Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

“I thought you’d chicken out,” the boy said.

“You thought wrong. Maybe you’re just bad at thinking.” Michael opened the bottle and took a swig. It burned, but he didn’t embarrass himself. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Jimmy Shea,” said the boy, taking the bottle. He drank a big gulp of it, and it triggered an immediate coughing fit. He sank to his knees and started to vomit.

Moments later, their fathers caught them, two eleven-year-olds drinking whiskey in broad daylight at the height of Prohibition, and there was hell to pay. The boys-though their lives would run parallel-never spoke directly to each other again.

When Prohibition was repealed, Vito Corleone faced yet another fork in the road. He had, without suffering so much as an arrest, made a small fortune, enough to provide for his family and live the rest of his days in comfort. He chose, instead, to seek a partnership with Salvatore Maranzano, the New York underworld kingpin. Was that Vito Corleone’s one destiny? A cunning act of venal opportunism? Or did he do what he did simply because he was brilliant at doing it? Perhaps Vito had no choice. Sonny and Fredo were young men with little education and few skills. Left to their own devices, either son would probably have been dead in a year. Still, weren’t there legitimate businesses that a wealthy, brilliant man like Vito might have run? If there was ever a time for the Corleones to move to Las Vegas and go legit, this was it.

What happened instead is the stuff of history.

Maranzano scoffed at becoming an equal partner with Vito Corleone, and it touched off the Castellammarese War. Maranzano’s ally Al Capone sent two top men to New York to kill Vito Corleone. One was Willie “the Icepick” Russo, older brother of the future Don. Vito Corleone’s ability to derive power from the powerless paid off yet again. A railroad porter in Chicago sent information about what train the men were on, and a porter in New York led the gunmen into a taxi whose driver worked for Luca Brasi. Brasi tied the men up, and while they were still alive he hacked off their arms and legs with a fireman’s ax and calmly watched them die. Then he beheaded them. On New Year’s Eve, Tessio walked into a restaurant and shot Maranzano. Vito took over the Maranzano organization, reorganized other interests in New York and New Jersey into the Five Families we know today, and became capo di tutti capi. Boss of all bosses. He’d done so with a minimum of bloodshed and with hardly a mention of his name in any newspaper.

The young Michael Corleone had noticed more of his father’s men standing guard than usual, and his father had been gone at night more often. Otherwise, the upheaval didn’t touch that apartment building in the Bronx. When, years later, he learned what had happened, he was astonished. He’d remembered that as a good time for the family. Sonny got married. Tom finished law school. Connie got her first pony. Michael was elected president of his class. Fredo had come out of his shell and often took Michael with him into the city to shoot pool. Michael was a natural, able to see the angles on the table as if in a vision. Fredo was a capable player but a natural hustler, able to see the metaphorical angles several steps ahead of all but the best sharks. Anyone who underestimated the quiet, unflappable boy and his endearing loudmouth big brother left the table broke. The one time Fredo and Michael were rolled, Sonny found the two sore losers who’d done it and stomped them to death in broad daylight, in the middle of 114th Street, and left them there. The murder was investigated by a detective on the Corleones’ payroll. A dishonest Family shylock was convicted for it. Michael didn’t know a thing about any of that until he heard the story, years later, from Sonny himself, who thought the whole thing was hilarious. Why did they think they’d only been rolled once?

For more than ten years, peace reigned. The country foundered through the Great Depression and rose up to fight a just war, but during these hard times, Vito Corleone kept amassing power and riches. He brought a crew of stonecutters from Sicily to fashion mausoleums for nonexistent people that were in fact surprisingly commodious places to keep millions of dollars in cash. The Corleones continued to live modestly.

One day, well after this peace was under way, Michael was at the blackboard in his high school geometry class when there was a knock at the door. It was Fredo. He told the teacher there’d been a family emergency. Fredo didn’t say anything until they got in his car. “It’s Pop,” he said. “They shot him. In the chest. He’s gonna be okay, they said, but-”

Michael could barely hear him. The car was still double-parked in front of the school, but Michael felt like it had just gone over a huge dip in the road. “ Who shot him?”

“They’re nobody,” Fredo said. “Gang of Irish shitbirds too dumb to know the difference between Pop and some nothing you’d get into a turf war with. This dumb Mick walked right up to Pop on the street and shot him, and a second later we all opened fire on him.”

“On Pop?” Turf war? Gang? Nobody ever said this kind of thing in front of Michael.

“What? No. Jesus, Mikey. Don’t be stupid.” He put the car in gear and tore off.

“Where are we going?”

“Home. The hospital’s too crowded.”

Crowded was a euphemism. Michael didn’t know for what and didn’t push it.

Carmela put on a brave front for her children, but Michael saw through it. After everyone went to bed, he could hear her through the wall of his room. She was praying when he finally fell asleep and when he woke up, too. He hurried to the kitchen to make the whole family breakfast, to spare her that tiny burden. She shooed him out of her kitchen, but on his way out she hugged him and started chanting something in Latin that he didn’t understand.

Later that morning, when Fredo said it was time to go to the hospital, Michael refused.

“He’s going to be okay, right?” Michael said.

“Right,” Fredo said.

“Then I’ll see him when he gets home.”

His mother’s face fell.

“I got a test coming up,” he said. “As long as Pop’s okay, I should go to school.”

His mother patted Michael on the cheek and told him what a good boy he was, that his father would be proud.

The next morning, Michael again refused to go. Fredo told his mother to take Connie and wait in the car. Then he pulled Michael aside and asked what the fuck he was trying to prove.

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? C’mon.”

“He probably had it coming,” Michael said.

“He what? What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me. He’s a criminal. Criminals get shot. He’s lucky he never got shot before. You all are.”

Fredo’s punch caught him squarely in the cheek. Michael fell into his father’s favorite armchair and heard a dull crash. It was the big ceramic ashtray with a mermaid on a ridged island in the middle. It had broken into two clean pieces, right down the middle.

Still Michael refused to go to the hospital. Fredo gave up. When the glue dried, the crack in the middle of the ashtray was barely visible.

The day Vito was discharged, Carmela had been up since dawn, cooking a dinner to welcome him home. The whole family came: Sonny and his new wife, Sandra, Tom and his fiancée, Theresa, everyone. Vito looked more weary than weakened. He seemed to be doting on Michael in particular. No mention was made of Michael’s failure to go to the hospital.

As courses came and went and glasses were raised high again and again, anger rose in the breast of young Michael Corleone. He was less than a year from his sixteenth birthday and remained fearful that he would somehow be drawn into working for his father. Even in times of peace and prosperity in the world his father ran, Vito was never safe from the countless men who thought they’d benefit from killing him. Michael loved his family with the depth and breadth of his soul, yet at the same time he wanted to get out of there: this apartment, this neighborhood, this city, this life. Where he wanted to go, he had no real idea. Why he wanted to do it was beyond reckoning. Only as a very old man would he attain enough wisdom to realize the folly of trying to divine why any human being does anything.