Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Years later, Michael would learn that Sonny had robbed a filling station that received protection from the Maranzano Family, though Sonny hadn’t known that. The robbery had been a lark. That night, Vito went to make things right with Maranzano and dispatched Clemenza to go look for Sonny. A few hours later, Pete found him atop a lonely and demonstrative housewife and dragged the boy to the office at Genco Pura Olive Oil to face his father’s wrath.

When Vito confronted Sonny about his stupid act, what Sonny said in his defense was that he’d seen his father kill Fanucci. Vito sat down, heavily, defeated, unable to talk to his son about how he should behave. When Sonny asked to quit school and join the family business, Vito relented and called it destiny.

Vito believed that he himself had done what he had to do in a world that offered little to a man who looked like he did and came from where he came from. He did so steadfast in the belief that life would be different for his children. He’d promised himself that none of them, not even Hagen, would follow in his footsteps. It was the only promise Vito Corleone ever broke.

At the time, though, all Michael knew was that, for the first time in his life, he’d seen his stoic father lose his temper, and that Sonny had somehow caused it. Moments after Vito and Clemenza left, Tom, obviously disgusted, excused himself and headed for the door. “Need anything, Ma? I’m going for a walk.”

She didn’t. Her face was gray and drawn.

Michael caught the door as Tom was closing it and followed him down the stairs. When they got to the street it was raining. A downpour. Tom leaned against the glass door, hesitating.

“Tell me what’s happening, Tom,” Michael said. “I have a right to know. We’re family.”

“Where’d you learn to talk like that, kid?”

Michael hardened his expression as best he could.

Tom glanced over his shoulder. The super and a few tenants were milling around. “Not here.” He motioned toward an awning a few doors down. Together, they ran for it.

At sixteen, Hagen didn’t know everything. But he knew how to read Sonny, and he worshiped Vito, so he knew more than anyone would have guessed. The things he told Michael that night, under the striped awning in front of Racalmuto Meat, were candid and true.

From that day on, Sonny became one of the men who accompanied Vito everywhere. He came home late if at all. When he was home, he doted on Fredo, who looked up to him the way Michael did Tom. For Michael’s seventh birthday, Tom gave him a tennis sweater. Michael wore it tied around his neck, the way Tom did.

Within weeks of one another, Sonny left home and got his own apartment in Manhattan, just off Mulberry Street, and Tom moved into a dormitory at NYU. Whether because of their departure or his own maturation, Fredo emerged quite unexpectedly at thirteen as a strong and powerful young man. Though undersized, he played guard on the freshman football team. After years of being knocked around, he won a small CYO boxing tournament. He was getting better grades and excelling in his religious studies under Father Stefano. Fredo was still shy around girls, but to them this shyness was suddenly endearing, an allure made more profound because they all knew he wanted to be a priest.

Michael couldn’t have pinpointed a moment when all this changed, when Fredo’s clumsiness became something darker, when the self-sufficiency became sullen self-absorption. It must have happened gradually, but to Michael, it seemed that one moment Fredo was a weakling, the next he was a strong, serious young man, and the next he was locked in his room for hours at a time. At sixteen, Fredo announced what everyone but his mother already assumed: he no longer wished to become a priest. He started flunking classes. He had dates, but only because girls found him harmless. Soon he, too, joined his father’s business, though Vito gave him only menial tasks: relaying messages, fetching coffee, unloading actual olive oil.

Vito Corleone kept stressing the importance of education, and sometimes at night he and Michael sat on the fire escape and dreamed big dreams about the boy’s future. Vito had had such conversations with the other boys, too, and only Tom-who was about to start law school at Columbia-even finished high school. Michael loved and respected his father, but he was scared that he’d turn sixteen and something in his blood would send him into the world Tom told him about.

Michael’s understanding of that world was still that of an eleven-year-old. During the summer, when Michael was home from school, his father-undoubtedly on days he expected to be uneventful-sometimes took him along as he made his rounds. Vito seemed mainly to go from meal to meal, at various social clubs, restaurants, and coffee shops, shaking hands, saying he’d already eaten, and then eating anyway. He’d leave without seeming to have conducted any business at all, unless it somehow all got done in brief whispers.

On one such day, Vito was suddenly called to meet with some people at the Genco Pura warehouse. He told Michael to wait outside. Michael found a baseball in the trunk of the car and went into the alley to throw it off the wall. When he got there, a boy he’d never seen before was already doing the same thing. The boy’s features were aggressively Irish.

“This is my alley,” Michael said, though he didn’t know what provoked him to say that.

“Aw, c’mon,” the boy said. “No one owns alleys.” He flashed a dazzling white smile and laughed. The laugh was kind of braying, but it somehow put Michael at ease.

Still, they didn’t say much more than that for a long time. They stood alongside each other in that alley, and each threw his scuffed baseball against the wall over and over, trying to outdo each other, though neither one was a born ballplayer.

“You know,” the Irish boy finally said, out of breath and taking a break, “my dad’s boss of all those trucks out there, and you know what’s in ’em, don’tcha?”

“Some of those trucks are my dad’s. All the ones that say ‘Genco Pura Olive Oil.’ ”

“Likkah!” The boy’s accent sounded like Katharine Hepburn’s: neither American nor British yet both. It took Michael a moment to realize he’d said liquor. “Enough likkah to get all of New York drunk tonight, and half of New Jersey, too.”

Michael shrugged. “It says olive oil. ” Though he knew that most of those trucks carried liquor. He’d seen inside them before. “Where’d you learn to talk like that?” Michael said.

“I might ask you the same thing,” the boy said. “You’re Italian, right?”

“I don’t talk like anything.”

“Sure you don’t. Listen, you want to know why the coppahs aren’t here right now arresting everyone for selling all that bootleg likkah? Do you?”

“You’re off your nut. All those trucks have in ’em are olive oil.”

“Because my dad bribes every coppah in New York!” the boy said.

Michael looked up and down the alley. There was no one in earshot, but he still didn’t like the boy talking so loud about such things. “You’re lying,” Michael said.

The boy explained in detail how his father bribed all the cops. He spoke in specific terms about the murders and beatings necessary to make a profit selling liquor. Either he had a great imagination or he was telling the truth. “You’re makin’ it all up,” Michael said.

“Your people are worse, from what I hear.”

“You’re just talkin’ big. You don’t know anything.”

“Think what you want,” the boy said. “In the meantime, I dare you to go get a bottle of likkah off the truck and bring it back here and split it with me.”

This was nothing that had ever occurred to Michael to do, but he just nodded and went to get one. Fredo was helping another man unload a truck. Michael told them his father wanted to see them. When they left, Michael took a bottle of Canadian whiskey back to the alley.