Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

“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?”