Carlo Tramonti stared toward the meat cleaver, frowning.
“The attorney general of the United States has declared war on our way of life,” Michael said. “In the past, we have declared war on one another as well, yet we manage to come to rooms like this one and, through the efforts of this very body, achieve peace. Our differences then become things of the past. Former enemies sit at these tables now as friends. If the president and his brother, who were once friends to some of us, now wish to declare war on us, so be it. But let us not abandon reason. Let us not abandon the ways of our tradition. War, unfortunately, has become part of that tradition, something we all understand too well.”
He shot a quick glance at Carlo Tramonti, who’d been tested neither by actual war, as Michael had, nor by the siege wars most of the other Dons had fought and survived. The New Orleans Don had a hand cupped over his ear but did not look up.
“We are men skilled in the art of war,” Michael said, “and as a wise man once said, achieving a hundred victories in a hundred battles takes less skill than subduing your opponent without battle. We certainly possess such skill. Whether Don Tramonti’s proposal would work or whether it would ruin us is a matter of debate, but we are men who prefer action to debate. So let’s act. But let’s do so in a way that doesn’t threaten us with a counterattack. Let’s use the system against itself. It’s not our system, but we control enough of it to get this job done. We have friends within the president’s own party, people who could cause him trouble in the primaries. We have friends in the other party as well, men who could be troublesome opponents and yet friends to us. The presidential election isn’t a national election, remember. It’s won state by state. There’s not a man in this room who doesn’t have dozens of important state officials who could be called upon for favors. There’s not a man here who doesn’t have an interest in a newspaper, a radio station, a TV station, even if it’s only somebody there who’s a degenerate gambler or on the hook to one of your shys. What easier way to subdue an opponent without battle than to forgive a debt here and there? And there is one more thing, the most powerful force we can unleash.”
Purposefully, he had not mentioned the possibility of blackmail. A man showing his cards still hangs on to the one up his sleeve.
Michael smiled. “Our labor unions. Millions of Americans, who every year vote for the man their union endorses. Without these votes, Jimmy Shea would have lost the last election, and, without those endorsements, he’ll lose this one, too. The point isn’t to defeat him, of course, but to withhold those endorsements until we get what we want. Our power comes from the possibility that—”
There came a booming knock on the door. It opened before anyone had time to say anything.
It was Al Neri, flanked by the other bodyguards.
Outside, car doors slammed.
“OK, three things,” Neri said. “First, stay calm, cool, and collected, all right?” He strode to Tramonti’s place at the table and removed the cleaver and handed it to Carlo the Whale. “This ain’t what it looks like, believe me, nothing to fear, so whatever you do, just stay put.” Neri hurried back toward the door. “Second, excuse me for interrupting. Third, um, Tom? Can you give me a hand out here?”
Behind Al Neri now were several uniformed cops and a pair of detectives in the kind of cheap suits that must have come free with the badge.
The strobing lights were actually coming from their police cars. The fireworks were out of synch with those lights, of course, and too far away to see. It’s not the eye that sees, it’s the mind.
Most of the Dons were able to make eye contact with their respective bodyguards in the hall, and none of the bodyguards seemed anxious or even concerned. Several tried to convey in gesture that, appearances be damned, everything was fine.
To everyone’s surprise, the man the police had come for was Tom Hagen.
“Are you Thomas Feargal Hagen?”
The detective pronounced Hagen’s middle name correctly. He even looked Irish.
“What’s this about?” Hagen said.
“You need to come with us, sir,” said the second detective.
“I need to see my lawyer,” Tom said.
He didn’t have a lawyer, as far as Michael knew. Tom was the lawyer. He got other people out of situations like this.
“We got a telephone at the precinct house,” said the second detective. “It’s new. Works like a charm. We even give you the dime.”
The men at the tables were hunched over, obscuring their faces, even though it really did seem that the cops didn’t know what was going on here—or didn’t want to know. Michael wondered if Neri had engineered this, if it was some kind of professional courtesy extended Neri’s way. As Michael had seen on various occasions, there was no such thing as an ex-cop.
“What’s this about?” Hagen said.
“Do you know a woman named Judy Buchanan?” the first detective said.
Hagen went white.
“Who?” he said.
Pretending not to know his mistress’s name, Michael thought, wouldn’t change a thing.
“We need you to come with us, sir,” the detective said. “We need to ask you a few questions in connection with the murder of Judith Epstein Buchanan.”
BOOK III
CHAPTER 15
Two investigators—an ex-cop named Dantzler and the brother-in-law he’d reluctantly agreed to employ—had been following Judy Buchanan for about two months. They didn’t know precisely who had hired them. The job had come in via a detective friend who was still on the force, a man more bent than do-it-yourself plumbing. The detective, Dantzler knew, was nothing but the guy who was working for the guy who was working for the guy. Whoever the top man was, the detective probably didn’t even know.
The brother-in-law, who hadn’t held a steady job since he came home from Korea, didn’t even know that much. As far as Bob Dantzler could tell, he was a shell-shocked mooncow mooch who barely knew enough to tie his own shoes.
Bob Dantzler understood the contours of the situation he had taken on, and he was comfortable with it. A different sort of man would have gotten spooked once he figured out that the guy who’d set Judy Buchanan up as a kept woman was much more than just the attorney to the Corleone Family. A different sort of man would have been unwilling to take pictures of Tom Hagen’s fishbelly-white buttocks while he screwed his mistress and then hand them over to who the hell knew, to do God knows what with them. A different sort of man, realizing just who Hagen was and what he controlled, would have given back every dime of the money he’d already been paid, along with a sizable gift of some sort. A different sort of ex-cop would have remembered Al Neri from their days together on the force—Neri had been one of those maverick free-styling time bombs you either knew or knew about—and understood what kind of threat the Corleones posed, having apparently domesticated such a man as that. He might even have remembered that Neri and the detective who sent Dantzler the job had a history—that the detective had testified against Neri in the manslaughter trial that had gotten Neri kicked off the force and sentenced to one to ten years in the state penitentiary (a sentence mysteriously suspended only days before Neri was to be sent upstate). But Dantzler didn’t want to know things he didn’t need to know. He talked a lot about destiny and letting the chips fall where they may. He investigated the things he was paid to investigate. Anything more would have been hazardous to his financial health—and thus, by extension, to the health of his marriage to the acquisitive and much younger Mrs. Bob Dantzler.
Planting the bug in that Buchanan woman’s apartment, however, had been Dantzler’s brother-in-law’s idea. He had recently taken a two-day class in electronic surveillance at a Holiday Inn in Paramus, New Jersey. Afterward, he bought so much spy gear—both electronics and clever weaponry—that he needed help carrying it all out to his car. He purchased it on time, presuming that Dantzler would foot the bill, which, grudgingly, Dantzler had. As it turned out, the Judy Buchanan case had been
the first chance they’d had to use the new bugs. It had been an unnecessary and frankly illegal step to take. They already had plenty of information to embarrass and perhaps even blackmail Tom Hagen. Maybe even send him to jail, if the client knew the right people. Photos galore, duplicate receipts of all kinds of things that Hagen had bought for her or paid for on her behalf, including years upon years of the nursing-home bills he footed for her severely retarded son. The yellow Buick she drove in Las Vegas was still registered to a dealership there, which Dantzler could all but prove that the Corleones secretly owned. She had been married to a Las Vegas auto mechanic, an abusive man (the police had responded several times to domestic disturbances) who was crushed by a limousine when a lift malfunctioned. She invested the proceeds from his life-insurance policy in two holding companies. The money had grown at an eye-popping rate and was, at least on paper, her only source of income.
One of those holding companies developed shopping centers in the Midwest, Arizona, and Florida. It was headed by a man named Ray Clemenza—the son of the late Peter Clemenza, believed to have been a caporegime in the Corleone Family, and the son-in-law of Giuseppe “Joe Z” Zaluchi, rumored to be the most powerful gangster in Detroit. Ray Clemenza checked out as a completely legitimate businessman, but by Dantzler’s stars, there was enough smoke here that the fire he couldn’t find could kiss his ass. The other holding company, which was not doing as well, seemed primarily concerned with buying up movie theaters.
Judy Buchanan spent most of her time in Las Vegas, although she did take frequent day trips to small, unglamorous cities in the American heartland, always with no luggage but a satchel. She paid cash for everything, stayed only a few hours, and returned carrying nothing but her purse and a mystery novel. Dantzler couldn’t prove anything that would hold up in court, but common sense decreed that she was a courier for the Corleone crime syndicate.
The way Dantzler figured it, the Buchanan job was already done. He and his brother-in-law broke into Judy Buchanan’s apartment that day for no better reason than to pass the cost of the new gizmos on to a client.
Whenever Judy Buchanan came to New York to be with Hagen, she spent most of her time in the apartment he kept for her—a walk-up over a flower shop. Any time she and Hagen were going out on the town, Hagen sent a car for her. Otherwise, she walked or took a taxi. The car she got into that night was one familiar to the investigators, so they presumed, reasonably enough, that she’d be gone for at least an hour or so.
JUDY BUCHANAN WAS A HARD WOMAN, IN EVERY sense of that, but she was flirting with paranoia. The accidents attributed to the missing capo Nick Geraci—poisoned dogs, faulty brakes, overdoses by people who weren’t known to be drug users, fires, explosions, drownings—more often than not had absolutely nothing to do with him. A great many were, in fact, accidents. Still, she was afraid. Her doctor gave her a prescription to help with the fear, but all it did was help her sleep. Awake, things just got worse. Eventually, her fear of what might happen grew larger than her fear of guns. And guns terrified her.
It was a fear she’d always had, one that had amused her late husband. Marvin Buchanan had grown up on a ranch, guns everywhere, and he’d been in the service, too. But she’d refused to have one in the house, and he’d gone along with it, even keeping his hunting rifles at a friend’s house, which may have saved his life for a while, during the years he was beating her. ( Judy had had the good sense never to ask Tom Hagen if he knew what really happened when that limousine fell on Marvin. In truth, it hadn’t bothered her.) But the circumstances and the times had changed. There were things she knew now that she hadn’t known then.
And so it was that, on the day of Judy Buchanan’s death, Richie Two-Guns came to get her, bearing three guns he thought she might like. The guns had all been purchased over the counter at a sporting-goods store in the Bronx, which seemed fine, given the way they’d be used (not at all, Nobilio had to assume). Nobilio had volunteered to handle this personally as a favor to Tom Hagen, not because the job needed to be done by a man at his level. Also because Richie Nobilio, after the incident that gave him his nickname, had become a gun buff. In Nobilio’s world, this was an exotic, even eccentric passion—there were men who’d killed a dozen other men, never thinking about the manufacturers of the guns they’d used. Nobilio’s love of guns had less to do with function than with the way it made him feel to touch them and hold them and admire them and caress and even—when no one was looking—taste them.
All three guns Nobilio showed Judy Buchanan were smallish—a .32 Ladysmith and two .22s. All were suitable nightstand pieces for novices who would probably never use them. She and Nobilio drove around the neighborhood while she looked the pistols over. Nobilio’s recommendation was that she go with the .32. It was a simple snub-nosed revolver, small enough to fit in a purse, more able to knock a man down. She was intimidated by the way it looked, although what she said was that she hated the name of it.
“Ladysmith?” Nobilio said. “All it is, is short for Lady Smith & Wesson.”
“Even so,” she said. “I want that one.”
She chose the .22 caliber Ruger: a rimfire five-and-a-half-inch bull-barrel Mark I Target model, with a micro-adjustable rear sight and a walnut stock instead of the standard black hard rubber. It was a humble but elegant-looking weapon.
Richie Nobilio called it “a good first gun.” He said that he knew a place out in Brooklyn, the Carroll Gardens Hunt Club, which was owned by some friends of his. He offered to take her and show her how to shoot it. Right now, if she wanted. “No time like the present,” he said, winking and then pointing at her with both index fingers, a gesture that had to do with his love of his own nickname but which struck her as what a salesman would do.
A wave of panic came over her.
She didn’t know Richie Nobilio from the man in the moon. Even if he was a friend of Tom’s, who’s to say that Tom didn’t want to kill her? She didn’t want to think this, which made her think about it every day. She was the other woman, an inconvenient woman, someone who did things, bad things, both in the bedroom and on errands she knew too much about. She tried like hell not to know, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t kill her for what they thought she knew, or might have known. She wasn’t thinking straight. She knew that. She was short of breath. She was alone in the back of a car with a gangster. The driver was no doubt a gangster, too. A bug-eyed man in slicked-back hair and a shiny suit was trying to sell her on going to Brooklyn. To a hunt club, which suddenly struck her as an obvious lie. A hunt club, in Brooklyn? She didn’t really know Brooklyn, but that made her think of that line, some famous writer’s line: Only the dead know Brooklyn. She started to shake.
They were going to kill her.
Nobilio picked up the Ruger.
“Tom loves me!” she blurted.
Love was a lie that she and Tom whispered to each other in the dark. They were both too sensible to say it out of bed or believe it. But she didn’t know what else to say to save herself.
“You know that,” she said, “right?”
Richie Two-Guns stuck out his lower lip, wagged his head, and turned up the palm of the hand that wasn’t holding the .22. Who knew anything about such things?
“I really must insist,” she said, “that we turn around. I want to go home right this instant. Immediately. Back to the apartment, I mean.”
To her shock, he shrugged and told the driver to do just that.
As the driver obeyed and turned around, Nobilio loaded the clip for her. “If you ever need to use this,” he said calmly, “try and aim for the gut or the, uh, whaddaya. The groin region. Whatever you do, stay away from the ribs. The head is good if you’re real, real close, but you need to know what you’re doing for that.”
She kept waiting for him to shoot her.
This had not been the first time she thought she was about to be killed, and, like every other time (obviously enough), she’d been wrong.
As they pulled up in front of
her building, Nobilio handed her the papers for the gun. “You change you mind, or you don’t like it or whatever else, you call me—or if you want, you can take it right back to this place here. Ask for Rodney, mention my name, and, butta-beepa-da-boppa-da-boop, you can swap it out for anything you want.” Nobilio handed her the gun and showed her again how to use the safety.
“The groin region, huh?” she said, biting her lip, trying to breathe normally, hoping to regain some small measure of composure.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Betcha that knocks a man down. Shooting his nuts off.”
Nobilio blushed. He clearly did not like hearing a woman talk like that.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It’s been known to happen.”
She laughed mirthlessly, slipped the gun into her purse—she’d brought a big summer bag, just in case—and got out. The old man who owned the flower shop underneath her apartment was just locking up. “Thomas Wolfe,” she muttered.
“Ma’am?”
“Only the dead know Brooklyn,” she said. “That was him, right? Who wrote that? Or was it Hart Crane?”
Nobilio looked confused.
“Never mind,” she said.
The car idled at the curb until she was safely inside.
“You think you’re better than me?” murmured Nobilio, still watching the door.
“What’s that?” the driver said.
“Women,” Nobilio said. “Am I right?”
“I could tell you stories,” the driver said.
“Don’t,” Nobilio said. “You eat?”
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