The Godfather Returns (26 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not Chicago.”

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

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

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

Michael started to explain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The men under the tent were calling for them.

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

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

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

“Yes?” Michael said to Russo.

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

So
this
was what the walk had really been about.

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

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

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

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

“He can’t eat pork,” Michael said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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