Mark Winegardner: The Godfather returns

The note didn’t say where.

Kay Corleone pointed back toward the road to the Las Vegas airport. “He missed our turn,” she said. “Michael, we missed our turn.”

Next to her in the backseat of their new yellow Cadillac, Michael shook his head.

Kay frowned. “We’re driving all the way to Los Angeles? Are you out of your mind?”

It was their fifth anniversary. She and the kids and even her mother and Baptist pastor father had already been to Mass. Michael had business tonight, before, during, and after the private show Johnny Fontane was doing as a favor for the Teamsters. But he’d promised her that the whole day up until then would be one long date-like old times, only better.

Michael shook his head. “We’re not driving. And we’re not going to Los Angeles.”

Kay turned around in her seat, looking back toward the road not taken, then turned to her husband. Abruptly, she had what felt like a block of ice in her guts. “Michael,” she said. “Forgive me, but I think this marriage has withstood about all the surprises that-” She made circles with her hands, like a sports official signaling improper movement of some sort.

He smiled. “This will be a good surprise,” he said. “I promise.”

Soon they came to Lake Mead, near a dock with a seaplane moored to the end. The plane was registered to Johnny Fontane’s movie production company, though neither Fontane nor anyone who worked there knew anything about it.

“Surprise number one,” Michael said, pointing to the plane.

“Oh, brother,” she said. “ ‘Number one’? You’ve counted them up. You really should have become a mathematics professor.” The illicit thrill she’d once gotten from what he’d become instead had waned enough that she might actually have meant this.

They got out of the car.

“That’s counting,” he said. “At most ac counting. Not mathematics.” He held out his hand toward the dock. “M’lady.”

Kay wanted to say she was afraid but did not, could not. She had no reason whatsoever to think that he might do her harm.

“Surprise number two-”

“Michael.”

“-is that I’m flying.”

Her eyes widened.

“I started pilot training in the Marines,” he said, “before I was, you know.” Sent to fight in 120-degree heat for tunnel-riddled coral islands ladled with a maggoty stew of mud and corpses. “For some reason flying relaxes me,” he said. “I’ve been taking lessons.”

Kay exhaled. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath. She hadn’t realized that, in all those unaccounted-for hours the past few weeks, she was afraid he was having an affair. That’s not true. What she was afraid of was worse. “It’s good you have a hobby,” she ventured. “Everyone needs a hobby. Your father had his garden. Other men have golf.”

“Golf,” he said. “Hmm. You don’t have a hobby, do you?”

“I don’t,” she said.

“There’s always golf.” He was wearing a tailored sport coat and a stark white shirt with no necktie. He hadn’t slicked his hair. A light wind tousled it.

“Actually,” she said, “what would you think if I went back to teaching?”

“That’s a job,” Michael said. “You don’t need a job. Who’d watch Mary and Anthony?”

“I wouldn’t start until we’re settled. By then your mother will be here and she could do it. Carmela would be thrilled to do it.” Though Kay actually dreaded hearing what her mother-in-law would say about Kay working outside the home. “Really, all it would be is a hobby.”

“Do you want a job?” Michael said.

She looked away. A job wasn’t exactly the point.

“Let me think about it.” His father wouldn’t have approved, but he was not his father. Michael had once, like his father, been married to a nice Italian girl, but Kay did not know that and was not that girl. What concerned Michael was security, even though it was part of the code that the risks to her were slight. Michael put a hand on her arm and gave it a gentle squeeze.

Kay put her hand on top of his. She took a deep breath. “Well, look,” she said. “I’m not getting in that contraption. At least not until you tell me where we’re going.”

Michael shrugged. “Tahoe,” he said. A grin flickered on his face. “ Lake Tahoe.” He gestured to the seaplane. “Obviously.”

She’d told him once she’d love to go there. She hadn’t thought he’d been listening.

He opened the door to the plane. Kay got in. As she did, her dress both hiked up and stretched taut across her ass. Michael felt a wild impulse to grab her hips from behind but instead just let his eyes linger. There was nothing better, nothing sexier, than looking at your wife like this without her knowing it.

“Now, the only tricky part about floatplanes,” Michael said as he got in and started the engine, “is that they sometimes flip.”

“Flip?!” Kay said.

“Rarely.” He stuck out his lower lip, as if to indicate the lightning-strike unlikelihood of such a thing. “And if a floatplane flips, guess what? It floats.”

Kay regarded him. “That’s comforting.”

“I do love you,” he said. “You know that, right?”

She tried for the expressionlessness Michael had mastered all too well. “That’s also comforting.”

Their takeoff was so smooth that Kay felt her every muscle relax. She hadn’t been aware that they were clenched. She had no idea for how long.

OVERLAKE ERIE, the small plane flew into the teeth of a thunderstorm. The cabin was hot, which suited Nick Geraci just fine. The other men in the plane were sweating just as much as he was. The bodyguards had already blamed it on the heat. Tough guys. He’d been one of them, once, written off as a big dumb ox, both relied upon and disposable.

“I thought the storm was behind us,” said Frank Falcone, one of the silk-shirted men, the one in orange, the one who didn’t know who the pilot really was.

“You said a mouthful,” said the one in aquamarine, Tony Molinari, who did know.

The hits on the top men in the Barzini, Tattaglia, and Corleone crime syndicates had aroused the interest of law enforcement everywhere, from local-yokel hard-ons to the FBI (though the agency’s director, supposedly because the Corleones had something on him, continued to maintain that the so-called Mafia was a myth). For most of the summer, even corner-bar shylocks had had to close things down. The other two New York Dons, Ottilio “Leo the Milkman” Cuneo and Anthony “Black Tony” Stracci, had overseen a cease-fire. Whether this would mean an end to the war, no one knew.

“Excuse me, but I meant the real storm,” said Falcone. “The storm out there. The fucking storm.”

Molinari shook his head. “Jokes are wasted on you, my friend.”

Their bodyguards, noticeably more pale now, looked down at the floor of the plane. “Lake effect,” said Geraci. “The way it works is that the air and the water are sharply different temperatures.” He tried to make his voice sound the way a pilot’s would, in a movie where the pilot was the lead. He relaxed his grip. “That’s what makes it possible for storms to come from any direction, and all of a sudden. Keeps things interesting, eh?”

Molinari put a hand on Geraci’s shoulder. “Thank you, Mister fucking Science.”

“You’re welcome, sir,” Geraci said.

Falcone had been a top connection guy in Chicago -buying politicians, judges, and cops-and now ran his own thing in Los Angeles. Molinari had a four-star dockside restaurant in San Francisco, plus a piece of anything there he wanted a piece of. According to the briefing Michael had given Geraci, Falcone and Molinari had always had their differences, particularly when it came to the New York Families. Falcone saw them as snobbish, Molinari as recklessly violent. Molinari had also felt a personal attachment to the late Vito Corleone that Falcone had never shared. But the last few years, the two West Coast Dons had forged a wary, effective allegiance, particularly in organizing the importation and distribution of narcotics from the Philippines and Mexico (another reason, Michael did not have to say, that Geraci was being sent to meet them). Until Michael had taken over the Corleone Family, they’d been the two youngest Dons in America.