The Godfather's Revenge
Page 5
Hagen put a finger to his throat to feel his racing pulse. His heart did that, raced. “I wasn’t sure your people were actively looking for him. For it. The package.”
“What’d you think this was about?” Lucadello said. “That immigration circus?”
Hagen shrugged. It wasn’t just Carlo Tramonti’s deportation to Colombia, which might be comical were it not for the things Tramonti knew. There were also the related, mounting complications posed by that self-righteous prick Danny Shea.
“So where is he?”
“It,” Lucadello said.
“Excuse me?”
“It. The package.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Lucadello tossed the white Bible aside. “In a place of worship, you talk like that? What ring of hell you figure that’ll get you sent to?”
“It’s not a…It’s just a hotel.” Hagen took a deep breath. “Fine. Where’d you find it?”
“We didn’t so much find it as figure out where it’s been. Guess where.”
Sicily, Hagen thought. The narcotics operation had given Geraci connections all over that island. But Hagen wasn’t about to guess. In a tactic he’d learned from watching the great Vito Corleone, Hagen remained utterly still, addressing this show of disrespect with withering silence.
“All right, killjoy,” Lucadello said, “but you’re gonna love this. In a huge man-made cave underneath a certain Great Lake.”
“Erie?”
“Positively spooky, actually.”
Hagen sighed. Lucadello bobbed his head in concession.
“Anyway, if the Russians dropped the bomb,” Lucadello said, “two horny kids could’ve gone down there and restarted the whole human race, that’s how well stocked this place was. Or so I hear. It was attached through some kind of passageway to a lodge on a private island up there. I’m sure you know the one.” The agent laughed. “A secret passageway. What a riot. We live in interesting times.”
Vincent Forlenza, the former owner of that lodge on Rattlesnake Island and the boss of the Cleveland mob, had also been Geraci’s real-life godfather. For his part in the conspiracy with Geraci and the Chicago outfit, Forlenza’s body was at the bottom of Lake Erie, chained to a tugboat anchor, food for the sludgeworms.
“I figured you’d be happy about this,” Lucadello said. “No doubt your brother, too.”
Hagen thought he heard a note of sarcasm in the way Lucadello said brother. “Happy’s not the perfect word,” Hagen said. “But you’re right to think it’s good news. The bad news I’m guessing is that he’s not there anymore.”
“It’s not there anymore.”
Hagen closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry.” Lucadello laughed. “I can’t keep this going. I’m just busting balls. You’re right—he’s not there anymore, but that’s not the bad news. The bad news is the way we found out about it, which was the FBI.”
Hagen’s heart wasn’t slowing down at all. No boss or caporegime had ever cooperated with a government investigation, but few had ever been backed into more of a hole—literally, as it turned out. “Is he in custody?”
“We think Geraci is still at large.” Lucadello pronounced it the Italian way—Jair-AH-chee, rather than the Americanized way—Juh-RAY-see—that Nick preferred.
“You think?” Hagen said.
“Think, yes. That’s why we call this process intelligence, counselor. What we know for certain is that our boy was sloppy getting out of there, threatening the lives of two children and a retired cop who plowed snow up there. The ex-cop angle was probably what got the Bureau interested. Then they found the cave, found prints everywhere, even found the gun he used.”
“He shot at kids?” It was unthinkable that anyone with Geraci’s skills would threaten children, and unlikely that he’d have left a security guard alive as an eyewitness.
“Threatened. It hadn’t been fired.”
“But it had his prints on it?”
“We’re not sure. Maybe the guard just recognized it as the same gun he’d looked down the barrel of. We’re just getting our bearings here ourselves. We do have a source who in the past has cut us in on certain ongoing investigations.”
“How good’s this source?”
Lucadello sighed. “What, on a one-to-ten scale? It’s good.” He started flipping through the Bible. “As for the company I represent, you have clearance from the top”—he mouthed the name Soffet—“to take this to the next level.”
As in CIA Director Allen Soffet, whom Hagen knew from his own stint in Washington. Michael had met the director, too, while serving on President Shea’s transition team.
Lucadello found what he was looking for. He held the Bible out to Hagen and jabbed a finger at a passage in Exodus.
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.”
CHAPTER 3
“What 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.
“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.