The Godfather's Revenge (43 page)

The girl’s sobs were audible from across the hall.

The doors to each of the bedrooms were closed. The idea here was to make them each hear the other one screaming and weeping, so that their love for each other would make them give up what they knew. The girl, being a girl, should be easy enough to scare so that she’d scream and cry without harming. Fausto Geraci was fair game.

Al took out a switchblade, which had actually been a Christmas gift from Tommy last year. He held it in front of the old man’s face long enough to inspire more cursing, then he pulled the tape away from Fausto’s cheek and sliced through the tape with the knife, just grazing the old man’s unshaven gray skin. Then Al grabbed one end of the tape and in one motion ripped the tape from Fausto’s head, hard and counterclockwise, taking a hank of bloodied hair from the back of his head and inspiring a scream so loud and piercing Al’s ears rang.

Bev Geraci’s scream followed a moment later, calling out to her grandfather.

Fausto clenched his eyes tightly shut for a few moments, fighting back pain.

“I’m all right,” he called to her.

Knowing she could hear him apparently put an end to his cursing. He began to beg and beg on his granddaughter’s behalf, claiming she knew nothing.

“What about you?” Al said. “You tell us where your boy is, and we leave you alone. We know you talk to him.”

“I don’t talk to him never, nothing. He don’t call, he don’t write. It’s the usual thing boys do to their old man once the mother is dead. He don’t like it that I got remarried. It’s hard for the kids when that happens. What can I do?”

Al punched Fausto in the face—a hard right to the uncut cheek—and followed it with a little left jab to the already broken ribs. Fausto sent out a wail made even more anguished by the tough old bird’s determination not to show any pain at all.

On cue, Bev Geraci called out to him once more.

He did not call back that he was all right. Pain-sweat flowed freely. He was as drenched now as if he’d been in the pool, too.

She was crying again. Al hadn’t heard anything that made him think Tommy had hit her.

“He’s an animal,” Al said. “Which I’m sorry about, but there you have it. He’s what I got stuck with. The thing is this. Your son unfortunately is doomed either way. Sooner or later, we’ll find him. Like the man said, if history teaches you anything, it’s that we’ll find him. But, her, she’s innocent. Her, you can spare. You can give us some information, and we’ll go. Five minutes from now, this could be all over,
capisce
? We’ll walk away, and that’ll be that.”

He shook his head. “Ah,
va fa Napoli.
Eh? We’re dead already.” The ribs were making it hard for him to get the breath to speak. “You’ll think. We can identify you.”

“Actually, you can’t,” Al said. “We’re not here. There’s no record of it. We’re ghosts, is what we are. The real him and me, we’re nowhere near here. And the people we’re with right now will swear to it. Honest, hardworking people, strangers with no reason to lie, will remember seeing us. I tell you all this so you can rest easy. So that we can get this done and go on about our lives. Cigarette?”

Fausto nodded his bloodied head.

Al went out onto the patio to get them. He came back and tortured Fausto by smoking one in front of him.

It was sad, Al thought, the attitudes men have about how they’ll stand up to pain. Done right, pain gets everybody. The holy trinity of pain—broken ribs, burns, hard blows to the balls—can bring any man to a crossroads. Resolve to give up and die. Or the main road, which is to talk. The problem is that the ones who talk almost always lie first. But between what Fausto said and what the girl said, he and Tommy ought to be able to walk out of there with something.

“I don’t take no pleasure in none of this,” Al said. “You’re just an old man. So do us all a favor, huh? Where is he?”

“I got no idea. You probably know. Twice as much. As me. I admit I helped him. Get over there to Mexico. After that. All I know is. What he tells me. He don’t tell me sh—…Diddly-whatnot. Don’t hit me again. No jokin’. That’s how boys are. With their fathers. You got boys?”

Al put a cigarette between Fausto’s lips and lit it. Fausto inhaled and worked it to the corner of his mouth. He closed his eyes, savoring the drag. Al admired Fausto for not wanting to curse within earshot of his granddaughter, but
diddly-whatnot
? Fucking Cleveland
cafone.
Al lit another cigarette for himself.

“Again: where is he?”

“We arrange calls to pay phones, you’re right, but what do I know about where he’s calling from, huh? It’s impossible. How you supposed to know a thing like that?”

Al took the lit cigarette and screwed it into Fausto’s forearm. The old man’s screams brought on uncontrollable sobs from his granddaughter.

Al relit it and did it again on the palm of Fausto’s hand.

Fausto Geraci’s spirit was as visibly broken as his body. He summoned up his strength and called to her that he was going to tell them everything. Al picked up Fausto’s cigarette from the floor and replaced it between his lips. Fausto then gave Al Neri a list of places: someplace outside Cleveland, Taxco, some little town near Acapulco, then Mexico City, Veracruz, then someplace in Guatemala, then Panama City. Whether it was the one in Panama or the one in Florida, he didn’t know. It was the same list of places in the same order that the Corleones had received from Joe Lucadello, other than the inclusion of the town near Acapulco, which was news, and the possibility, however confused, that Nick Geraci might be hiding out in the wilds of the Florida Panhandle. If he really had been to all these places, it was an impressive itinerary for a man who wouldn’t fly.

Fausto’s broken ribs made it hard for him to talk, but he seemed determined to get the information out, a good sign that he might be telling the truth. He claimed honestly not to know where Nick was now, but that if they wanted to go to the pay phone outside the Painted Pony Lounge tomorrow at noon, they could wait until the fifth ring and then ask him themselves.

This could be a lie, Al knew, a trap, but there were ways of puzzling out what to do. It was something, anyway.

“Also,” Fausto said. His breathing had become a sickening wheeze. “I got a birthday card. From him. On top of the TV. Stack of papers. Open, but. Still in the envelope.”

As if Nick Geraci would show his tracks that brazenly. Al went to get it anyway.

He found what seemed to be the envelope. It was typed. The return address on the birthday card read
Wm. Shakespeare, London, England.
Inside, there was a note in some kind of foreign language or code, also typed, maybe four or five sentences long. The only thing that wasn’t typed was a block-printed
N
at the bottom. The postmark was New York, New York. Al slipped it in his pocket.

In the next room, the gun went off. Bev Geraci shrieked. Fausto called her name. The gun went off twice more.

Al came running.

When he got there, Tommy was frowning at him. Bev was sitting on the bed. She’d washed her face and head and, while she was still obviously terrified, she was in better shape than Al had left her in.

“What the hell?” Al said.

“What the hell nothing,” Tommy said. “It’s under control,
Sport.
”

He was pushing his luck, this kid.

“What are you shooting at?”

“Nothing,” Tommy said. “Jesus.”

He wagged his eyebrows. Al realized Tommy had just been firing the pistol to scare the girl and Fausto, too.

“Not Jesus,” Al said, as calmly as possible, pointing to the new bullet hole in the jigsaw puzzle. “I think that might be Judas, which would be what you call it.”

“Ironical,” Tommy said.

“Apropos,” Al said, which was the word he was trying to remember. “Stay put,” Al said to Bev Geraci. “C’mere,” he said to Tommy. “Let me show you something.” He led Tommy into the hall and closed the door, leaving the girl there. Then he slapped his nephew on the back of the head and pointed to the door that led to the garage. Al held a finger to his lips, and, as quietly as they’d come, they walked out.

Al didn’t want to seem to be in a hurry, but they needed to haul ass out of there. This was precisely the sort of neighborhood where some nosy old bat would hear those shots and summon Tucson’s finest.

“So what do you think?” Tommy said, pulling out of the driveway.

“Go,” Al said. “Don’t speed, but go.” He was twisted around in his seat, looking for anyone watching them, listening for the cops. He was glad now they’d taken the time to swing by the airport and boost the license plates off a car in the long-term lot. “You get a ticket, I’ll kill you.”

Tommy turned the corner.

“Go toward where the motels are,” Al said. “Semi-nice. Howard Johnson, Holiday Inn, shit like that.” Wholesome nowheres, perfect for their current situation. Tommy would have to go in to register for the room, though. Al had the blood of Nick Geraci’s father and daughter all over him. He silently cursed himself for not bringing the flashlight. How can something bring you good luck if you leave it in the goddamned rental car?

“So what do you think?” Tommy repeated.

“Think about
what
?” Al snapped at him.

“You think we did any good back there?”

Al looked at him. He might not be a dope fiend, but he was without a doubt a fucking dope. Al slapped him again on the back of the head.

“Drive,” he said.

THE MEXICAN AT THE CAR RENTAL LOT MUST HAVE
been done with his shift. Behind the counter was a leather-skinned white man in a white shirt with metal snaps instead of buttons. He looked Al and Tommy Neri over, then looked at the paperwork with their fake names on it.

“Short trip,” he noted.

“Best kind,” Al said.

“Amen, brother,” the man said.

He’d most likely forgotten them before they got out the door.

They walked back down the blacktopped sidewalk to the airstrip.

Al Neri had changed clothes back at the motel, but he still had on the tam. The clean clothes were similar to the ones he’d shit-canned, though he hadn’t brought a second Windbreaker. He’d scrubbed all the blood off his skin with a bar of pumice soap that he carried in his travel bag for times like this. Experience had also taught him, during his years in Nevada, that most trailer parks had their own incinerators, and most boondocks towns had trailer parks galore. In the first incinerator they found, he dumped a pillowcase containing the bloody gloves and clothes and the license plates. In the second, Tommy tossed in the Walther. They drove around a while and didn’t see a third, so Al just went into a men’s room at a gas station. The trash can was predictably full. He wiped Fausto Geraci’s .38 clean, wrapped it in paper towels, shoved it halfway down, washed his hands, and left. Back at the motel, Al and Tommy sat around comparing notes about what they’d learned, taking a futile stab at breaking the code on the birthday card and trying to figure out someone they could call who either would go to the Painted Pony tomorrow at noon and answer the phone or at the very least park nearby and see who did. They’d come up with nothing. Too risky, all the way around.

Later, they would learn that, in this regard at least, they’d made the right decision. Fausto Geraci didn’t show up for the call. Bev Geraci did, though, her head bandaged, and she took it on the fifth ring. The Arizona State Police had driven her there. The FBI listened in.

Fausto Geraci had passed out in the guest bedroom. When Bev Geraci got to him, he was still alive. She called an ambulance. A few hours later, in the hospital, with Bev and Conchita at his side, his heart gave out, at just about the time Al and Tommy Neri boarded their plane.

Their pilot was ready for them, engine running. “So how was it?” he asked, grinning as he closed the door.

Tommy looked at Al. Al shrugged. Too late now. “How was what?”

The pilot belted himself in. “How was it up the whale’s ass?”

“Same as usual,” Al answered. “Thank you.”

T
he heat was almost unbearable. August in South Florida. Dressed in a perfectly tailored summer-weight suit, Tom Hagen stood in the shade of a magnolia tree in the backyard of his house in Florida, smoking a cigar, watching an alligator sun itself on the banks of the canal, no more than forty feet away. His daughter Christina, who was eleven, sat under an umbrella beside the fenced-in pool, reading
Gone with the Wind.
Gianna, who was six, was inside with Theresa and her aunt Sandra, helping to get dinner together. The air-conditioning had conked out, and all the windows were open. Tom could hear the drone of the televised convention coverage all the way out here. Over it, he could hear Gianna singing a song she’d learned that helped her set the table correctly. Their old collie, Elvis, barked on cue each time she finished a place setting. Tom smiled. He was a lucky man. He was, in his way, happy.

He looked at his watch. Almost six; the president’s plane would be landing about now.

Frankie Corleone was grilling sausages while his new girlfriend sat in a lawn chair in a short summer dress and watched, almost worshipful. Frankie had his own place—he’d been set up with a beer distributorship, a joint venture with Sandra’s perpetual fiancé Stan Kogut—but he still ate nearly every meal at his mother’s house or here, though he, unlike Stan (who no doubt was on the couch watching TV), often helped cook. “You get used to it,” Frankie said.

“Used to what?” Tom said, squinting into the late afternoon sun.

“Gators. Guarantee you that little fella’s more scared of you than you are of him.”

“That’s true,” said the girlfriend. She was a lithe brunette whose name Tom had learned moments before and forgotten. All he recalled was that she’d competed in the Miss Florida pageant. “Alligators have primitive fight/flight impulses. When they’re afraid, they freeze.”

“That one’s little?” Tom said. “He must be twenty feet long.”

Frankie raised his head and shoulders for a split second in what looked like surprise before he burst into laughter, precisely as his father always had. “Wait’ll you see a big one.”

He was a dead ringer for Sonny Corleone at the same age, so much so that Hagen sometimes felt as if he were seeing a ghost. Though if anything, the boy did even better with the ladies.

Just then a mosquito bit him and he slapped himself. “Florida,” he said, disgusted.

“Paradise by the sea,” the brunette said. She didn’t sound sarcastic.

“My uncle’s still adjusting,” Frankie explained. He’d been a baby when his father was killed, and Sandra took the kids and moved down here. He thought of himself as a Floridian. “Wait’ll your first winter,” he called to Tom. “At least you don’t have to shovel the heat, right?”

“You sure about that?” Tom plucked his sweat-damp shirt away from his chest. “It sure feels like it.”

But Tom was smiling as he said it. Nothing was going to bring him down today, not even his disdain for the place he now nominally called home. He put out the butt of the cigar against the trunk of the tree and crossed the thick carpet of centipede grass to tell Theresa he was going.

From inside the house, there came a tinny roar and, over it, the shrill, white-bread patter of an excited reporter. The crowd at the airport had gotten its first glimpse of President Shea. There had been calls to move the convention to a city that didn’t so vividly underscore the failures of Jimmy Shea’s Cuban policy, and that, as a corollary, didn’t pose such a security risk. But Miami was also Vice President Payton’s hometown (Coral Gables, actually), and Florida was a state that could go either way in what figured to be a close general election. So the convention stayed in Miami. Judging from the noise on the television and the earlier reports of the thousands of cheering people, baking in the sun alongside the route from the airport to the Fontainebleau, it had been a popular choice. The right choice, Tom believed.

“Wish I could stay for those,” Tom said as he passed the grilling sausages.

“You’re missing out,” Frankie said. He winked at the girlfriend. “Nothing like my big sausages.”

The boy had inherited Sonny’s sophisticated wit, too. Tom glanced back at Christina, but she seemed too engrossed in her book for the vulgar comment to have registered.

“Where you going?” the woman asked Tom.

“He’s going to meet the president,” Frankie joked. “Ain’t that right?”

“I already met him,” Tom said, also joking, although he had, years ago.

“Are you
serious
?” the brunette said. “President
Shea
?”

“What are you, stupid?” Frankie said. “No, he’s not serious.”

“Nothing so glamorous as that, I’m afraid,” Tom said. “Just business.”

“You know I’m not stupid,” the brunette said to Frankie.

“Then don’t say stupid things.”

“Stupid things?” she said, folding her arms. “Listen to
you.
”

“Remind you of anyone?” Theresa said, stepping out onto the patio, pointing at the young couple with a wagging wooden spoon. She was smirking playfully. Her hair was pinned up but falling away. She had on Bermuda shorts and an orange sweated-through Hawaiian-print blouse.

Tom gave her a hug and a kiss. He kept his arm around her. She smelled like a million bucks: her own raw scent lurking underneath sweet basil, sautéed onions, and Chanel No. 5.

“Your aunt’s right,” Tom called to Frankie. “If I’ve learned one thing in life,” he said, sneaking a chaste, furtive squeeze of Theresa’s hip, “it’s that there’s no better quality a woman can have than standing up for herself and telling you when you’ve said something stupid.”

“Oh, yeah?” Frankie said. “I thought all women did that.”

“He should know better,” the brunette said, turning to Tom and Theresa. “Football players get the same thing that pageant contestants get, which is that people automatically think they’re stupid. I was a straight-A student at Florida State.”

Frankie dismissed her with a wave of his tongs. “A really smart person wouldn’t have to say that all the time.”

Theresa and the brunette exchanged a look. Frankie’s prospects with this girl were irradiated to subatomic dust.

“I have to go,” Tom said. “Keep the girls away from that alligator.” He pointed at it. It hadn’t moved an inch.

“Who, Luca?”

“You named it?”

“Remember that man who used to work for Vito? The tough guy? Luca Brasi?”

“I remember.”

“Doesn’t he look like him? Same brow, same dead look in his eyes.”

“All alligators do,” Tom said. “Just keep the girls away. Sorry I can’t stay for dinner.”

From the blaring television came the news that the president’s motorcade was under way. He was going straight from the airport to the Fontainebleau. Several roads had been closed off for security, none of them likely to cause Tom any inconvenience. The airport was due west of the hotel, and Tom was coming from the north.

He and Theresa kissed again. He started toward his car, a new and sensible blue Buick.

“I’ll have a plate waiting for you in the fridge when you get home,” she called after him.

“I’m not sure when that will be,” Tom said.

“Whenever it is,” she said, brushing a wet strand of hair from her face, “it’ll be there.”

“Bye, Daddy!” Christina called, looking up from her book.

It was hard to tell at this distance if his daughter’s face was streaked with sweat or tears. If it was tears, Tom decided, it was probably that book.

“Bye, sweetpea,” he called, and kept going.

WHEN TOM SAW THE BLACK CHEVY BISCAYNE IN HIS
rearview mirror, he pulled over and got out. The Chevy stopped about a hundred yards back. Although the tails were becoming erratic and halfhearted, FBI agents still followed Tom Hagen fairly often. He’d learned the names of the regular agents, and he was unfailingly polite to them. He was especially pleased to see one today. Having an FBI agent on your ass was better than having a bodyguard. Tom waved for the car to come closer, and when it didn’t, he started walking toward it.

“Agent Bianchi,” Tom said.

“Mr. Hagen.”

“I’m going to the Deauville Hotel,” he said.

“Isn’t that where the Beatles played?” the agent said. “My kids went to that. That’s where the Napoleon Ballroom is, right?”

“No idea.”

“So what’s at the Deauville?”

“I just wanted you to know I’m not going to the Fontainebleau,” Tom said. “The Deauville’s a little bit north of it, I understand. I don’t know a better way to go than the way we’re heading, which is the route to the Fontainebleau, too. Is there a better way?”

“You want directions,” Bianchi said, “you’re going to have to wait’ll it’s Agent Rand McNally’s turn to babysit.”

“That’s fine,” Tom said. “I was just afraid that, as we got closer to the Fontainebleau, you’d be back here wondering if you should pull me over, call ahead to whoever your contact might be with the Secret Service, et cetera. I’m sure it’s a mess down there already. This is a president people turn out to see. I’d hate to be responsible for making it even a little bit worse. Do what you think is best, of course. But have I ever steered you wrong?”

The agent sighed. “Just get back in the car,” he said, “and do what you need to do.”

“Certainly,” Hagen said. “I’ll need gas on the way. But otherwise,” he said, patting the roof like a stock car mechanic signaling that the pit stop was finished, “straight to the Deauville.”

True to his word, Tom stopped at a filling station, not far from the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway. He used the phone booth to call Michael Corleone. Michael had flown himself and Rita up to Maine, to visit his children and for a getaway. He’d been waiting by a pay phone in the lobby of the inn where they were staying.

“It looks like seven,” Michael said, meaning the number of made guys in the Family who, in the time since Geraci’s disappearance, finished a prison sentence and took their thank-you trip to Acapulco. The thinking now was that Geraci had made contact with someone there. The Family had sent a few others, too, but only a made guy would have had enough clout to be Geraci’s inside man.

“Any names on that list jump out at you?”

“To be honest,” Michael said, “no.” Naturally, he did not list them on the phone. “Five of the seven were reasonably close associates of the person in question. But Nobilio isn’t ready to rule out any of them, even the other two.”

“What does Al think?”

“Same as Richie.”

He’d put them both on this, his two most trusted men. Nobilio, as a
capo,
would take the lead, of course, which pleased Hagen. He liked Al and trusted him, but he was a man of action, not a strategist.

“What about you?” Tom said. “What do you think?”

“To be perfectly honest,” Michael said, “they weren’t names I knew very well.”

Which was a barometer, Tom now realized, of how far Michael had removed himself from the men on the streets. That removal, until recently, had been the name of the game.

“No-go on the other place?” Tom said, meaning Panama City, Florida, the only other place Fausto Geraci had mentioned that had come as news to Al Neri and Tommy Scootch. Tommy had been there a week, looking for leads.

“Nothing,” Michael said. “You know, despite everything, this matter isn’t my biggest concern right now.”

“If you mean down here, everything’s so jake it’s Jacob.”

Tom heard himself blurt this pet saying of Johnny Fontane’s and shook his head. He didn’t know how Ben Tamarkin did it, working around those Hollywood people all the time without the phoniness rubbing off on him.

“Call me when it’s finished. This phone is fine. The innkeeper will come get me.”

“It’s finished now,” Tom said. “It’s all set up. But, yeah, I’ll call. How are Kay and the kids?”

“Rita and I just got in. A couple hours ago,” Michael said. “We pick up Anthony and Mary first thing tomorrow.”

“Well, send them my love.” Tom hated to think about how long it had been since Michael had seen them. More than a few visits had been canceled at the last minute, sometimes on Michael’s end, just as often by Kay or the kids. Rita had never even met Anthony and Mary. It was a big step, but if she and Michael really were getting serious about each other, it had to happen. “How’s Rita? Nervous?”

“She did great. A couple of pills for the motion sickness, and she was fine.”

He wasn’t asking how Rita was on the flight up but how she
was.
Tom let it go. “Look, I’ll call somewhere I can get a drink. We’ll raise a glass in each other’s general direction.”

“You know, Tom, Pop would have—”

“Save it.” As much as Tom himself had worshipped Vito, Michael’s increasingly frequent mentions of the old man were starting to get on his nerves. “I’ll call.”

On his way back to the car, Tom bought two bottles of Pepsi-Cola from a machine and walked one over to Agent Bianchi.

TOM PULLED UP IN FRONT OF THE DEAUVILLE AND
handed the valet his keys and a hundred dollars. The valet gave a nod and just like that, three other cars pulled in and blocked Bianchi’s way.