Dressed in a tuxedo and his ratty old fishing hat, Fredo Corleone, who was dead, stood before his brother Michael in the middle of the dark cobblestone street in Hell’s Kitchen where they’d lived as children, a fishing rod in one hand and a naked woman on his arm. It was twilight. Fredo seemed poised between laughter and tears, which was heartbreakingly familiar. At the end of the block, the Eleventh Avenue freight train, which had long since been rerouted and dismantled, rumbled toward them but was still out of sight.
“I forgive you,” Fredo said.
Blood began to pour from a wound in the back of his head.
Michael Corleone did not know what he was seeing, but he knew it wasn’t a dream. He certainly did not believe in ghosts.
“That’s impossible,” Michael said.
Fredo laughed. “True,” he admitted. “Only God can do that, right?”
Michael, on the stoop to their apartment building, felt nailed to the spot. There was no one else around. The woman was curvy and milky white, raven-haired, a little bit sheepish about being out in public like this but also brave, the kind of woman who didn’t care too much about what other people thought.
“God,” Michael said. “Right.”
“You want to fish?” Fredo extended the rod, grinning. “Or do you want to fuck around?”
The woman stepped forward. As she moved through the mottled light, she changed into a rotting corpse, then back into Michael’s very ideal of beauty.
“Let me know, huh?” Fredo said. “Contrary to what you may think, I can set things up. I know you’re lonely. I know you’re all alone. If not this, then something. I want to help you, Mike. I want you to be happy.”
“Happy?” Michael said. “Don’t you think that’s a little childish, Fredo?”
Michael immediately regretted saying this, but Fredo didn’t seem to take offense.
The woman kissed Fredo, and he kissed her back. At the end of his fishing pole, there suddenly appeared a tuna almost as big as Fredo himself. The tuna thrashed, then began to bleed, too, as if it had been both speared and clubbed. The naked woman looked at the fish and started crying.
“I keep getting confused,” Fredo said to Michael. “Why did I have to die?”
Michael sighed. Same old Fredo, even dead, in need of explanations for things he should have understood by instinct.
“I understand revenge and all that, but what happened to me compared to what I did—it don’t exactly balance out. It makes no sense. This ain’t exactly your eye-for-an-eye justice, Mike.”
Michael shook his head sadly. “Fredo,” he whispered.
“I’m not saying I didn’t fuck up, because I did.” Fredo was still bleeding, but slower now. “Those fellas I gave that information to, Roth and Ola and them? I told ’em things not knowing how they’d use it, but, to be honest with you, what’d I tell ’em that amounted to anything? When you’d be at home? Christ. There was only one road into and out of your place in Tahoe. A goddamned babbuino could have figured out when you were home. So when they tried to kill you, how was it my fault? As for the other things I told them that might’ve helped bring about peace, I understand it was wrong to go against the Family on that. But it’s also true everything that happened would’ve happened anyhow. With or without me. Right? You know I’m right. None of it hurt the organization, made it any less strong than it was. On top of which, everybody outside the Family who knew about what I did? Dead. You had ’em taken care of, every last one. The only living people who know about it are you, Hagen, and Neri—and you’re always talking about how you’d trust them two with your life. So they’re no problem, right?”
“There’s Nick Geraci.” Awake, Michael wouldn’t have said the vanished traitor’s name aloud.
Fredo slapped the palm of his hand against his forehead. Blood sprayed everywhere. “Right! I think of him as dead, but you’re right.”
“I will avenge your death. You have my word.”
“That’s comical.” He pointed to his wounded head. “Al pulled the trigger. You gave the order. You gave the order to kill Nick, too. You tried to sacrifice him, like in chess, like losing a knight or a bishop to cover up what’s really going on. Except in chess, the bishop don’t have no chance of swimming away from the discard pile and back on the board, changing its colors, and coming after you. So, sure, kill him. What choice do you have?”
The bleeding from Fredo’s wound seemed finally to have stopped. He was drenched in blood. He whispered something to the naked woman, and she nodded but kept crying.
“At the time you did this,” Fredo said to Michael, “neither one of us knew that Nick was behind it. You were certain you’d killed off everybody who knew what I’d done. What I want to know,” he said, “is who you thought would’ve held it against you if you hadn’t’ve killed me? Who’d’ve thought you were weak for showing me some mercy? Name one person.”
“Fredo, I—”
“I’m not angry, Mike. Far from it. What happened to me was my destiny and all that stuff Pop liked to talk about. On the other hand—and forgive me for saying this—it’s hard to imagine that Pop, under the same circumstances, would’ve had me killed, y’know? Look. What I’m trying to do is understand what’s in your head. I know what’s in your heart, OK? Your heart’s obvious. But what goes on in your head, I gotta say, it’s a mystery to me.”
Hagen, Michael thought.
With a pang of clarity, he realized that Tom Hagen, his consigliere, had been the reason he’d done it. That’s who’d have held it against him. Hagen, who both was and wasn’t his brother, who was but wasn’t exactly family. Who wasn’t even Italian and therefore, strictly speaking, shouldn’t know anything. And he knew everything. Tom Hagen was the link to Vito, the old man. It was Tom who kept the lines of communication open during the years Michael was in youthful revolt against his father and everything his father stood for. Hagen’s job was to give Michael advice when asked, to resolve certain situations when dispatched, and he did so with great skill and greater obedience. Yet until now it had never clicked that it was Hagen’s disapproval Michael most dreaded, Hagen’s intelligence Michael most needed to one-up, Hagen’s deceptive toughness Michael most needed to surpass, even if doing so meant going against his own nature. His own blood. After Michael and Fredo’s last embrace, what had Fredo done? He’d put on his lucky fishing hat and gone to teach Michael’s son Anthony to fish. And what had Michael done? He’d gone straight to his office: to do business, yes, but also to bust Tom’s balls about his loyalty, which was never in question, and his mistress, which meant nothing, just to put him on the defensive. Why? So that Tom couldn’t question him in the matter of Hyman Roth? No. It was about that long look toward Fredo and Anthony that Tom had taken as he’d walked into the room. About Michael’s fear that Tom would disapprove.
This insight flowed through Michael Corleone like a deep breath. Yet he couldn’t quite speak the answer to his bloodied brother’s question.
“No, you tell me, Fredo. Since it’s so obvious. What is in my heart?”
“Oh, boy,” Fredo said. The naked woman shrank away from Fredo, ducked her head, and turned around a little, now clearly embarrassed. “That’s your problem in a nutshell, Mike, ain’t it? You don’t know your own heart.”
Michael folded his arms. He wanted to embrace his brother and tell him he was right about everything. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Are you finished, Fredo? Because I have business I need to take care of.”
Michael struggled to remember specifically what the business was. Someone else’s problems, no doubt. The particulars of his day’s work now seemed strewn about in his head and just out of reach. The rump of that raven-haired woman suddenly struck Michael Corleone as the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. He imagined himself running his tongue along the curve of her wide and perfect hips. He shivered. He forced himself to avert his eyes. At the end of the block, the old train roared by, boxcars filled with the nameless dead.
“I have a warning for you!” Fredo shouted over the train. “But what’s the point? You wouldn’t listen to me, would you? Coming from me, you’d think it was a joke. You’d think it was bullshit. You’d never give it a second goddamned thought. You never give me a second goddamned thought, I bet.”
Fredo was mistaken: Michael thought about him all the time. He’d been wrong about Fredo. Michael had made betrayers out of other allies. Sally Tessio, Nick Geraci, on and on. Fredo wasn’t the only one, and he was probably the least valuable one, but it was Fredo who haunted Michael most.
“You were dead to me when you were still alive, Fredo,” Michael was horrified to hear himself say. “You think being dead changes anything? Nothing has changed. Go away, Fredo.”
Michael didn’t mean a word of it.
He wanted to hear the warning, truly he did. Not that it stood to be a surprise. There was the matter of the Bocchicchios, that nearly extinct revenge-mad clan, who supposedly did not blame the Corleones for the death of Carmine Marino, a Bocchicchio cousin. There was the matter of Nick Geraci, the former Corleone capo, who had conspired with the late Dons of the Cleveland and Chicago outfits to trick Michael into killing his friend Hyman Roth and—just for spite—Fredo, too, who had eluded Michael’s vengeance and was still out there, somewhere. There was the president of the United States, who owed his election to Michael Corleone and yet gave every sign of turning on him.
On and on; of such threats there was no end. Michael had a gift for anticipating trouble. What mattered to Michael wasn’t the news Fredo had, because he was confident it would not be news. What felt important was that Fredo had come to deliver it.
The train was gone now and, somehow, so were the tuna, the fishing rod, and the luscious naked woman who was sometimes a corpse. Fredo turned and started walking away, a pink mist of blood obscuring the wound at the back of his head.
What was happening to Michael now might be perfectly logical. Some kind of hallucination, brought on by a diabetic reaction. He might even die. More likely, someone would find him, help him, give him an orange or a pill or a shot.
He called out to Fredo to wait.
Fredo stopped and turned to face him. “What do you want?”
Michael was on a gurney now, stable, heading for the emergency room. Al Neri—who shot Fredo with two slugs from a .38, at Michael’s behest and without the slightest resistance from Fredo himself—hovered nearby, yelling about sugar to people Michael could sense but not quite see. There was a woman here, too, coming into view, in Michael’s own robe: Marguerite Duvall, the actress. Rita. She was sobbing. Her dyed red hair looked like a madwoman’s. The robe gapped to reveal a dark nipple almost as big around as her small breast. Rita had been with Fredo, years ago, back when she was just a dancer in Vegas, back before Johnny Fontane had helped make her a star, back before she had that brief affair with Jimmy Shea. Fredo had even gotten her pregnant. Michael knew about that, and Rita no doubt knew that he knew, and they never talked about it. Michael wasn’t lonely. There were friends and family he’d drawn near him, right in this building. And there was this woman, Rita. Michael tried to reach out to her. She smiled at him through her tears and muttered something in French. Then Al Neri told her to stand back, taking her by the arm and tugging her away from Michael.
“What do you want?” Fredo repeated. “I’m losing my patience here, kid.”
Kid. Fredo never called him that. Sonny called him that.
Michael closed his eyes and willed himself to use reason.
A needle jabbed his arm, and Michael opened his eyes. The gurney was moving, and its wheels were squeaking, shrieking, and Rita’s hand was on his arm and then batted away, and he somehow saw both the ceiling of his apartment rushing by and also Fredo on that dark street in his tuxedo, dabbing at his wound with a blood-drenched pocket square.
“You deaf?” Fredo said. “Answer me.”
Michael felt as if he were living two lives at once, both equally real.
“I want you to wait, Fredo,” he murmured. “That’s what I want. I want you to stay.”
“Madonn’.” Fredo backed away, angry now. “No, Mike. I mean, what do you want?”
“Nothing I can have.”
Fredo laughed, mirthlessly. “And you call me dead,” he said. “You got a lot to learn, kid. Give Rita and the baby a kiss for me.” Fredo turned his back. In his bloody tuxedo and Mary Janes, he walked toward where the train had passed. Michael was falling through space now, in what must have been the elevator.
Rita and the baby? Rita didn’t have a baby.
Michael turned his head, trying to get a last glimpse of his brother. Fredo was still walking away. From this angle, at this increasing distance, it looked to Michael as if most of his brother’s head had been shot off. And then Fredo was gone.