The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  Frankie raised his head and shoulders for a split second in what looked like surprise before he burst into laughter, precisely as his father always had. “Wait’ll you see a big one.”

  He was a dead ringer for Sonny Corleone at the same age, so much so that Hagen sometimes felt as if he were seeing a ghost. Though if anything, the boy did even better with the ladies.

  Just then a mosquito bit him and he slapped himself. “Florida,” he said, disgusted.

  “Paradise by the sea,” the brunette said. She didn’t sound sarcastic.

  “My uncle’s still adjusting,” Frankie explained. He’d been a baby when his father was killed, and Sandra took the kids and moved down here. He thought of himself as a Floridian. “Wait’ll your first winter,” he called to Tom. “At least you don’t have to shovel the heat, right?”

  “You sure about that?” Tom plucked his sweat-damp shirt away from his chest. “It sure feels like it.”

  But Tom was smiling as he said it. Nothing was going to bring him down today, not even his disdain for the place he now nominally called home. He put out the butt of the cigar against the trunk of the tree and crossed the thick carpet of centipede grass to tell Theresa he was going.

  From inside the house, there came a tinny roar and, over it, the shrill, white-bread patter of an excited reporter. The crowd at the airport had gotten its first glimpse of President Shea. There had been calls to move the convention to a city that didn’t so vividly underscore the failures of Jimmy Shea’s Cuban policy, and that, as a corollary, didn’t pose such a security risk. But Miami was also Vice President Payton’s hometown (Coral Gables, actually), and Florida was a state that could go either way in what figured to be a close general election. So the convention stayed in Miami. Judging from the noise on the television and the earlier reports of the thousands of cheering people, baking in the sun alongside the route from the airport to the Fontainebleau, it had been a popular choice. The right choice, Tom believed.

  “Wish I could stay for those,” Tom said as he passed the grilling sausages.

  “You’re missing out,” Frankie said. He winked at the girlfriend. “Nothing like my big sausages.”

  The boy had inherited Sonny’s sophisticated wit, too. Tom glanced back at Christina, but she seemed too engrossed in her book for the vulgar comment to have registered.

  “Where you going?” the woman asked Tom.

  “He’s going to meet the president,” Frankie joked. “Ain’t that right?”

  “I already met him,” Tom said, also joking, although he had, years ago.

  “Are you serious?” the brunette said. “President Shea?”

  “What are you, stupid?” Frankie said. “No, he’s not serious.”

  “Nothing so glamorous as that, I’m afraid,” Tom said. “Just business.”

  “You know I’m not stupid,” the brunette said to Frankie.

  “Then don’t say stupid things.”

  “Stupid things?” she said, folding her arms. “Listen to you.”

  “Remind you of anyone?” Theresa said, stepping out onto the patio, pointing at the young couple with a wagging wooden spoon. She was smirking playfully. Her hair was pinned up but falling away. She had on Bermuda shorts and an orange sweated-through Hawaiian-print blouse.

  Tom gave her a hug and a kiss. He kept his arm around her. She smelled like a million bucks: her own raw scent lurking underneath sweet basil, sautéed onions, and Chanel No. 5.

  “Your aunt’s right,” Tom called to Frankie. “If I’ve learned one thing in life,” he said, sneaking a chaste, furtive squeeze of Theresa’s hip, “it’s that there’s no better quality a woman can have than standing up for herself and telling you when you’ve said something stupid.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Frankie said. “I thought all women did that.”

  “He should know better,” the brunette said, turning to Tom and Theresa. “Football players get the same thing that pageant contestants get, which is that people automatically think they’re stupid. I was a straight-A student at Florida State.”

  Frankie dismissed her with a wave of his tongs. “A really smart person wouldn’t have to say that all the time.”

  Theresa and the brunette exchanged a look. Frankie’s prospects with this girl were irradiated to subatomic dust.

  “I have to go,” Tom said. “Keep the girls away from that alligator.” He pointed at it. It hadn’t moved an inch.

  “Who, Luca?”

  “You named it?”

  “Remember that man who used to work for Vito? The tough guy? Luca Brasi?”

  “I remember.”

  “Doesn’t he look like him? Same brow, same dead look in his eyes.”

  “All alligators do,” Tom said. “Just keep the girls away. Sorry I can’t stay for dinner.”

  From the blaring television came the news that the president’s motorcade was under way. He was going straight from the airport to the Fontainebleau. Several roads had been closed off for security, none of them likely to cause Tom any inconvenience. The airport was due west of the hotel, and Tom was coming from the north.

  He and Theresa kissed again. He started toward his car, a new and sensible blue Buick.

  “I’ll have a plate waiting for you in the fridge when you get home,” she called after him.

  “I’m not sure when that will be,” Tom said.

  “Whenever it is,” she said, brushing a wet strand of hair from her face, “it’ll be there.”

  “Bye, Daddy!” Christina called, looking up from her book.

  It was hard to tell at this distance if his daughter’s face was streaked with sweat or tears. If it was tears, Tom decided, it was probably that book.

  “Bye, sweetpea,” he called, and kept going.

  WHEN TOM SAW THE BLACK CHEVY BISCAYNE IN HIS rearview mirror, he pulled over and got out. The Chevy stopped about a hundred yards back. Although the tails were becoming erratic and halfhearted, FBI agents still followed Tom Hagen fairly often. He’d learned the names of the regular agents, and he was unfailingly polite to them. He was especially pleased to see one today. Having an FBI agent on your ass was better than having a bodyguard. Tom waved for the car to come closer, and when it didn’t, he started walking toward it.

  “Agent Bianchi,” Tom said.

  “Mr. Hagen.”

  “I’m going to the Deauville Hotel,” he said.

  “Isn’t that where the Beatles played?” the agent said. “My kids went to that. That’s where the Napoleon Ballroom is, right?”

  “No idea.”

  “So what’s at the Deauville?”

  “I just wanted you to know I’m not going to the Fontainebleau,” Tom said. “The Deauville’s a little bit north of it, I understand. I don’t know a better way to go than the way we’re heading, which is the route to the Fontainebleau, too. Is there a better way?”

  “You want directions,” Bianchi said, “you’re going to have to wait’ll it’s Agent Rand McNally’s turn to babysit.”

  “That’s fine,” Tom said. “I was just afraid that, as we got closer to the Fontainebleau, you’d be back here wondering if you should pull me over, call ahead to whoever your contact might be with the Secret Service, et cetera. I’m sure it’s a mess down there already. This is a president people turn out to see. I’d hate to be responsible for making it even a little bit worse. Do what you think is best, of course. But have I ever steered you wrong?”

  The agent sighed. “Just get back in the car,” he said, “and do what you need to do.”

  “Certainly,” Hagen said. “I’ll need gas on the way. But otherwise,” he said, patting the roof like a stock car mechanic signaling that the pit stop was finished, “straight to the Deauville.”

  True to his word, Tom stopped at a filling station, not far from the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway. He used the phone booth to call Michael Corleone. Michael had flown himself and Rita up to Maine, to visit his children and for a getaway. He’d been waiting by a pay phone in the lob
by of the inn where they were staying.

  “It looks like seven,” Michael said, meaning the number of made guys in the Family who, in the time since Geraci’s disappearance, finished a prison sentence and took their thank-you trip to Acapulco. The thinking now was that Geraci had made contact with someone there. The Family had sent a few others, too, but only a made guy would have had enough clout to be Geraci’s inside man.

  “Any names on that list jump out at you?”

  “To be honest,” Michael said, “no.” Naturally, he did not list them on the phone. “Five of the seven were reasonably close associates of the person in question. But Nobilio isn’t ready to rule out any of them, even the other two.”

  “What does Al think?”

  “Same as Richie.”

  He’d put them both on this, his two most trusted men. Nobilio, as a capo, would take the lead, of course, which pleased Hagen. He liked Al and trusted him, but he was a man of action, not a strategist.

  “What about you?” Tom said. “What do you think?”

  “To be perfectly honest,” Michael said, “they weren’t names I knew very well.”

  Which was a barometer, Tom now realized, of how far Michael had removed himself from the men on the streets. That removal, until recently, had been the name of the game.

  “No-go on the other place?” Tom said, meaning Panama City, Florida, the only other place Fausto Geraci had mentioned that had come as news to Al Neri and Tommy Scootch. Tommy had been there a week, looking for leads.

  “Nothing,” Michael said. “You know, despite everything, this matter isn’t my biggest concern right now.”

  “If you mean down here, everything’s so jake it’s Jacob.”

  Tom heard himself blurt this pet saying of Johnny Fontane’s and shook his head. He didn’t know how Ben Tamarkin did it, working around those Hollywood people all the time without the phoniness rubbing off on him.

  “Call me when it’s finished. This phone is fine. The innkeeper will come get me.”

  “It’s finished now,” Tom said. “It’s all set up. But, yeah, I’ll call. How are Kay and the kids?”

  “Rita and I just got in. A couple hours ago,” Michael said. “We pick up Anthony and Mary first thing tomorrow.”

  “Well, send them my love.” Tom hated to think about how long it had been since Michael had seen them. More than a few visits had been canceled at the last minute, sometimes on Michael’s end, just as often by Kay or the kids. Rita had never even met Anthony and Mary. It was a big step, but if she and Michael really were getting serious about each other, it had to happen. “How’s Rita? Nervous?”

  “She did great. A couple of pills for the motion sickness, and she was fine.”

  He wasn’t asking how Rita was on the flight up but how she was. Tom let it go. “Look, I’ll call somewhere I can get a drink. We’ll raise a glass in each other’s general direction.”

  “You know, Tom, Pop would have—”

  “Save it.” As much as Tom himself had worshipped Vito, Michael’s increasingly frequent mentions of the old man were starting to get on his nerves. “I’ll call.”

  On his way back to the car, Tom bought two bottles of Pepsi-Cola from a machine and walked one over to Agent Bianchi.

  TOM PULLED UP IN FRONT OF THE DEAUVILLE AND handed the valet his keys and a hundred dollars. The valet gave a nod and just like that, three other cars pulled in and blocked Bianchi’s way.

  It was something Tom did as a precaution and because he could, more than because it was necessary. Tom wasn’t doing anything illegal. Bianchi was almost certainly the only agent assigned to watch him. And anything he managed to figure out would be thwarted at the top.

  Inside the lobby, Tom didn’t recognize anyone as an agent, but just to be on the safe side he made a beeline for the stairs. He was almost to the third floor before he heard anyone else in the stairwell. Hagen couldn’t see who it was, but it sounded like a shuffling old man, a person in no hurry. Gassed, Tom opened the door to the third floor and went down the gilded hallway to the other end of the building. No one was following him. His heart was racing. He tried to take long, even breaths. He needed to get back to playing tennis. It was so goddamned hot, but maybe he and Theresa could join a club with an indoor court somewhere and play together. They used to play together all the time…when? A lifetime ago. When they were first married.

  He should cut back on the cigars, but he knew he never would.

  He took the stairs one more flight up and, confident no one was watching, rode the elevator the rest of the way to the suite.

  Tom rapped on the door. Pat Geary opened it, as if he were Ben Tamarkin’s butler and not, at least for now, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The light from the suite was so bright it almost knocked Tom over. The suite itself was awash in glass, white leather, and blond wood. Along one mirrored wall was an upholstered bar. The sound of a television—convention coverage—wafted in from another room. Tamarkin, dressed in a black guayabera and white linen pants, had positioned himself in a thronelike leather chair in the far corner.

  “Always a pleasure,” Geary said, showing Tom in. For a man who’d once clumsily tried to shake them down for a bribe and then told Tom and Michael never to contact him again, Geary had certainly seen a lot of them over the years. That the relationship had become a pleasant one was all Fredo. Fredo and Geary had gotten along well, and it had helped the Corleones get innumerable things from Geary with a minimum of fuss. People liked Fredo, and Tom and everyone around him hadn’t appreciated the value of that until he was gone.

  “I gather you and Mr. Tamarkin know each other?”

  Tamarkin stood, and they shook hands. Tamarkin did not take off the dark glasses.

  “Good work,” Tom said.

  “Knock wood,” Tamarkin said, making a fist and tapping his skull with it.

  “Everything’s still set?”

  “He’ll be here,” Tamarkin said, meaning the president’s campaign chairman, a former lobbyist for Walt Disney Studios, through whom Tamarkin had negotiated their deal. Hagen hadn’t met the man before. He sat back down. “He’s coming from the Fontainebleau. You and I have other things to talk about, but it can wait.”

  “Other things?” But he knew. The Discovery of America was now hemorrhaging money. The first Santa Maria had sunk. The actress playing Queen Isabella was back on heroin. The grant from the Italian government had been rescinded. And that was just for starters.

  “It can wait,” Tamarkin said. He wasn’t in on the plan, at least not yet.

  Tom nodded and turned to Geary. “Listen, before I forget, Senator,” Tom said, “tremendous speech last night. I liked what you had to say, sincerely.”

  “Why, thank you,” Geary said. He ducked behind the bar to make them drinks. “I thought it went well.”

  “It was a triumph,” Tom said. “Scotch, rocks.”

  “I remember,” Geary said.

  “I’ll have a mojito,” Tamarkin said.

  “A mosquito?” Geary frowned. He seemed legitimately confused.

  “Forget it, Festus,” Tamarkin said. “I was just banging your cymbals. I don’t drink.”

  Geary stared him down for a second, but he knew what side his bread was buttered on and turned back to Hagen. “Triumph may be laying on the bullshit a little thick, Tom. But it was rewarding, getting a chance to speak out for people who otherwise wouldn’t have been heard.”

  Ben Tamarkin folded his arms, apparently set off slightly by the word rewarding. Geary was a notorious anti-Semite, and Tamarkin couldn’t have relished doing the man any favors.

  “On several of your issues,” Tom said, “I’m one of those people.” Like many men in his position, he took a hard line against street crime. The crimes with which he himself was associated, he considered either victimless (gambling, moneylending, drugs) or perpetrated against people who opted to be involved, who agreed to certain rules and then broke them. “Your common thief,” he said,
“your mugger, your wife beater, your rapist, and your child molester and the like—we need to keep people like that off the streets.”

  “Hear, hear,” Geary said, and handed Tom his drink. “As I say, we need to reclaim the streets of our cities for decent Americans.”

  “Looks like you’re going to have your chance soon enough,” Tom said. “Here’s to the right man for the job,” he said, and they clinked glasses.

  Pat Geary was the right man for the job only in that he was infinitely preferable to the noisy debacle that had been Danny Shea’s tenure as attorney general. But Pat Geary didn’t know the streets of our cities from his flat Protestant ass cheeks. Geary was the son of a wealthy rancher. He’d never lived on the streets, the way Tom had. He’d never had to fight for his life every day, or fight just to have something to eat. As a child, although Tom hadn’t felt like it at the time. He’d been a grotesque creature, he now realized: an eleven-year-old man. Scabbed and filthy and not even mourning his dead parents or thinking about them and the life he’d had, such as it had been. He was overmatched against the regular bullies and the people who’d steal a penny and a crust of bread from an orphaned eleven-year-old man, and the predatory boy-fucking freaks—and yet Tom Hagen had survived it. He’d escaped it.

  Tom excused himself and went out to the balcony and looked out over the ocean while he waited. It was twilight. The view was spectacular but about what he’d have thought: an expanse of white sand and the vast blue-green Atlantic, oil tankers gliding near the horizon, Coast Guard boats closer to shore. Glimpses of the art deco buildings to the north, crisp modern hotels to the south. From here he couldn’t see the Fontainebleau, and he certainly couldn’t see the Miami Beach Convention Center, where the vice president would soon be giving his speech. He couldn’t see Cuba but it seemed to him that he could feel it. He couldn’t hear anything wafting his way up here from ground level, but he could feel that, too. Tom Hagen wasn’t one to go in for crap like excitement in the air, but he had to admit: what he was feeling was about more than the view, more than himself.