Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Russo grunted.

“I don’t know where you’re getting your information,” Michael said, “but it’s not true. We have no plans to run Las Vegas. We’re only here temporarily. I have land on Lake Tahoe, and once we complete some construction there, that’s where we’ll go, permanently.”

“Last I checked,” Russo said, “Tahoe’s west of Chicago, too.”

Michael shrugged. “When the time comes, that won’t be of any concern to you.”

“It’s of concern to me now.”

“It doesn’t need to be,” Michael said. “In the future, we won’t be initiating any more members. I’m gradually splitting off from everything we had in New York. The businesses I’ll be running here will be legal. I look forward to your cooperation-or at least your lack of interference-as we get things to that point. As you know-you mention my time at Dartmouth -I never planned to take part in my father’s business. It’s not what he wanted either. As I say, it’s only temporary. We’ll be opening a new casino in Lake Tahoe, and we’re planning on running it so clean that an army of cops, IRS agents, and Gaming Commission men could live there night and day.”

Russo laughed. “Good fucking luck!”

“I’ll have to take that as sincerity,” Michael said, standing, “because we need to go. My apologies. It’s our pleasure to have you as our guests. We look forward to seeing you tonight.”

Tom Hagen opened the door to the basement office of Enzo Aguello, an old friend of the Corleone Family and now the casino’s head pastry chef. All three men inside-the two established capo s, Rocco Lampone and Pete Clemenza, as well as the head of protection, Al Neri-had been together yesterday in Detroit, at Pete’s son’s wedding. Every eye in the room was bloodshot. Lampone was only thirty but looked ten years older. He’d used a cane ever since he’d been shipped home from North Africa with a Purple Heart and no left kneecap. Clemenza gasped from the effort of getting out of his chair. Hagen always thought of him as one of those ageless fat men, but now he just looked old. He must have been about seventy.

They could have met in a suite upstairs, but Enzo’s office had the advantages of being humble, close to the food, and one hundred percent secure-a cinder-block bunker that, with the best equipment money could buy, Neri had swept for bugs. Neri took his place in the hall, closing the door behind him.

“Where’s Fredo?” Clemenza said.

Mike shook his head.

“He’s fine,” Hagen said. “His plane’s late. Storms in Detroit. He’ll be in tomorrow.”

Clemenza and Lampone looked at each other. They sat down on hard metal folding chairs around Enzo’s gunmetal gray desk.

“I wasn’t gonna say nothin’,” Clemenza said, “but I hear weird fucking things about Fredo, I hate to say.” Fredo’s new bodyguards had come from Clemenza’s regime.

“What do you mean?” Mike said.

Clemenza waved him off. “Believe me, it’s too flaky and ridiculous to talk about, and from what I hear it comes from junkies and niggers, so you can ignore ninety-nine percent of it right there. But the thing is, we all know he’s-” Clemenza grimaced, as if he were enduring a gas pang. “Well, I ain’t one to preach the abstemious life, but he’s got a problem with the juice.”

“ Abstemious ?” Mike arched his eyebrows. “Where’d you learn that word?”

“I sent my fucking kid to that same fancy school you went to, Mike, that was how I heard about it.” He winked. “Only unlike you he finished it up.”

“He says abstemious? Out loud?”

“How else you say things? You know what else I learned about that word? It’s one of just two words in the whole English language that uses all five vowels and in order.”

“What’s the other one?”

“How the fuck should I know what the other one is? A minute ago, you thought I was too fucking dumb to know how to use even one of them.”

Everyone laughed, and the men got to work.

The little time Hagen had spent as a corporate lawyer, for a meeting half this important and ten percent as detailed, there would have been a squadron of secretaries, scribbling like mad, and still half of what was said would have been lost or distorted. These men of course wrote down nothing and, as tired as they were, could be counted upon to remember everything. They spent three hours chewing through old business, new business, grilled calamari, and pasta e fagioli.

They discussed the toll the war with the Barzinis and Tattaglias had taken on the Family’s business interests. They discussed the accommodations made for the wife and family of Tessio, that saddest and unlikeliest of traitors, friend and partner of Vito Corleone since their youth, and the medical, funeral, and family financial needs of the organization’s other casualties. They discussed the triumph of the erroneous but widely held opinion-among the NYPD and the newspapers, among other crime families, among nearly everyone outside the Corleone Family-that both Tessio and the wife-beating brute Carlo, Mike’s brother-in-law and the de facto murderer of his brother Sonny, had been killed by men dispatched by Barzini or Tattaglia. On top of this, the Corleone Family’s man in the New York D.A.’s office (a classmate of Mike’s at Dartmouth) planned to bring a series of indictments this week charging members of the Tattaglia Family with the murder of Emilio Barzini and charging members of the Barzini Family with the murder of Phillip Tattaglia. Even if, as was likely, these arrests didn’t result in convictions, the FBI would consider the matter closed and stay out of it. Local cops-hundreds of whom had suffered from the lost income as much as any shylock-were happiest with business as usual. The short attention span of the public would soon swerve back, as it reliably does, to bread and circuses. All in all, the current cease-fire stood to be a genuine peace.

“Every ten years,” Clemenza said, shrugging. “We have these things and then we get back to work.” He’d found a whole box of toothpicks in Enzo’s desk and was chewing up a new one every couple minutes. The other men all had cigars or cigarettes going. Clemenza’s doctor had told him to stop smoking. He was trying. “Like clockwork. This one’s my fourth.”

Everyone had, over the years, heard this theory of Clemenza’s. No one said anything.

“So,” Clemenza said. “You think that’s what we got, Mike? Peace?” He even brandished the toothpick like a cigar. “Do we need to call for a meeting of the Commission?”

Michael nodded, more in concentration than assertion. Hagen knew that Michael had failed to present the Commission with a list of the men being initiated tonight. Probably the last thing he’d have wanted was for the Commission to meet. But his face registered nothing. “Rocco?” he said, bowing his head, extending his palm: after you.

That long pause- Hagen noted, impressed-made it look as if Michael were giving the question serious thought and then consulting with a trusted aide. If Sonny had lived and been in charge now, he’d have just blurted out what he thought and been proud of his decisiveness. Michael had inherited and honed his father’s ability to create consensus.

Rocco Lampone took a long puff on his cigar. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, ain’t it? How do we know the war’s over unless someone comes out and says it, huh?”

Michael knitted his fingers together and said nothing, his face utterly blank. The Commission functioned as an executive committee for America ’s twenty-four crime families, with the heads of the top seven or eight Families approving the names of new members, new capo s, and new bosses (these were nearly always approved) and arbitrating only the most intractable conflicts. It met as infrequently as possible.