Free The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner Page A

Daddy,” as they’d left. Anthony, who this time next year would start kindergarten, was sitting under a box on the floor, watching television through a hole. It was a program in which clay figures confront life’s problems: the temptation not to share one’s red wagon or the virtues of admitting one’s role in the shattering of Mom’s sewing lamp. Safe to say the little clay boy would never have to contend with two of his uncles being murdered. His cardigan-sweatered clay daddy would never be called an “alleged underworld figure” in
The New York Times.
His svelte clay grandfather was unlikely to drop dead at his feet. “How did you think they were?”
    “They seemed to be making out fine. Do they have friends yet? In the neighborhood?”
    “I’m still unpacking, Michael. I haven’t had time—”
    “Right,” he said. “I’m not being critical.”
    He was close enough to Reno airspace to check in.
    “Your parents had a nice trip?” he said.
    “They did.” Her father had taught theology at Dartmouth long enough to have a small pension from that, too, augmenting the one he’d been drawing since he’d retired as a pastor five years before. He and Kay’s mother had bought a travel trailer and planned to see America. They’d arrived yesterday, to help Kay get the house together and see their grandkids. “They said the trailer park was so nice they might never leave.” The Castle in the Sand had its own trailer park.
    “They’re welcome to stay there as long as they like.”
    “That was a joke,” she said. “So what do you have planned? What’s to do in Tahoe?”
    “What would you say to dinner and a movie?”
    “It’s not even eleven o’clock.”
    “Lunch and a movie. A matinee. There’s got to be a matinee we can catch.”
    “Okay. Oh, God, Michael, look! It’s beautiful!”
    The lake, much bigger than Kay had imagined, was dotted with fishing boats and ringed by mountains. Around most of it, thick dark pine forest extended to the banks. The surface of the water looked as smooth as a lacquered table.
    “It is,” he said. “I’ve never seen a more beautiful place.”
    He glanced at her. She was swiveling around in her seat, craning her neck to see the splendor into which they were descending. She seemed happy.
    Michael came in low, near the shore, and landed the plane not far from a dock and boathouse. There seemed to be nothing else around but woods and a clearing nearby, where a point of land jutted into the lake.
    “This is pretty far from the town part,” Kay said.
    “I know a great place for lunch,” he said, “right near here.”
    As the plane approached the dock, three men in dark suits emerged from the woods.
    Kay drew in a breath and pulled back in her seat. The men came out on the dock, and she called her husband’s name.
    Michael shook his head. The implication was clear:
Don’t worry. They work for me.
    The men climbed out onto the floats and tethered the plane to the dock. The one in charge was Tommy Neri, Al’s nephew. Al—who, in his old NYPD uniform, had emptied a service revolver into Don Emilio Barzini’s chest, and who, with a steak knife taken right from the man’s kitchen, had disemboweled Phillip Tattaglia’s top button man and urinated into the man’s steaming body cavity—was in charge of security for all of the Family-controlled hotels. Like Al, Tommy had been a New York cop. All three looked to be barely out of high school. They said almost nothing and headed back into the woods.
    As they did, Kay faced Michael at the foot of the dock. There was both a world of things to say about that and nothing whatsoever.
    “Wait right here,” Michael said. He touched the side of his face where it had once been crushed, which he did, probably unconsciously, when he was nervous. For years after that cop had punched him, he’d done nothing, blowing his nose constantly and talking about his ruined looks until finally, for Kay’s sake, he’d had it fixed,