The Godfather returns

Michael summoned Rocco, Clemenza, and Fredo to his home. They huffed upstairs and sat in front of his blond desk in those orange plastic chairs. He asked point-blank if any of them had any idea what happened to Geraci. Each said no with equal vehemence. “It wasn’t you?” Rocco asked and Michael shook his head, and they all seemed surprised. An accident was bad enough, but eventually the people who mattered would learn that the pilot had been Geraci. “Which is when the fan’ll hit the shit,” Clemenza said.

Michael nodded. The only way to fix this mess, he said, was to call a meeting of all the Families, the first since the one his father had convened right after So

Clemenza snorted and said he smelled something rotten in Cleveland, and Michael cocked his head. “I seen Hamlet with that fruit, what’s-his-face. The famous one. Not half bad, once you got past the tights.” He looked at Fredo and Fredo said “What?” and Clemenza shrugged and asked Mike if he figured Forlenza’s men sabotaged the plane or if they were trying to keep Geraci’s identity secret so that people wouldn’t think they’d sabotaged the plane? Since the best way out of this mess would be to point out that the Jew certainly wouldn’t sabotage a plane flown by his own godson, which would open up a whole other can of worms. Maybe it was all just a misguided attempt by Forlenza to protect his godson? Maybe even from us?

Downstairs, Michael’s half-deaf father-in-law had the TV blasting. In a piercing falsetto, little Anthony Corleone sang along to the theme song for a cowboy show.

“Jesus, what a giambott’,” Fredo said. “Makes my head hurt, how many different ways this thing could go.”

Michael nodded, so slowly it was clearly a theatrical pause for thought, not agreement. A necessary pause. He was not, so soon after his brother’s elevation to sotto capo, going to disagree with him forcefully, even in front of men as trusted as Clemenza and Lampone.

“None of this,” Michael said, “brings us closer to finding out what happened to Geraci.”

He leaned across his Danish modern desk. It was time to stop speculating. Time to get down to business.

The next day, Clemenza returned to New York with orders to run his operation as if peace were assured and the crash never happened. His men were to do the same. The day after that, Rocco, who knew the men in Geraci’s crew, also went to New York, where he would remain and oversee those operations until further notice. Fredo, as underboss, would temporarily be in charge of Rocco’s men in Nevada.

The Corleones had long been close to Tony Molinari, who’d protected Fredo in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on his father and whose cooperation had helped make it possible for the Corleones to establish themselves in Las Vegas and now in Tahoe and Reno. Neither Vito nor now Michael had ever regarded Frank Falcone as a serious person. Neither believed that his flashy, second-rate operation possessed either the means or the will to come out from under Chicago ’s apron skirts. Michael might have opted to be represented at neither funeral. Many expected him to make just that decision, and, on the face of it, this might have seemed the more cautious and more prudent of choices. But these are only words-caution, prudence-and they are words that can easily be replaced by other words-hubris, fear, weakness. A man is his actions, public and private, both when watched and when alone.

Fredo, who after all had been the closest of anyone in the organization to Tony Molinari, was dispatched to San Francisco. Michael, accompanied by Tommy Neri and the same two others who’d been hiding in the woods in Lake Tahoe, went to Chicago: the city where Frank Falcone was born, the city where he’d made his bones, was where his own bones, or what remained of them, would be buried. Those who’d known Vito Corleone recognized the logic in Michael’s decision. Keep your friends close, the great Don had said, and your enemies closer.

The ceremony was held in a tiny white clapboard church on the near west side of the city, in the Italian neighborhood known as the Patch, where Falcone had been raised and where his parents had once run a corner grocery. Hot for Chicago in September. The Chicago police had blocked off traffic for two blocks in every direction. Several of the dignitaries-including the lieutenant governor of California, the heavyweight champion of the world, and several movie stars, including Joh

Twenty policemen on horseback (every horse in blinders, because of the incessant flashbulbs) cleared a path through the crowd, and the funeral procession, many of the cars sporting large campaign signs for the politicians and judges inside, made its way to Mt. Carmel Cemetery. Thousands of people followed it on foot. Just inside the main entrance, the procession passed the final resting place of the rotting, syphilitic remains of Al Ca-pone, who died sixteen years after the IRS killed him, and whose own anticlimactic funeral had been attended by a fraction of the people here for Falcone’s. Vito Corleone had sent nothing but flowers.