The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  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.

  When I think about how I should feel about this—which is almost never—I know it’s awful. I’m not a stupid man. At every turn of my life, I understand that I should feel all kinds of things that I don’t feel. A person can make himself understand a thing, but how do you make yourself feel? What’s a man supposed to do about that?

  If this were all out in the open, probably our family would be destroyed. I’d be devastated. But as long as you never really know these things, as long as we never talk about it, as long as I’m not found out, I have to be honest: I don’t feel bad.

  I don’t feel anything.

  That’s what I feel bad about.

  I’ve helped plot the deaths of many men and one whore. I’ve stood in rooms where the body was still warm and calmly discussed business. I’ve killed three men myself, Theresa. The first time, I was only a boy, eleven years old, an orphan, living on the streets. I don’t like to think about it. I think about the good that came from it, which was that Sonny brought me home to live with his family. The other two happened last year, right before that Notre Dame–Syracuse game you and I saw with Andrew. On one of the men, I used the belt I’m wearing right now, which seems odd only when I stop to think about it, which I never do. The other man, the one I shot in the head, was Louie Russo, head of the Chicago crime syndicate, and a sick man, in ways I don’t like to think about. The world is a better place without this individual, I can assure you. Here again: self-defense. All three times, it was kill or be killed, and I killed.

  These things do not haunt me.

  Nobody suspects me of anything—nobody except, I suspect, you.

  As you must know, sweetheart, I’m not just Michael’s lawyer and his unofficial brother. I’m also his consigliere, and, lately, his sotto capo as well. His underboss.

  Which I can’t be officially, because, unlike you, my love, I’m not Sicilian, not even Italian.

  You know all this. You must. Right after Pearl Harbor, when your parents got thrown in detention, like a lot of Italian immigrants did, how do you think I got ’em out so fast, huh? When your cousin fell on hard times, didn’t you wonder how a high school gym teacher who’d never set foot in Rhode Island made such a smooth transition into the vending-machine business there?

  How many times have you wanted to buy a painting and done so with an envelope of cash I gave you that you took, no questions asked? You’re a smart woman, Theresa. If—as I never will—I asked you to estimate the amount of money you’ve laundered, not to mention the number of art dealers whose tax fraud you’ve abetted, I’m certain you could tote it up in your head.

  You know things. You keep asking me questions I can’t answer, but, Theresa, my love, you know.

  Their gaze was broken by the arrival of two plates piled high with stone crabs.

  “Well?” Theresa said. A little hurt, it seemed, as she always was. “Nothing to say?”

  “Ah, you know,” Tom Hagen said, throwing up his hands. “Not much to tell, I guess. A day’s a day.”

  “Wow,” she said. “Look at all this food! I’ll never eat all this.”

  Theresa had ridden out his long silences countless times before, often without the aid of candlelight and a tart white wine.

  “Call Sandra,” Tom said. “Bet you she’ll help.”

  “I already did.” Theresa grinned in a way she must have hoped was wicked. “When I went to the Ladies. She and Stan are on their way.”

  Theresa had a good heart, Tom thought. At this point, it was probably as broken as it was going to get.

  CHAPTER 4

  The indios had a name for the land of the dead. They called it Mictlan. Nick Geraci was under no illusions that he was the only one in Taxco who’d conducted business there.

  He stood on his balcony in the waning desert light, draped in a bathrobe, postponing the ordeal of having to get dressed again. His fists throbbed. Behind him, on the green tile floor inside, were the clothes he’d cursed himself trying to zip and button this morning, now soaked with blood and rolled up inside a rug along with the stranger who’d come to kill him.

  Centuries ago, Taxco was hacked from this steep hillside by the colonizing rear guard of the conquistadors, who enslaved the natives and marched them into dark holes to mine silver. The big shots stayed up top, basking in the thin air and idyllic weather, supervising what was destined to become a maze of tortuous cobblestone streets, shooting dice and despoiling the local women, drinking first one sort of spirits, then bracing themselves for the visits from another. On such a foundation rose this small city, still a source of silver, lovely beyond reason, filthy with jewelry shops and bars, fragrant with bougainvillea and boiled chicken, with fried cornmeal and rotting straw, a haven for outsiders and eccentrics. Around every corner were views that provoked tourists and newcomers to gasp and unholster their cameras.

  Geraci’s apartment was on the third floor. From its balcony, he could see the zócalo, the baroque dome of the church of Santa Prisca, and an exultation of tile-roofed colonial houses, each forced by the sheer angles of the hillside and its spurs of virgin rock to be ingeniously different from the next. From here, the city seemed aglow in white, red, and green, same as the Mexican (and Italian) flag. But Geraci had been in Taxco long enough to see past beauty.

  He could pick out sad-eyed women behind counters in silver shops or seated at café tables and watch them swallow grimaces they’ll never unleash on their haggling customers and oblivious lovers. He could spot isolated men muttering to themselves, walking with awkward, hurried gaits: away from something and not toward it. He noticed dogs trotting alone down side streets, their heads bobbing as if silently cursing their demons. His heart went out to those dogs.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the rug. He’d bought it on the street. It was wool, brightly colored, turquoise and orange, black where it needed to be. It had a warrior on it, in noble profile. He’d liked that rug.
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  Even though Geraci hadn’t wanted to kill the guy, and even though his now-aching hands stood to make a tough job, getting dressed, even tougher, it was wild—in every sense of that—to feel his fists throb again. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thrown a real punch. In his time of need, his body, to his surprise, had not betrayed him.

  He leaned out over the railing and was able to glimpse the distant gorge, safely downwind, where four centuries of the city’s garbage had been dumped, where today’s trash hill often became tomorrow’s sinkhole, where brown lakes of putrefied sewage formed and vanished, where children were warned never to go. Buzzards circled it all day, and wolves patrolled it all night. There were no doubt other corpses in that gorge, but this would be the first Geraci ever heaved there. It didn’t bother him. He’d been to New Jersey.

  Getting dressed, though: that bothered him.

  The tremors bothered him, too, but they came and went.

  Charlotte, his wife, was upset about his face, the way it sometimes lacked expression, but until he figured out a way to reunite with her that wouldn’t get him killed, that was no problem at all. If other people can’t see his expressions, what’s it to Nick Geraci?

  Losing track of his thoughts was disturbing, but it didn’t happen often. Anyway, he was pushing fifty. Everybody forgets things. It might be a mercy. Geraci would like to be able to forget how miserable he felt every day when he thought about his wife and kids and how little hope he had of seeing them any time soon. He’d like to be able to forget the plane crash he was in and the blow to his head that he was convinced caused all his problems (he’d been a heavyweight prizefighter, but so many of his fights were fixed, he’d rarely been hit in the head much harder than he slapped himself when he forgot something). But what Nick Geraci could never, ever forget was that Michael Corleone had arranged to have the plane sabotaged. Geraci would never abandon hope of somehow settling that score, no matter how long it took. His fine motor skills were shot. Every time he went to button a shirt or fasten a goddamned pair of pants, it was like Michael Corleone was staring at him with that cold and, come to think of it, expressionless face.