“Fredo, I—”
“I’m not angry, Mike. Far from it. What happened to me was my destiny and all that stuff Pop liked to talk about. On the other hand—and forgive me for saying this—it’s hard to imagine that Pop, under the same circumstances, would’ve had me killed, y’know? Look. What I’m trying to do is understand what’s in your head. I know what’s in your heart, OK? Your heart’s obvious. But what goes on in your head, I gotta say, it’s a mystery to me.”
Hagen, Michael thought.
With a pang of clarity, he realized that Tom Hagen, his consigliere, had been the reason he’d done it. That’s who’d have held it against him. Hagen, who both was and wasn’t his brother, who was but wasn’t exactly family. Who wasn’t even Italian and therefore, strictly speaking, shouldn’t know anything. And he knew everything. Tom Hagen was the link to Vito, the old man. It was Tom who kept the lines of communication open during the years Michael was in youthful revolt against his father and everything his father stood for. Hagen’s job was to give Michael advice when asked, to resolve certain situations when dispatched, and he did so with great skill and greater obedience. Yet until now it had never clicked that it was Hagen’s disapproval Michael most dreaded, Hagen’s intelligence Michael most needed to one-up, Hagen’s deceptive toughness Michael most needed to surpass, even if doing so meant going against his own nature. His own blood. After Michael and Fredo’s last embrace, what had Fredo done? He’d put on his lucky fishing hat and gone to teach Michael’s son Anthony to fish. And what had Michael done? He’d gone straight to his office: to do business, yes, but also to bust Tom’s balls about his loyalty, which was never in question, and his mistress, which meant nothing, just to put him on the defensive. Why? So that Tom couldn’t question him in the matter of Hyman Roth? No. It was about that long look toward Fredo and Anthony that Tom had taken as he’d walked into the room. About Michael’s fear that Tom would disapprove.
This insight flowed through Michael Corleone like a deep breath. Yet he couldn’t quite speak the answer to his bloodied brother’s question.
“No, you tell me, Fredo. Since it’s so obvious. What is in my heart?”
“Oh, boy,” Fredo said. The naked woman shrank away from Fredo, ducked her head, and turned around a little, now clearly embarrassed. “That’s your problem in a nutshell, Mike, ain’t it? You don’t know your own heart.”
Michael folded his arms. He wanted to embrace his brother and tell him he was right about everything. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Are you finished, Fredo? Because I have business I need to take care of.”
Michael struggled to remember specifically what the business was. Someone else’s problems, no doubt. The particulars of his day’s work now seemed strewn about in his head and just out of reach. The rump of that raven-haired woman suddenly struck Michael Corleone as the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. He imagined himself running his tongue along the curve of her wide and perfect hips. He shivered. He forced himself to avert his eyes. At the end of the block, the old train roared by, boxcars filled with the nameless dead.
“I have a warning for you!” Fredo shouted over the train. “But what’s the point? You wouldn’t listen to me, would you? Coming from me, you’d think it was a joke. You’d think it was bullshit. You’d never give it a second goddamned thought. You never give me a second goddamned thought, I bet.”
Fredo was mistaken: Michael thought about him all the time. He’d been wrong about Fredo. Michael had made betrayers out of other allies. Sally Tessio, Nick Geraci, on and on. Fredo wasn’t the only one, and he was probably the least valuable one, but it was Fredo who haunted Michael most.
“You were dead to me when you were still alive, Fredo,” Michael was horrified to hear himself say. “You think being dead changes anything? Nothing has changed. Go away, Fredo.”
Michael didn’t mean a word of it.
He wanted to hear the warning, truly he did. Not that it stood to be a surprise. There was the matter of the Bocchicchios, that nearly extinct revenge-mad clan, who supposedly did not blame the Corleones for the death of Carmine Marino, a Bocchicchio cousin. There was the matter of Nick Geraci, the former Corleone capo, who had conspired with the late Dons of the Cleveland and Chicago outfits to trick Michael into killing his friend Hyman Roth and—just for spite—Fredo, too, who had eluded Michael’s vengeance and was still out there, somewhere. There was the president of the United States, who owed his election to Michael Corleone and yet gave every sign of turning on him.
On and on; of such threats there was no end. Michael had a gift for anticipating trouble. What mattered to Michael wasn’t the news Fredo had, because he was confident it would not be news. What felt important was that Fredo had come to deliver it.
The train was gone now and, somehow, so were the tuna, the fishing rod, and the luscious naked woman who was sometimes a corpse. Fredo turned and started walking away, a pink mist of blood obscuring the wound at the back of his head.
What was happening to Michael now might be perfectly logical. Some kind of hallucination, brought on by a diabetic reaction. He might even die. More likely, someone would find him, help him, give him an orange or a pill or a shot.
He called out to Fredo to wait.
Fredo stopped and turned to face him. “What do you want?”
Michael was on a gurney now, stable, heading for the emergency room. Al Neri—who shot Fredo with two slugs from a .38, at Michael’s behest and without the slightest resistance from Fredo himself—hovered nearby, yelling about sugar to people Michael could sense but not quite see. There was a woman here, too, coming into view, in Michael’s own robe: Marguerite Duvall, the actress. Rita. She was sobbing. Her dyed red hair looked like a madwoman’s. The robe gapped to reveal a dark nipple almost as big around as her small breast. Rita had been with Fredo, years ago, back when she was just a dancer in Vegas, back before Johnny Fontane had helped make her a star, back before she had that brief affair with Jimmy Shea. Fredo had even gotten her pregnant. Michael knew about that, and Rita no doubt knew that he knew, and they never talked about it. Michael wasn’t lonely. There were friends and family he’d drawn near him, right in this building. And there was this woman, Rita. Michael tried to reach out to her. She smiled at him through her tears and muttered something in French. Then Al Neri told her to stand back, taking her by the arm and tugging her away from Michael.
“What do you want?” Fredo repeated. “I’m losing my patience here, kid.”
Kid. Fredo never called him that. Sonny called him that.
Michael closed his eyes and willed himself to use reason.
A needle jabbed his arm, and Michael opened his eyes. The gurney was moving, and its wheels were squeaking, shrieking, and Rita’s hand was on his arm and then batted away, and he somehow saw both the ceiling of his apartment rushing by and also Fredo on that dark street in his tuxedo, dabbing at his wound with a blood-drenched pocket square.
“You deaf?” Fredo said. “Answer me.”
Michael felt as if he were living two lives at once, both equally real.
“I want you to wait, Fredo,” he murmured. “That’s what I want. I want you to stay.”
“Madonn’.” Fredo backed away, angry now. “No, Mike. I mean, what do you want?”
“Nothing I can have.”
Fredo laughed, mirthlessly. “And you call me dead,” he said. “You got a lot to learn, kid. Give Rita and the baby a kiss for me.” Fredo turned his back. In his bloody tuxedo and Mary Janes, he walked toward where the train had passed. Michael was falling through space now, in what must have been the elevator.
Rita and the baby? Rita didn’t have a baby.
Michael turned his head, trying to get a last glimpse of his brother. Fredo was still walking away. From this angle, at this increasing distance, it looked to Michael as if most of his brother’s head had been shot off. And then Fredo was gone.
BOOK I
CHAPTER 1
Three black Chevy
Biscaynes—each carrying two armed men, squinting into the harsh sunlight, clench-jawed—rocketed single file toward New Orleans on U.S. Highway 61, that queen of American long roads. Highway 61 ran the length of the country, right through its engorged and corn-fed heart. Its terminus lay dead ahead. Alongside this highway, men of God have both sinned against us and died for our sins. At its crossroads, genius has been bought for the bargain price of a human soul. On nearby backstreets and dusty roads, the misfit children of shopkeepers, of ex-slaves, of unappreciated schoolteachers, have seen fit to assume aliases. Buddy, Fats, Jelly Roll, T.S., and Satchmo. Bix, Pretty Boy, Tennessee, Kingfish, and Lightnin’. Muddy, Dizzy, and Bo; Son, Sonny, and Sonny Boy. B.B., Longhair, Yogi, Gorgeous, and Dylan. Thus disguised, they left home on this very highway and unleashed America’s strange, true voice on an unsuspecting world. At least one lowly truck driver traveled this road to his improbable destiny as king, at least one prostitute to hers as queen. Both died young, as the royals along Highway 61 reliably do—the king on his gilded throne and the queen on the road itself, her blood soaking into the blacktop. Along this highway, a nation’s idea of itself died and was born again. And again. Over and over.
It was 1963. A Sunday, unseasonably hot for January. The men in the three black Biscaynes drove with the windows down and did not appear to be sweating or nervous. The New Orleans skyline loomed. The speed limit changed, and the drivers slowed down.
Ahead, on the left, a few miles shy of the end of the highway, was the Pelican Motor Lodge, where Carlo Tramonti kept his office. No out-of-towner would have guessed that the nondescript cinder-block restaurant next door, Nicastro’s (closed Sundays), served the best Italian food in the city. The best that money could buy.
The best food, period, was available every Sunday, a few blocks away, at Tramonti’s plantation-style home, where Nicastro’s gifted young proprietor/chef—along with nearly every other man related by marriage or blood to Carlo Tramonti—was on this day sipping red wine and taking his leisure under a massive live oak that obscured any view of the house from the street. The house was white, lovely, in scale with the rest of the neighborhood. The backyard overlooked a swampy, magnolia-lush corner of one of the finest country clubs in New Orleans. Tramonti was the first Italian the club admitted; he’d been sponsored by the governor himself.
Children of all ages swarmed the yard.
A game of bocce had sprung up and become an excuse for good-natured taunting among the men. As usual, Agostino Tramonti—the smartest and shortest of Carlo’s five younger brothers—came in for the worst of it. He had a talent for sports and games but took them too seriously.
From inside the house came the sharply barked Italian commands of Gaetana Tramonti, wafting into the midday haze along with the aroma of baking chicken, roasting sausages, and various simple sauces her chef son-in-law could imitate but never perfect. Gaetana was a stout Neapolitan matriarch, Carlo’s wife of forty-one years. An army of bickering daughters and daughters-in-law did her bidding, exasperated in a way everyone here understood as love.
Carlo Tramonti strolled among his guests with a walking stick, kissing his grandchildren and tousling their hair, listening to the problems of his nephews and cousins. He looked like a Mediterranean shipping magnate, from his sun-bleached, perfectly trimmed white hair and double-breasted navy blazer right down to his sockless, loafered feet. He was five-eleven, the tallest man here. He wore enormous black sunglasses. His aristocratic air had come gradually. He’d started out as a shrimp-boat hand and part-time bookie and risen through the ranks. In those days, the city’s underworld was run by two warring factions, families who’d come from the same little town on the west coast of Sicily and whose grievances went back for centuries. Tramonti had negotiated peace and united the survivors of that negotiation into the clan he’d run for almost thirty years. No Family ever enjoyed better political protection or such a complete monopoly over its territory. No Family was ever less violent. The fear the Tramonti clan inspired was akin to the fear that the devout have of their God: a subservience to power and a form of love. To most people in New Orleans and throughout Louisiana, the Tramontis were the big black king snake that lived quietly under the house, dining on water moccasins, pygmy rattlesnakes, and disease-laden rats.
Carlo finally joined the bocce game. There was a gracefulness to his every fluid motion. His presence calmed his brother down. Augie Tramonti was a foot-shorter version of Carlo—same haircut, same tan, same custom-made clothes from the same tailor—except that he walked on the balls of his feet, bouncing, a man with too much to prove.
The pasta course was set out on long tables on the wraparound porch. The women called out to the men and the children to come eat.
It would of course be difficult to exaggerate the significance in most Italian homes of good food and big family meals, especially in New Orleans—the oldest Italian community in the New World, where the vigilante murder of innocent Sicilian immigrants was once ordered by the city’s mayor and publicly condoned by the president of the United States, and yet where that Italian creation, the muffuletta, was the city’s true Communion host. The Tramontis were a family, a New Orleans family, and meals like this kept them that way. No outsider could hope to understand how much the bounty now set before the Tramonti clan was both taken for granted and cherished. Carlo Tramonti made his usual toast, just a warm and simple “La famiglia.”
His family echoed him and drank.
The Tramontis set down their glasses. “Mangiamo!” Gaetana called out.
As she did, the men from the black cars appeared on the lawn, guns drawn.
Women and children screamed.
Carlo Tramonti got to his feet. He made no attempt to flee. Absurdly, he grabbed a steak knife and held it aloft. These men could not be cops. Tramonti owned the cops. Several shades of color had drained from his face. He looked down at his plate, at his wife’s spaghetti puttanesca. He could not have expected anything like this would happen to him, in front of his family, on a Sunday afternoon, as he was about to eat.
“INS!” the lead agent shouted. “Immigration!”
Carlo Tramonti cocked his head, obviously confused. He’d been in New Orleans for almost sixty years, about as long as jazz and—certainly in the eyes of his family, at least—just as American. Even the Tramonti grandchildren must have imagined that the badges were fake.
Augie Tramonti—who, after the recent death of a trusted old uncle, had been promoted from head of the Family’s drug-trafficking operation to consigliere—asked if he could look at the badges. The agents politely complied. He bit his lip, looked at his brother, and shrugged. Who’d ever seen an immigration agent’s badge?
If they really were from the INS, it did explain quite a bit. They weren’t cops or even FBI, and they probably weren’t there to kill him. It explained how they got past the associates Tramonti had stationed out front. It explained why they stormed the place, rather than the more subtle approach the CIA would probably have used on him.
Carlo Tramonti slowly set his steak knife down.
In fact, he had never quite managed to become an American citizen. By the time he was old enough to apply for citizenship himself, he was up to his sleepy-lidded eyeballs in various rackets that might have made the process difficult. But those same involvements had given him the means to avoid the issue altogether. Four years earlier, Carlo Tramonti had even testified before a subcommittee of the United States Senate—taking the Fifth Amendment sixty-one times—without the question of his citizenship ever coming to light.
The lead agent first asked him if he was Señor Carlos Tramonti, from Santa Rosa, Colombia. Tramonti stared at him.
Another agent said “La Ballena.” Spanish for “the Whale.” Other agents chuckled.
Nicastro, the chef, perhaps from years of hearing customers mispronounce Italian words, and surely also from the stress of the situation, blurted a correction: “La Balena.”
Other members of the Tramonti clan
glared at him. No one called Carlo Tramonti by that nickname, not to his face.
Carlo looked only at Gaetana, at the other end of the table, standing now, hair damp with sweat, tears streaming down her round cheeks.
“I’d like to have my lawyer present,” Carlo Tramonti said.
“That won’t be necessary,” said the head agent.
Tramonti shrugged. Who can say what’s necessary?
“We just have a few questions for you,” the agent continued. “A minor matter. We’ll be finished in no time.”
“A minor matter can wait,” Carlo Tramonti said, “until Monday.”
“I’m afraid not.” The agent asked Tramonti to go get his passport and come with them.
“It’s at my office.”
One of the other agents produced a pair of handcuffs.
“There’s no need for that,” Carlo Tramonti said.
The agents handcuffed him anyway. “Procedure,” they insisted. They cuffed his ankles, too.
In Italian, Carlo Tramonti asked Gaetana to go get him some cash.
The agent in charge smirked. “No need for that, either.”
“My toothbrush, then,” Carlo said to his wife, still in Italian.
“No,” the agent said.
The agent’s colleagues seemed to enjoy marching Carlo Tramonti from the table, past a din of protest from his alarmed family, past the terrified faces of his grandchildren.
Carlo looked back over his shoulder at Gaetana and told her to, please, eat without him.
“We’ll be back in time for dessert,” Augie said, scrambling to his feet and following.
Augie told the agents that he’d meet them at the office. He nodded to another brother, one who ran several of their legitimate businesses—warehouses, parking lots, dog tracks, strip clubs—and who’d know the right lawyers to call.
The Godfather's Revenge Page 2
