Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

The Ambassador would have no way of knowing that it had been Tom Hagen, while Genco was still consigliere, who’d taken care of that wartime news coverage.

And even though the Ambassador thought he’d bought his ambassadorship-which was mostly true-it was Hagen who, behind the scenes, had secured it.

It was Vito Corleone who’d taught Hagen the power of staying silent about such matters.

Motorized iron gates glided open. The driver stopped the golf cart in front of a house made of stone blocks, designed like a half-scale replica of an English castle. A crew of Mexicans was laying sod and planting cactus. Shirtless, leather-skinned blond men on scaffolding were antiquing the stones with narrow brushes. Hagen thought his head would explode.

“This way, sir.” The driver still made no eye contact.

Hagen, squinting, wondering if three hundred more bucks could get him four aspirin and a pair of shades, headed up the front walk.

“No, sir. This way.”

Hagen looked up. The man was standing in the rocks of the unfinished yard. The driver took him around the side of the house to the pool, as if Hagen couldn’t be trusted to go through the house. Hagen checked his watch. Almost three. He would have to catch a later plane home.

In the backyard, the pool was shaped like the letter P, a circle spliced onto a single lane for lap swimming. Around the perimeter of the circular part were seven identical white marble angels. The Ambassador sat at a stone table, shouting into a white telephone. A platter of meats and cheeses was set out. In front of the Ambassador was a plate smeared with mustard and strewn with crumbs. This arrogant fuckjob had already eaten. Plus he was stark naked (which might have thrown Hagen except that the last meeting he’d had with the Ambassador had taken place in the steam room of the Princeton Club). His skin was the color of rare prime rib. His chest and back were hairless as a fetal pig’s. He didn’t have sunglasses on either.

“Hi ho!” he shouted at Hagen, though he was still on the phone.

Hagen nodded. “Mr. Ambassador.”

The Ambassador motioned for Hagen to sit down, which he did, and to eat up, which he did not. “Already ate,” Hagen mouthed, and he made a wincing gesture that indicated he was sorry for the misunderstanding.

The Ambassador lowered his voice but kept on talking, cryptically, but the conversation seemed personal, not business. At one point he put his hand over the receiver and asked Hagen if he’d brought trunks. Hagen shook his head. “Too bad,” the Ambassador said.

Naturally. Only a pezzonovante could sit there in his fluorescent altogether. Not that Hagen would have stripped naked and gone for a dip. The point, of course, was Shea’s rude semiassertion that he couldn’t.

Finally, the Ambassador got off the phone.

“Hey hey! It’s the Irish consigliere. ” Cahn-sig-lee-airy.

Hagen wondered if the Ambassador really didn’t know how to pronounce the word or if the mispronunciation was willful, a joke on the “Irish” part of it.

“German-Irish,” Hagen corrected.

“Nobody’s perfect,” said the Ambassador.

“And I’m just a lawyer,” Hagen said.

“Even worse,” the Ambassador said-a strange thing to say, Hagen thought, for a man who’d sent four children to law school. “Drink?”

“Ice water,” Hagen said. Said, not asked. In public, the Ambassador was a famously charming man. The lack of any apology had to be both on purpose and purposeful.

“Nothing stronger?”

“Ice water will be fine.” As a chaser to a fistful of aspirin. “Heavy on the ice.”

“I quit boozing, too,” the Ambassador said, “other than a nip of Pernod from time to time.” He raised an iced half-empty glass. “Prune juice. Want some?” When Hagen shook his head, the Ambassador shouted for water. “My father went the same way as yours, you know? Drink. Curse of our people.”

A young Negro woman in a French maid costume brought out a silver pitcher of ice water and one small crystal class. Hagen downed his water and refilled the glass himself. “Sorry to have missed you on the court,” he said, pantomiming a ground stroke. “I’ve been hearing for years you have quite a game.”

The Ambassador looked at him as if he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“From other people,” Hagen said.

The Ambassador nodded, slapped together another sandwich, stood, waved for Hagen to follow him, walked to the side of the pool, and sat down on the top step of the shallow end of the circular part. His prick lolled in the water, half submerged before him. He tapped it, absently.

“I’m fine right here, sir,” Hagen said. “In the shade. If you don’t mind.”

“You’re missing out.” He held the sandwich in his teeth and made a show of splash-sprinkling water on himself, then bit off a chunk. As if it could see this, Hagen ’s stomach growled. “Refreshing,” the Ambassador said.

The Ambassador finished his sandwich. Hagen asked about his family. The Ambassador went on and on about them, especially Danny (Daniel Brendan Shea, former law clerk to a U.S. Supreme Court justice and now the assistant attorney general of the state of New York) and Danny’s big brother, Jimmy (James Kavanaugh Shea, governor of New Jersey). Danny, whose wedding last year, to a direct descendant of Paul Revere, had been a highlight of the Newport social season, was screwing a TV star, the hostess of a puppet show Hagen ’s girls watched. And Jimmy. The governor. Though only in his first term, he was already inspiring talk about a run for the presidency. The Ambassador did not ask about Hagen ’s family.

The Ambassador went on to ask about several of the men’s mutual associates and acquaintances. Hovering between and among their every chatty word were the recent events in New York. But neither man spoke the names of any of the dead-Tessio, Tattaglia, Barzini, nobody. Neither Hagen nor the Ambassador spoke specifically of those events, or had to.

The Ambassador stood, knee deep on a step of the pool, and stretched. He was a tall man, a giant by the standards of men of his generation. He’d claimed to have licked Babe Ruth in a fistfight when they were kids; this was a lie, but with the Babe dead for years now and the Ambassador standing there in his aging, ropy-penised glory, the story contained its own sort of truth. The Ambassador dove forward and began swimming laps. After ten he stopped.

“Fountain of youth, fella,” he said, not as breathless as Hagen would have thought. “Swear to you. Swear to fucking God.”

Had it not been for the beating sun, his headache, his irritation at being trifled with by the Ambassador, and his need to get home tonight, Hagen might have let things drag out.

“So, Mr. Ambassador. Do we have a deal?”

“Ho ho! You get right to the point there, don’t you?”

Hagen glanced at his watch. It was pushing four. “I’m like that.”

The Ambassador got out of the pool. How the woman in the maid outfit knew to appear from out of nowhere with a towel and a thick robe, Hagen couldn’t imagine. Hagen followed the Ambassador into a glassed-in porch, which was, thank God, both dark and air-conditioned.

“You flatter me. You and Mike do. Or rather you people flatter Danny. ” He paused for Hagen to catch his implication. “I can’t really call off the investigation. You must know that. And Danny certainly can’t. Even if he could, it’s a local matter. New York City, not state.”

All of which Hagen correctly understood to mean the opposite. What that little turn of phrase about Danny meant was that the Ambassador had rigged it so that nothing came directly from his office, nothing could be traced back to him.