“Neither you nor anyone else in your company is working with my friends down there. Is that right?”
“Jesus Christ, are you hearing me? New Orleans is a colorful place, but it’s all gray.”
Michael clasped his hands behind his back as he walked. He had an uncanny ability to tell when even seasoned liars were lying, and he felt sure Joe was telling him the truth: that because of the nature of the place and of the intelligence business at present, Joe was shut off from figuring out what was going on.
“At a certain point in life,” Joe said, “a man has to accept that ability and experience are disposable. Sometimes all that matters is that they’re them and you’re you and that’s it. I don’t have to tell you. You went to school with Ivy League fucks,” which he said a little too loudly and several passersby glared at him, including a Puerto Rican woman who actually clamped her hands over her daughter’s ears.
It was the kind of thing that got people noticed.
Michael tapped Joe’s elbow and steered him down the road toward the Kodak exhibit, which looked like a four-hundred-foot-long oval of undulating dough, made of cement and yet somehow levitating a few feet off the ground. Atop it was a rotating pentagon, each side of which featured a photograph about four stories high: the five largest color photos in the world. The one facing them seemed to be of a Japanese warrior.
“Things have changed,” Joe said. “I’m not in this line of work for the chance to file fifty-six-page operational plans with the appropriate wise men every time I need a drainage ditch blown up. Or to get second-guessed before the literal dust settles. That plan we worked on together, your people and mine, it came from the wise men. That’s how they think. They labor under the great man theory, because that’s what they learned at Yale, and that’s how they see themselves. Each one: a big, indispensable man.”
“The plan had its merits,” Michael said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. The plan itself was crazy. Michael had expected it to fail. From the ashes of that failure, he’d expected something good to pin on Geraci. And cash. If, against the odds, it had worked, the silver lining would have been that the Corleones would get their casinos back. Win-win. “After all,” Michael said, “there’s that old saying, if you want to kill a snake, chop off the head, not the tail.”
“Never heard it. I’m a city boy like you. I know jack shit about killing snakes, but it seems like chopping off the bottom half would do the trick, too. But why focus on just one snake, is my point. There’s always another snake. Why not drain the swamp? Kill the habitat.”
“Other creatures use the same habitat, though, right?”
A huge sad clown stared down at them from the tower.
They took the escalator to the roof.
As they rose, Joe stood close to Michael’s ear. “All we needed to do,” he said, just above a whisper, “was mount a guerrilla war, island-wide. If we involved your men, it should have been for their proven skills with fire and explosives. Burn the cane fields, the tobacco fields, blow up the copper mines, then smuggle out TV footage of the fires and angry gusanos playing to the cameras. The world wouldn’t have stood for it. They’d have thought the insurgency was bigger than it was because it looked big on TV. And, bim, bam, boom, it’s over. You gents are back in business, and I’m off to the next adventure. Everybody’s happy. Instead, we have now.”
The surface was a hodgepodge of fountains, sloping sidewalks, rooftop gardens, and clearly marked backdrops for snapshots. PICTURE SPOT, the signs read. The tower was on one end; on the other were smooth, white twenty-foot-tall cement stalagmites meant to evoke the surface of the moon. They headed toward the moonscape.
“What’s all this have to do with New Orleans, Joe?”
“New Orleans?” he said, frowning. “Nothing. Everything. Everything’s connected, Mike. Goddamn.”
Joe stopped to light a cigarette and offered Michael one, which he declined.
“All right,” Michael said. “And so what about the missing package?”
Joe put his smokes and lighter away, and they kept walking. “I already answered that.”
“Say again? If you did, I missed it.”
He took a deep drag of the cigarette. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Lucadello said, teeth clenched and growing red in the face, “that I haven’t said already.”
Michael put his arm around his old friend and they started through the moonscape.
“I’ll be blunt,” Michael finally said. “The wild-goose chase needs to stop.”
“I’m being blunt, too. You’re not listening. You’re missing my point. I’m not sure I can say it any more directly than I have.”
“Try,” Michael said.
From where Michael now stood he could see the Garden of Meditation below and, just beyond it, the Van Wyck Expressway. His bodyguards were positioned on opposite ends of the rooftop.
“The simple answer is we don’t know. The simple answer is that I have not, nor to my knowledge have any other agents, seen your boy since those first few days he was in Sicily. These are the facts. What this could mean is that he’s dead—by his own hand, natural causes, or what have you. In my personal opinion, it’s more likely that he’s found a good place to hide on that island, in which case your guess as to where he is will be better than mine. Your resources and your connections there are better than mine, not to mention your better understanding of the culture, even the terrain. Historically speaking, men have found Sicily a magnificent place to hide. Is his wife there with him? We don’t know. There is some evidence to suggest yes. We don’t know where she is exactly, either. Is this what you’re looking for when you ask me to be direct?”
Which was when it finally hit Michael that Joe Lucadello, a man who knew things for a living, probably knew nothing for certain except that he’d been used by his superiors, by his country, as a pawn.
“Do you have any idea,” Michael said, “any idea whatsoever, where the leaks are coming from?”
“I was sorry to hear about those kids from Calabria. The…” Joe stopped himself and bowed and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “but even if I did, you know I’d have to say I didn’t. I can tell you this: if there is a leak, the smart money says it’s in your house and not mine. Common sense decrees, as the saying goes. But I’m also saying that things are complicated right now.”
“Meaning the end of the line.”
“The end of the line segment,” Joe said. “Lines don’t end. That’s the main thing that makes them lines.”
“But line segments end.”
“They do,” Joe said. “Goddamned right they do.”
The expression, no doubt, came from railroad lines, but Michael had no reason to point this out. He thanked Joe, and the men embraced.
“Look at all this,” Joe said, backing away, then turning slowly around in a circle. “What a bill of goods the future is. What are all these saps going to do when the future gets here, and they still don’t beat the traffic by flying to work in a jetpack, and they still don’t have free electricity in their houses from their own personal nuclear-fusion device, and America still hasn’t set foot on the goddamned moon? There has never in human history been a culture where optimism and cynicism existed side by side on such a scale as this, not even ancient Rome.”
“Do you mean New York?” Michael said. “Or America?”
“Touché.” Joe winked his glass eye. His face lacked any trace of playfulness.
“Tell me the truth,” Michael said, pointing. “Is there a camera in there?”
“Even if there was, I’d have to say there wasn’t.” This time the smile that came over him seemed real. But a moment later it faded. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “You’re not joking.”
Michael had been, he thought. But before he could say anything, Joe bent slightly and took the eye out. It made a sucking sound, and in one smooth motion he jammed it into the pocket of Michael’s shirt.
“See for yourself.”
Joe made no attempt to close his empty eye socket. It was pink and vaguely, grotesquely sexual. Michael didn’t flinch and couldn’t stop looking into it. As Joe reached inside his jacket, the bodyguards broke into a run. But all Joe pulled out was a pair of dark green sunglasses. The bodyguards stopped. Their running had attracted stares from the other visitors on the roof.
“Let me know if you find anything, my friend,” Joe said. He patted Michael on the cheek and then, harder, on the pocket where the eye was. “Maybe send me a snapshot.” He turned and headed alone toward the escalator, the exaggerated stiffness in his posture gone now, replaced with a carriage not unlike the exhausted hero at the end of a good Western. Michael wondered if that, too, was some kind of pose.
Michael ignored the stares of the bystanders and waited for his old friend to disappear—his oldest friend, it occurred to him. He did not pull out the eye, but he could feel it in his pocket, more dense, much heavier than he’d have guessed. Michael’s ears were burning. Handing over that eye had been such a strange gesture that it only now registered as a terrible act of disrespect. Worse: a wiseass’s version of the evil eye. He closed his fist around the eye, hard. He should shove this thing down Joe Lucadello’s throat, or up his ass.
He motioned to the bodyguards. They said nothing about the eye. Protocol was for men this lowly not to speak to a boss unless spoken to.
They stopped at a men’s room on the way to the Vatican City pavilion. Michael told one of the men to stand at the door and say the john was out of order and he took the other inside and asked for his gun. Again, simple protocol.
Michael stood before the sink. With his handkerchief, he took the eye out of his pocket. It was not gruesome. The detail was amazing. That someone could make something like this by hand seemed like a miracle. It was shaped more like an egg than a ball.
He wrapped the handkerchief around the eye and set it on the counter, then pulled out the gun and checked the safety. With his left hand he held the edge of the handkerchief. With his right, he gripped the gun by the barrel, raised it above his head, and with all his strength brought the butt of it down on the eye. The guard at the door stuck his head in. Michael hammered the eye with the gun again and again and everything became a blur, and when he stopped he was sweating and out of breath.
He opened the handkerchief. No camera, of course. It still looked a little like an eye, tiny particles and thin broken glass rods and a dozen or so glass chips, thicker and more rounded than Michael would have thought.
On impulse he pocketed the biggest piece.
He left the rest on the counter and washed his face and combed his hair. His white hair, which always made the man in the mirror seem unfamiliar. He looked down at the mess and only then realized that the initials on the handkerchief weren’t his. They were Fredo’s.
MINUTES LATER, ALONG WITH HUNDREDS OF strangers, a sliver of his diminished family, and a woman he was starting to think it might be possible to love, Michael Corleone boarded one of the three motorized platforms in the Pietà exhibit and trolled slowly past the spotlighted crucified Christ in the white marble arms of his mother. To bring such beauty to life, as Michelangelo had, was beyond all human understanding. To bring it to America was something much more modest, but it had nonetheless involved months of delicate negotiations and a tremendous number of exchanged favors and cash tributes. It was, Michael Corleone told himself, in and of itself the accomplishment of a lifetime.
During the fair’s run, this year and next, Michael Corleone would rarely set foot in the other parts of the pavilion—the chapel on the mezzanine, the exhibit explaining the Catholic sacraments, the replica of the excavation made underneath St. Peter’s Basilica (underneath this replica, Michael knew, was garbage). But Michael would return to see the Pietà countless times, before and after its normal business hours, alone and with others, on the platforms and strolling at his own pace on the crowded walkway. Anytime he’d see so much as a pull tab or a straw wrapper—anything at all to mar the site—he’d pick it up himself and throw it away. Above the statue were eighty-two spotlights arranged in a halo, and he would sometimes marvel to strangers that there seemed to be light coming from within that white stone, too: a piece of rock, dug from the humble soil of Italy, transformed by Italian hands into this vision of unspeakable beauty. Michael no longer prayed. He had not been to confession in fifteen years, and he doubted he would ever go again, but the Pietà would never lose the power to move him.
Often, as now, Michael Corleone wept.
CHAPTER 23
Charlotte Geraci dropped off the rental car at the airport and took a cab down Highway 61 into the city of New Orleans. It was midmorning. She’d been driving nearly nonstop for two days. She was road-haggard and still wearing the wig, still looking behind her every few seconds, as she had the entire way from Saratoga. The cabbie asked if she was OK, if he could get her a glass of water or an aspirin. “I’m fine,” she lied. “I’m just tired.” When the cabbie asked if it was her first trip to New Orleans, she lied and said no. It seemed like the answer most likely to shut him up.
Nick was waiting for her in a slightly faded grand hotel on Poydras Street. She was getting there exhausted and famished—she’d been too frightened to stop for anything but gas and a few crummy snacks and Pepsi-Cola. She also had no luggage, which, along with the wig, made her feel like a whore. She went in the ladies’ room off the lobby and brushed her teeth, washed her face, and dabbed at her underarms.
She took the elevator to the room.
“I’m sorry, little lady,” Nick said, doing a corny John Wayne imitation. “You’re an awfully darned purty brunette, but my blond wife is a-ridin’ into town on the next stage.”
It was a regular room, not a suite.
“I’m looking for my husband, actually,” Charlotte said. “Maybe you’ve seen him. He’s a man with no beard.” She tugged on it. He’d had it for nearly three years, yet she’d never seen it. He’d sent her those reel-to-reel tapes—dozens of them—but he’d never once in the time he was gone sent her a photo.
They stood in the doorway. Despite the jokes about her wig and his beard, they were sincerely flummoxed by the reality of standing there, together, after so long.
“You’re real, right?” She poked him as if he might be a ghost her finger would pass through.
That did the trick. They fell into an embrace, spinning around and kicking the door closed.
Their shoes and clothes flew and moments later they were in bed. It did not go well. She was exhausted and could have used a shower and they were both fumbling and shaking. They’d done it because the situation had seemed to call for it. It was so clumsy and bad that afterward Nick threw a glass against the wall in frustration and Charlotte went into a fetal ball with the sheets pulled tight around her.
Things looked up from there. There was pink champagne on ice. It was still morning, but they drank about half of it. He gave her a painted wooden box full of Mexican jewelry, which she loved, and a gift-wrapped copy of Chet Baker’s Chet, which confused her—she’d heard the name Chet Baker, she said, but didn’t know the music. “You’ll love it,” he said, “it’s a thing of beauty, like you. Not to mention, look at the cover.” It was a picture of Baker in a beige sweater, gorgeous and haunted and looking right at the camera, and a blond woman in a black sweater behind him, eyes closed, face nuzzled against the back of his neck, oozing unspeakable sadness, as if she knows she’ll never be able to help tame the handsome man’s demons. She’ll never even know what his demons are.
“It’s you,” he said.
She was wiped out from the drive and the fear and the bad sex, and the champagne was going to her head. It took her a moment to register that he meant that the woman looked like her.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “She doesn’t look anything like me.”
“Because you’re better-looking,” he said.
“Sure,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s the difference.”
; Charlotte had a long nap and got up to take a shower.
While she was in the bathroom, Nick looked at the size of her clothes and called the place Augie Tramonti had recommended. Nick described her to the person on the phone—“Forty-four years old but youthful, elegant, classy, not too flashy but only more beautiful because of it, sort of like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and the First Lady, only blond.”
“Who were you talking to?” Charlotte said. The rooms didn’t come with robes, but she was wearing his.
“Nobody,” he said.
“Your girlfriend?”
“Don’t even joke about a thing like that.”
She shrugged.
Within twenty minutes, a woman from the store arrived and wheeled in a cart with all kinds of clothes in Charlotte’s size. Charlotte had come to New Orleans with only what she could fit in a large summer purse. She melted. She picked out a few things—surprisingly nice things, so far from New York, which Nick thought sounded snobbish but which didn’t visibly offend the woman. Charlotte asked if they could really afford this, and Nick told her not to worry about it. (Augie had already taken care of the damages, which Nick did not say.) They got dressed up and went for a long walk in the French Quarter. She asked him how he could just walk around in the open like this in a major American city. He told her that it was a long story, but the short version was that nobody Nick was concerned with, nobody connected with anybody other than certain powers that be here in New Orleans, could even set foot in the state of Louisiana without getting permission from a friend of Nick’s.
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