The Godfather's Revenge by Mark Winegardner Page A

identification. But keeping the Pontiac was an even bigger risk. He gassed it up, ran it through a car wash, and drove to the nearest high school. He wiped down the interior, rolled down the windows, and left the car running, begging to be restolen.
    He walked back from the school, took a Howard Johnson’s postcard from the desk drawer in his room, and went around to the motels, restaurants, and filling stations in and around the Turnpike exit, jotting down pay-phone numbers.
    He was officially squared away.
    Nick had phones back in Brooklyn he could call, but it would take time to figure out which of his associates he could trust. There was nothing he’d have liked more than to call Charlotte, but if anyone in his family was under surveillance, it would be her. Nick couldn’t call his father, not cold. His daughter Barb, a junior at Skidmore, was excitable, a more brittle version of Charlotte: a beauty, with all the benefits and responsibilities attendant thereto. It was Bev he’d call first. She was a freshman at Berkeley. Charlotte hadn’t wanted her to go so far away, but Bev had had her reasons, and she’d quietly stuck to her guns; she was Nick’s daughter, all right. Barb lived off campus, but Bev lived in a dorm, where the only phones were pay phones.
    He walked to the Sohio station across the street and went through a lot of dimes calling various numskulls at the university to get Bev’s number, nearly as many waiting for the girl who answered the phone to go summon Bev.
    “Whoever this is,” Bev finally said, “you’re a jerk.”
    True , he thought. “Is that what they teach you at that school?” he said. “How to talk like that to your father?”
    “Daddy? I thought you were some…Oh my God! Daddy! Where are—”
    Then she started to cry.
    He let her. He had a warm coat and plenty of dimes. He kept an eye on the cars coming in for gas and the men pumping it, but no one was giving him a second look.
    He knew Bev would come around, and, when she did, she justified every bit of his faith in her. She didn’t ask any questions he couldn’t answer. He assured her that he was fine and that he’d be grateful to her if she passed the good word along to her mother and sister. “In the case of your mother, call what’s-her-face. Her friend across the street.”
    “Mrs. Brubaker.”
    “Yeah, her. See if she’ll go get your mom and bring her to the phone. Say you tried to call home but the phone was all screwy.”
    “I can handle it, Dad.”
    “Tell her that pay phone up by the park, across from that statue thing. She’ll know the one. Tell her I’ll call her there tomorrow at eight.”
    “Eight. Got it.”
    “But if I don’t call, don’t worry. I’m just tied up with business, is all.”
    “Business.” Her voice was faint.
    He hated that he was putting her through this. He hated Michael Corleone for being the cause of it all. He changed the subject, and for a long time they talked about how she was doing at school: well, apparently. She claimed to be OK for money, but he got her address and told her he’d send her some anyway. “Just don’t tell your mother,” he said.
    “Do you think I tell her anything?”
    This was said with a hard edge, well beyond the standard father-daughter mock conspiratorial. He should have said something, but he didn’t feel like getting into it now. He needed to take care of business. “How’s your grandpa?”
    “Which?”
    “Both, I guess.”
    Bev laughed. “Yeah, right.” She wasn’t close to Charlotte’s snooty parents, either. “He’s terrific, actually.”
    “Still in Tucson, there?”
    “Why wouldn’t he be in Tucson?”
    Because the last Nick Geraci knew, his father was en route to Sicily, sailing into an ambush, his main protection being that he wasn’t the Fausto Geraci they were looking for. “No reason. Can you do me one more little favor? Can you call him, too?”
    “Call him where ?” Didn’t miss a beat, this one.
    “Seeing