The Godfather's Revenge (7 page)

When I think about how I should feel about this—which is almost never—I know it’s awful. I’m not a stupid man. At every turn of my life, I understand that I should feel all kinds of things that I don’t feel. A person can make himself understand a thing, but how do you make yourself feel? What’s a man supposed to do about that?

If this were all out in the open, probably our family would be destroyed. I’d be devastated. But as long as you never
really
know these things, as long as we never talk about it, as long as I’m not found out, I have to be honest: I don’t feel bad.

I don’t feel anything.

That’s
what I feel bad about.

I’ve helped plot the deaths of many men and one whore. I’ve stood in rooms where the body was still warm and calmly discussed business. I’ve killed three men myself, Theresa. The first time, I was only a boy, eleven years old, an orphan, living on the streets. I don’t like to think about it. I think about the good that came from it, which was that Sonny brought me home to live with his family. The other two happened last year, right before that Notre Dame–Syracuse game you and I saw with Andrew. On one of the men, I used the belt I’m wearing right now, which seems odd only when I stop to think about it, which I never do. The other man, the one I shot in the head, was Louie Russo, head of the Chicago crime syndicate, and a sick man, in ways I don’t like to think about. The world is a better place without this individual, I can assure you. Here again: self-defense. All three times, it was kill or be killed, and I killed.

These things do not haunt me.

Nobody suspects me of anything—nobody except, I suspect, you.

As you must know, sweetheart, I’m not just Michael’s lawyer and his unofficial brother. I’m also his
consigliere,
and, lately, his
sotto capo
as well. His underboss.

Which I can’t be officially, because, unlike you, my love, I’m not Sicilian, not even Italian.

You know all this. You must. Right after Pearl Harbor, when your parents got thrown in detention, like a lot of Italian immigrants did, how do you think I got ’em out so fast, huh? When your cousin fell on hard times, didn’t you wonder how a high school gym teacher who’d never set foot in Rhode Island made such a smooth transition into the vending-machine business there?

How many times have you wanted to buy a painting and done so with an envelope of cash I gave you that you took, no questions asked? You’re a smart woman, Theresa. If—as I never will—I asked you to estimate the amount of money you’ve laundered, not to mention the number of art dealers whose tax fraud you’ve abetted, I’m certain you could tote it up in your head.

You know things. You keep asking me questions I can’t answer, but, Theresa, my love, you know.

Their gaze was broken by the arrival of two plates piled high with stone crabs.

“Well?” Theresa said. A little hurt, it seemed, as she always was. “Nothing to say?”

“Ah, you know,” Tom Hagen said, throwing up his hands. “Not much to tell, I guess. A day’s a day.”

“Wow,” she said. “Look at all this food! I’ll never eat all this.”

Theresa had ridden out his long silences countless times before, often without the aid of candlelight and a tart white wine.

“Call Sandra,” Tom said. “Bet you she’ll help.”

“I already did.” Theresa grinned in a way she must have hoped was wicked. “When I went to the Ladies. She and Stan are on their way.”

Theresa had a good heart, Tom thought. At this point, it was probably as broken as it was going to get.

T
he
indios
had a name for the land of the dead. They called it Mictlan. Nick Geraci was under no illusions that he was the only one in Taxco who’d conducted business there.

He stood on his balcony in the waning desert light, draped in a bathrobe, postponing the ordeal of having to get dressed again. His fists throbbed. Behind him, on the green tile floor inside, were the clothes he’d cursed himself trying to zip and button this morning, now soaked with blood and rolled up inside a rug along with the stranger who’d come to kill him.

Centuries ago, Taxco was hacked from this steep hillside by the colonizing rear guard of the conquistadors, who enslaved the natives and marched them into dark holes to mine silver. The big shots stayed up top, basking in the thin air and idyllic weather, supervising what was destined to become a maze of tortuous cobblestone streets, shooting dice and despoiling the local women, drinking first one sort of spirits, then bracing themselves for the visits from another. On such a foundation rose this small city, still a source of silver, lovely beyond reason, filthy with jewelry shops and bars, fragrant with bougainvillea and boiled chicken, with fried cornmeal and rotting straw, a haven for outsiders and eccentrics. Around every corner were views that provoked tourists and newcomers to gasp and unholster their cameras.

Geraci’s apartment was on the third floor. From its balcony, he could see the zócalo, the baroque dome of the church of Santa Prisca, and an exultation of tile-roofed colonial houses, each forced by the sheer angles of the hillside and its spurs of virgin rock to be ingeniously different from the next. From here, the city seemed aglow in white, red, and green, same as the Mexican (and Italian) flag. But Geraci had been in Taxco long enough to see past beauty.

He could pick out sad-eyed women behind counters in silver shops or seated at café tables and watch them swallow grimaces they’ll never unleash on their haggling customers and oblivious lovers. He could spot isolated men muttering to themselves, walking with awkward, hurried gaits: away from something and not toward it. He noticed dogs trotting alone down side streets, their heads bobbing as if silently cursing their demons. His heart went out to those dogs.

He looked back over his shoulder at the rug. He’d bought it on the street. It was wool, brightly colored, turquoise and orange, black where it needed to be. It had a warrior on it, in noble profile. He’d liked that rug.

Even though Geraci hadn’t wanted to kill the guy, and even though his now-aching hands stood to make a tough job, getting dressed, even tougher, it was wild—in every sense of that—to feel his fists throb again. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thrown a real punch. In his time of need, his body, to his surprise, had not betrayed him.

He leaned out over the railing and was able to glimpse the distant gorge, safely downwind, where four centuries of the city’s garbage had been dumped, where today’s trash hill often became tomorrow’s sinkhole, where brown lakes of putrefied sewage formed and vanished, where children were warned never to go. Buzzards circled it all day, and wolves patrolled it all night. There were no doubt other corpses in that gorge, but this would be the first Geraci ever heaved there. It didn’t bother him. He’d been to New Jersey.

Getting dressed, though: that bothered him.

The tremors bothered him, too, but they came and went.

Charlotte, his wife, was upset about his face, the way it sometimes lacked expression, but until he figured out a way to reunite with her that wouldn’t get him killed, that was no problem at all. If other people can’t see his expressions, what’s it to Nick Geraci?

Losing track of his thoughts was disturbing, but it didn’t happen often. Anyway, he was pushing fifty. Everybody forgets things. It might be a mercy. Geraci would
like
to be able to forget how miserable he felt every day when he thought about his wife and kids and how little hope he had of seeing them any time soon. He’d
like
to be able to forget the plane crash he was in and the blow to his head that he was convinced caused all his problems (he’d been a heavyweight prizefighter, but so many of his fights were fixed, he’d rarely been hit in the head much harder than he slapped himself when he forgot something). But what Nick Geraci could never, ever forget was that Michael Corleone had arranged to have the plane sabotaged. Geraci would never abandon hope of somehow settling that score, no matter how long it took. His fine motor skills were shot. Every time he went to button a shirt or fasten a goddamned pair of pants, it was like Michael Corleone was staring at him with that cold and, come to think of it, expressionless face.

Geraci steeled himself for the task at hand and turned to walk back inside.

Then he panicked.

For a moment, he’d forgotten the other task at hand. For a split second—though it had the force of much more time—Geraci even forgot who the dead man had claimed to be.

ONLY MONTHS AFTER HIS DISAPPEARANCE, NICK
Geraci had begun to attain the status of myth. Even the great, gray
New York Times
weighed in, late in the game, with an editorial headlined
JUDGE CRATER, AMELIA EARHART, PLEASE MEET ACE GERACI
.

Only a few members of the secret society to which Geraci belonged and certain augmented elements of the CIA knew precisely who Geraci was—and even for those people he had become, seemingly overnight, larger than life. They knew about the assassin squad he led and the debacle in Cuba that came from that, though few blamed Geraci. They knew that Michael Corleone had tried to kill him, sacrificing Geraci as a pawn in the young crime boss’s obsessive quest to become a legitimate businessman. They knew that Geraci had found out about this, and they knew that he’d conspired with the bosses of the Cleveland and Chicago organizations in an attempt to get revenge. And they knew that it had almost worked. This conspiracy had been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of dozens of notable men associated with the American Cosa Nostra, including those two bosses themselves—Luigi “Louie” Russo of Chicago (aka “Fuckface,” because of his penis-shaped nose) and Vincent Forlenza of Cleveland (aka “The Jew,” because he had so many Jews in top positions in his syndicate), as well as several top men in the Chicago and Cleveland organizations. Other notable casualties had included the most powerful Jewish mobster in the country (a man named Hyman Roth), the bosses of the Los Angeles and San Francisco syndicates, and an assortment of Corleone Family underbosses and
caporegimes,
including Rocco Lampone, Frank Pantangeli, and Fredo Corleone. The chaos had forced Michael Corleone to return to New York to more closely oversee his businesses there, both legal and illegal.

The people who knew these things were of course not talking—except among themselves.

As for the FBI, it had an imperfect sense of who Geraci was and what had happened. The Bureau had assigned a fairly large number of agents to the case but had not assumed jurisdiction from the NYPD, reputedly because of a difference of opinion between the Bureau’s director, who believed this to be a local matter and thus in the hands of New York’s finest, and the attorney general, a man half the director’s age but his putative boss, who had ordered the investigation to be a top priority. These things were reported in several sleazy true-crime gazettes and girlie magazines but turned out to be true.

The NYPD’s understanding of the case was more flawed than the FBI’s. It had identified Geraci as the
capo di tutti capi,
the boss of all bosses, when all he’d ever been was Corleone
caporegime
acting as boss for the Family’s interests in New York—and even that had been something of a setup. But the investigation had nonetheless provoked dissension within the NYPD, which the press was gleefully exploiting. A faction of the department’s true believers—eyes on promotions or federal appointments—was actually trying to find him. Another faction was occupied by efforts to pin a number of absurdly unrelated cases it wanted to close on the missing crime boss. The faction in ascendancy was pushing to close the investigation and hand it off to the FBI and/or someone in Ohio. Given that Geraci was the literal godson of Cleveland crime lord Vincent Forlenza (who, with less fanfare, was also missing and not technically dead), it was common sense that those responsible for Geraci’s disappearance or demise were based in Cleveland and/or nearby Youngstown, a mob haven. It should be said that not all the police in this faction wanted this case off their desks because they were disinclined to investigate anything related to the brown paper bags of cash that had helped pay for their remodeled basements and their kid’s braces.

The press, especially in New York, could not restrain its glee. For weeks, the front pages were awash with colorful nicknames and wild speculation. One “highly placed gangland source” even claimed that Geraci had disappeared once before, in 1955, that he was actually the pilot of a plane that crashed into Lake Erie and killed the bosses of the San Francisco and Los Angeles crime syndicates. The pilot had been taken to a Cleveland hospital, unconscious, but then vanished, only to be found several months later, rat-gnawed and badly decomposed. The pilot’s name was supposedly Gerald O’Malley, but efforts to learn anything about him failed. At the time, two different papers opined that he might never have existed. That did not prove that Geraci and O’Malley were one and the same. But it was true that in his boxing days, Nick Geraci did use various aliases and participated in various fights of dubious resolution, so in the minds of many, these allegations seemed to fit a pattern.

The word on the street? Nick Geraci’s body was encased somewhere in the fresh cement of the new baseball stadium at Flushing Meadows Park.

Instead—far-fetched as it might seem—the truth was, the most powerful nation on earth had deployed skilled intelligence and law enforcement personnel to conduct a gigantic manhunt for a powerful and resourceful leader of a secret criminal society—a tall, imposing, bearded man with a chronic, withering disease—and somehow failed to find the cave where he was hiding.

GERACI HAD FOUND REFUGE UNDERNEATH LAKE
Eerie, in a bomb shelter the size of a ballroom, complete with its own water treatment system and power supply and seemingly endless cache of canned food. Geraci had learned about the place doing some business with Don Forlenza. Most of the people who knew about it either were dead or wouldn’t think to look for him here. On the train from New York, Geraci thought that at any second someone would kill him. He took it past Cleveland to Toledo, where he didn’t know anybody, stole a boat, and, hugging the shore, took it to Rattlesnake Island. The lodge was empty, as it usually was when Forlenza wasn’t there. Geraci disabled the alarm, climbed in a window, ransacked the liquor cabinet, and left a radio tuned to a rock-and-roll station so that it would look like kids had broken into the place. Then he made his way down to the shelter.

The genius of the setup was that it was carved into bedrock underneath a secret guest room, where Geraci had stayed a few times and so knew how to make the hidden door open, and another well-stocked shelter. It was possible that even if people searched the lodge, they’d never find the hidden door. Even if they did, they might never think to look for the other, larger shelter below.

Always at the edge of Geraci’s attention was what might be waiting for him up there, outside his door, what catastrophe might seek him out, how this might end. A pack of strangers in long, dark coats. Or waves of G-men with square jaws, bad suits, and tommy guns—images he realized came from the movies, but where else? He’d never had a run-in with the Feds in his life.

Or maybe just one man. Michael Corleone’s pet killer, Al Neri, smiling and alone.

Or Geraci’s own protégé, Cosimo Barone—Momo the Roach. That was more Michael’s way. He’d had Geraci, as a test of loyalty, kill Sally Tessio—Momo’s uncle, a man who’d been like a father to Nick Geraci.

When, if ever, would Geraci know he could come out? What would force his hand?

For months, no one knew where Nick Geraci was except Nick Geraci.

One of his many difficulties, down in the hole, was that he had no way of knowing what anyone knew. There was a ham radio, but Geraci didn’t know how to use it and was afraid to try, for fear it might send out signals that would tip off his location. There was a TV, hooked up to an antenna on the roof of the lodge. Much as Geraci detested television, he did watch it off and on. There was nothing on the TV news about his situation. There wasn’t much on the TV news that could tell a person what anyone knew about anything. Everything else on TV was just as bad. But then the TV stopped working, too.

When that happened, Geraci braced himself for the other shoe to drop. He dragged a chair to face the heavy steel door and waited there with a shotgun across his lap. If cops of some sort came to get him, they’d announce themselves. He’d keep the gun trained on them until he saw badges, at which point he’d lay down his weapon and go peacefully. He didn’t want to die. But anyone else, he’d say a little prayer and open fire.

This was if he wasn’t having a bout of tremors and could fire the goddamned thing at all.

Hours passed. He fell asleep. When he woke he realized to his horror that he’d forgotten to wind his watch. He’d allowed himself to depend on television as a backup to winding the watch. He wanted to shoot the TV, but he didn’t want to make any noise. Also, there was a chance it might start to work again. No matter how much you hate TV, the monster lulls you back.