The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  It was bad news, but it wasn’t about her husband. It was horrible, but it wasn’t, yet, the end of the world.

  TOMMY NERI SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN MIAMI BY THEN, but he was still in Panama City. It had to do with a woman. Nothing special, just a lot of laughs for both parties involved, and hard for Tommy to walk away from. He could do without all the stress he’d been under. He’d been doing heroin, but never this much in such a short time. It was a day after the president was killed that he realized she’d told him about it yesterday. Fucking yesterday.

  EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON, CARLO TRAMONTI had, as expected, been cleared of all charges in the tax-evasion case against him, an even more flimsy legal assault the federal government mounted against his empire. No one, not even the prosecution—whose heart was visibly not in the case—expected any other verdict. Still, it had cost the Whale time and the money he shelled out to his handsomely paid lawyer. So a person still might have expected Tramonti to leave the court-room with something other than a broad and unforced smile on his face.

  “This is vindication,” he told the assembled reporters.

  At the time of the shooting, he was celebrating this vindication at a private party at Nicastro’s, the restaurant near his offices, along with his brothers, several prominent state officials, and Paul Drago, the younger brother of Tampa crime boss Salvatore “Silent Sam” Drago. There was no radio or television in the main dining room, and, supposedly, no one there learned about what happened in Miami until the party stopped.

  AL NERI WOULD ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT THE YANKEES were losing. He would remember the way the dial of his car radio looked, like something from a spaceship. The Coupe de Ville was his first Cadillac, and nothing he had ever bought or would ever buy would give him such satisfaction. It still had the new smell. He would remember staring at the wide dial as if it were a television. He would remember looking up from the dashboard and seeing a woman in a battered panel truck drive by. She was maybe thirty, with her hair tied in a scarf, and the windows down and her radio turned up full-blast. “I’m all through ever trusting anyone,” she sang along, happily enough. “The only thing I can count on now is my fingers.”

  Al held up his own fingers and looked at them.

  She turned the corner. He couldn’t hear the music anymore, but she got only two more blocks and pulled over. Her radio station must have interrupted its regular programming now, too.

  Al rarely thought about how desperately lonely he was, but he thought about it then. The violent, childless path he’d chosen. He wanted to go to her, the woman with the scarf around her head. To see if she was all right.

  Instead, he snapped out of it. He got out of his car and went to give Michael the news.

  CHAPTER 29

  Michael Corleone did stay for a whole week in Maine, as planned, but it had hardly been a vacation. Al Neri and Donnie Bags set up shop at the inn, working the phones on the Tom Hagen situation and trying to figure out how to confirm Michael’s suspicions about Carlo Tramonti. Al worked out a deal with the innkeeper and soon all eight rooms were either vacant or occupied by Michael and his family or the men in his employ.

  The television in the lobby was on almost constantly, usually with the sound off, flickering images of Jimmy Shea’s presidency and of the encomia he’d received at the now-postponed convention. There were also countless exterior shots of the Fontainebleau, and the swearing-in of President Payton—that would take some getting used to, President Ambrose “Bud” Payton—seemed to come up again and again, as if this were all a film loop.

  For the most part, Rita, too, stayed at the inn, glued to the TV, although she did go out for meals and a few game attempts to get closer to Anthony and Mary. Generally, these attempts seemed to have been debacles, most memorably including the time she was thrown from a horse and the time she went out on the fishing boat and got seasick and Michael and Anthony had an argument about cleaning up the vomit.

  The billiard table was set up in the rec room at Trask, and, in no time, Michael’s ability to see the angles on the table as if in a vision came back to him. He tried to teach this to his children, but the game came too naturally to him. He struggled to articulate its yielded secrets even to the two people on earth he loved most. They soon lost patience with one another.

  Somehow, the New York newspapers got wind of the fact that Tom Hagen was missing and ran stories about it, all sources anonymous. The stories were buried deep in the Metro section. He was yesterday’s news, particularly relative to the news about Jimmy Shea.

  A sleazy tabloid newspaper reported the rumor that Tom Hagen was in the custody of the FBI. Al Neri, in telling Michael about it, told him not to worry, which only engendered more worry.

  The day of the president’s funeral it rained, and they all stayed in and watched it together. Kay came over, too. The day was too sad for anyone to argue. The Shea children, a boy and a girl, were slightly younger than Michael’s children. This seemed to get to everyone. The mourning children on TV were in fact the ages of Tom Hagen’s daughters. There seemed to be nothing that could come out of anyone’s mouth that didn’t just make everything worse.

  As the graveside ceremonies began, Kay hugged her children and as she was leaving whispered to Michael to call if there was any news about Tom.

  That night, Michael and Rita and the kids went out for lobster, which Mary wouldn’t eat because of the live ones in the tanks in the waiting area, and Anthony wouldn’t eat because he claimed to be allergic. Then they all went to see a Marlon Brando movie that had been filmed on the Riviera. Brando and David Niven are trying to trick a woman into bed. It was supposed to be funny. Michael found it tasteless and in the middle of a bit where Brando’s character is pretending to be a mentally retarded man with a Napoleon complex, he got up and started to herd Rita and the kids out of the theater.

  Rita said she thought it was funny and wanted to stay.

  “Can I stay, too?” Anthony said. “I think it’s funny, too.”

  “No,” Michael said to him, but he was glaring at Rita.

  “I’m staying,” Rita said.

  “Suit yourself,” Michael told her. And he took the kids and left.

  Rita came back to the inn four hours later, drunk. From then on, Rita slept in a different room.

  And Michael barely slept at all.

  The last few nights in Maine, Michael had Donnie Bags drive him out to the school. The security guard let Michael into the rec room. While Bags napped behind the wheel of Al Neri’s idling Cadillac, Michael played rotation, alone, running the table well after midnight.

  Upon his return to New York, Michael Corleone was greeted with a tidal wave of unmet responsibilities and a mountain of unopened mail.

  Michael went to his office and got to work on the responsibilities, and Al Neri went to the kitchen table for more coffee and to open and sort the mail. The kitchen was at the opposite end of the penthouse, and when Al shouted out, it sounded like he’d been stung by a wasp or stubbed his toe—something startling but insignificant. Michael went to see what was happening, just in case.

  As Michael entered the kitchen, he smelled something rotten. Al Neri stood over an opened box, holding up a suit jacket wrapped around a bundle of newspapers.

  Miami newspapers.

  Inside was a dead baby alligator.

  To the surprise of neither man, inside one of the pockets of the suit jacket was Tom Hagen’s wallet.

  WITH JAMES K. SHEA BURIED AND A NATION STILL numb with grief and confusion, the delegates reconvened. With a minimum of pomp and circumstance, preceded by a brief, emotional nominating speech by Senator Patrick Geary of Nevada, they made President Payton their nominee for the fall election.

  Life magazine never ran those diving photos, believing that doing so would have been in bad taste. For years, the photographer fought to have them returned to her. Years later, she prevailed. She made millions, not only from the exhibit of those shots but also the companion coffee-table book (with essays by
a dozen members of the American literary elite) and other licensed material (T-shirts, calendars, and so forth).

  Instead of the photo spread, the magazine published both the introduction Daniel Brendan Shea never gave for his brother and the speech accepting the nomination that James Kavanaugh Shea never delivered (which Danny Shea personally rewrote, it would later be revealed). These ran with no illustrations at all. The cover was plain white. Centered, moderately sized bold type read JAMES KAVANAUGH SHEA/1919–1964. It was the bestselling issue in the magazine’s history.

  Who, in the end, was Juan Carlos Santiago?

  There was no evidence that he was in any way connected with the current Cuban government. In fact, he was its sworn enemy. He was a skilled fisherman, who, since he’d fled his homeland and in between bouts of manic behavior, had been a valued member of crews both in South Florida and, more recently, in New Orleans. He was, it seemed, simply the bad seed from a good family. A confused and delusional man who wanted to be a patriot, who tried to avenge the death of his brother by participating in the botched invasion and then tried to avenge the humiliation he’d suffered during that debacle by killing the president.

  Case closed.

  To appease the worried masses, President Ambrose Payton launched an investigation. He offered the chairmanship of the investigation first to Danny Shea, who understandably declined (and, perhaps less understandably to most people, seemed to have little interest in getting to the bottom of what had happened; those closest to him said it was as if he already knew). Payton’s second choice accepted: a retired Speaker of the House of Representatives, a wholesome Iowan and a beloved American statesman. Those picked to assist him would be similarly august names.

  The public appreciated the thoroughness of this, and for all but a few—a fringe element, it seemed, in a fringe-loathing nation—the earnestness of the endeavor allowed them to get on with their lives—shaken by this act of random gun violence but secure that the Star-Spangled Banner yet waved, that the Union was preserved, and understanding that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

  Nonetheless, the investigation would solemnly pursue every confusing or mysterious element of the case—a rapidly lengthening list, according to some among the fringe element.

  There were no television cameras? No home movies that showed anything of note?

  And what about the two large men Santiago squirmed past? The ones who, some felt, seemed to screen him from view until the last second. They were dressed about the same, built about the same. They appeared in countless grainy, blurry photographs, taken by tourists and the Life photographer alike, but all attempts to find or identify them had proved fruitless.

  Santiago’s fake driver’s license was not a forgery. Neither was it issued in Miami, where Santiago lived, or anywhere in South Florida, but rather in Pensacola. The birth certificate used to get the license was a legal copy, though the real Belford Williams had died in a flood in Louisiana when he was three years old. No one in Pensacola remembered having ever seen Juan Carlos Santiago. The woman who processed the paperwork for it and supposedly took the photo admitted that she believed it to be a scientific fact that your darker-skinned people all look alike to members of the white race.

  Santiago was apparently shot five times, but the Secret Service agents advancing on him, from the front, apparently fired only four shots. There were accounts of a shot coming from behind him, although nothing had been conclusively proven. There were conflicting accounts about whether or not Santiago spun around as he was shot; if he did, that would explain the shot in his back (which was just a rumor, since his autopsy had been rendered classified).

  Ballistics would prove nothing. Dum-dum rounds break up into pieces that are nearly impossible to trace to a specific gun. All that could be said for certain was what had already been released to the public: all the bullets that killed Juan Carlos Santiago had been fired at about the same time, all from the same kind of gun.

  Even citizens with less conspiratorial frames of mind had to wonder how a lone gunman—a crazy, a nothing—got that close to a president of the United States with a loaded handgun.

  Dumb luck?

  Why not?

  It would happen at least three more times in the twentieth century, after all, each time by someone even less formidable than Santiago. Each time the event seemed a little less plausible, but nonetheless, there it was: a thing that happened.

  Call it luck, call it probability, call it what you will, but if each was a one-in-a-million longshot, wasn’t that explanation enough? Billions of people walked the earth in that time. Millions have, at least fleetingly, wished the president dead. Three (that we know of) came close.

  The statistically unlikely fact may be that only one succeeded.

  BOOK VI

  CHAPTER 30

  Metropolitan Heating & Cooling was an almost perfectly cubical two-story gray cinder-block building in Kenilworth, New Jersey. Black Tony Stracci kept his office upstairs. Nick Geraci arrived in the middle of a downpour. He was characteristically early. He parked in back. Stracci, his old friend, was seated at the window and saw Nick and waved him up.

  The Shea assassination had thrown off Nick Geraci’s timetable. His wife was back at home in East Islip, and his daughters were back in school (Barb was getting a master’s in education at Johns Hopkins). But Nick needed a Commission meeting to happen before he could surface, and the one that had been scheduled in late August had been pushed back. Maybe it had been needless. Danny Shea was rumored to be stepping down as A.G.—the unconditional surrender in his “War on the Mafia.” There had been a fear that the investigation that the former Speaker of the House was leading would wash up on the shores of the underworld, but it apparently hadn’t done so. The only accusations Carlo Tramonti faced had been discreet, leveled in whispers. But, necessary or not, the Commission meeting had been moved back, and the rumor that Tramonti had had something to do with the president’s killing—the presumption he had, which Nick shared—made it risky for Geraci to rely on him to get the Commission votes he’d promised he could deliver, the votes Nick would need to take over as boss. At this point, Carlo Tramonti could deliver Tampa’s Silent Sam Drago, and that was about it. Nick needed three more.

  The meeting was back on now—in Staten Island as originally planned, the heart of the Barzini Family’s empire and the home of Fat Paulie Fortunato, the Barzinis’ new boss. It was only a week away. Now was the time for Geraci to reason with Black Tony, to do whatever was necessary to get his make-or-break support.

  The old man rose to greet him. “Nick Geraci! Let me look at you!”

  Stracci’s remaining strands of hair were blacker than ever. The office was as impersonal and meticulously neat as a surgical theater and yet smelled of anisette and mildew.

  Their embrace was warm and lengthy. They’d made a lot of money for each other over the years, with barely a whimper of discontent. Stracci and Sally Tessio had been friends, and Nick thought of Black Tony as a dear uncle he didn’t see as often as he’d have liked.

  Stracci’s consigliere, Elio Nunziato, ducked in the door, bearing a big white bag of pastries. He apologized for being late (even though he was early). He turned on an old air-conditioning unit that they’d rebuilt just to make noise, enough to thwart anyone’s attempt to record their conversation.

  Other than the fact that he didn’t dye his gray hair, Nunziato looked remarkably like Stracci had twenty years ago. Some said Black Tony was really Elio’s father. But Nick subscribed to the notion that two people who work that closely together do sometimes start to look alike, the way people start to look like their dogs.

  “Fausto Dominick Geraci, Jr.,” Black Tony marveled. “Back from the fucking dead.” He motioned for Nick to take a seat across the desk from him. “Look at you. This is a pleasure I thought we seen the last of.”

  Nick thanked him. He said he’d sometimes had his doubts in that regard himself.

  They
asked after each other’s families. Elio passed the pastries around and got coffee for the other two men from a pot balanced on an old typing table.

  “And business?” Nick asked.

  “Business is good,” Black Tony said. “All in all.”

  “It’s nice to see some things don’t change,” Nick said, indicating Stracci’s office.

  “What the hell, y’ know? It’s not like a lot of men do, bosses and captains with their offices, I mean. This ain’t a place I took over. This place, it’s a place of business I started up myself. Me and my brother Mario, may he rest in peace. I still go out on the occasional service calls, you know.”

  “Still?”

  “Still,” Elio confirmed. He puffed up with touching, vicarious pride. “Last night, matter of fact.”

  “Ah, last night, nothing,” Stracci said. “Last night was for family. The thought of my grandson having to sleep in heat like that, I did what anybody in my position would have done. This rain is a nice break from all that Indian summer.”

  “We need the rain,” Elio said.

  “But, in general,” Stracci said, “these days I just go on calls for my own petty entertainment. I get a little exercise, fresh air, meet some nice people or see old friends, use my hands, get dirty. I get satisfaction out of fixing things. I enjoy it.”

  It also allowed Stracci to keep the common touch and to maintain, however ludicrously, the illusion that this company was where his money was coming from.

  “I feel the same way,” Nick said. “A lot of my jobs give me the same opportunities.”

  “Nick fucking Geraci,” he marveled again. “I have to say, if you wasn’t right here before my very eyes I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  Nunziato nodded in agreement.

  “You don’t mind me askin’ where you been,” Stracci said, “do you?”