Mark Winegardner: The Godfather returns

Finally, just after nine o’clock, Peter Clemenza and three bodyguards walked into Two Toms and sat down at Geraci’s table. Geraci took it as a bad sign that Michael hadn’t come, that he’d sent his caporegime instead, the one who’d over the years supervised the family’s most important hits. Which sealed it: Tessio was dead.

“You eat?” Clemenza asked, wheezing from the effort of the walk from his car to the table.

Geraci shook his head.

But Clemenza waved a meaty paw to indicate the restaurant’s aroma. “How can you resist? We’ll get a little something. Just a snack.” Clemenza ordered and devoured an antipasto crudo, a plate of caponata, two baskets of bread, and linguine with clam sauce. Last of a breed, Clemenza, almost literally so-the last capo Michael had inherited from his father, now that Tessio was dead.

“Tessio’s not dead,” Clemenza whispered to Geraci on the way out.

Geraci’s stomach lurched. They were going to make him pull the trigger himself, a test of loyalty. Geraci’s certainty that he would pass was no solace at all.

Darkness had fallen. He rode in the backseat with Clemenza. On the way, Clemenza lit a cigar and asked Geraci what he knew and what he could guess. Geraci told the truth. He did not know, yet, that earlier that day the heads of the Barzini and the Tattaglia families had both been killed. He couldn’t have known that the reason Clemenza was late was because he’d first had to garrote Carlo Rizzi, Michael Corleone’s own brother-in-law. These and several other strategic murders had all been made to look like the work of either the Barzinis or the Tattaglias. Geraci didn’t know that, either. But the things Geraci had been able to surmise were in fact correct. He took the cigar Clemenza had offered him but didn’t light it. He said he’d smoke it later.

The car pulled into a closed Sinclair station just off Flatbush Avenue. Geraci got out, and so did everyone in the two cars that had pulled in beside them, one bearing Clemenza’s men, the other Geraci’s. Clemenza and his driver stayed in the car. When Geraci turned and saw them there, an electric ribbon of panic shot through him. He looked for the men who would kill him. Trying to guess how it would happen. Trying to figure out why his own men were standing by passively watching. Why they’d betrayed him.

Clemenza rolled down his window. “It ain’t like that, kiddo,” he said. “This situation here is just too-” He put both palms to his jowly face and rubbed it fast, the way you’d scrub a stain. He let out a long breath. “Me and Sally, we go back I don’t want to think about how long. Some things a man just don’t want to see. You know?”

Geraci knew.

The fat man wept. Clemenza made very little noise doing it and seemed unembarrassed. He left without saying anything more, waving to his driver and rolling up his window and looking straight ahead.

Geraci watched the taillights of Clemenza’s car disappear.

Inside, toward the back of the first filthy service bay, two corpses in jumpsuits lay in a heap, their blackening blood oozing together on the floor. In the next bay, flanked only by Al Neri, Michael’s new pet killer and an ex-cop Geraci had some history with, was Salvatore Tessio. The old man sat on a case of oil cans, hunched over, staring at his shoes like an athlete removed from a game that was hopelessly lost. His lips moved, but it was nothing Geraci could understand. He trembled, but he had some kind of condition and had been trembling for a year now. There was only the sound of Geraci’s own footsteps and, wafting in from another room, thin, distorted laughter that could only have come from a television set.

Neri nodded hello. Tessio did not look up. Neri put a hand on the old warrior’s shoulder and squeezed, a gesture of grotesque reassurance. Tessio fell to his knees, still not looking up, lips still moving.

Neri handed Geraci a pistol, butt first. Geraci wasn’t good with guns and didn’t know much about them. This one was heavy as a cashbox and long as a tent spike-a lot more gun than seemed necessary. He’d been around long enough to know that the weapon of choice in matters like this was a.22 with a silencer-three quick shots to the head (the second to make sure, the third to make extra sure, and no fourth because silencers jam when you fire too many shots too fast). Whatever this was, it was bigger than a.22. No silencer. He stood in that dark garage with Tessio, a man he loved, and Neri, who’d once cuffed him, chained him to a radiator, punched him in the balls, and gotten away with it. Nick Geraci took a deep breath. He’d always been a man who followed his head and not his heart. The heart was just a bloody motor. The head was meant to drive. He’d always thought there’d come a time, when he was old and set, when he would move down to Key West with Charlotte and play the affluent fool.

Now, looking at Tessio, he realized that would never happen. Tessio was twenty-some years older than Nick Geraci, which until that moment had seemed like a long time. Tessio had been born in the last century. He would die in the next minute. He’d lived his life governed by his head and not his heart, and where had it gotten him? Here. A man who loved him was about to reduce that same head to blood and pulp.

“I’m sorry,” Tessio muttered, still looking down.

This might have been directed at the Corleones or Geraci or at God. Geraci certainly didn’t want to know which. He took the gun and walked around behind Tessio, whose bald spot, lit only by streetlights, gleamed in the darkness.

“No,” Neri said. “Not like that. In front. Look him in the eyes.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

He cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose I look like I’m kidding you.”

“Whose idea is that?” Geraci said. Neri didn’t have a gun in his hand, but Geraci could not leave this scummy garage alive if he shot anyone but Tessio. From that back office, the television set erupted in a gale of tinny applause.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Neri said. “I’m just the messenger, sir.”

Geraci cocked his head. This dumbass didn’t seem witty enough to make a joke about shooting the messenger. But he did seem sadistic enough to take it on himself to make the killing as cruel as possible. And sir? How did he mean that? “Salvatore Tessio,” Geraci said, “no matter what he’s done, deserves more respect than that.”

“Fuck youse!” Tessio said, loud now, but eyes still on the slimy floor.

“Look up,” Neri ordered Tessio. “Traitor.”

Trembling no worse, the old man did as he was told, eyes dry, staring into Geraci’s but already far away. He muttered a rapid string of names that meant nothing to Nick Geraci.

Geraci raised the gun, both sickened by and grateful for the sight of his own steady hand. He pressed the barrel gently against the old man’s soft forehead. Tessio did not move, did not blink, did not even shake anymore. His saggy flesh pillowed around the gun sight. Geraci had never before killed a man with a gun.

“Just business,” Tessio whispered.

What made my father great, Michael Corleone had said at his father’s eulogy, was that nothing was ever just business. Everything was personal. My father was just a man, as mortal as anyone. But he was a great man, and I am not the only person here today who thought of him as a god among men.

“What are you waiting for?” Tessio whispered. “ Sono fottuto. Shoot me. You pussy.”

Geraci shot.

Tessio’s body flew backward so hard his knees made a sound like snapped roof shingles. The air was filled with a glowing pinkish gray mist. A yarmulke-sized piece of Tessio’s skull caromed off the wall of the garage, smacked Neri in the face, and clattered to the floor. The tang of Tessio’s airborne blood mixed with the smell of his shit.