Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

“O’Malley, eh?” said Falcone.

Geraci nosed the plane up through the thunderhead, seeking better air. He knew what Falcone meant: the name on his pilot’s license. The flight was obviously challenging enough that Falcone accepted it when Geraci didn’t answer. It’s not the eyes that see, it’s the brain. As Michael had predicted, Falcone put an Irish name together with a broad-shouldered, fair-haired Sicilian, a man he naturally presumed worked for the Cleveland operation, and what he saw was an Irishman. Why not? Cleveland worked with so many Jews, Irish, and Negroes that the men in it called it the Combination. People outside of it called its Don, Vincent Forlenza, “the Jew.”

It was a necessary deception. Rattlesnake Island was not an easy place to get to. Falcone might not have boarded a plane owned by the Corleones. Don Forlenza had hoped to come to the wedding, but his health had precluded it.

The plane finally rose above the clouds. The men were bathed in blinding sunlight.

“So, O’Malley,” Falcone said, “you’re from Cleveland, huh?”

“Yes, sir, born and raised.” Misleading, but true.

“Guess our DiMaggio and his Yanks were too much for the Indians this year.”

“We’ll get you next year,” Geraci said.

Molinari started talking about watching DiMaggio play for the San Francisco Seals and how even then he was a god among men. Over the years Molinari had made a bundle fixing Seals games, but never once the whole time DiMaggio had been there. “People have these ideas about Italians, am I right, O’Malley?”

“I’m not sure I have any ideas at all, sir.”

“We got us a cacasangue, ” Falcone said.

“Pardon me?” Geraci said, though he knew full well what the word meant.

“Smart-ass,” said Falcone’s bodyguard.

“ Wiiiiise guy, eh? ” said Geraci, in the manner of Curly from the Three Stooges.

Molinari and the two bodyguards laughed. “That’s pretty good,” Molinari said. Geraci obliged him with a perfect nyuck-nuck-nyuck laugh. This, too, amused everyone but Falcone.

The conversation was sporadic, inhibited by the bumpy flight and the name on Geraci’s pilot’s license. They talked for a while about restaurants and then about the title fight at the Cleveland Armory that they were planning to attend tonight instead of going to Vegas to see Fontane-an invitation-only show, courtesy of Michael Corleone, to kick off a Teamsters convention. They talked, too, about The Untouchables, which they both liked, though partly because they found it funny. Geraci had heard it on the radio and been irritated by the stereotypical straight-arrow cops and spaghetti-slurping, bloodthirsty Italians. He’d never seen the television show, though. He was a reader. He’d sworn never to own a television set, but last year, Charlotte and the girls had worn him down. He knew a guy-Geraci always knew a guy or had a guy- and one day a truck pulled up and two men in suits unloaded the biggest one anybody made. Before long, Charlotte was serving meals on TV trays. Saturday became “TV dinner night,” an abomination Geraci was glad his mother never lived to see. Geraci would’ve liked to drag that television to the curb, but a man must pick his battles. A week later, a contractor Geraci knew pulled a crew off the parking garage they were building in Queens and had them dig up the wild mulberry bushes behind Geraci’s in-ground swimming pool. A couple weeks after that, Geraci had his own little house back there, his den: a refuge from the noise and the zombie feeling he got when he used that goddamned television to watch anything but sports.

Geraci nosed the plane down into the clouds. “We’re beginning our descent.”

The plane was bucking. The passengers eyed every strut, every bolt, every screw and rivet, as if they expected it all to break apart.

Geraci tried to trust his instruments and not his eye or his anxieties. He breathed evenly. Soon the shit-brown surface of the lake came into view.

“ Rattlesnake Island,” said Molinari, pointing. “Right?”

“Roger that,” said Geraci, using the voice again. “That’s pilot talk, fellas.”

“We’re landing on that?” Falcone said. “That fucking little landing strip?”

The island was only forty-some acres, a fifteenth the size of New York ’s Central Park, and most of it, from the air, seemed to be taken up by a golf course and an alarmingly small landing strip. A long dock protruded north from Rattlesnake Island so far it was practically in Canadian waters, which of course, during Prohibition, had been useful. The privately owned island was so tangentially a part of the United States that it issued its own postage stamps.

“It’s a lot bigger than it looks from up here,” Geraci said, though he wasn’t so sure about that. Not only had he never landed on the island; even though his padrino for all intents and purposes owned it, Geraci had never been there.

Molinari patted Falcone’s hand. “Relax, my friend,” Molinari said.

Falcone nodded, sat back in his seat, and tried to coax a last drop of coffee from his cup.

Moments before they were about to touch down, the plane caught a downdraft, as if it had been slapped out of the sky by a giant hand. It plummeted toward the surface of the lake. Geraci could see the froth of the waves. He pulled up, got control, leveled the wings, buzzed a cabin near the shore.

“Oooo-kay,” Geraci said, yanking back the stick. “Let’s try that again.”

“Jesus, kid,” Molinari said, though he was only a few years older than Geraci. Softly, Geraci muttered the Twenty-third Psalm, in Latin. When he got to the part about fearing no evil, instead of “for Thou art with me,” he said, “for I am the toughest motherfucker in the valley.”

Falcone laughed. “Never heard that in Latin.”

“You know Latin?” Molinari said.

“I studied to be a priest,” said Falcone.

“Yeah, for about a week. Don’t distract the pilot, Frank.”

Geraci flashed a thumbs-up.

He found a pocket of smooth air, and his second attempt to land was improbably soft. Only now, the flight over, did one of the bodyguards start to vomit. Geraci caught a whiff of it and stifled the gag it provoked. Then the other bodyguard threw up on himself. Moments later, men in yellow slickers appeared on the end of the runway to meet them.

Geraci sucked fresh air from his window, and his passengers got out. Men opened umbrellas for them, put chocks behind the wheels, lashed down the wings, and took all but one of the suitcases. A big black carriage, lined in red velvet and drawn by white horses, waited for them onshore, to carry them up the hill-a hundred-yard journey, tops.

Geraci watched the Dons and their puke-stained men rush to get into the carriage. Once they were inside the lodge, Geraci lugged his suitcase up the hill alone, opened the cellar doors, and disappeared down the steps, into the remains of what was once a thriving casino, past the bandstand and the cobwebby bar to the dressing room. He flicked on the light. The rear wall was made out of the kind of sliding steel door he associated with automotive garages in Brooklyn, but otherwise the room looked like a high-roller suite in Vegas: king-sized bed, red velvet everywhere, elevated bathtub. Behind the steel door was a room full of canned goods, gas masks, oxygen canisters, generators, a water-treatment system, a ham radio, and a bank vault. Underneath, carved into the bedrock, was a gigantic fuel oil tank and, supposedly, other rooms and more supplies. So long as Don Forlenza had any warning at all, whatever happened-if the state police staged a raid, if strange men came to kill him, if the Russians dropped the bomb-he could hide down here for years. Forlenza controlled the union that worked the salt mine under the lake near Cleveland; rumor had it that a crew did nothing day and night but dig tunnels to and from Rattlesnake Island. Geraci had to laugh. A kid like him, son of a truck driver, standing inside the kind of place a regular person would never even hear about. He carried the bag of money into the other room. He set it down in front of the vault.