Godfather 01 The Godfather pdfdrive com

A month after her operation Lucy Mancini sat beside the Vegas hotel
pool, one hand holding a cocktail, the other hand stroking Jules’ head, which lay
in her lap.
“You don’t have to build up your courage,” Jules said teasingly. “I
have champagne waiting in our suite.”
“Are you sure it’s OK so soon?” Lucy asked.
“I’m the doctor,” Jules said. “Tonight’s the big night. Do you realize
I’ll be the first surgeon in medical history who tried out the results of his
‘medical first’ operation? You know, the Before and After. I’m going to enjoy
writing it up for the journals. Let’s see, ‘while the Before was distinctly
pleasurable for psychological reasons and the sophistication of the surgeon-
instructor, the post-operative coitus was extremely rewarding strictly for its
neurological”--he stopped talking because Lucy had yanked on his hair hard
enough for him to yell with pain.
She smiled down at him. “If you’re not satisfied tonight I can really
say it’s your fault,” she said.
“I guarantee my work. I planned it even though I just let old Kellner
do the manual labor,” Jules said. “Now let’s just rest up, we have a long night of
research ahead.”
When they went up to their suite--they were living together now--Lucy
found a surprise waiting: a gourmet supper and next to her champagne glass, a
jeweler’s box with a huge diamond engagement ring inside it.
“That shows you how much confidence I have in my work,” Jules said.
“Now let’s see you earn it.”
He was very tender, very gentle with her. She was a little scary at first,
her flesh jumping away from his touch but then, reassured, she felt her body
building up to a passion she had never known, and when they were done the first
time and Jules whispered; “I do good work,” she whispered back, “Oh, yes, you
do; yes, you do.” And they both laughed to each other as they started making
love again.

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BOOK VI

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Chapter 23
After five months of exile in Sicily, Michael Corleone came finally to
understand his father’s character and his destiny. He came to understand men
like Luca Brasi, the ruthless caporegime Clemenza, his mother’s resignation and
acceptance of her role. For in Sicily he saw what they would have been if they
had chosen not to struggle against their fate. He understood why the Don always
said, “ A man has only one destiny.” He came to understand the contempt for
authority and legal government, the hatred for any man who broke omerta, the
law of silence.
Dressed in old clothes and a billed cap, Michael had been transported
from the ship docked at Palermo to the interior of the Sicilian island, to the very
heart of a province controlled by the Mafia, where the local capo-mafioso was
greatly indebted to his father for some past service. The province held the town
of Corleone, whose name the Don had taken when he emigrated to America so
long ago. But there were no longer any of the Don’s relatives alive. The women
had died of old age. All the men had been killed in vendettas or had also
emigrated, either to America, Brazil or to some other province on the Italian
mainland. He was to learn later that this small poverty-stricken town had the
highest murder rate of any place in the world.
Michael was installed as a guest in the home of a bachelor uncle of the
capo-mafioso. The uncle, in his seventies, was also the doctor for the district.
The capo-mafioso was a man in his late fifties named Don Tommasino and he
operated as the gabbellotto for a huge estate belonging to one of Sicily’s most
noble families. The gabbellotto, a sort of overseer to the estates of the rich, also
guaranteed that the poor would not try to claim land not being cultivated, would
not try to encroach in any way on the estate, by poaching or trying to farm it as
squatters. In short, the gabbellotto was a mafioso who for a certain sum. of
money protected the real estate of the rich from all claims made on it by the
poor, legal or illegal. When any poor peasant tried to implement the law which
permitted him to buy uncultivated land, the gabbellotto frightened him off with
threats of bodily harm or death. It was that simple.
Don Tommasino also controlled the water rights in the area and vetoed
the local building of any new dams by the Roman government. Such dams
would ruin the lucrative business of selling water from the artesian wells he
controlled, make water too cheap, ruin the whole important water economy so
laboriously built up over hundreds of years. However, Don Tommasino was an

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old-fashioned Mafia chief and would have nothing to do with dope traffic or
prostitution. In this Don Tommasino was at odds with the new breed of Mafia
leaders springing up in big cities like Palermo, new men who, influenced by
American gangsters deported to Italy, had no such scruples.
The Mafia chief was an extremely portly man, a “man with a belly,”
literally as well as in the figurative sense that meant a man able to inspire fear in
his fellow men. Under his protection, Michael had nothing to fear, yet it was
considered necessary to keep the fugitive’s identity a secret. And so Michael was
restricted to the walled estate of Dr. Taza, the Don’s uncle.
Dr. Taza was tall for a Sicilian, almost six feet, and had ruddy cheeks
and snow-white hair. Though in his seventies, he went every week to Palermo to
pay his respects to the younger prostitutes of that city, the younger the better. Dr.
Taza’s other vice was reading. He read everything and talked about what he read
to his fellow townsmen, patients who were illiterate peasants, the estate
shepherds, and this gave him a local reputation for foolishness. What did books
have to do with them?
In the evenings Dr. Taza, Don Tommasino and Michael sat in the huge
garden populated with those marble statues that on this island seemed to grow
out of the garden as magically as the black heady grapes. Dr. Taza loved to tell
stories about the Mafia and its exploits over the centuries and in Michael
Corleone he had a fascinated listener. There were times when even Don
Tommasino would be carried away by the balmy air, the fruity, intoxicating
wine, the elegant and quiet comfort of the garden, and tell a story from his own
practical experience. The doctor was the legend, the Don the reality.
In this antique garden, Michael Corleone learned about the roots from
which his father grew. That the word “Mafia” had originally meant place of
refuge. Then it became the name for the secret organization that sprang up to
fight against the rulers who had crushed the country and its people for centuries.
Sicily was a land that had been more cruelly raped than any other in history. The
Inquisition had tortured rich and poor alike. The landowning barons and the
princes of the Catholic Church exercised absolute power over the shepherds and
farmers. The police were the instruments of their power and so identified with
them that to be called a policeman is the foulest insult one Sicilian can hurl at
another.
Faced with the savagery of this absolute power, the suffering people
learned never to betray their anger and their hatred for fear of being crushed.
They learned never to make themselves vulnerable by uttering any sort of threat

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since giving such a warning insured a quick reprisal. They learned that society
was their enemy and so when they sought redress for their wrongs they went to
the rebel underground, the Mafia. And the Mafia cemented its power by
originating the law of silence, the omerta. In the countryside of Sicily a stranger
asking directions to the nearest town will not even receive the courtesy of an
answer. And the greatest crime any member of the Mafia could commit would
be to tell the police the name of the man who had just shot him or done him any
kind of injury. Omerta became the religion of the people. A woman whose
husband has been murdered would not tell the police the name of her husband’s
murderer, not even of her child’s murderer, her daughter’s raper.
Justice had never been forthcoming from the authorities and so the
people had always gone to the Robin Hood Mafia. And to some extent the Mafia
still fulfilled this role. People turned to their local capo-mafioso for help in every
emergency. He was their social worker, their district captain ready with a basket
of food and a job, their protector.
But what Dr. Taza did not add, what Michael learned on his own in the
months that followed, was that the Mafia in Sicily had become the illegal arm of
the rich and even the auxiliary police of the legal and political structure. It had
become a degenerate capitalist structure, anti-communist, anti-liberal, placing its
own taxes on every form of business endeavor no matter how small.
Michael Corleone understood for the first time why men like his father
chose to become thieves and murderers rather than members of the legal society.
The poverty and fear and degradation were too awful to be acceptable to any
man of spirit. And in America some emigrating Sicilians had assumed there
would be an equally cruel authority.
Dr. Taza offered to take Michael into Palermo with him on his weekly
visit to the bordello but Michael refused. His flight to Sicily had prevented him
from getting proper medical treatment for his smashed jaw and he now carried a
memento from Captain McCluskey on the left side of his face. The bones had
knitted badly, throwing his profile askew, giving him the appearance of
depravity when viewed from that side. He had always been vain about his looks
and this upset him more than he thought possible. The pain that came and went
he didn’t mind at all, Dr. Taza gave him some pills that deadened it. Taza
offered to treat his face but Michael refused. He had been there long enough to
learn that Dr. Taza was perhaps the worst physician in Sicily. Dr. Taza read
everything but his medical literature, which he admitted he could not understand.
He had passed his medical exams through the good offices of the most important

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Mafia chief in Sicily who had made a special trip to Palermo to confer with
Taza’s professors about what grades they should give him. And this too showed
how the Mafia in Sicily was cancerous to the society it inhabited. Merit meant
nothing. Talent meant nothing. Work meant nothing. The Mafia Godfather gave
you your profession as a gift.
Michael had plenty of time to think things out. During the day he took
walks in the countryside, always accompanied by two of the shepherds attached
to Don Tommasino’s estate. The shepherds of the island were often recruited to
act as the Mafia’s hired killers and did their job simply to earn money to live.
Michael thought about his father’s organization. If it continued to prosper it
would grow into what had happened here on this island, so cancerous that it
would destroy the whole country. Sicily was already a land of ghosts, its men
emigrating to every other country on earth to be able to earn their bread, or
simply to escape being murdered for exercising their political and economic
freedoms.
On his long walks the most striking thing in Michael’s eyes was the
magnificent beauty of the country; he walked through the orange orchards that
formed shady deep caverns through the countryside with their ancient conduits
splashing water out of the fanged mouths of great snake stones carved before
Christ. Houses built like ancient Roman villas, with huge marble portals and
great vaulted rooms, falling into ruins or inhabited by stray sheep. On the
horizon the bony hills shone like picked bleached bones piled high. Gardens and
fields, sparkly green, decorated the desert landscape like bright emerald
necklaces. And sometimes he walked as far as the town of Corleone, its eighteen
thousand people strung out in dwellings that pitted the side of the nearest
mountain, the mean hovels built out of black rock quarried from that mountain.
In the last year there had been over sixty murders in Corleone and it seemed that
death shadowed the town. Further on, the wood of Ficuzza broke the savage
monotony of arable plain.
His two shepherd bodyguards always carried their luparas with them
when accompanying Michael on his walks. The deadly Sicilian shotgun was the
favorite weapon of the Mafia. Indeed the police chief sent by Mussolini to clean
the Mafia out of Sicily had, as one of his first steps, ordered all stone walls in
Sicily to be knocked down to not more than three feet in height so that murderers
with their luparas could not use the walls as ambush points for their
assassinations. This didn’t help much and the police minister solved his problem
by arresting and deporting to penal colonies any male suspected of being a

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