The Godfather Returns (4 page)

He surfaced. He swam a couple laps to limber up, then took a deep breath and went under again. He repeated the drill three more times and got out. At the end of the deck, on the far edge of the roof, was a billboard:
HAVE A BLAST
!
BEST VIEW OF THE BOMB IN LAS VEGAS
!
Underneath a painting of a purple-orange mushroom cloud, on movable letters, was a time, tomorrow morning.
Early
tomorrow morning. Johnny had heard they were going to set up a bar, a breakfast buffet, even crown some broad Miss Atomic Bombshell. What sort of sucker would get up at dawn to watch a bomb go off sixty miles away? Maybe they think they’ll start to glow and set off the slot machines. People want to pay to watch a bomb, they ought to go see Johnny’s last picture. He grabbed his robe and took the stairs two at a time, down to his room.

She was gone. Rita. Good kid. The room still smelled like whiskey, smokes, and pussy. The statue of the naked lady in the fountain, whose outflung arm had seemed at the time like it was made to hold on to, needed repairs. He got dressed and—just to make sure he didn’t nod off on the way to L.A.—took one of the little green pills Dr. Jules Segal had prescribed.

Johnny Fontane emerged into the brutal sunlight of the Castle’s VIP parking lot and did not flinch. He grabbed his lapels, so sharp they could cut meat, straightened his jacket, and climbed into his new red Thunderbird. The cops here knew this car. He had that ’Bird going over a hundred before he even left town. He checked his watch. In a couple hours, the musicians would start trickling into the studio. They’d spend an hour tuning and gassing, then for another hour or so Eddie Neils, his musical director this time out, would have them rehearsing. Johnny should make it in time. Lay down the first few tracks, get to the airport by six, hop on the charter along with Falcone and Gussie Cicero, and be back here in plenty of time for the private show he said he’d do for Michael Corleone.

It wasn’t until four in the morning—after he arrived, exhausted, at the guest suites at the Vista del Mar Golf and Racquet Club—that Tom Hagen realized he’d forgotten his racquet. The pro shop didn’t open until nine, the same time Hagen was supposed to meet the Ambassador on Court 14. Hagen couldn’t bear to be late. He asked the desk clerk if he might borrow a racquet, and the clerk looked at him as though he’d tracked mud on the lobby’s white carpeting. He told the man he had an early court time and asked if there was any way to get in the pro shop now, and the clerk shook his head and said he didn’t have a key. Hagen asked if there was anything that could be done, either now or at some time before eight-thirty tomorrow, and the clerk apologized and said no. Hagen took out two hundred-dollar bills and told the clerk he’d be grateful if there was anything humanly possible that could be done, and the man just smirked.

Hagen had begun yesterday in his own bed in Las Vegas, then, before dawn, flown with Michael Corleone to Detroit, first for a meeting with Joe Zaluchi on his daughter’s wedding day, then the wedding itself, an appearance at the reception, and finally a flight back to Vegas. Mike had been able to go home and go to sleep. Hagen went to the office for an hour of paperwork and then a quick stop home, to change and to kiss his sleeping daughter, Gianna, who’d just turned two, and his wife, Theresa, who’d become an art collector and was excited about a Jackson Pollock that had just arrived from her dealer in New York. His boys, Frank and Andrew, were teenagers, each behind a closed door in a bedroom strewn with science fiction paperbacks and records by Negroes, both of them unkissable now.

As Tom Hagen packed his tennis gear, Theresa walked around their new house holding the gorgeous, paint-splattered thing in front of various white walls. She’d taken advantage of the move to Las Vegas and the expanses of blank surfaces to go on a buying spree. The paintings were worth several times more than the house itself. He loved being married to a woman with taste. “What about opposite the red Rothko in the center hallway?” she called.

“What about the bedroom?” he said.

“You think?” she said.

“Just a thought,” he said. He met her gaze and cocked an eyebrow to indicate that it wasn’t the location of the painting he was talking about.

She sighed. “Maybe you’re right.” She set down the painting and took his hand.

Marriage.

But he’d been far too tired, and things hadn’t gone particularly well.

Hagen was no longer the Corleone
consigliere,
but with the death of Vito Corleone—who’d succeeded Hagen in the job—and with Tessio dead, too, and Clemenza in the process of taking over in New York, Michael needed an experienced hand. He was waiting to announce a new
consigliere
until he felt sure the war with the Barzinis and Tattaglias was definitely over. Michael had something up his sleeve, but all Hagen had been able to figure out was that it had something to do with Cleveland. In the meantime, Hagen was still doing his old job and trying to move on to his next thing, too. He was forty-five years old, older than either of his parents had been when they’d died and definitely too old for this shit.

Now he rose to the knock of the room service he’d had the foresight to order before going to bed. He downed the first cup of coffee before the door closed behind the bellboy. Weak. The way it was everywhere out here. Hagen congratulated himself for guessing beforehand that he’d need two carafes. He took the first one out on the balcony. Eight
A.M.,
the sun barely over the mountains, and already it was baking hot. Who needed a sauna? By the time Hagen finished the first pot of coffee—ten minutes, give or take—the robe that had come with the room was soaked.

Hagen shaved, showered, dressed in his tennis clothes, and was standing outside the pro shop at eight-thirty, waiting for someone to arrive. After a few interminable minutes, he went back to the desk. A different clerk said that the manager was here now and he’d page him.

Hagen went back outside the pro shop. The wait was excruciating. If there was one thing he’d learned from Vito Corleone—and what
hadn’t
he learned from him?—it was promptness. He paced back and forth and dared not go to the men’s room for fear he’d miss the manager or some other arriving employee. When finally someone came to open up—a Slavic woman who looked more like a masseuse than a manager or club pro—it was nine on the dot.

Hagen grabbed a racquet, slapped two hundred dollars on the front counter, and told her to keep the change.

“We don’t take cash,” she said. “You have to sign for it.”

“Where do I sign?”

“Are you a member? I don’t recognize you.”

“I’m a guest of Ambassador Shea’s.”

“He needs to be the one to sign for it. Him or a family member or his valet.” She pronounced it to rhyme with
mallet.

Hagen took out another hundred and said that if she could find it in her heart to straighten all this out, there was more than enough money here for the racquet and her time.

She looked at him the same way last night’s clerk had, but she took the money.

Hagen thought his bladder would burst, but by now it was five after nine. He tore the cardboard off the racquet and broke into a dead sprint. Those exact words occurred to him
—dead sprint.

When he got to Court 14, ten minutes late, there was no one there. He was so rarely late that he had no idea what to do. Had the Ambassador already been here and left? Was he late, too? How long should Hagen wait? Would it make sense to go take a leak and come back? He looked around. A lot of bushes, but this wasn’t the sort of place where a guy ought to be pissing in the bushes. So he stood there, hopping from foot to foot, holding it. Surely, the Ambassador had come and gone. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he ran to the nearest men’s room. When he got back to the Court 14, a note was pinned to the net.
Ambassador Shea—unable to play tennis this a.m. Late brunch? 2. Poolside. A man will pick you up.

The note didn’t say where.

Kay Corleone pointed back toward the road to the Las Vegas airport. “He missed our turn,” she said. “Michael, we missed our turn.”

Next to her in the backseat of their new yellow Cadillac, Michael shook his head.

Kay frowned. “We’re
driving
all the way to Los Angeles? Are you out of your mind?”

It was their fifth anniversary. She and the kids and even her mother and Baptist pastor father had already been to Mass. Michael had business tonight, before, during, and after the private show Johnny Fontane was doing as a favor for the Teamsters. But he’d promised her that the whole day up until then would be one long date—like old times, only better.

Michael shook his head. “We’re not driving. And we’re not going to Los Angeles.”

Kay turned around in her seat, looking back toward the road not taken, then turned to her husband. Abruptly, she had what felt like a block of ice in her guts. “Michael,” she said. “Forgive me, but I think this marriage has withstood about all the surprises that—” She made circles with her hands, like a sports official signaling improper movement of some sort.

He smiled. “This will be a good surprise,” he said. “I promise.”

Soon they came to Lake Mead, near a dock with a seaplane moored to the end. The plane was registered to Johnny Fontane’s movie production company, though neither Fontane nor anyone who worked there knew anything about it.

“Surprise number one,” Michael said, pointing to the plane.

“Oh, brother,” she said. “ ‘Number one’? You’ve counted them up. You really should have become a mathematics professor.” The illicit thrill she’d once gotten from what he’d become instead had waned enough that she might actually have meant this.

They got out of the car.

“That’s counting,” he said. “At most
ac
counting. Not mathematics.” He held out his hand toward the dock. “M’lady.”

Kay wanted to say she was afraid but did not, could not. She had no reason whatsoever to think that he might do her harm.

“Surprise number two—”

“Michael.”

“—is that I’m flying.”

Her eyes widened.

“I started pilot training in the Marines,” he said, “before I was, you know.”
Sent to fight in 120-degree heat for tunnel-riddled coral islands ladled with a maggoty stew of mud and corpses.
“For some reason flying relaxes me,” he said. “I’ve been taking lessons.”

Kay exhaled. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath. She hadn’t realized that, in all those unaccounted-for hours the past few weeks, she was afraid he was having an affair.
That’s not true.
What she was afraid of was worse. “It’s good you have a hobby,” she ventured. “Everyone needs a hobby. Your father had his garden. Other men have golf.”

“Golf,” he said. “Hmm. You don’t have a hobby, do you?”

“I don’t,” she said.

“There’s always golf.” He was wearing a tailored sport coat and a stark white shirt with no necktie. He hadn’t slicked his hair. A light wind tousled it.

“Actually,” she said, “what would you think if I went back to teaching?”

“That’s a job,” Michael said. “You don’t need a job. Who’d watch Mary and Anthony?”

“I wouldn’t start until we’re settled. By then your mother will be here and she could do it. Carmela would be
thrilled
to do it.” Though Kay actually dreaded hearing what her mother-in-law would say about Kay working outside the home. “Really, all it would be is a hobby.”

“Do you want a job?” Michael said.

She looked away. A job wasn’t exactly the point.

“Let me think about it.” His father wouldn’t have approved, but he was not his father. Michael had once, like his father, been married to a nice Italian girl, but Kay did not know that and was not that girl. What concerned Michael was security, even though it was part of the code that the risks to her were slight. Michael put a hand on her arm and gave it a gentle squeeze.

Kay put her hand on top of his. She took a deep breath. “Well, look,” she said. “I’m not getting in that contraption. At least not until you tell me where we’re going.”

Michael shrugged. “Tahoe,” he said. A grin flickered on his face. “
Lake
Tahoe.” He gestured to the seaplane. “Obviously.”

She’d told him once she’d love to go there. She hadn’t thought he’d been listening.

He opened the door to the plane. Kay got in. As she did, her dress both hiked up and stretched taut across her ass. Michael felt a wild impulse to grab her hips from behind but instead just let his eyes linger. There was nothing better, nothing sexier, than looking at your wife like this without her knowing it.

“Now, the only tricky part about floatplanes,” Michael said as he got in and started the engine, “is that they sometimes flip.”

“Flip?!” Kay said.

“Rarely.” He stuck out his lower lip, as if to indicate the lightning-strike unlikelihood of such a thing. “And if a floatplane flips, guess what? It floats.”

Kay regarded him. “That’s comforting.”

“I do love you,” he said. “You know that, right?”

She tried for the expressionlessness Michael had mastered all too well. “That’s also comforting.”

Their takeoff was so smooth that Kay felt her every muscle relax. She hadn’t been aware that they were clenched. She had no idea for how long.

Chapter 4

O
VER
L
AKE
E
RIE,
the small plane flew into the teeth of a thunderstorm. The cabin was hot, which suited Nick Geraci just fine. The other men in the plane were sweating just as much as he was. The bodyguards had already blamed it on the heat. Tough guys. He’d been one of them, once, written off as a big dumb ox, both relied upon and disposable.

“I thought the storm was behind us,” said Frank Falcone, one of the silk-shirted men, the one in orange, the one who didn’t know who the pilot really was.

“You said a mouthful,” said the one in aquamarine, Tony Molinari, who did know.

The hits on the top men in the Barzini, Tattaglia, and Corleone crime syndicates had aroused the interest of law enforcement everywhere, from local-yokel hard-ons to the FBI (though the agency’s director, supposedly because the Corleones had something on him, continued to maintain that the so-called Mafia was a myth). For most of the summer, even corner-bar shylocks had had to close things down. The other two New York Dons, Ottilio “Leo the Milkman” Cuneo and Anthony “Black Tony” Stracci, had overseen a cease-fire. Whether this would mean an end to the war, no one knew.

“Excuse me, but I meant the real storm,” said Falcone. “The storm out there. The fucking storm.”

Molinari shook his head. “Jokes are wasted on you, my friend.”

Their bodyguards, noticeably more pale now, looked down at the floor of the plane. “Lake effect,” said Geraci. “The way it works is that the air and the water are sharply different temperatures.” He tried to make his voice sound the way a pilot’s would, in a movie where the pilot was the lead. He relaxed his grip. “That’s what makes it possible for storms to come from any direction, and all of a sudden. Keeps things interesting, eh?”

Molinari put a hand on Geraci’s shoulder. “Thank you, Mister fucking Science.”

“You’re welcome, sir,” Geraci said.

Falcone had been a top connection guy in Chicago—buying politicians, judges, and cops—and now ran his own thing in Los Angeles. Molinari had a four-star dockside restaurant in San Francisco, plus a piece of anything there he wanted a piece of. According to the briefing Michael had given Geraci, Falcone and Molinari had always had their differences, particularly when it came to the New York Families. Falcone saw them as snobbish, Molinari as recklessly violent. Molinari had also felt a personal attachment to the late Vito Corleone that Falcone had never shared. But the last few years, the two West Coast Dons had forged a wary, effective allegiance, particularly in organizing the importation and distribution of narcotics from the Philippines and Mexico (another reason, Michael did not have to say, that Geraci was being sent to meet them). Until Michael had taken over the Corleone Family, they’d been the two youngest Dons in America.

“O’Malley, eh?” said Falcone.

Geraci nosed the plane up through the thunderhead, seeking better air. He knew what Falcone meant: the name on his pilot’s license. The flight was obviously challenging enough that Falcone accepted it when Geraci didn’t answer. It’s not the eyes that see, it’s the brain. As Michael had predicted, Falcone put an Irish name together with a broad-shouldered, fair-haired Sicilian, a man he naturally presumed worked for the Cleveland operation, and what he saw was an Irishman. Why not? Cleveland worked with so many Jews, Irish, and Negroes that the men in it called it the Combination. People outside of it called its Don, Vincent Forlenza, “the Jew.”

It was a necessary deception. Rattlesnake Island was not an easy place to get to. Falcone might not have boarded a plane owned by the Corleones. Don Forlenza had hoped to come to the wedding, but his health had precluded it.

The plane finally rose above the clouds. The men were bathed in blinding sunlight.

“So, O’Malley,” Falcone said, “you’re from Cleveland, huh?”

“Yes, sir, born and raised.” Misleading, but true.

“Guess our DiMaggio and his Yanks were too much for the Indians this year.”

“We’ll get you next year,” Geraci said.

Molinari started talking about watching DiMaggio play for the San Francisco Seals and how even then he was a god among men. Over the years Molinari had made a bundle fixing Seals games, but never once the whole time DiMaggio had been there. “People have these ideas about Italians, am I right, O’Malley?”

“I’m not sure I have any ideas at all, sir.”

“We got us a
cacasangue,
” Falcone said.

“Pardon me?” Geraci said, though he knew full well what the word meant.

“Smart-ass,” said Falcone’s bodyguard.

“
Wiiiiise guy, eh?
” said Geraci, in the manner of Curly from the Three Stooges.

Molinari and the two bodyguards laughed. “That’s pretty good,” Molinari said. Geraci obliged him with a perfect
nyuck-nuck-nyuck
laugh. This, too, amused everyone but Falcone.

The conversation was sporadic, inhibited by the bumpy flight and the name on Geraci’s pilot’s license. They talked for a while about restaurants and then about the title fight at the Cleveland Armory that they were planning to attend tonight instead of going to Vegas to see Fontane—an invitation-only show, courtesy of Michael Corleone, to kick off a Teamsters convention. They talked, too, about
The Untouchables,
which they both liked, though partly because they found it funny. Geraci had heard it on the radio and been irritated by the stereotypical straight-arrow cops and spaghetti-slurping, bloodthirsty Italians. He’d never seen the television show, though. He was a reader. He’d sworn never to own a television set, but last year, Charlotte and the girls had worn him down. He knew a guy—Geraci always
knew a guy
or
had a gu
y
—
and one day a truck pulled up and two men in suits unloaded the biggest one anybody made. Before long, Charlotte was serving meals on TV trays. Saturday became “TV dinner night,” an abomination Geraci was glad his mother never lived to see. Geraci would’ve liked to drag that television to the curb, but a man must pick his battles. A week later, a contractor Geraci knew pulled a crew off the parking garage they were building in Queens and had them dig up the wild mulberry bushes behind Geraci’s in-ground swimming pool. A couple weeks after that, Geraci had his own little house back there, his den: a refuge from the noise and the zombie feeling he got when he used that goddamned television to watch anything but sports.

Geraci nosed the plane down into the clouds. “We’re beginning our descent.”

The plane was bucking. The passengers eyed every strut, every bolt, every screw and rivet, as if they expected it all to break apart.

Geraci tried to trust his instruments and not his eye or his anxieties. He breathed evenly. Soon the shit-brown surface of the lake came into view.

“Rattlesnake Island,” said Molinari, pointing. “Right?”

“Roger that,” said Geraci, using the voice again. “That’s pilot talk, fellas.”

“We’re landing on that?” Falcone said. “That fucking little landing strip?”

The island was only forty-some acres, a fifteenth the size of New York’s Central Park, and most of it, from the air, seemed to be taken up by a golf course and an alarmingly small landing strip. A long dock protruded north from Rattlesnake Island so far it was practically in Canadian waters, which of course, during Prohibition, had been useful. The privately owned island was so tangentially a part of the United States that it issued its own postage stamps.

“It’s a lot bigger than it looks from up here,” Geraci said, though he wasn’t so sure about that. Not only had he never landed on the island; even though his
padrino
for all intents and purposes owned it, Geraci had never been there.

Molinari patted Falcone’s hand. “Relax, my friend,” Molinari said.

Falcone nodded, sat back in his seat, and tried to coax a last drop of coffee from his cup.

Moments before they were about to touch down, the plane caught a downdraft, as if it had been slapped out of the sky by a giant hand. It plummeted toward the surface of the lake. Geraci could see the froth of the waves. He pulled up, got control, leveled the wings, buzzed a cabin near the shore.

“Oooo-kay,” Geraci said, yanking back the stick. “Let’s try that again.”

“Jesus, kid,” Molinari said, though he was only a few years older than Geraci. Softly, Geraci muttered the Twenty-third Psalm, in Latin. When he got to the part about fearing no evil, instead of “for Thou art with me,” he said, “for I am the toughest motherfucker in the valley.”

Falcone laughed. “Never heard that in Latin.”

“You know Latin?” Molinari said.

“I studied to be a priest,” said Falcone.

“Yeah, for about a week. Don’t distract the pilot, Frank.”

Geraci flashed a thumbs-up.

He found a pocket of smooth air, and his second attempt to land was improbably soft. Only now, the flight over, did one of the bodyguards start to vomit. Geraci caught a whiff of it and stifled the gag it provoked. Then the other bodyguard threw up on himself. Moments later, men in yellow slickers appeared on the end of the runway to meet them.

Geraci sucked fresh air from his window, and his passengers got out. Men opened umbrellas for them, put chocks behind the wheels, lashed down the wings, and took all but one of the suitcases. A big black carriage, lined in red velvet and drawn by white horses, waited for them onshore, to carry them up the hill—a hundred-yard journey, tops.

Geraci watched the Dons and their puke-stained men rush to get into the carriage. Once they were inside the lodge, Geraci lugged his suitcase up the hill alone, opened the cellar doors, and disappeared down the steps, into the remains of what was once a thriving casino, past the bandstand and the cobwebby bar to the dressing room. He flicked on the light. The rear wall was made out of the kind of sliding steel door he associated with automotive garages in Brooklyn, but otherwise the room looked like a high-roller suite in Vegas: king-sized bed, red velvet everywhere, elevated bathtub. Behind the steel door was a room full of canned goods, gas masks, oxygen canisters, generators, a water-treatment system, a ham radio, and a bank vault. Underneath, carved into the bedrock, was a gigantic fuel oil tank and, supposedly, other rooms and more supplies. So long as Don Forlenza had any warning at all, whatever happened—if the state police staged a raid, if strange men came to kill him, if the Russians dropped the bomb—he could hide down here for years. Forlenza controlled the union that worked the salt mine under the lake near Cleveland; rumor had it that a crew did nothing day and night but dig tunnels to and from Rattlesnake Island. Geraci had to laugh. A kid like him, son of a truck driver, standing inside the kind of place a regular person would never even hear about. He carried the bag of money into the other room. He set it down in front of the vault.

He stood there, staring at the bag.

Money was an illusion. The leather of the bag had more inherent value than the thousands of little slips of paper inside it. “Money” is nothing more than thousands of markers, drawn up by a government that couldn’t cover one percent of what it had out on the street. Best racket in the world: the government puts out all the markers it wants and passes laws so they can never be called in. From what Geraci understood, those slips of paper
represented
a month’s worth of the skim from a Las Vegas casino in which both the Corleones and Forlenza had points, along with a sizable gift in consideration of Don Forlenza’s hospitality and influence. Those stacks of bills
represented
the labors of hundreds of men, reduced to scrip, to wampum, exchanged for the negotiating power of a few, the actions of fewer yet. Worthless paper that Don Forlenza would accept unthinkingly. Just markers.

Minchionaggine,
his father would say.
You think too much.

Fredo rolled down the window and handed the customs agent his driver’s license. “Nothing to declare.”

“Are those oranges?”

“Are what oranges?”

“In the backseat. On the floor there.”

Sure enough, there they were: a mesh bag of Van Arsdale oranges. They weren’t
his
oranges per se. Fredo wouldn’t eat an orange if it were the last fucking morsel of food on earth.

“Sir, could you just pull your vehicle over to that lane there? Next to that man in the white uniform?”

“You can have the oranges. Keep ’em, toss ’em, I don’t care. They’re not mine.” His father had been buying oranges the day Fredo saw him get shot. One of the bullets pulverized an orange on the way into the old man’s gut. A lot of things from that day were fuzzy. Fredo remembered fumbling with his gun. He remembered watching the men run away up Ninth Avenue, leaving Fredo unfired upon, too insignificant for even a single bullet. He remembered that orange. He did not remember failing to check to see if his father was dead and instead sitting on the curb weeping, even though the picture of him doing so had won the photographer all kinds of prizes. “I forgot they were even there.”

“Mr. Frederick.” The agent was studying Fredo’s driver’s license. It was under a fake name, Carl Frederick, but it was real, right from the Nevada DMV. “How much have you had to drink this morning?”

Fredo shook his head. “Over there, huh? By that guy?”

“Yes, sir. If you will, please.”

Two men dressed like Detroit cops were making their way toward the man in white. Fredo pulled over and reached around to the backseat, grabbing the yellow shirt and draping it over the whiskey bottle. The man in white asked him to please step away from the car.

This was more or less exactly how it had happened to his brother Sonny. If this
was
a setup and they were there to kill him, the only chance he had was to reach under the seat,
right now,
get his gun, and come out of the car shooting. But what if they were for real? In which case he’d have killed a cop or two and might as well be dead. Though Mike had gotten away with it.

Think.