Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

“You think if I knew I’d fucking ask? C’mon, Fredo. I’m given a job, I do a job. With all due respect, please, non rompermi i coglioni, eh?”

Capra and the other two men had gone to the bar. Coffee all around.

“I’m not busting your balls.” Fredo arched an eyebrow. “You mean you didn’t hear her? In the background there?”

“You gotta be kiddin’ me.” Since it had been the gist of his excuse this morning, too.

“French girl. Dancer, I forgot to ask where. I ran into her on the way up, one thing led to another, you know how it goes. Che fica. ”

Figaro was bald, ten years older than Fredo, and probably did not, hookers aside, know how it goes. He shook his head. “You fuckin’ guy. You goin’ for some kind of record?”

Someone had shut off the motor that made the ballroom rotate. The air was thick with smoke and spilled booze. At a table covered with a dirty white tablecloth sat four old guys from what had used to be Tessio’s regime, playing dominos. Two of them were the DiMiceli brothers, one of whom (Fredo couldn’t keep them straight) had a boy, Eddie, who had gotten initiated that night. He didn’t know the other two. Fredo wasn’t real good on the Brooklyn guys.

Slumped alone in an aquamarine armchair was Rocco Lampone, staring out the window and muttering something to himself. Décor aside, it was as if Fredo had walked into one of those joints in Gowanus where the regulars show up first thing in the morning for a chipped mug full of brandy-laced coffee and either sit there in silent misery or else pick petty fights about what’s on the jukebox or what the world’s coming to.

“Hey-hey!” shouted one of the DiMicelis. “If it ain’t our underboss.”

Fredo waited for someone to make more of a joke about this. He hadn’t asked for the title. He knew men thought he was weak. He knew they weren’t clear on his responsibilities or Michael’s reasons for creating the job. Missing the thing tonight wouldn’t help matters. But the men at the table only nodded and grunted their hellos.

Rocco motioned Fredo over. Next to him by the window was an empty metal chair. Outside, a brassy jazz combo on a makeshift stage on the rooftop below played a tune from that famous musical about Negroes. The whole rooftop swarmed with people, though there was no one in the swimming pool. A couple dozen slot machines, four blackjack tables, and two craps tables had been carted up here. There were several full bars and a breakfast buffet.

“What the fuck?” asked Fredo, pointing.

“Where you been?”

“ Detroit. Los Angeles. Missed my plane. Long story.”

“It’s one I heard. Where you been since you got back here? To the hotel? And made me wait here like I’m-” Rocco rubbed his ruined knee. “And made me wait. Here. For you.”

One of the men playing dominos cackled. Fredo looked over his shoulder. The cackling guy rubbed the bald head of an unamused guy, who sat still and took it.

“Seriously,” Fredo said, “what’s going on down there?”

“Sit down. Please.” Rocco had never been much of a talker. It was clear from the look on his face that he hadn’t figured out either what he had to say or how he was going to say it.

Fredo sat. “Is it Ma?” he blurted.

“No.” Rocco shook his head. “There was an accident,” he said. “Friends of ours. It looks I would say bad.”

On the rickety stage, the mayor of Las Vegas-a former Ziegfield dancer herself, a terrific old broad, Fredo thought, who still had some of her looks-adjusted the fluorescent orange sash over the huge, impractical tits of the laughing brunette Hal Mitchell had, apparently after no competition at all, named Miss Atomic Bomb. The tiara was an even tougher fit. Miss Atomic Bomb had done her hair up in some great shellacked mass vaguely in the shape of a mushroom cloud. The mayor tried to put it on her from the front, which was impossible without leaning into her tits, so she tried it from behind and kept dropping it. The mayor stopped and handed the brunette her tiara. Miss Atomic Bomb had to crown herself. She was undaunted. This was a very happy young woman. Her bathing suit was cut so low you could just about see her belly button. The trombonist struck up the band. Miss Atomic Bomb stepped to the microphone and started singing “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

The gaming tables were packed. Every slot machine was in use. Scattered everywhere were people on chaise lounges and at picnic tables, working on paper plates heaped with eggs.

Fredo had gotten all the way down here-entourage in tow, even in his own hotel: Figaro and Capra plus those two guys from New York, his shadows until whatever happened because of those deaths in Cleveland happened-before he had any idea what was going on.

Miss Atomic Bomb, who bounced as she sang and was smiling so wide and with such apparent sincerity that any reasonable person would have wanted to slap her or break her heart, started singing “Take the A Train,” only with new lyrics. “Drop the A-Bomb.”

Fredo was all for coaxing pigeons out of their rooms early and often, but he’d seen enough. He cocked his head toward the exit, and his bone-tired bodyguards looked at him like he was Jesus bearing chocolates.

Just then, for no perceptible reason, everything got quiet. The band stopped, the drone of the guests’ babble seemed to be sucked inside their throats, and the faint sounds of traffic from the street below made themselves known by ceasing to be. Fredo looked up, and there it was: a puffball of white smoke in the northeastern sky.

And then sound returned.

That was it ?

Everywhere on the roof, people lounged and gambled. Slot machine zombies kept their eyes steadfastly on the spinning fruit decals. The beauty queen seemed to be the only person applauding. And then:

A blast of heat that felt like standing inside a raging dryer vent lined with sunlamps snapped his head back. Fredo shielded his eyes with both hands.

Seconds earlier, on a salt flat sixty-five miles away, there had been a place called Doomtown-a cluster of ordinary but variously constructed American homes (no two alike), each filled with the aroma of one of the various, ordinary American meals (no two alike) cooling on the dining room table, each table surrounded by human figures dressed variously in brand-new JC Penney clothing. In and around Doomtown, at various distances from the fifty-foot tower that was the town’s epicenter, were dozens of individually penned and oddly quiet pigs. As two hundred American soldiers watched, crouched in trenches they’d dug themselves a mile from the outskirts of Doomtown, the U.S. government detonated a twenty-nine-kiloton bomb. In the first second after that, the houses, mannequins, food, and pigs nearest the tower became flame, wind, and dust. Farther away, as government cameras whirred, siding ignited and debris pulverized lawn jockeys and decapitated mannequins of smiling babies in disintegrating high chairs. Flaming pigs ran screaming in irregular paths and exploded. Another half second passed, and that was all dust, too. In the half second after that, a hot wind worse than twenty harnessed hurricanes leveled most of the rest of the town. Grit-it could have been anything: sand, salt, glass, particles of steel or wood or uranium, bonemeal from pigs killed only because their skin superficially resembled that of the humans so eager to study what remained of it-shot with supersonic speed through Thanksgiving dinner, shiny automobiles, plastic fathers with real tobacco in their pipes, solid-state monitoring equipment, brick walls, everything.

The trenches collapsed. The soldiers were buried alive, but all survived-for now.

Most of the pigs farther than a thousand yards from the tower survived but were so badly burned men shot them long before anyone got around to whipping out the Geiger counters.