The Godfather Returns (24 page)

“I never said that.”

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

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

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

“No,” Geraci lied.

“No? Think hard.”

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

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

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

Narducci waited. He didn’t move.

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

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

“All ears.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Something like that.”

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

“People,” Geraci agreed. “I bet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lid came open.

It was Charlotte.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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