The Godfather's Revenge by Mark Winegardner Read Free Book Online

bucks and a blowjob could you get Hagen to live in Florida.
    The chapel was needlessly large. The Fontainebleau had been built to be a casino, but the political support fell through. A resort hotel doesn’t need the kind of chapel a casino does.
    Across the aisle, a man in a plain black suit paged through a white leatherette Bible. Hagen caught the man’s good eye—the other was glass—and turned his palms heavenward. The man, a CIA operative named Joe Lucadello, shrugged and looked away. He used to have an eye patch and more hair.
    Outside, a pounding rain all but drowned out the shouts of the crowd, herded away from the entrance of the hotel by the Secret Service. President Shea—in full view of a horde of TV cameras—was scheduled to play golf with the vice president, former Florida senator Ambrose “Bud” Payton, who had once been his biggest in-party rival (and a longtime friend of Sam Drago’s in Tampa and Carlo Tramonti’s, too). Tom’s wife was out seeing some art-world people—her own collection of modern paintings was, quietly, among the finest in the country—but the real reason Theresa had come along on this trip was to attend a fund-raiser tonight in the Fontainebleau’s ballroom. The party’s convention would be here in Miami Beach, in fact, in a little more than a year—hard for Hagen to believe. It seemed like only yesterday that he’d helped put together some of the deals that got Shea elected in the first place.
    Ordinarily a paragon of taste and good sense, Theresa was fascinated with the dashing young president and his doe-eyed rich-bitch wife. The Sheas were just people, Tom kept explaining, full of flaws, like everybody else. Theresa was from New Jersey. She knew what an unremarkable governor Shea had been. But Theresa believed what she wanted to believe. Like everybody else. Even Michael, of all people, had been drawn in, though he made a distinction between Jimmy and Danny. He thought Jimmy was an inspirational and potentially great president. There had been problems: Cuba and his own brother. But Cuba was an impossible situation, Michael believed, and so was Danny. Brothers can be that way.
    Hagen looked at his watch. The crone at the rail rocked silently back and forth. Hagen considered praying, too, if only to settle his mind. He closed his eyes. He had no real regrets. In his life, there were only things that had to be done, and he did them, end of story. This left little to pray about. Hagen would be damned if he treated the Almighty like some department-store Santa, making childish requests for things a man should be able to acquire or control without need for supernatural intervention. He opened his eyes. To hell with it. No prayers.
    Finally, the old woman stood. She had a big white bandage on her forehead and mascara running down her cheeks. Eight million stories in the naked city , Hagen thought, averting his eyes.
    As she left, Lucadello nodded toward a man he’d stationed outside the door, who would tell anyone else who came by that the room had to be sealed off until the president was secured in his suite upstairs. Still toting the Bible, Lucadello went to the pulpit and turned up the organ music, then took a seat in the pew behind Hagen. “Too much is never enough.”
    He grew up outside Philly and had a Jersey accent, though he turned it on and off.
    Hagen turned around to face him. “Say what?”
    “The architect who designed this hotel. That was his favorite saying.”
    “Sounds about right.”
    “I used to want to be an architect, I ever tell you that?”
    “No.”
    “Idealist that I was, this was the kind of building I dreamed about building. Curves galore in boxy times. Zigging where others zag. Ever hear that record, Fontane Blue ?”
    Hagen frowned and gave Lucadello a Who do you think you’re talking to? look. In truth, Hagen had little use for music in general and Johnny Fontane in particular, but it would have been embarrassing in all kinds of ways for