The Godfather returns Page 5

  Chapter 4

  O VER LAKE ERIE , the small plane flew into the teeth of a thunderstorm. The cabin was hot, which suited Nick Geraci just fine. The other men in the plane were sweating just as much as he was. The bodyguards had already blamed it on the heat. Tough guys. He’d been one of them, once, written off as a big dumb ox, both relied upon and disposable.

  “I thought the storm was behind us,” said Frank Falcone, one of the silk-shirted men, the one in orange, the one who didn’t know who the pilot really was.

  “You said a mouthful,” said the one in aquamarine, Tony Molinari, who did know.

  The hits on the top men in the Barzini, Tattaglia, and Corleone crime syndicates had aroused the interest of law enforcement everywhere, from local-yokel hard-ons to the FBI (though the agency’s director, supposedly because the Corleones had something on him, continued to maintain that the so-called Mafia was a myth). For most of the summer, even corner-bar shylocks had had to close things down. The other two New York Dons, Ottilio “Leo the Milkman” Cuneo and Anthony “Black Tony” Stracci, had overseen a cease-fire. Whether this would mean an end to the war, no one knew.

  “Excuse me, but I meant the real storm,” said Falcone. “The storm out there. The fucking storm.”

  Molinari shook his head. “Jokes are wasted on you, my friend.”

  Their bodyguards, noticeably more pale now, looked down at the floor of the plane. “Lake effect,” said Geraci. “The way it works is that the air and the water are sharply different temperatures.” He tried to make his voice sound the way a pilot’s would, in a movie where the pilot was the lead. He relaxed his grip. “That’s what makes it possible for storms to come from any direction, and all of a sudden. Keeps things interesting, eh?”

  Molinari put a hand on Geraci’s shoulder. “Thank you, Mister fucking Science.”

  “You’re welcome, sir,” Geraci said.

  Falcone had been a top connection guy in Chicago -buying politicians, judges, and cops-and now ran his own thing in Los Angeles. Molinari had a four-star dockside restaurant in San Francisco, plus a piece of anything there he wanted a piece of. According to the briefing Michael had given Geraci, Falcone and Molinari had always had their differences, particularly when it came to the New York Families. Falcone saw them as snobbish, Molinari as recklessly violent. Molinari had also felt a personal attachment to the late Vito Corleone that Falcone had never shared. But the last few years, the two West Coast Dons had forged a wary, effective allegiance, particularly in organizing the importation and distribution of narcotics from the Philippines and Mexico (another reason, Michael did not have to say, that Geraci was being sent to meet them). Until Michael had taken over the Corleone Family, they’d been the two youngest Dons in America.

  “O’Malley, eh?” said Falcone.

  Geraci nosed the plane up through the thunderhead, seeking better air. He knew what Falcone meant: the name on his pilot’s license. The flight was obviously challenging enough that Falcone accepted it when Geraci didn’t answer. It’s not the eyes that see, it’s the brain. As Michael had predicted, Falcone put an Irish name together with a broad-shouldered, fair-haired Sicilian, a man he naturally presumed worked for the Cleveland operation, and what he saw was an Irishman. Why not? Cleveland worked with so many Jews, Irish, and Negroes that the men in it called it the Combination. People outside of it called its Don, Vincent Forlenza, “the Jew.”

  It was a necessary deception. Rattlesnake Island was not an easy place to get to. Falcone might not have boarded a plane owned by the Corleones. Don Forlenza had hoped to come to the wedding, but his health had precluded it.

  The plane finally rose above the clouds. The men were bathed in blinding sunlight.

  “So, O’Malley,” Falcone said, “you’re from Cleveland, huh?”

  “Yes, sir, born and raised.” Misleading, but true.

  “Guess our DiMaggio and his Yanks were too much for the Indians this year.”

  “We’ll get you next year,” Geraci said.

  Molinari started talking about watching DiMaggio play for the San Francisco Seals and how even then he was a god among men. Over the years Molinari had made a bundle fixing Seals games, but never once the whole time DiMaggio had been there. “People have these ideas about Italians, am I right, O’Malley?”

  “I’m not sure I have any ideas at all, sir.”

  “We got us a cacasangue,” Falcone said.

  “Pardon me?” Geraci said, though he knew full well what the word meant.

  “Smart-ass,” said Falcone’s bodyguard.

  “Wiiiiise guy, eh?” said Geraci, in the manner of Curly from the Three Stooges.

  Molinari and the two bodyguards laughed. “That’s pretty good,” Molinari said. Geraci obliged him with a perfect nyuck-nuck-nyuck laugh. This, too, amused everyone but Falcone.

  The conversation was sporadic, inhibited by the bumpy flight and the name on Geraci’s pilot’s license. They talked for a while about restaurants and then about the title fight at the Cleveland Armory that they were planning to attend tonight instead of going to Vegas to see Fontane-an invitation-only show, courtesy of Michael Corleone, to kick off a Teamsters convention. They talked, too, about The Untouchables, which they both liked, though partly because they found it funny. Geraci had heard it on the radio and been irritated by the stereotypical straight-arrow cops and spaghetti-slurping, bloodthirsty Italians. He’d never seen the television show, though. He was a reader. He’d sworn never to own a television set, but last year, Charlotte and the girls had worn him down. He knew a guy-Geraci always knew a guy or had a guy-and one day a truck pulled up and two men in suits unloaded the biggest one anybody made. Before long, Charlotte was serving meals on TV trays. Saturday became “TV dinner night,” an abomination Geraci was glad his mother never lived to see. Geraci would’ve liked to drag that television to the curb, but a man must pick his battles. A week later, a contractor Geraci knew pulled a crew off the parking garage they were building in Queens and had them dig up the wild mulberry bushes behind Geraci’s in-ground swimming pool. A couple weeks after that, Geraci had his own little house back there, his den: a refuge from the noise and the zombie feeling he got when he used that goddamned television to watch anything but sports.

  Geraci nosed the plane down into the clouds. “We’re beginning our descent.”

  The plane was bucking. The passengers eyed every strut, every bolt, every screw and rivet, as if they expected it all to break apart.

  Geraci tried to trust his instruments and not his eye or his anxieties. He breathed evenly. Soon the shit-brown surface of the lake came into view.

  “ Rattlesnake Island,” said Molinari, pointing. “Right?”

  “Roger that,” said Geraci, using the voice again. “That’s pilot talk, fellas.”

  “We’re landing on that?” Falcone said. “That fucking little landing strip?”

  The island was only forty-some acres, a fifteenth the size of New York ’s Central Park, and most of it, from the air, seemed to be taken up by a golf course and an alarmingly small landing strip. A long dock protruded north from Rattlesnake Island so far it was practically in Canadian waters, which of course, during Prohibition, had been useful. The privately owned island was so tangentially a part of the United States that it issued its own postage stamps.

  “It’s a lot bigger than it looks from up here,” Geraci said, though he wasn’t so sure about that. Not only had he never landed on the island; even though his padrino for all intents and purposes owned it, Geraci had never been there.

  Molinari patted Falcone’s hand. “Relax, my friend,” Molinari said.

  Falcone nodded, sat back in his seat, and tried to coax a last drop of coffee from his cup.

  Moments before they were about to touch down, the plane caught a downdraft, as if it had been slapped out of the sky by a giant hand. It plummeted toward the surface of the lake. Geraci could see the froth of the waves. He pulled up, got control, leveled the wings, buzzed a c
abin near the shore.

  “Oooo-kay,” Geraci said, yanking back the stick. “Let’s try that again.”

  “Jesus, kid,” Molinari said, though he was only a few years older than Geraci. Softly, Geraci muttered the Twenty-third Psalm, in Latin. When he got to the part about fearing no evil, instead of “for Thou art with me,” he said, “for I am the toughest motherfucker in the valley.”

  Falcone laughed. “Never heard that in Latin.”

  “You know Latin?” Molinari said.

  “I studied to be a priest,” said Falcone.

  “Yeah, for about a week. Don’t distract the pilot, Frank.”

  Geraci flashed a thumbs-up.

  He found a pocket of smooth air, and his second attempt to land was improbably soft. Only now, the flight over, did one of the bodyguards start to vomit. Geraci caught a whiff of it and stifled the gag it provoked. Then the other bodyguard threw up on himself. Moments later, men in yellow slickers appeared on the end of the runway to meet them.

  Geraci sucked fresh air from his window, and his passengers got out. Men opened umbrellas for them, put chocks behind the wheels, lashed down the wings, and took all but one of the suitcases. A big black carriage, lined in red velvet and drawn by white horses, waited for them onshore, to carry them up the hill-a hundred-yard journey, tops.

  Geraci watched the Dons and their puke-stained men rush to get into the carriage. Once they were inside the lodge, Geraci lugged his suitcase up the hill alone, opened the cellar doors, and disappeared down the steps, into the remains of what was once a thriving casino, past the bandstand and the cobwebby bar to the dressing room. He flicked on the light. The rear wall was made out of the kind of sliding steel door he associated with automotive garages in Brooklyn, but otherwise the room looked like a high-roller suite in Vegas: king-sized bed, red velvet everywhere, elevated bathtub. Behind the steel door was a room full of canned goods, gas masks, oxygen canisters, generators, a water-treatment system, a ham radio, and a bank vault. Underneath, carved into the bedrock, was a gigantic fuel oil tank and, supposedly, other rooms and more supplies. So long as Don Forlenza had any warning at all, whatever happened-if the state police staged a raid, if strange men came to kill him, if the Russians dropped the bomb-he could hide down here for years. Forlenza controlled the union that worked the salt mine under the lake near Cleveland; rumor had it that a crew did nothing day and night but dig tunnels to and from Rattlesnake Island. Geraci had to laugh. A kid like him, son of a truck driver, standing inside the kind of place a regular person would never even hear about. He carried the bag of money into the other room. He set it down in front of the vault.

  He stood there, staring at the bag.

  Money was an illusion. The leather of the bag had more inherent value than the thousands of little slips of paper inside it. “Money” is nothing more than thousands of markers, drawn up by a government that couldn’t cover one percent of what it had out on the street. Best racket in the world: the government puts out all the markers it wants and passes laws so they can never be called in. From what Geraci understood, those slips of paper represented a month’s worth of the skim from a Las Vegas casino in which both the Corleones and Forlenza had points, along with a sizable gift in consideration of Don Forlenza’s hospitality and influence. Those stacks of bills represented the labors of hundreds of men, reduced to scrip, to wampum, exchanged for the negotiating power of a few, the actions of fewer yet. Worthless paper that Don Forlenza would accept unthinkingly. Just markers.

  Minchionaggine, his father would say. You think too much.

  Fredo rolled down the window and handed the customs agent his driver’s license. “Nothing to declare.”

  “Are those oranges?”

  “Are what oranges?”

  “In the backseat. On the floor there.”

  Sure enough, there they were: a mesh bag of Van Arsdale oranges. They weren’t his oranges per se. Fredo wouldn’t eat an orange if it were the last fucking morsel of food on earth.

  “Sir, could you just pull your vehicle over to that lane there? Next to that man in the white uniform?”

  “You can have the oranges. Keep ’em, toss ’em, I don’t care. They’re not mine.” His father had been buying oranges the day Fredo saw him get shot. One of the bullets pulverized an orange on the way into the old man’s gut. A lot of things from that day were fuzzy. Fredo remembered fumbling with his gun. He remembered watching the men run away up Ninth Avenue, leaving Fredo unfired upon, too insignificant for even a single bullet. He remembered that orange. He did not remember failing to check to see if his father was dead and instead sitting on the curb weeping, even though the picture of him doing so had won the photographer all kinds of prizes. “I forgot they were even there.”

  “Mr. Frederick.” The agent was studying Fredo’s driver’s license. It was under a fake name, Carl Frederick, but it was real, right from the Nevada DMV. “How much have you had to drink this morning?”

  Fredo shook his head. “Over there, huh? By that guy?”

  “Yes, sir. If you will, please.”

  Two men dressed like Detroit cops were making their way toward the man in white. Fredo pulled over and reached around to the backseat, grabbing the yellow shirt and draping it over the whiskey bottle. The man in white asked him to please step away from the car.

  This was more or less exactly how it had happened to his brother Sonny. If this was a setup and they were there to kill him, the only chance he had was to reach under the seat, right now, get his gun, and come out of the car shooting. But what if they were for real? In which case he’d have killed a cop or two and might as well be dead. Though Mike had gotten away with it.

  Think.

  “Sir,” said the man. “Now, please.”

  If they were for real and they found the gun there, he’d get arrested. Which someone, probably Zaluchi, could fix. No way to get rid of the gun now anyway.

  Fredo palmed one of the oranges. He opened the door and got out slowly. No sudden moves. He flipped the orange to the man in white and braced himself for death. The man just stepped aside. The cops grabbed Fredo by the arms before the orange hit the ground.

  “Shouldn’t you fellas be Mounties?” Fredo’s eyes darted, looking for the men with tommy guns.

  “You’re coming into the United States, sir. Please come this way.”

  “You know, that car?” Fredo said. “It’s Mr. Joe Zaluchi’s, who as you probably know is a pretty important businessman in Detroit.”

  Their grip loosened, but only a little. They took him behind the roadside A-frame customs building. Fredo’s heart knocked against his rib cage. He kept looking around for the men with guns, listening for the sounds of cocking hammers, inserted clips. He considered shaking himself free and making a run for it. Just as he was about to, the men pointed to a line on the ground and asked him to walk it.

  They were real. They weren’t going to kill him. Probably.

  “Mr. Zaluchi is kind of eager to get his car back,” Fredo said.

  “With your arms out like this, sir,” said one of the cops. He said out in that funny Canadian way. That accent always struck Fredo as comical.

  “Sure you’re not a Mountie?” Fredo asked, but he did as he was told.

  So far as he could tell, he walked the line perfectly, but these jokers were unimpressed. They had him recite the alphabet backward, which he did perfectly. He looked at his watch.

  “If you fellas give me your names,” he said, “I’m sure Mr. Zaluchi would be happy to make a donation to your retirement fund or something. Whatever he does, I’ll do, too.”

  Each man cocked his head, the way dogs do.

  Fredo was getting the giggles.

  “Is something funny, Mr. Frederick?”

  Fredo shook his head. Betrayed by his own nerves, he tried, literally, to wipe the smile from his face. Nothing was funny.

  “I apologize if I misunderstood, sir,” one of them said. “Did you offer us a bribe?”


  He frowned. “Wasn’t the word I used donation?”

  “That was the word all right,” said the other one. “I think Bob thought you were proposing a sort of quid pro quo.”

  A cop learns some lawyer words, he gets assigned to cream puff duty at the border. Cream puff duty: the thought forced the corners of his mouth up, though he was furious at himself, not amused. Cream puff. Not Fredo Corleone, who’d knocked up half the showgirls in Vegas and was on his way back there to take care of the other half. He took a deep breath. He was not going to laugh. “I don’t want no trouble. I don’t want to assume anything, but”-and here he had to fight the giggles again-“did I pass the test or not?”

  They exchanged a look.

  The man in white came around the corner of the building. Here it comes, Fredo thought. But he wasn’t carrying Fredo’s gun. Instead, he had that wet, mangled piece of paper, the handbill, spread out on a clipboard, dabbing at it with a handkerchief. “Mr. Frederick?” he said. “Can you explain this?”

  “What’s that?” Fredo said. Which was when he remembered: he’d left his gun back in the room. “I never seen that.”

  The man put his face close to the note. “It’s signed ‘Forgive me, Fredo,’ ” he read. “Who’s Fredo?”

  Which he pronounced to rhyme with guido.

  Which caused Fredo, finally, to erupt in laughter.

  The warm-ups his doctor had prescribed took half an hour, tops, but Johnny Fontane was taking no chances. He started them in the desert, stopped in Barstow for a steaming mug of tea with honey and lemon, and was going through the regimen of humming and ululations for maybe the fiftieth time when he blew through a red light a couple blocks from the National Records Tower. An LAPD motorcycle cop swung behind him. They came to a stop together, near the back entrance of the building. Phil Ornstein-second in command at National-stood alone at the curb, pacing, smoking.

  Johnny ran his fingers through his thinning hair, grabbed his hat from the seat beside him, and got out of the car. “Take care of this,” Johnny said, jerking a thumb toward the cop. “Will ya, Philly?”