“My ma used to say being fine is more a decision than a condition.”

“Smart woman.”

“Yeah, well, you look like either you’re scared out of your wits or else you got some kind of whatchacallit. Tropical fever. Like from the jungles. Hey, boys?” he called. “My Mick friend in here could maybe use a towel.”

“All I need is coffee,” Hagen said, downing the cup in two long swallows.

“Only person I ever had in here who sweated the way you are was wearing a wire.”

“Is that right?”

Russo nodded.

Hagen raised his arms. “Search me,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

Russo wasn’t too proud-or respectful-to do it, either. Russo searched him. No wire, of course. Russo again motioned for Hagen to sit. Hagen paused, waiting for Russo to sit, too.

“A few small matters, eh?” Russo settled in behind his desk. “Like for instance what?”

From the small third-story balcony of a boarded-up library in downtown Cienfuegos, Carmine Marino loaded the Russian-made rifle he’d been set up to use and waited for the motorcade to come his way. He’d lost the two angry Cubans he’d come with the night they all landed. The only Spanish he spoke was corrupted Italian, but he managed to make his way across two hundred miles of a dictatorship to the two women spies who gave him the rest of his instructions. Carmine was naturally disappointed when he did not have hot sex with them in the dark and sultry Cuban night. Who ever heard of a female spy who didn’t have sex with a dashing assassin such as himself? Why else be an assassin such as himself? There were two of them, and still nothing. It was confusing. Maybe they were dykes. Maybe he wasn’t the man he thought he was. If he got out of this alive, he thought, he’d go back to that one-eyed Jew and tell him that if he knew what was good for him, he’d find the brave Carmine Marino a buxom, randy spy, and pronto. Carmine was nobody’s fool. He knew that girls like that were out there.

The streets were lined with soldiers and cheering Cubans. As the motorcade approached, the sound the people made was oddly metallic, like a record of a cheering crowd played too loud and a little too fast. As a toddler in Sicily, Carmine had heard another despot, Mussolini, cheered this way.

Now the motorcade turned the corner by the cathedral and came toward him, a row of American cars, which was hilarious. These people hate the Americans, yet look. Carmine shouldered his rifle.

In the fourth car-a blue convertible, as promised-was the bearded target, in full military uniform, smiling beatifically and waving to his oppressed people.

Marino inhaled smoothly and squeezed the trigger.

The bearded man’s head jerked backward. A shower of blood and gore arced over the trunk. The driver hit the gas.

Screams filled the air. Police waved the rest of the motorcade-including the black sedan two cars behind the convertible, in which the leader of Cuba was riding-down a side street and out of the city.

The man in the blue convertible, the dictator’s favorite double, was dead.

Carmine Marino was captured on his way to Guantánamo Bay, dressed like a woman.

Louie Russo agreed to everything. The Corleones could, with no interference from Chicago, operate their hotels and casinos in Nevada. Atlantic City, too, if, as expected, things opened up there. Hagen admitted that Geraci’s assassin squad operation was ultimately controlled by the Corleones, and Russo admitted, in so many words, that he controlled the ones run by Tramonti and Drago. They might be rivals, these Families, but they had more in common with one another than with the cynical opportunists at the CIA and in the White House.

After a brief discussion of the particulars, Russo agreed that if his people did the job in Cuba first, the Corleones could resume control of the Capri and the Sevilla Biltmore and operate them within the law and with no interference from Russo or any other organization-power Russo would certainly have once Michael helped make him the first formal boss of all bosses since the death of Vito Corleone seven years before.

Hagen himself would personally oversee the organization of the people on the Corleone payroll. Some of this operation would be gradually given to Nick Geraci, but it would also be available to Louie Russo on occasion and in consideration of his help in allowing Michael Corleone to become an entirely legitimate businessman.

Russo was so cooperative that it became increasingly clear to Tom Hagen that Fuckface didn’t plan to let him out of here alive. It was something he and Michael had thought might happen. Knowing that a thing like that might happen is a world apart from feeling it edge closer to happening. The sweating hadn’t slowed down. He’d have given a thousand bucks for a chance to shower and put on some dry clothes.

“This is a great day, Irish,” Russo said. “We should celebrate. I’ll join you, too, only I was kidding about the cocktail before. I don’t have nothing here stronger than that coffee and the bad breath of those gentlemen out in the hall. The bar in the club there’s all right, but the really top-shelf stuff, best selection in the state of Illinois, is right across Lake Louie there.”

It wasn’t even nine A.M.

“I appreciate that,” Hagen said. “But tempting as it is, I need to be getting back.”

“Aw, c’mon, Irish. You don’t drink on it, it ain’t a deal. On top of which, since you people are going to be in the legal casino business-I pity you the money you ain’t gonna make, but no one asked you to go down that road-anyway, you ought to get a last look at my establishment here, which at the risk of not being humble I have to say I’m proud of. It don’t open up for a while yet, but-” Russo took off his black glasses. His eyes were solidly red with a green ring in the middle. He smiled.

The chill that went through Tom Hagen was not a result of the sweating and the air-conditioning, though that’s what he told himself.

“-I know some people,” Russo said. “Ever take a gondola ride?”

“Can’t say I have,” Hagen said.

Russo herded him out the door. The men with the tommy guns stood. “Get this,” Russo said. “Irish here ain’t ever been on a gondola ride. If that ain’t one of those things a man ought to do before he dies, I’d like to know what is.”

Joe Lucadello walked to the front door of Nick Geraci’s house, in the middle of the night, and rang the bell. Geraci had fallen asleep in the chair in his den out back. Charlotte had taken a sleeping pill and was dead to the world. Barb was off at college. After several rings, Bev Geraci answered, but only through the intercom.

“Tell your father it’s Ike Rosen.”

“Will he know what this is about?”

“Sure, why not?”

“What happened to your eye?” she asked. “Is that real?”

“It is. It’s from a war wound.”

“I don’t believe you,” Bev said.

Lucadello flipped the eye patch up. Even through the peephole, the absence of an eyeball was gory enough to make the girl scream and run away. Lucadello sighed, sat down on the porch steps, and waited for the police to come. That was another brilliant thing these people had worked out. The police functioned as their private security force, and other people-civilians-would summon them when needed.

Two squad cars responded. Cops piled out of them, guns drawn. Lucadello raised his hands. He provided them with his Ike Rosen driver’s license and told them he was in the import-export business with Mr. Geraci. He was there at such an ungodly hour only because of an unfortunate customs incident. By then, the commotion had awakened Nick Geraci, who thanked the cops and calmed his daughter down. Then he and the agent went back out to his den.

Lucadello sat down on one of the seats Geraci had salvaged from the wreckage of Ebbets Field and gave Geraci the news about Carmine.