The Godfather's Revenge (30 page)

“No,” Francesca said. “It’s not. Not really. There’s just some things I’m worried about. Ongoing situations, you know?”

Kathy nodded. “Do I.”

She wasn’t weaving, wasn’t drunk. She came over and kissed Francesca on the forehead. Francesca could smell the sex on her.

“We’ll talk tomorrow, OK?” Kathy said. “I still need to read the last hundred pages of a novel I’m teaching at ten in the morning.”

So when exactly would they talk? But Francesca let that go, too.

“What novel?” Francesca said. Topic number fifty-one plus.

“It’s actually a friend’s. I’m not teaching it, that’s not what I meant, I’m just reading it, giving him my two cents’ worth. I’m not thinking straight. It’s been a long day.” She turned and walked away. “It’s been a long everything.”

Why she was reading some man’s stupid unpublished book when she should be writing her own—that was a top-fifty topic.

“So guess what?” Francesca said as Kathy was turning the corner toward her room.

“Really, Francie. I’m on fumes. Tomorrow, I’ll guess.”

“Aunt Connie said…a certain word.”

“She did what?”

Francesca mouthed
fuck.

“Who made her do that?”

“Me.”

“Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“Not really.”

“OK, I’ll bite,” Kathy said. “What in the hell did you do to make Connie say
that
?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” Francesca said.

“Touché,” Kathy said, and then bowed. “And good night.”

AN HOUR LATER
,
FRANCESCA CHECKED ON SONNY
again. He was still sound asleep, clutching the GI Joe doll her brother sent him for his birthday. Behind the closed door to Kathy’s bedroom, the light was still on. Francesca called to her that she’d be right back.

“Right back?” Kathy said, her voice groggy. “Where you going?”

“For a walk,” Francesca said. “I can’t sleep.”

“Be careful,” Kathy said. “Go walk in the courtyard, maybe.”

This from a woman who’s going to bed with God knows who, God knows where, and toward God knows what end. “OK,” Francesca said. “See you.”

Going up, it was impossible to bypass security, but going down, there were several ways. Francesca took the elevator a few floors down and then got out, walked to the other end of the hall, and took the back stairs. They didn’t go all the way to the top, and the security guards didn’t monitor them. She went out through the parking garage, down a narrow alley to the next street over, then headed west toward York Avenue. It would have been the path Tom Hagen took, too. It must have been a perfect setup, until whatever went wrong went wrong.

One thing that Francesca had learned during the time she’d lived in Washington was that once the federal government got involved for any reason in an essentially local criminal investigation, the investigation could go haywire. One day it’s about apples, and the next it’s about oranges—probably a whole grove’s worth. In this particular case, Francesca was certain, the reason Danny Shea wouldn’t let things drop was that he was avenging the death of his own staffer, Billy Van Arsdale, who had, in fact, been feeding him information about Francesca’s family—a file Francesca had found, stolen, and destroyed. Billy had even told her himself that he was afraid his own political ambitions could never survive being related by marriage to the so-called Mafia.

At some point, he’d apparently decided to address the situation. At another point, distraught and betrayed, in the heat of emotion, Francesca had retaliated.

The simple fact was that Francesca had been backed into a corner and she’d done what strong people backed into corners do. She’d bulled her way out. She’d acted. She’d survived. And she would continue to survive and to live with it. She was a member of the Corleone family. That was her blood. Then, when she had called upon Tom and Michael to protect her, she had become something else. In some small way she was one of them now, and for the rest of her life she’d be beholden to them, and that was that.

She’d come to Judy Buchanan’s apartment.

It was on the other side of the street from where she’d pictured it. At this hour, no one seemed to be around, other than an occupied squad car at the curb. The sidewalk was strewn with flowers and trash.

From the outside, the place looked like nothing—a turn-of-the-century brick three-story like thousands of others in the city. She tried to transform this in her mind’s eye into the images she’d seen on TV and really couldn’t do it.

She tried to conjure up the murder scene upstairs, and that, for her, was a little easier.

She crossed the street.

As she was looking at some of the discarded placards, a gray-haired Chinese man in a tuxedo seemed to materialize from thin air with a tin bucket half full of wilting yellow roses.

“How much?” she asked.

He told her. It was a reasonable price for dead flowers.

The cop rolled down his window. “What’d I tell you, huh, Hop Sing?”

The Chinese man muttered something she couldn’t understand, then handed her the rest of the flowers. “No charge,” he said in obvious disgust. “You enjoy.” He dumped the water from his bucket and started walking downtown.

She waggled the flowers in her hand. Dozens of petals fell.

“Your lucky night, I guess,” the cop said, chuckling. “You come here often?”

She shook her head.

He was about her age but had gone soft. He looked like the sort of man who still wore his letterman’s sweater sometimes, even though it didn’t button over his gut. Who did it hurt, that man selling flowers? He was a man out to make an honest living, and the cop was flexing his cop muscles just because he could.

“Sad situation,” the cop said. “Inside this place, I mean. Not the flowers. The flowers were just something that worked out for you. Fell in your lap, as it were.”

“You want these?” she said, extended them toward him.

“What would I do with flowers?” the cop said. “They’re for you people.”

“What do you mean,
you people
?”

“The I don’t know what you’d call it. The mourners.”

“Give ’em to somebody. Your wife, your girlfriend, your mother, anybody.”

“My ma’s in Florida,” he said. “The other two things I’m still looking for. You should keep ’em.”

“Fine,” she said. She walked to the corner and put the roses in a trash can. “I was just out for a walk,” Francesca said to the cop on her way back. “I’m not a
mourner.
I don’t want anything to do with that dead whore.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the cop said. “I do understand. Are you going to be all right?”

“Am I
going
to be?” she said. “Who can predict the future? Not me, I’ll tell you that. I’m trying not to think too much.”

“I know some people you should meet,” he said. “Some of ’em barely think at all.”

She gave him what she hoped was a withering stare and started home, whistling past the garbage trucks, which had materialized as suddenly as the Chinaman with the yellow roses, and were out in force now, down every street. She was whistling just to whistle. Her mind was elsewhere. She’d gone through the tune who knew how many times before it clicked that she was whistling a real song, one she’d obviously heard before but couldn’t place. Even if someone had identified the tune for her (“Ridin’ High,” by Cole Porter), it might not have clicked how or where she’d heard it before. Wherever it had come from, the song’s melody had wormed its way into Francesca’s brain and taken root there, unnoticed. It was a standard; it could have come from anyplace, the radio or one of Kathy’s records, and not necessarily the second of the three songs Johnny Fontane had performed in a striped tux at President Shea’s inaugural ball.

T
he weekend before the California presidential primary, Memorial Day weekend, Tom and Theresa Hagen flew separately to the West Coast and met at the Los Angeles airport. The limousine had actually met Tom at the airstrip on Senator Pat Geary’s ranch, just outside Las Vegas, and, after a quick meeting with the senator, driven him the rest of the way. Theresa left their daughters with her sister-in-law and went Pan Am.

She came out of the terminal and did not, at first, see his limo among the many. She wore what Tom was fairly sure was a new green dress, high-necked and snug in the right places but classy. Her hair was cut short—much shorter than Tom liked or even than he’d thought fashionable—and was darker, too.

The driver got out and held up the sign with her maiden name on it, just to be perfectly safe about not attracting attention.

Theresa looked like she’d lost some weight. She looked pale. She’d come from Florida and she looked pale.

The driver opened the door for her. “You look great,” Tom said.

“You like it?” Theresa said, touching the back of her hairdo.

“I do,” he said.

“Liar,” she said. “Don’t give me that look. I always know. Always have, always will.”

He couldn’t say anything to that. This was how it was going to have to be for a while. For a while, he’d just have to brace himself and take it like a man.

The car pulled away. Tom finally reached over to embrace her, and she pulled back a little. Then she sighed, exasperated, and they embraced.

Exasperated at
herself,
Tom realized. For being here, he supposed. For caving in and making peace for the good of the children, sure. But also because—the event that triggered it—she wanted to see Jack Woltz’s art collection.

Tom had begged her and begged her to come back to New York or at least see him, yet when she’d finally relented and invited him to Florida for Memorial Day weekend, it turned out that was a bad time. He had to go away that weekend on business. She’d asked him what kind of business he had on a holiday weekend, and instead of the usual long silence he gave her when yet again she asked him to talk about his business, he’d answered her. He was going to meet with Jack Woltz, he said. He wouldn’t have needed to name that name, and he was honestly unaware at the time that he had any motive more ulterior than to be more honest with her from now on, at least to the degree circumstances allowed. But he was also aware, looking back, that he’d baited the hook and cast the line and Theresa had bitten.
Jack Woltz the movie producer?
she’d said, and he’d said,
Is there another Jack Woltz?
and she said that she was asking because she knew someone who knew his curator.
Curator for what?
Tom said.
For his art
, she said.
He’s got one on retainer. He’s supposedly got pieces in his country house that haven’t been seen in public in fifty years or more.
She asked Tom if he could get her in to see it, the house. Tom said he didn’t know if that was something he could swing. He said he’d already set it up to meet Woltz at his office on the studio lot. He didn’t tell her that Woltz had also said that he and his new wife were having several friends out to his house in Palm Springs for the weekend and had invited Tom to come and bring the family, too, if he wanted, which at the time Hagen had taken as a wisecrack. He also didn’t relish the thought of spending the night—much less two or three nights—under the same roof as degenerates like Jack Woltz and the dope-fiend surfers he imagined Woltz’s new wife’s friends to be. But Theresa had him over a barrel.
You don’t know if you can swing it?
she’d scoffed. She said that she knew him. She didn’t have her head in the sand, she’d said.
You can set up anything you want to set up. Don’t pretend you can’t.
He’d told her she was overestimating him, and she said there was little chance of that.

And now here they were. Heading to goddamned Jack Woltz’s house for the
weekend.

There are times a man wants to cut off his own prick.

Not really.

Tom gave his wife a kiss.

“Take it slow,” she said to Tom.

The driver, just merging onto the freeway, slowed down.

“Not you,” Theresa said to him. Tom toggled the partition closed.

THEY STOPPED FOR A QUICK ROMANTIC DINNER ON
the way—a French bistro Tom had heard about from Fontane, who, to give the devil his due, knew how to impress a lady. Despite the precautions, the FBI caught up to them there. They were following him most of the time now. When Theresa went to the ladies’ room, he sent a waiter out to their car to see if the agents wanted anything to eat, on him.

He and Theresa arrived in Palm Springs at twilight.

In the almost twenty years between Tom Hagen’s visits to Jack Woltz’s estate in Palm Springs, it had been transformed. When Tom had been there to discuss casting Fontane in that war picture, the place had looked like a movie-set replica of a British country manor—so studied in its detail that every bloom in the garden, every newly acquired painting by an old master, every graceful curve of the bridle paths, exaggerated the fakery. Now it had become a fortified monstrosity. Woltz had bought the houses on either side of him and had them bulldozed. The security guards had been replaced by black-clad machine-gun-bearing veterans of the Israeli army. Around the perimeter of the property now was an iron-bar fence about twenty feet high and spiked at the top, fabricated to Woltz’s specifications by an ironworks whose principal clients were prisons. Closed-circuit televisions were everywhere.

“Those bars,” Theresa Hagen said. “Are they to keep people out or in?”

Though Woltz’s reputation as a cocksman was public knowledge, his taste for young girls was not. Theresa knew about it only through Tom.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Tom said.

Theresa bowed her head slightly and looked up at him with her eyebrows arched in an exaggerated way, as a teacher might regard a student who couldn’t possibly be as stupid as the answer he’d just blurted out.

The FBI agents had pulled their car to the side of the road, about two hundred yards away. Guards waved the Hagens’ limo through the gate. It glided shut behind them.

“Fine,” Tom said. “But don’t tell me this doesn’t bother you.”

Theresa shrugged him off, so worn down by other bothersome things, apparently, that a hulking jail-door fence and machine-gun-bearing commandos were merely today’s fresh hell.

As the limo came around a bend in the driveway, Tom stared out the window in stunned silence. He’d heard about the changes from Johnny, but seeing them for himself was still a shock. Gone were the estate’s tennis courts and topiary. Gone were the long rows of stables with their Victorian façades and their gleaming modern interiors. The golf-green pastures where Thoroughbreds once frolicked and the movie mogul chomped his cigars and bragged about them to guests had been replaced by long, featureless lawns and a bunkerlike structure with a marquee salvaged from an old movie palace incongruously appended to the front. On it were the names of the motion pictures that Woltz’s studio had in current release.

The mansion itself had been remodeled so drastically by Woltz, in collaboration with his new wife, that if Tom hadn’t known better, he’d have presumed the old one had been torn down altogether. They’d stripped away the curlicues and cupolas, sheathed the gray stonework in something beige and smooth, supplanted the contrived Old World grandeur with long glass walls, harsh right angles, and frank, cement-loving modernity.

Next to the mansion, and blocking it slightly from view, the spring-fed swimming pool remained. The statues surrounding it—and in it, too, on pedestals and in fountains—had multiplied: there were at least two hundred of them now. Most were earnest neoclassical life-size metal casts of political leaders in swallowtail frocks or military heroes on horseback. But he also had a few incongruous marble nudes—the usual chubby women swooning against one another in twos and threes—and several gaunt contemporary pieces as well. The statues were crammed close together, with no discernible pattern.

Theresa was agog, speculating about different pieces, throwing out names Hagen didn’t recognize: Thorvaldsen, Carpeaux, Crocetti, Lehmbruck, Count Troubetsky, Lord Leighton. Tom loved that about her: how much she knew and how jazzed she got about it. Hagen wasn’t sure he could have named a sculptor other than Michelangelo. But he appreciated culture, and he loved being married to a woman who knew things like that. Even more, he loved being married to a woman who (unlike most of the women he’d known growing up) had daily creative passions that extended well beyond the laundry and the Sunday gravy. Theresa knew what great art fetched at auction, yet somehow her first reaction to any piece wasn’t what it cost or how it would appreciate but rather how beautiful it was, what the artist had accomplished, how it made Theresa feel. Which Tom loved.

“Were they always arranged like that?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “There were fewer pieces. The…I don’t know. The flow was better.”

“Who would do that?” Theresa said. “How could a person take so much beauty and make it look like a garage sale? Why would a person do that?”

“His new wife doesn’t like sculpture,” Tom said. “She’s in a religious group that thinks a sculptured likeness of a human being is a graven idol or robs a person’s soul.” He shrugged. “It’s California. Kooky ideas are written on the wind. All I know is, right after she moved in, she had every statue in the mansion carted out here. Her religion is one of those free-spirit ones, but somehow it also has a rule against men and women using the same swimming pools, so since Woltz takes a half-mile swim every morning, the pool’s just a place she doesn’t go. Actually, I heard he built another one for her someplace.”

Theresa seemed as if she had other questions about the wife’s peculiarities, but when they came around the final bend in the road, she burst out laughing.

“Get it out of your system now,” Tom said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “
Madonn’
. Oh, my God, I need my camera.”

In the middle of the oval drive in front of the mansion, a crew of workers swarmed around a cast of Rodin’s
The Thinker
. They were in the process of moving it. On the far side of the house, on a flatbed truck parked in a stone lot, next to what must have been cars belonging to the other guests (convertibles, foreign jobs) was the newest addition to the collection—a commissioned bronze cast of Jack Woltz himself on the occasion of his fiftieth year in show business, conspicuously larger than life, arms outstretched, the thumb and index finger of each hand making a right angle: a movie frame.

“It’s a miracle he didn’t have it done in a Roman toga,” Tom said.

“Or nude,” Theresa said, regaining her composure. “The way Napoleon did.”

“There are nude statues of Napoleon?”

“There’s Canova’s
Marte Pacificatore.
The original’s in London somewhere, but I saw a bronze cast of it in Milan last year.”

“You were in Milan last year?”

“We were all in Milan last year,” she said. “You don’t remember? The whole family, except you. You had whatever it was that came up at the last minute.”

“I remember. I thought you went to the Riviera. France.”

“We did go to the Riviera,” she said. “We flew into Milan, and took a train. I showed you the pictures.”

“Thaaaaat’s right,” he said. “Now I remember.”

“You see? You’re such a good liar with everyone else and such a bad one with me.”

She was wrong. He was a horrendous liar, period. He operated in a world in which everything he said was not less than factual, where deception lurked only in what was not said.
Michael wants to see you
isn’t a lie when, for example, it’s shorthand for
Michael wants to see you killed.
Or
Michael wants to see you get in this fucking car and never come back, you fucking cocksucker, you goddamned traitor.
Typically, the only person Tom Hagen lied to was Theresa. In a perverse way, it was a compliment. Confessing this, though, seemed like an unpromising way back into her heart. “I’m a bad liar with you,” Tom said, “because I don’t feel about everyone else the way I feel about you.”

“That,” she said, “isn’t so much a lie as a sentence full of loopholes.” The limo driver opened the door now. Members of the household staff had rushed to get the suitcases. One of the former Israeli commandos stood ready to escort the Hagens to the front door.

Theresa patted him on the knee. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go have some fun.”

THE MEN WITH THE MACHINE GUNS ON EITHER SIDE
of the front door did not acknowledge the arrival or even the presence of the Hagens. They had apparently been given the order to stand as still and be as imperturbable as the guards at Buckingham Palace.

Tom Hagen had never been this close to real machine guns, and it seemed to be bothering him more than it did Theresa. She went up the last few stairs ahead of him and rang the bell with no visible anxiety.