The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  Only Michael and Tom Hagen had had any direct contact with Lucadello. It was theoretically possible that Joe was toying with them, too, which Tom believed but Michael didn’t. Or that the rat was one of Joe’s people or Joe himself.

  Michael did not believe the rat was Joe.

  CHAPTER 22

  The 1964 New York World’s Fair—which commemorated the three-hundredth anniversary of the Duke of York’s muscling in and taking over the city from the Dutch, who’d scammed it from the Algonquin tribe in exchange for some fugazi jewels and the smallpox-laden blankets that killed them—proved to be a windfall for the Five Families of New York. It was perhaps the government’s public onslaught against them that motivated all involved to split the profits equitably and with a minimum of observable conflict. The fair included well over one hundred new pavilions, mostly for corporations but also for various state governments and foreign countries, all built on the same site as the 1939 fair, a paved-over landfill in Flushing Meadows. Robert Moses was making a hundred grand to run the Fair Corporation (the mayor’s salary was $40,000), on the condition that he resign from all his other posts, which he hadn’t exactly done; he also had deals where he shared in the proceeds of various attractions and was actually guaranteed a salary of at least a million bucks. This was all legal, somehow, which boggled Michael Corleone’s mind. As on most of Moses’s grand projects, his own public idealism and private greed set the tone for the entire operation. Demolition and construction work abounded, including no-show and no-work union jobs that couldn’t have come along at a better time for men in need of something wholesome to put in the “occupation” box on their income-tax returns. When the construction wound down, new no-shows and no-works sprang up, mostly as landscapers, maintenance workers, and security guards (these jobs were especially prized, for the badges). Contracts seemed to fall from the sky: to haul away the debris and garbage; to supply the food and beverages, the cigarettes and the souvenirs; to build parking lots and then repave them when the companies that built them in the first place did a poor job and then went into receivership, their offshore papers of incorporation beyond the reach of the long arm of American law. Nearby strip clubs and whorehouses thrived—thanks in part to Moses’s square ideas about entertainment. Popular 1939 shows like the Little Egypt nudie act had been superseded by the insufferable, money-flushing likes of Dick Button’s Ice-Stravaganza and the It’s a Small World ride Walt Disney was paid handsomely to design for the Pepsi pavilion (another scam worthy of a mobster but conducted by an American legend and somehow legal: have other people pay you to design a ride for your own amusement park, and all you have to do is let them use it for two years, during which time you get a percentage of the take). The fair might have been a nod to the city’s past, but it celebrated the Space Age, and the opportunities it presented for men like Michael Corleone seemed to be, to swipe a name from an exhibit at one of the corporate pavilions, “As Infinite as Imagination.”

  One of Michael’s fronts—an old Marine Corps buddy—was actually on the board of directors of that corporation. Last year, one of its divisions received no-bid contracts from the Department of Defense to do classified jobs in Vietnam and Iran; the profits generated over there made what the Five Families were getting out of the World’s Fair seem like the loose change under the sofa cushions. The secretary of defense was the company’s former CEO; his stock, for now, was in a blind trust. And it was all legal. To glimpse things like this, Michael thought, was to be reassured that his dream of becoming a legitimate businessman was no delusion.

  The fair provided a more subtle opportunity as well. Rarely had there been a better place to hide in plain sight, to be just a face in the crowd, and to conduct business without fear of being tape-recorded or hit. Other traditional sites for this remained in use—the big museums, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the lobby outside any opera, parts of Central Park, the aisles of big department stores, and so on. The fair had the novelty appeal that a suddenly fashionable new restaurant might have had, but it also seemed safer. The fairgrounds provided almost seven hundred acres where men could tell their stories walking. It was rich with background noise—abetted nicely by the roar from La Guardia Airport and the whine from the Bob Moses superhighways that surrounded the fairgrounds on all sides. Trusted men had jobs as security cops. Best of all, everyone had friends of theirs who were pulling money out of the place. It would have been suicide to shit where every made guy in New York was eating.

  And so it was that Michael Corleone chose to meet Joe Lucadello at the fair. Michael had come with Francesca and Connie and their kids, as well as Rita Duvall, wearing a head scarf and enormous sunglasses. (Her celebrity was only of the aren’t you what’s-her-face variety; even when she was recognized, in New York, no one ever really bothered her.) Erring on the side of caution, Michael had two men positioned far enough behind them that no one would notice. Tom Hagen was still too hot to bring along, and the security risk at the fair was low enough that Al Neri would have been overkill. But the rumors that Nick Geraci might be behind various unsolved acts of mayhem were enough to make Michael bring men along for protection, even to the World’s Fair.

  Michael met Joe, as suggested, at the Louisiana pavilion. Joe’s sense of humor hadn’t changed much over the years.

  Joe himself, in contrast, looked different. The last time Michael had seen him was more than three years ago in Las Vegas, when they were putting together the Cuba project. It wasn’t just that Joe was no longer wearing his eye patch or that he was wearing a wig or that, in his red Munsingwear tennis shirt, cheap navy blazer, and crepe-soled shoes, he looked like a member of an unfashionable yacht club. It was the stiff, uncharacteristic way he was standing. Joe was a brainy, confident wiseass, with the slouchy body language that such men have. Now, here he was, in the middle of a replica of Bourbon Street, near the intersection of Grand Central Parkway and the Long Island Expressway, standing almost at attention. A miniature Mardi Gras parade was in progress, complete with a brass band of marching Negroes and strange zombie creatures with enormous papier-mâché heads. Joe was flanked by artists making charcoal caricatures of paying tourists and absent famous people, including Jimmy Shea, of course, and also Louis Armstrong and the Beatles.

  Joe and Michael pretended they were old war buddies (a near truth) who just happened to have run into each other. Their embrace gave Michael a chance to dispense with his concern, however remote, that his old friend’s odd posture had anything to do with carrying a gun or wearing a listening device. Joe introduced himself to Rita and Michael’s family under an even longer Italian name than Lucadello.

  “You are in what line of work now, Joe?” Rita asked.

  She’d heard an Italian name, Michael thought, and drawn certain conclusions. Michael let it pass. She seemed to have meant it playfully, though the dark glasses made it hard to know for sure.

  “I’m in sales,” Joe said. “And you?”

  “Ah,” she said in mock disgust. “That is a good question.” Her game show had been canceled. Even if Joe had meant it as a dig, she was taking it well. “I am thinking, maybe, I don’t know, I will become a famous recluse.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” Joe said.

  Michael put an arm around her.

  “Your eye looks funny, Mr. Joe,” said Sonny, Francesca’s six-year-old.

  “Sonny!” Francesca said. “That’s not nice.”

  “It’s all right,” Joe said. “It’s made out of glass, hand-blown, from Germany,” he said to the boy, and he bent down toward him and tapped on it.

  “What happened to your real one?” Sonny said. “Did a Nazi shoot it out?”

  Francesca gave the boy a look.

  “It’s all right,” Joe said. “It was during the war, not in it. I was at a pub in London when a bomb landed, not all that close but close enough to break the window I was standing beside.”

  “Can you take it out?” Sonny said.

  “Sonny!” said Francesca.
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  “Hey, does it have a camera in it?” said Victor, Connie’s oldest. “I saw that once in a comic book.”

  “Boy, I wish,” Joe said. “For a long time I wore an eye patch. The eyes they make in America are plastic, like everything else these days, but in Germany you can still find craftsmen whose families—”

  “An eye patch like a pirate?” Sonny said, excited, and his mother again admonished him. The other two boys laughed.

  “Yep,” Joe said. “Mr. Joe, the Paisan’ Pirate.”

  “See!” Sonny said. “What about a parrot, Mr. Joe?”

  Rita, beaming, gave Michael a kiss on the cheek. She took ever more blatant delight in children. She was a damaged girl, Rita, and something about that drew Michael to her.

  “I wanted a parrot,” Joe said, “but my mom wouldn’t let me. She was right, though. A friend of mine got one, and not only did it smell bad, it bit his pinkie finger off.”

  “Mr. Joe and I want to go catch up on old times,” Michael said. “Over a coffee. Boring old war stories, that kind of thing.” He handed cash to his sister and made arrangements to meet up with everyone later at the Vatican City pavilion, to see Michelangelo’s Pietà, which had never before left the Vatican. Now, thanks to the exchange of certain favors, it was drawing the longest lines of any exhibit at the fair.

  “Beautiful family,” Joe said. “You should take ’em to see the Underground House.”

  “Funny,” Michael said. They took a seat at an outdoor café and had coffee.

  “In all seriousness, it’s a real house,” Joe said. “Built underground, good with utilities, a godsend if, when, the Russians drop the bomb.”

  “I know,” Michael said. Some of his men had theoretically helped build it, an irony Joe would have appreciated. “Speaking of living underground—”

  “Didn’t you tell me you were going to bring your kids here, too?” Joe said. “I was looking forward to seeing them.”

  “Anthony got involved in baseball, and Mary had something, too. They had to cancel.” A lie: at the last minute, Anthony had refused to come. Kay wouldn’t send Mary on the train alone, and Michael hadn’t had time to fly up himself and get her.

  “They doin’ all right, though?”

  “They’re great,” Michael said. Michael had a feeling there was something in Joe that was broken, that he was standing tall for show. He asked about Joe’s family, too, but there was nothing in the response to indicate that this was the source of his pain.

  “And Rita?” Joe said. “That’s going well?”

  Michael smiled, despite himself. “I’m a lucky man,” he said.

  “That you are,” Joe said. “Droopy kid like you, growing up to have a girl like that.”

  “What’s in this?” Michael said, pushing the coffee away.

  “Chicory.”

  “The same chicory you put in salads?”

  “It’s good,” Joe said.

  “Take it with you, then. Let’s go.” Michael stood and started down the fake Bourbon Street.

  Joe rushed to catch up. “True story about that parrot, by the way,” he said. “One day he’s plain old Silvio Passonno. The next, he’s got to go through the rest of his life as Silly Nine-Fingers.”

  “Silly Nine-Fingers?” Michael laughed, again despite himself. “It sounds like an Indian chief. Big Chief Silly Nine-Fingers. How can that be a true story?”

  Joe’s furtive smile, the pleasure he took in amusing a friend even when something was obviously eating at him, evoked no one so much as Fredo. Though he still wasn’t loosening up entirely. “That’s how it is with true stories,” Joe said. “They’re stupid. It’d be a better story if my eye was shot out by a Nazi, too, or when I crash-landed my plane behind enemy lines, instead of when I was drunk on warm beer, standing too close to a window during an air raid, kissing a pale, unremarkable woman whose name I never knew in a bar whose name I’ve forgotten. Call her Ishmaela. In my next life, I’m going to lie about everything, from the cradle to the grave.”

  They passed a shop selling pralines and headed back past the New York State pavilion, toward the Unisphere.

  “Tell me another true story,” Michael said.

  “About which? New Orleans, or those skin flicks or your missing package?”

  “Any order.”

  “Well, I know everybody’s a critic these days, but judging from the reel you sent me, the movies are badly lit and weak on plot. Though I guess maybe that’s where I’m supposed to come in, eh? To thicken that plot.”

  “So thicken it,” Michael said.

  “No can do. I’m a fan of the ends, but the means can’t be justified.”

  “That was a friend of yours I read about a few weeks back, right?”

  He was referring to the Shea administration’s most recent debacle in Cuba, for which a CIA official had been made the scapegoat.

  “I can’t tell whether we were, or are, friends,” Joe said. “However you mean that word. I can tell you that he was, that he is, a good man. The only part of what went public about him, the negative info, was that he did call Danny Shea a liar. That was on TV. That was right there in plain view. That was wrong, wrong to have done, but it wasn’t inaccurate. The A.G. accused him of going off the reservation by planning that submarine attack. But what are we, the navy? We have no submarines. Obviously, no plan to deploy dozens of them all at once is going to get too far without the proper authority. This was not the sort of man who’d ever go off the reservation period, but in the case of what happened, it wouldn’t have even been possible. Yet Danny Boy makes him fall on his sword, and the papers swallow it whole.”

  “And yet.”

  “Right. And yet, we have to pass. I’d like to see them out of office altogether, but we can’t see any good way, any emissary I can send their way who can advance your agenda. Never say never, but for a while now, I’ve had to be Mr. By-the-Book. I can’t touch anything irregular. The people getting forced into retirement or fates worse than that, you can’t believe. Men my age, our age, men who fought in the war, got our start that way, there are a lot of us—too many of us, the way some people see it. The best field agent I ever saw, you know where the wise men stuck him? He’s an assistant dean at a music college. He’s supposed to be recruiting, I don’t know, bassoonists with the potential to be agents. I’d die at a desk, I can tell you that, and I’m not about to wreck the slim chance I have of not winding up at one. So I have to think you have better men for this job than me anyway. Your friends in the union brass, other politicians. I don’t know. I shouldn’t tell you how to do your job. My apologies.”

  Michael glanced over his shoulder.

  “They’re still there,” Joe said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “They’re yours, those men. Skinny and the fatso. I can tell. Although for all you know they’re mine, too.”

  “I’d know.”

  “Sure,” Joe said. “I’m joking with you.”

  “All right,” Michael said. “New Orleans and the package?”

  “New Orleans, sweet mother of God,” Joe said, letting out a deep breath. “New Orleans. New Orleans is complicated.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  Joe thought about this for a while.

  So far, the Tramontis seemed to be abiding by the Commission’s ruling, but Michael Corleone didn’t want to leave anything to chance. He hadn’t, of course, told Lucadello anything about Carlo Tramonti’s proposal, but knowing that the Tramontis, too, had worked with the CIA on the assassination project, Michael had asked Joe to look into whether the Tramontis had any ongoing relationship with anyone Joe worked with.

  “New Orleans is not America,” Joe finally said. “Same way New York isn’t. A place like Philly, that’s America.” Joe had grown up in South Philly, but it was a bigger part of his persona than when he’d first left—a reaction, Michael supposed, to working around all those Yale men at the agency. “Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, even L.A. and Las Vegas. Especially those place
s, y’know? Hot, artificial, and so shiny that whoever you are, you can see your reflection in it. This right here,” Joe said, gesturing expansively toward the World’s Fair, its futuristic architecture on the site of a paved-over dump, epic vainglory surrounded by highways and cloverleafs, admission not free, “is sure as hell America. But the rest of New York is New York. It’s its own thing. And New Orleans is New Orleans, and Miami’s well on its way to being just Miami.”

  Joe lived in Miami. To the best of Michael’s understanding, he was the agent in charge there.

  Michael shook his head. “New York is its own thing? Joe, please.”

  Any number of tourists taking snapshots of the Unisphere with their Brownies and their Instamatics were now capturing Michael Corleone and a bushy-haired man in the corner of the frame. Michael would have been unsurprised to learn that among the tourists was an FBI photographer in short pants, flanked by nonunion actors hired to pretend to be his family.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Joe said. “I mean that New York’s a case apart. You people think of the rest of the world as your goddamned farm club. New Orleans isn’t on an island, and it doesn’t have the superior attitude, but it’s also a place where—”

  “I’ve known you more than half my life, Joe,” Michael said. “You’re a dear friend, and I put up with things from you I’m not sure I’d put up with from family. These wiseass routines in search of a straight man are just who you are, but cut it out. I’m in no mood.”

  Joe gave Michael a look. Michael stared him down and then, reluctantly, nodded in concession. It was Joe who was doing him the favor.

  “Maybe this is a better way to get at it,” Joe said. “Remember when your nephew was playing college ball, and you’d see all these men in the stands with clipboards and stopwatches, and you knew that some of them were scouting for bookies, some for pro teams, some for another school coming up on the schedule, and plenty of them were bullshit artists. Some, God knows, just liked the sound of hearing their lives tick away. A few were crazies who’d convinced themselves they had ties to some pro team. They’d mail these detailed reports faithfully every week to someone at the Eagles or Giants or whichever, who never took the time to call them up and tell them to cut it out. Even if you dug into who these men all were, a few would be simple to verify, but you’d never figure it perfectly. There’d be legit pro scouts who also worked for bookies, for example. There’d be skilled liars and liars who didn’t know they were lying. You understand me, Mike? That’s what I’m trying to tell you about New Orleans.”