The Godfather Returns (18 page)

Rocco motioned Fredo over. Next to him by the window was an empty metal chair. Outside, a brassy jazz combo on a makeshift stage on the rooftop below played a tune from that famous musical about Negroes. The whole rooftop swarmed with people, though there was no one in the swimming pool. A couple dozen slot machines, four blackjack tables, and two craps tables had been carted up here. There were several full bars and a breakfast buffet.

“What the fuck?” asked Fredo, pointing.

“Where you been?”

“Detroit. Los Angeles. Missed my plane. Long story.”

“It’s one I heard. Where you been since you got back here? To the hotel? And made me wait here like I’m—” Rocco rubbed his ruined knee. “And made me wait. Here. For you.”

One of the men playing dominos cackled. Fredo looked over his shoulder. The cackling guy rubbed the bald head of an unamused guy, who sat still and took it.

“Seriously,” Fredo said, “what’s going on down there?”

“Sit down. Please.” Rocco had never been much of a talker. It was clear from the look on his face that he hadn’t figured out either what he had to say or how he was going to say it.

Fredo sat. “Is it Ma?” he blurted.

“No.” Rocco shook his head. “There was an accident,” he said. “Friends of ours. It looks I would say bad.”

On the rickety stage, the mayor of Las Vegas—a former Ziegfield dancer herself, a terrific old broad, Fredo thought, who still had some of her looks—adjusted the fluorescent orange sash over the huge, impractical tits of the laughing brunette Hal Mitchell had, apparently after no competition at all, named Miss Atomic Bomb. The tiara was an even tougher fit. Miss Atomic Bomb had done her hair up in some great shellacked mass vaguely in the shape of a mushroom cloud. The mayor tried to put it on her from the front, which was impossible without leaning into her tits, so she tried it from behind and kept dropping it. The mayor stopped and handed the brunette her tiara. Miss Atomic Bomb had to crown herself. She was undaunted. This was a very happy young woman. Her bathing suit was cut so low you could just about see her belly button. The trombonist struck up the band. Miss Atomic Bomb stepped to the microphone and started singing “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

The gaming tables were packed. Every slot machine was in use. Scattered everywhere were people on chaise lounges and at picnic tables, working on paper plates heaped with eggs.

Fredo had gotten all the way down here—entourage in tow, even in his own hotel: Figaro and Capra plus those two guys from New York, his shadows until whatever happened because of those deaths in Cleveland happened—before he had any idea what was going on.

Miss Atomic Bomb, who bounced as she sang and was smiling so wide and with such apparent sincerity that any reasonable person would have wanted to slap her or break her heart, started singing “Take the A Train,” only with new lyrics. “Drop the A-Bomb.”

Fredo was all for coaxing pigeons out of their rooms early and often, but he’d seen enough. He cocked his head toward the exit, and his bone-tired bodyguards looked at him like he was Jesus bearing chocolates.

Just then, for no perceptible reason, everything got quiet. The band stopped, the drone of the guests’ babble seemed to be sucked inside their throats, and the faint sounds of traffic from the street below made themselves known by ceasing to be. Fredo looked up, and there it was: a puffball of white smoke in the northeastern sky.

And then sound returned.

That was
i
t
?

Everywhere on the roof, people lounged and gambled. Slot machine zombies kept their eyes steadfastly on the spinning fruit decals. The beauty queen seemed to be the only person applauding. And then:

A blast of heat that felt like standing inside a raging dryer vent lined with sunlamps snapped his head back. Fredo shielded his eyes with both hands.

Seconds earlier, on a salt flat sixty-five miles away, there had been a place called Doomtown—a cluster of ordinary but variously constructed American homes (no two alike), each filled with the aroma of one of the various, ordinary American meals (no two alike) cooling on the dining room table, each table surrounded by human figures dressed variously in brand-new JC Penney clothing. In and around Doomtown, at various distances from the fifty-foot tower that was the town’s epicenter, were dozens of individually penned and oddly quiet pigs. As two hundred American soldiers watched, crouched in trenches they’d dug themselves a mile from the outskirts of Doomtown, the U.S. government detonated a twenty-nine-kiloton bomb. In the first second after that, the houses, mannequins, food, and pigs nearest the tower became flame, wind, and dust. Farther away, as government cameras whirred, siding ignited and debris pulverized lawn jockeys and decapitated mannequins of smiling babies in disintegrating high chairs. Flaming pigs ran screaming in irregular paths and exploded. Another half second passed, and that was all dust, too. In the half second after that, a hot wind worse than twenty harnessed hurricanes leveled most of the rest of the town. Grit—it could have been anything: sand, salt, glass, particles of steel or wood or uranium, bonemeal from pigs killed only because their skin superficially resembled that of the humans so eager to study what remained of it—shot with supersonic speed through Thanksgiving dinner, shiny automobiles, plastic fathers with real tobacco in their pipes, solid-state monitoring equipment, brick walls, everything.

The trenches collapsed. The soldiers were buried alive, but all survived—for now.

Most of the pigs farther than a thousand yards from the tower survived but were so badly burned men shot them long before anyone got around to whipping out the Geiger counters.

The Hagens would never find their arthritic dachshund, Garbanzo. Just as well.

The main stage was really Doomtown: officially classified and yet—because those houses (built by a certain Las Vegas contractor) and even that food (flown in fresh from a certain San Francisco food wholesaler) had to come from someplace—something more than a rumor and less than an open secret.

The rooftop of Hal Mitchell’s Castle in the Sand was just the lounge act. In the time it took Fredo Corleone to think to cover his eyes with both hands until the time his hands met his face, the intense heat waned. After that, some kind of dust fell, too small to see and barely big enough to feel. It was roundly ignored. People kept gambling and barely moved.

“This can’t be good,” Fredo said.

“This shit here, you mean?” said the barber, motioning to the dust, to the very air.

The young goatherd had his tongue out, almost as if he were catching snowflakes.

“The Reds want you to think this shit’s something,” the barber said, “but that’s just a conspiracy to make the U.S. stop all this testing so that the Russians can catch up to us. Believe me. This is nothing. Dust. Less than nothing. ’S go.”

“Nothing,” murmured Fredo, whisking the invisible dust from his shirtsleeves.

Directly above, two of the huge mirrored windows in the ballroom concealed by the casino’s top parapet were gone. The old domino players from the Patrick Henry Social Club stood there in full view and jowly disbelief. Fredo didn’t look up. Why would he? The windows had imploded. Every shard of broken glass had been sucked inward.

BOOK III

Fall
–
Christmas 1955

Chapter 12

T
HE DEATHS OF
Tony Molinari and Frank Falcone—coming as they had on the threshold of what had looked like a lasting peace—sent shock waves through the underworld of the nation. Out of context, anyone would have presumed the crash was an accident: severe thunderstorm, lake-effect air pockets, case closed. The unsolved disappearance of Gerald O’Malley, the crash’s lone survivor, aroused suspicion, as did his garbled words to the tower in Cleveland, in which he had apparently wondered if the plane had been sabotaged. Despite this, his voice had remained calm until right before impact, when he shouted, “
Sono fottuto,
” which the FAA report translated from the Italian as “I’m a goner.” Investigators found no clear evidence of sabotage. They attributed the pilot’s assertion to his inexperience. They ruled the crash an accident. Pilot error.

It was, by any measure, a meaningless coincidence that the last funeral the four dead men had attended together was that of Vito Corleone. But from the Mafia’s murky, contested origins in nineteenth-century Sicily to the present day, every human act—benevolent or violent, willful or inadvertent, whether born of aggression or self-preservation, of passion or ice-cold
ragione—
becomes part of one vast gossamer web, where no quiver or throb is too small to be felt everywhere. For a Sicilian, whose mother tongue is the only one in the Western world that lacks a future tense, the past and the present are as one. For a Sicilian, whose blood has endured six thousand years of invasion and occupation, an accident or a coincidence is no more meaningless, or meaningful, than an act of will. Each may be indistinguishable from the other. For a Sicilian, nothing happens out of context.

The Coast Guard rescuers had lashed “O’Malley” to a body board and raced him to a nearby hospital, where the admitting nurse—referring to the man’s Nevada driver’s license, which formed the core of the fat wad of bills in his front pocket—logged him in at 10:25
P.M.
as “Gerald O’Malley, male Caucasian, age 38.” His broken leg was set and put in traction, his broken ribs taped, his other wounds sewn shut. He did not appear to have any serious internal injuries, but there were still tests to run. He remained unconscious, but the long-term prognosis appeared excellent. His condition was upgraded from critical to serious. According to his chart, the doctors finished with him at 4:18
A.M.
The final notation on the chart came at 4:30
A.M.—
though that one seemed likely to have been a fake. Nothing was noted but the time and some illegible initials no one at the hospital could identify.

By that time, irregularities in both the flight and the other four bodies, or at least parts of them, had either surfaced on their own or been lifted into the gray light of day by human hands.

The bodies had not yet been identified, and the riot of reporters and law enforcement officials that those identifications would trigger was not yet unleashed. The flight plan in Detroit was shown as having been filed, but no one could find it. The plane had left Detroit in the morning and so had to have stopped somewhere else in the twelve ensuing hours, but when the pilot made radio contact with the tower at Burke Lakefront Airport, he indicated he was coming directly from Detroit. The tower tried to get a clarification, but the plane’s radio transmissions—probably because of all the lightning—were a roar of static. When it became clear the plane was in distress, attention turned exclusively to bringing it down safely.

The meatpacking company whose logo was on the side of the plane was located outside Buffalo, New York. The president of the company, groggy with sleep, at first told the investigator he had the wrong number, that his company had no plane, though when the investigator asked if he was sure about that, the president paused and then said, “Ri-i-ight, our plane,” and hung up. By the time other calls were made and the state cops sped out to his lakefront home to bring him in for questioning, he was freshly shaved and showered, dressed in a suit, waiting in his living room, flanked by a lawyer who had once been the state’s attorney general. On behalf of his client, the lawyer informed the officers that a week’s unlimited use of the aircraft in question had been a gift from his client to his friend Joseph Zaluchi—two-time winner of the prestigious Michigan Philanthropist of the Year Award and a board member since 1953 of Detroit, Hooray!—to aid the transportation of guests to and from his daughter’s lovely wedding this past weekend in Detroit, which, owing to a prior commitment, his client had been unable to attend. The client knew nothing about the men and/or women on board, or any details about the flight other than what had become public knowledge. The lawyer asked the cops if they had any warrants, for either search or arrest, then thanked them for their time and for leaving his client alone so he could begin to mourn this unfortunate tragedy.

An attorney for Joseph Zaluchi said that Mr. Zaluchi knew nothing about the man who had crashed the plane, other than that he was a licensed commercial pilot who worked for a reputable charter company in New York. He’d been hired over the telephone by an associate of Mr. Zaluchi. Mr. Zaluchi expressed his deep sympathy for the victims and to their families.

“Gerald O’Malley” disappeared from the hospital sometime between the 4:18 notation on the chart and about five, when an orderly walked into the room and found the bed empty and tubes dangling from the devices that had been connected to the patient’s arms. The pulley that had been attached to his broken leg was also gone, as were the patient’s personal effects.

Nick Geraci had been arrested several times (though never convicted), so his fingerprints were on file. But when he arrived at the hospital, there had been no reason to fingerprint him. His room had been wiped clean.

The two attending nurses whose responsibility it might have been to check frequently on the man admitted as Gerald O’Malley each claimed she was certain he’d been assigned to the other. The head nurse would later take full responsibility for the mistake and resign in disgrace. She moved to Florida and got what was presumably a lower-paying job for a company providing in-home nursing care. Many years later she died peacefully in her sleep. When her will was read, her newly rich children marveled at the savings habits of that generation of Americans forged by the Great Depression.

Several law enforcement agencies and countless reporters tried for months to solve the mystery of the missing pilot. All failed. Members of the U.S. Senate, capitalizing on the public’s fascination with the case, began to discuss holding hearings on this and other matters related to the growing and perhaps Communist menace of organized crime syndicates in America, variously calling such proceedings “long overdue,” “perhaps inevitable,” and “something we owe to our women and children and, indeed, our way of life.”

The driver’s license wasn’t a forgery, but the birth certificate the State of Nevada had on record actually belonged to an infant buried in a New Hampshire cemetery.

The information the feds had for O’Malley on his pilot’s license led of course to that same New Hampshire cemetery.

(Only God and Tom Hagen knew the rest. The cemetery lay beside a road that, many miles north, became the main drag of the town where Kay Adams Corleone had grown up. Soon after Michael killed his sister’s husband and lied to Kay about it, she left him. She took the kids and went to her parents’ house. Michael called her only once. A week passed. One morning, Hagen showed up in a limousine. Tom and Kay took a long walk in the woods. Mike wanted her to know that she could have anything she wanted and do whatever she wanted as long as she took good care of the kids, but that he loved her and—in a characteristically labored joke—that she was his Don. Hagen relayed this message only after confiding in her about some of the things Mike had done—an act of defiance that might have gotten Hagen killed. But it worked; Kay eventually came home. On Hagen’s way back to New York, he stopped at a random public library, leafed through an old volume of the local newspaper, and learned of the sad story of Gerald O’Malley, stricken by diphtheria and taken by the Lord at the age of eleven months. Hagen kept the limo idling out of sight and walked to the courthouse. He was a nondescript man who knew how to behave in a library or courthouse so that people would forget him the moment he left. His various travels had allowed him to collect notarized copies of birth certificates from all over the country, never the same courthouse twice. He had a stack as thick as a Sears catalog. When Geraci asked for one with an Irish name, poor O’Malley’s was right on top.)

Once the identities of the dead were confirmed and then made public, anyone who knew or suspected what Vincent Forlenza was and what sort of situation he had on Rattlesnake Island immediately presumed that the plane had spent the afternoon there—this, with no inkling that the pilot was Forlenza’s actual godson. The authorities, of course, could prove nothing. Forlenza, questioned two days after the accident, also in the presence of distinguished legal counsel, wondered if the good men of the law might not be watching too much television.
Gangster
s
?
On his beloved island sanctuary? Now he’d heard everything. In any case, he’d been home all weekend, except for Sunday afternoon, when these so-called gangsters supposedly landed on Rattlesnake Island to have some kind of—what? Summit? Powwow? No matter. Forlenza said he’d spent the day in question as a guest at a Labor Day clambake sponsored by one of the union locals, huddled under a big-top tent, sipping ice-cold union-made beer and refusing to let the downpour spoil his celebration of an important national holiday, a story corroborated by any number of office-holding Cleveland Teamsters.

The physical description of O’Malley the police cobbled together from their interviews with rescue and medical personnel held little promise. They’d seen the man’s injuries but not the man. They were more fixated on the patient’s vital signs than the size of his ears, the shape of his (closed) eyes, or the subtleties of the jagged ridge of his much-broken nose, which had at any rate been broken again and was too purple and swollen to look much like the way it had.

No one outside the Corleone and Forlenza organizations could have guessed that Gerald O’Malley was the same guy as Nick Geraci. No one outside those Families knew much about who Geraci was or what he did. His seven years in the ring, even with all the fixed fights, had rearranged his face enough that boyhood friends would be unlikely to recognize him. He’d fought under more fake names than he himself could remember. Boxers become muscle guys every day, and any loyal muscle guy with half a brain can become a button man. But those guys don’t turn into big earners so often, much less into big earners a few courses shy of their law degree. He was known in New York as a guy who’d been under the wing of Sally Tessio, but all the different things he’d done would have made it nearly impossible for anyone to put all the pieces together. The more exceptional a person becomes, the more his place in the world seeks a similar extreme. It becomes more likely that he will be known either by everyone or by no one. He will either stand out, even though most people will never see him in the flesh, or he will vanish, even if he’s sitting right next to you at a lunch counter in Tucson, humming the bridge from that new Johnny Fontane record and tapping a dime on the Formica, waiting to use the pay phone.

It’s a crazy goddamned world. For months, Nick Geraci or what was left of him was out there in it, somewhere. Hardly anyone knew where. Hardly anyone was even looking for him.

Richard “the Ape” Aspromonte, who was asked only once, by a blind woman, how he got that nickname, was buried in Los Angeles, followed by a reception afterward at Gussie Cicero’s supper club. When the time came to make toasts, all four of Aspromonte’s brothers looked to Jackie Ping-Pong, who hardly knew the Ape, but whose words proved eloquent, moving, and a comfort to the dead man’s grieving mother. In San Francisco, Lefty Mancuso’s parents tried to keep his funeral small. The only celebrity there was a lesser DiMaggio brother, a high school classmate of Lefty’s. The only member of the Molinari Family was Tony Molinari’s younger brother Nicodemo. Out of respect, even his bodyguards stayed on the periphery, just in front of the small cadre of the cops and the curious.

Ordinarily, a Don would attend a funeral of such men only if they were close personal friends. But these were not ordinary times. And so it became known beyond their own small circles and throughout the underworld that, as expected, Jackie Ping-Pong and Nicodemo “Butchie” Molinari had each, apparently peacefully, assumed control of his organization.

Aspromonte’s and Mancuso’s bosses, Frank Falcone and Tony Molinari, were buried the next day. They’d had many common friends, but no one could attend both funerals.

A choice had to be made. These choices would be watched.

On a walk back and forth past the unfinished houses on Tom Hagen’s cul-de-sac, with Al Neri and two others in the car, parked so it blocked off the whole street, Michael Corleone, smoking cigarettes, told Hagen, who was smoking a cigar, only that he should start amassing untraceable cash, in case there was a ransom to be paid. Michael wanted to be protected from knowing exactly where the money came from, and otherwise he needed to protect Hagen from this entire matter. Hagen stopped at the end of the cul-de-sac. At the far end of the street, his boy Andrew, the thirteen-year-old, ran out the front door with a football under his arm, then apparently saw Neri’s car, dropped his head in lolling teenaged exasperation, and went back inside. Hagen looked past Michael to some vague spot on the saw-toothed horizon, and for a very long time he said nothing. Michael lit another cigarette and said that was just how it had to be. “You wouldn’t pay the ransom, though, would you?” Hagen asked. Michael looked at him with obvious disappointment but only shrugged. Hagen stayed silent for a while longer, then whipped his half-finished cigar across the bright white cement and said, “Protect me,” in a way that was neither a plea nor an incredulity, just a statement. Michael nodded. Nothing more was said.