The Godfather's Revenge (41 page)

“Never?” she said.

He anchored the boat, and he told her he loved her.

“Come belowdecks,” he said.

“I’ll do my best,” she said, grabbing him by his stiffening cock and leading him there.

Our thing here has gotten beaucoup bigger,
he thought.

T
he twin-engine plane carrying Al Neri and his nephew landed early in the morning at a private airstrip in the Arizona desert. The airstrip was the one that movie people used when they were coming to Old Tucson to film Westerns. The plane was a charter from Las Vegas, and the pilot seemed to think they were in the movie business. They had done nothing to encourage or discourage this assumption. They were dressed, per Al’s instructions, in snap-brim tams, Windbreakers, sport shirts, and loafers, like golfers whose spikes and clubs were waiting for them somewhere. Tommy’s loose, untucked shirt—he’d lost a lot of weight lately—hung over his gun. All the way from Las Vegas, the pilot had gone on and on about all the stars he’d had in his plane, and Al and Tommy had just let him talk. “Break a leg,” he said as they climbed out. “Or is that just for the theater?”

“Thank you,” Al said. “It was a nice flight.”

“In my neighborhood,” Tommy said, “we said
in culo alla balena.
”

Al gave him a look.

“I never heard that,” the pilot said. “What’s it mean?”

“Up the whale’s ass.” Tommy caught Al’s eye. “It just means break a leg,” Tommy said. “More or less.”

“What language is that?” the pilot said.

“We’ll see you at six,” Al said, guiding Tommy away.

They started down the blacktopped sidewalk from the airstrip to the car-rental lot a couple hundred yards away. “Talk a little, people forget you,” Al muttered. “Too silent, people remember. Teach people colorful slang, you might as well hand ’em your mug shot and rap sheet as keepsakes.”

“My rap sheet?” Tommy said. “I’m not sure you could call what I got a
rap sheet.
The only thing that ever stuck to me was that thing with the skim in Reno, which got reduced to time served.”

“That’s not really my point,” Al said.

Tommy had his good qualities—loyalty, doggedness, a great singing voice, devotion to his mother, good in the kitchen in his own right—but intelligence probably wasn’t one of them.

The Mexican at the car-rental lot asked which production they were with and named two as guesses. The Neris didn’t answer him. The Mexican assured them he didn’t sell news to the tabloids. “Seems like good business to me,” said Al Neri.

“I seen you in that one movie, didn’t I?” the Mexican said. “With that guy who always plays the sheriff? It had that actress in it, too, what’s-her-face; the one with the hair and the big tits. It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

Al handed the man cash. “You’re thinking of that other guy,” he said.

Tommy drove. He cranked up the air-conditioning and turned onto a road that would take them into Tucson proper. On the right, as far as the eye could see, were hundreds of derelict airplanes, most of them World War II combat planes.

“Look at this shit, huh?” Tommy said, rubbing his eyes.

“You all right to drive?” Al said.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“The rubbing your eyes, sweating,” Al said. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“I’m fine.” Tommy reached to turn up the already full-blast a/c. “We’re in the fucking desert, Uncle Al. It’s been known to make people fucking sweat. I got some allergies to the plants out here, too. If you recall, when we was living in Nevada, up in Tahoe I’d be fine but down in Vegas I’d start sneezing, my nose would run, itchy eyes, all that.”

It wasn’t just the sweating and the eyes. There was the weight he’d lost, the eternity Tommy spent on the can first thing in the morning. Al knew the signs. “Allergies, huh?” Al said. “Not a taste for smack?”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“Look me in the eye and tell me you ain’t using dope.”

“I ain’t using dope,” Tommy said. “I swear to God.”

“Fuck God,” Al said. “Swear to me.”

“I swear to you, Uncle Al. I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve used it here and there. But
using
it, no, no fucking way. Not in the ongoing sense of that, and
definitely
not in the am-I-on-it-now sense. Call Ma, if you don’t believe me about the allergies.”

In the airplane boneyard, there were now rows and rows of B-29 Superfortress bombers, their engines and windows covered with tarps.

Al folded his arms and studied his nephew. There was nothing whatsoever in Tommy’s driving or his manner to suggest he was on dope right now. There was no need to overreact here. All the younger guys seemed to have used it
here and there.
Al himself, no choirboy, had tried the stuff. “Don’t bullshit me, kid,” Al said. “All I want to know is the last time you used.”

Tommy took a deep breath. “Two days ago.”

“You hadn’t fucking better be lying.”

“Two days ago,” Tommy reasserted, more forcefully this time. “And before that it’d been months. Maybe almost a year.”

“Maybe, huh?” Al said.
“Maybe almost?”

“You want to take someone else in to do this job, you want to do it yourself, whatever you want, y’know? Anything you want me to do to prove I’m not high on junk, tell me, and I’ll do it.”

Al didn’t say anything for a while. Maybe he was reading too much into things. Al really didn’t want to do this job, and maybe that was clouding his judgment. “Just drive,” he said.

Tommy turned on the radio.
Who’s gonna jump,
Buck Owens sang,
when you say frog?
Tommy improvised a credible harmony line.

“Turn that peckerwood shit off,” Al said.

Tommy snickered, but he did it.

“What’s so funny?” Al said.

“Nothing,” Tommy said.

“I asked you a question. What’s so funny?”

“The guy in the song sings
who’s gonna jump, when you say frog,
and then you tell me to turn off the radio.”

“What the fuck does that have to do with saying
frog
?”

“Nothing.”

“You want to listen to the radio, listen,” Al said. “Sing along if you want. Just not that peckerwood shit.”

“Forget it.” Tommy stared out at the dusty road ahead. “Out here, what else you think there is?”

This would be Tommy Neri’s third trip to Tucson to speak with Fausto Geraci.

“You’re telling me you like that shit?” Al said.

“I was just turning on the radio to turn it on,” Tommy said. Absently, he touched the gun at his hip. It was probably unconscious, Al knew. A lot of guys did that. There were cops who touched their piece every thirty seconds for thirty years. Al himself had not brought a gun. His heavy steel cop-issue flashlight was tucked inside his small suitcase.

Again, Tommy touched the pistol. It was a newish 9mm Walther: a beauty, Al thought. A weapon that no right-minded individual would want to use once and then dump. If it was Al, he’d have brought some cheap
strunz
good only for close-in work, but Al tried his best to keep from second-guessing his nephew’s every move. It was what Al’s own father had done to him—beaten him almost to death, in fact, more than a few times, for not doing things by the old man’s arbitrary, contradictory code of conduct. With Al’s big sister, Tommy’s mother, his father had been even more ruthless about telling her everything she did that was wrong and then punctuating it with his fists. So fuck it. All that really mattered was that Tommy’s gun was clean and untraceable, and it was. If today’s job went at all well, Tommy wouldn’t need to fire the thing anyway and thus wouldn’t need to shitcan it. If he
did,
so be it. It was just a goddamned gun. The good Germans at Walther would make more.

The ghost planes they were passing now were nearly all decorated with fading paintings of busty women in stockings or bathing suits or both.

“You sure you know where you’re going?” Al asked.

“Relax.”

“Let’s swing by the airport real quick on the way.”

“We just came from it.”

“Not the air
strip.
The airport. It’s—”

“I know where the airport is.”

“Right,” Al said. He pulled a map from his jacket pocket and followed along anyway.

AS HE APPARENTLY DID EVERY MORNING, FAUSTO
Geraci returned home from driving his wife, Conchita, to her job at the cannery on the other side of town, which he did dressed in a ratty old bathrobe and an undershirt, and took a seat in a webbed lawn chair on his back patio, smoking Chesterfield Kings and staring out at his swimming pool.

“Why don’t he just get her a car?” Al said. “She don’t drive?”

He and Tommy were parked the next street over, situated so they could see a judicious sliver of Fausto’s backyard.

“She drives,” Tommy said. “But he likes to drive her. Like I told you, he likes to drive, period.”

Every Sunday, Fausto Geraci took his car out in the middle of nowhere and opened it up, well past 100. It was one of the things Al planned to ask him about.

“The Mexican wife,” Al said. “Why don’t she quit that job, then? She’s married now. All of our money this old fuck’s probably sittin’ on, I can’t imagine she needs it.”

“Maybe she likes to work. How the fuck should I know? She’s a Mexican. Who knows what they think?”

Al took out his binoculars.

“What’d I tell you, huh?” said Tommy. “Have you ever in your whole life seen a
stronzo vecchio
who looked more like he was just waitin’ to die?”

“To be honest with you, he looks like he’s been that way awhile,” Al said. “Like that’s just who he is.” Appearances could be deceiving. The man was, after all, practically a newlywed. He was by all accounts enjoying the attention his son’s disappearance had brought his way. “I thought you said he kept it empty, the pool.”

“He does. He did.”

“Full now.” That ruled out one of the ideas Al had come up with, which was to handcuff Fausto Geraci to the bottom and turn on the water. He’d seen it work before. He had a pair of cuffs in the pocket of his Windbreaker. Al probably wouldn’t have done it that way anyway. Too many neighbors around to hear the old man if he started yelling—and getting the old man yelling was key, Al figured, to getting the information they wanted. But the way Al liked to do jobs—hits or muscle, either one—was to come in with a few options swirling around in his head and then size up the situation quickly and go with what felt right. Like a basketball guard bringing the ball down the court, or a jazz horn player soloing off a simple melody everybody already knew, or a gunslinger riding into a town where men were waiting for him.

“Maybe it suddenly occurred to the old bastard that it’s hotter out here than the devil’s morning piss,” Tommy said. “Figured it’d be nice to be able to take a dip now and then.”

“Could be,” Al said, raising the binoculars again.

“Or maybe it was the Mexican’s idea.”

“Possible,” Al said, though Fausto had married Conchita a little more than a year ago.

The story on the pool—which Nick Geraci himself had often told—was that Fausto and his first wife had moved down here from Cleveland after she was diagnosed with the Big C. Her people were from Milazzo, fishermen and sponge divers, and she herself swam in meets as a girl. Loved the water, never had a pool, always wanted one, finally got it, used it all the time. She was in that pool when her weakened heart gave out. Fausto found her there, pulled her out himself. Before she was even in the ground, he drained the pool and never refilled it. Maybe out of grief, maybe because he was a cheap son of a bitch—who knew? Nick would refill it whenever he visited, but the old man would drain it the minute he left. At least that was the story.

Suddenly, a metal screen door slammed. Fausto Geraci sat up straight in his lawn chair, beaming. “More likely,” Al said, handing Tommy the binoculars, “doting grand-pop that he is, our man here did it for her. Filled the pool.”

There was the sound of a splash and then the distant laughter of a young woman.

The information they’d gotten was good. Bev Geraci, Nick’s younger daughter, had finished her sophomore year of college at Berkeley and had come to spend the summer with her grandfather. The poor kid took after her father. Even from the sound of the splash, Al Neri would have guessed, correctly, that she was a big hulk of a girl.

AL AND TOMMY NERI DROVE AROUND THE BLOCK
and pulled their rental car into the driveway of Fausto Geraci’s stucco-clad ranch style, coasting in with the engine already killed, blocking the red-and-white Olds Starfire in the garage. The old man was supposedly a fancy driver and prided himself on it. There wasn’t much chance of his getting to the car—or of his granddaughter getting that far, either—but Al wanted it blocked anyway. When he was a kid and certainly when he was on the force, he’d expected to die young and in a blaze of glory, like a mysterious hero in one of the Westerns he loved so much. He even courted it, that stupid boy’s stupid dream. Things had changed. He still loved Westerns (movies, TV, even books), and he still thought of himself as a young man (he’d turn forty next year but could pass as the brother of his gray-haired, balding nephew). But the older he got, the more attached he became to the idea of getting even older yet. And getting older—as any fan of Westerns could tell you—meant paying attention to all the little things that could go wrong.