Mark Winegardner: The Godfather returns

Nick Geraci rubbed his shoulder-the pistol kick was like a savage right cross-and felt a wave of euphoria wash over him, obliterating the hesitation he’d felt. He felt no remorse, no fear, no disgust, no anger. I am a killer, he thought. Killers kill.

He spun around, laughing not out of madness but joy, more intense, better than the rush he’d gotten the time he sampled his own heroin. He knew what was happening. This was not the first man he’d killed. Sometimes when he killed he felt nothing at all, but even that might have been a lie, he told himself. Because the plain truth was that killing people felt good. Anyone who’d done it could tell you that, but they won’t. They won’t! A book Geraci had read about the First World War had a whole chapter on the subject. Hardly anyone would talk about it because for most people the bad feeling that came later, after the good feeling, shut them up. Plus, any shithead could guess that everything that would happen after a person proclaimed that it felt good to kill people, and after he convinced his listeners that he was serious, would be entirely bad. Still. It felt good. Almost sexual (another thing any shithead could guess would be bad to admit). You’re powerful and the dead guy’s not. You’re alive and the dead guy’s dead. You’ve done something that everyone on earth has at some heated moment wanted to do but most never will. It was easy, and it felt magnificent. Geraci practically skated across the scummy floor of that garage, certain that, this time, the bad feeling would not come later. There would be no later. Everything would always be now. Everything is always now.

Geraci wanted to give every live man there a bear hug and a highball, but he settled for striding toward them, raising his pistol before they could raise theirs. Being the cowardly cocksuckers that at heart they surely were, they hit the ground, which gave him a clear shot through the doorway to the office at his target: the rectangle of hazy blue light behind them. Geraci fired. The shock he felt at the recoil (was Neri really stupid enough to give him a gun with more than one bullet? what a dumbass!) giving way a split second later to a dull pop, a puff of toxic smoke, a belched little fireball, and a tiny and satisfying afterglow of falling glass. Human beings have never built a machine more satisfying to destroy than a television set.

And then silence.

For Geraci, it seemed like an awfully long silence.

“Hey!” shouted a raspy-voiced man, one of Geraci’s guys. “I was watching that.”

It cracked everyone up. Just what the doctor ordered. Neri patted Geraci softly on the back. Geraci handed him the gun. Then everyone went to work.

Clemenza’s men used a bone saw on the two corpses who’d been assigned to kill Michael Corleone. Geraci sat on the case of oil cans and watched, so flooded with ebbing adrenaline that everything seemed like the same thing. Grimy window. Calendar with topless wrench-wielding dairy maid. Fan belts on metal hook. Friend’s corpse. Button on cuff. A universe of undifferentiated equivalency.

When the men finished, Neri handed Geraci the bone saw and pointed to Tessio’s head. Around the gaping entry wound, the dead man’s flesh was already proud.

Numb, Geraci took the saw and dropped to one knee. Later, he would look back on this moment with fury. But at the time, Geraci could have been checking the pH in his pool. When a man sees things for their essential literalness, how is sawing off the head of a dead father figure so different from separating a succulent turkey leg from the carcass? A thicker bone, true, but a bone saw is a better tool than some knife your brother-in-law got you as a wedding present.

Nick Geraci closed Tessio’s bulging eyes and drew back the saw. Later had come-sooner rather than later, which in a moment of clarity Geraci recognized as later’s way.

Neri clamped his hand on Geraci’s forearm and took the saw.

“That was an order, too.”

“What was an order?” Geraci said.

“Seeing how willing you were to do it.”

Geraci knew better than to ask how willing he’d seemed or, worse, who’d given the order. He merely stood and said nothing, went blank and revealed nothing. He motioned toward the pocket of his bloodied suit jacket. Neri nodded. Geraci took out the cigar Clemenza had given him, a Cuban the color of dark chocolate, and sat back down on the oil cans to enjoy it.

Clemenza’s men stripped the assassins naked and stuffed their clothing and the ten severed body parts into a suitcase. Tessio’s corpse was left alone.

Which was when Geraci figured everything out.

There was no need to send a message to the Barzinis. Everyone involved with Tessio’s betrayal was already too dead to benefit from messages. And of course the Corleones wanted Tessio’s body found. This part of Brooklyn was identified with the Barzinis. The cops would presume that was who ordered the hit. The detectives would puzzle over the unidentifiable corpses of the assassins, and none of the conclusions they’d draw would involve the Corleones. The Corleones wouldn’t even need to trouble their judges or their people in the NYPD. And it wouldn’t take the usual forgiven gambling tabs and extended grace periods on loans to get the newspapers to fall in line. They’d play this just the way Michael Corleone wanted and feel virtuous about every squalid inch of type.

It was, Geraci had to admit, brilliant.

With a final glance back at the corpse of his mentor, Geraci got into the back of a car with Al Neri. Geraci wasn’t afraid or even angry. For now he was only a man, staring straight ahead and ready to confront whatever came next.

In the weeks that followed the killings, Geraci worked closely with Michael Corleone. As he saw and helped administer the details of the ongoing war, Geraci learned how badly he’d underestimated his new Don. The Corleones had safe houses in every borough and a dozen suburbs, a constantly rotating inventory. They had underground garages full of cars and trucks with phony licenses and registrations. Some were armored and/or souped up with engines that could compete at Le Mans. Others were deceptively sound junkers that could break down at the flick of a hidden switch, snarling traffic and blocking pursuers. Some were destined to be crashed or fished out of rivers and swamps. Several were exact replicas of cars driven by high-ranking members of the Family, poised to mislead witnesses, enemies, or the police. They had arsenals of weapons all over the city: behind a rack of clothes at a dry cleaner’s on Belmont Avenue, underneath bags of sugar and flour in the back rooms of a bakery in Carroll Gardens, inside crates at a coffin warehouse in Lindenhurst. Michael Corleone was out to gain full political control of a state (Nevada) and a country (Cuba), and the more Geraci learned, the more plausible such things began to seem. The Corleones had more law enforcement agents on their payroll than the FBI, and they had pictures of the FBI director in a dress, sucking the penis of his top assistant.

Michael’s grand, intricate plan was this: peace, coupled with massive expansion and relocation, then organization of the crime families through-out the country, better than before, while at the same time strengthening and expanding business ties with Sicily, all on the way to legitimacy, complete with utter control of Cuba and access to the White House and even the Vatican. Everything new would be built with other people’s money: “loans,” much of it from the pension funds of various unions. Those truck drivers, electricians, and jukebox stockers would receive a greater rate of return than they’d have ever gotten from a racket like the stock market. The Corleones would put more and more layers between themselves and anything like street crime. Before long they could stop using fronts and operate in the open, indistinguishable from any of the master criminals known collectively to suckers everywhere as the Fortune 500.