Which, by a unanimous vote, they agreed not to do.
CHAPTER 14
As dessert was served—plates of simple cookies, plus a pear and grappa pound cake that was a specialty of the chef’s own mother, not to mention coffee and amaretto—and the waiters left once again, Carlo Tramonti was finally called upon to say his piece.
“I come a long way,” said Carlo Tramonti, “to give a short speech. Some of you are good talkers”—he shot a glance at Michael, then Altobello—“but I come from a humble background where it’s nothing I ever got good at, even in front of such good friends. Most of you know about my recent difficulties. I don’t want to tell that story no more to nobody. Some of the rest of you’s got stories to tell that are like it, I don’t gotta be told that, eh?”
This provoked murmurs of approval.
“So if I may, I’ll tell you a different story. Forgive me if you heard it. My organization’s got a few rules different from some others for the simple reason that we’re older. A hundred years ago, when the niggers got set free, the plantation owners got Italians to do such work. They made some of us into what might as well have been slaves, one of which was my grandfather. He worked hard, like a lot of ’em. Before long Italians was comin’ up in the world, not just as tinkers and cobblers but in the fruit trades and also great in the fishing and the oysters.”
Tramonti left his place behind the table and started pacing, like a trial lawyer delivering his closing arguments to the jury. Carlo Tramonti had been in court plenty of times himself.
“What happened next,” Tramonti said, “was the Anglos, they killed this chief of police they had, who was popular with a lot of people but crooked as a cypress root. And they blamed it on us, the Italians. Our most successful Italian businessman, fella had a big tomato cannery, biggest one in the state, he got stabbed in the eye by an assassin. Honest Italians was rounded up, put in jail. They accuse us of being Mafia, a word I never heard used the way they use it. But the official leaders, elected and all that, they act like Mafia, or at least the cartoon they got in their head about Mafia. They make a vendetta against a whole class of people, one of which was my own grandfather. When a lynch mob got formed, the police led innocent men out into the prison yard, handed ’em right over. The men huddled in a corner, trapped. The Anglos—shopkeepers, lawyers, even a Baptist preacher—what they do is, they line up ten feet away and open fire. Rifle shots, shotguns, everything. My grandfather, he’s still alive, it’s a miracle. Then someone says, wait, this one’s not dead. Someone with a shotgun comes up, steps on his chest, blows his head off completely. The killers, they laugh, they cheer. This is reported in all the papers. President Theodore Roosevelt himself hears about it and right away he gives his approval. I got those newspapers hung up on the walls of my office, so I don’t never forget what the people who run this country think of us. I don’t never forget it, never.”
Hagen leaned toward Michael’s ear. “Anybody,” Hagen whispered, “who says he’s going to make a short speech is just about to deliver a stem-winder.”
“Most of you,” Tramonti said, turning to glance over his shoulder at Hagen, “are Sicilian. You understand in your guts how the rulers of nations have treated our people for a thousand years. We can’t be surprised to find ourselves in the position we are with regard to those Sheas. Eh? I don’t fault you, Don Corleone, for putting forth your friend Mr. Shea for president, because I understand that your family and his go way back and all that there.”
Michael cleared his throat.
Tramonti smiled. “I agree, Don Corleone. This is no time to play Who Shot John.”
“James,” Leo Cuneo blurted. “Jimmy Shea. Not John.”
Tramonti spun to face him. “I know the fucking president’s name. It’s a figure of speech, for Christ’s sake.”
Leo Cuneo’s consigliere leaned forward and said something to him. Don Cuneo looked confused. “Then who the fuck is John?”
“I said it was a figure of speech,” Tramonti said. “I’m only trying to say that there’s no point wasting our time working out who’s to blame. The thing is done, he’s in the White House, end of story. Whoever would have wound up in that White House, he wasn’t going to be no friend to the Italians, in the end, which is how it is. We all know that.”
They all also knew that Tramonti had given a million laundered dollars to the campaign of Shea’s opponent, in defiance of the Commission’s decision to support Shea—hardly the act of a man who thought all non-Italian candidates would be equally hostile toward Italians.
“The thing we got to talk about here,” Tramonti said, “is what we’re going to do about it, how we’re going to get that little prick Danny Shea off our balls. Eh? Or at the very bare minimum, make it so he don’t do no damage while he’s on ’em. Which, see, is the reason I told you that story. The moral of which is this. Most of you’s city boys, but down in the bayous, we learn early that if you want to kill a snake, you don’t chop off the tail. Like with the chief of police I was tellin’ you about. Or.” He paused for effect, finger in the air. “Or, like what would happen if anything happened to Danny Shea, see. All that kind of thing does is make the snake mad. If Danny Shea becomes a martyr, take it from me, that’s the end of us. His brother’ll call out the National Guard. You want to do away with the snake, how do you do it?” He strode to the table in front of Michael Corleone, paused, and held out his hand in an imitation of a meat cleaver. “You got to chop it off at the head.” Tramonti slammed it down on the table, spilling water from both Michael and Hagen’s water glasses.
Neither Michael nor Hagen even blinked.
“‘If history teaches us anything,’ eh?” Hagen whispered to Michael.
In a moment that seemed to last much longer, Michael saw Fredo in that unluckiest of lucky fishing hats, sitting on the dock, teaching Anthony how to fish, something Michael had somehow always been too busy to do. A few feet away in Michael’s office, Tom had said that getting to Roth would be impossible, like trying to kill the president. Michael had glanced at Fredo, then mocked Tom. If history teaches us anything, he’d said, it’s that you can kill anybody.
Michael felt dizzy and downed what was left of his water.
“Jimmy Shea,” Tramonti said, “if he gets taken care of, then what? Then nothing. It’s the end of all our biggest problems. Payton’s the president, and he hates that Danny Shea just about as much as we do. Sam Drago can vouch for me on that.”
Drago, in fact, nodded to indicate that he could.
“Bud Payton’s not going to have us over to the White House to help him hide Easter eggs or nothin’, but he ain’t gonna keep Danny Shea on his payroll, neither. And the FBI, forget the FBI, the director hates Danny Shea more than we do. He ain’t gonna want to keep coming after us, since Danny, he’ll get the credit, whether he stays on or not. Danny, he’ll take the credit. Everybody knows what Danny Shea wants to go down in history as. The FBI, the fellas we see, regular agents, they’d like to help him. But their boss? Forget about it. He don’t want that no more than we do. So, like I say,” Tramonti said.
He reached into his jacket pocket, as if for a gun.
Some of the younger men with faster reflexes began to dive for cover, but before anyone embarrassed himself there was a flash of steel: a meat cleaver, smallish and new-looking. Tramonti faced his own place at the table and raised the blade over his head and let out a grunt and brought it down hard and it stuck there, about a quarter-inch deep.
Then he held out his hands to the other men to indicate that there was nothing to it, a regular guy killing everyday vermin, and returned to his seat.
Agostino Tramonti patted his brother heartily on the shoulder, more like a cornerman than a consigliere.
There was a stunned silence in the room.
How had he gotten that thing in here? Why had he seen the need to pull a theatrical stunt like that? Of more concern, though: could it be that the Don of the least violent Family in America was suggesting some
thing so purely crazy?
Neri opened the door a crack.
Michael shook his head.
Neri nodded and closed it.
The Dons exchanged looks with one another and back at that meat cleaver. Gradually all eyes drifted toward Michael Corleone.
Michael stood. He willed himself to stop thinking of Fredo. He tried to keep his eyes off the meat cleaver as well. He nodded toward his empty water glass. Tom obediently filled it.
Like his father, Michael was in the habit of waiting a long time between the time he rose to speak and the time he spoke. This time, however, Michael—though his face was an expressionless mask—was scrambling for the right thing to say. Michael reached down and took a sip from his water glass and shook his head in theatrical disappointment.
“Don Tramonti,” he began. “My dear friend. With full respect for you and your organization, I believe I speak for everyone in this room when I say that what you are suggesting is an outrage. I understand that you are angry, you’re frustrated, and so, in this matter, are we all. But surely you must understand that what you’re suggesting would ruin us. I don’t need to remind you, or anyone else, either, that it’s strictly forbidden even to kill a common police officer without first getting permission from this body. These are crimes the authorities don’t rest until they solve. We can’t protect those responsible. Yet what you—”
“Bullshit.” Tramonti stood. The cleaver quivered. “I say that with full respect, too, my friend. You yourself killed a common police officer without getting no permission—”
“Sit down,” Paulie Fortunato said, raising his enormous head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The last person in the room Michael would have expected to defend him was the boss of the Barzini Family—a good indication of how far over the line Carlo Tramonti had stepped.
“If I may, Don Corleone?”
Michael extended his arm toward Don Fortunato, yielding the floor. Tramonti, too, sat.
Fortunato remained in his chair, no doubt because the effort to stand up would have left him out of breath. “Back then,” he said, speaking more than loud enough for Tramonti to hear, “which was almost twenty years ago, Mike was a civilian, all right? Not involved in no way with this thing of ours. He was a simple college boy, up at Harvard or some such.”
Dartmouth, but there was no need to correct him.
Fortunato wiped his chin with a napkin. “What you’re referring to, Don Tramonti, is an event another man confessed to, all right? Even if it happened the way you said, it would’ve been done to atone for a hit that was put on his father, which is the kind of thing that is also never supposed to happen—a hit on the boss of any Family—unless first it gets approved by this body. In the situation you’re talking about? Nothing like that was approved, believe me.”
Everyone did, since it had been the Barzinis who’d ordered the hit.
“What happened back then, if it happened like you say, was that two men who were trying to kill Vito Corleone were, some say, killed by his son. One of them happened to be a crooked police captain, the other was a scumbag dope smuggler. Now, if this incident did happen, it’s both understandable and, more important, personal. It means it don’t concern us.” Fortunato smiled. The devil himself would have struggled to flash such malevolence. “So my advice, friend, is maybe you should watch your tongue. OK? I thank you.”
Fortunato balled up the napkin and tossed it aside.
Carlo Tramonti turned to his brother. They whispered counsel to each other. Carlo did most of the talking. He waited a long time before addressing the rest of the Commission.
When he did, he merely faced them, bowed his head, and nodded.
A split second after this apparent concession, there came from outside what sounded like distant gunfire.
“The fireworks,” Michael said, jerking his thumb vaguely toward Red Hook. He bowed his head. “My apologies.”
“Fireworks?” Carlo Tramonti looked disoriented.
“The fireworks, yes,” Don Altobello said. “Outside.”
“There’s a fireworks display over the East River,” Michael explained. “To celebrate Columbus Day.”
Tramonti muttered what sounded like a curse toward the mercenary nature of Genoans. Then he thanked the Commission for this opportunity and for their patience.
But the matter was on the table now, as unavoidable as the meat cleaver. And, absent Carlo Tramonti’s fanatical and unreasonable solution, there was much to discuss.
As the fireworks continued, the Dons learned that everyone there was being audited by the IRS. All over the country, the length of the prison sentences imposed upon convicted associates had increased dramatically. Carlo Tramonti’s deportation had been followed by several others that had been more meticulously executed; nearly every Family had lost a man or two this way. There were other issues. All the men agreed that, if nothing was done, the worst was surely yet to come.
Michael Corleone and Tom Hagen listened patiently. They certainly shared most of these concerns. The Corleones’ support of the Sheas had come somewhat out of loyalty, given the business relationship their father had enjoyed with Mickey Shea, but, more so, out of the desire for access—and, in Michael’s case, legitimacy. There had been other reasons, too. For example, Jimmy Shea was more hawkish on Cuba than anyone else running. Michael continued to believe that, in the long run, his interests were best served by keeping the Sheas in power and figuring out a way to combat Danny’s excesses.
The assassination efforts in Cuba were still unknown to most of the men in this room. A rumor, perhaps, but no more. As an ace in the hole, Michael and Tom Hagen had long since written it off as unplayable. But they had a better ace in a more literal hole. The Shea brothers were both cunt-happy. Johnny Fontane, in the not-too-distant past, had practically served as their pimp. Providing the Sheas with women, particularly starlets, had a certain value, and the Corleones were, in fact, quietly but dramatically expanding their holdings in Hollywood. The Shea brothers could distance themselves from certain people all they wanted, but they were permanently attached to their own disloyal pricks.
Yet, as the discussion went on, Michael realized that Tramonti’s crazed desire to kill the president put the Corleones in an impossible position.
The Commission would not, of course, approve Tramonti’s proposal, but if Tramonti carried through on it or even attempted to do so, everyone here was now an accessory.
It was possible that Tramonti could be dissuaded or appeased. But knowing the habits of mind of those closest to the old Sicilian ways, Michael wasn’t optimistic. Even if the Commission rebuked Tramonti, so what? Michael certainly did not have the resources to monitor the Tramontis, to make sure they didn’t merely have someone else do the job and cover their tracks.
Killing Tramonti was forbidden and would start more fires than it extinguished.
Warning the Sheas wasn’t an option, either. It was unthinkable to betray the confidence of another Don, especially about anything said at a meeting of the Commission.
The only true solution would be to figure out how to get the Sheas to call off the dogs, to call a halt to the persecution of the men in Michael Corleone’s tradition. The dirt the Corleones had on the Shea brothers might have been the right ammo for the job, but how could Michael fire it? Leaking it to the press wasn’t the right play. The job had to be done via the possibility of leaking the information. The government played it the same way. No one wants nuclear war, but a nation unable to create the possibility of it may as well be armed with rocks and sharpened sticks. Michael didn’t want scandal. He wanted the fruits that came from the fear of scandal.
To do this, he’d need to find an emissary, someone the president trusted and would see. If that wasn’t a tall enough order, it also had to be someone who would then (faithfully, subtly) let the president know what the Corleones knew and what they were prepared to do with that knowledge. Who could do that?
A few pos
sibilities sprang to mind, none of them ideal.
But there would be someone. There was always someone.
Michael needed time to think.
He wouldn’t have to figure this out today. But he’d have to figure it out, and soon. Tramonti’s proclamation meant that this might not be able to wait until next year’s election. Nonetheless, Michael decided to go ahead and deliver a slightly modified version of the speech he’d rehearsed.
As he rose to give it, the grand finale of the fireworks got under way. Light strobed through the grid of drawn blinds. This inspired good-natured chuckling from several of the men and a shrug from Michael to indicate he couldn’t have known to time it like that.
“The president and his brother,” Michael began, practically shouting, “are men with a gift for inspiring the masses. They are leaders. They may even be good leaders, if, admittedly, not as good for us as we might like. But they’re also politicians, and so let’s not be naïve. Like all politicians, they want one thing most of all.”
“Pussy,” Hagen muttered, too softly for anyone else to hear.
“To be reelected,” Michael said. “The Sheas need to be reelected next year. They’re doing this to us now in order to get reelected, and to do so without the need for our support. The Sheas aren’t stupid men. They know that they’re biting the hands that fed them. They’ve undoubtedly reached the conclusion that once they bite our hands off, millions of other hands will applaud. Millions of hands will reach for their wallets. And then millions of hands will reach for the lever that reelects the president.”
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