No one had put a gun to Johnny’s head to sign a contract with the Les Halley Orchestra, yet Vito Corleone had to send a man to put a gun to Halley’s to get him out of it. The Corleones had gotten Jack Woltz to cast him in that war picture, which Johnny would have had in the first place if he hadn’t sport-fucked a starlet Woltz was in love with. Hagen shuddered. After the murders of so many people, how was it possible that what stayed with him in his nightmares was Luca taking a machete and hacking off the head of Woltz’s racehorse? Something Hagen hadn’t even seen. And something Johnny didn’t even know about, since Woltz, as expected, had hushed it up. Another gift from the Corleones: the blessings of ignorance. The Corleones had even bought Fontane an Academy Award. All those favors, and this was how he acted?

The silence in the room thickened.

Fontane shifted his weight from foot to foot. Did he really think he could win a battle of nerves with Michael Corleone?

Finally, Fontane let out a deep breath. “All right, but here’s the second thing.” He pointed to his throat. “I’m sorry as hell, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go on.”

All Michael said was “Is that right?”

Clemenza pursed his lips and flicked a softened toothpick past Fontane’s ear. “I thought Fredo’s doctor friend fixed that. Your throat. The Jew surgeon, what’s-his-face. Jules Stein.”

“Segal,” Johnny corrected. “He did.” He looked around the room. “Which reminds me. You guys seen Fredo? I got something for him. A present. A present from me.”

“His plane was delayed,” Hagen said.

Fontane shrugged. “It’ll wait, I guess,” he said. “Look, fellas, you know me. I’m a pro.” The stage whisper made him seem like one of those women who do it to make men come closer. “My voice is good, but my throat?” He shook his head. “Not a hundred percent. Even so, I been doing these shows here, filling up the joint. Today I had a terrific recording session in L.A. Sometimes you just know. Here’s the rub. On the plane back here, I fell asleep. When I woke up, my throat? Awful sore. So I was thinking-”

“Your first mistake right there,” Clemenza said.

“-I should gargle some salt water and hit the hay. I’m no good like this. Numbnuts could go long.” Morrie “Numbnuts” Streator was Fontane’s long-suffering opening act, a comic he’d rescued from the Catskills. “He’s on now. He’s killin’ ’em. Ask the sarge.”

No one did. The issue here wasn’t how much the guests were enjoying the blue jokes.

“I took the liberty,” Fontane said, “of calling Buzz Fratello. He and Dotty don’t have a show tonight. They could do it. Step in for me. In fact, they’re on their way over right now.”

“Yeah?” said Clemenza, impressed. “The more I see that Buzz, the more I like him.”

“No can do, Johnny,” Hal said. He had not been invited to come in the room and, like Neri, had remained just outside the doorway. “Buzz Fratello and Dotty Ames are under contract across the way.” Meaning the Kasbah, which the Chicago outfit controlled. “Exclusively.”

“They don’t start there until next weekend. This thing’s just a private show, right? A party. It’s no different than someone singing in one of the lounges afterward. We all do that.”

Michael remained still, his eyes on Fontane. After a very long time, Michael reached up and flicked his fingertips backhanded against his own jawbone, a gesture so identical to the late Don’s it gave Hagen chills.

“Mike,” Fontane said. “Michael.” He was getting nowhere. You had to hand it to the guy, though. A different sort of person would have turned around and looked at the other people in the room, trying to read anything he could from the less inscrutable faces. He might even have made a wisecrack-Fontane’s nature, most of the time. But Johnny held his spot. “Don Corleone. I have the greatest respect for you. I mean that. But this? This is just one show.”

Michael folded his hands on the desk. He didn’t even blink. Finally he cleared his throat. After the long stillness, it had the effect of a gunshot.

“What you do,” Michael said, “is of no concern to me. Get out.”

Chapter 10

FRANK FALCONE had a hundred grand on that fight at the Cleveland Armory. He was going to be ringside, he told Nick Geraci, even if it meant Geraci swimming to shore with Falcone lashed to his back. Don Forlenza offered the services of one of his boats. Laughing Sal Narducci pointed out that the bigger ones were already at the fight. There was nothing left but fishing boats unfit to go that far in open water during a storm.

It was not a long flight: maybe fifteen minutes. Geraci told them not to worry, he’d flown in conditions a hundred times worse than this-which of course he had not-and he went to ready the plane. He radioed the tower at Burke Lakefront Airport, which issued a staunch warning not to take off. He pretended not to hear.

The twin-engine airplane carrying Tony Molinari, Frank Falcone, Richard “the Ape” Aspromonte, Lefty Mancuso, and their pilot, officially listed as Gerald O’Malley, lifted off from Rattlesnake Island and into the dark sky. From the moment they were airborne, the flight was a struggle. He was so preoccupied with the challenges the storm threw his way that he wasn’t at all sure if there was anything wrong with the fuel. Probably there wasn’t. He’d checked both tanks before takeoff. He switched to the other tank not so much as a precaution but because he needed to focus on other things. As he strained though the soupy sky to see the lights of Cleveland, he thought he heard the engine sputtering, and without thinking he switched the tanks again and blurted something to the tower about sabotage, which, under these conditions, would have been difficult to assess for a pilot ten times more experienced than Nick Geraci.

The plane made its hapless approach toward Cleveland. The pilot’s last words to the tower were “Sono fottuto.” Translation: “I’m fucked.”

Then, a mile from shore, the plane plowed into the frothy brown chop of Lake Erie.

Geraci had been hit hard playing football in school, much harder in the ring. Once, at Lake Havasu, he’d been in a speedboat driven by his father and slammed into an aluminum dock. The hardest tackle, the most brutal punch, and that speedboat crash he’d somehow survived combined would have felt about half as bad as smacking into Lake Erie in an airplane.

The plane flipped. What felt like a moment later, Geraci was underwater. His door was jammed. He worked his legs free and started stomping a bigger hole in the glass of the windshield. The water was completely black. As he tried to get through the hole, a hand grabbed his arm. It was too dark to know whose hand it was. He tried to pull the man with him, through the hole in the windshield, to safety. The man was stuck. If Geraci hung on, they’d both die. He was about out of breath. The grip was strong, digging deep into the flesh of his arm. Geraci pried off the fingers, feeling and hearing the bones actually break.

Geraci swam free of the sinking wreck. He used the sound of the pounding rain to find the surface. His lungs spasmed and his Adam’s apple bucked. A tingling feeling shot down his arms. He felt a twinge, almost a draining feeling, at the top of his skull. He’d never make it to the top. He was going to breathe water. This was it. Have a good last thought, something worthy, but all he could think of was this filthy water, near home, and how this was where he was going to die. He kept swimming. His mother had loved to swim. His mother! Ah. That was a good last thought. He loved her. She was a good mother, a good woman. He could see her. She was younger than when he’d last seen her. Now she was sipping a martini and reading a movie magazine beside the public pool in his old neighborhood. She was dead, too.