The Godfather's Revenge

by Mark Winegardner

  “Did you say something? I don’t hear so good no more.”

  “So what do you got for me?”

  “See for yourself.” He pointed toward his parking lot in back. Nick looked out the door.

  “That Dodge a fifty-nine?”

  “It fit your description,” Lou said. Which was to say: a used car, bland-looking, good title, well maintained, no customizing except for bulletproof glass.

  He showed Nick the three diamond-encrusted Cartier watches, symbolizing the time he wanted to make up for with Charlotte, Barb, and Bev, each engraved on the back.

  “Perfect,” Nick said. “Wrap ’em. What do I owe you?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Listen, all you done for me, I ought to be buyin’ you a gift, too. How much do I owe you?”

  “I’m telling you, Nick, we’re square. I’m pushing sixty years old, and I got a house out at the beach and enough saved up, even my worthless kids don’t need to work. Without you, I’m an old broken man freezing my balls off in Cleveland and dealing with dumb fucks trying to fence Avon bottles and Tupperware.”

  Nick didn’t know what those things were, but he got the picture.

  He patted Lou on the shoulder. “Without you—”

  “Forget it,” Lou said, waving him off. “Where does it end, eh? Listen, I don’t want to pry,” Lou said, “but ain’t there a bakery owner somewhere wants his truck back?”

  Nick shook his head. The New Orleans distributorship of that bread had been swallowed up by Carlo the Whale. The truck had been depreciated off the books. Its serial number was gone. The Florida plates had come from a room full of them—various states, passenger and commercial, even dealer—next to the counting room in a casino outside Bossier City. “A friend of mine gave it to me,” Nick said.

  Just then the barber from the shop next door burst in. “It goddamned sure wasn’t me,” the barber said.

  “What wasn’t you, Harlan?” Zook said.

  “It wasn’t me what shot the president.”

  “Who said you did?”

  “Nobody said I did, but somebody done went and did.”

  “Somebody shot him?” Geraci asked.

  “Down in Miami, they did, yessir. It’s up on the TV, even.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Zook said.

  “All the times I said I wanted that nigger-lover shot and now someone shot him and there ain’t no pleasure in it, which is for damn sure. I been right next door all the time. I got witnesses.”

  “Don’t even joke about shit like that, Harlan,” Zook said. “Is he dead?”

  “How would I know? I wasn’t there, and I don’t know what happened to the guy what did it.”

  “Not that guy,” Zook said. “The president.”

  “Him, it seems like maybe yes.”

  “Who shot him?” Geraci asked.

  “I will swear on a stack of Bibles, mister, I don’t know and couldn’t guess,” and he slammed the door behind him.

  “Crazy Nazi fuckstick,” Zook muttered. He had an old tube radio on the counter crackling to life now.

  Geraci didn’t see a picture of Juan Carlos Santiago until the next day, when the paper he bought ran the mug shot taken after Santiago’s 1961 arrest in a bar altercation. Geraci recognized him right away as one of the people he’d met at the Tramontis’ rifle range.

  IT WOULD SWIFTLY BECOME AN INDELIBLE IMAGE in American history, that, when Daniel Brendan Shea heard, he was holed up in a tiny, borrowed office at the Miami Beach Convention Center, stripped down to his undershirt and white boxer shorts, laboring over the introduction to his brother’s speech that night. The room was filled with wadded-up paper and crumpled coffee cups. Earlier that day, the A.G. had told those close to him that he had decided to run for the United States Senate in 1966 and thus would not be a part of his brother’s second term. He had done this, by all accounts, with real tears in his eyes. It might have been true that his Senate career was to be launched from the podium, on national television, via this speech. But Danny Shea would not mention this in the speech. He made it clear to those who mattered that he was honored to have this chance to tell the world—directly, candidly, and specifically—what a great man his brother was.

  Although Jimmy Shea had been a skilled orator, most of the things he was supposed to have written (including both his books and his senior thesis) were penned by seasoned professional writers. Danny, on the other hand, was a gifted writer and, more important, someone willing to work at it. He had professional speechwriters at his disposal, of course, including two accomplished American novelists. But even the things they worked on, he rewrote and rewrote until he got them the way he wanted them; remarkably, those writers usually thought Danny Shea had improved the speech.

  Danny, like many good writers, believed that he wrote better while stripped down to his underwear.

  When the knock came at the door, he said he thought he was almost finished—though he’d been saying this for hours.

  “No, sir.” It was his brother’s chief of staff. “It’s not that. May I come in, please?”

  The attorney general got up and unlocked the door.

  The chief of staff was not fazed by Danny Shea’s standing before him in an undershirt and boxer shorts.

  Danny, in contrast, seemed devastated just by the look on the chief of staff’s face.

  “It’s your brother,” the man said.

  Danny Shea froze. Then, as he listened to the details about what happened, he started to take short breaths—not so much hyperventilation as an effort to keep a lid on his emotions.

  Suddenly, he began frantically to get dressed, as if getting out of that small room and going to his brother’s side would make any difference now.

  “I’m a fool,” he said.

  “Sir?” said the chief of staff.

  “This is all my fault,” said Danny Shea.

  “I’m not following you,” said the chief of staff.

  WHEN EDDIE PARADISE HEARD, HE WAS ABOUT TO go downstairs at his Hunt Club and show Richie Nobilio the lion, which Richie Two-Guns had been good enough to help him acquire from a down-on-its-luck circus that was about to cash in its chips.

  Richie had met him for a late lunch at a place on Court Street, bearing gifts: a box of twenty-four pairs of socks—the right brand, too—and a poster in a tube. It was another World War II poster for the collection. In it, a lone man sank into a blue-black sea, his arm extended, his hand huge in the foreground, pointing right at the viewer. The caption was SOMEONE TALKED!

  Eddie thanked him profusely for two such thoughtful gifts. “How you been?” Eddie asked. “You been all right?”

  “Can’t complain, but I still do.” He bugged out his eyes comically. “Yourself?”

  “Not exactly number one on the hit parade,” Eddie said, “although who is?”

  “One guy, I guess, is,” Richie said. “By definition.”

  “Yeah, but it don’t last long. There’s always that next song rising with a bullet.”

  They ordered.

  “Listen,” Eddie said when the waiter left. “How did you mean this here? Because I think maybe you’re trying to say something about me not wearing socks more than once and also maybe being the traitor. Or if not me, one of the men under me. Someone talked. Eh? Real cute. Admit it.”

  Richie poker-faced him and milked it. “You know you’re nuts, right?”

  Eddie stared him down and then gave up and laughed.

  “You’re right.” Eddie rapped his knuckles on the box full of socks. “Very thoughtful. Again, I thank you. It’s just, with everything going on…”

  “Trying times,” Richie said, nodding in commiseration.

  “Exactly.”

  Richie Two-Guns raised his glass. “Salut’.”

  They drank.

  They discussed the rumor about Acapulco, that Geraci’s whole counteroffensive had been launched via someone he’d contacted down there. They each had a top guy they were hoping
pretty passionately it wasn’t. They talked about the timing of when they—and others—were down there, and it was inconclusive.

  “So, how do we ever figure it out?”

  “We keep a close eye, I guess,” Eddie said. “We keep on doing what we’re doing. Sooner or later, it all comes to a head. Like the turtle says, huh? Slow and steady wins the race.”

  “That’s tortoise, Ed. The tortoise and the hare.”

  “Same difference.”

  “Not to a tortoise.” Richie smiled. “But the principle still holds, I guess. Obviously, you’re right. If we act too fast, if we act like we’re concerned, the men under us get nervous, which we don’t want. But if we act too slow, Geraci’s our boss again, and, to use your analogy, we’re knocked right off the pop charts.”

  Eddie flinched slightly when Nobilio said Geraci. No one said his name aloud.

  “What I say,” Nobilio said, “is we use a little more psychology, watching our men. I’m a smart guy, you keep long hours. Between us, we can figure it out.”

  Eddie chose to take the ballbusting in the lighthearted spirit in which he hoped it was intended.

  “Psychology, huh?” Eddie said. “I’m a graduate of the Brooklyn Streetcorner School of Economics. Most of the courses we got, that’s what they boil down to—psychology.”

  They ate and talked about this and several other items of business. They agreed to keep the lines of communication open between them. If the Corleone Family was going to survive, it would be men like Eddie Paradise and Richie Nobilio who’d take it there.

  “Who’s to say that when the dust settles from this thing with Michael and my old captain,” Eddie said, meaning Geraci, “that one of us might not wind up as boss. Though, God forbid, not any time soon.”

  “In this Family? Never happen. Your name’s got to be Corleone.”

  “They’re out of Corleones,” Eddie said.

  “Maybe,” Richie said. “But Sonny had a couple boys, didn’t he? Michael’s got a son, Connie’s got two of ’em.”

  “I don’t see any of them getting into this thing.”

  “At one point people said the same about Michael, if you remember. Oh, and Fredo’s got at least one that I know of.”

  “Fredo? Fredo never had any kids.”

  “Fredo knocked up half the showgirls in Las Vegas. You really think every one of those got taken care of?”

  “So, you know of one? How do you know about it?”

  “I shouldn’t have said nothin’.”

  “Mike knows about this, right?”

  “Let’s change the subject, all right?” Richie said. They got ready to leave. “So, you really got the lion, huh?”

  “Beautiful animal,” Eddie said.

  “Amazing that’s working out for you,” Richie said.

  He realized Richie was fishing for either another thank-you or an invitation to come see the lion. The thank-you was out of the question. Eddie already sent a thank-you in the form of four Mets tickets, right behind home plate, which was plenty of thanks for just giving Eddie the tip about the circus and how to contact the debt-ridden schmuck who owned it. That hadn’t been the half of things. There was finding a way to transport it, modifications to that old jail cell downstairs so it was a comfortable cage for it, getting training on what to feed it and how to get in and clean the cage, then getting one of the worthless coglioni to go down there and actually do it. Half the time, Eddie did it himself. He didn’t mind, necessarily, because Ronald really was a beautiful animal that seemed to have genuine affection for Eddie. Despite which, lion shit is lion shit.

  So Richie could shove any more of a thank-you up his skinny ass. But he could certainly come see Ronald, if he wanted.

  “You want to go see it? We can walk. It’s just over and down, the club.”

  “I know where it is,” Richie said.

  “So, come. You should come. Let’s go.”

  They went.

  Eddie carried the socks under his arm and, with the other, brandished the cardboard poster tube almost like a scepter.

  “Very humbling, standing right next to a big, powerful jungle cat like Ronald,” Eddie said on the walk over. They were trying to walk side by side, which was awkward in places where the sidewalk narrowed, but Eddie kept a straight, unswerving line and made the whippet-like Nobilio dodge the trees and hydrants. They each had men behind them, following at a polite distance.

  “Ronald?” Nobilio said. “You named it?”

  “The lion’s got a name, yes. Ronald.”

  “Why Ronald?”

  “You see? There you go again, busting my balls. Why the fuck do I know, why Ronald? Ronald was the name it had when I got it.”

  “Why not call it something you want to call it?”

  “Because I want to call it by the name it’s used to,” Eddie said. “Common sense. Common courtesy.”

  “You’re extending common courtesy to a lion?”

  “Go ahead and be rude to it,” Eddie said. “See where that gets you.”

  “A lion in fucking Brooklyn,” Richie said. “I admire you, my friend. It’d scare me to death, having a lion in my social club.”

  “It’s like anybody else,” Eddie said. “Treat it with respect, you got nothing to be afraid of.”

  Eddie looked over at Richie.

  “What I’d be afraid of,” Richie said, “would be that people would say that a lion’s a house cat for a man with a small dick.”

  Fuck people. Fuck what they say.

  “Well, maybe,” Eddie said, “we ain’t all got the same kind of anxieties as you have in that department.”

  “Bullshit,” Richie said, but not with any apparent anger. “Unless—speaking of circuses—you’re a circus freak down there, you got anxieties. It’s just some men aren’t as comfortable admitting it as me.”

  They climbed the stoop. Inside, the worthless coglioni had the TV on.

  “You bust a lot of balls, Rich,” Eddie said.

  “To know me is to love me, baby.” He slapped Eddie on the back. Eddie didn’t like to be touched unless he knew it was coming, but he let that go, too.

  They walked inside just as the TV reporter said that the killer had been identified not as Belford Williams, as initial reports had said, but rather as Juan Carlos Santiago.

  “What killer?” Eddie said, and his own men shushed him and did not rise. Momo Barone was right in the middle of them. It should have been the Roach’s job to speak up and tell the others that that was out of line.

  Juan Carlos Santiago, the reporter said, is believed to be the younger half brother of a high-ranking official in the Batista government, a man believed to have been killed by rebels during the revolution. Santiago also participated in the failed invasion of the island a year earlier. Some who knew him have described him as “kind of a loner” and “a troubled young man.” He had apparently been in and out of mental hospitals since childhood, both here and in Cuba.

  Richie Two-Guns pulled up a chair.

  “Who got fucking killed?” Eddie asked.

  KATHY CORLEONE WOULD ALWAYS REMEMBER THE pie-faced man. She was seated at a carrel in the New York Public Library, working on her book. She had never seen the man before, but he seemed like the sort of man half her male colleagues were: pudgy, pasty, bearded, obsessive on three or four narrow subjects, dominated by his mother, either a virgin or a deviant or a sad, sour-smelling combination of both.

  When he told her the horrible news, he did so in a hushed voice and with what seemed to be real emotional turmoil, but he betrayed himself with a smile. She knew this didn’t mean he was happy about what had happened in Miami. He was happy because he’d been the first to tell her, as if doing so allowed him to ride back to his village with her scalp.

  In no time, librarians were wheeling out television sets.

  The library patrons got up as if summoned and hurried to the screens.

  The broadcasts featured exhausted-looking white men wearing thick eyeglasses they r
arely wore on the air. No one seemed to have footage of what happened.

  The pie-faced man came back. He came up behind Kathy.

  “I know who you are,” he said.

  She shushed him.

  “You’re that gangster’s niece,” he said, far too loudly for a library, “who’s making the beast with two backs with Johnny Fontane.”

  People glanced her way, but they had other things on their minds.

  Kathy would have voted virgin.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. “And you’re that annoying man who’s making me nuts.”

  She went home to get her sister’s phone call. She just knew. It was ringing when she walked in the door.

  VICE PRESIDENT AMBROSE “BUD” PAYTON WAS AT HIS home in Coral Gables, asleep. He’d expected this to be a long night, and he was a man ever vigilant about when to wrest magic from his good friend, the catnap. Which, whenever he could, he took with one or more of his cats. He and Mrs. Payton had twenty cats in Coral Gables and fourteen at their residence in D.C. For this nap, he had his favorite with him, a fat old tom named Osceola.

  His wife had told the Secret Service she would deliver the news. Trembling, she awoke him by calling him Mr. President.

  Bud Payton sat up, and without missing a beat, asked if the Russians were behind it.

  She didn’t seem to know how to answer that. She told him that their yard was filling up with government-issue sedans and then had trouble saying any more. She had a stuttering problem that got worse in tough situations. They had been married a long time, and he was not in the habit of pushing her.

  He kissed her and got up and inhaled deeply and softly started humming “I Am a Pilgrim,” a hymn his late mother had sung to him when he was a boy, growing up on a sun-blasted truck farm outside Plant City. He stood tall and walked down the hallway, toward the full explanation of what the world had come to.

  THERESA HAGEN WAS SITTING AT HER KITCHEN table with the telephone in front of her, fearing the worst.

  The phone rang. It was a friend of hers, an art gallery owner in South Beach, his voice shaking with the bad news he was about to deliver.

  Strangely, she felt relieved when she heard what it was.