“Abstemious?” Mike arched his eyebrows. “Where’d you learn that word?”
“I sent my fucking kid to that same fancy school you went to, Mike, that was how I heard about it.” He winked. “Only unlike you he finished it up.”
“He says abstemious? Out loud?”
“How else you say things? You know what else I learned about that word? It’s one of just two words in the whole English language that uses all five vowels and in order.”
“What’s the other one?”
“How the fuck should I know what the other one is? A minute ago, you thought I was too fucking dumb to know how to use even one of them.”
Everyone laughed, and the men got to work.
The little time Hagen had spent as a corporate lawyer, for a meeting half this important and ten percent as detailed, there would have been a squadron of secretaries, scribbling like mad, and still half of what was said would have been lost or distorted. These men of course wrote down nothing and, as tired as they were, could be counted upon to remember everything. They spent three hours chewing through old business, new business, grilled calamari, and pasta e fagioli.
They discussed the toll the war with the Barzinis and Tattaglias had taken on the Family’s business interests. They discussed the accommodations made for the wife and family of Tessio, that saddest and unlikeliest of traitors, friend and partner of Vito Corleone since their youth, and the medical, funeral, and family financial needs of the organization’s other casualties. They discussed the triumph of the erroneous but widely held opinion-among the NYPD and the newspapers, among other crime families, among nearly everyone outside the Corleone Family-that both Tessio and the wife-beating brute Carlo, Mike’s brother-in-law and the de facto murderer of his brother Sonny, had been killed by men dispatched by Barzini or Tattaglia. On top of this, the Corleone Family’s man in the New York D.A.’s office (a classmate of Mike’s at Dartmouth) planned to bring a series of indictments this week charging members of the Tattaglia Family with the murder of Emilio Barzini and charging members of the Barzini Family with the murder of Phillip Tattaglia. Even if, as was likely, these arrests didn’t result in convictions, the FBI would consider the matter closed and stay out of it. Local cops-hundreds of whom had suffered from the lost income as much as any shylock-were happiest with business as usual. The short attention span of the public would soon swerve back, as it reliably does, to bread and circuses. All in all, the current cease-fire stood to be a genuine peace.
“Every ten years,” Clemenza said, shrugging. “We have these things and then we get back to work.” He’d found a whole box of toothpicks in Enzo’s desk and was chewing up a new one every couple minutes. The other men all had cigars or cigarettes going. Clemenza’s doctor had told him to stop smoking. He was trying. “Like clockwork. This one’s my fourth.”
Everyone had, over the years, heard this theory of Clemenza’s. No one said anything.
“So,” Clemenza said. “You think that’s what we got, Mike? Peace?” He even brandished the toothpick like a cigar. “Do we need to call for a meeting of the Commission?”
Michael nodded, more in concentration than assertion. Hagen knew that Michael had failed to present the Commission with a list of the men being initiated tonight. Probably the last thing he’d have wanted was for the Commission to meet. But his face registered nothing. “Rocco?” he said, bowing his head, extending his palm: after you.
That long pause- Hagen noted, impressed-made it look as if Michael were giving the question serious thought and then consulting with a trusted aide. If Sonny had lived and been in charge now, he’d have just blurted out what he thought and been proud of his decisiveness. Michael had inherited and honed his father’s ability to create consensus.
Rocco Lampone took a long puff on his cigar. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, ain’t it? How do we know the war’s over unless someone comes out and says it, huh?”
Michael knitted his fingers together and said nothing, his face utterly blank. The Commission functioned as an executive committee for America ’s twenty-four crime families, with the heads of the top seven or eight Families approving the names of new members, new capos, and new bosses (these were nearly always approved) and arbitrating only the most intractable conflicts. It met as infrequently as possible.
“I’d say yeah,” Lampone finally said, “we got a peace. We got the word of, what? Joe Zaluchi, that’s a given. Molinari, Leo the Milkman, Black Tony Stracci. All but Molinari are on the Commission, right? Forlenza’s leaning our way, right? Any word yet from the Ace?”
“Not yet,” Hagen said. “Geraci’s supposed to call in after they get to that fight.”
“That’s a sure thing,” Rocco said. “Geraci, not the fight. The fight, I like that half-breed nigger lefty, what a sweet cross he’s got. Ain’t even human how fast and smooth it is.”
Clemenza slapped the top of the metal desk four times and arched his eyebrows.
“Anyway, Forlenza makes five,” Rocco said. “We still think Paulie Fortunato’s the new Don of the Barzinis?”
“We do,” Hagen said.
“Then six. He’s a reasonable man, and in addition to that he’s closer to Cleveland than Barzini was. In other words, he’ll do what the Jew does. So that just leaves the other ones.” In lieu of pronouncing the name Tattaglia, Rocco made a filthy Sicilian gesture. His differences with the Tattaglias were personal, visceral, complicated, and many. He’d been the one who burst in on Phillip Tattaglia, surprising him in a bungalow off Sunrise Highway, out on Long Island. Tattaglia was standing there naked except for his gartered silk socks, a hairy man in his seventies, with this teenage prostitute spread out on the bed in front of him, squeezing back tears while he tried to jack off into her open mouth. Lampone put four rounds into the man’s soft gut. The Tattaglias’ organization was in shambles, and the man who’d taken over, Phillip Tattaglia’s brother Rico, had come out of a comfortable retirement in Miami. It seemed unlikely a man like that would have the stomach for more vendettas, but a Tattaglia was still a Tattaglia.
When Mike said nothing, Lampone frowned like a determined schoolkid working to please the teacher. Mike was the youngest man in the room, the youngest Don in America, yet all the others were straining to prove themselves to him. He stood and walked to the place on the wall where a window would have been if there had been a window. “What do you think, Tom?”
“No Commission meeting,” Hagen said, “not if we can avoid it.” Hagen, as Vito’s consigliere, was the only one of them ever to attend such a meeting. He was also the only one ever to attend an even more rare meeting of all the Families, which is what a call for a meeting of the Commission would snowball into. “Reason being, three Commission members have died this year. With that many new men, if they meet, they’ll have to figure out whether to add Louie Russo. No matter what anyone thinks of him personally, with Chicago what it is, they have to say yes. They don’t meet, they can keep him on the hook and say they’ll get to it next time they do meet. Once they meet, Russo’s got to be a part of it, which means a lot of different things could happen. Unpredictable things.”
“Older that guy gets,” Clemenza said, “the more his nose looks like a pecker.”
This made Mike smile. Clemenza had had the same knack with Vito, though, truth be told, it had been a hell of a lot easier to get a smile out of Vito than it was Mike.
“When he got the nickname, his nose was just big,” Clemenza said, inserting toothpick number nine into his little round mouth. “Now the end’s red and shaped exactly like a dickhead. And those eyebrows? Pubic hair. Am I right? All he needs is a vein to stand out on the side of his nose, and Fuckface’ll get thrown in the joint for indecent exposure. Shit, they got Capone for tax evasion.” He shook his head. “Pantywaist arrests”-and here Clemenza grabbed his balls and put on a good Chicago accent-“it’s da Chiacahgo way.”