The Godfather's Revenge (50 page)

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 rarely 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.

It was bad news, but it wasn’t about her husband. It was horrible, but it wasn’t, yet, the end of the world.

TOMMY NERI SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN MIAMI BY THEN
, but he was still in Panama City. It had to do with a woman. Nothing special, just a lot of laughs for both parties involved, and hard for Tommy to walk away from. He could do without all the stress he’d been under. He’d been doing heroin, but never this much in such a short time. It was a day after the president was killed that he realized she’d told him about it yesterday. Fucking yesterday.

EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON, CARLO TRAMONTI
had, as expected, been cleared of all charges in the tax-evasion case against him, an even more flimsy legal assault the federal government mounted against his empire. No one, not even the prosecution—whose heart was visibly not in the case—expected any other verdict. Still, it had cost the Whale time and the money he shelled out to his handsomely paid lawyer. So a person still might have expected Tramonti to leave the court-room with something other than a broad and unforced smile on his face.

“This is vindication,” he told the assembled reporters.

At the time of the shooting, he was celebrating this vindication at a private party at Nicastro’s, the restaurant near his offices, along with his brothers, several prominent state officials, and Paul Drago, the younger brother of Tampa crime boss Salvatore “Silent Sam” Drago. There was no radio or television in the main dining room, and, supposedly, no one there learned about what happened in Miami until the party stopped.

AL NERI WOULD ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT THE YANKEES
were losing. He would remember the way the dial of his car radio looked, like something from a spaceship. The Coupe de Ville was his first Cadillac, and nothing he had ever bought or would ever buy would give him such satisfaction. It still had the new smell. He would remember staring at the wide dial as if it were a television. He would remember looking up from the dashboard and seeing a woman in a battered panel truck drive by. She was maybe thirty, with her hair tied in a scarf, and the windows down and her radio turned up full-blast.
“I’m all through ever trusting anyone,”
she sang along, happily enough.
“The only thing I can count on now is my fingers.”

Al held up his own fingers and looked at them.

She turned the corner. He couldn’t hear the music anymore, but she got only two more blocks and pulled over. Her radio station must have interrupted its regular programming now, too.

Al rarely thought about how desperately lonely he was, but he thought about it then. The violent, childless path he’d chosen. He wanted to go to her, the woman with the scarf around her head. To see if she was all right.

Instead, he snapped out of it. He got out of his car and went to give Michael the news.

M
ichael Corleone did stay for a whole week in Maine, as planned, but it had hardly been a vacation. Al Neri and Donnie Bags set up shop at the inn, working the phones on the Tom Hagen situation and trying to figure out how to confirm Michael’s suspicions about Carlo Tramonti. Al worked out a deal with the innkeeper and soon all eight rooms were either vacant or occupied by Michael and his family or the men in his employ.

The television in the lobby was on almost constantly, usually with the sound off, flickering images of Jimmy Shea’s presidency and of the encomia he’d received at the now-postponed convention. There were also countless exterior shots of the Fontainebleau, and the swearing-in of President Payton—
that
would take some getting used to,
President
Ambrose “Bud” Payton—seemed to come up again and again, as if this were all a film loop.

For the most part, Rita, too, stayed at the inn, glued to the TV, although she did go out for meals and a few game attempts to get closer to Anthony and Mary. Generally, these attempts seemed to have been debacles, most memorably including the time she was thrown from a horse and the time she went out on the fishing boat and got seasick and Michael and Anthony had an argument about cleaning up the vomit.

The billiard table was set up in the rec room at Trask, and, in no time, Michael’s ability to see the angles on the table as if in a vision came back to him. He tried to teach this to his children, but the game came too naturally to him. He struggled to articulate its yielded secrets even to the two people on earth he loved most. They soon lost patience with one another.

Somehow, the New York newspapers got wind of the fact that Tom Hagen was missing and ran stories about it, all sources anonymous. The stories were buried deep in the Metro section. He was yesterday’s news, particularly relative to the news about Jimmy Shea.

A sleazy tabloid newspaper reported the rumor that Tom Hagen was in the custody of the FBI. Al Neri, in telling Michael about it, told him not to worry, which only engendered more worry.

The day of the president’s funeral it rained, and they all stayed in and watched it together. Kay came over, too. The day was too sad for anyone to argue. The Shea children, a boy and a girl, were slightly younger than Michael’s children. This seemed to get to everyone. The mourning children on TV were in fact the ages of Tom Hagen’s daughters. There seemed to be nothing that could come out of anyone’s mouth that didn’t just make everything worse.

As the graveside ceremonies began, Kay hugged her children and as she was leaving whispered to Michael to call if there was any news about Tom.

That night, Michael and Rita and the kids went out for lobster, which Mary wouldn’t eat because of the live ones in the tanks in the waiting area, and Anthony wouldn’t eat because he claimed to be allergic. Then they all went to see a Marlon Brando movie that had been filmed on the Riviera. Brando and David Niven are trying to trick a woman into bed. It was supposed to be funny. Michael found it tasteless and in the middle of a bit where Brando’s character is pretending to be a mentally retarded man with a Napoleon complex, he got up and started to herd Rita and the kids out of the theater.

Rita said she thought it was funny and wanted to stay.

“Can I stay, too?” Anthony said. “I think it’s funny, too.”

“No,” Michael said to him, but he was glaring at Rita.

“I’m staying,” Rita said.

“Suit yourself,” Michael told her. And he took the kids and left.

Rita came back to the inn four hours later, drunk. From then on, Rita slept in a different room.

And Michael barely slept at all.

The last few nights in Maine, Michael had Donnie Bags drive him out to the school. The security guard let Michael into the rec room. While Bags napped behind the wheel of Al Neri’s idling Cadillac, Michael played rotation, alone, running the table well after midnight.

Upon his return to New York, Michael Corleone was greeted with a tidal wave of unmet responsibilities and a mountain of unopened mail.

Michael went to his office and got to work on the responsibilities, and Al Neri went to the kitchen table for more coffee and to open and sort the mail. The kitchen was at the opposite end of the penthouse, and when Al shouted out, it sounded like he’d been stung by a wasp or stubbed his toe—something startling but insignificant. Michael went to see what was happening, just in case.

As Michael entered the kitchen, he smelled something rotten. Al Neri stood over an opened box, holding up a suit jacket wrapped around a bundle of newspapers.

Miami
newspapers.

Inside was a dead baby alligator.

To the surprise of neither man, inside one of the pockets of the suit jacket was Tom Hagen’s wallet.

WITH JAMES K. SHEA BURIED AND A NATION STILL
numb with grief and confusion, the delegates reconvened. With a minimum of pomp and circumstance, preceded by a brief, emotional nominating speech by Senator Patrick Geary of Nevada, they made President Payton their nominee for the fall election.

Life
magazine never ran those diving photos, believing that doing so would have been in bad taste. For years, the photographer fought to have them returned to her. Years later, she prevailed. She made millions, not only from the exhibit of those shots but also the companion coffee-table book (with essays by a dozen members of the American literary elite) and other licensed material (T-shirts, calendars, and so forth).

Instead of the photo spread, the magazine published both the introduction Daniel Brendan Shea never gave for his brother and the speech accepting the nomination that James Kavanaugh Shea never delivered (which Danny Shea personally rewrote, it would later be revealed). These ran with no illustrations at all. The cover was plain white. Centered, moderately sized bold type read
JAMES KAVANAUGH SHEA
/1919–1964. It was the bestselling issue in the magazine’s history.

Who, in the end, was Juan Carlos Santiago?

There was no evidence that he was in any way connected with the current Cuban government. In fact, he was its sworn enemy. He was a skilled fisherman, who, since he’d fled his homeland and in between bouts of manic behavior, had been a valued member of crews both in South Florida and, more recently, in New Orleans. He was, it seemed, simply the bad seed from a good family. A confused and delusional man who wanted to be a patriot, who tried to avenge the death of his brother by participating in the botched invasion and then tried to avenge the humiliation he’d suffered during that debacle by killing the president.

Case closed.

To appease the worried masses, President Ambrose Payton launched an investigation. He offered the chairmanship of the investigation first to Danny Shea, who understandably declined (and, perhaps less understandably to most people, seemed to have little interest in getting to the bottom of what had happened; those closest to him said it was as if he already knew). Payton’s second choice accepted: a retired Speaker of the House of Representatives, a wholesome Iowan and a beloved American statesman. Those picked to assist him would be similarly august names.

The public appreciated the thoroughness of this, and for all but a few—a fringe element, it seemed, in a fringe-loathing nation—the earnestness of the endeavor allowed them to get on with their lives—shaken by this act of random gun violence but secure that the Star-Spangled Banner yet waved, that the Union was preserved, and understanding that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Nonetheless, the investigation would solemnly pursue every confusing or mysterious element of the case—a rapidly lengthening list, according to some among the fringe element.

There were
no
television cameras?
No
home movies that showed anything of note?

And what about the two large men Santiago squirmed past? The ones who, some felt, seemed to screen him from view until the last second. They were dressed about the same, built about the same. They appeared in countless grainy, blurry photographs, taken by tourists and the
Life
photographer alike, but all attempts to find or identify them had proved fruitless.

Santiago’s fake driver’s license was not a forgery. Neither was it issued in Miami, where Santiago lived, or anywhere in South Florida, but rather in Pensacola. The birth certificate used to get the license was a legal copy, though the real Belford Williams had died in a flood in Louisiana when he was three years old. No one in Pensacola remembered having ever seen Juan Carlos Santiago. The woman who processed the paperwork for it and supposedly took the photo admitted that she believed it to be a scientific fact that your darker-skinned people all look alike to members of the white race.

Santiago was apparently shot five times, but the Secret Service agents advancing on him, from the front, apparently fired only four shots. There were accounts of a shot coming from behind him, although nothing had been conclusively proven. There were conflicting accounts about whether or not Santiago spun around as he was shot; if he did, that would explain the shot in his back (which was just a rumor, since his autopsy had been rendered classified).

Ballistics would prove nothing. Dum-dum rounds break up into pieces that are nearly impossible to trace to a specific gun. All that could be said for certain was what had already been released to the public: all the bullets that killed Juan Carlos Santiago had been fired at about the same time, all from the same
kind
of gun.

Even citizens with less conspiratorial frames of mind had to wonder how a lone gunman—a crazy, a nothing—got that close to a president of the United States with a loaded handgun.

Dumb luck?

Why not?

It would happen at least three more times in the twentieth century, after all, each time by someone even less formidable than Santiago. Each time the event seemed a little less plausible, but nonetheless, there it was: a thing that happened.

Call it luck, call it probability, call it what you will, but if each was a one-in-a-million longshot, wasn’t that explanation enough? Billions of people walked the earth in that time. Millions have, at least fleetingly, wished the president dead. Three (that we know of) came close.

The statistically unlikely fact may be that only one succeeded.