Men from the lighting crew had come in and started to set up a shot. Prop guys scattered sawdust on the floor and set out playing cards, poker chips, dirty glasses, and sheet music for the presumably doomed piano player. “It’s just going to be complicated, that’s all,” Geraci said. “Going home.”
Fredo lowered his voice. “Hey, how are you with the Straccis? I mean, you know, how were you? Before all this down here. I got a reason for asking.”
“I’ve got guys there I work with.” Without the tributes he paid to Black Tony Stracci, the drugs could never land in Jersey and get to New York so smoothly. “What’s your reason?”
“I’ve got this idea. There might be something in it for you. New source of income. Could be one of the best things we ever had. When I talked to Mike, he said no dice, but the more I get to know you, the more I think you and me together can make him come around.”
“I don’t know, Fredo.” Geraci hoped he didn’t show it, but he was shocked. Fredo hardly knew him yet was enlisting him to defy Michael Corleone. “If the Don turned it down-”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of that. I know him like nobody knows him.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Geraci said. This sort of open disloyalty would have been outrageous coming from some neighborhood punk. But from the sotto copo? From the brother of the Don? “I have to be straight with you, though, Fredo. I’m not going to-”
“I appreciate what you’re saying, but hear me out, okay? Okay. So here it is. You’re a lawyer, right? Did you know it’s against the law to bury people in San Francisco?”
Wrong, he wasn’t a lawyer, but Geraci didn’t bother to correct him. Just then, Deanna Dunn burst through the swinging doors.
“Barkeep,” she growled, “gimme a shot of your best red-eye.”
“That’s pretty good,” Geraci said, because it was. She sounded exactly like the actor who played the villain in this movie, a grizzled lout who’d also started out as a boxer.
“Those aren’t real bottles of whiskey,” Fredo said.
“This attachment you have to the real,” she said, “is very cute. Knock it off, will ya?”
“Oh, and yeah,” Fredo said, ignoring his wife and addressing Geraci. “I almost forgot.” He grabbed the lapels of his own suit. “I do have a guy. He’s out in Beverly Hills, but I fly him to Vegas for fittings. He’s Fontane’s guy out there, too, which is how I heard about him.”
“Unlike you,” said Deanna Dunn, “Johnny has to have his pants made special. Otherwise they wouldn’t fit right because his dick’s-”
Fredo smiled wanly. “It’s true.”
“Big one, huh?” Geraci couldn’t believe Fredo was going to let her get away with that.
“That’s what they say,” Fredo said.
“Who’s they?”
“Oh, darling.” Deanna Dunn turned a chair around and straddled it. “Who isn’t they?” She waggled her eyebrows.
Geraci could see in Fredo’s eyes that he was mad, but the smile lingered gruesomely on his face of the underboss.
“I did a picture with Margot Ashton,” said Deanna Dunn, “while she was still married to Johnny. The director-Flynn, that fat Mick slob-was razzing her about being married to a skinny ninety-eight-pound weakling like Johnny Fontane. This was awhile back, you know. So in front of ev-v-v-v-v-verybody, Margot says, real loud, ‘He may be skinny, but his proportions are perfect. Eight pounds Johnny and ninety pounds of cock.’ ”
Fredo exploded in shrill laughter.
“Lovely woman, Miss Ashton,” Geraci said. And you, Miss Dunn, are eight pounds Deanna and ninety pounds of gigantic head.
“Naturally,” Deanna said, “after she said that, I made it my business to see if she’d been exaggerating.”
The only people Geraci had ever seen whose faces could go from joy to despair as swiftly as Fredo Corleone’s were his beautiful daughters’, but only when they were still babies.
“And so it is with great pleasure, in front of all you good people, that I can reveal, at long last, and I do mean long-”
“I should go home,” Geraci said, and he did. He’d hear about the stiffs in San Francisco some other time.
One thing kept bothering Pete Clemenza.
That night at the Castle in the Sand? When they were watching Fontane and Buzz Fratello and Dotty Ames, until Mike got the phone call from Hagen with the news about the plane crash? Why did Mike tap Clemenza on the shoulder to get his attention to leave before he even started talking to Hagen? How did he know they’d be getting up and going?
Not that Clemenza would ever say anything.
But it’s the kind of little thing a guy thinks about a lot. Kind of thing that can make a guy go outside at two in the morning in his silk pajamas, light a good cigar, flip on the floodlights, and wax the living shit out of his Cadillac.
Chapter 15
THE CONGRESSMAN- a former state attorney general, a vigilant opponent of the incursion of the Cosa Nostra into his beloved Silver State, and also, for what it’s worth, a rancher whose property lay downwind of Doomtown-first received his grim diagnosis in the hospital’s newly completed Vito Corleone Wing. When he went back to Washington, he got a second opinion from a specialist. The news was the same: the Big C; lymphatic, inoperable; six months to live. He chose to keep his illness a secret and fight it. If anyone was tough enough to lick the Big C, it was that big ox. A year later and eighty-eight pounds lighter, he died. As so often happens, the person whose constitutional responsibility it was to appoint a successor was a political rival of the deceased. The governor asked Thomas F. Hagen, a prominent Las Vegas attorney and financier, to abandon his long-shot bid for his party’s Senate nomination and accept the appointment to Congress. Mr. Hagen graciously agreed to put aside his plans for the chance to serve the good people of the State of Nevada.
The appointment was unpopular. The issue was less Hagen ’s associates-he was hardly the only politician in that era with such associates-than his brief tenure as a Nevada resident. Also, he was a political novice with no record of public service. Every newspaper in the state, without exception, criticized the choice and gave the controversy prominent coverage. The primary added further complications. The late congressman had been running unopposed. Lawsuits abounded, but the November general election was shaping up as a contest between Tom Hagen and a dead man.
To build power, sometimes one must control those who seem the least powerful. This was the secret of the Corleones’ ability to control judges. Though corruption and venality thrive in all classes of men, the normative judge-the public might be relieved to know-is more honest than the normative human being. In practice, judges are difficult and expensive to control. However. Cases are typically assigned “randomly” by a clerk of court who’s paid no more than, say, a normative Spanish teacher. A person who controls ten percent of such people and a majority of the judges is vastly less powerful than one who’s sewn up most of the clerks and a few strategically placed judges afflicted by cynical natures, bad habits, or dark secrets.
Newspapers work the opposite way. Some reporters can be swayed by a free lunch, a forgiven gambling debt, even a glass of ice-cold beer. But most have a crusading streak and a fixation on whatever strikes them as news that overrides their loyalty to anything. Happily, they are also excitable, eager for newer news, toward which they follow one another like lemmings. To control the news, one needs influence at the top. The public has a short memory. If a story goes away after a few days and is replaced by something new, the public wants not closure to the old but newer details about the new. Or something newer still. Control those who control those who decide how long to cover a story and where it goes in the paper, and you control the news.