Here's the final installment for now, guys, the beginning of Chapter 2. I'm taking the rest of the weekend off.
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CHAPTER 2

The room service dinner that Tom Hagen ordered hadn’t arrived yet when his telephone rang.

“Tom, it’s Michael” said the voice at the other end of the line. “I need you back here as soon as possible – tonight, actually.”
“Why? Is everything O.K.?” Tom asked.
There was an almost imperceptible pause before Michael answered. “There’s been an accident, Tom. Fredo is dead.”
“God, Mikey……What the hell happened?” Tom said softly.
“Fredo went out fishing with Al Neri” Michael began. “Somehow, I don’t know, somehow he fell overboard. Neri tried to save him, but Fredo almost drowned them both”. For the first time since he could remember, Tom heard a tinge of emotion in Michael’s voice. And then, as quickly as ithe emotion was there, it was gone, as Michael’s tone switched to his usual businesslike voice.
“The family plane is waiting for you right now at the airport” Michael said. “There’s a car waiting downstairs to get you there. I expect you back in less than three hours. I haven’t told Connie yet, and I want you there when I do.”
“Sure, Mike, I’ll leave right away. Anything else I can do?” Hagen asked.
“No. Just get back here as soon as you can” Michael said, before abruptly hanging up the phone without waiting to hear if Tom Hagen had anything else to say.

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It had been nearly a year since Connie Corleone had had confronted her brother Michael, and in an act of defiance in which she had failed to follow his wishes had run off and married Merle Johnson.

It was only after their honeymoon, paid for by Connie by pawning her jewelry, after they had set up housekeeping in Merle’s squalid Reno apartment, the irony lost on her that the city in which he lived was known at the time as a common residence for rich women of the east while waiting out the residency requirement for a Nevada divorce, and after she learned that he had absolutely no visible means of support other than the anticipation of her allowance from the Corleone family that Michael had now cut off, that she decided to leave him.

It then that she learned of his four previous marriages, all of them to rich divorcees, and all of which had ended with Merle Johnson receiving generous settlements from each of his ex-wives, and of his many infidelities, two of which had taken place during the brief few months that they had been together, almost as if he were planning who his next victim in the crime of marriage would be.

Michael was right, of course, as he almost always had been, when he said about Merle Johnson in his uniquely icy way, “I don’t know who this man is, and I don’t know what he does for a living. Now tell him you don’t want to see him anymore. I’m sure he’ll understand.” Just as he had been right in ordering the killing of her husband, Carlo Rizzi, who she now knew had set-up her brother Sonny to be murdered.

Her initial reaction to the disappearance of her husband had been worry. And two days later, when his body turned up in the marshlands of New Jersey, anger. Anger at Michael, when she put things together and realized that Carlo’s death was somehow related to the murders of the heads of four of the five New York crime families that very same week. Anger at Michael for taking her husband away from her, who, as badly as he treated her, was still the father of her children.

Even after she realized that she no longer cared about his death, that Carlo was responsible for the murder of her oldest brother, a brother who had always protected her and who she realized she loved even more than her husband, Carlo’s death had sent her into a depression and downward spiral that had lasted until only two months before, with the death of her mother.

It was then that she finally forgave Michael, in the process forgiving herself, and reconciled with her older brother.

She knew that for some reason – she was unsure of exactly what the reason was, but suspected that it had something to do with the embarrassment that Fredo’s ex-wife had caused Michael at Anthony’s communion party – that Michael was terribly angry with Fredo, and she begged Michael to make up with him on the very first day of their mother’s wake. And she promised Michael that she would change, that she wanted to stay close to the family now, and that she would take care of him, not as a wife but in the way in which an older sister might care for a baby brother, even though she was the younger of the two.

And Connie Corleone had found happiness and contentment in her new way of life. Her husband had been a gambler and a chaser of other women, and she found a satisfyingly tranquil chord of domesticity in caring for Michael, and Fredo as well, that she had never been able to strike while married to Carlo Rizzi.

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Because of the many trips made by Tom Hagen in his role as family attorney, Al Neri, acting as Security Director of the family hotels, and Michael himself, between the Corleone’s Lake Tahoe estate and Las Vegas, Reno, and the state capital in Carson City, the family owned a small twin-engine airplane that seated four comfortably. Michael had even undertaken the considerable expense of clearing several acres of woodland on the property, and built a private airstrip, complete with a hangar and a small cottage, shared by the pilot, a much decorated Korean War veteran on 24-hour call, and an expert airplane mechanic.

Now, flying over Lake Tahoe at dusk, Hagen could see the entire estate in front of him. As many times as he had seen it, the beauty of the lake and the surrounding mountains never failed to impress him as surely being one of the most beautiful places in the world, especially when he compared it to the grime and grit of New York City.

Coming in for a landing, Hagen could already make out the figure of Michael Corleone, standing alone about twenty yards from the end of the runway. Although there was a road which led from the small airstrip to the compound, which was nearly half of a mile away, Hagen saw no car, which meant that he and Michael would be walking back to the compound, giving them about 10-20 minutes of absolute privacy, depending on their pace, to talk.

Tom had once thought that Michael sometimes chose to walk because he appreciated the natural beauty of the surroundings and enjoyed a rare few minutes when he had the opportunity to communicate with nature, but he soon learned otherwise shortly after the airstrip was completed, when he realized that the only time he and Michael walked from the airstrip were those times when Michael wanted to discuss something in absolute privacy and did not wish to risk the chance of being overheard by his driver.

As the plane taxied to a stop, Michael was there at the door to open it for Tom and greet him with an embrace as soon as Hagen’s feet touched the ground. Then, silently, with Michael’s arm draped across Tom’s shoulder in a rare display of emotion, they began to make their way towards the compound.

They walked quietly for a minute or two. Finally, it was Tom who broke the silence.

“Mikey…..I don’t know what to say…..”
“Don’t say anything, Tom” Michael said. “I want you to just listen.” The emotion that Hagen expected to hear in the voice of a man talking about the death of a brother just hours before was missing, and Hagen, not sure of what he was about to hear next yet somehow knowing that he wasn’t going to like it, braced himself for what Michael was about to tell him.
“Fredo didn’t drown” Michael said in his flat and emotionless way. “He and Neri went out in the boat, and Neri shot him and dumped his body in the lake.”
“But why, Mike?” Hagen’s voice cracked, and he felt tears welling up in his eyes. “Fredo was no threat anymore. You even said yourself that you knew that Ola and Roth misled him.”
“Fredo was misled” Michael said “But not the way you think he was. We have about a ten minute walk back to the house. I want you to listen while I tell you the whole story of what really happened the night that Hyman Roth and my brother Fredo tried to have me killed.

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