The Godfather Returns (19 page)

Michael summoned Rocco, Clemenza, and Fredo to his home. They huffed upstairs and sat in front of his blond desk in those orange plastic chairs. He asked point-blank if any of them had any idea what happened to Geraci. Each said no with equal vehemence. “It wasn’t you?” Rocco asked and Michael shook his head, and they all seemed surprised. An accident was bad enough, but eventually the people who mattered would learn that the pilot had been Geraci. “Which is when the fan’ll hit the shit,” Clemenza said.

Michael nodded. The only way to fix this mess, he said, was to call a meeting of all the Families, the first since the one his father had convened right after Sonny was killed. Admit that this was a dumb decision, trying to go see a boxing match, even if Falcone did have a big bet on it and pressured him to go. Restitution could be made, all the Dons would give their word that the matter was finished, and it would all be a blessing in disguise because they could go right from that to formalizing a larger peace agreement. Everyone would benefit. Yes, such a meeting would mean that there would be a vote about putting Russo on the Commission, but at this point the definitive end to this war would be worth even that. It was going to happen sooner or later anyway. “But the problem we have now,” Michael said, “is that whatever happened—cover-up, kidnapping, maybe even the government—makes that kind of a summit impossible.”

Clemenza snorted and said he smelled something rotten in Cleveland, and Michael cocked his head. “I seen Hamlet with that fruit, what’s-his-face. The famous one. Not half bad, once you got past the tights.” He looked at Fredo and Fredo said “What?” and Clemenza shrugged and asked Mike if he figured Forlenza’s men sabotaged the plane or if they were trying to keep Geraci’s identity secret so that people wouldn’t
think
they’d sabotaged the plane? Since the best way out of this mess would be to point out that the Jew certainly wouldn’t sabotage a plane flown by his own godson, which would open up a whole other can of worms. Maybe it was all just a misguided attempt by Forlenza to protect his godson? Maybe even from us?

Downstairs, Michael’s half-deaf father-in-law had the TV blasting. In a piercing falsetto, little Anthony Corleone sang along to the theme song for a cowboy show.

“Jesus, what a
giambott’,
” Fredo said. “Makes my head hurt, how many different ways this thing could go.”

Michael nodded, so slowly it was clearly a theatrical pause for thought, not agreement. A necessary pause. He was not, so soon after his brother’s elevation to
sotto capo,
going to disagree with him forcefully, even in front of men as trusted as Clemenza and Lampone.

“None of this,” Michael said, “brings us closer to finding out what happened to Geraci.”

He leaned across his Danish modern desk. It was time to stop speculating. Time to get down to business.

The next day, Clemenza returned to New York with orders to run his operation as if peace were assured and the crash never happened. His men were to do the same. The day after that, Rocco, who knew the men in Geraci’s crew, also went to New York, where he would remain and oversee those operations until further notice. Fredo, as underboss, would temporarily be in charge of Rocco’s men in Nevada.

The Corleones had long been close to Tony Molinari, who’d protected Fredo in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on his father and whose cooperation had helped make it possible for the Corleones to establish themselves in Las Vegas and now in Tahoe and Reno. Neither Vito nor now Michael had ever regarded Frank Falcone as a serious person. Neither believed that his flashy, second-rate operation possessed either the means or the will to come out from under Chicago’s apron skirts. Michael might have opted to be represented at neither funeral. Many expected him to make just that decision, and, on the face of it, this might have seemed the more cautious and more prudent of choices. But these are only words—
caution, prudenc
e
—and they are words that can easily be replaced by other words—
hubris, fear, weakness.
A man
is
his actions, public and private, both when watched and when alone.

Fredo, who after all had been the closest of anyone in the organization to Tony Molinari, was dispatched to San Francisco. Michael, accompanied by Tommy Neri and the same two others who’d been hiding in the woods in Lake Tahoe, went to Chicago: the city where Frank Falcone was born, the city where he’d made his bones, was where his own bones, or what remained of them, would be buried. Those who’d known Vito Corleone recognized the logic in Michael’s decision.
Keep your friends close,
the great Don had said,
and your enemies closer.

The ceremony was held in a tiny white clapboard church on the near west side of the city, in the Italian neighborhood known as the Patch, where Falcone had been raised and where his parents had once run a corner grocery. Hot for Chicago in September. The Chicago police had blocked off traffic for two blocks in every direction. Several of the dignitaries—including the lieutenant governor of California, the heavyweight champion of the world, and several movie stars, including Johnny Fontane—received a motorcycle escort right to the back steps. Others, including Michael Corleone, came early enough to take their seats without such ostentation. Out front, the street was packed. Falcone’s origins were the stuff of local legend, and although the mourners inside observed a respectful silence, no one among the buzzing horde in the street could have failed to hear someone tell the dead man’s story. When Frank was only a boy of fifteen, his father had closed the store and his older sister was counting the day’s receipts when they were both killed in a stickup, a crime investigated so halfheartedly by the police—“ain’t nothin’ but dagos killing dagos in Dagotown,” a detective said, laughing, within earshot of Frank and, worse, of Frank’s mother—that the boy vowed to get revenge. It didn’t take long. Somehow, the kid’s passion got him an audience with Al Capone. The thief’s corpse was found on the front steps of the precinct station, stabbed, as legend has it, sixty-four times (Frank’s father was forty-five years old; his sister was nineteen). The detective and his partner went on a fishing trip to the Wisconsin Dells and were never seen again. For a time, Frank and his mother ran the store, but the memories were too much. From nowhere (Trapani, actually), a buyer emerged and paid a fair price. Frank’s mother took that money and the money from selling her house and moved in next door with her brother’s family. Frank found employment with Mr. Capone. After Mr. Capone had his problems, Frank pursued other opportunities in Los Angeles. At first, he managed to remain in everyone’s good graces by doing well, remembering where he came from, and repaying the men who’d helped him get where he was. These men had enough problems without worrying about everything west of here that was supposed to be Chicago’s, too, and Falcone was their boy anyhow, always would be. It’s hard to say when it happened, but it came to seem as though Falcone had always been the guy out there—his own outfit. Never did get his mother to move, even though he built her a house in the Hollywood Hills—swimming pool, the works.

Twenty policemen on horseback (every horse in blinders, because of the incessant flashbulbs) cleared a path through the crowd, and the funeral procession, many of the cars sporting large campaign signs for the politicians and judges inside, made its way to Mt. Carmel Cemetery. Thousands of people followed it on foot. Just inside the main entrance, the procession passed the final resting place of the rotting, syphilitic remains of Al Ca-pone, who died sixteen years after the IRS killed him, and whose own anticlimactic funeral had been attended by a fraction of the people here for Falcone’s. Vito Corleone had sent nothing but flowers.

The Falcone mausoleum was made of black granite and topped with a statue of an angel with a falcon tethered to its right arm. The falcon was taking off, its wings spread wide enough to provide welcome shade for several sweaty bystanders. Falcone’s father and sister had not been buried here, but brass plaques on two of the doors bore their names.

Falcone’s mother and his wife and kids sat beside the coffin. The only other person in the front row was Louie Russo, sporting those gigantic sunglasses. The rest of Falcone’s blood family sat in the second row, along with Jackie Ping-Pong and Johnny Fontane, who was listed in the bulletin as an honorary pallbearer. Fontane cried like a woman.

The other forty-nine honorary pallbearers—politicians, police captains, judges, businessmen, athletes, and entertainers; no one from the Chicago Outfit or any other organization—were all shown seats near the front as well.

Certainly there were people watching Michael Corleone, but, especially in the context of this circus, not many. He was not a famous man, certainly not in comparison with Fontane, the heavyweight champion of the world, the lieutenant governor of California, or even philanthropist and former ambassador to Canada M. Corbett Shea (row six, next to Mae West). Michael Corleone was not the target of the photographers’ flashes, and only a few of the men from law enforcement knew more about him than the public did, which was not much. He’d been a war hero, but a lot of men had been war heroes. His name had been in the papers during the troubles in New York in the spring, but the pictures of him were blurry, shot at a distance, and the public’s memory is shorter than a senile dog’s. In his world, Michael Corleone was known by all, but many of those men knew him only by reputation and couldn’t have easily connected the name to the face. He knew several of the people here well, but he did not approach them. Somber nods sufficed. Fontane didn’t appear even to notice him. Michael watched the proceedings in silence. Afterward, he stood patiently in line to offer his condolences to Falcone’s widow and mother, the only words he said in public all day, then disappeared into the frosty backseat of the humble black Dodge that had brought him.

Inside, for the first time, Michael Corleone wept for his dead father.

Don Molinari’s funeral procession rolled through the fog, a line of more than a hundred cars in long, snarling traffic, winding southbound and out of San Francisco. Frederico Corleone rode in the fourth car behind the hearse, in a two-tone Cadillac—black and white—that Tony Molinari used to like to drive himself. Fredo had come alone. He’d told Michael that bringing along Capra and Figaro, after all the protection the Molinaris had provided Fredo over the years, would look like disrespect—or worse, like the Corleones had something to fear in San Francisco—and was shocked when his brother had agreed. The driver was a Molinari
soldato
whose name Fredo was trying to remember. Also up front was Tony’s little brother Dino’s wife. Her two girls rode in back beside Fredo.

It was the longest ride to a graveyard that Fredo could remember ever taking, made longer by the crying kids and his clumsy attempts to console them. He’d had the foresight to bring two handkerchiefs, soft silk monogrammed ones that floated from kid to kid until one of them blew her nose so hard she got a nosebleed and had to use both of them to help stop it.

“Where
is
this place?” Fredo asked, reaching for the prayer card that had the name of the cemetery on it:
THE ITALIAN CEMETERY
.

“Colma,” said the driver. “They’re all in Colma.”

“Who’s all in Colma? Where the h—” He stopped himself. “Where’s Colma?”

“Cemeteries. They’re illegal in San Francisco. Gotta go to Colma, which we’re almost to now. Back in the gold rush days, you buried your people wherever they fell. The garden, backyard, some alley, whatever. There were some cemeteries, mostly for the rich ones. But those got moved to Colma, the bodies. They had to do it. My
nonna,
she still talks about how during the earthquakes all over the city, dead bodies would heave to the surface and come shooting—”

“
Enough,
” said Dino’s wife. “Talk,” she said in Italian, “when the chickens piss.” Meaning
Shut your damn mouth.
Her children didn’t seem to understand Italian.

The driver didn’t say another word.

Fredo supposed that the driver’s story wasn’t the kind of thing to tell the kids, but they’d both stopped crying and looked pretty interested.

Outside, the houses and neighborhoods just stopped, superseded in every direction by undulating plains covered with gravestones, vaults, statues, crosses, and palm trees, a vast, unyielding city of the dead, and for some reason he thought of what his brother Sonny had said when he’d effectively banished Fredo from the family:
Las Vegas is a city of the future.
No, Sonny. This, Colma, is a city of the future.
The
city of the future. City of the dead. Dead, like Sonny. Fredo felt a nervous laugh, the crazy kind, rising in him, and he stifled it.

The Italian Cemetery stretched for miles along both sides of the road. The procession entered a path on the south side, past a monument that had dozens of green metal hands sticking out, grasping a long black chain.

Fredo shook his head in wonder.
This is the greatest racket I ever saw. Of
course
there’s a cemetery here just for Italians.
Before any of this was here, back when you could still plant the dead under your rosebushes, Fredo would bet that this whole place had been bought up quietly by Italians. Land that looks like the Sicilian countryside, where poor farmers struggled to grow grapes and olives until someone came up with the idea for a better crop. You get the papers to run sob stories from doctors talking about health risks, you get an ordinance passed, presto! you’re getting paid twice to bury a hundred years’ worth of people who’d already been buried. Get paid once to dig and move, again for the grave site in Colma. Give jobs to a hundred Italian stonecutters who now owe you a favor. Same goes for anyone, really, who needs work and can handle a shovel. Then, for good measure, you buy up the land in San Francisco where the cemeteries were, prime real estate that comes cheap because it used to be full of corpses. But this is America. No history, no memory. You develop the land, and people line up to buy it. On the back end, you get a piece of everything it takes to keep hauling stiffs down here—plots, stones, caskets, flowers, limos. All this plus the traditional benefit of being a silent partner in the graveyard business (if that cemetery in Brooklyn that Amerigo Bonasera ran ever got dug up, it’d be kind of like Cracker Jack, a surprise under every box).