Read The Godfather's Revenge for Free Online Page B

named Tom Hagen, who was also somehow but not really Michael’s brother. A consigliere who was not Italian was unique in their tradition—a violation of it, in fact, at least to someone like Carlo Tramonti, whose organization was by far the oldest in America and was run more like a Sicilian clan. For years it had been autonomous from the rest of the Families, and even now, its rules were distinct from everyone else’s. For example, any time Carlo Tramonti wanted to open the books and initiate a new member, he, alone among the twenty-four Dons in America, didn’t need to get the Commission’s approval. Any time an associate of any other organization wanted to so much as set foot in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, or the Florida Panhandle, he had to go to his boss and have him get permission from Carlo Tramonti. To do otherwise, Tramonti deemed an “insult.” These requests were all but unknown. He’d approved a few weddings, when some wiseguy fell for a New Orleans girl who’d moved away, but only if Carlo and some associates were invited, too, if all out-of-state guests cleared out by noon the next day, and if it was crystal clear that, in the future, the in-laws went to visit the happy couple and not vice versa. But if someone from another Family merely wanted to go to Mardi Gras, just as a tourist or whatnot? He could be sure his boss would simply tell him to forget it. Don’t go.
    Tramonti’s seat on the Commission was permanent but somewhat honorary. His attendance was optional. He rarely went. He was unaccustomed to making decisions by committee, by voting. Men like Michael Corleone might have gotten into this thing of theirs to transform it into a corporate board of directors. But Carlo Tramonti was another kind of man.
    Nonetheless: so be it. What was past was past. The Corleones had gotten their wish, and, predictably, the gods were now punishing them for it. Yet Michael Corleone, whatever his flaws, had proven himself an honorable man, a uomo di panza. As such a man, he would have no choice but to act.
     
    THE TRAMONTI BROTHERS TOOK OFF FROM MEDELLÍN in a Ford Tri-Motor that, officially, belonged to a private subcontractor of the Colombian postal service. In fact, it was part of a fleet of such planes that helped smuggle marijuana, cocaine, and heroin from Colombia to various airstrips in the swamps of Florida and Louisiana. For a few delirious minutes, they rose into a perfect blue sky, high above the mountains and jungles of the Colombian interior, gasping not just from the thin air but at the preposterous beauty of it all, too.
    When the sputtering plane suddenly began its descent, the Tramonti brothers asked if it was engine trouble.
    The pilot said no. He pointed to the sleek, unmistakably American fighter jets escorting them down.
    Moments later, the Tramontis were dumped at an abandoned army base, somewhere in the densely forested mountains of they didn’t know where, relieved of their personal effects and all the cash that had not been in their shoes.
    Speechless, they watched the planes take off.
    They tucked their remaining cash in their pockets. The brothers had little choice but to trek through the jungle. The brush reduced their exquisite silk suits quickly to rags. The stones in their pathway ruined their fine, thin-soled loafers. They wheezed and cursed every step of the way, plotting their revenge as they made their way through the undergrowth, stepping around large and unfamiliar forms of vermin, never sure just which slithering, scuttling creature might be full of deadly poison.

CHAPTER 2
    T om Hagen sat in the back of the chapel of the Fontainebleau Hotel and waited for an old woman to finish her prayers. She was kneeling at the altar rail, wearing a tropical beachwear getup, parrots and pineapples. Going to church like that offended the consigliere ’s sense of propriety. Organ recordings of droning Protestant hymns played from a pulpit-mounted loudspeaker. Not for a million