Free The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner

do except look upon all the pretty words and false fronts lost love inspired, upon all the blame lavished on everyone who did the right thing and left you, and despair.
    The song finished.
    Milner lowered the baton and looked to the engineer, who nodded. The people in the studio—even the diminished band—burst into applause. Milner headed toward the booth.
    Johnny stood back from the microphone. He looked around at the smiling faces of all these yes-men. Milner returned from the booth and started repositioning microphones. He said nothing. You’d swear the guy was Sicilian, for how little he said, and how much.
    “No,” Johnny said. “Thank you all very much, but no. You fellas were great, but I can do better. Let’s give it a shot, okay?”
    Milner repositioned another mike.
    “That eighth bar, Cy,” Johnny said. “Can you do that up like Puccini?”
    Milner fished a wrinkled piece of paper from his shirt pocket, a dry- cleaning receipt it looked like, and sat down at the piano bench, noodled around a bit, scribbled a few notes, gave a few brief directions to various men in the band.
    Johnny wouldn’t be working with Eddie Neils anytime soon.
    He’d been somewhere, gone somewhere, singing that song, and he could go there again, he was absolutely sure of it, and go deeper, and then do it a dozen more times. He could fill a whole long-playing record with songs that took people out of their lives, and deeper into them, and—it came to him, in a flash—sequence the songs the way Les Halley did back when Johnny was his singer, only all together on a record, so that everything plays off of everything else, in a way and to an extent that nobody, not even the best jazz cats, had ever quite done before.
    Phil Ornstein kept congratulating everyone. Philly wasn’t going to be happy to have them spend the whole session on just this one song, but too bad. Johnny Fontane would defy you to show him a record shop where people walked in asking about the new releases from National Records. It was the songs they wanted. It was the singers.
    Milner climbed to the podium. His glasses made it look like his regular eye was on the orchestra and his huge eye was on Johnny. Johnny looked down, and again they began.
    Eight bars in, Puccini’s ghost somehow cracked the song open even farther, and Johnny filled his lungs with air and swam right in.
    Michael and Kay spent the first hour of the flight in relative silence. Once Kay marveled about the startling beauty of the desert, comparing it to the work of abstract painters Michael knew he should know. He pretended to, and she talked about art for a while, and he sat there wondering why, about something so trivial, he hadn’t just been honest.
    Michael asked about the move. Kay considered telling him about the day last week when the Clemenzas had shown up at his parents’ old house, which they’d already bought, and found Carmela Corleone standing at the window of her late husband’s office, a room she’d hardly set foot in over the years. She was drunk and mumbling prayers in Latin.
This is my home,
she’d announced.
I’m not moving to no desert.
He’d hear about that soon enough. Who was she kidding? He must already know. “It’s going fine,” Kay said. “Connie’s been a big help.”
    Even that neutral comment was loaded. Michael didn’t react to the mention of his sister, but he knew Connie still blamed him for the death of her husband, Carlo, even though an assistant D.A. he knew from Guadalcanal had charged a Barzini button man with the murder.
    “Strange,” Kay said after another long silence. “Flying over the desert in a seaplane.”
    In every direction, desolate, unpopulated sand and scrub stretched to the horizon. Eventually shapes that turned out to be mountains emerged from the haze to the north.
    “How are the kids getting along?” Michael finally asked.
    “You saw them this morning,” Kay said. Mary, who was two, had cried and chanted, “Daddy,