The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  He would still get out of this. The water would make the duct tape lose its adhesive. He kept struggling. He thought he felt some give in the tape that was around his ankles.

  The Buick’s electrical system sizzled. Just as the headlights flickered out, a big black snake swam by on the other side of the windshield, but Tom Hagen’s heart withstood that, too.

  “If you want to kill a snake, you don’t chop off the tail,” he said out loud. It gave Tom a perverse feeling of satisfaction that Geraci had come for him first and not Michael.

  He kept struggling. He definitely felt give in the tape now, everywhere.

  The water was up to his chin.

  He tilted his head toward the roof of the car and got ready to take a deep breath. He could do this. It was a matter of will. Who had more will than he did?

  His ankles were free now and so, almost, were his knees. There was all kinds of give around his right arm. Any second now, his arm would be free.

  The back of his head was in the water. It was time to take the breath.

  Now.

  He started slowly, evenly, drawing air into his lungs.

  Suddenly there was a tickle in this throat and a catch in his chest, and his head snapped forward, and he was having a coughing fit.

  Gasping for air, except that there was no air to breathe. What he’d already breathed in was swamp water, and any air there was to breathe was now above his head, somewhere.

  He’d heard that drowning was the most peaceful way to die.

  There was nothing in Tom Hagen’s convulsing body that suggested peace.

  He tried to stop coughing and tried to stop taking in water, but his body betrayed him.

  His mind, he thought, would not betray him.

  He would concentrate.

  He would think his way out of this.

  No. He couldn’t. He had to accept that.

  He willed himself to let go, because there was no other way to think about what he wanted to think about. In his mind, he drew his family to him, and for one horrible, lovely moment, he looked into the imagined faces of Theresa, of his boys, Frank the lawyer and Andrew, who would be a priest, and his girls, Christina, who would be a beauty, and Gianna, who would be a beauty, too.

  And then he lost any control that he had of anything, and, just as the Buick’s electrical system had shorted out moments ago, Tom Hagen’s life started flickering out, and what he thought about was not his whole life but Sonny.

  Sonny Corleone, who was dead. Shot to pieces.

  But what he saw was Sonny, as a boy, in that alley.

  Tom hadn’t been friends with Sonny Corleone, at least not at first. That was a lie he and Sonny made up, one they told even to each other, even to themselves. All they’d ever said, even to one another, about what led up to Sonny’s decision to bring Tom home to live with his family, was that it had been a cold day in Hell’s Kitchen. But what had really happened was that Sonny and two older boys had wandered into an alley in an Irish part of the neighborhood, a bad place, but one where Tom knew how to hide and where to sleep and stay warm and even what nearby garbage cans had the best food. Snow fell. It was a big snowstorm. A man on the corner was selling switchblades. He was really a pimp, and he wasn’t right in the eyes, and the boys asked how much for a stick, and the man said he didn’t sell to boys. They weren’t boys, they argued, and he laughed in a way that was almost a scream and said that proved it: only a boy would say he wasn’t a boy. Tom Hagen would have said he wasn’t a boy, too, but he didn’t want to take any hope whatsoever from the pimp who wasn’t right in the eyes. Also, he was hiding and didn’t want to say anything. The pimp told the boys that he also refused to sell to dagos, and when they started to get tough about the slur, he pulled one of his knives and grabbed Sonny by the throat, and the two older boys took off running. The man selling switchblades who was really a pimp was also something else, and Tom knew about it. Tom had seen the man cut his girls, but the man didn’t seem to want to be with his girls. The man with the switchblades who wasn’t right in the eyes found kids in trouble who’d suck his cock for half a sandwich, except that usually he pulled a knife on them and didn’t bother with the sandwich. Tom Hagen had stayed clear of this man, and he’d never sucked anybody’s cock for a sandwich or anything else for that matter, though there had been times when he’d been so delirious with hunger pain that he knew he’d have done it, and he thought that maybe he’d just been lucky about how he’d felt on the days when he’d seen this man, this pimp, who also sold switchblades. But now the man was dragging Sonny down the alley, and Tom didn’t think about anything, he just acted. Like the grotesque creature that he was, he came up howling from out of the ground, out of the space under a stoop where he was getting too big to hide, and he grabbed a splintered board and hit the man in the back of the head. It was everyone’s good dumb luck—Sonny’s, to be sure, but Hagen’s more so, and even humanity’s—that the board had a nail in it and the nail impaled the man who sold women and switchblades in the side of his neck and a gout of blood spewed out onto the falling snow like red sleet. It was that man’s good luck, too, because his life was violent and miserable and now it was almost over. Tom’s life was almost over, too, now. Why wasn’t his whole life flashing before his eyes? Why was it this he was seeing? What he was seeing was this: he and Sonny were pummeling the man with the eyes that weren’t right, and when he fell they kicked him, too, and when they realized he wasn’t moving, which might have been a fraction of a second or it might have been forever—the way this felt, Tom thought, underwater, his head lolling to the side—then Tom and Sonny stopped, gasping for breath. They looked around and saw that there were witnesses, adults, men and women—fathers and mothers, probably—wrapped in cloth overcoats. No one was going to miss this man with the eyes that weren’t right, and, one by one, the adults turned their backs on him and walked away muttering things. Tom and Sonny looked at each other, and they could have done a lot of things more likely than what they did do, which was to laugh, to let go of everything that had just happened to them and laugh, hard. And the laughing hurt because the air was so cold and they were doing it so hard. They were a cunt’s hair shy of crying, but they didn’t. Tom had cried when his mother died, when his father died, but he did not cry now, and he would never cry again, not once, the rest of his life—which was flickering out now, somewhere in the Everglades. Sonny didn’t cry then, either, but was a bighearted, sentimental lug who wept fat, unashamed tears at weddings and funerals and sad movies and especially, epically, when he stood in the hospital hallway and got his first glimpse of his beautiful twin girls, Francesca and Katherine, and then his boys, too. Tom was there with him, all three times. Mike and Fredo were there for the twins. Tom was happy to have seen this now, and he almost wept with joy when he saw his own children behind that big hospital window, too, but then a thunderbolt of pain hit him now, too, which wasn’t supposed to happen—was it? When you’re dying? Tom would have given anything to feel his wife’s fingertips brush his skin—anything, anything—but instead he was back with Sonny, who was also dead, standing in the snow over that dead pimp. Tom looked the bigger boy squarely in the eyes and told him—the way an adult would, the way a father would—that there are things that have to be done and you do them and you never talk about them. You don’t try to justify them, because they can’t be justified. You just do them. Then you forget it. My name is Santino Corleone, Sonny said, his arm outstretched. Steam rose from the wound in the dead pimp’s neck. Tom Hagen, Tom said, and they shook hands.

  They walked away, together. Sonny looped an arm around Tom, and Tom did the same to Sonny. Sonny asked where Tom lived, and Tom just shook his head. Sonny asked Tom what was wrong with his eye, and Tom said it was some kind of infection, he didn’t know. His mother had had the same thing, and then she died. Sonny asked about Tom’s father, and Tom couldn’t even bring himself to say it, that his father had been torn up with grief over his mother’s death, and a few months later he�
��d successfully drunk himself to death. Well, all right then, Sonny said. You and me. We’re brothers now. Tom Hagen’s final living thought was of that huge blue bowl of spaghetti Mama Corleone, who was dead now, too, put before him that day: the aroma of her oily, rich tomato sauce, the sound of her voice, ordering him to eat.

  CHAPTER 27

  “Come to bed.” Rita Duvall, in a nightgown and with a sleep mask pushed up in her mussed red hair, came padding into the darkened lobby of the inn. Michael was slumped in a wing chair he’d dragged over by the pay phone. “Tomorrow’s…well, it’s three in the morning, so I suppose that today is tomorrow. All the more reason you should come to bed, darling. Get some sleep.”

  “I don’t think I could sleep,” Michael said.

  “Come to bed, anyway,” she said.

  “I don’t think I could do that, either.”

  “I’m not suggesting you do anything,” she said, “except rest. C’mon. Let me just take care of you. I can do that, you know.”

  “I just can’t.”

  “I gather there’s no word.”

  Michael shook his head.

  “Did you call Theresa back?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. It was so unlike Tom not to call when he said he would that when Michael called his home in Florida, he’d let it slip to Theresa that he’d been expecting to hear from Tom about an hour earlier. Given Tom and Theresa’s recent troubles, she’d jumped to the conclusion that this all had something to do with another woman. Michael had told her he hoped like hell that another woman was all they had to worry about. That sent Theresa on a screaming tirade. He’d had to hang up on her. “I’m giving it until at least dawn, I think.”

  Better yet, he’d have Al Neri call her. He was on his way up here, driving.

  “Sunrise is nearly an hour later down there, remember.”

  “Yeah? How do you know that?”

  “I am French,” she said.

  “What does being French have to do with it?”

  Her hands danced, making a kind of voilà gesture. “We are passionate about the sun and the sunrise. The promise of a new day, yes? And more to enjoy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Speaking of a new day, did you check your sugar? Because you’re not going to be any good to anyone tomorrow if—”

  “It’s fine,” Michael said. He’d gotten better about keeping tabs on his diabetes. It had been a long time since he’d had any sort of incident.

  “You don’t think we should go back to New York?” There was a heartbreaking mixture of fear and hopefulness in Rita’s voice. “Do you?”

  Yes, he thought. “No,” he said. “Of course we’re not going back.” He couldn’t.

  She brightened.

  Rita was pushing to get engaged, which Michael wasn’t even going to consider until she and his kids had a good relationship. More important, Michael had canceled so many other visits with Mary and Anthony at the last minute that he couldn’t bear the thought of coming all the way here to see them and then not seeing them. Also, he had presents to deliver, deliveries he was supposed to coordinate. So he had to see this through.

  “There’s probably a logical explanation for why Tom didn’t call,” Michael said. “I may be overreacting. This is all probably nothing.”

  “If it’s probably nothing,” she said, “then you should definitely come to bed.”

  Michael looked at the telephone, as if he might be able to will it to ring.

  Moments later, he lay in bed, staring up at the frilly canopy. For maybe two minutes, Rita rubbed her hand over his chest in consolation, then dropped off to sleep.

  Michael lay still and awake until the sun came up, then got out of bed, showered, got dressed, and went to sit by the pay phone.

  “SO WHAT DOES YOUR GUT TELL YOU?” MICHAEL said.

  “Three eggs over easy with sausage,” Al Neri told the waitress. Michael hadn’t noticed her. He wasn’t hungry, but he ordered the same thing and would force himself to eat it.

  They were having coffee in a diner down the street from the inn. Rita was back in the room getting ready. Al looked reasonably rested. He’d had someone drive him up here, and he’d slept in the car. Michael had bags under his eyes and his white hair was disheveled. He could have passed for sixty.

  “My gut,” Neri said, “says he’s in custody.”

  “Wouldn’t we have heard from Sid Klein by now?”

  “Did you call Sid Klein?”

  “I did. He hasn’t talked to Tom in weeks.”

  “I’m not necessarily saying they have him for that thing that blew over,” Al said. Meaning Judy Buchanan. “I’ve got a bad feeling that maybe the Feds have some dirt on him. Tom mentioned he had his FBI tail when he talked to you, right? So that seems to rule out anyone making a move on Tom except them. Plus, we know that the FBI is getting some kind of information from that girl out in Arizona.” Meaning, Bev Geraci. “So that’s my feeling.”

  “Just your feeling?”

  “Maybe a little more than that. Tom goes to strike that deal and then, poof, he’s gone. Whether it’s bribery they got him on or whether it’s something unrelated, I don’t know. What I’m doing is answering your question. You asked me my gut, I’m telling you my gut.” Neri shrugged. “To tell the truth,” he whispered, “I’d be kind of relieved if it wasn’t custody.”

  “Relieved?” Michael said. “Relieved how?”

  “Look, Tom’s almost as much a brother to me as to you,” Al said, “but the fact remains he’s not Sicilian, not Italian even. I know of Irish gangsters who sold out their friends, but never one of us.”

  “Tom is one of us.”

  “I’m not saying he’s not, in that sense,” Al said. “But if it ever comes to pass that he’s looking at a long prison sentence of some kind, I, personally, would be nervous. Tom’s got loyalty in spades but no conscience. You know this better than anybody. Nothing he’s ever done has been for anything but the greater good of Tom Hagen. Loyalty to you and your family has been good for him, but if the time ever came that things changed…” Al blew on his coffee. “Let’s just hope we never get to that moment.”

  Michael tapped his knife against the chipped Formica tabletop.

  “Tom is my brother,” Michael said. “I’m going to try to forget you ever told me this.”

  “Right,” Al said. “You’re right. If I overstepped, I’m sorry. Thank you.”

  Their food came, and Michael gave it a try. Al’s was nearly gone before Michael had made it through his first rubbery egg.

  “So,” Michael said. “We’re one hundred percent certain Tom got the deal done?”

  “I talked to Geary and Tamarkin directly, and they both say yes,” Al said. “Ben Tamarkin swears Tom left the hotel at about nine. So that all checks out.”

  “And the contributions were delivered?”

  “They were,” Neri said. “I’m convinced that the deal was done. I even talked to some people we know in New Jersey.” He waggled his black sunglasses case to underscore that he was talking about Black Tony Stracci. “The ball’s rolling. The senate thing in ’66, all that.”

  “Forget about New Jersey. Who are you talking to down in Miami? Which of our people?”

  Neri shrugged hopelessly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Other than Tom, what do we got who does business down there? Richie Nobilio’s up to his eyeballs with business in New York, and the men he’s got running his Fort Lauderdale things are just low-level guys,” Al said. “Which is about all we got down there period. Nobody of consequence.”

  “Are you sure?” Michael said. “Nobody?”

  It took Al a few tortured moments to realize that Michael was referring to Nick Geraci. Or maybe Al was just preoccupied with the last few bites of his final sausage.

  “I don’t think so,” Al finally said. “We can’t rule it out entirely, but even if he’s in the area, I don’t see how he’d get to Tom. Seems like that FBI tail rules it
out.”

  “And we can’t find out anything from the FBI?”

  “This is your lack of sleep talking,” Al said. “How would we do that?”

  Michael sighed. “It would be difficult,” he said, “but not impossible.”

  “Well, if you want to send me out on that, give me the details. In the meantime, I got calls in to some friends of friends down in Miami,” Al said, signaling the waitress to bring more coffee. “Real subtle ones, so don’t worry about nobody figuring nothing out. Also, as a kind of just-in-case, Tommy’s driving down from Panama City as we speak. Tommy can be our man on the scene in Miami, if unfortunately there ends up being a scene.”

  “Tommy,” Michael said. “You sent Tommy?”

  “He was already in Florida.”

  “Do you have any idea what a big state Florida is? That’s probably a ten-, twelve-hour drive. Anyone we flew down from New York would get there faster.”

  “You want me to send someone else down, boss, say the word. And no offense if it’s because you don’t have enough faith in Tommy.”

  “I don’t have any faith in Tommy. For all I know, Tommy’s our traitor. It would explain why the rat he’s chased all this time has never bitten him.”

  “Tommy’s not the traitor,” Al said, “and if he is, I’d be the first to take care of him.”

  “You say that as if you’d have any choice in the matter.”

  “I wouldn’t want a choice in the matter. If it came to that.”

  Michael nodded. Good old Al. For better or for worse, they’d be together forever.

  “Tommy’s fine,” Michael said. “For now anyway.”

  He pushed his plate away. He’d eaten maybe half his food.

  “Tell me this, though,” Michael said. “Geary is a known commodity, but tell me why we should trust Ben Tamarkin?”

  “Don’t take this wrong,” Al said, “but I’m starting to worry about you. What would it benefit Ben Tamarkin to do anything to Tom?”

  Michael took a long pull from his coffee. “I don’t know,” he said. “But, right now, we can’t take anything for granted.”