What everyone at the table agreed to believe for the sake of peace was this: The plane crash in Lake Erie was nobody’s fault. Frank Falcone did in fact bet a hundred grand on that fight at the Cleveland Armory, and he’d insisted on going to see it no matter how bad the storm was. As the plane went down, someone in the tower heard Geraci say the word sabotage, but Geraci was merely thinking aloud in a time of great stress and ruling out sabotage. The thunder and lightning made the radio transmissions difficult to hear. The plane crashed and everyone died on impact except Geraci, who almost did. Don Forlenza learned about the terrible deaths of his recent guests, and he learned that the authorities thought the crash might have been the result of sabotage. Immediately, Don Forlenza made certain that no one in his organization had sabotaged the plane. Then he rescued his injured godson from the hospital. What else was there to do? Had Don Falcone and Don Molinari been killed as a result of sabotage, there was the chance this might be blamed on the Cleveland organization. There was a chance it might be blamed on his godson, who was unconscious-unable to protect himself, unable to answer for himself. Who in this room would not have done the same for his own godson? Also, because Geraci was a member of the Corleone Family, Don Forlenza was concerned that his godson may have been the target of violence by one of the other New York Families. Geraci had regained consciousness. The federal authorities had ruled out sabotage. The crash had been an act of God. Don Corleone had let the other members of the Commission know that the missing pilot was Geraci. As Don Corleone had said then and reasserted now, the fake name on Geraci’s pilot’s license was intended to be a deception to no one but law enforcement officials, no different in kind than the driver’s licenses many of them were carrying now. In this case, the alias had done its job. While every man in this room had known for months that Gerald O’Malley was in fact Fausto Geraci, Jr., the authorities had presumed that O’Malley was the rat-gnawed corpse in that ravine.
What a fitting monument to the four men who died that the discussions initiated to help understand the crash soon expanded themselves to other issues. Soon an agreement for a lasting peace had been struck-an agreement they’d had all come here to ratify.
Much of the official story was true, but no one in that farmhouse believed every word of it.
Though no proof had come to light, there seemed to be little doubt that Louie Russo’s men had penetrated Vincent Forlenza’s little island fortress and sabotaged the plane. After all, the men in that plane did represent all four of Chicago ’s biggest rivals in Las Vegas and the West. The crash had succeeded in making Don Forlenza look like an old fool. The struggles in New York had given Russo an opening, and he’d seized it. He’d forged allegiances with several other Dons-Carlo Tramonti in New Orleans, Bunny Coniglio in Milwaukee, Sammy Drago in Tampa, and the new boss in L.A., Jackie Ping-Pong. When Russo went to Cuba, he stayed in the presidential palace. No one but Russo’s allies relished Chicago ’s return to power, but the consensus was that Russo posed less of a threat with a seat on the Commission than he had as a turf-grabbing outsider. To most of the men at those tables, trying to prove Russo responsible for that crash was unimportant. What mattered was returning their full attention to their own business. Even Butchie Molinari had been persuaded (by Michael Corleone, in fact) to declare publicly that he accepted the official version of the crash and to vow not to seek revenge.
Louie Russo and also his consigliere were not about to deny an accusation that no one had openly made, even if they knew it was false. Russo hadn’t ordered a hit on the men in that plane. If he had his theories about who if anyone had, he wasn’t letting on.
Russo, naturally, knew some things. Jackie Ping-Pong knew some things. Sal Narducci-who because of Forlenza’s health problems sat alone at the head table, as if he were already running Cleveland -knew some other things.
The man Narducci hired to sabotage the plane went on vacation in Las Vegas a few days later and hadn’t been seen since.
(Or, rather, he hadn’t been seen since Al Neri, a man who didn’t know or care about who he killed or why, shot him and buried him in the desert.)
Clemenza knew a lot, but not everything.
Michael Corleone was fairly certain that he’d covered his tracks well enough that no one-neither friend nor enemy, cop nor capo-would ever put it all together.
Who would possibly surmise that not only did Michael order the deaths of Barzini, of Tattaglia, of his own top caporegime Tessio, and of his own sister’s husband-not to mention all the collateral killings those killings unleashed-but that he then negotiated a cease-fire and used that uneasy truce to orchestrate a hit on the men in the airplane, including Nick Geraci, whom he’d recently promoted to capo, and Tony Molinari, a steadfast ally? There were no rumors that either man had betrayed him-largely, of course, because they had not.
Who’d ever figure out what that satchel Fontane delivered was really for? Even Hagen had unquestioningly presumed that it was an investment in the new casino at Lake Tahoe.
From where Michael Corleone sat, tapping that old Swiss watch given to him by Corporal Hank Vogelsong, how could anyone-even someone who’d only read about Jap planes exploding into fireballs, cutting troopships in half-think that a man who’d seen what Michael had seen in the Pacific would kill anyone by ordering a plane crash?
Every morning, Fausto Geraci-it’s Jair-AH-chee, but, what the hell, people’ll say it how they want-was always the first one up. He’d make coffee and go out on the back patio of his little stucco house in his boxer shorts and an undershirt, where he’d sit on an aluminum lawn chair, reading the morning paper and chain-smoking Chesterfield Kings. Once he finished the paper, he’d stare out at his empty swimming pool. Even having his granddaughters in the house for the better part of a school year had had little visible effect on his mood.
Fausto Geraci’s heart was pickled in a bitterness more corrosive than battery acid. He was a man convinced that the world had fucked him over. Years and years of dragging himself out of bed and climbing into the freezing cab of some truck and hauling anything a person could imagine and a lot of things a person wouldn’t want to imagine. Loading and unloading his own trucks, hard work that was taken for granted by everyone who wound up with any goddamned thing he’d ever hauled. Driving what maybe were getaway cars; he wouldn’t know. But he did it. He spent a lifetime standing firm against everyone who was against the Italians, and he stayed loyal to that prick Vinnie Forlenza and his organization. He went to prison for those people. Did he complain, say a word about it? No. To them he was just Fausto the Driver, some quiet ox who worked hard and followed orders. He did all that work for them, jobs that doomed his soul to Hell so long ago even his own wife told him she stopped praying for it, but did they cut him in as an equal? No. He got some money, sure, but they gave Jews and niggers more of a break than they ever gave Fausto Geraci. He was supposed to be grateful for how they set him up in the union. Ha. He was still their puppet. The pay was good but not enough to make up for having to sit at a desk all day and listen to petty complaints from lazy people. Still, he listened, said almost nothing, and did his job. He spent years solving other people’s problems, but who ever gave two shits about Fausto Geraci’s problems, huh? Then after all those years of loyalty, one day: pow. He’s out. They gave his job to someone else (Fausto knew better than to ask why), and they gave Fausto the Driver “early retirement.” Hush money. Go-away money. What did he do? He went away. Loyal to the end. Loyal past the end. Good old Fausto.