Ralph even arranged a visit to the Oval Office, as a family, to meet the president. Better yet, Princess, the president’s collie and a relative of the dog who played Lassie on TV, had given birth to a litter of puppies and the Hagens were going to get one. They walked from their hotel together and were caught without umbrellas in a downpour. In the picture taken by the official White House photographer, the Hagens, as diminished-looking as a family of dripping wet cats, stand flanking the president, who looks like a man trying to smile through an untimely bowel spasm. Little Gianna holds up the puppy-Elvis, they ended up calling it-grimacing, her eyes on the airborne green bean-sized puppy turd that seems destined for the president’s coffee cup.

Tom ordered the biggest print of the photo he could get. The whole family thought it was hilarious. When they went back to Las Vegas, he hung it over the mantelpiece, superseding the Picasso lithograph Theresa had paid a mint for, which looked better in the dining room anyway.

Hagen ’s defeat was one of the most lopsided in the history of the state of Nevada -by far the most decisive victory the dead had ever exacted from the living, at least at the polls.

Again and again-whether at meetings of the Kiwanis, Rotary International, the United Mineworkers, the teachers union, or the Cattlemen’s Association of Nevada- Hagen had proven to be a stiff, humorless, and unpopular speaker. He was an observant Irish-Catholic lawyer in a state run by Baptists and agnostic cowboys. The first time Hagen had really seen his new home state was when he began campaigning in it. There were transients in flea-bitten rescue missions who’d spent more time in Nevada than Tom Hagen. His debate with the congressman’s fierce and tiny widow had been a hideous mistake but one Hagen had made out of desperation, a last-ditch effort, since all indications, even at that point, pointed to him as a hopeless long shot. The same poker-faced persuasiveness Hagen had deployed so effectively in delivering hundreds of unrefusable offers came across on TV as frankly reptilian. Nevada has more species of lizards than any state in America. It’s a place that knows reptilian when it sees it.

Days before the election, a Las Vegas newspaper reported that Congressman Hagen had not only been the attorney for reputed mobster Vito “the Godfather” Corleone, as was widely known, but also his unofficial ward, which was not. According to the story, Vito’s surviving children sometimes even called Hagen their “brother.” Hagen denied nothing. He cited himself as one of the thousands of charitable efforts made by members of the Corleone family, along with the largest wing of the biggest hospital in Nevada and the upcoming art museum, which would soon be the best in the country west of the Rockies and east of California. He showed the reporter a copy of the Saturday Evening Post article in which the Vito Corleone Foundation was called one of the best new philanthropies of the 1950s and a spread in Life that featured Michael Corleone’s heroism during World War II. Hagen pointed out that the Corleones, whom the reporter seemed to regard as criminals, had never, to a person, been convicted of a crime of any sort, not even jaywalking. She asked him about the several times they’d been charged with crimes, especially the late Santino Corleone. Hagen handed her a copy of the U.S. Constitution and recommended that she read the part about being presumed innocent until proven guilty. The story pointed out that this turn of phrase appears nowhere in that document.

It was unclear if the reporter or her editor had gotten a tip about Hagen ’s origins. If they had, it could have come from several different people. Friends and neighbors Hagen had known growing up. Fontane, who’d never liked Hagen. The Chicago outfit, who’d been furious about Hagen ’s appointment. Maybe even-given the crazy way he’d been acting lately-Fredo. It was not inconceivable that the reporter might have figured it out for herself. However it had happened, neither Hagen nor Michael chose to waste any time trying to figure out such a puzzle, at least for now. What was the point? Even without that article, Hagen had been destined to lose the election, and badly.

Soon afterward, though, back in Washington, a different small puzzle was solved, a more trivial injustice redressed. The culmination of several weeks of the right people asking the right questions came when a red-and-black Cadillac with New York plates pulled up in front of a tenement building near the Anacostia River. Snow fell. Two white men got out of the car, a short one in a shiny suit and a tall one in a gray duster. They went straight to the front door, and almost without breaking stride the man in the duster kicked it open. A moment later, there came a gunshot. This was a neighborhood where gunshots were as common as lizards in Nevada. The man in the shiny suit came out of the building first, carrying a white ten-gallon hat under his arm like a football. Behind him, with Hagen ’s old wristwatch balled into his fist, came the man in the duster. Upstairs, the mugger-who’d liked the watch too much to sell it-was splayed unconscious on his cold linoleum floor. He’d been brutally kayoed by the tall man, a journeyman heavyweight boxer named Elwood Cusik, whose married girlfriend’s abortion had been arranged-in a sterile New York hospital, no less-by a man with various reasons to be loyal to Ace Geraci. The short man-Cosimo “Momo the Roach” Barone, Sally Tessio’s nephew-had fired a.38 into the Negro’s thieving hand, as a lesson. The thief hadn’t woken up. Cusik, who’d never done a job like this before, lifted the thief’s unmaimed hand and checked his pulse. Seemed normal. Same with his breathing. The thief’s injuries were the sort that could have been easily avoided by anyone who never robbed anyone. Presuming the man regained consciousness before he bled to death, and unless he had any plans to take up typing or the piano, he’d be fine.

“So who’s the wristwatch belong to?” asked Cusik, trying it on in the car.

Momo the Roach didn’t answer. He flipped down the visor and checked his exoskeleton-hard shellacked hair in the mirror. They were out of the city before the boxer said anything else.

“The hat belongs to the same guy as the watch or someone else?”

“Try that on, too, why don’t you?” the Roach said.

Cusik shrugged and obeyed. The hat fit perfectly. “What do you think?” he said.

The Roach shook his head. “It’s you,” he said. “Listen, Tex, do me a favor, see if you can shut up as good as you throw a punch.”

Again Cusik shrugged and obeyed.

The thief-crumpled on the floor of a tiny room in a part of the world where people were slow to call the police and the police were even slower to respond-did in fact bleed to death. Call it business. Call it destiny. Call it the law of unintended consequences. Whichever. Why should Tom Hagen care? A man does things, and it sets other things in motion. A dead man doesn’t have to mean anything. Few do.