Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Francesca knew what it was to grow up without a father. She did not know what it was like to grow up with a father who was willing to destroy his own family.

She still felt no remorse.

For now, she’d tell Sonny that Daddy had had an accident and was in Heaven with baby Carmela. But someday, she vowed, she’d tell the boy the truth.

She plugged the phone back in and called Kathy to tell her what had happened. As part of the plan she’d worked out a few hours before, Kathy had told Francesca to betray nothing on the phone, in case Billy had had them bugged. Kathy and Francesca had a fake conversation about what happened and a real one about who Kathy should call.

It was getting close to dawn. It would be late in Nevada now, too. Even so, Francesca called. He’d want to know.

“Sorry to wake you, Uncle Mike. It’s just… there’s been an accident.”

The next day-as Kathy had predicted-the secretary at Billy’s office mentioned that Francesca had come by to get a file for Billy. There was nothing incriminating or unusual about this. She hadn’t left the office angry or distraught. Billy had several different files at home, and Francesca produced them. The one marked Insurance was a personal file of Billy’s. No one outside her immediate family ever asked to see it.

Francesca’s whereabouts after the trip to the Justice Department were easy to prove. The counter people at Eastern Market Lunch said that of course they’d seen Francesca and little Sonny there the night before.

The people in the apartment upstairs said they’d seen Francesca and Sonny come home not long after dark. For at least two hours after that there had been typing coming steadily from below.

Francesca confirmed this. She said that she’d been writing a letter to her sister in New York, which she’d mailed not long before the police arrived. She said this in the presence of the best criminal defense lawyer in New York (an arrangement quietly made by Tom Hagen). A few days later, Kathy (by now ably represented by the same lawyer) said she’d received the letter but had thrown it away. As several friends and relatives (including their mother, Sandra) could and did attest, the twins had grown apart in recent years. One happy consequence of this unhappy story would be the way it served to bring the twins together again, as close as they’d ever been.

The steering wheel and gearshift of the Dual-Ghia seemed to have been wiped of fingerprints (the effect of Francesca’s Ace bandage, actually). Still, detectives identified four sets of prints. Three came from the members of the family for which this was the only car-Billy, Francesca, and Sonny Van Arsdale (Kathy had both kept her gloves on for the short drive from Union Station to her sister’s apartment and remembered that she’d kept them on). The fourth set-found in both the front seat and back-came from a woman with whom Billy Van Arsdale had had an ongoing affair.

The police were able to find several people who’d seen this woman on the very afternoon of Billy’s death, checking into a hotel on Dupont Circle and leaving in tears approximately ninety minutes later. The woman had confessed to several people in her office that Billy had ended his relationship with her that day. Several months before, she’d confessed to many of these same friends that Billy had impregnated her and coerced her into having an abortion.

When detectives questioned her about this, she was openly distraught. They arrested her and charged her with second-degree murder.

C ARMINE MARINO’S ARRESTturned out to be the international incident that everyone involved with his trip to Cuba had feared.

The scope of what the CIA was trying to do in Cuba came as a shock to President Shea. Publicly, he made it clear that the United States would cooperate in any way it could to bring Marino, an Italian national, to justice (for its part, the Italian government said that it had several Carmine Marinos on record, but none matching the description of the notorious killer). Marino had been living in the United States for six years. The Cuban dictator said that he held President Shea personally responsible. The Soviet premier issued no public statement on the matter, but he did come to Havana for the double’s lavish funeral.

Privately, President Shea spent many long hours meeting with his national security team and screaming at his CIA director. But before the president got the chance to confront his father with his suspicions of the old man’s involvement in the matter, the Ambassador had a massive stroke. He’d live for several more years, but he’d had his last conversation.

Marino’s affiliation with what the newspapers had never stopped calling “the Corleone crime family” was easy enough to document. Even the papers still controlled by the Family had little choice but to follow suit with their competitors and investigate the many rumors that the young gangster had not acted alone.

In public, the attorney general scoffed at any notion of a connection between the federal government and what he was now calling “the Mafia.” In a private meeting with his staff, he unveiled an aggressive new plan to prosecute organized crime. Billy Van Arsdale was irreplaceable, he told them, but their efforts would be dedicated to his memory.

The FBI director had not forgotten his meeting with Tom Hagen many years before, when the future congressman had produced that grainy black-and-white image of the director on his knees, fellating his top assistant. His current situation gave grimly comic new meaning to being caught between a rock and a hard place. Still, the director had no choice, for now, but to go along with the attorney general’s bold initiative.

At the United Nations, the usual sorts of intermediaries-small countries with good educational systems and disbanded armies-were dispatched to conduct negotiations to deport or extradite Carmine Marino either to the supposed country of his birth or to the United States, where he’d been months away from becoming a citizen. At minimum, the negotiators wanted to ensure that Marino was given a swift and fair trial in Cuba. The Cuban government made a big show of meeting with these men, but Marino was of most use to Cuba where he was: safely imprisoned, the sword of justice suspended indefinitely over his bare neck.

Whether Marino was tortured remains to this day a matter that can spark debate. But by all accounts, he never told anyone anything.

Soon, other crises, including another, more ominous one between the United States and Cuba, shoved the assassination of the dictator’s double and its thorny aftermath off the pages of the world’s newspapers. It reemerged on the front page of the official state newspaper of Cuba when Carmine Marino tried to escape and was shot. Few American newspapers ran the story anywhere close to the front. It barely rated a mention on TV. In no case was the official story questioned.

Concealed in a tunnel underneath Madison Square Garden, two hours before Johnny Fontane’s sold-out concert, Michael Corleone, in a new but classically styled tuxedo, waited for his consigliere. Michael lit a cigarette with his brother’s old lighter. This was, he thought, the problem with being early. Waiting.

Michael’s return to New York had been rumored for months. The men in his and other Families wanted him back. And why not? Those who stayed on Michael’s good side got rich. But it wasn’t just those men who engaged in speculation about Michael’s next move. The public was just as intrigued. The rumors were reported by every newspaper in the city. He had, to his horror, become something of a folk hero. Hundreds of crimes were rumored to be his doing, and he’d never once been charged with any of them. Thugs like Louie Russo and Emilio Barzini were gone, and Michael was still kicking. Most of the Dons in America had been arrested in upstate New York, and Michael-who, common sense decreed, must have been there-wasn’t seen within a thousand miles of the place. Brilliant men in his own Family-Sally Tessio, Nick Geraci-had questioned his authority and were no longer around to question it further.