Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Michael summoned Rocco, Clemenza, and Fredo to his home. They huffed upstairs and sat in front of his blond desk in those orange plastic chairs. He asked point-blank if any of them had any idea what happened to Geraci. Each said no with equal vehemence. “It wasn’t you?” Rocco asked and Michael shook his head, and they all seemed surprised. An accident was bad enough, but eventually the people who mattered would learn that the pilot had been Geraci. “Which is when the fan’ll hit the shit,” Clemenza said.

Michael nodded. The only way to fix this mess, he said, was to call a meeting of all the Families, the first since the one his father had convened right after Sonny was killed. Admit that this was a dumb decision, trying to go see a boxing match, even if Falcone did have a big bet on it and pressured him to go. Restitution could be made, all the Dons would give their word that the matter was finished, and it would all be a blessing in disguise because they could go right from that to formalizing a larger peace agreement. Everyone would benefit. Yes, such a meeting would mean that there would be a vote about putting Russo on the Commission, but at this point the definitive end to this war would be worth even that. It was going to happen sooner or later anyway. “But the problem we have now,” Michael said, “is that whatever happened-cover-up, kidnapping, maybe even the government-makes that kind of a summit impossible.”

Clemenza snorted and said he smelled something rotten in Cleveland, and Michael cocked his head. “I seen Hamlet with that fruit, what’s-his-face. The famous one. Not half bad, once you got past the tights.” He looked at Fredo and Fredo said “What?” and Clemenza shrugged and asked Mike if he figured Forlenza’s men sabotaged the plane or if they were trying to keep Geraci’s identity secret so that people wouldn’t think they’d sabotaged the plane? Since the best way out of this mess would be to point out that the Jew certainly wouldn’t sabotage a plane flown by his own godson, which would open up a whole other can of worms. Maybe it was all just a misguided attempt by Forlenza to protect his godson? Maybe even from us?

Downstairs, Michael’s half-deaf father-in-law had the TV blasting. In a piercing falsetto, little Anthony Corleone sang along to the theme song for a cowboy show.

“Jesus, what a giambott’, ” Fredo said. “Makes my head hurt, how many different ways this thing could go.”

Michael nodded, so slowly it was clearly a theatrical pause for thought, not agreement. A necessary pause. He was not, so soon after his brother’s elevation to sotto capo, going to disagree with him forcefully, even in front of men as trusted as Clemenza and Lampone.

“None of this,” Michael said, “brings us closer to finding out what happened to Geraci.”

He leaned across his Danish modern desk. It was time to stop speculating. Time to get down to business.

The next day, Clemenza returned to New York with orders to run his operation as if peace were assured and the crash never happened. His men were to do the same. The day after that, Rocco, who knew the men in Geraci’s crew, also went to New York, where he would remain and oversee those operations until further notice. Fredo, as underboss, would temporarily be in charge of Rocco’s men in Nevada.

The Corleones had long been close to Tony Molinari, who’d protected Fredo in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on his father and whose cooperation had helped make it possible for the Corleones to establish themselves in Las Vegas and now in Tahoe and Reno. Neither Vito nor now Michael had ever regarded Frank Falcone as a serious person. Neither believed that his flashy, second-rate operation possessed either the means or the will to come out from under Chicago ’s apron skirts. Michael might have opted to be represented at neither funeral. Many expected him to make just that decision, and, on the face of it, this might have seemed the more cautious and more prudent of choices. But these are only words- caution, prudence -and they are words that can easily be replaced by other words- hubris, fear, weakness. A man is his actions, public and private, both when watched and when alone.

Fredo, who after all had been the closest of anyone in the organization to Tony Molinari, was dispatched to San Francisco. Michael, accompanied by Tommy Neri and the same two others who’d been hiding in the woods in Lake Tahoe, went to Chicago: the city where Frank Falcone was born, the city where he’d made his bones, was where his own bones, or what remained of them, would be buried. Those who’d known Vito Corleone recognized the logic in Michael’s decision. Keep your friends close, the great Don had said, and your enemies closer.

The ceremony was held in a tiny white clapboard church on the near west side of the city, in the Italian neighborhood known as the Patch, where Falcone had been raised and where his parents had once run a corner grocery. Hot for Chicago in September. The Chicago police had blocked off traffic for two blocks in every direction. Several of the dignitaries-including the lieutenant governor of California, the heavyweight champion of the world, and several movie stars, including Johnny Fontane-received a motorcycle escort right to the back steps. Others, including Michael Corleone, came early enough to take their seats without such ostentation. Out front, the street was packed. Falcone’s origins were the stuff of local legend, and although the mourners inside observed a respectful silence, no one among the buzzing horde in the street could have failed to hear someone tell the dead man’s story. When Frank was only a boy of fifteen, his father had closed the store and his older sister was counting the day’s receipts when they were both killed in a stickup, a crime investigated so halfheartedly by the police-“ain’t nothin’ but dagos killing dagos in Dagotown,” a detective said, laughing, within earshot of Frank and, worse, of Frank’s mother-that the boy vowed to get revenge. It didn’t take long. Somehow, the kid’s passion got him an audience with Al Capone. The thief’s corpse was found on the front steps of the precinct station, stabbed, as legend has it, sixty-four times (Frank’s father was forty-five years old; his sister was nineteen). The detective and his partner went on a fishing trip to the Wisconsin Dells and were never seen again. For a time, Frank and his mother ran the store, but the memories were too much. From nowhere (Trapani, actually), a buyer emerged and paid a fair price. Frank’s mother took that money and the money from selling her house and moved in next door with her brother’s family. Frank found employment with Mr. Capone. After Mr. Capone had his problems, Frank pursued other opportunities in Los Angeles. At first, he managed to remain in everyone’s good graces by doing well, remembering where he came from, and repaying the men who’d helped him get where he was. These men had enough problems without worrying about everything west of here that was supposed to be Chicago ’s, too, and Falcone was their boy anyhow, always would be. It’s hard to say when it happened, but it came to seem as though Falcone had always been the guy out there-his own outfit. Never did get his mother to move, even though he built her a house in the Hollywood Hills-swimming pool, the works.

Twenty policemen on horseback (every horse in blinders, because of the incessant flashbulbs) cleared a path through the crowd, and the funeral procession, many of the cars sporting large campaign signs for the politicians and judges inside, made its way to Mt. Carmel Cemetery. Thousands of people followed it on foot. Just inside the main entrance, the procession passed the final resting place of the rotting, syphilitic remains of Al Ca-pone, who died sixteen years after the IRS killed him, and whose own anticlimactic funeral had been attended by a fraction of the people here for Falcone’s. Vito Corleone had sent nothing but flowers.