The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  “I can answer for myself,” she said, but she betrayed herself by blushing. And by not being able to take her eyes off that disturbing painting. She was sweating like mad.

  He always found that sexy. It’s not the heat, Tom thought. It’s the cupidity.

  She asked him if that painting was by who she thought it was by. Her tongue might as well have been hanging out.

  It was.

  “That painting, I thought…” Theresa said. “I could be wrong,” which she said only when she was certain she was right, “but hasn’t that painting been missing since the Nazis seized it during the war?”

  “I can’t say,” Woltz said. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask my curator about that.” He smiled, unashamed. “I just know what I like,” Woltz said. “You want a tour? I’ll get you a tour. Back when I had horses,” he said, shooting Tom a quick, malevolent glance, “I could give that tour myself, the one of the stables, I mean. But with the art, I need a hand. You want to go on the tour, Tom? John and Jessica already had theirs.”

  “Francesca,” Francesca said.

  “I’d love to,” Tom said, looping an arm around his wife.

  Woltz called for the butler.

  All those years ago, when Luca Brasi paid off someone in the household staff to slip something into Woltz’s nightly brandy, Tom Hagen had been on the plane back to New York. Luca—Vito Corleone’s Al Neri—had then chopped off the head of Woltz’s prize racehorse and shoved it between the old man’s satin sheets. Tom hadn’t seen any of this, of course; he had only his imagination to contend with. That poor horse—Khartoum; he could still remember the name. In truth, he rarely thought of it. But when he did, it disturbed him. It provoked genuine regret.

  FRANCESCA AND JOHNNY STOOD JUST OUTSIDE THE sunroom, dabbing at themselves with white hand towels. “My mother’s parents are like that,” she said. “Hot when everyone’s cold, cold when everyone’s hot. I guess a lot of old people are like that.”

  She was twenty-seven, half his age. She was older than Lisa, his daughter. So there was that.

  “I think we did some good in there, though.” Johnny didn’t want to think about how old he was. He focused instead on her wet hair and her damp summer dress. He had a thing for women when they were wet. Right out of the shower, out of the ocean, the pool. Caught in a rainstorm. Sweating. All of it did something to him. Not that he was crazy enough to get involved with her. But there was no denying she was a lovely creature, toweling off, running her fingers through her long black hair in a happily doomed effort to tame it. “He’s a tightwad, but with the involvement of the Corleone Foundation behind the scenes in setting this all up—it’s the proverbial offer he can’t refuse.”

  Francesca frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing, sweetheart,” he said. “It’s just a saying.”

  “A saying,” she repeated.

  “Just a saying.” He was about to add no need to make a federal case of it, but he caught himself. Danny Shea was in California doing some last-minute campaigning and was in fact staying only a few miles from here, at the house of an Old Hollywood crooner turned TV game-show producer, at the other end of the golf course from Johnny’s compound.

  “So,” Francesca said. “Do you want to go see where that music’s coming from?”

  “Music? I don’t hear any music.”

  Francesca pointed in the general direction of its source.

  It was a current, infamous hit, featuring a flailing drummer, an electric bass player who couldn’t handle the song’s three-chord progression, a guitarist who kept turning his amplifier on and off, and a drunken man with a sore throat, screaming supposedly dirty lyrics in the general direction of a microphone suspended far above his head. Other than “Louie Louie,” Johnny couldn’t make out a word.

  “I hear noise,” Johnny said, “but nothing I’d call music.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, taking him by the sleeve and starting down the hall. “Don’t you ever have fun?”

  “Fun?” Johnny said, allowing himself to be pulled along. “Why do you think they call me Johnny Funtane?”

  “You mean like the way they call Mr. Sinatra Frank Sinatra?”

  “Nobody calls him that that I ever heard,” he said.

  “I’m just…teasing you.”

  For a bizarre moment he’d thought she was going to say busting your balls.

  She smiled. “I never heard anyone call you Funtane, either.”

  They walked down a dark hallway toward a wooden door big enough to drive a Buick through. It opened onto an indoor pool, enveloped in a noxious cloud of cigarette and reefer smoke and chlorine. There were thirty or so guests, mostly people who worked with the new Mrs. Woltz—Vickie Adair. Men in tennis clothes and women in terry-cloth robes, most of them closer to Francesca’s age than Johnny’s, sat on metal chaise lounges. The men all had beards and shaggy hair. Between the noise and the smoke, it took a moment for it to sink in that the people in the pool were all women and that they were all naked, too. Along the back wall was a bar and what looked like an exit, and Johnny steered Francesca toward both. No one seemed to recognize Johnny, but presumably they were just trying to play it cool.

  He got them drinks, and while they were waiting, Vickie Adair got out of the pool, stark naked, and padded over to them. Someone tossed her a towel, but she didn’t use it to cover up. She was a washed-up starlet, a bottle blonde who’d crammed eighty-some years of living into the forty-some years she’d lived, and it showed. If she hadn’t been wet and naked, Johnny wouldn’t have given her a second look. She’d shaved her bush, the sick motives for which Johnny didn’t want to think about. He maintained eye contact, with her and with Francesca, as best he could. Francesca seemed nonplussed. They shouted their introductions. Vickie said that she and Johnny went way back and asked him if he remembered when. Johnny hated when people pulled this shit. He met a thousand times more people than the average Joe. How the fuck was he supposed to remember? He wanted to get out of here. Francesca remained poised and serene. Vickie said that she’d been in Bang-Up Job with him. He didn’t recall that, either, which didn’t mean anything. He barely remembered the picture. He leaned toward her ear, so Francesca wouldn’t hear. “Now I remember,” he said. “Back then you were doing something different with your hair.”

  He darted a glance at her absent bush. She gave him a mocking, very funny smile and then said something in Francesca’s ear. Vickie told them to make themselves at home, turned her saggy, depleted ass toward them, and padded back to the pool.

  Johnny and Francesca took their drinks and went outside. It was dark now. The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees. There were about the same number of people out here as inside, milling around on the lawn, but this was by and large where the older crowd had settled. A familiar ripple of recognition went through them at his presence there. Johnny, on instinct, maneuvered himself away from them. He and Francesca wandered out on the lawn together, far enough to talk but not so far that they were alone, exactly. There was what looked like a tombstone and a stone bench not far away, and they walked toward it.

  “I’m sorry about that scene back there,” Johnny said.

  “Don’t be. It was my idea. Did you think I’d be shocked?”

  “No,” Johnny lied. He touched his throat. “Bad for the voice—all that smoke, that chlorine in the air. To be honest with you, I couldn’t hear myself think. If you want to go back, though—”

  “This is nice,” she said. “Out here. I’ve seen naked women before. I imagine you have, too.”

  “Those back there were my first,” Johnny said. “Rough introduction.”

  “I’ve smoked a reefer or two in my time, too.” She laughed at his surprise. “C’mon, John. The foundation I work for has a lot to do with artists and entertainers. My sister’s a college professor, a real Bohemian, almost. I’ve been to college, I live in New York.” She ticked these apparent virtues off on her fingers. “Just how shelt
ered do you think I am?”

  Johnny shook his head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you by assuming you weren’t a drug addict,” he joked. “So what’d she tell you?”

  “Vickie? That the rumors about…uh, you.” She blushed. “That the rumors about you aren’t true.”

  “What rumors?” he said, but he knew.

  Francesca shook her head. “What about you?” she asked. “What’d you tell her?”

  “Vickie?” he said. “I thanked her for her hospitality.”

  The black marble tombstone featured a bas-relief depiction of a horse.

  “Khartoum,” Francesca said, reading the name off the stone. “Is this for real?”

  “I think so. Yes. The horse was real, at any rate. It was a racehorse.”

  “Huh,” Francesca said, staring at the grave for a long time. “He must have really loved that horse.”

  “Must have,” Johnny said.

  “So,” Francesca said. “Mr. and Mrs. Woltz, huh?” she said. “Explain that.”

  “Who knows? There’s a rumor that he had some kind of scandal that was going to break, something that getting married helped make go away.” Which was that he liked to have sex with twelve-year-old girls and had been doing so for years. “Why she married him, I can’t imagine.”

  Francesca rubbed her fingers together.

  “I don’t think so,” Johnny said. “I heard she comes from a little money of her own. Her granddad supposedly invented the agitator for the washing machine. Though I guess you can never have too much.”

  “Maybe she’s got daddy issues,” Francesca said, staring straight into Johnny’s eyes. Johnny found her expression unreadable.

  “Is love out of the question?” Johnny said.

  “Love,” Francesca said, without any particular inflection. “I never thought of that.”

  Their faces drew almost imperceptibly closer.

  “There you are,” said Theresa Hagen, startling them halfway off the bench. She was done with her tour. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Somebody ought to put a bell on you,” Johnny said. Though what he felt was relief. He wondered if he could hire this broad to swoop in on an as-needed basis and save him from himself. Long hours, though.

  “How was the tour?” Francesca said, smoothing her dress.

  “Hard to put into words,” Theresa said. “They’re looking for you, Mr. Fontane,” she said, looking back and forth from Johnny to Francesca, clearly trying to figure out what she’d broken up.

  “Call me Johnny.”

  “Tom and Mr. Woltz and apparently some other people you’re meeting with…Johnny.” She looked at Francesca and rolled her eyes. “You know. Business.”

  Johnny gave Francesca a kiss on the hand and did the same for Theresa Hagen.

  Who, despite the way she was looking at him, hadn’t exactly broken up anything that was wrong or unseemly—anything but a conversation really.

  He hurried around to the front of the mansion, so that he wouldn’t have to pass through that nightmare again.

  You had to hand it to Vickie Adair, Johnny thought. That was a genius taunt. The rumor that he had a large penis was indeed true, but what the hell was he going to do about setting the record straight? Nothing. Johnny was a gentleman. He wasn’t about to tell Francesca Van Arsdale anything about his cock. And he certainly wasn’t going to show her. He knew that it was juvenile that he wanted to show her now, strictly in the interest of science, and he knew he’d never do it. He knew it shouldn’t bother him in the slightest that Francesca thought maybe he might have a small dick. In every sense, Johnny Fontane had nothing to prove.

  He was not going to get involved with this woman. Period.

  All that was going on was that he was getting her help on setting up this charity. It seemed like a good way to help repair his frayed connections with the Corleones, to work together on charitable causes and not just when they need favors from each other. This one made sense: Vito Corleone had been fond of Johnny’s friend Nino, who’d been a big success as a singer and an actor until the booze and the pills caught up with him. He’d have approved of a fund that honored the man’s memory and helped out people in the industry who, like Nino, had fallen on hard times and could use some help getting back on their feet. Francie was a sweet kid, but he wasn’t interested in her like that, and no doubt, without a couple martinis in her, neither was she. What was he, nuts? Michael Corleone’s niece? Sonny Corleone’s daughter? Whose family curse had already killed off her first husband? Never in a million years.

  PRODUCTION ONTHE DISCOVERY OF AMERICAWAS set to begin the following week, on location in and around Genoa, and Woltz’s attorney—the legendary Ben Tamarkin, whom Tom had never met but to whom he had often been compared—joined the men in Woltz’s little theater to talk about a variety of related details. Tamarkin, a foppish silver-haired man with hair-tonic-green eyes and a red cravat, sat in silence throughout, taking it all in. There are few things on earth that are ultimately more dangerous than a good lawyer who can really listen.

  Hagen disliked both Woltz and Fontane. They disliked each other as well. Tom had expected to be amused, watching these overindulged, self-important boy-men pretend to be magnanimous, watching their long-standing and childish grievances fall away as they spoke with genuine excitement over the movie itself, its financial prospects, and some of the consequent doors those profits might open. But, to Tom’s surprise, it was actually sad. The poor bastards really seemed to have no idea what was about to befall them.

  Tom had been a little wary that he was pushing it too hard, that they’d see what was coming. Every day, the trades seemed to announce yet another big star who’d signed on for a supporting role or cameo. A cover story about the construction of the life-size replicas of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria was coming out next month in Life magazine. Hagen, for his part, had used some connections—including the public relations firm Eddie Paradise controlled—to plant stories in other magazines and big newspapers, overhyping the movie to the extent possible. Many of those same reporters were already on the hook to write stories about how troubled the production was. The hilarious thing about entertainment writers was that they didn’t even need to be bribed in the conventional way. They’d write what you told them to for the low, low price of junkets and swag, garnished with a fresh sprig of access to the stars.

  The lavish production didn’t stop with the three ships (four, really, since there was a spare Santa Maria in case the first one sank, which it was destined to do). They’d reconstructed fifteenth-century Madrid in the countryside outside Genoa, transforming a monastery there into the palace of Queen Isabella (Deanna Dunn) and King Ferdinand (Sir Oliver Smith-Christmas). The sets alone cost more than most entire movies, though, of course, sometimes that was how it went with movies like this. You had to spend money to make it. The amount of spending on this movie seemed justifiable to Woltz and Fontane for several reasons, which Hagen recapped now. First and foremost was that the movie theaters the Corleones owned or could influence seemed to ensure that the distribution costs would be a fraction of the usual, and the number of screens on which it would play was guaranteed to be especially high. Another factor was that the dollar was strong relative to the hopelessly devalued lira. Also, Hagen had helped secure highly advantageous deals with the unions here and in Italy. And Michael had gotten “a friend of ours in Italy” (they wouldn’t have known who Cesare Indelicato was, anyway) to agree to have his men watch over the production, so that no one would dare steal from them or overcharge them for so much as a nail.

  “And there’s a final piece of good news for you, gentlemen,” Hagen said. “The Italian government has agreed to help underwrite the production with an economic-development grant of one million dollars.”

  “Not bad,” Tamarkin said, the first time he had reacted to anything.

  “See, Jack?” Johnny said. “What’d I tell you about my friends here, huh? How better to make money in business than to be
in business with people who never lose money in business?”

  Woltz seemed pleased as well, but there was a sourness to his smile that revealed a man who knew what he was hearing was too good to be true and just couldn’t figure out why. Woltz had made a mint off the last picture he made with Johnny and with the Corleones’ backing. There was little reason to imagine that this wouldn’t turn out even better. His bean counters—who were under Tamarkin’s supervision—liked the idea largely because of all the free publicity, huge discounts, and distribution advantages.

  According to Tom’s research, Woltz was leveraged to the hilt. He hadn’t gotten into TV when some of the other studios had, and he was getting by now by quietly selling off parcels of land, including some of the outer reaches of the studio lot (a trend the Corleones hoped to accelerate soon). He’d married Vickie Adair not just to quell the rumors of his pedophilia but for her money—which she’d promptly squandered on the renovations, believing that Woltz was so rich that her money wasn’t needed. Woltz had been too proud to tell her the truth. He’d also kept thinking his studio was just one blockbuster away from turning the tide.

  As for Johnny, his old accountant had turned up recently in the Bahamas—where, coincidentally, some of the movie’s nautical scenes were to be filmed as well as a few of the beach scenes with the Indians. The accountant was found on the beach as well, shot in the back of the head. Most of Johnny’s money had been recovered, and it was all the capital that his new accountant—handpicked by Tom Hagen—had allowed Johnny’s company to invest in this movie. Johnny was going to lose every penny, but he’d lost it once before, so, in essence, it was like playing with the house’s money. Johnny’s career was going to take one on the chin here, too, when the movie bombed, but his career had gotten up off the canvas a time or two already, as a fighter with great will and great cornermen will do.

  CHAPTER 20

  Johnny left and the other three men were able to turn their attention to the matter of Danny and Jimmy Shea. To Tom’s surprise, this began with Woltz calling for the lights.