Russo started to jump, to try to swim for it, but before he got out of the boat the gondolier grabbed him by the back of the shirt and held him fast. His sunglasses fell into the water.
The tiny-fingered Don started to cry. “I gave you everything you wanted. Now this?”
“Don’t insult me,” Hagen said. He fished a.22 with a silencer out of the coat pocket of the man he’d killed. The assassin’s tool of choice. His arms tingled from the effort it had taken to garrote a man. “You were going to kill me,” Hagen said, waving the gun in front of Russo.
“You’re crazy,” Russo whimpered. “That’s just a gun. It don’t mean nothin’.”
“Even if you weren’t, I don’t care. You gave Roth the idea of getting Fredo to betray the Family, and you set it all up with your people in L.A. You’ve done a hundred other things that give me cause to kill you.”
“ You?” Russo’s tears muted the effect of his devilish eyes. Snot ran freely from his phallic nose. “Kill me? You’re not in this side of the business, Irish. You were a fucking congressman. You think they’re gonna let you make your bones, Irish? You’re Irish.”
Tom Hagen’s whole adult life, everyone had gotten him wrong. He was first and foremost a poor Irish kid from the streets. He’d lived under bushes and in tunnels for an entire New York winter and won fistfights with grown men over half a loaf of moldy bread. Hagen raised the pistol. Now it was his turn to smile.
“If you live in the wolf’s den long enough,” Hagen said, “you learn to howl.”
He fired. The bullet tore into Russo’s brain, ricocheted around in his skull, and did not make an exit wound, the way a bigger-caliber bullet would have.
Hagen tossed the gun into the pond.
He and the gondolier quickly, silently tied weights to the three dead men and threw them overboard. No one saw them. The gondolier took Hagen back to shore and went to work scouring the boat with a bleach solution. He didn’t see any blood, but it paid (well) to play it safe. Hagen drove away in Louie Russo’s own car. The gondolier would swear on the immortal soul of his sainted mother that he’d seen Russo’s car drive away. The car was found two days later in the airport parking lot. The newspapers reported that passengers with any of several aliases known to have been used by Louie the Face had boarded planes that day. None of these leads had turned up an actual person.
The gunmen had been loyal, trusted Russo soldatos, men it would have been difficult if not impossible for the Corleones to bribe. This gondolier, on the other hand, made less in a year than what Louie Russo’s cuff links cost. Russo and his men were found a month later. They were hardly the only corpses there, either. The acidic pond accelerated decomposition. When the state police had it drained and the top layer of mud excavated, they found bones galore, most of them in weighted gunnysacks, suitcases, and oil drums.
By then the gondolier had disappeared.
Neither the authorities nor anyone from the Chicago outfit ever found him. He lived out his days under a different name in a small town in Nevada, running a gun shop and private cemetery on land purchased (with other people’s money) from the federal government, only twenty miles from the windy, irradiated outskirts of Doomtown.
Joe Lucadello called from a pay phone less than a mile from Geraci’s house and told Michael Corleone everything. The lie he’d told about Russo, the truth he’d told about Michael. The details about the ship that would take Geraci to Sicily. Alone. His wife and kids weren’t going with him, which ought to make things even easier.
“Sorry we didn’t get it done down there,” Lucadello said, meaning Cuba. “I know you were counting on it.”
“We’ve lived to fight another day,” Michael said. “What more can a person ask of life?”
“Quite a bit,” Joe said. “But only if you’re young.”
At his mansion in Chagrin Falls, Vincent Forlenza awoke in the dark barely able to breathe, with the familiar and excruciating sensation of an elephant standing on his chest. He managed to ring the bell for his nurse. He knew a heart attack when he had one. It wasn’t his first, and with any luck it wouldn’t be the last, either. It wasn’t as bad as the others. More like a baby elephant. Though maybe he was just getting used to it.
The nurse called for an ambulance. She did what she could and told him he’d be fine. She wasn’t a cardiologist, but she meant what she said. His vital signs were good, considering.
Vincent Forlenza was a cautious man. God seemed to be having a hard time killing him, and he’d be damned if he was going to make the job easy for mere mortals. His estate here and his lodge on Rattlesnake Island were heavily guarded and fortified. It had been years since Forlenza had gotten into a car or boat without his men checking it thoroughly for bombs. Ordinarily, he had two guys do the job who were known to dislike each other, so they’d each be eager to catch the other betraying his Don. He’d stopped eating anything that wasn’t prepared as he watched. But even Don Forlenza, in his hour of medical need, wouldn’t have thought to question the men who arrived to save his life. Neither did anyone guarding the estate. Neither did the nurse, who noticed nothing unusual in the way the men administered to the old man. There was nothing unusual about the ambulance, either-until it left and, moments later, another one just like it showed up.
The first ambulance was found the next day, a block from where it had been stolen. Vincent “the Jew” Forlenza was never seen again.
In the family section of the stadium, Tom and Theresa Hagen and their handsome son Andrew rose for the playing of the national anthem. Tom clamped his hand over his breast and found himself singing along.
“You usually just mutter,” Theresa said.
“This is such a great country,” Tom said. “No one should ever just mutter.”
Frankie Corleone was the smallest man on the entire Notre Dame defense, but on the first play from scrimmage, he shot through the line and hit the Syracuse Orangemen’s gigantic fullback so hard his head snapped back and his body followed. The crowd went wild, but Frankie jogged back to the huddle like he hadn’t done anything unusual.
“Frankie!” Andrew shouted.
“My nephew!” Theresa said.
Tom and Theresa hugged each other, and the fullback made it off the field without the need of a stretcher.
On the next play, Syracuse tried to pass. The receiver was wide open over the middle. Just as the ball got there, Frankie came out of nowhere and batted the ball away.
“Woo-hoo!” Theresa yelled. “Go, Frankie!”
“The Hit Man!” Tom shouted. It was his nephew’s nickname. He didn’t allow himself to give it a second thought.
“Aren’t you supposed to be cheering for Syracuse, Ma?” Andrew teased her.
It was a perfect November day for football, crisp and struggling to be sunny. Everyone should see a football game at Notre Dame. The Golden Dome. Touchdown Jesus.
“This is different,” she said. “This is family.”
In the Palermo harbor, Michael Corleone sat on the deck of a yacht belonging to his father’s old friend Cesare Indelicato. Michael had never traveled with as many men for security as he had on this trip, but Don Cesare had not taken offense. They were living in troubled times.
Michael settled in now, comfortable that he would not suffer a double cross, willing to risk the recklessness of being only a few hundred meters away from Geraci when he arrived in Sicily for the satisfaction of watching him taken from the boat by the best assassins in Sicily.
Michael would have to return to New York. Other than Hagen, the best people the Corleone Family had left posed unacceptable risks because of their ties to Geraci. The next best people were mediocrities like Eddie Paradise and the DiMiceli brothers. Michael would have to run the Family again, every aspect of it. He’d be able to make it look as if he were returning in triumph, he was certain-the elimination of Louie Russo and Vince Forlenza would see to that, at least in the eyes of the top men from the other New York Families. But so much of what Michael had wanted-legitimacy, peace, the love of his wife and children, a life different and better than the one his father lived-was now beyond his reach: for years, perhaps forever.