The Fourth K (53 page)

She saw Dr. Zed Annaccone seated beside the Oracle’s wheelchair. The doctor was probably trying to get the old man to donate his brain to science. And Dr. Annaccone was another problem. His PET brain-scan test was already being discussed in various scientific papers. Du Pray had always seen its virtues and its dangers. She felt it was a problem that should be carefully considered over a long period of time. A government with the capacity to find out the infallible truth could be very dangerous. True, such a test would root out crime and political corruption; it could reform the whole legal structure of society. But there were complicated truths, there were status quo truths, and then was it not true that at certain moments in history, truth could bring a halt to certain evolutionary changes? And what about the psyche of a people who knew the various truths about themselves could be exposed?

She glanced at the corner of the Rose Garden where Oddblood Gray and Arthur Wix were sitting in wicker chairs and talking animatedly. Gray was now seeing a psychiatrist every day for depression. The psychiatrist had told Gray that after the events of the past year it was perfectly normal for him to be suffering from depression. So why the hell was he going to a psychiatrist?

In the Rose Garden the Oracle was now the center of attraction. The birthday cake was being presented to him, a huge cake that covered the entire garden table. On the top, colored in red, white and blue spun sugar, was the Stars and Stripes. The TV cameras moved in; they caught for the
nation the sight of the Oracle blowing out the hundred birth-day candles. And blowing with him were President Du Pray, Oddblood Gray, Eugene Dazzy, Arthur Wix and the members of the Socrates Club.

The Oracle accepted a piece of cake and then allowed himself to be interviewed by Cassandra Chutt, who had managed this coup with the help of Lawrence Salentine. Cassandra Chutt had already made her introductory remarks while the candles were being blown out. Now she asked, “How does it feel to be one hundred years old?”

The Oracle glared at her malevolently, and at that moment he looked so evil that Cassandra Chutt was glad that this show was being taped for the evening. God, the man was ugly, his head a mass of liver spots, the scaly skin as shiny as scar tissue, the mouth almost nonexistent. For a moment she was afraid that he was deaf, so she repeated herself. She said, “How does it feel to be a century old?”

The Oracle smiled, his facial skin cracking into countless wrinkles. “Are you a fucking idiot?” he said. He caught sight of his face in one of the TV monitors, and it broke his heart. Suddenly he hated his birthday party. He looked directly into the camera and said, “Where’s Christian?”

President Helen Du Pray sat by the Oracle’s wheelchair and held his hand. The Oracle was sleeping, the very light sleep of old men waiting for death. The party in the Rose Garden went on without him.

Helen remembered herself as a young woman, one of the protégées of the Oracle. She had admired him so much. He had an intellectual grace, a turn of wit, a natural vivacity and joy in life that was everything she herself wanted to have.

Did it matter that he always tried to form a sexual liaison? She remembered the years before and how hurt she had been
when his friendship had turned into lechery. She ran her fingers over the scaly skin of his withered hand. She had followed the destiny of power, while most women followed the destiny of love. Were the victories of love sweeter?

Helen Du Pray thought of her own destiny and that of America. She was still astonished that after all the terrible events of the past year the country had settled down so peacefully. True, she had been partly responsible for that; her skill and intelligence had extinguished the fire in the country. But still …

She had wept at the death of Kennedy; in a small way she had loved him. She had loved the tragedy written into the bones of his beautifully planed face. She had loved his idealism, his vision of what America could be. She had loved his personal integrity, his purity and selflessness, his lack of interest in material things. And yet despite all this she had come to know that he was a dangerous man.

Helen Du Pray realized that now she had to guard against the belief in her own righteousness. She believed that in a world of such peril, humankind could not solve its problems with strife but only with a never-ending patience. She would do the best she could, and in her heart try not to feel hatred for her enemies.

At that moment the Oracle opened his eyes and smiled. He pressed her hand and began to speak. His voice was very low, and she bent her head close to his wrinkled mouth. “Don’t worry,” the Oracle said. “You will be a great President.”

Helen Du Pray for a moment felt a desire to weep as a child might when praised, for fear of failure. She looked about her in the Rose Garden filled with the most powerful men and women of America. She would have their help,
most of them; some she would have to guard against. But most of all she would have to guard against herself.

She thought again of Francis Kennedy. He lay now with his two famous uncles, loved as they had been. And his daughter. Well, Helen Du Pray thought, I will be the best of what Francis was, I will do the best of what he hoped to do. And then, holding tightly to the Oracle’s hand, she pondered on the simplicities of evil and the dangerous deviousness of good.

A new novel based on the characters created by Mario Puzo

Available wherever books are sold

I was ready to forget novels except maybe as a puttering hobby for my old age. But one day a writer friend dropped into my magazine office. As a natural courtesy, I gave him a copy of
The Fortunate Pilgrim
. A week later he came back. He thought I was a great writer. I bought him a magnificent lunch. During lunch, I told him some funny Mafia stories and my ten-page outline. He was enthusiastic. He arranged a meeting for me with the editor of G. P. Putnam’s Sons. The editors just sat around for an hour listening to my Mafia tales and said go ahead. They also gave me a $5,000 advance and I was on my way, just like that. Almost—almost, I believed that publishers were human.

It took me three years to finish.… And it was mostly all fun. I remember it as the happiest time of my life. (Family and friends disagree.) I’m ashamed to admit I wrote
The Godfather
entirely from research. I never met a real honest-to-God gangster. I knew the gambling world pretty good, but that’s all. After the book became “famous,” I was introduced to a few gentlemen related to the material. They were flattering. They refused to believe that I had never been in the rackets. They refused to believe that I had never had the confidence of a Don. But all of them loved the book.

In different parts of the country I heard a nice story: that the Mafia had paid me a million dollars to write
The Godfather
as a public relations con. I’m not in the literary world much, but I hear some writers claim I must have been a Mafia man, that the book could not have been written purely out of research. I treasure the compliment.

—Mario Puzo,
The Godfather Papers
, 1972

Throughout the decade I was Mario Puzo’s editor, I would periodically beg him to write a sequel to
The Godfather
. “Bring back the Corleones!” I would plead. “Whatever happened to Johnny Fontane? Can’t you do something with Tom Hagen? Don’t you think Michael has some unfinished business?”

Mario was always polite in the face of my wheedling and his response was always the same: No.

I understood why Mario never wanted to continue the story. He was a gambler at heart, and resurrecting
The Godfather
would have been a bad percentage move for him. It was bound to pale in comparison to the original. How do you improve on a legend?

But one day on the phone, Mario did give me his blessing to revisit the Corleones. He told me his family could do whatever they wanted with the rights to
The Godfather
after he died. (His exact phrase was “after I croak,” which I remember precisely because it was the first time an author had ever discussed his posthumous career with me in such direct terms.)

Mario left behind two novels,
Omerta
and his partially completed tale of the Borgias,
The Family
, so it was a while before I approached his estate about the prospect of reviving
The Godfather
. After conversations with Mario’s eldest son, Anthony Puzo, and his literary agent, Neil Olson, we agreed on a strategy.

We would discreetly search for a writer at roughly the same stage of his or her career as Mario was when he wrote
The Godfather
—mid-forties, with two acclaimed literary novels to his credit, and a yearning to write a larger, more ambitious novel for a broader readership than his previous books had reached. We didn’t want a by-the-numbers hired gun. We
wanted an original voice, someone who would bring artistry and vision to the Corleone saga, just as director Francis Ford Coppola had done so brilliantly in his film adaptations.

I outlined what we were looking for in a one-page query, which I sent confidentially via e-mail to about a dozen respected literary agents. Within twenty-four hours of sending my confidential email, I received a phone call from
New Yorker
staff writer Nick Paumgarten. He’d heard all about our search and wanted to write about it. At first I was reluctant to cooperate, due to my concern that every would-be goomba in the country would send me a manuscript. Upon further consideration, I realized that there probably weren’t a lot of goombas reading
The New Yorker
, and that a story might be a good way to get out the word and attract a broader range of authors.

The day the story was published,
The Godfather Returns
became headline news. I was deluged with calls from almost every major media organization in the United States, as well as many abroad, from CNN to the BBC in New Zealand. The
New York Times Magazine
published a cautionary essay about the dangers of sequels. I appeared on a Detroit radio morning “zoo” show with a Vito Corleone impersonator who warned me that my career might come to an untimely end if I didn’t hire him to write the book.

We had set a deadline for the delivery of outlines from potential writers. We stuck to our guidelines—only published authors of acclaimed fiction would be considered. By the day of the deadline, we had been swamped with submissions from well-regarded authors (plus countless more from unpublished ones). As I sorted through the outlines, I was taped by a TV cameraman and interviewed by NBC News correspondent Jamie Gangel, who was covering our search, and who ultimately revealed the winner live on the
Today
show.

I quickly narrowed down the field to about a dozen serious contenders. Some were dismissed on account of inadvisable plot lines. (Michael Corleone falls in love with a Native American activist. Or, the Corleone women take over the family business. Or, Sonny Corleone didn’t really die.) Others
were rejected because the writers didn’t seem to have the right feel for the material.. One literary critic described Mario Puzo’s style as “somewhere between pulp and Proust.” That’s part of the reason for his success—he was an original writer who loved to entertain his readers. He could turn a phrase, and there was a sly ironic undertone to almost everything he wrote, but Mario’s greatest talent was for telling a story that stayed with you because the details were so captivating. Our ideal writer would have similar gifts.

From the dozen contenders, we arrived at four finalists. We would have been happy to publish any of them. After consultation with Tony Puzo and Neil Olson, we unanimously agreed that the best candidate was Mark Winegardner. Like Mario, he was an author of two acclaimed literary novels,
The Veracruz Blues
and
Crooked River Burning
, and to our delight, both books had organized crime plot threads. I read
Crooked River Burning
and loved it, not only for its ambition (it’s the story of the rise and fall of a great American city over a period of decades), but also because the author shows such compassion for his characters. Mario Puzo’s greatest literary inspiration was Dostoevsky, who taught him to see the humanity within the villainous. Winegardner has an equally big heart when writing about his characters. That can be very interesting when you’re going to have to kill a lot of them. He was our first choice to write
The Godfather Returns
and we were elated when he accepted. Our selection was international news. When Mark visited Sicily for some background research, it was a front page story there.

Neither Mark nor I have ever worked on a more highly anticipated book. We know the risks of following in the tradition of a pop classic. I’m not worried. Having edited the novel, I’m certain of its quality and its power. The Corleones have become an American myth, and like all great myths, each retelling brings new meaning and new rewards.