could
not take any steps to remedy them. He was not the Don and only the Don could
replace the caporegimes and the Consigliere. And the very act of replacement
would make the situation more dangerous, might precipitate some treachery. At
first, Sonny had thought of fighting a holding action until the Don could
become well enough to take charge, but with the defection of the policy bankers, the
terrorization of the bookmakers, the Family position was becoming precarious.
He decided to strike back.
But he decided to strike right at the heart of the enemy. He
planned the execution of the heads of the five Families in one grand tactical
maneuver. To that purpose he put into effect an elaborate system of
surveillance of these leaders. But after a week the enemy chiefs promptly,
dived underground and were seen no more in public.
The Five Families and the Corleone
Empire were in stalemate.
Chapter 18
Amerigo Bonasera lived only a few blocks from his
undertaking establishment on Mulberry Street and so always went home for supper.
Evenings he returned to his place of business, dutifully joining those mourners
paying their respects to the dead who lay in state in his somber parlors.
He always resented the jokes made about his profession, the
macabre technical details which were so unimportant. Of course none of his
friends or family or neighbors would make such jokes. Any profession was worthy
of respect to men who for centuries earned bread by the sweat of their brows.
Now at supper with his wife in their solidly furnished
apartment, gilt statues of the Virgin Mary with their red-glassed candles
flickering on the sideboard, Bonasera lit a Camel cigarette and took a relaxing
glass of American whiskey. His wife brought steaming plates of soup to the
table. The two of them were alone now; he had sent his daughter to live in
Boston with her mother’s sister, where she could forget her terrible experience
and her injuries at the hands of the two ruffians Don Corleone had punished.
As they ate their soup his wife asked,
“Are you going back to work tonight?”
Amerigo Bonasera nodded. His wife respected his work but did
not understand it. She did not understand that the technical part of his
profession was the least important. She thought, like most other people, that
he was paid for his skill in making the dead look so lifelike in their coffins.
And indeed his skill in this was legendary. But even more important, even more
necessary was his physical presence at the wake. When the
bereaved family came at night to receive their blood
relatives and their friends beside the coffin of their loved one, they needed
Amerigo Bonasera with them.
For he was a strict chaperone to death. His face always
grave, yet strong and comforting, his voice unwavering, yet muted to a low
register, he commanded the mourning ritual. He could quiet grief that was too
unseemly, he could rebuke unruly children whose parents had not the heart to
chastise. Never cloying in the tender of his condolences, yet never was he
offhand. Once a family used Amerigo Bonasera to speed a loved one on, they came
back to him again and again. And he never, never, deserted one of his clients
on that terrible last night above ground.
Usually he allowed himself a little nap after supper. Then
he washed and shaved afresh, talcum powder generously used to shroud the heavy
black beard. A mouthwash always. He respectfully changed into fresh linen,
white gleaming shirt, the black tie, a freshly pressed dark suit, dull black
shoes and black socks. And yet the effect was comforting instead of somber. He
also kept his hair dyed black, an unheard-of frivolity in an Italian male of
his generation; but not out of vanity. Simply because his hair had turned a
lively pepper and salt, a color which struck him as unseemly for his
profession.
After he finished his soup, his wife placed a small steak
before him with a few forkfuls of green spinach oozing yellow oil. He was a
light eater. When he finished this he drank a cup of coffee and smoked another
Camel cigarette. Over his coffee he thought about his poor daughter. She would
never be the same. Her outward beauty had been restored but there was the look
of a frightened animal in her eyes that had made him unable to bear the sight
of her. And so they had sent her to live in Boston for a time. Time would heal
her wounds. Pain and terror was not so final as death, as he well knew. His
work made him an optimist.
He had just finished the coffee when his phone in the living
room rang. His wife never answered it when he was home, so he got up and
drained his cup and stubbed out his cigarette. As he walked to the phone he
pulled off his tie and started to unbutton his shirt, getting ready for his
little nap. Then he picked up the phone and said with quiet courtesy, “Hello.”
The voice on the other end was harsh, strained. “This is Tom
Hagen,” it said. “I’m calling for Don Corleone, at his request.”
Amerigo Bonasera felt the coffee churning sourly in his
stomach, felt himself going a little sick. It was more than a year since he had
put himself in the debt of the Don to
avenge his daughter’s honor and in that time the knowledge
that he must pay that debt had receded. He had been so grateful seeing the
bloody faces of those two ruffians that he would have done anything for the
Don. But time erodes gratitude more quickly than it does beauty. Now Bonasera
felt the sickness of a man faced with disaster. His voice faltered as he
answered, “Yes, I understand. I’m listening.”
He was surprised at the coldness in Hagen’s voice. The
Consigliere had always been a courteous man, though not Italian, but now he was
being rudely brusque. “You owe the Don a service,” Hagen said. “He has no doubt
that you will repay him. That you will be happy to have this opportunity. In
one hour, not before, perhaps later, he will be at your funeral parlor to ask
for your help. Be there to greet him. Don’t have any people who work for you
there. Send them home. If you have any objections to this, speak now and I’ll
inform Don Corleone. He has other friends who can do him this service.”
Amerigo Bonasera almost cried out in his fright, “How can
you think I would refuse the Godfather? Of course I’ll do anything he wishes. I
haven’t forgotten my debt. I’ll go to my business immediately, at once.”
Hagen’s voice was gentler now, but there was something
strange about it. “Thank you,” he said “The Don never doubted you. The question
was mine. Oblige him tonight and you can always come to me in any trouble,
you’ll earn my personal friendship.”
This frightened Amerigo Bonasera even more. He stuttered,
“The Don himself is coming to me tonight?”
“Yes,” Hagen said.
“Then he’s completely recovered from his injuries, thank
God,” Bonasera said. His voice made it a question.
There was a pause at the other end of the phone, then
Hagen’s voice said very quietly, “Yes.” There was a click and the phone went
dead.
Bonasera was sweating. He went into the bedroom and changed
his shirt and rinsed his mouth. But he didn’t shave or use a fresh tie. He put
on the same one he had used during the day. He called the funeral parlor and
told his assistant to stay with the bereaved family using the front parlor that
night. He himself would be busy in the laboratory working area of the building.
When the assistant started asking question Bonesera cut him off very curtly and
told him to follow orders exactly.
He put on his suit jacket and his wife,
still eating, looked up at him in surprise. “I have
work to do,” he said and she did not
dare question him because of the look on his face.
Bonasera went out of the house and
walked the few blocks to his funeral parlor.
This building stood by itself on a large lot with a white
picket fence running all around it. There was a narrow roadway leading from the
street to the rear, just wide enough for ambulances and hearses. Bonasera
unlocked the gate and left it open. Then he walked to the rear of the building
and entered it through the wide door there. As he did so he could see mourners
already entering the front door of the funeral parlor to pay their respects to
the current corpse.
Many years ago when Bonasgra had bought this building from
an undertaker planning to retire, there had been a stoop of about ten steps
that mourners had to mount before entering the funeral parlor. This had posed a
problem. Old and crippled mourners determined to pay their respects had found
the steps almost impossible to mount, so the former undertaker had used the
freight elevator for these people, a small metal platform, that rose out of the
ground beside the building. The elevator was for coffins and bodies. It would
descend underground, then rise into the funeral parlor itself, so that a
crippled mourner would find himself rising through the floor beside the coffin
as other mourners moved their black chairs aside to let the elevator rise
throngh the trapdoor. Then when the crippled or aged mourner had finished
paying his respects, the elevator would again come up through the polished
floor to take him down and out again.
Amerigo Bonasera had found this solution to the problem
upseernly and penny-pinching. So he had had the front of the building
remodeled, the stoop done away with and a slightly inclining walk put in its
place. But of course the elevator was still used for coffins and corpses.
In the rear of the building, cut off from the funeral parlor
and reception rooms by a massive soundproof door, was the business office, the
embalming room, a storeroom for coffins, and a carefully locked closet holding
chemicals and the awful tools of his trade. Bonasera went to the office, sat at
his desk and lit up a Camel,,one of the few times he had ever smoked in this
building. Then he waited for Don Corleone.
He waited with a feeling of the utmost despair. For, he had
no doubt as to what services he would be called upon to perform. For the last
year the Corleone Family had waged war against the five great Mafia Families of
New York and the carnage had filled the newspapers. Many men on both sides had
been killed. Now the Corleone Family had killed somebody so important that they
wished to hide his body, make it disappear, and
what better way than to have it officially buried by a
registered undertaker? And Amerigo Bonasera had no illusions about the act he
was to commit. He would be an accessory to murder. If it came out, he would
spend years in jail. His daughter and wife would be disgraced, his good name,
the respected name of Amerigo Bonasera, dragged through the bloody, mud of the
Mafia war.
He indulged himself by smoking another Camel. And then he
thought of something even more terrifying. When the other Mafia Families found
out that he had aided the Corleones they would treat him as an enemy. They
would murder him. And now he cursed the day he had gone to the Godfather and
begged for his vengeance. He cursed the day his wife and the wife of Don
Corleone had become friends. He cursed his daughter and America and his own
success. And then his optimism returned. It could all go well. Don Corleone was
a clever man. Certainly everything had been arranged to keep the secret. He had
only to keep his nerve. For of course the one thing more fatal than any other
was to earn the Don’s displeasure.
He heard tires on gravel. His practiced ear told him a car
was coming through the narrow driveway and parking in the back yard. He opened
the rear door to let them in. The huge fat man, Clemenza, entered, followed by
two very rough-looking young fellows. They searched the rooms without saying a
word to Bonasera, then clemenza went out. The two young men remained with the
undertaker.
A few moments later Bonasera recognized the sound of a heavy
ambulance coming through the narrow driveway. Then Clemenza appeared in the
doorway followed by two men carrying a stretcher. And Amerigo Bonasera’s worst
fears were realized. On the stretcher was a corpse swaddled in a gray blanket
but with bare yellow feet sticking out the end.
Clemenza motioned the stretcher-bearers into the embalming
room. And then from the blackness of the yard another man stepped into the
lighted office room. It was Don Corleone.
The Don had lost weight during his illness and moved with a
curious stiffness. He was holding his hat in his hands and his hair seemed thin
over his massive skull. He looked older, more shrunken than when Bonasera had
seen him at the wedding, but he still radiated power. Holding his hat against
his chest, he said to Bonasera, “Well, old friend, are you ready to do me this
service?”
Bonasera nodded. The Don followed the
stretcher into the embalming room and
Bonasera trailed after him. The corpse was on one of the
guttered tables. Don Corleone made a tiny gesture with his hat and the other
men left the room.
Bonasera whispered, “What do you wish
me to do?”
Don Corleone was staring at the table. “I want you to use
all your powers, all your skill, as you love me,” he said. “I do not wish his
mother to see him as he is.” He went to the table and drew down the gray
blanket. Amerigo Bonasera against all his will, against all his years of
training and experience, let out a gasp of horror. On the embalming able was
the bullet-smashed face of Sonny Corleone. The left eye drowned in blood had a
star fracture in its lens. The bridge of his nose and left cheekbone were
hammered into Pulp.
For one fraction of a second the Don put out his hand to
support himself against Bonasera’s body. “See how they have massacred my son,”
he said.
Chapter 19
Perhaps it was the stalemate that made Sonny Corleone embark
on the bloody course of attrition that ended in his own death. Perhaps it was
his dark violent nature given full rein.
In any case, that spring and summer he mounts senseless
raids on enemy auxiliaries. Tattaglia Family pimps were shot to death in
Harlem, dock goons were massacred. Union officials who owed allegiance to the
Five Families were warned to stay neutral, and when the Corleone bookmakers and
shylocks were still barred from the docks, Sonny sent Clemenza and his regime
to wreak havoc upon the long shore.
This slaughter was senseless because it could not affect
affect the outcome of the war. Sonny was a brilliant tactician and wears his
brilliant victories. But what was needed was the strategical genius of Don
Corleone. The whole thing degenerated into such a deadly guerrilla war that
both sides found themselves losing a great deal of revenue and lives to no
purpose. The Corleone Family was finally forced to close down some of its most
profitable bookmaking stations, including the book given to son-in-law Carlo
Rizzi for his living. Carlo took to drink and running with chorus girls and
giving his wife Connie a hard time. Since his beating at the hands of Sonny he
had not dared to hit his wife again but he had not slept with her. Connie had
thrown herself at his feet and he had spurned her, as he thought, like a Roman,
with exquisite patrician pleasure. He had sneered at her, “Go call your brother
and tell him I won’t screw you, maybe he’ll beat me up until I get a hard on.”
But he was in deadly fear of Sonny though they treated each
other with cold politeness. Carlo had the sense to realize that Sonny would
kill him, that Sonny was a man who could, with the naturalness of an animal,
kill another man, while he himself would have to call up all his courage, all
his will, to commit murder. It never occurred to Carlo that because of this he
was a better man than Sonny Corleone, if such terms could be used; he envied
Sonny his awesome savagery, a savagery which was now becoming a legend.
Tom Hagen, as the Consigliere, disapproved of Sonny’s
tactics and yet decided not to protest to the Don simply because the tactics,
to some extent, worked. The Five Families seemed to be cowed, finally, as the
attrition went on, and their counterblows weakened and finally ceased
altogether. Hagen at first distrusted this seeming pacification of the enemy
but Sonny was jubilant. “I’ll pour it on,” he told Hagen, “and then those
bastards will come begging for a deal.”
Sonny was worried about other things. His wife was giving
him a hard time because the rumors had gotten to her that Lucy Mancini had
bewitched her husband. And though she joked publicly about her Sonny’s
equipment and technique, he had stayed away from her too long and she missed
him in her bed, and she was making life miserable for him with her nagging.
In addition to this Sonny was under the enormous strain of
being a marked man. He had to be extraordinarily careful in all his movements
and he knew that his visits to Lucy Mancini had been charted by the enemy. But
here he took elaborate precautions since this was the traditional vulnerable
spot. He was safe there. Though Lucy had not the slightest suspicion, she was
watched twenty-four hours a day by men of the Santino regime and when an
apartment became vacant on her floor it was immediately rented by one of the
most reliable men of that regime.
The Don was recovering and would soon be able to resume
command. At that time the tide of battle must swing to the Corleone Family.
This Sonny was sure of. Meanwhile he would guard his Family’s empire, earn the
respect of his father, and, since the position was not hereditary to an
absolute degree, cement his claim as heir to the Corleone Empire.
But the enemy was making its plans. They too had analyzed
the situation and had come to the conclusion that the only way to stave off
complete defeat was to kill Sonny Corleone. They understood the situation
better now and felt it was possible to negotiate
with the Don, known for his logical reasonableness. They had
come to hate Sonny for his bloodthirstiness, which they considered barbaric.
Also not good business sense. Nobody wanted the old days back again with all
its turmoil and trouble.
One evening Connie Corleone received an anonymous phone
call, a girl’s voice, asking for Carlo. “Who is this?” Connie asked.
The girl on the other end giggled and said, “I’m a friend of
Carlo’s. I just wanted to tell him I can’t see him tonight. I have to go out of
town.”
“You lousy bitch,” Connie Corleone said. She screamed it
again into the phone. “You lousy tramp bitch.” There was a click on the other
end.
Carlo had gone to the track for that afternoon and when he
came home in the late evening he was sore at losing and half drunk from the
bottle he always carried. As soon as he stepped into the door, Connie started
screaming curses at him. He ignored her and went in to take a shower. When he
came out he dried his naked body in front of her and started dolling up to go
out.
Connie stood with hands on hips, her face pointy and white
with rage. “You’re not going anyplace,” she said. “Your girl friend called and
said she can’t make it tonight. You lousy bastard, you have the nerve to give
your whores my phone number. I’ll kill you, you bastard.” She rushed at him,
kicking and scratching.
He held her off with one muscular forearm. “You’re crazy,”
he said coldly. But she could see he was worried, as if he knew the crazy girl
he was screwing would actually pull such a stunt. “She was kidding around, some
nut,” Carlo said.
Connie ducked around his arm and clawed at his face. She got
a little bit of his cheek under her fingernails. With surprising patience he
pushed her away. She noticed he was careful because of her pregnancy and that
gave her the courage to feed her rage. She was also excited. Pretty soon she
wouldn’t be able to do anything, the doctor had said no sex for the last two
months and she wanted it, before the last two months started. Yet her wish to
inflict a physical injury on Carlo was very real too. She followed him into the
bedroom.
She could see he was scared and that filled her with
contemptuous delight. “You’re staying home,” she said, “you’re not going out.”
“OK, OK,” he said. He was still undressed, only wearing his
shorts. He liked to go around the house like that, he was proud of his V-shaped
body, the golden skin. Connie
looked at him hungrily. He tried to laugh. “You gonna give
me something to eat at least?”
That mollified her, his calling on her duties, one of them
at least. She was a good cook, she had learned that from her mother. She
sauteed veal and peppers, preparing a mixed salad while the pan simmered.
Meanwhile Carlo stretched out on his bed to read the next day’s racing form. He
had a water glass full of whiskey beside him which he kept sipping at.
Connie came into the bedroom. She stood in the doorway as if
she could not come close to the bed without being invited. “The food is on the
table,” she said.
“I’m not hungry yet,” he said, still
reading the racing form.
“It’s on the table,” Connie said
stubbornly.
“Stick it up your ass,” Carlo said. He drank off the rest of
the whiskey in the water glass, tilted the bottle to fill it again. He paid no
more attention to her.
Connie went into the kitchen, picked up the plates filled
with food and smashed them against the sink. The loud crashes brought Carlo in
from the bedroom. He looked at the greasy veal and peppers splattered all over
the kitchen walls and his finicky neatness was outraged. “You filthy guinea
spoiled brat,” he said venomously. “Clean that up right now or I’ll kick the
shit out of you.”
“Like hell I will,” Connie said. She held her hands like
claws ready to scratch his bare chest to ribbons.
Carlo went back into the bedroom and when he came out he was
holding his belt doubled in his hand. “Clean it up,” he said and there was no
mistaking the menace in his voice. She stood there not moving and he swung the
belt against her heavily padded hips, the leather stinging but not really
hurting. Connie retreated to the kitchen cabinets and her hand went into one of
the drawers to haul out the long bread knife. She held it ready.
Carlo laughed. “Even the female Corleones are murderers,” he
said. He put the belt down on the kitchen table and advanced toward her. She
tried a sudden lunge but her pregnant heavy body made her slow and he eluded
the thrust she aimed at his groin in such deadly earnest. He disarmed her
easily and then he started to slap her face with a slow medium-heavy stroke so
as not to break the skin. He hit her again and again as she retreated around
the kitchen table trying to escape him and he pursued her into the
bedroom. She tried to bite his hand and he grabbed her by
the hair to lift her head up. He slapped her face until she began to weep like
a little girl, with pain and humiliation. Then he threw her contemptuously onto
the bed. He drank from the bottle of whiskey still on the night table. He
seemed very drunk now, his light blue eyes had a crazy glint in them and
finally Connie was truly afraid.
Carlo straddled his legs apart and drank from the bottle. He
reached down and grabbed a chunk of her pregnant heavy thigh in his hand. He
squeezed very hard, hurting her and making her beg for mercy. “You’re fat as a
pig,” he said with disgust and walked out of the bedroom.
Thoroughly frightened and cowed, she lay in the bed, not
daring to see what her husband was doing in the other room. Finally she rose
and went to the door to peer into the living room. Carlo had opened a fresh
bottle of whiskey and was sprawled on the sofa. In a little while he would
drink himself into sodden sleep and she could sneak into the kitchen and call
her family in Long Beach. She would tell her mother to send someone out here to
get her. She just hoped Sonny didn’t answer the phone, she knew it would be
best to talk to Tom Hagen or her mother.
It was nearly ten o’clock at night when the kitchen phone in
Don Corleone’s house rang. It was answered by one of the Don’s bodyguards who
dutifully turned the phone over to Connie’s mother. But Mrs. Corleone could
hardly understand what her daughter was saying, the girl was hysterical yet
trying to whisper so that her husband in the next room would not hear her. Also
her face had become swollen because of the slaps, and her puffy lips thickened
her speech. Mrs. Corleone made a sign to the bodyguard that he should call
Sonny, who was in the living room with Tom Hagen.
Sonny came into the kitchen and took the phone from his
mother. “Yeah, Connie,” he said.
Connie was so frightened both of her husband and of what her
brother would do that her speech became worse. She babbled, “Sonny, just send a
car to bring me home, I’ll tell you then, it’s nothing, Sonny. Don’t you come.
Send Tom, please, Sonny. It’s nothing, I just want to come home.”
By this time Hagen had come into the room. The Don was
already under a sedated sleep in the bedroom above and Hagen wanted to keep an
eye on Sonny in all crises. The two interior bodyguards were also in the
kitchen. Everybody was watching Sonny as he listened on the phone.
There was no question that the violence in Sonny Corleone’s
nature rose from some deep mysterious physical well. As they watched they could
actually see the blood rushing to his heavily corded neck, could see the eyes
film with hatred, the separate features of his face tightening, growing
pinched, then his face took on the grayish hue of a sick man fighting off some
sort of death, except that the adrenaline pumping through his body made his
hands tremble. But his voice was controlled, pitched low, as he told his
sister, “You wait there. You just wait there.” He hung up the phone.
He stood there for a moment quite stunned with his own rage,
then he said, “The fucking sonofabitch, the fucking sonofabitch.” He ran out of
the house.
Hagen knew the look on Sonny’s face, all reasoning power had
left him. At this moment Sonny was capable of anything. Hagen also knew that
the ride into the city would cool Sonny off, make him more rational. But that
rationality might make him even more dangerous, though the rationality would
enable him to protect himself against the consequences of his rage. Hagen heard
the car motor roaring into life and he said to the two bodyguards, “Go after
him.”
Then he went to the phone and made some calls. He arranged
for some men of Sonny’s regime living in the city to go up to Carlo Rizzi’s
apartment and get Carlo out of there. Other men would stay with Connie until
Sonny arrived. He was taking a chance, thwarting Sonny, but he knew the Don
would back him up. He was afraid that Sonny might kill Carlo in front of
witnesses. He did not expect trouble from the enemy. The Five Families had been
quiet too long and obviously were looking for peace of some kind.
By the time Sonny roared out of the mall in his Buick, he
had already regained, partly, his senses. He noted the two bodyguards getting
into a car to follow him and approved. He expected no danger, the Five Families
had quit counterattacking, were not really fighting anymore. He had grabbed his
jacket in the foyer and there was a gun in a secret dashboard compartment of
the car, the car registered in the name of a member of his regime, so that he
personally could not get into any legal trouble. But he did not anticipate
needing any weapon. He did not even know what he was going to do with Carlo
Rizzi.
Now that he had a chance to think, Sonny knew he could not kill
the father of an unborn child, and that father his sister’s husband. Not over a
domestic spat. Except that it was not just a domestic spat. Carlo was a bad guy
and Sonny felt responsible that his sister had met the bastard through him.
The paradox in Sonny’s violent nature was that he could not
hit a woman and had never done so. That he could not harm a child or anything
helpless. When Carlo had refused to fight back against him that day, it had
kept Sonny from killing him; complete submission disarmed his violence. As a
boy, he had been truly tenderhearted. That he had become a murderer as a man
was simply his destiny.
But he would settle this thing once and for all, Sonny
thought, as he headed the Buick toward the causeway that would take him over
the water from Long Beach to the parkways on the other side of Jones Beach. He
always used this route when he went to New York. There was less traffic.
He decided he would send Connie home with the bodyguards and
then he would have a session with his brotherin-law. What would happen after
that he didn’t know. If the bastard had really hurt Connie, he’d make a cripple
out of the bastard. But the wind coming over the causeway, the salty freshness
of the air, cooled his anger. He put the window down all the way.
He had taken the Jones Beach Causeway, as always, because it
was usually deserted this time of night, at this time of year, and he could
speed recklessly until he hit the parkways on the other side. And even there
traffic would be light. The release of driving very fast would help dissipate
what he knew was a dangerous tension. He had already left his bodyguards car
far behind.
The causeway was badly lit, there was not a single car. Far
ahead he saw the white cone of the manned tollbooth.
There were other tollbooths beside it but they were staffed
only during the day, for heavier traffic. Sonny started braking the Buick and
at the same time searched his pockets for change. He had none. He reached for
his wallet, flipped it open with one hand and fingered out a bill. He came
within the arcade of light and he saw to his mild surprise a car in the
tollbooth slot blocking it, the driver obviously asking some sort of directions
from the toll taker. Sonny honked his horn and the other car obediently rolled
through to let his car slide into the slot.
Sonny handed the toll taker the dollar bill and waited for
his change. He was in a hurry now to close the window. The Atlantic Ocean air
had chilled the whole car. But the toll taker was fumbling with his change; the
dumb son of a bitch actually dropped it. Head and body disappeared as the toll
man stooped down in his booth to pick up the money.
At that moment Sonny noticed that the
other car had not kept going but had parked a
few feet ahead, still blocking his way. At that same moment
his lateral vision caught sight of another man in the darkened tollbooth to his
right. But he did not have time to think about that because two men came out of
the car parked in front and walked toward him. The toll collector still had not
appeared. And then in the fraction of a second before anything actually
happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man. And in that moment his mind
was lucid, drained of all violence, as if the hidden fear finally real and
present had purified him.
Even so, his huge body in a reflex for life crashed against
the Buick door, bursting its lock. The man in the darkened tollbooth opened
fire and the shots caught Sonny Corleone in the head and neck as his massive
frame spilled out of the car. The two men in front held up their guns now, the
man in the darkened tollbooth cut his fire, and Sonny’s body sprawled on the
asphalt with the legs still partly inside. The two men each fired shots into
Sonny’s body, then kicked him in the face to disfigure his features even more,
to show a mark made by a more personal human power.
Seconds afterward, all four men, the three actual assassins
and the bogus toll collector, were in their car and speeding toward the
Meadowbrook Parkway on the other side of Jones Beach. Their pursuit was blocked
by Sonny’s car and body in the tollgate slot but when Sonny’s bodyguards pulled
up a few minutes later and saw his body lying there, they had no intention to
pursue. They swung their car around in a huge arc and returned to Long Beach.
At the first public phone off the causeway one of them hopped out and called
Tom Hagen. He was very curt and very brisk. “Sonny’s dead, they got him at the
Jones Beach toll.”
Hagen’s voice was perfectly calm. “OK,” he said. “Go to
Clemenza’s house and tell him to come here right away. He’ll tell you what to
do.”
Hagen had taken the call in the kitchen, with Mama Corleone
bustling around preparing a snack for the arrival of her daughter. He had kept
his composure and the old woman had not noticed anything amiss. Not that she
could not have, if she wanted to, but in her life with the Don she had learned
it was far wiser not to perceive. That if it was necessary to know something painful,
it would be told to her soon enough. And if it was a pain that could be spared
her, she could do without. She was quite content not to share the pain of her
men, after all did they share the pain of women? Impassively she boiled her
coffee and set the table with food. In her experience pain and fear did not
dull physical hunger; in her experience the taking of food dulled pain. She
would have been outraged if a doctor had tried to sedate her with a drug, but
coffee and a crust of bread
were another matter; she came, of
course, from a more primitive culture.
And so she let Tom Hagen escape to his corner conference
room and once in that room, Hagen began to tremble so violently he had to sit
down with his legs squeezed together, his head hunched into his contracted
shoulders, hands clasped together between his knees as if he were praying to
the devil.
He was, he knew now, no fit Consigliere for a Family at war.
He had been fooled, faked out, by the Five Families and their seeming timidity.
They had remained quiet, laying their terrible ambush. They had planned and
waited, holding their bloody hands no matter what provocation they had been
given. They had waited to land one terrible blow. And they had. Old Genco Abbandando
would never have fallen for it, he would have smelled a rat, he would have
smoked them out, tripled his precautions. And through all this Hagen felt his
grief. Sonny had been his true brother, his savior; his hero when they had been
boys together. Sonny had never been mean or bullying with him, had always
treated him with affection, had taken him in his arms when Sollozzo had turned
him loose. Sonny’s joy at that reunion had been real. That he had grown up to
be a cruel and violent and bloody man was, for Hagen, not relevant.
He had walked out of the kitchen because he knew he could
never tell Mama Corleone about her son’s death. He had never thought of her as
his mother as he thought of the Don as his father and Sonny as his brother. His
affection for her was like his affection for Freddie and Michael and Connie.
The affection for someone who has been kind but not loving. But he could not
tell her. In a few short months she had lost all her sons; Freddie exiled to
Nevada, Michael hiding for his life in Sicily, and now Santino dead. Which of
the three had she loved most of all? She had never shown.
It was no more than a few minutes. Hagen got control of
himself again and picked up the phone. He called Connie’s number. It rang for a
long time before Connie answered in a whisper.
Hagen spoke to her gentiy. “Connie, this is Tom. Wake your
husband up, I have to talk to him.”
Connie said in a low frightened voice,
“Tom, is Sonny coming here?”
“No,” Hagen said. “Sonny’s not coming there. Don’t worry
about that. Just wake Carlo up and tell him it’s very important I speak to
him.”
Connie’s voice was weepy. “Tom, he beat me up, I’m afraid
he’ll hurt me again if he knows I called home.”
Hagen said gently, “He won’t. He’ll talk to me and I’ll
straighten him out. Everything will be OK. Tell him it’s very important, very,
very important he come to the phone. OK?”
It was almost five minutes before Carlo’s voice came over
the phone, a voice half slurred by whiskey and sleep. Hagen spoke sharply to
make him alert.
“Listen, Carlo,” he said, “I’m going to tell you something
very shocking. Now prepare yourself because when I tell it to you I want you to
answer me very casually as if it’s less than it is. I told Connie it was important
so you have to give her a story. Tell her the Family has decided to move you
both to one of the houses in the mall and to give you a big job. That the Don
has finally decided to give you a chance in the hope of making your home life
better. You got that?”
There was a hopeful note in Carlo’s
voice as he answered, “Yeah, OK.”
Hagen went on, “In a few minutes a couple of my men are
going to knock on your door to take you away with them. Tell them I want them
to call me first. Just tell them that. Don’t say anything else. I’ll instruct
them to leave you there with Connie. OK?”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” Carlo said. His voice was excited.
The tension in Hagen’s voice seemed to have finally alerted him that the news
coming up was going to be really important.
Hagen gave it to him straight. “They killed Sonny tonight.
Don’t say anything. Connie called him while you were asleep and he was on his
way over there, but I don’t want her to know that, even if she guesses it, I
don’t want her to know it for sure. She’ll start thinking it’s all her fault.
Now I want you to stay with her tonight and not tell her anything. I want you
to make up with her. I want you to be the perfect loving husband. And I want
you to stay that way until she has her baby at least. Tomorrow morning
somebody, maybe you, maybe the Don, maybe her mother, will tell Connie that her
brother got killed. And I want you by her side. Do me this favor and I’ll take
care of you in the times to come. You got that?”
Carlo’s voice was a little shaky. “Sure, Tom, sure. Listen,
me and you always got along. I’m grateful. Understand?”
“Yeah,” Hagen said. “Nobody will blame your fight with
Connie for causing this, don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of that.” He
paused and softly, encouragingly, “Go ahead now, take care of Connie.” He broke
the connection.
He had learned never to make a threat,
the Don had taught him that, but Carlo had
gotten the message all right: he was a
hair away from death.
Hagen made another call to Tessio, telling him to come to
the mall in Long Beach immediately. He didn’t say why and Tessio did not ask.
Hagen sighed. Now would come the part he dreaded.
He would have to waken the Don from his drugged slumber. He
would have to tell the man he most loved in the world that he had failed him,
that he had failed to guard his domain and the life of his eldest son. He would
have to tell the Don everything was lost unless the sick man himself could
enter the battle. For Hagen did not delude himself. Only the great Don himself
could snatch even a stalemate from this terrible defeat. Hagen didn’t even
bother checking with Don Corleone’s doctors, it would be to no purpose. No
matter what the doctors ordered, even if they told him that the Don could not
rise from his sickbed on pain of death, he must tell his adoptive father and
then follow him. And of course there was no question about what the Don would
do. The opinions of medical men were irrelevant now, everything was irrelevant
now. The Don must be told and he must either take command or order Hagen to
surrender the Corleone power to the Five Families.
And yet with all his heart, Hagen dreaded the next hour. He
tried to prepare his own manner. He would have to be in all ways strict with
his own guilt. To reproach himself would only add to the Don’s burden. To show
his own grief would only sharpen the grief of the Don. To point out his own
shortcomings as a wartime Consigliere, would only make the Don reproach himself
for his own bad judgment for picking such a man for such an important post.
He must, Hagen knew, tell the news, present his analysis of
what must be done to rectify the situation and then keep silent. His reactions
thereafter must be the reactions invited by his Don. If the Don wanted him to
show guilt, he would show guilt; if the Don invited grief, he would lay bare
his genuine sorrow.
Hagen lifted his head at the sound of motors, cars rolling
up onto the mall. The caporegimes were arriving. He would brief them first and
then he would go up and wake Don Corleone. He got up and went to the liquor
cabinet by the desk and took out a glass and bottle. He stood there for a
moment so unnerved he could not pour the liquid from bottle to glass. Behind
him, he heard the door to the room close softly and, turning, he saw, fully
dressed for the first time since he had been shot, Don Corleone.
The Don walked across the room to his
huge leather armchair and sat down. He walked
a little stiffly, his clothes hung a little loosely on his
frame but to Hagen’s eyes he looked the same as always. It was almost as if by
his will alone the Don had discarded all external evidence of his still
weakened frame. His fact was sternly set with all its old force and strength.
He sat straight in the armchair and he said to Hagen, “Give me a drop of
anisette.”
Hagen switched bottles and poured them both a portion of the
fiery, licorice-tasting alcohol. It was peasant, homemade stuff, much stronger
than that sold in stores, the gift of an old friend who every year presented
the Don with a small truckload.
“My wife was weeping before she fell asleep,” Don Corleone
said. “Outside my window I saw my caporegimes coming to the house and it is
midnight. So, Consigliere of mine, I think you should tell your Don what
everyone knows.”
Hagen said quietly, “I didn’t tell Mama anything. I was
about to come up and wake you and tell you the news myself. In another moment I
would have come to waken you.”
Don
Corleone said impassively, “But you needed a drink first.” “Yes,” Hagen said.
“You’ve had your drink,” the Don said. “You can tell me
now.” There was just the faintest hint of reproach for Hagen’s weakness.
“They shot Sonny on the causeway,”
Hagen said. “He’s dead.”
Don Corleone blinked. For just the fraction of a second the
wall of his will disintegrated and the draining of his physical strength was
plain on his face. Then he recovered.
He clasped his hands in front of him on top of the desk and
looked directly into Hagen’s eyes. “Tell me everything that happened,” he said.
He held up one of his hands. “No, wait until Clemenza and Tessio arrive so you
won’t have to tell it all again.”
It was only a few moments later that the two caporegimes
were escorted into the room by a bodyguard. They saw at once that the Don knew
about his son’s death because the Don stood up to receive them. They embraced
him as old comrades were permitted to do. They all had a drink of anisette
which Hagen poured them before he told them the story of that night.
Don Corleone asked only one question at
the end. “Is it certain my son is dead?”
Clemenza answered. “Yes,” he said. “The bodyguards were of
Santino’s regime but picked by me. I questioned them when they came to my
house. They saw his body in
the light of the tollhouse. He could not live with the
wounds they saw. They place their lives in forfeit for what they say.”
Don Corleone accepted this final verdict without any sign of
emotion except for a few moments of silence. Then he said, “None of you are to
concern yourselves with this affair. None of you are to commit any acts of
vengeance, none of you are to make any inquiries to track down the murderers of
my son without my express command. There will be no further acts of war against
the Five Families without my express and personal wish. Our Family will cease
all business operations and cease to protect any of our business operations
until after my son’s funeral. Then we will meet here again and decide what must
be done. Tonight we must do what we can for Santino, we must bury him as a
Christian. I will have friends of mine arrange things with the police and all
other proper authorities. Clemenza, you will remain with me at all times as my
bodyguard, you and the men of your regime. Tessio, you will guard all other
members of my Family. Tom, I want you to call Amerigo Bonasera and tell him I
will need his services at some time during this night. To wait for me at his
establishment. It may be an hour, two hours, three hours. Do you all understand
that?”
The three men nodded. Don Corleone said, “Clemenza, get some
men and cars and wait for me. I will be ready in a few minutes. Tom, you did
well. In the morning I want Constanzia with her mother. Make arrangements for
her and her husband to live in the mall. Have Sandra’s friends, the women, go
to her house to stay with her. My wife will go there also when I have spoken
with her. My wife will tell her the misfortune and the women will arrange for
the church to say their masses and prayers for his soul.”
The Don got up from his leather armchair. The other men rose
with him and Clemenza and Tessio embraced him again. Hagen held the door open
for the Don, who paused to look at him for a moment. Then the Don put his hand
on Hagen’s cheek, embraced him quickly, and said, in Italian, “You’ve been a
good son. You comfort me.” Telling Hagen that he had acted properly in this
terrible time. The Don went up to his bedroom to speak to his wife. It was then
that Hagen made the call to Amerigo Bonasera for the undertaker to redeem the
favor he owed to the Corleones.
Book Five
Chapter 20
The death of Santino Corleone sent shock waves through the
underworld of the nation. And when it became known that Don Corleone had risen
from his sick bed to take charge of the Family affairs, when spies at the
funeral reported that the Don seemed to be fully recovered, the heads of the
Five Families made frantic efforts to prepare a defense against the bloody
retaliatory war that was sure to follow. Nobody made the mistake of assuming
that Don Corleone could be held cheaply because of his past misfortunes. He was
a man who had made only a few mistakes in his career and had learned from every
one of them.
Only Hagen guessed the Don’s real intentions and was not
surprised when emissaries were sent to the Five Families to propose a peace.
Not only to propose a peace but a meeting of all the Families in the city and
with invitations to Families all over the United States to attend. Since the
New York Families were the most powerful in the country, it was understood that
their welfare affected the welfare of the country as a whole.
At first there were suspicions. Was Don Corleone preparing a
trap? Was he trying to throw his enemies off their guard? Was he attempting to
prepare a wholesale massacre to avenge his son? But Don Corleone soon made it
clear that he was sincere. Not only did he involve all the Families in the
country in this meeting, but made no move to put his own people on a war
footing or to enlist allies. And then he took the final irrevocable step that
established the authenticity of these intentions and assured the safety of the
grand council to be assembled. He called on the services of the Bocchicchio
Family.
The Bocchicchio Family was unique in that, once a
particularly ferocious branch of the Mafia in Sicily, it had become an
instrument of peace in America. Once a group of men who earned their living by
a savage determination, they now earned their living in what perhaps could be
called a saintly fashion. The Bocchicchios’ one asset was a closely knit
structure of blood relationships, a family loyalty severe even for a society
where family loyalty came before loyalty to a wife.
The Bocchicchio Family, extending out to third cousins, had
once numbered nearly two hundred when they ruled the particular economy of a
small section of southern Sicily. The income for the entire family then came
from four or five flour mills, by no means owned communally, but assuring labor
and bread and a minimal security for all Family members. This was enough, with
intermarriages, for them to present a common front against their enemies.
No competing mill, no dam that would create a water supply
to their competitors or ruin their own selling of water, was allowed to be
built in their corner of Sicily. A powerful landowning baron once tried to
erect his own mill strictly for his personal use. The mill was burned down. He
called on the carabineri and higher authorities, who arrested three of the
Bocchicchio Family. Even before the trial the manor house of the baron was
torched. The indictment and accusations were withdrawn. A few months later one
of the highest functionaries in the Italian government arrived in Sicily and
tried to solve the chronic water shortage of that island by proposing a huge
dam. Engineers arrived from Rome to do surveys while watched by grim natives,
members of the Bocchicchio clan. Police flooded the area, housed in a specially
built barracks.
It looked like nothing could stop the dam from being built
and supplies and equipment had actually been unloaded in Palermo. That was as
far as they got. The Bocchicchios had contacted fellow Mafia chiefs and
extracted agreements for their aid. The heavy equipment was sabotaged, the
lighter equipment stolen. Mafia deputies in the Italian Parliament launched a
bureaucratic counterattack against the planners. This went on for several years
and in that time Mussolini came to power. The dictator decreed that the dam
must be built. It was not. The dictator had known that the Mafia would be a
threat to his regime, forming what amounted to a separate authority from his
own. He gave full powers to a high police official, who promptly solved the
problem by throwing everybody into jail or deporting them to penal work
islands. In a few short years he had broken the power of the Mafia, simply by
arbitrarily arresting anyone even suspected of being a mafioso. And so also
brought ruin to a great many innocent families.
The Bocchicchios had been rash enough to resort to force
against this unlimited power. Half of the men were killed in armed combat, the
other half deported to penal island colonies. There were only a handful left
when arrangements were made for them to emigrate to America via the clandestine
underground route of jumping ship through Canada. There were almost twenty
immigrants and they settled in a small town not far from New York City, in the
Hudson Valley, where by starting at the very bottom they worked their way up to
owning a garbage hauling firm and their own trucks. They became prosperous
because they had no competition. They had no competition because competitors
found their trucks burned and sabotaged. One persistent fellow who undercut
prices was found buried in the garbage he had picked up during the day,
smothered to death.
But as the men married, to Sicilian
girls, needless to say, children came, and the
garbage business though providing a living, was not really
enough to pay for the finer things America had to offer. And so, as a
diversification, the Bocchicchio Family became negotiators and hostages in the
peace efforts of warring Mafia families.
A strain of stupidity ran through the Bocchicchio clan, or
perhaps they were just primitive. In any case they recognized their limitations
and knew they could not compete with other Mafia families in the struggle to
organize and control more sophisticated business structures like prostitution,
gambling, dope and public fraud. They were straight-from-the-shoulder people
who could offer a gift to an ordinary patrolman but did not know how to
approach a political bagman. They had only two assets. Their honor and their
ferocity.
A Bocchicchio never lied, never committed an act of
treachery. Such behavior was too complicated. Also, a Bocchicchio never forgot
an injury and never left it unavenged no matter what the cost. And so by
accident they stumbled into what would prove to be their most lucrative
profession.
When warring families wanted to make peace and arrange a
parley, the Bocchicchio clan was contacted. The head of the clan would handle
the initial negotiations and arrange for the necessary hostages. For instance,
when Michael had gone to meet Sollozzo, a Bocchicchio had been left with the
Corleone Family as surety for Michael’s safety, the service paid for by
Sollozzo. If Michael were killed by Sollozzo, then the Bocchicchio male hostage
held by the Corleone Family would be killed by the Corleones. In this case the
Bocchicchios would take their vengeance on Sollozzo as the source of their
clansman’s death. Since the Bocchicchios were so primitive, they never let
anything, any kind of punishment, stand in their way of vengeance. They would
give up their own lives and there was no protection against them if they were
betrayed. A Bocchicchio hostage was gilt-edged insurance.
And so now when Don Corleone employed the Bocchicchios as
negotiators and arranged for them to supply hostages for all the Families to
come to the peace meeting, there could be no question as to his sincerity.
There could be no question of treachery. The meeting would be safe as wedding.
Hostages given, the meeting took place in the director’s
conference room of a small commercial bank whose president was indebted to Don
Corleone and indeed some of whose stock belonged to Don Corleone though it was
in the president’s name. The president always treasured that moment when he had
offered to give Don Corleone a
written document proving his ownership of the shares, to
preclude any treachery. Don Corleone had been horrified. “I would trust you
with my whole fortune,” he told the president. “I would trust you with my life
and the welfare of my children. It is inconceivable to me that you would ever
trick me or otherwise betray me. My whole world, all my faith in my judgment of
human character would collapse. Of course I have my own written records so that
if something should happen to me my heirs would know that you hold something in
trust for them. But I know that even if I were not here in this world to guard
the interests of my children, you would be faithful to their needs.”
The president of the bank, though not Sicilian, was a man of
tender sensibilities. He understood the Don perfectly. Now the Godfather’s
request was the president’s command and so on a Saturday afternoon, the
executive suite of the bank, the inference room with its deep leather chairs,
its absolute privacy, was made available to the Families.
Security at the bank was taken over by a small army of
handpicked men wearing bank guard uniforms. At ten o’clock on a Saturday
morning the conference room began to fill up. Besides the Five Families of New
York, there were representatives from ten other Families across the country,
with the exception of Chicago, that black sheep of their world. They had given
up trying to civilize Chicago, and they saw no point in including those mad
dogs in this important conference.
A bar had been set up and a small buffet. Each
representative to the conference had been allowed one aide. Most of the Dons
had brought their Consiglieres as aides so there were comparatively few young
men in the room. Tom Hagen was one of those young men and the only one who was
not Sicilian. He was an object of curiosity, a freak.
Hagen knew his manners. He did not speak, he did not smile.
He waited on his boss, Don Corleone, with all the respect of a favorite earl
waiting on his king; bringing him a cold drink, lighting his cigar, positioning
his ashtray; with respect but no obsequiousness.
Hagen was the only one in that room who knew the identity of
the portraits hanging on the dark paneled walls. They were mostly portraits of
fabulous financial figures done in rich oils. One was of Secretary of the
Treasury Hamilton. Hagen could not help thinking that Hamilton might have
approved of this peace meeting being held in a banking institution. Nothing was
more calming, more conducive to pure reason, than the atmosphere of money.
The arrival time had been staggered for between nine-thirty
to ten A.M. Don Corleone, in a sense the host since he had initiated the peace
talks, had been the first to arrive; one of his many virtues was punctuality.
The next to arrive was Carlo Tramonti, who had made the southern part of the
United States his territory. He was an impressively handsome middle-aged man,
tall for a Sicilian, with a very deep sunburn, exquisitely tailored and
barbered. He did not look Italian, he looked more like one of those pictures in
the magazines of millionaire fishermen lolling on their yachts. The Tramonti
Family earned its livelihood from gambling, and no one meeting their Don would
ever guess with what ferocity he had won his empire.
Emigrating from Sicily as a small boy, he had settled in
Florida and grown to manhood there, employed by the American syndicate of
Southern small-town politicians who controlled gambling. These were very tough
men backed up by very tough police officials and they never suspected that they
could be overthrown by such a greenhorn immigrant. They were unprepared for his
ferocity and could not match it simply because the rewards being fought over
were not, to their minds, worth so much bloodshed. Tramonti won over the police
with bigger shares of the gross; he exterminated those redneck hooligans who
ran their operation with such a complete lack of imagination. It was Tramonti
who opened ties with Cuba and the Batista regime and eventually poured money
into the pleasure resorts of Havana gambling houses, whorehouses, to lure
gamblers from the American mainland. Tramonti was now a millionaire many times
over and owned one of the most luxurious hotels in Miami Beach.
When he came into the conference room followed by his aide, an
equally sunburned Consigliere, Tramonti embraced Don Corleone, made a face of
sympathy to show he sorrowed for the dead son.
Other Dons were arriving. They all knew each other, they had
met over the years, either socially or when in the pursuit of their businesses.
They had always showed each other professional courtesies and in their younger,
leaner days had done each other little services. The second Don to arrive was
Joseph Zaluchi from Detroit. The Zaluchi Family, under appropriate disguises
and covers, owned one of the horse-racing tracks in the Detroit area. They also
owned a good part of the gambling. Zaluchi was a moon-faced, amiable-looking
man who lived in a one-hundred-thousand-dollar house in the fashionable Grosse
Pointe section of Detroit. One of his sons had married into an old, well-known
American family. Zaluchi, like Don Corleone, was sophisticated. Detroit had the
lowest incidence of physical violence of any of the cities controlled by the
Families; there had been only two execution in the last
three years in that city. He disapproved of traffic in drugs.
Zaluchi had brought his Consigliere with him and both men
came to Don Corleone to embrace him. Zaluchi had a booming American voice with
only the slightest trace of an scent. He was conservatively dressed, very
businessman, and with a hearty goodwill to match. He said to Don Corleone,
“Only your voice could have brought me here.” Don Corleone bowed his head in
thanks. He could count on Zaluchi for support.
The next two Dons to arrive were from the West Coast,
motoring from there in the same car since they worked together closely in any
case. They were Frank Falcone and Anthony Molinari and both were younger than
any of the other men who would come to the meeting; in their early forties.
They were dressed a little more informally than the others, there was a touch
of Hollywood in their style and they were a little more friendly than
necessary. Frank Falcone controlled the movie unions and the gambling at the
studios plus a complex of pipeline prostitution that supplied girls to the
whorehouses of the states in the Far West. It was not in the realm of
possibility for any Don to become “show biz” but Falcone had just a touch. His
fellow Dons distrusted him accordingly.
Anthony Molinari controlled the waterfronts of San Francisco
and was preeminent in the empire of sports gambling. He came of Italian
fishermen stock and owned the best San Francisco sea food restaurant, in which
he took such pride that the legend had it he lost money on the enterprise by
giving too good value for the prices charged. He had the impassive face of the
professional gambler and it was known that he also had something to do with
dope smuggling over the Mexican border and from the ships plying the lanes of
the oriental oceans. Their aides were young, powerfully built men, obviously
not counselors but bodyguards, though they would not dare to carry arms to this
meeting. It was general knowledge that these bodyguards knew karate, a fact
that amused the other Dons but did not alarm them in the slightest, no more
than if the California Dons had come wearing amulets blessed by the Pope.
Though it must be noted that some of these men were religious and believed in
God.
Next arrived the representative from the Family in Boston.
This was the only Don who did not have the respect of his fellows. He was known
as a man who did not do right by his “people,” who cheated them unmercifully.
This could be forgiven, each man measures his own greed. What could not be
forgiven was that he could not keep order in his empire. The Boston area had
too many murders, too many petty wars for power, too many unsupported
free-lance activities; it flouted the law too brazenly. If the Chicago
Mafia were savages, then the Boston people were gavones, or
uncouth louts; ruffians. The Boston Don’s name was Domenick Panza. He was
short, squat; as one Don put it, he looked like a thief.
The Cleveland syndicate, perhaps the most powerful of the
strictly gambling operations in the United States, was represented by a
sensitive-looking elderly man with gaunt features and scow-white hair. He was
known, of course not to his face, as “the Jew” because he had surrounded
himself with Jewish assistants rather than Sicilians. It was even rumored that
he would have named a Jew as his Consigliere if he had dared. In any case, as
Don Corleone’s Family was known as the Irish Gang because of Hagen’s
membership, so Don Vincent Forlenza’s Family was known as the Jewish Family
with somewhat more accuracy. But he ran an extremely efficient organization and
he was not known ever to have fainted at the sight of blood, despite his
sensitive features. He ruled with an iron hand in a velvet political glove.
The representatives of the Five Families of New York were
the last to arrive and Tom Hagen was struck by how much more imposing,
impressive, these five men were than the out-of-towners, the hicks. For one
thing, the five New York Dons were in the old Sicilian tradition, they were
“men with a belly” meaning, figuratively, power and courage; and literally,
physical flesh, as if the two went together, as indeed they seem to have done
in Sicily. The five New York Dons were stout, corpulent men with massive leonine
heads, features on a large scale, fleshy imperial noses, thick mouths, heavy
folded cheeks. They were not too well tailored or barbered; they had the look
of no-nonsense busy men without vanity.
There was Anthony Stracci, who controlled the New Jersey area
and the shipping on the West Side docks of Manhattan. He ran the gambling in
Jersey and was very strong with the Democratic political machine. He had a
fleet of freight hauling trucks that made him a fortune primarily because his
trucks could travel with a heavy overload and not be stopped and fined by
highway weight inspectors. These trucks helped ruin the highways and then his
roadbuilding firm, with lucrative state contracts, repaired the damage wrought.
It was the kind of operation that would warm any man’s heart, business of
itself creating more business. Stracci, too, was old-fashioned and never dealt
in prostitution, but because his business was on the waterfront it was
impossible for him not to be involved in the drug-smuggling traffic. Of the five
New York Families opposing the Corleones his was the least powerful but the
most well disposed.
The Family that controlled upper New
York State, that arranged smuggling of Italian
immigrants from Canada, all upstate gambling and exercised
veto power on state licensing of racing tracks, was headed by Ottilio Cuneo.
This was a completely disarming man with the face of a jolly round peasant
baker, whose legitimate activity was one of the big milk companies. Cuneo was one
of those men who loved children and carried a pocket full of sweets in the
hopes of being able to pleasure one of his many grandchildren or the small
offspring of his associates. He wore a round fedora with the brim turned down
all the way round like a woman’s sun hat, which broadened his already
moon-shaped face into the very mask of joviality. He was one of the few Dons
who had never been arrested and whose true activities had never even been
suspected. So much so that he had served on civic committees and had been voted
as “Businessman of the Year for the State of New York” by the Chamber of
Commerce.
The closest ally to the Tattaglia Family was Don Emilio
Barzini. He had some of the gambling in Brooklyn and some in Queens. He had
some prostitution. He had strong-arm. He completely controlled Staten Island.
He had some of the sports betting in the Bronx and Westchester. He was in
narcotics. He had close ties to Cleveland and the West Coast and he was one of
the few men shrewd enough to be interested in Las Vegas and Reno, the open
cities of Nevada. He also had interests in Miami Beach and Cuba. After the
Corleone Family, his was perhaps the strongest in New York and therefore in the
country. His influence reached even to Sicily. His hand was in every unlawful
pie. He was even rumored to have a toehold in Wall Street. He had supported the
Tattaglia Family with money and influence since the start of the war. It was
his ambition to supplant Don Corleone as the most powerful and respected Mafia
leader in the country and to take over part of the Corleone empire. He was a
man much like Don Corleone, but more modern, more sophisticated, more
businesslike. He could never be called an old Moustache Pete and he had the
confidence of the newer, younger, brasher leaders on their way up. He was a man
of great personal force in a cold way, with none of Don Corleone’s warmth and
he was perhaps at this moment the most “respected” man in the group.
The last to arrive was Don Phillip Tattaglia, the head of
the Tattagfia Family that had directly challenged the Corleone power by
supporting Sollozzo, and had so nearly succeeded. And yet curiously enough he
was held in a slight contempt by the others. For one thing, it was known that
he had allowed himself to be dominated by Sollozzo, had in fact been led by the
nose by that fine Turkish hand. He was held responsible for all this commotion,
this uproar that had so affected the conduct of everyday business by
the New York Families. Also he was a sixty-year-old dandy
and woman-chaser. And he had ample opportunity to indulge his weakness.
For the Tattaglia Family dealt in women. Its main business
was prostitution. It also controlled most of the nightclubs in the United
States and could place any talent anywhere in the country. Phillip Tattaglia
was not above using strong-arm to get control of promising singers and comics
and muscling in on record firms. But prostitution was the main source of the
Family income.
His personality was unpleasant to these men. He was a
whiner, always complaining of the costs in his Family business. Laundry bills,
all those towels, ate up the profits (but he owned the laundry firm that did
the work). The girls were lazy and unstable, running off, committing suicide.
The pimps were treacherous and dishonest and without a shred of loyalty. Good
help was hard to find. Young lads of Sicilian blood turned up their noses at
such work, considered it beneath their honor to traffic and abuse women; those
rascals who would slit a throat with a song on their lips and the cross of an
Easter palm in the lapel of their jackets. So Phillip Tattaglia would rant on
to audiences unsympathetic and contemptuous. His biggest howl was reserved for
authorities who had it in their power to issue and cancel liquor licenses for
his nightclubs and cabarets. He swore he had made more millionaires than Wall
Street with the money he had paid those thieving guardians of official seals.
In a curious way his almost victorious war against the
Corleone Family had not won him the respect it deserved. They knew his strength
had come first from Sollozzo and then from the Barzini Family. Also the fact
that with the advantage of surprise he had not won complete victory was
evidence against him. If he had been more efficient, all this trouble could
have been avoided. The death of Don Corleone would have meant the end of the
war.
It was proper, since they had both lost sons in their war
against each other, that Don Corleone and Phillip Tattaglia should acknowledge each
other’s presence only with a formal nod. Don Corleone was the object of
attention, the other men studying him to see what mark of weakness had been
left on him by his wounds and defeats. The puzzling factor was why Don Corleone
had sued for peace after the death of his favorite son. It was an
acknowledgment of defeat and would almost surely lead to a lessening of his
power. But they would soon know.
There were greetings, there were drinks
to be served and almost another half hour went
by before Don Corleone took his seat at the polished walnut
table. Unobtrusively, Hagen sat in the chair slightly to the Don’s left and
behind him. This was the signal for the other Dons to make their way to the
table. Their aides sat behind them, the Consiglieres up close so that they
could offer any advice when needed.
Don Corleone was the first to speak and he spoke as if
nothing had happened. As if he had not been grievously wounded and his eldest
son slain, his empire in a shambles, his personal family scattered, Freddie in
the West and under the protection of the Molinari Family and Michael secreted
in the wastelands of Sicily. He spoke naturally, in Sicilian dialect.
“I want to thank you all for coming,” he said. “I consider
it a service done to me personally and I am in the debt of each and every one
of you. And so I will say at the beginning that I am here not to quarrel or
convince, but only to reason and as a reasonable man do everything possible for
us all to part friends here too. I give my word on that, and some of you who
know me well know I do not give my word lightly. Ah, well, let’s get down to
business.. We are all honorable men here, we don’t have to give each other
assurances as if we were lawyers.”
He paused. None of the others spoke. Some were smoking
cigars, others sipping their drinks. All of these men were good listeners,
patient men. They had one other thing in common. They were those rarities, men
who had refused to accept the rule of organized society, men who refused the
dominion of other men. There was no force, no mortal man who could bend them to
their will unless they wished it. They were men who guarded their free will
with wiles and murder. Their wills could be subverted only by death. Or the
utmost reasonableness.
Don Corleone sighed. “How did things ever go so far?” he
asked rhetorically. “Well, no matter. A lot of foolishness has come to pass. It
was so unfortunate, so unnecessary. But let me tell what happened, as I see
it.”
He paused to see if someone would
object to his telling his side of the story.
“Thank God my health has been restored and maybe I can help
set this affair aright. Perhaps my son was too rash, too headstrong, I don’t
say no to that. Anyway let me just say that Sollozzo came to me with a business
affair in which he asked me for my money and my influence. He said he had the
interest of the Tattaglia Family. The affair involved drugs, in which I have no
interest. I’m a quiet man and such endeavors are too lively for my taste. I explained
this to Sollozzo, with all respect for him and the Tattaglia Family. I
gave him my ‘no’ with all courtesy. I told him his business
would not interfere with mine, that I had no objection to his earning his
living in this fashion. He took it ill and brought misfortune down on all our
heads. Well, that’s life. Everyone here could tell his own tale of sorrow.
That’s not to my purpose.”
Don Corleone paused and motioned to Hagen for a cold drink,
which Hagen swiftly furnished him. Don Corleone wet his mouth. “I’m willing to
make the peace,” he said. “Tattaglia has lost a son, I have lost a son. We are
quits. What would the world come to if people kept carrying grudges against all
reason? That has been the cross of Sicily, where men are so busy with vendettas
they have no time to earn bread for their families. It’s foolishness. So I say
now, let things be as they were before. I have not taken any steps to learn who
betrayed and killed my son. Given peace, I will not do so. I have a son who
cannot come home and I must receive assurances that when I arrange matters so
that he can return safely that there will be no interference, no danger from
the authorities. Once that’s settled maybe we can talk about other matters that
interest us and do ourselves, all of us, a profitable service today.” Corleone
gestured expressively, submissively, with his hands. “That is all I want.”
It was very well done. It was the Don Corleone of old.
Reasonable. Pliant. Soft-spoken. But every man there had noted that he had
claimed good health, which meant he was a man not to be held cheaply despite
the misfortunes of the Corleone Family. It was noted that he had said the
discussion of other business was useless until the peace he asked for was given.
It was noted that he had asked for the old status quo, that he would lose
nothing despite his having got the worst of it over the past year.
However, it was Emilio Barzini who answered Don Corleone,
not Tattaglia. He was curt and to the point without being rude or insulting.
“That is all true enough,” Barzini said. “But there’s a
little more. Don Corleone is too modest. The fact is that Sollozzo and the
Tattaglias could not go into their new business without the assistance of Don
Corleone. In fact, his disapproval injured them. That’s not his fault of
course. The fact remains that judges and politicians who would accept favors
from Don Corleone, even on drugs, would not allow themselves to be influenced
by anybody else when it came to narcotics. Sollozzo couldn’t operate if he
didn’t have some insurance of his people being treated gently. We all know
that. We would all be poor men otherwise. And now that they have increased the
penalties the judges and the prosecuting attorneys drive a hard bargain when one
of our people get in trouble with narcotics. Even a Sicilian sentenced to
twenty years might break the omerta and talk his
brains out. That can’t happen. Don Corleone controls all
that apparatus. His refusal to let us use it is not the act of a friend. He
takes the bread out of the mouths of our families. Times have changed, it’s not
like the old days where everyone can go his own way. If Corleone had all the
judges in New York, then he must share them or let us others use them.
Certainly he can present a bill for such services, we’re not communists, after
all. But he has to let us draw water from the well. It’s that simple.”
When Barzini had finished talking there was a silence. The
lines were now drawn, there could be no return to the old status quo. What was
more important was that Barzini by speaking out was saying that if peace was
not made he would openly join the Tattaglia in their war against the Corleone.
And he had scored a telling point. Their lives and their fortunes depended upon
their doing each other services, the denial of a favor asked by a friend was an
act of aggression. Favors were not asked lightly and so could not be lightly
refused.
Don Corleone finally spoke to answer. “My friends,” he said,
“I didn’t refuse out of spite. You all know me. When have I ever refused an
accommodation? That’s simply not in my nature. But I had to refuse this time.
Why? Because I think this drug business will destroy us in the years to come.
There is too much strong feeling about such traffic in this country. It’s not
like whiskey or gambling or even women which most people want and is forbidden
them by the pezzonovante of the church and the government. But drugs are
dangerous for everyone connected with them. It could jeopardize all other
business. And let me say I’m flattered by the belief that I am so powerful with
the judges and law officials, I wish it were true. I do have some influence but
many of the people who respect my counsel might lose this respect if drugs become
involved in our relationship. They are afraid to be involved in such business
and they have strong feelings about it. Even policemen who help us in gambling
and other things would refuse to help us in drugs. So to ask me to perform a
service in these matters is to ask me to do a disservice to myself. But I’m
willing to do even that if all of you think it proper in order to adjust other
matters.”
When Don Corleone had finished speaking the room became much
more relaxed with more whisperings and cross talk. He had conceded the
important point. He would offer his protection to any organized business
venture in drugs. He was, in effect, agreeing almost entirely to Sollozzo’s
original proposal if that proposal was endorsed by the national group gathered
here. It was understood that he would never participate in the operational
phase, nor would he invest his money. He would merely use his protective
influence with the legal apparatus. But
this was a formidable concession.
The Don of Los Angeles, Frank Falcone, spoke to answer.
“There’s no way of stopping our people from going into that business..They go
in on their own and they get is trouble. There’s too much money in it to
resist. So it’s more dangerous if we don’t go in. At least if we control it we
can cover it better, organize it better, make sure it causes less trouble.
Being in it is not so bad, there has to be control, there has to be protection,
there has to be organization, we can’t have everybody running around doing just
what they please like a bunch of anarchists.”
The Don of Detroit, more friendly to Corleone than any of
the others, also now spoke against his friend’s position, in the interest of
reasonableness. “I don’t believe in drugs,” he said. “For years I paid my
people extra so they wouldn’t do that kind of business. But it didn’t matter,
it didn’t help. Somebody comes to them and says, ‘I have powders, if you put up
the three-, four-thousand-dollar investment we can make fifty thousand
distributing.’ Who can resist such a profit? And they are so busy with their
little side business they neglect the work I pay them to do. There’s more money
in drugs. It’s getting bigger all the time. There’s no way to stop it so we
have to control the business and keep it respectable. I don’t want any of it
near schools, I don’t want any of it sold to children. That is an infamita. In
my city I would try to keep the traffic in the dark people, the colored. They
are the best customers, the least troublesome and they are animals anyway. They
have no respect for their wives or their families or for themselves. Let them
lose their souls with drugs. But something has to be done, we just can’t let
people do as they please and make trouble for everyone.”
This speech of the Detroit Don was received with loud
murmurs of approval. He had hit the nail on the head. You couldn’t even pay
people to stay out of the drug traffic. As for his remarks about children, that
was his well-known sensibility, his tenderheartedness speaking. After all, who
would sell drugs to children? Where would children get the money? As for his
remarks about the coloreds, that was not even heard. The Negroes were
considered of absolutely no account, of no force whatsoever. That they had
allowed society to grind them into the dust proved them of no account and his
mentioning them in any way proved that the Don of Detroit had a mind that
always wavered toward irrelevancies.
All the Dons spoke. Ail of them deplored the traffic in
drugs as a bad thing that would cause trouble but agreed there was no way to
control it. There was, simply, too much money to be made in the business,
therefore it followed that there would be men who
would dare anything to dabble in it.
That was human nature.
It was finally agreed. Drug traffic would be permitted and
Don Corleone must give it some legal protection in the East. It was understood
that the Barzini and Tattaglia Families would do most of the large-scale
operations. With this out of the way the conference was able to move on to
other matters of a wider interest. There were many complex problems to be
solved. It was agreed that Las Vegas and Miami were to be open cities where any
of the Families could operate. They all recognized that these were the cities
of the future. It was also agreed that no violence would be permitted in these
cities and that petty criminals of all types were to be discouraged. It was
agreed that in momentous affairs, in executions that were necessary but might
cause too much of a public outcry, the execution must be approved by this
council. It was agreed that button men and other soldiers were to be restrained
from violent crimes and acts of vengeance against each other on personal
matters. It was agreed that Families would do each other services when
requested, such as providing executioners, technical assistance in pursuing
certain courses of action such as bribing jurors, which in some instances could
be vital. These discussions, informal, colloquial and on a high level, took
time and were broken by lunch and drinks from the buffet bar.
Finally Don Barzini sought to bring the meeting to an end.
“That’s the whole matter then,” he said. “We have the peace and let me pay my
respects to Don Corleone, whom we all have known over the years as a man of his
word. If there are any more differences we can meet again, we need not become
foolish again. On my part the road is new and fresh. I’m glad this is all
settled.”
Only Phillip Tattaglia was a little worried still. The murder
of Santino Corleone made him the most vulnerable person in this group if war
broke out again. He spoke at length for the first time.
“I’ve agreed to everything here, I’m willing to forget my
own misfortune. But I would like to hear some strict assurances from Corleone.
Will he attempt any individual vengeance? When time goes by and his position
perhaps becomes stronger, will he forget that we have sworn our friendship? How
am I to know that in three or four years he won’t feel that he’s been ill served,
forced against his will to this agreement and so free to break it? Will we have
to guard against each other all the time? Or can we truly go in peace with
peace of mind? Would Corleone give us all his assurances as I now give mine?”
It was then that Don Corleone gave the speech that would be
long remembered, and that reaffirmed his position as the most far-seeing
statesman among them, so full of common sense, so direct from the heart; and to
the heart of the matter. In it he coined a phrase that was to become as famous
in its way as Churchill’s Iron Curtain, though not public knowledge until more
than ten years later.
For the first time he stood up to address the council. He
was short and a little thin from his “illness,” perhaps his sixty years showed
a bit more but there was no question that he had regained all his former
strength, and had all his wits.
“What manner of men are we then, if we do not have our
reason,” he said. “We are all no better than beasts in a jungle if that were
the case. But we have reason, we can reason with each other and we can reason
with ourselves. To what purpose would I start all these troubles again, the
violence and the turmoil? My son is dead and that is a misfortune and I must
bear it, not make the innocent world around me suffer with me. And so I say, I
give my honor, that I will never seek vengeance, I will never seek knowledge of
the deeds that have been done in the past. I will leave here with a pure heart.
“Let me say that we must always look to our interests. We
are all men who have refused to be fools, who have refused to be puppets
dancing on a string pulled by the men on high. We have been fortunate here in
this country. Already most of our children have found a better life. Some of
you have sons who are professors, scientists, musicians, and you are fortunate.
Perhaps your grandchildren will become the new pezzonovanti. None of us here
want to see our children follow in our footsteps, it’s too hard a life. They
can be as others, their position and security won by our courage. I have
grandchildren now and I hope their children may someday, who knows, be a
governor, a President, nothing’s impossible herein America. But we have to
progress with the times. The time is past for guns and killings and massacres.
We have to be cxmning like the business people, there’s more money in it and
it’s better for our children and our grandchildren.
“As for our own deeds, we are not responsible to the.90
calibers the pezzonovantis who take it upon themselves to decide what we shall
do with our lives, who declare wars they wish us to fight in to protect what
they own. Who is to say we should obey the laws they make for their own
interest and to our hurt? And who are they then to meddle when we look after
our own interests? Sonna coca nostra,” Don Corleone said, “these are our own
affairs. We will manage our world for ourselves because it is our world, cosa
nostra. And so we have to stick together to guard against outside meddlers.
Otherwise they will
put the ring in our nose as they have put the ring in the
nose of all the millions of Neapolitans and other Italians in this country.
“For this reason I forgo my vengeance for my dead son, for
the common good. I swear now that as long as I am responsible for the actions
of my Family there will not be one finger lifted against any man here without
just cause and utmost provocation. I am willing to sacrifice my commercial
interests for the common good. This is my word, this is my honor, there are
those of you here who know I have never betrayed either.
“But I have a selfish interest. My youngest son had to flee,
accused of Sollozzo’s murder and that of a police captain. I must now make
arrangements so that he can come home with safety, cleared of all those false
charges. That is my affair and I will make those arrangements. I must find the
real culprits perhaps, or perhaps I must convince the authorities of his
innocence, perhaps the witnesses and informants will recant their lies. But
again I say that this is my affair and I believe I will be able to bring my son
home.
“But let me say this. I am a superstitious man, a ridiculous
failing but I must confess it here. And so if some unlucky accident should
befall my youngest son, if some police officer should accidentally shoot him,
if he should hang himself in his cell, if new witnesses appear to testify to
his guilt, my superstition will make me feel that it was the result of the ill
will still borne me by some people here. Let me go further. If my son is struck
by a bolt of lightning I will blame some of the people here. If his plane show
fall into the sea or his ship sink beneath the waves of the ocean, if he should
catch a mortal fever, if his automobile should be struck by a train, such is my
superstition that I would blame the ill will felt by people here. Gentlemen,
that ill will, that bad luck, I could never forgive. But aside from that let me
swear by the souls of my grandchildren that I will never break the peace we have
made. After all, are we or are we not better men than those pezzonovanti who
have killed countless millions of men in our lifetimes?”
With this Don Corleone stepped from his place and went down
the table to where Don Phillip Tattaglia was sitting. Tattaglia rose to greet
him and the two men embraced, kissing each other’s cheeks. The other Dons in
the room applauded and rose to shake hands with everybody in sight and to
congratulate Don Corleone and Don Tattaglia on their new friendship. It was not
perhaps the warmest friendship in the world, they would not send each other
Christmas gift greetings, but they would not murder each other. That was
friendship enough in this world, all that was needed.
Since his son Freddie was under the
protection of the Molinari Family in the West, Don
Corleone lingered with the San Francisco Don after the
meeting to thank him. Molinari said enough for Don Corleone to gather that
Freddie had found his niche out there, was happy and had become something of a
ladies’ man. He had a genius for running a hotel, it seemed. Don Corleone shook
his head in wonder, as many fathers do when told of undreamed-of talents in
their children. Wasn’t it true that sometimes the greatest misfortunes brought
unforeseen rewards? They both agreed that this was so. Meanwhile Corleone made
it clear to the San Francisco Don that he was in his debt for the great service
done in protecting Freddie. He let it be known that his influence would be
exerted so that the important racing wires would always be available to his
people no matter what changes occurred in the power structure in the years to
come, an important guarantee since the struggle over this facility was a
constant open wound complicated by the fact that the Chicago people had their
heavy hand in it. But Don Corleone was not without influence even in that land
of barbarians and so his promise was a gift of gold.
It was evening before Don Corleone, Tom Hagen and the
bodyguard-chauffeur, who happened to be Rocco Lampone, arrived at the mall in
Long Beach. When they went into the house the Don said to Hagen, “Our driver,
that man Lampone, keep an eye on him. He’s a fellow worth something better I
think.” Hagen wondered at this remark. Lampone had not said a word all day, had
not even glanced at the two men in the back seat. He had opened the door for
the Don, the car had been in front of the bank when they emerged, he had done
everything correctly but no more than any well-trained chauffeur might do.
Evidently the Don’s eye had seen something he had not seen.
The Don dismissed Hagen and told him to come back to the
house after supper. But to take his time and rest a little since they would put
in a long night of discussion. He also told Hagen to have Clemenza and Tessio
present. They should come at ten P.M., not before. Hagen was to brief Clemenza
and Tessio on what had happened at the meeting that afternoon.
At ten the Don was waiting for the three men in his office,
the corner room of the house with its law library and special phone. There was
a tray with whiskey bottles, ice and soda water. The Don gave his instructions.
“We made the peace this afternoon,” he said. “I gave my word
and my honor and that should be enough for all of you. But our friends are not
so trustworthy so let’s all be on our guard still. We don’t want any more nasty
little surprises.” Then Don turned to Hagen. “You’ve let the Bocchicchio
hostages go?”
Hagen nodded. “I called Clemenza as
soon as I got home.”
Corleone turned to the massive Clemenza. The caporegime
nodded. “I released them. Tell me, Godfather, is it possible for a Sicilian to
be as dumb as the Bocchicchios pretend to be?”
Don Corleone smiled a little. “They are clever enough to
make a good living. Why is it so necessary to be more clever than that? It’s
not the Bocchicchios who cause the troubles of this world. But it’s true, they
haven’t got the Sicilian head.”
They were all in a relaxed mood, now that the war was over.
Don Corleone himself mixed drinks and brought one to each man. The Don sipped
his carefully and lit up a cigar.
“I want nothing set forth to discover what happened to
Sonny, that’s done with and to be forgotten. I want all cooperation with the
other Families even if they become a little greedy and we don’t get our proper
share in this. I want nothing to break this peace no matter what the
provocation until we’ve found a way to bring Michael home. And I want that to
be first thing on your minds. Remember this, when he comes back he must come
back in absolute safety. I don’t mean from the Tattaglias or the Barzinis. What
I’m concerned about are the police. Sure, we can get rid of the real evidence
against him; that waiter won’t testify, nor that spectator or gunman or whatever
he was. The real evidence is the least of our worries since we know about it.
What we have to worry about is the police framing false evidence because their
informers have assured them that Michael Corleone is the man who killed their
captain. Very well. We have to demand that the Five Families do everything in
their power to correct this belief of the police. All their informers who work
with the police must come up with new stories. I think after my speech this
afternoon they will understand it is to their interest to do so. But that’s not
enough. We have to come up with something special so Michael won’t ever have to
worry about that again. Otherwise there’s no point in him coming back to this
country. So let’s all think about that. That’s the most importunt matter.
“Now, any man should be allowed one foolishness in his life.
I have had mine. I want all the land around the mall bought, the houses bought.
I don’t want any man able to look out his window into my garden even if it’s a
mile away. I want a fence around the mall and I want the mall to be on full
protection all the time. I want a gate in that fence. In short, I wish now to
live in a fortress. Let me say to you now that I will never go into the city to
work again. I will be semiretired. I feel an urge to work in the garden, to
make a
little wine when the grapes are in season. I want to live in
my house. The only time I’ll leave is to go on a little vacation or to see
someone on important business and then I want all precautions taken. Now don’t
take this amiss. I’m not preparing anything. I’m being prudent, I’ve always
been a prudent man, there is nothing I find so little to my taste as
carelessness in life. Women and children can afford to be careless, men cannot.
Be leisurely in all these things, no frantic preparations to alarm our friends.
It can be done in such a way as to seem natural.
“Now I’m going to leave things more and more up to each of
you three. I want the Santino regime disbanded and the men placed in your
regimes. That should reassure our friends and show that I mean peace. Tom, I
want you to put together a group of men who will go to Las Vegas and give me a
full report on what is going on out there. Tell me about Fredo, what is really
happening out there, I hear I wouldn’t recognize my own son. It seems he’s a
cook now, that be amuses himself with young girls more than a grown man should.
Well, he was always too serious when he was young and he was never the man for
Family business. But let’s find out what really can be done out there.”
Hagen said quietly, “Should we send your son-in-law? After
all, Carlo is a native of Nevada, he knows his way around.”
Don Corleone shook his head. “No, my wife is lonely here
without any of her children. I want Constanzia and her husband moved into one
of the houses on the mall. I want Carlo given a responsible job, maybe I’ve
been too harsh on him, and”– Don Corleone made a grimace– “I’m short of sons.
Take him out of the gambling and put him in with the unions where he can do
some paper work and a lot of talking. He’s a good talker.” There was the
tiniest note of contempt in the Don’s voice.
Hagen nodded. “OK, Clemenza and I will go over all the
people and put together a group to do the Vegas job. Do you want me to call
Freddie home for a few days?”
The Don shook his head. He said cruelly, “What for? My wife
can still cook our meals. Let him stay out there.” The three men shifted
uneasily in their seats. They had not realized Freddie was in such severe
disfavor with his father and they suspected it must be because of something
they did not know.
Don Corleone sighed. “I hope to grow some good green peppers
and tomatoes in the garden this year, more than we can eat. I’ll make you
presents of them. I want a little peace, a little quiet and tranquillity for my
old age. Well, that’s all. Have another drink if you like.”
It was a dismissal. The men rose. Hagen accompanied Clemenza
and Tessio to their cars and arranged meetings with them to thrash out the
operational details that would accomplish the stated desires of their Don. Then
he went back into the house where he knew Don Conrleone world be waiting for
him.
The Don had taken off his jacket and tie and was lying down
on the couch. His stern face was relaxed into lines of fatigue. He waved Hagen
into a chair and said, “Well, Consigliere, do you disapprove of any of my deeds
today?”
Hagen took his time answering. “No,” he said. “But I don’t
find it consistent, nor true to your nature. You say you don’t want to find out
how Santino was killed or want vengeance for it. I don’t believe that. You gave
your word for peace and so you’ll keep the peace but I can’t believe you will
give your enemies the victory they seem to have won today. You’ve constructed a
magnificent riddle that I can’t solve, so how can I approve or disapprove?”
A look of content came over the Don’s face. “Well, you know
me better than anyone else. Even though you’re not a Sicilian, I made you one.
Everything you say is true, but there’s a solution and you’ll comprehend it
before it spins out to the end. You agree everyone has to take my word and I’ll
keep my word. And I want my orders obeyed exactly. But, Tom, the most important
thing is we have to get Michael home as soon as possible. Make that first in
your mind and in your work. Explore all the legal alleys, I don’t care how much
money you have to spend. It has to be foolproof when he comes home. Consult the
best lawyers on criminal law. I’ll give you the names of some judges who will
give you a private audience. Until that time we have to guard against all
treacheries.”
Hagen said, “Like you, I’m not worried so much about the
real evidence as the evidence they will manufacture. Also some police friend
may kill Michael after he’s arrested. They may kill him in his cell or have one
of the prisoners do it. As I see it, we can’t even afford to have him arrested
or accused.”
Don Corleone sighed. “I know, I know. That’s the difficulty.
But we can’t take too long. There are troubles in Sicily. The young fellows
over there don’t listen to their elders anymore and a lot of the men deported
from America are just too much for the old-fashioned Dons to handle. Michael
could get caught in between. I’ve taken some precautions against that and he’s
still got a good cover but that cover won’t last forever. That’s one of the
reasons I had to make the peace. Barzini has friends in Sicily and they
were beginning to sniff Michael’s trail. That gives you one
of the answers to your riddle. I had to make the peace to insure my son’s
safety. There was nothing else to do.”
Hagen didn’t bother asking the Don how he had gotten this
information. He was not even surprised, and it was true that this solved part
of the riddle. “When I meet with Tattaglia’s people to firm up the details,
should I insist that all his drug middlemen be clean? The judges will be a
little skittish about giving light sentences to a man with a record.”
Don Corleone shrugged. “They should be smart enough to
figure that out themselves. Mention it, don’t insist. We’ll do our best but if
they use a real snowbird and he gets caught, we won’t lift a finger. We’ll just
tell them nothing can be done. But Barzini is a man who will know that without
being told. You notice how he never committed himself in this affair. One might
never have known he was in any way concerned. That is a man who doesn’t get
caught on the losing side.”
Hagen was startled. “You mean he was
behind Sollozzo and Tattaglia all the time?”
Don Corleone sighed. “Tattaglia is a pimp. He could never
have outfought Santino. That’s why I don’t have to know about what happened.
It’s enough to know that Barzini had a hand in it.”
Hagen let this sink in. The Don was giving him clues but
there was something very important left out. Hagen knew what it was but he knew
it was not his place to ask. He said good night and turned to go. The Don had a
last word for him.
“Remember, use all your wits for a plan to bring Michael
home.” the Don said. “And one other thing. Arrange with the telephone man so
that every month I get a list of all the telephone calls, made and received, by
Clemenza and Tessio. I suspect them of nothing. I would swear they would never
betray me. But there’s no harm in knowing any little thing that may help us
before the event.”
Hagen nodded and went out. He wondered if the Don was
keeping a check on him also in some way and then was ashamed of his suspicion.
But now he was sure that in the subtle and complex mind of the Godfather a
far-ranging plan of action was being initiated that made the day’s happenings
no more than a tactical retreat. And there was that one dark fact that no one
mentioned, that he himself had not dared to ask, that Don Corleone ignored. All
pointed to a day of reckoning in the future.
Chapter 21
But it was to be nearly another year before Don Corleone
could arrange for his son Michael to be smuggled back into the United States.
During that time the whole Family racked their brains for suitable schemes.
Even Carlo Rizzi was listened to now that he was living in the mall with
Connie. (During that time they had a second child, a boy.) But none of the
schemes met with the Don’s approval.
Finally it was the Bocchicchio Family who through a
misfortune of its own solved the problem. There was one Bocchicchio, a young
cousin of no more than twenty-five years of age, named Felix, who was born in
America and with more brains than anyone in the clan had ever had before. He
had refused to be drawn into the Family garbage hauling business and married a
nice American girl of English stock to further his split from the clan. He went
to school at night, to become a lawyer, and worked during the day as a civil
service post office clerk. During that time he had three children but his wife
was a prudent manager and they lived on his salary until he got his law degree.
Now Felix Bocchicchio, like many young men, thought that
having struggled to complete his education and master the tools of his
profession, his virtue would automatically be rewarded and he would earn a
decent living. This proved not to be the case. Still proud, he refused all help
from his clan. But a lawyer friend of his, a young man well connected and with
a budding career in a big law firm, talked Felix into doing him a little favor.
It was very complicated, seemingly legal, and had to do with a bankruptcy
fraud. It was a million-to-one shot against its being found out. Felix
Bocchicchio took the chance. Since the fraud involved using the legal skills he
had learned in a university, it seemed not so reprehensible, and, in an odd
way, not even criminal.
To make a foolish story short, the fraud was discovered. The
lawyer friend refused to help Felix in any manner, refused to even answer his
telephone calls. The two principals in the fraud, shrewd middle-aged
businessmen who furiously blamed Felix Bocchicchio’s legal clumsiness for the
plan going awry, pleaded guilty and cooperated with the state, naming Felix Bocchicchio
as the ringleader of the fraud and claiming he had used threats of violence to
control their business and force them to cooperate with him in his fraudulent
schemes. Testimony was given that linked Felix with uncles and cousins in the
Bocchiochio clan who had criminal records for strong-arm, and this evidence was
damning. The two businessmen got off with suspended sentences. Felix
Bocchiochio was given a sentence of one to five years and served three of them.
The clan did not ask help from any of the Families or Don Corleone because
Felix had
refused to ask their help and had to be taught a lesson:
that mercy comes only from the Family, that the Family is more loyal and more
to be trusted than society.
In any case, Felix Bocchicchio was released from prison
after serving three years, went home and kissed his wife and three children and
lived peacefully for a year, and then showed that he was of the Bocchicchio
clan after all. Without any attempt to conceal his guilt, he procured a weapon,
a pistol, and shot his lawyer friend to death. He then searched out the two
businessmen and calmly shot them both through the head as they came out of a
luncheonette. He left the bodies lying in the street and went into the luncheonette
and ordered a cup of coffee which he drank while he waited for the police to
come and arrest him.
His trial was swift and his judgment merciless. A member of
the criminal underworld had cold bloodedly murdered state witnesses who had
sent him to the prison he richly –deserved. It was a flagrant flouting of
society and for once the public, the press, the structure of society and even
soft-headed and soft-hearted humanitarians were united in their desire to see
Felix Bocchicchio in the electric chair. The governor of the state would no
more grant him clemency than the officials of the pound spare a mad dog, which
was the phrase of one of the governor’s closest political sides. The
Bocchiochio clan of course would spend whatever money was needed for appeals to
higher courts, they were proud of him now, but the conclusion was certain.
After the legal folderol, which might take a little time, Felix Bocchicchio
would die in the electric chair.
It was Hagen who brought this case to the attention of the
Don at the request of one of the Bocchiochios who hoped that something could be
done for the young man. Don Codeone curtly refused. He was not a magician.
People asked him the impossible. But the next day the Don called Hagen into his
office and had him go over the case in the most intimate detail. When Hagen was
finished, Don Corleone told him to summon the head of the Bocchicchio clan to
the mall for a meeting.
What happened next had the simplicity of genius. Don
Corleone guaranteed to the head of the Bocchicchio clan that the wife and
children of Felix Bocchicchio would be rewarded with a handsome pension. The
money for this would be handed over to the Bocchicchio clan immediately. In
turn, Felix must confess to the murder of Sollozzo and the police captain McCluskey.
There were many details to be arranged. Felix Bocchicchio
would have to confess convincingly, that is, he would have to know some of the
true details to confess to. Also
he must implicate the police captain in narcotics. Then the
waiter at the Luna Restaurant must be persuaded to identify Felix Bocchiochio
as the murderer. This would take some courage, as the description would change
radically, Felix Bocchicchio being much shorter and heavier. But Don Corleone
would attend to that. Also since the condemned man had been a great believer in
higher education and a college graduate, he would want his children to go to
college. And so a sum of money would have to be paid by Don Corleone that would
take care of the children’s college. Then the Bocchicchio clan had to be
reassured that there was no hope for clemency on the original murders. The new
confession of course would seal the man’s already almost certain doom.
Everything was arranged, the money paid and suitable contact
made with the condemned man so that he could be instructed and advised. Finally
the plan was sprung and the confession made headlines in all the newspapers.
The whole thing was a huge success. But Don Corkone, cautious as always, waited
until Felix Bocchicchio was actually executed four months later before finally
giving the command that Michael Corleone could return home.
Chapter 22
Lucy Mancini, a year after Sonny’s death, still missed him
terribly, grieved for him more fiercely than any lover in any romance. And her
dreams were not the insipid dreams of a schoolgirl, her longings not the
longings of a devoted wife. She was not rendered desolate by the loss of her
“life’s companion,” or miss him because of his stalwart character. She held no fond
remembrances of sentimental gifts, of girlish hero worship, his smile, the
amused glint of his eyes when she said something endearing or witty.
No. She missed him for the more important reason that he had
been the only man in the world who could make her body achieve the act of love.
And, in her youth and innocence, she still believed that he was the only man
who could possibly do so.
Now a year later she sunned herself in the balmy Nevada air.
At her feet the slender, blond young man was playing with her toes. They were
at the side of the hotel pool for the Sunday afternoon and despite the people
all around them his hand was sliding up her bare thigh.
“Oh, Jules, stop,” Lucy said. “I
thought doctors at least weren’t as silly as other men.”
Jules grinned at her. “I’m a Las Vegas doctor.” He tickled
the inside of her thigh and was amazed how just a little thing like that could
excite her so powerfully. It showed on her face though she tried to hide it.
She was really a very primitive, innocent girl. Then why
couldn’t he make her come across? He had to figure that one
out and never mind the crap about a lost love that could never be replaced.
This was living tissue here under his hand and living tissue required other
living tissue. Dr. Jules Segal decided he would make the big push tonight at
his apartment. He’d wanted to make her come across without any trickery but if
trickery there had to be, he was the man for it. All in the interests of
science of course. And, besides, this poor kid was dying for it.
“Jules, stop, please stop,” Lucy said.
Her voice was trembling.
Jules was immediately contrite. “OK, honey,” he said. He put
his head in her lap and using her soft thighs as a pillow, he took a little
nap. He was amused at her squirming, the heat that registered from her loins
and when she put her hand on his head to smooth his hair, he grasped her wrist
playfully and held it loverlike but really to feel her pulse. It was galloping.
He’d get her tonight and he’d solve the mystery, what the hell ever it was.
Fully confident, Dr. Jules Segal fell asleep.
Lucy watched the people around the pool. She could never
have imagined her life would change so in less than two years. She never
regretted her “foolishness” at Connie Corleone’s wedding. It was the most
wonderful thing that had ever happened to her and she lived it over and over
again in her dreams. As she lived over and over again the months that followed.
Sonny had visited her once a week, sometimes more, never
less. The days before she saw him again her body was in torment. Their passion
for each other was of the most elementary kind, undiluted by poetry or any form
of intellectualism. It was love of the coarsest nature, a fleshly love, a love
of tissue for opposing tissue.
When Sonny called to her he was coming she made certain
there was enough liquor in the apartment and enough food for supper and
breakfast because usually he would not leave until late the next morning. He
wanted his fill of her as she wanted her fill of him. He had his own key and
when he came in the door she would fly into his massive arms. They would both
be brutally direct, brutally primitive. During their first kiss they would be
fumbling at each other’s clothing and he would be lifting her in the air, and
she would be wrapping her legs around his huge thighs. They would be making
love standing up in the foyer of her apartment as if they had to repeat their
first act of love together, and then he would carry her so to the bedroom.
They would lie in bed making love. They would live together
in the apartment for sixteen hours, completely naked. She would cook for him,
enormous meals. Sometimes he
would get phone calls obviously about business but she never
even listened to the words. She would be too busy toying with his body,
fondling it, kissing it, burying her mouth in it. Sometimes when he got up to
get a drink and he walked by her, she couldn’t help reaching out to touch his
naked body, hold him, make love to him as if those special parts of his body
were a plaything, a specially constructed, intricate but innocent toy revealing
its known, but still surprising ecstasies. At first she had been ashamed of
these excesses on her part but soon saw that they pleased her lover, that her
complete sensual enslavement to his body flattered him. In all this there was
an animal innocence. They were happy together..
When Sonny’s father was gunned down in the street, she
understood for the first time that her lover might be in danger. Alone in her
apartment, she did not weep, she wailed aloud, an animal wailing. When Sonny
did not come to see her for almost three weeks she subsisted on sleeping pills,
liquor and her own anguish. The pain she felt was physical pain, her body
ached. When he finally did come she held on to his body at almost every moment.
After that he came at least once a week until he was killed.
She learned of his death through the newspaper accounts and
that very same night she took a massive overdose of sleeping pills. For some
reason, instead of killing, the pills made her so ill that she staggered out
into the hall of her apartment and collapsed in front of the elevator door
where she was found and taken to the hospital. Her relationship to Sonny was not
generally known so her case received only a few inches in the tabloid
newspapers.
It was while she was in the hospital that Tom Hagen came to
see her and console her. It was Tom Hagen who arranged a job for her in Las
Vegas working in flue hotel run by Sonny’s brother Freddie. It was Tom Hagen
who told her that she would receive an annuity from the Corleone Family, that
Sonny had made provisions for her. He had asked her if she was pregnant, as if
that were the reason for her taking the pills and she had told him no. He asked
her if Sonny had come to see her that fatal night or had called that he would
come to see her and she told him no, that Sonny had not called. That she was
always home waiting for him when she finished working. And she had told Hagen
the truth. ‘He’s the only man I could ever love,” she said. “I can’t love
anybody else.” She saw him smile a little but he also looked surprised. “Do you
find that so unbelievable?” she asked. “Wasn’t he the one who brought you home
when you were a kid?”
“He was a different person,” Hagen
said, “he grew up to be a different kind of man.”
“Not to me,” Lucy said. “Maybe to everybody else, but not to
me.” She was still too weak to explain how Sonny had never been anything but
gentle with her. He’d never been angry with her, never even irritable or
nervous.
Hagen made all the arrangements for her to move to Las
Vegas. A rented apartment was waiting, he took her to the airport himself and
he made her promise that if she ever felt lonely or if things didn’t go right,
she would call him and he would help her in any way he could.
Before she got on the plane she asked him hesitantly, “Does
Sonny’s father know what you’re doing?”
Hagen smiled, “I’m acting for him as well as myself. He’s
old-fashioned in these things and he would never go against the legal wife of
his son. But he feels that you were just a young girl and Sonny should have
known better. And your taking all those pills shook everybody up.” He didn’t
explain how incredible it was to a man like the Don that any person should try
suicide.
Now, after nearly eighteen months in Las Vegas, she was
surprised to find herself almost happy. Some nights she dreamed about Sonny and
lying awake before dawn continued her dream with her own caresses until she
could sleep again. She had not had a man since. But the life in Vegas agreed
with her. She went swimming in the hotel pools, sailed on Lake Mead and drove
through the desert on her day off. She became thinner and this improved her
figure. She was still voluptuous but more in the American than the old Italian
style. She worked in the public relations section of the hotel as a
receptionist and had nothing to do with Freddie though when he saw her he would
stop and chat a little. She was surprised at the change in Freddie. He had
become a ladies’ man, dressed beautifully, and seemed to have a real flair for
running a gambling resort. He controlled the hotel side, something not usually
done by casino owners. With the long, very hot summer seasons, or perhaps his
more active sex life, he too had become thinner and Hollywood tailoring made
him look almost debonair in a deadly sort of way.
It was after six months that Tom Hagen came out to see how
she was doing. She had been receiving a check for six hundred dollars a month,
every month, in addition to her salary. Hagen explained that this money had to
be shown as coming from someplace and asked her to sign complete powers of
attorney so that he could channel the money properly. He also told her that as
a matter of form she would be listed as owner of five “points” in the hotel in
which she worked. She would have to go through all the legal
formalities required by the Nevada laws but everything would
be taken care of for her and her own personal inconvenience would be at a
minimum. However she was not to discuss this arrangement with anyone without
his consent. She would be protected legally in every way and her money every
month would be assured. If the authorities or any law-enforcement agencies ever
questioned her, she was to simply refer them to her lawyer and she would not be
bothered any further.
Lucy agreed. She understood what was happening but had no
objections to how she was being used. It seemed a reasonable favor. But when
Hagen asked her to keep her eyes open around the hotel, keep an eye on Freddie
and on Freddie’s boss, the man who owned and operated the hotel, as a major
stockholder, she said to him, “Oh, Tom, you don’t want me to spy on Freddie?”
Hagen smiled. “His father worries about Freddie. He’s in
fast company with Moe Greene and we just want to make sure he doesn’t get into
any trouble.” He didn’t bother to explain to her that the Don had backed the
building of this hotel in the desert of Las Vegas not only to supply a haven
for his son, but to get a foot in the door for bigger operations.
It was shortly after this interview that Dr. Jules Segal
came to work as the hotel physician. He was very thin, very handsome and
charming and seemed very young to be a doctor, at least to Lucy. She met him
when a lump grew above her wrist on her forearm. She worried about it for a few
days, then one morning went to the doctor’s suite of offices in the hotel. Two
of the show girls from the chorus line were in the waiting room, gossiping with
each other. They had the blond peach-colored prettiness Lucy always envied.
They looked angelic. But one of the girls was saying, “I swear if I have
another dose I’m giving up dancing.”
When Dr. Jules Segal opened his office door to motion one of
the show giris inside, Lucy was tempted to leave, and if it had been something
more personal and serious she would have. Dr. Segal was wearing slacks and an
open shirt. The horn-rimmed glasses helped and his quiet reserved manner, but
the impression he gave was an informal one, and like many basically
old-fashioned people, Lucy didn’t believe that medicine and informality mixed.
When she finally got into his office there was something so
reassuring in his manner that all her misgivings fled. He spoke hardly at all
and yet he was not brusque, and he took his time. When she asked him what the
lump was he patiently explained that it was
a quite common fibrous growth that could in no way be
malignant or a cause for serious concern. He picked up a heavy medical book and
said, “Hold out your arm.”
She held out her arm tentatively. He smiled at her for the
first time. “I’m going to cheat myself out of a surgical fee,” he said. “I’ll
just smash it with this book and it will flatten out. It may pop up again but
if I remove it surgically, you’ll be out of money and have to wear bandages and
all that. OK?”
She smiled at him. For some reason she had an absolute trust
in him. “OK,” she said. In the next instant she let out a yell as he brought
down the heavy medical volume on her forearm. The lump had flattened out,
almost.
“Did it hurt that much?” he asked.
“No,” she said. She watched him
completing her case history card. “Is that all?”
He nodded, not paying any more
attention to her. She left.
A week later he saw her in the coffee shop and sat next to
her at the counter. “How’s the arm?” he asked.
She smiled at him. “Fine,” she said.
“You’re pretty unorthodox but you’re pretty good.”
He grinned at her. “You don’t know how unorthodox I am. And
I didn’t know how rich you were. The Vegas Sun just published the list of point
owners in the hotel and Lucy Mancini has a big ten points. I could have made a
fortune on that little bump.”
She didn’t answer him, suddenly reminded of Hagen’s
warnings. He grinned again. “Don’t worry, I know the score, you’re just one of
the dummies, Vegas is full of them. How about seeing one of the shows with me
tonight and I’ll buy you dinner. I’ll even buy you some roulette chips.”
She was a little doubtful. He urged her. Finally she said,
“I’d like to come but I’m afraid you might be disappointed by how the night
ends. I’m not really a swinger like most of the girls here in Vegas.”
“That’s why I asked you,” Jules said
cheerfully. “I’ve prescribed a night’s rest for myself.”
Lucy smiled at him and said a little sadly, “Is it that
obvious?” He shook his head and she said, “OK, supper then, but I’ll buy my own
roulette chips.”
They went to the supper show and Jules kept her amused by
describing different types of bare thighs and breasts in medical terms; but
without sneering, all in good humor. Afterward they played roulette together at
the same wheel and won over a hundred
dollars. Still later they drove up to Boulder Dam in the
moonlight and he tried to make love to her but when she resisted after a few
kisses he knew that she really meant no and stopped. Again he took his defeat
with great good humor. “I told you I wouldn’t.” Lucy said with half-guilty
reproach.
“You would have been awfully insulted if I didn’t even try,”
Jules said. And she had to laugh because it was true.
The next few months they became best friends. It wasn’t love
because they didn’t make love, Lucy wouldn’t let him. She could see he was
puzzled by her refusal but not hurt the way most men would be and that made her
trust him even more. She found out that beneath his professional doctor’s
exterior he was wildly fun-loving and reckless. On weekends he drove a souped-up
MG in the California races. When he took a vacation he went down into the
interior of Mexico, the real wild country, he told her, where strangers were
murdered for their shoes and life was as primitive as a thousand years ago.
Quite accidentally she learned that he was a surgeon and had been connected
with a famous hospital in New York.
All this made her more pooled than ever at his having taken
the job at the hotel. When she asked him about it, Jules said, “You tell me
your dark secret and I’ll tell you mine.
She blushed and let the matter drop. Jules didn’t pursue it
either and their relationship continued, a warm friendship that she counted on
more than she realized.
* * *
Now, sitting at the side of the pool with Jules’ blond head
in her lap, she felt an overwhelming tenderness for him. Her loins ached and
without realizing it her fingers sensuously stroked the skin of his neck. He
seemed to be sleeping, not noticing, and she became excited just by the feel of
him against her. Suddenly he raised his head from her lap and stood up. He took
her by the hand and led her over the grass on to the cement walk. She followed
him dutifully even when he led her into one of the cottages that held his
private apartment. When they were inside he fixed them both big drinks. After
the blazing sun and her own sensuous thoughts the drink went to her head and
made her dizzy. Then Jules had his arms around her and their bodies, naked
except for scanty bathing suits, were pressed against each other. Lucy was murmuring.
“Don’t,” but there was no conviction in her voice and Jules paid no attention
to her. He quickly stripped her bathing bra off so that he could fondle her
heavy breasts, kissed them and then stripped off her bathing trunks and as he
did so kept kissing her body, her rounded
belly and the insides of her thighs. He stood up, struggling
out of his own bathing shorts and embracing her, and then, naked in each
other’s arms, they were lying on his bed and she could feel him entering her
and it was enough, just the slight touch, for her to reach her climax and then
in the second afterward she could read in the motions of his body, his
surprise. She felt the overwhelming shame she had felt before she knew Sonny,
but Jules was twisting her body over the edge of the bed, positioning her legs
a certain way and she let him control her limbs and her body, and then he was
entering her again and kissing her and this time she could feel him but more
important she could tell that he was feeling something too and coming to his
climax.
When he rolled off her body, Lucy huddled into one corner of
the bed and began to cry. She felt so ashamed. And then she was shockingly
surprised to hear Jules laugh softly and say, “You poor benighted Eye-talian
girl, so that’s why you kept refusing me all these months? You dope.” He said
“you dope” with such friendly affection that she turned toward him and he took
her naked body against his saying, “You are medieval, you are positively
medieval.” But the voice was soothingly comforting as she continued to weep.
Jules lit a cigarette and put it in her mouth so that she
choked on the smoke and had to stop crying. “Now listen to me,” he said, “if
you had had a decent modern raising with a family culture that was part of the
twentieth century your problem would have been solved years ago. Now let me
tell you what your problem is: it’s not the equivalent of being ugly, of having
bad skin and squinty eyes that facial surgery really doesn’t solve. Your
problem is like having a wart or a mole on your chin, or an improperly formed
ear. Stop thinking of it in sexual terms. Stop thinking in your head that you
have a big box no man can love because it won’t give his penis the necessary
friction. What you have is a pelvic malformation and what we surgeons call a
weakening of the pelvic floor. It usually comes after child-bearing but it can
be simply bad bone structure. It’s a common condition and many women live a
life of misery because of it when a simple operation could fix them up. Some
women even commit suicide because of it. But I never figured you for that
condition because yon have such a beautiful body. I thought it was
psychological, since I know your story, you told it to me often enough, you and
Sonny. But let me give you a thorough physical examination and I can tell you
just exactly how much work will have to be done. Now go in and take a shower.”
Lucy went in and took her shower. Patiently and over her
protests, Jules made her lie on the bed, legs spread apart. He had an extra
doctor’s bag in his apartment and it was
open. He also had a small glass-topped table by the bed
which held some other instruments. He was all business now, examining her,
sticking his fingers inside her and moving them around. She was beginning to
feel humiliated when he kissed her on the navel and said, almost
absentmindedly, “First time I’ve enjoyed my work.” Then he flipped her over and
thrust a finger in her rectum, feeling around, but his other hand was stroking
her neck affectionately. When he was finished he turned her right side up
again, kissed her tenderly on the mouth and said, “Baby, I’m going to build you
a whole new thing down there, and then I’ll try it out personally. It will be a
medical first, I’ll be able to write a paper on it for the official journals.”
Jules did everything with such good-humored affection, he so
obviously cared for her, that Lucy got over her shame and embarrassment. He
even had the medical textbook down off its shelf to show her a case like her
own and the surgical procedure to correct it. She found herself quite
interested.
“It’s a health thing too,” Jules said. “If you don’t get it
corrected you’re going to have a hell of a lot of trouble later on with your whole
plumbing system. The structure becomes progressively weaker unless it’s
corrected by surgery. It’s a damn shame that old-fashioned prudery keeps a lot
of doctors from properly diagnosing and correcting the situation, and a lot of
women from complaining about it.”
“Don’t talk about it, please don’t talk
about it,” Lucy said.
He could see that she was still to some extent ashamed of
her secret, embarrassed by her “ugly defect.” Though to his medically trained
mind this seemed the height of silliness, he was sensitive enough to identify
with her. It also put him on the right track to making her feel better.
“OK, I know your secret so now I’ll tell you mine,” he said.
“You always ask me what I’m doing in this town, one of the youngest and most
brilliant surgeons in the East.” He was mocking some newspaper reports about
himself. “The truth is that I’m an abortionist, which in itself is not so bad,
so is half the medical profession; but I got caught. I had a friend, a doctor
named Kennedy, we interned together, and he’s a really straight guy but he said
he’d help me. I understand Tom Hagen had told him if he ever needed help on
anything the Corleone Family was indebted to him. So he spoke to Hagen. The
next thing I know the charges were dropped, but the Medical Association and the
Eastern establishment had me blacklisted. So the Corleone Family got me this
job out here. I make a good living. I do a job that has to be done. These show
girls are always getting
knocked up and aborting them is the easiest thing in the
world if they come to me right away. I curette ‘em like you scrape a frying
pan. Freddie Corleone is a real terror. By my count he’s knocked up fifteen
girls while I’ve been here. I’ve seriously considered giving him a
father-to-son talk about sex. Especially since I’ve had to treat him three
times for clap and once for syphilis. Freddie is the original bareback rider.”
Jules stopped talking. He had been deliberately indiscreet,
something he never did, so that Lucy would know that other people, including
someone she knew and feared a little like Freddie Corleone, also had shameful
secrets.
“Think of it as a piece of elastic in your body that has
lost its elasticity,” Jules said. “By cutting out a piece, you make it tighter,
snappier.”
“I’ll think about it,” Lucy said, but she was sure she was
going to go through with it, she trusted Jules absolutely. Then she thought of
something else. “How much will it cost?”
Jules frowned. “I haven’t the facilities here for surgery
like that and I’m not the expert at it. But I have a friend in Los Angeles
who’s the best in the field and has facilities at the best hospital. In fact he
tightens up all the movie stars, when those dames find out that getting their
faces and breasts lifted isn’t the whole answer to making a man love them. He
owes me a few favors so it won’t cost anything. I do his abortions for him.
Listen, if it weren’t unethical I’d tell you the names of some of the movie sex
queens who have had the operation.”
She was immediately curious. “Oh, come on, tell me,” she
said. “Come on.” It would be a delicious piece of gossip and one of the things
about Juice was that she could show her feminine love of gossip without him
making fun of it.
“I’ll tell you if you have dinner with me and spend the
night with me,” Jules said. “We have a lot of lost time to make up for because
of your silliness.”
Lucy felt an overwhelming affection to him for being so kind
and she was able to say, “You don’t have to sleep with me, you know you won’t
enjoy it the way I am now.”
Jules burst out laughing. “You dope, you incredible dope.
Didn’t you ever hear of any other way of making love, far more ancient, far
more civilized. Are you really that innocent?”
“Oh that,” she said..
“Oh that,” he mimicked her. “Nice girls don’t do that, manly
men don’t do that. Even in the year 1948. Well, baby, I can take you to the
house of a little old lady right here is Las
Vegas who was the youngest madam of the most popular
whorehouse in the wild west days, back is 1880, I think it was. She likes to
talk about the old days. You know what she told me? That these gunslingers,
those manly, virile, straight-shooting cowboys would always ask the girls for a
‘French,’ what we actors call fellatio, what you call ‘oh that.’ Did you ever
think of doing ‘oh that’ with your beloved Sonny?”
For the first time she truly surprised him. She turned on
him with what he could think of only as a Mona Lisa smile (his scientific mind
immediately darting off on a tangent, could this be the solving of that
centuries-old mystery?) and said quietly, “I did everything with Sonny.” It was
the first time she had ever admitted anything like that to anyone.
Two weeks later Jules Segal stood in the operating room of
the Los Angeles hospital and watched his friend Dr. Frederick Kellner perform
the specialty. Before Lucy was put under anesthesia, Jules leaned over and
whispered, “I told him you were my special girl so he’s going to put in some
real tight walls.” But the preliminary pill had already made her dopey and she
didn’t laugh or smile. His teasing remark did take away some of the terror of
the operation.
Dr. Kellner made his incision with the confidence of a pool
shark making an easy shot. The technique of any operation to strengthen the
pelvic floor required the accomplishment of two objectives. The musculofibrous
pelvic sling had to be shortened so that the slack was taken up. And of course
the vaginal opening, the weak spot itself in the pelvic floor, had to be
brought forward, brought under the pubic arch and so relieved from the line of
direct pressure above. Repairing the pelvic sling was called perincorrhaphy.
Suturing the vaginal wall was called colporrhaphy.
Jules saw that Dr. Kellner was working carefully now, the
big danger in the cutting was going too deep and hitting the rectum. It was a
fairly uncomplicated case, Jules had studied all the X rays and tests. Nothing
should go wrong except that in surgery something could always go wrong.
Kellner was working on the diaphragm sling, the T forceps
held the vaginal flap, and exposing the ani muscle and the fasci which formed
its sheath. Kellner’s gauze-covered fingers were pushing aside loose connective
tissue. Jules kept his eyes on the vaginal wall for the appearance of the
veins, the telltale danger signal of injuring the rectum. But old Kellner knew
his stuff. He was building a new snatch as easily as a carpenter nails together
two-by-four studs.
Kenner was trimming away the excess
vaginal wall using the fastening-down stitch to
close the “bite” taken out of the tissue of the redundant
angle, insuring that no troublesome projections would form. Kellner was trying
to insert three fingers into the narrowed opening of the lumen, then two. He
just managed to get two fingers in, probing deeply and for a moment he looked
up at Jules and his china-blue eyes over the gauze mask twinkled as though
asking if that was narrow enough. Then he was busy again with his sutures.
It was all over. They wheeled Lucy out to the recovery room
and Jules talked to Kellner. Kellner was cheerful, the best sign that
everything had gone well. “No complications at all, my boy,” he told Jules.
“Nothing growing in there, very simple case. She has wonderful body tone,
unusual in these cases and now she’s in first-class shape for fun and games. I
envy you, my boy. Of course you’ll have to wait a little while but then I
guarantee you’ll like my work.”
Jules laughed. “You’re a true Pygmalion,
Doctor. Really, you were marvelous.”
Dr. Kellner grunted. “That’s all child’s play, like your
abortions. If society would only be realistic, people like you and I, really
talented people, could do important work and leave this stuff for the hacks. By
the way, I’ll be sending you a girl next week, a very nice girl, they seem to
be the ones who always get in trouble. That will make us all square for this
job today.”
Jules shook his hand. “Thanks, Doctor. Come out yourself
sometime and I’ll see that you get all the courtesies of the house.”
Kellner gave him a wry smile. “I gamble every day, I don’t
need your roulette wheels and crap tables. I knock heads with fate too often as
it is. You’re going to waste out there, Jules. Another couple of years and you
can forget about serious surgery. You won’t be up to it.” He turned away.
Jules knew it was not meant as a reproach but as a warning.
Yet it took the heart out of him anyway. Since Lucy wouldn’t be out of the
recovery room for at least twelve hours, he went out on the town and got drunk.
Part of getting drunk was his feeling of relief that everything had worker out
so well with Lucy.
* * *
The next morning when he went to the hospital to visit her
he was surprised to find two men at her bedside and flowers all over the room.
Lucy was propped up on pillows, her face radiant. Jules was surprised because
Lucy had broken with her family and had told him not to notify them unless
something went wrong. Of course Freddie Corleone knew
she was in the hospital for a minor operation; that had been
necessary so that they both could get time off, and Freddie had told Jules that
the hotel would pick up all the bills for Lucy.
Lucy was introducing them and one of the men Jules recognized
instantly. The famous Johnny Fontane. The other was a big, muscular,
snotty-looking Italian guy whose name was Nino Valenti. They both shook hands
with Jules and then paid no further attention to him. They were kidding Lucy,
talking about the old neighborhood in New York, about people and events Jules
had no way of sharing. So he said to Lucy, “I’ll drop by later, I have to see
Dr. Kellner anyway.”
But Johnny Fontane was turning the charm on him. “Hey,
buddy, we have to leave ourselves, you keep Lucy company. Take good care of
her, Doc.” Jules noticed a peculiar hoarseness in Johnny Fontane’s voice and
remembered suddenly that the man hadn’t sung in public for over a year now,
that he had won the Academy Award for his acting. Could the man’s voice have
changed so late in life and the papers keeping it a secret, everybody keeping
it a secret? Jules loved inside gossip and kept listening to Fontane’s voice in
an attempt to diagnose the trouble. It could be simple strain, or too much
booze and cigarettes or even too much women. The voice had an ugly timbre to
it, he could never be called the sweet crooner anymore.
“You sound like you have a cold,” Jules
said to Johnny Fontane.
Fontane said politely, “Just strain, I tried to sing last
night. I guess I just can’t accept the fact that my voice changed, getting old
you know.” He gave Jules a what-the-hell grin.
Jules said casually, “Didn’t you get a doctor to look at it?
Maybe it’s something that can be fixed.”
Fontane was not so charming now. He gave Jules a long cool
look. “That’s the first thing I did nearly two years ago. Best specialists. My
own doctor who’s supposed to be the top guy out here in California. They told
me to get a lot of rest. Nothing wrong, just getting older. A man’s voice
changes when he gets older.”
Fontane ignored him after that, paying attention to Lucy,
charming her as he charmed all women. Jules kept listening to the voice. There
had to be a growth on those vocal cords. But then why the hell hadn’t the
specialists spotted it? Was it malignant and inoperable? Then there was other
stuff.
He interrupted Fontane to ask, “When was the last time you
got examined by a specialist?”
Fontane was obviously irritated but
trying. to be polite for Lucy’s sake. “About eighteen months ago.” he said.
“Does your own doctor take a look once
in a while?” Jules asked.
“Sure he does,” Johnny Fontane said
irritably. “He gives me a codeine spray and checks me out. He told me it’s just
my voice aging, that all the drinking and smoking and other stuff. Maybe you
know more than he does?”
Jules asked, “What’s his name?”
Fontane said with just a faint flicker
of pride, “Tucker, Dr. James Tucker. What do you think of him?”
The name was familiar, linked to famous
movie stars, female, and to an expensive health farm.
“He’s a sharp dresser,” Jules said with
a grin.
Fontane was angry now. “You think
you’re a better doctor than he is?”
Jules laughed. “Are you a better singer
than Carmen Lombardo?” He was surprised to see Nino Valenti break up in
laughter, banging his head on his chair. The joke hadn’t been that good. Then
on the wings of those guffaws he caught the smell of bourbon and knew that even
this early in the morning Mr. Valenti, whoever the hell he was, was at least
half drunk.
Fontane was grinning at his friend.
“Hey, you’re supposed to be laughing at my jokes, not his.” Meanwhile Lucy
stretched out her hand to Jules and drew him to her bedside.
“He looks like a bum but he’s a brilliant surgeon,” LUCY
told them. “If he says he’s better than Dr. Tucker then he’s better than Dr.
Tucker. You listen to him, Johnny.”
The nurse came in and told them they
would have to leave. The resident was going to do some work on Lucy and needed
privacy. Jules was amused to see Lucy turn her head away so when Johnny Fontane
and Nino Valenti kissed her they would hit her cheek instead of her mouth, but
they seemed to expect it. She let Jules kiss her on the mouth and whispered,
“Come back this afternoon, please?” he nodded.
Out in the corridor, Valenti asked him,
“What was the operation for? Anything serious?”
Jules shook his head. “Just a little
female plumbing. Absolutely routine, please believe me. I’m more concerned than
you are, I hope to marry the girl.”
They were looking at him appraisingly
so he asked, “How did you find out she was in the
hospital?”
“Freddie called us and asked us to look in,” Fontane said.
“We all grew up in the same neighborhood. Lucy was maid of honor when Freddie’s
sister got married.”
“Oh,” Jules said. He didn’t let on that he knew the whole
story, perhaps because they were so cagey about protecting Lucy and her affair
with Sonny.
As they walked down the corridor, Jules said to Fontane, “I
have visiting doctor’s privileges here, why don’t you let me have a look at
your throat?”
Fontane shook his head. “I’m in a
hurry.”
Nino Valenti said, “That’s a million-dollar throat, he can’t
have cheap doctors looking down it.” Jules saw Valenti was grinning at him,
obviously on his side.
Jules said cheerfully, “I’m no cheap doctor. I was the
brightest young surgeon and diagnostician on the East Coast until they got me
on an abortion rap.”
As he had known it would, that made them take him seriously.
By admitting his crime he inspired belief in his claim of high competence.
Valenti recovered first. “If Johnny can’t use you, I got a girl friend I want
you to look at, not at her throat though.”
Fontane said to him nervously, “How
long will you take?”
“Ten minutes,” Jules said. It was a lie but he believed in
telling lies to people. Truth telling and medicine just didn’t go together
except in dire emergencies, if then.
“OK,” Fontane said. His voice was
darker, hoarser, with fright.
Jules recruited a nurse and a consulting room. It didn’t
have everything he needed but there was enough. In less than ten minutes he
knew there was a growth on the vocal cords, that was easy. Tucker, that
incompetent sartorial son of a bitch of a Hollywood phony, should have been
able to spot it. Christ, maybe the guy didn’t even have a license and if he did
it should be taken away from him. Jules didn’t pay any attention to the two men
now. He picked up the phone and asked for the throat man at the hospital to
come down. Then he swung around and said to Nino Valenti, “I think it might be
a long wait for you, you’d better leave.”
Fontane stared at him in utter disbelief. “You son of a
bitch, you think you’re going to keep me here? You think you’re going to fuck
around with my throat?”
Jules, with more pleasure than he would have thought
possible, gave it to him straight between the eyes. “You can do whatever you
like,” he said. “You’ve got a growth of
some sort on your vocal cords, in your larynx. If you stay
here the next few hours, we can nail it down, whether it’s malignant or
nonmalignant. We can make a decision for surgery or treatment. I can give you
the whole story. I can give you the name of a top specialist in America and we
can have him out here on the plane tonight, with your money that is, and if I
think it necessary. But you can walk out of here and see your quack buddy or
sweat while you decide to see another doctor, or get referred to somebody
incompetent. Then if it’s malignant and gets big enough they’ll cut out your
whole larynx or you’ll die. Or you can just sweat. Stick here with me and we
can get it all squared away in a few hours. You got anything more important to
do?”
Valenti said, “Let’s stick around, Johnny, what the hell.
I’ll go down the hall and call the studio. I won’t tell them anything, just
that we’re held up. Then I’ll come back here and keep you company.”
It proved to be a very long afternoon but a rewarding one.
The diagnosis of the staff throat man was perfectly sound as far as Jules could
see after the X rays and swab analysis. Halfway through, Johnny Fontane, his
mouth soaked with iodine, retching over the roll of gauze stuck in his mouth,
tried to gait. Nino Valenti grabbed him by the shoulders and slammed him back
into a chair. When it was all over Jules grinned at Fontane and said, “Warts.”
Fontane didn’t grasp it. Jules said again. “Just some warts.
We’ll slice them right off like skin off baloney. In a few months you’ll be
OK.”
Valenti let out a yell but Fontane was still frowning. “How
about singing afterward, how will it affect my singing?”
Jules shrugged. “On that there’s no guarantee. But since you
can’t sing now what’s the difference?”
Fontane looked at him with distaste. “Kid, you don’t know
what the hell you’re talking about. You act like you’re giving me good news
when what you’re telling me is maybe I won’t sing anymore. Is that right, maybe
I won’t sing anymore?”
Finally Jules was disgusted. He’d operated as a real doctor
and it had been a pleasure. He had done this bastard a real favor and he was
acting as if he’d been done dirt. Jules said coldly, “Listen, Mr. Fontane, I’m
a doctor of medicine and you can call me Doctor, not kid. And I did give you
very good news. When I brought you down here I was certain that you had a
malignant growth in your larynx which would entail cutting out your whole voice
box. Or which could kill you. I was worried that I might have to tell you that
you
were a dead man. And I was so delighted when I could say the
word ‘warts.’ Because your singing gave me so much pleasure, helped me seduce
girls when I was younger and you’re a real artist. But also you’re a very
spoiled guy. Do you think because you’re Johnny Fontane you can’t get cancer?
Or a brain tumor that’s inoperable. Or a failure of the heart? Do you think
you’re never going to die? Well, it’s not all sweet music and if you want to
see real trouble take a walk through this hospital and you’ll sing a love song
about warts. So just stop the crap and get on with what you have to do. Your
Adolphe Menjou medical man can get you the proper surgeon but if he tries to
get into the operating room I suggest you have him arrested for attempted
murder.”
Jules started to walk out of the room when Valenti said,
“Attaboy, Doc, that’s telling him.”
Jules whirled around and said, “Do you
always get looped before noontime?”
Valenti said, “Sure,” and grinned at him and with such good
humor that Jules said more gently than he had meant to, “You have to figure you’ll
be dead in five years if you keep that up.”
Valenti was lumbering up to him with little dancing steps.
He threw his arms around Jules, his breath stank of bourbon. He was laughing
very hard. “Five years?” he asked still’ laughing. “Is it going to take that
long?”
* * *
A month after her operation Lucy Mancini sat beside the
Vegas hotel pool, one hand holding a cocktail, the other hand stroking Jules’
head, which lay in her lap.
“You don’t have to build up your courage,” Jules said
teasingly. “I have champagne waiting in our suite.”
“Are you sure it’s OK so soon?” Lucy
asked.
“I’m the doctor,” Jules said. “Tonight’s the big night. Do
you realize I’ll be the first surgeon in medical history who tried out the
results of his ‘medical first’ operation? You know, the Before and After. I’m
going to enjoy writing it up for the journals. Let’s see, ‘while the Before was
distinctly pleasurable for psychological reasons and the sophistication of the
surgeon-instructor, the post-operative coitus was extremely rewarding strictly
for its neurological”– he stopped talking because Lucy had yanked on his hair
hard enough for him to yell with pain.
She smiled down at him. “If you’re not
satisfied tonight I can really say it’s your fault,”
she said.
“I guarantee my work. I planned it even though I just let
old Kellner do the manual labor,” Jules said. “Now let’s just rest up, we have
a long night of research ahead.”
When they went up to their suite– they were living together
now– Lucy found a surprise waiting: a gourmet supper and next to her champagne
glass, a jeweler’s box with a huge diamond engagement ring inside it.
“That shows you how much confidence I have in my work,”
Jules said. “Now let’s see you earn it.”
He was very tender, very gentle with her. She was a little
scary at first, her flesh jumping away from his touch but then, reassured, she
felt her body building up to a passion she had never known, and when they were
done the first time and Jules whispered, “I do good work,” she whispered back,
“Oh, yes, you do; yes, you do.” And they both laughed to each other as they
started making love again.
Book Six
Chapter 23
After five months of exile in Sicily, Michael Corleone came
finally to understand his father’s character and his destiny. He came to
understand men like Luca Brasi, the ruthless caporegime Clemenza, his mother’s
resignation and acceptance of her role. For in Sicily he saw what they would
have been if they had chosen not to struggle against their fate. He understood
why the Don always said, “A man has only one destiny.” He came to understand
the contempt for authority and legal government, the hatred for any man who
broke omerta, the law of silence.
Dressed in old clothes and a billed cap, Michael had been
transported from the ship docked at Palermo to the interior of the Sicilian
island, to the very heart of a province controlled by the Mafia, where the
local capo-mafioso was greatly indebted to his father for some past service.
The province held the town of Corleone, whose name the Don had taken when he
emigrated to America so long ago. But there were no longer any of the Don’s
relatives alive. The women had died of old age. All the men had been killed in
vendettas or had also emigrated, either to America, Brazil or to some other
province on the Italian mainland. He was to learn later that this small
poverty-stricken town had the highest murder rate of any place in the world.
Michael was installed as a guest in the
home of a bachelor uncle of the capo-mafioso.
The uncle, in his seventies, was also the doctor for the
district. The capo-mafioso was a man in his late fifties named Don Tommasino
and he operated as the gabbellotto for a huge estate belonging to one of
Sicily’s most noble families. The gabbellotto, a sort of overseer to the
estates of the rich, also guaranteed that the poor would not try to claim land
not being cultivated, would not try to encroach in any way on the estate, by
poaching or trying to farm it as squatters. In short, the gabbellotto was a
mafioso who for a certain sum of money protected the real estate of the rich
from all claims made on it by the poor, legal or illegal. When any poor peasant
tried to implement the law which permitted him to buy uncultivated land, the
gabbellotto frightened him off with threats of bodily harm or death. It was
that simple.
Don Tommasino also controlled the water rights in the area
and vetoed the local building of any new dams by the Roman government. Such
dams would ruin the lucrative business of selling water from the artesian wells
he controlled, make water too cheap, ruin the whole important water economy so
laboriously built up over hundreds of years. However, Don Tommasino was an
old-fashioned Mafia chief and would have nothing to do with dope traffic or
prostitution. In this Don Tommasino was at odds with the new breed of Mafia
leaders springing up in big cities like Palermo, new men who, influenced by
American gangsters deported to Italy, had no such scruples.
The Mafia chief was an extremely portly man, a “man with a
belly,” literally as well as is the figurative sense that meant a man able to
inspire fear in his fellow men. Under his protection, Michael had nothing to
fear, yet it was considered necessary to keep the fugitive’s identity a secret.
And so Michael was restricted to the walled estate of Dr. Taza, the Don’s
uncle.
Dr. Taza was tall for a Sicilian, almost six feet, and had
ruddy cheeks and snow-white hair. Though in his seventies, he went every week
to Palermo to pay his respects to the younger prostitutes of that city, the
younger the better. Dr. Taza’s other vice was reading. He read everything and
talked about what he read to his fellow townsmen, patients who were illiterate
peasants, the estate shepherds, and this gave him a local reputation for
foolishness. What did books have to do with them?
In the evenings Dr. Taza, Don Tommasino and Michael sat in
the huge garden populated with these marble statues that on this island seemed
to grow out of the garden as magically as the black heady grapes. Dr. Taza
loved to tell stories about the Mafia and its exploits over the centuries and
in Michael Corleone he had a fascinated listener. There were times when even
Don Tommasino would be carried away by the
balmy air, the fruity, intoxicating wine, the elegant and
quiet comfort of the garden, and tell a story from his own practical
experience. The doctor was the legend, the Don the reality.
In this antique garden, Michael Corleone learned about the
roots from which his father grew. That the word “Mafia” had originally meant
place of refuge. Then it became the name for the secret organization that
sprang up to fight against the rulers who had crushed the country and its people
for centuries. Sicily was a land that had been more cruelly raped than any
other in history. The Inquisition had tortured rich and poor alike. The
landowning barons and the princes of the Catholic Church exercised absolute
power over the shepherds and farmers. The police were the instruments of their
power and so identified with them that to be called a policeman is the foulest
insult one Sicilian can hurl at another.
Faced with the savagery of this absolute power, the
suffering people learned never to betray their anger and their hatred for fear
of being crushed. They learned never to make themselves vulnerable by uttering
any sort of threat since giving such a warning insured a quick reprisal. They
learned that society was their enemy and so when they sought redress for their
wrongs they went to the rebel underground, the Mafia. And the Mafia cemented
its power by originating the law of silence, the omerta. In the countryside of
Sicily a stranger asking directions to the nearest town will not even receive
the courtesy of an answer. And the greatest crime any member of the Mafia could
commit would be to tell the police the name of the man who had just shot him or
done him any kind of injury. Omerta became the religion of the people. A woman
whose husband has been murdered would not tell the police the name of her
husband’s murderer, not even of her child’s murderer,, her daughter’s raper.
Justice had never been forthcoming from the authorities and
so the people had always gone to the Robin Hood Mafia. And to some extent the
Mafia still fulfilled this role. People turned to their local capo-mafioso for
help in every emergency. He was their social worker, their district captain
ready with a basket of food and a job, their protector.
But what Dr. Taza did not add, what Michael learned on his
own in the months that followed, was that the Mafia in Sicily had become the
illegal arm of the rich and even the auxiliary police of the legal and
political structure. It had become a degenerate capitalist structure, anti-communist,
anti-liberal, placing its own taxes on every form of business endeavor no
matter how small.
Michael Corleone understood for the first time why men like
his father chose to become thieves and murderers rather than members of the
legal society. The poverty and fear and degradation were too awful to be
acceptable to any man of spirit. And in America some emigrating Sicilians had
assumed there would be an equally cruel authority.
Dr. Taza offered to take Michael into Palermo with him on
his weekly visit to the bordello but Michael refused. His flight to Sicily had
prevented him from getting proper medical treatment for his smashed jaw and he
now carried a memento from Captain McCluskey on the left side of his face. The
bones had knitted badly, throwing his profile askew, giving him the appearance
of depravity when viewed from that side. He had always been vain about his
looks and this upset him more than he thought possible. The pain that came and
went he didn’t mind at all, Dr. Taza gave him some pills that deadened it. Taza
offered to treat his face but Michael refused. He had been there long enough to
learn that Dr. Taza was perhaps the worst physician in Sicily. Dr. Taza read
everything but his medical literature, which he admitted he could not
understand. He had passed his medical exams through the good offices of the
most important Mafia chief in Sicily who had made a special trip to Palermo to
confer with Taza’s professors about what grades they should give him. And this
too showed how the Mafia in Sicily was cancerous to the society it inhabited.
Merit meant nothing. Talent meant nothing. Work meant nothing. The Mafia
Godfather gave you your profession as a gift.
Michael had plenty of time to think things out. During the
day he took walks in the countryside, always accompanied by two of the
shepherds attached to Don Tommasino’s estate. The shepherds of the island were
often recruited to act as the Mafia’s hired killers and did their job simply to
earn money to live. Michael thought about his father’s organization. If it
continued to prosper it would grow into what had happened here on this island,
so cancerous that it would destroy the whole country. Sicily was already a land
of ghosts, its men emigrating to every other country on earth to be able to
earn their bread, or simply to escape being murdered for exercising their
political and economic freedoms.
On his long walks the most striking thing in Michael’s eyes
was the magnificent beauty of the country; he walked through the orange
orchards that formed shady deep caverns through the countryside with their
ancient conduits splashing water out of the fanged mouths of great snake stones
carved before Christ. Houses built like ancient Roman villas, with huge marble
portals and great vaulted rooms, falling into ruins or inhabited by stray
sheep. On the horizon the bony hills shone like picked bleached bones piled
high.
Gardens and fields, sparkly green, decorated the desert landscape
like bright emerald necklaces. And sometimes he walked as far as the town of
Corleone, its eighteen thousand people strung out in dwellings that pitted the
side of the nearest mountain, the mean hovels built out of black rock quarried
from that mountain. In the last year there had been over sixty murders in
Corleone and it seemed that death shadowed the town. Further on, the wood of
Ficuzza broke the savage monotony of arable plain.
His two shepherd bodyguards always carried their luparas
with them when accompanying Michael on his walks. The deadly Sicilian shotgun
was the favorite weapon of the Mafia. Indeed the police chief sent by Mussolini
to clean the Mafia out of Sicily had, as one of his first steps, ordered all
stone walls in Sicily to be knocked down to not more than three feet in height
so that murderers with their luparas could not use the walls as ambush points
for their assassinations. This didn’t help much and the police minister solved
his problem by arresting and deporting to penal colonies any male suspected of
being a mafioso.
When the island of Sicily was liberated by the Allied
Armies, the American military government officials believed that anyone
imprisoned by the Fascist regime was a democrat and many of these mafiosi were
appointed as mayors of villages or interpreters to the military government.
This good fortune enabled the Mafia to reconstitute itself and become more
formidable than ever before.
The long walks, a bottle of strong wine at night with a
heavy plate of pasta and meat, enabled Michael to sleep. There were books in
Italian in Dr. Taza’s library and though Michael spoke dialect Italian and had
taken some college courses in Italian, his reading of these books took a great
deal of effort and time. His speech became almost accentiess and, though he
could never pass as a native of the district, it would be believed that he was
one of those strange Italians from the far north of Italy bordering the Swiss
and Germans.
The distortion of the left side of his face made him more
native. It was the kind of disfigurement common in Sicily because of the lack
of medical care. The little injury that cannot lie patched up simply for lack
of money. Many children, many men, bore disfigurements that in America would
have been repaired by minor surgery or sophisticated medical treatments.
Michael often thought of Kay, of her smile, her body, and
always felt a twinge o conscience at leaving her so brutally without a word of
farewell. Oddly enough his
conscience was never troubled by the two men he had
murdered; Sollozzo had tried to kill his father, Captain McCluskey had
disfigured him for life.
Dr. Taza always kept after him about getting surgery done
for his lopsided face, especially when Michael asked him for pain-killing
drugs, the pain getting worse as time went on, and more frequent. Taza
explained that there was a facial nerve below the eye from which radiated a
whole complex of nerves. Indeed, this was the favorite spot for Mafia torturers,
who searched it out on the cheeks of their victims with the needle-fine point
of an ice pick. That particular nerve in Michael’s fee had been injured or
perhaps there was a splinter of bone lanced into it. Simple surgery in a
Palermo hospital would permanently relieve the pain.
Michael refused. When the doctor asked why, Michael grinned
and said, “It’s something from home.”
And he really didn’t mind the pain, which was more an ache,
a small throbbing in his skull, like a motored apparatus running in liquid to
purify it.
It was nearly seven months of leisurely rustic living before
Michael felt real boredom. At about this time Don Tommasino became very busy
and was seldom seen at the villa. He was having his troubles with the “new
Mafia” springing up in Palermo, young men who were making a fortune out of the
postwar construction boom in that city. With this wealth they were trying to
encroach on the country fiefs of oldtime Mafia leaders whom they contemptuously
labeled Moustache Petes. Don Tommasino was kept busy defending his domain. And
so Michael was deprived of the old man’s company and had to be content with Dr.
Taza’s stories, which were beginning to repeat themselves.
One morning Michael decided to take a long hike to the
mountains beyond Corleone. He was, naturally, accompanied by the two shepherd
bodyguards. This was not really a protection against enemies of the Corleone
Family. It was simply too dangerous for anyone not a native to go wandering
about by himself. It was dangerous enough for a native. The region was loaded
with bandits, with Mafia partisans fighting against each other and endangering
everybody else in the process. He might also be mistaken for a pagliaio thief.
A pagliaio is a straw-thatched but erected in the fields to
house farming tools and to provide shelter for the agricultural laborers so
that they will not have to carry them on the long walk from their homes in the
village. In Sicily the peasant does not live on the land he cultivates. It is
too dangerous and any arable land, if he owns it, is too precious.
Rather, he lives in his village and at sunrise begins his
voyage out to work in distant fields, a commuter on foot. A worker who arrived
at his pagliaio and found it looted was an injured man indeed. The bread was
taken out of his mouth for that day. The Mafia, after the law proved helpless,
took this interest of the peasant under its protection and solved the problem
in typical fashion. It hunted down and slaughtered all pagliaio thieves. It was
inevitable that some innocents suffered. It was possible that if Michael
wandered past a pagliaio that had just been looted he might be adjudged the
criminal unless he had somebody to vouch for him.
So on one sunny morning he started hiking across the fields
followed by his two faithful shepherds. One of them was a plain simple fellow,
almost moronic, silent as the dead and with a face as impassive as an Indian.
He had the wiry small build of the typical Sicilian before they ran to the fat
of middle age. His name was Calo.
The other shepherd was more outgoing, younger, and had seen
something of the world. Mostly oceans, since he had been a sailor in the
Italian navy during the war and had just had time enough to get himself
tattooed before his ship was sunk and he was captured by the British. But the
tattoo made him a famous man in his village. Sicilians do not often let
themselves be tattooed, they do not have the opportunity nor the inclination.
(The shepherd, Fabrizzio, had done so primarily to cover a splotchy red
birthmark on his belly.) And yet the Mafia market carts had gaily painted
scenes on their sides, beautifully primitive paintings done with loving care.
In any case, Fabrizzio, back is his native village, was not too proud of that
tattoo on his chest, though it showed a subject dear to the Sicilian “honor,” a
husband stabbing a naked man and woman entwined together on the hairy floor of
his belly. Fabrizzio would joke with Michael and ask questions about America,
for of course it was impossible to keep them in the dark about his true
nationality. Still, they did not know exactly who he was except that he was in
hiding and there could be no babbling about him. Fabrizzio sometimes brought
Michael a fresh cheese still sweating the milk that formed it.
They walked along dusty country roads passing donkeys
pulling gaily painted carts. The land was filled with pink flowers, orange
orchards, groves of almond and olive trees, all blooming. That had been one of
the surprises. Michael had expected a barren land because of the legendary
poverty of Sicilians. And yet he had found it a land of gushing plenty,
carpeted with flowers scented by lemon blossoms. It was so beautiful that he
wondered how its people could bear to leave it. How terrible man had been to
his fellow man could be measured by the great exodus from what seemed to be a
Garden of
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