Mark Winegardner: The Godfather returns

In the next room, Vincent started jumping on the bed, which he’d been told countless times not to do. The phone rang. Connie smiled. That would be Carlo. She let Victor answer.

“Mo-om!” the boy called. “It’s Uncle To-om!” Hagen.

Connie stood. The baby began to scream.

On the street below, draped in a long black shawl, Carmela Corleone emerged from the hotel, head down, shielding her eyes from the glare of the neon lights, muttering to herself in Italian. She started down the Strip. It was after nine, too late for services anywhere, especially on a Monday, but in a town with all these wedding chapels, how hard could it be for a determined widow to find a priest? Or at least a man of the cloth. If all else failed, a quiet and holy place where she might escape these garish lights and fall to her knees and seek intervention on behalf of the souls of the damned, humbly beseeching the Virgin Mary, as she did every day, one suffering mother to another.

FOUR MONTHS LATER, early Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend, Michael Corleone lay in his bed in Las Vegas, his wife beside him, his two kids right down the hall, all of them sound asleep. Yesterday in Detroit, at the wedding of the daughter of his late father’s oldest friend, Michael had given the merest nod toward Sal Narducci, a man he barely knew, putting in motion a plan designed to hurt every formidable rival the Corleones still had. If it worked, Michael would emerge blameless. If it worked, it would bring lasting peace to the American underworld. The final bloody victory of the Corleone Family was at hand. A trace of a smile flickered on Michael Corleone’s surgically repaired face. His breathing was even and deep. Otherwise, he was motionless, untroubled, basking in the cool air of his new home, enjoying the sleep of the righteous. Outside, even in the pale morning light, the desert baked.

Near the oily banks of the Detroit River, two lumpy men in silk short-sleeved shirts-one aquamarine, the other Day-Glo orange-emerged from the guest cottage of an estate belonging to Joe Zaluchi, the Don of Detroit, the man who’d saved his city from the arbitrary violence of the Purple Gang. The one in orange was Frank Falcone, formerly of Chicago and now the head of organized crime in Los Angeles. The one in aquamarine, Tony Molinari, was his counterpart in San Francisco. Behind them came two men in overcoats, each carrying two suitcases, each suitcase containing, among other things, a tux worn to last night’s Clemenza-Zaluchi nuptials. The surface of the water was awash in dead fish. From the barn-sized garage, a limo came to get them. When the limo pulled out onto the street, a police car followed it. The cop was on Zaluchi’s payroll.

At Detroit City Airport, they turned down a dirt access road and drove alongside a fence until they got to a gate marked EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY. The police car stopped. The limo kept going, right onto the tarmac. The silk-shirted men got out, sipping coffee from paper cups. Their bodyguards practiced karate moves.

A plane taxied toward them, bearing the logo of a meatpacking concern in which Michael Corleone had a silent, controlling interest. The logo featured the profile of a lion. The name on the pilot’s birth certificate was Fausto Dominick Geraci, Jr., but the license clipped to the visor read “Gerald O’Malley.” The flight plan he’d turned in was blank. Geraci had a guy in the tower. At airports all over America, Geraci had the use of planes that did not on paper belong to him.

Under his seat was a satchel full of cash. Storm clouds filled the western sky.

Across the river, just outside Windsor, the door to Room 14 of the Happy Wanderer Motor Inn opened just a crack. Framed there was Fredo Corleone, his brother’s new appointed sotto capo, a man shaped like a bowling pin and dressed in last night’s rumpled shirt and tux pants. He looked out to the parking lot. He didn’t see anyone walking around. He waited for a piece of junk car to chug by. It was loud enough to wake a person up. Fredo was aware of some stirring on the bed behind him, but the last thing he was going to do was look back.

Finally the coast was clear. He pulled a porkpie hat low, over his eyes, eased the door closed behind him, and hurried around the corner, down an embankment, and across a drive-in theater, filthy with discarded cups and popcorn buckets. The buckets were adorned with fat blue clowns-heads cocked, faces contorted into gruesome, knowing smiles. The hat wasn’t his. Maybe it belonged to the man in that room or else came from one of Fredo’s many stops last night. It may have even belonged to one of his bodyguards. They were new, strangers to him. His head pounded. He patted his shirt pockets, his pants pockets. He’d left his smokes back in the room. His lighter, too. The lighter was a present from Mike: jeweled, from Milan. It was engraved CHRISTMAS 1954 but with no name, of course. Never put your name on anything, his old man always said. Fredo didn’t even break stride. Fuck it. He jumped a muddy ditch and jogged across the parking lot of an apartment building. He’d hidden the car, a Lincoln that Zaluchi had lent him, behind a trash incinerator. The coat of his tux was balled up in the backseat, along with a yellow satin shirt, which wasn’t his, and a whiskey bottle, which was.

He got in. He took a drink and tossed the bottle onto the passenger seat. It may, he thought, be time to take a break from the booze. And the other thing. Jesus. How can a thing you want so bad seem so repulsive right after you do it? He’d quit that, too. No more after-hours clubs. No more paying for it from junkies too messed up to know whose dick they sucked. Easy enough to start today, heading home to Vegas, where he was a known ladies’ man, where the town was so small he couldn’t get the other thing anyway. He put the car in gear and drove away as if he were someone’s pious Canadian grandpa on the way to Mass. Though he did-at a stoplight-finish off the whiskey. He hit the main drag and sped up. At this pace, he’d make the plane to Vegas, easy. It started to rain. Only when he flicked on the wipers did he notice that there was a piece of paper under the passenger-side blade, a handbill or something.

Back in the darkness of Room 14 of the Happy Wanderer, the naked man on the bed awoke. He was a restaurant supply salesman from Dearborn, married, two kids. He moved the pillow from his crotch and rose. He smelled his fingertips. He rubbed his eyes. “ Troy?” he called. “Hey, Troy? Oh, hell. Not again. Troy?” Then he saw the lighter. He saw Troy ’s gun. Troy struck him as the kind of guy who’d carry a gun, but not this kind. This was a cowboy gun, a Colt.45, its grip and trigger covered with white adhesive tape. The naked man had never touched a real gun before. He sat back down on the bed. He felt faint. He was a diabetic. Somewhere, there should be oranges. He remembered Troy giving a bartender fifty bucks to go to the kitchen and get a bag of oranges. He ate three right at the bar, while Troy walked to the door and looked out into the street, waiting until he’d finished eating and the peels were gone. The man could not remember what happened to the rest of the oranges.

His heart revved and sweat poured out of him. He called the front desk and asked for room service. “Where you think you are,” said the desk clerk, “the Ritz?” Good question. Where was he? He wanted to ask, but first he had to do something about his blood sugar. Was there any food at all? he asked. A vending machine or something? Any way he could get the clerk to bring him, let’s just say, a candy bar? “Your legs busted?” the clerk asked. The man said he’d pay five bucks for a candy bar to be delivered to his room. The clerk said he’d be right there.