“Starting?”

Fredo threw a punch. Tom caught it with his left hand, wrenched Fredo’s arm around, then buried his fist in Fredo’s gut with such force Fredo left his feet. Tom let go of the arm. Fredo staggered and then fell to his knees, gasping for breath.

“I fucking hate you, Tom,” Fredo finally said, still panting.

“You what?”

“The minute you walked in our house,” Fredo said, “you were Pop’s favorite.”

“C’mon, Fredo. How old are you?”

“Mike was Ma’s,” he said, his breathing slowing. “Sonny didn’t need nobody, and Connie’s a girl. You know, I was Pop’s favorite until you got there. Did you know that? You ever think of that? Did you ever care? What you took was mine.”

“This is a hell of a thing to say to the guy you’re counting on to fix the mess you made.”

“What’s it matter what I say?” Fredo said. “You’ll do it anyway. You’ll do whatever Mike tells you to.”

“I’m loyal to this family.”

“Bullshit. You’re just loyal to him.”

“Listen to yourself, Fredo.”

He stood up, then charged. Hagen ’s second punch caught Fredo square on the chin and dropped him flat on his back in a bed of Asian jasmine.

“Had enough?”

Fredo sat up and rubbed his hands over his gray, stubbly face. He took several deep breaths. “I haven’t slept,” he said, “y’know, really slept, for I don’t know. Days.”

Hagen took out a cigar and lit it. He got a good draw going and then extended his hand. Fredo, still kneeling, looked up at it for a long time, then finally took it.

“Cigar?” Hagen asked, reaching for his breast pocket.

“No thanks,” Fredo said.

Hagen nodded. “Go up and see your wife, Fredo.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. Anyway, she’s not up there.”

“Where else would she be? They’re not filming today.”

“She’s up there?”

Hagen patted Fredo on the shoulder. “I love you, Fredo. You know that, right?”

Fredo shrugged. “I love you, too, Tommy,” he said, “but at the same time-”

“We’ve been over that,” Tom said. “Forget about it.”

“I guess how could it be any other way, with brothers, huh?”

Hagen cocked his head in a way that indicated maybe, maybe not.

“Nice reflexes, by the way,” Fredo said. “Catching that punch.”

“Lots of coffee,” Hagen said.

“Oughta cut back on that stuff,” Fredo said. “It’ll kill you.”

“Just go. Rest up. Everything’s going to be fine.”

For a time, however briefly, Hagen was right.

Deanna greeted him at the door. She kissed him again and again and ran a hot bath in the huge tub. He soaked in it as she shaved him.

She was, yes, one of the most honored actresses of her generation, but Fredo was convinced that the ardor he’d sparked by standing up for her, by fighting for her, couldn’t be faked. In their whole time together, they’d never had a better time in bed.

“So how’d a bum like me wind up with you, huh?” he asked afterward.

She sighed in a way that sounded happy. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” she said.

“What about here?” he said.

“Definitely look there. Get close and take a good lick around. I mean look.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You’re right,” she purred, hands pressed firmly against the back of his head. “I don’t.”

THAT MARCH, Nick Geraci’s father came to New York -the first time he’d been there since Nick moved from Cleveland. Naturally, he drove. All however many thousand miles from Arizona, which he somehow did alone and in three days. To the end, he’d be Fausto the Driver.

When he first arrived, he seemed content to simmer in the self-contained cocoon of his own sulky regret, staring out at his son’s swimming pool. He ran out of Chesterfield Kings. Charlotte offered him a carton of hers, which he said would be fine. They were a ladies’ brand, but he said a friend of his smoked this kind and he was used to them, in a pinch. Nick winked and asked if that meant Miss Conchita Cruz. “Shut up about things you don’t know nothin’ about, eh? You want money for these?” He reached for his money clip.

“It’s fine, Dad. No.”

“You’re a big shot, but I pay my own way, understood?”

“We just want you to have a good time, okay?”

“That’s a lot of pressure on me,” he said. “Why don’t you all just mind your own business? And take the money, unless my money’s no good.”

“It’s no good in this house, Dad,” Nick said. “You’re our guest.”

“Guest?” he scoffed. “Don’t be stupid, you big stupid. I’m family.”

“It’s nice to see you,” Nick said, still refusing the money and embracing his father, who did in fact embrace him back, and they kissed each other’s cheeks.

In the morning, there were five bucks under Charlotte ’s purse.

The next day, unseasonably warm for New York in March, they went as a family for lunch at Patsy’s, Geraci’s favorite Italian restaurant in the city, where he practically had his own table upstairs, and then for a cruise on the Circle Line, which had been Charlotte’s idea. It offered views of New York that even a native like her never got to see otherwise, plus it seemed like a congenial afternoon for a man who spent every day brooding and staring at the water. Nick and Charlotte had taken the cruise on an early date, but their girls had never done it before. Barb was a freshman in high school now and could barely go anywhere without her friends, a squadron of whom met her at the pier. Bev, though, who looked as old as Barb but was only eleven, stayed next to her grandfather, asking him things about Ellis Island-which, as a little boy, was the last time Fausto had been to New York. By the time they got to Roosevelt Island, she’d somehow gotten him to give her lessons in Sicilian dialect.

After they’d passed the Polo Grounds but before the desolation of the northern tip of Manhattan had segued from hard to believe to deathly boring, Fausto, his spirits as buoyant as they got, took his son aside and said that he’d actually come to New York on business.

Nick frowned and cocked his head.

“Message from the Jew,” he said, meaning Vince Forlenza. “Long story. This ain’t the place. How far are we from Troy?”

“ Troy what? Troy, New York?” Nick Geraci was pretty sure his father had never told him a long story of any kind.

“No, big shot. Troy with Helen and the big fuckin’ horse. Yes, Troy, New York.”

“We need to go to Troy for you to tell me what you need to tell me?”

“We don’t need to go to Troy at all. We could do what we need to do at your house or at your precious Henry Hudson Political Club, any place we can talk that’s-”

“Patrick Henry,” Nick corrected. His headquarters in Brooklyn. His office.

“Wherever. Let me tell you something. I want to go to Troy. All right? Think you can begrudge a dying old man that one little thing?”

“Since when are you dying?”

“Since the day I was born.”

“I thought you were going to say since the day I was born.”

“You give yourself too much credit, hotshot.”

Turned out, Fausto had heard that there were cockfights in Troy, supposedly the top place in the country. It was upstate, and thus presumably under the direct or indirect control of the Cuneo Family. Fausto had always been a fan of cockfights and over the years had dropped enough money at a joint in Youngstown that by rights his name should have been on the deed. Tucson had cockfights, but they were run by Mexicans, and Fausto thought they were crooked.

“You’re kidding,” Nick said. “That place in Youngstown had birds with cocaine on their feathers, birds pumped full of blood thinner so they’d bleed like mad in a loss and become a huge underdog and then go off the drugs and win. Birds with any of a thousand kinds of poison on their spurs. I can’t begin to remember all the different ways they made birds look sick when they were ready to kill and made others look healthy when they were about to die.”