“We talked about it then,” Michael said. “At the time, it was more of an idea than an offer. His idea. Just talk. At the time, I believed that the revolution was far bigger than the charisma of one man. I didn’t think killing him would make any difference.”
“And now?”
“The same. Only now I don’t think it makes any difference if it makes a difference.”
More riddles. Tom took a slug of his drink.
“I love you,” Tom said, “but it may be time for you and me to go our separate ways. Professionally, at least.”
“I was thinking just the opposite,” Michael said.
“Whatever you’re thinking, I can tell you, I’ve had it up to here with being kept in the dark, enough of being in, then I’m out, then I’m in, then I’m out. I’m your brother, then I’m just your lawyer. I’m your consigliere, then I’m just another politician on your payroll, then I’m in charge of things while you’re out of the country, then I’m some fucking nothing that you don’t consult about a thing like this. You knew I wasn’t going to say anything one way or the other about-anything, really, in front of a man I’ve known since this morning, without talking to you about it first. Not to mention Corbett Shea. Yet for some secret reason I’ll have to puzzle out on my own, you set it up that way.”
“Look, Tom, there’s nothing to puzzle out. I wanted you to hear it from him first because it’s his operation. Not mine. We’d be performing a service. Mickey Shea is your reassurance that the president is behind this, too. You saw how angry Mickey was. For us, it’s business. Money, opportunity, power. For them it’s revenge. I wasn’t sure about that myself, but there was no better way to see it firsthand.”
Mickey Shea. Hagen had never heard anyone call him that but the Don, Vito.
“You want to talk about it, Tom, let’s talk. Doing this job at all is a big step. The fact that we need to do it with Geraci’s people makes it a bigger step. Theoretically we could use our men here in Nevada, but the only one who’s ready for something like this would be Al Neri, and we can’t risk losing him. This is more than likely a suicide mission. If we have Geraci’s men do it, either they succeed or they don’t. If they don’t, we’ll have set it up so that we have nothing to do with it. Any repercussions would be felt by him but not us. I’m retired, after all.”
Hagen crunched an ice cube from his drink, his eyes on the nearby darkness of the desert.
“It’s possible that they’ll succeed,” Michael said, “and yet the Communists stay in power. So what? The world is neither better nor worse, and we wind up with a little something for our trouble. But think of it, Tom. Think if it does make a difference. Freedom is restored, we’re back in business in Cuba. Legal, bigger than anything we have now. Our government and whatever sort of puppet regime the U.S. installs in Cuba will be indebted to us, enough to ensure that we get re-established down there ahead of any other Family. We can easily convince the others on the Commission that Geraci and his men were just our puppets. Any resentment for our having cooperated with the government will be quelled by the millions they’ll make because of us when Cuba reopens. In any case, though, no matter how all this plays out, we’d get half the money the government is prepared to pay and Geraci’d get the other half. He’ll never know that the whole thing came through us. Joe and his associates will approach him without mentioning us. We’ll get half what they’re paying, same as if Geraci gave us our share of any big deal, only in this case Joe will bring it to us directly. Geraci is too opportunistic, too aggressive, to turn down a chance like this. And he’s got all those Sicilians he can use on this job-brave, single-minded people with the added bonus of not having the rule about killing cops or government officials. In the unlikely event that Geraci does come to us and ask for our advice or our blessings, we simply say that we’re out of such things. If he offers us a share of the money, we politely decline. Only if his efforts are successful will he ever learn a thing-probably via his godfather, Don Forlenza. Again, so what? By then Geraci will be a hero, and he’ll owe it all to us. But the bottom line is this, Tom: I need someone beside me so smart and loyal that I’ll be-we’ll be-thinking with two brains. I can’t, and won’t, go ahead with this without you at my side.”
“You’ve already thought it out pretty well without me,” Hagen said. “You’d have your old pal Joe at your side. Neri at your side. Nick Geraci doing the dirty work. I’m not indispensable, Mike. Look at the body count in this thing of ours, and it’s been going on for centuries, turning a profit every year. None of it needs any of us.”
“Well, I need you, Tom. You’ve been dealing with the Ambassador for years. The president won’t do anything to us against the old man’s wishes.”
“You could send someone else. A lawyer, a judge, somebody like that.”
“You’re the only person on this earth I trust. You know that. There’s nothing I’ve ever done that cut you out because I didn’t value you or need you. I was only trying to protect you.”
“Protect me, huh?” he said. “Thank you very much.”
“What do you want me to say? You want me to say I’m human? That I’ve made mistakes, particularly when it comes to you, and that I’m sorry? Is that what you want?”
Tom sighed. “Of course not. What I want are some straight answers.”
Michael extended his arm in an after-you gesture. “Ask away, counselor.”
“Is that eye patch for real?”
“That’s your question?”
“I’m working up to the big ones.”
“He told me war wound. I never gave it a thought after that.”
“And he’s for real, too? This whole thing, you’re certain it’s on the level? The Ambassador may have helped get his son elected, but he has no official position. I’ve never trusted him, and I’m sure you don’t either.”
“Joe was my initial contact,” Michael said, “but when I decided we might go ahead with this, I insisted on meeting with Albert Soffet. When I was in Washington for the transition meetings, I didn’t meet with those people at all, as you know. But I did meet with Director Soffet. Even then, I thought this might be too big a risk. Like that bungled invasion, it was approved by the previous administration. What Joe said was true. Soffet told me the same thing. The U.S. military can’t invade Cuba because then the Russians will retaliate. If all the U.S. does is use economic sanctions, fifty years from now the place will still be in the hands of the Communists. But our government doesn’t dare do anything directly. So they need to come up with other means. They tried Plan A, and it failed. We’re Plan B.”
“So am I to assume this was somehow the real reason you quote-unquote retired?”
“Yes and no. Look, you already know nearly everything. You know more about the finances of the legitimate businesses than I do. There’s nothing about the things we did to help get the president elected that you don’t know. And as far as putting all the connection guys we have in one crew so that both Geraci and I can use them, independently of each other-hell, Tom, we’d call that a regime if you were Sicilian.”
Tom took another long drink.
“That was supposed to be a joke,” Michael said.
Hagen rattled the ice in his glass. “Hear that? That’s me laughing.”
A siren wailed, and then another. Two fire trucks sped by. There was a big fire on the far edge of town.
“Okay. So you’re right. I didn’t tell you everything. I had two other things I had to address. I couldn’t do those things as a completely private citizen, so I engineered the deal with the Commission that-well, Jesus, Tom, you put that together, too.”
“So one of those two things you’re talking about is this job in Cuba?”
“No. Cuba is just a means to an end.”
Tom patted his coat, looking for a cigar, and found one in his breast pocket. He was softening. He had an orphan’s distrust of the stability of all human bonds, yet he knew in his heart he was destined to be Michael’s consigliere, now a
nd forever.
Michael flicked his lighter. He kept the flame awfully high for a cigarette smoker.
Hagen bit off the tip of his Cuban cigar.
“Thanks,” Hagen said. “Nice lighter.”
“It was a gift,” Michael said.
“The other two things?” Hagen said.
As Michael lit a new cigarette for himself, he pointed to the Kasbah. “Number one.”
“Fontane?” Hagen said. “I’m getting tired of the guessing.”
“Fontane?” Michael scoffed. “No, no, no. I meant Russo. If I retired, truly retired, Louie Russo’s gotten so much power the last few years that the Commission would end up making him boss of bosses, which would be a great blow to our interests, particularly here and in Lake Tahoe. Cuba, too, if and when it opens up. He’d come after us, and we’d be powerless to stop him. We have a whole crew of men here, but it’s relatively small and primarily muscle. Without a seat on the Commission and with Russo as capo di tutti capi, we’d get outfought politically, which would be the end of us.”
“True,” Hagen agreed.
The deejay came on the radio, said they’d been listening to a selection from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, then grew very excited about the beer commercial he was doing.
“Not to mention, if Russo does become boss of bosses, knowing the way the Ambassador thinks, I’m concerned that Fuckface would have better access to the president than we would.”
“I guess I had that one half figured out already,” Tom said. “I never heard you call him that before, though. I never heard you call any Don by a nickname.”
“Well, the reason for that leads me to my second thing.” Michael smiled. It was not a smile with any mirth at all. “You want to know who gave me this lighter?”
“Let me guess. Russo.”
“All of a sudden you want to take guesses? No, Tom. Not Russo.”
Michael told him about Geraci.
He told him about trying to kill Geraci.
He told him about the need to try again, when the time was right.
Hagen listened in silence, knowing he should be angry for having been kept out in the cold for so long, fighting back the elation he was feeling instead.
He got himself another Jack Daniel’s. Michael, who almost never drank, not even wine, asked him to make him one, too.
“Question,” Hagen said, handing Michael his glass. “What’s to keep the CIA from doing the same thing to us that you’re planning to do to Geraci? Use us for the job and then dispose of us when it’s done?”
“Good to be working with you like this again,” Michael said.
“And?”
“Touché,” Michael admitted. “That’s the tricky part. But we have the connections to pit the Bureau against the Company and vice versa, at least to an extent. And, don’t forget, we do have a family member at the Justice Department.”
“Who, Billy Van Arsdale?” Hagen scoffed. “That kid still thinks he got the job because of his parents’ connections. He’s going to do everything he can to keep his distance from us.”
“He’ll do what we need him to do,” Michael said, “which is to be our personal canary in the coal mine. He’s ambitious, and he resents us. He’s afraid his connection to us by marriage is why he’s stuck in the law library instead of holding press conferences or going to court. We don’t need to use our connections to get him promoted to something better. He’ll use us-what he thinks he knows about us-to get the job done. After that, we ask him, politely, for his help.”
“In other words,” Hagen said, biting his lip to keep from grinning, “we make him an offer he can’t refuse. It’s brilliant, Mike. The old man would be proud.”
Vito Corleone had never set foot in Las Vegas, but the two men on that balcony felt the force of his legacy press down on them like a warm, firm hand.
“We’ll see,” he said. “The final test of any plan is its execution.”
“To execution,” Hagen said. They clanked glasses and drank to his grim pun.
Book VIII. 1961 – 1962
Chapter 28
S O IT WAS that Michael Corleone and Nick Geraci began their final year in business together in a state of perfect Cold War stalemate.
They’d each attacked the other and thought, mistakenly, that the other didn’t know.
They were both frozen by a secret they thought they were harboring, wary at all times of tipping their hands.
They might have been eager to kill each other now, too, but they couldn’t.
It wasn’t safe for Geraci to make a move against Michael (or Russo, for that matter) without the blessings of the Commission, which would be essentially impossible without being on the Commission. Just as important, killing Michael Corleone might also mean killing the most powerful army of on-the-take politicians, judges, union officials, cops, fire marshals, building inspectors, coroners, newspaper and magazine editors, TV news producers, and strategically placed clerk-typists the world has ever known. No one but Michael and Hagen knew everyone the Family had on the payroll and everything about how that operation worked, and Hagen seemed incorruptible. Michael had toyed with Hagen’s dignity, but those two needed each other the way old married people do. Even if Geraci was wrong about this, he was right: the risk of trying to flip Hagen was too great. Maybe one chance in a thousand it’d work, nine hundred ninety-nine it’d get Geraci killed. Even if Geraci did get rid of Michael, it was hard to imagine Hagen-out in Nevada, not even Italian, no chance of taking over the operation-saying, Okay, Nick, here’s how this thing works. Even the indirect access Geraci now had to that machine of connections was too valuable to jeopardize.
As for Michael, he needed Geraci far too much to kill him. Who else could oversee this business in Cuba? Michael needed someone who’d pick the right men, get the job done, and yet after the job was done be disposable: Geraci to a T.
More important, who else would, during this transition phase, seem like a credible boss to the other Dons? Kill Geraci now, and Michael would kill any chance he had of keeping the pledge he’d made to his wife and his father.
His ex-wife. His dead father.
No matter. Divorce and death are terrible things, but a man who uses them to break a promise cannot consider himself a man of honor.
Nick Geraci hadn’t noticed his shaking problem until the day Michael Corleone told him he was the new Boss. It didn’t completely go away after that, but it was barely noticeable, easily explained away (chills, coffee jitters) until that summer, about the time he first went out to New Jersey with Joe Lucadello (whom he believed to be “Agent Ike Rosen”) to visit the swampy tract of land Geraci had found when he and Fredo had been planning Colma East. Whatever the merits of Fredo’s plan, the land had been a steal. Geraci had used the barn for various storage needs and otherwise sat on the property. Anytime he wanted to, he could sell it for twice what he paid.
They all drove there together, Donnie Bags at the wheel and Carmine Marino, the baby-faced zip, also up front. Rosen wore an eye patch and didn’t seem Jewish at all. He’d brought another agent, a tight-jawed WASP whose name was supposedly Doyle Flower. The same congressman who’d told Geraci that Michael never met with anyone on the presidential transition team had spoken about all this with Director Albert Soffet, who’d apparently confirmed that Rosen and Flower were indeed CIA field agents. Nonetheless, Geraci used a trail car, with Eddie Paradise and some muscle, just as a precaution.
They turned down the rutted, muddy road to the barn. Rogue garbage trucks and private citizens had for years been using this place as a dump. The property was pocked with stoves, toilets, and the rusting hulks of cars and farm machinery. That island of debris in the scum pond was a portion of what had once been Ebbets Field.
“Good place to plant your stiffs, I bet,” Rosen said.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Geraci said, which was true. Any recent bodies on the property would have been the work of civilians. Mob guys out here-Stracci’s people, for
the most part-knew who owned the place and respected that. “We’re the best boogeyman the cops ever invented. Every time you guys find a body rolled up in a carpet, we get blamed.”
“We’re not cops,” Rosen said.
“My granny had one of those things,” Flower said, meaning Donnie’s colostomy bag.
“You get used to it,” Donnie said. “Probably like your friend’s pirate thing there.”
“Did you shit?” Rosen said. “It smells like shit in here.”
Donnie rounded a bend so hard a flume of mud shot up and was about to say something stupid when Carmine interrupted him. “Is not his shit, that smell. Is New Jersey.”
Flower and Geraci both laughed, which cooled things off. Carmine was a born leader. He was almost thirty but looked ten years younger. He was related to the Bocchicchios on his mother’s side and was also a godson of Cesare Indelicato, the Palermitan Don who’d been Geraci’s partner in the narcotics business from the beginning. The kid had originally come over to be a hostage during the first meeting of all the Families. Five years later, and he was already running a crew of fellow zips over on Knickerbocker Avenue.
Two cars were parked behind the barn. It was broad daylight, but they were both bobbing with illicit coitus.
“The only real problem we have out here,” Geraci said, “as far as the locals go, is this.”
The trail car pulled up behind them. Only Eddie Paradise got out.
“You’re shaking as much as those cars are,” Rosen said. “You okay?”
“Donnie and his fucking air-conditioning,” Geraci said, though it hadn’t been particularly cold in the car. He got out of the car. Moving around helped make the shaking stop.
Carmine got out, too. In one fluid motion, he drew a pistol from the waistband of his pants and fired three hollow-point slugs into the barn siding.
The trespassing cars began to lurch in place; inside, the terrified fornicators clawed at their strewn-about clothing. Carmine fired another shot.
The Godfather returns Page 48