Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

It wasn’t even nine A.M.

“I appreciate that,” Hagen said. “But tempting as it is, I need to be getting back.”

“Aw, c’mon, Irish. You don’t drink on it, it ain’t a deal. On top of which, since you people are going to be in the legal casino business-I pity you the money you ain’t gonna make, but no one asked you to go down that road-anyway, you ought to get a last look at my establishment here, which at the risk of not being humble I have to say I’m proud of. It don’t open up for a while yet, but-” Russo took off his black glasses. His eyes were solidly red with a green ring in the middle. He smiled.

The chill that went through Tom Hagen was not a result of the sweating and the air-conditioning, though that’s what he told himself.

“-I know some people,” Russo said. “Ever take a gondola ride?”

“Can’t say I have,” Hagen said.

Russo herded him out the door. The men with the tommy guns stood. “Get this,” Russo said. “Irish here ain’t ever been on a gondola ride. If that ain’t one of those things a man ought to do before he dies, I’d like to know what is.”

Joe Lucadello walked to the front door of Nick Geraci’s house, in the middle of the night, and rang the bell. Geraci had fallen asleep in the chair in his den out back. Charlotte had taken a sleeping pill and was dead to the world. Barb was off at college. After several rings, Bev Geraci answered, but only through the intercom.

“Tell your father it’s Ike Rosen.”

“Will he know what this is about?”

“Sure, why not?”

“What happened to your eye?” she asked. “Is that real?”

“It is. It’s from a war wound.”

“I don’t believe you,” Bev said.

Lucadello flipped the eye patch up. Even through the peephole, the absence of an eyeball was gory enough to make the girl scream and run away. Lucadello sighed, sat down on the porch steps, and waited for the police to come. That was another brilliant thing these people had worked out. The police functioned as their private security force, and other people-civilians-would summon them when needed.

Two squad cars responded. Cops piled out of them, guns drawn. Lucadello raised his hands. He provided them with his Ike Rosen driver’s license and told them he was in the import-export business with Mr. Geraci. He was there at such an ungodly hour only because of an unfortunate customs incident. By then, the commotion had awakened Nick Geraci, who thanked the cops and calmed his daughter down. Then he and the agent went back out to his den.

Lucadello sat down on one of the seats Geraci had salvaged from the wreckage of Ebbets Field and gave Geraci the news about Carmine.

“Rest assured,” Geraci said, “whatever they do to him, that kid’s not going to talk.”

“Whether he talks may be the least of your problems.”

“Oh yeah?” Geraci wasn’t sure what the agent was talking about, but his choice of pronouns -your problems, not our problems- didn’t bode well.

“The Cuban government would be nuts to torture him. They’d be nuts to do anything but make a big fuss about this foreign national who tried to kill their bearded, beloved revolutionary sweetheart. The Russians will be on their side. The U.N. will get dragged in. When they deport him, there won’t be anything for us to do but put him in jail, maybe execute him.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Geraci said. “Carmine Marino’s still an Italian citizen. If they send him back there, he’s got a pretty powerful godfather.”

Lucadello shook his head. “You don’t understand. We need to execute him a long time before any of that happens. But that’s just where your problems start, I’m afraid.”

Geraci would be goddamned if he was going to let this one-eyed bastard kill him in his own backyard. “Stand up,” Geraci said. “I need to search you.”

“Suit yourself. But if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. And if you waste precious time on things like this, you may wind up that way.”

Geraci searched him anyway and liberated him of a gun and two knives.

“Keep ’em with my compliments,” Lucadello said. “I’m on your side, remember?”

Geraci motioned for him to sit back down. “It’s late. I was sleeping. Forgive me if I’m confused about why this is my problem and not yours, too.”

“Oh, it’s mine, too. Look, I’ve already heard from somebody at the top-not my boss but his-that the FBI knows about the camp Tramonti was operating in Jacksonville. They already had an investigation going. I’d heard a rumor floating around that the Bureau was somehow tipped off to our operation, too, but it didn’t seem credible. But after this incident, it doesn’t matter. The risk of someone at the Bureau putting it all together is high.”

“And you can’t protect me from that? There’s nothing you can do?”

“Very little, under these circumstances,” he said. “I’d like to kill those guys.”

“Kill ’em, then,” Geraci said. “I’m not stopping you.”

“Unfortunately,” Lucadello said, “that’s not an option. It wouldn’t solve everything for you anyway. We have reliable intelligence that your former associate Michael Corleone has been planning to kill you. The only thing he’s been waiting for was for you to do this job. Now that you’re not going to get it done at all, we believe your life is in immediate danger. In addition, we have somewhat less reliable intelligence that Louie Russo is planning to kill you as well, apparently because… well, I don’t know how everything works for you people, but apparently there’s some sort of Commission?”

Geraci shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“Of course not. At any rate, everything Russo’s doing had their approval and unfortunately your operation didn’t. Apparently that’s a breach of protocol severe enough for them to authorize… well, we’re not certain who. Presumably Mr. Russo. To kill you, that is. You’re not shaking.”

“It comes and goes.”

“If something like this was happening with me, I’d be shaking.”

“It’s a type of Parkinson’s. Not fear. It has nothing to do with fear. And anyway, how do you know something like this isn’t happening with you?”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s happening,” he said. “At any rate, things are going to move fast, and you need to move faster.”

“Not we?”

“No,” Lucadello said. “Not we. We never had anything to do with anything. You and I have never met. There is no we. There is no me, either. Agent Ike Rosen doesn’t exist.”

Lucadello said that the best he could do was get Nick Geraci and his family out of there. One-way tickets under assumed names, to any destination on earth. It might be possible to have an agent meet them at the airport and give them some quick pointers about starting a new life in wherever they happened to be. This wouldn’t be possible everywhere, but if Geraci wanted to run a few locations by him, he could probably say if they were a good choice.

Geraci looked at the gun on his desk. It would have been nice to kill the guy. It might not make anything worse than it was.

Then, in a flash, almost a vision, he saw his way out of this, or at least how to buy some time.

“All right,” Geraci said, extending his hand, consciously imitating his godfather, Vincent Forlenza. “Four things. First”-index finger-“I’m going to Sicily. I don’t need your people. I have people. Second”-middle finger-“I don’t fly. Period. But you’re going to help me get where I want to go, and my family, too, if they’ll join me, which I doubt. Third”-ring finger-“I promise you, my good friend Michael Corleone isn’t going to kill me, so you might want to check into your reliable intelligence and see what went wrong. And fourth”-pinkie-“I’d strongly advise you not to kill Carmine Marino or to have him killed.”