Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Uncle Fredo was missing and presumed dead, but there was no picture of him here. There was no picture of baby Carmela, either. None had been taken. She’d lived, briefly, but had had no life.

Uncle Mike, as busy as he undoubtedly was, came early, stayed late, and was a tremendous comfort. Not even her mother was able to talk to Francesca as openly about the nightmare of losing a child as Uncle Mike did. And seeing Sonny playing with Tony and Mary at the reception afterward, watching how well they got along, what buoyant spirits they all seemed to have, gave Francesca hope she could go on.

Billy was struggling with the baby’s death and, understandably, was having a hard time talking about it.

She was having a hard time not blaming him. It was irrational, she knew. But it seemed like a kind of justice being visited on them for his having wanted her to get an abortion when she had been pregnant with Sonny. And what on earth had possessed him to think that telling her he’d been so disinclined to marry her in the first place that he’d only done it after her uncle had sent men to break his leg would make him seem like the good guy in the story?

On top of that, every time she looked at him, she imagined that he was worrying about being photographed by the police or the FBI while attending a gen-u-ine Mafia funeral. That was probably unfair. She had no idea what he was thinking. But they had been photographed. Evil, heartless bastards. She was starting to understand the oppression her uncle faced every day, that her father had faced every day, too.

Suddenly, on the day she buried her own daughter, it clicked. He’d used his parents’ money and his efforts in the Shea campaign to get the job in the attorney general’s office so he could destroy her family.

That was ridiculous, she immediately realized. She wasn’t thinking clearly. She was emotional, distraught, with crazy hormones running amok from head to toe. This was Billy. Whatever his faults-and who doesn’t have faults?-this was the one true love of her life.

Still.

When she’d accused Billy, once, of there having been a crime behind his own family’s fortune, he’d nonchalantly said he was sure there’d been several. Those assholes are capable of anything, he’d said, and he hadn’t been joking. So why was he worried about whatever her family might or might not have done? She knew what her sister would say: Because we’re Italian. It was Kathy who’d found out that the new president’s father had been in business with Grandpa Vito. Bootlegging. A crime that no longer exists. A crime that never should have been a crime, but a crime nonetheless. A generation later, James K. Shea is in the White House and Michael Corleone (again, according to Kathy, who’d gotten it from Aunt Connie, who’d sobered up and seemed a more reliable source than she used to be) had cut himself off from criminal activity of any kind and yet was still being trailed by the heartless maggots from law enforcement at the family-only funeral of his baby niece. Why? Because we’re Italian.

A few weeks later, on a transatlantic call Francesca had been working up to since the funeral, she woke her sister up from a deep sleep and told her how much she’d been hurt that Kathy hadn’t come home.

“You had a funeral ?” Kathy said. “I thought it was just a miscarriage.”

“ Just a miscarriage? And anyway, she lived for-”

“Do you know what time it is here?”

“How could you not know we’d have a funeral? When I lost baby Carmela-”

“You named it? Oh, honey. Honey. You named it after Grandma ?”

It.

Francesca hung up.

Even though Jimmy Shea had said that he probably wouldn’t be able to get out to Las Vegas until after his administration’s first hundred days, from the moment Johnny Fontane got back from Washington, he took time out of his frantic professional schedule to oversee preparations at his newly expanded estate as if the president’s first visit would be tomorrow. Johnny added ten people to his staff, including a retired member of the Secret Service, whose job was to stay in constant contact with his old agency, to be ready at a moment’s notice if the president needed to come west and blow off a little steam. There was now a guest room accessible through an ingenious recessed panel from what would be the president’s office as well as from a stairway in the floor of the closet, which would allow the Secret Service to show women in and out via the new underground garage. Louie Russo had given Rita Duvall her own suite at the Kasbah, but as a backup, Fontane had at least three of Hollywood’s reigning sex goddesses clamoring to be of service as well, again at a moment’s notice. Danny Shea had started back up with Annie McGowan, who’d been his mistress before she had been married to Johnny, and Johnny had made it clear to them both that they’d be welcome anytime, together or separately. He’d given several of the best chefs in L.A. fifty thousand apiece just to agree to drop everything and come when Johnny called. Johnny didn’t go for drugs himself, but Bobby Chadwick and the president both had a thing for cocaine; the stuff Gussie Cicero had gotten him was supposedly as pure as it gets.

Johnny’s career was at its commercial peak. The record label he owned might or might not have been bankrolled to some extent by Louie Russo and Jackie Ping-Pong. Johnny tried to stay out of that kind of thing and let his team of lawyers and accountants take care of it. Same thing went for his movie production company and the Corleones’ investment. What he did know was that both companies were making a mint. His own records sold like mad-for which he got three times the royalty rate he’d made back at National Records. He’d hired Philly Ornstein away from National to run the company, and the acts Philly had signed were piling up gold records, too. Even the bad pictures his company released were packing the theaters (perhaps especially the bad ones; the only film the company released from 1959 to 1962 that lost money in its initial run was Fried Neck Bones, with Oliver Smith-Christmas playing a terminally ill southern lawyer and J. J. White, Jr., playing a Negro juke joint singer falsely accused of raping a white girl, a film now considered a classic). If Johnny Fontane bought a stock, it went up. If he bought land, same deal. The casino he owned twenty percent of in Lake Tahoe, the Castle in the Clouds? Forget about it: full of suckers every day of the year, hottest joint in town. Sure, it was good to be the president’s pally. It was better to be Johnny Fontane’s.

Johnny hadn’t spoken to either Shea brother since the inauguration. He understood, of course, but a few days before the Shea administration’s hundred-day mark, Johnny finally broke down and called the private number he’d been given. The secretary refused to put him through.

“Can you take a message?”

“Of course, Mr. Fontane.”

“Here it is: Get your bird out here before it falls off. Love, JF. In those exact words.”

Later that day, as the news started to get out that the crazy little invasion of Cuba wasn’t just the work of a bunch of angry expatriates but instead had been undertaken with the backing of the U.S. government, Johnny felt bad about leaving such a frivolous message. His retired Secret Service man said there was no use calling to tell the secretary to tell her to toss the message. If it was on the log, it stayed on the log.

Soon, though, the worst of the controversy passed-the whole operation had been approved by Jimmy’s predecessor anyway, something he’d inherited that was too far along to stop-and Corbett Shea sent word that the president was planning his first trip to the West. He’d signed a bill for a new national park not far from Las Vegas, and he wanted to give a speech at the site. He had a few other stops to make-other smiley feel-good moments for the boys on the nightly news-but primarily this was going to be a vacation.