Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

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Even before you open the book, the stark red, white and black cover sparks the strains of Nino Rota's "The Godfather Waltz" begin playing in your mind. Mark Winegardner has been granted to task of writing a sequel to Mario Puzo's essential 1969 novel The Godfather, a novel which not only must pick up the story of that book, but must also fit the characters and situations Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, and others traced through three epic films. The result in The Godfather Returns.
Perhaps most of Winegardner's readers will be more familiar with the films than with the novel, which followed several different characters, many of whom, such as Johnny Fontane or Lucy Mancini, are only peripheral to the films. Winegardner returns to Puzo's novel to follow several different characters. Taking a technique for the second film, however, he also moves through time to present Michael Corleone's story before the first film, between the first two films, and between the second and third films.
Winegardner's decisions to fill in the blanks between the films is one of the weaknesses of The Godfather Returns. The films left out much of the empire building Michael had to do between them in his attempt to go legitimate. While Winegardner manages to add interesting layers of intrigue to Michaels' quest, and to the characters who surround him, the novel really works best when the characters are engaging in mafioso wheeling and dealing.
One of the strengths of Puzo's work was the characters he made come to life, and Winegardner does an excellent job not only with the lives of Puzo's characters, but with his own. Just as Puzo eventually picked up the story of Santino's son, Vincent, in "The Godfather, Part III," Winegardner also elects to follow Santino's offspring, in this case his twin daughters, as they take their first steps at breaking from the family business. Fredo, a pivotal character in the first two films, is actually fleshed out in The Godfather Returns, in which Winegardner adds to the appetites he exhibits in the first films and gives a deeper look into his need to become his own man and gain his older brother's approval.
The central character to the novel, however, is Nick Geraci, a member of the Corleone family who, Winegardner reveals, becomes the button man who killed Sal Tessio, his mentor. After proving his loyalty to the Corleones, it is clear that Geraci will eventually turn on the family as he tries to strike out on his own, setting up an eventual confrontation with Michael. Although it is clear Michael will be victorious, the cost of his victory helps build tension.
In many ways, Winegardner manages to recapture the style and spirit of Puzo's original novel. Nevertheless, there is the feeling that something is missing from The Godfather Returns. Winegardner successfully captures every individual aspect of Puzo's work, whether in the original novel or the films, but there is a magic beneath it that is missing. Despite missing the Puzo magic, The Godfather Returns is a welcome reintroduction to the Corleone clan.
Steven H Silver

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Soon afterward, though, back in Washington, a different small puzzle was solved, a more trivial injustice redressed. The culmination of several weeks of the right people asking the right questions came when a red-and-black Cadillac with New York plates pulled up in front of a tenement building near the Anacostia River. Snow fell. Two white men got out of the car, a short one in a shiny suit and a tall one in a gray duster. They went straight to the front door, and almost without breaking stride the man in the duster kicked it open. A moment later, there came a gunshot. This was a neighborhood where gunshots were as common as lizards in Nevada. The man in the shiny suit came out of the building first, carrying a white ten-gallon hat under his arm like a football. Behind him, with Hagen ’s old wristwatch balled into his fist, came the man in the duster. Upstairs, the mugger-who’d liked the watch too much to sell it-was splayed unconscious on his cold linoleum floor. He’d been brutally kayoed by the tall man, a journeyman heavyweight boxer named Elwood Cusik, whose married girlfriend’s abortion had been arranged-in a sterile New York hospital, no less-by a man with various reasons to be loyal to Ace Geraci. The short man-Cosimo “Momo the Roach” Barone, Sally Tessio’s nephew-had fired a.38 into the Negro’s thieving hand, as a lesson. The thief hadn’t woken up. Cusik, who’d never done a job like this before, lifted the thief’s unmaimed hand and checked his pulse. Seemed normal. Same with his breathing. The thief’s injuries were the sort that could have been easily avoided by anyone who never robbed anyone. Presuming the man regained consciousness before he bled to death, and unless he had any plans to take up typing or the piano, he’d be fine.

“So who’s the wristwatch belong to?” asked Cusik, trying it on in the car.

Momo the Roach didn’t answer. He flipped down the visor and checked his exoskeleton-hard shellacked hair in the mirror. They were out of the city before the boxer said anything else.

“The hat belongs to the same guy as the watch or someone else?”

“Try that on, too, why don’t you?” the Roach said.

Cusik shrugged and obeyed. The hat fit perfectly. “What do you think?” he said.

The Roach shook his head. “It’s you,” he said. “Listen, Tex, do me a favor, see if you can shut up as good as you throw a punch.”

Again Cusik shrugged and obeyed.

The thief-crumpled on the floor of a tiny room in a part of the world where people were slow to call the police and the police were even slower to respond-did in fact bleed to death. Call it business. Call it destiny. Call it the law of unintended consequences. Whichever. Why should Tom Hagen care? A man does things, and it sets other things in motion. A dead man doesn’t have to mean anything. Few do.

Chapter 16

T HE MOMENT she first glimpsed the island of Sicily, Kay Corleone gasped.

Michael looked up from the book he was reading - Peyton Place, which Kay had bought after her mother, Deanna Dunn, and several women from the Las Vegas Junior League had all recommended it, though she’d finished it hours ago and thought it was lousy. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Kay said. “My God. You never told me how beautiful it is.”

He set the book down and leaned across Kay, toward the window. “It is beautiful.”

A ridge of snowcapped mountains ringed the walled city of Palermo, visible from the air as a bounty of spires and carved stone and scrolled balconies. It was February, but the Mediterranean was impossibly blue and crested with the gold of the sun, the smoothness of the surface of the water marred only by what seemed the tiniest of vibration, like that of a glass of wine atop a softly playing radio. The runway was on a spit of land northwest of the city. Among the countless things Michael had said to dissuade Kay from coming here on their vacation was that, statistically, this was one of the most dangerous airports in the world. Most of the time, he himself flew into Rome and took a train and ferry here. As the plane banked low, over the water, so close to a small gray fishing boat she could see the men’s unshaven faces, Kay-who’d been to Europe before, but always by sea-was thrilled she’d insisted they fly all the way here.

Only when the plane’s shadow appeared on the boulders of the coastline did a hot pang of panic shoot through her -my babies!- but a pang was all it was. Seconds later, they touched down, a little harder than a person might like but an essentially uneventful landing.

“After all these years,” Kay marveled, “here I am in Sicily for the first time.”

“Birthplace of Venus,” Michael said, rubbing her thigh. “Goddess of love.”

For Kay’s whole adult life, she’d been hearing about all the things that were and weren’t Sicilian, all the things she could never understand because she wasn’t Sicilian. Michael had been here numerous times on business and had even, for three years, lived here. The least he could do was show her the place: a week’s worth of sightseeing and a second week holed up in a romantic resort carved into a mountainside near Taormina. He owed her that much. At least that much.

As the plane taxied toward the terminal, Kay noticed a precisely parked row of tiny Italian cars in the grass infield. Beside the cars, thirty or so people, many with bread or flowers tucked under their arms, stood behind a waist-high rope, smiling and waving at the arriving plane. In front of the rope were four uniformed carabinieri, two with gleaming silver swords on their shoulders, two with their swords sheathed and machine guns held across their chests.

“People you know?” Kay said.

She’d been joking, but Michael nodded. “Friends,” he said. “Friends of friends, really. There’s supposed to be a surprise party at a restaurant on the beach at Mondello.”

She gave him a look.

“I know,” he said.

“I thought we had an understanding.”

“We do. I’m not the one surprising you. No more surprises from me, that’s the deal. As far as the portion of the world I don’t control, you’re going to have to take it up with God.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Was he making a crack about her becoming Catholic?

“Nothing,” he said. “Look, I wasn’t sure it was going to happen. I let you know about it as soon as I saw that it was. It would have been just as much a surprise if the surprise party I told you about ended up not happening, right?”

She shook her head and patted his knee. He did need a vacation. Her, too. She put her hand on his thigh. “We can’t even check into the hotel and take a shower first?”

“If that’s what you really want,” he said, which was a way he had of saying no. “Try to look surprised, at any rate. For their benefit.”

When the plane stopped, the carabinieri without machine guns sheathed their swords, too, and hurried across the tarmac. A stewardess told the passengers to keep their seats.

“What’s going on?” Kay whispered.

“No idea.” Michael swiveled his head, almost imperceptibly but enough to make eye contact with Al Neri, two rows behind them. That Michael had agreed to go on this vacation with only one bodyguard (albeit his best and most trusted one) seemed to be a clear sign that things had gotten better. And, true to Michael’s word, they’d been on airplanes or in airports for almost two whole days, and it really had been as if Neri weren’t there.

The hatch opened. The steps came down. The head stewardess and the carabinieri had a conversation that, though she’d like to think she understood Italian, Kay couldn’t quite make out.

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