Forlenza waved him off in disgust. “Hey, Joe. You called for a vote, let’s vote.”

Blissed out on barbecue and good company, Pete had said they ought to hold these things every year, and Joe Zaluchi had raised a glass in assent and pushed for a postmeeting vote. All but one of the Commission members were still there. The vote was unanimous.

Not long before he returned to New York, Nick Geraci met Fredo Corleone in a saloon on the set of Ambush at Durango. It looked real enough if you didn’t look up at the cables and catwalks. Fredo had a part in the movie (“Card Sharp #2”) but wasn’t yet in costume. They sat at a table near the swinging doors. They were the only ones there. Outside, the director, a German with a monocle, yelled at someone because he disliked the color and texture of the mud.

“You see this shit?” Fredo said, throwing the morning paper on the table. MOVIE QUEEN HONEYMOONS HERE WITH HOODLUM HUSBAND, the headline read. The first two paragraphs had innocuous quotes from Deanna Dunn. The third mentioned that Fredo was in the movie, too, “making his screen debut as a bad guy.” After that, the story was a clip job, full of old news that had, over the years, already appeared in papers in New York and was peppered with the word allegedly. There were pictures, though. Fredo was furious they’d dredged up the shot of him sitting on the curb right after Vito had been shot, bawling his eyes out instead of trying to save the old man’s life. “I don’t play the bad guy,” Fredo said. “I catch the bad guy cheating.”

“What’s the point?” Geraci said. “If you call the paper or go down there, then they’ll really have a story. It’ll make things worse. That’s a nice suit, by the way. You have a guy?”

“You said worse? Right? So you agree. This is bad. You don’t get to worse from good or just fine. Not unless you’re already at bad.”

“What do you care?” Geraci said. “It’s the fucking Tucson newspaper.”

“They got all kinds of facts wrong.”

Like the fact that Deanna Dunn qualified as a movie “queen” anymore. She was a lush, and her looks and her career were suffering for it. Geraci figured she’d married Fredo only so she could keep living the high life even when her roles dried up completely.

Outside, the director yelled “Action!” A buckboard wagon hurtled down the dusty street, and Deanna Dunn began screaming.

“That’s in the script,” Fredo said. “Fontane dies and Dee Dee screams.” She was playing the sheriff’s widow. Johnny Fontane was the gunslinging priest.

“You want facts,” Geraci said, “there are better places to go than a newspaper.”

“We got married a month ago. It wasn’t a secret, like it says, and we already took a honeymoon. Weekend in Acapulco at that place with the pink Jeeps that go down to the beach.”

“Short honeymoon.”

“We’re busy people.”

“Hit a nerve, did I?”

“Hey, who wouldn’t want to spend more time on his honeymoon, y’know?”

Geraci wouldn’t, not if he had to be stuck in a hotel room with a woman as militantly self-absorbed as Deanna Dunn. Unless maybe you could make her scream like that in the sack. The director called action on another take. Deanna’s screams sounded even better. “I’ve never been to Acapulco,” Geraci said. “Nice?”

“I don’t know. Sure. It’s like a lot of places, I guess.” Fredo pounded his fist on the table, right on the photo of him getting into a limo at the airport. “Explain this to me, huh? She’s been here three weeks solid, me off and on, now all of a sudden this shit’s news?”

“You married a movie star, Fredo. What did you expect?”

“I married a movie star a month ago.”

“You’re a movie star now yourself, for God’s sake.”

“Aw, that’s just for shits and giggles, the acting. I got like two lines.”

“Still.”

“So why don’t they talk about me as someone with a background in entertainment who’s trying to branch out, huh?”

Geraci recognized Michael Corleone’s words in his brother’s mouth. Michael had gone along with Fredo’s more public image as something useful in helping to make the Corleones legitimate, or at least ostensibly so.

“Look,” Geraci said. “I been reading that paper for months. Trust me, nobody reads it.”

Fredo laughed. A moment later the smile drained from his face. “You meant that as a joke, right?”

Geraci shrugged, but then smiled.

“Coglionatore,” Fredo said, smiling too, punching Geraci’s shoulder affectionately.

Until three weeks ago, when the filming on this movie started, Geraci had barely ever spoken to Fredo. He’d turned out to be a thoroughly likable guy.

“You think all that whiskey’s real?” Fredo said, pointing to the clear, unlabeled bottles behind the rough-hewn bar.

“How would I know? Why don’t you go look?”

Fredo dismissed the notion with a frown and a wave. “Last thing I need.”

Geraci nodded. “Aspirin?”

“Had some.”

“That was some night.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Fredo said, shaking his head and suddenly looking both rueful and amazed. “Anymore, every night is some night.”

Last night, they’d taken their wives and gone out on the town, such as it was. On a whim, they’d headed to Mexico. When they’d gotten there, Deanna Dunn insisted on going to see a donkey show. Charlotte, at least as of this morning, still wasn’t speaking to him. Though she might have been angry because all night, no matter what anyone said about anything, Deanna Dunn brought the conversation back to Deanna Dunn. Geraci started changing the subject arbitrarily, but no matter how ridiculous the changes were, she took it as a cue to tell another Deanna Dunn story. After they got home, Char had accused him of flirting. He’d let it roll off his back. She couldn’t help but be disappointed that the Movie Queen she’d been so excited about hobnobbing with turned out to be a large-headed loudmouth who joked about how her husband didn’t like blow jobs-with Fredo sitting right there, like a man trying to smile through bowel cramps-and who thought that watching a donkey fuck a teenage Indian girl was a hoot. Give Charlotte time, though, and she’d be telling all the hens back in East Islip about her wild night, making herself sound like some jet-setter.

From down the street came a horrible splintering crash. The buckboard.

“Don’t worry,” Fredo said. “That’s in the script, too.”

“Yeah, well,” Geraci said. “Forgive me if I’m a little jumpy about crashes.”

“I don’t have that kind of power,” Fredo said. “You want forgiveness, it’s Mike’s department.”

Geraci tried not to look surprised. He’d never heard Fredo voice any sort of resentment toward his brother. “So Fontane’s here?”

Fredo shook his head. “They flew in some writer to write him out of the picture, can you believe that? It’s his stand-in that’s out there dying.”

Fontane’s inattention to his own production company was getting to be a bigger and bigger problem, but this was the first time he’d ever skipped out on a movie in the middle of shooting. “So that’s all?” Geraci said. “He’s going to get away with that?”

“I don’t want to get into it,” Fredo said. “I got Dee Dee in one ear, my brother in the other, fucking Hagen in the other.”

“You have three ears?”

“Feels like it,” Fredo said. “It ain’t a feeling I’d recommend.”

They got down to business. Geraci had expected Fredo-as he had done other times they’d sat down to meet-to relay messages about Geraci’s operation back in New York. Instead, Fredo gave him the news about the peace talks the day before. It was all set: Geraci was going home.

This, too, was the sort of thing a guy might hear right before he got clipped. But if that’s what was going to happen, why had Mike sent Fredo?

“You okay?” Fredo said. “Your hearing going or something? I’d’ve thought a guy gets news like this he’d be on cloud nine.”