The Godfather's Revenge (48 page)

“What’s going on?” Mary asked.

Michael had no idea. This had nothing to do with Al—no one else was looking that way. Al’s news, Michael presumed, had something to do with Tom Hagen, which of course was of no concern to anyone else there. It had to be about Anthony, but that, too, was puzzling. How could a wild pitcher in the final ending of a lopsided game provoke anything like this, no matter who his father was? There was shock on some of the faces, what seemed like anger on others. One of the coaches pulled the umpire aside.

The umpire was just a kid, probably a college boy home for the summer. Michael heard him ask the coach if he was sure, and the coach nodded.

The umpire’s face was ashen. He strode toward the plate, then turned to face the bleachers. Behind him, Anthony stood on the mound with his glove on his hip and scowled.

Rita and Michael exchanged a glance, but he shook his head. He didn’t know what was going on.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the umpire said, “may I have your attention. There’s just been…we’re suspending the…” And then he hung his head and started sobbing and did not move from the spot where he stood. Anthony came off the mound toward him.

Al Neri, beside Michael now, bent and cupped his hand around his boss’s ear, as if what he was about to say could stay a secret, as if he himself hadn’t just heard about it on the radio.

“Somebody shot the president,” Al said. “They shot him. He’s dead.”

F
or the rest of her life, Francesca would always remember exactly where she was and what she was doing when she heard the news about President James Kavanaugh Shea, who had once kissed her hand in a receiving line.

She’d spent the better part of the night waiting for Johnny in his dressing room, a trailer near the beach, not far from the custom-made temporary pier where the camera boats and the replica ships were moored. She wasn’t wearing a watch. Johnny often joked that it was bad luck to have a clock in his dressing room because “movies should be timeless.” But it was safe to say that when she left the trailer, it was well after midnight.

For the past few weeks, she and Johnny and their children and Johnny’s ex-wife, Ginny, and a few actors close to Johnny had all been living together in a huge rented villa in the countryside, not far from the monastery that had been turned into the Madrid set. Francesca and Johnny were openly a couple now, but in that situation, they were not of course staying in the same bedroom, any more than were Lisa Fontane and her fiancé, a New York City police detective named Steve Vaccarello, who were here together just for a week, on vacation. Francesca had been more than a little wary of this arrangement, but she was falling hard for Johnny, and he’d assured her that Ginny and his daughters would love her and Little Sonny, too, and to her surprise everything was working out.

But if Francesca and Johnny wanted any time alone, any intimate time, it had to be in his dressing room or at least somewhere away from the villa. Once, they’d even snuck into the monastery and made love on the throne built for King Ferdinand.

She’d been waiting for at least two hours, maybe three, and she was running out of patience and wine. She came outside to see if Johnny was close to being done for the day.

She was a little drunk.

A few hundred meters out into the blue-black Mediterranean, the
Santa Maria
and two modern boats were sailing in circles. Even this far away, she could hear the new director screaming. The movie had been shooting for a month, and this was the third director. According to Johnny, they were on their seventh screenwriter and they still didn’t really have a shootable script.

She crossed the beach and saw Johnny in costume, striding across the deck. The director yelled cut, and said something to Johnny. Johnny wadded up his hat in what looked like anger and threw it overboard. Someone from one of the camera boats dove in to retrieve it.

It struck Francesca as funny.

On the ship, they’d gotten the news, but Francesca would learn that only later. Johnny had reacted by throwing that hat and was now sitting on the deck of the ship, stunned silent.

Francesca sat down on the sand.

She was actually much more than a little drunk.

When she saw Lisa Fontane and her fiancé holding hands and walking on the beach not far away, she thought it was maybe a hallucination, but Lisa greeted her—cheerfully—and they walked over to where Francesca sat.

“Steve has an early flight home,” Lisa said.

Apparently that was supposed to explain what they were doing here. “All right,” Francesca said.

“Mind if we join you?” Lisa said.

Francesca shook her head. “You’re staying, though?” she said.

“For another week,” Lisa said. “Until classes start.”

They sat together in uncomfortable silence, staring at the ship. The shouting had stopped. The motors were cut, and all three vessels were drifting.

Lisa and Steve exchanged a look, and Lisa took a deep breath. “My father and you,” Lisa said, “make a great couple.”

“Thanks.”

He’d obviously put her up to it, but it was still sweet. Lisa had actually been reasonably nice to her already.

“At first,” Lisa said, “I had the same reaction you would have if your father was dating somebody who was just a little more than seven years older than you.”

That didn’t seem so strange. Her age plus seven equaled thirty-four. Her father had been thirty-seven when he died. Actually, her
mother
had been thirty-four when her father had died. But then Francesca realized she was doing the math wrong. She was very, very drunk.

“Of course,” Francesca said.

“At any rate, it’s not for me to say,” Lisa said, “but I hope it works out for you guys. I’m glad to see him happy. He and Mom were more like brother and sister even when they were married, but you guys…” She blushed and looked again at Steve. “Well, I know what love is.”

Francesca nodded. “I’m happy for you, too.”

Just then, in full Queen Isabella regalia, Deanna Dunn—the Oscar-winning actress who had briefly been married to Fredo Corleone and therefore had briefly been Francesca’s aunt—came careening out onto the beach, hysterical, kicking up sand, and, it would seem, also spectacularly drunk. She was a pill freak, too, so it was hard to tell. Steve and Lisa and Francesca stood up. At first, Miss Dunn seemed to be speaking in tongues, but as she drew closer Francesca made out what she was saying.

“The goddamned Cubans killed the president!”

THAT WASN’T EXACTLY TRUE
.

There was, incontrovertibly, one Cuban involved. But Cubans plural? The Cuban government? Cuban expatriates frustrated by the president’s betrayal of their efforts to regain power? All seemed possible, none certain.

Details were initially sketchy.

Here was what came clear in short order.

At the Fontainebleau Hotel, only a few hours before he was to accept, once again, his party’s nomination for the presidency of the United States, Jimmy Shea—surrounded by Secret Servicemen—came out to the pool for his daily vigorous one-mile swim and a few recreational dives. The pool at the White House had neither a three-meter springboard ( Jimmy’s event at Princeton) nor a ten-meter platform (which he was known to enjoy for the thrill of it), but the Fontainebleau’s had both, on a tower flanked by two one-meter boards. The chance to take a few dives had helped make the Fontainebleau his regular hotel in Miami.

A row of luxury cabanas separated the pool from the beach. These had been secured. There were men on the roof of the cabanas as well, and on several of the balconies of the hotel. Everyone coming into the hotel for a week had been thoroughly searched. No other guests were allowed in the pool area while the president used it. The closest that the public could get to Shea was a small gap between the cabanas—through which, ordinarily, guests passed from the pool to the beach. This was packed with placard-bearing well-wishers, kept safely behind a patrolled barricade. The Secret Service had screened the crowd, ridding it of anyone who was or looked Cuban, with no evidence whatsoever that those turned away were anything but law-abiding citizens. The agents, however, missed Juan Carlos Santiago—a light-skinned man who spoke perfect English and carried a Florida driver’s license that identified him as Belford Williams. He carried his real driver’s license, too, but the agents had been satisfied seeing just one.

A photographer from
Life
magazine—a woman—waited by the pool. This was an exclusive. The White House would get the chance to approve the shot, and it was guaranteed to run on the cover next week. The regular members of the press—including any and all television cameras—were already at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

The president came out in a navy blue terry-cloth robe with the presidential seal on the breast, and he smiled and waved to the crowd and made a joke about the heat and dropped the robe. People gasped. He had been working out with dumbbells and had recently lost about twenty pounds, explicitly for this moment. The photographer from
Life
captured it, and—with cheaper cameras and poorer angles and light—so did several people in the crowd and in the hotel.

President Shea wore stretchy, modestly cut jade-green trunks that came about a third of the way down his thigh. It was the same style he’d worn in college and only one size bigger.

He swam his laps first. Whether he went his whole, usual mile would become among that afternoon’s more petty matters of debate.

The president got out of the pool and took two practice dives on the one-meter springboard and then told the photographer he was ready and then mounted the steps to the three.

The photographer stayed on the deck and used a telephoto lens. She had promised her editor she would come back with the hero shot to end all hero shots—America’s youthful president, hurtling through the air like a sculpted god, with nothing in the background but blue sky.

After about a dozen dives off the springboard, culminating in a very clean one-and-a-half, he comically exaggerated his reluctance to continue and then climbed the stairs to the ten. The crowd laughed. People loved this. People loved him.

He hadn’t dove from a ten-meter platform in years, and he didn’t try anything difficult. The first time, in fact, he paused up there and looked down and pretended to be afraid. This, too, was a hit with the crowd.

The first dive—like the two that would follow—was a simple swan dive, the president’s back nicely arched, his entry unimpressive but clean enough to cause no pain. Each time he got out of the pool, he acted humble and relieved not to have screwed up. After the third dive, the photographer gave him a thumbs-up, and an aide rushed over to the president and draped his robe on him the way a cornerman would, then handed him a pair of aviator sunglasses.

Which the president handed back.

He looked directly into the eyes of the people. His supporters, his countrymen, who’d been wildly cheering his newly svelte torso and his airborne trip down memory lane. He put his arms through the robe and tied the sash and ran his fingers through his hair. It fell strangely, perfectly into place. His was a great head of hair, exquisitely cut.

And he headed toward the crowd. The Secret Service agents’ headsets buzzed. New positions were taken, the detail remobilizing on the fly.

The agents famously hate these spontaneous shows of common-man populism. Every president is asked, warned, begged, all but ordered not to do this. And every president does it, anyway, some more often than others, but none more often than Jimmy Shea, who liked to touch people, who waded into crowds the way hopeless drunks stagger into bars, the way degenerate gamblers finish off a day at the track by betting on the serial number of their last dollar bill. Jimmy Shea walked the length of his first inaugural parade, and he presumably had every intention of doing so again.

Great men, like children, often regard death as a thing that happens to other people.

Santiago, a slender man with thinning hair and a shy smile, was wedged behind two much larger men. No one seemed to have noticed him draw his gun, a 9mm Beretta.

As the president drew near, Santiago squirmed his way between the men with no apparent difficulty, almost as if they let him through, darting into the president’s view like a sprinting child coming out into the street from between parked cars.

He bared his teeth, shoved the barrel of the gun against the presidential seal, and fired.

Jimmy Shea’s arms flew backward, above his head.

In a grim parody of triumph, some would say.

Like an evangelical minister, flung backward by the Holy Spirit, said others.

Like surrender.

A split second after the first, Santiago’s second shot grazed President Shea’s neck. The president careened farther backward, his eyes were wide. Disbelief, fear, pain. Blood spurted from his neck.

Sprayed, some would argue.

In an arc, others said. A ribbon. Spewing, several feet.

Two teams of Secret Service agents scrambled into action—those whose job it was to throw themselves on the target, and those ordered to ignore the target and eliminate the attacker with extreme prejudice.

Screaming, stampeding civilians were suddenly everywhere.

An agent dove between Santiago and the president, but the third shot missed him and hit Shea in the shoulder and spun him around, away from a second agent who was about to catch him.

The president of the United States fell dead into the pool.

Three other agents jumped in after him.

Two agents drew their weapons—semiautomatic Colt .45s—and opened fire on the assassin.

This was protocol. There was no reasonable chance of hitting an accidental target. These were some of the finest handgun marksmen in the world. The bullets they fired further ensured the safety of bystanders. They had X’s notched in the tips: mushroom rounds that explode against the target mass with no chance of a through-and-through.

The agents each shot twice.

Oddly, Santiago fell momentarily forward, as if hit in the back, and then four rounds exploded in his chest, and he sailed backward and hit his head on a post.

The carnage, it seemed, was all over.

CONNIE CORLEONE SPENT THE MOMENTS RIGHT BEFORE
she heard the news on her hands and knees, pulling weeds from the rooftop replica of her father’s garden. A table radio was tuned to a Top 40 station, where someone else had left it, and she hadn’t bothered to find something more to her liking. This was fine, just something to keep her company. It was the summer everything grew. The beefsteak tomatoes were bigger and better than anything she’d managed up here before, and the peppers seemed to go from blossom to skillet overnight, but the weeds were thicker than anything she’d ever seen. When she’d been planning this garden, she’d thought—irrationally, she now realized—that weeds wouldn’t find their way up here. Her boys—who were at the movies—had grown like mad that summer, too.