The Godfather Returns (10 page)

Hagen told the front desk to call him whenever a car came for him. He left a wake-up call for 1:45.

It came. He awoke famished. Hagen hated late lunches. Two o’clock came and went. Hagen called down and was told, “No, sir, there still hasn’t been anyone asking for you.”

He hung up the phone and stared at it, willing it to ring. Like a stupid kid waiting for his sweetheart to call. He picked up the phone again and had the operator connect him with Mike’s office. No answer. He tried Mike’s home number. If the meeting with the Ambassador were about anything of lesser stakes, Hagen would already have been on a plane home. Kay’s father answered. Michael and Kay had gone out for their anniversary lunch. Hagen had forgotten. He’d catch up with Mike later. Then he called home to say he’d gotten in okay and everything was fine, and Theresa was crying because Garbanzo, their arthritic dachshund, had run away. The kids had made flyers and posted them in the neighborhood and now were out looking for their pet. What if the dog wandered out into the desert? Think of all the ways it could die then: coyotes, cougars, snakes, thirst. There was an atomic bomb test tomorrow; think of that. Hagen tried to calm her down. He reassured her that an arthritic dachshund probably couldn’t have made it out of the subdivision, much less the sixty-some miles to that test site.

Hagen looked at the racquet, available for twenty bucks at any hardware store and not nearly as good as the one he had at home. In his mind’s eye, he saw his brother Sonny, outraged at this show of disrespect, ordering everything on the room service menu, eating what he wanted and pissing over all the rest, then smashing up the racquet and the room, too, sticking the Ambassador with the damages
—we don’t take cash, you have to sign for it—
and heading home. Hagen’s stomach growled. He smiled. He missed Sonny.

The phone rang. His driver was here.

Hagen went down, but there was no car there. He asked the parking attendant. No cars for a while now, he said. Hagen’s head pounded. He’d forgotten his sunglasses. Squinting was painful. Back in the lobby, he saw a Negro in a tuxedo. He’d pulled up on the other side of the building, in an optic-white-roofed, six-seater golf cart. It was after two-thirty.

“This may be the biggest golf cart I’ve ever seen.” Hagen shielded his eyes from the glare off the vehicle’s white skin.

“Thank you, sir,” said the driver, clearly someone who’d been told in his training not to make eye contact with his employers or their associates except when spoken to.

The ride across the golf course, through a maze of tennis courts, and across another golf course took about fifteen minutes, during which each of them averted his eyes from the other.

When the Ambassador had first gone into business with Vito Corleone, his name had been Mickey Shea. Now he was known in the newspapers as M. Corbett Shea. No one called him Mickey. Close friends and family, even his wife, called him Corbett. To everyone else, he was the Ambassador. His father had left County Cork, settled in Baltimore, and opened a saloon across the street from the one Babe Ruth’s dad owned. The oldest of six children, Mickey Shea grew up working hard—scrubbing floors, lugging boxes, shoveling manure from the street and snow from the alley. But his life, especially compared to other Irish kids’ in the neighborhood, was a comfortable one. Soon, though, his parents began sampling too much of their own wares. They lost everything. His mother became the rare woman who chooses a gun to kill herself, opening wide to wrap her mouth around the barrels of a sawed-off shotgun taken from the shelf under the cash register. Mickey, snow shovel in hand, was the one who discovered her near-headless body in the alley behind the bar. His father just kept drinking until that, too, did the job.

Mickey joined the army at seventeen and soon became a supply sergeant. It was there, not (as legend had it) on the streets of Baltimore, that he learned that there were the rules and then there was what people do. The black market, lucrative in peacetime, proved to be a license to print money once the United States entered the war. The week after the armistice, Sergeant Shea rigged himself an honorable discharge. He was a millionaire, most of it in cash. He went to New York and opened a tavern in the Tenderloin district. Being both Irish and a fine negotiator, he quickly forged useful bonds with the police and, more important, Irish street gangs like the Marginals and the Gophers. He bought a few warehouses near the piers, a solid investment that helped him keep his import-export skills sharp. And that might have been that, if not for Prohibition. Shea was God’s perfect bootlegger. He owned warehouses. He employed dockworkers. He knew how to move goods outside the law. He had friends in two eastern cities and people in Canada, former supply sergeants from the RAF with whom he’d done business and remained friendly. And not only did he run a tavern, he ran one known as a cops’ bar. Nearly overnight, that tavern became an ice cream parlor and its basement was gutted, remodeled, and reopened as a speakeasy. The cops, his former regulars, were now paid to drink there for free—money well spent, since the place got a word-of-mouth reputation as one safe from raids. Before Shea knew it, that basement was a who’s who of Manhattan swells—opera divas and Broadway stars, newspaper publishers and their star columnists, flashy lawyers and florid aldermen, even presidents of banks and titans of Wall Street. Shea bought the building next door and tunneled through to its basement, almost tripling the size of the place. A full orchestra played there every night. It was as brazen an operation as existed anywhere in America.

But Mickey Shea was a man who had seen things. During the war, men like him could get rich, but there was a whole tier of rich and powerful people above that, people who hadn’t had to get their hands dirty setting up a swap of morphine and girlie pictures for blood and generators, who’d never had to work the room slapping the backs of men they’d bribed. He’d used his connections with the cops in lower Manhattan to help keep the converted olive oil trucks from getting stopped on the way to his warehouses (and to keep those warehouses from getting raided), but what were those men in those trucks doing that he couldn’t do? Why was he getting only the warehousing money and the money from the speakeasy when he could just as easily
—more
easily—bring the stuff down and sell it himself? So men in Canada set him up with a fleet of speedboats and retrofitted syrup trucks. Soon the men in the olive oil trucks were blowing up his boats and his trucks—often with Shea’s men still inconveniently inside. Shea got cops to get other cops to get other cops to look out for his people, a corridor of sheriffs, judges, and beat cops all the way from Quebec to Manhattan, which helped but didn’t solve things.

One day, Genco Abbandando—Hagen’s predecessor as
consigliere
and the man Shea thought owned Genco Pura Olive Oil—contacted a police captain on Shea’s payroll and set up a meeting between Mickey Shea and Vito Corleone. They met at the lunch counter of an Italian grocery store in Hell’s Kitchen, only six blocks from Shea’s warehouses but someplace he’d never been. He hated spicy food and refused to eat anything but bread and sauceless noodles. When the meal was finished, Don Corleone explained that the men running those converted trucks were only leasing them from Genco Pura, then let the implications of this sink in. He spoke of the wastefulness of free-market competition, and here, too, Mickey Shea was a quick study. Don Corleone told Mickey Shea that he believed that someone with so many friends (he did not have to say in City Hall and on Wall Street and especially among the Irish-dominated ranks of law enforcement) must be a great man, someone it would be profitable to know. Mickey Shea’s friends became friends of the Corleone Family. Shea was instrumental in building up Don Corleone’s political and legal connections, ultimately his biggest source of power. Don Corleone was instrumental in amassing for Shea so much wealth—at such great reserve both from any bloodshed and from the overt display of muscle necessary to prevent it—that even before the death of that great cash cow Prohibition, Shea was able to sever all traceable ties to the sources of his wealth and reinvent himself in the public eye as a blue blood: M. Corbett Shea, president of a brokerage house, part owner of a baseball team, and much-photographed philanthropist (the country’s many Corbett Halls, Corbett Auditoriums, and Corbett Public Libraries were funded by the Ambassador). His children went to Lawrenceville and then to Princeton. Their service in the war was packaged in national magazines as heroism. He served as the ambassador to Canada for the last six weeks of a lame-duck president’s term—not long enough to move his family but long enough to get the title. His oldest daughter was married to a Rockefeller. His oldest son was now governor of the great state of New Jersey.

The Ambassador would have no way of knowing that it had been Tom Hagen, while Genco was still
consigliere,
who’d taken care of that wartime news coverage.

And even though the Ambassador thought he’d bought his ambassadorship—which was mostly true—it was Hagen who, behind the scenes, had secured it.

It was Vito Corleone who’d taught Hagen the power of staying silent about such matters.

Motorized iron gates glided open. The driver stopped the golf cart in front of a house made of stone blocks, designed like a half-scale replica of an English castle. A crew of Mexicans was laying sod and planting cactus. Shirtless, leather-skinned blond men on scaffolding were antiquing the stones with narrow brushes. Hagen thought his head would explode.

“This way, sir.” The driver still made no eye contact.

Hagen, squinting, wondering if three hundred more bucks could get him four aspirin and a pair of shades, headed up the front walk.

“No, sir. This way.”

Hagen looked up. The man was standing in the rocks of the unfinished yard. The driver took him around the side of the house to the pool, as if Hagen couldn’t be trusted to go through the house. Hagen checked his watch. Almost three. He would have to catch a later plane home.

In the backyard, the pool was shaped like the letter
P,
a circle spliced onto a single lane for lap swimming. Around the perimeter of the circular part were seven identical white marble angels. The Ambassador sat at a stone table, shouting into a white telephone. A platter of meats and cheeses was set out. In front of the Ambassador was a plate smeared with mustard and strewn with crumbs. This arrogant fuckjob had already eaten. Plus he was stark naked (which might have thrown Hagen except that the last meeting he’d had with the Ambassador had taken place in the steam room of the Princeton Club). His skin was the color of rare prime rib. His chest and back were hairless as a fetal pig’s. He didn’t have sunglasses on either.

“Hi ho!” he shouted at Hagen, though he was still on the phone.

Hagen nodded. “Mr. Ambassador.”

The Ambassador motioned for Hagen to sit down, which he did, and to eat up, which he did not. “Already ate,” Hagen mouthed, and he made a wincing gesture that indicated he was sorry for the misunderstanding.

The Ambassador lowered his voice but kept on talking, cryptically, but the conversation seemed personal, not business. At one point he put his hand over the receiver and asked Hagen if he’d brought trunks. Hagen shook his head. “Too bad,” the Ambassador said.

Naturally. Only a
pezzonovante
could sit there in his fluorescent altogether. Not that Hagen would have stripped naked and gone for a dip. The point, of course, was Shea’s rude semiassertion that he couldn’t.

Finally, the Ambassador got off the phone.

“Hey hey! It’s the Irish
consigliere.
”
Cahn-sig-lee-airy.

Hagen wondered if the Ambassador really didn’t know how to pronounce the word or if the mispronunciation was willful, a joke on the “Irish” part of it.

“German-Irish,” Hagen corrected.

“Nobody’s perfect,” said the Ambassador.

“And I’m just a lawyer,” Hagen said.

“Even worse,” the Ambassador said—a strange thing to say, Hagen thought, for a man who’d sent four children to law school. “Drink?”

“Ice water,” Hagen said. Said, not asked. In public, the Ambassador was a famously charming man. The lack of any apology had to be both on purpose and purposeful.

“Nothing stronger?”

“Ice water will be fine.” As a chaser to a fistful of aspirin. “Heavy on the ice.”

“I quit boozing, too,” the Ambassador said, “other than a nip of Pernod from time to time.” He raised an iced half-empty glass. “Prune juice. Want some?” When Hagen shook his head, the Ambassador shouted for water. “My father went the same way as yours, you know? Drink. Curse of our people.”

A young Negro woman in a French maid costume brought out a silver pitcher of ice water and one small crystal class. Hagen downed his water and refilled the glass himself. “Sorry to have missed you on the court,” he said, pantomiming a ground stroke. “I’ve been hearing for years you have quite a game.”

The Ambassador looked at him as if he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“From other people,” Hagen said.

The Ambassador nodded, slapped together another sandwich, stood, waved for Hagen to follow him, walked to the side of the pool, and sat down on the top step of the shallow end of the circular part. His prick lolled in the water, half submerged before him. He tapped it, absently.

“I’m fine right here, sir,” Hagen said. “In the shade. If you don’t mind.”

“You’re missing out.” He held the sandwich in his teeth and made a show of splash-sprinkling water on himself, then bit off a chunk. As if it could see this, Hagen’s stomach growled. “Refreshing,” the Ambassador said.

The Ambassador finished his sandwich. Hagen asked about his family. The Ambassador went on and on about them, especially Danny (Daniel Brendan Shea, former law clerk to a U.S. Supreme Court justice and now the assistant attorney general of the state of New York) and Danny’s big brother, Jimmy (James Kavanaugh Shea, governor of New Jersey). Danny, whose wedding last year, to a direct descendant of Paul Revere, had been a highlight of the Newport social season, was screwing a TV star, the hostess of a puppet show Hagen’s girls watched. And Jimmy. The governor. Though only in his first term, he was already inspiring talk about a run for the presidency. The Ambassador did not ask about Hagen’s family.