The Godfather Returns (25 page)

Geraci motioned for Charlotte to help him climb out, but she was oblivious.

“Daddy won’t
ever
die,” Bev said.

“You’re stupid,” Barb said. “Everybody dies someday.”

“Now, girls,” Charlotte said. “Be nice.”

It was as if she didn’t see the first thing strange about this scene, being brought two thousand miles to the back of a funeral home to retrieve her missing husband from a casket. Upstairs, an organ, God knows why, started playing “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.”

“He will too die,” Barb said. “Everybody does.”

“Not Daddy,” Bev said. “He promised. Didn’t you, Daddy?”

Actually, he had, once. His father had always said that a promise is a debt.
Ogni promessa è un debito.
It had taken being a father himself—even more than his treacherous professional life—to drive the lesson home.

“Now you see what
my
days are like,” Charlotte said. She said it cheerfully, though. She didn’t sound like she was trying too hard. She smiled and took his bruised face in her hands and kissed it. Nothing needy or passionate, just an ordinary, slightly lingering marital kiss, the kind a man might enjoy one morning at the breakfast table. It was not the sort of kiss Geraci would ever have expected to receive while sitting in a casket with bandaged ribs and a broken leg—and, who knows, maybe a fresh concussion, too—while a chorus of muffled voices in the room upstairs sang an old Tin Pan Alley song at some poor stiff’s funeral. Though in fairness to Charlotte, perhaps there was no right sort of kiss for an occasion like this.

“Can you give me a hand?” he said. “Getting out?”

“Your dad’s waiting in the car,” she said. “Should I go get him?”

“No.” Naturally, his father couldn’t be bothered to come in and greet him. “I really just need a hand. We can do it.”

They did. The girls came forward, perfectly in step. They’d rehearsed this. They presented him with his crutches as if they were peasants bestowing a humble gift to the king.

Then they cracked up, and for a long time he didn’t do anything much but hold the girls’ embrace. At some point Bev whispered, “You did promise,” and he whispered, “So far, so good.”

“It’s nice to have you back,” Charlotte said.

Outside, the funeral home’s pebbled parking lot would have been big enough for a shopping center. Maybe fifty cars, but his father, Fausto, of course, had the best space, closest to the door. He’d probably come by yesterday, sized up the parking situation, then gotten here hours ago to make sure he got that space. He sat behind the wheel of his idling Oldsmobile, looking straight ahead and listening to Mexican music on the radio. He had the air-conditioner going full blast, probably for no other reason than to create a need for him to wear the old quilted jacket with his union local’s logo on the back. He waited for Nick to finish struggling with the crutches and get situated in the passenger seat even to turn to face him.

“Well, well, well,” said Fausto Geraci, “if it ain’t Eddie Rickenbacker.”

A team of local carpenters had been hired to make long maple tables especially for the peace talks. The tables were arranged in a big rectangle inside a ballroom that had once been the stable. The stain on the tables was dry but so fresh it still smelled. The odor wasn’t too bad until the room also filled with cigar and cigarette smoke. They opened all the windows, but the
consigliere
from Philly, who had emphysema, and Don Forlenza from Cleveland, who had just about every affliction under the sun, both had to listen from the next room. The temperature outside was forty. Other than Louie Russo, who must have been trying to prove something, the men conducted the entire meeting in their scarves and overcoats.

What everyone at the table agreed to believe for the sake of peace was this: The plane crash in Lake Erie was nobody’s fault. Frank Falcone did in fact bet a hundred grand on that fight at the Cleveland Armory, and he’d insisted on going to see it no matter how bad the storm was. As the plane went down, someone in the tower heard Geraci say the word
sabotage,
but Geraci was merely thinking aloud in a time of great stress and
ruling out
sabotage. The thunder and lightning made the radio transmissions difficult to hear. The plane crashed and everyone died on impact except Geraci, who almost did. Don Forlenza learned about the terrible deaths of his recent guests, and he learned that the authorities thought the crash might have been the result of sabotage. Immediately, Don Forlenza made certain that no one in his organization had sabotaged the plane. Then he rescued his injured godson from the hospital. What else was there to do? Had Don Falcone and Don Molinari been killed as a result of sabotage, there was the chance this might be blamed on the Cleveland organization. There was a chance it might be blamed on his godson, who was unconscious—unable to protect himself, unable to answer for himself. Who in this room would not have done the same for his own godson? Also, because Geraci was a member of the Corleone Family, Don Forlenza was concerned that his godson may have been the target of violence by one of the other New York Families. Geraci had regained consciousness. The federal authorities had ruled out sabotage. The crash had been an act of God. Don Corleone had let the other members of the Commission know that the missing pilot was Geraci. As Don Corleone had said then and reasserted now, the fake name on Geraci’s pilot’s license was intended to be a deception to no one but law enforcement officials, no different in kind than the driver’s licenses many of them were carrying now. In this case, the alias had done its job. While every man in this room had known for months that Gerald O’Malley was in fact Fausto Geraci, Jr., the authorities had presumed that O’Malley was the rat-gnawed corpse in that ravine.

What a fitting monument to the four men who died that the discussions initiated to help understand the crash soon expanded themselves to other issues. Soon an agreement for a lasting peace had been struck—an agreement they’d had all come here to ratify.

Much of the official story was true, but no one in that farmhouse believed every word of it.

Though no proof had come to light, there seemed to be little doubt that Louie Russo’s men had penetrated Vincent Forlenza’s little island fortress and sabotaged the plane. After all, the men in that plane
did
represent all four of Chicago’s biggest rivals in Las Vegas and the West. The crash had succeeded in making Don Forlenza look like an old fool. The struggles in New York had given Russo an opening, and he’d seized it. He’d forged allegiances with several other Dons—Carlo Tramonti in New Orleans, Bunny Coniglio in Milwaukee, Sammy Drago in Tampa, and the new boss in L.A., Jackie Ping-Pong. When Russo went to Cuba, he stayed in the presidential palace. No one but Russo’s allies relished Chicago’s return to power, but the consensus was that Russo posed less of a threat with a seat on the Commission than he had as a turf-grabbing outsider. To most of the men at those tables, trying to prove Russo responsible for that crash was unimportant. What mattered was returning their full attention to their own business. Even Butchie Molinari had been persuaded (by Michael Corleone, in fact) to declare publicly that he accepted the official version of the crash and to vow not to seek revenge.

Louie Russo and also his
consigliere
were not about to deny an accusation that no one had openly made, even if they knew it was false. Russo hadn’t ordered a hit on the men in that plane. If he had his theories about who if anyone had, he wasn’t letting on.

Russo, naturally, knew some things. Jackie Ping-Pong knew some things. Sal Narducci—who because of Forlenza’s health problems sat alone at the head table, as if he were already running Cleveland—knew some other things.

The man Narducci hired to sabotage the plane went on vacation in Las Vegas a few days later and hadn’t been seen since.

(Or, rather, he hadn’t been seen since Al Neri, a man who didn’t know or care about who he killed or why, shot him and buried him in the desert.)

Clemenza knew a lot, but not everything.

Michael Corleone was fairly certain that he’d covered his tracks well enough that no one—neither friend nor enemy, cop nor
capo
—
would ever put it all together.

Who would
possibly
surmise that not only did Michael order the deaths of Barzini, of Tattaglia, of his own top
caporegime
Tessio,
and
of his own sister’s husband—not to mention all the collateral killings those killings unleashed—but that he then negotiated a cease-fire and used that uneasy truce to orchestrate a hit on the men in the airplane, including Nick Geraci, whom he’d recently promoted to
capo,
and Tony Molinari, a steadfast ally? There were no rumors that either man had betrayed him—largely, of course, because they had not.

Who’d ever figure out what that satchel Fontane delivered was really for? Even Hagen had unquestioningly presumed that it was an investment in the new casino at Lake Tahoe.

From where Michael Corleone sat, tapping that old Swiss watch given to him by Corporal Hank Vogelsong, how could anyone—even someone who’d only
read
about Jap planes exploding into fireballs, cutting troopships in half—think that a man who’d seen what Michael had seen in the Pacific would kill
anyone
by ordering a plane crash?

Every morning, Fausto Geraci—it’s
Jair-AH-chee,
but, what the hell, people’ll say it how they want—was always the first one up. He’d make coffee and go out on the back patio of his little stucco house in his boxer shorts and an undershirt, where he’d sit on an aluminum lawn chair, reading the morning paper and chain-smoking Chesterfield Kings. Once he finished the paper, he’d stare out at his empty swimming pool. Even having his granddaughters in the house for the better part of a school year had had little visible effect on his mood.

Fausto Geraci’s heart was pickled in a bitterness more corrosive than battery acid. He was a man convinced that the world had fucked him over. Years and years of dragging himself out of bed and climbing into the freezing cab of some truck and hauling anything a person could imagine and a lot of things a person wouldn’t
want
to imagine. Loading and unloading his own trucks, hard work that was taken for granted by everyone who wound up with any goddamned thing he’d ever hauled. Driving what maybe were getaway cars; he wouldn’t know. But he did it. He spent a lifetime standing firm against everyone who was against the Italians, and he stayed loyal to that prick Vinnie Forlenza and his organization. He went to
prison
for those people. Did he complain, say a word about it? No. To them he was just Fausto the Driver, some quiet ox who worked hard and followed orders. He did all that work for them, jobs that doomed his soul to Hell so long ago even his own wife told him she stopped praying for it, but did they cut him in as an equal? No. He got some money, sure, but they gave Jews and niggers more of a break than they ever gave Fausto Geraci. He was supposed to be grateful for how they set him up in the union. Ha. He was still their puppet. The pay was good but not enough to make up for having to sit at a desk all day and listen to petty complaints from lazy people. Still, he listened, said almost nothing, and did his job. He spent years solving other people’s problems, but who ever gave two shits about Fausto Geraci’s problems, huh? Then after all those years of loyalty, one day:
pow.
He’s out. They gave his job to someone else (Fausto knew better than to ask why), and they gave Fausto the Driver “early retirement.” Hush money. Go-away money. What did he do? He went away. Loyal to the end. Loyal
past
the end. Good old Fausto.

And, Jesus Christ, don’t get him started on kids. His daughter was a dried-up old maid schoolteacher who moved from Youngstown to Tucson just to make his life miserable—every night after school she comes by and it’s
eat this, don’t eat that, how many cigarettes is that today, Poppa?
On and on. And the boy, his
namesak
e
? He thought he was better than everybody else. His mother encouraged it, too. Everything came easy for that kid. Married a blonde with tits out to here. Went not just to college but to fucking law school. And that business with the flying? Just another way of showing the world he wasn’t his old man—a hotshot private pilot, see, not some broken-down truck driver. Every breath that ungrateful shit drew was an affront. Even says his
name
wrong. Ace Geraci. Goddamn. Who’d he think paved his way? Vinnie Forlenza, that’s what he probably thinks. Or those cocksuckers in New York.

When the others started waking up, before they could start bothering him, Fausto got up from his lawn chair and went to the garage. He kept a robe and slippers in there. He’d put them on and work up a sweat doing yard work. On their way to school, Barb and Bev, bless their hearts, would come out and give him a kiss. He wanted to protect those sweet kids from a world that was going to disappoint and then destroy them, but instead he’d just stand there in his robe, holding a hose or a rake, smiling like a happy peasant and waving good-bye.

Then he’d go in and clean himself up and drive across town to Conchita Cruz’s house trailer. She barely spoke English, and he barely spoke, but somehow they’d met in a bar not long after he’d moved here and come to this arrangement. He couldn’t remember how, that’s how relaxed this thing he had with her was.
Hair-AH-see,
she pronounced his name, which was a fuckload closer than how his own son said it. Sometimes they’d fuck, but more often they’d spend an hour together not asking questions. Just existing. Television’s good for that. Other times there’d be cards, dominos, maybe a foot massage. They’d eat lunch, there or at the diner on the corner, and then he’d kiss her on the forehead. They’d declare no love and make no promises, and she’d go to her second-shift job at the cannery and he’d go for a short drive in the desert. Every day but Sunday, on the same straight stretch of road, he’d stomp on the gas and blow the carbon off his engine—and his heart, too, or so it felt once he buried that speedometer needle in the black space beyond 120. Once he did, he’d ease off the gas, letting his speed and pulse and spirits drop. Then he’d go home, where his sorry-ass namesake and that goddamned Swedish wife would be bickering. When they’d first gotten there, Charlotte had been a model wife, and Nick was humbled by having just fucked up so bad. But a few weeks later, about the time he got that cast off his leg, the bickering started. Even the turning on of the television would touch off some stupid argument. Especially that. Day by day, they behaved more and more like Fausto had with his late wife, another way the boy seemed determined to mock him.