The Godfather Returns (55 page)

She wasn’t hurt. No one seemed to have seen her. The only thing she felt was awe. She wasn’t screaming or crying. She’d had the mental strength to go through with this and the physical strength to brace herself against the wheel, even with a badly injured hand. The hand was killing her now, but on impact she hadn’t felt a thing.

About fifty yards from the wreck she saw one of his shoes but didn’t even break stride.

She told herself not to look. But as she was about to turn onto M Street, she couldn’t help but look back.

From the top of the hill, the damage to the car didn’t look bad at all. Billy was still on the hood, motionless. A pool of blood was spreading across the cobblestones. At first she couldn’t tell where all that blood was coming from, until she realized that his legs were not crumpled underneath the front bumper. Far behind the car, under the alley’s lone streetlight, lay the severed bottom half of his body.

She felt no remorse whatsoever.

The walk home might have taken her a minute or a day, Francesca couldn’t have said. All the way home, enduring the pain in her hand and the almost as severe pain from the lurches her heart made every time she heard a siren, she didn’t look behind her, not once.

Kathy was at the table, lost in her writing, and Sonny was asleep in his room.

Francesca sat heavily down on the sofa.

“Did Billy call?”

“I don’t know,” Kathy said, not looking up. “I unplugged the phone to work. I hope you weren’t worried. Sonny was a blast. A doll. Everything went great. How’s your hand?”

“Remember when I found out Billy was cheating on me, and you said I should kill him? Well, I did it.”

Kathy started to laugh, then looked closer at her sister and, eyes wide, stifled it. She rushed over to the sofa. “Oh, my God, you—”

“Look at this,” Francesca said, extending the folder to her sister.

“Tell me everything,” Kathy said. “Tell me everything
fast.
”

The police showed up about an hour after Francesca did, maybe five minutes after Kathy got on the bus that would take her to Union Station and the night’s last train back to New York. There was no trace of her in Francesca’s apartment. Kathy hadn’t even told her mother and her mother’s fiancé, Stan the Liquor Man, that she’d gone to Washington for fear Sandra would immediately start laying on the guilt about how long it had been since Kathy had come to see them in Florida.

When the police gave Francesca the news, she ran down the hall to her bedroom, screaming in not-quite-mock hysteria. She hit the wall with the palm of her left hand—hard but of course not hard enough to hurt anything. Still, the noise it made was convincing. When they caught up to her, there was a hole in the wall and Francesca’s hand was, in their opinion, broken and starting to swell. The ice that had in fact just brought the swelling down dramatically had been flushed down the toilet.

Miraculously, Sonny slept through all of this. After the police left, and after the doctor sent over by Danny Shea’s secretary left, too, Francesca unplugged the telephone and stood over her son’s bed and watched him sleep, his golden football helmet on the pillow beside him.

She would have to tell him. She would call Kathy in New York, and Kathy would call everyone else: their mother, even Billy’s brother and his parents. But Francesca would, somehow, have to shoulder the burden of telling Sonny.

She went back out to the kitchen and took the file out from behind her pots and pans, where she’d hidden it. She paged through it again, marveling that anyone would betray his own family like this. And for what? His career? He was rich. Francesca’s family had connections. Her family could have
been
Billy’s insurance.

Francesca knew what it was to grow up without a father. She did not know what it was like to grow up with a father who was willing to destroy his own family.

She still felt no remorse.

For now, she’d tell Sonny that Daddy had had an accident and was in Heaven with baby Carmela. But someday, she vowed, she’d tell the boy the truth.

She plugged the phone back in and called Kathy to tell her what had happened. As part of the plan she’d worked out a few hours before, Kathy had told Francesca to betray nothing on the phone, in case Billy had had them bugged. Kathy and Francesca had a fake conversation about what happened and a real one about who Kathy should call.

It was getting close to dawn. It would be late in Nevada now, too. Even so, Francesca called. He’d want to know.

“Sorry to wake you, Uncle Mike. It’s just . . . there’s been an accident.”

The next day—as Kathy had predicted—the secretary at Billy’s office mentioned that Francesca had come by to get a file for Billy. There was nothing incriminating or unusual about this. She hadn’t left the office angry or distraught. Billy had several different files at home, and Francesca produced them. The one marked
Insurance
was a personal file of Billy’s. No one outside her immediate family ever asked to see it.

Francesca’s whereabouts after the trip to the Justice Department were easy to prove. The counter people at Eastern Market Lunch said that of course they’d seen Francesca and little Sonny there the night before.

The people in the apartment upstairs said they’d seen Francesca and Sonny come home not long after dark. For at least two hours after that there had been typing coming steadily from below.

Francesca confirmed this. She said that she’d been writing a letter to her sister in New York, which she’d mailed not long before the police arrived. She said this in the presence of the best criminal defense lawyer in New York (an arrangement quietly made by Tom Hagen). A few days later, Kathy (by now ably represented by the same lawyer) said she’d received the letter but had thrown it away. As several friends and relatives (including their mother, Sandra) could and did attest, the twins had grown apart in recent years. One happy consequence of this unhappy story would be the way it served to bring the twins together again, as close as they’d ever been.

The steering wheel and gearshift of the Dual-Ghia seemed to have been wiped of fingerprints (the effect of Francesca’s Ace bandage, actually). Still, detectives identified four sets of prints. Three came from the members of the family for which this was the only car—Billy, Francesca, and Sonny Van Arsdale (Kathy had both kept her gloves on for the short drive from Union Station to her sister’s apartment and remembered that she’d kept them on). The fourth set—found in both the front seat and back—came from a woman with whom Billy Van Arsdale had had an ongoing affair.

The police were able to find several people who’d seen this woman on the very afternoon of Billy’s death, checking into a hotel on Dupont Circle and leaving in tears approximately ninety minutes later. The woman had confessed to several people in her office that Billy had ended his relationship with her that day. Several months before, she’d confessed to many of these same friends that Billy had impregnated her and coerced her into having an abortion.

When detectives questioned her about this, she was openly distraught. They arrested her and charged her with second-degree murder.

BOOK IX

Summer 1962

Chapter 32

C
ARMINE
M
ARINO’S ARREST
turned out to be the international incident that everyone involved with his trip to Cuba had feared.

The scope of what the CIA was trying to do in Cuba came as a shock to President Shea. Publicly, he made it clear that the United States would cooperate in any way it could to bring Marino, an Italian national, to justice (for its part, the Italian government said that it had several Carmine Marinos on record, but none matching the description of the notorious killer). Marino had been living in the United States for six years. The Cuban dictator said that he held President Shea personally responsible. The Soviet premier issued no public statement on the matter, but he did come to Havana for the double’s lavish funeral.

Privately, President Shea spent many long hours meeting with his national security team and screaming at his CIA director. But before the president got the chance to confront his father with his suspicions of the old man’s involvement in the matter, the Ambassador had a massive stroke. He’d live for several more years, but he’d had his last conversation.

Marino’s affiliation with what the newspapers had never stopped calling “the Corleone crime family” was easy enough to document. Even the papers still controlled by the Family had little choice but to follow suit with their competitors and investigate the many rumors that the young gangster had not acted alone.

In public, the attorney general scoffed at any notion of a connection between the federal government and what he was now calling “the Mafia.” In a private meeting with his staff, he unveiled an aggressive new plan to prosecute organized crime. Billy Van Arsdale was irreplaceable, he told them, but their efforts would be dedicated to his memory.

The FBI director had not forgotten his meeting with Tom Hagen many years before, when the future congressman had produced that grainy black-and-white image of the director on his knees, fellating his top assistant. His current situation gave grimly comic new meaning to being caught between a rock and a hard place. Still, the director had no choice, for now, but to go along with the attorney general’s bold initiative.

At the United Nations, the usual sorts of intermediaries—small countries with good educational systems and disbanded armies—were dispatched to conduct negotiations to deport or extradite Carmine Marino either to the supposed country of his birth or to the United States, where he’d been months away from becoming a citizen. At minimum, the negotiators wanted to ensure that Marino was given a swift and fair trial in Cuba. The Cuban government made a big show of meeting with these men, but Marino was of most use to Cuba where he was: safely imprisoned, the sword of justice suspended indefinitely over his bare neck.

Whether Marino was tortured remains to this day a matter that can spark debate. But by all accounts, he never told anyone anything.

Soon, other crises, including another, more ominous one between the United States and Cuba, shoved the assassination of the dictator’s double and its thorny aftermath off the pages of the world’s newspapers. It reemerged on the front page of the official state newspaper of Cuba when Carmine Marino tried to escape and was shot. Few American newspapers ran the story anywhere close to the front. It barely rated a mention on TV. In no case was the official story questioned.

Concealed in a tunnel underneath Madison Square Garden, two hours before Johnny Fontane’s sold-out concert, Michael Corleone, in a new but classically styled tuxedo, waited for his
consigliere.
Michael lit a cigarette with his brother’s old lighter. This was, he thought, the problem with being early. Waiting.

Michael’s return to New York had been rumored for months. The men in his and other Families wanted him back. And why not? Those who stayed on Michael’s good side got rich. But it wasn’t just those men who engaged in speculation about Michael’s next move. The public was just as intrigued. The rumors were reported by every newspaper in the city. He had, to his horror, become something of a folk hero. Hundreds of crimes were rumored to be his doing, and he’d never once been charged with any of them. Thugs like Louie Russo and Emilio Barzini were gone, and Michael was still kicking. Most of the Dons in America had been arrested in upstate New York, and Michael—who, common sense decreed, must have been there—wasn’t seen within a thousand miles of the place. Brilliant men in his own Family—Sally Tessio, Nick Geraci—had questioned his authority and were no longer around to question it further.

He had also, not incidentally, grown into his good looks. His suits were exquisitely tailored. His hair was as perfect and his teeth were as white as the president’s. He was a war hero. He flew his own airplane. If he said
Jump,
even an icon of cool like Johnny Fontane would say
How high?
He’d withstood the grief of losing his two likable brothers. He’d loved and lost, twice, and managed to go on. Barely a day went by without the newpapers mentioning or picturing the progress of his new romance with the glamorous Tony award–winning actress Marguerite Duvall. She lived in New York now. Only a matter of time before he did, too, right?

For savvy New Yorkers, there was another tantalizing matter, the legendary ability of people like Michael Corleone to make urban neighborhoods safer than small Lutheran towns in Iowa. All over the city, developers tried to figure out how to give away property to him, knowing they’d make it up when everything around it appreciated.

Michael heard Tom Hagen call his name.

Tom left his bodyguards with Michael’s and came down the tunnel alone. They embraced.

“You ready?”

Michael nodded. “It’s just dinner, right?”

“Just dinner,” Tom said. “Right. It’s this way.”

They headed toward what was ordinarily the locker room of the basketball team that would come to play the New York Knicks, where the heads of the Five Families of New York and their respective
consiglier
e
s were meeting for a catered, celebratory dinner. For the first time, all four of the other Dons—Black Tony, Leo the Milkman, Fat Paulie Fortunato, and the newest one, Ozzie Altobello, who’d taken over for the late Rico Tattaglia, who’d died of natural causes—were friends of the Corleones.

“C’mon, Mike.” Tom put an arm around him. “Everything’s going to be all right. You tried to do things that had never been done. You tried to do the impossible, and you almost did it. Damn close. You can’t kick yourself over it.”

“Do I look like I’m kicking myself over it?”

“Not to the untrained eye.” Tom squeezed his shoulder, in the same tender way Vito Corleone had when he was asking for a favor. “You’re the sort of man who only pays attention to what he doesn’t have. Which is what makes you a great man, but there comes a time when you have to step back and appreciate what you do have.”

Michael was tempted to say that there wasn’t anything he had that he really wanted. But that was wrong. He knew that. He had two great kids, a brother and a sister who loved him. The memories of a happy childhood. The will to regroup and try again. Untold riches, in the greatest country on earth, which practically demands that a person reinvent himself.

Tom let his arm drop. They were on the threshold of where the dinner would be.

“If he’s out there,” Tom said, “we’ll find him.” He did not say Geraci’s name. It was unspeakable now. “No one can hide forever.”

Michael said that he wasn’t so sure. They’d both heard stories of Mafiosi in Sicily who’d gone underground and weren’t heard from for twenty or even thirty years, and America was a lot bigger place than Sicily.

“It’s also full of people with a hell of a lot bigger mouths. If he’s out there, I have to believe that we’ll eventually find him.”

“You have to believe that, huh?”

“A boy’s gotta have hope, Mikey.”

From upstairs came the sound of Fontane’s sound check. His big arrogant anthem, the one he’d always professed to hate.

“I have hope,” Michael said.

Tom Hagen opened the door.

The other Dons shouted Michael’s name and, beaming, rushed to greet him.

In a ballroom-sized cavern underneath the lodge on Rattlesnake Island, where he was prepared to stay as long as he could, Nick Geraci finally finished that two-volume history of Roman warfare, the only books he’d had time to take with him. There were others down there, but they were dime novels and pornos, things Geraci couldn’t bring himself to read even in weak moments. He’d lost track of day and night, but, bored, he went to sleep, and in what functioned for him as morning, he made himself a pot of coffee, took out a notebook, and started to write.
Fausto’s Bargain,
he’d call it. It would blow the lid off the world of American crime.

What did he know about writing a book?

Fuck it. What did anyone know? Begin. That’s what a person needs to know. He began.

“We live by a code,” he wrote, “which is more than you can say for your government, which I’ve seen enough of from the inside to speak about with some authority. In the time it will take you to read this book, your government will take part in more killings and other crimes than the men in my tradition have done in its seven centuries of existence. Believe me. Probably you won’t. Suit yourself. No disrespect, but that’s what makes you, dear reader, a sucker. On behalf of my former associates, and if I may be so bold also your president, we thank you.”

He stopped. He couldn’t stay here forever, but arrangements had been made so that he could stay here a hell of a long time. Certainly long enough to write a book.

Sometimes at night, he thought he could hear drilling—the crew that was digging the tunnel that, supposedly, would one day connect him to Cleveland. Maybe he was imagining things. Maybe by the time they finished, he’d be gone, or dead. His chances weren’t good. Slim and none, and the word on the street was, slim just got whacked.

Nick Geraci laughed. Miserable as he was, he had it all over slim.

Michael Corleone and Francesca Van Arsdale emerged from the elevator into an empty, blindingly white penthouse apartment. Roger Cole followed. Al Neri punched the red button and waited in the elevator. Kathy Corleone had stayed downstairs with little Sonny, in the suite that, if Michael bought the building, was earmarked for the twins.

The penthouse took up the whole top floor, the fortieth, but it was a small building. Michael strode across the gleaming marble floor to the windows overlooking the East River and Queens. The building was plain, almost ugly, from the outside, tucked behind a bigger building on a cul-de-sac at the end of Seventy-second Street. The lower floors were filled with offices. Security guards were stationed by the elevator to the apartments on the top floors; it would be easy to have those people replaced by men Neri chose himself. And the penthouse required a special key. This place would be more secure than either the complex at Lake Tahoe or the mall in Long Beach. Cole’s own company had gutted and remodeled the apartment, long before Michael told him what he was looking for, so there was no chance of a repeat of the bugging debacle in Tahoe.

Francesca was gasping at the beauty of the view and the apartment. For weeks, Michael had expected the shock of what happened with Billy to bring her low, but it never happened. He was beginning to realize it never would. She had become, even more than her all-American football-star brother, the closest living embodiment of her father’s single-minded toughness. Killing her husband was just the kind of hotheaded thing Sonny would have done. She’d had no way of knowing that Michael had already taken care of this. Tom Hagen had made Billy an offer he couldn’t refuse. He’d have been a resource for the Corleones, not a nemesis. For a brief, shining moment, they’d had a person inside the Justice Department. And then he’d been cut in half by his own wife, with his own car. Michael would make certain Francesca never learned the truth.

Michael pointed down the hallway. “The kids’ bedrooms would be . . . ?”

“Right,” Cole said. “That way.”

Cole was probably the most famous developer and real estate speculator in New York. Born Ruggero Colombo, he grew up in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement near the Corleones. He often told the heartwarming story of the day Vito Corleone convinced their landlord not to evict the Colombos, ignoring the no-pets clause in the lease (and foregoing the opportunity to rent the apartment for more money to another family) so that little Ruggero could keep his beloved but noisy mongrel puppy (the namesake of Cole’s company, King Properties). Vito also paid for Roger Cole to get his business degree from Fordham. Cole had made Michael Corleone millions—silently at first and now publicly. If Michael had only had more time to develop a few more relationships like the one he had with Cole, he might have been able to stay true to his promise to Kay and his father. It wasn’t too late. He could try again. But for now, he was back.

“How often do you get to see them?”

“Who?”

“Your family,” he said. “Tony and Mary.”

For a moment, Michael had thought Roger meant his theoretically former business associates. “I’m seeing them tomorrow.”

The rooms were big for Manhattan, small compared to what they’d had in Tahoe. “They’ll like this, I think.”

“What about you?” Cole asked. “Do you like it? Because if you don’t I’ve got a couple other places that could work. If you have time.”

“Who’s the seller?” Michael said.

Cole smiled. “King Properties, every square foot.”

Which meant that as Cole’s silent partner Michael already had a piece of it. “And the whole building’s for sale?”

“Not officially. Just the apartments. But for you, of course.”

He could draw his family closer to him than ever. Kathy had gotten a teaching job at City College; she and Francesca would live together and raise little Sonny. Connie and her kids would move into the other big suite on that floor. Tom and Theresa could have the whole floor under that. Anyone who moved here, he could make room for them and keep them safe.