The Godfather Returns (27 page)

“What’s the point?” Geraci said. “If you call the paper or go down there, then they’ll really have a story. It’ll make things worse. That’s a nice suit, by the way. You have a guy?”

“You said
wors
e
? Right? So you
agree.
This
is
bad. You don’t get to
worse
from
good
or
just fine.
Not unless you’re already at
bad.
”

“What do you care?” Geraci said. “It’s the fucking Tucson newspaper.”

“They got all
kinds
of facts wrong.”

Like the fact that Deanna Dunn qualified as a movie “queen” anymore. She was a lush, and her looks and her career were suffering for it. Geraci figured she’d married Fredo only so she could keep living the high life even when her roles dried up completely.

Outside, the director yelled “Action!” A buckboard wagon hurtled down the dusty street, and Deanna Dunn began screaming.

“That’s in the script,” Fredo said. “Fontane dies and Dee Dee screams.” She was playing the sheriff’s widow. Johnny Fontane was the gunslinging priest.

“You want facts,” Geraci said, “there are better places to go than a newspaper.”

“We got married a
month
ago. It wasn’t a secret, like it says, and we already took a honeymoon. Weekend in Acapulco at that place with the pink Jeeps that go down to the beach.”

“Short honeymoon.”

“We’re busy people.”

“Hit a nerve, did I?”

“Hey, who wouldn’t want to spend more time on his honeymoon, y’know?”

Geraci wouldn’t, not if he had to be stuck in a hotel room with a woman as militantly self-absorbed as Deanna Dunn. Unless maybe you could make her scream like that in the sack. The director called action on another take. Deanna’s screams sounded even better. “I’ve never been to Acapulco,” Geraci said. “Nice?”

“I don’t know. Sure. It’s like a lot of places, I guess.” Fredo pounded his fist on the table, right on the photo of him getting into a limo at the airport. “Explain this to me, huh? She’s been here three weeks solid, me off and on, now all of a sudden this shit’s news?”

“You married a movie star, Fredo. What did you expect?”

“I married a movie star a
month
ago.”

“You’re a movie star now yourself, for God’s sake.”

“Aw, that’s just for shits and giggles, the acting. I got like two lines.”

“Still.”

“So why don’t they talk about me as someone with a background in entertainment who’s trying to branch out, huh?”

Geraci recognized Michael Corleone’s words in his brother’s mouth. Michael had gone along with Fredo’s more public image as something useful in helping to make the Corleones legitimate, or at least ostensibly so.

“Look,” Geraci said. “I been reading that paper for months. Trust me, nobody reads it.”

Fredo laughed. A moment later the smile drained from his face. “You meant that as a joke, right?”

Geraci shrugged, but then smiled.

“
Coglionatore,
” Fredo said, smiling too, punching Geraci’s shoulder affectionately.

Until three weeks ago, when the filming on this movie started, Geraci had barely ever spoken to Fredo. He’d turned out to be a thoroughly likable guy.

“You think all that whiskey’s real?” Fredo said, pointing to the clear, unlabeled bottles behind the rough-hewn bar.

“How would I know? Why don’t you go look?”

Fredo dismissed the notion with a frown and a wave. “Last thing I need.”

Geraci nodded. “Aspirin?”

“Had some.”

“That was some night.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Fredo said, shaking his head and suddenly looking both rueful and amazed. “Anymore, every night is some night.”

Last night, they’d taken their wives and gone out on the town, such as it was. On a whim, they’d headed to Mexico. When they’d gotten there, Deanna Dunn insisted on going to see a donkey show. Charlotte, at least as of this morning, still wasn’t speaking to him. Though she might have been angry because all night, no matter what anyone said about anything, Deanna Dunn brought the conversation back to Deanna Dunn. Geraci started changing the subject arbitrarily, but no matter how ridiculous the changes were, she took it as a cue to tell another Deanna Dunn story. After they got home, Char had accused him of flirting. He’d let it roll off his back. She couldn’t help but be disappointed that the Movie Queen she’d been so excited about hobnobbing with turned out to be a large-headed loudmouth who joked about how her husband didn’t like blow jobs—with Fredo sitting right there, like a man trying to smile through bowel cramps—and who thought that watching a donkey fuck a teenage Indian girl was a hoot. Give Charlotte time, though, and she’d be telling all the hens back in East Islip about her wild night, making herself sound like some jet-setter.

From down the street came a horrible splintering crash. The buckboard.

“Don’t worry,” Fredo said. “That’s in the script, too.”

“Yeah, well,” Geraci said. “Forgive me if I’m a little jumpy about crashes.”

“I don’t have that kind of power,” Fredo said. “You want forgiveness, it’s Mike’s department.”

Geraci tried not to look surprised. He’d never heard Fredo voice any sort of resentment toward his brother. “So Fontane’s here?”

Fredo shook his head. “They flew in some writer to write him out of the picture, can you believe that? It’s his stand-in that’s out there dying.”

Fontane’s inattention to his own production company was getting to be a bigger and bigger problem, but this was the first time he’d ever skipped out on a movie in the middle of shooting. “So that’s all?” Geraci said. “He’s going to get away with that?”

“I don’t want to get into it,” Fredo said. “I got Dee Dee in one ear, my brother in the other, fucking Hagen in the other.”

“You have three ears?”

“Feels like it,” Fredo said. “It ain’t a feeling I’d recommend.”

They got down to business. Geraci had expected Fredo—as he had done other times they’d sat down to meet—to relay messages about Geraci’s operation back in New York. Instead, Fredo gave him the news about the peace talks the day before. It was all set: Geraci was going home.

This, too, was the sort of thing a guy might hear right before he got clipped. But if that’s what was going to happen, why had Mike sent Fredo?

“You okay?” Fredo said. “Your hearing going or something? I’d’ve thought a guy gets news like this he’d be on cloud nine.”

Men from the lighting crew had come in and started to set up a shot. Prop guys scattered sawdust on the floor and set out playing cards, poker chips, dirty glasses, and sheet music for the presumably doomed piano player. “It’s just going to be complicated, that’s all,” Geraci said. “Going home.”

Fredo lowered his voice. “Hey, how are you with the Straccis? I mean, you know, how were you? Before all this down here. I got a reason for asking.”

“I’ve got guys there I work with.” Without the tributes he paid to Black Tony Stracci, the drugs could never land in Jersey and get to New York so smoothly. “What’s your reason?”

“I’ve got this idea. There might be something in it for you. New source of income. Could be one of the best things we ever had. When I talked to Mike, he said no dice, but the more I get to know you, the more I think you and me together can make him come around.”

“I don’t know, Fredo.” Geraci hoped he didn’t show it, but he was shocked. Fredo hardly knew him yet was enlisting him to defy Michael Corleone. “If the Don turned it down—”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of that. I know him like nobody knows him.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Geraci said. This sort of open disloyalty would have been outrageous coming from some neighborhood punk. But from the
sotto cop
o
? From the brother of the Don? “I have to be straight with you, though, Fredo. I’m not going to—”

“I appreciate what you’re saying, but hear me out, okay? Okay. So here it is. You’re a lawyer, right? Did you know it’s against the law to bury people in San Francisco?”

Wrong, he wasn’t a lawyer, but Geraci didn’t bother to correct him. Just then, Deanna Dunn burst through the swinging doors.

“Barkeep,” she growled, “gimme a shot of your best red-eye.”

“That’s pretty good,” Geraci said, because it was. She sounded exactly like the actor who played the villain in this movie, a grizzled lout who’d also started out as a boxer.

“Those aren’t real bottles of whiskey,” Fredo said.

“This attachment you have to the real,” she said, “is very cute. Knock it off, will ya?”

“Oh, and yeah,” Fredo said, ignoring his wife and addressing Geraci. “I almost forgot.” He grabbed the lapels of his own suit. “I do have a guy. He’s out in Beverly Hills, but I fly him to Vegas for fittings. He’s Fontane’s guy out there, too, which is how I heard about him.”

“Unlike you,” said Deanna Dunn, “Johnny
has
to have his pants made special. Otherwise they wouldn’t fit right because his dick’s—”

Fredo smiled wanly. “It’s true.”

“Big one, huh?” Geraci couldn’t believe Fredo was going to let her get away with that.

“That’s what they say,” Fredo said.

“Who’s they?”

“Oh,
darling.
” Deanna Dunn turned a chair around and straddled it. “Who
isn’t
they?” She waggled her eyebrows.

Geraci could see in Fredo’s eyes that he was mad, but the smile lingered gruesomely on his face of the underboss.

“I did a picture with Margot Ashton,” said Deanna Dunn, “while she was still married to Johnny. The director—Flynn, that fat Mick slob—was razzing her about being married to a skinny ninety-eight-pound weakling like Johnny Fontane. This was awhile back, you know. So in front of
ev-v-v-v-v-verybody,
Margot says,
real loud,
‘He may be skinny, but his proportions are perfect. Eight pounds Johnny and ninety pounds of cock.’ ”

Fredo exploded in shrill laughter.

“Lovely woman, Miss Ashton,” Geraci said.
And you, Miss Dunn, are eight pounds Deanna and ninety pounds of gigantic head.

“Naturally,” Deanna said, “after she said that, I made it my business to see if she’d been exaggerating.”

The only people Geraci had ever seen whose faces could go from joy to despair as swiftly as Fredo Corleone’s were his beautiful daughters’, but only when they were still babies.

“And so it is with great pleasure, in front of all you good people, that I can reveal, at long last, and I do mean long—”

“I should go home,” Geraci said, and he did. He’d hear about the stiffs in San Francisco some other time.

One thing kept bothering Pete Clemenza.

That night at the Castle in the Sand? When they were watching Fontane and Buzz Fratello and Dotty Ames, until Mike got the phone call from Hagen with the news about the plane crash? Why did Mike tap Clemenza on the shoulder to get his attention to leave
before
he even started talking to Hagen? How did he know they’d be getting up and going?

Not that Clemenza would ever say anything.

But it’s the kind of little thing a guy thinks about a lot. Kind of thing that can make a guy go outside at two in the morning in his silk pajamas, light a good cigar, flip on the floodlights, and wax the living shit out of his Cadillac.

Chapter 15

T
HE CONGRESSMAN—
a former state attorney general, a vigilant opponent of the incursion of the Cosa Nostra into his beloved Silver State, and also, for what it’s worth, a rancher whose property lay downwind of Doomtown—first received his grim diagnosis in the hospital’s newly completed Vito Corleone Wing. When he went back to Washington, he got a second opinion from a specialist. The news was the same: the Big C; lymphatic, inoperable; six months to live. He chose to keep his illness a secret and fight it. If anyone was tough enough to lick the Big C, it was that big ox. A year later and eighty-eight pounds lighter, he died. As so often happens, the person whose constitutional responsibility it was to appoint a successor was a political rival of the deceased. The governor asked Thomas F. Hagen, a prominent Las Vegas attorney and financier, to abandon his long-shot bid for his party’s Senate nomination and accept the appointment to Congress. Mr. Hagen graciously agreed to put aside his plans for the chance to serve the good people of the State of Nevada.

The appointment was unpopular. The issue was less Hagen’s associates—he was hardly the only politician in that era with such associates—than his brief tenure as a Nevada resident. Also, he was a political novice with no record of public service. Every newspaper in the state, without exception, criticized the choice and gave the controversy prominent coverage. The primary added further complications. The late congressman had been running unopposed. Lawsuits abounded, but the November general election was shaping up as a contest between Tom Hagen and a dead man.

To build power, sometimes one must control those who seem the least powerful. This was the secret of the Corleones’ ability to control judges. Though corruption and venality thrive in all classes of men, the normative judge—the public might be relieved to know—is more honest than the normative human being. In practice, judges are difficult and expensive to control. However. Cases are typically assigned “randomly” by a clerk of court who’s paid no more than, say, a normative Spanish teacher. A person who controls ten percent of such people and a majority of the judges is vastly less powerful than one who’s sewn up most of the clerks and a few strategically placed judges afflicted by cynical natures, bad habits, or dark secrets.

Newspapers work the opposite way. Some reporters can be swayed by a free lunch, a forgiven gambling debt, even a glass of ice-cold beer. But most have a crusading streak and a fixation on whatever strikes them as news that overrides their loyalty to anything. Happily, they are also excitable, eager for newer news, toward which they follow one another like lemmings. To control the news, one needs influence at the top. The public has a short memory. If a story goes away after a few days and is replaced by something new, the public wants not closure to the old but newer details about the new. Or something newer still. Control those who control those who decide how long to cover a story and where it goes in the paper, and you control the news.

After a few days, a magnetic, strange-looking man in black leather and blacker sideburns—a popular music sensation from Mississippi, a white boy screaming Negro songs—came to Las Vegas for the first time. Hagen was supplanted on the front page and in the public’s imagination by gleeful news of the hillbilly sensation’s poor performance and speculation about whether this signaled an end not just to the young hick’s career but also to the whole vulgar, allegedly Communistic fad known as “rock and roll.” The day Hagen was sworn in and flew to Washington to assume his duties, the only mention of him in any Nevada paper was a story by one dogged reporter from Carson City, who, from the wilderness of an inside page, tried to sort out the legal battle over the congressional contest. The late congressman’s party was beset by infighting and injunctions and seemed increasingly unlikely to be able both to pick a candidate and to get that candidate onto the ballot in time. Congressman Hagen was faring better. Though he’d been appointed to office well after the filing deadline for the November ballot, he’d submitted all the necessary petitions and paperwork within a week of the announcement of his appointment. The clerk of the court was quoted as saying that, under the circumstances, the request by Hagen’s lawyers to grant him the necessary extension promised to be “a routine matter.”

The Dons and their top men were acting more and more like the top men in corporations or governments. This, Hagen knew, was what Michael thought he wanted: to be
legitimate.
Michael was continuing down this road without Hagen’s advice. Until it was sought, Hagen would keep his reservations to himself.

Unlike Hagen, Michael had never worked for a corporation. In
this
business, who gets hurt who hasn’t brought it on himself? It’s rare. But in “legitimate” businesses? Before Hagen had quit to go to work for Vito Corleone, he’d spent his final months as a corporate lawyer working on “acceptable death rates”: How many innocent people would have to die various ways in various crashes of cars manufactured by the firm’s client before the fully expected lawsuits justified the cost of installing safer, more expensive parts. Babies, high school kids, pregnant women, brilliant young white men with high salaries: all researched, all calculated, all written down in the report he filed the day he quit. What did
those
people do to bring on their deaths?

The government was worse, which Hagen knew long before he took office himself. Remember “Remember the Maine”? All a big lie concocted so the United States could go to war under false pretenses and the men in charge could make their rich friends richer (including the newspaper moguls who self-servingly spread the lie in the first place). More people died in that trumped-up war than in every Mafia conflict put together. It’s only the negative stereotypes about Italians that make people think they’re a threat to the average Joe. The government, on the other hand, wages nonstop war on the average Joe, and the suckers just eat their bread, go to their circuses, and keep on pretending they live in a democracy—a lie so cherished they can’t grasp the self-evident, that America is run entirely via backroom deals involving the rich. In almost every election, the richer candidate defeats the poorer candidate. When the poorer candidate wins, it’s usually because he’s agreed to be a stooge for people richer than the ones who backed his opponent. Go ahead, try voting the bastards out. See what happens. More to the point: see what doesn’t. That ought to be his slogan:
Hagen for Congress. See What Doesn’t Happen.

Hagen doubted that the world had ever seen a better racket than the American government. It’s hard to sue the government, for example, and even if you win, so what? Here’s a million bucks. Then they raise taxes two million. Plus, with businesses, someone somewhere has to buy their crummy product. What are people supposed to do about the government? It’s yours, it’s
you,
you’re stuck with it, end of story.

For years, Hagen had been working out deals with politicians, looking into their dead eyes and seeing what soulless opportunists those men had become, long before Hagen ever set foot in their offices to explain whatever mutually beneficial arrangement they would have little choice but to accept. These men—and, very occasionally, women—accepted without objection, thanked Hagen, shook his hand, smiled those public-servant smiles, and told him to come back anytime. If Hagen ever looked in the mirror and saw that look in his own eyes, he might just have to put a bullet between them.

He’d never expected to hold elected office outside the state of Nevada (and was reluctant even to do that), and he never would have if not for the unforeseen opportunity provided by his predecessor’s death. The people of Nevada seemed as alarmed to find Tom Hagen in Congress as he was to be there—though less alarmed than his wife, Theresa. The criticism of his appointment, even after it had died down, was too much for her. She was concerned about the effect it would have on the kids. And the idea of being a Washington wife gave her the creeps. “You always seem to get what you want,” she’d told him, “and I know you well enough to know you never wanted this.” He tried to deny it, and she saw through him. She needed time to think about all this. She took the kids and went to spend the summer with her folks at the Jersey shore.

Perhaps it was precisely because Tom Hagen had gone into this so grudgingly that his arrival in Washington was such a shock to his system. As his taxicab crossed the Potomac, it hit him, really, where he was, who he was. As realistic as Hagen was about what went on in that city, the sight of the Lincoln Memorial put a lump in his throat.

That first night in his hotel, when he couldn’t sleep, he initially blamed it on jet lag and coffee, but he flew all the time and drank coffee by the gallon and ordinarily could go to sleep anytime he allowed himself to do so. He pulled back the curtain and saw the lights of the Mall, and felt goose bumps.

He was a millionaire. He was a
United States congressman.
He started laughing.

Then he got dressed.

The impulse had come from the heart, and he was in the elevator before he thought about what an indefensibly sentimental thing he was about to do.

He knew even as it was happening that this was not a story he could ever tell to anyone.

He crossed Constitution Avenue and stood at the west end of the Reflecting Pool, which smelled like rotten eggs. Lights shone on the water. A couple opposite him held hands and kissed. What tremendous beauty.

He was an
orphan,
that’s what he was. When he was ten, his mother went blind and then died and his father drank himself to death, and Hagen got stuck in an orphanage and ran away and lived on the street for more than a year before he made friends with Sonny Corleone and Sonny brought him home like a stray puppy. At the time, it had made no sense that Sonny’s father had gone along with this, but Hagen had been too grateful to question anything. After that, it became something Hagen didn’t think about. His mother died of a venereal disease and his father was a violent, rampaging, death-courting drunk. Hagen was an expert about not talking about things or thinking about them a long time before Vito Corleone honed and harnessed those skills.

But that night it suddenly hit him.
Vito
had been an orphan, too, taken in by the Abbandandos at about the same age as Hagen was taken in by the Corleones. Vito grew up in the same house as the man who would become his
consigliere.
Vito had re-created a mirror image of that dynamic in his own house, as first Sonny and then Michael used Hagen in that role.

Hagen turned around slowly, arms out, taking it all in, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument. The Capitol and, above it, the seemingly random stars that had somehow aligned for that to be his new place of business. Hagen stayed where he was, at the west end of the pool, both reflected and reflecting, and kept turning around. He didn’t believe in God, an afterlife, or anything mystical, but at that moment he did, without a doubt, feel the presence of the dead, heavy and literal as a block of ice. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The late congressman. Sonny and Vito Corleone. Bridget and Marty Hagen. Those untold thousands of men who’d taken bullets in the head and heart for something bigger than their own immediate families and interests. All the people whose lives had been laid down so that he could have his—so that, for however long, he would find himself here, transformed into some excellent gray-haired stranger named Congressman Thomas F. Hagen.

During his time in Congress, he’d often think back to this moment and the euphoria he’d felt—usually at one of the surprisingly many times people seemed legitimately and even selflessly interested in improving the lives of strangers. Unlike those whose early days in Washington were spent watching their naive idealism swiftly ground to dust, pulverized by the realities of politics and money, Hagen had no ideals to crush. When congressmen he’d last seen when he’d come to bribe them saw him inside the Capitol and introduced themselves, pretending never to have met him, Hagen was only mildly amused. He’d spent his life sitting in an office while people paraded in one by one, asking for favors, so their piggishness barely registered on him, either. On the other hand, while virtue and altruism are in short supply on Capitol Hill, for a man incapable of disillusionment, they’re everywhere.

That first night in Washington, though, his euphoria was finally interrupted when, as he was staring up at the night sky, he felt the barrel of a gun against his ribs. It was a Negro in a white cowboy hat with a bandanna over his face. He wore crepe-soled shoes. Hagen hadn’t heard him coming.

“Hope that watch doesn’t have sentimental value,” the man said.

“It doesn’t,” Hagen said, though it had been an anniversary present from Theresa. Not a milestone anniversary, but he did like the watch. “It’s just a watch.”

“It’s a hell of a
nice
watch.”

“Thanks. Be sure to point that out to your fence. I like the hat, by the way.”

“Thanks. You’re rich, huh?” he said, handing back Hagen’s emptied wallet.

“Less so now,” Hagen said. He’d only had a couple hundred dollars on him.

“Sorry about that,” the man said, turning away. “It’s just business, you know?”

“I understand completely,” Hagen called after him. Had the city ever seen a more cheerful mugging victim? “Good luck to you, friend.”

Hagen, being Hagen, had left plenty of time for the drive from Theresa’s parents’ house in Asbury Park down the shore to his party’s national convention in Atlantic City, and it was only after he hit Atlantic City and the traffic was rerouted and snarled that he had any reason to check his watch. He’d replaced the one that had been stolen with a replica of it so he wouldn’t have to say anything to Theresa. But he’d left it on the nightstand. He could picture it. It was right next to his convention credentials. He slammed the steering wheel with the palm of his hand.