Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

“ Moron,” Narducci said. “What do doctors know? So look. Tell me. What happened up there that made you say sabotage ?”

“I never said that.”

Narducci winced. “I sort of think you maybe did.”

“Huh,” Geraci said. “I have no memory of that. None at all.”

“None at all. On your radio you never did? To the control tower? This ring a bell?”

“No,” Geraci lied.

“No? Think hard.”

Geraci had a pretty good idea why Narducci was making such an issue of this. If it had been sabotage, it would mean that somehow someone got onto that island and did it. Even if it came out later who that was, who’d been behind it, Don Forlenza would still take the blame.

Had it been sabotage? So much had gone wrong in those last few moments. Geraci thought he remembered everything, and still he had no real idea what had happened. It was not unlikely that the fault had been entirely his. Knowing the plane was about to go down had made him say and do stupid things. He’d blurted it out. Sabotage. The tower had said, Say again, and he hadn’t. It had been wrong to think of Charlotte and his girls, their sweet faces contorted in pain when they got the news that he’d died. That couldn’t have taken more than a couple seconds, but who knows? Might have been a couple seconds he didn’t have. He couldn’t see the runway, but he’d known he wasn’t far from shore. There was a problem with the artificial horizon, yes, but a lot of things might have caused that. His instruments had told him conflicting things, and he’d gone with what felt right. If you indulge your feelings, his flight instructor had said, they will kill you. The instructor was a former test pilot. Reality, he preached, is absolute. A good pilot never loses sight of this. Geraci was afraid he might have.

“Things went wrong,” Geraci said. “It happened fast.”

Narducci waited. He didn’t move.

“If I said something about sabotage-which I don’t recall, but if I did-I was just thinking out loud. Ruling it out.” Geraci thought he’d finished both doughnuts and was surprised to see one last big bite left. He ate it. “What happened was terrible, but it was nobody’s fault.”

“Nobody’s fault.” Narducci repeated it several more times, blankly. “Well,” he finally said, “that’s good. I got one more question right now.”

“All ears.”

“Tell me about O’Malley. Who knows he’s you? Or could figure it out? Lot of lucky guessers in the world, don’t forget. Lot of guys smarter than you think. Again, take your time. I’m in no hurry. Just the thought of going back down all them stairs…” He shuddered.

It was a short list. It included no one but Narducci, Forlenza, and the top people in the Corleone Family. There was no reason not to recite it. If all Don Forlenza had wanted to do was cover his tracks, Geraci would have been dead already. If Forlenza and his men were going to help Geraci talk his way out of this mess, they’d need some information.

On a narrow road in upstate New York more commonly traveled by tractors and pickup trucks, there came an irregular but persistent stream of Cadillacs and Lincolns. Uniformed police officers directed Clemenza’s car to a pasture behind a white clapboard farmhouse. Judging from the long row of big and precisely parked cars, they were among the last to arrive. If Hagen were still consigliere, Michael would have had to hear that Vito Corleone would have been among the first. That was one way of doing things; Michael’s was another. Even his father had, during his final months, stressed that Michael needed to do things his own way. Clemenza whistled an old folk song and questioned nothing, not even how far he had to walk.

They got out. Behind the house was a catering tent. Next to it, hissing over a pit of coals and rotating on a spit, was a pig large enough to pass for an immature hippo.

Neither Michael nor Clemenza had ever been to one of these, but they approached the house like men who knew what to expect. Michael was fairly sure he did. But he’d also been fairly sure he knew what to expect when he was crouching in that amphibious tractor off the shore of Peleliu, ready to take the beach.

This was not the same thing, he told himself. War was at his back. Peace lay before him.

“Every ten years, eh?” Clemenza tapped his wristwatch. The gesture was a good excuse for him to stop for a moment and catch his wheezing breath. “Like clockwork.”

“Actually,” Michael said, “it’s only been eight.” Despite the Bocchicchio insurance, he scanned the woods for snipers or anyone else who shouldn’t have been there. Habit.

“So next time, it’ll be twelve. Average it out. Hey, get a load of that big fuckin’ pig.”

Michael laughed. “You sure you don’t want to do this permanently?”

Clemenza shook his head and began walking again. “A chi consiglia non vuole il capo.” He who advises doesn’t want to be boss; an old saying. “Nothing against Hagen or Genco, any of them,” he said, “but I’m a guy who helps.”

The rear door opened. They were met by a chorus of greetings, as if from friends at a party. With a quick glance back at the roasting pig, Clemenza clapped his hand on Michael’s shoulder and followed him inside.

Nick Geraci spent weeks in that lemon yellow apartment, waking each morning to the aroma of doughnuts and the sound of women in slippers muttering in Italian and sweeping their stoops. Charlotte and the girls were still doing fine, he was assured, and knew he was recuperating nicely. He was told that Vincent Forlenza and Michael Corleone were doing everything they could to negotiate a deal to bring him home safely. Hardly a day went by without someone telling him how lucky he was to have two godfathers, both of whom loved him.

In all that time Geraci never learned the name of that old doctor or how the man had become beholden to Don Forlenza. It must have been something big. To prepare the body that would be discovered in the ravine down by the river, the doctor had stood by, holding a clipboard with several diagrams, and advised Forlenza’s men as they took some corpse about Geraci’s size and gave it injuries nearly identical to the ones Geraci had. The doctor sewed the contrived wounds himself, imitating the stitch work of the emergency room hacks. Geraci never found out where the corpse had come from. The only question he asked, the day they got him out of there and sent him to Arizona to meet his family, was if they knew the rats would eat that much of the body and if so, how they knew. The face had helpfully been destroyed, he’d heard, and rats were living inside the rotting corpse. Was that just what happened naturally when you hid a body near the river? Or had they done things to make sure?

“What difference does it make?” asked Laughing Sal, beside him in the hearse they were using to take him to the train station.

Geraci shrugged. “Knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”

“There you go!” Narducci said, nodding. “That college-boy angle you play.”

“Something like that.”

“I bet there are some people who aren’t all that crazy about it, that angle.”

“People,” Geraci agreed. “I bet.”

He’d studied the way Narducci used echolalia and silence. He copied it now. People never recognize themselves. Even in a boxing ring, you can knock men out this way.

“Odds are,” Narducci finally said, “nature would have taken its course. But like a lot of things where the odds are in a man’s favor, you still want to make sure.”

Despite how far it was to Arizona, Geraci had refused to fly, not even in a luxurious medical plane that came complete with a hi-fi system and a pretty nurse. No more planes, ever. And so they sent him there in a casket, shipped in a freight car to the same funeral home he’d gone to that summer, after his mother died.