The Reynolds/Bradshaw Connection - Epilogue
The Reynolds/Bradshaw Connection
IT IS FINISHED!
Special thanks go out to Keaira and Sigrid. Keaira, even though she did not get to finish beta’ing this project, was everything to this fic for the time that she was the beta-this was, and still is a collaboration between me and her. And Sigrid, for the sentence structure guru that she is (in a VERY good way), has given me all the confidence, as a beta, that the sequel I have planned will eclipse this by far.
For anyone interested in reading the sequel, here's its title-You Only Die Twice. Look for it soon!
As a segue to the sequel, and because this, as an epilogue, is an addendum to the rest of the story, this will be written in the third person. Enjoy!
Opening lyrics come from You Know My Name by Chris Cornell; end lyrics belong to It’s the End of the World (As We Know It) by REM
Epilogue
---------------------
Arm yourself because no one else here will save you
The odds will betray you
And I will replace you
You can't deny the prize it may never fulfill you
It longs to kill you
Are you willing to die?
The coldness burns through my veins
You know my name
---------------------
It was a dank and dreary day down in the prison in Barcelona. The two guards sat around a table, playing Texas Hold’em in their office, all the while trying to block out the frantic and inane screams and utterances of the prisoners from behind the hinged door that served as their barricade.
“HA, gotcha! Straight! The pot’s mine!” exclaimed one of the guards, a younger, gruff-looking man. The man extended his arms around the chips on the table and pulled them towards him.
“Wait, where’s the straight? You don’t have it, so my two-pair wins!” the other guard argued as he flipped over his cards.
“The Ace in the community starts it off.”
“What are you talking about? You can’t have a straight that goes Ace-two-three-four-five!”
“HA! You stupid, not like bear!” shouted one of the prisoners mockingly. She bore a strong Russian accent and was a physically daunting woman, taller than the majority of men and extremely muscle-bound.
“Yah! You stupid!” joined another prisoner from the same cell.
They were the targets.
A woman crawled along the air ducts overhead, taking in the action as the guards yelled their retorts to the women. She was on a mission and nothing would stop her. No, that was wrong-nothing could stop her, she thought.
The woman continued crawling through the ducts until she reached a grate that she could effectively lower herself through. Looking down through the grate, it appeared that she was right above the guards’ office, but they were nowhere to be found.
Voices rang out below and behind her.
“You two, shut up!” shouted one of the guards. Muffled voices followed, and, with the guards distracted, she realized that there was no better time than the present to make her move.
She slowly swung up the grate, careful not to make a noise or draw attention. Once the grate was up, she lowered herself through the hole in the ducts. The sounds of the argument were getting louder and clearer.
“You think you strong like bear, but you not!”
Once down on the floor, the woman conducted a cursory survey of her whereabouts. She had made nary a noise coming down, and the guards were still preoccupied, their backs turned to the hallway, facing her targets. The cards lay haphazardly on the table. This is what happens when you foolishly gamble, jackasses.
Her targets, the two large Russian women, were in the first cell outside the guards’ office, making her plan all too easy. The woman turned her head, checking on her surroundings, making sure she would go unstopped, and suddenly she was off running, through the doors. She stopped right behind the guards, who turned at the noise, grabbing for their guns. They never had the chance to draw. The woman deftly collected a head in each hand and forcefully thrust them into the bars of the door, knocking the men out cold.
“Tiny? Smalls?” the woman, speaking in a French accent, addressed the two women.
“Da-Who you?” responded one of the women in acknowledgement. The woman was indistinguishable from her companion.
“I’m your savior.”
---------------------
A man sat in a brand new black leather chair, peering out above his desk on a warehouse that was in the process of being renovated. Before him on the desk lay a chess board from which he would extract a black piece every so often and move it to a spot which required no thought to determine. The man played against an invisible opponent, although he graciously moved the pieces for this unnamed challenger. There was no way the man could lose, however, for he was a machine when it came to chess-never had he found an equal.
The man, not having to focus on the moves his chess pieces would make, always enjoyed to contemplate on various themes as he would play. This night the man, in between moves, deliberated on the meaning of one particular word: Loyalty. The word meant a lot to the man sitting black leather chair, as the man needed loyalty on a daily basis. If he didn’t get loyalty, well, those disloyal had to pay the consequence. That was the only way to run a global crime network, and Corleone knew that.
It was the topic of loyalty that had forced Corleone’s hand to put into action one of the most ambitious and daring plans the genius had ever conceived-the death of Charitine LeFleur.
Charitine, a few weeks prior to arriving in Barcelona, had shown Corleone the beginnings of a revolt, she had shown her disloyalty. She had let emotions control her and had become completely indignant, completely useless to him. As soon as the disloyalty had coursed through her veins, Corleone knew that it was time to play the game.
Sure, playing chess with inanimate pieces of wood on a chessboard was a means of amusement, but Corleone felt no challenge coming from it. Playing chess with humans, on the other hand, held the ultimate challenge, and Corleone was the ultimate challenger.
Human chess was an intricate game of deception and deceit, and none excelled better than Corleone. Humans, with their intelligence, and free will were seemingly unpredictable, but Corleone knew better. Corleone knew how to play the game.
Scientists and computer programmers would want you to believe that the human mind is an object of randomness, and that the decisions it makes cannot be determined accurately one-hundred percent of the time. They would like you to believe that true artificial intelligence was impossible.
They would be wrong.
Corleone knew better-the human mind is a factor of many things, but randomness played little to no factor. He had found that the mind was prominently controlled by past events, current events, and the effects of one’s surroundings, among other affecting circumstances.
In the end, it all boiled down to Sigmund Freud. The id, ego, and the super-ego were the three predominant factors in every decision; the key was controlling them. Of course, the ego was the easiest to manipulate, being, in a nutshell, the part of the brain that made the conscious decisions. It was the part of the human mind that was the most affected by an altered reality, and it was this fact that made it the easiest to mold.
Of course, the ego was directly affected by the balance between the id and the super-ego, and that was where the fun began for Corleone. Striking the balance and manipulating each subconscious entity was where the challenge always lay. The super-ego, the symbolic father-figure of the brain, the moral portion always was striving to limit the id, the part of the brain that existed only for pleasure, the part that yearned for the sensory. These were significantly harder to manipulate than the ego, but, providing the right circumstances, one could pull it off, and Corleone frequently did.
By controlling a person’s ego, id and super ego in a controlled environment, Corleone found it not only possible to influence a person’s actions, but to completely determine a person’s actions before they themselves determined it.
Say, for example, Charitine’s decision to mutiny-Corleone had merely planted the seeds and provided the necessary route for her decisions. He had controlled her like a master puppeteer controlling a marionette and she had fallen straight into his trap.
The problem with Charitine was that she let emotions guide her, something Corleone had learned to avoid. Emotions complicated things, and Corleone had no use for them anymore. Yes, once he too had let emotions control him, but they had torn him asunder and cast him to the ground. He knew firsthand the damage they could do, but, alas, that was a story for another day.
When Corleone had discovered, through his vast wealth of contacts, that his former protégé, Lucy Reynolds, had moved to Barcelona he found the perfect circumstance to facilitate and manipulate his prey. Lucy was the irresistible jewel in Charitine’s eye, the prize that she wanted, yet, like a masochistic, forbade herself from. He alone knew the reason she had broken up with Lucy, and it had not been Lucy’s attachment to Charitine. In fact, it had been quite the opposite.
After her father had shunned her from the family, Corleone had always noticed an aversion to emotion on Charitine’s part. Charitine, perhaps as a response to her father, felt the need to maintain apathy for and a complete detachment from everything. So, when her id had started to desire Lucy Reynolds, her super-ego’s defense mechanisms had kicked into gear, and she had realized that she needed to break it. This had not surprised Corleone. Rather, what surprised Corleone was that her super-ego had been ignored for as long as it was.
So, in Lucy’s presence in Spain, Corleone found the needed catalyst for the deposal of the waste that was Charitine. When he had told Lucy that he had needed the second favor from her, she never would have guessed what it was, nor would he have ever told her what the true favor was. She was still under the impression that the second favor had been the heist at the art museum, and she was dead wrong. The second favor had been to assist Corleone in the murder of her ex-girlfriend.
The art heist had never been a real plan; instead, it was just a part of the much larger plan. It had been a rush job on purpose, although all things considered, as part of the larger plan, it certainly was not a rush job. As a perceived rush job, however, it served as the channel to ensure that the portion of Charitine’s id that had wanted to revolt and usurp Corleone had won out over the super-ego that had warned against it. Thereby, Corleone took an event that he knew would happen eventually and put it on his terms rather than hers-it was easier to control that way.
Corleone had spent decades studying people, and from those long, arduous years had ascertained a method of diagnosing and dissecting a person’s mind just by observing their actions. He had known the effects being near Lucy would have on Charitine. He had known the temptation Charitine had faced with Lucy, and he had certainly known that she would formulate her plan to rule the criminal world with Lucy by her side. Charitine, by nature, was a creature of ambition, and that ambition had been her downfall. Her over-ambitiousness had blinded her, and in the moment of her ultimate triumph, the moment she had been able to eliminate the thought that haunted her super-ego, he had used that ambitiousness to end her life.
As for his “resurrection,” Corleone had planned that out to the tee. Knowing that he had pushed her over the edge to her breaking point, Corleone had taken every precaution he could have possibly imagined to ensure that he would not perish.
Days after the incident, Corleone had begun taking multiple painkillers, and had barely moved from the chair. He had been effectively numb, and that only played into his hands, as he knew that, not feeling the pain, his sick smile would haunt Charitine until her untimely death. Oh, the blood had been real, that was not staged, but it was planned. For months he had been taking blood and storing it in a small refrigerator he kept in his makeshift office, and it had served the purpose he knew it would.
Months earlier, in the first steps of the plan, Corleone had implanted a small GPS device under the skin in his arm. This device had allowed his newest protégé, the woman who had made Charitine disposable, to track him and quickly find him after Charitine had deposited his body in the woods.
His protégé had arrived in the nick of time in the white van she drove for this occasion and, upon finding him, quickly strapped him into the medical cot she had stolen from the hospital. Inside the van, the doctor she had kidnapped days before Charitine’s coup set about performing a crude blood transfusion at gunpoint. It had not been sophisticated, but it had worked.
Corleone had spent the next few weeks in bed, recovering in the secret location only he and his newest protégé had known about. Even though he was out of commission, the events he had set in motion continued to go on without him.
To play the game of human chess, one constantly had to rely on the power of human connections. Mother to daughter, father to son, lover to lover, and enemy to enemy, they all had different connections, and if you knew how to exploit them, they could be used to the player’s advantage.
In this case, from careful observation, Corleone had felt the need to use the connection he had sensed between Lucy Reynolds and her girlfriend, Amy Bradshaw, a connection he cared to refer to as the Reynolds/Bradshaw Connection. From observation, he had sensed that it was nearly indestructible, and therefore, could withstand the onslaught Charitine’s blow would have dealt. Once the connection had mended, it was only a matter of time before they realized the monster that Charitine was and dealt with her themselves.
The Four Horsemen Defense System was a joke, a crude system Corleone had thrown together knowing full well what it would be used for. He had meant for Lucy and company to be able to penetrate the system, and had kept an eye tracking Charitine, suspecting that her id would win out and that she would make a move to draw Lucy to her. He had proved correct in both cases.
Lucy had refused once again, as he fully expected, and, being out of practice, had lost in her fight against Charitine. Luckily…no, thankfully (Corleone had never believed in luck) Corleone had already expected such an outcome and had…insurance in that case. That insurance policy had dealt with the problem of Charitine and insured that she would not be coming back any time soon.
The game of human chess, Corleone thought, is more enjoyable when no one knows you’re playing. He picked up a white piece, and, sensing the thoughts of his invisible rival, moved the pawn to the G-5 square. Surveying the board, he leaned back in the leather chair and took in his surroundings. Behind him stood his most loyal employees, his new protégé, a woman with flowing brown hair and a tanned complexion to rival Lucy Reynolds’, as well as the two idiot savants, Tiny and Smalls, who only knew violence-they were the future…he was the future. He moved his black queen directly diagonal to his challenger’s king, putting them in check.
The world would not know what was about to hit it.
Gingerly, he extended a frail finger towards the white king, and in one fluid motion toppled it, the piece rolling off the board. “Checkmate.”
---------------------
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine.
---------------------
So, by now you may have realized that I’ve been fooling you this entire time - you have all been reading the side-story in this conflict - the real plot revolves around the Chastity/Corleone conflict, and everything that happened is a factor in that.
I also tend to think of this as an extended prologue to the sequel.
~Dan
IT IS FINISHED!
Special thanks go out to Keaira and Sigrid. Keaira, even though she did not get to finish beta’ing this project, was everything to this fic for the time that she was the beta-this was, and still is a collaboration between me and her. And Sigrid, for the sentence structure guru that she is (in a VERY good way), has given me all the confidence, as a beta, that the sequel I have planned will eclipse this by far.
For anyone interested in reading the sequel, here's its title-You Only Die Twice. Look for it soon!
As a segue to the sequel, and because this, as an epilogue, is an addendum to the rest of the story, this will be written in the third person. Enjoy!
Opening lyrics come from You Know My Name by Chris Cornell; end lyrics belong to It’s the End of the World (As We Know It) by REM
Epilogue
---------------------
Arm yourself because no one else here will save you
The odds will betray you
And I will replace you
You can't deny the prize it may never fulfill you
It longs to kill you
Are you willing to die?
The coldness burns through my veins
You know my name
---------------------
It was a dank and dreary day down in the prison in Barcelona. The two guards sat around a table, playing Texas Hold’em in their office, all the while trying to block out the frantic and inane screams and utterances of the prisoners from behind the hinged door that served as their barricade.
“HA, gotcha! Straight! The pot’s mine!” exclaimed one of the guards, a younger, gruff-looking man. The man extended his arms around the chips on the table and pulled them towards him.
“Wait, where’s the straight? You don’t have it, so my two-pair wins!” the other guard argued as he flipped over his cards.
“The Ace in the community starts it off.”
“What are you talking about? You can’t have a straight that goes Ace-two-three-four-five!”
“HA! You stupid, not like bear!” shouted one of the prisoners mockingly. She bore a strong Russian accent and was a physically daunting woman, taller than the majority of men and extremely muscle-bound.
“Yah! You stupid!” joined another prisoner from the same cell.
They were the targets.
A woman crawled along the air ducts overhead, taking in the action as the guards yelled their retorts to the women. She was on a mission and nothing would stop her. No, that was wrong-nothing could stop her, she thought.
The woman continued crawling through the ducts until she reached a grate that she could effectively lower herself through. Looking down through the grate, it appeared that she was right above the guards’ office, but they were nowhere to be found.
Voices rang out below and behind her.
“You two, shut up!” shouted one of the guards. Muffled voices followed, and, with the guards distracted, she realized that there was no better time than the present to make her move.
She slowly swung up the grate, careful not to make a noise or draw attention. Once the grate was up, she lowered herself through the hole in the ducts. The sounds of the argument were getting louder and clearer.
“You think you strong like bear, but you not!”
Once down on the floor, the woman conducted a cursory survey of her whereabouts. She had made nary a noise coming down, and the guards were still preoccupied, their backs turned to the hallway, facing her targets. The cards lay haphazardly on the table. This is what happens when you foolishly gamble, jackasses.
Her targets, the two large Russian women, were in the first cell outside the guards’ office, making her plan all too easy. The woman turned her head, checking on her surroundings, making sure she would go unstopped, and suddenly she was off running, through the doors. She stopped right behind the guards, who turned at the noise, grabbing for their guns. They never had the chance to draw. The woman deftly collected a head in each hand and forcefully thrust them into the bars of the door, knocking the men out cold.
“Tiny? Smalls?” the woman, speaking in a French accent, addressed the two women.
“Da-Who you?” responded one of the women in acknowledgement. The woman was indistinguishable from her companion.
“I’m your savior.”
---------------------
A man sat in a brand new black leather chair, peering out above his desk on a warehouse that was in the process of being renovated. Before him on the desk lay a chess board from which he would extract a black piece every so often and move it to a spot which required no thought to determine. The man played against an invisible opponent, although he graciously moved the pieces for this unnamed challenger. There was no way the man could lose, however, for he was a machine when it came to chess-never had he found an equal.
The man, not having to focus on the moves his chess pieces would make, always enjoyed to contemplate on various themes as he would play. This night the man, in between moves, deliberated on the meaning of one particular word: Loyalty. The word meant a lot to the man sitting black leather chair, as the man needed loyalty on a daily basis. If he didn’t get loyalty, well, those disloyal had to pay the consequence. That was the only way to run a global crime network, and Corleone knew that.
It was the topic of loyalty that had forced Corleone’s hand to put into action one of the most ambitious and daring plans the genius had ever conceived-the death of Charitine LeFleur.
Charitine, a few weeks prior to arriving in Barcelona, had shown Corleone the beginnings of a revolt, she had shown her disloyalty. She had let emotions control her and had become completely indignant, completely useless to him. As soon as the disloyalty had coursed through her veins, Corleone knew that it was time to play the game.
Sure, playing chess with inanimate pieces of wood on a chessboard was a means of amusement, but Corleone felt no challenge coming from it. Playing chess with humans, on the other hand, held the ultimate challenge, and Corleone was the ultimate challenger.
Human chess was an intricate game of deception and deceit, and none excelled better than Corleone. Humans, with their intelligence, and free will were seemingly unpredictable, but Corleone knew better. Corleone knew how to play the game.
Scientists and computer programmers would want you to believe that the human mind is an object of randomness, and that the decisions it makes cannot be determined accurately one-hundred percent of the time. They would like you to believe that true artificial intelligence was impossible.
They would be wrong.
Corleone knew better-the human mind is a factor of many things, but randomness played little to no factor. He had found that the mind was prominently controlled by past events, current events, and the effects of one’s surroundings, among other affecting circumstances.
In the end, it all boiled down to Sigmund Freud. The id, ego, and the super-ego were the three predominant factors in every decision; the key was controlling them. Of course, the ego was the easiest to manipulate, being, in a nutshell, the part of the brain that made the conscious decisions. It was the part of the human mind that was the most affected by an altered reality, and it was this fact that made it the easiest to mold.
Of course, the ego was directly affected by the balance between the id and the super-ego, and that was where the fun began for Corleone. Striking the balance and manipulating each subconscious entity was where the challenge always lay. The super-ego, the symbolic father-figure of the brain, the moral portion always was striving to limit the id, the part of the brain that existed only for pleasure, the part that yearned for the sensory. These were significantly harder to manipulate than the ego, but, providing the right circumstances, one could pull it off, and Corleone frequently did.
By controlling a person’s ego, id and super ego in a controlled environment, Corleone found it not only possible to influence a person’s actions, but to completely determine a person’s actions before they themselves determined it.
Say, for example, Charitine’s decision to mutiny-Corleone had merely planted the seeds and provided the necessary route for her decisions. He had controlled her like a master puppeteer controlling a marionette and she had fallen straight into his trap.
The problem with Charitine was that she let emotions guide her, something Corleone had learned to avoid. Emotions complicated things, and Corleone had no use for them anymore. Yes, once he too had let emotions control him, but they had torn him asunder and cast him to the ground. He knew firsthand the damage they could do, but, alas, that was a story for another day.
When Corleone had discovered, through his vast wealth of contacts, that his former protégé, Lucy Reynolds, had moved to Barcelona he found the perfect circumstance to facilitate and manipulate his prey. Lucy was the irresistible jewel in Charitine’s eye, the prize that she wanted, yet, like a masochistic, forbade herself from. He alone knew the reason she had broken up with Lucy, and it had not been Lucy’s attachment to Charitine. In fact, it had been quite the opposite.
After her father had shunned her from the family, Corleone had always noticed an aversion to emotion on Charitine’s part. Charitine, perhaps as a response to her father, felt the need to maintain apathy for and a complete detachment from everything. So, when her id had started to desire Lucy Reynolds, her super-ego’s defense mechanisms had kicked into gear, and she had realized that she needed to break it. This had not surprised Corleone. Rather, what surprised Corleone was that her super-ego had been ignored for as long as it was.
So, in Lucy’s presence in Spain, Corleone found the needed catalyst for the deposal of the waste that was Charitine. When he had told Lucy that he had needed the second favor from her, she never would have guessed what it was, nor would he have ever told her what the true favor was. She was still under the impression that the second favor had been the heist at the art museum, and she was dead wrong. The second favor had been to assist Corleone in the murder of her ex-girlfriend.
The art heist had never been a real plan; instead, it was just a part of the much larger plan. It had been a rush job on purpose, although all things considered, as part of the larger plan, it certainly was not a rush job. As a perceived rush job, however, it served as the channel to ensure that the portion of Charitine’s id that had wanted to revolt and usurp Corleone had won out over the super-ego that had warned against it. Thereby, Corleone took an event that he knew would happen eventually and put it on his terms rather than hers-it was easier to control that way.
Corleone had spent decades studying people, and from those long, arduous years had ascertained a method of diagnosing and dissecting a person’s mind just by observing their actions. He had known the effects being near Lucy would have on Charitine. He had known the temptation Charitine had faced with Lucy, and he had certainly known that she would formulate her plan to rule the criminal world with Lucy by her side. Charitine, by nature, was a creature of ambition, and that ambition had been her downfall. Her over-ambitiousness had blinded her, and in the moment of her ultimate triumph, the moment she had been able to eliminate the thought that haunted her super-ego, he had used that ambitiousness to end her life.
As for his “resurrection,” Corleone had planned that out to the tee. Knowing that he had pushed her over the edge to her breaking point, Corleone had taken every precaution he could have possibly imagined to ensure that he would not perish.
Days after the incident, Corleone had begun taking multiple painkillers, and had barely moved from the chair. He had been effectively numb, and that only played into his hands, as he knew that, not feeling the pain, his sick smile would haunt Charitine until her untimely death. Oh, the blood had been real, that was not staged, but it was planned. For months he had been taking blood and storing it in a small refrigerator he kept in his makeshift office, and it had served the purpose he knew it would.
Months earlier, in the first steps of the plan, Corleone had implanted a small GPS device under the skin in his arm. This device had allowed his newest protégé, the woman who had made Charitine disposable, to track him and quickly find him after Charitine had deposited his body in the woods.
His protégé had arrived in the nick of time in the white van she drove for this occasion and, upon finding him, quickly strapped him into the medical cot she had stolen from the hospital. Inside the van, the doctor she had kidnapped days before Charitine’s coup set about performing a crude blood transfusion at gunpoint. It had not been sophisticated, but it had worked.
Corleone had spent the next few weeks in bed, recovering in the secret location only he and his newest protégé had known about. Even though he was out of commission, the events he had set in motion continued to go on without him.
To play the game of human chess, one constantly had to rely on the power of human connections. Mother to daughter, father to son, lover to lover, and enemy to enemy, they all had different connections, and if you knew how to exploit them, they could be used to the player’s advantage.
In this case, from careful observation, Corleone had felt the need to use the connection he had sensed between Lucy Reynolds and her girlfriend, Amy Bradshaw, a connection he cared to refer to as the Reynolds/Bradshaw Connection. From observation, he had sensed that it was nearly indestructible, and therefore, could withstand the onslaught Charitine’s blow would have dealt. Once the connection had mended, it was only a matter of time before they realized the monster that Charitine was and dealt with her themselves.
The Four Horsemen Defense System was a joke, a crude system Corleone had thrown together knowing full well what it would be used for. He had meant for Lucy and company to be able to penetrate the system, and had kept an eye tracking Charitine, suspecting that her id would win out and that she would make a move to draw Lucy to her. He had proved correct in both cases.
Lucy had refused once again, as he fully expected, and, being out of practice, had lost in her fight against Charitine. Luckily…no, thankfully (Corleone had never believed in luck) Corleone had already expected such an outcome and had…insurance in that case. That insurance policy had dealt with the problem of Charitine and insured that she would not be coming back any time soon.
The game of human chess, Corleone thought, is more enjoyable when no one knows you’re playing. He picked up a white piece, and, sensing the thoughts of his invisible rival, moved the pawn to the G-5 square. Surveying the board, he leaned back in the leather chair and took in his surroundings. Behind him stood his most loyal employees, his new protégé, a woman with flowing brown hair and a tanned complexion to rival Lucy Reynolds’, as well as the two idiot savants, Tiny and Smalls, who only knew violence-they were the future…he was the future. He moved his black queen directly diagonal to his challenger’s king, putting them in check.
The world would not know what was about to hit it.
Gingerly, he extended a frail finger towards the white king, and in one fluid motion toppled it, the piece rolling off the board. “Checkmate.”
---------------------
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine.
---------------------
So, by now you may have realized that I’ve been fooling you this entire time - you have all been reading the side-story in this conflict - the real plot revolves around the Chastity/Corleone conflict, and everything that happened is a factor in that.
I also tend to think of this as an extended prologue to the sequel.
~Dan