. On the other side of the pond was a nondescript, windowless, three-story warehouse that had been converted into a casino. At night, gondoliers poled guests back and forth across the pond. Russo was unduly proud of the place; by all accounts, it was impossible to come see him here on business and leave without getting a tour of his precious casino. Even so, Hagen had to admire the amount of work that had gone into bribing all the cops it would have taken so that Louie Russo’s customers could arrive at his illegal gambling joint right out in the open, in something as slow as a gondola.

Behind the club, an old farmhouse had been expanded and converted into a guesthouse. Russo kept an office in the biggest room upstairs. To get there, Hagen had to go through some kind of metal-detecting device and then though a steel door, the kind they have on bank vaults. As Hagen expected, two of Russo’s goons sat in an outer room, each with a tommy gun across his lap. One got up, gave him a lazy search, and waved him into his boss’s lair.

“If it ain’t the world’s only Mick consigliere!” Russo said. He had on a pair of diamond cuff links. “What an honor.”

Hagen thanked him and sat down in the offered seat. Russo remained standing, a crude and petty assertion of control.

“Michael Corleone,” Hagen said, “is prepared to support you as capo di tutti capi and to resign his seat on the Commission, which will go to Nick Geraci, so long as you and I can reach an understanding on a few small matters.”

“Hey, you hear this guy?’ Russo called down the hall to the men with guns. “Listen, Irish. Where I come from, we don’t get fucked without first we get kissed. Get my meaning?”

Hagen did. “I’m German-Irish,” he corrected. “And I meant no offense, Don Russo. I know you’re a busy man, and I thought you’d appreciate it if I got right to the point.”

“Coffee? Shit, where are my manners? How about a cocktail, Irish?”

“Coffee’s perfect,” Hagen said. It was from a percolator, but it would have to do. “Thank you.”

Russo frowned. “Hey, are you okay? Because it ain’t hot in here.”

“I’m fine.”

“My ma used to say being fine is more a decision than a condition.”

“Smart woman.”

“Yeah, well, you look like either you’re scared out of your wits or else you got some kind of whatchacallit. Tropical fever. Like from the jungles. Hey, boys?” he called. “My Mick friend in here could maybe use a towel.”

“All I need is coffee,” Hagen said, downing the cup in two long swallows.

“Only person I ever had in here who sweated the way you are was wearing a wire.”

“Is that right?”

Russo nodded.

Hagen raised his arms. “Search me,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

Russo wasn’t too proud-or respectful-to do it, either. Russo searched him. No wire, of course. Russo again motioned for Hagen to sit. Hagen paused, waiting for Russo to sit, too.

“A few small matters, eh?” Russo settled in behind his desk. “Like for instance what?”

From the small third-story balcony of a boarded-up library in downtown Cienfuegos, Carmine Marino loaded the Russian-made rifle he’d been set up to use and waited for the motorcade to come his way. He’d lost the two angry Cubans he’d come with the night they all landed. The only Spanish he spoke was corrupted Italian, but he managed to make his way across two hundred miles of a dictatorship to the two women spies who gave him the rest of his instructions. Carmine was naturally disappointed when he did not have hot sex with them in the dark and sultry Cuban night. Who ever heard of a female spy who didn’t have sex with a dashing assassin such as himself? Why else be an assassin such as himself? There were two of them, and still nothing. It was confusing. Maybe they were dykes. Maybe he wasn’t the man he thought he was. If he got out of this alive, he thought, he’d go back to that one-eyed Jew and tell him that if he knew what was good for him, he’d find the brave Carmine Marino a buxom, randy spy, and pronto. Carmine was nobody’s fool. He knew that girls like that were out there.

The streets were lined with soldiers and cheering Cubans. As the motorcade approached, the sound the people made was oddly metallic, like a record of a cheering crowd played too loud and a little too fast. As a toddler in Sicily, Carmine had heard another despot, Mussolini, cheered this way.

Now the motorcade turned the corner by the cathedral and came toward him, a row of American cars, which was hilarious. These people hate the Americans, yet look. Carmine shouldered his rifle.

In the fourth car-a blue convertible, as promised-was the bearded target, in full military uniform, smiling beatifically and waving to his oppressed people.

Marino inhaled smoothly and squeezed the trigger.

The bearded man’s head jerked backward. A shower of blood and gore arced over the trunk. The driver hit the gas.

Screams filled the air. Police waved the rest of the motorcade-including the black sedan two cars behind the convertible, in which the leader of Cuba was riding-down a side street and out of the city.

The man in the blue convertible, the dictator’s favorite double, was dead.

Carmine Marino was captured on his way to Guantánamo Bay, dressed like a woman.

Louie Russo agreed to everything. The Corleones could, with no interference from Chicago, operate their hotels and casinos in Nevada. Atlantic City, too, if, as expected, things opened up there. Hagen admitted that Geraci’s assassin squad operation was ultimately controlled by the Corleones, and Russo admitted, in so many words, that he controlled the ones run by Tramonti and Drago. They might be rivals, these Families, but they had more in common with one another than with the cynical opportunists at the CIA and in the White House.

After a brief discussion of the particulars, Russo agreed that if his people did the job in Cuba first, the Corleones could resume control of the Capri and the Sevilla Biltmore and operate them within the law and with no interference from Russo or any other organization-power Russo would certainly have once Michael helped make him the first formal boss of all bosses since the death of Vito Corleone seven years before.

Hagen himself would personally oversee the organization of the people on the Corleone payroll. Some of this operation would be gradually given to Nick Geraci, but it would also be available to Louie Russo on occasion and in consideration of his help in allowing Michael Corleone to become an entirely legitimate businessman.

Russo was so cooperative that it became increasingly clear to Tom Hagen that Fuckface didn’t plan to let him out of here alive. It was something he and Michael had thought might happen. Knowing that a thing like that might happen is a world apart from feeling it edge closer to happening. The sweating hadn’t slowed down. He’d have given a thousand bucks for a chance to shower and put on some dry clothes.

“This is a great day, Irish,” Russo said. “We should celebrate. I’ll join you, too, only I was kidding about the cocktail before. I don’t have nothing here stronger than that coffee and the bad breath of those gentlemen out in the hall. The bar in the club there’s all right, but the really top-shelf stuff, best selection in the state of Illinois, is right across Lake Louie there.”

It wasn’t even nine A.M.

“I appreciate that,” Hagen said. “But tempting as it is, I need to be getting back.”

“Aw, c’mon, Irish. You don’t drink on it, it ain’t a deal. On top of which, since you people are going to be in the legal casino business-I pity you the money you ain’t gonna make, but no one asked you to go down that road-anyway, you ought to get a last look at my establishment here, which at the risk of not being humble I have to say I’m proud of. It don’t open up for a while yet, but-” Russo took off his black glasses. His eyes were solidly red with a green ring in the middle. He smiled.

The chill that went through Tom Hagen was not a result of the sweating and the air-conditioning, though that’s what he told himself.

“-I know some people,” Russo said. “Ever take a gondola ride?”

“Can’t say I have,” Hagen said.

Russo herded him out the door. The men with the tommy guns stood. “Get this,” Russo said. “Irish here ain’t ever been on a gondola ride. If that ain’t one of those things a man ought to do before he dies, I’d like to know what is.”

Joe Lucadello walked to the front door of Nick Geraci’s house, in the middle of the night, and rang the bell. Geraci had fallen asleep in the chair in his den out back. Charlotte had taken a sleeping pill and was dead to the world. Barb was off at college. After several rings, Bev Geraci answered, but only through the intercom.

“Tell your father it’s Ike Rosen.”

“Will he know what this is about?”

“Sure, why not?”

“What happened to your eye?” she asked. “Is that real?”

“It is. It’s from a war wound.”

“I don’t believe you,” Bev said.

Lucadello flipped the eye patch up. Even through the peephole, the absence of an eyeball was gory enough to make the girl scream and run away. Lucadello sighed, sat down on the porch steps, and waited for the police to come. That was another brilliant thing these people had worked out. The police functioned as their private security force, and other people-civilians-would summon them when needed.

Two squad cars responded. Cops piled out of them, guns drawn. Lucadello raised his hands. He provided them with his Ike Rosen driver’s license and told them he was in the import-export business with Mr. Geraci. He was there at such an ungodly hour only because of an unfortunate customs incident. By then, the commotion had awakened Nick Geraci, who thanked the cops and calmed his daughter down. Then he and the agent went back out to his den.

Lucadello sat down on one of the seats Geraci had salvaged from the wreckage of Ebbets Field and gave Geraci the news about Carmine.

“Rest assured,” Geraci said, “whatever they do to him, that kid’s not going to talk.”

“Whether he talks may be the least of your problems.”

“Oh yeah?” Geraci wasn’t sure what the agent was talking about, but his choice of pronouns-your problems, not our problems-didn’t bode well.

“The Cuban government would be nuts to torture him. They’d be nuts to do anything but make a big fuss about this foreign national who tried to kill their bearded, beloved revolutionary sweetheart. The Russians will be on their side. The U.N. will get dragged in. When they deport him, there won’t be anything for us to do but put him in jail, maybe execute him.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Geraci said. “Carmine Marino’s still an Italian citizen. If they send him back there, he’s got a pretty powerful godfather.”

Lucadello shook his head. “You don’t understand. We need to execute him a long time before any of that happens. But that’s just where your problems start, I’m afraid.”

Geraci would be goddamned if he was going to let this one-eyed bastard kill him in his own backyard. “Stand up,” Geraci said. “I need to search you.”

“Suit yourself. But if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. And if you waste precious time on things like this, you may wind up that way.”

Geraci searched him anyway and liberated him of a gun and two knives.

“Keep ’em with my compliments,” Lucadello said. “I’m on your side, remember?”

Geraci motioned for him to sit back down. “It’s late. I was sleeping. Forgive me if I’m confused about why this is my problem and not yours, too.”

“Oh, it’s mine, too. Look, I’ve already heard from somebody at the top-not my boss but his-that the FBI knows about the camp Tramonti was operating in Jacksonville. They already had an investigation going. I’d heard a rumor floating around that the Bureau was somehow tipped off to our operation, too, but it didn’t seem credible. But after this incident, it doesn’t matter. The risk of someone at the Bureau putting it all together is high.”

“And you can’t protect me from that? There’s nothing you can do?”

“Very little, under these circumstances,” he said. “I’d like to kill those guys.”

“Kill ’em, then,” Geraci said. “I’m not stopping you.”

“Unfortunately,” Lucadello said, “that’s not an option. It wouldn’t solve everything for you anyway. We have reliable intelligence that your former associate Michael Corleone has been planning to kill you. The only thing he’s been waiting for was for you to do this job. Now that you’re not going to get it done at all, we believe your life is in immediate danger. In addition, we have somewhat less reliable intelligence that Louie Russo is planning to kill you as well, apparently because… well, I don’t know how everything works for you people, but apparently there’s some sort of Commission?”

Geraci shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“Of course not. At any rate, everything Russo’s doing had their approval and unfortunately your operation didn’t. Apparently that’s a breach of protocol severe enough for them to authorize… well, we’re not certain who. Presumably Mr. Russo. To kill you, that is. You’re not shaking.”

“It comes and goes.”

“If something like this was happening with me, I’d be shaking.”

“It’s a type of Parkinson’s. Not fear. It has nothing to do with fear. And anyway, how do you know something like this isn’t happening with you?”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s happening,” he said. “At any rate, things are going to move fast, and you need to move faster.”

“Not we?”

“No,” Lucadello said. “Not we. We never had anything to do with anything. You and I have never met. There is no we. There is no me, either. Agent Ike Rosen doesn’t exist.”

Lucadello said that the best he could do was get Nick Geraci and his family out of there. One-way tickets under assumed names, to any destination on earth. It might be possible to have an agent meet them at the airport and give them some quick pointers about starting a new life in wherever they happened to be. This wouldn’t be possible everywhere, but if Geraci wanted to run a few locations by him, he could probably say if they were a good choice.

Geraci looked at the gun on his desk. It would have been nice to kill the guy. It might not make anything worse than it was.

Then, in a flash, almost a vision, he saw his way out of this, or at least how to buy some time.

“All right,” Geraci said, extending his hand, consciously imitating his godfather, Vincent Forlenza. “Four things. First”-index finger-“I’m going to Sicily. I don’t need your people. I have people. Second”-middle finger-“I don’t fly. Period. But you’re going to help me get where I want to go, and my family, too, if they’ll join me, which I doubt. Third”-ring finger-“I promise you, my good friend Michael Corleone isn’t going to kill me, so you might want to check into your reliable intelligence and see what went wrong. And fourth”-pinkie-“I’d strongly advise you not to kill Carmine Marino or to have him killed.”

“Three out of four we can do. As for Carmine, I love him, too. He didn’t do anything wrong. He went where he was supposed to, he made a great shot at the target we told him to hit, and he was smart enough to swallow his manly pride and dress like a woman and try to escape that way. If it was up to me, I’d hire him, but… well, all I can say is that it’s out of our hands.”

Geraci smiled. “Carmine’s mother’s maiden name was Bocchicchio.”

Even after he explained about the peerless, weirdly mercenary ability of the Bocchicchio clan to exact revenge, Lucadello was unmoved.

“So who are they going to come after, huh?” Lucadello said. “The United States government?”

Geraci shook his head. “They’ll take it personally.”

“Meaning what? Me? Or wait, I know! They’ll go after the president!”

Abruptly, Geraci started shaking. To steady himself, he crossed the room, grabbed a fistful of Lucadello’s shirt, and pulled him to his feet. “Carmine’s still alive,” he whispered. “Keep him that way, and they won’t come after anybody.”

Only one gondolier was at work this early, but the gondolas were large. There was plenty of room. As Hagen expected, Russo’s men took their tommy guns on board.

“Don’t look like that, Irish,” Louie Russo said, taking a seat at the front. “I know you ain’t on the muscle side of things. Hell, you people aren’t even gonna have no muscle side of things. Anyhow, loosen up. Take it from me, you’ll live longer.”

The gunmen found this pretty funny. The gondolier averted his eyes and didn’t say anything. He began poling them across the fetid, man-made pond. Finally, he and Hagen made eye contact. Almost imperceptibly, the gondolier nodded.

Hagen had stopped sweating. A sense of peace washed over him. Russo was telling the story of how he had gotten this place, but Hagen wasn’t listening. He studied the tree-lined shore, anticipating the moment they’d get to the halfway point across, bending over enough that no one would notice him unbuckling his belt.

Halfway across, the gondolier brought his pole out of the water. He’d made tens of thousands of trips across this pond, and it had given him forearms a pile driver might envy. As Hagen straightened up and yanked off his belt, the gondolier swung the pole, unleashing the pent-up anger of a man who’d spent years wanting to do this to every self-important asshole who’d ridden in his gondola. It connected with the skull of one of the gunmen.

The other whipped around, but before he could get off a shot, he was jerked backward. Tom Hagen’s belt dug into his neck.

The gondolier grabbed the first dead man’s gun and trained it on Louie Russo.

The second man kicked and turned purple. Hagen felt his windpipe rupture. The man went still. Tom shoved him to the floor of the boat.

Russo started to jump, to try to swim for it, but before he got out of the boat the gondolier grabbed him by the back of the shirt and held him fast. His sunglasses fell into the water.

The tiny-fingered Don started to cry. “I gave you everything you wanted. Now this?”

“Don’t insult me,” Hagen said. He fished a.22 with a silencer out of the coat pocket of the man he’d killed. The assassin’s tool of choice. His arms tingled from the effort it had taken to garrote a man. “You were going to kill me,” Hagen said, waving the gun in front of Russo.

“You’re crazy,” Russo whimpered. “That’s just a gun. It don’t mean nothin’.”

“Even if you weren’t, I don’t care. You gave Roth the idea of getting Fredo to betray the Family, and you set it all up with your people in L.A. You’ve done a hundred other things that give me cause to kill you.”

“ You?” Russo’s tears muted the effect of his devilish eyes. Snot ran freely from his phallic nose. “Kill me? You’re not in this side of the business, Irish. You were a fucking congressman. You think they’re gonna let you make your bones, Irish? You’re Irish.”

Tom Hagen’s whole adult life, everyone had gotten him wrong. He was first and foremost a poor Irish kid from the streets. He’d lived under bushes and in tunnels for an entire New York winter and won fistfights with grown men over half a loaf of moldy bread. Hagen raised the pistol. Now it was his turn to smile.

“If you live in the wolf’s den long enough,” Hagen said, “you learn to howl.”

He fired. The bullet tore into Russo’s brain, ricocheted around in his skull, and did not make an exit wound, the way a bigger-caliber bullet would have.

Hagen tossed the gun into the pond.

He and the gondolier quickly, silently tied weights to the three dead men and threw them overboard. No one saw them. The gondolier took Hagen back to shore and went to work scouring the boat with a bleach solution. He didn’t see any blood, but it paid (well) to play it safe. Hagen drove away in Louie Russo’s own car. The gondolier would swear on the immortal soul of his sainted mother that he’d seen Russo’s car drive away. The car was found two days later in the airport parking lot. The newspapers reported that passengers with any of several aliases known to have been used by Louie the Face had boarded planes that day. None of these leads had turned up an actual person.

The gunmen had been loyal, trusted Russo soldatos, men it would have been difficult if not impossible for the Corleones to bribe. This gondolier, on the other hand, made less in a year than what Louie Russo’s cuff links cost. Russo and his men were found a month later. They were hardly the only corpses there, either. The acidic pond accelerated decomposition. When the state police had it drained and the top layer of mud excavated, they found bones galore, most of them in weighted gunnysacks, suitcases, and oil drums.

By then the gondolier had disappeared.

Neither the authorities nor anyone from the Chicago outfit ever found him. He lived out his days under a different name in a small town in Nevada, running a gun shop and private cemetery on land purchased (with other people’s money) from the federal government, only twenty miles from the windy, irradiated outskirts of Doomtown.

Joe Lucadello called from a pay phone less than a mile from Geraci’s house and told Michael Corleone everything. The lie he’d told about Russo, the truth he’d told about Michael. The details about the ship that would take Geraci to Sicily. Alone. His wife and kids weren’t going with him, which ought to make things even easier.

“Sorry we didn’t get it done down there,” Lucadello said, meaning Cuba. “I know you were counting on it.”

“We’ve lived to fight another day,” Michael said. “What more can a person ask of life?”

“Quite a bit,” Joe said. “But only if you’re young.”

At his mansion in Chagrin Falls, Vincent Forlenza awoke in the dark barely able to breathe, with the familiar and excruciating sensation of an elephant standing on his chest. He managed to ring the bell for his nurse. He knew a heart attack when he had one. It wasn’t his first, and with any luck it wouldn’t be the last, either. It wasn’t as bad as the others. More like a baby elephant. Though maybe he was just getting used to it.

The nurse called for an ambulance. She did what she could and told him he’d be fine. She wasn’t a cardiologist, but she meant what she said. His vital signs were good, considering.

Vincent Forlenza was a cautious man. God seemed to be having a hard time killing him, and he’d be damned if he was going to make the job easy for mere mortals. His estate here and his lodge on Rattlesnake Island were heavily guarded and fortified. It had been years since Forlenza had gotten into a car or boat without his men checking it thoroughly for bombs. Ordinarily, he had two guys do the job who were known to dislike each other, so they’d each be eager to catch the other betraying his Don. He’d stopped eating anything that wasn’t prepared as he watched. But even Don Forlenza, in his hour of medical need, wouldn’t have thought to question the men who arrived to save his life. Neither did anyone guarding the estate. Neither did the nurse, who noticed nothing unusual in the way the men administered to the old man. There was nothing unusual about the ambulance, either-until it left and, moments later, another one just like it showed up.

The first ambulance was found the next day, a block from where it had been stolen. Vincent “the Jew” Forlenza was never seen again.

In the family section of the stadium, Tom and Theresa Hagen and their handsome son Andrew rose for the playing of the national anthem. Tom clamped his hand over his breast and found himself singing along.

“You usually just mutter,” Theresa said.

“This is such a great country,” Tom said. “No one should ever just mutter.”

Frankie Corleone was the smallest man on the entire Notre Dame defense, but on the first play from scrimmage, he shot through the line and hit the Syracuse Orangemen’s gigantic fullback so hard his head snapped back and his body followed. The crowd went wild, but Frankie jogged back to the huddle like he hadn’t done anything unusual.

“Frankie!” Andrew shouted.

“My nephew!” Theresa said.

Tom and Theresa hugged each other, and the fullback made it off the field without the need of a stretcher.

On the next play, Syracuse tried to pass. The receiver was wide open over the middle. Just as the ball got there, Frankie came out of nowhere and batted the ball away.

“Woo-hoo!” Theresa yelled. “Go, Frankie!”

“The Hit Man!” Tom shouted. It was his nephew’s nickname. He didn’t allow himself to give it a second thought.

“Aren’t you supposed to be cheering for Syracuse, Ma?” Andrew teased her.

It was a perfect November day for football, crisp and struggling to be sunny. Everyone should see a football game at Notre Dame. The Golden Dome. Touchdown Jesus.

“This is different,” she said. “This is family.”

In the Palermo harbor, Michael Corleone sat on the deck of a yacht belonging to his father’s old friend Cesare Indelicato. Michael had never traveled with as many men for security as he had on this trip, but Don Cesare had not taken offense. They were living in troubled times.

Michael settled in now, comfortable that he would not suffer a double cross, willing to risk the recklessness of being only a few hundred meters away from Geraci when he arrived in Sicily for the satisfaction of watching him taken from the boat by the best assassins in Sicily.

Michael would have to return to New York. Other than Hagen, the best people the Corleone Family had left posed unacceptable risks because of their ties to Geraci. The next best people were mediocrities like Eddie Paradise and the DiMiceli brothers. Michael would have to run the Family again, every aspect of it. He’d be able to make it look as if he were returning in triumph, he was certain-the elimination of Louie Russo and Vince Forlenza would see to that, at least in the eyes of the top men from the other New York Families. But so much of what Michael had wanted-legitimacy, peace, the love of his wife and children, a life different and better than the one his father lived-was now beyond his reach: for years, perhaps forever.

The terrible sting of this would not go away by killing Geraci. He knew that.

There was no pleasure to be taken from such a thing. He knew that, too.

Still.

As they waited, Don Cesare-in his brilliantly indirect Sicilian way-was discussing the benefits of membership in a Roman Masonic organization, the name of which, Propaganda Due, he did not utter but which was understood between these men. P2, as it was usually called (though Indelicato did not say this either), was a secret society rumored to be more powerful than the Mafia, the Vatican, the CIA, and the KGB put together. Michael was being proposed for membership, and if all went well, he would be the first American admitted. Not even his father had been considered for this. It was a sign that, even in the wake of the Carmine Marino debacle, the true powers understood that Michael Corleone was destined to resume this role as the most dominant force in the American underworld. Any other man in Michael’s position would have been flattered, and he gamely pretended to be just that.

Finally the ship came into view. Michael sipped a glass of ice water and kept his eyes on the men Indelicato had positioned at the foot of the pier.

The ship docked.

The passengers gradually disembarked.

There was no sign of Nick Geraci.

Indelicato nodded to a man on the roof of the yacht, who waved an orange flag, signaling the men on shore to board the ship and look for their target.

“They’ll find him,” said Don Cesare. “They’re good men, and he has nowhere to go.”

But soon the ship-to-shore radio crackled with bad news. Their target had apparently eluded them.

Enraged, Michael used the radio to call the United States.

He was unable to reach Joe Lucadello, but his assistant assured Michael that nothing had gone wrong. They’d had to use several layers of intermediaries to conceal the man’s identity, but the assistant assured him that, unless the guy jumped off somewhere in the Mediterranean, he was on that ship. “I assure you it was him,” the assistant said. “I have the paperwork right in front of me. Fausto Geraci. Passport, pictures, everything.”

Whistling a tune his Palermitan mother sang him as a little boy, Fausto Geraci, Sr., disappeared under the ancient stone arch near the dock, into what was once the walled city of Palermo.

Cesare Indelicato professed to be as flummoxed by the situation as Michael was.

Chapter 31

MICHAEL CORLEONE’S phone rang in the middle of the night. He was still jet-lagged from the punishingly long trip home from Palermo.

“Sorry to wake you, Uncle Mike. It’s just… there’s been an accident.”

He could never tell Francesca and Kathy apart, on the phone or in person.

“Francie!” Kathy Corleone called from the kitchen. She had Billy’s typewriter and several neat piles of books set up on Francesca’s kitchen table-which, only hours after her train arrived in D.C., she’d already com-mandeered so she could work on her dissertation. “Phone!”

“Who is it?” Francesca asked. She was giving Sonny a haircut on a chair in the bathroom.

From Kathy’s lips came words Francesca and Billy had agreed would never be spoken in this apartment, the name of the tall blond whore from Floridians for Shea.

Francesca dropped her scissors. For a crazed moment, she was furious with her sister for this cruel joke, but of course it was no joke. Kathy didn’t even know Billy had had an affair. “Don’t move,” she told Sonny. “Stay right there.”

The boy must have heard something in his mother’s voice. He froze.

For most of their lives, Kathy and Francesca had known the most trivial details of each other’s lives. When had that changed? It wasn’t just going away to different colleges, Francesca thought, standing over the black telephone in her bedroom, blood roaring in her ears. Boys, she thought. Men. What of life’s biggest problems are caused by anything else? Francesca wanted to go back into the bathroom, lock the door, take her son in her arms, and hold him tight, willing him not to become one of those charming, selfish sociopaths.

Instead, she stopped stalling, took a deep breath, and picked up the phone.

“I’m sorry to call you at your home.” The voice of That Woman sounded as if she’d just stopped crying. It also didn’t sound long distance. “This isn’t easy for me.”

“Where are you?” Francesca said.

“Look, it would have been easier for me not to call than to call,” the woman said. “Much easier. I’m only trying to do what’s right.”

“You’re a little late for that, you whore,” Francesca said. “Don’t lie to me and tell me you’re not in Washington.”

“I have no intention of lying,” she said. “I wouldn’t put myself through this for anything but the truth.”

Francesca resisted the urge to hang up. Instinctively, she knew that whatever the woman was about to say, it was something Francesca should hear, and wouldn’t want to. “Hold on,” she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and asked Kathy if she’d go finish up Sonny’s haircut. Francesca closed and locked her bedroom door. She slammed the heel of her hand against the plaster wall. She put a hole in it. Kathy called out to see if she was okay. Francesca lied and said she was. She picked up the phone and sat down. “Now talk,” Francesca said. She covered her eyes with her throbbing right hand as if avoiding the sight of a dead dog on the road.

“To begin with,” the woman said, “you’re right. I’m in Washington. I work in a congressman’s office. When I first moved here, it wasn’t for Billy, it was for this job, but-”

“Do you really think,” Francesca said, “that you have the right to cry about this?”

The woman regained her composure and succinctly confessed. She and Billy had started up again not long after Francesca had lost the baby. They’d been at it off and on until lately, when Billy had gotten her pregnant and been so casual about her getting an abortion that she’d gone ahead with it. She was having a hard time living with herself, though, and had decided to quit her job and move back home to Sarasota.

Francesca clenched her teeth and pressed her swelling hand firmly against the bedpost, trying to use pain to keep the rage that was rising in her from exploding. Not yet. Don’t give this whore the satisfaction.

The woman said she was calling from her office. She and Billy had gone to a hotel at Dupont Circle on their lunch hour. There-what does it matter how it had happened?-whatever they’d had had come to a tearful end. She claimed that Billy had cried as much as she had.

“Feel better, do you?” Francesca said between her clenched teeth. “Can you live with yourself now?” She was shaking. If she’d been in the same room with this woman, it would have been nothing to kill her. Knock her down and stomp her pretty skull until it popped like a grape. Better yet, thrust a butcher knife through her heart.

“Not really,” the woman said. “Listen, say anything to me you want. I deserve it. I really don’t-” More tears. “I mean, I’m not the sort of person who-”

“Bad people,” Francesca said, “never think they’re the sort of person who did the things they did. I’ve got news for you, you whore. You’re not what you think you are. None of us are. You’re what you did, nothing more. You act like a whore, you’re a whore. I have to go.”

“Wait, don’t,” the woman said. “There’s something else I have to tell you. As bad as what I already said, this might be even worse. I think it’s even worse.”

“You don’t impress me as someone who knows the difference between good and bad.”

“It’s about your family.”

“I know that look,” Kathy said. “Don’t think I don’t know that look.”

“Help me bandage my hand,” Francesca said.

“You need to see a doctor,” Kathy said. “What happened that-”

“Help me.”

After years of petty conflict and drifting affection, the sisters felt a shock of understanding shoot through them. They’d had their differences the past few years, but the bond they had as twins never went anywhere. Summoned, it obeyed. There is nothing more complicated and less so than family, nothing easier to understand and at the same time unknowable. With twins, that all goes double.

Francesca didn’t explain any of the particulars to Kathy, yet Kathy understood what she needed to understand. She helped Francesca with her hand, helped her get dressed, listened to her instructions about Sonny (get dinner at Eastern Market Lunch, he loves that, loves the market, too, but dress warm, it’s supposed to snow later tonight). Kathy tried to soothe her but not counterproductively so.

Francesca kissed Sonny and grabbed the keys to Billy’s Dual-Ghia. They had only one car (though it cost more than two nice ones), and of course it was his, the selfish prick, a big fancy custom-built thing he was ordinarily reluctant to let her drive. At least he’d left it for her today so she could go pick up Kathy at the train station.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Kathy called as Francesca slammed the apartment door behind her.

“Maybe I am you,” Francesca shouted back.

When she got there, since only Billy himself was allowed to use the parking garage, she had to circle round and round the building, looking for a space. Her tightly wrapped hand throbbed. Pain shot through it each time she had to shift. The pain wasn’t exactly unpleasant. It was somehow keeping her from crying. The last thing she wanted to allow herself to do was cry.

She banged her unbandaged fist on the leather-wrapped wheel, trying to quell her anger. It only made it worse. You are what you do, nothing more. Francesca was disgusted to be the kind of person who’d look for a legal parking space at a time like this. She growled, feral as a cornered wolf, and whipped the car into an empty space in a loading zone.

She strode but did not run up the steps to the Department of Justice.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Van Arsdale,” said the receptionist in Billy’s office. “Mr. Van Arsdale is in an off-site meeting with the attorney general. I don’t expect them back until tomorrow.”

Which Francesca knew. She was supposed to meet Billy at a bar he and his friends from work liked, down by the river in Georgetown, then go out for dinner and a movie. “Billy needed some files,” Francesca said. “He forgot them. He told me right where to look.”

The next thing Francesca knew, she was alone in Billy’s office, going where the whore had told her to go, looking where the whore had told her to look: in the backmost file in the top drawer. The file was thick and battered; the handwritten label-Billy’s handwriting-read Insurance.

Francesca couldn’t be seen going through it, not there. She tucked it under her arm, thanked the receptionist, and left. She went back to the car. It had not been towed. It had not been ticketed. A good omen, she thought, with no sincere hope it would be.

Inside the folder, as the whore had promised, was information about her family. Newspaper clippings that anyone might have kept, but from papers all over the country. Hundreds of carefully arranged and catalogued snapshots, including quite a few Francesca had taken with her own camera, even before Billy had met her: photos of everyone in her family, but especially those on her father’s side. There was the picture of her uncles and grandfather at Aunt Connie’s wedding that used to be on their dresser and had supposedly been lost in one of their moves. There were four notebooks, the same kind Francesca had been required to use for her freshman English themes, filled with notes about her family, and a several-page typewritten summary of the contents of those notebooks. She tried to figure out when he’d started doing this. The first began in December 1955, the day after they first made love. It wasn’t about that; it was everything that happened at Grandma Carmela’s house, not a journal of any sort, but notes, as if from a class. They weren’t faked. There were things in there only Billy could have known, rendered in handwriting that was unmistakably his (right down to the cursive-style capital A’s and M’s that he’d used then and replaced with printed style a few years later).

Can’t you see Billy’s just here to experience a gen-u-ine Mafia Christmas?

Billy told his whore blonde from Sarasota that he had this file. He probably showed it to her. They probably had a good laugh about it, naked in a hotel room overlooking Dupont Circle.

Dizzy, she collapsed, falling sideways against the gearshift and not caring. She let herself cry. That made nothing better. She wanted to do something, not sit in her cheating husband’s fancy car, crying like some helpless woman.

She was not some helpless woman.

She was a Corleone.

She was the daughter of a great warrior king, Santino Corleone.

By the time she noticed she was murmuring “Daddy, help me” over and over, she’d been doing it awhile.

A Capitol Police traffic cop stopped to write her a ticket, but when Francesca sat up-her face contorted in anguish, her hair and eyes wild-the cop put the summons book away. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. He turned and walked the other way, shaking his head.

In a dark parking lot down by the Potomac River, Francesca waited in her husband’s red car, watching the bar across the street, where she was supposed to meet Billy. She’d been there for a long time, long enough to read every speculation, half-truth, and condescending comment in that hateful file. She wasn’t wearing a watch, and the clock in the Ghia kept lousy time. There had been a handful of aspirin in her purse (next to the kitchen knife, a wedding present from Fredo Corleone and Deanna Dunn), but they’d worn off. Her hand was throbbing worse than ever. But the emotional and physical pain were working together to keep her from passing out, the way two deadly poisons in the bloodstream can keep a person alive.

Maybe an hour ago, Billy had gone into the bar with several other young lawyers. He hadn’t seen her. If he had, they’d have probably had this out already. She wouldn’t really have used that knife (would she?), and she wasn’t above making a scene. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Every moment since then, she’d been a moment away from getting out of the car. She would have, she thought, if she knew what she was going to do or even what she wanted.

She kept going back and forth between wishing she hadn’t brought the knife at all and fearing that she couldn’t possibly do this with her left hand.

She kept thinking about her tough and funny little boy, which made her alternately more and then less inclined to act.

She kept thinking that if only she could calm down, she’d think better.

She realized, now, that this was as absurd as thinking that if only her father were here for her, her whole life would be different and better.

She thought she might soften when she saw Billy again, but when he finally came out of the bar, alone and unsteady on his feet, turning up the collar of his coat against the cold, the opposite happened.

Insurance.

Her heart raced. Her hand hurt so badly she whimpered like a dying animal. Billy turned the corner and started up a steep, narrow cobblestone alley toward M Street. She knew what he was doing. He was a rich boy who’d bought this fancy car because it was what Johnny Fontane, Bobby Chadwick, and Danny Shea drove, but he was also too cheap to hail a cab if it meant having to ride around an unnecessary block. On M Street, he’d be able to get one that wouldn’t have to turn around.

Francesca turned on the ignition. It was a fast car, that Dual-Ghia, one of the fastest made. A perfect hybrid of Italian engineering and American flamboyance.

In the blink of an eye and a few agonizing thrusts of the gearshift, Francesca had it rocketing up that alley.

Billy turned, shielding his eyes from the glare of the headlights. She braced her arms against the big, faux-wood steering wheel. Billy was directly in front of her. There was a split-second flash of what might have been a smile, and she hit him. On impact, his shoes exploded off his feet, his legs buckled, his torso whipped forward, and his head slammed into the hood as hard as if he’d dove from ten stories above. The car fishtailed but kept going. She slowed down but did not slam on the brakes. Billy stayed on the hood as if he were imbedded there.

Francesca grabbed the folder and jumped out of the car. She closed the door as if nothing unusual had just happened and, without hesitating, walked away from the car.

She wasn’t hurt. No one seemed to have seen her. The only thing she felt was awe. She wasn’t screaming or crying. She’d had the mental strength to go through with this and the physical strength to brace herself against the wheel, even with a badly injured hand. The hand was killing her now, but on impact she hadn’t felt a thing.

About fifty yards from the wreck she saw one of his shoes but didn’t even break stride.

She told herself not to look. But as she was about to turn onto M Street, she couldn’t help but look back.

From the top of the hill, the damage to the car didn’t look bad at all. Billy was still on the hood, motionless. A pool of blood was spreading across the cobblestones. At first she couldn’t tell where all that blood was coming from, until she realized that his legs were not crumpled underneath the front bumper. Far behind the car, under the alley’s lone streetlight, lay the severed bottom half of his body.

She felt no remorse whatsoever.

The walk home might have taken her a minute or a day, Francesca couldn’t have said. All the way home, enduring the pain in her hand and the almost as severe pain from the lurches her heart made every time she heard a siren, she didn’t look behind her, not once.

Kathy was at the table, lost in her writing, and Sonny was asleep in his room.

Francesca sat heavily down on the sofa.

“Did Billy call?”

“I don’t know,” Kathy said, not looking up. “I unplugged the phone to work. I hope you weren’t worried. Sonny was a blast. A doll. Everything went great. How’s your hand?”

“Remember when I found out Billy was cheating on me, and you said I should kill him? Well, I did it.”

Kathy started to laugh, then looked closer at her sister and, eyes wide, stifled it. She rushed over to the sofa. “Oh, my God, you-”

“Look at this,” Francesca said, extending the folder to her sister.

“Tell me everything,” Kathy said. “Tell me everything fast.”

The police showed up about an hour after Francesca did, maybe five minutes after Kathy got on the bus that would take her to Union Station and the night’s last train back to New York. There was no trace of her in Francesca’s apartment. Kathy hadn’t even told her mother and her mother’s fiancé, Stan the Liquor Man, that she’d gone to Washington for fear Sandra would immediately start laying on the guilt about how long it had been since Kathy had come to see them in Florida.

When the police gave Francesca the news, she ran down the hall to her bedroom, screaming in not-quite-mock hysteria. She hit the wall with the palm of her left hand-hard but of course not hard enough to hurt anything. Still, the noise it made was convincing. When they caught up to her, there was a hole in the wall and Francesca’s hand was, in their opinion, broken and starting to swell. The ice that had in fact just brought the swelling down dramatically had been flushed down the toilet.

Miraculously, Sonny slept through all of this. After the police left, and after the doctor sent over by Danny Shea’s secretary left, too, Francesca unplugged the telephone and stood over her son’s bed and watched him sleep, his golden football helmet on the pillow beside him.

She would have to tell him. She would call Kathy in New York, and Kathy would call everyone else: their mother, even Billy’s brother and his parents. But Francesca would, somehow, have to shoulder the burden of telling Sonny.

She went back out to the kitchen and took the file out from behind her pots and pans, where she’d hidden it. She paged through it again, marveling that anyone would betray his own family like this. And for what? His career? He was rich. Francesca’s family had connections. Her family could have been Billy’s insurance.

Francesca knew what it was to grow up without a father. She did not know what it was like to grow up with a father who was willing to destroy his own family.

She still felt no remorse.

For now, she’d tell Sonny that Daddy had had an accident and was in Heaven with baby Carmela. But someday, she vowed, she’d tell the boy the truth.

She plugged the phone back in and called Kathy to tell her what had happened. As part of the plan she’d worked out a few hours before, Kathy had told Francesca to betray nothing on the phone, in case Billy had had them bugged. Kathy and Francesca had a fake conversation about what happened and a real one about who Kathy should call.

It was getting close to dawn. It would be late in Nevada now, too. Even so, Francesca called. He’d want to know.

“Sorry to wake you, Uncle Mike. It’s just… there’s been an accident.”

The next day-as Kathy had predicted-the secretary at Billy’s office mentioned that Francesca had come by to get a file for Billy. There was nothing incriminating or unusual about this. She hadn’t left the office angry or distraught. Billy had several different files at home, and Francesca produced them. The one marked Insurance was a personal file of Billy’s. No one outside her immediate family ever asked to see it.

Francesca’s whereabouts after the trip to the Justice Department were easy to prove. The counter people at Eastern Market Lunch said that of course they’d seen Francesca and little Sonny there the night before.

The people in the apartment upstairs said they’d seen Francesca and Sonny come home not long after dark. For at least two hours after that there had been typing coming steadily from below.

Francesca confirmed this. She said that she’d been writing a letter to her sister in New York, which she’d mailed not long before the police arrived. She said this in the presence of the best criminal defense lawyer in New York (an arrangement quietly made by Tom Hagen). A few days later, Kathy (by now ably represented by the same lawyer) said she’d received the letter but had thrown it away. As several friends and relatives (including their mother, Sandra) could and did attest, the twins had grown apart in recent years. One happy consequence of this unhappy story would be the way it served to bring the twins together again, as close as they’d ever been.

The steering wheel and gearshift of the Dual-Ghia seemed to have been wiped of fingerprints (the effect of Francesca’s Ace bandage, actually). Still, detectives identified four sets of prints. Three came from the members of the family for which this was the only car-Billy, Francesca, and Sonny Van Arsdale (Kathy had both kept her gloves on for the short drive from Union Station to her sister’s apartment and remembered that she’d kept them on). The fourth set-found in both the front seat and back-came from a woman with whom Billy Van Arsdale had had an ongoing affair.

The police were able to find several people who’d seen this woman on the very afternoon of Billy’s death, checking into a hotel on Dupont Circle and leaving in tears approximately ninety minutes later. The woman had confessed to several people in her office that Billy had ended his relationship with her that day. Several months before, she’d confessed to many of these same friends that Billy had impregnated her and coerced her into having an abortion.

When detectives questioned her about this, she was openly distraught. They arrested her and charged her with second-degree murder.