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

him to admit that.
    “You know it was recorded in the ballroom here, right?” Lucadello said.
    “Hence the title. You going to jabber all morning or are we going to do business?”
    “What a record. Talk about zigging where others zag, huh?” Lucadello shook his head as if he were humbled to be near such a hallowed site. “You know Fontane pretty well, I guess?”
    “Friend of the family is all,” Hagen said.
    “The family.” Lucadello laughed. “I bet. Seriously, though, how’s your brother?”
    Lost. Michael put on a good show, but his heart clearly wasn’t in his work. It wasn’t anywhere else, either, that Tom Hagen could see. “He’s doing great.”
    “Glad to hear it.” Lucadello sounded both glad and skeptical. He and Michael had known each other since Mike was in the Civilian Conservation Corps, trying to piss off his father and find his way in the world. Joe and Mike had also gone off together to join the RAF. Hagen, working behind the scenes, had gotten Mike tossed out. The day after Pearl Harbor, though, Mike volunteered again, this time for the Marines. The rest was history. Mike came home a war hero. And, with little fanfare, so did Joe. That was how he lost his eye: the war. Noble. Michael was fond of him and trusted him, which should have been enough for Tom Hagen. But some guys, he thought, just rub you the wrong way.
    “Look,” Hagen said, “I appreciate you coming all the way down here—”
    “I live ten minutes away,” Lucadello said.
    “—but I’ve got a busy day, so if it’s not too much trouble…”
    Lucadello patted him on the shoulder. “Easy, paisan’. ”
    Hagen didn’t say anything. He’d eaten so much shit about not being Italian, what was another teaspoonful from this smug bastard?
    “I got good news and bad news,” Lucadello said. “What do you want first?”
    Maybe he was just trying to be friendly, but Jesus. Fuck him. “The bad.”
    “I better start with the good.”
    Then why ask? “People usually start with the bad,” Hagen said, “but shoot.”
    “We’ve finally got a lead on your missing package.”
    Nick Geraci.
    The thought sent Hagen’s heart racing. The traitorous capo was last seen boarding a ship to Palermo. Button men had been waiting on the docks when it arrived. Michael watched from a yacht in the harbor. They’d been left holding their respective dicks. Other than some information that seemed to place him, at least briefly, in Buffalo, there had been no sign of him for months—long enough that within the Corleone Family, he was becoming the unnamed suspect behind every misfortune large or small. An arrest that stuck. A fixed title fight none of the Family’s bookies knew about. A heart attack a lot of people thought wasn’t really a heart attack. If a guy slipped and fell in his bathtub, men wondered if maybe Geraci had rigged it.
    A protégé of the late Sally Tessio, Geraci had been the best earner the Corleones ever had. In the words of the late, great Pete Clemenza—Vito Corleone’s other, more loyal capo —Nick Geraci could swallow a nickel and shit a stack of banded Clevelands. He was an ex-heavyweight boxer who’d almost finished a law degree, and he knew the virtues and limitations of both force and reason. He’d built the Family’s narcotics operation into what Hagen, some fifteen years earlier, had tried to convince Vito Corleone it was destined to be: the most lucrative part of the business. This generation’s Prohibition. Geraci was as likable as Fredo had been without being a flake, as tough as Sonny but with none of the recklessness, every bit as shrewd as Michael but with more heart. Yet even though Geraci’s parents were Sicilian, he had been born and raised in Cleveland, and so—like Hagen, a Corleone and a Sicilian in all but name and blood—Geraci was the quintessential insider doomed never to get all the way in. Hagen had always liked him. Now he hoped someday to enjoy a long, remorseless piss on the