The Godfather's Revenge (44 page)

It was something Tom did as a precaution and because he could, more than because it was necessary. Tom wasn’t doing anything illegal. Bianchi was almost certainly the only agent assigned to watch him. And anything he managed to figure out would be thwarted at the top.

Inside the lobby, Tom didn’t recognize anyone as an agent, but just to be on the safe side he made a beeline for the stairs. He was almost to the third floor before he heard anyone else in the stairwell. Hagen couldn’t see who it was, but it sounded like a shuffling old man, a person in no hurry. Gassed, Tom opened the door to the third floor and went down the gilded hallway to the other end of the building. No one was following him. His heart was racing. He tried to take long, even breaths. He needed to get back to playing tennis. It was so goddamned hot, but maybe he and Theresa could join a club with an indoor court somewhere and play together. They used to play together all the time…when? A lifetime ago. When they were first married.

He should cut back on the cigars, but he knew he never would.

He took the stairs one more flight up and, confident no one was watching, rode the elevator the rest of the way to the suite.

Tom rapped on the door. Pat Geary opened it, as if he were Ben Tamarkin’s butler and not, at least for now, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The light from the suite was so bright it almost knocked Tom over. The suite itself was awash in glass, white leather, and blond wood. Along one mirrored wall was an upholstered bar. The sound of a television—convention coverage—wafted in from another room. Tamarkin, dressed in a black guayabera and white linen pants, had positioned himself in a thronelike leather chair in the far corner.

“Always a pleasure,” Geary said, showing Tom in. For a man who’d once clumsily tried to shake them down for a bribe and then told Tom and Michael never to contact him again, Geary had certainly seen a lot of them over the years. That the relationship had become a pleasant one was all Fredo. Fredo and Geary had gotten along well, and it had helped the Corleones get innumerable things from Geary with a minimum of fuss. People liked Fredo, and Tom and everyone around him hadn’t appreciated the value of that until he was gone.

“I gather you and Mr. Tamarkin know each other?”

Tamarkin stood, and they shook hands. Tamarkin did not take off the dark glasses.

“Good work,” Tom said.

“Knock wood,” Tamarkin said, making a fist and tapping his skull with it.

“Everything’s still set?”

“He’ll be here,” Tamarkin said, meaning the president’s campaign chairman, a former lobbyist for Walt Disney Studios, through whom Tamarkin had negotiated their deal. Hagen hadn’t met the man before. He sat back down. “He’s coming from the Fontainebleau. You and I have other things to talk about, but it can wait.”

“Other things?” But he knew.
The Discovery of America
was now hemorrhaging money. The first
Santa Maria
had sunk. The actress playing Queen Isabella was back on heroin. The grant from the Italian government had been rescinded. And that was just for starters.

“It can wait,” Tamarkin said. He wasn’t in on the plan, at least not yet.

Tom nodded and turned to Geary. “Listen, before I forget, Senator,” Tom said, “tremendous speech last night. I liked what you had to say, sincerely.”

“Why, thank you,” Geary said. He ducked behind the bar to make them drinks. “I thought it went well.”

“It was a triumph,” Tom said. “Scotch, rocks.”

“I remember,” Geary said.

“I’ll have a mojito,” Tamarkin said.

“A mosquito?” Geary frowned. He seemed legitimately confused.

“Forget it, Festus,” Tamarkin said. “I was just banging your cymbals. I don’t drink.”

Geary stared him down for a second, but he knew what side his bread was buttered on and turned back to Hagen. “
Triumph
may be laying on the bullshit a little thick, Tom. But it was rewarding, getting a chance to speak out for people who otherwise wouldn’t have been heard.”

Ben Tamarkin folded his arms, apparently set off slightly by the word
rewarding.
Geary was a notorious anti-Semite, and Tamarkin couldn’t have relished doing the man any favors.

“On several of your issues,” Tom said, “I’m one of those people.” Like many men in his position, he took a hard line against street crime. The crimes with which he himself was associated, he considered either victimless (gambling, moneylending, drugs) or perpetrated against people who opted to be involved, who agreed to certain rules and then broke them. “Your common thief,” he said, “your mugger, your wife beater, your rapist, and your child molester and the like—we need to keep people like that off the streets.”

“Hear, hear,” Geary said, and handed Tom his drink. “As I say, we need to reclaim the streets of our cities for decent Americans.”

“Looks like you’re going to have your chance soon enough,” Tom said. “Here’s to the right man for the job,” he said, and they clinked glasses.

Pat Geary was the right man for the job only in that he was infinitely preferable to the noisy debacle that had been Danny Shea’s tenure as attorney general. But Pat Geary didn’t know
the streets of our cities
from his flat Protestant ass cheeks. Geary was the son of a wealthy rancher. He’d never
lived
on the streets, the way Tom had. He’d never had to fight for his life every day, or fight just to have something to eat. As a
child,
although Tom hadn’t felt like it at the time. He’d been a grotesque creature, he now realized: an eleven-year-old man. Scabbed and filthy and not even mourning his dead parents or thinking about them and the life he’d had, such as it had been. He was overmatched against the regular bullies and the people who’d steal a penny and a crust of bread from an orphaned eleven-year-old man, and the predatory boy-fucking freaks—and yet Tom Hagen had survived it. He’d
escaped
it.

Tom excused himself and went out to the balcony and looked out over the ocean while he waited. It was twilight. The view was spectacular but about what he’d have thought: an expanse of white sand and the vast blue-green Atlantic, oil tankers gliding near the horizon, Coast Guard boats closer to shore. Glimpses of the art deco buildings to the north, crisp modern hotels to the south. From here he couldn’t see the Fontainebleau, and he certainly couldn’t see the Miami Beach Convention Center, where the vice president would soon be giving his speech. He couldn’t see Cuba but it seemed to him that he could feel it. He couldn’t hear anything wafting his way up here from ground level, but he could feel that, too. Tom Hagen wasn’t one to go in for crap like
excitement in the air,
but he had to admit: what he was feeling was about more than the view, more than himself.

Salut’,
he thought, raising his glass toward the darkening sky, toasting whatever it was.

“WHAT ASSURANCES DO WE HAVE,” SAID THE CAMPAIGN
chairman, “that even if we do agree to all this, these films won’t surface somewhere else when we least expect it?” He was a bald and florid man with pale, nearly invisible eyebrows and the gray pallor insomniacs get. His body seemed to be all curves and no angles.

“If I may?” Tom said.

Tamarkin shrugged. “Be my guest.”

“It’s impossible,” Tom said, “to prove that someone doesn’t have a thing, only that he does. Furthermore, who knows how
many
of these films there are out there, somewhere? I’m sure you’ve discussed this with the president and his brother. I’m sure they have some sense of how often the camera was rolling. What point would there be in us giving every frame of film we have? You probably won’t believe us. And there’s probably more of this material out there. Unfortunately, sir, we can give you no assurances at all,” Tom said, “beyond our word—which I’m sure you’ve checked out enough to know is a better bet than the sun coming up tomorrow.”

“Dick,” Geary said, “I can personally vouch for you that this is true.”

“If you don’t mind,” the bald man said. “I’ll take the sun and give the points.”

“Gambling man, are you?” said Ben Tamarkin.

“As little as possible,” the man said.

“What you’re really saying,” Tom said, “is
why trust us
? What’s in it for you? This is where this all makes such good sense. The films are just what got your attention, what got us to the table. I don’t see who’d ever print anything like that and show it to the public, and, while it would be a shame if they came into the possession of either the First Lady or the current A.G.’s lovely wife, for all we know, those women have made their peace a long time ago with their husbands’ proclivities.”

Tom glanced at Geary. The senator immediately leaned back and looked at the ceiling.

“So forget the films. There’s
still
more in this for the Sheas than anyone. You saw the response that Senator Geary got last night. If he runs as an independent—which I can assure you we can raise the funds for him to do—he’s not going to win, but he’s going to siphon off votes from the president. There are voters whose bigotry against Catholics, Jews, and colored people could make them vote for the other guy in November. Senator Geary can either work for you, a voice of moderation that would bring those votes back into the fold, or he can take them with him.”

“You’re prepared to do that, Pat? To betray the party that’s been your home for your whole life?”

“Cut the bullshit, Dick,” Geary said. “If it comes to that, it’ll be the party that’s betrayed me.”

“But,” Tom said, “if you appoint our friend here as your attorney general, everyone wins.
Everybody.
Senator Geary gets a platform to express and implement his passions.”

Geary nodded in assent.

“You get the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee as your attorney general and all the experience and clout that goes with that. As a replacement for—if you’ll forgive me—that boy Danny Shea, whose main qualification for the job is that he’s the president’s brother. He has next to nothing to show for all his reckless, grandstanding initiatives. His so-called war against the so-called Mafia—just to cite one example—has resulted in how many convictions?”

“Ninety-one.”

Tamarkin and Geary both chuckled.

“I’m not talking about bookies and pimps,” Hagen said. “I mean the kind of big-time gangsters you see in the movies. How many of those people has Danny Shea sent to prison?”

The answer, as they all knew, was zero.

“I get your point.”

“Daniel Brendan Shea is in over his head,” Tom said, “and I’m sure you and the president agree with us on this count, delicate as that might be to express. But if he steps down now and announces that he’s going to run for the Senate in 1966, everyone would understand.”

“Because it looks like he’s parlaying his success into something else,” the bald man said. “I understand.”

“
Parlaying
?” Tamarkin said, his thick eyebrows arched impressively. “I don’t care what you say, you’re a gambler.”

“Naturally,” Hagen said, “we can’t give you any
assurances
that Danny Shea will win, but we do pledge to you that we won’t work against him. He’ll have a fair and square shot, which is all anyone can ask for, right?”

“Now maybe
you
should cut the bullshit, Mr. Hagen.”

“Call me Tom.”

“If it’s all the same to you,” said the bald man, “I’d rather not.”

He had the kind of face it was impossible not to imagine punching.

Hagen took a deep breath, and it triggered a coughing fit. Geary shot to his feet and brought Tom a glass of water.

“Sorry,” Tom said. “I should switch brands of smokes, I guess.”

The bald man shook his head, slowly. “I’ve got you pegged as the sort of gent who’d rather fight than switch.”

It was an allusion to some advertisement. Hagen didn’t dignify it with a response.

“As for
this
November,” Tom said, “the union vote is very much up in the air, but we’ve shown that we can deliver that, and overwhelmingly so. There’s no third-party candidate to worry about, no scheming little brother looking over the president’s shoulder. What’s shaping up right now as a close election in November could very well become a landslide—a real mandate for the president. He’ll be the biggest, most literal winner in all this.” Tom smiled. “All in all,” he said, “it’s an offer you can’t refuse.”

The bald man rocked gently back and forth. Denial and anger must have happened before he arrived; he was keening his miserable way through bargaining and depression and toward acceptance.

Ben Tamarkin took out a briefcase. It was full of banded packs of thousand-dollar bills and a list of names and addresses of real people to whom its donation could be severally ascribed, should the campaign wish to go to the trouble.

“Whattaya say, Dick?” Tamarkin popped open the latches. “Friends?”

GEARY AND THE CAMPAIGN MANAGER HURRIED TO
the convention center to go watch Vice President Payton’s speech, and Tamarkin joined Tom Hagen on the balcony for a celebratory Cuban cigar. Like his father, Michael Corleone insisted on hearing bad news right away. But good news, like a full-bodied red wine, needed to breathe for a while to be fully savored.