The Godfather returns

It was a traditional Italian cemetery, with pictures of the dead in cameo frames mounted on the marble monument. As Francesca left, she bent to kiss the cold images. Grandma Carmela. Grandpa Vito. Zia Angelina. Uncle Carlo. Her father, Santino Corleone. She looked into his laughing eyes and thought, See you next time, Daddy.

Uncle Fredo was missing and presumed dead, but there was no picture of him here. There was no picture of baby Carmela, either. None had been taken. She’d lived, briefly, but had had no life.

Uncle Mike, as busy as he undoubtedly was, came early, stayed late, and was a tremendous comfort. Not even her mother was able to talk to Francesca as openly about the nightmare of losing a child as Uncle Mike did. And seeing So

Billy was struggling with the baby’s death and, understandably, was having a hard time talking about it.

She was having a hard time not blaming him. It was irrational, she knew. But it seemed like a kind of justice being visited on them for his having wanted her to get an abortion when she had been pregnant with So

On top of that, every time she looked at him, she imagined that he was worrying about being photographed by the police or the FBI while attending a gen-u-ine Mafia funeral. That was probably unfair. She had no idea what he was thinking. But they had been photographed. Evil, heartless bastards. She was starting to understand the oppression her uncle faced every day, that her father had faced every day, too.

Suddenly, on the day she buried her own daughter, it clicked. He’d used his parents’ money and his efforts in the Shea campaign to get the job in the attorney general’s office so he could destroy her family.

That was ridiculous, she immediately realized. She wasn’t thinking clearly. She was emotional, distraught, with crazy hormones ru

Still.

When she’d accused Billy, once, of there having been a crime behind his own family’s fortune, he’d nonchalantly said he was sure there’d been several. Those assholes are capable of anything, he’d said, and he hadn’t been joking. So why was he worried about whatever her family might or might not have done? She knew what her sister would say: Because we’re Italian. It was Kathy who’d found out that the new president’s father had been in business with Grandpa Vito. Bootlegging. A crime that no longer exists. A crime that never should have been a crime, but a crime nonetheless. A generation later, James K. Shea is in the White House and Michael Corleone (again, according to Kathy, who’d gotten it from Aunt Co

A few weeks later, on a transatlantic call Francesca had been working up to since the funeral, she woke her sister up from a deep sleep and told her how much she’d been hurt that Kathy hadn’t come home.

“You had a funeral?” Kathy said. “I thought it was just a miscarriage.”

“Just a miscarriage? And anyway, she lived for-”

“Do you know what time it is here?”

“How could you not know we’d have a funeral? When I lost baby Carmela-”

“You named it? Oh, honey. Honey. You named it after Grandma?”

It.

Francesca hung up.

Even though Jimmy Shea had said that he probably wouldn’t be able to get out to Las Vegas until after his administration’s first hundred days, from the moment Joh

Joh

Joh

“Can you take a message?”

“Of course, Mr. Fontane.”

“Here it is: Get your bird out here before it falls off. Love, JF. In those exact words.”

Later that day, as the news started to get out that the crazy little invasion of Cuba wasn’t just the work of a bunch of angry expatriates but instead had been undertaken with the backing of the U.S. government, Joh