The Godfather Returns (29 page)

On his way out, he saw Fredo sitting in the lobby, talking with the two Chicago guys and a man in a plaid coat, Morty Whiteshoes, who worked mostly in Miami.

“You leaving, Tom?” Fredo called out.

Tom motioned for him to stay seated. “Catch you later tonight.”

“No, hold on,” Fredo said, excusing himself. “I’ll walk with you. Be right back, guys.”

Fredo fell in beside him on the crowded boardwalk. Hagen walked faster than he would have needed to.

“I need to ask you something.”

“It’s taken care of,” Hagen said, presuming this was about the mess last year in San Francisco. “Forgotten, okay? So forget it.”

“Look, did Mike ever say anything to you about this idea I had?” Fredo said. “This vision really, where we’d get a law passed so you couldn’t bury nobody in New York—any of the boroughs and Long Island, too?”

“Keep it down.” Instinctively Hagen looked around.

“I don’t mean
that
kind of body burying,” Fredo said. “I’m talking about regular, you know? Everybody. You get a zoning thing passed so that—”

“No,” Hagen said. “You know I’m out of that end of things. Listen, I really have to go.” He cut in front of Fredo and walked backward, hoping to put an end to this. “Tell Deanna I said hello, all right?”

Fredo stopped and looked puzzled. Though it might have been the sunglasses. Hagen couldn’t see his eyes.

“Deanna,” Hagen said. “Your wife. Ring any bells?”

Fredo nodded. “Tell Theresa and the kids I love them,” he said. “Don’t forget, okay?”

There was something about the way he said it that Hagen didn’t like. He pulled him aside, into an alley. “You okay, Fredo?”

Fredo looked down and shrugged, like one of Hagen’s sulky teenage boys.

“Do you want to tell me more about what happened in San Francisco?”

Fredo looked up and took off his sunglasses. “Fuck you, okay? I’m not answerable to you, Tommy.”

“What sort of twisted Hollywood bullshit have you gotten yourself into, Fredo?”

“What did I just say? I don’t have to answer to you, all right?”

“Why the hell are all of Fontane’s friends either sleeping with women he used to sleep with or else used to sleep with the women he’s sleeping with?”

“Say what now?”

Hagen repeated himself.

“That’s low, Tommy.”

It was. “Forget it,” Hagen said.

“No, I know you,” Fredo said, closing in on Hagen, backing him against the wall of the alley. “You don’t forget jack shit. You’ll keep turning it over in your mind until you think you got a solution, even if there
is
no solution, or the solution’s so simple you couldn’t stand it because then you wouldn’t get to think about it over”—and here he jabbed Hagen in the breastbone—“and over”—again—“and over”—and again—“and over again.”

Hagen had his back against a sooty brick wall. Fredo had been a violent little kid for a while, and then that part of him just disappeared. Until he beat up that queer in San Francisco.

“I should go,” Hagen said. “All right? I need to go.”

“You think you’re so fucking smart.” He gave Hagan’s chest a little shove. “Don’t you?”

“C’mon, Fredo. Easy, huh?”

“Answer me.”

“Do you have a gun, Fredo?”

“What’s wrong, you afraid of me?”

“Always have been,” Hagen said.

Fredo laughed, low and mirthless. He reached up, open-handed, and gave Hagen’s cheek something harder than a pat and softer than a slap. “Look, Tommy,” Fredo said. “It’s not complicated.”

What
isn’t? Hagen pursed his lips and nodded. “It’s not, huh?”

“It’s not.” Fredo had onions and red wine on his breath. He’d missed a spot on his neck, shaving. “See, when you’re a pussy hound like Johnny? And all your friends are pussy hounds, too? It’s
bound
to happen. Believe me. There’s only so much quality pussy on Earth, and eventually the numbers catch up with a guy. You know?”

“In theory,” Hagen said, “yeah. Sure. I know.”

Fredo stepped backward and put his sunglasses back on. “Next time you talk to Mike,” he said, “tell him I got a few more of the details worked out on my idea, all right?”

“C’mon, Fredo. Like I said, I’m out—”

“Just
go,
goddamn it.” Fredo pointed vaguely toward the ocean. “You need to go, go.”

That night, when Tom Hagen got back to Theresa’s parents’ house in Asbury Park, his sons were rolling around on the tiny front yard, fighting.

He got out of the car. The fight was, apparently, about a girl, someone Andrew had liked first and Frank had kissed. Hagen let it go on for a while, but when he saw Theresa coming through the front door onto the porch he stuck his fingers in his mouth, whistled, then walked into the middle of the fight and separated them. He ordered them to get in the car and then went inside and got his watch. Gianna was watching a TV Western with her grandparents. He picked her up and piled everyone into the car to go get ice cream. “Mom and Dad have ice cream here,” Theresa said, but Tom shot her a look and she went along.

They got to the Dairy Duchess out by the highway just as it closed. Tom Hagen went around to the back door and slipped the owner a fifty, and a few moments later the Hagen family was sitting together at a sticky green picnic table under a yellow vapor light: a family. Gianna—nothing if not her father’s daughter—ate her cone as fastidiously as a charm-school headmistress, not spilling so much as a sprinkle. Theresa’s sundae melted as she dabbed at Andrew’s puffy face with a spit-dampened paper napkin. Andrew had something with a brownie inside. Frank wolfed down a banana split in a red plastic boat-shaped dish. Tom just had coffee.

When everyone had finished, Tom Hagen rose and stood at the head of the table and told them they were going to spend the rest of the summer in Washington, as a family. Before school started, they’d all drive back to Nevada together, as a family. When he lost the election to a dead man, as he felt fairly certain he would, they would confront that, too, and how?

Gianna’s hand shot up. “As a family!”

“Attagirl,” he said, kissing her on top of her red head. “I know this hasn’t been easy on any of you. I know that the papers have said some crazy things, and I know people have said things to your face that are worse. But we’re in this together. For now, I am a United States congressman. It’s an honor, a privilege, a miracle, really. An experience I want you all to remember for the rest of your lives. Our lives.”

His children turned to look at Theresa. She took a deep breath and nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “And I’m sorry I haven’t been—”

“No need,” Tom said, waving her off. “I understand completely.”

He didn’t so much forget to tell Theresa and the kids that Fredo loved them as he never found the right moment to do it.

The next day, they got in the car together and drove to D.C. By the time they got there, Ralph had moved Hagen’s things into a bigger suite and drafted an intern to act as a tour guide. They saw every monument, got behind-the-scenes tours of the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. They went to every museum, and Theresa, who had an art history degree from Syracuse, seemed happier than she’d been in years. Tom and the boys played basketball at the congressional gym and got haircuts from the congressional barber.

Ralph even arranged a visit to the Oval Office, as a family, to meet the president. Better yet, Princess, the president’s collie and a relative of the dog who played Lassie on TV, had given birth to a litter of puppies and the Hagens were going to get one. They walked from their hotel together and were caught without umbrellas in a downpour. In the picture taken by the official White House photographer, the Hagens, as diminished-looking as a family of dripping wet cats, stand flanking the president, who looks like a man trying to smile through an untimely bowel spasm. Little Gianna holds up the puppy—Elvis, they ended up calling it—grimacing, her eyes on the airborne green bean–sized puppy turd that seems destined for the president’s coffee cup.

Tom ordered the biggest print of the photo he could get. The whole family thought it was hilarious. When they went back to Las Vegas, he hung it over the mantelpiece, superseding the Picasso lithograph Theresa had paid a mint for, which looked better in the dining room anyway.

Hagen’s defeat was one of the most lopsided in the history of the state of Nevada—by far the most decisive victory the dead had ever exacted from the living, at least at the polls.

Again and again—whether at meetings of the Kiwanis, Rotary International, the United Mineworkers, the teachers union, or the Cattlemen’s Association of Nevada—Hagen had proven to be a stiff, humorless, and unpopular speaker. He was an observant Irish-Catholic lawyer in a state run by Baptists and agnostic cowboys. The first time Hagen had really seen his new home state was when he began campaigning in it. There were transients in flea-bitten rescue missions who’d spent more time in Nevada than Tom Hagen. His debate with the congressman’s fierce and tiny widow had been a hideous mistake but one Hagen had made out of desperation, a last-ditch effort, since all indications, even at that point, pointed to him as a hopeless long shot. The same poker-faced persuasiveness Hagen had deployed so effectively in delivering hundreds of unrefusable offers came across on TV as frankly reptilian. Nevada has more species of lizards than any state in America. It’s a place that knows reptilian when it sees it.

Days before the election, a Las Vegas newspaper reported that Congressman Hagen had not only been the attorney for reputed mobster Vito “the Godfather” Corleone, as was widely known, but also his unofficial ward, which was not. According to the story, Vito’s surviving children sometimes even called Hagen their “brother.” Hagen denied nothing. He cited himself as one of the thousands of charitable efforts made by members of the Corleone family, along with the largest wing of the biggest hospital in Nevada and the upcoming art museum, which would soon be the best in the country west of the Rockies and east of California. He showed the reporter a copy of the
Saturday Evening Post
article in which the Vito Corleone Foundation was called one of the best new philanthropies of the 1950s and a spread in
Life
that featured Michael Corleone’s heroism during World War II. Hagen pointed out that the Corleones, whom the reporter seemed to regard as criminals, had never, to a person, been convicted of a crime of any sort, not even jaywalking. She asked him about the several times they’d been charged with crimes, especially the late Santino Corleone. Hagen handed her a copy of the U.S. Constitution and recommended that she read the part about being presumed innocent until proven guilty. The story pointed out that this turn of phrase appears nowhere in that document.

It was unclear if the reporter or her editor had gotten a tip about Hagen’s origins. If they had, it could have come from several different people. Friends and neighbors Hagen had known growing up. Fontane, who’d never liked Hagen. The Chicago outfit, who’d been furious about Hagen’s appointment. Maybe even—given the crazy way he’d been acting lately—Fredo. It was not inconceivable that the reporter might have figured it out for herself. However it had happened, neither Hagen nor Michael chose to waste any time trying to figure out such a puzzle, at least for now. What was the point? Even without that article, Hagen had been destined to lose the election, and badly.

Soon afterward, though, back in Washington, a different small puzzle was solved, a more trivial injustice redressed. The culmination of several weeks of the right people asking the right questions came when a red-and-black Cadillac with New York plates pulled up in front of a tenement building near the Anacostia River. Snow fell. Two white men got out of the car, a short one in a shiny suit and a tall one in a gray duster. They went straight to the front door, and almost without breaking stride the man in the duster kicked it open. A moment later, there came a gunshot. This was a neighborhood where gunshots were as common as lizards in Nevada. The man in the shiny suit came out of the building first, carrying a white ten-gallon hat under his arm like a football. Behind him, with Hagen’s old wristwatch balled into his fist, came the man in the duster. Upstairs, the mugger—who’d liked the watch too much to sell it—was splayed unconscious on his cold linoleum floor. He’d been brutally kayoed by the tall man, a journeyman heavyweight boxer named Elwood Cusik, whose married girlfriend’s abortion had been arranged—in a sterile New York hospital, no less—by a man with various reasons to be loyal to Ace Geraci. The short man—Cosimo “Momo the Roach” Barone, Sally Tessio’s nephew—had fired a .38 into the Negro’s thieving hand, as a lesson. The thief hadn’t woken up. Cusik, who’d never done a job like this before, lifted the thief’s unmaimed hand and checked his pulse. Seemed normal. Same with his breathing. The thief’s injuries were the sort that could have been easily avoided by anyone who never robbed anyone. Presuming the man regained consciousness before he bled to death, and unless he had any plans to take up typing or the piano, he’d be fine.

“So who’s the wristwatch belong to?” asked Cusik, trying it on in the car.

Momo the Roach didn’t answer. He flipped down the visor and checked his exoskeleton-hard shellacked hair in the mirror. They were out of the city before the boxer said anything else.

“The hat belongs to the same guy as the watch or someone else?”

“Try that on, too, why don’t you?” the Roach said.

Cusik shrugged and obeyed. The hat fit perfectly. “What do you think?” he said.

The Roach shook his head. “It’s you,” he said. “Listen, Tex, do me a favor, see if you can shut up as good as you throw a punch.”

Again Cusik shrugged and obeyed.

The thief—crumpled on the floor of a tiny room in a part of the world where people were slow to call the police and the police were even slower to respond—did in fact bleed to death. Call it business. Call it destiny. Call it the law of unintended consequences. Whichever. Why should Tom Hagen care? A man does things, and it sets other things in motion. A dead man doesn’t have to mean anything. Few do.

Chapter 16

T
HE MOMENT
she first glimpsed the island of Sicily, Kay Corleone gasped.

Michael looked up from the book he was reading
—Peyton Place,
which Kay had bought after her mother, Deanna Dunn, and several women from the Las Vegas Junior League had all recommended it, though she’d finished it hours ago and thought it was lousy. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Kay said. “My God. You never told me how beautiful it is.”

He set the book down and leaned across Kay, toward the window. “It is beautiful.”

A ridge of snowcapped mountains ringed the walled city of Palermo, visible from the air as a bounty of spires and carved stone and scrolled balconies. It was February, but the Mediterranean was impossibly blue and crested with the gold of the sun, the smoothness of the surface of the water marred only by what seemed the tiniest of vibration, like that of a glass of wine atop a softly playing radio. The runway was on a spit of land northwest of the city. Among the countless things Michael had said to dissuade Kay from coming here on their vacation was that, statistically, this was one of the most dangerous airports in the world. Most of the time, he himself flew into Rome and took a train and ferry here. As the plane banked low, over the water, so close to a small gray fishing boat she could see the men’s unshaven faces, Kay—who’d been to Europe before, but always by sea—was thrilled she’d insisted they fly all the way here.

Only when the plane’s shadow appeared on the boulders of the coastline did a hot pang of panic shoot through her
—my babies!—
but a pang was all it was. Seconds later, they touched down, a little harder than a person might like but an essentially uneventful landing.

“After all these years,” Kay marveled, “here I am in Sicily for the first time.”

“Birthplace of Venus,” Michael said, rubbing her thigh. “Goddess of love.”

For Kay’s whole adult life, she’d been hearing about all the things that were and weren’t Sicilian, all the things she could never understand because she wasn’t Sicilian. Michael had been here numerous times on business and had even,
for three years,
lived here. The least he could do was show her the place: a week’s worth of sightseeing and a second week holed up in a romantic resort carved into a mountainside near Taormina. He owed her that much. At
least
that much.

As the plane taxied toward the terminal, Kay noticed a precisely parked row of tiny Italian cars in the grass infield. Beside the cars, thirty or so people, many with bread or flowers tucked under their arms, stood behind a waist-high rope, smiling and waving at the arriving plane. In front of the rope were four uniformed carabinieri, two with gleaming silver swords on their shoulders, two with their swords sheathed and machine guns held across their chests.

“People you know?” Kay said.

She’d been joking, but Michael nodded. “Friends,” he said. “Friends of friends, really. There’s supposed to be a surprise party at a restaurant on the beach at Mondello.”

She gave him a look.

“I know,” he said.

“I thought we had an understanding.”

“We do.
I’m
not the one surprising you. No more surprises from
me,
that’s the deal. As far as the portion of the world I don’t control, you’re going to have to take it up with God.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Was he making a crack about her becoming Catholic?

“Nothing,” he said. “Look, I wasn’t sure it was going to happen. I let you know about it as soon as I saw that it was. It would have been just as much a surprise if the surprise party I told you about ended up not happening, right?”

She shook her head and patted his knee. He
did
need a vacation. Her, too. She put her hand on his thigh. “We can’t even check into the hotel and take a shower first?”

“If that’s what you really want,” he said, which was a way he had of saying
no.
“Try to look surprised, at any rate. For their benefit.”

When the plane stopped, the carabinieri without machine guns sheathed their swords, too, and hurried across the tarmac. A stewardess told the passengers to keep their seats.

“What’s going on?” Kay whispered.

“No idea.” Michael swiveled his head, almost imperceptibly but enough to make eye contact with Al Neri, two rows behind them. That Michael had agreed to go on this vacation with only one bodyguard (albeit his best and most trusted one) seemed to be a clear sign that things had gotten better. And, true to Michael’s word, they’d been on airplanes or in airports for almost two whole days, and it really had been as if Neri weren’t there.

The hatch opened. The steps came down. The head stewardess and the carabinieri had a conversation that, though she’d like to think she understood Italian, Kay couldn’t quite make out.

The stewardess turned and faced the passengers. “May I have your attention?” she said in perfect English. “Would Mr. and Mrs. Michael Corleone please identify yourselves?”

She had less of an accent than most of Michael’s employees. She’d even Americanized the pronunciation of
Corleone.

Neri stood and walked toward the front of the plane. The stewardess asked if he was Mr. Corleone, and Neri didn’t say anything.

Only after he passed Michael and Kay did Michael raise his hand. Kay followed suit.

Kay kept her lips still. “Surprise,” she muttered.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Michael said. “Just logistics.”

Neri started speaking with the stewardess in Italian—something about protection and about how Michael Corleone was an important man in America and something about rudeness and hospitality, all in hushed enough voices that Kay still couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then Neri turned toward Michael and Kay and made a patting gesture
—there, there.
Michael nodded. The stewardess asked that Mr. and Mrs. Corleone remain seated until the other passengers disembarked. Neri took an empty seat toward the front of the plane and stayed there.

“What’s going on?” Kay whispered.

“It’s going to be fine,” Michael said.

“That wasn’t what I asked you.”

When everyone else had left the plane, the two carabinieri came on board. Neri intercepted them. They had a quick whispered conversation, then proceeded down the aisle and stood next to Michael and Kay.

In Italian, Michael welcomed them. One of the men seemed to know him. Michael gestured for them to have a seat. They remained standing. They explained that reliable sources had indicated that the welcoming party in Mondello was not certainly but quite possibly a trap, that it would be inadvisable for him and his wife to set foot on Sicilian soil at this time.

“ ‘Reliable sources’?” Michael repeated, in Italian.

The men’s faces were implacable. “Yes,” the one who seemed to know him said in English.

Michael glanced at Neri, who mouthed the word
Chicago.
What could he possibly have meant by that? Maybe he’d mouthed something else, someone’s name.

Michael got up and nodded toward the front of the plane. The carabinieri followed him, and they resumed their discussion there, in whispers, out of her earshot. Kay didn’t know whether to be terrified or furious. Outside, the waving people milled around, gesturing toward the airplane in various demonstrative ways. Several got into their cars and drove away. Kay pulled down her window shade. Finally, Michael clapped the two carabinieri on their backs. “
Bene,
” he said, no longer whispering.
“A che ora è il prossimo volo per Roma?”

The carabinieri who’d seemed to know him beamed. “We are pleasurable to report,” said one, again in English, “that you are upon it.” And with that, the men left.

Not only were Michael and Kay and Neri already on the next flight to Rome, it turned out to be a private flight, too. The stewardesses claimed it had been supposed to happen anyway, though they struggled to explain why.

“Deadhead,” Michael said. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”

“I beg your pardon?” said the stewardess with the perfect English.

“
Nell ’inglese la parole è
deadhead.”

“Deadhead,” she said. “Why, thank you.” She seemed offended that he’d resorted to Italian. She and the other stewardesses cleaned the cabin and left.

“This is
so
like you,” Kay said to Michael. “You
never
wanted to go to Sicily, and now you’re getting your way.”

“Kay,” he said, “you can’t be serious.”

“Think of your mother,” she said, thinking of the trunk full of gifts sitting somewhere in the airplane. Preparing it had been her reason to live for months, the reason—everyone agreed, even the doctors—that she’d recovered so well from her brush with death.

“I’ll have it unloaded,” he said. “I know people who can get it all to the right people.”

“Of course you do.”

“Kay.”

“I feel awful, flying all the way here and leaving the kids. For what? For nothing.”

Michael didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He’d wanted to go someplace and take the kids. That kind of vacation would have been a vacation for him. The hardest thing he’d have had to do was sit still to be buried in the sand. Kay’d have spent her time tending to Anthony and Mary, which she loved doing but was not a vacation. For two years she’d selflessly done what Michael needed her to do. She’d had to raise the kids almost as if she were a widow (including holding them though hours of inconsolable crying the year he’d been so caught up in whatever he was trying to do in Cuba that he never even came home for Christmas). She still hadn’t gone back to teaching and was starting to fear she never would. On her own, she’d coordinated the move to Las Vegas. Then she’d taken on the even bigger job of designing and overseeing the construction of the whole complex in Lake Tahoe: their house, a bandstand for entertaining, and preliminary architecturally harmonious plans for houses for the Hagens, for Connie and Ed Federici, for Fredo and Deanna Dunn, for Al Neri, even a little bungalow for guests. Kay had been surprised by how much she’d enjoyed building a house, actually: the countless details and decisions, the chance to undertake the ultimate shopping spree, all for the greater good of her whole family. Still, it was work. She’d asked almost nothing from Michael except to go where she’d wanted to go on vacation, just the two of them.

“What are we going to do now,” Kay said, “turn around and go home?”

“We don’t have to go home. This kind of thing, if you’ll recall, was a part of why I didn’t want to go with you to Sicily.”

“For God’s sake, Michael. This is a murder threat we’re running away from.”

“We’re not running.”

“Right. We’re flying.”

“That’s not what I mean. And it’s not so much a threat as a precaution. Look, Kay, if there’s one thing I’ve been completely . . . what’s the word I’m looking for? Steadfast. Right. If there’s one thing I’ve been steadfast about, it’s been protecting my family.”

Kay looked away and didn’t say anything. He was steadfast about everything, actually. His good traits and his bad. It was the best and the worst thing about him.

“Those men,” he said, “the carabinieri? One of them is Calogero Tommasino, the son of an old friend of my father’s. I’ve had dealings with his father and with him, too. I trust him. We’re certainly in no danger now and probably wouldn’t have been at all. Again, just a precaution. Please understand. And you at any rate would
never
have been in any danger, obviously. It’s the code not to—” He stopped himself.

“Harm the wives or children,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Which no doubt goes double in Sicily, which I can’t of course
hope
to understand, can I, because I’m not Sicilian?”

Michael didn’t answer her. He looked like hell. Maybe it was just the flight. She couldn’t admit it now, but if she’d really understood the ordeal involved in flying from Las Vegas to Palermo, she’d have probably gone along with going to Hawaii or Acapulco.

The pilots got back on board. Neri went up to the cabin to talk to them. Moments later he took a seat, far away from Kay and Michael. The cars and people were gone from the tarmac. The plane took off.

“You actually wouldn’t understand,” Michael finally said. “How could you?”

“Oh, Christ,” Kay said. She got up and sat far away from Michael. Twice in a matter of moments he’d provoked her to use the Lord’s name in vain.

He let her go.

But she knew it would work, eventually, her silence. Just because he so expertly wielded silence as a weapon didn’t mean that he was invulnerable to it himself, especially from her. She sat on the right side of the plane and patiently watched the Italian coast ease by.

After about an hour he came to her. “Is this seat taken?” he said.

“So’d you finish your book?”

“I did,” he said. “I thought it was good, actually. A nice escape.”

“If you say so.” The book he’d taken to read was Edwin O’Connor’s
The Last Hurrah,
which Kay had given him for Christmas. He kept nodding off. Not long after she’d finished her book, he’d picked it up, and she’d taken his. Kay thought
The Last Hurrah
was the best thing she’d ever read about city politics. She was appalled he hadn’t loved it. “And, yes, the seat’s taken.”

“Kay,” he said. “The reason you wouldn’t understand is because I didn’t—” He closed his eyes. Maybe this, too, his struggling for words, had to do with the long flight, but there was something about him now that seemed more shaken up than exhausted. “Because,” he said, “it’s true that . . . that I haven’t been entirely, you know . . .” He let out what started as a frustrated sigh and finished as a soft, agonized moan.

“Michael,” she said.

“I want to tell you some things,” he said. “I
have
to tell you some things.”

Most of the time, she looked at him and hardly recognized the man she’d fallen in love with. He’d had his face smashed, then fixed. His hair was shot through with gray, and—though she told herself it was her imagination—he’d become a dead ringer for his father. But there was the same look in his eyes now as he’d had years ago, on a New Hampshire golf course on a warm starry night, when he told her what he’d done during the war, things he’d never told anyone, and he’d sobbed in her arms. Angry as she’d been, suddenly she just melted.