The Family Corleone (6 page)

“Soon,” Vito said. “We’ll make a picnic. We’ll go out and spend the day.”

Anita Columbo said, “God has blessed you with good fortune. We will miss you, though.” She clasped her hands in front of her, as if in prayer. “The neighborhood will never be the same without the Corleones.”

“We will always be nearby for our friends,” Vito said. “This I promise to all of you.”

Sonny, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, beamed at Anita, offering her a bright smile. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Columbo,” he said. “You don’t think I’m going to let that beautiful granddaughter of yours get too far away from me, do you?”

Sonny’s boldness made everyone at the table erupt into laughter—except Sandra, Mrs. Columbo, and Vito.

When the laughter died down, Vito said to Mrs. Columbo, “Forgive my son,
signora
. He was born blessed by a good heart and cursed by a big mouth.” He punctuated his remark by slapping Sonny lightly on the back of the head.

Vito’s words and the slap brought more laughter to the table and a slight smile to Sandra’s lips—but did nothing to lighten the coldness of Mrs. Columbo’s expression.

Jimmy Mancini, a big muscular guy in his early thirties, raised his glass of wine. “To the Corleones,” he said. “May God bless and keep them. May their family prosper and flourish.” He lifted his glass higher, said, “
Salute!
” and drank heartily, as everyone at the table followed suit, shouting “
Salute!
” and drinking.

S
onny stretched out on his bed, hands folded under his neck, feet crossed at the ankles. Through the open bedroom door, he had a view of his kitchen and a clock on the wall over a claw-foot bathtub. Tom had called the apartment “spare,” and now that word rattled around in Sonny’s head as he waited for the minutes to tick away until midnight. The round clock face had the words “Smith & Day” at its center, in the same black print as the numbers. Once every minute, the long hand jumped and the short hand crept closer to the twelve. “Spare” meant not much furniture and not decorated much. That was about right. A cheap dresser that came with the place was the only other piece of furniture in the bedroom. The kitchen furniture consisted of two white chairs and a table with a single drawer under a white baked-enamel top. The tabletop was trimmed in red, and the drawer handle was red. “Spare”… He didn’t need anything more. His mother took care of his laundry, he bathed at home (which was how he thought of his parents’ apartment), and he never brought girls here, preferring to sleep with them at their places, or to do it quick and dirty in the back of the car.

He had five minutes yet before he could leave. In the bathroom, he looked himself over in the medicine cabinet mirror. He had on a dark shirt, black chinos, and black Nat Holman sneakers. It was a kind of uniform. He had decided all the guys should wear the same
thing on a job. This way it would be harder to pick one out from the other. He didn’t like the sneakers. He thought they made them look even more like kids, which was the last thing they needed since the oldest of them was eighteen—but Cork thought they could run faster and be more sure-footed with sneakers, and so sneakers it was. Cork was five-seven and maybe 120 pounds, but there wasn’t anyone, including Sonny, who wanted to fight him. He was relentless and possessed of a powerhouse right that Sonny had personally witnessed knock a guy out cold. The mug was smart, too. He had boxes of books scattered all over his apartment. He’d always been that way, reading a lot, since they were kids together in elementary school.

Sonny took a dark blue jacket from a hook on the front door. He slipped into it, fished a wool cap out of one pocket, and pulled it down over the thick tangle of his hair. He glanced back at the clock just as it ticked past midnight, and then jogged down two flights of stairs to Mott Street, where a three-quarter moon peeking out from a hole in the clouds lit up the cobblestone street and rows of apartment buildings with brick facades and black-iron fire escapes. The windows were all dark, and the sky was overcast, threatening rain. On the corner of Mott and Grand, a pool of light gathered under a lamppost. Sonny walked toward the light, and when he saw that he was alone on the street, he ducked into a maze of alleys and followed them across Mulberry to Baxter, where Cork was waiting behind the wheel of a black Nash with bug-eye headlights and wide running boards.

Cork drove off slowly as soon as Sonny slid into the front seat. “Sonny Corleone,” he said, pronouncing Sonny’s last name like a native Italian, having fun with it. “Day’s been dull as a dishrag. What about you?” He was dressed the same as Sonny, his hair straight and sandy blond, locks of it spilling out from the borders of his cap.

“Same thing,” Sonny said. “You nervous?”

“Little bit,” Cork said, “but we don’t need to announce that to the others, do we, now?”

“What do I look like?” Sonny shoved Cork and then pointed up
the street, to the corner, where the Romeros, Vinnie and Angelo, were on the bottom steps of a rough stone stoop.

Cork pulled the car over and then took off again as soon as the boys jumped in the back. Vinnie and Angelo were twins, and Sonny had to look closely to figure out who was who. Vinnie wore his hair cut close to the scalp, which made him look tougher than Angelo, whose hair was always carefully combed and neatly parted. With their caps on, the only way Sonny could distinguish between them was the few strands of loose hair falling over Angelo’s forehead.

“Jaysus,” Cork said, glancing into the backseat. “I’ve known you two birds all my life, and I’ll be damned if I can tell you apart dressed like that.”

Vinnie said, “I’m the smart one,” and Angelo said, “I’m the good-looking one,” and then they both laughed. Vinnie said, “Did Nico get the choppers?”

“Yeah.” Sonny took his cap off, pressed his hair flat, and then struggled to get the cap over it and in place. “They cost us a lot of dough.”

“Worth it,” Vinnie said.

“Hey, you drove right past the alley!” Sonny had been looking into the backseat. He spun around and shoved Cork.

“Where?” Cork said. “And quit shoving, ya fuckin’ jelly bean.”

“Before the laundry,” Sonny said. He pointed to the plate-glass window of Chick’s Laundry. “What are you, blind?”

“Blind, your ass,” Cork said. “I was preoccupied.”

“
Stugots
…” Sonny shoved Cork again, making him laugh.

Cork put the Nash in reverse and backed it into the alley. He cut the engine and turned off the lights.

Angelo said, “Where are they?” just as a crooked alley door popped opened and Nico Angelopoulos stepped onto the littered pavement, between lines of overstuffed garbage pails, followed by Stevie Dwyer. Nico was a full inch shorter than Sonny, but still taller than the rest. He was thin, with a track runner’s wiry body. Stevie was short and bulky. They were both lugging black duffel bags with canvas straps slung over their shoulders. From the way the boys were moving, the bags looked heavy.

Nico squeezed into the front seat beween Cork and Sonny. “Wait till you see these things.”

Stevie had put his bag down on the floorboards and was in the process of opening it. “We’d better pray these tommy guns aren’t a heap of garbage.”

“A heap of garbage?” Cork said.

“We didn’t test-fire them. I told this dumb Greek—”

“Ah, shut it,” Nico said to Stevie. To Sonny he said, “What were we supposed to do, start throwing lead in my bedroom while the folks are downstairs listening to Arthur Godfrey?”

“That’d wake up the neighbors,” Vinnie said.

“They’d better not be rejects,” Stevie said. “Otherwise we might as well stick ’em up our arses.”

Nico pulled one of the choppers out of his duffel bag and handed it to Sonny, who held the tommy gun by the stock and then wrapped his fingers around the polished wood grip welded to the rifle barrel. The grip was carved with grooves for the fingers and the wood was solid and warm. The round black metal magazine at the center of the gat, an inch in front of the trigger guard, reminded Sonny of a film canister. Sonny said to Nico, “You got them from Vinnie Suits in Brooklyn?”

“Yeah, of course. Just like you said.” Nico looked surprised at the question.

Sonny faced Little Stevie. “Then they’re not no rejects,” he said. To Nico he said, “And my name never came up, right?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Nico said. “Did I suddenly become an idiot? No one mentioned your name or anything about you.”

“My name ever slips out,” Sonny said, “we’re all done for.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Cork said. He started the car and pulled out of the alley. “Put those things away or some flatfoot’ll be giving us trouble.”

Sonny put the gat back in the duffel bag. “How many magazines did we get?”

“What’s on it now and one extra for each,” he said.

Sonny said to the twins, “You palookas think you can handle these?”

Angelo said, “I know how to pull a trigger.”

Vinnie said, “Sure. Why not?”

“Let’s go over it.” Sonny nudged Cork. The Nash pulled onto the street and he leaned into the back. “Big thing is,” he said, “like before, fast and loud, so that everybody’s confused but us. We wait till the truck’s loaded. There’s one lead car and one trailer. Soon as the lead car passes, Cork pulls in front of the truck. Vinnie and Angelo, you get out throwing lead. Shoot high. We don’t want to kill anybody. Me and Nico go right for the cab and get the driver and whoever’s riding shotgun. Stevie’s got the back of the truck, in case somebody’s there.”

“But nobody’s gonna be there,” Stevie said, “right? You haven’t seen anybody riding in the back?”

“Alls that’s in the back is liquor,” Sonny said. “But you never know, so be ready.”

Stevie took a tommy gun from the duffel bag and tested the feel of it in his hands. “I’ll be ready,” he said. “Tell you the truth, I hope somebody’s back there.”

Cork said, “Put that away. And don’t go giving nobody lead poisoning if you don’t have to.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll shoot high,” Stevie said, grinning.

“Listen to Cork.” Sonny let his stare linger on Stevie, and then went on explaining the plan. “Once we’ve got the truck, we head out down the alley. Cork follows us, with Vinnie and Angelo still making a racket.” To the Romeros he said, “If they try to follow us, shoot for the tires and the engine block.” To everybody he said, “The whole thing should be over in a minute. In and out, and a whole lot of noise. Right?”

“Good,” the Romero brothers said.

“Remember,” Sonny said. “They don’t know what’s going on. We do. They’re the ones confused.”

Cork said, “Confused as a hungry baby in a room full of strippers.” When nobody laughed, he said, “Jaysus! Where’s your sense of humor!”

Stevie said, “Just drive, Corcoran.”

“Jaysus,” Cork said again, and then the car was quiet.

Sonny took a chopper from the duffel bag. He’d been dreaming about this night for a month, ever since he’d overheard Eddie Veltri and Fat Jimmy, two of Tessio’s guys, mention the operation in passing. They hadn’t said much, just enough for Sonny to figure out the shipments were whiskey from Canada, they were unloading at the Canarsie piers, and the whiskey was Giuseppe Mariposa’s. After that it was easy. He hung around the piers with Cork until they saw a couple of Hudson straight-eights parked on the docks alongside a long Ford pickup with a stake-bed covered by a blue tarp. A few minutes later, a pair of sleek speedboats came along, cutting cleanly through the water. They tied up at the dock and a half dozen men started pulling crates off the boats and loading them into the truck. In twenty minutes the boats were speeding away and the trucks were loaded. Coppers weren’t a problem. Mariposa had them in his pocket. That was a Tuesday night, and the next Tuesday was the same thing. He and Cork cased the operation one more time after that, and now they were ready. It wasn’t likely there’d be any surprises. Chances were no one would put up much of a fight. Who’d want to get himself killed over one lousy shipment of hooch?

When they reached the piers, Cork cut the lights and drove up the alley as planned. He inched the car along until they had a view of the docks. The pickup and the Hudsons were parked in the same places they’d been parked for the past three weeks. Sonny rolled his window down. A couple of sharp dressers leaned against the lead car’s front fender smoking and talking, a whitewall tire and chrome-capped wheel between them. Two more guys were in the Ford’s cab, smoking cigarettes with the windows open. They were wearing Windbreakers and wool caps and looked like a couple of stevedores. The driver had his hands on the wheel and his head back, a cap pulled down over his eyes. The one riding shotgun smoked a cigarette and looked out at the water.

Sonny said to Cork, “Looks like a couple of dockworkers driving the truck.”

Cork said, “Good for us.”

Nico said, “Easy pickin’s,” but with a touch of nervousness.

Little Stevie pretend-fired the chopper, whispering “Rat-a-tat-tat” and grinning. “I’m Baby Face Nelson,” he said.

“You mean Bonnie and Clyde,” Cork said. “You’re Bonnie.”

The Romero brothers laughed. Vinnie pointed to Angelo and said, “He’s Pretty Boy Floyd.”

Angelo said, “Who’s the ugliest gangster out there?”

Nico said, “Machine Gun Kelly.”

“That’s you,” Angelo said to his brother.

“Shaddup,” Cork said. “You hear that?”

A moment later, Sonny heard the hum of speedboat motors.

“There they are,” Cork said. “Time to go, boys.”

Sonny held his tommy gun by the grip, with his finger on the trigger guard, and shifted it around, trying to get the feel of the thing. “
Che cazzo!
” he said, and tossed it back in the duffel bag. He pulled a gun from his shoulder holster and pointed it toward the roof.

Cork said, “Good idea.” He took a pistol out of his jacket pocket and laid it on the seat beside him.

Nico said, “Me too.” He tossed his tommy gun onto the seat and pulled a .38 out of a shoulder holster. He gestured to the chopper. “That thing’s like carrying a kid around with you.”

Sonny looked back to the Romeros and said, “Don’t get any ideas. We need you with the choppers.”