Mark Winegardner: The Godfather returns

The plan wasn’t unworkable, Geraci thought. Merely unnecessary. They were already in the only business in the history of the world that turned a profit every year. But he went along. In the short run, he had no choice. In the long run, he couldn’t lose. If things worked out, he’d get what he really wanted, which was to run Tessio’s old regime: a traditional operation with roots in the neighborhoods. If the Corleones spread themselves too thin and fell apart, Geraci could just grab what was rightly his and take it from there.

He forced himself not to think about Tessio. A boxer learns quickly to put things out of his mind. Otherwise he’s a sitting duck. Geraci had hated boxing the whole time he was doing it, but ten years after his last fight, he had to admit that it had served him well.

Over the course of that summer, Nick Geraci and Michael Corleone became something like friends. Had a thing or two gone differently, they might have stayed that way.

For example: If only Michael hadn’t decided in August to make his brother, Fredo, his underboss, a position the Corleones had never used and that Michael intended as symbolic, a way of bringing Fredo, a good-hearted bumbler, back into the fold. If only Michael had let the top people in his organization-rather than no one at all -know it was only symbolic.

Or: If only Geraci had been from New York and not Cleveland. If only he hadn’t had such ties to Don Forlenza. If only he’d been less ambitious. If only he hadn’t, upon getting the news that Michael had appointed Fredo sotto capo, respectfully asked Michael if he’d lost his mind. If only his subsequent apology had made his intemperate remark go away.

If only Fredo had known his new job was symbolic, he might not have been so driven to have a piece of action that was all his. He might not have tried to create his own city of the dead in the swamps of New Jersey. He might have lived to celebrate his forty-fourth birthday.

If only Tom Hagen had been more involved with all aspects of the Family business, instead of being removed as consigliere so that he could try to become the governor of Nevada.

If only, twenty years ago in Cleveland, after Don Forlenza had been shot for the second time but before his first heart attack, he hadn’t anointed a man his own age as his successor. If only one of Forlenza’s many afflictions had killed him. If only Sal Narducci, a man of moderate ambition otherwise, hadn’t had to spend two decades ready to take over any minute now.

If only Vito Corleone hadn’t observed Narducci serving as consigliere at a dozen Commission meetings. If only, not long before Vito’s death, he hadn’t suggested to his son that installing Narducci as Don, rather than waiting for nature to take its course, would eliminate the Barzini Family’s biggest ally outside New York.

Change one or two of those things, and-who knows?-maybe, as you read this, Nick Geraci and Michael Corleone would be out there somewhere, side by side, two leathery old goats beside a swimming pool in Arizona, toasting a life well lived, eyeing a couple sixty-something babes across the way, and busting out the Viagra.

History is a lot of things, but one thing it’s not is inevitable.

Vito Corleone often said that every man has but one destiny. His own life was a powerful contradiction of his own cherished aphorism. Yes, he fled Sicily when men came to kill him. Yes, when a young neighborhood tough named Pete Clemenza asked him to hide a cache of guns, Vito had little choice but to comply. And, yes, when Vito committed his first crime in America, the theft of an expensive rug, he thought at the time that he was just helping Clemenza move it. All of these things had found him. This is not unusual. Bad things find everyone. Some might call this destiny. Others might call it chance. Tomato, tomahto. But Vito’s involvement in his next crimes-hijacking trucks along with Clemenza and another young tough from Hell’s Kitchen by the name of Tessio-had been a willful act. When they invited Vito to join their band of thieves, he could have said no. Saying yes, choosing to become a predatory criminal, sent him down one path. Saying no would have sent him down another, perhaps a family business his three sons would have been able to join without first becoming murderers.

Vito was a skillful, intuitive mathematician, a brilliant assessor of probability, and a man of vision. Believing in something as irrational and unimaginative as destiny was out of character. It was beneath him.

Still, what human being is above rationalizing the worst thing he ever did? Who among us, if directly and indirectly responsible for the killing of hundreds of people, including one of his own children, might not tell himself a lie, something that, unexamined, might even seem profound?

Both Nick Geraci and Michael Corleone were young, smart, creative, careful, and tough. Each had a gift for reinventing himself, at contriving to be underestimated and then taking advantage of it. It has often been said that they were too similar and destined to become enemies. It has often been said that wars are waged to create peace. It has often been said that the earth is flat and that this way demons lie. Wisdom is a thing rarely said (the late Vito Corleone often said) and less often heard.

Michael Corleone and Nick Geraci might certainly have made other choices. Better things could easily have happened. They were by no means destined to destroy each other.

THE CREMATORY was owned by none other than Amerigo Bonasera. Neri had his own key. He and Geraci went right in the front door, and stripped out of their bloody clothes and into the best of what they could find in a back room. Geraci was a big man. The closest thing to a fit was a linen suit the color of baby shit and two sizes too small. Bonasera was semiretired, living most of the time in Miami Beach. His son-in-law took the suitcase and the wad of bloody clothes from Neri and didn’t say a word.

One of Geraci’s men drove him home. It wasn’t even midnight. Charlotte was still wide awake, sitting up in bed, doing the Times crossword puzzle. She was good at crossword puzzles but did them only when something was eating at her.

Nick Geraci stood at the foot of their bed. He knew how he looked in that suit. He cocked his head, arched his eyebrows in a way he hoped was comical, and thrust out his arms the way a vaudevillian would as he said “Ta-da!”

His wife did not laugh or even smile. The “gangland-style slayings” of Phillip Tattaglia and Emilio Barzini had been on the television news. She tossed the Times aside.

“Long day,” Geraci said. “Long story, okay, Char? Let’s leave it at that.”

He watched her size him up. He watched her face go slowly slack, watched her make herself not say she wasn’t going anywhere, watched her swallow her desire to ask to hear the story. She didn’t say a word.

Nick Geraci got undressed, tossing the suit over a chair. In the time it took him to piss, brush his teeth, and put on his pajamas, Charlotte managed to make the suit disappear (Geraci never saw it again), turn off the lights, get back into bed, and pretend to have fallen asleep.

In New Hampshire, in her parents’ house, Kay Corleone lay next to her sleeping children in the same double bed she’d had as a girl, trying to concentrate on the Dostoyevsky novel in her hands, dogged by the questions she hadn’t asked, and knew she couldn’t ask, about why Michael had not only suggested this visit but picked the dates.

In Las Vegas, in a darkened hotel suite on the top floor of the first high-rise in Las Vegas, the Castle in the Sand, home of the buck-fifty steak dinner and the nickel cup of coffee, Connie Corleone Rizzi clutched her newly baptized baby boy to her breast and stared out beyond the lights of the city. The last light of day drained from the desert. She was happy. Connie was not, as a rule, a happy person. She had not had an easy day, getting up so early for that flight and then having to contend the whole way with her six-year-old son Victor’s epic squirming and resourceful misbehavior while her mother, Carmela, barely lifted a finger to help and just nattered on and on about how this trip had made her miss Mass. But the baby-Michael Francis Rizzi, christened yesterday, named after her brother Mike, who’d stood as the boy’s godfather-had been a perfect angel, sleeping and cooing and burrowing that little nose into her. Somewhere over the Rocky Mountains, for the first time, he had laughed. Now, every time she blew on his forehead, he’d do it again. It was a sign, she thought. Babies bring their own luck. The move out here would be a new start for everybody. Carlo would change. He had changed. He hadn’t hit her once since she’d gotten pregnant with this baby. Mike was going to give Carlo a lot more responsibility in the family business now. Carlo had been supposed to make the flight, too, to look at houses and help shop for other things they’d need, but at the last minute Mike had said he needed Carlo to stay. Business. Neither her father nor any of her brothers had ever done that before, made Carlo feel like he mattered. She moved her infant son to her other breast and stroked his soft, fine hair. He smiled. She blew on his forehead. He laughed, and she did, too.