The Godfather's Revenge (51 page)

M
etropolitan Heating & Cooling was an almost perfectly cubical two-story gray cinder-block building in Kenilworth, New Jersey. Black Tony Stracci kept his office upstairs. Nick Geraci arrived in the middle of a downpour. He was characteristically early. He parked in back. Stracci, his old friend, was seated at the window and saw Nick and waved him up.

The Shea assassination had thrown off Nick Geraci’s timetable. His wife was back at home in East Islip, and his daughters were back in school (Barb was getting a master’s in education at Johns Hopkins). But Nick needed a Commission meeting to happen before he could surface, and the one that had been scheduled in late August had been pushed back. Maybe it had been needless. Danny Shea was rumored to be stepping down as A.G.—the unconditional surrender in his “War on the Mafia.” There had been a fear that the investigation that the former Speaker of the House was leading would wash up on the shores of the underworld, but it apparently hadn’t done so. The only accusations Carlo Tramonti faced had been discreet, leveled in whispers. But, necessary or not, the Commission meeting
had
been moved back, and the rumor that Tramonti had had something to do with the president’s killing—the
presumption
he had, which Nick shared—made it risky for Geraci to rely on him to get the Commission votes he’d promised he could deliver, the votes Nick would need to take over as boss. At this point, Carlo Tramonti could deliver Tampa’s Silent Sam Drago, and that was about it. Nick needed three more.

The meeting was back on now—in Staten Island as originally planned, the heart of the Barzini Family’s empire and the home of Fat Paulie Fortunato, the Barzinis’ new boss. It was only a week away. Now was the time for Geraci to reason with Black Tony, to do whatever was necessary to get his make-or-break support.

The old man rose to greet him. “Nick Geraci! Let me look at you!”

Stracci’s remaining strands of hair were blacker than ever. The office was as impersonal and meticulously neat as a surgical theater and yet smelled of anisette and mildew.

Their embrace was warm and lengthy. They’d made a lot of money for each other over the years, with barely a whimper of discontent. Stracci and Sally Tessio had been friends, and Nick thought of Black Tony as a dear uncle he didn’t see as often as he’d have liked.

Stracci’s
consigliere,
Elio Nunziato, ducked in the door, bearing a big white bag of pastries. He apologized for being late (even though he was early). He turned on an old air-conditioning unit that they’d rebuilt just to make noise, enough to thwart anyone’s attempt to record their conversation.

Other than the fact that he didn’t dye his gray hair, Nunziato looked remarkably like Stracci had twenty years ago. Some said Black Tony was really Elio’s father. But Nick subscribed to the notion that two people who work that closely together do sometimes start to look alike, the way people start to look like their dogs.

“Fausto Dominick Geraci, Jr.,” Black Tony marveled. “Back from the fucking dead.” He motioned for Nick to take a seat across the desk from him. “Look at you. This is a pleasure I thought we seen the last of.”

Nick thanked him. He said he’d sometimes had his doubts in that regard himself.

They asked after each other’s families. Elio passed the pastries around and got coffee for the other two men from a pot balanced on an old typing table.

“And business?” Nick asked.

“Business is good,” Black Tony said. “All in all.”

“It’s nice to see some things don’t change,” Nick said, indicating Stracci’s office.

“What the hell, y’ know? It’s not like a lot of men do, bosses and captains with their offices, I mean. This ain’t a place I took over. This place, it’s a place of business I started up myself. Me and my brother Mario, may he rest in peace. I still go out on the occasional service calls, you know.”

“Still?”

“Still,” Elio confirmed. He puffed up with touching, vicarious pride. “Last night, matter of fact.”

“Ah, last night, nothing,” Stracci said. “Last night was for family. The thought of my grandson having to sleep in heat like that, I did what anybody in my position would have done. This rain is a nice break from all that Indian summer.”

“We need the rain,” Elio said.

“But, in general,” Stracci said, “these days I just go on calls for my own petty entertainment. I get a little exercise, fresh air, meet some nice people or see old friends, use my hands, get dirty. I get satisfaction out of fixing things. I enjoy it.”

It also allowed Stracci to keep the common touch and to maintain, however ludicrously, the illusion that this company was where his money was coming from.

“I feel the same way,” Nick said. “A lot of my jobs give me the same opportunities.”

“Nick fucking Geraci,” he marveled again. “I have to say, if you wasn’t right here before my very eyes I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Nunziato nodded in agreement.

“You don’t mind me askin’ where you been,” Stracci said, “do you?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Because maybe give me the
Reader’s Digest
version.”

Nick tried to.

Stracci seemed content to follow the gist of it.

“It’s a sad story in a lot of ways from where I sit,” Stracci said. “I’m sure you been in a similar position from time to time. Friends you got which for mysterious reasons can’t work things out with other friends you got. It breaks your heart, you know? But, as I get older—as a matter of fact, maybe one good reason I
did
make it to this old—is that I make it my business to stay out of everything I can that’s not my business.”

“Don’t you think it is your business, though?” Geraci asked. “Our import operation we worked out, that was us, Don Stracci. You and me.”

Stracci shrugged. He had a bigger part of the business now, in Nick’s absence, than when Nick had been there to run his side of things. “It was Michael who was over you,” he said. “It’s Michael I’m still in business with, when it comes right down to it.”

“But I have your word you haven’t talked to him about—”

“On my honor,” Stracci said. He folded his arms.

“Forgive me for even asking,” Geraci said.

“You have a question you want to ask, ask,” Stracci said. “This right here, it’s just friends talking.”

He kept his arms folded. Nick had no choice but to continue.

“All right,” he said, “I understand your perspective. I respect anybody smart enough to take the long way around someone else’s crossfire. But I really think it
is
your business, Don Stracci. Don’t you think it’s your business that Michael Corleone—however good he is at handling outside situations—always seems to be having internal problems? Always some kind of problems in his
borgata
? That kind of instability—we both know in the long run, that’s bad for everyone. Plus, you’ve got him in the news all the time for his various mishandling of things I don’t need to go into now, but it’s a long list.”

“Ah, Nicky. Wait’ll you’re a boss,” Stracci said. “If you ever are. Because if and when that happens, you’ll see we’re, all of us, always fighting with that.”

“With all due respect,” Geraci said, “the things I’m talking about aren’t your everyday situations that anyone running any business has to contend with when his employees fuck up. Michael is a bright, capable, ruthless businessman, without a doubt. But he never wanted to be involved with this thing of ours in the first place. From the very
beginning
up to this very moment, he’s constantly been flying in the face of the rules that everybody else has to live by. He’s constantly shown
contempt
for those rules.”

“Contempt?” Stracci said. He unfolded his arms. He had a sip of his coffee.

“Contempt, yes. The thing that took him from college boy to eventual bane of my existence was that he shot a police captain, executed him, completely against the rules and with nobody’s sanction. Was Mike ever a
capo
or
consigliere
on the way up? Or did he ever even run so much as a sports book and kick upstairs? No. Those ways of doing things don’t apply to him, either. Mike never proved himself as an earner at all, he didn’t come up through the ranks the way I know all three of us here did, and yet the next thing
you
know—and this must be particularly hard to take, out here in New Jersey—he’s not just the boss of our Family but just because he’s in New York, he winds up as I guess what you’d call first among equals of
all
the bosses. Something like being
your
boss.”

Stracci looked slightly stung. “It’s more complicated than that,” he said. “But, uh…whattayacallit. Go on.”

Geraci had him on the hook now, he was sure of it. Now he just had to reel him in.

“Michael moves his base of operations to Nevada for a while there, when Las Vegas and Tahoe are supposed to be open cities for everybody, which I know for a fact he never ran by the Commission.
And
he’s divorced, which just goes to show you what taking sacred vows means to him.
And
he tries to kill me, Don Stracci: me, your friend and business partner, his best
capo
, he
sacrifices
me so that other people he gave the orders on—without the approval of the Commission in that case as well, if I’m not mistaken—so that it doesn’t look like he’s behind what happened to those men.”

“
Tried
to sacrifice you,” Elio pointed out.

“Right,” Geraci said. “Lucky me. And then when he’s trying to find me, he has his goons torture civilian members of my family, did you know that?”

From his reaction and the look he and Elio exchanged, it was clear that he did not.

“Torture?”

“He had my daughter tortured and my father
killed,
did you know that?”

“I asked about your family,” Stracci said. “You didn’t say nothin’ about that.”

“It’s hard to talk about in a how’s-your-family context. And my daughter’s doing fine,” he lied, “which is not the point. The point is that was a vile act, a horrible betrayal of our code.”

“Really? Your father wasn’t in this thing?” asked Elio Nunziato. “I thought he was.”

“My father was just an around-town guy, back in Cleveland. He’d been retired from even that for a long time, down in Arizona, which is where they killed him.”

“Come to think of it,” Elio said, “I heard about this at the time, only I heard it was a heart attack.”

“That was no heart attack,” Geraci said.

He dug in the bag and took out a jelly doughnut. One bite and he set it down on a napkin. Presti’s, back in Cleveland, a block from the house where he grew up, was such a magical place that it ruined a man for the rest of life’s doughnuts.

“Then there’s the matter of his
consigliere,
Tom Hagen, remember him? What I heard is, his big scandal last year just about got the whole Commission run in for questioning. If that’s true, that’s surely your business, Don Stracci. On top of that, now he’s been missing for almost two months. I know the prevailing wisdom is that he skipped the country because he’s afraid he’s going to finally get prosecuted for killing his whore. But—maybe you heard this, I don’t know—there’s a rumor going around he’s in FBI custody and going to rat us all out.”

Stracci looked at Elio, and Elio nodded in confirmation. This had found its way into the tabloids. It would be a tough rumor for Michael to stamp out, especially with no body. Nick had done his homework: the sinkhole in the Everglades where Hagen and his Buick now rested was so deep no one had yet found the bottom. There were more of these than people would think.

“Rumors,” Stracci said, waving his hand in dismissal. “Whattaya gonna do, am I right?”

“You may be right,” Geraci said. “But on the other hand, Hagen, he’s not Italian, and so not a made guy, of course. He never took vows or anything like that, never swore to
omertà,
and yet he was Mike’s
consigliere.
He even had him as acting
boss
for a while, which I don’t know if you knew. Tom Hagen was at Michael’s side for things nobody but a Sicilian should ever see or hear about, certainly nobody but an Italian, and if he does sing like the narrowback canary I’m afraid he is…Well, to cite an old New Jersey saying, we’re all in Trouble River, six feet high and rising.”

“That’s
if,
” Stracci said.

But Geraci felt like he had him. “My sources tell me that Sid Klein—you know him, right?”

“Know of him.”

“Klein’s been given all the lawyer jobs Tom Hagen used to handle, back when Michael still limited Hagen to just those specific areas of the Family business. As to who Michael’s going to bring to the Commission meeting as his
consigliere,
it’s anybody’s guess, but I’m picking Sid Klein and giving the points.”

Stracci shook his head.