The Godfather Returns (47 page)

“So what Family is he with?” Tom asked, in Sicilian, too. “I contacted Nunzio in Philly—”

“Why do you leap to the conclusion that Joe is a part of this thing of ours, Tom? Because he has an Italian name? I’m disappointed in you.”

“Not because he has an Italian name, no. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

“Look, it’s fine. Everything you want to know about Joe he’ll tell you himself.” Michael switched back to English. “Actually, more like everything you
need
to know. At any rate, we’re meeting with him at midnight in my suite.”

Theresa had escaped from the ring of people surrounding the artist and made a beeline over to her husband and Michael. “What do you think?”

“Great,” Michael said.

“Visionary,” Tom said.

She put her arm around him, as if they were still schoolkids.

“I hate it, too,” Theresa said. “But, believe me, it’ll be big. Him, too.”

“Late plane?” Tom asked, holding out his arms the way the sarge had, which did manage to get a smile out of Mike.

Theresa shook her head. “He made me stop so he could get out and walk down the Strip. He stared at one marquee, just stared without moving, for—God, I don’t know. Forever. He did it again at a gift shop window. He took every whorehouse leaflet he could get his hands on, too. Hundreds of them, for art purposes obviously, but who ended up carrying them?
Moi.
”

“Obviously?” Tom said.

“I don’t think he likes girls,” Theresa stage-whispered.

Tom averted his eyes from Michael’s.

“Anyway,” Theresa said, “now he’s over there telling everybody that in the future, America will be Las Vegas. Not be
like
Vegas.
Be
Vegas. The man’s been here three hours.”

Michael shrugged. “Some people catch on quick.”

After the dinner meeting, when they got to Michael’s suite, Joe Lucadello was already there, shirtless, still in his orange pants, sitting at the bar and playing solitaire.

“Tom! What a treat. C’mon in.” As if it were his suite. “Mike tells me you were interested in getting to know me better. I’m flattered.”

Tom had been with Michael the entire time since the art museum. There would have been no time Michael could have told Joe anything.

Al and Tommy Neri had followed them in. Michael gave them a nod, and they headed to the adjoining room, closing the door behind them.

“Mike tells you that, huh?” Hagen looked around the room and realized why it seemed so familiar. The pool table. This was the same suite where Fredo had lived before he had been married. It had been redecorated, but the pool table was the same. Michael turned on the television, loud. The TV was also new. Fredo had kept the TV on all the time just for the sake of having noise around, but these days they turned it on to provide cover from possible wiretaps. The late show was on, some old picture with people in togas.

Joe raised an open bottle of Pernod in one hand, a sealed bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other, and arched his eyebrows. As he did, Hagen tried to see behind the eye patch, but no dice.

“I’ll pass,” Tom said. “Look, I don’t want to sound disrespectful, but I’ve had a long day, and it’s not over yet, so would you mind telling me what’s going on? Whoever you are.”

“He’s Joe Lucadello,” Michael said, racking the balls on the pool table. “That’s God’s honest truth.”

“Though I haven’t been Joe Lucadello in fifteen years,” Joe admitted.

“Oh yeah?” Hagen said. “So who are you?”

“Nobody. Anybody. Mike knows me as Joe Lucadello, which was who I was back when we first met. It still is who I am, of course, but as you took it upon yourself to learn, other than the hotel registration last night—which will disappear, by the way—there’s no record of me anywhere. A few people have memories of that young man, but that’s all.”

“Right,” Hagen said. “You’re a ghost.”

Joe laughed. “Excellent guess, Tom! You’re
very
warm.”

The shattering sound of Michael Corleone’s break startled Tom off his bar stool.

Then it hit him. What’s close to ghost? Spook. Joe was a spook. CIA.

“Sure you don’t want a drink?” Joe said. “You’re pretty jumpy.”

“He drinks a lot of coffee.” Michael sank two balls off the break. He kept shooting. “Like you can’t believe. Gallons.”

“Stuff’ll kill you,” Joe said.

Hagen turned on the bar stool to face Michael. “What’s going on here? This one-eyed guy you haven’t seen since Christ left Chicago stops by on vacation claiming he’s in the—”

“Company,” Joe said.

“And we’re supposed to believe him? Without checking—”

Michael slammed the two ball into a corner pocket, much harder than necessary.

“You’re off your game, Tom,” Michael said in Sicilian. “All this jumping to conclusions. Why do you assume I haven’t seen him in years? I simply told you he was my friend Joe that I met in the CCC. Why do you assume I haven’t verified who he works for? Why do you assume he’s stopping by and not that he came here with business to discuss with us?”

Hagen frowned.
Us?

And how did Hagen—or Michael, for that matter—know for certain that Joe couldn’t understand Sicilian dialect?

Michael lined up a tough bank shot on the three ball and stroked it in like it was nothing. “Tom, you were my lawyer at those Senate hearings,” he said in English, “and you did a first-rate job, but—”

Three ball, side pocket.

“—I was fortunate enough to have another line of defense.”

“Defense overstates it,” Joe said, gathering up the cards from the bar. “Insurance; that’s all it was. Friends helping friends. You did such a good job, Tom, that we didn’t have to do much of anything.”

Much
of anything?

Michael set down the cue stick.

What happened, he said, was that Joe had contacted him not long after the raid on that farmhouse in New York, when the FBI established the Top Hoodlum Program and it became clear they’d be putting more pressure on the so-called Mafia. He and Joe hadn’t seen each other since the day Billy Bishop had asked to see Michael’s pilot’s license and Michael had protected Joe by saying he had no license. In the meantime, Joe had been shot down over Remagen, escaped from a prison camp, then been assigned to a U.S. intelligence detail. After that, one thing led to another. Lots of jobs in Europe. The last few years back on home soil. Long story short, Joe—who’d remained grateful to Mike for what he did—had thought he might be able to help an old friend. He had various ways of keeping a man out of jail, protecting him from prosecution. If it ever came to that, the FBI wouldn’t know who was responsible, wouldn’t even know what had happened. What’s the catch? Michael had wanted to know. No catch, Joe said. We’re not looking for an informant the way the FBI would. Nothing that could get you into trouble within your world. Anything we’d ever ask would be a purely cash-and-carry, services-rendered deal. If Michael was ever asked to do a job he didn’t want to send men to do, Joe promised, that’d be fine. Say no, and that would be the end of it. Joe wasn’t in the market for a slave or a terrified supplicant. Just a vendor.

Hagen started going over all the jobs the past three years that he’d wondered about, but he stopped himself. He couldn’t think about that.

“So why all of a sudden are you bringing me into this?” Hagen said.

“Joe has a proposal,” Michael said. “And I need your counsel. It’s a big step. One step backward from what we’ve been trying to do in order to take a dozen steps ahead. If we accept, I’ll need your full involvement.”

“A proposal?”

Michael picked up his stick, pointed it at Joe, giving him the floor, then started sizing up angles on the impossible shot the four ball seemed to be.

Joe clapped a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “What I’m going to tell you here, you’re either going to like it and be a part of it or else it never happened. One or the other. Obviously, I’m talking to men who understand how to conduct themselves under conditions like that.”

Michael missed the shot, but not by much.

“A long time ago,” said Joe Lucadello, “I told Michael—I’ll bet you remember this, Mike; we were talking about Mussolini—I said that in all of history there’s never been any hero, any villain, any leader of any kind who was impossible to kill.”

Michael nodded. “It made an impression.”

“So here’s your government’s proposal, in a nutshell. This comes directly from Albert Soffet himself”—Soffet was the director of the CIA—“and it has presidential approval. How would you—meaning your business interests—like to be able to go back down to Cuba and pick up right where you left off? How would you like to get paid to do a job for us down there that would make that happen? Supremely well paid, I should add. Every dime is a hundred percent legal, and we can do things so that it’s effectively tax-free. We’d even help train your people. In fact, we’d have to insist on that point.”

“Train them?”

“The revolution changed many things. The men you send to do the job need to know about those things. There are Cuban patriots living in exile who will be able to help as well. We know these people. We’re familiar with their skills and limitations. There’s procedure to follow, too, so that, as I say, nobody goes to jail, be it one in America or, God forbid, Cuba. The risk—let me be clear—is that if and when anything goes wrong, we had nothing to do with it. If the Russians think we’re behind it, as a government, we could be looking at World War Three. Naturally, if your people get into trouble, we’ll do everything possible to help, but not at the expense of revealing our connection with the project. You—your people—will have acted as private citizens. You never met me. I don’t exist.”

Hagen would have been amused by Joe’s spelling all this out—he
definitely
wasn’t a connected guy of any sort—except for the enormity of the scheme he was suggesting. Killing a lowly beat cop was against the rules of their tradition, Hagen thought. How in the hell were they going to get away with assassinating the leader of another country?

And contrary to what the public and FBI and apparently the CIA seemed to think, killings happened for some
reason
—
self-preservation, revenge—not for a
fee.

But wasn’t it revenge? Men had died for stealing a hundred bucks from a Corleone shylock. When the Cuban government had taken over or closed down their casinos—how had that been any different from stealing millions?

And what exactly
were
the rules that governed a retired Don?

In a spectacular combination shot, Michael Corleone sank the four in the side pocket. The six rolled after the five like a man trying to apologize to an angry lover, and they disappeared into the corner pocket together.

“Wow,” Joe said. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

Just then, there was a knock at the door.

“We expecting someone?” Hagen said.

“He’s late,” Joe said, though it was Michael who went to get the door. “My apologies. As perhaps you know, he’s nearly always late.”

It was Ambassador M. Corbett Shea.

“Sorry, gents,” he said. The Secret Service men stayed in the hall, which meant they’d been allowed to search the room earlier. “I had some business with my sons. So can I tell the president and the attorney general we have a deal? Or do you have questions you’d like me to pass on? How’d you put it, Mr. Cahn-sig-lee-airy? Anything the president needs, consider it done?”

Chapter 27

A
FTER
L
UCADELLO
and Shea left, Hagen made himself a stiff drink and went out onto the balcony. Johnny Fontane’s name was in lights on the marquee of the casino across the street, the Kasbah. The Chicago joint. No performer “belonged” to a certain Family, but for years it had rankled Hagen that they’d let the biggest draw in Las Vegas cross the street to play the casino of the Corleones’ biggest rival. Hagen didn’t
like
Johnny, the way Vito and Fredo did, and even, to an extent, Michael. Michael was right that Families couldn’t be fighting over matters so small as what singer was booked in what casino, but in truth Michael was also covering for Fredo, who’d been responsible for overseeing the entertainment at the Corleone hotels at the time. Thinking his friendship with Johnny was a substitute for negotiation, Fredo had been caught flat-footed when Fontane—who was friendly with Russo, too, after all—had signed a six-year exclusive deal with the Kasbah. Fuck friendly. It was business.

This was business, too. He took a deep breath. He couldn’t let his emotions enter into it.

The door opened, and Michael joined him on the balcony. There was a built-in hi-fi unit, and Michael turned on a radio station, again as cover, presumably. Opera. Hagen didn’t particularly care for opera, which Michael knew. Hagen didn’t bother objecting.

“That wasn’t the first time you heard that offer,” Hagen said. “How long have you known about it?”

Michael flipped open his lighter, a jeweled one with something engraved on it. His face glowed in the flame. He took a long drag off his cigarette. “Since the last time I was in Cuba.”

“The last time you were in Cuba, you—”
Were there with Fredo.
Hagen didn’t want to get into that at all. “The revolution was just under way. They knew then?
You
knew then?”

“We talked about it then,” Michael said. “At the time, it was more of an idea than an offer. His idea. Just talk. At the time, I believed that the revolution was far bigger than the charisma of one man. I didn’t think killing him would make any difference.”

“And now?”

“The same. Only now I don’t think it makes any difference if it makes a difference.”

More riddles. Tom took a slug of his drink.

“I love you,” Tom said, “but it may be time for you and me to go our separate ways. Professionally, at least.”

“I was thinking just the opposite,” Michael said.

“
Whatever
you’re thinking, I can tell you, I’ve had it up to here with being kept in the dark, enough of being in, then I’m out, then I’m in, then I’m out. I’m your brother, then I’m just your lawyer. I’m your
consigliere,
then I’m just another politician on your payroll, then I’m in charge of things while you’re out of the country, then I’m some fucking nothing that you don’t consult about a thing like this. You
knew
I wasn’t going to say anything one way or the other about—anything, really, in front of a man I’ve known since this morning, without talking to you about it first. Not to mention Corbett Shea. Yet for some secret reason I’ll have to puzzle out on my own, you set it up that way.”

“Look, Tom, there’s nothing to puzzle out. I wanted you to hear it from him first because it’s his operation. Not mine. We’d be performing a service. Mickey Shea is your reassurance that the president is behind this, too. You saw how angry Mickey was. For us, it’s business. Money, opportunity, power. For them it’s revenge. I wasn’t sure about that myself, but there was no better way to see it firsthand.”

Mickey
Shea. Hagen had never heard anyone call him that but the Don, Vito.

“You want to talk about it, Tom, let’s talk. Doing this job at all is a big step. The fact that we need to do it with Geraci’s people makes it a bigger step. Theoretically we could use our men here in Nevada, but the only one who’s ready for something like this would be Al Neri, and we can’t risk losing him. This is more than likely a suicide mission. If we have Geraci’s men do it, either they succeed or they don’t. If they don’t, we’ll have set it up so that we have nothing to do with it. Any repercussions would be felt by him but not us. I’m retired, after all.”

Hagen crunched an ice cube from his drink, his eyes on the nearby darkness of the desert.

“It’s possible that they’ll succeed,” Michael said, “and yet the Communists stay in power. So what? The world is neither better nor worse, and we wind up with a little something for our trouble. But think of it, Tom. Think if it
does
make a difference. Freedom is restored, we’re back in business in Cuba.
Legal,
bigger than anything we have now. Our government and whatever sort of puppet regime the U.S. installs in Cuba will be indebted to us, enough to ensure that we get re-established down there ahead of any other Family. We can easily convince the others on the Commission that Geraci and his men were just
our
puppets. Any resentment for our having cooperated with the government will be quelled by the millions they’ll make because of us when Cuba reopens. In any case, though, no matter how all this plays out, we’d get half the money the government is prepared to pay and Geraci’d get the other half. He’ll never know that the whole thing came through us. Joe and his associates will approach him without mentioning us. We’ll get half what they’re paying, same as if Geraci gave us our share of any big deal, only in this case Joe will bring it to us directly. Geraci is too opportunistic, too aggressive, to turn down a chance like this. And he’s got all those Sicilians he can use on this job—brave, single-minded people with the added bonus of not having the rule about killing cops or government officials. In the unlikely event that Geraci
does
come to us and ask for our advice or our blessings, we simply say that we’re out of such things. If he offers us a share of the money, we politely decline. Only if his efforts are successful will he ever learn a thing—probably via his godfather, Don Forlenza. Again, so what? By then Geraci will be a hero, and he’ll owe it all to us. But the bottom line is this, Tom: I need someone beside me so smart and loyal that I’ll be—we’ll be—thinking with two brains. I can’t, and won’t, go ahead with this without you at my side.”

“You’ve already thought it out pretty well without me,” Hagen said. “You’d have your old pal Joe at your side. Neri at your side. Nick Geraci doing the dirty work. I’m not indispensable, Mike. Look at the body count in this thing of ours, and it’s been going on for centuries, turning a profit every year. None of it needs any of us.”

“Well,
I
need
you,
Tom. You’ve been dealing with the Ambassador for years. The president won’t do anything to us against the old man’s wishes.”

“You could send someone else. A lawyer, a judge, somebody like that.”

“You’re the only person on this earth I trust. You know that. There’s nothing I’ve ever done that cut you out because I didn’t value you or need you. I was only trying to protect you.”

“Protect me, huh?” he said. “Thank you very much.”

“What do you want me to say? You want me to say I’m human? That I’ve made mistakes, particularly when it comes to you, and that I’m
sorr
y
? Is that what you want?”

Tom sighed. “Of course not. What I want are some straight answers.”

Michael extended his arm in an after-you gesture. “Ask away, counselor.”

“Is that eye patch for real?”

“That’s your question?”

“I’m working up to the big ones.”

“He told me war wound. I never gave it a thought after that.”

“And he’s for real, too? This whole thing, you’re certain it’s on the level? The Ambassador may have helped get his son elected, but he has no official position. I’ve never trusted him, and I’m sure you don’t either.”

“Joe was my initial contact,” Michael said, “but when I decided we might go ahead with this, I insisted on meeting with Albert Soffet. When I was in Washington for the transition meetings, I didn’t meet with those people at all, as you know. But I did meet with Director Soffet. Even then, I thought this might be too big a risk. Like that bungled invasion, it was approved by the previous administration. What Joe said was true. Soffet told me the same thing. The U.S. military can’t invade Cuba because then the Russians will retaliate. If all the U.S. does is use economic sanctions, fifty years from now the place will still be in the hands of the Communists. But our government doesn’t dare do
anything
directly. So they need to come up with other means. They tried Plan A, and it failed. We’re Plan B.”

“So am I to assume this was somehow the real reason you quote-unquote retired?”

“Yes and no. Look, you already know nearly everything. You know more about the finances of the legitimate businesses than I do. There’s nothing about the things we did to help get the president elected that you don’t know. And as far as putting all the connection guys we have in one crew so that both Geraci and I can use them, independently of each other—hell, Tom, we’d call that a
regime
if you were Sicilian.”

Tom took another long drink.

“That was supposed to be a joke,” Michael said.

Hagen rattled the ice in his glass. “Hear that? That’s me laughing.”

A siren wailed, and then another. Two fire trucks sped by. There was a big fire on the far edge of town.

“Okay. So you’re right. I didn’t tell you everything. I had two other things I had to address. I couldn’t do those things as a completely private citizen, so I engineered the deal with the Commission that—well, Jesus, Tom, you put that together, too.”

“So one of those two things you’re talking about is this job in Cuba?”

“No. Cuba is just a means to an end.”

Tom patted his coat, looking for a cigar, and found one in his breast pocket. He was softening. He had an orphan’s distrust of the stability of all human bonds, yet he knew in his heart he was destined to be Michael’s
consigliere,
now and forever.

Michael flicked his lighter. He kept the flame awfully high for a cigarette smoker.

Hagen bit off the tip of his Cuban cigar.

“Thanks,” Hagen said. “Nice lighter.”

“It was a gift,” Michael said.

“The other two things?” Hagen said.

As Michael lit a new cigarette for himself, he pointed to the Kasbah. “Number one.”

“Fontane?” Hagen said. “I’m getting tired of the guessing.”

“Fontane?” Michael scoffed. “No, no, no. I meant
Russo.
If I retired, truly retired, Louie Russo’s gotten so much power the last few years that the Commission would end up making him boss of bosses, which would be a great blow to our interests, particularly here and in Lake Tahoe. Cuba, too, if and when it opens up. He’d come after us, and we’d be powerless to stop him. We have a whole crew of men here, but it’s relatively small and primarily muscle. Without a seat on the Commission and with Russo as
capo di tutti capi,
we’d get outfought politically, which would be the end of us.”

“True,” Hagen agreed.

The deejay came on the radio, said they’d been listening to a selection from Mascagni’s
Cavalleria Rusticana,
then grew very excited about the beer commercial he was doing.

“Not to mention, if Russo does become boss of bosses, knowing the way the Ambassador thinks, I’m concerned that Fuckface would have better access to the president than we would.”

“I guess I had that one half figured out already,” Tom said. “I never heard you call him that before, though. I never heard you call any Don by a nickname.”

“Well, the reason for that leads me to my second thing.” Michael smiled. It was not a smile with any mirth at all. “You want to know who gave me this lighter?”

“Let me guess. Russo.”

“All of a sudden you want to take guesses? No, Tom. Not Russo.”

Michael told him about Geraci.

He told him about trying to kill Geraci.

He told him about the need to try again, when the time was right.

Hagen listened in silence, knowing he should be angry for having been kept out in the cold for so long, fighting back the elation he was feeling instead.

He got himself another Jack Daniel’s. Michael, who almost never drank, not even wine, asked him to make him one, too.

“Question,” Hagen said, handing Michael his glass. “What’s to keep the CIA from doing the same thing to us that you’re planning to do to Geraci? Use us for the job and then dispose of us when it’s done?”

“Good to be working with you like this again,” Michael said.

“And?”

“Touché,” Michael admitted. “That’s the tricky part. But we have the connections to pit the Bureau against the Company and vice versa, at least to an extent. And, don’t forget, we do have a family member at the Justice Department.”

“Who, Billy Van Arsdale?” Hagen scoffed. “That kid still thinks he got the job because of his parents’ connections. He’s going to do everything he can to keep his distance from us.”

“He’ll do what we need him to do,” Michael said, “which is to be our personal canary in the coal mine. He’s ambitious, and he resents us. He’s afraid his connection to us by marriage is why he’s stuck in the law library instead of holding press conferences or going to court. We don’t need to use our connections to get him promoted to something better. He’ll use us—what he thinks he knows about us—to get the job done. After
that,
we ask him, politely, for his help.”

“In other words,” Hagen said, biting his lip to keep from grinning, “we make him an offer he can’t refuse. It’s brilliant, Mike. The old man would be proud.”

Vito Corleone had never set foot in Las Vegas, but the two men on that balcony felt the force of his legacy press down on them like a warm, firm hand.

“We’ll see,” he said. “The final test of any plan is its execution.”

“To execution,” Hagen said. They clanked glasses and drank to his grim pun.