The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  Hagen nodded toward the back of Fontane’s entourage-Gussie Cic-ero, a club owner in L.A. and an associate of Jackie Ping-Pong, and two men from the Chicago outfit. “So what are they doing here?”

  “They came with Johnny, too.”

  “Come again?”

  “Gussie was married to Margot Ashton before Johnny was married to her, remember? And now they’re friends of mine. Relax, Tommy. It’s a party, y’know. Christ almighty, did you see that speech?”

  Fredo had credentials to the convention? “You saw it?”

  “On TV. We were up in the penthouse where Gussie and Johnny are staying. Jimmy and Danny were up there last night, too. Wild. Hoo boy. You should have come by.”

  He hadn’t been invited, hadn’t had any idea. “Jimmy and Danny Shea?”

  “Who we talking about? Of course Jimmy and Danny Shea.”

  Hagen knew he should have this conversation later. After all the bad publicity right after his appointment, being seen in public, here, saying anything more than hello, couldn’t be good.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “So are those the biggest you’ve ever seen, or what?” Fredo nodded toward Annie McGowan and her famously enormous breasts. She was the blonde walking right behind Fontane, next to the comic Fontane called Numbnuts, whom she’d replaced as Johnny’s opening act but who was somehow still a part of Fontane’s entourage. Annie McGowan had superseded the aging Mae West as the person whose name people used in big-breasted-woman jokes.

  “I should go, Fredo.”

  “You ever meet her?”

  “Once,” Hagen said. “She wouldn’t remember me.”

  Finally Jimmy Shea made his entrance, flanked by his father and brother. The room exploded in applause and a recorded version of “Into the Wild Blue Yonder.”

  “Shea and Hagen in 1960!” Fredo yelled.

  As far as Hagen could tell, Fredo was drowned out.

  Hagen slipped away. By now the room was packed. He tried to shake hands with the right people, but it was tough. He did what he could, but there were more than a few times he extended his hand toward someone he thought he recognized as a senator or congressman or top aide and got a blank stare in return. He tried to find members of the Nevada delegation-the only people, presumably, who’d have noticed he wasn’t there. The only one he saw was a schoolteacher from Beatty, wherever that was.

  “Gateway to Death Valley,” she said, shouting over the din.

  “Oh, right,” he said. They brag about that in Beatty?

  “Mines,” she said, “that’s what we have there. Though several have closed.”

  “That’s why we need to vote the bastards out,” Hagen blurted out.

  She frowned. Maybe it was the word bastards, maybe because he was one of the bastards she’d like to vote out, but before he could apologize, her face brightened. “You’re wonderful!” she screamed in obvious delight.

  It took Hagen a second to realize that behind him Governor Shea was drawing near, using his big smile like a snowplow. Shea directed the smile at the teacher, gave her a thumbs-up, said, “Thank you, good to see you,” and patted her on the shoulder. Then the governor shook Hagen ’s hand-they’d never met-and before his grip even eased he was moving his eyes to the next person in the crowd. That was it. But the postcoital look on the schoolteacher’s face gave Hagen an immediate lesson about politics. Being young and attractive had nothing to do with being president but a lot to do with getting elected.

  Hagen leaned toward her ear. “So I take it you saw Governor Shea’s speech?”

  “One hears a speech,” she said, frowning again.

  “Right,” he said.

  She put her mouth next to Hagen ’s ear. “Allow me to save you some time, sir,” she said. “I’ve never crossed party lines in my life, but I’m doing so in November, to vote against you.”

  She pulled back from him, batting her eyes to underscore the sarcasm.

  What was he supposed to say, Lady, my opponent’s dead? “Well, okay,” he said, patting her on the shoulder, unconsciously mimicking Shea. “Good to see you.”

  Hagen slithered through the crowd. Packed as the ballroom was, there was hardly anyone in line at the bar. Nearly everyone was gawking at the many celebrities.

  Fontane, Shea, and Annie McGowan had climbed up on a table. Fontane and Shea were arm in arm and Annie was off to the side, her hands clasped in front of her, fig-leaf style. The Ambassador, standing on the floor beside them, stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. It was hard for Hagen to look at him and not think of him standing naked and sunburned in his swimming pool. Fontane asked everyone to please join in as they sang “ America the Beautiful.”

  A few years ago, Hagen had taken Andrew to FAO Schwartz to see Annie McGowan, back when Andrew was still little and her puppet show, Jojo, Mrs. Cheese amp; Annie, was just starting. Last year, about the time Annie left Danny Shea (who was married anyway) and she and Johnny Fontane became an item, she’d quit her TV show to become a singer.

  Shea climbed down from the table, waving. Fontane and Annie stayed, belting out a show tune that originally had celebrated another state and now sported lyrics extolling the virtues of New Jersey.

  Hagen pulled out the index card on which his chief of staff had-in tiny, perfect handwriting-listed what parties to attend tonight, including meticulous directions, names of people to see, even conversational prompts. Screw it. He’d seen enough, had enough. Hagen was going back to Asbury Park to see his family.

  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. “F
orget 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 ask
ed 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.