The Godfather's Revenge (37 page)

“Let me know if you find anything, my friend,” Joe said. He patted Michael on the cheek and then, harder, on the pocket where the eye was. “Maybe send me a snapshot.” He turned and headed alone toward the escalator, the exaggerated stiffness in his posture gone now, replaced with a carriage not unlike the exhausted hero at the end of a good Western. Michael wondered if that, too, was some kind of pose.

Michael ignored the stares of the bystanders and waited for his old friend to disappear—his oldest friend, it occurred to him. He did not pull out the eye, but he could feel it in his pocket, more dense, much heavier than he’d have guessed. Michael’s ears were burning. Handing over that eye had been such a strange gesture that it only now registered as a terrible act of disrespect. Worse: a wiseass’s version of the evil eye. He closed his fist around the eye, hard. He should shove this thing down Joe Lucadello’s throat, or up his ass.

He motioned to the bodyguards. They said nothing about the eye. Protocol was for men this lowly not to speak to a boss unless spoken to.

They stopped at a men’s room on the way to the Vatican City pavilion. Michael told one of the men to stand at the door and say the john was out of order and he took the other inside and asked for his gun. Again, simple protocol.

Michael stood before the sink. With his handkerchief, he took the eye out of his pocket. It was not gruesome. The detail was amazing. That someone could make something like this by hand seemed like a miracle. It was shaped more like an egg than a ball.

He wrapped the handkerchief around the eye and set it on the counter, then pulled out the gun and checked the safety. With his left hand he held the edge of the handkerchief. With his right, he gripped the gun by the barrel, raised it above his head, and with all his strength brought the butt of it down on the eye. The guard at the door stuck his head in. Michael hammered the eye with the gun again and again and everything became a blur, and when he stopped he was sweating and out of breath.

He opened the handkerchief. No camera, of course. It still looked a little like an eye, tiny particles and thin broken glass rods and a dozen or so glass chips, thicker and more rounded than Michael would have thought.

On impulse he pocketed the biggest piece.

He left the rest on the counter and washed his face and combed his hair. His white hair, which always made the man in the mirror seem unfamiliar. He looked down at the mess and only then realized that the initials on the handkerchief weren’t his. They were Fredo’s.

MINUTES LATER, ALONG WITH HUNDREDS OF
strangers, a sliver of his diminished family, and a woman he was starting to think it might be possible to love, Michael Corleone boarded one of the three motorized platforms in the
Pietà
exhibit and trolled slowly past the spotlighted crucified Christ in the white marble arms of his mother. To bring such beauty to life, as Michelangelo had, was beyond all human understanding. To bring it to America was something much more modest, but it had nonetheless involved months of delicate negotiations and a tremendous number of exchanged favors and cash tributes. It was, Michael Corleone told himself, in and of itself the accomplishment of a lifetime.

During the fair’s run, this year and next, Michael Corleone would rarely set foot in the other parts of the pavilion—the chapel on the mezzanine, the exhibit explaining the Catholic sacraments, the replica of the excavation made underneath St. Peter’s Basilica (underneath this replica, Michael knew, was garbage). But Michael would return to see the
Pietà
countless times, before and after its normal business hours, alone and with others, on the platforms and strolling at his own pace on the crowded walkway. Anytime he’d see so much as a pull tab or a straw wrapper—anything at all to mar the site—he’d pick it up himself and throw it away. Above the statue were eighty-two spotlights arranged in a halo, and he would sometimes marvel to strangers that there seemed to be light coming from within that white stone, too: a piece of rock, dug from the humble soil of Italy, transformed by Italian hands into this vision of unspeakable beauty. Michael no longer prayed. He had not been to confession in fifteen years, and he doubted he would ever go again, but the
Pietà
would never lose the power to move him.

Often, as now, Michael Corleone wept.

C
harlotte Geraci dropped off the rental car at the airport and took a cab down Highway 61 into the city of New Orleans. It was midmorning. She’d been driving nearly nonstop for two days. She was road-haggard and still wearing the wig, still looking behind her every few seconds, as she had the entire way from Saratoga. The cabbie asked if she was OK, if he could get her a glass of water or an aspirin. “I’m fine,” she lied. “I’m just tired.” When the cabbie asked if it was her first trip to New Orleans, she lied and said no. It seemed like the answer most likely to shut him up.

Nick was waiting for her in a slightly faded grand hotel on Poydras Street. She was getting there exhausted and famished—she’d been too frightened to stop for anything but gas and a few crummy snacks and Pepsi-Cola. She also had no luggage, which, along with the wig, made her feel like a whore. She went in the ladies’ room off the lobby and brushed her teeth, washed her face, and dabbed at her underarms.

She took the elevator to the room.

“I’m sorry, little lady,” Nick said, doing a corny John Wayne imitation. “You’re an awfully darned purty
brunette
, but my
blond
wife is a-ridin’ into town on the next stage.”

It was a regular room, not a suite.

“I’m looking for my husband, actually,” Charlotte said. “Maybe you’ve seen him. He’s a man with no beard.” She tugged on it. He’d had it for nearly three years, yet she’d never seen it. He’d sent her those reel-to-reel tapes—dozens of them—but he’d never once in the time he was gone sent her a photo.

They stood in the doorway. Despite the jokes about her wig and his beard, they were sincerely flummoxed by the reality of standing there, together, after so long.

“You’re real, right?” She poked him as if he might be a ghost her finger would pass through.

That did the trick. They fell into an embrace, spinning around and kicking the door closed.

Their shoes and clothes flew and moments later they were in bed. It did not go well. She was exhausted and could have used a shower and they were both fumbling and shaking. They’d done it because the situation had seemed to call for it. It was so clumsy and bad that afterward Nick threw a glass against the wall in frustration and Charlotte went into a fetal ball with the sheets pulled tight around her.

Things looked up from there. There was pink champagne on ice. It was still morning, but they drank about half of it. He gave her a painted wooden box full of Mexican jewelry, which she loved, and a gift-wrapped copy of Chet Baker’s
Chet,
which confused her—she’d heard the name Chet Baker, she said, but didn’t know the music. “You’ll love it,” he said, “it’s a thing of beauty, like you. Not to mention, look at the cover.” It was a picture of Baker in a beige sweater, gorgeous and haunted and looking right at the camera, and a blond woman in a black sweater behind him, eyes closed, face nuzzled against the back of his neck, oozing unspeakable sadness, as if she knows she’ll never be able to help tame the handsome man’s demons. She’ll never even know what his demons are.

“It’s you,” he said.

She was wiped out from the drive and the fear and the bad sex, and the champagne was going to her head. It took her a moment to register that he meant that the woman
looked
like her.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “She doesn’t look anything like me.”

“Because you’re better-looking,” he said.

“Sure,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s the difference.”

Charlotte had a long nap and got up to take a shower.

While she was in the bathroom, Nick looked at the size of her clothes and called the place Augie Tramonti had recommended. Nick described her to the person on the phone—“Forty-four years old but youthful, elegant, classy, not too flashy but only more beautiful because of it, sort of like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and the First Lady, only blond.”

“Who were you talking to?” Charlotte said. The rooms didn’t come with robes, but she was wearing his.

“Nobody,” he said.

“Your girlfriend?”

“Don’t even joke about a thing like that.”

She shrugged.

Within twenty minutes, a woman from the store arrived and wheeled in a cart with all kinds of clothes in Charlotte’s size. Charlotte had come to New Orleans with only what she could fit in a large summer purse. She melted. She picked out a few things—surprisingly nice things, so far from New York, which Nick thought sounded snobbish but which didn’t visibly offend the woman. Charlotte asked if they could really afford this, and Nick told her not to worry about it. (Augie had already taken care of the damages, which Nick did not say.) They got dressed up and went for a long walk in the French Quarter. She asked him how he could just walk around in the open like this in a major American city. He told her that it was a long story, but the short version was that nobody Nick was concerned with, nobody connected with anybody other than certain powers that be here in New Orleans, could even set foot in the state of Louisiana without getting permission from a friend of Nick’s.

He didn’t mention Carlo Tramonti by name. And Charlotte didn’t ask for more details. It was something he loved about her.

They had a magnificent meal at Galatoire’s and came back to their hotel with a bottle of red wine. Nick shaved his beard for her, unbidden. She seemed to appreciate the gesture. They talked deep into the night, catching up on the three years they could never really recover and easing back into bed together twice more, with demonstrably better results.

The next morning, Charlotte Geraci sat up in bed, doing a crossword puzzle. Through a gap in the hotel curtains, a sliver of morning light cut across the bed. Beside her, in a white undershirt and blue silk pajama bottoms, Nick slept. Charlotte was naked and on top of the covers. Nick had clothes on and was under them. She was tanned, even though she was a natural blond and until a few days ago had been in New York—where, true, it had been a nice spring and she’d spent a lot of time sunning herself beside her heated pool. She was forty-four years old; her tan lines came from a bikini, in which she did not look at all foolish. Though Nick was Sicilian on both sides, he’d always been fair-haired enough to pass for Irish or English, and he was paler now than when Charlotte had last seen him, despite having spent the last two years in the tropics. The bottom part of his face was whiter yet. Without the beard he looked more like himself, though in truth only slightly so. The muscles of his face were slack from the Parkinson’s. He did not look only three years older than his wife.

Nick woke. He reached over and softly traced the curve of his wife’s breast. It was a sight that, not unreasonably, he’d feared he would never see again. Her breast. But come to think of it, the crossword puzzles, too. She did them only when something was bothering her. It was one of the subtle delights of marriage, knowing a person this well, enduring long enough that quirks and strange habits go from intriguing to maddening and finally to oddly comforting. Nick could feel the heat of that shaft of sunlight through the sheets.

“I hated you,” Charlotte said, not looking at him.

“Good morning to you, too,” he said, pulling her to him.

It was their first morning together in almost three years.

“I understand that I should blame the people who did this to you,” she said. “And I do. But it’s hard. I don’t know the whole story. It’s hard not to just blame you for what this has done to our family.”

“We’ve been over this,” Nick said. “Our family’s fine. The girls are strong. You’ve done a great job with those girls. We’ll all come out OK. I’ll make it up to you. To you, to them. I really am inching my way back, honey. You’ve got to believe this.”

She tossed the crossword puzzle book aside and shrugged off his grasp. “Twice now, Nick. You disappeared on us
twice
now. You think some few-and-far-between phone calls and one long night on the town covers it? Some
tapes
of you talking on and on about jazz and world events and the books you’re reading? We
haven’t
been over it, Nick. We haven’t been over the half of it. The one-hundredth of it. I love you, I do, but I hated you, too. Listen to me. Understand this. I really don’t think—don’t look at me like that. I really don’t think you
realize
what it’s been like for me.”

Whatever sort of disapproving look she thought he’d been giving her was probably a result of the Parkinson’s. He’d actually been studying her breasts, the tan line, thinking what a lucky guy he was, how good it would be when this all blew over. He was, on the other hand, concerned that she’d been wearing a bathing suit like that, that there might be another man. But he didn’t believe that. She wouldn’t dare, probably wouldn’t even want to. He held out his hand, conceding the floor. “I’m listening,” he said. “I’m all ears.”

“I’m scared, and I’m alone, and I feel like I can’t control my own life,” she said. “I’m just a prop in this big production, Nick’s Wild Ride. I have to do everything, your jobs around the house and mine, too. You think the girls are fine, but they’re not fine. They need their father. Barb is angry, which I know you know. I know you think you’ll be coming back soon, that we’ll be coming back soon, but I hate to think of her alone in our house, waiting for me to come back, waiting for you, and just steaming in it. And Bev. Bev worships you—never a bad word, always defending you like her life depends on it. Bev’s the one I’m really worried about. Maybe you’ve been gone too long to know about the kind of things that go on in California these days, especially on the college campuses out there, but it’s terrifying to think about how she might be falling into some of those things. She’s staying with your dad for the summer, thank God, but after that she’ll be right back with the beatniks and the freethinkers and dope smokers and whatever else is there for her in Berkeley. I’m trying not to blame you for anything, but how could it not be a good thing for her, at her age, to have her father around, in her life more?”

“Give me a minute here,” Nick said, and went to go take a leak and brush his teeth.

This was not like Charlotte. She kept things in. Last night, they’d talked at dinner and late into the night, too, in between making love again. But what they’d been talking about was mostly news, catching up on things, including all the details of Charlotte’s trip. She’d driven, by herself. She’d walked out the back door of the restaurant in a dark wig and walked across town to pick up her rental car, afraid to look over her shoulder the whole way. Once she’d gotten in the car, she kept looking in her rearview, scared out of her wits, for well over a thousand miles. She’d been afraid to stop, and her fear had kept her from needing to, other than for gas and Pepsi-Cola. But the way Charlotte was talking now was different. By Nick’s stars, it was fine. She was entitled. He had it coming. But it wasn’t like her. Nick’s mother had been a big talker, all the time yammering her complaints about Fausto and other emotional matters, talking to Nick like he was an adult, a confidante instead of just a boy. Nick was devoted to his mother until the end, but he thought she was a handful, too. He’d seen how his mother’s candor in public had hurt his father’s prospects with the Forlenza organization back in Cleveland. She’d turned Fausto’s own son against him, in his own house. She hadn’t meant to, Nick knew that. She had a good heart. She and Fausto had a terrific marriage, as such things go. Still, Nick had been determined to marry a woman as good-hearted as his mother and as smart, but with more control over what she said and where. He’d succeeded, too. Charlotte was just sore. More than that, she was scared, and she had every right to be. They were both struggling to act like themselves—they had been ever since she’d arrived. It would take time.

“You’re right about the girls,” he said when he came back. “I know that. But, you know, I do talk to Bev, maybe more than you think. She’s the only one of you who still sends me those tapes. I still send ’em to her, too. If you’re on dope, it comes through in your voice. She’s not on dope, she’s doing well with her studies, and so forth. She’s been raised right, Char, and that’s because of you, too. A strong person doesn’t automatically become what she’s surrounded by. Castles are surrounded by moats, too, but it doesn’t mean the princess is drowning.”

Charlotte considered this a moment and then laughed.

Nick laughed, too. “OK, well, all I’m trying to say is that I’m not as in the dark as you seem to think.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” Charlotte folded her arms across her chest. “The fact remains that Bev needs more of you than she’s getting. I’m never going to be able to get through to her the way you do, and that’s just how it is. The fact remains that over the past three years every time she and I went at it like cats and dogs, I hated you for it. I admit it. I hate myself for feeling like that, but who can I talk to? Not even Father DiTrilio in confession, since I’m supposed to be in mourning for you. I could confess
that
to him, too, I know, but I can’t. I wouldn’t. I’m supposed to be behaving to the whole world like you’re dead. I’ve had to do everything. Everything. I need a spider killed, no Nick. It’s me. Barb and Bev bring their boyfriends over, and I have to pull them aside and figure out their intentions, because there’s no Nick. My father dies, and I go to the funeral alone, because that’s the way I do everything. Not to mention the bills. Money’s very, very tight. Do you know that I’m cutting the grass myself now? I am. Don’t
look
at me like that, I said.”