The Godfather's Revenge (45 page)

He’d done it.

He imagined that this was how a person must feel right after he realizes he’s been elected president but before he emerges from private to share this with the world.

Tamarkin, who’d been paid handsomely for the services he’d just rendered, made them two more drinks and proposed a toast.

It was dark now, but it still must have been ninety degrees outside.

“Here’s to the mercenaries,” he said. “To every soldier of fortune, every gun for hire, and every goddamned American lawyer who ever drew a breath.”

Tamarkin didn’t understand. Hagen was not a mercenary. It was too complicated to explain, though. But as he started to raise his glass, exhaustion hit him like a wave, like a wall of water, and he all but collapsed into a chair.

“You going to be all right?” Tamarkin said.

Tom shook his head. “I’m fine.”

Tamarkin cocked his head, dubious. “I should maybe call a doctor?”

“It’s not my heart, OK? Nothing like that. I’m fine. I’m just…” Happy? He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “I’ve just been burning the candle on both ends, that’s all.”

More than a year after he’d met with Joe Lucadello in the chapel of the Fontainebleau, here Tom Hagen was, just up the road. He’d made it through tough times before, but nothing like this. With Michael falling apart, with the government of the most powerful nation in the history of the world on his balls, Tom had come out the other side, a little the worse for wear but in every important way unscathed. Nothing that just happened was a surprise to Tom—that was how he liked it, always, and he busted his ass so that things went like that—but there was a difference between anticipating a happy ending and experiencing it.

“You need to get your rest,” Tamarkin said. “Take a vacation, for Christ’s sake. The cemeteries are full of people who thought they were too busy to take a vacation.”

“I’m really OK.” And he was. He stood. He was steady on his feet now. His second scotch sat sweating on the table, untouched. His cigar had gone out. The cocktail of elation and fatigue surging through him was all he could handle. He’d call Michael from home. Tom wanted to be home, with his family. “But I think I’m going to shove off.”

Tamarkin patted him on the back. “Do that,” he said. “Call me tomorrow, though, about our emerging fiasco back in the old country.”

Hagen had forgotten. The Corleones’ takeover of Woltz International Pictures was, like everything all of a sudden, going just the way it was supposed to go. “Will do.”

He took the elevator down. He stared into the mirror, at the face of the gloriously happy fool grinning back at him.

A
few blocks away from the hotel, Hagen felt a cold gun barrel press against the back of his neck and nearly jumped out of his skin. There, in the rearview mirror, was Nick Geraci.

“That was a nice trick,” Geraci said, “duking that parking guy a hundred bucks.” He laughed. “Take a wild guess what two hundred bucks can do.”

Tom started to pull the car over.

“Ah-ah-ah,” Nick said. “Keep driving.”

The other man in the stairwell, Tom thought. The shuffling footsteps. It had been Geraci.

“So how long have you been following me?” Tom asked.

“Turn left up here,” Geraci said. Wherever he’d been all this time, he’d come back with a nice tan and bulging muscles.

“You’re making a huge mistake, Nick,” Tom said. “For a number of reasons.”

“Please don’t say
You’ll never get away with this.
”

“You do know I’ve got the FBI tailing me wherever I go, right?”

Hagen looked again in the rearview and tried to see around Nick’s big, square head, but there was no immediate sign of Agent Bianchi’s black Chevy.

“Gee, that’s funny,” Nick said. “I don’t see him, either. This is just a guess, but it might have something to do with one of those parking jockeys back at the hotel. You’ve seen the way they whip those cars around. I wouldn’t be surprised if every once in a while they hit something.” Geraci gave Hagen’s shoulder a squeeze, the way a pal would. “You want to take a guess at what a
thousand
bucks can buy, you cheap Irish prick?”

Tom couldn’t believe this was happening to him. He touched his neck. The pulse, oddly, didn’t seem much out of the ordinary. He took it as a good sign. “German-Irish,” he said.

“My apologies,” Geraci said. “You German-Irish prick.”

“I’m pulling over,” Tom said, but didn’t, yet.

He glanced in the mirror again. There was a bread truck right behind them. Maybe Nick was bluffing. Maybe Bianchi was behind that truck.

“Maybe you should drive,” Tom said.

“You’re doing fine.”

“I’m not going to do you the service of driving us to wherever you’ve decided to do this.”

“Decided to do what?” Geraci said.

“You were always a wiseass,” Hagen said. “But I was never amused. Cut the crap, huh?”

Tom kept driving. There was some way out of this mess, he thought. If he could figure out how to get the Justice Department off his ass, he could surely come up with something that would throw off a punch-drunk mook from Cleveland. He’ll still get to take a remorseless piss on Geraci’s grave. Maybe sooner rather than later.

“Hmm, let’s see,” Geraci said, mocking him. “You’re thinking maybe you could go for the gun, right? But then you remember what a pussy you are compared to me, so that’s out.”

Tom stared straight ahead. They were going through a neighborhood of nurseries, trailer parks, and tawdry little motels.

“Then you’re thinking,” Geraci said, “I’ll just convince this dumb
cafone
that we can bury the hatchet, and not in each other’s skulls. Where’s it all end, this cycle of revenge? Nick, we need you. Everyone but you and me and Mike: they’re morons. Let’s all make the music of beautiful business together. Sadly, that’s such a load of shit, even a lying bastard like you couldn’t keep a straight face.”

“You’re good,” Tom said, as dryly as he could. “It’s amazing.”

“Yeah,” Geraci said. “I’ve been on the lam with a traveling carnival, working as a mind reader. Turns out, I have a gift.”

Tom unconsciously started to shake his head at Geraci’s pathetic sense of humor. A split second later, when it provoked Nick to dig the gun barrel harder against the base of Tom’s neck, it became conscious.

“Bear right,” Nick said. “Right here.”

Tom obeyed. The bread truck turned right as well. It let Tom see what was behind it: a yellow convertible, top down, a girl in a bikini behind the wheel and a shirtless boy beside her. Definitely not FBI.

“By now,” Geraci said, “your mind is racing. Because, hey, you’re Tom Hagen! Let’s see…you could say you have to take a leak, and if I don’t tell you just to piss yourself, you can try something to or from the john. Or maybe we’ll pass a police station and you can just duck in there. Maybe that’ll work. You want me to be on the lookout for a police station?”

No. He’d keep it simple. He’d stop in a well-lit place, with as many people around as possible. That’s all it would take.

“I guess this is why we never found you. Because you’re such a mind reader.”

“No,” Geraci said. “You never found me because that fucking CIA shitbird you and Mike went into business with was playing us all for fools. You never found me because he was protecting you. Kill me, and the FBI would have nailed you guys for murder. He was ordered to tell you where I was, and he followed those orders. It’s just that he took it on his own initiative to tip me off right before he told you. Not for my benefit, but for yours. This is your federal tax dollars at work, Tom. These are the people who think they’re the good guys.”

There had to be a bargain he could strike with Geraci. But Hagen was drawing a blank.

“Pull over, if you want,” Geraci said. “Ideally, someplace brightly lit and with a lot of people. We’re going to pass a dog track pretty soon. That’d be just the ticket, huh?”

Tom had to fight off any feelings of anxiety—any feelings at all.

Geraci pulled the gun very slightly back, then started tapping it against Tom’s head, no harder than someone might tap a person’s shoulder to get his attention.

“You think you’ve got this all figured out,” Geraci said, “don’t you?”

Hagen made eye contact in the mirror. Both
yes
and
no
seemed like the wrong thing so say. Nick’s face was slack and unreadable, unnaturally so, a symptom of his Parkinson’s that was exaggerated by the pale glow from the streetlights. “Why isn’t your hand shaking?” Tom said. “Isn’t that part of what’s wrong with you?”

“Thank you for your concern,” Geraci said. “Those things come and go. I have a theory that it helps to be active. I go to a gym a little bit, and, you know, even when I’m on my way there, thinking about hitting the speed bag or some ugly sonofabitch such as yourself? The tremors—
poof.
They’re just gone. Magic. Hey, where’s my manners? How are
you
? Take a left up there, by the way. At the light.”

The street they were on had become brighter and more commercial, flanked on both sides by retail stores and storefront offices, all of them closed. It was a little after ten. Fucking Florida.

“Your manners?” Tom said.

“I heard about your heart attack. How are you doing with that?”

“How did you hear about that?”

“You’re an important man,” Geraci said. “People talk about important men.”

As Tom got in the left lane, the light turned red. From the sheer force of habit, he stopped. It didn’t matter. Even if he’d gunned it, there were no cops around to pull him over.

“Nobody outside my family knows about that,” Tom said. “The doctor actually said he didn’t know for sure that it even
was
a heart attack.”

“That’s great,” Geraci said. “That’s good news. But I’ve been watching you awhile now. A person should really take better care of himself. Eat better, maybe cut down on the smoking and such.”

“Thank you, Dr. Geraci.”

“Scoff if you want,” Nick said, “but you know, my father died of a heart attack.”

Geraci pulled the gun away, and Hagen glanced up at the mirror in time to see the bread truck behind them and the butt of the gun coming down toward him.

Then everything exploded into white light.

WHEN TOM CAME TO, HIS HEAD WAS POUNDING, PAIN
so blinding he could hardly bear to open his eyes. He was tied up. There was something wrong with his hearing, too, as if he were in a cave under a waterfall.

But he was still in his Buick, he realized, still in the front seat, tied to it, upright. He could barely see. There was a yellow haze from his headlights but no other light he could see. He tried to shake the wooziness out of his head. It hurt so bad that it was almost like getting hit again. It was the pain and the wooziness that kept him from immediately feeling the water or hearing the splashing.

He wasn’t under a waterfall. He was
in
water, fetid and brown, rushing into the car. He was
under
water. All four windows were open. He couldn’t have been here long. And he wouldn’t have long. He wasn’t tied up with rope. It was duct tape. He was encased in it from his waist to his shoulders. His ankles and knees were taped together, too.

Tom felt the tires of his car sinking into the muck. The water was warmer than his blood.

He began to shout and to thrash against the tape, which made the pain in his head even more agonizing. The water was above the seats now. Above his navel. Above his heart.

He would still get out of this. The water would make the duct tape lose its adhesive. He kept struggling. He thought he felt some give in the tape that was around his ankles.

The Buick’s electrical system sizzled. Just as the headlights flickered out, a big black snake swam by on the other side of the windshield, but Tom Hagen’s heart withstood that, too.

“If you want to kill a snake, you don’t chop off the tail,” he said out loud. It gave Tom a perverse feeling of satisfaction that Geraci had come for him first and not Michael.

He kept struggling. He definitely felt give in the tape now, everywhere.

The water was up to his chin.

He tilted his head toward the roof of the car and got ready to take a deep breath. He could do this. It was a matter of will. Who had more will than he did?

His ankles were free now and so, almost, were his knees. There was all kinds of give around his right arm. Any second now, his arm would be free.

The back of his head was in the water. It was time to take the breath.

Now.

He started slowly, evenly, drawing air into his lungs.

Suddenly there was a tickle in this throat and a catch in his chest, and his head snapped forward, and he was having a coughing fit.

Gasping for air, except that there was no air to breathe. What he’d already breathed in was swamp water, and any air there was to breathe was now above his head, somewhere.

He’d heard that drowning was the most peaceful way to die.

There was nothing in Tom Hagen’s convulsing body that suggested peace.

He tried to stop coughing and tried to stop taking in water, but his body betrayed him.

His mind, he thought, would not betray him.

He would concentrate.

He would think his way out of this.

No. He couldn’t. He had to accept that.

He willed himself to let go, because there was no other way to think about what he wanted to think about. In his mind, he drew his family to him, and for one horrible, lovely moment, he looked into the imagined faces of Theresa, of his boys, Frank the lawyer and Andrew, who would be a priest, and his girls, Christina, who would be a beauty, and Gianna, who would be a beauty, too.

And then he lost any control that he had of anything, and, just as the Buick’s electrical system had shorted out moments ago, Tom Hagen’s life started flickering out, and what he thought about was not his whole life but Sonny.

Sonny Corleone, who was dead. Shot to pieces.

But what he saw was Sonny, as a boy, in that alley.

Tom hadn’t been
friends
with Sonny Corleone, at least not at first. That was a lie he and Sonny made up, one they told even to each other, even to themselves. All they’d ever said, even to one another, about what led up to Sonny’s decision to bring Tom home to live with his family, was that it had been a cold day in Hell’s Kitchen. But what had really happened was that Sonny and two older boys had wandered into an alley in an Irish part of the neighborhood, a bad place, but one where Tom knew how to hide and where to sleep and stay warm and even what nearby garbage cans had the best food. Snow fell. It was a big snowstorm. A man on the corner was selling switchblades. He was really a pimp, and he wasn’t right in the eyes, and the boys asked how much for a stick, and the man said he didn’t sell to boys. They weren’t boys, they argued, and he laughed in a way that was almost a scream and said that
proved
it: only a boy would say he wasn’t a boy. Tom Hagen would have said he wasn’t a boy, too, but he didn’t want to take any hope whatsoever from the pimp who wasn’t right in the eyes. Also, he was hiding and didn’t want to say anything. The pimp told the boys that he also refused to sell to dagos, and when they started to get tough about the slur, he pulled one of his knives and grabbed Sonny by the throat, and the two older boys took off running. The man selling switchblades who was really a pimp was also something else, and Tom knew about it. Tom had seen the man cut his girls, but the man didn’t seem to want to be with his girls. The man with the switchblades who wasn’t right in the eyes found kids in trouble who’d suck his cock for half a sandwich, except that usually he pulled a knife on them and didn’t bother with the sandwich. Tom Hagen had stayed clear of this man, and he’d never sucked anybody’s cock for a sandwich or anything else for that matter, though there had been times when he’d been so delirious with hunger pain that he knew he’d have done it, and he thought that maybe he’d just been lucky about how he’d felt on the days when he’d seen this man, this pimp, who also sold switchblades. But now the man was dragging Sonny down the alley, and Tom didn’t think about anything, he just acted. Like the grotesque creature that he was, he came up howling from out of the ground, out of the space under a stoop where he was getting too big to hide, and he grabbed a splintered board and hit the man in the back of the head. It was everyone’s good dumb luck—Sonny’s, to be sure, but Hagen’s more so, and even humanity’s—that the board had a nail in it and the nail impaled the man who sold women and switchblades in the side of his neck and a gout of blood spewed out onto the falling snow like red sleet. It was that man’s good luck, too, because his life was violent and miserable and now it was almost over. Tom’s life was almost over, too, now. Why wasn’t his whole life flashing before his eyes? Why was it this he was seeing? What he was seeing was this: he and Sonny were pummeling the man with the eyes that weren’t right, and when he fell they kicked him, too, and when they realized he wasn’t moving, which might have been a fraction of a second or it might have been forever—the way this felt, Tom thought, underwater, his head lolling to the side—then Tom and Sonny stopped, gasping for breath. They looked around and saw that there were witnesses, adults, men and women—fathers and mothers, probably—wrapped in cloth overcoats. No one was going to miss this man with the eyes that weren’t right, and, one by one, the adults turned their backs on him and walked away muttering things. Tom and Sonny looked at each other, and they could have done a lot of things more likely than what they did do, which was to laugh, to let go of everything that had just happened to them and laugh, hard. And the laughing hurt because the air was so cold and they were doing it so hard. They were a cunt’s hair shy of crying, but they didn’t. Tom had cried when his mother died, when his father died, but he did not cry now, and he would never cry again, not once, the rest of his life—which was flickering out now, somewhere in the Everglades. Sonny didn’t cry then, either, but was a bighearted, sentimental lug who wept fat, unashamed tears at weddings and funerals and sad movies and especially, epically, when he stood in the hospital hallway and got his first glimpse of his beautiful twin girls, Francesca and Katherine, and then his boys, too. Tom was there with him, all three times. Mike and Fredo were there for the twins. Tom was happy to have seen this now, and he almost wept with joy when he saw his own children behind that big hospital window, too, but then a thunderbolt of pain hit him now, too, which wasn’t supposed to happen—was it? When you’re dying? Tom would have given anything to feel his wife’s fingertips brush his skin—anything,
anything
—but instead he was back with Sonny, who was also dead, standing in the snow over that dead pimp. Tom looked the bigger boy squarely in the eyes and told him—the way an adult would, the way a father would—that there are things that have to be done and you do them and you never talk about them. You don’t try to justify them, because they can’t be justified. You just do them. Then you forget it.
My name is Santino Corleone,
Sonny said, his arm outstretched. Steam rose from the wound in the dead pimp’s neck.
Tom Hagen,
Tom said, and they shook hands.