Road to Paradise

In a courtyard illuminated only by the moon and the green-and-red of motel neon, Michael left the Garand rifle in the trunk of the Lincoln, but took the .45 Colt automatic with him, as he slipped inside Room 12, the cabin farthest from the highway.

He did not hit the light switch — Anna was sleeping in one of the twin beds — but the bathroom light had been left on, the door ajar. A small air conditioner chugged, making no more noise than a Volkswagen with a faulty muffler; but the girl — under the sheets in her pink nightshirt, lost in a deep sedative-aided slumber — was past noticing or caring.

In addition to throwing the bolt and the latch, Michael wedged the back of a chair under the knob. On the nightstand between the twin beds he set the .45 next to the .38 Smith & Wesson already there, and picked up an envelope propped against the lamp.

The letter, labeled anna, he tucked away — for now — in his Samsonite.

In the bathroom he pissed and brushed his teeth and lifted a few handfuls of water to his face. Back at his bed, he slipped out of his crepe-sole shoes, but left on the rest of his clothing — long-sleeve T-shirt and black jeans and black socks — then lay on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling, hands locked behind his head, elbows winged out.

He would take a chance on Accardo.

The man some called Big Tuna, others called Joe Batters, was the last of the Capone crowd — the surviving Outfit leader with any sense of Old World decency. Michael, in his brief mid-’40s tour of duty as Accardo’s lieutenant, had never really bonded with the ganglord — not as he had with Nitti and Ricca, anyway — but he had nonetheless witnessed a boss who must have been like the old turn-of-the-century Mafia dons, fair and never hasty to act, approachable, willing to help a “family” member.

Accardo truly viewed the Outfit as an extended family, and those backyard barbecues he used to throw every summer indicated his good heart, even though it eventually got the real-life Godfather into trouble, attracting more unwanted guests than invited ones — the press hanging around taking pictures of the attendees, and the FBI showing up with their own clicking cameras.

Still, while Michael could risk his own life, trusting Accardo, he would take extra precautions where Anna was concerned. Right now the motherless girl was a wreck — a newlywed who’d lost her husband on the honeymoon — and she had wept and slept in the backseat on the way from Tahoe to Palm Springs. At the Solona Court, she’d willingly taken the sedatives to help her sleep deeper, and he had not told her he was going out.

What he had done was leave her that sealed envelope with a letter in it. On the back, he had penned in his small cramped precise handwriting: