The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  About a week later, Rosen told Geraci he’d been authorized to send another three men in, this time on a low-flying seaplane, under the radar, delivered right to a trusted operative who’d be waiting on the beach. Geraci was told he could recommend one man. Geraci insisted on two. One or nothing, the agent said. Geraci picked Carmine. The Sicilian soldato told Geraci not to worry; he was as good as two men, any two.

  A few days after that, Geraci was out in his office behind the pool, reading the same two-volume history of Roman warfare that had been defeating him off and on for seven years, when Charlotte knocked on the door. “There was a call.” She was ticked off. The longer they’d been married, the more she seemed to resent taking messages for him, especially from callers who didn’t identify themselves. “Whoever it was, he wanted me to tell you that they’re in. That’s it. ‘They’re in.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Yes.” In Cuba, of course. And from where he sat it meant everything.

  “How’s that book coming?” she said.

  “Books,” Geraci said. “Two volumes. When’s the last time you read anything that wasn’t flashed up on a television screen? And as a matter of fact, I’m making headway.”

  It was still dark outside as Tom Hagen left the Palmer House and caught a cab to go see Louie Russo. Theresa was asleep in their hotel room upstairs. Later this morning she had a meeting at the Art Institute of Chicago-some kind of national museum board consortium. Tomorrow they’d drive over to South Bend, to see not just Andrew but also Frankie Corleone, Sonny’s oldest kid, who was starting at middle linebacker for the Fighting Irish and had gotten them tickets for the last home game of the year, against Syracuse, Theresa’s alma mater. Hagen had been looking forward to this weekend for a long time.

  Hagen would have rather taken a limo, but he couldn’t risk taking anything so prearranged. The cabbie was classic Chicago, spewing profanity and cheerful complaints about some sports team. Hagen had a lot on his mind. He’d had only two cups of coffee. He was sweating. He didn’t feel nervous, and it wasn’t hot in the car. Probably it had to do with his blood pressure, so high his doctor might not have been joking when he’d said that one day Hagen might just pop, like an engorged tick. The driver kept yapping. Hagen did nothing to discourage it. The more the guy talked, the less he’d remember his passenger.

  Russo had a private supper club out in the sticks, almost in Wisconsin. Even against the flow of morning traffic, the drive took more than an hour. It seemed almost as long from the gate and across the expanse of parking lot to the club itself-a white barn made of painted cinder blocks. Though it didn’t seem like much, this place managed to book singers like Johnny Fontane, all the top comics, even the Ice Capades. A sign over the door read HECTOR SANTIAGO, THE KING OF RUMBA! The shows were never advertised but always sold out. Next to the barn was a square pond about the size of four city blocks and surrounded by pine trees. The water was barely visible and black as tar. On the other side of the pond was a nondescript, windowless, three-story warehouse that had been converted into a casino. At night, gondoliers poled guests back and forth across the pond. Russo was unduly proud of the place; by all accounts, it was impossible to come see him here on business and leave without getting a tour of his precious casino. Even so, Hagen had to admire the amount of work that had gone into bribing all the cops it would have taken so that Louie Russo’s customers could arrive at his illegal gambling joint right out in the open, in something as slow as a gondola.

  Behind the club, an old farmhouse had been expanded and converted into a guesthouse. Russo kept an office in the biggest room upstairs. To get there, Hagen had to go through some kind of metal-detecting device and then though a steel door, the kind they have on bank vaults. As Hagen expected, two of Russo’s goons sat in an outer room, each with a tommy gun across his lap. One got up, gave him a lazy search, and waved him into his boss’s lair.

  “If it ain’t the world’s only Mick consigliere!” Russo said. He had on a pair of diamond cuff links. “What an honor.”

  Hagen thanked him and sat down in the offered seat. Russo remained standing, a crude and petty assertion of control.

  “Michael Corleone,” Hagen said, “is prepared to support you as capo di tutti capi and to resign his seat on the Commission, which will go to Nick Geraci, so long as you and I can reach an understanding on a few small matters.”

  “Hey, you hear this guy?’ Russo called down the hall to the men with guns. “Listen, Irish. Where I come from, we don’t get fucked without first we get kissed. Get my meaning?”

  Hagen did. “I’m German-Irish,” he corrected. “And I meant no offense, Don Russo. I know you’re a busy man, and I thought you’d appreciate it if I got right to the point.”

  “Coffee? Shit, where are my manners? How about a cocktail, Irish?”

  “Coffee’s perfect,” Hagen said. It was from a percolator, but it would have to do. “Thank you.”

  Russo frowned. “Hey, are you okay? Because it ain’t hot in here.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “My ma used to say being fine is more a decision than a condition.”

  “Smart woman.”

  “Yeah, well, you look like either you’re scared out of your wits or else you got some kind of whatchacallit. Tropical fever. Like from the jungles. Hey, boys?” he called. “My Mick friend in here could maybe use a towel.”

  “All I need is coffee,” Hagen said, downing the cup in two long swallows.

  “Only person I ever had in here who sweated the way you are was wearing a wire.”

  “Is that right?”

  Russo nodded.

  Hagen raised his arms. “Search me,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

  Russo wasn’t too proud-or respectful-to do it, either. Russo searched him. No wire, of course. Russo again motioned for Hagen to sit. Hagen paused, waiting for Russo to sit, too.

  “A few small matters, eh?” Russo settled in behind his desk. “Like for instance what?”

  From the small third-story balcony of a boarded-up library in downtown Cienfuegos, Carmine Marino loaded the Russian-made rifle he’d been set up to use and waited for the motorcade to come his way. He’d lost the two angry Cubans he’d come with the night they all landed. The only Spanish he spoke was corrupted Italian, but he managed to make his way across two hundred miles of a dictatorship to the two women spies who gave him the rest of his instructions. Carmine was naturally disappointed when he did not have hot sex with them in the dark and sultry Cuban night. Who ever heard of a female spy who didn’t have sex with a dashing assassin such as himself? Why else be an assassin such as himself? There were two of them, and still nothing. It was confusing. Maybe they were dykes. Maybe he wasn’t the man he thought he was. If he got out of this alive, he thought, he’d go back to that one-eyed Jew and tell him that if he knew what was good for him, he’d find the brave Carmine Marino a buxom, randy spy, and pronto. Carmine was nobody’s fool. He knew that girls like that were out there.

  The streets were lined with soldiers and cheering Cubans. As the motorcade approached, the sound the people made was oddly metallic, like a record of a cheering crowd played too loud and a little too fast. As a toddler in Sicily, Carmine had heard another despot, Mussolini, cheered this way.

  Now the motorcade turned the corner by the cathedral and came toward him, a row of American cars, which was hilarious. These people hate the Americans, yet look. Carmine shouldered his rifle.

  In the fourth car-a blue convertible, as promised-was the bearded target, in full military uniform, smiling beatifically and waving to his oppressed people.

  Marino inhaled smoothly and squeezed the trigger.

  The bearded man’s head jerked backward. A shower of blood and gore arced over the trunk. The driver hit the gas.

  Screams filled the air. Police waved the rest of the motorcade-including the black sedan two cars behind the convertible, in which the leader of Cuba was riding-down a side street and out of the city.
<
br />   The man in the blue convertible, the dictator’s favorite double, was dead.

  Carmine Marino was captured on his way to Guantánamo Bay, dressed like a woman.

  Louie Russo agreed to everything. The Corleones could, with no interference from Chicago, operate their hotels and casinos in Nevada. Atlantic City, too, if, as expected, things opened up there. Hagen admitted that Geraci’s assassin squad operation was ultimately controlled by the Corleones, and Russo admitted, in so many words, that he controlled the ones run by Tramonti and Drago. They might be rivals, these Families, but they had more in common with one another than with the cynical opportunists at the CIA and in the White House.

  After a brief discussion of the particulars, Russo agreed that if his people did the job in Cuba first, the Corleones could resume control of the Capri and the Sevilla Biltmore and operate them within the law and with no interference from Russo or any other organization-power Russo would certainly have once Michael helped make him the first formal boss of all bosses since the death of Vito Corleone seven years before.

  Hagen himself would personally oversee the organization of the people on the Corleone payroll. Some of this operation would be gradually given to Nick Geraci, but it would also be available to Louie Russo on occasion and in consideration of his help in allowing Michael Corleone to become an entirely legitimate businessman.

  Russo was so cooperative that it became increasingly clear to Tom Hagen that Fuckface didn’t plan to let him out of here alive. It was something he and Michael had thought might happen. Knowing that a thing like that might happen is a world apart from feeling it edge closer to happening. The sweating hadn’t slowed down. He’d have given a thousand bucks for a chance to shower and put on some dry clothes.

  “This is a great day, Irish,” Russo said. “We should celebrate. I’ll join you, too, only I was kidding about the cocktail before. I don’t have nothing here stronger than that coffee and the bad breath of those gentlemen out in the hall. The bar in the club there’s all right, but the really top-shelf stuff, best selection in the state of Illinois, is right across Lake Louie there.”

  It wasn’t even nine A.M.

  “I appreciate that,” Hagen said. “But tempting as it is, I need to be getting back.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Irish. You don’t drink on it, it ain’t a deal. On top of which, since you people are going to be in the legal casino business-I pity you the money you ain’t gonna make, but no one asked you to go down that road-anyway, you ought to get a last look at my establishment here, which at the risk of not being humble I have to say I’m proud of. It don’t open up for a while yet, but-” Russo took off his black glasses. His eyes were solidly red with a green ring in the middle. He smiled.

  The chill that went through Tom Hagen was not a result of the sweating and the air-conditioning, though that’s what he told himself.

  “-I know some people,” Russo said. “Ever take a gondola ride?”

  “Can’t say I have,” Hagen said.

  Russo herded him out the door. The men with the tommy guns stood. “Get this,” Russo said. “Irish here ain’t ever been on a gondola ride. If that ain’t one of those things a man ought to do before he dies, I’d like to know what is.”

  Joe Lucadello walked to the front door of Nick Geraci’s house, in the middle of the night, and rang the bell. Geraci had fallen asleep in the chair in his den out back. Charlotte had taken a sleeping pill and was dead to the world. Barb was off at college. After several rings, Bev Geraci answered, but only through the intercom.

  “Tell your father it’s Ike Rosen.”

  “Will he know what this is about?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “What happened to your eye?” she asked. “Is that real?”

  “It is. It’s from a war wound.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Bev said.

  Lucadello flipped the eye patch up. Even through the peephole, the absence of an eyeball was gory enough to make the girl scream and run away. Lucadello sighed, sat down on the porch steps, and waited for the police to come. That was another brilliant thing these people had worked out. The police functioned as their private security force, and other people-civilians-would summon them when needed.

  Two squad cars responded. Cops piled out of them, guns drawn. Lucadello raised his hands. He provided them with his Ike Rosen driver’s license and told them he was in the import-export business with Mr. Geraci. He was there at such an ungodly hour only because of an unfortunate customs incident. By then, the commotion had awakened Nick Geraci, who thanked the cops and calmed his daughter down. Then he and the agent went back out to his den.

  Lucadello sat down on one of the seats Geraci had salvaged from the wreckage of Ebbets Field and gave Geraci the news about Carmine.

  “Rest assured,” Geraci said, “whatever they do to him, that kid’s not going to talk.”

  “Whether he talks may be the least of your problems.”

  “Oh yeah?” Geraci wasn’t sure what the agent was talking about, but his choice of pronouns-your problems, not our problems-didn’t bode well.

  “The Cuban government would be nuts to torture him. They’d be nuts to do anything but make a big fuss about this foreign national who tried to kill their bearded, beloved revolutionary sweetheart. The Russians will be on their side. The U.N. will get dragged in. When they deport him, there won’t be anything for us to do but put him in jail, maybe execute him.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Geraci said. “Carmine Marino’s still an Italian citizen. If they send him back there, he’s got a pretty powerful godfather.”

  Lucadello shook his head. “You don’t understand. We need to execute him a long time before any of that happens. But that’s just where your problems start, I’m afraid.”

  Geraci would be goddamned if he was going to let this one-eyed bastard kill him in his own backyard. “Stand up,” Geraci said. “I need to search you.”

  “Suit yourself. But if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. And if you waste precious time on things like this, you may wind up that way.”

  Geraci searched him anyway and liberated him of a gun and two knives.

  “Keep ’em with my compliments,” Lucadello said. “I’m on your side, remember?”

  Geraci motioned for him to sit back down. “It’s late. I was sleeping. Forgive me if I’m confused about why this is my problem and not yours, too.”

  “Oh, it’s mine, too. Look, I’ve already heard from somebody at the top-not my boss but his-that the FBI knows about the camp Tramonti was operating in Jacksonville. They already had an investigation going. I’d heard a rumor floating around that the Bureau was somehow tipped off to our operation, too, but it didn’t seem credible. But after this incident, it doesn’t matter. The risk of someone at the Bureau putting it all together is high.”

  “And you can’t protect me from that? There’s nothing you can do?”

  “Very little, under these circumstances,” he said. “I’d like to kill those guys.”

  “Kill ’em, then,” Geraci said. “I’m not stopping you.”

  “Unfortunately,” Lucadello said, “that’s not an option. It wouldn’t solve everything for you anyway. We have reliable intelligence that your former associate Michael Corleone has been planning to kill you. The only thing he’s been waiting for was for you to do this job. Now that you’re not going to get it done at all, we believe your life is in immediate danger. In addition, we have somewhat less reliable intelligence that Louie Russo is planning to kill you as well, apparently because… well, I don’t know how everything works for you people, but apparently there’s some sort of Commission?”

  Geraci shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

  “Of course not. At any rate, everything Russo’s doing had their approval and unfortunately your operation didn’t. Apparently that’s a breach of protocol severe enough for them to authorize… well, we’re not certain who. Presumably Mr. Russo. To kill you, that is. You’re not sha
king.”

  “It comes and goes.”

  “If something like this was happening with me, I’d be shaking.”

  “It’s a type of Parkinson’s. Not fear. It has nothing to do with fear. And anyway, how do you know something like this isn’t happening with you?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s happening,” he said. “At any rate, things are going to move fast, and you need to move faster.”

  “Not we?”

  “No,” Lucadello said. “Not we. We never had anything to do with anything. You and I have never met. There is no we. There is no me, either. Agent Ike Rosen doesn’t exist.”

  Lucadello said that the best he could do was get Nick Geraci and his family out of there. One-way tickets under assumed names, to any destination on earth. It might be possible to have an agent meet them at the airport and give them some quick pointers about starting a new life in wherever they happened to be. This wouldn’t be possible everywhere, but if Geraci wanted to run a few locations by him, he could probably say if they were a good choice.

  Geraci looked at the gun on his desk. It would have been nice to kill the guy. It might not make anything worse than it was.

  Then, in a flash, almost a vision, he saw his way out of this, or at least how to buy some time.

  “All right,” Geraci said, extending his hand, consciously imitating his godfather, Vincent Forlenza. “Four things. First”-index finger-“I’m going to Sicily. I don’t need your people. I have people. Second”-middle finger-“I don’t fly. Period. But you’re going to help me get where I want to go, and my family, too, if they’ll join me, which I doubt. Third”-ring finger-“I promise you, my good friend Michael Corleone isn’t going to kill me, so you might want to check into your reliable intelligence and see what went wrong. And fourth”-pinkie-“I’d strongly advise you not to kill Carmine Marino or to have him killed.”