The Godfather Returns (12 page)

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

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

“No tea, either, looks like.”

“I’m heating the water right now.”

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

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

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

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

Chapter 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me?” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

Billy’s dinner companions broke out laughing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Honey,” said the girl with the cling peaches, “you are in
co
r
rigible.”

“—don’t hesitate to ask.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“See myself why?” Francesca said.

A thunderclap sounded.

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

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

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

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

“That was a joke,” Francesca said.

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

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

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

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

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

Francesca shrugged. Van Arsdale
Citru
s
?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 9

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

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

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

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

Kay rubbed her eyes.

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

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

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What were you dreaming about?” Michael said.

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

“Well, we’re back at Lake Mead.”

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

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

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

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

He got in back beside Kay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They rode home with cowboy songs on the radio.

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

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

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

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

“He’s in my den,” Michael said.

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

“He’s in my den,” Michael repeated.

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

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

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

“Thornton,” Michael said.

“I took the liberty of—”

“Forget it,” he said. “It’s fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s Puccini.”

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

“I’m aware of that,” Michael said.

“Say again?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorry.”

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

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

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

“To see Fontane?”

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

“We’re just partners in it.”

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

Then she laughed.

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

“I thought your mother had a casserole going.”

“Have you
tasted
my mother’s casseroles?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They started down the back stairs.

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

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

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

“Right.”

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