Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

“Three out of four we can do. As for Carmine, I love him, too. He didn’t do anything wrong. He went where he was supposed to, he made a great shot at the target we told him to hit, and he was smart enough to swallow his manly pride and dress like a woman and try to escape that way. If it was up to me, I’d hire him, but… well, all I can say is that it’s out of our hands.”

Geraci smiled. “Carmine’s mother’s maiden name was Bocchicchio.”

Even after he explained about the peerless, weirdly mercenary ability of the Bocchicchio clan to exact revenge, Lucadello was unmoved.

“So who are they going to come after, huh?” Lucadello said. “The United States government?”

Geraci shook his head. “They’ll take it personally.”

“Meaning what? Me? Or wait, I know! They’ll go after the president!”

Abruptly, Geraci started shaking. To steady himself, he crossed the room, grabbed a fistful of Lucadello’s shirt, and pulled him to his feet. “Carmine’s still alive,” he whispered. “Keep him that way, and they won’t come after anybody.”

Only one gondolier was at work this early, but the gondolas were large. There was plenty of room. As Hagen expected, Russo’s men took their tommy guns on board.

“Don’t look like that, Irish,” Louie Russo said, taking a seat at the front. “I know you ain’t on the muscle side of things. Hell, you people aren’t even gonna have no muscle side of things. Anyhow, loosen up. Take it from me, you’ll live longer.”

The gunmen found this pretty funny. The gondolier averted his eyes and didn’t say anything. He began poling them across the fetid, man-made pond. Finally, he and Hagen made eye contact. Almost imperceptibly, the gondolier nodded.

Hagen had stopped sweating. A sense of peace washed over him. Russo was telling the story of how he had gotten this place, but Hagen wasn’t listening. He studied the tree-lined shore, anticipating the moment they’d get to the halfway point across, bending over enough that no one would notice him unbuckling his belt.

Halfway across, the gondolier brought his pole out of the water. He’d made tens of thousands of trips across this pond, and it had given him forearms a pile driver might envy. As Hagen straightened up and yanked off his belt, the gondolier swung the pole, unleashing the pent-up anger of a man who’d spent years wanting to do this to every self-important asshole who’d ridden in his gondola. It connected with the skull of one of the gunmen.

The other whipped around, but before he could get off a shot, he was jerked backward. Tom Hagen’s belt dug into his neck.

The gondolier grabbed the first dead man’s gun and trained it on Louie Russo.

The second man kicked and turned purple. Hagen felt his windpipe rupture. The man went still. Tom shoved him to the floor of the boat.

Russo started to jump, to try to swim for it, but before he got out of the boat the gondolier grabbed him by the back of the shirt and held him fast. His sunglasses fell into the water.

The tiny-fingered Don started to cry. “I gave you everything you wanted. Now this?”

“Don’t insult me,” Hagen said. He fished a.22 with a silencer out of the coat pocket of the man he’d killed. The assassin’s tool of choice. His arms tingled from the effort it had taken to garrote a man. “You were going to kill me,” Hagen said, waving the gun in front of Russo.

“You’re crazy,” Russo whimpered. “That’s just a gun. It don’t mean nothin’.”

“Even if you weren’t, I don’t care. You gave Roth the idea of getting Fredo to betray the Family, and you set it all up with your people in L.A. You’ve done a hundred other things that give me cause to kill you.”

“ You?” Russo’s tears muted the effect of his devilish eyes. Snot ran freely from his phallic nose. “Kill me ? You’re not in this side of the business, Irish. You were a fucking congressman. You think they’re gonna let you make your bones, Irish? You’re Irish. ”

Tom Hagen’s whole adult life, everyone had gotten him wrong. He was first and foremost a poor Irish kid from the streets. He’d lived under bushes and in tunnels for an entire New York winter and won fistfights with grown men over half a loaf of moldy bread. Hagen raised the pistol. Now it was his turn to smile.

“If you live in the wolf’s den long enough,” Hagen said, “you learn to howl.”

He fired. The bullet tore into Russo’s brain, ricocheted around in his skull, and did not make an exit wound, the way a bigger-caliber bullet would have.

Hagen tossed the gun into the pond.

He and the gondolier quickly, silently tied weights to the three dead men and threw them overboard. No one saw them. The gondolier took Hagen back to shore and went to work scouring the boat with a bleach solution. He didn’t see any blood, but it paid (well) to play it safe. Hagen drove away in Louie Russo’s own car. The gondolier would swear on the immortal soul of his sainted mother that he’d seen Russo’s car drive away. The car was found two days later in the airport parking lot. The newspapers reported that passengers with any of several aliases known to have been used by Louie the Face had boarded planes that day. None of these leads had turned up an actual person.

The gunmen had been loyal, trusted Russo soldato s, men it would have been difficult if not impossible for the Corleones to bribe. This gondolier, on the other hand, made less in a year than what Louie Russo’s cuff links cost. Russo and his men were found a month later. They were hardly the only corpses there, either. The acidic pond accelerated decomposition. When the state police had it drained and the top layer of mud excavated, they found bones galore, most of them in weighted gunnysacks, suitcases, and oil drums.

By then the gondolier had disappeared.

Neither the authorities nor anyone from the Chicago outfit ever found him. He lived out his days under a different name in a small town in Nevada, running a gun shop and private cemetery on land purchased (with other people’s money) from the federal government, only twenty miles from the windy, irradiated outskirts of Doomtown.

Joe Lucadello called from a pay phone less than a mile from Geraci’s house and told Michael Corleone everything. The lie he’d told about Russo, the truth he’d told about Michael. The details about the ship that would take Geraci to Sicily. Alone. His wife and kids weren’t going with him, which ought to make things even easier.

“Sorry we didn’t get it done down there,” Lucadello said, meaning Cuba. “I know you were counting on it.”

“We’ve lived to fight another day,” Michael said. “What more can a person ask of life?”

“Quite a bit,” Joe said. “But only if you’re young.”

At his mansion in Chagrin Falls, Vincent Forlenza awoke in the dark barely able to breathe, with the familiar and excruciating sensation of an elephant standing on his chest. He managed to ring the bell for his nurse. He knew a heart attack when he had one. It wasn’t his first, and with any luck it wouldn’t be the last, either. It wasn’t as bad as the others. More like a baby elephant. Though maybe he was just getting used to it.

The nurse called for an ambulance. She did what she could and told him he’d be fine. She wasn’t a cardiologist, but she meant what she said. His vital signs were good, considering.

Vincent Forlenza was a cautious man. God seemed to be having a hard time killing him, and he’d be damned if he was going to make the job easy for mere mortals. His estate here and his lodge on Rattlesnake Island were heavily guarded and fortified. It had been years since Forlenza had gotten into a car or boat without his men checking it thoroughly for bombs. Ordinarily, he had two guys do the job who were known to dislike each other, so they’d each be eager to catch the other betraying his Don. He’d stopped eating anything that wasn’t prepared as he watched. But even Don Forlenza, in his hour of medical need, wouldn’t have thought to question the men who arrived to save his life. Neither did anyone guarding the estate. Neither did the nurse, who noticed nothing unusual in the way the men administered to the old man. There was nothing unusual about the ambulance, either-until it left and, moments later, another one just like it showed up.