Michael Corleone did stay for a whole week in Maine, as planned, but it had hardly been a vacation. Al Neri and Donnie Bags set up shop at the inn, working the phones on the Tom Hagen situation and trying to figure out how to confirm Michael’s suspicions about Carlo Tramonti. Al worked out a deal with the innkeeper and soon all eight rooms were either vacant or occupied by Michael and his family or the men in his employ.
The television in the lobby was on almost constantly, usually with the sound off, flickering images of Jimmy Shea’s presidency and of the encomia he’d received at the now-postponed convention. There were also countless exterior shots of the Fontainebleau, and the swearing-in of President Payton—that would take some getting used to, President Ambrose “Bud” Payton—seemed to come up again and again, as if this were all a film loop.
For the most part, Rita, too, stayed at the inn, glued to the TV, although she did go out for meals and a few game attempts to get closer to Anthony and Mary. Generally, these attempts seemed to have been debacles, most memorably including the time she was thrown from a horse and the time she went out on the fishing boat and got seasick and Michael and Anthony had an argument about cleaning up the vomit.
The billiard table was set up in the rec room at Trask, and, in no time, Michael’s ability to see the angles on the table as if in a vision came back to him. He tried to teach this to his children, but the game came too naturally to him. He struggled to articulate its yielded secrets even to the two people on earth he loved most. They soon lost patience with one another.
Somehow, the New York newspapers got wind of the fact that Tom Hagen was missing and ran stories about it, all sources anonymous. The stories were buried deep in the Metro section. He was yesterday’s news, particularly relative to the news about Jimmy Shea.
A sleazy tabloid newspaper reported the rumor that Tom Hagen was in the custody of the FBI. Al Neri, in telling Michael about it, told him not to worry, which only engendered more worry.
The day of the president’s funeral it rained, and they all stayed in and watched it together. Kay came over, too. The day was too sad for anyone to argue. The Shea children, a boy and a girl, were slightly younger than Michael’s children. This seemed to get to everyone. The mourning children on TV were in fact the ages of Tom Hagen’s daughters. There seemed to be nothing that could come out of anyone’s mouth that didn’t just make everything worse.
As the graveside ceremonies began, Kay hugged her children and as she was leaving whispered to Michael to call if there was any news about Tom.
That night, Michael and Rita and the kids went out for lobster, which Mary wouldn’t eat because of the live ones in the tanks in the waiting area, and Anthony wouldn’t eat because he claimed to be allergic. Then they all went to see a Marlon Brando movie that had been filmed on the Riviera. Brando and David Niven are trying to trick a woman into bed. It was supposed to be funny. Michael found it tasteless and in the middle of a bit where Brando’s character is pretending to be a mentally retarded man with a Napoleon complex, he got up and started to herd Rita and the kids out of the theater.
Rita said she thought it was funny and wanted to stay.
“Can I stay, too?” Anthony said. “I think it’s funny, too.”
“No,” Michael said to him, but he was glaring at Rita.
“I’m staying,” Rita said.
“Suit yourself,” Michael told her. And he took the kids and left.
Rita came back to the inn four hours later, drunk. From then on, Rita slept in a different room.
And Michael barely slept at all.
The last few nights in Maine, Michael had Donnie Bags drive him out to the school. The security guard let Michael into the rec room. While Bags napped behind the wheel of Al Neri’s idling Cadillac, Michael played rotation, alone, running the table well after midnight.
Upon his return to New York, Michael Corleone was greeted with a tidal wave of unmet responsibilities and a mountain of unopened mail.
Michael went to his office and got to work on the responsibilities, and Al Neri went to the kitchen table for more coffee and to open and sort the mail. The kitchen was at the opposite end of the penthouse, and when Al shouted out, it sounded like he’d been stung by a wasp or stubbed his toe—something startling but insignificant. Michael went to see what was happening, just in case.
As Michael entered the kitchen, he smelled something rotten. Al Neri stood over an opened box, holding up a suit jacket wrapped around a bundle of newspapers.
Miami newspapers.
Inside was a dead baby alligator.
To the surprise of neither man, inside one of the pockets of the suit jacket was Tom Hagen’s wallet.
WITH JAMES K. SHEA BURIED AND A NATION STILL numb with grief and confusion, the delegates reconvened. With a minimum of pomp and circumstance, preceded by a brief, emotional nominating speech by Senator Patrick Geary of Nevada, they made President Payton their nominee for the fall election.
Life magazine never ran those diving photos, believing that doing so would have been in bad taste. For years, the photographer fought to have them returned to her. Years later, she prevailed. She made millions, not only from the exhibit of those shots but also the companion coffee-table book (with essays by a dozen members of the American literary elite) and other licensed material (T-shirts, calendars, and so forth).
Instead of the photo spread, the magazine published both the introduction Daniel Brendan Shea never gave for his brother and the speech accepting the nomination that James Kavanaugh Shea never delivered (which Danny Shea personally rewrote, it would later be revealed). These ran with no illustrations at all. The cover was plain white. Centered, moderately sized bold type read JAMES KAVANAUGH SHEA/1919–1964. It was the bestselling issue in the magazine’s history.
Who, in the end, was Juan Carlos Santiago?
There was no evidence that he was in any way connected with the current Cuban government. In fact, he was its sworn enemy. He was a skilled fisherman, who, since he’d fled his homeland and in between bouts of manic behavior, had been a valued member of crews both in South Florida and, more recently, in New Orleans. He was, it seemed, simply the bad seed from a good family. A confused and delusional man who wanted to be a patriot, who tried to avenge the death of his brother by participating in the botched invasion and then tried to avenge the humiliation he’d suffered during that debacle by killing the president.
Case closed.
To appease the worried masses, President Ambrose Payton launched an investigation. He offered the chairmanship of the investigation first to Danny Shea, who understandably declined (and, perhaps less understandably to most people, seemed to have little interest in getting to the bottom of what had happened; those closest to him said it was as if he already knew). Payton’s second choice accepted: a retired Speaker of the House of Representatives, a wholesome Iowan and a beloved American statesman. Those picked to assist him would be similarly august names.
The public appreciated the thoroughness of this, and for all but a few—a fringe element, it seemed, in a fringe-loathing nation—the earnestness of the endeavor allowed them to get on with their lives—shaken by this act of random gun violence but secure that the Star-Spangled Banner yet waved, that the Union was preserved, and understanding that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Nonetheless, the investigation would solemnly pursue every confusing or mysterious element of the case—a rapidly lengthening list, according to some among the fringe element.
There were no television cameras? No home movies that showed anything of note?
And what about the two large men Santiago squirmed past? The ones who, some felt, seemed to screen him from view until the last second. They were dressed about the same, built about the same. They appeared in countless grainy, blurry photographs, taken by tourists and the Life photographer alike, but all attempts to find or identify them had proved fruitless.
Santiago’s fake driver’s license was not a forgery. Neither was it issued in Miami, where Santiago lived, or anywhere in South Florida, but rather in Pensacola. The birth certificate used to get the license was a legal copy, though the real Belford Williams had died in a flood in Louisiana when he was three years old. No one in Pensacola remembered having ever seen Juan Carlos Santiago. The woman who processed the paperwork for it and supposedly took the photo admitted that she believed it to be a scientific fact that your darker-skinned people all look alike to members of the white race.
Santiago was apparently shot five times, but the Secret Service agents advancing on him, from the front, apparently fired only four shots. There were accounts of a shot coming from behind him, although nothing had been conclusively proven. There were conflicting accounts about whether or not Santiago spun around as he was shot; if he did, that would explain the shot in his back (which was just a rumor, since his autopsy had been rendered classified).
Ballistics would prove nothing. Dum-dum rounds break up into pieces that are nearly impossible to trace to a specific gun. All that could be said for certain was what had already been released to the public: all the bullets that killed Juan Carlos Santiago had been fired at about the same time, all from the same kind of gun.
Even citizens with less conspiratorial frames of mind had to wonder how a lone gunman—a crazy, a nothing—got that close to a president of the United States with a loaded handgun.
Dumb luck?
Why not?
It would happen at least three more times in the twentieth century, after all, each time by someone even less formidable than Santiago. Each time the event seemed a little less plausible, but nonetheless, there it was: a thing that happened.
Call it luck, call it probability, call it what you will, but if each was a one-in-a-million longshot, wasn’t that explanation enough? Billions of people walked the earth in that time. Millions have, at least fleetingly, wished the president dead. Three (that we know of) came close.
The statistically unlikely fact may be that only one succeeded.