The Godfather's Revenge (31 page)

A uniformed butler opened the door and a blast of air-conditioning—another new addition—nearly knocked them over. The butler was British—or sounded convincing enough—and young for the job, maybe thirty-five, with the long, sloping nose typical of both royals and their senior staff. His haircut was a perfect re-creation of President Shea’s.

From somewhere in the house came the sound of distant laughter and the kind of guitar-slinger rock-and-roll music often associated with surfers and dopers, although Tom was familiar with it only because Connie’s oldest, Vic, played it all the time, too.

The butler showed them through the dark and echo-filled main hallway. They seemed to be going away from the music. The furnishings, incongruously, seemed about the same as they’d been before the remodeling: thick rugs, hand-carved tables and chairs with mythical creatures carved into the legs and backs, lushly upholstered chairs and settees that seemed to have been designed primarily as good places for a corseted Victorian lady to faint. The mansion’s thick velvet curtains were drawn, and it was hard to get a great look at the artwork, but that didn’t seem so different, either. Every wall in every room still had at least one piece on it that had no doubt cost a bundle. Theresa was keeping her excitement to herself, though it was obvious to Tom that she wanted to stop in front of every painting and study it.

Contemporary art was her specialty—it was also what the Hagens could afford—but Theresa got a thrill from any good private collection. In a museum, she’d explained to him years earlier, you feel like the art belongs to the world, but in a private collection, you’re aware of ownership. It’s what makes good private collections so exciting. Ninety percent of the thrill is the work itself, but that last ten percent made Theresa’s world go around. Some
person
owns this, she’d think, and the more she’d think about it—while face-to-face with genius and beauty—the tougher time she’d have accepting that that person wasn’t her.

Woltz was waiting for them in the same glass-paneled sun porch where he’d received Hagen the first time. Johnny Fontane and Francesca Corleone sat together on the buttercream leather love seat next to him. Francesca was brandishing a martini, Johnny his usual whiskey and water. They looked dressed for a board meeting, and they were soaked in sweat. The room was an oven. Seeing the Hagens, they all rose.

Seeing Johnny and Francesca together, Theresa did a double take. Francesca looked just a little bit afraid. Tom took it all in stride and squeezed Theresa’s arm. He’d explain later. She seemed to understand.

“Congressman Hagen!” said Woltz.

“Just Tom,” he said. When people greeted him that way, it always sounded to Tom like a joke at his expense.

“Sorry to hear about your legal problems,” Woltz said. “I know, firsthand, there’s no bigger nightmare than being falsely accused.”

Now it was Theresa’s turn to squeeze Tom’s arm, though it was more of a vicious pinch.

“Thank you,” Tom said.

The old man wasn’t sweating at all. Like most men who had once been tall and strong, the ravages of age seemed to have exasperated him. Woltz was completely bald now. His upper lip sagged on one side from a mild stroke he’d suffered the year before. He still dressed the same way: Italian loafers as expensive as a good used car, freshly pressed tan linen slacks, blue silk shirt, open at the throat, a sprout of thick white chest hair asserting itself like an unafraid furbearing creature.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” Woltz said. “How long has it been?”

“Almost twenty years,” Tom said.

“Brings back memories,” Woltz said. Bitterness dripped from his voice. “You know everybody, right? Some familiar faces, obviously. Obviously.” He pointed at Francesca but looked at Tom. “You know about the Nino Valenti Fund, right? The Nino Valenti Fund. I’m just hearing about it. Promising idea. Old actors, singers, sick ones, caring for them. Your trip go OK? Been to your room yet? Where are my manners! This must be Mrs. Congressman Hagen.”

“It must be,” Theresa said.

“You’ll have to forgive him,” Johnny said. “Back in the nickelodeon days, right after Jack earned his first million, his first wife made him take speech and etiquette lessons, to cover up the fact of where he came from, only it looks like over the years they’ve worn off.”

Woltz ignored him. “So I hear you’re quite the art maven, Mrs. Hagen.”

Theresa was studying the painting on the wall behind Woltz, a massive oil painting of nude young girls bathing in a lake and a cloven-hoofed satyr laughing on the muddy banks.

“She helped found the Museum of Modern Art in Las Vegas,” Tom said. “She’s on the board there and at a few other museums, too. She’s really more of an expert than a maven.”

“I can answer for myself,” she said, but she betrayed herself by blushing. And by not being able to take her eyes off that disturbing painting. She was sweating like mad.

He always found that sexy. It’s not the heat, Tom thought. It’s the cupidity.

She asked him if that painting was by who she thought it was by. Her tongue might as well have been hanging out.

It was.

“That painting, I thought…” Theresa said. “I could be wrong,” which she said only when she was certain she was right, “but hasn’t that painting been missing since the Nazis seized it during the war?”

“I can’t say,” Woltz said. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask my curator about that.” He smiled, unashamed. “I just know what I like,” Woltz said. “You want a tour? I’ll get you a tour. Back when I had horses,” he said, shooting Tom a quick, malevolent glance, “I could give that tour myself, the one of the stables, I mean. But with the art, I need a hand. You want to go on the tour, Tom? John and Jessica already had theirs.”

“Francesca,” Francesca said.

“I’d love to,” Tom said, looping an arm around his wife.

Woltz called for the butler.

All those years ago, when Luca Brasi paid off someone in the household staff to slip something into Woltz’s nightly brandy, Tom Hagen had been on the plane back to New York. Luca—Vito Corleone’s Al Neri—had then chopped off the head of Woltz’s prize racehorse and shoved it between the old man’s satin sheets. Tom hadn’t seen any of this, of course; he had only his imagination to contend with. That poor horse—Khartoum; he could still remember the name. In truth, he rarely thought of it. But when he did, it disturbed him. It provoked genuine regret.

FRANCESCA AND JOHNNY STOOD JUST OUTSIDE THE
sunroom, dabbing at themselves with white hand towels. “My mother’s parents are like that,” she said. “Hot when everyone’s cold, cold when everyone’s hot. I guess a lot of old people are like that.”

She was twenty-seven, half his age. She was older than Lisa, his daughter. So there was that.

“I think we did some good in there, though.” Johnny didn’t want to think about how old he was. He focused instead on her wet hair and her damp summer dress. He had a thing for women when they were wet. Right out of the shower, out of the ocean, the pool. Caught in a rainstorm. Sweating. All of it did something to him. Not that he was crazy enough to get involved with her. But there was no denying she was a lovely creature, toweling off, running her fingers through her long black hair in a happily doomed effort to tame it. “He’s a tightwad, but with the involvement of the Corleone Foundation behind the scenes in setting this all up—it’s the proverbial offer he can’t refuse.”

Francesca frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, sweetheart,” he said. “It’s just a saying.”

“A saying,” she repeated.

“Just a saying.” He was about to add
no need to make a federal case of it,
but he caught himself. Danny Shea was in California doing some last-minute campaigning and was in fact staying only a few miles from here, at the house of an Old Hollywood crooner turned TV game-show producer, at the other end of the golf course from Johnny’s compound.

“So,” Francesca said. “Do you want to go see where that music’s coming from?”

“Music? I don’t hear any music.”

Francesca pointed in the general direction of its source.

It was a current, infamous hit, featuring a flailing drummer, an electric bass player who couldn’t handle the song’s three-chord progression, a guitarist who kept turning his amplifier on and off, and a drunken man with a sore throat, screaming supposedly dirty lyrics in the general direction of a microphone suspended far above his head. Other than “Louie Louie,” Johnny couldn’t make out a word.

“I hear noise,” Johnny said, “but nothing I’d call music.”

“Oh, come on,” she said, taking him by the sleeve and starting down the hall. “Don’t you ever have fun?”

“Fun?” Johnny said, allowing himself to be pulled along. “Why do you think they call me Johnny
Fun
tane?”

“You mean like the way they call Mr. Sinatra Frank
Sin
atra?”

“Nobody calls him that that I ever heard,” he said.

“I’m just…teasing you.”

For a bizarre moment he’d thought she was going to say
busting your balls.

She smiled. “I never heard anyone call you
Fun
tane, either.”

They walked down a dark hallway toward a wooden door big enough to drive a Buick through. It opened onto an indoor pool, enveloped in a noxious cloud of cigarette and reefer smoke and chlorine. There were thirty or so guests, mostly people who worked with the new Mrs. Woltz—Vickie Adair. Men in tennis clothes and women in terry-cloth robes, most of them closer to Francesca’s age than Johnny’s, sat on metal chaise lounges. The men all had beards and shaggy hair. Between the noise and the smoke, it took a moment for it to sink in that the people in the pool were all women and that they were all naked, too. Along the back wall was a bar and what looked like an exit, and Johnny steered Francesca toward both. No one seemed to recognize Johnny, but presumably they were just trying to play it cool.

He got them drinks, and while they were waiting, Vickie Adair got out of the pool, stark naked, and padded over to them. Someone tossed her a towel, but she didn’t use it to cover up. She was a washed-up starlet, a bottle blonde who’d crammed eighty-some years of living into the forty-some years she’d lived, and it showed. If she hadn’t been wet and naked, Johnny wouldn’t have given her a second look. She’d shaved her bush, the sick motives for which Johnny didn’t want to think about. He maintained eye contact, with her and with Francesca, as best he could. Francesca seemed nonplussed. They shouted their introductions. Vickie said that she and Johnny went way back and asked him if he remembered when. Johnny hated when people pulled this shit. He met a thousand times more people than the average Joe. How the fuck was he supposed to remember? He wanted to get out of here. Francesca remained poised and serene. Vickie said that she’d been in
Bang-Up Job
with him. He didn’t recall that, either, which didn’t mean anything. He barely remembered the picture. He leaned toward her ear, so Francesca wouldn’t hear. “Now I remember,” he said. “Back then you were doing something different with your hair.”

He darted a glance at her absent bush. She gave him a mocking,
very funny
smile and then said something in Francesca’s ear. Vickie told them to make themselves at home, turned her saggy, depleted ass toward them, and padded back to the pool.

Johnny and Francesca took their drinks and went outside. It was dark now. The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees. There were about the same number of people out here as inside, milling around on the lawn, but this was by and large where the older crowd had settled. A familiar ripple of recognition went through them at his presence there. Johnny, on instinct, maneuvered himself away from them. He and Francesca wandered out on the lawn together, far enough to talk but not so far that they were alone, exactly. There was what looked like a tombstone and a stone bench not far away, and they walked toward it.

“I’m sorry about that scene back there,” Johnny said.

“Don’t be. It was my idea. Did you think I’d be shocked?”

“No,” Johnny lied. He touched his throat. “Bad for the voice—all that smoke, that chlorine in the air. To be honest with you, I couldn’t hear myself think. If you want to go back, though—”

“This is nice,” she said. “Out here. I’ve seen naked women before. I imagine you have, too.”

“Those back there were my first,” Johnny said. “Rough introduction.”

“I’ve smoked a reefer or two in my time, too.” She laughed at his surprise. “C’mon, John. The foundation I work for has a lot to do with artists and entertainers. My sister’s a college professor, a real Bohemian, almost. I’ve been to college, I live in New York.” She ticked these apparent virtues off on her fingers. “Just how sheltered do you think I am?”

Johnny shook his head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you by assuming you weren’t a drug addict,” he joked. “So what’d she tell you?”

“Vickie? That the rumors about…uh, you.” She blushed. “That the rumors about you aren’t true.”

“What rumors?” he said, but he knew.

Francesca shook her head. “What about you?” she asked. “What’d you tell
her
?”

“Vickie?” he said. “I thanked her for her hospitality.”