The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  “Kindergarten,” Molinari said. “That’s pretty funny.”

  Falcone stood, rubbing his jaw. “Nice punch, O’Malley. Sittin’ down. Wow.”

  “Instinct,” Geraci said. Narducci didn’t even say thank you. “Sorry. You all right?”

  Falcone shrugged. “Forget about it.”

  “What were you going to do,” Molinari said, “beat up an old man?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Falcone said, and now everyone laughed. Geraci took his seat, and the bodyguards took theirs. “I don’t give a fuck,” said Falcone. “Take it.”

  The two visibly grateful waiters rushed to obey. The one with the dyed moustache even had the poise to return a moment later and refill everyone’s water glass.

  “Blow their head off with what, Frank?” Forlenza asked.

  “Figure of speech,” said Falcone, which got another big laugh.

  Geraci had been looking for an opening, a chance to say what he’d come there to say, and this seemed like the time. He made eye contact with his godfather.

  Forlenza nodded.

  Again he cleared his throat as a call to order, and in the pause this created took a regally unhurried drink of water.

  “Gentlemen,” Forlenza said. “Our guest unfortunately needs to go.” By which, everyone understood, he meant, should leave before certain things are discussed, not has somewhere else to be. “But he has come a long, long way, and before he leaves, he’d like to say a few words.”

  Geraci, in addressing his superiors, stood. He thanked Don Forlenza and promised that his words would be few. “Though I am flattered to have been allowed at this table,” Geraci said, “Don Falcone is correct. This is not my place. As you point out”-indicating Falcone and thinking of Tessio, who always stressed the natural advantages of being underestimated-“I’m just someone’s wet-behind-the-ears soldato.” A lie, but one Falcone had initiated.

  Narducci’s echolalia had grown so faint that this time Geraci couldn’t guess at what he said.

  “The Corleone organization,” Geraci said, “is not, I assure you, a threat to any of you. Michael Corleone wants peace. He’s determined that this cease-fire become permanent and has taken measures to achieve it. He never had any intention of running Las Vegas. After three or four years in this interim location, the Corleone Family will relocate to Lake Tahoe. Actually, it will cease to exist. Our New York operation will continue in some form, but everything in Lake Tahoe will be run by Michael Corleone like the affairs of any American business magnate-Carnegie, Ford, Hughes, whomever.”

  “Law school,” Narducci said, presumably triggered by whomever.

  “The Corleone Family,” said Geraci, “will not in the future initiate any more members.” Tonight, in other words, to be construed as the pres-ent. “Michael Corleone will retire from our way of life, and he will do so in a manner that will both be respectful of other organizations and, if anyone chooses, also provide a model for any of us who wishes to take a similar path.” He pushed his chair in. “Gentlemen, unless you have any questions or concerns…?”

  He waited a moment. Falcone and Forlenza both looked at Molinari, who ever so slowly blinked. A known friend of the Corleones, he was prepared to elaborate and the more appropriate person to do so.

  “In that case,” Geraci said, “I’m going to go check on the weather, in case we-”

  “Fuck the weather,” Falcone said. He had a hundred grand on the fight. “When it’s time to go, hotshot, we’re going.”

  Narducci muttered something that sounded like “acts of God.”

  “Fuck God,” Falcone said. “Don’t take this wrong, Vincent, but I’m not getting stuck-”

  “I’m sure it will be fine,” Geraci said, and left.

  Tom Hagen went back to his room to wait. He tossed his unused three-hundred-dollar tennis racquet onto the bed. He kept on his tennis shirt and changed from shorts into chinos, from sneakers into loafers. On the two different golf courses he could see from the air-conditioned splendor of his room, foursomes of brightly dressed men laughed and drank cocktails on the vast expanse of green where a few decades earlier there had been only cactus and sand, where anyone out there at midday would have been roasting, starving, dying of thirst, gleeful buzzards circling overhead. Instead, servants on golf carts bore cold beer and fresh towels. It reminded Hagen of the stories he’d read about ancient Rome, where the emperors cooled their palaces in the summertime by having slaves haul untold tons of heavy, melting snow down from the mountaintops. More slaves stood beside the mounds of snow night and day, drenched in sweat and waving big papyrus fans. For a king, no corner of the earth is inhospitable.

  Hagen told the front desk to call him whenever a car came for him. He left a wake-up call for 1:45.

  It came. He awoke famished. Hagen hated late lunches. Two o’clock came and went. Hagen called down and was told, “No, sir, there still hasn’t been anyone asking for you.”

  He hung up the phone and stared at it, willing it to ring. Like a stupid kid waiting for his sweetheart to call. He picked up the phone again and had the operator connect him with Mike’s office. No answer. He tried Mike’s home number. If the meeting with the Ambassador were about anything of lesser stakes, Hagen would already have been on a plane home. Kay’s father answered. Michael and Kay had gone out for their anniversary lunch. Hagen had forgotten. He’d catch up with Mike later. Then he called home to say he’d gotten in okay and everything was fine, and Theresa was crying because Garbanzo, their arthritic dachshund, had run away. The kids had made flyers and posted them in the neighborhood and now were out looking for their pet. What if the dog wandered out into the desert? Think of all the ways it could die then: coyotes, cougars, snakes, thirst. There was an atomic bomb test tomorrow; think of that. Hagen tried to calm her down. He reassured her that an arthritic dachshund probably couldn’t have made it out of the subdivision, much less the sixty-some miles to that test site.

  Hagen looked at the racquet, available for twenty bucks at any hardware store and not nearly as good as the one he had at home. In his mind’s eye, he saw his brother Sonny, outraged at this show of disrespect, ordering everything on the room service menu, eating what he wanted and pissing over all the rest, then smashing up the racquet and the room, too, sticking the Ambassador with the damages-we don’t take cash, you have to sign for it-and heading home. Hagen ’s stomach growled. He smiled. He missed Sonny.

  The phone rang. His driver was here.

  Hagen went down, but there was no car there. He asked the parking attendant. No cars for a while now, he said. Hagen ’s head pounded. He’d forgotten his sunglasses. Squinting was painful. Back in the lobby, he saw a Negro in a tuxedo. He’d pulled up on the other side of the building, in an optic-white-roofed, six-seater golf cart. It was after two-thirty.

  “This may be the biggest golf cart I’ve ever seen.” Hagen shielded his eyes from the glare off the vehicle’s white skin.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the driver, clearly someone who’d been told in his training not to make eye contact with his employers or their associates except when spoken to.

  The ride across the golf course, through a maze of tennis courts, and across another golf course took about fifteen minutes, during which each of them averted his eyes from the other.

  When the Ambassador had first gone into business with Vito Corleone, his name had been Mickey Shea. Now he was known in the newspapers as M. Corbett Shea. No one called him Mickey. Close friends and family, even his wife, called him Corbett. To everyone else, he was the Ambassador. His father had left County Cork, settled in Baltimore, and opened a saloon across the street from the one Babe Ruth’s dad owned. The oldest of six children, Mickey Shea grew up working hard-scrubbing floors, lugging boxes, shoveling manure from the street and snow from the alley. But his life, especially compared to other Irish kids’ in the neighborhood, was a comfortable one. Soon, though, his parents began sampling too much of their own wares. They lost everything. His moth
er became the rare woman who chooses a gun to kill herself, opening wide to wrap her mouth around the barrels of a sawed-off shotgun taken from the shelf under the cash register. Mickey, snow shovel in hand, was the one who discovered her near-headless body in the alley behind the bar. His father just kept drinking until that, too, did the job.

  Mickey joined the army at seventeen and soon became a supply sergeant. It was there, not (as legend had it) on the streets of Baltimore, that he learned that there were the rules and then there was what people do. The black market, lucrative in peacetime, proved to be a license to print money once the United States entered the war. The week after the armistice, Sergeant Shea rigged himself an honorable discharge. He was a millionaire, most of it in cash. He went to New York and opened a tavern in the Tenderloin district. Being both Irish and a fine negotiator, he quickly forged useful bonds with the police and, more important, Irish street gangs like the Marginals and the Gophers. He bought a few warehouses near the piers, a solid investment that helped him keep his import-export skills sharp. And that might have been that, if not for Prohibition. Shea was God’s perfect bootlegger. He owned warehouses. He employed dockworkers. He knew how to move goods outside the law. He had friends in two eastern cities and people in Canada, former supply sergeants from the RAF with whom he’d done business and remained friendly. And not only did he run a tavern, he ran one known as a cops’ bar. Nearly overnight, that tavern became an ice cream parlor and its basement was gutted, remodeled, and reopened as a speakeasy. The cops, his former regulars, were now paid to drink there for free-money well spent, since the place got a word-of-mouth reputation as one safe from raids. Before Shea knew it, that basement was a who’s who of Manhattan swells-opera divas and Broadway stars, newspaper publishers and their star columnists, flashy lawyers and florid aldermen, even presidents of banks and titans of Wall Street. Shea bought the building next door and tunneled through to its basement, almost tripling the size of the place. A full orchestra played there every night. It was as brazen an operation as existed anywhere in America.

  But Mickey Shea was a man who had seen things. During the war, men like him could get rich, but there was a whole tier of rich and powerful people above that, people who hadn’t had to get their hands dirty setting up a swap of morphine and girlie pictures for blood and generators, who’d never had to work the room slapping the backs of men they’d bribed. He’d used his connections with the cops in lower Manhattan to help keep the converted olive oil trucks from getting stopped on the way to his warehouses (and to keep those warehouses from getting raided), but what were those men in those trucks doing that he couldn’t do? Why was he getting only the warehousing money and the money from the speakeasy when he could just as easily-more easily-bring the stuff down and sell it himself? So men in Canada set him up with a fleet of speedboats and retrofitted syrup trucks. Soon the men in the olive oil trucks were blowing up his boats and his trucks-often with Shea’s men still inconveniently inside. Shea got cops to get other cops to get other cops to look out for his people, a corridor of sheriffs, judges, and beat cops all the way from Quebec to Manhattan, which helped but didn’t solve things.

  One day, Genco Abbandando- Hagen ’s predecessor as consigliere and the man Shea thought owned Genco Pura Olive Oil-contacted a police captain on Shea’s payroll and set up a meeting between Mickey Shea and Vito Corleone. They met at the lunch counter of an Italian grocery store in Hell’s Kitchen, only six blocks from Shea’s warehouses but someplace he’d never been. He hated spicy food and refused to eat anything but bread and sauceless noodles. When the meal was finished, Don Corleone explained that the men running those converted trucks were only leasing them from Genco Pura, then let the implications of this sink in. He spoke of the wastefulness of free-market competition, and here, too, Mickey Shea was a quick study. Don Corleone told Mickey Shea that he believed that someone with so many friends (he did not have to say in City Hall and on Wall Street and especially among the Irish-dominated ranks of law enforcement) must be a great man, someone it would be profitable to know. Mickey Shea’s friends became friends of the Corleone Family. Shea was instrumental in building up Don Corleone’s political and legal connections, ultimately his biggest source of power. Don Corleone was instrumental in amassing for Shea so much wealth-at such great reserve both from any bloodshed and from the overt display of muscle necessary to prevent it-that even before the death of that great cash cow Prohibition, Shea was able to sever all traceable ties to the sources of his wealth and reinvent himself in the public eye as a blue blood: M. Corbett Shea, president of a brokerage house, part owner of a baseball team, and much-photographed philanthropist (the country’s many Corbett Halls, Corbett Auditoriums, and Corbett Public Libraries were funded by the Ambassador). His children went to Lawrenceville and then to Princeton. Their service in the war was packaged in national magazines as heroism. He served as the ambassador to Canada for the last six weeks of a lame-duck president’s term-not long enough to move his family but long enough to get the title. His oldest daughter was married to a Rockefeller. His oldest son was now governor of the great state of New Jersey.

  The Ambassador would have no way of knowing that it had been Tom Hagen, while Genco was still consigliere, who’d taken care of that wartime news coverage.

  And even though the Ambassador thought he’d bought his ambassadorship-which was mostly true-it was Hagen who, behind the scenes, had secured it.

  It was Vito Corleone who’d taught Hagen the power of staying silent about such matters.

  Motorized iron gates glided open. The driver stopped the golf cart in front of a house made of stone blocks, designed like a half-scale replica of an English castle. A crew of Mexicans was laying sod and planting cactus. Shirtless, leather-skinned blond men on scaffolding were antiquing the stones with narrow brushes. Hagen thought his head would explode.

  “This way, sir.” The driver still made no eye contact.

  Hagen, squinting, wondering if three hundred more bucks could get him four aspirin and a pair of shades, headed up the front walk.

  “No, sir. This way.”

  Hagen looked up. The man was standing in the rocks of the unfinished yard. The driver took him around the side of the house to the pool, as if Hagen couldn’t be trusted to go through the house. Hagen checked his watch. Almost three. He would have to catch a later plane home.

  In the backyard, the pool was shaped like the letter P, a circle spliced onto a single lane for lap swimming. Around the perimeter of the circular part were seven identical white marble angels. The Ambassador sat at a stone table, shouting into a white telephone. A platter of meats and cheeses was set out. In front of the Ambassador was a plate smeared with mustard and strewn with crumbs. This arrogant fuckjob had already eaten. Plus he was stark naked (which might have thrown Hagen except that the last meeting he’d had with the Ambassador had taken place in the steam room of the Princeton Club). His skin was the color of rare prime rib. His chest and back were hairless as a fetal pig’s. He didn’t have sunglasses on either.

  “Hi ho!” he shouted at Hagen, though he was still on the phone.

  Hagen nodded. “Mr. Ambassador.”

  The Ambassador motioned for Hagen to sit down, which he did, and to eat up, which he did not. “Already ate,” Hagen mouthed, and he made a wincing gesture that indicated he was sorry for the misunderstanding.

  The Ambassador lowered his voice but kept on talking, cryptically, but the conversation seemed personal, not business. At one point he put his hand over the receiver and asked Hagen if he’d brought trunks. Hagen shook his head. “Too bad,” the Ambassador said.

  Naturally. Only a pezzonovante could sit there in his fluorescent altogether. Not that Hagen would have stripped naked and gone for a dip. The point, of course, was Shea’s rude semiassertion that he couldn’t.

  Finally, the Ambassador got off the phone.

  “Hey hey! It’s the Irish consigliere.” Cahn-sig-lee-airy.

  Hagen wondered if
the Ambassador really didn’t know how to pronounce the word or if the mispronunciation was willful, a joke on the “Irish” part of it.

  “German-Irish,” Hagen corrected.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” said the Ambassador.

  “And I’m just a lawyer,” Hagen said.

  “Even worse,” the Ambassador said-a strange thing to say, Hagen thought, for a man who’d sent four children to law school. “Drink?”

  “Ice water,” Hagen said. Said, not asked. In public, the Ambassador was a famously charming man. The lack of any apology had to be both on purpose and purposeful.

  “Nothing stronger?”

  “Ice water will be fine.” As a chaser to a fistful of aspirin. “Heavy on the ice.”

  “I quit boozing, too,” the Ambassador said, “other than a nip of Pernod from time to time.” He raised an iced half-empty glass. “Prune juice. Want some?” When Hagen shook his head, the Ambassador shouted for water. “My father went the same way as yours, you know? Drink. Curse of our people.”

  A young Negro woman in a French maid costume brought out a silver pitcher of ice water and one small crystal class. Hagen downed his water and refilled the glass himself. “Sorry to have missed you on the court,” he said, pantomiming a ground stroke. “I’ve been hearing for years you have quite a game.”

  The Ambassador looked at him as if he didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “From other people,” Hagen said.

  The Ambassador nodded, slapped together another sandwich, stood, waved for Hagen to follow him, walked to the side of the pool, and sat down on the top step of the shallow end of the circular part. His prick lolled in the water, half submerged before him. He tapped it, absently.

  “I’m fine right here, sir,” Hagen said. “In the shade. If you don’t mind.”

  “You’re missing out.” He held the sandwich in his teeth and made a show of splash-sprinkling water on himself, then bit off a chunk. As if it could see this, Hagen ’s stomach growled. “Refreshing,” the Ambassador said.