“Rest assured,” Geraci said, “whatever they do to him, that kid’s not going to talk.”

“Whether he talks may be the least of your problems.”

“Oh yeah?” Geraci wasn’t sure what the agent was talking about, but his choice of pronouns-your problems, not our problems-didn’t bode well.

“The Cuban government would be nuts to torture him. They’d be nuts to do anything but make a big fuss about this foreign national who tried to kill their bearded, beloved revolutionary sweetheart. The Russians will be on their side. The U.N. will get dragged in. When they deport him, there won’t be anything for us to do but put him in jail, maybe execute him.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Geraci said. “Carmine Marino’s still an Italian citizen. If they send him back there, he’s got a pretty powerful godfather.”

Lucadello shook his head. “You don’t understand. We need to execute him a long time before any of that happens. But that’s just where your problems start, I’m afraid.”

Geraci would be goddamned if he was going to let this one-eyed bastard kill him in his own backyard. “Stand up,” Geraci said. “I need to search you.”

“Suit yourself. But if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. And if you waste precious time on things like this, you may wind up that way.”

Geraci searched him anyway and liberated him of a gun and two knives.

“Keep ’em with my compliments,” Lucadello said. “I’m on your side, remember?”

Geraci motioned for him to sit back down. “It’s late. I was sleeping. Forgive me if I’m confused about why this is my problem and not yours, too.”

“Oh, it’s mine, too. Look, I’ve already heard from somebody at the top-not my boss but his-that the FBI knows about the camp Tramonti was operating in Jacksonville. They already had an investigation going. I’d heard a rumor floating around that the Bureau was somehow tipped off to our operation, too, but it didn’t seem credible. But after this incident, it doesn’t matter. The risk of someone at the Bureau putting it all together is high.”

“And you can’t protect me from that? There’s nothing you can do?”

“Very little, under these circumstances,” he said. “I’d like to kill those guys.”

“Kill ’em, then,” Geraci said. “I’m not stopping you.”

“Unfortunately,” Lucadello said, “that’s not an option. It wouldn’t solve everything for you anyway. We have reliable intelligence that your former associate Michael Corleone has been planning to kill you. The only thing he’s been waiting for was for you to do this job. Now that you’re not going to get it done at all, we believe your life is in immediate danger. In addition, we have somewhat less reliable intelligence that Louie Russo is planning to kill you as well, apparently because… well, I don’t know how everything works for you people, but apparently there’s some sort of Commission?”

Geraci shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“Of course not. At any rate, everything Russo’s doing had their approval and unfortunately your operation didn’t. Apparently that’s a breach of protocol severe enough for them to authorize… well, we’re not certain who. Presumably Mr. Russo. To kill you, that is. You’re not shaking.”

“It comes and goes.”

“If something like this was happening with me, I’d be shaking.”

“It’s a type of Parkinson’s. Not fear. It has nothing to do with fear. And anyway, how do you know something like this isn’t happening with you?”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s happening,” he said. “At any rate, things are going to move fast, and you need to move faster.”

“Not we?”

“No,” Lucadello said. “Not we. We never had anything to do with anything. You and I have never met. There is no we. There is no me, either. Agent Ike Rosen doesn’t exist.”

Lucadello said that the best he could do was get Nick Geraci and his family out of there. One-way tickets under assumed names, to any destination on earth. It might be possible to have an agent meet them at the airport and give them some quick pointers about starting a new life in wherever they happened to be. This wouldn’t be possible everywhere, but if Geraci wanted to run a few locations by him, he could probably say if they were a good choice.

Geraci looked at the gun on his desk. It would have been nice to kill the guy. It might not make anything worse than it was.

Then, in a flash, almost a vision, he saw his way out of this, or at least how to buy some time.

“All right,” Geraci said, extending his hand, consciously imitating his godfather, Vincent Forlenza. “Four things. First”-index finger-“I’m going to Sicily. I don’t need your people. I have people. Second”-middle finger-“I don’t fly. Period. But you’re going to help me get where I want to go, and my family, too, if they’ll join me, which I doubt. Third”-ring finger-“I promise you, my good friend Michael Corleone isn’t going to kill me, so you might want to check into your reliable intelligence and see what went wrong. And fourth”-pinkie-“I’d strongly advise you not to kill Carmine Marino or to have him killed.”

“Three out of four we can do. As for Carmine, I love him, too. He didn’t do anything wrong. He went where he was supposed to, he made a great shot at the target we told him to hit, and he was smart enough to swallow his manly pride and dress like a woman and try to escape that way. If it was up to me, I’d hire him, but… well, all I can say is that it’s out of our hands.”

Geraci smiled. “Carmine’s mother’s maiden name was Bocchicchio.”

Even after he explained about the peerless, weirdly mercenary ability of the Bocchicchio clan to exact revenge, Lucadello was unmoved.

“So who are they going to come after, huh?” Lucadello said. “The United States government?”

Geraci shook his head. “They’ll take it personally.”

“Meaning what? Me? Or wait, I know! They’ll go after the president!”

Abruptly, Geraci started shaking. To steady himself, he crossed the room, grabbed a fistful of Lucadello’s shirt, and pulled him to his feet. “Carmine’s still alive,” he whispered. “Keep him that way, and they won’t come after anybody.”

Only one gondolier was at work this early, but the gondolas were large. There was plenty of room. As Hagen expected, Russo’s men took their tommy guns on board.

“Don’t look like that, Irish,” Louie Russo said, taking a seat at the front. “I know you ain’t on the muscle side of things. Hell, you people aren’t even gonna have no muscle side of things. Anyhow, loosen up. Take it from me, you’ll live longer.”

The gunmen found this pretty funny. The gondolier averted his eyes and didn’t say anything. He began poling them across the fetid, man-made pond. Finally, he and Hagen made eye contact. Almost imperceptibly, the gondolier nodded.

Hagen had stopped sweating. A sense of peace washed over him. Russo was telling the story of how he had gotten this place, but Hagen wasn’t listening. He studied the tree-lined shore, anticipating the moment they’d get to the halfway point across, bending over enough that no one would notice him unbuckling his belt.

Halfway across, the gondolier brought his pole out of the water. He’d made tens of thousands of trips across this pond, and it had given him forearms a pile driver might envy. As Hagen straightened up and yanked off his belt, the gondolier swung the pole, unleashing the pent-up anger of a man who’d spent years wanting to do this to every self-important asshole who’d ridden in his gondola. It connected with the skull of one of the gunmen.

The other whipped around, but before he could get off a shot, he was jerked backward. Tom Hagen’s belt dug into his neck.

The gondolier grabbed the first dead man’s gun and trained it on Louie Russo.

The second man kicked and turned purple. Hagen felt his windpipe rupture. The man went still. Tom shoved him to the floor of the boat.