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

man’s grave.
    Hagen put a finger to his throat to feel his racing pulse. His heart did that, raced. “I wasn’t sure your people were actively looking for him. For it . The package.”
    “What’d you think this was about?” Lucadello said. “That immigration circus?”
    Hagen shrugged. It wasn’t just Carlo Tramonti’s deportation to Colombia, which might be comical were it not for the things Tramonti knew. There were also the related, mounting complications posed by that self-righteous prick Danny Shea.
    “So where is he?”
    “It,” Lucadello said.
    “Excuse me?”
    “It. The package.”
    “Jesus Christ.”
    Lucadello tossed the white Bible aside. “In a place of worship, you talk like that? What ring of hell you figure that’ll get you sent to?”
    “It’s not a…It’s just a hotel.” Hagen took a deep breath. “Fine. Where’d you find it ?”
    “We didn’t so much find it as figure out where it’s been. Guess where.”
    Sicily, Hagen thought. The narcotics operation had given Geraci connections all over that island. But Hagen wasn’t about to guess. In a tactic he’d learned from watching the great Vito Corleone, Hagen remained utterly still, addressing this show of disrespect with withering silence.
    “All right, killjoy,” Lucadello said, “but you’re gonna love this. In a huge man-made cave underneath a certain Great Lake.”
    “Erie?”
    “Positively spooky, actually.”
    Hagen sighed. Lucadello bobbed his head in concession.
    “Anyway, if the Russians dropped the bomb,” Lucadello said, “two horny kids could’ve gone down there and restarted the whole human race, that’s how well stocked this place was. Or so I hear. It was attached through some kind of passageway to a lodge on a private island up there. I’m sure you know the one.” The agent laughed. “A secret passageway. What a riot. We live in interesting times.”
    Vincent Forlenza, the former owner of that lodge on Rattlesnake Island and the boss of the Cleveland mob, had also been Geraci’s real-life godfather. For his part in the conspiracy with Geraci and the Chicago outfit, Forlenza’s body was at the bottom of Lake Erie, chained to a tugboat anchor, food for the sludgeworms.
    “I figured you’d be happy about this,” Lucadello said. “No doubt your brother, too.”
    Hagen thought he heard a note of sarcasm in the way Lucadello said brother. “ Happy ’s not the perfect word,” Hagen said. “But you’re right to think it’s good news. The bad news I’m guessing is that he’s not there anymore.”
    “ It’s not there anymore.”
    Hagen closed his eyes.
    “I’m sorry.” Lucadello laughed. “I can’t keep this going. I’m just busting balls. You’re right—he’s not there anymore, but that’s not the bad news. The bad news is the way we found out about it, which was the FBI.”
    Hagen’s heart wasn’t slowing down at all. No boss or caporegime had ever cooperated with a government investigation, but few had ever been backed into more of a hole—literally, as it turned out. “Is he in custody?”
    “We think Geraci is still at large.” Lucadello pronounced it the Italian way— Jair-AH-chee, rather than the Americanized way— Juh-RAY-see —that Nick preferred.
    “You think ?” Hagen said.
    “Think, yes. That’s why we call this process intelligence , counselor. What we know for certain is that our boy was sloppy getting out of there, threatening the lives of two children and a retired cop who plowed snow up there. The ex-cop angle was probably what got the Bureau interested. Then they found the cave, found prints everywhere, even found the gun he used.”
    “He shot at kids?” It was unthinkable that anyone with Geraci’s skills would threaten children, and unlikely that he’d have left a security guard alive as an eyewitness.
    “Threatened. It hadn’t been fired.”
    “But it had his prints on it?”
    “We’re not sure. Maybe the guard just recognized it as the same