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Mickey joined the army at seventeen and soon became a supply sergeant. It was there, not (as legend had it) on the streets of Baltimore, that he learned that there were the rules and then there was what people do. The black market, lucrative in peacetime, proved to be a license to print money once the United States entered the war. The week after the armistice, Sergeant Shea rigged himself an honorable discharge. He was a millionaire, most of it in cash. He went to New York and opened a tavern in the Tenderloin district. Being both Irish and a fine negotiator, he quickly forged useful bonds with the police and, more important, Irish street gangs like the Marginals and the Gophers. He bought a few warehouses near the piers, a solid investment that helped him keep his import-export skills sharp. And that might have been that, if not for Prohibition. Shea was God’s perfect bootlegger. He owned warehouses. He employed dockworkers. He knew how to move goods outside the law. He had friends in two eastern cities and people in Canada, former supply sergeants from the RAF with whom he’d done business and remained friendly. And not only did he run a tavern, he ran one known as a cops’ bar. Nearly overnight, that tavern became an ice cream parlor and its basement was gutted, remodeled, and reopened as a speakeasy. The cops, his former regulars, were now paid to drink there for free-money well spent, since the place got a word-of-mouth reputation as one safe from raids. Before Shea knew it, that basement was a who’s who of Manhattan swells-opera divas and Broadway stars, newspaper publishers and their star columnists, flashy lawyers and florid aldermen, even presidents of banks and titans of Wall Street. Shea bought the building next door and tu
But Mickey Shea was a man who had seen things. During the war, men like him could get rich, but there was a whole tier of rich and powerful people above that, people who hadn’t had to get their hands dirty setting up a swap of morphine and girlie pictures for blood and generators, who’d never had to work the room slapping the backs of men they’d bribed. He’d used his co
One day, Genco Abbandando- Hagen ’s predecessor as consigliere and the man Shea thought owned Genco Pura Olive Oil-contacted a police captain on Shea’s payroll and set up a meeting between Mickey Shea and Vito Corleone. They met at the lunch counter of an Italian grocery store in Hell’s Kitchen, only six blocks from Shea’s warehouses but someplace he’d never been. He hated spicy food and refused to eat anything but bread and sauceless noodles. When the meal was finished, Don Corleone explained that the men ru
The Ambassador would have no way of knowing that it had been Tom Hagen, while Genco was still consigliere, who’d taken care of that wartime news coverage.
And even though the Ambassador thought he’d bought his ambassadorship-which was mostly true-it was Hagen who, behind the scenes, had secured it.
It was Vito Corleone who’d taught Hagen the power of staying silent about such matters.
Motorized iron gates glided open. The driver stopped the golf cart in front of a house made of stone blocks, designed like a half-scale replica of an English castle. A crew of Mexicans was laying sod and planting cactus. Shirtless, leather-ski
“This way, sir.” The driver still made no eye contact.
Hagen, squinting, wondering if three hundred more bucks could get him four aspirin and a pair of shades, headed up the front walk.
“No, sir. This way.”
Hagen looked up. The man was standing in the rocks of the unfinished yard. The driver took him around the side of the house to the pool, as if Hagen couldn’t be trusted to go through the house. Hagen checked his watch. Almost three. He would have to catch a later plane home.
In the backyard, the pool was shaped like the letter P, a circle spliced onto a single lane for lap swimming. Around the perimeter of the circular part were seven identical white marble angels. The Ambassador sat at a stone table, shouting into a white telephone. A platter of meats and cheeses was set out. In front of the Ambassador was a plate smeared with mustard and strewn with crumbs. This arrogant fuckjob had already eaten. Plus he was stark naked (which might have thrown Hagen except that the last meeting he’d had with the Ambassador had taken place in the steam room of the Princeton Club). His skin was the color of rare prime rib. His chest and back were hairless as a fetal pig’s. He didn’t have sunglasses on either.
“Hi ho!” he shouted at Hagen, though he was still on the phone.
Hagen nodded. “Mr. Ambassador.”
The Ambassador motioned for Hagen to sit down, which he did, and to eat up, which he did not. “Already ate,” Hagen mouthed, and he made a wincing gesture that indicated he was sorry for the misunderstanding.
The Ambassador lowered his voice but kept on talking, cryptically, but the conversation seemed personal, not business. At one point he put his hand over the receiver and asked Hagen if he’d brought trunks. Hagen shook his head. “Too bad,” the Ambassador said.
Naturally. Only a pezzonovante could sit there in his fluorescent altogether. Not that Hagen would have stripped naked and gone for a dip. The point, of course, was Shea’s rude semiassertion that he couldn’t.