The Godfather's Revenge (36 page)

“And yet.”

“Right. And yet, we have to pass. I’d like to see them out of office altogether, but we can’t see any good way, any emissary I can send their way who can advance your agenda. Never say never, but for a while now, I’ve had to be Mr. By-the-Book. I can’t touch anything irregular. The people getting forced into retirement or fates worse than that, you can’t believe. Men my age, our age, men who fought in the war, got our start that way, there are a lot of us—too many of us, the way some people see it. The best field agent I ever saw, you know where the wise men stuck
him
? He’s an assistant dean at a music college. He’s supposed to be recruiting, I don’t know, bassoonists with the potential to be agents. I’d die at a desk, I can tell you that, and I’m not about to wreck the slim chance I have of not winding up at one. So I have to think you have better men for this job than me anyway. Your friends in the union brass, other politicians. I don’t know. I shouldn’t tell you how to do your job. My apologies.”

Michael glanced over his shoulder.

“They’re still there,” Joe said.

“Excuse me?”

“They’re yours, those men. Skinny and the fatso. I can tell. Although for all you know they’re mine, too.”

“I’d know.”

“Sure,” Joe said. “I’m joking with you.”

“All right,” Michael said. “New Orleans and the package?”

“New Orleans, sweet mother of God,” Joe said, letting out a deep breath. “New Orleans. New Orleans is complicated.”

“Enlighten me.”

Joe thought about this for a while.

So far, the Tramontis seemed to be abiding by the Commission’s ruling, but Michael Corleone didn’t want to leave anything to chance. He hadn’t, of course, told Lucadello anything about Carlo Tramonti’s proposal, but knowing that the Tramontis, too, had worked with the CIA on the assassination project, Michael had asked Joe to look into whether the Tramontis had any ongoing relationship with anyone Joe worked with.

“New Orleans is not America,” Joe finally said. “Same way New York isn’t. A place like Philly, that’s America.” Joe had grown up in South Philly, but it was a bigger part of his persona than when he’d first left—a reaction, Michael supposed, to working around all those Yale men at the agency. “Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, even L.A. and Las Vegas.
Especially
those places, y’know? Hot, artificial, and so shiny that whoever you are, you can see your reflection in it. This right here,” Joe said, gesturing expansively toward the World’s Fair, its futuristic architecture on the site of a paved-over dump, epic vainglory surrounded by highways and cloverleafs, admission not free, “is sure as hell America. But the rest of New York is New York. It’s its own thing. And New Orleans is New Orleans, and Miami’s well on its way to being just Miami.”

Joe lived in Miami. To the best of Michael’s understanding, he was the agent in charge there.

Michael shook his head. “
New York is its own thing
? Joe, please.”

Any number of tourists taking snapshots of the Unisphere with their Brownies and their Instamatics were now capturing Michael Corleone and a bushy-haired man in the corner of the frame. Michael would have been unsurprised to learn that among the tourists was an FBI photographer in short pants, flanked by nonunion actors hired to pretend to be his family.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Joe said. “I mean that New York’s a case apart. You people think of the rest of the world as your goddamned farm club. New Orleans isn’t on an island, and it doesn’t have the superior attitude, but it’s also a place where—”

“I’ve known you more than half my life, Joe,” Michael said. “You’re a dear friend, and I put up with things from you I’m not sure I’d put up with from family. These wiseass routines in search of a straight man are just who you are, but cut it out. I’m in no mood.”

Joe gave Michael a look. Michael stared him down and then, reluctantly, nodded in concession. It was Joe who was doing him the favor.

“Maybe this is a better way to get at it,” Joe said. “Remember when your nephew was playing college ball, and you’d see all these men in the stands with clipboards and stopwatches, and you knew that some of them were scouting for bookies, some for pro teams, some for another school coming up on the schedule, and plenty of them were bullshit artists. Some, God knows, just liked the sound of hearing their lives tick away. A few were crazies who’d convinced themselves they had ties to some pro team. They’d mail these detailed reports faithfully every week to someone at the Eagles or Giants or whichever, who never took the time to call them up and tell them to cut it out. Even if you dug into who these men all were, a few would be simple to verify, but you’d never figure it perfectly. There’d be legit pro scouts who also worked for bookies, for example. There’d be skilled liars and liars who didn’t know they were lying. You understand me, Mike? That’s what I’m trying to tell you about New Orleans.”

“Neither you nor anyone else in your company is working with my friends down there. Is that right?”

“Jesus Christ, are you hearing me? New Orleans is a colorful place, but it’s all gray.”

Michael clasped his hands behind his back as he walked. He had an uncanny ability to tell when even seasoned liars were lying, and he felt sure Joe was telling him the truth: that because of the nature of the place and of the intelligence business at present, Joe was shut off from figuring out what was going on.

“At a certain point in life,” Joe said, “a man has to accept that ability and experience are disposable. Sometimes all that matters is that they’re them and you’re you and that’s it. I don’t have to tell you. You went to school with Ivy League fucks,” which he said a little too loudly and several passersby glared at him, including a Puerto Rican woman who actually clamped her hands over her daughter’s ears.

It was the kind of thing that got people noticed.

Michael tapped Joe’s elbow and steered him down the road toward the Kodak exhibit, which looked like a four-hundred-foot-long oval of undulating dough, made of cement and yet somehow levitating a few feet off the ground. Atop it was a rotating pentagon, each side of which featured a photograph about four stories high: the five largest color photos in the world. The one facing them seemed to be of a Japanese warrior.

“Things have changed,” Joe said. “I’m not in this line of work for the chance to file fifty-six-page operational plans with the appropriate wise men every time I need a drainage ditch blown up. Or to get second-guessed before the literal dust settles. That plan we worked on together, your people and mine, it came from the wise men. That’s how they think. They labor under the
great man
theory, because that’s what they learned at Yale, and that’s how they see themselves. Each one: a big, indispensable man.”

“The plan had its merits,” Michael said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. The plan itself was crazy. Michael had expected it to fail. From the ashes of that failure, he’d expected something good to pin on Geraci. And cash. If, against the odds, it had worked, the silver lining would have been that the Corleones would get their casinos back. Win-win. “After all,” Michael said, “there’s that old saying, if you want to kill a snake, chop off the head, not the tail.”

“Never heard it. I’m a city boy like you. I know jack shit about killing snakes, but it seems like chopping off the bottom half would do the trick, too. But why focus on just one snake, is my point. There’s always another snake. Why not drain the swamp? Kill the habitat.”

“Other creatures use the same habitat, though, right?”

A huge sad clown stared down at them from the tower.

They took the escalator to the roof.

As they rose, Joe stood close to Michael’s ear. “All we needed to do,” he said, just above a whisper, “was mount a guerrilla war, island-wide. If we involved your men, it should have been for their proven skills with fire and explosives. Burn the cane fields, the tobacco fields, blow up the copper mines, then smuggle out TV footage of the fires and angry
gusanos
playing to the cameras. The world wouldn’t have stood for it. They’d have thought the insurgency was bigger than it was because it looked big on TV. And, bim, bam, boom, it’s over. You gents are back in business, and I’m off to the next adventure. Everybody’s happy. Instead, we have now.”

The surface was a hodgepodge of fountains, sloping sidewalks, rooftop gardens, and clearly marked backdrops for snapshots.
PICTURE SPOT
, the signs read. The tower was on one end; on the other were smooth, white twenty-foot-tall cement stalagmites meant to evoke the surface of the moon. They headed toward the moonscape.

“What’s all this have to do with New Orleans, Joe?”

“New Orleans?” he said, frowning. “Nothing. Everything. Everything’s connected, Mike. Goddamn.”

Joe stopped to light a cigarette and offered Michael one, which he declined.

“All right,” Michael said. “And so what about the missing package?”

Joe put his smokes and lighter away, and they kept walking. “I already answered that.”

“Say again? If you did, I missed it.”

He took a deep drag of the cigarette. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Lucadello said, teeth clenched and growing red in the face, “that I haven’t said already.”

Michael put his arm around his old friend and they started through the moonscape.

“I’ll be blunt,” Michael finally said. “The wild-goose chase needs to stop.”

“I’m being blunt, too. You’re not listening. You’re missing my point. I’m not sure I can say it any more directly than I have.”

“Try,” Michael said.

From where Michael now stood he could see the Garden of Meditation below and, just beyond it, the Van Wyck Expressway. His bodyguards were positioned on opposite ends of the rooftop.

“The simple answer is we don’t know. The simple answer is that I have not, nor to my knowledge have any other agents, seen your boy since those first few days he was in Sicily. These are the facts. What this could mean is that he’s dead—by his own hand, natural causes, or what have you. In my personal opinion, it’s more likely that he’s found a good place to hide on that island, in which case your guess as to where he is will be better than mine. Your resources and your connections there are better than mine, not to mention your better understanding of the culture, even the terrain. Historically speaking, men have found Sicily a magnificent place to hide. Is his wife there with him? We don’t know. There is some evidence to suggest yes. We don’t know where she is exactly, either. Is this what you’re looking for when you ask me to be direct?”

Which was when it finally hit Michael that Joe Lucadello, a man who knew things for a living, probably knew nothing for certain except that he’d been used by his superiors, by his
country,
as a pawn.

“Do you have any idea,” Michael said, “any idea whatsoever, where the leaks are coming from?”

“I was sorry to hear about those kids from Calabria. The…” Joe stopped himself and bowed and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “but even if I did, you know I’d have to say I didn’t. I can tell you this: if there
is
a leak, the smart money says it’s in your house and not mine. Common sense decrees, as the saying goes. But I’m also saying that things are complicated right now.”

“Meaning the end of the line.”

“The end of the line
segment,
” Joe said. “Lines don’t end. That’s the main thing that makes them lines.”

“But line segments end.”

“They do,” Joe said. “Goddamned right they do.”

The expression, no doubt, came from railroad lines, but Michael had no reason to point this out. He thanked Joe, and the men embraced.

“Look at all this,” Joe said, backing away, then turning slowly around in a circle. “What a bill of goods the future is. What are all these saps going to do when the future gets here, and they still don’t beat the traffic by flying to work in a jetpack, and they still don’t have free electricity in their houses from their own personal nuclear-fusion device, and America still hasn’t set foot on the goddamned moon? There has never in human history been a culture where optimism and cynicism existed side by side on such a scale as this, not even ancient Rome.”

“Do you mean New York?” Michael said. “Or America?”

“Touché.” Joe winked his glass eye. His face lacked any trace of playfulness.

“Tell me the truth,” Michael said, pointing. “
Is
there a camera in there?”

“Even if there was, I’d have to say there wasn’t.” This time the smile that came over him seemed real. But a moment later it faded. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “You’re not joking.”

Michael had been, he thought. But before he could say anything, Joe bent slightly and took the eye out. It made a sucking sound, and in one smooth motion he jammed it into the pocket of Michael’s shirt.

“See for yourself.”

Joe made no attempt to close his empty eye socket. It was pink and vaguely, grotesquely sexual. Michael didn’t flinch and couldn’t stop looking into it. As Joe reached inside his jacket, the bodyguards broke into a run. But all Joe pulled out was a pair of dark green sunglasses. The bodyguards stopped. Their running had attracted stares from the other visitors on the roof.