Under any circumstances, Molinari’s was a dark restaurant, with black cypress-plank walls, black leather booths, and red-curtained windows, drawn on every side but the one that faced the bay, where often the only light was a fog-defeated pallor. Today, even those curtains were closed. The usually dim lighting was even lower, the candles were smaller, and the room was filled shoulder to shoulder with dark-haired, olive-skinned people dressed in black. The brightest things in the room were the tablecloths, starched so impossibly white that Fredo found himself squinting. Standing in the middle of the restaurant’s famous marble fountain was a life-sized ice sculpture of Tony Molinari, its hand extended toward the bar. People kept reaching across the water and touching its forehead.
The crowd was bigger than the one at the cemetery-something that anyone who took a bite of anything could have explained. Fredo made his rounds, embracing people and shaking his head about the tragedy and the terrible waste of it all. A few people made cryptic allusions to his promotion to underboss, and Fredo thanked them and said, you know, a man’s got to eat, and then ate. He drank beer so he wouldn’t get drunk. He lacked the charisma his father and brothers had, but as he’d grown older, he’d realized that for that very reason he was better at this kind of thing than they were. He intimidated no one. He was so frankly awkward that women wanted to mother him. Men would see him hovering at the edge of their conversation, hand him a drink, and bring him up to speed on the story they’d been telling. He’d reciprocate; drink with him once, and until the end of time Fredo Corleone would remember your poison. He’d thrived during his years of exile on the hotel side of the casino business because he genuinely liked to see people enjoying themselves, not just because then they’d owe him a favor.
Around the other Corleone men, people behaved like robots, silently rehearsing each word before they dared to speak. Around Fredo, they could be themselves. People liked him. He knew people saw this as a weakness, but that’s where they were wrong. There is no greater natural advantage in life than having your enemy overestimate your faults, Pop had said. Not to him, true. To Sonny. Pop had given Sonny lessons, a lot of times with Fredo sitting right in the room, totally ignored. Sonny heard. Fredo listened.
The room buzzed with speculation about the missing charter pilot known as O’Malley, and people opened up to Fredo about it as they never would have to Mike. He heard every theory under the sun, the most frequent being either that O’Malley was some kind of undercover cop or else that he was somehow connected to the Cleveland family. Both, maybe. But the higher-ranking men had other ideas. Butchie Molinari, for example, as he released Fredo from his embrace, merely whispered, “It’s Fuckface, no?” As he had all day, Fredo said he had no idea whatsoever, which was also something Mike could never have pulled off.
Why did he do this to himself? This endless comparison with his brothers. Fredo stood in front of the gilded mirror in the men’s room. He stood up straight and sucked in his gut. His eyes looked like, how did that song go? Two cherries in a glass of buttermilk. His brothers, he was sure, didn’t waste time comparing themselves with each other, and certainly not with him. He ran his hand through his thinning hair. He’d had enough to drink, that was for sure. He looked at his round face and tried not to see in it the traits he’d inherited from his parents, the stronger version of his jawline that Sonny had, the eyes that were just like Mike’s only closer together. He picked up the glass jar full of combs and tonic and smashed it against his own reflection. Green liquid rained everywhere. The mirror only cracked. Fredo handed C-notes to the man at the sink next to him and to the Negro attendant, who said he understood, we all loved Mr. Tony. Fredo headed through the nearly empty restaurant, past the ice sculpture of Tony Molinari, its forehead gruesomely melted, as if it had taken a hollow-point slug instead of a thousand loving caresses, and out the door into the cool dark, determined to be nobody at all, not even himself.
He ignored the men at the cab stand and, head down, continued down the wharf. It wouldn’t be long, he knew, before the neighborhood turned rough, before he got to the bars full of stevedores and sailors and the back-alley bars that only the most depraved of those men knew about.
He stopped himself. No. Not again.
Ahead was Powell Street. A straight shot to his hotel. A long walk, but it’d do him good. Clear his head. He looked toward the gloomy distant lights of those bars, then up Powell Street. He was pretty sure it went by that old Italian neighborhood, North Beach. He could stop there, take a break, have a coffee, think this Colma thing through. It’d be nice, just the ticket.
The second he turned up Powell he felt a wave of self-congratulatory relief.
By the time he climbed the first big hill, though, he was sweating and having second thoughts. He was too winded to think about his plan or anything else except that he didn’t want a coffee anymore, he wanted something cold, even a beer, what could it hurt?
The street leveled out. The businesses started to have Italian names, but something was wrong. The streets were full of dirty-looking kids in sweaters and dungarees, some of them Negroes, hardly any of them looking especially Italian. He tried to remember when the last time was he’d been down here-’47? ’48? He looked down Vallejo and saw the coffee shop he was thinking of, smelled it a block away, and it still had the same name, Caffè Trieste, which he took as a sign-have the coffee, not a drink-but when he opened the door he caught sight of a redheaded white kid playing the bongos while a Negro in a black sweater stood next to him shouting who the fuck knew what-it was hard to make out over the shouting and finger snapping of the people at the tables. Mulberry-eyed girls, the man might have said. Mint jelly. Turtleneck angel guys.
Fucking Bohemians. He left. Somewhere in this city was a very tall whiskey and water with Fredo Corleone’s name on it.
He stopped in at another Italian place he remembered, Enrico’s, which looked about the same except for the sign outside saying LIVE JAZZ TONIGHT! Bohemians here, too, but the music sounded better, so fuck it. He paid his three bucks and took a seat at the bar. Piano, soprano sax, and a drummer with brushes. Crazy stuff, but Fredo got his drink and bobbed his head along with the syncopated beat. He was the only one in the room in a suit, which for some reason seemed to provoke people into coming up to him and talking to him about the “scene” and telling him about the wonders of reefer. He resisted the impulse to tell them he’d just come from the funeral of the guy who’d made most of the profit off their precious reefer. After another drink he started thinking this combo was about the best goddamned thing he’d ever heard. Before long he was at a table with a big group of people, men and women, even smoking some reefer when it came his way. The band took a break, and a fat Norwegian in a fez took the stage and said that after the intermission he’d read his haikus and the combo would jam along. Fredo felt a hand on his arm. It was a long-faced man with long sideburns, about thirty, in a sweater and taped-together eyeglasses. “I hear you’re with a record label,” the man said, practically blushing.
“That’s what you hear, huh?” Fredo dimly remembered having told this lie when he’d first sat down at the table.
“I got a band that plays here tomorrow,” the man said, and started describing his music in what was probably English. More gibberish. Turtleneck angel guy, Fredo thought. He looked him up and down. A fag, no question.