CHAPTER 19
The weekend before the California presidential primary, Memorial Day weekend, Tom and Theresa Hagen flew separately to the West Coast and met at the Los Angeles airport. The limousine had actually met Tom at the airstrip on Senator Pat Geary’s ranch, just outside Las Vegas, and, after a quick meeting with the senator, driven him the rest of the way. Theresa left their daughters with her sister-in-law and went Pan Am.
She came out of the terminal and did not, at first, see his limo among the many. She wore what Tom was fairly sure was a new green dress, high-necked and snug in the right places but classy. Her hair was cut short—much shorter than Tom liked or even than he’d thought fashionable—and was darker, too.
The driver got out and held up the sign with her maiden name on it, just to be perfectly safe about not attracting attention.
Theresa looked like she’d lost some weight. She looked pale. She’d come from Florida and she looked pale.
The driver opened the door for her. “You look great,” Tom said.
“You like it?” Theresa said, touching the back of her hairdo.
“I do,” he said.
“Liar,” she said. “Don’t give me that look. I always know. Always have, always will.”
He couldn’t say anything to that. This was how it was going to have to be for a while. For a while, he’d just have to brace himself and take it like a man.
The car pulled away. Tom finally reached over to embrace her, and she pulled back a little. Then she sighed, exasperated, and they embraced.
Exasperated at herself, Tom realized. For being here, he supposed. For caving in and making peace for the good of the children, sure. But also because—the event that triggered it—she wanted to see Jack Woltz’s art collection.
Tom had begged her and begged her to come back to New York or at least see him, yet when she’d finally relented and invited him to Florida for Memorial Day weekend, it turned out that was a bad time. He had to go away that weekend on business. She’d asked him what kind of business he had on a holiday weekend, and instead of the usual long silence he gave her when yet again she asked him to talk about his business, he’d answered her. He was going to meet with Jack Woltz, he said. He wouldn’t have needed to name that name, and he was honestly unaware at the time that he had any motive more ulterior than to be more honest with her from now on, at least to the degree circumstances allowed. But he was also aware, looking back, that he’d baited the hook and cast the line and Theresa had bitten. Jack Woltz the movie producer? she’d said, and he’d said, Is there another Jack Woltz? and she said that she was asking because she knew someone who knew his curator. Curator for what? Tom said. For his art, she said. He’s got one on retainer. He’s supposedly got pieces in his country house that haven’t been seen in public in fifty years or more. She asked Tom if he could get her in to see it, the house. Tom said he didn’t know if that was something he could swing. He said he’d already set it up to meet Woltz at his office on the studio lot. He didn’t tell her that Woltz had also said that he and his new wife were having several friends out to his house in Palm Springs for the weekend and had invited Tom to come and bring the family, too, if he wanted, which at the time Hagen had taken as a wisecrack. He also didn’t relish the thought of spending the night—much less two or three nights—under the same roof as degenerates like Jack Woltz and the dope-fiend surfers he imagined Woltz’s new wife’s friends to be. But Theresa had him over a barrel. You don’t know if you can swing it? she’d scoffed. She said that she knew him. She didn’t have her head in the sand, she’d said. You can set up anything you want to set up. Don’t pretend you can’t. He’d told her she was overestimating him, and she said there was little chance of that.
And now here they were. Heading to goddamned Jack Woltz’s house for the weekend.
There are times a man wants to cut off his own prick.
Not really.
Tom gave his wife a kiss.
“Take it slow,” she said to Tom.
The driver, just merging onto the freeway, slowed down.
“Not you,” Theresa said to him. Tom toggled the partition closed.
THEY STOPPED FOR A QUICK ROMANTIC DINNER ON the way—a French bistro Tom had heard about from Fontane, who, to give the devil his due, knew how to impress a lady. Despite the precautions, the FBI caught up to them there. They were following him most of the time now. When Theresa went to the ladies’ room, he sent a waiter out to their car to see if the agents wanted anything to eat, on him.
He and Theresa arrived in Palm Springs at twilight.
In the almost twenty years between Tom Hagen’s visits to Jack Woltz’s estate in Palm Springs, it had been transformed. When Tom had been there to discuss casting Fontane in that war picture, the place had looked like a movie-set replica of a British country manor—so studied in its detail that every bloom in the garden, every newly acquired painting by an old master, every graceful curve of the bridle paths, exaggerated the fakery. Now it had become a fortified monstrosity. Woltz had bought the houses on either side of him and had them bulldozed. The security guards had been replaced by black-clad machine-gun-bearing veterans of the Israeli army. Around the perimeter of the property now was an iron-bar fence about twenty feet high and spiked at the top, fabricated to Woltz’s specifications by an ironworks whose principal clients were prisons. Closed-circuit televisions were everywhere.
“Those bars,” Theresa Hagen said. “Are they to keep people out or in?”
Though Woltz’s reputation as a cocksman was public knowledge, his taste for young girls was not. Theresa knew about it only through Tom.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Tom said.
Theresa bowed her head slightly and looked up at him with her eyebrows arched in an exaggerated way, as a teacher might regard a student who couldn’t possibly be as stupid as the answer he’d just blurted out.
The FBI agents had pulled their car to the side of the road, about two hundred yards away. Guards waved the Hagens’ limo through the gate. It glided shut behind them.
“Fine,” Tom said. “But don’t tell me this doesn’t bother you.”
Theresa shrugged him off, so worn down by other bothersome things, apparently, that a hulking jail-door fence and machine-gun-bearing commandos were merely today’s fresh hell.
As the limo came around a bend in the driveway, Tom stared out the window in stunned silence. He’d heard about the changes from Johnny, but seeing them for himself was still a shock. Gone were the estate’s tennis courts and topiary. Gone were the long rows of stables with their Victorian façades and their gleaming modern interiors. The golf-green pastures where Thoroughbreds once frolicked and the movie mogul chomped his cigars and bragged about them to guests had been replaced by long, featureless lawns and a bunkerlike structure with a marquee salvaged from an old movie palace incongruously appended to the front. On it were the names of the motion pictures that Woltz’s studio had in current release.
The mansion itself had been remodeled so drastically by Woltz, in collaboration with his new wife, that if Tom hadn’t known better, he’d have presumed the old one had been torn down altogether. They’d stripped away the curlicues and cupolas, sheathed the gray stonework in something beige and smooth, supplanted the contrived Old World grandeur with long glass walls, harsh right angles, and frank, cement-loving modernity.
Next to the mansion, and blocking it slightly from view, the spring-fed swimming pool remained. The statues surrounding it—and in it, too, on pedestals and in fountains—had multiplied: there were at least two hundred of them now. Most were earnest neoclassical life-size metal casts of political leaders in swallowtail frocks or military heroes on horseback. But he also had a few incongruous marble nudes—the usual chubby women swooning against one another in twos and threes—and several gaunt contemporary pieces as well. The statues were crammed close together, with no discernible pattern.
Theresa was agog, speculating about different pie
ces, throwing out names Hagen didn’t recognize: Thorvaldsen, Carpeaux, Crocetti, Lehmbruck, Count Troubetsky, Lord Leighton. Tom loved that about her: how much she knew and how jazzed she got about it. Hagen wasn’t sure he could have named a sculptor other than Michelangelo. But he appreciated culture, and he loved being married to a woman who knew things like that. Even more, he loved being married to a woman who (unlike most of the women he’d known growing up) had daily creative passions that extended well beyond the laundry and the Sunday gravy. Theresa knew what great art fetched at auction, yet somehow her first reaction to any piece wasn’t what it cost or how it would appreciate but rather how beautiful it was, what the artist had accomplished, how it made Theresa feel. Which Tom loved.
“Were they always arranged like that?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “There were fewer pieces. The…I don’t know. The flow was better.”
“Who would do that?” Theresa said. “How could a person take so much beauty and make it look like a garage sale? Why would a person do that?”
“His new wife doesn’t like sculpture,” Tom said. “She’s in a religious group that thinks a sculptured likeness of a human being is a graven idol or robs a person’s soul.” He shrugged. “It’s California. Kooky ideas are written on the wind. All I know is, right after she moved in, she had every statue in the mansion carted out here. Her religion is one of those free-spirit ones, but somehow it also has a rule against men and women using the same swimming pools, so since Woltz takes a half-mile swim every morning, the pool’s just a place she doesn’t go. Actually, I heard he built another one for her someplace.”
Theresa seemed as if she had other questions about the wife’s peculiarities, but when they came around the final bend in the road, she burst out laughing.
“Get it out of your system now,” Tom said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Madonn’. Oh, my God, I need my camera.”
In the middle of the oval drive in front of the mansion, a crew of workers swarmed around a cast of Rodin’s The Thinker. They were in the process of moving it. On the far side of the house, on a flatbed truck parked in a stone lot, next to what must have been cars belonging to the other guests (convertibles, foreign jobs) was the newest addition to the collection—a commissioned bronze cast of Jack Woltz himself on the occasion of his fiftieth year in show business, conspicuously larger than life, arms outstretched, the thumb and index finger of each hand making a right angle: a movie frame.
“It’s a miracle he didn’t have it done in a Roman toga,” Tom said.
“Or nude,” Theresa said, regaining her composure. “The way Napoleon did.”
“There are nude statues of Napoleon?”
“There’s Canova’s Marte Pacificatore. The original’s in London somewhere, but I saw a bronze cast of it in Milan last year.”
“You were in Milan last year?”
“We were all in Milan last year,” she said. “You don’t remember? The whole family, except you. You had whatever it was that came up at the last minute.”
“I remember. I thought you went to the Riviera. France.”
“We did go to the Riviera,” she said. “We flew into Milan, and took a train. I showed you the pictures.”
“Thaaaaat’s right,” he said. “Now I remember.”
“You see? You’re such a good liar with everyone else and such a bad one with me.”
She was wrong. He was a horrendous liar, period. He operated in a world in which everything he said was not less than factual, where deception lurked only in what was not said. Michael wants to see you isn’t a lie when, for example, it’s shorthand for Michael wants to see you killed. Or Michael wants to see you get in this fucking car and never come back, you fucking cocksucker, you goddamned traitor. Typically, the only person Tom Hagen lied to was Theresa. In a perverse way, it was a compliment. Confessing this, though, seemed like an unpromising way back into her heart. “I’m a bad liar with you,” Tom said, “because I don’t feel about everyone else the way I feel about you.”
“That,” she said, “isn’t so much a lie as a sentence full of loopholes.” The limo driver opened the door now. Members of the household staff had rushed to get the suitcases. One of the former Israeli commandos stood ready to escort the Hagens to the front door.
Theresa patted him on the knee. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go have some fun.”
THE MEN WITH THE MACHINE GUNS ON EITHER SIDE of the front door did not acknowledge the arrival or even the presence of the Hagens. They had apparently been given the order to stand as still and be as imperturbable as the guards at Buckingham Palace.
Tom Hagen had never been this close to real machine guns, and it seemed to be bothering him more than it did Theresa. She went up the last few stairs ahead of him and rang the bell with no visible anxiety.
A uniformed butler opened the door and a blast of air-conditioning—another new addition—nearly knocked them over. The butler was British—or sounded convincing enough—and young for the job, maybe thirty-five, with the long, sloping nose typical of both royals and their senior staff. His haircut was a perfect re-creation of President Shea’s.
From somewhere in the house came the sound of distant laughter and the kind of guitar-slinger rock-and-roll music often associated with surfers and dopers, although Tom was familiar with it only because Connie’s oldest, Vic, played it all the time, too.
The butler showed them through the dark and echo-filled main hallway. They seemed to be going away from the music. The furnishings, incongruously, seemed about the same as they’d been before the remodeling: thick rugs, hand-carved tables and chairs with mythical creatures carved into the legs and backs, lushly upholstered chairs and settees that seemed to have been designed primarily as good places for a corseted Victorian lady to faint. The mansion’s thick velvet curtains were drawn, and it was hard to get a great look at the artwork, but that didn’t seem so different, either. Every wall in every room still had at least one piece on it that had no doubt cost a bundle. Theresa was keeping her excitement to herself, though it was obvious to Tom that she wanted to stop in front of every painting and study it.
Contemporary art was her specialty—it was also what the Hagens could afford—but Theresa got a thrill from any good private collection. In a museum, she’d explained to him years earlier, you feel like the art belongs to the world, but in a private collection, you’re aware of ownership. It’s what makes good private collections so exciting. Ninety percent of the thrill is the work itself, but that last ten percent made Theresa’s world go around. Some person owns this, she’d think, and the more she’d think about it—while face-to-face with genius and beauty—the tougher time she’d have accepting that that person wasn’t her.
Woltz was waiting for them in the same glass-paneled sun porch where he’d received Hagen the first time. Johnny Fontane and Francesca Corleone sat together on the buttercream leather love seat next to him. Francesca was brandishing a martini, Johnny his usual whiskey and water. They looked dressed for a board meeting, and they were soaked in sweat. The room was an oven. Seeing the Hagens, they all rose.
Seeing Johnny and Francesca together, Theresa did a double take. Francesca looked just a little bit afraid. Tom took it all in stride and squeezed Theresa’s arm. He’d explain later. She seemed to understand.
“Congressman Hagen!” said Woltz.
“Just Tom,” he said. When people greeted him that way, it always sounded to Tom like a joke at his expense.
“Sorry to hear about your legal problems,” Woltz said. “I know, firsthand, there’s no bigger nightmare than being falsely accused.”
Now it was Theresa’s turn to squeeze Tom’s arm, though it was more of a vicious pinch.
“Thank you,” Tom said.
The old man wasn’t sweating at all. Like most men who had once been tall and strong, the ravages of age seemed to have exasperated him. Woltz was completely bald now. His upper lip sagged on one side from a mild stro
ke he’d suffered the year before. He still dressed the same way: Italian loafers as expensive as a good used car, freshly pressed tan linen slacks, blue silk shirt, open at the throat, a sprout of thick white chest hair asserting itself like an unafraid furbearing creature.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” Woltz said. “How long has it been?”
“Almost twenty years,” Tom said.
“Brings back memories,” Woltz said. Bitterness dripped from his voice. “You know everybody, right? Some familiar faces, obviously. Obviously.” He pointed at Francesca but looked at Tom. “You know about the Nino Valenti Fund, right? The Nino Valenti Fund. I’m just hearing about it. Promising idea. Old actors, singers, sick ones, caring for them. Your trip go OK? Been to your room yet? Where are my manners! This must be Mrs. Congressman Hagen.”
“It must be,” Theresa said.
“You’ll have to forgive him,” Johnny said. “Back in the nickelodeon days, right after Jack earned his first million, his first wife made him take speech and etiquette lessons, to cover up the fact of where he came from, only it looks like over the years they’ve worn off.”
Woltz ignored him. “So I hear you’re quite the art maven, Mrs. Hagen.”
Theresa was studying the painting on the wall behind Woltz, a massive oil painting of nude young girls bathing in a lake and a cloven-hoofed satyr laughing on the muddy banks.
“She helped found the Museum of Modern Art in Las Vegas,” Tom said. “She’s on the board there and at a few other museums, too. She’s really more of an expert than a maven.”
The Godfather's Revenge Page 27