The Godfather Returns (6 page)

The song finished.

Milner lowered the baton and looked to the engineer, who nodded. The people in the studio—even the diminished band—burst into applause. Milner headed toward the booth.

Johnny stood back from the microphone. He looked around at the smiling faces of all these yes-men. Milner returned from the booth and started repositioning microphones. He said nothing. You’d swear the guy was Sicilian, for how little he said, and how much.

“No,” Johnny said. “Thank you all very much, but no. You fellas were great, but I can do better. Let’s give it a shot, okay?”

Milner repositioned another mike.

“That eighth bar, Cy,” Johnny said. “Can you do that up like Puccini?”

Milner fished a wrinkled piece of paper from his shirt pocket, a dry- cleaning receipt it looked like, and sat down at the piano bench, noodled around a bit, scribbled a few notes, gave a few brief directions to various men in the band.

Johnny wouldn’t be working with Eddie Neils anytime soon.

He’d been somewhere, gone somewhere, singing that song, and he could go there again, he was absolutely sure of it, and go deeper, and then do it a dozen more times. He could fill a whole long-playing record with songs that took people out of their lives, and deeper into them, and—it came to him, in a flash—sequence the songs the way Les Halley did back when Johnny was his singer, only all together on a record, so that everything plays off of everything else, in a way and to an extent that nobody, not even the best jazz cats, had ever quite done before.

Phil Ornstein kept congratulating everyone. Philly wasn’t going to be happy to have them spend the whole session on just this one song, but too bad. Johnny Fontane would defy you to show him a record shop where people walked in asking about the new releases from National Records. It was the songs they wanted. It was the singers.

Milner climbed to the podium. His glasses made it look like his regular eye was on the orchestra and his huge eye was on Johnny. Johnny looked down, and again they began.

Eight bars in, Puccini’s ghost somehow cracked the song open even farther, and Johnny filled his lungs with air and swam right in.

Michael and Kay spent the first hour of the flight in relative silence. Once Kay marveled about the startling beauty of the desert, comparing it to the work of abstract painters Michael knew he should know. He pretended to, and she talked about art for a while, and he sat there wondering why, about something so trivial, he hadn’t just been honest.

Michael asked about the move. Kay considered telling him about the day last week when the Clemenzas had shown up at his parents’ old house, which they’d already bought, and found Carmela Corleone standing at the window of her late husband’s office, a room she’d hardly set foot in over the years. She was drunk and mumbling prayers in Latin.
This is my home,
she’d announced.
I’m not moving to no desert.
He’d hear about that soon enough. Who was she kidding? He must already know. “It’s going fine,” Kay said. “Connie’s been a big help.”

Even that neutral comment was loaded. Michael didn’t react to the mention of his sister, but he knew Connie still blamed him for the death of her husband, Carlo, even though an assistant D.A. he knew from Guadalcanal had charged a Barzini button man with the murder.

“Strange,” Kay said after another long silence. “Flying over the desert in a seaplane.”

In every direction, desolate, unpopulated sand and scrub stretched to the horizon. Eventually shapes that turned out to be mountains emerged from the haze to the north.

“How are the kids getting along?” Michael finally asked.

“You saw them this morning,” Kay said. Mary, who was two, had cried and chanted, “Daddy, Daddy,” as they’d left. Anthony, who this time next year would start kindergarten, was sitting under a box on the floor, watching television through a hole. It was a program in which clay figures confront life’s problems: the temptation not to share one’s red wagon or the virtues of admitting one’s role in the shattering of Mom’s sewing lamp. Safe to say the little clay boy would never have to contend with two of his uncles being murdered. His cardigan-sweatered clay daddy would never be called an “alleged underworld figure” in
The New York Times.
His svelte clay grandfather was unlikely to drop dead at his feet. “How did you think they were?”

“They seemed to be making out fine. Do they have friends yet? In the neighborhood?”

“I’m still unpacking, Michael. I haven’t had time—”

“Right,” he said. “I’m not being critical.”

He was close enough to Reno airspace to check in.

“Your parents had a nice trip?” he said.

“They did.” Her father had taught theology at Dartmouth long enough to have a small pension from that, too, augmenting the one he’d been drawing since he’d retired as a pastor five years before. He and Kay’s mother had bought a travel trailer and planned to see America. They’d arrived yesterday, to help Kay get the house together and see their grandkids. “They said the trailer park was so nice they might never leave.” The Castle in the Sand had its own trailer park.

“They’re welcome to stay there as long as they like.”

“That was a joke,” she said. “So what do you have planned? What’s to do in Tahoe?”

“What would you say to dinner and a movie?”

“It’s not even eleven o’clock.”

“Lunch and a movie. A matinee. There’s got to be a matinee we can catch.”

“Okay. Oh, God, Michael, look! It’s beautiful!”

The lake, much bigger than Kay had imagined, was dotted with fishing boats and ringed by mountains. Around most of it, thick dark pine forest extended to the banks. The surface of the water looked as smooth as a lacquered table.

“It is,” he said. “I’ve never seen a more beautiful place.”

He glanced at her. She was swiveling around in her seat, craning her neck to see the splendor into which they were descending. She seemed happy.

Michael came in low, near the shore, and landed the plane not far from a dock and boathouse. There seemed to be nothing else around but woods and a clearing nearby, where a point of land jutted into the lake.

“This is pretty far from the town part,” Kay said.

“I know a great place for lunch,” he said, “right near here.”

As the plane approached the dock, three men in dark suits emerged from the woods.

Kay drew in a breath and pulled back in her seat. The men came out on the dock, and she called her husband’s name.

Michael shook his head. The implication was clear:
Don’t worry. They work for me.

The men climbed out onto the floats and tethered the plane to the dock. The one in charge was Tommy Neri, Al’s nephew. Al—who, in his old NYPD uniform, had emptied a service revolver into Don Emilio Barzini’s chest, and who, with a steak knife taken right from the man’s kitchen, had disemboweled Phillip Tattaglia’s top button man and urinated into the man’s steaming body cavity—was in charge of security for all of the Family-controlled hotels. Like Al, Tommy had been a New York cop. All three looked to be barely out of high school. They said almost nothing and headed back into the woods.

As they did, Kay faced Michael at the foot of the dock. There was both a world of things to say about that and nothing whatsoever.

“Wait right here,” Michael said. He touched the side of his face where it had once been crushed, which he did, probably unconsciously, when he was nervous. For years after that cop had punched him, he’d done nothing, blowing his nose constantly and talking about his ruined looks until finally, for Kay’s sake, he’d had it fixed, after which he’d looked better, but not exactly like before, never again exactly like himself. She had never once told him this.

He walked to the door of the boathouse, reached up onto a ledge, found a key, and went in.

Kay both did and didn’t want to ask whose boathouse this was. What stopped her wasn’t fear of the answer. It was fear of Michael not wanting to be asked.

A moment later, he emerged, thrusting a dozen roses toward her. She moved backward a step. Then she reached forward and accepted them. They kissed.

“Happy anniversary,” Michael said.

“I thought this trip was my present.”

“All part of the same package.”

He ducked back into the boathouse and came out carrying a striped beach blanket and a huge picnic basket covered with a red-checked tablecloth. Two long loaves of Italian bread poked out of the basket, like crossed swords. “Voilà!” he said. With his head, he pointed toward the clearing. “Lunch at the beach.”

Kay led. She set down her flowers and spread out the blanket.

They sat down Indian-style, facing each other. They were both overcome by hunger, and they dug in. At one point Michael dangled a bunch of grapes over Kay’s head.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll bite.” She bit off a grape.

“Nicely done,” Michael said.

She looked into the woods but could not see the men. “That wasn’t what I meant. That wasn’t
only
what I meant.” She paused. But why not ask? It wasn’t a question about business. He’d brought her here on a date. For their anniversary. “Where’d this food come from?”

He pointed across the lake. “I had it delivered.”

“Whose land is this?”

“This land? Here?”

She frowned.

“Oh,” he said. “I guess it’s yours.”

“You guess?”

“It’s yours.” He stood. He pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket. It was a photostat of the deed. Like everything they owned, it had her name on it and not his. “Happy anniversary,” he said.

Kay picked up her roses. That they could afford this, on top of the house in Las Vegas, both appalled her and thrilled her. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time,” she said.

Michael knew he shouldn’t have called this land an anniversary pres-ent, too. He was overdoing it. “Your last present,” he said. He put his right hand on an imaginary Bible and raised his left. “I swear. No more surprises.”

She looked up at him. She ate a strawberry. “You bought land here without telling me?”

He shook his head. “I have an interest in a real estate company that bought it. It’s an investment. I was thinking we could develop the land here, for us. For the family.”

“For the family?”

“Right.”

“Define family,” she said.

He turned around and faced the lake. “Kay, you have to trust me. Things are in a delicate place right now, but nothing’s changed.”

Everything has changed.
But she knew better than to say this. “You move us to Las Vegas and then, before we even unpack, you move us again, up here?”

“Fredo already had things set up for us in Las Vegas. But in the long run Lake Tahoe is a better opportunity. For
us,
Kay. You can work with the architect, build your dream house. It may take a year, even two. Take your time. Get it right. The kids can grow up swimming in this lake, exploring the woods, riding horses, skiing.” He turned to face her. “The day I asked you to marry me, Kay, I said that if everything went right, our businesses would be completely legitimate in five years.”

“I remember,” she said, though this was the first time they’d spoken of this since then.

“That still holds. We’ve had to make some adjustments, it’s true, and not everything went right. I hadn’t counted on losing my father. There were other things, too. A person can’t expect everything in a plan that features human beings to go right. But”—he held up his index finger—“but: We’re close. Despite some setbacks, Kay, we are very, very close.” He smiled and went down on his knees. “Las Vegas already has a certain reputation. In any version of this plan, we’ll retain our hotel and casino businesses there. But Lake Tahoe is different. This is a place that can work for us all, indefinitely. We have enough land here to build any kind of house you want. My mother, your folks if they want. Anybody who wants to be here, there’s room.”

He did not mention his sister or his brother. Kay knew him well enough to be sure this was probably not an accident.

“I can fly the seaplane in and out of here, and any size jet can fly into Reno, which is just up the road. Carson City is less than an hour from here. San Francisco is three.”

“Carson City?”

“The capital.”

“I thought Reno was the capital.”

“Everyone thinks that. It’s Carson City.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve been there on business, to the capitol building itself. You want me to prove it?”

“Sure.”

“It’s Carson City, Kay, believe me. How do you propose I prove it?”

“You’re the one who proposed proving it.”

He picked up an egg. He held it like a dart and flicked it at her.

She caught it and in the same motion threw it back at him. She missed. It sailed past him and two-hopped into the lake, and he laughed.

“It’s nice to see you like this,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t explain it.”

He sat down beside her. “There’s a lot I can’t explain, too, Kay. But I have a vision. It’s the same vision I always had, only now it’s a hell of a lot closer to reality, with our children growing up more the way you did than I did, all-American kids who can grow up to be anything they want. You grew up in a small town; so will they. You went to a good college; so can they.”

“You went to one, too. You went to a better one.”

“You finished. They won’t need to leave for any reason, and certainly not to help with my business. They won’t be influenced by me the way I was by my father, and living here will be a part of that. We’re distancing the family—”

Kay arched an eyebrow.

“Define it however you want, all right? The family. Our family. Ourselves. We’re distancing ourselves from all the”—he picked up a half-empty milk bottle and chugged the rest of it—“from let’s just say New York. That
alone
is going to chart a new course for us. Our holdings in the state of Nevada—this isn’t a very populated state, Kay, not yet—our holdings here will give us a means of reorganizing my business in ways that would have been impossible in New York. We’re already done with the hardest part of this. Mark my words: five years from now, the Corleone Family should be every bit as legitimate as Standard Oil.”