The Godfather returns Page 2

  Finally, just after nine o’clock, Peter Clemenza and three bodyguards walked into Two Toms and sat down at Geraci’s table. Geraci took it as a bad sign that Michael hadn’t come, that he’d sent his caporegime instead, the one who’d over the years supervised the family’s most important hits. Which sealed it: Tessio was dead.

  “You eat?” Clemenza asked, wheezing from the effort of the walk from his car to the table.

  Geraci shook his head.

  But Clemenza waved a meaty paw to indicate the restaurant’s aroma. “How can you resist? We’ll get a little something. Just a snack.” Clemenza ordered and devoured an antipasto crudo, a plate of caponata, two baskets of bread, and linguine with clam sauce. Last of a breed, Clemenza, almost literally so-the last capo Michael had inherited from his father, now that Tessio was dead.

  “Tessio’s not dead,” Clemenza whispered to Geraci on the way out.

  Geraci’s stomach lurched. They were going to make him pull the trigger himself, a test of loyalty. Geraci’s certainty that he would pass was no solace at all.

  Darkness had fallen. He rode in the backseat with Clemenza. On the way, Clemenza lit a cigar and asked Geraci what he knew and what he could guess. Geraci told the truth. He did not know, yet, that earlier that day the heads of the Barzini and the Tattaglia families had both been killed. He couldn’t have known that the reason Clemenza was late was because he’d first had to garrote Carlo Rizzi, Michael Corleone’s own brother-in-law. These and several other strategic murders had all been made to look like the work of either the Barzinis or the Tattaglias. Geraci didn’t know that, either. But the things Geraci had been able to surmise were in fact correct. He took the cigar Clemenza had offered him but didn’t light it. He said he’d smoke it later.

  The car pulled into a closed Sinclair station just off Flatbush Avenue. Geraci got out, and so did everyone in the two cars that had pulled in beside them, one bearing Clemenza’s men, the other Geraci’s. Clemenza and his driver stayed in the car. When Geraci turned and saw them there, an electric ribbon of panic shot through him. He looked for the men who would kill him. Trying to guess how it would happen. Trying to figure out why his own men were standing by passively watching. Why they’d betrayed him.

  Clemenza rolled down his window. “It ain’t like that, kiddo,” he said. “This situation here is just too-” He put both palms to his jowly face and rubbed it fast, the way you’d scrub a stain. He let out a long breath. “Me and Sally, we go back I don’t want to think about how long. Some things a man just don’t want to see. You know?”

  Geraci knew.

  The fat man wept. Clemenza made very little noise doing it and seemed unembarrassed. He left without saying anything more, waving to his driver and rolling up his window and looking straight ahead.

  Geraci watched the taillights of Clemenza’s car disappear.

  Inside, toward the back of the first filthy service bay, two corpses in jumpsuits lay in a heap, their blackening blood oozing together on the floor. In the next bay, flanked only by Al Neri, Michael’s new pet killer and an ex-cop Geraci had some history with, was Salvatore Tessio. The old man sat on a case of oil cans, hunched over, staring at his shoes like an athlete removed from a game that was hopelessly lost. His lips moved, but it was nothing Geraci could understand. He trembled, but he had some kind of condition and had been trembling for a year now. There was only the sound of Geraci’s own footsteps and, wafting in from another room, thin, distorted laughter that could only have come from a television set.

  Neri nodded hello. Tessio did not look up. Neri put a hand on the old warrior’s shoulder and squeezed, a gesture of grotesque reassurance. Tessio fell to his knees, still not looking up, lips still moving.

  Neri handed Geraci a pistol, butt first. Geraci wasn’t good with guns and didn’t know much about them. This one was heavy as a cashbox and long as a tent spike-a lot more gun than seemed necessary. He’d been around long enough to know that the weapon of choice in matters like this was a.22 with a silencer-three quick shots to the head (the second to make sure, the third to make extra sure, and no fourth because silencers jam when you fire too many shots too fast). Whatever this was, it was bigger than a.22. No silencer. He stood in that dark garage with Tessio, a man he loved, and Neri, who’d once cuffed him, chained him to a radiator, punched him in the balls, and gotten away with it. Nick Geraci took a deep breath. He’d always been a man who followed his head and not his heart. The heart was just a bloody motor. The head was meant to drive. He’d always thought there’d come a time, when he was old and set, when he would move down to Key West with Charlotte and play the affluent fool.

  Now, looking at Tessio, he realized that would never happen. Tessio was twenty-some years older than Nick Geraci, which until that moment had seemed like a long time. Tessio had been born in the last century. He would die in the next minute. He’d lived his life governed by his head and not his heart, and where had it gotten him? Here. A man who loved him was about to reduce that same head to blood and pulp.

  “I’m sorry,” Tessio muttered, still looking down.

  This might have been directed at the Corleones or Geraci or at God. Geraci certainly didn’t want to know which. He took the gun and walked around behind Tessio, whose bald spot, lit only by streetlights, gleamed in the darkness.

  “No,” Neri said. “Not like that. In front. Look him in the eyes.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  He cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose I look like I’m kidding you.”

  “Whose idea is that?” Geraci said. Neri didn’t have a gun in his hand, but Geraci could not leave this scummy garage alive if he shot anyone but Tessio. From that back office, the television set erupted in a gale of tinny applause.

  “Don’t know, don’t care,” Neri said. “I’m just the messenger, sir.”

  Geraci cocked his head. This dumbass didn’t seem witty enough to make a joke about shooting the messenger. But he did seem sadistic enough to take it on himself to make the killing as cruel as possible. And sir? How did he mean that? “Salvatore Tessio,” Geraci said, “no matter what he’s done, deserves more respect than that.”

  “Fuck youse!” Tessio said, loud now, but eyes still on the slimy floor.

  “Look up,” Neri ordered Tessio. “Traitor.”

  Trembling no worse, the old man did as he was told, eyes dry, staring into Geraci’s but already far away. He muttered a rapid string of names that meant nothing to Nick Geraci.

  Geraci raised the gun, both sickened by and grateful for the sight of his own steady hand. He pressed the barrel gently against the old man’s soft forehead. Tessio did not move, did not blink, did not even shake anymore. His saggy flesh pillowed around the gun sight. Geraci had never before killed a man with a gun.

  “Just business,” Tessio whispered.

  What made my father great, Michael Corleone had said at his father’s eulogy, was that nothing was ever just business. Everything was personal. My father was just a man, as mortal as anyone. But he was a great man, and I am not the only person here today who thought of him as a god among men.

  “What are you waiting for?” Tessio whispered. “Sono fottuto. Shoot me. You pussy.”

  Geraci shot.

  Tessio’s body flew backward so hard his knees made a sound like snapped roof shingles. The air was filled with a glowing pinkish gray mist. A yarmulke-sized piece of Tessio’s skull caromed off the wall of the garage, smacked Neri in the face, and clattered to the floor. The tang of Tessio’s airborne blood mixed with the smell of his shit.

  Nick Geraci rubbed his shoulder-the pistol kick was like a savage right cross-and felt a wave of euphoria wash over him, obliterating the hesitation he’d felt. He felt no remorse, no fear, no disgust, no anger. I am a killer, he thought. Killers kill.

  He spun around, laughing not out of madness but joy, more intense, better than the rush he’d gotten the time he sampled his own heroin. He knew what was happening. This was not the
first man he’d killed. Sometimes when he killed he felt nothing at all, but even that might have been a lie, he told himself. Because the plain truth was that killing people felt good. Anyone who’d done it could tell you that, but they won’t. They won’t! A book Geraci had read about the First World War had a whole chapter on the subject. Hardly anyone would talk about it because for most people the bad feeling that came later, after the good feeling, shut them up. Plus, any shithead could guess that everything that would happen after a person proclaimed that it felt good to kill people, and after he convinced his listeners that he was serious, would be entirely bad. Still. It felt good. Almost sexual (another thing any shithead could guess would be bad to admit). You’re powerful and the dead guy’s not. You’re alive and the dead guy’s dead. You’ve done something that everyone on earth has at some heated moment wanted to do but most never will. It was easy, and it felt magnificent. Geraci practically skated across the scummy floor of that garage, certain that, this time, the bad feeling would not come later. There would be no later. Everything would always be now. Everything is always now.

  Geraci wanted to give every live man there a bear hug and a highball, but he settled for striding toward them, raising his pistol before they could raise theirs. Being the cowardly cocksuckers that at heart they surely were, they hit the ground, which gave him a clear shot through the doorway to the office at his target: the rectangle of hazy blue light behind them. Geraci fired. The shock he felt at the recoil (was Neri really stupid enough to give him a gun with more than one bullet? what a dumbass!) giving way a split second later to a dull pop, a puff of toxic smoke, a belched little fireball, and a tiny and satisfying afterglow of falling glass. Human beings have never built a machine more satisfying to destroy than a television set.

  And then silence.

  For Geraci, it seemed like an awfully long silence.

  “Hey!” shouted a raspy-voiced man, one of Geraci’s guys. “I was watching that.”

  It cracked everyone up. Just what the doctor ordered. Neri patted Geraci softly on the back. Geraci handed him the gun. Then everyone went to work.

  Clemenza’s men used a bone saw on the two corpses who’d been assigned to kill Michael Corleone. Geraci sat on the case of oil cans and watched, so flooded with ebbing adrenaline that everything seemed like the same thing. Grimy window. Calendar with topless wrench-wielding dairy maid. Fan belts on metal hook. Friend’s corpse. Button on cuff. A universe of undifferentiated equivalency.

  When the men finished, Neri handed Geraci the bone saw and pointed to Tessio’s head. Around the gaping entry wound, the dead man’s flesh was already proud.

  Numb, Geraci took the saw and dropped to one knee. Later, he would look back on this moment with fury. But at the time, Geraci could have been checking the pH in his pool. When a man sees things for their essential literalness, how is sawing off the head of a dead father figure so different from separating a succulent turkey leg from the carcass? A thicker bone, true, but a bone saw is a better tool than some knife your brother-in-law got you as a wedding present.

  Nick Geraci closed Tessio’s bulging eyes and drew back the saw. Later had come-sooner rather than later, which in a moment of clarity Geraci recognized as later’s way.

  Neri clamped his hand on Geraci’s forearm and took the saw.

  “That was an order, too.”

  “What was an order?” Geraci said.

  “Seeing how willing you were to do it.”

  Geraci knew better than to ask how willing he’d seemed or, worse, who’d given the order. He merely stood and said nothing, went blank and revealed nothing. He motioned toward the pocket of his bloodied suit jacket. Neri nodded. Geraci took out the cigar Clemenza had given him, a Cuban the color of dark chocolate, and sat back down on the oil cans to enjoy it.

  Clemenza’s men stripped the assassins naked and stuffed their clothing and the ten severed body parts into a suitcase. Tessio’s corpse was left alone.

  Which was when Geraci figured everything out.

  There was no need to send a message to the Barzinis. Everyone involved with Tessio’s betrayal was already too dead to benefit from messages. And of course the Corleones wanted Tessio’s body found. This part of Brooklyn was identified with the Barzinis. The cops would presume that was who ordered the hit. The detectives would puzzle over the unidentifiable corpses of the assassins, and none of the conclusions they’d draw would involve the Corleones. The Corleones wouldn’t even need to trouble their judges or their people in the NYPD. And it wouldn’t take the usual forgiven gambling tabs and extended grace periods on loans to get the newspapers to fall in line. They’d play this just the way Michael Corleone wanted and feel virtuous about every squalid inch of type.

  It was, Geraci had to admit, brilliant.

  With a final glance back at the corpse of his mentor, Geraci got into the back of a car with Al Neri. Geraci wasn’t afraid or even angry. For now he was only a man, staring straight ahead and ready to confront whatever came next.

  In the weeks that followed the killings, Geraci worked closely with Michael Corleone. As he saw and helped administer the details of the ongoing war, Geraci learned how badly he’d underestimated his new Don. The Corleones had safe houses in every borough and a dozen suburbs, a constantly rotating inventory. They had underground garages full of cars and trucks with phony licenses and registrations. Some were armored and/or souped up with engines that could compete at Le Mans. Others were deceptively sound junkers that could break down at the flick of a hidden switch, snarling traffic and blocking pursuers. Some were destined to be crashed or fished out of rivers and swamps. Several were exact replicas of cars driven by high-ranking members of the Family, poised to mislead witnesses, enemies, or the police. They had arsenals of weapons all over the city: behind a rack of clothes at a dry cleaner’s on Belmont Avenue, underneath bags of sugar and flour in the back rooms of a bakery in Carroll Gardens, inside crates at a coffin warehouse in Lindenhurst. Michael Corleone was out to gain full political control of a state (Nevada) and a country (Cuba), and the more Geraci learned, the more plausible such things began to seem. The Corleones had more law enforcement agents on their payroll than the FBI, and they had pictures of the FBI director in a dress, sucking the penis of his top assistant.

  Michael’s grand, intricate plan was this: peace, coupled with massive expansion and relocation, then organization of the crime families through-out the country, better than before, while at the same time strengthening and expanding business ties with Sicily, all on the way to legitimacy, complete with utter control of Cuba and access to the White House and even the Vatican. Everything new would be built with other people’s money: “loans,” much of it from the pension funds of various unions. Those truck drivers, electricians, and jukebox stockers would receive a greater rate of return than they’d have ever gotten from a racket like the stock market. The Corleones would put more and more layers between themselves and anything like street crime. Before long they could stop using fronts and operate in the open, indistinguishable from any of the master criminals known collectively to suckers everywhere as the Fortune 500.

  The plan wasn’t unworkable, Geraci thought. Merely unnecessary. They were already in the only business in the history of the world that turned a profit every year. But he went along. In the short run, he had no choice. In the long run, he couldn’t lose. If things worked out, he’d get what he really wanted, which was to run Tessio’s old regime: a traditional operation with roots in the neighborhoods. If the Corleones spread themselves too thin and fell apart, Geraci could just grab what was rightly his and take it from there.

  He forced himself not to think about Tessio. A boxer learns quickly to put things out of his mind. Otherwise he’s a sitting duck. Geraci had hated boxing the whole time he was doing it, but ten years after his last fight, he had to admit that it had served him well.

  Over the course of that summer, Nick Geraci and Michael Corleone became something like friends. Had a thin
g or two gone differently, they might have stayed that way.