Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

“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.

S O IT WAS that Michael Corleone and Nick Geraci began their final year in business together in a state of perfect Cold War stalemate.

They’d each attacked the other and thought, mistakenly, that the other didn’t know.

They were both frozen by a secret they thought they were harboring, wary at all times of tipping their hands.

They might have been eager to kill each other now, too, but they couldn’t.

It wasn’t safe for Geraci to make a move against Michael (or Russo, for that matter) without the blessings of the Commission, which would be essentially impossible without being on the Commission. Just as important, killing Michael Corleone might also mean killing the most powerful army of on-the-take politicians, judges, union officials, cops, fire marshals, building inspectors, coroners, newspaper and magazine editors, TV news producers, and strategically placed clerk-typists the world has ever known. No one but Michael and Hagen knew everyone the Family had on the payroll and everything about how that operation worked, and Hagen seemed incorruptible. Michael had toyed with Hagen’s dignity, but those two needed each other the way old married people do. Even if Geraci was wrong about this, he was right: the risk of trying to flip Hagen was too great. Maybe one chance in a thousand it’d work, nine hundred ninety-nine it’d get Geraci killed. Even if Geraci did get rid of Michael, it was hard to imagine Hagen-out in Nevada, not even Italian, no chance of taking over the operation-saying, Okay, Nick, here’s how this thing works. Even the indirect access Geraci now had to that machine of connections was too valuable to jeopardize.