The Godfather's Revenge Read online

“You’re leaving me here,” he said, “just like that? No money, no passport, no papers, no real knowledge of Span—”

  “Bisteca, the word is. Beefsteak. Pronounced the same as in Italian. Roger that? Charge it to your room, whatever you need to do. But right now, sir, you need to get out of the car.”

  Tramonti nodded and, because he had no choice, obeyed.

  He got out.

  The doorman closed the door for him and did not kill him.

  The bellboy did not kill him, either, or even seem to find anything remarkable in Don Tramonti’s lack of luggage.

  The desk clerk spoke serviceable English. The room was indeed reserved, but the hotel requested some kind of payment up front.

  Tramonti frowned. “Do I look like that kind of a bum, sir? The sort of man who doesn’t settle his accounts?”

  He did: unshaven, stained clothes, stinking of sweat and vomit.

  “No, sir,” the clerk said. He extended a key as if he might jerk it back at the last second. Tramonti grabbed it. The clerk’s smile oozed contempt. “Thank you,” he said. “The bill, it is in our futures.”

  The hotel was not the sort to have a menswear shop where Tramonti could buy clothes and charge them to his room. He went up to his suite.

  He sent his suit out to be cleaned and ordered fish from room service. Better to be sick than poisoned. He tried to make a phone call back to his wife and family, but the operator’s English and Italian were as weak as Tramonti’s Spanish. The call never had a chance. He ordered bottled beer as a way of not drinking the water. He spent a sleepless night tossing and turning in the too-soft bed and every so often going to the bathroom to vomit. The fish had not agreed with him.

  In the morning, the manager knocked on the door and said it would be necessary to address the issue of payment. Tramonti came to the chained door in his boxer shorts. The manager had the police with him and Tramonti’s dry-cleaned suit as well.

  They waited patiently for him to perform his ablutions and get dressed. Then they took him to jail, to his own private cell, which was clean and modern and, like his office back in New Orleans, did not contain a trash can. Out the barred window was a lovely view of the mountains. He was not formally charged with anything.

  His first caller was a government official who asked in impeccable English if it might be possible that Tramonti, as the most famous and indeed most prosperous person ever to come from the impoverished mountain town of Santa Rosa, would be willing to donate a hundred thousand of his American dollars to build a new elementary school. The school they had now was an unheated, rat-infested garage.

  Tramonti did not look at the man. He hunched over and stared at his shoes.

  The man repeated the request in Italian.

  “I am not a famous man,” Tramonti said in English. “Or a wealthy one.”

  The newspapers, the official said, are filled with speculations about Tramonti’s exploits and origins. He produced a copy of one called La Imparcial. On the front was a picture of Carlo Tramonti in chains at the New Orleans airport and a flattering file photo of Daniel Brendan Shea.

  Tramonti handed it back, stone-faced.

  “Whatever small help I might be able to give you for that school,” he said to the official, “will be impossible while I am in here. I am a victim of the kind of injustice men face only in nightmares. Without my lawyers or my accountants or my brother Agostino…” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged.

  Three days later, that was where Augie Tramonti found him. Carlo’s shoes had been spit-shined and a trash can had been placed right outside the bars. A bed-sheet concealed the cell’s sink and toilet.

  The brothers embraced. The brothers wept. They could hardly breathe. Even Augie, who had been to Colombia before, had never really strayed far from the coast. They had spent their lives at sea level or, more often, below it.

  Augie, whose pockets were swollen with wads of American cash, told his brother he had things under control. He had connections in this country, plus lawyers who, at that very moment, were working to get Carlo out of this hellhole and back home. As jail cells go, this was hardly a hellhole, but Carlo did not correct him. All over Colombia, Augie said, the newspapers were attacking the government for allowing a notorious gangster like Carlo Tramonti into their country, especially under such a fraudulent pretext. The story had actually died down in America, even in New Orleans. This was partly because of Americans’ indifference toward anything that happened beyond their shores and partly because of a few strategic favors Augie had engineered. Here in Colombia, though, the crusading newspapers and the political pressure they’d whipped up were a godsend.

  Agostino Tramonti then lowered his voice and told his brother that two days ago, deep in a bayou south of New Orleans, the INS agent in charge of Carlo’s deportation had died in a boating mishap: a fire on board that had been ruled an accident. The news item on it had been brief—a tiny story, buried in the Picayune, with no mention of the particular cases the agent had worked.

  Carlo clenched his teeth and, in Sicilian dialect, whispered that to kill a snake, one does not cut off the tail but rather the head.

  Augie nodded. He seemed to understand this cryptic rebuke immediately. They found no need to discuss it further.

  The guards brought a cot, and Augie moved into the cell as if he were a hospital visitor unwilling to leave a loved one unattended.

  The next day, Augie and Carlo Tramonti stuffed their shoes with cash and waited for the Colombian military detail to come and deport them to Guatemala.

  There, Augie had arranged for them to be met by the Dominican Air Force. They’d be taken to Santo Domingo, where a United States senator—a second cousin of the Kingfish himself, that old friend of the Tramontis’—would then personally arrange an escort from there to Miami. From there, they could turn their attention to Michael Corleone.

  Back in 1960, it had been Michael Corleone’s support of the Shea family that had gotten Jimmy Shea elected president. The other members of the Commission—especially the southern Dons, Tramonti and Silent Sam Drago—had preferred the man who was now the vice president. It was Michael Corleone who had turned the Commission around. True, he had been backed by the late Louie Russo of Chicago and, to a lesser degree, Black Tony Stracci, who was from New Jersey and was thus partial to the devil he knew. But Michael Corleone had been the ringleader, trading favors and pulling every string he had to get Jimmy Shea into the White House. The other Dons should not have been surprised. The Corleones had a weakness for the Irish. They even had an Irish consigliere, a fellow named Tom Hagen, who was also somehow but not really Michael’s brother. A consigliere who was not Italian was unique in their tradition—a violation of it, in fact, at least to someone like Carlo Tramonti, whose organization was by far the oldest in America and was run more like a Sicilian clan. For years it had been autonomous from the rest of the Families, and even now, its rules were distinct from everyone else’s. For example, any time Carlo Tramonti wanted to open the books and initiate a new member, he, alone among the twenty-four Dons in America, didn’t need to get the Commission’s approval. Any time an associate of any other organization wanted to so much as set foot in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, or the Florida Panhandle, he had to go to his boss and have him get permission from Carlo Tramonti. To do otherwise, Tramonti deemed an “insult.” These requests were all but unknown. He’d approved a few weddings, when some wiseguy fell for a New Orleans girl who’d moved away, but only if Carlo and some associates were invited, too, if all out-of-state guests cleared out by noon the next day, and if it was crystal clear that, in the future, the in-laws went to visit the happy couple and not vice versa. But if someone from another Family merely wanted to go to Mardi Gras, just as a tourist or whatnot? He could be sure his boss would simply tell him to forget it. Don’t go.

  Tramonti’s seat on the Commission was permanent but somewhat honorary. His attendance was optional. He rarely went. He was unaccustomed to making decisions
by committee, by voting. Men like Michael Corleone might have gotten into this thing of theirs to transform it into a corporate board of directors. But Carlo Tramonti was another kind of man.

  Nonetheless: so be it. What was past was past. The Corleones had gotten their wish, and, predictably, the gods were now punishing them for it. Yet Michael Corleone, whatever his flaws, had proven himself an honorable man, a uomo di panza. As such a man, he would have no choice but to act.

  THE TRAMONTI BROTHERS TOOK OFF FROM MEDELLÍN in a Ford Tri-Motor that, officially, belonged to a private subcontractor of the Colombian postal service. In fact, it was part of a fleet of such planes that helped smuggle marijuana, cocaine, and heroin from Colombia to various airstrips in the swamps of Florida and Louisiana. For a few delirious minutes, they rose into a perfect blue sky, high above the mountains and jungles of the Colombian interior, gasping not just from the thin air but at the preposterous beauty of it all, too.

  When the sputtering plane suddenly began its descent, the Tramonti brothers asked if it was engine trouble.

  The pilot said no. He pointed to the sleek, unmistakably American fighter jets escorting them down.

  Moments later, the Tramontis were dumped at an abandoned army base, somewhere in the densely forested mountains of they didn’t know where, relieved of their personal effects and all the cash that had not been in their shoes.

  Speechless, they watched the planes take off.

  They tucked their remaining cash in their pockets. The brothers had little choice but to trek through the jungle. The brush reduced their exquisite silk suits quickly to rags. The stones in their pathway ruined their fine, thin-soled loafers. They wheezed and cursed every step of the way, plotting their revenge as they made their way through the undergrowth, stepping around large and unfamiliar forms of vermin, never sure just which slithering, scuttling creature might be full of deadly poison.

  CHAPTER 2

  Tom Hagen sat in the back of the chapel of the Fontainebleau Hotel and waited for an old woman to finish her prayers. She was kneeling at the altar rail, wearing a tropical beachwear getup, parrots and pineapples. Going to church like that offended the consigliere’s sense of propriety. Organ recordings of droning Protestant hymns played from a pulpit-mounted loudspeaker. Not for a million bucks and a blowjob could you get Hagen to live in Florida.

  The chapel was needlessly large. The Fontainebleau had been built to be a casino, but the political support fell through. A resort hotel doesn’t need the kind of chapel a casino does.

  Across the aisle, a man in a plain black suit paged through a white leatherette Bible. Hagen caught the man’s good eye—the other was glass—and turned his palms heavenward. The man, a CIA operative named Joe Lucadello, shrugged and looked away. He used to have an eye patch and more hair.

  Outside, a pounding rain all but drowned out the shouts of the crowd, herded away from the entrance of the hotel by the Secret Service. President Shea—in full view of a horde of TV cameras—was scheduled to play golf with the vice president, former Florida senator Ambrose “Bud” Payton, who had once been his biggest in-party rival (and a longtime friend of Sam Drago’s in Tampa and Carlo Tramonti’s, too). Tom’s wife was out seeing some art-world people—her own collection of modern paintings was, quietly, among the finest in the country—but the real reason Theresa had come along on this trip was to attend a fund-raiser tonight in the Fontainebleau’s ballroom. The party’s convention would be here in Miami Beach, in fact, in a little more than a year—hard for Hagen to believe. It seemed like only yesterday that he’d helped put together some of the deals that got Shea elected in the first place.

  Ordinarily a paragon of taste and good sense, Theresa was fascinated with the dashing young president and his doe-eyed rich-bitch wife. The Sheas were just people, Tom kept explaining, full of flaws, like everybody else. Theresa was from New Jersey. She knew what an unremarkable governor Shea had been. But Theresa believed what she wanted to believe. Like everybody else. Even Michael, of all people, had been drawn in, though he made a distinction between Jimmy and Danny. He thought Jimmy was an inspirational and potentially great president. There had been problems: Cuba and his own brother. But Cuba was an impossible situation, Michael believed, and so was Danny. Brothers can be that way.

  Hagen looked at his watch. The crone at the rail rocked silently back and forth. Hagen considered praying, too, if only to settle his mind. He closed his eyes. He had no real regrets. In his life, there were only things that had to be done, and he did them, end of story. This left little to pray about. Hagen would be damned if he treated the Almighty like some department-store Santa, making childish requests for things a man should be able to acquire or control without need for supernatural intervention. He opened his eyes. To hell with it. No prayers.

  Finally, the old woman stood. She had a big white bandage on her forehead and mascara running down her cheeks. Eight million stories in the naked city, Hagen thought, averting his eyes.

  As she left, Lucadello nodded toward a man he’d stationed outside the door, who would tell anyone else who came by that the room had to be sealed off until the president was secured in his suite upstairs. Still toting the Bible, Lucadello went to the pulpit and turned up the organ music, then took a seat in the pew behind Hagen. “Too much is never enough.”

  He grew up outside Philly and had a Jersey accent, though he turned it on and off.

  Hagen turned around to face him. “Say what?”

  “The architect who designed this hotel. That was his favorite saying.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “I used to want to be an architect, I ever tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Idealist that I was, this was the kind of building I dreamed about building. Curves galore in boxy times. Zigging where others zag. Ever hear that record, Fontane Blue?”

  Hagen frowned and gave Lucadello a Who do you think you’re talking to? look. In truth, Hagen had little use for music in general and Johnny Fontane in particular, but it would have been embarrassing in all kinds of ways for him to admit that.

  “You know it was recorded in the ballroom here, right?” Lucadello said.

  “Hence the title. You going to jabber all morning or are we going to do business?”

  “What a record. Talk about zigging where others zag, huh?” Lucadello shook his head as if he were humbled to be near such a hallowed site. “You know Fontane pretty well, I guess?”

  “Friend of the family is all,” Hagen said.

  “The family.” Lucadello laughed. “I bet. Seriously, though, how’s your brother?”

  Lost. Michael put on a good show, but his heart clearly wasn’t in his work. It wasn’t anywhere else, either, that Tom Hagen could see. “He’s doing great.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Lucadello sounded both glad and skeptical. He and Michael had known each other since Mike was in the Civilian Conservation Corps, trying to piss off his father and find his way in the world. Joe and Mike had also gone off together to join the RAF. Hagen, working behind the scenes, had gotten Mike tossed out. The day after Pearl Harbor, though, Mike volunteered again, this time for the Marines. The rest was history. Mike came home a war hero. And, with little fanfare, so did Joe. That was how he lost his eye: the war. Noble. Michael was fond of him and trusted him, which should have been enough for Tom Hagen. But some guys, he thought, just rub you the wrong way.

  “Look,” Hagen said, “I appreciate you coming all the way down here—”

  “I live ten minutes away,” Lucadello said.

  “—but I’ve got a busy day, so if it’s not too much trouble…”

  Lucadello patted him on the shoulder. “Easy, paisan’.”

  Hagen didn’t say anything. He’d eaten so much shit about not being Italian, what was another teaspoonful from this smug bastard?

  “I got good news and bad news,” Lucadello said. “What do you want first?”

  Maybe he was just trying to be friendly, but Jesu
s. Fuck him. “The bad.”

  “I better start with the good.”

  Then why ask? “People usually start with the bad,” Hagen said, “but shoot.”

  “We’ve finally got a lead on your missing package.”

  Nick Geraci.

  The thought sent Hagen’s heart racing. The traitorous capo was last seen boarding a ship to Palermo. Button men had been waiting on the docks when it arrived. Michael watched from a yacht in the harbor. They’d been left holding their respective dicks. Other than some information that seemed to place him, at least briefly, in Buffalo, there had been no sign of him for months—long enough that within the Corleone Family, he was becoming the unnamed suspect behind every misfortune large or small. An arrest that stuck. A fixed title fight none of the Family’s bookies knew about. A heart attack a lot of people thought wasn’t really a heart attack. If a guy slipped and fell in his bathtub, men wondered if maybe Geraci had rigged it.

  A protégé of the late Sally Tessio, Geraci had been the best earner the Corleones ever had. In the words of the late, great Pete Clemenza—Vito Corleone’s other, more loyal capo—Nick Geraci could swallow a nickel and shit a stack of banded Clevelands. He was an ex-heavyweight boxer who’d almost finished a law degree, and he knew the virtues and limitations of both force and reason. He’d built the Family’s narcotics operation into what Hagen, some fifteen years earlier, had tried to convince Vito Corleone it was destined to be: the most lucrative part of the business. This generation’s Prohibition. Geraci was as likable as Fredo had been without being a flake, as tough as Sonny but with none of the recklessness, every bit as shrewd as Michael but with more heart. Yet even though Geraci’s parents were Sicilian, he had been born and raised in Cleveland, and so—like Hagen, a Corleone and a Sicilian in all but name and blood—Geraci was the quintessential insider doomed never to get all the way in. Hagen had always liked him. Now he hoped someday to enjoy a long, remorseless piss on the man’s grave.