Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

The Hagens would never find their arthritic dachshund, Garbanzo. Just as well.

The main stage was really Doomtown: officially classified and yet-because those houses (built by a certain Las Vegas contractor) and even that food (flown in fresh from a certain San Francisco food wholesaler) had to come from someplace-something more than a rumor and less than an open secret.

The rooftop of Hal Mitchell’s Castle in the Sand was just the lounge act. In the time it took Fredo Corleone to think to cover his eyes with both hands until the time his hands met his face, the intense heat waned. After that, some kind of dust fell, too small to see and barely big enough to feel. It was roundly ignored. People kept gambling and barely moved.

“This can’t be good,” Fredo said.

“This shit here, you mean?” said the barber, motioning to the dust, to the very air.

The young goatherd had his tongue out, almost as if he were catching snowflakes.

“The Reds want you to think this shit’s something,” the barber said, “but that’s just a conspiracy to make the U.S. stop all this testing so that the Russians can catch up to us. Believe me. This is nothing. Dust. Less than nothing. ’S go.”

“Nothing,” murmured Fredo, whisking the invisible dust from his shirtsleeves.

Directly above, two of the huge mirrored windows in the ballroom concealed by the casino’s top parapet were gone. The old domino players from the Patrick Henry Social Club stood there in full view and jowly disbelief. Fredo didn’t look up. Why would he? The windows had imploded. Every shard of broken glass had been sucked inward.

T HE DEATHS OF Tony Molinari and Frank Falcone-coming as they had on the threshold of what had looked like a lasting peace-sent shock waves through the underworld of the nation. Out of context, anyone would have presumed the crash was an accident: severe thunderstorm, lake-effect air pockets, case closed. The unsolved disappearance of Gerald O’Malley, the crash’s lone survivor, aroused suspicion, as did his garbled words to the tower in Cleveland, in which he had apparently wondered if the plane had been sabotaged. Despite this, his voice had remained calm until right before impact, when he shouted, “ Sono fottuto, ” which the FAA report translated from the Italian as “I’m a goner.” Investigators found no clear evidence of sabotage. They attributed the pilot’s assertion to his inexperience. They ruled the crash an accident. Pilot error.

It was, by any measure, a meaningless coincidence that the last funeral the four dead men had attended together was that of Vito Corleone. But from the Mafia’s murky, contested origins in nineteenth-century Sicily to the present day, every human act-benevolent or violent, willful or inadvertent, whether born of aggression or self-preservation, of passion or ice-cold ragione- becomes part of one vast gossamer web, where no quiver or throb is too small to be felt everywhere. For a Sicilian, whose mother tongue is the only one in the Western world that lacks a future tense, the past and the present are as one. For a Sicilian, whose blood has endured six thousand years of invasion and occupation, an accident or a coincidence is no more meaningless, or meaningful, than an act of will. Each may be indistinguishable from the other. For a Sicilian, nothing happens out of context.

The Coast Guard rescuers had lashed “O’Malley” to a body board and raced him to a nearby hospital, where the admitting nurse-referring to the man’s Nevada driver’s license, which formed the core of the fat wad of bills in his front pocket-logged him in at 10:25 P.M. as “Gerald O’Malley, male Caucasian, age 38.” His broken leg was set and put in traction, his broken ribs taped, his other wounds sewn shut. He did not appear to have any serious internal injuries, but there were still tests to run. He remained unconscious, but the long-term prognosis appeared excellent. His condition was upgraded from critical to serious. According to his chart, the doctors finished with him at 4:18 A.M. The final notation on the chart came at 4:30 A.M.-though that one seemed likely to have been a fake. Nothing was noted but the time and some illegible initials no one at the hospital could identify.

By that time, irregularities in both the flight and the other four bodies, or at least parts of them, had either surfaced on their own or been lifted into the gray light of day by human hands.

The bodies had not yet been identified, and the riot of reporters and law enforcement officials that those identifications would trigger was not yet unleashed. The flight plan in Detroit was shown as having been filed, but no one could find it. The plane had left Detroit in the morning and so had to have stopped somewhere else in the twelve ensuing hours, but when the pilot made radio contact with the tower at Burke Lakefront Airport, he indicated he was coming directly from Detroit. The tower tried to get a clarification, but the plane’s radio transmissions-probably because of all the lightning-were a roar of static. When it became clear the plane was in distress, attention turned exclusively to bringing it down safely.

The meatpacking company whose logo was on the side of the plane was located outside Buffalo, New York. The president of the company, groggy with sleep, at first told the investigator he had the wrong number, that his company had no plane, though when the investigator asked if he was sure about that, the president paused and then said, “Ri-i-ight, our plane,” and hung up. By the time other calls were made and the state cops sped out to his lakefront home to bring him in for questioning, he was freshly shaved and showered, dressed in a suit, waiting in his living room, flanked by a lawyer who had once been the state’s attorney general. On behalf of his client, the lawyer informed the officers that a week’s unlimited use of the aircraft in question had been a gift from his client to his friend Joseph Zaluchi-two-time winner of the prestigious Michigan Philanthropist of the Year Award and a board member since 1953 of Detroit, Hooray!-to aid the transportation of guests to and from his daughter’s lovely wedding this past weekend in Detroit, which, owing to a prior commitment, his client had been unable to attend. The client knew nothing about the men and/or women on board, or any details about the flight other than what had become public knowledge. The lawyer asked the cops if they had any warrants, for either search or arrest, then thanked them for their time and for leaving his client alone so he could begin to mourn this unfortunate tragedy.

An attorney for Joseph Zaluchi said that Mr. Zaluchi knew nothing about the man who had crashed the plane, other than that he was a licensed commercial pilot who worked for a reputable charter company in New York. He’d been hired over the telephone by an associate of Mr. Zaluchi. Mr. Zaluchi expressed his deep sympathy for the victims and to their families.

“Gerald O’Malley” disappeared from the hospital sometime between the 4:18 notation on the chart and about five, when an orderly walked into the room and found the bed empty and tubes dangling from the devices that had been connected to the patient’s arms. The pulley that had been attached to his broken leg was also gone, as were the patient’s personal effects.

Nick Geraci had been arrested several times (though never convicted), so his fingerprints were on file. But when he arrived at the hospital, there had been no reason to fingerprint him. His room had been wiped clean.

The two attending nurses whose responsibility it might have been to check frequently on the man admitted as Gerald O’Malley each claimed she was certain he’d been assigned to the other. The head nurse would later take full responsibility for the mistake and resign in disgrace. She moved to Florida and got what was presumably a lower-paying job for a company providing in-home nursing care. Many years later she died peacefully in her sleep. When her will was read, her newly rich children marveled at the savings habits of that generation of Americans forged by the Great Depression.