The Godfather's Revenge (6 page)

It concerned personal-injury law. Hagen looked up, puzzled.

Lucadello winked his glass eye.

Hagen nodded. This must be where the eye-for-an-eye thing came from, though that wasn’t exactly what the passage said. He’d humor the guy. Despite his revving heartbeat, he felt a sense of calm. He sat back and pointed at the white Bible. “Always meant to read that thing.”

“Good book,” Lucadello said.

“Hence its informal name.”

“Clever. We’ll do everything we can to get you, yes, intelligence that points you in the right direction. Once your objective is achieved, we’ll help in any way possible with post-event damage control. It goes without saying that the need for same should be kept to a minimum. But make no mistake. We’re on the same side as you are, believe me.”

Geraci—via Lucadello (who he knew as “Ike Rosen”)—had been involved in certain Cuban initiatives. The thinking on the part of Michael and Tom Hagen, who had approved it, was that it was a win-win. If things worked out, they got their casinos back, and if not, Geraci was the fall guy, his ambitions forever thwarted. Things had not worked out. One of Geraci’s men, a Sicilian kid named Carmine Marino, was caught down there trying to assassinate the Cuban dictator. Marino was shot trying to escape (by whom, Hagen didn’t want to know). It became, briefly, an international incident. There was also the problem posed by Marino’s epically vengeful relatives back in Sicily, which the public didn’t know about, though Hagen thought that the CIA might. Geraci’s disappearance had kept him from being the fall guy, yet. Done right, the killing of Nick Geraci could actually solve a matrix of interlocking problems.

Hagen nodded. “I’ve been involved in the law, in negotiations, for most of my life. One thing I’ve learned is to be skeptical of anybody who says
believe me
.”

“You calling me a liar?” Lucadello said. He seemed more amused than offended.

“In this sacred place?” Hagen gestured toward the altar. “No. But what assurances do we have that this isn’t a setup? That you won’t get us to take out the trash for you and then while we’re at the curb—red-handed, so to speak—stuff us in the can, too? Why don’t you just take it out yourselves?”

“Nice pun there,” Lucadello said. “On
can.
”

Again, Hagen went blank.

“C’mon, counselor,” Lucadello said. “The scope of what really went on down there and what led up to it is far from public knowledge. We have every reason to want to keep it that way. Which rules out one sort of
can
. As for the
shitcan
sense of…Listen to me; you’re a bad influence. At any rate, why would we want to do that? You people are still in power, I’m still friends with your boss—as I’ve been for a
quarter century,
almost, don’t forget—and we all live to fight another day, as it were. I know a little about the traditions of your
people,
all right,
paisan’
? The government’s no different. Example: a man’s going to the electric chair, and he has a heart attack. What happens? A team of doctors and nurses swings into action and does everything it can to save him. The moment he’s back on his feet, they reshave his head and march him back to the killing floor. The object isn’t for the person to die; it’s to kill him.
You
tell
me
: if I’d have sat down with you here and told you the job was already done on your
package
, you’d have been furious. Don’t deny it. And if I’d told you that we were planning on taking care of it, you’d have tried to persuade me to let your people have the satisfaction. Don’t pretend like you’re talking to some
mortadell’,
all right? Our desire to avoid any kind of embarrassment and your need for revenge—it all dovetails perfectly.”

Lucadello sat back in the pew.

Hagen’s heart had slowed without his noticing exactly when. These episodes came and went like that. Outside, the rain wasn’t slowing, but the noise of the crowd seemed to pick up.

Hagen jerked a thumb toward the crowd. “So do we have time to discuss the great man’s brother?” Meaning Attorney General Daniel Brendan Shea.

“Him, I don’t know what we could possibly help you with.”

“Is that right? You don’t think you have as much to lose in all this as we do?”

“Me personally?”

“Are you really that mercenary?”

“Aren’t we all?” Lucadello said. “Wait, I forgot. With you people, it’s all about family. Cute concept. I can’t say as I think it’s one you’ve really embraced. You personally.”

Hagen didn’t dignify that with a response.

“What’s going to happen,” Hagen said, “when a certain Colombian uses his get-out-of-jail-free card?”

“I told you, we don’t really talk like that.” Lucadello pointed to the pulpit. The music would make any attempts to record their conversation unintelligible. Plus, both his and Hagen’s people had swept the room for listening devices. “The Colombian—you mean Carlo Tramonti, right? You know that guy or is he just
un amico degli amici
?”

Friend of the friends. “Very funny.”

“I hear he’s out of the woods down there. He threw some money around and managed to set up shop in a two-star hotel in Cartageña, right on the coast, which is hardly jail.” Lucadello looked heavenward and grimaced as he pretended to do math in his head. “He can probably take care of business from there indefinitely, the way Luciano did in Sicily. But he won’t need to. Tramonti is, I would say, three bribes and two good lawyers away from coming home and sleeping in his own bed. Forgive me, though: you’re not suggesting, with your Monopoly allusion, that Tramonti might try to get off the hook by blackmailing the federal government, are you? What a joke!”

“I wouldn’t call—”

“No,
literally
. Guy walks into a courtroom. Now, this fella’s been to court before, seen a little jail—arson, robbery, et cetera. But now he’s got the whole state of Louisiana in his pocket, see, so
he’s
the one making accusations. He claims that top-secret government agents came to him in his official capacity as the head of a crime syndicate and asked him nicely if he’d let them train some of his assassins to go—what’s that word? right:
whack
—to go whack the leader of Cuba. What natural partners they would make! The government’s fighting the good ol’ Red Menace, and the mobsters want revenge because the Commies stole their casinos. Brilliant. Naturally, the man agrees. So what they do is, they set up a camp in a nice sunny place near the beach, like they’re ballplayers in spring training. They take target practice, they go marching around in government-issued tracksuits, and they sit around discussing how they might for example be able to get the maximum leader to go scuba diving and pick up this one special seashell that explodes. The assassins are more meat-and-potatoes, guns-and-knives men, but they come up with a few ideas of their own, and a good time is had by all. Unfortunately, they never get into the game, see, because—get this—it turns out the government has gone to two
other
gangsters and put together two
other
hit-man squads. Sadly, a numskull from one of those
other
squads goes to Cuba and botches it. Kills a
double,
a man hired by our Commie nemesis in anticipation of just such an eventuality. Then the idiot gets caught, but before he can come to trial, he’s shot trying to escape. A lot of this is only what our guy in the courtroom has heard about. But, hey, forget that it’s hearsay. The punch line is, it’s all true! Every last word!”

Hagen bit his lip. That
was
the punch line.

To be precise, Carmine Marino, a Corleone soldier, hadn’t been a numskull. Just a brave pawn. But everything else really happened.

Lucadello shook his head in mock awe. “But wait. The laughs keep on coming. The guy goes on to tell the judge that the only reason he came to court to share his hilarious tale is that recently some
completely different
government agents kidnapped him! They sent him to a country he’d never been to—though he does import coffee, hookers, and many profitable varieties of narcotics from there. He’s also got a passport from this country, but, um, see, it’s fake. What happened was, the Ivy League–educated attorney general, the president’s
brother
, was too stupid to figure out how to prosecute this criminal mastermind, who, by the way, is a grammar school dropout who signs his name with an X. So instead, young Shea, a frat boy at heart, resorted to a mindless prank: he took our guy out in the woods and left him there. Har-de-har-har. Tap that keg, brother!”

“A mindless prank?”

“Explain it to me, then. Our friend the A.G. goes on TV and brags that he wants his legacy to be…no, that he wants to go down in
history
as the man who brought down the Mafia. Which, as you and I and the FBI director know, doesn’t exist. Just an ethnic slur, et cetera, right?”

The FBI director had not, in fact, ever publicly admitted to the existence of the Mafia. Tom Hagen was in possession of photographs of the director in a hiked-up taffeta dress, enjoying fellatio from his loyal assistant, which had proven helpful in this regard.

“So what’s the A.G.’s first big move against this invisible empire?” Lucadello continued. “Where does he start? With Carlo Tramonti. But not with a grandstanding trial where he and his crackerjack staff put the guy away for murder or even tax evasion. Nothing
substantial.
Just some harebrained deportation scheme. Why? Why start there? He’s got no case. No due process, no anything. And he
knows
that Tramonti thinks he’s got this
get-out-of-jail-free card
he can and will play.”

“You think Danny Shea
wants
him to play the card, don’t you?”

“Common sense decrees.”

Hagen waved his hand in disgust.

What Danny Shea wanted—and, for all Hagen knew, what Joe Lucadello and his people wanted as well—was for Tramonti to realize
the card wasn’t playable
. They wanted Tramonti to understand that his story, though true, wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, and no good lawyer would let him tell it there. Danny Shea was trying to win the hearts and minds of the people. In the court of public opinion, it would be easy to convict a man who’d lived in this country since he was a boy but had no valid passport except a fraudulent one from a country in which he’d never set foot. It would be easy to use that to scare the people that we have another evil conspiracy on our hands, a worthy sequel to the Red Menace. It was great political theater, and the Shea brothers were politicians to their telegenic pussy-mad Irish cores.

“Common sense,” Hagen said, “is for suckers.”

“Come again?” Lucadello said.

“Common sense is the true opiate of the masses.”

Lucadello slapped Hagen’s back. “I’m beginning to like you,
paisan’.
Who said that?”

“What do you mean, who said that?”

“You’re quoting somebody. That sounds like a quote.”

From habit, Hagen started to say he was quoting Vito Corleone, then realized Vito had never said that. Still, what could Hagen do, say that he’d come up with it himself? Unseemly.

“I heard it from Vito Corleone,” he said. An honorable lie, which Tom Hagen garnished with another: “My godfather.”

“W
hat a great day.” Theresa Hagen didn’t sound sarcastic. More like she was trying to sell herself on the idea. They were alone in the hotel elevator, dressed for dinner, heading down. Because of the rain (and a behind-the-scenes tiff between Bud Payton and Jimmy Shea), President and Mrs. Shea had cut their visit short and were on their way back to Washington.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. His own day had been no picnic—one piece of good news, then a day’s worth of going downhill from there.

“Don’t be,” Theresa said. “I’m serious.”

“Hubba-hubba,” he said, bending to kiss the nape of her sleek neck.

“Stop it.”

“I can’t.” She had on a backless red dress. It was a dark, muted shade of red, but still: red. Her ass looked great in it. For better or worse, she’d lost most of the fleshiness she’d had when she was younger. You could squint and see her mother’s dried-up bony frame, but Theresa’s ass was still an onion-shaped wonder. “I’m powerless.”

She blushed. What could be more lovely than a blushing, olive-skinned woman in her forties? The blushing gave Tom a glimpse of the bookish schoolgirl she’d once been—smart enough to see through everybody, too nice to use what she saw as a weapon—and of all the stages in between, too: the chain of life and circumstance that had produced this woman and somehow, via fate or chance, brought her here, with him, still weirdly vulnerable to flattery and maybe even that great nothing and everything, love.

“Great how?” Tom said. “Your day.”

They’d been together in the room for the past half hour, rushing around getting ready, speaking in little more than the familiar grunts and two-word sentences that sustain old, childbearing marriages.
Behind you. No idea. Want coffee? Excuse me. Zip this.

“Long story,” she said, straightening his bow tie, smoothing the lapels of his tux.

“Tell me,” he said.

“For starters,” Theresa said, “there was a monkey farm, I kid you not, three miles wide.”

The elevator dinged. “This is your stop,” Tom said.

“Are we really going to do this?”

He grinned. “This is the main reason we came here, doll.”

“
Doll
?”

Tom shrugged. So what?
Doll.
Common endearment. “Go on and make your entrance.”

She got out, one floor from the bottom. The door closed. Tom rode the last floor alone.

The broad, curving stairway in the lobby of the Fontainebleau had no other purpose than this. The ladies get off first (earlier today, when he’d told this to his mistress, who was also staying here, she’d made an annoying and lascivious comment). Then their gentlemen ride down, take their positions in the lobby, and watch the ladies descend.

As Theresa started to do this, Tom shot a look at the bellman, who threaded the crowd in the lobby and, as Tom dropped to one knee, deftly handed him a dozen roses. Perfect timing. Tom presented the bouquet to his wife. Here he’d put together this grand, romantic gesture, and nobody smiled or reacted, not even Theresa, who received the bouquet as nonchalantly as if it had been the afternoon paper.

“You call the mother of your children
doll
?” she said.

“Don’t ruin the moment.” Tom stood up and gestured toward the dining room. “C’mon and tell me about the monkeys, OK?”

“Sorry,” she said, stroking the flowers. “This is thoughtful. They’re really beautiful.”

A billboard-size banner in the hangar-size ballroom read
WELCOME PRESIDENT SHEA!
The Hagens were among the first to arrive, which annoyed Tom (rigid punctuality was another lesson from Vito Corleone that now coursed through his blood) almost as much as looking around and seeing that most of the other men there were dressed in business suits, not formalwear, for a formal event. He shook his head. Florida.

Tom and Theresa’s seats were all the way in the back, which was fine, especially without the Sheas for Theresa to ogle. The Hagens had gotten their fill of political glitz during Tom’s brief, miserable stint filling out a term as a Nevada congressman.

As they were about to sit down, Tom, seized by a crazy impulse, put his mouth to her ear. “Let’s go,” he whispered.

Her eyes lit up. Impulse, yes, but not crazy. He was on the money. “Go where?”

“Anywhere but here,” he said. “Somewhere nice, just you and me.”

They kept walking, went out the side door, and took a taxi to Joe’s Stone Crabs.

On the way, they talked about when they’d last done this: a night on the town, no kids, no rings for Tom to kiss, no important painter or museum board member for Theresa to indulge. Maybe not since they lived in New York the first time, seven years ago.

The place was packed, but Tom duked a few people, and he and Theresa were ushered straight to a dark corner booth. The waiter took their drink order and produced a vase for the roses.

“So,” Theresa said, “want to hear about my day?”

“I was just about to ask,” Tom said.

She rolled her eyes, but affectionately.

She’d had breakfast with some people who were talking about setting up a museum of modern art in Miami, something she’d done in Las Vegas, and they were eager to pick her brain. Flattering, obviously. Then she went to see a collector up in Palm Beach, some crackpot cash-poor heiress who sold off several great pieces to help fund the monkey farm in question. She rescued them from bankrupt zoos and then trained them to be “helper monkeys,” whatever that was. Also, the government bought monkeys from her, including the ones NASA sent into space.

“Or claimed to have,” Tom said.

“Who cares?” Theresa laughed and clinked wineglasses with him. “Print the legend.”

“Exactly,” Tom said, though he wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by that.

“Then, this afternoon…” She took a long swig of wine. “…I bought a house.”

“You did
what
?”

“Don’t look at me like that. I bought a house. I got a great deal on it.”

She told him the price and called it a steal, but his head was swimming. It was too much to process. “You bought a
house
? Without even talking to me about it? Jesus Christ, Theresa, I didn’t even know you were
looking
for a house. What the hell do we need a house for?”

“I was going to talk to you about it—I was just looking as kind of a lark—but this place…Oh, Tom, wait’ll you see it. A bungalow not far from here. Bigger inside than it looks from the street. Six blocks from the ocean, with a backyard facing a canal. It’s got a pool, grapefruit trees, tile roof, arches, cypress floors, even a widow’s walk. It’s adorable. A classic old Florida home. As the kids start moving away, a vacation house like this can keep us all together. It’ll be a place that we can all gather as a family.”

Frank, their oldest, was in his first year of law school at Yale; Andrew was a divinity major at Notre Dame. “None of our kids have moved away. They’re just away at school. The girls are just babies.”

“The boys are gone, Tom. Face it. And it pains me to admit this, but nine and four aren’t babies. It’ll go fast. Look how fast it went with Frank.”

That was all true, but not quite what Tom was trying to say. “How can you buy a house without me signing something?” Which wasn’t exactly the point, either. “Without me even
looking
at it?”

“I have my own money. There are pieces I could sell and pay cash for this thing.”

Also not the point. The point was, the more he—and Theresa—threw cash around, the more of a trail it left. The account she used to buy art was actually an offshore corporation. Bermuda. But this house? Who knows?

“Art is one thing,” he said, “but a house?”

“Sure, it’s another thing,” she conceded. “But it’s all just business, isn’t it?”

He liked being married to a smart woman, but it posed certain challenges. “I don’t like Florida,” Tom said.

“Nonsense,” Theresa said. “Everybody likes Florida.”

“I wouldn’t live here for a million bucks.”

“Over time, we’ll probably
make
a million bucks. It’s a great investment.”

“We have other investments.”

“We have
family
here, Tom.”

Suddenly, he understood.

“This was you and Sandra,” he said, “wasn’t it?”

“You’re quick, counselor.”

“I’ll say this,” Tom said. “This gives new meaning to
thick as thieves
.” Sandra Corleone, Sonny’s widow, lived in Hollywood, Florida, which was not that far away. She’d been engaged for ten years to a former New York fire marshal who, as a reward for some of the fires he ruled to be accidents, now fronted a chain of liquor stores here. Sandra and Theresa weren’t blood, and they could hardly have been more different, but they were as close as any sisters Tom had seen. “How long have you two been cooking this up?”

Triumphant, Theresa clinked his glass again. “Just look at it, OK? Keep an open mind.”

Tom shook his head, defeated. “I don’t have to.” He could put accountants on this, too. If she wanted it, she wanted it. He did see how it was good for his family. A little place in the sun. It wasn’t as if he’d have to actually live there. “If you want to do this, just do it.”

“I love you, Tom.”

“You better.”

The waiter came by and refilled their wineglasses.

“Keep ’em coming,” Tom said, only half joking.

“So,” she said, “how was
your
day?”

Their eyes met. In this light, anyway, she looked as if she really thought that, this time, he might answer. He held her gaze. After all these years, after all the vague answers he’d given to this question, she kept right on asking it.

He reached for his glass and took a long drink.

What, really, did she want him to say?

Gee, it was swell, dear. This gentleman who almost destroyed our whole organization turned up, only maybe the FBI’s got him. The things he knows could get us all thrown in jail, which he’d never have talked about in a million years except that Michael, unbeknownst to me, tried to sabotage this guy’s airplane a few years back. Mr. Geraci didn’t just survive, he eventually figured the whole thing out
—
well before I did. Long story short, somehow we need to find this guy and kill him. Purely out of self-defense.

Then this afternoon, just as I told you, I had some routine legal matters to address. A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns can, and I thank you again for the lovely briefcase. After that, I went for a quick meeting with the president of the United States; sorry I had to keep that from you, hon. It didn’t work out anyway. The president’s father was our connection, but he’s dead and his sons are turning on us, which is ridiculous. Jimmy Shea would have lost the election without us, and Bud Payton has been on the payroll of some friends of ours for so long that his retirement plan should have kicked in. Then again, it’s a ridiculous world. I know you agree, which is part of why you’ve got such a great eye for art. Anyway, Shea’s golf game gets rained out, but instead of meeting with me, he and Payton zoom off to a slapped-together rally at the gym where a Cuban fighter, a defector, is training for his shot at the title—which, by the way, if you want to make back some of the money you spent on that house, bet the other guy. At any rate, some snot-nosed aide tells me the meeting will happen in the limo, after the rally. I get to the gym in time to hear liberty championed, America blessed, common ground asserted, and a better world imagined. Payton hates Shea’s guts, by the way, and his smile looks like rigor mortis. All of this is staged inside a boxing ring. The fighter stands there clutching a tiny American flag. When it’s all over, a Secret Service agent pulls me aside and says the meeting is a quote-unquote
no-go.

Tom finished his wine and then reached out and took Theresa’s other hand. He leaned slightly across the table. They stared into each other’s eyes.

So I come back to the hotel. At about the same time you and Sandra are out shopping for a house behind my back, what I’m doing behind
your
back is worse. Unforgivable. It’s where I went last night, too, when I said I couldn’t sleep and needed to take a walk. That was a lie, since
—
unlike Mike with his insomnia and his nightmares
—
I sleep just fine. Which you know. Yet you didn’t question it, did you? I got up from our bed and got dressed and took the stairs three flights down, and I knocked on a door to a room where I was expected.

It doesn’t mean anything.

That’s not exactly true, but I certainly don’t love her. She’s no threat to you or our family. I couldn’t explain it myself if I tried, except that, as you know, men do this sort of thing. You probably already know about her. How could you not? It’s been going on for years. She lives in Vegas. Where I go on business all the time. And, yes, you guessed right: she likes it when I call her
doll.