Still in his golf clothes, Tom Hagen flicked on the lights of his office in Las Vegas, above a shoe store near Fremont, and sat down at his desk-the rolltop that had once been Genco Abbandando’s, shipped here from Vito Corleone’s house on the mall. At this point in Hagen’s career, he had the connections to get anybody’s story on his desk and gift wrapped, generally with three or four calls, nearly always in no time at all. An hour, by his standards, was a pretty lousy showing. He already had the information Lucadello had given to register at the Castle in the Sand and what he’d learned about the guy during a morning on the golf course. He estimated that Joe Lucadello would be a three-call, twenty-minute job. Hagen looked at his watch, noted the time, and picked up the phone.
Four hours later, Hagen had nothing. No one by that name had ever worked for Eastern Airlines, flown for the RCAF, or been a member of the CCC. The Philly people had never heard of him. He’d never been fingerprinted anywhere in the United States. He’d never registered a car, a boat, a gun, or a legal complaint. He’d never paid federal income tax. Sure, the identity was probably a fake, but even a fake ID left more of a trace than this. As far as Hagen could tell, there was no Joe Lucadello. He’d played golf all morning with Casper the One-Eyed Ghost.
Just to have anything at all to show for his afternoon, he checked out the Ambassador’s story. All of it was true: he’d been at Johnny’s but left; he had in fact met with the people at the university, who were very eager to know if Mr. Shea seemed inclined to approve the building. “The Ambassador’s a hard man to read,” Hagen said. “Good luck to you, though.”
He looked at his watch again. He’d barely have time to change and make it to the opening at the art museum.
He sped to the hotel and ran around getting ready to go out for the night as if he were dreadfully late, but he arrived at the museum early, as usual. The opening didn’t start for twenty minutes. Theresa, the chairwoman of the museum’s acquisitions committee, was at the airport picking up the artist. The wizened docent minding the velvet rope wagged her finger at Hagen and told him to hold his horses, but the museum director rushed over and apologized profusely.
Tom had never heard of this artist, but he saw right away that the exhibit was Theresa’s idea of a compromise, garnished with a wicked joke. He couldn’t help but smile. She had a degree in art history, and her taste ran toward abstract painting. Many of the ladies on her committee were blue-haired ranchers’ wives who didn’t know art but knew what they liked. They liked lugubrious oil paintings of Indians. They liked Norman Rockwell. They liked some of Picasso’s early work. The show was called “Cats, Cars, and Comics: The Pop Art of Andy Warhol.” The cars looked like they’d been copied from magazine ads, with the same image of a sports car repeated in neat rows and many colors. The comics were blotchy enlargements of Popeye and Superman. The bluehairs loved the cats, though, even the green one with red eyes that gave Hagen the willies.
The rope came down. Still no Theresa. A sparse crowd began to gather.
“Nice car,” Michael said, pointing. He’d arrived along with a group of stockholders and fronts in their biggest real estate company, plus Al Neri and some other muscle. After this they were all going to a private dinner Enzo Arguello was serving up in the rotating ballroom at the Castle. “All those different colors make it hard to choose, though.”
“I think maybe that’s sort of the point,” Hagen said.
Finally, Theresa arrived with what had to be the artist, a frail, blank-faced young man with pinkish blond hair and red-lensed glasses. The bluehairs swarmed him.
“Your friend Joe seemed like a good man,” Hagen said.
“He is,” Michael said. “One of the best I’ve ever met.”
“Is that right?” Hagen said.
“You have a nice afternoon?” Michael said.
It was not said kindly.
How the hell could he have learned about that blackjack dealer in Bonanza Village? Hagen had taken every precaution. Had it been the flowers? A phone tap?
“You didn’t find a thing, did you?”
Lucadello. That’s what he was talking about. “I just made a few calls on him,” Tom said. “I had some other paperwork. But to answer your question, no. I didn’t.”
“If you wanted to know about my friend Joe, why didn’t you ask me?”
“I was just curious,” Hagen said.
Michael raised his wineglass and nodded toward the green cat. “To curiosity,” he said, but did not drink.
“Did something get back to you?”
“Nothing got back to me,” Michael said, switching to Sicilian. “I know how you think, Tom. I knew what you’d do. It’s who you are, why you’re such a good lawyer.”
“So what Family is he with?” Tom asked, in Sicilian, too. “I contacted Nunzio in Philly-”
“Why do you leap to the conclusion that Joe is a part of this thing of ours, Tom? Because he has an Italian name? I’m disappointed in you.”
“Not because he has an Italian name, no. Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“Look, it’s fine. Everything you want to know about Joe he’ll tell you himself.” Michael switched back to English. “Actually, more like everything you need to know. At any rate, we’re meeting with him at midnight in my suite.”
Theresa had escaped from the ring of people surrounding the artist and made a beeline over to her husband and Michael. “What do you think?”
“Great,” Michael said.
“Visionary,” Tom said.
She put her arm around him, as if they were still schoolkids.
“I hate it, too,” Theresa said. “But, believe me, it’ll be big. Him, too.”
“Late plane?” Tom asked, holding out his arms the way the sarge had, which did manage to get a smile out of Mike.
Theresa shook her head. “He made me stop so he could get out and walk down the Strip. He stared at one marquee, just stared without moving, for-God, I don’t know. Forever. He did it again at a gift shop window. He took every whorehouse leaflet he could get his hands on, too. Hundreds of them, for art purposes obviously, but who ended up carrying them? Moi.”
“Obviously?” Tom said.
“I don’t think he likes girls,” Theresa stage-whispered.
Tom averted his eyes from Michael’s.
“Anyway,” Theresa said, “now he’s over there telling everybody that in the future, America will be Las Vegas. Not be like Vegas. Be Vegas. The man’s been here three hours.”
Michael shrugged. “Some people catch on quick.”
After the dinner meeting, when they got to Michael’s suite, Joe Lucadello was already there, shirtless, still in his orange pants, sitting at the bar and playing solitaire.
“Tom! What a treat. C’mon in.” As if it were his suite. “Mike tells me you were interested in getting to know me better. I’m flattered.”
Tom had been with Michael the entire time since the art museum. There would have been no time Michael could have told Joe anything.
Al and Tommy Neri had followed them in. Michael gave them a nod, and they headed to the adjoining room, closing the door behind them.
“Mike tells you that, huh?” Hagen looked around the room and realized why it seemed so familiar. The pool table. This was the same suite where Fredo had lived before he had been married. It had been redecorated, but the pool table was the same. Michael turned on the television, loud. The TV was also new. Fredo had kept the TV on all the time just for the sake of having noise around, but these days they turned it on to provide cover from possible wiretaps. The late show was on, some old picture with people in togas.
Joe raised an open bottle of Pernod in one hand, a sealed bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other, and arched his eyebrows. As he did, Hagen tried to see behind the eye patch, but no dice.
“I’ll pass,” Tom said. “Look, I don’t want to sound disrespectful, but I’ve had a long day, and it’s not over yet, so would you mind telling me what’s going on? Whoever you
are.”
“He’s Joe Lucadello,” Michael said, racking the balls on the pool table. “That’s God’s honest truth.”
“Though I haven’t been Joe Lucadello in fifteen years,” Joe admitted.
“Oh yeah?” Hagen said. “So who are you?”
“Nobody. Anybody. Mike knows me as Joe Lucadello, which was who I was back when we first met. It still is who I am, of course, but as you took it upon yourself to learn, other than the hotel registration last night-which will disappear, by the way-there’s no record of me anywhere. A few people have memories of that young man, but that’s all.”
“Right,” Hagen said. “You’re a ghost.”
Joe laughed. “Excellent guess, Tom! You’re very warm.”
The shattering sound of Michael Corleone’s break startled Tom off his bar stool.
Then it hit him. What’s close to ghost? Spook. Joe was a spook. CIA.
“Sure you don’t want a drink?” Joe said. “You’re pretty jumpy.”
“He drinks a lot of coffee.” Michael sank two balls off the break. He kept shooting. “Like you can’t believe. Gallons.”
“Stuff’ll kill you,” Joe said.
Hagen turned on the bar stool to face Michael. “What’s going on here? This one-eyed guy you haven’t seen since Christ left Chicago stops by on vacation claiming he’s in the-”
“Company,” Joe said.
“And we’re supposed to believe him? Without checking-”
Michael slammed the two ball into a corner pocket, much harder than necessary.
“You’re off your game, Tom,” Michael said in Sicilian. “All this jumping to conclusions. Why do you assume I haven’t seen him in years? I simply told you he was my friend Joe that I met in the CCC. Why do you assume I haven’t verified who he works for? Why do you assume he’s stopping by and not that he came here with business to discuss with us?”
Hagen frowned. Us?
And how did Hagen-or Michael, for that matter-know for certain that Joe couldn’t understand Sicilian dialect?
Michael lined up a tough bank shot on the three ball and stroked it in like it was nothing. “Tom, you were my lawyer at those Senate hearings,” he said in English, “and you did a first-rate job, but-”
Three ball, side pocket.
“-I was fortunate enough to have another line of defense.”
“Defense overstates it,” Joe said, gathering up the cards from the bar. “Insurance; that’s all it was. Friends helping friends. You did such a good job, Tom, that we didn’t have to do much of anything.”
Much of anything?
Michael set down the cue stick.
What happened, he said, was that Joe had contacted him not long after the raid on that farmhouse in New York, when the FBI established the Top Hoodlum Program and it became clear they’d be putting more pressure on the so-called Mafia. He and Joe hadn’t seen each other since the day Billy Bishop had asked to see Michael’s pilot’s license and Michael had protected Joe by saying he had no license. In the meantime, Joe had been shot down over Remagen, escaped from a prison camp, then been assigned to a U.S. intelligence detail. After that, one thing led to another. Lots of jobs in Europe. The last few years back on home soil. Long story short, Joe-who’d remained grateful to Mike for what he did-had thought he might be able to help an old friend. He had various ways of keeping a man out of jail, protecting him from prosecution. If it ever came to that, the FBI wouldn’t know who was responsible, wouldn’t even know what had happened. What’s the catch? Michael had wanted to know. No catch, Joe said. We’re not looking for an informant the way the FBI would. Nothing that could get you into trouble within your world. Anything we’d ever ask would be a purely cash-and-carry, services-rendered deal. If Michael was ever asked to do a job he didn’t want to send men to do, Joe promised, that’d be fine. Say no, and that would be the end of it. Joe wasn’t in the market for a slave or a terrified supplicant. Just a vendor.
Hagen started going over all the jobs the past three years that he’d wondered about, but he stopped himself. He couldn’t think about that.
“So why all of a sudden are you bringing me into this?” Hagen said.
“Joe has a proposal,” Michael said. “And I need your counsel. It’s a big step. One step backward from what we’ve been trying to do in order to take a dozen steps ahead. If we accept, I’ll need your full involvement.”
“A proposal?”
Michael picked up his stick, pointed it at Joe, giving him the floor, then started sizing up angles on the impossible shot the four ball seemed to be.
Joe clapped a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “What I’m going to tell you here, you’re either going to like it and be a part of it or else it never happened. One or the other. Obviously, I’m talking to men who understand how to conduct themselves under conditions like that.”
Michael missed the shot, but not by much.
“A long time ago,” said Joe Lucadello, “I told Michael-I’ll bet you remember this, Mike; we were talking about Mussolini-I said that in all of history there’s never been any hero, any villain, any leader of any kind who was impossible to kill.”
Michael nodded. “It made an impression.”
“So here’s your government’s proposal, in a nutshell. This comes directly from Albert Soffet himself”-Soffet was the director of the CIA-“and it has presidential approval. How would you-meaning your business interests-like to be able to go back down to Cuba and pick up right where you left off? How would you like to get paid to do a job for us down there that would make that happen? Supremely well paid, I should add. Every dime is a hundred percent legal, and we can do things so that it’s effectively tax-free. We’d even help train your people. In fact, we’d have to insist on that point.”
“Train them?”
“The revolution changed many things. The men you send to do the job need to know about those things. There are Cuban patriots living in exile who will be able to help as well. We know these people. We’re familiar with their skills and limitations. There’s procedure to follow, too, so that, as I say, nobody goes to jail, be it one in America or, God forbid, Cuba. The risk-let me be clear-is that if and when anything goes wrong, we had nothing to do with it. If the Russians think we’re behind it, as a government, we could be looking at World War Three. Naturally, if your people get into trouble, we’ll do everything possible to help, but not at the expense of revealing our connection with the project. You-your people-will have acted as private citizens. You never met me. I don’t exist.”
Hagen would have been amused by Joe’s spelling all this out-he definitely wasn’t a connected guy of any sort-except for the enormity of the scheme he was suggesting. Killing a lowly beat cop was against the rules of their tradition, Hagen thought. How in the hell were they going to get away with assassinating the leader of another country?
And contrary to what the public and FBI and apparently the CIA seemed to think, killings happened for some reason-self-preservation, revenge-not for a fee.
But wasn’t it revenge? Men had died for stealing a hundred bucks from a Corleone shylock. When the Cuban government had taken over or closed down their casinos-how had that been any different from stealing millions?
And what exactly were the rules that governed a retired Don?
In a spectacular combination shot, Michael Corleone sank the four in the side pocket. The six rolled after the five like a man trying to apologize to an angry lover, and they disappeared into the corner pocket together.
“Wow,” Joe said. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
Just then, there was a knock at the door.
“We expecting someone?” Hagen said.
“He’s late,” Joe said, though it was Michael who went to get the door. “My apologies. As perhaps you know, he’s nearly always late.”
It was Ambassador M. Corbett Shea.
“Sorry, gents,” he said. The Secret Service men stayed in the hall, which meant they’d been allowed to search the
room earlier. “I had some business with my sons. So can I tell the president and the attorney general we have a deal? Or do you have questions you’d like me to pass on? How’d you put it, Mr. Cahn-sig-lee-airy? Anything the president needs, consider it done?”
Chapter 27
A FTER LUCADELLO and Shea left, Hagen made himself a stiff drink and went out onto the balcony. Johnny Fontane’s name was in lights on the marquee of the casino across the street, the Kasbah. The Chicago joint. No performer “belonged” to a certain Family, but for years it had rankled Hagen that they’d let the biggest draw in Las Vegas cross the street to play the casino of the Corleones’ biggest rival. Hagen didn’t like Johnny, the way Vito and Fredo did, and even, to an extent, Michael. Michael was right that Families couldn’t be fighting over matters so small as what singer was booked in what casino, but in truth Michael was also covering for Fredo, who’d been responsible for overseeing the entertainment at the Corleone hotels at the time. Thinking his friendship with Johnny was a substitute for negotiation, Fredo had been caught flat-footed when Fontane-who was friendly with Russo, too, after all-had signed a six-year exclusive deal with the Kasbah. Fuck friendly. It was business.
This was business, too. He took a deep breath. He couldn’t let his emotions enter into it.
The door opened, and Michael joined him on the balcony. There was a built-in hi-fi unit, and Michael turned on a radio station, again as cover, presumably. Opera. Hagen didn’t particularly care for opera, which Michael knew. Hagen didn’t bother objecting.
“That wasn’t the first time you heard that offer,” Hagen said. “How long have you known about it?”
Michael flipped open his lighter, a jeweled one with something engraved on it. His face glowed in the flame. He took a long drag off his cigarette. “Since the last time I was in Cuba.”
“The last time you were in Cuba, you-” Were there with Fredo. Hagen didn’t want to get into that at all. “The revolution was just under way. They knew then? You knew then?”
The Godfather returns Page 47
