The Godfather Returns (54 page)

“Frankie!” Andrew shouted.

“My nephew!” Theresa said.

Tom and Theresa hugged each other, and the fullback made it off the field without the need of a stretcher.

On the next play, Syracuse tried to pass. The receiver was wide open over the middle. Just as the ball got there, Frankie came out of nowhere and batted the ball away.

“Woo-hoo!” Theresa yelled. “Go, Frankie!”

“The Hit Man!” Tom shouted. It was his nephew’s nickname. He didn’t allow himself to give it a second thought.

“Aren’t you supposed to be cheering for Syracuse, Ma?” Andrew teased her.

It was a perfect November day for football, crisp and struggling to be sunny. Everyone should see a football game at Notre Dame. The Golden Dome. Touchdown Jesus.

“This is different,” she said. “This is family.”

In the Palermo harbor, Michael Corleone sat on the deck of a yacht belonging to his father’s old friend Cesare Indelicato. Michael had never traveled with as many men for security as he had on this trip, but Don Cesare had not taken offense. They were living in troubled times.

Michael settled in now, comfortable that he would not suffer a double cross, willing to risk the recklessness of being only a few hundred meters away from Geraci when he arrived in Sicily for the satisfaction of watching him taken from the boat by the best assassins in Sicily.

Michael would have to return to New York. Other than Hagen, the best people the Corleone Family had left posed unacceptable risks because of their ties to Geraci. The next best people were mediocrities like Eddie Paradise and the DiMiceli brothers. Michael would have to run the Family again, every aspect of it. He’d be able to make it look as if he were returning in triumph, he was certain—the elimination of Louie Russo and Vince Forlenza would see to that, at least in the eyes of the top men from the other New York Families. But so much of what Michael had wanted—legitimacy, peace, the love of his wife and children, a life different and better than the one his father lived—was now beyond his reach: for years, perhaps forever.

The terrible sting of this would not go away by killing Geraci. He knew that.

There was no pleasure to be taken from such a thing. He knew that, too.

Still.

As they waited, Don Cesare—in his brilliantly indirect Sicilian way—was discussing the benefits of membership in a Roman Masonic organization, the name of which,
Propaganda Due,
he did not utter but which was understood between these men. P2, as it was usually called (though Indelicato did not say this either), was a secret society rumored to be more powerful than the Mafia, the Vatican, the CIA, and the KGB put together. Michael was being proposed for membership, and if all went well, he would be the first American admitted. Not even his father had been considered for this. It was a sign that, even in the wake of the Carmine Marino debacle, the true powers understood that Michael Corleone was destined to resume this role as the most dominant force in the American underworld. Any other man in Michael’s position would have been flattered, and he gamely pretended to be just that.

Finally the ship came into view. Michael sipped a glass of ice water and kept his eyes on the men Indelicato had positioned at the foot of the pier.

The ship docked.

The passengers gradually disembarked.

There was no sign of Nick Geraci.

Indelicato nodded to a man on the roof of the yacht, who waved an orange flag, signaling the men on shore to board the ship and look for their target.

“They’ll find him,” said Don Cesare. “They’re good men, and he has nowhere to go.”

But soon the ship-to-shore radio crackled with bad news. Their target had apparently eluded them.

Enraged, Michael used the radio to call the United States.

He was unable to reach Joe Lucadello, but his assistant assured Michael that nothing had gone wrong. They’d had to use several layers of intermediaries to conceal the man’s identity, but the assistant assured him that, unless the guy jumped off somewhere in the Mediterranean, he was on that ship. “I assure you it was him,” the assistant said. “I have the paperwork right in front of me. Fausto Geraci. Passport, pictures, everything.”

Whistling a tune his Palermitan mother sang him as a little boy, Fausto Geraci, Sr., disappeared under the ancient stone arch near the dock, into what was once the walled city of Palermo.

Cesare Indelicato professed to be as flummoxed by the situation as Michael was.

Chapter 31

M
ICHAEL
C
ORLEONE’S
phone rang in the middle of the night. He was still jet-lagged from the punishingly long trip home from Palermo.

“Sorry to wake you, Uncle Mike. It’s just . . . there’s been an accident.”

He could never tell Francesca and Kathy apart, on the phone or in person.

“Francie!” Kathy Corleone called from the kitchen. She had Billy’s typewriter and several neat piles of books set up on Francesca’s kitchen table—which, only hours after her train arrived in D.C., she’d already com-mandeered so she could work on her dissertation. “Phone!”

“Who is it?” Francesca asked. She was giving Sonny a haircut on a chair in the bathroom.

From Kathy’s lips came words Francesca and Billy had agreed would never be spoken in this apartment, the name of the tall blond whore from Floridians for Shea.

Francesca dropped her scissors. For a crazed moment, she was furious with her sister for this cruel joke, but of course it was no joke. Kathy didn’t even know Billy had had an affair. “Don’t move,” she told Sonny. “Stay right there.”

The boy must have heard something in his mother’s voice. He froze.

For most of their lives, Kathy and Francesca had known the most trivial details of each other’s lives. When had that changed? It wasn’t just going away to different colleges, Francesca thought, standing over the black telephone in her bedroom, blood roaring in her ears.
Boys,
she thought.
Men.
What of life’s biggest problems are caused by anything else? Francesca wanted to go back into the bathroom, lock the door, take her son in her arms, and hold him tight, willing him not to become one of those charming, selfish sociopaths.

Instead, she stopped stalling, took a deep breath, and picked up the phone.

“I’m sorry to call you at your home.” The voice of That Woman sounded as if she’d just stopped crying. It also didn’t sound long distance. “This isn’t easy for me.”

“Where are you?” Francesca said.

“Look, it would have been easier for me not to call than to call,” the woman said. “Much easier. I’m only trying to do what’s right.”

“You’re a little late for that, you whore,” Francesca said. “Don’t lie to me and tell me you’re not in Washington.”

“I have no intention of lying,” she said. “I wouldn’t put myself through this for anything but the truth.”

Francesca resisted the urge to hang up. Instinctively, she knew that whatever the woman was about to say, it was something Francesca should hear, and wouldn’t want to. “Hold on,” she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and asked Kathy if she’d go finish up Sonny’s haircut. Francesca closed and locked her bedroom door. She slammed the heel of her hand against the plaster wall. She put a hole in it. Kathy called out to see if she was okay. Francesca lied and said she was. She picked up the phone and sat down. “Now talk,” Francesca said. She covered her eyes with her throbbing right hand as if avoiding the sight of a dead dog on the road.

“To begin with,” the woman said, “you’re right. I’m in Washington. I work in a congressman’s office. When I first moved here, it wasn’t for Billy, it was for this job, but—”

“Do you really think,” Francesca said, “that
you
have the right to cry about this?”

The woman regained her composure and succinctly confessed. She and Billy had started up again not long after Francesca had lost the baby. They’d been at it off and on until lately, when Billy had gotten her pregnant and been so casual about her getting an abortion that she’d gone ahead with it. She was having a hard time living with herself, though, and had decided to quit her job and move back home to Sarasota.

Francesca clenched her teeth and pressed her swelling hand firmly against the bedpost, trying to use pain to keep the rage that was rising in her from exploding.
Not yet. Don’t give this whore the satisfaction.

The woman said she was calling from her office. She and Billy had gone to a hotel at Dupont Circle on their lunch hour. There—what does it matter how it had happened?—whatever they’d had had come to a tearful end. She claimed that Billy had cried as much as she had.

“Feel better, do you?” Francesca said between her clenched teeth. “Can you live with yourself now?” She was shaking. If she’d been in the same room with this woman, it would have been nothing to kill her. Knock her down and stomp her pretty skull until it popped like a grape. Better yet, thrust a butcher knife through her heart.

“Not really,” the woman said. “Listen, say anything to me you want. I deserve it. I really don’t—” More tears. “I mean, I’m not the sort of person who—”

“Bad people,” Francesca said, “never think they’re the sort of person who did the things they did. I’ve got news for you, you whore. You’re not what you think you are. None of us are. You’re what you did, nothing more. You act like a whore, you’re a whore. I have to go.”

“Wait, don’t,” the woman said. “There’s something else I have to tell you. As bad as what I already said, this might be even worse.
I
think it’s even worse.”

“You don’t impress me as someone who knows the difference between good and bad.”

“It’s about your family.”

“I know that look,” Kathy said. “Don’t think I don’t know that look.”

“Help me bandage my hand,” Francesca said.

“You need to see a doctor,” Kathy said. “What happened that—”

“Help me.”

After years of petty conflict and drifting affection, the sisters felt a shock of understanding shoot through them. They’d had their differences the past few years, but the bond they had as twins never went anywhere. Summoned, it obeyed. There is nothing more complicated and less so than family, nothing easier to understand and at the same time unknowable. With twins, that all goes double.

Francesca didn’t explain any of the particulars to Kathy, yet Kathy understood what she needed to understand. She helped Francesca with her hand, helped her get dressed, listened to her instructions about Sonny (
get dinner at Eastern Market Lunch, he loves that, loves the market, too, but dress warm, it’s supposed to snow later tonight
). Kathy tried to soothe her but not counterproductively so.

Francesca kissed Sonny and grabbed the keys to Billy’s Dual-Ghia. They had only one car (though it cost more than two nice ones), and
of course
it was his, the selfish prick, a big fancy custom-built thing he was ordinarily reluctant to let her drive. At least he’d left it for her today so she could go pick up Kathy at the train station.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Kathy called as Francesca slammed the apartment door behind her.

“Maybe I
am
you,” Francesca shouted back.

When she got there, since only Billy himself was allowed to use the parking garage, she had to circle round and round the building, looking for a space. Her tightly wrapped hand throbbed. Pain shot through it each time she had to shift. The pain wasn’t exactly unpleasant. It was somehow keeping her from crying. The last thing she wanted to allow herself to do was cry.

She banged her unbandaged fist on the leather-wrapped wheel, trying to quell her anger. It only made it worse.
You are what you do, nothing more.
Francesca was disgusted to be the kind of person who’d look for a legal parking space at a time like this. She growled, feral as a cornered wolf, and whipped the car into an empty space in a loading zone.

She strode but did not run up the steps to the Department of Justice.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Van Arsdale,” said the receptionist in Billy’s office. “Mr. Van Arsdale is in an off-site meeting with the attorney general. I don’t expect them back until tomorrow.”

Which Francesca knew. She was supposed to meet Billy at a bar he and his friends from work liked, down by the river in Georgetown, then go out for dinner and a movie. “Billy needed some files,” Francesca said. “He forgot them. He told me right where to look.”

The next thing Francesca knew, she was alone in Billy’s office, going where the whore had told her to go, looking where the whore had told her to look: in the backmost file in the top drawer. The file was thick and battered; the handwritten label—Billy’s handwriting—read
Insurance.

Francesca couldn’t be seen going through it, not there. She tucked it under her arm, thanked the receptionist, and left. She went back to the car. It had not been towed. It had not been ticketed. A good omen, she thought, with no sincere hope it would be.

Inside the folder, as the whore had promised, was information about her family. Newspaper clippings that anyone might have kept, but from papers all over the country. Hundreds of carefully arranged and catalogued snapshots, including quite a few Francesca had taken with her own camera, even before Billy had met her: photos of everyone in her family, but especially those on her father’s side. There was the picture of her uncles and grandfather at Aunt Connie’s wedding that used to be on their dresser and had supposedly been lost in one of their moves. There were four notebooks, the same kind Francesca had been required to use for her freshman English themes, filled with notes about her family, and a several-page typewritten summary of the contents of those notebooks. She tried to figure out when he’d started doing this. The first began in December 1955, the day after they first made love. It wasn’t about that; it was everything that happened at Grandma Carmela’s house, not a journal of any sort, but notes, as if from a class. They weren’t faked. There were things in there only Billy could have known, rendered in handwriting that was unmistakably his (right down to the cursive-style capital
A
’s and
M
’s that he’d used then and replaced with printed style a few years later).

Can’t you see Billy’s just here to experience a gen-u-ine Mafia Christmas?

Billy
told
his whore blonde from Sarasota that he had this file. He probably
showed
it to her. They probably had a good laugh about it, naked in a hotel room overlooking Dupont Circle.

Dizzy, she collapsed, falling sideways against the gearshift and not caring. She let herself cry. That made nothing better. She wanted to
do
something, not sit in her cheating husband’s fancy car, crying like some helpless woman.

She was
not
some helpless woman.

She was a Corleone.

She was the daughter of a great warrior king, Santino Corleone.

By the time she noticed she was murmuring “Daddy, help me” over and over, she’d been doing it awhile.

A Capitol Police traffic cop stopped to write her a ticket, but when Francesca sat up—her face contorted in anguish, her hair and eyes wild—the cop put the summons book away. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. He turned and walked the other way, shaking his head.

In a dark parking lot down by the Potomac River, Francesca waited in her husband’s red car, watching the bar across the street, where she was supposed to meet Billy. She’d been there for a long time, long enough to read every speculation, half-truth, and condescending comment in that hateful file. She wasn’t wearing a watch, and the clock in the Ghia kept lousy time. There had been a handful of aspirin in her purse (next to the kitchen knife, a wedding present from Fredo Corleone and Deanna Dunn), but they’d worn off. Her hand was throbbing worse than ever. But the emotional and physical pain were working together to keep her from passing out, the way two deadly poisons in the bloodstream can keep a person alive.

Maybe an hour ago, Billy had gone into the bar with several other young lawyers. He hadn’t seen her. If he had, they’d have probably had this out already. She wouldn’t really have used that knife (would she?), and she wasn’t above making a scene. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Every moment since then, she’d been a moment away from getting out of the car. She would have, she thought, if she knew what she was going to do or even what she wanted.

She kept going back and forth between wishing she hadn’t brought the knife at all and fearing that she couldn’t possibly do this with her left hand.

She kept thinking about her tough and funny little boy, which made her alternately more and then less inclined to act.

She kept thinking that if only she could calm down, she’d think better.

She realized, now, that this was as absurd as thinking that if only her father were here for her, her whole life would be different and better.

She thought she might soften when she saw Billy again, but when he finally came out of the bar, alone and unsteady on his feet, turning up the collar of his coat against the cold, the opposite happened.

Insurance.

Her heart raced. Her hand hurt so badly she whimpered like a dying animal. Billy turned the corner and started up a steep, narrow cobblestone alley toward M Street. She knew what he was doing. He was a rich boy who’d bought this fancy car because it was what Johnny Fontane, Bobby Chadwick, and Danny Shea drove, but he was also too cheap to hail a cab if it meant having to ride around an unnecessary block. On M Street, he’d be able to get one that wouldn’t have to turn around.

Francesca turned on the ignition. It was a fast car, that Dual-Ghia, one of the fastest made. A perfect hybrid of Italian engineering and American flamboyance.

In the blink of an eye and a few agonizing thrusts of the gearshift, Francesca had it rocketing up that alley.

Billy turned, shielding his eyes from the glare of the headlights. She braced her arms against the big, faux-wood steering wheel. Billy was directly in front of her. There was a split-second flash of what might have been a smile, and she hit him. On impact, his shoes exploded off his feet, his legs buckled, his torso whipped forward, and his head slammed into the hood as hard as if he’d dove from ten stories above. The car fishtailed but kept going. She slowed down but did not slam on the brakes. Billy stayed on the hood as if he were imbedded there.

Francesca grabbed the folder and jumped out of the car. She closed the door as if nothing unusual had just happened and, without hesitating, walked away from the car.