Free The Godfather's Revenge by Mark Winegardner Page A

asking me questions I can’t answer, but, Theresa, my love, you know.
    Their gaze was broken by the arrival of two plates piled high with stone crabs.
    “Well?” Theresa said. A little hurt, it seemed, as she always was. “Nothing to say?”
    “Ah, you know,” Tom Hagen said, throwing up his hands. “Not much to tell, I guess. A day’s a day.”
    “Wow,” she said. “Look at all this food! I’ll never eat all this.”
    Theresa had ridden out his long silences countless times before, often without the aid of candlelight and a tart white wine.
    “Call Sandra,” Tom said. “Bet you she’ll help.”
    “I already did.” Theresa grinned in a way she must have hoped was wicked. “When I went to the Ladies. She and Stan are on their way.”
    Theresa had a good heart, Tom thought. At this point, it was probably as broken as it was going to get.

CHAPTER 4
    T he indios had a name for the land of the dead. They called it Mictlan. Nick Geraci was under no illusions that he was the only one in Taxco who’d conducted business there.
    He stood on his balcony in the waning desert light, draped in a bathrobe, postponing the ordeal of having to get dressed again. His fists throbbed. Behind him, on the green tile floor inside, were the clothes he’d cursed himself trying to zip and button this morning, now soaked with blood and rolled up inside a rug along with the stranger who’d come to kill him.
    Centuries ago, Taxco was hacked from this steep hillside by the colonizing rear guard of the conquistadors, who enslaved the natives and marched them into dark holes to mine silver. The big shots stayed up top, basking in the thin air and idyllic weather, supervising what was destined to become a maze of tortuous cobblestone streets, shooting dice and despoiling the local women, drinking first one sort of spirits, then bracing themselves for the visits from another. On such a foundation rose this small city, still a source of silver, lovely beyond reason, filthy with jewelry shops and bars, fragrant with bougainvillea and boiled chicken, with fried cornmeal and rotting straw, a haven for outsiders and eccentrics. Around every corner were views that provoked tourists and newcomers to gasp and unholster their cameras.
    Geraci’s apartment was on the third floor. From its balcony, he could see the zócalo, the baroque dome of the church of Santa Prisca, and an exultation of tile-roofed colonial houses, each forced by the sheer angles of the hillside and its spurs of virgin rock to be ingeniously different from the next. From here, the city seemed aglow in white, red, and green, same as the Mexican (and Italian) flag. But Geraci had been in Taxco long enough to see past beauty.
    He could pick out sad-eyed women behind counters in silver shops or seated at café tables and watch them swallow grimaces they’ll never unleash on their haggling customers and oblivious lovers. He could spot isolated men muttering to themselves, walking with awkward, hurried gaits: away from something and not toward it. He noticed dogs trotting alone down side streets, their heads bobbing as if silently cursing their demons. His heart went out to those dogs.
    He looked back over his shoulder at the rug. He’d bought it on the street. It was wool, brightly colored, turquoise and orange, black where it needed to be. It had a warrior on it, in noble profile. He’d liked that rug.
    Even though Geraci hadn’t wanted to kill the guy, and even though his now-aching hands stood to make a tough job, getting dressed, even tougher, it was wild—in every sense of that—to feel his fists throb again. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thrown a real punch. In his time of need, his body, to his surprise, had not betrayed him.
    He leaned out over the railing and was able to glimpse the distant gorge, safely downwind, where four centuries of the city’s garbage had been dumped, where today’s trash hill often became tomorrow’s sinkhole, where brown