The Godfather returns

Chapter 17

SO WAS KAY SORE, ” Fredo asked, leaning across an empty seat, whispering into his brother’s ear, “when she found out about the bugs?”

Michael lit a cigarette. Kay and Deanna were across the banquet hall by now, on their way to the ladies’ room. Sonny’s daughter Francesca and that rich WASP asshole she’d just married were on the dance floor (the kid had broken his leg skiing or some other rich-boy thing and was hobbling around out there on his wedding day in a cast). Most of the other guests were dancing, too, including, amazingly enough, Carmela, who’d been at death’s door a couple months ago. She was twirling around with Sonny’s kid Frankie, the football star. Michael and Fredo were alone at their table. Fredo couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a moment alone with his brother, even one like this, in plain sight.

“She doesn’t know,” Michael finally said.

“Kay’s smarter than you think. She’ll figure it out.”

Michael exhaled. He smoked with the studied cool of someone who’d cultivated the habit from watching people smoke in the movies. He’d smoked this way from the time he’d started. Sonny used to give him the business about it, and in truth, at first he’d looked ridiculous, like a little boy playing dress-up. Somewhere along the line he’d grown into it.

“Fredo,” Michael said, “you, of all people, should not be second-guessing me about how I handle things with my own wife.”

This was a crack about Deanna, of course, but Fredo let it go. “The bug situation,” Fredo said, meaning the listening devices someone had managed to embed in the very beams of Michael’s new house in Tahoe. Neri had used his gizmos to find them, and apparently Michael’s house was the only one of the buildings affected. “Is it-whaddayacallit with bugs? Fumigated. Is it fumigated? Do we-” He hesitated. What he wanted to know was who planted them. “Do we know what species of bugs they were?”

Michael narrowed his eyes.

“So the exterminator got called in, right?” Meaning, Did Neri take care of things?

“Clever doesn’t especially suit you, Fredo.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How much have you had to drink?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Why don’t you go dance?” Michael said. “She’d probably like that.”

Okay, so Mike didn’t want to be talking about this in public. Though it was mostly family and thus not really public. And anyway, it wasn’t something anyone listening in could have figured out. Bugs. People get bugs. They fumigate. They exterminate. Especially in Florida. The vermin a person sees down here, even in nice hotels? Forget about it. So who’s going to think twice about hearing a conversation about bugs in Miami Beach? C’mon.

“I’m sorry,” Fredo murmured.

Michael shook his head. “Ah, Fredo.”

“Don’t ‘Ah, Fredo’ me, all right? Whatever you do, don’t do that.”

“The situation is under control,” Michael said.

Fredo held out his hands, shaking them in frustration. Meaning what? Talk to me.

“You’re leaving when?” Michael said. “I have an early flight to Havana, but maybe we can have breakfast someplace. Just you and me. Or at least take a walk out by the beach.”

“God, that’d be great, Mikey. Really great. Our flight’s in the afternoon, I forget when.” Fredo had been trying to get in to see his own brother for months. Because of Deanna, Fredo spent half his time in L.A. Mike was gone half the time. Even when they were in the same town together, they never found time just to be brothers-to see a ball game, have a beer, go fishing. They hadn’t done any of that since before the war. And that wasn’t to mention business. Fredo needed to talk to Mike again about setting up a cemetery business in New Jersey, one like out in Colma. Fredo had looked into it some more. Nick Geraci had been a big help. Fredo was convinced he could make Mike reconsider.

“Kay’s not going to Havana with you?” Fredo said.

“I’m going on business, Fredo. You know that.”

“Right.” Fredo banged the heel of his hand against his head. “Sorry. How’s that going?” Fredo said. “ Havana, Hyman Roth, all that?”

Michael frowned. “Tomorrow,” he said. “At breakfast.”

Fredo’s vagueness was born of ignorance, not discretion. Roth had been an associate of Vito Corleone’s during Prohibition. Now he was the most powerful Jewish Mob boss in New York -and, by extension, Las Vegas and Havana, too. Fredo had no clear idea what Michael and Roth were cooking up in Cuba, only that Michael had been working on it for a long time and that it was big. “Breakfast’s great,” Fredo said. He’d waited this long to learn what was going on, he could wait until tomorrow morning, too. “Most important meal of the day.”

“When’s your television show start?” Michael asked.

“September. I got Fontane booked for the first one.” All the favors they’d done for Johnny Fontane, this was the least he could do. He’d said yes right away.

“That was a good idea,” Michael said.

“What-Fontane? Or the show?”

“Both, I guess. The show was what I meant.”

“Really?”

“We need to change people’s perceptions. For our businesses to grow the way we want them to, it’s valuable to show the public the Corleones are”-he gestured toward the groom’s side of the ballroom-“no different, in the end, than people like the Van Arsdales.”

“Thanks,” Fredo said.

They made arrangements to meet in the hotel lobby at six the next morning.

“You know, I never could tell them apart.” Michael nodded toward Francesca and Kathy.

“Francesca’s the one in the wedding dress.”

Michael laughed. “You don’t say?”

Fredo embraced his brother. They held it longer than Fredo could remember ever doing before, then pulled each other even closer. It was Sonny they were thinking about, which they both seemed to know without saying anything. His spirit had been there all day, more present than any live guest. Both Fredo and Mike had been on the edge of breaking down when they’d stood in line to hand Francesca their envelopes. Now, when they let go, the brothers’ faces were slick with unashamed tears. They patted each other on the shoulders and said no more.

It was a rough thing to handle, though. Who could blame a guy for wanting to drown his sorrows? Fredo knew even as it was happening that he was drinking too much, but under the circumstances it didn’t seem like a federal offense. Also, there was the matter of that priest at the ceremony-a dead ringer for Father Stefano, the priest who’d made Fredo want to be a priest: same lopsided smile, a plume of black hair combed just the same way, same slim-hipped build, like a long-distance runner’s. Fredo tried not to think about Father Stefano, and most of the time he succeeded-months passed without so much as a momentary image-but at those rare times he did think of him, Fredo wound up drinking too much.

If people everywhere didn’t drink to forget, half the songs on the radio and three fourths of the world’s distilleries would disappear. Fredo stayed at the wedding and didn’t make a scene and didn’t go out anywhere afterward. He and Deanna started dancing together to every song, and she did seem happy, though they were both too drunk for any emotion to be above suspicion.

Back in the room, he gave it to her in the ass, something he’d have never done sober, and she didn’t complain, which was also the doing of all that booze.

When he woke up the next morning, Fredo had no memory of how he’d gotten to his room. He lifted Deanna’s limp arm to look at her Cartier watch. His head pounded. He struggled to get his bleary eyes to focus. It was almost eleven. In a panic, Fredo called Michael’s room. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the operator. “Mr. Corleone and his entire family checked out hours ago.”

(The Fred Corleone Show aired irregularly, usually on Monday nights on a UHF station in Las Vegas, from 1957 until its host’s disappearance in 1959. It was broadcast from the lounge at the Castle in the Sand on a minimal set: a low round table flanked by the host and a guest on leopard-print chairs. On a board behind them, white lights spelled out “ FRED !” Behind the board was a dark curtain. The following is from the show’s debut on September 30, 1957 [transcript courtesy of the Nevada Museum of Radio and Television].)

FRED CORLEONE: This first show, I expect it to be real mothery. If you don’t know what that means, I guess call it a gasser. I see these other shows with everything-girls, jokes, little skits, whatnot. Music. So on and so forth. Sometimes these guys got so many guest stars they need a traffic cop in the wings, y’know? The fellas who do those shows are good men, but, personally, I think maybe they’re not sure they can grab you, so they keep throwing acts at you. More guests than they got folks at home watching. Tonight we’re takin’ a different road, and I hope you’ll sit back and join us. One guest, that’s it, but he’s a major leaguer: a star of stage and screen and of course a singer like none other, not to mention being a fellow paesano. Ladies and gents, Mr. John Fontane.

(Corleone stands and applauds. Fontane nods toward the audience. The men sit, and both take their time lighting cigarettes and getting started.)

FRED CORLEONE: They tell me Groovesville could wind up being the biggest long-player in history. The rock-and-roll fad is dying, and you’re on top, number one across the land.

JOHNNY FONTANE: Thank you. My recording career had a bad case of pavement rash for a while there, but I picked myself up and caught a few breaks. In all modesty, the records I’ve been fortunate enough to make with the genius Cy Milner-not just Groovesville but also The Last Lonely Midnight, Johnny Sings Hoagy, and starting with Fontane Blue-those may very well be the best records I’ve ever done.

FRED CORLEONE: Those are maybe the best sides anyone ever did.

JOHNNY FONTANE: You should have Cy on your show. He’s doing my next record, too, which is sort of a dream project for me, a duets record with Miss Ella Fitzgerald.

FRED CORLEONE: I’ll do that. (Looks offstage.) Somebody write that down. Cy Milner, genius, and, um, y’know. Book him on the show I guess is the good word.

JOHNNY FONTANE: You should have Ella on, also. Like the song says, she’s the top.

FRED CORLEONE: Sure.

JOHNNY FONTANE: I don’t use the word genius lightly.

FRED CORLEONE: The way Hollywood phonies do. I know. You don’t.

JOHNNY FONTANE: Any singer who works with Milner will tell you he’s a genius, for the simple reason that during his years as a ’bone man with the Les Halley Band, he-

FRED CORLEONE: That would be the trombone, folks.

JOHNNY FONTANE: -played it so much like the human voice that he knows how to take a singer into the studio and make him or her feel better than the proverbial million bucks.

FRED CORLEONE: What’s better than a million bucks?

JOHNNY FONTANE: A million bucks and… (Takes a long drag from his cigarette. Shrugs.)

FRED CORLEONE: Your records make millions, though. And not proverbial.

JOHNNY FONTANE: What I’ve learned, in all my years in this business we call show, is that whatever amount of success I’ve had-

FRED CORLEONE: Lots of success.

JOHNNY FONTANE: -I owe to the people. (Acknowledges applause.) Thank you. It’s true.

FRED CORLEONE: Am I right that this rock and roll has gone about as far as it can go? To me it ain’t… you know, it isn’t music. And also, if I may say so, it doesn’t have a lot of class.

JOHNNY FONTANE: That stuff all comes from a primitive side of people. It was dead artistically from the get-go, so all that’s really left is for it to get gone.

FRED CORLEONE: Good to hear. Your opinion, I mean. So let me-let’s really get into it, all right? Things the people want to know.

JOHNNY FONTANE: Let ’er rip.

FRED CORLEONE: In your experience, in all of show business and including all of the women, right? Out of them all. Rating them that way one to ten, ten being high-

JOHNNY FONTANE: (pointing to the host’s coffee cup): That ain’t the only thing that’s high.

FRED CORLEONE: -and in two categories, looks and then also talent. So one to twenty. Or else one to ten, then add the two and divide for the average. The scale’s not important.

JOHNNY FONTANE: You never told me I’d need a Ph.D. in mathematics to do this show.

FRED CORLEONE: For objectivity let’s say excepting your fiancée, Miss Annie McGowan, who can do it all, by the way-sing, dance, tell jokes, even act. Plus there’s the puppets, which I never saw but I heard good things about. Hold on, though. I need to stop right here.

JOHNNY FONTANE: I didn’t know you started.

FRED CORLEONE: So, Annie. You know what they say. About… them. Help me out, John. We got the family market to consider. People know what I’m talking about, believe me. How should I say it? Her what?

JOHNNY FONTANE (grinning): Her chest?

FRED CORLEONE: Chest! Right. It’s a very famous chest, no disrespect to you or her in any way.

JOHNNY FONTANE: None taken. What was the question?

FRED CORLEONE: Who’s the best combination of talent and looks in all of Hollywood?

JOHNNY FONTANE (performing an exaggerated double-take): Your interview style’s gonna give me whiplash.

FRED CORLEONE: Hoo boy! The razzing, giving folks the business, just like from your stage show. We need to get you back onstage here at the world-famous Castle in the Sand.

JOHNNY FONTANE: Thanks. Thank you. I haven’t been able to do shows in Vegas for a while. I do have some gigs locked up in L.A. and Chicago, if people want to come see me there.

FRED CORLEONE: Our show just goes to here in Vegas, and not even all of it, either. This channel doesn’t quite make it to my own house, can you believe that?

JOHNNY FONTANE: You got a tower or just the rabbit ears?

FRED CORLEONE: You kidding? Tower. Back to business matters, though, if you will. All kidding aside, you’re telling me you’re not singing here? Today? For us? I was told we had a little combo coming in to back you.

JOHNNY FONTANE: I’d love to, but I gotta rest the pipes. Those are big shows comin’ up. Sorry.

FRED CORLEONE: That’s disappointing. Really disappointing. You’re making me look bad.

JOHNNY FONTANE: That ship already sailed before I came on deck.

FRED CORLEONE (cracking up): Funny guy!

JOHNNY FONTANE: I try.

FRED CORLEONE (to someone offstage): Did anyone call that combo and… Right. You did? You did. Why am I the last to know these things? (Turns to Fontane.) So, all right, what? Let’s start. Any thoughts on the Dodgers and Giants moving to California?

JOHNNY FONTANE: Nothing that’ll fly with the family market. That ripped people’s hearts out.

FRED CORLEONE: I don’t know. Businesses relocate all the time. My brother’s business, which I am also a partner in, that business-hotels and entertainment, construction, cement-it moved west, too. That move led to us being here together on this show. Why is baseball different? I got sentimental feelings about New York just like you, but at the same time, why should the national pastime operate in a way that’s not un-American?

JOHNNY FONTANE: Baseball’s tied in to neighborhoods and with the faith of the common people. All the times I been to Ebbets Field… well, I can’t imagine that place empty or torn down. They tear it down, and a piece of me’ll get torn down, too.

FRED CORLEONE: You yourself relocated from New York to the West.

JOHNNY FONTANE: That’s different. People can play my records anywhere, see my pictures anywhere. Sooner or later I end up performing everywhere.

FRED CORLEONE: I bet you’ll go. To Dodgers games out in Los Angeles. These days, you’ve got more ties to L.A. than you do New York.

JOHNNY FONTANE (pausing to light another cigarette): I’ll go, sure. But they’ll never be the real Dodgers. They cut themselves off from what made them the real Dodgers.

FRED CORLEONE: Okay, look, no more about that touchy subject. We could talk about politics. I hear you already got a fella you’re backing for president next time. Little bird tells me.

JOHNNY FONTANE: How’s Deanna?

FRED CORLEONE: She’s fine. Though that ain’t the bird I’m talkin’ about.

JOHNNY FONTANE (winking at the camera): Because to answer your previous question, I think that if both looks and talent are the categories used, I can’t think of anyone who outclasses Deanna Dunn. No disrespect to you or her, but she’s a real barn burner.

FRED CORLEONE: Thank you, Johnny. That’s very kind and not to mention in my opinion also a true fact. For those of you who may have just joined us, this lucky bum here, yours truly, is happily married to the lovely and talented Deanna Dunn.

JOHNNY FONTANE: Academy Award-winning.

FRED CORLEONE: Two times, though you won one also. Were you surprised how heavy it was?

JOHNNY FONTANE: An honor like that, coming from your peers, that’s what this cat found heavy.

FRED CORLEONE: Speaking of awards, you’re backing Governor Shea from New Jersey for president? He won that big award for his book, you know the one I mean.

JOHNNY FONTANE: If he runs, I’m leaning that way, yes. I hope he does run. He’s a good man, and he’d be good for our country. Did you read his book?

FRED CORLEONE: It’s on my nightstand as we speak. I’ll read it before he comes on the show.

JOHNNY FONTANE: He’s coming on the show?

FRED CORLEONE: We’re working on it. Listen, John, let me ask you something. You ever see a picture called Ambush in Durango?

JOHNNY FONTANE: Did I see it? (Laughing) Are you for real?

FRED CORLEONE: Johnny was in that picture, folks, in case you got there after the first reel.

JOHNNY FONTANE: You were in it, too. And also your wife.

FRED CORLEONE: Blink, and you missed me. Blink twice, and folks missed you, too.

JOHNNY FONTANE: In which case they’d be in good company. Most people missed the movie altogether. They can’t all be masterpieces, y’know. Or big hits at the box office.

FRED CORLEONE: I hear you may be getting away from making motion pictures?

JOHNNY FONTANE: No, not at all.

FRED CORLEONE: But it’s not where your heart is anymore, is it? You’ve got your own production company, and yet-

JOHNNY FONTANE: There’s pictures in the works that should be hits. A gladiator movie, for one.

FRED CORLEONE: A musical?

JOHNNY FONTANE: That’s right. Top songs. How’d you hear that?

FRED CORLEONE: I know half of the songwriting team a little. Listen, we gotta pay some bills.

JOHNNY FONTANE: You’re not paying your bills?

FRED CORLEONE: I meant going to commercial, as you know.

JOHNNY FONTANE: We’ll be right back.

FRED CORLEONE: Whose show is this, huh?

JOHNNY FONTANE: So you say it. How’d a bum like you get a television show in the first place, not to mention a chick like Deanna Dunn?

FRED CORLEONE: See what I mean, everybody? You’re a national treasure! We’ll be right back.

From the penthouse window of the Château Marmont, Fredo Corleone stood alone in the dark and looked down at the Sunset Strip, waiting for his wife to come home. This place cost Fredo more each week than what his pop had paid for that whole mall of houses back on Long Island, but it was probably worth it. He could stay here without fans bugging Deanna or bodyguards breathing down his neck. He looked at his watch. Almost two. They’d had dinner reservations at eleven. Shooting usually finished around nine, though he’d been in three movies himself (all bit parts) and knew that you could never tell. Deanna hadn’t been in a hit for five years-which in Hollywood time might as well have been five hundred. She’d landed this part after several younger actresses had passed, and every day she came back from shooting talking about what a dog the movie was going to be, what a horrible actor her pretty-boy costar was.

Even as Fredo turned away from the window and toward the phone, he told himself he wasn’t going to dial it, he was just going to test himself. He dialed. The switchboard put him through to Bungalow 3. The deep, sleepy voice that answered belonged to Wally Morgan, half of one of the most in-demand songwriting teams in the business. He’d been in the navy, raced motorcycles, liked to hunt: no one you’d have figured for a fairy. Fredo was learning that you can’t go by that. Guy paints a room in his house, it doesn’t make him a painter. Just a guy who painted a room is all. Also, this was Hollywood. Things were different here. Fontane called fags buttfuckers, right to their face, but he always had plenty of them at his parties to keep conversation with the ladies moving when he and the boys were talking football or chucking M-80s into the ravine behind his house. And where was Fredo when this was happening? With the boys, maligning quarterbacks and pissing off the neighbors. So he was certainly no fag.

Fredo cleared his voice and asked if it would be okay if he swung by for a drink.

“Swung by?” Morgan chuckled. “Nice euphemism, tiger. But sure. I’ll make some martinis. Be a sport and bring a few of our green friends, too, mmkay?”

Euphemism. Our green friends. Tiger. It was hard for Fredo to believe he had anything to do with anyone who talked like that. He grabbed his bathing suit and a bottle of pills and left. The trunks were for later, afterward, a swim to clear his head.

By the time he finally did get to the pool, it was four in the morning and there was a couple fucking in the deep end. No lights. Fredo changed in the bathhouse, hoping that while he did they’d finish, but when he opened the door they were still there. He hadn’t taken a shower back in Bungalow 3. He had to do something before he went back to the penthouse, to clean up, just in case. The couple had stayed more or less in the same place-against the wall, next to a ladder-and seemed to be in no hurry. What did Fredo care? He jumped into the shallow end and swam back and forth a few times. He hadn’t eaten anything, but the pills had given him all the energy in the world. As he was gathering up his clothes, he glanced over at the couple, still going at it in the deep end. That was when he realized that the woman was his wife.

“Dee Dee?”

She laughed. The man laughed, too. The man was her costar, Matt Marshall. “Be right with you,” Deanna called. “Little busy right now.”

Fredo put his head down and strode to the elevator. In the penthouse, he strapped on the gun belt he’d stolen from the set of Apache Creek (his second movie; he’d played an Indian) and two loaded Colt Peacemakers. Despite the pills, he felt an abiding calm. Revenge was justified, and in a few moments he’d have it.

But when he got back to the pool, they were gone.

The next thing Fredo knew, he was standing in the garage of the Château Marmont, leveling a pistol at the Regal Turquoise 1958 Corvette he’d bought Deanna for their first anniversary. He heard his heart beating. He took several deep breaths, keeping his arm steady, squeezing but not quite pulling the trigger. They’d gone to Flint together to pick up the car. Their publicist had gotten the photos of that smiling moment into newspapers and magazines across the world-good ink for all involved.

Fredo opened fire: into the rear window, the left rear tire, two in the driver’s door, one through the driver’s window and out the passenger’s, one in the windshield. It felt good to kill a car. Glass shattered, and tires and upholstery exploded. The echoes of metal on metal and the aftershock tinkling of who knew what.

He holstered the first Colt, opened the Corvette’s hood, and took out the other. The hotel manager and several of his people showed up, but they knew Fredo and knew that this was Deanna Dunn’s car. They’d seen many more famous people engaging in stranger and more clearly criminal behavior. In an even voice the manager asked if there was anything he could do.

“Nope.” Fredo fired a slug into the four-barrel carburetor. “Got it covered, thanks.”

The next one provoked a small explosion and a puff of white smoke. The first gawkers were showing up now.

“It’s rather late, Mr. Corleone. As you can see, several of the other guests-”

He put another bullet in the engine block.

“-have unfortunately been disturbed.”

Two more into the passenger side. His final bullet missed the car.

Behind him, a lady screamed and shouted shrill nonsense in what might have been French. When Fredo turned around, there was Matt Marshall-shirtless, barefoot, and in chinos, charging toward him, his blandly handsome face contorted in rage.

Fredo drew the other gun, too, and pointed them both at Marshall-who either was nuts or knew Fredo was out of bullets, because he kept coming. Fredo had never experienced a moment of such clarity. He stood his ground. Marshall lunged toward him, and Fredo dodged him, deftly as a matador. Marshall hit the pavement. He rose, bloodied, and charged again, head stupidly down. Fredo wanted to laugh but instead threw a roundhouse pistol-whip haymaker. It made a sound like dropping a roast from a tall building. Marshall crumpled.

As one-except for the shrieking French lady-the crowd that had gathered said, “Ooh.”

Fredo holstered the guns. “Self-defense,” he said, “pure and simple.”

It was Hagen who came to bail him out.

“You made good time,” Fredo said as they walked out of the police station. “You fly?”

“Only in a manner of speaking. Jesus, Fredo. I’m not sure anyone in that hotel ever managed to get themselves arrested.”

“Stray bullets,” he said. “It could happen to anyone. I feel rotten about that dog, though.”

The French lady was a deposed countess, out walking her toy poodle. One of the bullets had blown all but a few stringy remnants of its head off. The other problematic shot was one that had somehow passed through the Corvette and torn up the grille of the car behind it, a white DeSoto Adventurer, the pace car for the 1957 Indy 500. The winner of the race had made a mint selling it to Marshall, best known to moviegoers as the cocky gearhead with a heart of gold in Checkered Past, Checkered Flag. That asshole wasn’t fighting for Deanna or on her behalf. What set him off had been the acrid smoke coming from his precious car.

“It’s worse than stray bullets, Fredo. Those guns-”

“They’re clean. Neri said they were as clean as they come.”

“They better be, because the LAPD is bringing in the FBI to help check ’em out.”

“They’re clean.”

They got into Hagen ’s Buick-everyone in the Family was driving boring cars all of sudden-and they drove in silence to the Château Marmont. Not only hadn’t the management kicked Fredo out, but Hagen had taken a room there, too. There’s a lot to be said for a place with a discreet staff. There was also a lot to be said for tipping well, paying for one’s room in advance, and being married to a VIP. Hagen and Fredo took a walk together on the secluded tropical grounds.

“So what about those pills they found in your pocket?” Hagen said.

“Prescription. Segal gave ’em to me.” That was true, at least indirectly. He’d sent Figaro, his guy in Vegas, out to get the pills. Jules Segal, an old friend of the family, was head of surgery at the hospital the Corleones had built.

“They tell me they were in an aspirin bottle.”

“I dumped ’em in there and then took all the aspirin. There’s no law that says you gotta carry pills a certain way.”

“I don’t know. Segal got suspended once for that, a long time ago, and before he worked at our hospital. But now… well, the hospital makes us look good, and if-”

“Get a different doc at that hospital to say he prescribed it, then. Make it worth his while. You’ve fixed problems a hundred times worse than this. Jesus, Tommy. Pop always called you the most Sicilian one. What the fuck happened? They remove that from you with a special act of Congress? I told you what that guy did! It was my wife!”

“You told me on the phone. Which wasn’t smart, Fredo.”

Fredo shrugged, in concession. “ Marshall didn’t die or nothin’, did he?”

“No, thank God.” Hagen said. “He’ll be fine. His face is another matter, though.”

“Pretty bad, huh?”

“Pretty bad. Matt Marshall makes a living with his cheekbones, one of which is now more of a liquid than a solid. Which would be bad enough, but as you know he’s in the middle of shooting a movie. They don’t seem to think they can finish it without him. It’s possible we can take care of things, but L.A. is a tough town for us anymore, with the Chicago -”

“We got peace with those guys. They know me, they like me. I can handle ’em.”

“At any rate, you’ve given me a lot of things to take care of.”

“C’mon, Tom. What would you have done if it had been Theresa?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Kill a car, a poodle, and a major motion picture?”

“At least you didn’t say it would never be Theresa.”

“It would never be Theresa.”

“Fuck you, you fucking holier-than-thou fuck.”

“How many pills you take today, Fredo?”

“None.” He didn’t think like that, about the number. “I only take ’em off and on.” He didn’t want to go by Bungalow 3, and he didn’t wasn’t to go by the pool. “Better view this way,” he said. “Of Sunset Boulevard and all.”

“I know,” Hagen said. “I’ve stayed here. I was the one who told you about this place.”

“So you know, then. Better view this way.”

They went that way.

“I been meaning to ask,” Fredo said. “Did Kay go nuts when you told her about the bugs?”

“She doesn’t know,” Hagen said.

Fredo had guessed right: Mike hadn’t even told her himself. He’d have Tom do it. There was some pilgrim who’d lost his woman. “Kay’s smart. She knows things. Even if she don’t know, sooner or later but probably sooner you’ll tell her.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not saying you’re sweet on her or nothin’, but everyone knows she’s got a way of getting things out of you.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”

“You told me my idea about cornering the cemetery racket in New York like out in Colma was the most ridiculous thing you ever heard.”

“That cemetery idea? You’re still talking about that? Mike told you, it’s not a project we can get into now. We’re staying away from rackets of any sort. We don’t want to be beholden to the Straccis for anything. We’d need to call in favors from all kinds of politicians in New York, and the last thing we want to do right now is spend those kind of favors on a project like this-one that has a lot of holes in it, I might add.”

They rounded a corner and ran into Alfred Hitchcock, out for a walk along with Annie McGowan and her agent. Fredo introduced Hagen as “Congressman Hagen.” Annie asked Fredo if he was okay. Fredo said it was a long story and he’d give her a call later. No, Johnny wasn’t in town, Annie said. He was in Chicago. Hitchcock insisted he had to go, and they went.

“What holes?” Fredo said, again alone with Hagen.

“It’s got holes,” Hagen said. “Look, the way things are is this: The operation in New York is going to maintain things as is. The only new ventures have to be legitimate businesses.”

“That’s the beauty of my plan, Tom. It’s no racket. It’ll all be completely legal.”

“Fredo, you can’t have this both ways. You can’t on the one hand be in the public eye, married to a movie star, running the entertainment side of our hotels in Las Vegas, and starting up your own television show-which I hear went well, by the way.”

“Thanks. We try.”

“But you can’t do all that and at the same time be the force behind something like your cemetery plan. And you can’t do any of it if you don’t clean up your act. Wake up, huh?”

Waking up would be great, except that the cops had taken his fucking pills. “So let someone else take care of the dirty work,” Fredo said. “Rocco could do it. Or you know who’d be perfect? Nick Geraci. After it’s all legit, I’d be in charge. It was my idea, Tom.”

“Ideas,” Hagen said, “are shit. It’s knowing what to do with an idea that matters.”

“I know what to fucking do with my idea, okay? I know how to put it in place. I know how to run the fucking operation once it’s in place. My problem is, you won’t let me do it.”

Hagen started to say something.

“Say it,” Fredo said. “Say it’s not you stopping me, it’s Mike. Goddamn it, Tom, he takes advantage of you worse than he does me. We’re both older than him. We both got passed over, and why?”

Hagen frowned.

“You’re not Italian,” Fredo said, “and you’re not blood either, so fine, that complicates things, but not to the point of making you automatically into his errand boy.”

“I should have let you cool your heels in there, you ungrateful prick. Maybe you’d like it in jail.”

“Fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

Hagen closed his eyes. “Nothing.”

“What’s wrong, you afraid?”

Hagen didn’t say anything.

“I asked you a question, goddamnit.”

“Are you going to hit me, Fredo? Go ahead.”

“I know what you’re trying to say, Tom. Just say it. This is about that kid, the thief in San Fran.” Fredo hadn’t had to kill a guy to get initiated into the business. Dean the beatnik was the first person Fredo had ever killed. If only the kid hadn’t remembered that old photo of Fredo crying on the curb. Fredo had pretended not to know anything about it. He had the kind of face that looked like a lot of people, he’d told Dean. But the kid wouldn’t drop it. Fredo smothered the kid with a pillow, got him dressed, and beat up the corpse to make it look good. Nice kid, but the fact remained, he was a pervert. Not someone just messing around but a guy who thought of himself as a faggot. It was sick. At the time, Fredo had been in such a panic about being recognized that the whole business had been easy. Getting out of it had been harder, but that had come out all right, too. “Don’t keep looking at me like that. Say it.”

“I’m not trying to say a goddamned thing,” Hagen said. “ San Francisco, as far as I’m concerned, is ancient history.”

“You’re really starting to piss me off, Tom.”

“Starting?”

Fredo threw a punch. Tom caught it with his left hand, wrenched Fredo’s arm around, then buried his fist in Fredo’s gut with such force Fredo left his feet. Tom let go of the arm. Fredo staggered and then fell to his knees, gasping for breath.

“I fucking hate you, Tom,” Fredo finally said, still panting.

“You what?”

“The minute you walked in our house,” Fredo said, “you were Pop’s favorite.”

“C’mon, Fredo. How old are you?”

“Mike was Ma’s,” he said, his breathing slowing. “Sonny didn’t need nobody, and Connie’s a girl. You know, I was Pop’s favorite until you got there. Did you know that? You ever think of that? Did you ever care? What you took was mine.”

“This is a hell of a thing to say to the guy you’re counting on to fix the mess you made.”

“What’s it matter what I say?” Fredo said. “You’ll do it anyway. You’ll do whatever Mike tells you to.”

“I’m loyal to this family.”

“Bullshit. You’re just loyal to him.”

“Listen to yourself, Fredo.”

He stood up, then charged. Hagen ’s second punch caught Fredo square on the chin and dropped him flat on his back in a bed of Asian jasmine.

“Had enough?”

Fredo sat up and rubbed his hands over his gray, stubbly face. He took several deep breaths. “I haven’t slept,” he said, “y’know, really slept, for I don’t know. Days.”

Hagen took out a cigar and lit it. He got a good draw going and then extended his hand. Fredo, still kneeling, looked up at it for a long time, then finally took it.

“Cigar?” Hagen asked, reaching for his breast pocket.

“No thanks,” Fredo said.

Hagen nodded. “Go up and see your wife, Fredo.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. Anyway, she’s not up there.”

“Where else would she be? They’re not filming today.”

“She’s up there?”

Hagen patted Fredo on the shoulder. “I love you, Fredo. You know that, right?”

Fredo shrugged. “I love you, too, Tommy,” he said, “but at the same time-”

“We’ve been over that,” Tom said. “Forget about it.”

“I guess how could it be any other way, with brothers, huh?”

Hagen cocked his head in a way that indicated maybe, maybe not.

“Nice reflexes, by the way,” Fredo said. “Catching that punch.”

“Lots of coffee,” Hagen said.

“Oughta cut back on that stuff,” Fredo said. “It’ll kill you.”

“Just go. Rest up. Everything’s going to be fine.”

For a time, however briefly, Hagen was right.

Deanna greeted him at the door. She kissed him again and again and ran a hot bath in the huge tub. He soaked in it as she shaved him.

She was, yes, one of the most honored actresses of her generation, but Fredo was convinced that the ardor he’d sparked by standing up for her, by fighting for her, couldn’t be faked. In their whole time together, they’d never had a better time in bed.

“So how’d a bum like me wind up with you, huh?” he asked afterward.

She sighed in a way that sounded happy. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” she said.

“What about here?” he said.

“Definitely look there. Get close and take a good lick around. I mean look.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You’re right,” she purred, hands pressed firmly against the back of his head. “I don’t.”

Chapter 18

THAT MARCH, Nick Geraci’s father came to New York -the first time he’d been there since Nick moved from Cleveland. Naturally, he drove. All however many thousand miles from Arizona, which he somehow did alone and in three days. To the end, he’d be Fausto the Driver.

When he first arrived, he seemed content to simmer in the self-contained cocoon of his own sulky regret, staring out at his son’s swimming pool. He ran out of Chesterfield Kings. Charlotte offered him a carton of hers, which he said would be fine. They were a ladies’ brand, but he said a friend of his smoked this kind and he was used to them, in a pinch. Nick winked and asked if that meant Miss Conchita Cruz. “Shut up about things you don’t know nothin’ about, eh? You want money for these?” He reached for his money clip.

“It’s fine, Dad. No.”

“You’re a big shot, but I pay my own way, understood?”

“We just want you to have a good time, okay?”

“That’s a lot of pressure on me,” he said. “Why don’t you all just mind your own business? And take the money, unless my money’s no good.”

“It’s no good in this house, Dad,” Nick said. “You’re our guest.”

“Guest?” he scoffed. “Don’t be stupid, you big stupid. I’m family.”

“It’s nice to see you,” Nick said, still refusing the money and embracing his father, who did in fact embrace him back, and they kissed each other’s cheeks.

In the morning, there were five bucks under Charlotte ’s purse.

The next day, unseasonably warm for New York in March, they went as a family for lunch at Patsy’s, Geraci’s favorite Italian restaurant in the city, where he practically had his own table upstairs, and then for a cruise on the Circle Line, which had been Charlotte’s idea. It offered views of New York that even a native like her never got to see otherwise, plus it seemed like a congenial afternoon for a man who spent every day brooding and staring at the water. Nick and Charlotte had taken the cruise on an early date, but their girls had never done it before. Barb was a freshman in high school now and could barely go anywhere without her friends, a squadron of whom met her at the pier. Bev, though, who looked as old as Barb but was only eleven, stayed next to her grandfather, asking him things about Ellis Island-which, as a little boy, was the last time Fausto had been to New York. By the time they got to Roosevelt Island, she’d somehow gotten him to give her lessons in Sicilian dialect.

After they’d passed the Polo Grounds but before the desolation of the northern tip of Manhattan had segued from hard to believe to deathly boring, Fausto, his spirits as buoyant as they got, took his son aside and said that he’d actually come to New York on business.

Nick frowned and cocked his head.

“Message from the Jew,” he said, meaning Vince Forlenza. “Long story. This ain’t the place. How far are we from Troy?”

“ Troy what? Troy, New York?” Nick Geraci was pretty sure his father had never told him a long story of any kind.

“No, big shot. Troy with Helen and the big fuckin’ horse. Yes, Troy, New York.”

“We need to go to Troy for you to tell me what you need to tell me?”

“We don’t need to go to Troy at all. We could do what we need to do at your house or at your precious Henry Hudson Political Club, any place we can talk that’s-”

“Patrick Henry,” Nick corrected. His headquarters in Brooklyn. His office.

“Wherever. Let me tell you something. I want to go to Troy. All right? Think you can begrudge a dying old man that one little thing?”

“Since when are you dying?”

“Since the day I was born.”

“I thought you were going to say since the day I was born.”

“You give yourself too much credit, hotshot.”

Turned out, Fausto had heard that there were cockfights in Troy, supposedly the top place in the country. It was upstate, and thus presumably under the direct or indirect control of the Cuneo Family. Fausto had always been a fan of cockfights and over the years had dropped enough money at a joint in Youngstown that by rights his name should have been on the deed. Tucson had cockfights, but they were run by Mexicans, and Fausto thought they were crooked.

“You’re kidding,” Nick said. “That place in Youngstown had birds with cocaine on their feathers, birds pumped full of blood thinner so they’d bleed like mad in a loss and become a huge underdog and then go off the drugs and win. Birds with any of a thousand kinds of poison on their spurs. I can’t begin to remember all the different ways they made birds look sick when they were ready to kill and made others look healthy when they were about to die.”

“You’re naive. Mexicans are worse. Geniuses, though, gotta admit.”

They didn’t need to leave until midafternoon, but Fausto Geraci was up the next morning at four, studying road maps and ministering to the pampered engine of his Olds 88. He insisted on driving, of course. Geraci’s usual driver-Donnie Bags, his third cousin-was just a guy who drove the car, but Nick Geraci’s father was a true wheel man. Someone looking at him behind the wheel and ignoring everything else would have said he drove like an old man: huge eyeglasses, head bent over the wheel, gloved hands at ten and two, radio off so he could concentrate on the road. But he’d always driven like that. Meanwhile, he weaved that Rocket 88 through traffic like the Formula One racer he should have been, swerving from lane to lane, cutting into spaces that seemed too small but never were. Except for the cars and trucks he’d wrecked on purpose and notwithstanding the stretch he did in Marion for vehicular homicide (a cover-up he participated in, loyally, after the Jew’s joyriding fourteen-year-old niece accidentally greased an old lady), Fausto Geraci had never had an accident. He had a sixth sense for where the cops were, too, and, on the rare occasions he was pulled over, could size up the officer and know instantly whether to hand him the badge indicating that he was a retired member of the Ohio Highway Patrol (the badge was real, picked up, crazily enough, at a yard sale) or whether to slip him the badge with a folded-up fifty underneath it. He kept one, prefolded, in the glove box, between the badge and the car’s registration. Once, when Nick was twelve, he took the money. His father gave him an epic beating: the motivation, in fact, for him to start calling himself “Nick” (until then he’d been “Junior” or “Faustino”) and to sign up for boxing lessons.

Nick waited his father out. Whatever the story was, he’d tell it when he was good and ready. Whatever it was, it was something big. He had an air about him like he’d finally been given the kind of job suitable for a man of his obvious talents.

Finally, as they got to the other side of the George Washington Bridge and whipped onto the shoulder to pass two semis, Fausto Geraci veered back onto the road, took a deep breath, and began to tell his son everything he’d learned-personally, by the way-from Vinnie Forlenza.

“You listening?”

“All ears,” Nick said, tugging his ears.

Apparently, Sal Narducci got tired of waiting around for the Jew to die. But even though Laughing Sal probably killed a stadium full of men in his time, he didn’t have the balls to kill his boss. What he did was, he tried to humiliate Forlenza into stepping down, first by getting someone to sabotage that plane-yes, that plane-and then by coming up with the idea of kidnapping Nick from the hospital and hiding him, which was supposed to make Forlenza look reckless and weak, and which probably at least to a point did the trick.

“But look, Ace,” Fausto said, using the nickname, as always, with an edge to his voice, “don’t go running to your boss, either, okay? That pezzonovante is behind the whole thing.”

Nick Geraci found this more than a little hard to believe.

“Why you think you’re alive, you big dummy?’ Fausto said. “You think they’d’ve kept you alive if they thought you fucked up? How many guys you know pulled a stunt like you did in the lake there and didn’t wind up taking two in the head, a meat hook up the ass, butta-beepa-da-boppa-da-boop?”

There were plenty of reasons. Michael needed him. “The crash was ruled an accident.”

Fausto sighed. “Everyone tells me what a genius son I got, can you believe it?”

It only then occurred to Nick that he had no idea what sort of men worked for the FAA, how easy it might or might not be to bribe them. Though there was always some underpaid, powerless shmoe you could get to: a diver, some assistant in the crime lab, somebody who’d lie about life-and-death matters for a little cash or a night with a classy hooker.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. He listened. His father went over it. Everything added up. There had been something dumped in those gas tanks. Don Forlenza had figured it out when he’d heard about a guy who’d gone to Las Vegas on vacation and disappeared. Guy was a mechanic but also a cugin’, wanted to be a qualified man with all his heart. Fausto laughed. “I can tell you personally, those people ain’t let nobody in since who knows fucking when.”

Fausto kept the car at a steady eighty-eight, as if the car’s model name decreed it.

“Anyway, the cugin’ don’t come back from Vegas, and this pal of his, another cugin’, he gets on his high horses, comes to the social club, trying to find out what happened. For the Jew, a light goes on. A mechanic. Missing, probably-” He made a gun with his hand, reached over, and pretended to blow his son’s brains out. “So Forlenza takes the pal in back for a talk. A question here, question there, butta-beepa-da-boppa-da-boop. The pal knew everything. The rest you can guess.”

“What do you mean, the rest I can guess? You mean like what’s left of the pal is underneath a freshly poured basement in Chagrin Falls?”

“Smart guy. Forget the pal. Long story short, your boss and Laughing Sal had this dead mechanic slip something in your fuel tank. Look in the glove box, smart guy.”

Nick gave him a look. “Go on,” Fausto said. “I won’t beat you.”

Thirty years ago, that beating was, and they’d neither one mentioned it since. Thirty years between a father and a son can work like that. In fact, it usually does.

Like the rest of the car, the glove box was immaculate: the badge, neatly stacked atop the fifty (which Nick was careful not to touch), the registration, two white envelopes, and the owner’s manual. One envelope contained service records for the car. “The other one,” Fausto said. “That one there.”

Inside it were six train tickets to Cleveland, for Nick and five of his men, which made it unlikely there’d be any kind of ambush there.

Fausto explained in detail about where to go and the security measures to take to meet with Don Forlenza, which would happen in a part of the Cleveland Art Museum that was in between exhibits and closed off to the public. “Probably you don’t remember that Polack Mike Zielinsky, used to run my old local?”

“You serious, Dad? Of course I remember.” That Polack Zielinsky had been a friend of the family for years. He was Nick’s sister’s godfather and one of Fausto’s best and only friends.

“Well, all right then. Get to the museum nine-fifteen sharp. You see that fat fuck standing out by that Thinker thing-”

“The sculpture?”

“Sculpture, statue. In front there.”

“I know it.”

“He’s there-the Polack, not the statue-you’ll know things are jake, go on in. No Polack, go back to the hotel, he’ll be in the lobby.”

For Nick Geraci, this whole matter had gone from hard to believe to hard to accept. But what could Michael’s motives have been? Why would he want to kill him?

“I know what you’re thinking.” Fausto shook his head. “You really are naive.”

“How you figure?”

“How long you been in this line of work?”

“Your point?”

“My point is,” said his father, “no point. Shit gets done for no reason that makes sense to anybody but the doer and the fellas he has do the shit for him. Most of the time they don’t know shit, either. They just do shit. It’s a miracle you didn’t die a long time ago, big shot.”

It was a good thing that the drive to Troy was so long and that his father wasn’t much of a talker. The long silences gave Nick Geraci time to figure out what to do. Even so, he struggled. He’d look into things, verifying what he could verify without sending up any flags. He’d move slowly. He’d learn more. He’d consider every move, from every angle.

One thing he knew for certain: if what his father said was indeed true, Nick Geraci would figure out how to do something to Michael Corleone that would do more harm than death.

They made it to Troy. The cockfights were in an old icehouse. The front of the place had been turned into a bar. There was a huge gravel parking lot behind the building and out of sight from the road.

“How’d you know about this place, Dad?”

Fausto Geraci rolled his eyes. “You know all the ins and outs and what-have-yous, right? But your old man, he don’t know his ass from his elbow.”

Nick let it go. They got out. His father complained about the cold. He’d been the toughest sonofabitch there was about the cold back in Cleveland.

“It’s March in New York, Dad.”

“Your blood thins.” He nonetheless stopped to light one of Charlotte ’s cigarettes, gave a little scornful chuckle, muttered something, and headed for the door.

“What’s that?”

“I said, ‘I can see that aerial warfare is actually scientific murder.’ ” He was moving pretty fast for an old guy.

“You can what now?”

“From your Eddie Rickenbacker book, genius,” Fausto said. “He said it. You left it. The book. Do me a favor, stop looking at me like you think I can’t read.”

Nick seemed to remember that the line had been on the book’s flyleaf.

Inside, men Nick didn’t know recognized him and made way for him. This happened a lot in New York, but it was nice to see it here, through his father’s eyes.

They went to the men’s room. “Last words on the subject,” Fausto whispered, his eyes on the wall above the urinal trough. “You want me to take care of you-know-who”-he let go of his dick, turned to his son, and snapped his fingers, both hands-“I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Nick smiled. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

“Don’t take him lightly,” Fausto said, zipping up. “In his day he sent more men to meet the Devil than-”

“I won’t.” Nick washed his hands and held the door for his father. “First bet’s on me.”

He placed it with the same five his father had left under Charlotte ’s purse. It went on a big ugly Blueface stag, a ten-to-one underdog that they first saw in its pen, shitting all over itself. Fausto looked at the diarrhea and even stuck his finger into a gob that had fallen on the floor and smelled it. Thirty seconds in, the shit-tailed cock leapt up and hit the other bird’s carotid artery. As Fausto the Driver had guessed, the diarrhea had been a sham, induced with Epsom salts.

The Geracis were fifty to the good, playing it cool, trying to find the angles that would decide the next deadly fight, no matter how much rage beat in the hearts of the next two chickens.

Chapter 19

PETE CLEMENZA was holding court at a diner just outside the Garment District, a place with a back dining room where no one who was not with Clemenza was ever seated. The man who owned the place was old enough to be Pete’s father, and Pete was seventy. They’d been friends longer than either man could remember. This particular morning, the boss was home sick and Pete was in the kitchen, an apron tied over his silk suit, cooking peppers and eggs, redoing the chopped onions (the ones already prepared were “a million times too coarse”), and showing the ropes to the punks who worked for his friend, keeping them in line. Two of Clemenza’s men sat at a metal table crammed in the corner, listening to Clemenza do what he’d done for the better part of his waking life, which was tell a story. It had been what had sealed his bond with Vito Corleone. Pete was a born storyteller, Vito a born listener.

This one happened five years ago, right after Pete got out of prison for a short stretch he’d had to do for extortion (the case was overturned on appeal). Pete had gone to see Tessio’s new TV. “Compared to the TV sets in the joint,” Pete said, “this one’s got a picture so pretty it made your dick hard. It’s Friday night, and Tessio’s got a few of us over to watch the fights, hoist a couple, place a friendly wager or two. Tessio had inside dope on every fight in creation, but he’s extending his hospitality, so losing money to him, it’s like slipping the house a little something for a good seat. Only guy there I don’t know is this one kid-new guy, wound tight as a squirrel. For somebody who’s not well known, he’s asking a lot of questions, and at a certain point I say something about it. Kid goes white, but Sally says, ‘Let him ask, how else does a guy learn?’ A little later I’m in the hall comin’ out of the can when Richie Two Guns asks what the squirrel’s story was. I didn’t know shit, I said, which maybe oughta be on my tombstone. The first fight starts, and Sally tells Richie to turn the sound off, that he can’t stand the announcer. Then Sally tells the squirrel to announce the fight. Kid laughs, but Sally pulls out a gun and waves it at him like get on with it. Kid looks like he might piss himself. ‘Welcome to Madison Square Garden,’ he says, and, I shit you not, his voice comes out of the TV! ‘Who’s in the dark trunks?’ Sally says. The squirrel says, ‘In the dark trunks, we have Beau Jack,’ which again comes through the TV. Sally smiles and says he don’t like this announcer, either. Richie rips the squirrel’s shirt off, and damned if this hairy bastard ain’t wearing a wire. First one I ever saw with a transmitter. Primitive government piece of shit played right through Sally’s new TV. Sally goes over, leans into the microphone part, and says, ‘Fatta la legge, trovato l’inganno.’ For every law, there’s a loophole, I guess you’d say. Anyway, this cop or whatever he was must have known Italian and figured out that despite the rule against killing cops, Sally was going to get the job done anyway. So then the squirrel really does piss himself. It shorts out the fucking transmitter. Squirrel starts jerking and screaming. Swear to God, his nuts are on fire. His nuts!”

Everyone in that cramped kitchen laughed.

Clemenza keeled over onto the grill.

They must have thought he was going for a bigger laugh yet. For a moment-as the big man’s great big heart blew like a bald truck tire-he got one. Then the flesh of his fat face seared and crackled and his suit coat burst into flame. His men leapt up and pulled him from the grill. They smothered the fire in no time.

All the last original employees of Genco Pura Olive Oil-its president, Vito Corleone; its manager, Genco Abbandando; and its two salesmen, Sal Tessio and Pete Clemenza-were dead.

The train station in Cleveland was near enough to the lake that gusts of icy wind were knocking down disembarking passengers. Nick Geraci fell, as did two of his men. Eddie Paradise broke his arm, though it was a few days before he figured that out.

The Polack was out by the Thinker.

It was the day before Clemenza’s funeral and an hour after the Cleveland Museum of Art closed. Geraci was shown into a white room, utterly empty except for Vincent Forlenza-the largest anonymous donor in the history of that great museum-and his wheelchair. He called to his men to get Mr. Geraci a chair or a bench, but Geraci insisted that it was fine, he’d stand. Forlenza’s nurse and all the bodyguards waited at the end of a long hall.

Geraci admitted that his first impulse had been to have Laughing Sal’s car sabotaged and make it look like an accident. Tit for tat, more or less. Forlenza’s idea had been to car-bomb Narducci into a hundred corners of oblivion. Car bombing was the midwestern Families’ style. It was a labor saver, eliminating any need to dispose of the bodies.

They discussed the merits of torturing Narducci, as Forlenza had the dead pal of the dead mechanic. But there was nothing Narducci could tell them that they hadn’t already confirmed. If they were going to kill him, they might as well just give him two to the head or, sure, wire up his car.

But Geraci talked Forlenza into keeping Narducci alive. For now.

First of all, if Narducci died or disappeared, Michael Corleone would be onto them. And Narducci hardly seemed to pose a threat. He’d made the most indirect move on Forlenza possible. Furthermore, as far as Geraci knew, no consigliere had ever betrayed his boss. This could be a terrible embarrassment to the Cleveland organization. Narducci would have to be disposed of in a way that wouldn’t look as if it had been ordered or even condoned by Don Forlenza.

Killing Michael Corleone would have been another option, and, like killing Narducci, a satisfying one. But where would it have led? Mayhem, war, millions of dollars in lost profits in the meantime. Even if they won, they’d lose.

For now, they’d keep a close eye on the men who’d betrayed them but turn their efforts to building a new set of allegiances. Geraci already worked with Black Tony Stracci and his organization. Forlenza had ties to Paulie Fortunato. With Clemenza’s death, Geraci would be controlling the day-to-day operations of the Corleone Family in New York. He was practically a boss himself now. So that was three of the five New York Families.

The key after that would be Chicago. Louie Russo already had a coalition involving Milwaukee, Tampa, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Dallas. Put that together with what Geraci and Forlenza could build, and Michael Corleone will wish he was dead.

The best revenge on Michael Corleone was tit for tat.

They would use Fredo as a pawn, the same way Michael had tried to use Nick Geraci.

They’d stay above the fray and let their enemies kill each other off.

They’d take it slowly. Carefully.

When it was over, Cleveland and Chicago and the other midwestern Families would again control the West. Nick Geraci would be the boss of what used to be the Corleone Family, doing business in and around New York. All they needed to do was put Fredo in the middle between Michael and Hyman Roth.

Don Forlenza shook his frail head. Morgues are full of new arrivals who look more vital than the ancient Don. “Tell me this, Fausto,” he said. “Why would this Fredo do it?”

Fausto. Only he and Michael Corleone called Geraci Fausto and it always threw him, just a little. The real Fausto called him no name at all, just names. Genius. Big shot. Ace.

“That time he cried on the street in New York after his father was shot?” Forlenza said. “Didn’t that come after his brother Sonny took sides against the Family on the issue of narcotics?”

Don Forlenza had no idea his own godson was the biggest heroin importer in the United States. “I don’t know,” Geraci said. Though he did, of course. “Something like that.”

“Sonny more or less got Vito shot, is the story I heard. I don’t see this Fredo, after an experience like that, doing something even worse.”

“First of all,” Geraci said, “Fredo’s on the booze and has an unbelievably bad marriage. He’s out of control. Second, and this is how we get him to hang himself-”

“Hang himself?”

“Figure of speech.”

Forlenza shrugged. “If he hangs himself, he hangs himself.”

“Right, well. Sure. Anyway. Here’s the deal: Fredo’s got this idea about building a city of the dead in New Jersey. He’s like a guy who had a religious vision or something.”

“City of the dead?”

“Big cemetery scam. Long story. Michael’s not for it, and he’s probably right. How is Fredo, out west and married to a movie star, going to run a big new operation-on another Family’s turf, more or less? Point is, Fredo thinks he came up with a billion-dollar business and that Mike’s too caught up in his Cuba thing to give him the time of day. Or too sick of what a fuckup Fredo is to give him more than a symbolic title and a legal whorehouse to run.”

Geraci heard himself say all this and knew there was no turning back. He was taking sides against the Family, too. Fuck it. Loyalty’s a two-way street. Nick Geraci never breathed a disloyal breath-up until the point Michael Corleone tried to kill him.

Revenge, in Nick Geraci’s book, was not the same thing as betrayal.

Don Forlenza closed his eyes and sat in silence so long that Geraci looked at the man’s chest to make sure he was still breathing.

“Hyman Roth’s been in partnership with the Corleones,” Geraci said, “even longer than he has with you, but the deal he and Mike are working on in Cuba is so big that they’ve reached some sort of stalemate.” Geraci came closer. He raised his voice, enough to wake Forlenza up if need be. “We can use Fredo to break it. Roth still has plenty of political pull in New York. If Fredo thinks that Roth will back this cemetery thing, it’ll get his attention in a hurry.”

Forlenza kept breathing. His fingers tugged ever so slightly at the blanket on his lap.

“What we do,” Geraci said, “is go through Louie Russo for everything. The L.A. guys are Russo’s puppets. Fredo’s chummy with a lot of ’em. What happens is, you get Russo to get the word to L.A. Gussie Cic-ero or somebody can set it up so that one of Roth’s guys-Mortie Whiteshoes, Johnny Ola, a party boy like that-just happens to bump into Fredo out in Beverly Hills. Fredo’ll give Roth’s guys any info about Mike they want so long as he thinks that the payoff will be that if you die in New York City, Fredo’ll get a piece of it.”

Finally, Forlenza looked up. “Why the fuck would I die in New York City?”

“Godfather, I have every confidence that you’ll never die anywhere.”

Forlenza waved him off and laughed. “La testa di cazzo, eh?” What makes you so sure Fuckface will want to go along with all this?”

“He’ll benefit from it. That’s the main thing. But the other reason is that the person he’ll be dealing with is you-the only Don who’s not Russo’s puppet or his enemy.”

“That’s what you think, huh?” Forlenza said, clearly flattered.

“I didn’t get as far as I have by being a guy who doesn’t do his homework, you know?”

Forlenza smiled. He knew. He agreed to the plan and sealed it with a kiss.

If anything went wrong, the blame would fall on Russo. If that layer of insulation failed, the blame would fall on Forlenza, who could be counted on, in his dealings with Russo, to leave all mention of Geraci out of it-both to protect his godson and because he’d want to take credit for the plan himself. Geraci didn’t want blame to fall on Forlenza, but better him than Nick Geraci.

At great length, they discussed the details.

“Trust me,” Geraci said as they were finishing. “Fredo’s so dumb, he’ll betray his brother and think he’s helping out.”

“Never say Trust me. Because no one will.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Trust me.”

Geraci grinned “You trust me, don’t you, Godfather?”

“I do, of course. Of course!”

“Enough to grant me a favor? One final detail we haven’t yet covered?”

Forlenza pursed his lips and turned his hands palms up, a let-me-hear-it gesture.

“When the time is right,” Geraci said, “I want to kill that rat Narducci myself.”

That rat. In his mind’s eye, Geraci saw the river rat slithering out of the rectum of that stiff Laughing Sal had planted down by the river, the corpse the world had mistaken for Gerald O’Malley.

“Let me be honest with you,” Forlenza said. “I was already gonna have you do it.”

Clemenza had been Vito Corleone’s oldest friend, but the only member of the late Don’s immediate family who went to New York for the funeral was Fredo. Carmela had had a flare-up of her blood clots-this time in her legs-and couldn’t travel. Michael had business. Kay, a lot of people seemed to think, was on the edge of leaving him. Connie had dumped her second husband, that sadsack accountant Ed Federici, and was off in Monaco, consorting naked on the beaches with Eurotrash. It was unclear-to Nick Geraci, anyway-why Hagen couldn’t come, but he wasn’t here. The same went for all the members of the organization out in Nevada, even Rocco Lampone, who’d made it all the way from a gimpy war vet with few prospects all the way to caporegime, every step of it with Clemenza’s backing. Nobody but Fredo, dispatched for symbolic value, presumably, though when Geraci picked him up at the airport, Fredo said he wouldn’t have missed the chance to pay his respects to Pete Clemenza for anything.

On the way to the funeral, during a snowstorm, Fredo Corleone and Nick Geraci stopped for a walk through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. This had been Tessio’s favorite place to talk business, and it had become Geraci’s. The place was never so crowded on a weekday that it was hard to talk privately. Plus, it would have been an impossible place to bug.

The snow fell in wet flakes, four inches or more expected. The Rock Garden looked like the lumpy surface of the moon. Trailing several paces behind were four of Geraci’s men, Momo the Roach, Eddie Paradise, and two zips (recently arrived Sicilians, in other words, considered ruthless even by other wiseguys). Two others (Tommy Neri, who’d come with Fredo, and Geraci’s driver, Donnie Bags, so named for the colostomy bag he’d needed since he was gutshot by his own wife) had stayed with the cars.

“What I hear,” Fredo said, “is that maybe Pete’s heart attack was no heart attack.”

“The autopsy said heart attack,” Geraci said. “Making someone have a heart attack? Christ. Know what I think? People watch too much TV. Rots their brains. No offense.”

“None taken,” Fredo said. “Plus which you may be right.” The prevailing rumor was that the men who said they pulled Clemenza from the grill had actually pushed him onto it, that they were trying to burn him up and along with it, the diner, too, but lucked out: he had a heart attack, which streamlined things. There were men both inside and outside his own crew who were suspected of the killing, if there had been a killing, which was highly debatable.

That didn’t stop other rumors from flying. Many seemed to think Clemenza had been killed by Hyman Roth, the Jewish gang leader, if only because Roth was in the middle of negotiations with Michael Corleone for control of Cuba. Louie Russo’s Chicago outfit couldn’t be ruled out, either. If it had been murder, Geraci would have bet on the Rosato Brothers, a rogue element in Clemenza’s regime with ties to Don Rico Tattaglia. All that said, both Ockham’s razor and Clemenza’s diet pointed to an unadorned heart attack. An autopsy showed that his heart was twice the size of a normal man’s.

“ Hagen said he thought that all the rumors were ridiculous, too,” Fredo said.

“What did the Don say?” asked Geraci.

“Mike agreed with Hagen,” Fredo said. “I talked to him personally about it.” He bounced on the balls of his feet as he said it.

A semi-illiterate reader of human beings could have guessed that this was a lie, though Geraci didn’t even have to guess. Fredo’s top bodyguard used to be Geraci’s barber. Everyone called him Figaro. Figaro’s cousin was a welder and fabricator-Geraci’s guy for tricking out storage spaces in cars and trucks to transport goods from the docks in Jersey. According to Figaro and the cousin, Fredo had barely said hello to Michael since Francesca’s wedding.

Fredo was shivering almost to the point of convulsion. He’d lived out west for twelve years and said he couldn’t handle the cold anymore. Pathetic. If he wanted to experience real cold, he ought to take the fucking train to Cleveland sometime. But out of pity, Geraci steered him into a greenhouse, full of orchids in full bloom and a troop of Girl Scouts.

“How’s your ma?” asked Geraci. “Doin’ all right?”

“She’s tough. The move was hard on her, though. Her place in Tahoe is a million times nicer than that house on the mall, but she and Pop built that place together. Lot of memories.”

“If she’s anything like my mother,” Geraci said, crossing himself and looking out at the falling snow, “the change of scenery might do her a world of good.”

“Not to mention the warmer weather,” Fredo said. “I never seen an orange orchid before,” he said, pointing.

The Girl Scouts left, and the two men were alone together in the greenhouse.

“Mike really wanted to come,” Fredo said, “but he’s all tied up with something big. He loved Pete like an uncle. Christ, we all did.”

Geraci nodded, willing his face into impassiveness. “I’m sure the Don knows what’s best.” Geraci presumed that the real reason Michael hadn’t come was that he didn’t want to be seen at the funeral by any New York reporters or the FBI. His mania to become quote-unquote legitimate overrode his loyalty to his father’s oldest friend, a man he himself had seemed to love-to the extent he was capable of love, or any other emotion. “Something big, huh?”

“To be honest with you,” Fredo said, “I don’t know much about it.”

That was probably true. But Geraci knew plenty. Michael and Roth were apparently unaware that their negotiations for control of Cuba were pointless, since the Batista government was doomed to fall, and had no real importance other than to make them cogs in a bigger wheel involving a coalition of the midwest Families, led by Chicago and Cleveland. Louie Russo had a deal worked out with the rebels. Even if Batista somehow stayed in power, Fredo’s weakness could be used to turn Roth and Michael against each other. All that would be left of their deal was the deal itself, the terms of which Russo and his associates were fully prepared to assume.

Geraci nodded toward the door. They had to keep moving.

He gave Fredo an update on the project they were calling Colma East. He’d worked out the turf issues in Jersey with the Straccis. He had a front, someone impossible to connect to the Corleone Family, who had a contract on a big swampy parcel of land. Also, since Geraci was already shipping most of his heroin from Sicily in between slabs of marble too heavy for customs inspectors to move, getting into the stonecutting business would be a snap. “What about on your end?”

“It’s in the bag. Me and Mike just need to sit down and hammer out a few particulars.”

“You haven’t done that yet?” Geraci said, pretending to be surprised. “Because this is as far as I can take this thing. Ordinances, rezoning, et cetera-those aren’t fields of the law I know about. I know who to ask, how to get all that rolling, but first you have to get the Don’s blessing. The politicians-again, his call and not mine. There’s also the matter of how the public might react to this, how to sell it to them. How to keep it off the ballot and so on. Fredo, I respect what you’re trying to do, but don’t you think that if the Don thought these problems were easy to fix, we’d probably be moving forward already?”

“Nah. The problem is the timing. Mike’s focus for the time being is on other things. Knowing you’re on board, though, that’ll get it done. From Mike’s way of thinking, me and you are perfect for a thing like this. His brother and the guy he’s got the highest opinion of.”

Geraci put his big hand on Fredo’s shoulder. “Mike never said that, Fredo.”

It was a show of disrespect, a calculated risk, but of course Geraci was right.

“Did I say he said that?” Fredo said. “What I said was what his way of thinking was.”

“I’m just a mook from Cleveland.” Geraci tightened his grip; Fredo flinched. “I do what I’m told, run my own things, spread the wealth, everybody’s happy. Here and there, I see an opportunity, and I take it. But don’t make me into more than I am. I’m not on board, either. You asked me to look into some things, and I looked. Period. We clear?”

Fredo nodded. Geraci let go of his shoulder. They started walking again. The sun came out, but the snow kept falling.

“I hate that,” Fredo said. “The snow and the sun. It’s unnatural. Like the bomb’s been dropped and the world’s gone screwy on us.”

“I need to be clear on something else, Fredo,” Geraci said. “I don’t want to get into the middle of things between you and your brother.”

“Things are fine between me and my brother.”

“Just so it’s understood. I’m not taking sides. Under no circumstances.”

“There’s no sides to take. C’mon. We’re on the same side about everything. Anybody says different, they don’t know me. They don’t know Mike.”

“ ‘Methinks thou dost protest too much.’ ”

“What the fuck?”

Geraci jerked his thumb toward where they came from. “Shakespeare. The garden back there made me think of it. You’re an actor now, Fredo. Maybe you should learn that stuff.”

“Don’t college-boy me, Mr. Just-a-mook-from-Cleveland. You think you’re better than me?”

“Easy,” Geraci said. “I don’t think anything. Shakespeare was just on my mind.”

“Because I’ve been to see Shakespeare. I’ve even seen Shakespeare in Italian.”

“Which ones? Which plays?”

“I don’t know which ones, right off. What are you, my fucking En-glish teacher? Don’t tell me what I need to learn. It may come as news to you that I got a lot of different things going on. I’m not sittin’ on my ass sipping sherry and making lists of all the plays I ever been to. I’ve been to plays. All right? Smart guy? Plays.”

“Fine,” Geraci said.

They kept walking. He gave Fredo time to calm down.

“Look,” Geraci finally said. “I’m edgy, all right? I don’t like to go behind Michael’s back even to take a leak.”

“Don’t worry about it. Our operation’s too big for any one man to be aware of every little thing or even want to.”

If Fredo really believed that, he certainly didn’t know his brother.

“Problem with Mike,” Fredo said, “he’s smart but he’s bad with people. He don’t understand, it’s natural for people to want to do things for themselves, create things. All I want is to have something that’s mine. My legacy, if you will. If you didn’t feel the same way-”

“This is getting us nowhere, Fredo. I’ve said what I have to say.” Geraci had been right. Fredo was a sweet guy but dumb enough to take his thirty pieces of silver and betray his brother without even knowing that was what he’d done. It was a sad moment. Despite everything, he really liked Fredo. “The next step is one hundred percent between you and Mike. End of story.”

Fredo shrugged, then looked down at his loafers. “I tell you what,” he said. “These sure aren’t the right shoes for this slop.”

“Should’ve worn your cowboy boots,” Geraci said.

“What cowboy boots?”

“I thought all you guys out there wore cowboy boots, carried six-shooters, the whole bit. Shoot up cars and little dogs.”

Fredo laughed. He usually took it well when you needled him, further proof what a good guy he really was. How sad using him as a pawn in all this was going to be. “If there were ever two cars that had it coming,” Fredo said, “those were it. Too bad about the dog, though.”

“True it took the head right off?”

Fredo raised his eyes in woe and lamentation. “Clean. I couldn’t have made that shot in a million years if I was trying.”

“We need to get going,” Geraci said, pointing toward the lot where they’d parked. “This is not a thing I’m going to be late to.”

“We’re a lot alike,” Fredo said, “you know that?”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Geraci said, looping an arm around him, cuffing him playfully, the way a brother or an old friend would.

They crossed a small wooden bridge across a barely frozen pond.

“You should see this place in the spring,” Geraci said. “Cherry blossoms like you can’t believe, pinker than pink.”

“I probably should.”

“You know,” Geraci said, “I’ve always wanted to ask you something.”

“Anything, my friend.”

“Tell me if I’m out of line for even asking, but what exactly are your responsibilities as sotto capo? What did Mike tell you they were?”

“Are you serious? What are you talkin’ about? What are you askin’ me here?”

“Because I don’t think it’s clear to anyone. To a lot of people, and here I confess that what I really mean is to me, but I’m not alone, no offense, but it seems mostly symbolic.”

“Symbolic? What the fuck you talking about, symbolic? I got a lot of different things I do. How is it that you don’t understand that there’s a bunch of it I can’t talk about?”

“That, I understand. It’s just that-”

“I imagine that, with Pete gone, I’ll even be going along with Mike to the meeting of the heads of all the Families, in upstate New York there.”

I imagine. Which meant, of course, that he had no idea. It was a shocking and pathetic thing even to be talking about, both because Pete wasn’t even in the ground yet and because this was not the sort of speculation Fredo should be making to anyone but his brother.

“It’s just that a lot of what’s going on with you,” Geraci said, “is awfully public.”

“Come on. Bit parts. Little local TV show. It’s nothin’. No harm in any of it, and maybe some help.”

“I don’t disagree,” Geraci said. “I see the value of it to the organization if the only aim is to get out of any businesses that might be considered crimes, victimless and otherwise. But there are other parts of the business to consider.”

They got back into the car.

“Don’t worry about nothin’,” Fredo said. “Me and Mike, we’ll work out the details.”

What Nick Geraci would like to know is this: If Michael wanted the organization to be more like a corporation, bigger than General Motors, in control of presidents and potentates, then why run it like some two-bit corner grocery store? Corleone amp; Sons. The Brothers Corleone. When Vito Corleone was shot, incapacitated, who took over? Not Tessio, Vito’s smartest and most experienced man. Sonny, who was a violent rockhead. Why? Because he was a Corleone. Fredo was too weak for anything important, yet even then, symbolic or not, Michael made that empty suit his underboss. Hagen was the consigliere even when he supposedly wasn’t, the only non-Italian consigliere in the country. Why? Because Michael grew up in the same house with him. Michael himself had all the ability in the world, but in the end he was the biggest joke of all. Vito, without even consulting his own caporegimes, made Mike the boss-a guy who never earned a red cent for anyone, who never ran a crew, who never proved himself at all except for the night he whacked two guys in a restaurant (every detail of which was arranged by the late, great Pete Clemenza). Only three people ever even got initiated into the Corleone Family without first proving themselves as earners. That would be, yes, the Brothers Corleone.

So now the whole organization was under the control of a guy who’d never done anything but think big thoughts and order people killed. Yes, he was smart, but didn’t anybody besides Sally Tessio, Nick Geraci, and possibly Tom Hagen realize that, as long as Michael thought he was smarter than everybody else, the whole organization was at the mercy of the guy’s ego?

True: Geraci had barely allowed himself to think these things before he learned that Michael Corleone had tried to kill him. Still. That didn’t mean that he was wrong.

Though no one could have known it at the time, Peter Clemenza’s was the last of the great Mafia funerals. The air inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral was almost unbreathably thick with the scent of the tens of thousands of flowers, blanketing the altar and spilling down the aisles, signed less cryptically than any such flowers would ever be again. In the pews, for the last time, were dozens of unself-conscious judges, businessmen, and politicians. To this day, singers and other entertainers show up at such funerals, but never in the numbers in evidence for Clemenza. Anyone in the know-and for now there were still very few such people-could have scanned the scores of mourners and put together a pretty impressive all-star team of New York wiseguys and assorted heavy people from out of town-including Sicily. Never again would a Don attend a funeral for a member of another Family. Never again would the presence of law enforcement be at such a manageable level. And only one more time, ever, would so many high-ranking figures in La Cosa Nostra gather in one place. All this, for an olive oil importer who’d shunned attention and barely known many of the most famous people who had convened to see him off. The most famous person he knew well-Johnny Fontane-wasn’t even there.

Nick and Charlotte Geraci took a seat in the pew directly behind Laughing Sal Narducci, his wife, and Narducci’s son Buddy, who was in the shopping center business along with Ray Clemenza-like the Castle in the Sand, a wholly legitimate, privately held enterprise in which elements of the Corleone and Forlenza organizations were legal investors. (That is, irrespective of where that money had come from in the first place, although where does any money come from in the first place? How would one define “first place”?) Sal turned and reached over the back of the pew to give Geraci an enormous, lengthy embrace. Throughout the homily and several eulogies, at every pause, Laughing Sal, characteristically, muttered the speaker’s last few words, and not in a whisper, either. Charlotte had barely known Clemenza, but it got her goat.

After the service, Laughing Sal turned to face the Geracis, tears streaming down his face. “So young,” he said. “Such a tragedy.”

Nick Geraci nodded grimly, as anyone at a funeral would do. Narducci and Clemenza were about the same age.

As a soprano from the Metropolitan Opera sang “Ave Maria,” Charlotte crossed her arms and turned to face the back of the church. The huge oak double doors were open. The pallbearers started down the steps. Clemenza’s rosewood casket disappeared into the falling snow.

Chapter 20

EXPERTS CITE MANY factors that led from the heyday of La Cosa Nostra in the fifties and sixties to the mannered, treasonous shadow of itself it is today. Various Senate and congressional hearings. The FBI’s shift in focus from the Red Menace to the Mob. The tendency in all businesses created by first-generation immigrants to be destabilized by the second generation and ruined by the third. The widespread supposition on the part of average Americans (brought into mainstream thought by the Mafia and hammered home by the Watergate scandal) that laws and regulations are for other people, i.e., the suckers. The greater profits to be had by running “legal” corporations that get no-bid contracts from their powerful friends in the government. Most of all, the Mob was kneecapped by the RICO statutes, which gave the weapon of racketeering charges to federal prosecutors everywhere, which resulted in lengthy jail terms for mobsters and the feeling in many dark corners of the American underworld that omertà was becoming a law observed mostly in the breach.

These things were all hugely important, of course, but they flowed from a common source, the single most devastating blow ever dealt to organized crime in America: the order, placed less than a month before that first meeting of all the Families in a white clapboard farmhouse in upstate New York, for two dozen custom-built maple tables.

If, say, they’d just bought or stolen or even rented tables, the stain wouldn’t have been so fresh. The vapors wouldn’t have forced the men to open the windows. The aroma of the roasting pig wouldn’t have had all afternoon to waft inside and work its succulent magic. The Dons and their consiglieres wouldn’t have lingered. They might never have scheduled further meetings of the heads of all the Families.

Even if the tables had been custom-made at the last minute but the head carpenter had been anyone other than a Mr. Floyd Kirby, we might all be living in a very different America. This was not only because another carpenter might have favored a less noxious brand of stain but also because Mr. Kirby was married to a cousin of a New York State trooper. That Christmas, the trooper had heard about all those tables and what kind of people he thought they might have been for. The trooper knew that the brewing company owner who lived in the house was suspected of having the local police in his pocket. The trooper and his partner talked to several residents in the area, but no one had seen anything unusual, or so they said.

The trooper made a note to keep an eye on things there, but who knows if he’d have followed through on it if he hadn’t been recently divorced and if the woman who lived in the rusty trailer near the road that led to the farmhouse hadn’t been so friendly. They began dating. By the time the Families met the second time, they were married. She’d moved out of the trailer, but they kept it because she owned the land. They planned to build something nice on it someday. They happened to be there, in fact, making love in the trailer for old times’ sake, when the parade of Cadillacs and Lincolns came thundering down the gravel road, past the trailer.

Again: to build power, sometimes one must control the least powerful. The trooper slipped tenners to motel desk clerks in the area, with instructions to let him know if they had a flurry of reservations by out-of-state people with Italian names (he was also an instinctive racial profiler). The next year he had enough advance notice to get an operation going.

It nearly didn’t happen. His own commander didn’t see enough merit in the investigation to allocate anyone to it other than the trooper and his partner. No one at the FBI would return his phone calls. In a last-ditch effort, he contacted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The man he talked to was young and gung ho. The trooper also took it on himself to make a few calls to reporters. The next day, he and his partner were sitting in his wife’s old trailer with binoculars. Twenty ATF agents were poised in their gray government Chevrolets at a truck stop out on the main highway, waiting for a call. In rented cars behind the Chevys were the press, a platoon of shooters and scribes, and even a radio guy from Albany.

What happened next made the front page of every major newspaper in America and the cover of Life magazine. Even these many years later, most readers will be familiar with it: the raid on that white farmhouse and the seventy-odd men who saw them coming and scattered.

The pictures are famous: heavy men in silk suits and white fedoras hauling ass through the woods. Fat Rico Tattaglia and even fatter Paulie Fortunato being handcuffed as a half-carved hog turns on a spit behind them. ATF agents crouched beside sawhorses at a roadblock on that tree-lined road, guns drawn, as the Dons of Detroit, Tampa, and Kansas City emerge from their respective vehicles (armored, a fascinated public learned). The state trooper, grinning like he’s just caught the biggest walleye in the lake, while the man next to him-Ignazio Pignatelli, aka Jackie Ping-Pong (those nicknames! God, how the public loved the nicknames!)-covers his big round face with both hands.

The men were taken to the nearest state police barracks and charged with-what? That turned out to be a problem. It looked bad, all those men in that farmhouse together, but looking bad was in itself no crime. “It’s safe to say,” an ATF agent told a New York newspaper, “that all those Italians in fancy suits didn’t come from all over the country just to roast a pig.” Maybe. But what had they come there to do? No one but the men themselves had any idea, and they weren’t talking.

Eminent lawyers swooped in (including a former assistant attorney general of the United States, the senior partner of what was then the largest law firm in Philadelphia, and onetime U.S. congressman Thomas F. Hagen of Nevada). They were good enough to point out that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the right to free assembly.

Those detained invoked their constitutionally guaranteed right not to testify against themselves. As a consequence, a few were charged with obstruction of justice-charges that were later literally laughed out of court. Despite the efforts of countless state and federal attorneys, the only direct result of the raid was the deportation of three of the detainees to Sicily, including one, Salvatore Narducci of Cleveland, who’d lived in America since he was a baby, more than sixty years. He claimed he was unaware that he’d never become a citizen.

The indirect results, however, were legion. When the newspapers with the stories about the raid hit the front stoops up and down Main Street, USA, it was the first time many people heard the words Mafia and La Cosa Nostra. The stories speculated about the heretofore undreamt of existence of an international crime syndicate. Many headlines used that word: syndicate. It is not a word that soothes the American ear. It sounds vaguely mathematical, and America is not a mathematical country.

A public outcry went up: Who are these men?

Before the raid, beat cops and precinct captains, beholden politicians, and writers for magazines like Manhunt and Thrilling Detective all knew more about the men in that white farmhouse-and about the uomini rispettati who worked for those men, and about the legion lesser street toughs who worked for those men-than did the FBI.

That time was about to end.

Today, twenty-three of those lovely, almost indestructible maple tables are crated and stacked in a warehouse at an undisclosed location in or near the District of Columbia. By rights, the twenty-fourth should be on permanent display in the Smithsonian. This table, the plaque would read, helped deliver the single most devastating blow ever dealt to organized crime in America. With a pig skull on top, alongside a scale model of the rusted house trailer.

Instead, the table was sent from one white house to another. Since 1961, it has been in constant use in or near the Oval Office.

Tom Hagen didn’t swoop in, of course. It only looked that way. When detectives asked how someone who lived in Nevada had gotten there so fast, Hagen said that he had already been in New York, that he often was, which was true.

Hagen was among the younger men there. He made it to the bottom of the hill and followed a rocky stream until he got to a town. He walked into a diner. No one was looking for anyone who looked like Tom Hagen, and the car he’d driven there, now parked behind the farmhouse, was registered to a ghost. He sat in a booth and calmly had lunch. Then he went to Woolworth’s, bought a suitcase, and got directions to the county court-house. It was in the next town over. He walked back to the diner and called a cab. Luggage in hand like any ordinary, unremarkable traveler, Hagen checked into a hotel in the county seat. He walked to the barbershop closest to the courthouse. By the time he paid the barber, Hagen had learned the broad outlines of what had happened. He called in to the phone service in Las Vegas. He went back to the hotel and took a nap. A few hours later, the phone woke him. It was Rocco Lampone, calling from Tahoe. Hagen took a taxi to the nearest state police barracks. Michael had not been among those arrested, but, as a goodwill gesture, Hagen provided legal assistance to a few friends of the Family.

In 1959, under oath and before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate, Michael Corleone testified that he had not been in that farmhouse. He denied having been among those who had escaped what was undoubtedly an illegal police action.

Strictly speaking, Michael Corleone was telling the truth.

He and Hagen had driven there separately, for various business and security reasons (though they did have the archaic and, in the face of a police raid, worthless insurance policy provided by holding a Bocchicchio hostage at a whorehouse in the desert). Had Michael been as punctual as his father, he’d surely have been among those who, dignity be damned, went scrambling down the hill. Yes, he had escaped from more harrowing situations, with the air full of bullets and bombs and Jap Zeros heading his way on a divine tailwind. But that was a dozen years and a hundred thousand cigarettes ago. Who knows if he’d have been able to run fast enough and far enough to elude capture?

He did not have to find out-only because, as per usual, he was late: so egregiously late, in fact, that they’d started their business without him. A split second before Michael flicked on his turn signal to go down the gravel drive, he glimpsed something yellow in the bushes, not far from that rusted trailer. He put his hand back on the wheel and kept going. He passed the drive and began to round a bend. In his rearview mirror, he saw two men-cops of some kind-dragging yellow sawhorses from those bushes.

The car he was using was a blue Dodge, a few years old, equipped with a police scanner (Al Neri had been a cop; both the bland car and the scanner were his idea). Michael found the frequency the ATF agents were using.

He pounded the steering wheel as hard as he could and let out an anguished roar.

This was supposed to have been Michael’s last appearance at a meeting of the Commission or of all the Families. He’d planned to negotiate his retirement. After today, after he nailed down the deal in Cuba, he’d have been a completely legitimate businessman. He hit the wheel once more.

Calm down, he thought. Think.

He lit a cigarette. He sat back in his seat, forcing himself to take long and even breaths, listening to the raid he had so narrowly escaped. It was the sound of a world coming to an end. He’d heard about Pearl Harbor on a radio, too.

Michael Corleone had no idea where this narrow, winding road would lead. The sun was straight overhead, and he couldn’t even tell what direction he was going. Still he kept driving, scrupulously observing the traffic laws and looking for signs. What choice did he have? He sure as hell couldn’t turn around and go back the way he came.

Fredo Corleone did not wake up thinking, This is the day that I betray my brother. He did not set out to do it, and, as Nick Geraci had predicted, Fredo didn’t know what he’d done even after he’d sealed his fate by doing it. His day began, instead, when, in the suite at the Château Marmont, Deanna Dunn got out of the shower and, still smelling of last night’s gin, slipped into bed beside her sleeping husband.

“C’mon, lover,” she purred, starting to tie his wrist to the bedpost with a hand towel.

Fredo jerked his arm free. “What are you doing?”

“Be a sport,” she said.

“What time is it? I had an hour’s sleep, tops.”

She frowned and tossed the towel aside. “You don’t want me to be hungry for love on my first day of work with a new costar, do you?”

He had it on good authority-Wally Morgan, who’d know-that Deanna’s costar was hardly the sort of man who’d want to lay a hand on her.

Fredo nonetheless gave her what she wanted.

“Try doing more than up-down, up-down,” she said.

He was on top. “That ain’t exactly music to a guy’s ears.” He tried giving her a little side-to-side, or whatever it was she wanted. “Not in the middle of things.”

“Want me to roll over?” Before he could answer, she’d already done it. That was how she was about everything. “Not in the ass, though.” She was on all fours. “Not first thing in the morning.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said. “Jesus.” Why did she keep bringing that up? Even with Wally Morgan, all Fredo usually did was get his dick sucked. Last night, for example, that was all he’d done. Fredo lost his erection. He threw himself down on the mattress, disgusted.

“Don’t be like that,” she said, reaching for his prick. “It’s nothing.”

Fredo slapped her hand away. “It’s something to me.”

“You’re just drinking too much,” she said.

“You should know,” he said.

They lay side by side, staring at themselves in the mirror she’d paid the hotel to install on the bedroom ceiling. After a while, Deanna took matters into her own hands. She was rough with herself. Fredo lit a cigarette and watched. The idea of it was dirty and excited him. He tried to keep his eyes off the round-bellied balding man in the mirror, whose limp prick lolled uselessly against his thigh. Deanna planted her feet on the bed, raised up her ass, and made a big show of bucking her hips and coming. It was like looking at a nature program on TV. Afterward, she kissed him. He rolled away. They lay there and rode out another long silence.

“Fredo,” she finally said. “Baby. I want you to know that I know. I’ve always known.”

“Known what?” Fredo got out of bed and went to take a piss. He knew what she meant, though. Rage washed over him.

“This is Hollywood. That’s entertainment, y’know? Plenty of people have marriages that are covers for… well, that. It’s fine. All I ask is a warm place to come at night-pun intended-and maybe some nice things once in a-”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Nothing.” She sighed. “Forget it.”

Fredo washed his hands and stood in the doorway to the bathroom. “I want to know.” He raised his fist and bounced it lightly against the doorframe. “Tell me.”

“What are you going to do? Are you going to hit me? Shoot another little dog? I’m telling you that I understand how you are. I don’t know if forgive is the right word, but-”

“Forgive me for what?”

He could toss her out the window. She was a drunk bitch with a fading career. People like that jump out of windows every day.

“Really,” she said. “Forget it. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

His brothers would have beaten her up. Fredo knew that. They thought he was weak. Everyone did, but he wasn’t. He was strong. It took strength not to throw her out the window or beat her. Fredo kept his breathing perfectly even and ordered room service. When it came he did not smash his grapefruit in her face. He calmly ate his food and waited for her to leave.

Once she was out of earshot, he hurled his orange juice glass at the door.

He picked up the table lamp and slammed its iron base into the television screen. He threw a green glass ashtray against the row of liquor bottles behind the bar. He took out a knife and, taking his time, shredded the sofa, the chairs, the bed, the pillows, even the drapes.

He took running starts and stomped dozens of holes in the walls.

For no particular reason, the only things in the suite he was careful to leave alone were Deanna’s clothes and jewelry. And his own clothes. Otherwise, he destroyed whatever he could. People must have heard, but no one came to stop him.

Finally, he took out his gun. Some crummy off-brand piece of shit, nothing nice like those Colts. He went into the bathroom and fired a round at the bidet, which he’d never figured out how to use or whether it was just for women. Who the fuck wanted to pay prices like what this joint cost and feel stupid? A porcelain shard gashed his cheek, but he barely felt it.

He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He put a bullet in the reflection of his balding head. Then he shot the mirror over the bed, too. The shower of glass was spectacular. His life up to now had been but forty-three years of bad luck; if he’d just brought on another seven, another fourteen, so what?

Fredo looked at his watch. The whole day had gotten away from him. He was supposed to meet Jules Segal and some possible investors at Gussie Cicero’s supper club in an hour. Fredo called the front desk and said that his wife had had a wild party last night. “You might want to send someone up to figure out the damage,” he said. “Just put it on my bill.”

The clerk asked if Fredo had heard shots fired.

“Oh, that,” Fredo said. “I had a Western on the TV full-blast.”

He hung up. He gave the ruined TV set a kick. He went into the flooded bathroom and turned off the water to the toilet. He looked around the suite. A hell of a goddamned mess, but in the end, all he’d wasted on this one was a day. He’d spent forty-three years on the mess he’d made of his life. He grabbed his tux and his Mary Janes. He could get dressed at Cicero’s.

After two encores, J. J. White, Jr., left the stage, drenched in sweat and to a standing ovation. Fredo and Jules Segal were at a table in front, along with two Beverly Hills attorneys, Jacob Lawrence and Allen Barclay-friends of Segal’s and also the registered owners of a Vegas casino that really belonged to Vincent Forlenza. Fredo had wrangled gorgeous young starlets as dates for the two married lawyers. Segal’s date was Lucy Mancini, who used to be Sonny Corleone’s goumada. The ladies all went to powder their noses.

Figaro and Capra were at the next table with dates of their own, watching Fredo’s back.

“All right, Doc,” Fredo said, sitting down. “I got this theory.”

“I know what you’re going to say,” Segal said. “J.J.’s better when he’s solo and not kissing Johnny Fontane’s ass with all the Uncle Tomming.”

“My theory,” Lawrence said, “is that Jews are the best entertainers. It’s in our blood.”

This cracked Barclay and Segal up. White, a Negro, had married a Jew and converted. Lawrence, Barclay, and Segal were all born Jewish, though the lawyers had changed their names.

Fredo frowned. “J.J.’s great, but I’m not talking about nothin’ like that,” he said. “I’m talking about our possible business arrangement in New Jersey. My theory is, the trick to getting anybody to do anything is that you gotta get ’em to think it was their own idea in the first place.”

“You’re just figuring that out?” Segal said. “How old are you?” A few years ago, his hair had been gray. Now it was brown as milk chocolate. His suntanned face was only a shade lighter.

Fredo forced a smile. “Point is, I could twist things around and make you think you were the ones who thought of this cemetery thing, but that’s not how I do business. I’m not trying to sell you on nothin’. You don’t want to get in on the ground floor here? Believe me, I know a hundred guys who will. But Jules, you’ve helped me out of a lot of tight spots with the ladies; the least I could do was give you this chance. You fellas, too. Friends of Jules are friends of mine. I’m friends with your Cleveland friends, too. Me and Nick Geraci, probably you know him, we’re like this. Tight. When the time comes, he’ll be in on this, too, believe me. And the Jew?” he said, meaning Forlenza. “Personal friend.” Fredo had actually never laid eyes on the guy. “Long story short, this was my idea, all right? But put your pride aside, and you’ll see that if you go in on this, we’ll all make a mint.”

Capra buried his head in his date’s hair. His English was too shaky for him to pick up on what was going on at the next table. Figaro, on the other hand, was stunned that Fredo would go to civilians for money-even though Geraci had said that this was probably what would happen. Figaro used to cut Geraci’s hair; his original connection to the Family had been Tessio (another customer). The longer Figaro was out in Nevada and California, the more he was convinced that Vito’s sons were wrecking everything. The base of the Family’s power was New York-where Figaro was born, and where his loyalties remained. He was Nick Geraci’s guy, all the way.

Gussie Cicero and Figaro made eye contact from across the room. Figaro nodded. Gussie went to tell Mortie Whiteshoes and Johnny Ola they had the opening they’d need to get Fredo to help them get their boss and Michael to wrap up some sort of mutually beneficial negotiations. As far as Gussie knew, he himself was doing a harmless favor, and Figaro was just confirming that Fredo was talking about whatever it was that he’d supposedly come there to talk about. As far as Gussie Cicero knew, the idea for putting Ola and Whiteshoes together with Fredo Corleone-for whatever reason-had come from Jackie Ping-Pong. As far as Ping-Pong knew, the idea was Louie Russo’s. As far as Russo knew, it was Vincent the Jew’s idea.

“It may well be a good idea, Fredo,” Segal said. “But good ideas are for suckers.”

Fredo cocked his head.

“What makes an idea valuable,” Segal said, “is knowing what to do with it.”

This was a lot of disrespect to swallow from a self-important, cunt-happy Jew who’d have never even gotten his medical license back if the Corleones hadn’t made the head of the review board an offer he couldn’t refuse. “I know,” Fredo said in a near-whisper, consciously aping the quiet menace his father and brother came by so naturally, “what to do with it.”

The men at his table showed no sign of being intimidated.

“Maybe so,” Lawrence said, “but we’ve looked into the details. The ordinances will be next to impossible to pass. Even if you do, the existing cemeteries and related businesses are sure to file suit to get any new laws overturned. I don’t know how things were done in San Francisco or why, but it doesn’t matter. Different state, different century. Today, you have to worry about the likes of Allen and me. The lawyers. If you want to go ahead with this, trust me, there’ll be plenty of… what’s the term you people use? Plenty of beaks to wet.”

“ ‘You people’?” Fredo said.

Lawrence shrugged. The women were making their way back to the table.

“There’s other problems,” Segal said. “Tell him, Allen.”

“Cemeteries,” Barclay said, “have to able to be maintained until the end of time with only the interest from a trust. In other words, you’re tying up a fortune up front, which from what I know about your business, I can’t imagine you’d want to do. Also, don’t take this the wrong way, Mr. Corleone, but the money would need to be so clean you could eat off it.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Fredo said. He couldn’t believe they were going to keep talking about this in front of their dates. “I got all that covered.” Though he didn’t.

The women took their seats and kissed their dates.

“I won’t even get into all the problems you’d face,” Lawrence said, “trying to transport millions of dead bodies across state lines. Or the impossibility of sewing up any kind of monopoly on all this out in New Jersey.”

“Dead bodies!” said Lucy Mancini.

Fredo shot a look at the other men, who at least had enough sense not to explain things. The other women averted their eyes. Lucy flushed, redder than her fresh Singapore Sling. She’d been around long enough not to say a thing like that, and she obviously knew it.

Segal put an arm around Fredo and patted him on the shoulder. “As get-rich-quick schemes go,” Segal said, “this is the worst I’ve ever heard.”

Segal extended an arm toward his friends, and they told Fredo that Segal was right.

Fredo stood. He called out to their waitress to bring another round of drinks. “Ladies,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me?” He made it seem like he was just going to take a leak, but he had no intention of coming back to the table. It’d be a good way to ditch the bodyguards, too, and have a decent night on the town.

Across the room, Johnny Ola-Hyman Roth’s token Sicilian-rose and at a discreet distance followed him to the men’s room.

Maybe, Fredo thought, I’ll just go home. Although where was that? Home? He’d spent most of the last dozen or so years in hotel suites. His father was dead. His mother was in Tahoe, where Fredo had a house, too. But that wasn’t home. That was just a lake cottage in the country. A fishing cabin. Fredo Corleone was a city boy, stifled in Vegas, but Tahoe? Suffocating.

He saw Gussie Cicero and slipped him a Cleveland. For the tab. Gussie told Fredo his money wasn’t good here. “Aw, buy your wife flowers or something,” Fredo said. “Or put it in the offering plate at Mass tomorrow.”

“Mass tomorrow!” Gussie said, pocketing the thousand dollars. “You crack me up.”

At the urinal, he wondered what Deanna would do if she got back to the wreckage of their room before he did. It sent a chill through him. Though maybe it was just a piss shiver.

Fredo zipped up, spun around and slammed into Johnny Ola so hard Ola’s hat went flying and Fredo fell on his ass. The men’s room attendant rushed over to help, but Ola was already apologizing and helping Fredo to his feet.

“Did I do that?” Ola said, pointing to Fredo’s gashed cheek.

Fredo shook his head. “Cut myself shaving.”

“You’re Frederico Corleone, aren’t you? Johnny Ola,” he said, offering his hand. “We have some friends in common. I’ve been hoping to run into you. I didn’t expect it’d be so literal, you know?” He grinned. “We should talk. Sometime soon.”

Deanna was no doubt already there, had already seen what he’d done. If Fredo hadn’t balked at the thought of going to face up to that, it might have saved his life.

“No time like the present,” Fredo said.

Moments later, he was in his car, following Ola and Mortie White-shoes to Hollywood. They stopped at the Musso amp; Frank Grill. The place was packed, but one of those high-backed mahogany booths with the padded red leather seats miraculously opened up.

“My kind of place,” Fredo said. “Best martinis in L.A. if not the whole world. Stirred, not shaken, which, take it from an Italian, is the right way to make a martini.”

At a place with lesser martinis or less private booths, on a day that had gone better for Fredo than this one, who knows what might have happened? Fredo didn’t think of himself as a weak man, but he’d certainly look back on this as a weak moment. Ola and Whiteshoes explained that their boss and Fredo’s brother were involved in a big deal of some sort. They claimed not to know what it was about; Cuba wasn’t mentioned. Ola said that Michael was being unreasonable in the negotiations. On a better day, Fredo might have understood that was a fancy way of saying that Roth wanted Michael killed. All Fredo could think of at the time was that, when it came to his own big brother, Michael was unreasonable about everything. Fredo tried to poker-face it, but even under the best of circumstances, he was no good at that.

Ola said that if Fredo could help out with things-just some simple information that might help confirm things about the Family’s position and assets, nothing major-that there’d be something in it for him. They were open to talking about what that might be. A cash bonus, maybe.

That was when Whiteshoes chimed in and said that a little bird told him something about some kind of city of the dead Fredo was planning out in New Jersey. “I only know what my friend Jules Segal told me,” Mortie said, “but from the sound of it, I gotta say, I like the sound of it.”

(From The Fred Corleone Show, March 23, 1959 [final episode].)

FRED CORLEONE: Ladies and gentlemen, on our show tonight we were supposed to have a very special guest, but as you can see we don’t. We’re going to have a guest, that is, and I said the wrong thing in implying that this other guest-I’m getting ahead of myself. That the other one’s not special. He is. Great fella. I’m not… (Looks down; rubs his face with both hands.) I should keep this simple. Nobody wants me to make it complicated. Miss Deanna Dunn, who as you may know… What I mean to say is that despite what was in the newspaper there, our guest tonight is not Miss Deanna Dunn. (Looks offstage.) I don’t need to say more than that, do I?

VOICE OF DIRECTOR: (Inaudible)

FRED CORLEONE: Not really. (Turns back to face the camera.) Don’t worry, folks. With no further to-do, not to mention that there hasn’t been any to-do here in the first place, let’s welcome our first guest. Here he is, a fine actor who is now making a movie with Mr. Johnny Fontane and that whole crew, about robbing casinos, they tell me, which I can’t wait to hear more about, put your hands together for Mr. Robert Chadwick.

(Recorded applause. This is the only episode that used it, even though the show had dispensed with the live audience several episodes earlier.)

ROBERT CHADWICK (waving at the nonexistent audience): Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Freddie.

FRED CORLEONE: No, thank you, Bobby. You’re a lifesaver, comin’ in at the last minute.

ROBERT CHADWICK: Don’t mention it. Believe me, I’ve been second choice to movie stars a lot less legendary than Deanna Dunn.

FRED CORLEONE: You’re obviously being ironical, and I appreciate it. Though in seriousness, a good-lookin’ guy like you, leading-man material, classy British accent, I wouldn’t think that’d be the case. Most of the roles you get, you’re the first choice, right?

ROBERT CHADWICK: The scripts I see have been read by so many other actors, they have more coffee stains on the pages than words. But I must say, it does beat working for a living.

FRED CORLEONE: What?

ROBERT CHADWICK: I said, it’s a living.

FRED CORLEONE: Sorry. I’m sorry. I was just-

ROBERT CHADWICK: It’s fine. By the way, I wanted to say I was sorry to hear about your mother. I lost my own mother last year, so I know what you’re going through. It’s not something you really ever get over.

FRED CORLEONE (frowning): You know what I’m-? (Closes his eyes, nods, stops frowning.) Right. Of course… thanks.

ROBERT CHADWICK: I tell you what I truly believe, though. A philosophy of life, if you will. Between losing your mother and-I know you don’t want to talk about it on the air, but I just want to say I’m also sorry things didn’t work out with your lady.

FRED CORLEONE: Thank you.

ROBERT CHADWICK: But between those two misfortunes, I can just about guarantee you that your luck’s about to change.

FRED CORLEONE: Just about, huh?

ROBERT CHADWICK (looking into the camera): So, ladies, line up! This galoot next to me’s on the open market again!

FRED CORLEONE: That’ll be a while yet. Before I-

ROBERT CHADWICK: Sure. But there’s a lot of fish in the sea.

FRED CORLEONE: That’s what they say. You’re a happily married man these days, I hear.

ROBERT CHADWICK: I am. Seven years this month, actually.

FRED CORLEONE: To a great girl. She’s the sister of Governor Jimmy Shea, if I’m not mistaken.

ROBERT CHADWICK: She is.

FRED CORLEONE: Whattaya think, our next president?

ROBERT CHADWICK: Margaret?

FRED CORLEONE: No, Governor Shea. Oh, right. Good one.

ROBERT CHADWICK: I do. I certainly hope so. I’ve actually known him since prep school. He’s a great leader, a great friend. A war hero, as you may know. He’s done wonderful things for New Jersey, and I think in all honesty that America needs a man like this, someone young and smart who can inspire people and take us into the space age. Not to get on a soapbox, but you asked.

FRED CORLEONE: What? Oh. I did. No, I agree with you. This is not a political show, but I’m an American, and so I have my opinions. The opinions expressed by guests on this show or even the host do not necessarily represent blah, blah, blah. However that goes. Anyway, maybe we should get into another topic.

ROBERT CHADWICK: I’m an American, too, old boy.

FRED CORLEONE: You are? I thought-

ROBERT CHADWICK: Since I was twelve years old.

FRED CORLEONE: That’s tremendous. I want to hear about how it is that you and Fontane and all your buddies-Gene Jordan, J. J. White, Jr.-

ROBERT CHADWICK: Morrie Streator, Buzz Fratello.

FRED CORLEONE: Right. You guys are staying up all night doing your act onstage at that casino which I don’t want to name right now-

ROBERT CHADWICK: The Kasbah.

FRED CORLEONE: -and then filming a movie all day?

ROBERT CHADWICK: It sounds like a lot of work, but it’s been a total gas.

FRED CORLEONE: What do you do in a nightclub act?

ROBERT CHADWICK (laughing): Precious little.

FRED CORLEONE: Seriously?

ROBERT CHADWICK: I don’t sing, and I certainly can’t dance. What I do is, I go up onstage, have a few drinks, and tell a few blue jokes. I assure you, they’re ba-a-a-a-a-ad jokes. People laugh, though. When you’re having that much fun, it’s contagious.

FRED CORLEONE: I’ll get back to that in a minute, but before we go to commercial, I want to ask you about the movie you’re making, because I hear that you and Fontane, Gino, Buzz, all your friends-that you think you’re gonna rob all the casinos in Vegas.

ROBERT CHADWICK: It’s only a movie, old boy.

FRED CORLEONE: No, I understand that, obviously, having-

ROBERT CHADWICK: You were brilliant in Ambush at Durango, by the way. Gave me chills.

FRED CORLEONE: Thank you. What I’m saying is that I wonder how you’re going to pull off your big caper. My thinking is that either you’ll do it in a way that could never work in real life, in which case it’ll seem ridiculous to people. Or else-and here’s my question-you do have a realistic way of doing it, but then you run the risk of someone copying you.

ROBERT CHADWICK: You’re having me on, right? Is that a question?

FRED CORLEONE (shrugging): It’s a valid point, I think.

ROBERT CHADWICK: You want me to tell you how we do it? How they do it? In the movie?

FRED CORLEONE: I do. That would be interesting.

ROBERT CHADWICK: It would be. But then who’d go see the movie?

FRED CORLEONE: Lots of people would see a movie like that. Whattaya say, folks, you want to hear how they pull their, whatever. Their heist, I think is the right word. How ’bout it?

(Recorded applause)

ROBERT CHADWICK: Cute. The problem is, Freddie-and all you good people out there, too-the problem is that I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

FRED CORLEONE (stares at him, frowning; an excruciatingly long silence)

ROBERT CHADWICK: Yikes. (Calling out.) Footwear! Bring me a 12D Italian loafer in a nice gray cement, extra heavy. Send the bill to this fellow.

FRED CORLEONE: We’ll be right back.

ROBERT CHADWICK: At least one of us will.

Two days later, Fredo Corleone went to Lake Tahoe to attend to some details in the wake of his mother’s death. He had also promised to take his nephew Anthony fishing.

The boy lived on a lake, but his own father never took him. Uncle Fredo took him whenever he was in town. Anthony was eight years old and crazy about Uncle Fredo.

Anthony loved to fish, but he’d never wanted to go fishing more than he did that day. His parents were splitting up, and he had a sneaking suspicion that it was somehow his fault. If he’d been a better boy, maybe none of the bad things that happened would have happened. Now he and his little sister weren’t even allowed to stay with their mother. She was moving away. He was staying here, with his father who was gone all the time, in this scary house that a few months earlier had been fired upon by men with tommy guns. A lot of the bullet holes were still there if a person knew where to look. Anthony was the kind of boy who knew where to look.

An hour after his mother said good-bye to him, Anthony got into the boat with Uncle Fredo and Al Neri, who worked for Anthony’s father. Mr. Neri had said to call him Uncle Al, but he wasn’t really Anthony’s uncle. Anthony thought that might be a sin and so never did it. That was how the Devil caught you, he’d learned at Sunday school. With little tricks like that.

Mr. Neri fired up the motor. Uncle Fredo had a secret way of catching fish that they were going to try out. Anthony didn’t like the idea of letting Mr. Neri in on the secret, but he was so eager to get out on the water he wasn’t about to complain. Anthony was as happy as a completely miserable little boy could be.

Right as they were about to shove off, Aunt Connie came running down the dock, shouting that Anthony’s father needed to take him to Reno. Anthony started to complain, but Uncle Fredo got a hard look on his face and said that Anthony had to go. He promised to take him tomorrow instead. The boy, devastated, nodded and tried not to let on.

Aunt Connie took Anthony back to the house. Everyone had said bad things about her until a few months ago. Now she was going to be the person who took care of Anthony and his little sister every day. She was no good at taking care of her own kids, as far as Anthony could see.

Once they got inside, Aunt Connie sent him to his room. He asked about Reno. She said she didn’t know about Reno, just go. He went.

From his bedroom window, the boy watched Mr. Neri and Uncle Fredo ride away. After they disappeared from view, he stayed there, even though there was nothing to see. Anthony was alone. He didn’t cry. He promised himself he’d never cry, no matter what happened to him. He would be a good boy always, and maybe his parents would love each other again.

Minutes later, he heard a gunshot.

Soon after that, Mr. Neri came back in the boat alone.

Anthony sobbed. He didn’t stop crying for days.

During his parents’ contentious divorce, the boy summoned the courage to confront his father with what he’d seen. Michael Corleone dropped his demand for custody of his two children, which was awarded to Kay Adams Corleone.

The cold waters of Lake Tahoe often prevent the formation of the internal gases that make corpses float. The body of Frederico Corleone was never found. His nephew never again went fishing.