The Godfather Returns (31 page)

“And we know it was lightning?”

“We know it was lightning.”

“And how do we know it was lightning? Did anyone see it?”

“I know you’re upset, Kay. I’d be upset, too. I
am
upset, and so is everyone up there.”

“Did anyone see it?”

Behind her, Mary started crying. Anthony dropped to his knees, threw out his arms, and burst into a song first introduced to the world by a melancholy cartoon jalopy named Dudley.

BOOK V

1957–1959

Chapter 17

S
O WAS
K
AY 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?