Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Nick Geraci held out his left hand, palm down, in front of his chest and held his right underneath, pointing at the bottom of his palm. “Qui sotto non ci piove.” Under here you won’t be rained on. “Un giorno avrai bisogno di me.” One day you’ll need me.

An old expression. Tessio would say it when pledging his protection, and Michael must have heard his father say it, too.

“I appreciate that, Fausto,” Michael said.

“Don’t mention it.”

Michael smiled. A chill went through Nick Geraci.

“You thought I was going to kill you,” Michael said, “didn’t you?”

“I think everyone’s trying to kill me all the fucking time,” Geraci said. “Force of habit.”

“That’s probably why you’re still alive.”

How did he mean that? That it was probably why no one had ever killed him or why Michael wasn’t killing him now? Geraci wasn’t about to ask for a clarification.

“Anyway, Michael, what reason would I have to think you were going to kill me?” Geraci said. “Like you said, you’re retired. Good luck to you in your new life.”

Michael still had the lighter in his fist.

They kissed and embraced, and Geraci watched the limo pull away. When he walked inside the bar, his men had somehow known to gather, a good thirty or forty of them. Shaking, Nick Geraci went upstairs and slumped in a big leather chair in the corner. His men followed. He slipped his wedding ring onto the little finger of his right hand, and his men lined up to kiss it.

M R. FONTANE! Have you been promised a job in the Shea administration?”

The lobby of Constitution Hall was full of reporters. Johnny Fontane was sitting behind a table on a crowded dais, flanked by a dozen stars of stage and screen. There would be many more onstage tomorrow. They were making history. No one he’d asked to perform at the inaugural ball for Jimmy Shea had said no. If the Russians dropped the bomb on Washington, there’d be little left of show business but school plays, rock music, and stag films. “A job ?” Johnny said, in mock horror. “I became a saloon singer so I’d never have to have a job.”

This got a decent laugh. He wanted them to think the answer might be yes. The Ambassador had talked about setting Fontane up to run for office. Jimmy himself-at Fontane’s place in Vegas, on a break from going at it with Rita Duvall, who was also on the podium now-had suggested making Fontane the ambassador to Italy. Or how about some little tropical paradise with blue skies and limitless pussy? He and Johnny had both been pretty drunk at that point.

“What does it say about the Shea presidency,” a voice shouted, “that the inaugural ball is being produced by someone like yourself with reputed Mafia ties?”

Johnny couldn’t believe it. When was this shit going to stop?

The jerk-off who asked the question was with a paper in New York. Johnny had punched him out once. The out-of-court settlement had been ten grand and worth every cent.

Bobby Chadwick-the brother-in-law of the president-elect-leaned over his mike. “By someone like Johnny Fontane? Forgive me if you’re a correspondent from the planet Uranus and unfamiliar with our ways, but here on Earth, it’s safe to say there’s nobody like Johnny Fontane.”

He got a laugh, too, but the laughter subsided and the other reporters still looked at Johnny for an answer. If this had been a restaurant or a nightclub, Johnny could have merely arched an eyebrow and this jerk-off would have been out on his ass.

“ Reputed is a word lazy reporters use so they can make things up,” Johnny said. “Let me give you some facts. There are more than five million Americans of Italian descent. According to a report the U.S. Senate put out two years ago, there are at most four thousand people associated with the quote-unquote Mafia. I’ll do the math for you, buddy-boy. That’s thirteen-hundred-to-one odds. You’re more likely to get eaten by a bear. Yet every time somebody whose name ends with a vowel gets ahead, bigots like you ask if we’re in the Mob.”

“ Are you in the Mob?”

Well, he’d walked into that one. “I’m not even going to dignify a question that ignorant.”

“I could be wrong,” said Sir Oliver Smith-Christmas, the distinguished British actor, seated at the edge of the podium, “but aren’t you confusing the sort of gentlemen who oftentimes own American nightclubs with those like my friend Mr. Fontane, who simply perform in them? Where is a nightclub singer to perform if not in a nightclub?”

“Ollie makes a good point,” Johnny Fontane said. “Once the big-band era was over-”

“Isn’t it a fact that the late Vito Corleone was your godfather?” the reporter said.

Not that kind of godfather, you stupid fuck. “He stood for my baptism, yes. He was a friend of my parents.”

“Does President-elect Shea have ties to organized crime?” another reporter asked. “Michael Corleone, who was among those called to testify before the Senate two years ago, served as a member of the transition-”

“Why don’t you ask that to Michael Corleone, huh?” Johnny said. “Better yet, why don’t you ask all the sick kids Mr. Corleone’s hospital and charities have helped? Look, folks, this is an exciting time for our country. I think I can speak for everyone up here when I say that we’re behind President Shea one hundred percent. But let’s keep the questions a little more on the subject of the inaugural ball itself, all right?”

“You grew up in New York,” the jerk-off shouted, “but you’re friendly with Louie Russo in Chicago and Ignazio Pignatelli in Los Angeles.” The shithead pronounced it Pig-natelli, rather than Peenyatelli. “Pignatelli’s sister is listed as a shareholder in the new record label you started. My question is, is it possible to transfer your membership-”

“Don’t make me come down from here and show you some manners,” Johnny said.

“Are you going to have me whacked? That’s the Mafia word for it, right? Whacked?”

“Now, how the fuck would I know that?” Johnny said. Obviously, everyone knew that, but that wasn’t the point.

A murmur went through the room.

“How on earth, ” Johnny rephrased it, “would I know that?”

After Kay Corleone left her husband and left Nevada, she landed a teaching job at a first-rate boarding school in Maine. She and her children lived in a stone cottage on the grounds of the school. Michael didn’t like it, but she needed a job, not financially but as a means of creating an identity separate from all she’d been with him. She’d applied only to schools thousands of miles from Lake Tahoe. She hadn’t expected Michael to fight so hard for custody and had been even more surprised when out of the blue he told her he’d looked into the school where she was teaching and decided that the children’s education would be best served by going there. Kay had no idea what changed his mind. He claimed he simply realized he was using the kids as pawns in the divorce and putting his feelings ahead of what they really needed. She wanted to believe that. She’d curbed her impulse to tell him that if he’d paid more attention to his heart than his cold mind, he might not have found himself in this mess in the first place.

Michael didn’t see Tony and Mary often. When he did, he usually picked them up in his plane and flew them to New York for a weekend of frenzied activity: ice-skating, carriage rides, museums, movies, the zoo-everything he could cram in. They’d come home exhausted. For weeks afterward, Mary, who was seven now and worshiped her father, would tell endless stories about their time together. Tony, who was nine, rarely talked about him at all.