The Godfather's Revenge (14 page)

“It was real nice of you to leave those guys waitin’, by the way,” Eddie said. “I’d have hated like hell to miss out on the chance to solve even more of the world’s fucking problems.”

“I been on the phone.”

“On the phone lining up someone to clean up this dump, I hope. Or do I have to do every goddamned thing myself?”

“The guys can do it.”

“If the guys could do it, they’d have done it. The guys ain’t here.” It was a Saturday, Columbus Day on top of that.

Momo laughed. “You may have noticed this ain’t exactly a report-to-work-early line of work.”

“It’s a do-what-you’re-fucking-told line of work,” Eddie said. “Get a cleaning lady, a service, whatever.”

“Don’t look at me like I ain’t doin’ my share,” Momo said. “I been runnin’ around all morning, entertaining the yats.”

“The yats?”

“Our New Orleans friends.” Meaning Carlo Tramonti, and some of his associates. Tramonti was in town to address the Commission tonight. The job of squiring them around had fallen to Eddie Paradise and his crew, on top of everything else. “Yats. As in
where y’at
? It’s a common term down there.”

“Fuck do you know that?” said Eddie.

“I get out.”

“You get out? You barely get out of Brooklyn.”

“What the fuck do you call Mexico?” Momo held out his tanned arms as Exhibit A.

Eddie was going to say something about the faggot sunlamp, but let it go. “I call Mexico,” Eddie said, “the exception that proves the rule.”

Momo shook his head.

“What?” Eddie said. “C’mon. Say it. Just say it.”

Because Eddie Paradise figured that what Momo would call Mexico was the consolation prize, the vacation he got instead of the promotion he deserved. The sooner they got it out between them, the better.

“Say it,” Eddie said. Because he sure as hell wasn’t going to.

“Say what?” Momo said.

“Mexico,” Eddie said. “Just fucking say it.”

Momo held up his hands in mock surrender. “I don’t have the first goddamned idea what you’re talking about.”

Eddie Paradise knew that in a situation like this, Michael Corleone would smoke a man out with silence. He tried counting up to his age, which was a tip Geraci had taught him. If you maintain eye contact, people will give you a second for every year you’ve lived.

“I don’t know what you’re drivin’ at,” Momo said (as Eddie got to thirteen). “But for your information, I was out of Brooklyn
last night
, picking up the yats at the airport.”

Eddie decided to let it go.

“I was thinking, you like that nigger rock and roll so much,” Momo said, “I can’t believe you never heard of the word
yat.
”

Eddie didn’t have to ask what one thing had to do with the other. Music was an ongoing topic of affectionate bickering between them. The Roach meant only that he was incredulous on both fronts. The running joke successfully lightened the tone of things.

“So,” Eddie said, “is that something you can call a man to his face? Yat?”

“Everybody calls me Roach, and I got a sense of humor about that there.”

“Yeah, but you take offense at
dago
,
guinea
,
wop
, et cetera and so forth.”

“That’s when it comes from people who ain’t like us.”

“You ain’t exactly like Tramonti and them,” Eddie pointed out.

“Maybe not, but, no offense, I see some resemblance between you and what’s his face.”

“Funny,” Eddie said, but again he was able to translate effortlessly. Tramonti had five younger brothers. The one Momo meant was Augie the Midget, his
consigliere,
who wasn’t a true-blue midget but was even shorter than Eddie. “So where are they?”

“The yats? I got ’em a driver and a Cadillac, got ’em a charter tour of the harbor. After that, they take a late lunch at Manny Wolf’s Chop House. Best table in the house, and no matter how hard they try, the tab comes to us.”

Eddie nodded in approval.

“Manny’s, also, is out of Brooklyn, for your information.”

“I hit a nerve, eh?” Eddie grinned, the extra-large one he’d practiced so it looked like he was both joking around and not to be fucked with.

“I’m just making a point.”

“You don’t have to actually
go
to Manny Wolf’s to make a reservation,” Eddie said.

“You have to go there to know it’s good.”

“Every wiseguy in New York knows it’s good.”

“Goddamn. You know goddamned
well
I been out of Brooklyn.”

The Roach was a literal-minded man, or pretended to be. All in the game. “Maybe you’re right,” Eddie conceded. “Come to think of it, the state pen is also out of Brooklyn.”

WHEN THE KID CAME BACK WITH THE NEWSPAPERS
, Eddie finally saw what Spanos had been about to say.

Protests were expected at the parade because of Johnny Fontane’s difficulties with the Nevada Gaming Commission and his
alleged ties to the oft-investigated Michael Corleone, as well as to crime syndicates in New Jersey, Chicago, and Los Angeles
. That was a low blow—
oft-investigated
—though Eddie understood that only in the courts (and then only theoretically) are you innocent until proven guilty. In the press, you’re whatever they say you are.

On the bright side, they used an unquestionably flattering photo of the Don, dressed in a tux, leaving a benefit for the Metropolitan Opera with his niece Francesca, who helped run the Vito Corleone Foundation. That was a good indicator of the paper’s true position. It’s always possible to find an unflattering picture of anybody.

There was a long stretch of the article in which upright citizens made the self-evident point that Italian-Americans are honest, hardworking people who helped build America. Most had never even seen a so-called gangster. Toward the end, after some stupid shit about some young broad Fontane was supposedly balling, the story mentioned the fireworks display, scheduled for that night, on a pier in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, sponsored by the Italo-American Policemen’s Guild but underwritten by an anonymous donor,
which an unnamed source has confirmed to be Michael Corleone
.

Eddie tossed the newspaper to Momo and picked up another one. Again, the anonymous source was mentioned. The donation had actually come from the Vito Corleone Foundation, but that was reporters for you. Those people are like puppies: cute, fun to have around, wagging their tails at you every time you feed them. But sooner or later, they’re going to chew your slippers and piss on your rug. Whether it’s an accident or spite, you’ll never know. They’re dumb animals, and you’re a sap if you ever think otherwise. Still. They’re cute. Given enough time and free food, you can teach them to do some amazing tricks.

Again in this paper, the editor had chosen a glamorous-looking photo of Michael Corleone, this one with the lovely and talented Miss Marguerite Duvall on his arm. These newspaper guys had almost as much invested in building up the legend of Michael Corleone as Eddie Paradise did.

“Ten to one,” Eddie said, “that the unnamed source there is that public-relations company Hagen’s got working for us.”

A white lie. Hiring that outfit had been Eddie’s doing, an initiative he was proud of. Fontane’s getting tabbed as grand marshal—that was Eddie’s doing as well. He had a guy on the committee. Eddie, knowing that Fontane was the late Vito Corleone’s godson, figured it would please Michael Corleone to see Fontane get some positive publicity to counteract the negative shit he was facing because of those Nevada hard-ons in their ten-gallon hats. It hadn’t worked out perfectly, but it stood to work out. Like they say, no publicity is bad publicity.

“You think so, eh?” The Roach was by no means a stupid man, but he was a slow reader.

“It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, leaking it. Good for the Don’s image and thus-and-such. Y’know? How could they fucking know it’d wind up in the same story with that Fontane business?”

The phone rang.

Momo answered. He listened for a few moments, told the caller to hold on, and covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Yeah, well,
twenty
to one,” the Roach said, handing Eddie the receiver, “it’s why your Greek fireworks guys find themselves stuck sideways on shakedown street.”

Eddie sighed.

But in the end, the way Eddie figured it was like this: there are two kinds of people in this world, the ones who break things and the ones who fix things. If you’re born to be a fixer, then what are you supposed to do? Complain? No. Hell, no. What you do is, you fix. You make use of your God-given talents and go out in the world every goddamned day and you fix.

S
omeone from the parade called Johnny Fontane from the lobby. “Did we wake you, sir?”

“No,” he said, though they had.

“Because we called earlier,” the man said.

Johnny remembered having a dream in which he answered the phone but it kept on ringing. “I had a meeting,” Johnny said. But he’d slept through that, too. He’d slept most of the morning. He didn’t have time to call Ginny. And it was too late, anyway. The parade people had said they’d send a car for Lisa; she must already be downtown. “I’ll be right down,” he said.

“That’s a relief, sir.”

Johnny called the number he had for Michael Corleone. A service answered.

“Could you tell Mr. Corleone I’m running late?” Johnny sat on the bed, bouncing the meat of his fist against the marble-topped nightstand. “We were supposed to have a…coffee together this morning and…” What excuse would be good enough?
Be a man,
he could hear his godfather saying. “…and I was exhausted from my trip and fell asleep.
Mea culpa
. Please tell him I’m sincerely sorry, and if it’s in any way possible—”

“Hold, please,” she said.

He
was
exhausted. It had been one of those naps that just made him more tired.

Moments later she came back on and told him that Mr. Corleone said that immediately after the parade would be fine.

Johnny splashed cold water on his face, grabbed his suit jacket—dove-gray, part of his own signature line of suits—and was about to run out when out of the corner of his eye he saw those morning newspapers. He stopped. He gathered them up, stuffed them, emphatically, in the trash, spit on the lot of them, then ran to the elevator.

A squadron of handlers rushed him out a side entrance and into a limo. They got away clean.

The head handler was a bland-looking bald man in a cheap black suit. As they headed downtown, the man barked cryptic instructions into a handheld radio, the same kind Johnny had seen the Secret Service use. Johnny’s hangover was now in full eyeball-hammering bloom.

“Was there a…” Johnny didn’t know how to ask the handler about the protestors. He didn’t want to make it seem like it bothered him. “A crowd?”

“Sir?”

“That protest I read about,” Johnny said.

“At the hotel?” he said. “No.”

“What about where the parade is? Where it starts.”

“We have things very much under control, sir.”

They arrived at the staging area, a few roped-off blocks not far from Times Square. A white VIP tent was set up in the middle of Forty-fourth Street. A lone protestor with a sign turned the other way was giving a TV interview. A clutch of reporters, cordoned off behind a wooden police barrier, faced the other way, too, and didn’t see Johnny until he was ducking into the tent, too late for him to make anything of their shouted questions except the words
Johnny!
and
Is it true…?

Johnny Fontane, a virtuoso at working a crowd of well-wishers and people who wanted a piece of him, worked his way past the people on his guest list—schoolteachers, nuns, high school friends—making a polite and efficient beeline for his daughter. Even his old friend Danny Shea failed to get more of Johnny’s attention than a dead-eyed nod.

When Lisa saw Johnny, her face lit up. His knees nearly buckled from the joy of seeing it. “What a
hoot
!” she said, hugging him.

She was wearing a red cashmere turtleneck, and the black Italian knee-high boots he’d bought her the last time he was in New York.

“Hoot?”

“
Canoodling
? What a word!”

“Yeah? It means kissing. It—”

“I know what it means, Daddy. How funny! They thought we were a couple!”

“I know what they thought. You’re not angry, or, I don’t know—”

“It’s hilarious.”

Johnny cocked his head. “Those other things in there—”

She waved him off. “Old news, pun intended.”

“
Jaaaaahn
.” The attorney general, his phony Brahmin accent dialed up all the way, clapped a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. Flanking him was a man Johnny didn’t know but whose very bearing screamed
cop.
Northern Italian, Johnny would guess. “Great to see you, Mr. Grand Marshal,” said Danny Shea. “We were all starting to worry.”

Johnny started to introduce him to Lisa.

“We met,” said Danny Shea. “While we were waiting. You have a lovely daughter, Jaaahn.” Lisa shrugged, embarrassed. “How’s the rest of your family?”

“As people used to say in my old neighborhood, they’re good as bread.”

“Good as bread? I never heard that.”

“Because nothing’s as good as Italian bread.”

“How true that is!” Shea said.

He was a man playing to a nonexistent crowd. He and Johnny had once been friends. After Jimmy got elected—due in no small part to the efforts of one Johnny Fontane—the Shea family froze him out, for no reason Johnny could see other than the simple fact that he was Italian. Even after that, when the problem with the Gaming Commission had come up, Johnny had humbled himself and asked if there was any way the administration might intercede and get those Nevada cowboys off Johnny’s balls. Johnny had struggled even to get one of the Shea brothers on the phone, and when he did it was Danny, who’d politely and briefly said there was nothing he could do. Seeing Danny Shea now, pretending to be pals just like old times, made Johnny want to give this soft, pretty-boy shitweasel a hard right cross to those big shiny horse teeth.

“So,” Johnny said. “How’re Jeannie and the kids?”

“They’re fantastic. Say, I’d like you to meet Agent Charles Bianchi of the FBI.”

“I’m a big, big fan, Mr. Fontane,” Bianchi said. “My wife and I have all your records.”

Johnny had been recording for almost thirty years.
Nobody
had all his records. Though if everyone who’d told him they had all his records really
did
have them all, Johnny Fontane could have hired J. Paul Getty to hold the toilet paper and King Farouk to wipe his ass. “Much appreciated,” Johnny said, looping an arm around Lisa. “Food in the mouths of my children.”

Danny Shea and Agent Bianchi laughed louder than he’d given them reason to.

Johnny remembered reading about Bianchi in the newspapers, too; he was an assistant bureau chief out in one of those rectangular states, which made him the highest-ranking Italian-American in the FBI. Johnny was surprised there was anyone even that high up.

“Nice of you to take part in our parade, Mr. Attorney General,” Johnny said. “You got some Italian blood in you we don’t know about?”

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” Danny Shea said. “It’s a great opportunity for all of us to honor the contributions of the hardworking Italian people.”

“The cameras are all outside, Dan,” Johnny said. Lisa laughed, but there was a flicker of anger in Danny Shea’s eyes.

“Well, I think they’re about to start,” Shea said, though no one had signaled to him. He was walking toward the front of the parade, alongside the governor and the mayor, both already out working the crowd. “Duty calls. Anything I can ever do for you, Jaaahn, let me know, all right?”

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

Johnny would grant Danny Shea this: he was the only politician who didn’t steer clear of him. This parade was full of more strivers vying to become the next mayor or governor, more councilmen and Albany nobodies than Carter has liver pills, but did any of them come by and say hello to Johnny Fontane? No. Truth be told, thank God. It gave Johnny a chance to say hello to old friends and to hear compliments about Lisa from the likes of Sister Immaculata, his old music teacher, who must have been a hundred by now and who claimed she’d always known Johnny would make it big. Again and again, these well-wishers said how sorry they were about the protests, and again and again Johnny thanked them and told them it didn’t bother him, it was a small price to pay for an honor such as this.

Finally, the handlers came to get them. Johnny donned his sash—white with red and green letters. “If you don’t want to do this,” he whispered to Lisa, “it won’t hurt my feelings.”

She straightened the sash. She seemed slightly deflated. “Don’t you want me to do it?”

“Of course I do.” Either way, Johnny was afraid he’d set her up to be hurt.

The head handler told the reporters that Mr. Fontane would hold a brief press conference at the end of the parade. After a few noisy complaints, the reporters dispersed.

Johnny and Lisa took their places behind a clown troupe riding in Sicilian carts and a marching band from a Jesuit high school.

The band started off playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“Gee, I didn’t know John Philip Sousa was Italian,” Lisa said.

“Got any aspirin in that purse of yours?”

She gave him a bottle, and he dry-swallowed four.

He nodded toward the band and shook the bottle. “Mind if I hang on to this?”

A security detail appeared, a half dozen cops, two uniformed and four plainclothes. They all seemed to be fans. Johnny asked if this was more security than usual and was assured it was routine. “All the bigwigs get walkalongs,” said the youngest plainclothes. Lisa scrunched up her face, bemused.

Soon after they turned onto Fifth Avenue, on their left were a dozen-plus people, carrying signs that looked like the same person had lettered them, sporting slogans spouting negative stereotypes of Italians. Johnny ignored them. A guy with millions of fans ought to be able to take it in stride when twenty cocksuckers hate him.

As they headed up Fifth Avenue, reporters appeared on the wrong side of the wooden police barriers, shouting questions. The cops minding the barriers were in easy-duty-overtime mode. The walkalongs seemed untroubled.

Johnny put his mouth next to Lisa’s ear. “Just smile and wave,” he said, jaw clenched, continuing to smile and wave. The sole virtue of the band’s pounding out the same Sousa medley over and over was that it drowned out the roving vermin.

The crowd was in Johnny Fontane’s corner. They screamed for him the way they had when he was a teen idol. Off and on, they’d stop chanting
Italia! Italia! Italia!
and chant his name instead. A few times, one of the reporters stumbled over someone’s outstretched foot. Stray protestors were swallowed up by the ten-deep crowd, a sea of billowing Italian flags, and signs proclaiming
WE LOVE YOU JOHNNY
and
FONTANE FOR PRESIDENT
.

“My daughter!” he’d yell out from time to time, pointing at Lisa. It made her blush, but she loved it. If he didn’t think she loved it, he’d have stopped.

The Sicilian clowns had some kind of elaborate puppet act. It was hard to see it from where Johnny was marching, but whatever the clowns were doing, it left the crowd in high spirits as Johnny and his daughter approached.

“Remember that place?” They were approaching FAO Schwarz.

“Every girl remembers that place,” she said. “Every kid.”

“See,” he said, “I maybe never took you to Vegas, but I took you there.”

“That you did.”

“Remember that doll I got you? A Madame Alexander doll.”

“Do I.” The drone of the band made it hard to hear, but her voice seemed to have an edge to it. It was an expensive doll, and she’d begged for it.

“What was wrong with the doll?”

“Nothing,” Lisa said. “Ma wouldn’t let me play with it.”

“She what?”

“She said it was too nice to play with. I used to look up at it on the mantel and cry, but then I forgot about it.”

The reporters had kept pace. Johnny was fairly certain they were too far away to hear anything he and Lisa were saying.

“Your arm tired?” he asked. From the waving. “Because mine is.” His face was frozen in a garish smile that, abetted by the hangover, seemed sure to leave a scar.

“It’s OK,” Lisa said. “I may have picked the wrong shoes, though. This is farther than I thought.”

They were nearing the reviewing stand, by Central Park Zoo. “Not much farther now.”

“I still love them,” she said. “The boots.”

“They are great boots, miss,” said the young walkalong detective. “If you don’t mind me saying so, you certainly have the legs for them.”

Lisa looked down and thanked him. Johnny now realized Lisa had been giving the detective furtive looks the whole parade. He had an elegant Roman nose, wavy black hair, and looked young to have made detective.

In the bleachers was another thicket of protestors—maybe the same dozen-plus cocksuckers. Johnny imagined them cutting over to Madison and racing uptown, signs flailing, hoping for another chance to make their point. Which was
what
? Aside from tax penalties that weren’t his fault and a few stray misunderstandings he’d landed on a few stray jaws, Johnny had never been charged with a crime. Johnny had raised millions for charity, which he’d done quietly and for its own sake, but it still ought to count for something. This Nevada situation was just a publicity stunt by some bigoted political hacks. As for the protests, Johnny shared the sentiments on most of those signs. Criminals
aren’t
heroes. Most Italians never
have
met a gangster. Many
are
doctors, lawyers, industrialists, professors, and priests. There
were
great Italian-Americans who’d have been more worthy. He was excruciatingly aware of his epic shortcomings. He was an artist. He had the requisite self-loathing.