Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Russo had a private supper club out in the sticks, almost in Wisconsin. Even against the flow of morning traffic, the drive took more than an hour. It seemed almost as long from the gate and across the expanse of parking lot to the club itself-a white barn made of painted cinder blocks. Though it didn’t seem like much, this place managed to book singers like Johnny Fontane, all the top comics, even the Ice Capades. A sign over the door read HECTOR SANTIAGO, THE KING OF RUMBA! The shows were never advertised but always sold out. Next to the barn was a square pond about the size of four city blocks and surrounded by pine trees. The water was barely visible and black as tar. On the other side of the pond was a nondescript, windowless, three-story warehouse that had been converted into a casino. At night, gondoliers poled guests back and forth across the pond. Russo was unduly proud of the place; by all accounts, it was impossible to come see him here on business and leave without getting a tour of his precious casino. Even so, Hagen had to admire the amount of work that had gone into bribing all the cops it would have taken so that Louie Russo’s customers could arrive at his illegal gambling joint right out in the open, in something as slow as a gondola.

Behind the club, an old farmhouse had been expanded and converted into a guesthouse. Russo kept an office in the biggest room upstairs. To get there, Hagen had to go through some kind of metal-detecting device and then though a steel door, the kind they have on bank vaults. As Hagen expected, two of Russo’s goons sat in an outer room, each with a tommy gun across his lap. One got up, gave him a lazy search, and waved him into his boss’s lair.

“If it ain’t the world’s only Mick consigliere !” Russo said. He had on a pair of diamond cuff links. “What an honor.”

Hagen thanked him and sat down in the offered seat. Russo remained standing, a crude and petty assertion of control.

“Michael Corleone,” Hagen said, “is prepared to support you as capo di tutti capi and to resign his seat on the Commission, which will go to Nick Geraci, so long as you and I can reach an understanding on a few small matters.”

“Hey, you hear this guy?’ Russo called down the hall to the men with guns. “Listen, Irish. Where I come from, we don’t get fucked without first we get kissed. Get my meaning?”

Hagen did. “I’m German-Irish,” he corrected. “And I meant no offense, Don Russo. I know you’re a busy man, and I thought you’d appreciate it if I got right to the point.”

“Coffee? Shit, where are my manners? How about a cocktail, Irish?”

“Coffee’s perfect,” Hagen said. It was from a percolator, but it would have to do. “Thank you.”

Russo frowned. “Hey, are you okay? Because it ain’t hot in here.”

“I’m fine.”

“My ma used to say being fine is more a decision than a condition.”

“Smart woman.”

“Yeah, well, you look like either you’re scared out of your wits or else you got some kind of whatchacallit. Tropical fever. Like from the jungles. Hey, boys?” he called. “My Mick friend in here could maybe use a towel.”

“All I need is coffee,” Hagen said, downing the cup in two long swallows.

“Only person I ever had in here who sweated the way you are was wearing a wire.”

“Is that right?”

Russo nodded.

Hagen raised his arms. “Search me,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

Russo wasn’t too proud-or respectful-to do it, either. Russo searched him. No wire, of course. Russo again motioned for Hagen to sit. Hagen paused, waiting for Russo to sit, too.

“A few small matters, eh?” Russo settled in behind his desk. “Like for instance what?”

From the small third-story balcony of a boarded-up library in downtown Cienfuegos, Carmine Marino loaded the Russian-made rifle he’d been set up to use and waited for the motorcade to come his way. He’d lost the two angry Cubans he’d come with the night they all landed. The only Spanish he spoke was corrupted Italian, but he managed to make his way across two hundred miles of a dictatorship to the two women spies who gave him the rest of his instructions. Carmine was naturally disappointed when he did not have hot sex with them in the dark and sultry Cuban night. Who ever heard of a female spy who didn’t have sex with a dashing assassin such as himself? Why else be an assassin such as himself? There were two of them, and still nothing. It was confusing. Maybe they were dykes. Maybe he wasn’t the man he thought he was. If he got out of this alive, he thought, he’d go back to that one-eyed Jew and tell him that if he knew what was good for him, he’d find the brave Carmine Marino a buxom, randy spy, and pronto. Carmine was nobody’s fool. He knew that girls like that were out there.

The streets were lined with soldiers and cheering Cubans. As the motorcade approached, the sound the people made was oddly metallic, like a record of a cheering crowd played too loud and a little too fast. As a toddler in Sicily, Carmine had heard another despot, Mussolini, cheered this way.

Now the motorcade turned the corner by the cathedral and came toward him, a row of American cars, which was hilarious. These people hate the Americans, yet look. Carmine shouldered his rifle.

In the fourth car-a blue convertible, as promised-was the bearded target, in full military uniform, smiling beatifically and waving to his oppressed people.

Marino inhaled smoothly and squeezed the trigger.

The bearded man’s head jerked backward. A shower of blood and gore arced over the trunk. The driver hit the gas.

Screams filled the air. Police waved the rest of the motorcade-including the black sedan two cars behind the convertible, in which the leader of Cuba was riding-down a side street and out of the city.

The man in the blue convertible, the dictator’s favorite double, was dead.

Carmine Marino was captured on his way to Guantánamo Bay, dressed like a woman.

Louie Russo agreed to everything. The Corleones could, with no interference from Chicago, operate their hotels and casinos in Nevada. Atlantic City, too, if, as expected, things opened up there. Hagen admitted that Geraci’s assassin squad operation was ultimately controlled by the Corleones, and Russo admitted, in so many words, that he controlled the ones run by Tramonti and Drago. They might be rivals, these Families, but they had more in common with one another than with the cynical opportunists at the CIA and in the White House.

After a brief discussion of the particulars, Russo agreed that if his people did the job in Cuba first, the Corleones could resume control of the Capri and the Sevilla Biltmore and operate them within the law and with no interference from Russo or any other organization-power Russo would certainly have once Michael helped make him the first formal boss of all bosses since the death of Vito Corleone seven years before.

Hagen himself would personally oversee the organization of the people on the Corleone payroll. Some of this operation would be gradually given to Nick Geraci, but it would also be available to Louie Russo on occasion and in consideration of his help in allowing Michael Corleone to become an entirely legitimate businessman.

Russo was so cooperative that it became increasingly clear to Tom Hagen that Fuckface didn’t plan to let him out of here alive. It was something he and Michael had thought might happen. Knowing that a thing like that might happen is a world apart from feeling it edge closer to happening. The sweating hadn’t slowed down. He’d have given a thousand bucks for a chance to shower and put on some dry clothes.

“This is a great day, Irish,” Russo said. “We should celebrate. I’ll join you, too, only I was kidding about the cocktail before. I don’t have nothing here stronger than that coffee and the bad breath of those gentlemen out in the hall. The bar in the club there’s all right, but the really top-shelf stuff, best selection in the state of Illinois, is right across Lake Louie there.”