Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Tom Hagen spent his patience on his business and his family and had none left over for the game of golf. He rented a cart whenever possible. He walked up to the ball, addressed it, smacked it. Just hit it and forget it.

He had a knack for knowing where his ball went, and it drove him nuts-as was the case now-when one of his playing partners hacked through undergrowth with his seven-iron like some great explorer trying to find the headwaters of the Nile. You’re just a duffer with custom clubs, he thought, drumming his hands on the steering wheel of the cart. Take the fucking drop.

“Take a drop, for God’s sake!” Hagen shouted. On the rare occasions he had to spend more than ten seconds looking for his ball, he took the penalty and got on with it. Life’s short.

“Found it!” Michael Corleone called. Michael had heard that Corbett Shea was in town, too. Supposedly the president had been planning to stay at Fontane’s but had had to cancel. Which didn’t mean the story about the proposed Corbett Hall was entirely false.

“You’d get your handicap down to nothing,” Michael said, taking his sweet time lining up his shot, “if you took more time on your shots and weren’t so quick to take a drop.”

“Forget it,” Hagen said. “I’d just be trading one sort of handicap for another.” As it was, his handicap was a six, best in the foursome. Hal Mitchell was a fifteen, Mike was at best a twenty. Mike’s friend Joe was playing with borrowed clubs and would be lucky to break a hundred on the front nine. “You found your ball; hit the fucking thing and let’s go.”

Beside him in the cart, Hal Mitchell shook his head and chuckled. In any other context, even Hagen wouldn’t have dared to speak to Michael this way. But it was understood that when it came to sports, Tom was still the big brother, no different than when they were kids and he was trying to teach Mike to play a decent game of tennis. Their playing partners didn’t seem as startled by this as other people were. Both had known Mike almost as long as Tom had-Mitchell since the war and Joe Lucadello even longer, since Mike’s days in the CCC. Joe was a skinny guy from Philadelphia with loud clothes and an eye patch. He was in Vegas on vacation, a guest at the Castle in the Sand. This was the first Hagen had met him.

“Mike tells me you and him joined the Canadian Air Force together,” Mitchell said. Joe had just cheerfully four-putted the flattest, slowest green on the course. They were on the way to the next tee.

“That’s the Royal Canadian Air Force, Mr. Mitchell,” Joe said, winking.

“Call me Sarge,” he said. “All my fwiends do.”

“Thanks, friend.”

“Should’ve seen us, Sarge,” Michael said. “Couple of punk kids who could barely handle this little plane we’d taken lessons on, and somehow we thought we were ready to bring down the Red Baron.”

“Youth,” Joe said. “That’s your somehow. The Red Baron’s from the wrong war, by the way. He was the Great one. We were the Good one.”

“The wrong war,” Michael muttered.

Ever since the situation with Fredo, Michael had been like this, these shifts in mood. It weighed on Hagen, too. As consigliere, he’d always believed that there were things that had to be done and you did them. Once you did them, you never talked about it. You forgot about it. Even a tiny gap between believing a thing and doing it was enough space to harbor nightmares.

Snap out of it. Hit it and forget it.

Hagen had honors. He blasted the ball, more than two hundred fifty yards and straight as a Kansas Rotarian.

“I didn’t catch what you do, Joe,” Mitchell said on the way to the next hole, their two carts abreast on the path. “Still a piwot?”

“Very funny,” Joe said. “You’re a funny guy. I knew you managed the casino, but I had no idea you were one of the comedians, too.”

Pilot, the sarge had meant, but it did, Hagen realized, sound a lot like pirate. He didn’t want to embarrass Mitchell by correcting Joe, and he couldn’t make eye contact with Mike. For a long, painful moment, no one seemed to know what to say.

It was in that moment that Hagen first wondered if Joe Lucadello was really an old buddy from the CCC and not a member of another Family.

“Not piwate,” the Sarge barked. “Piwot.” He held out his arms to pantomime airplane. His golf cart nearly swerved into a sand trap. “Pwanes.”

“Oh, right,” Joe said. “Sorry. Um, no. Right after the war I was with Eastern. But no.”

“You get that in the war, did you?” Mitchell said. “The eye?”

“More or less,” Joe said.

More or less? Hagen got out and grabbed his driver. Maybe that wasn’t as odd as it sounded. A lot of veterans were funny about talking about the war. Hagen wasn’t a veteran, but those three were. Mitchell seemed to accept the nonanswer as nothing unusual.

Hagen teed up his ball.

“So what wine of work are you in?” Mitchell said.

“This and that,” Joe said. “Different deals in the works, you know? Mostly I take it nice and easy, like the song says.”

Hagen backed off the ball. He’d been about to tee off, but that got his attention. It wasn’t the breach of golf etiquette that bugged him. Chatter all you want, he didn’t care. It was that Joe had said what a wise-guy would say. Michael was supposedly in town for shareholders’ meetings of two of their companies, and Joe was supposedly here on vacation. What did it mean if Joe was with another Family? Hagen had always presumed there was something other than the desire to be a law-abiding citizen that was behind Michael’s making Geraci the boss. If Mike was sincere about stepping down, why did he do it with all those strings attached? The Commission? They’d have been glad to see him go. Michael had said that it was for protection: for himself, his family, his business interests. Or maybe Michael couldn’t bring himself to let go of the connection racket, which had always been the Corleones’ most valuable asset.

Or maybe it had something to do with this Joe character.

Hagen addressed the ball.

He continued to believe that Michael had created the kind of intricate, brilliant riddle that Vito had often constructed and Hagen had enjoyed trying to solve (why Hagen resented having to do this with Michael, he both did and didn’t understand). Could this pirate in orange Sansabelt slacks be a key to it all? Hagen hadn’t checked him out in advance. Michael had said that he and Joe had been in the CCC together, and Hagen had accepted it at face value. Joe said he was from Jersey, just outside Philly, but Hagen didn’t really know the Philly people. They were a thing unto themselves. New Jersey might be a lead, though. The president was from New Jersey. Michael had his head so far up the Ambassador’s ass he could sing out of that pink bastard’s navel. It didn’t all add up-Eastern Airlines? not what a wiseguy would say-but there were plenty of numbers to plug in and see if they’d help Tom Hagen solve for x.

Still in his golf clothes, Tom Hagen flicked on the lights of his office in Las Vegas, above a shoe store near Fremont, and sat down at his desk-the rolltop that had once been Genco Abbandando’s, shipped here from Vito Corleone’s house on the mall. At this point in Hagen’s career, he had the connections to get anybody’s story on his desk and gift wrapped, generally with three or four calls, nearly always in no time at all. An hour, by his standards, was a pretty lousy showing. He already had the information Lucadello had given to register at the Castle in the Sand and what he’d learned about the guy during a morning on the golf course. He estimated that Joe Lucadello would be a three-call, twenty-minute job. Hagen looked at his watch, noted the time, and picked up the phone.