Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

He had also, not incidentally, grown into his good looks. His suits were exquisitely tailored. His hair was as perfect and his teeth were as white as the president’s. He was a war hero. He flew his own airplane. If he said Jump, even an icon of cool like Johnny Fontane would say How high? He’d withstood the grief of losing his two likable brothers. He’d loved and lost, twice, and managed to go on. Barely a day went by without the newpapers mentioning or picturing the progress of his new romance with the glamorous Tony award-winning actress Marguerite Duvall. She lived in New York now. Only a matter of time before he did, too, right?

For savvy New Yorkers, there was another tantalizing matter, the legendary ability of people like Michael Corleone to make urban neighborhoods safer than small Lutheran towns in Iowa. All over the city, developers tried to figure out how to give away property to him, knowing they’d make it up when everything around it appreciated.

Michael heard Tom Hagen call his name.

Tom left his bodyguards with Michael’s and came down the tunnel alone. They embraced.

“You ready?”

Michael nodded. “It’s just dinner, right?”

“Just dinner,” Tom said. “Right. It’s this way.”

They headed toward what was ordinarily the locker room of the basketball team that would come to play the New York Knicks, where the heads of the Five Families of New York and their respective consigliere s were meeting for a catered, celebratory dinner. For the first time, all four of the other Dons-Black Tony, Leo the Milkman, Fat Paulie Fortunato, and the newest one, Ozzie Altobello, who’d taken over for the late Rico Tattaglia, who’d died of natural causes-were friends of the Corleones.

“C’mon, Mike.” Tom put an arm around him. “Everything’s going to be all right. You tried to do things that had never been done. You tried to do the impossible, and you almost did it. Damn close. You can’t kick yourself over it.”

“Do I look like I’m kicking myself over it?”

“Not to the untrained eye.” Tom squeezed his shoulder, in the same tender way Vito Corleone had when he was asking for a favor. “You’re the sort of man who only pays attention to what he doesn’t have. Which is what makes you a great man, but there comes a time when you have to step back and appreciate what you do have.”

Michael was tempted to say that there wasn’t anything he had that he really wanted. But that was wrong. He knew that. He had two great kids, a brother and a sister who loved him. The memories of a happy childhood. The will to regroup and try again. Untold riches, in the greatest country on earth, which practically demands that a person reinvent himself.

Tom let his arm drop. They were on the threshold of where the dinner would be.

“If he’s out there,” Tom said, “we’ll find him.” He did not say Geraci’s name. It was unspeakable now. “No one can hide forever.”

Michael said that he wasn’t so sure. They’d both heard stories of Mafiosi in Sicily who’d gone underground and weren’t heard from for twenty or even thirty years, and America was a lot bigger place than Sicily.

“It’s also full of people with a hell of a lot bigger mouths. If he’s out there, I have to believe that we’ll eventually find him.”

“You have to believe that, huh?”

“A boy’s gotta have hope, Mikey.”

From upstairs came the sound of Fontane’s sound check. His big arrogant anthem, the one he’d always professed to hate.

“I have hope,” Michael said.

Tom Hagen opened the door.

The other Dons shouted Michael’s name and, beaming, rushed to greet him.

In a ballroom-sized cavern underneath the lodge on Rattlesnake Island, where he was prepared to stay as long as he could, Nick Geraci finally finished that two-volume history of Roman warfare, the only books he’d had time to take with him. There were others down there, but they were dime novels and pornos, things Geraci couldn’t bring himself to read even in weak moments. He’d lost track of day and night, but, bored, he went to sleep, and in what functioned for him as morning, he made himself a pot of coffee, took out a notebook, and started to write. Fausto’s Bargain, he’d call it. It would blow the lid off the world of American crime.

What did he know about writing a book?

Fuck it. What did anyone know? Begin. That’s what a person needs to know. He began.

“We live by a code,” he wrote, “which is more than you can say for your government, which I’ve seen enough of from the inside to speak about with some authority. In the time it will take you to read this book, your government will take part in more killings and other crimes than the men in my tradition have done in its seven centuries of existence. Believe me. Probably you won’t. Suit yourself. No disrespect, but that’s what makes you, dear reader, a sucker. On behalf of my former associates, and if I may be so bold also your president, we thank you.”

He stopped. He couldn’t stay here forever, but arrangements had been made so that he could stay here a hell of a long time. Certainly long enough to write a book.

Sometimes at night, he thought he could hear drilling-the crew that was digging the tunnel that, supposedly, would one day connect him to Cleveland. Maybe he was imagining things. Maybe by the time they finished, he’d be gone, or dead. His chances weren’t good. Slim and none, and the word on the street was, slim just got whacked.

Nick Geraci laughed. Miserable as he was, he had it all over slim.

Michael Corleone and Francesca Van Arsdale emerged from the elevator into an empty, blindingly white penthouse apartment. Roger Cole followed. Al Neri punched the red button and waited in the elevator. Kathy Corleone had stayed downstairs with little Sonny, in the suite that, if Michael bought the building, was earmarked for the twins.

The penthouse took up the whole top floor, the fortieth, but it was a small building. Michael strode across the gleaming marble floor to the windows overlooking the East River and Queens. The building was plain, almost ugly, from the outside, tucked behind a bigger building on a cul-de-sac at the end of Seventy-second Street. The lower floors were filled with offices. Security guards were stationed by the elevator to the apartments on the top floors; it would be easy to have those people replaced by men Neri chose himself. And the penthouse required a special key. This place would be more secure than either the complex at Lake Tahoe or the mall in Long Beach. Cole’s own company had gutted and remodeled the apartment, long before Michael told him what he was looking for, so there was no chance of a repeat of the bugging debacle in Tahoe.

Francesca was gasping at the beauty of the view and the apartment. For weeks, Michael had expected the shock of what happened with Billy to bring her low, but it never happened. He was beginning to realize it never would. She had become, even more than her all-American football-star brother, the closest living embodiment of her father’s single-minded toughness. Killing her husband was just the kind of hotheaded thing Sonny would have done. She’d had no way of knowing that Michael had already taken care of this. Tom Hagen had made Billy an offer he couldn’t refuse. He’d have been a resource for the Corleones, not a nemesis. For a brief, shining moment, they’d had a person inside the Justice Department. And then he’d been cut in half by his own wife, with his own car. Michael would make certain Francesca never learned the truth.

Michael pointed down the hallway. “The kids’ bedrooms would be…?”

“Right,” Cole said. “That way.”

Cole was probably the most famous developer and real estate speculator in New York. Born Ruggero Colombo, he grew up in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement near the Corleones. He often told the heartwarming story of the day Vito Corleone convinced their landlord not to evict the Colombos, ignoring the no-pets clause in the lease (and foregoing the opportunity to rent the apartment for more money to another family) so that little Ruggero could keep his beloved but noisy mongrel puppy (the namesake of Cole’s company, King Properties). Vito also paid for Roger Cole to get his business degree from Fordham. Cole had made Michael Corleone millions-silently at first and now publicly. If Michael had only had more time to develop a few more relationships like the one he had with Cole, he might have been able to stay true to his promise to Kay and his father. It wasn’t too late. He could try again. But for now, he was back.