Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

He let her go.

But she knew it would work, eventually, her silence. Just because he so expertly wielded silence as a weapon didn’t mean that he was invulnerable to it himself, especially from her. She sat on the right side of the plane and patiently watched the Italian coast ease by.

After about an hour he came to her. “Is this seat taken?” he said.

“So’d you finish your book?”

“I did,” he said. “I thought it was good, actually. A nice escape.”

“If you say so.” The book he’d taken to read was Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, which Kay had given him for Christmas. He kept nodding off. Not long after she’d finished her book, he’d picked it up, and she’d taken his. Kay thought The Last Hurrah was the best thing she’d ever read about city politics. She was appalled he hadn’t loved it. “And, yes, the seat’s taken.”

“Kay,” he said. “The reason you wouldn’t understand is because I didn’t-” He closed his eyes. Maybe this, too, his struggling for words, had to do with the long flight, but there was something about him now that seemed more shaken up than exhausted. “Because,” he said, “it’s true that… that I haven’t been entirely, you know…” He let out what started as a frustrated sigh and finished as a soft, agonized moan.

“Michael,” she said.

“I want to tell you some things,” he said. “I have to tell you some things.”

Most of the time, she looked at him and hardly recognized the man she’d fallen in love with. He’d had his face smashed, then fixed. His hair was shot through with gray, and-though she told herself it was her imagination-he’d become a dead ringer for his father. But there was the same look in his eyes now as he’d had years ago, on a New Hampshire golf course on a warm starry night, when he told her what he’d done during the war, things he’d never told anyone, and he’d sobbed in her arms. Angry as she’d been, suddenly she just melted.

“I’d like that,” she said, her voice quavering. “Thank you.” She patted the seat beside her.

He sat. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she said, taking his hand. “No apologies. Just talk to me.”

They stayed in Rome only long enough to sleep off the jet lag and have a magnificent meal at a restaurant Kay had been to years before with her parents. The next day, with Michael still asleep upstairs, she spoke to the hotel concierge herself and arranged a reservation at a resort in the Swiss Alps. He helped her rent a plane, too, for Michael to fly them there, which she knew he’d love. She’d never been to the Alps, but when they’d flown over them on the way here, she’d promised herself she’d go someday. Turned out, someday would be tomorrow.

When she finished, she turned and saw Al Neri, sitting in a leather chair across the lobby, smoking and chomping a sweet roll. She shook her head and he nodded. She told the concierge she’d been mistaken. She needed two rooms. Preferably not adjoining. He sighed and made an exasperated gesture but dialed the phone and was able to change the reservation.

Kay got an espresso from the hotel bar. The hotel had a glassed-in courtyard, and on her way to get a table, a man about her age whistled at her. A younger man next to him raised an eyebrow and called her beautiful. She tried not to react, but she was a happy woman and in truth they’d made her happier. She was only thirty-two years old. Yes, they were Italian, but it was still nice to think of herself as a woman able to summon blurted compliments from strange men.

She took a seat by herself, bathed in that pink-yellow light so distinct to Rome.

The day Michael had proposed to her, he’d warned Kay that they couldn’t be equal partners. Kay had protested; clearly Michael’s father confided in his mother, no? True, Michael had said, but his mother’s first loyalty had always been to his father, for forty years. If things worked out as well with them, Michael had said, maybe someday he’d tell her a few things she didn’t really want to hear. Turned out, that someday had been yesterday.

Kay should probably be furious, frightened, or at least unmoored. She wasn’t. Despite or maybe even because of the things Michael had told her, Kay couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this happy. It was irrational as hell, but then again all happiness was irrational.

Her husband was a murderer. He’d fled to Sicily not because he had been unjustly accused of murdering those two men-the police captain and the dope kingpin-but because he’d shot them, one in the head, the other in the heart and throat. Three years after those killings, Michael came back to America. When he and Kay got together, he confessed that he’d been with a woman, yes, while he was gone, but only because he never thought he’d see Kay again, and at any rate not for six months. What he’d failed to mention until yesterday was that the woman, a teenage peasant girl named Apollonia, had been his wife. The reason it had been six months was because six months earlier she’d been blown sky high in a booby-trapped Alfa Romeo.

His brother Sonny did not die in a car wreck. He’d been shot to hamburger at a tollbooth.

Everything that Tom Hagen had told her two years ago-that Michael had ordered the deaths of Carlo, Tessio, Barzini, Tattaglia, and a host of related others-was true. The day Hagen had told her those things-and told her that if Michael ever found out about it Hagen would be a dead man-had felt like the worst day of her life.

Yesterday, when Michael had trusted her enough to tell her those things himself, had hardly been a good day. But it hadn’t been the worst day of her life. No one could have been happy to have heard that those things had happened, but she was, she realized, elated that he’d told her about them. Kay was shocked but not surprised. A wife knows things. Kay knew who Michael was. From the time they’d first met, he’d been the perfect mix of good boy and bad boy. At Connie’s wedding, Kay had blamed the strong red wine for her euphoric light-headedness, but what had really done it was Michael’s deadpan explanation of his family’s business. Afterward, when he dragged her into a family photo -six years before they got married-Kay felt like she’d been yanked into the cast of a Shakespeare play. She’d acted reluctant, but it was acting. She’d loved it.

If she was honest, she had to admit that she had her own secrets, ones she still hadn’t confessed to Michael. During his years in hiding she’d had a long affair with her history professor at Mount Holyoke (she’d never thought she’d see Michael again, either) that Michael still didn’t know about. Deanna Dunn had told her things about Fredo that Kay would never dare mention to Michael. And Kay never had let on that Hagen had told her anything.

Kay had fallen in love with Michael the night he’d told her about the horror of those Pacific islands-buddies decapitated, incinerated, rotting in hot mud. He’d told her about the men he’d killed. The raw male violence of it-and the strength this man had shown, not just to survive that but, in her arms, to allow himself to confide in her-had frankly excited her. He’d murdered men there, too, and it had excited her. If Kay had been able to fall in love with a man who’d killed men for his country (to fall in love with him, Kay knew, not in spite of this but because of it), how shocked could she be that he’d killed and had men killed in defense of his own blood?

Kay was older now, of course. She was a mother. That changed everything-everything but the way she felt now. She finished her coffee. Her heart raced.

She went back upstairs (she heard Neri following but didn’t turn to watch), chained the door behind her, drew open the curtains, and flooded the room with light. Michael stirred but didn’t wake. Kay got undressed and burrowed under the covers next to him.