The Godfather's Revenge (55 page)

He sat back down beside his sister.

They looked out at the swimming children and, beyond them, the white sand and the ocean.

Connie reached over and put an arm around him. “He’d be eight years old,” she said. “He’s out there, somewhere. Think of it as a comfort.”

IT WAS PROBABLY THANKS TO MICHAEL CORLEONE
that Carlo Tramonti did not—as Michael had once asserted to the other members of the Commission—ruin them all. President Payton discontinued the so-called War on the Mafia. The director of the FBI reassigned most of the agents who’d been on that detail. After his election to the Senate in 1966, Daniel Brendan Shea pursued other weighty matters.

In the long run, though, tremendous damage had been done. Younger FBI agents who’d been on the case didn’t forget what they’d learned. Younger U.S. attorneys reassigned to other matters or elected to office themselves didn’t forget what they’d learned, either. President Shea himself had proven much easier to kill than the public’s suspicion that “the Mafia” had the president “whacked.” All of these sentiments paved the way for the passage of the RICO statutes, which gave prosecutors powerful new ways to send gangsters to jail. It would be another ten years, however, before these complicated laws sent a Mafia boss to prison. But the threat loomed, and nothing would ever be the same. By the 1980s, both Michael Corleone and the Corleone Family often seemed like they’d been reduced to parodies of their former selves.

Yet the years that immediately followed the deaths of Tom Hagen, Jimmy Shea, and Nick Geraci might have been the most peaceful that Michael Corleone and the Corleone Family had ever known: one of the rare stretches of his life in which Michael would have considered himself almost happy.

During those years, he would often think back to that night in Staten Island, savoring the memory of the drive back home.

Michael and Richie Nobilio came out the front of Jerry’s Chop House into a pouring rainstorm. The bodyguard they’d brought handed them an umbrella, and they hurried into the back of a waiting black Lincoln. The bodyguard got in the front. Michael nodded to the driver, Donnie Bags, and they sped away.

By now, the mess across the street had been cleaned up. Fat Paulie Fortunato owned the bar and, for all intents and purposes, the neighborhood and the police that patrolled it, and, in exchange for other favors from Michael Corleone, he’d offered it up as a safe place to conduct that sad and ultimately grim showdown. Al Neri and Cato Tomaselli, the Corleone associate who’d posed as Greco’s bodyguard, were now under the care of a first-rate surgeon on Staten Island, a man Don Fortunato had actually moved here to address inconvenient situations such as this. Tomaselli’s wounds were minor. As for Neri, the bullet had gone through him cleanly, grazing and puncturing a lung but nothing worse than that. His recovery was expected to be lengthy but full.

Eddie Paradise had supervised the removal of the dead. Geraci’s body was on the boat Eddie had sold Momo. The earthly remains of Cosimo Barone and Italo Bocchicchio had been hauled off to the Fresh Kills Landfill, Robert Moses’s presumably unintentional gift to both kinds of Staten Island wiseguys. The slightly higher big hill next to it, where Fortunato and the top Barzini men had homes, was called Todt Hill;
todt
being the Dutch word for
death
. Staten Island gave Michael Corleone the creeps.

Michael Corleone and his men drove a few miles down dark, leafy residential streets until Donnie turned left, toward the waterfront. They pulled into a filling station, closed now, beside a panel truck with
FLATBUSH NOVELTIES
painted on the side. Through the rain, the towers of the new bridge loomed in the distance. The bodyguard got out of the front seat of the Lincoln. Eddie Paradise got out of the panel truck. The portly little man’s suit was torn and filthy. Eddie walked through the rain, unhurried and with no umbrella. He took the bodyguard’s place in the front seat and closed the car door.

“How was dinner?” Eddie said, running a hand through his wet hair. “I heard it’s good, Jerry’s Chop House. The chops, especially.”

The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable, understandable, and forgivable. Tonight would have been tough on anybody. Barone was Eddie’s best friend, and Geraci had shown him the ropes, yet Eddie had handled the whole business like a champ.

Michael patted the weary
caporegime
on his damp, tattered shoulder.

“You’ve rewarded my confidence in you, Ed. You have my gratitude.”

Eddie Paradise mumbled his thanks. Michael signaled to Donnie Bags to go. The Lincoln and the panel truck pulled out of the filling station in different directions.

Richie Two-Guns shook his head. “I take my hat off to you, Eddie,” he said. That same night, the man he’d started to groom as his own lieutenant, Renzo Sacripante—who, from all outward appearances, had done a fine job running the zip-laden Knickerbocker Avenue crew—had been garroted in a men’s room on Mott Street and was now a part of a different garbage heap, on a barge at the refuse station in Yorkville, courtesy of a city sanitation official for whom the day had come when it was necessary for him to perform a service for Michael Corleone.

“Not that you got a hat to take off,” Eddie said.

“On account of it’s already off to you,” Nobilio said, patting Eddie’s shoulder now, too.

Michael had heard that Eddie was also put out that—as the Corleones settled all Family business—two traitors from his crew had been fed to his beloved lion in the basement of the Carroll Gardens Hunt Club. Eddie said he’d heard that once lions got a taste for human flesh, they’ll never again be happy eating four-footed mammals. Al Neri had assured him that was a myth, but what the fuck did Al Neri know about lions? Still, Al had reported to Michael, Eddie had gone along with it with a minimum of complaint.

Now Eddie let out a deep breath, then turned on the radio, to a rock-and-roll station, and slumped down in his seat, clearly exhausted. Out of respect, no one asked him to change it.

The men were all talked out.

Donnie Bags—another of Geraci’s men who’d proven himself loyal to the Family—was a terrifically skilled driver, weaving through traffic, hitting lights perfectly, negotiating the wet roads without ever fishtailing or hydroplaning, all without calling attention to the many laws he bent to his own will. In no time they were crossing the Bayonne Bridge into New Jersey. Nobilio fell asleep. Eddie tapped a pinkie ring lightly against the glass, perfectly in rhythm with the beat of the song.

For too long, Michael Corleone had taken for granted the skills of men like Donnie Bags, Richie Two-Guns, and Eddie Paradise.

It had been after Michael’s sit-down with Eddie, the lecture about the traditions at the core of the organization Michael’s father had built, that the nightmares—or whatever they’d been—had stopped. Michael’s doctor attributed it—and the corresponding lack of any significant diabetic episodes—to better diet and less stress. But to Michael’s mind, it was because he’d figured out Fredo’s warning: to connect with the old ways, the old traditions, to remember that the source of their father’s greatness had been the relationships he built with people, relationships in which money and power were but by-products of fear and love.

The car carrying Michael Corleone now sped into the darkness of the Holland Tunnel. The radio went to static. It startled Nobilio awake.

“Don’t worry,” said Eddie Paradise. “We’re just underground.”