Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Geraci said he had a crew that could knock this job out in three days. Rosen frowned and said it was a lot more complicated than that. It turned out there were all kinds of government regulations that made that impossible, for money reasons (Geraci could get it done, but he had the right to make a buck in the process) just as much as security.

That was when Geraci felt sure this whole thing was for real. These clowns really did work for the government.

Rosen took the notebook back and paged through it like a spinster fogging the window of a bridal shop. “I don’t know, though,” Rosen said. “If only the locals weren’t such a problem.”

“Problem how?” Geraci said.

“Taking away the place people shitcan their most inconvenient trash or go to fuck their babysitters,” Flower answered, “definitely gets noticed in a community.”

“Especially in New Jersey,” said Carmine. He’d come back to the car to get more ammo.

“I’m from New Jersey, sir,” Rosen said.

“So then you know,” Carmine said, shrugging and slamming the trunk shut.

“I like you,” Flower said, patting Carmine on the back. “Just the kind of man we need.”

“My back?” Carmine said. “Don’t touch it no more.”

“He’s funny about that,” Geraci said. “The back patting.”

“Funny,” Carmine said. “Many dead men are laughing about this, I think.”

“Now I’m even more sure,” Flower said. “Mr. Marino, you’re at the very top of my list. Between all those dead rats and your attitude, you’re going to be hard to beat.”

Carmine smiled broadly and slapped Flower on the back, and Flower feinted a return slap that stopped short, and they both laughed like hell.

“Only Italian I ever saw who had a thing about being touched,” Rosen muttered, which made Geraci wonder if he was really Italian or if that was what someone who wasn’t Italian would say.

“The locals won’t be a problem,” Geraci said. “Trust me.”

The next day, a sign went up out by the highway, announcing an exclusive new subdivision. DELUXE LOTS ON SALE JUNE 1962! it read underneath. A year away. This should turn whatever curiosity the locals had into a plus. The anticipation might make it worth really developing the place-draining it, hiring lawyers and architects, bribing the planning commission: the usual subdivision drill, no different for a Mafia Don than anybody else.

That night at dinner Nick Geraci started shaking, enough to scare Barb and Bev. Charlotte wanted to call an ambulance. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Coffee jitters.” She said she thought he’d stopped. “That’s the problem,” he said. “I had an espresso at the club this afternoon.” Which he hadn’t. He concentrated on the movement of his hands and jaw as he ate, and the shaking stopped. But when it happened again in the morning, Char said if he didn’t go see a doctor she’d get a knife and stab him in the leg so he wouldn’t have any choice. He said he was fine, it’d pass. She went and got the biggest knife in the kitchen. He smiled and told her he loved her. She wagged it and said she was serious. “Me, too,” he said. He was. He held up his quavering hands. “Be a doll and dial him for me, huh?” Though the moment she set the phone back down he was fine.

His regular doctor prodded him with tools and questions, but he was stumped.

“I wonder if maybe it’s in your head,” he said. “Are you having a tough time at work? Pressure, stress, that sort of thing? Or at home, things okay there?”

“You think I’m a fucking nut, is that what you’re saying?”

He referred Geraci to a specialist.

“If specialist is just another word for shrink, I’ll be back, only not as a patient.”

The doctor said he certainly understood that.

The specialist was supposedly a world-famous neurologist and tiny, barely five feet tall. He diagnosed Geraci with a mild form of Parkinson’s disease, related to getting hit in the head all those times as a boxer and triggered by a serious concussion.

“I didn’t get hit in the head all that often,” Geraci said.

“You boxers are all the same,” the doctor said. “All you remember is what the other guy looked like. Tell me about that concussion, though. Pretty recent, right?”

Geraci hadn’t told the doctor a thing about the plane crash that had nearly killed him. “I guess so,” Geraci said. “If six years ago qualifies as recent.”

“What happened six years ago?”

“I fell down,” Geraci said. “Knocked myself cold. Damnedest thing.”

The doctor looked into Geraci’s eyes with his flashlight gizmo. “Fell down from where?” he asked. “The Empire State Building?”

“Something like that,” Geraci said.

From an upstairs window of the Antica Focacceria, Nick Geraci watched a wiry, moustached man-his friend and business partner Cesare Indelicato-cross the Piazza San Francesco, theoretically alone. The piazza was an oasis of light tucked deeply in a neighborhood of dark, narrow streets in the oldest part of Palermo.

Don Cesare was never really alone. He’d trained his soldato s and bodyguards to blend in. A casual observer wouldn’t have guessed that the young men leaning on Vespas in front of the cathedral were Don Cesare’s men, as were the four milling around outside the restaurant arguing about soccer. A casual observer might have guessed that the nondescript man in the off-the-rack suit walking across the piazza was a history teacher a few years shy of retirement, rather than a hero of the Allied invasion of Sicily and the most powerful Mafia boss in Palermo.

Though it’s also true that Palermo is a city where little is observed casually.

It was three in the afternoon, and the restaurant was closed. The waiter seeing to their table had been approved and searched by Don Cesare’s men, one of whom was stationed in the doorway. There were men downstairs, too, keeping an eye on the cooks and the back door.

Over wine and the restaurant’s legendary beef spleen sandwiches, Geraci and Indelicato discussed various details of their thriving narcotics business. They spoke entirely in English, not as any sort of security measure but because, even after all these years coming to Sicily on business, all these years surrounded by native Sicilians, Geraci’s Italian was atrocious and his Sicilian even worse. He understood it but couldn’t speak it. He couldn’t explain why. A mental block or something.

“It is good to have you in my city, my gigantic friend,” Don Cesare said, finishing his last bite and licking his fingers. “But these matters, I don’t know, I think they are not why you came all this way to speak with me?”

“I brought the family this time,” he said. “My wife and daughters. The older one is off to college in the fall. To university, I guess you’d say. It might be our last family vacation. They’d never been to your beautiful island before, and now they’ve been all over it, at least as best you can in ten days.” They’d have spent more time, but they’d had to come on an ocean liner. Nick Geraci had no intention of ever getting into an airplane again. “I actually never took the time to sightsee before. First time I’ve ever been to Taormina, if you can believe it.”

Don Cesare raised his hands in lamentation. “I own the finest hotel in Taormina. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be there? I would have seen to it that you and your family was treated like royalty.”

“You do so much for me already, Don Cesare, I wouldn’t think of imposing further.”

But Don Cesare wouldn’t let it drop until Geraci promised he’d come back to Taormina no later than next year and stay at Indelicato’s mountaintop resort.