The Godfather returns

Chapter 12

THE DEATHS OF Tony Molinari and Frank Falcone-coming as they had on the threshold of what had looked like a lasting peace-sent shock waves through the underworld of the nation. Out of context, anyone would have presumed the crash was an accident: severe thunderstorm, lake-effect air pockets, case closed. The unsolved disappearance of Gerald O’Malley, the crash’s lone survivor, aroused suspicion, as did his garbled words to the tower in Cleveland, in which he had apparently wondered if the plane had been sabotaged. Despite this, his voice had remained calm until right before impact, when he shouted, “Sono fottuto,” which the FAA report translated from the Italian as “I’m a goner.” Investigators found no clear evidence of sabotage. They attributed the pilot’s assertion to his inexperience. They ruled the crash an accident. Pilot error.

It was, by any measure, a meaningless coincidence that the last funeral the four dead men had attended together was that of Vito Corleone. But from the Mafia’s murky, contested origins in nineteenth-century Sicily to the present day, every human act-benevolent or violent, willful or inadvertent, whether born of aggression or self-preservation, of passion or ice-cold ragione-becomes part of one vast gossamer web, where no quiver or throb is too small to be felt everywhere. For a Sicilian, whose mother tongue is the only one in the Western world that lacks a future tense, the past and the present are as one. For a Sicilian, whose blood has endured six thousand years of invasion and occupation, an accident or a coincidence is no more meaningless, or meaningful, than an act of will. Each may be indistinguishable from the other. For a Sicilian, nothing happens out of context.

The Coast Guard rescuers had lashed “O’Malley” to a body board and raced him to a nearby hospital, where the admitting nurse-referring to the man’s Nevada driver’s license, which formed the core of the fat wad of bills in his front pocket-logged him in at 10:25 P.M. as “Gerald O’Malley, male Caucasian, age 38.” His broken leg was set and put in traction, his broken ribs taped, his other wounds sewn shut. He did not appear to have any serious internal injuries, but there were still tests to run. He remained unconscious, but the long-term prognosis appeared excellent. His condition was upgraded from critical to serious. According to his chart, the doctors finished with him at 4:18 A.M. The final notation on the chart came at 4:30 A.M.-though that one seemed likely to have been a fake. Nothing was noted but the time and some illegible initials no one at the hospital could identify.

By that time, irregularities in both the flight and the other four bodies, or at least parts of them, had either surfaced on their own or been lifted into the gray light of day by human hands.

The bodies had not yet been identified, and the riot of reporters and law enforcement officials that those identifications would trigger was not yet unleashed. The flight plan in Detroit was shown as having been filed, but no one could find it. The plane had left Detroit in the morning and so had to have stopped somewhere else in the twelve ensuing hours, but when the pilot made radio contact with the tower at Burke Lakefront Airport, he indicated he was coming directly from Detroit. The tower tried to get a clarification, but the plane’s radio transmissions-probably because of all the lightning-were a roar of static. When it became clear the plane was in distress, attention turned exclusively to bringing it down safely.

The meatpacking company whose logo was on the side of the plane was located outside Buffalo, New York. The president of the company, groggy with sleep, at first told the investigator he had the wrong number, that his company had no plane, though when the investigator asked if he was sure about that, the president paused and then said, “Ri-i-ight, our plane,” and hung up. By the time other calls were made and the state cops sped out to his lakefront home to bring him in for questioning, he was freshly shaved and showered, dressed in a suit, waiting in his living room, flanked by a lawyer who had once been the state’s attorney general. On behalf of his client, the lawyer informed the officers that a week’s unlimited use of the aircraft in question had been a gift from his client to his friend Joseph Zaluchi-two-time winner of the prestigious Michigan Philanthropist of the Year Award and a board member since 1953 of Detroit, Hooray!-to aid the transportation of guests to and from his daughter’s lovely wedding this past weekend in Detroit, which, owing to a prior commitment, his client had been unable to attend. The client knew nothing about the men and/or women on board, or any details about the flight other than what had become public knowledge. The lawyer asked the cops if they had any warrants, for either search or arrest, then thanked them for their time and for leaving his client alone so he could begin to mourn this unfortunate tragedy.

An attorney for Joseph Zaluchi said that Mr. Zaluchi knew nothing about the man who had crashed the plane, other than that he was a licensed commercial pilot who worked for a reputable charter company in New York. He’d been hired over the telephone by an associate of Mr. Zaluchi. Mr. Zaluchi expressed his deep sympathy for the victims and to their families.

“Gerald O’Malley” disappeared from the hospital sometime between the 4:18 notation on the chart and about five, when an orderly walked into the room and found the bed empty and tubes dangling from the devices that had been connected to the patient’s arms. The pulley that had been attached to his broken leg was also gone, as were the patient’s personal effects.

Nick Geraci had been arrested several times (though never convicted), so his fingerprints were on file. But when he arrived at the hospital, there had been no reason to fingerprint him. His room had been wiped clean.

The two attending nurses whose responsibility it might have been to check frequently on the man admitted as Gerald O’Malley each claimed she was certain he’d been assigned to the other. The head nurse would later take full responsibility for the mistake and resign in disgrace. She moved to Florida and got what was presumably a lower-paying job for a company providing in-home nursing care. Many years later she died peacefully in her sleep. When her will was read, her newly rich children marveled at the savings habits of that generation of Americans forged by the Great Depression.

Several law enforcement agencies and countless reporters tried for months to solve the mystery of the missing pilot. All failed. Members of the U.S. Senate, capitalizing on the public’s fascination with the case, began to discuss holding hearings on this and other matters related to the growing and perhaps Communist menace of organized crime syndicates in America, variously calling such proceedings “long overdue,” “perhaps inevitable,” and “something we owe to our women and children and, indeed, our way of life.”

The driver’s license wasn’t a forgery, but the birth certificate the State of Nevada had on record actually belonged to an infant buried in a New Hampshire cemetery.

The information the feds had for O’Malley on his pilot’s license led of course to that same New Hampshire cemetery.

(Only God and Tom Hagen knew the rest. The cemetery lay beside a road that, many miles north, became the main drag of the town where Kay Adams Corleone had grown up. Soon after Michael killed his sister’s husband and lied to Kay about it, she left him. She took the kids and went to her parents’ house. Michael called her only once. A week passed. One morning, Hagen showed up in a limousine. Tom and Kay took a long walk in the woods. Mike wanted her to know that she could have anything she wanted and do whatever she wanted as long as she took good care of the kids, but that he loved her and-in a characteristically labored joke-that she was his Don. Hagen relayed this message only after confiding in her about some of the things Mike had done-an act of defiance that might have gotten Hagen killed. But it worked; Kay eventually came home. On Hagen ’s way back to New York, he stopped at a random public library, leafed through an old volume of the local newspaper, and learned of the sad story of Gerald O’Malley, stricken by diphtheria and taken by the Lord at the age of eleven months. Hagen kept the limo idling out of sight and walked to the courthouse. He was a nondescript man who knew how to behave in a library or courthouse so that people would forget him the moment he left. His various travels had allowed him to collect notarized copies of birth certificates from all over the country, never the same courthouse twice. He had a stack as thick as a Sears catalog. When Geraci asked for one with an Irish name, poor O’Malley’s was right on top.)

Once the identities of the dead were confirmed and then made public, anyone who knew or suspected what Vincent Forlenza was and what sort of situation he had on Rattlesnake Island immediately presumed that the plane had spent the afternoon there-this, with no inkling that the pilot was Forlenza’s actual godson. The authorities, of course, could prove nothing. Forlenza, questioned two days after the accident, also in the presence of distinguished legal counsel, wondered if the good men of the law might not be watching too much television. Gangsters? On his beloved island sanctuary? Now he’d heard everything. In any case, he’d been home all weekend, except for Sunday afternoon, when these so-called gangsters supposedly landed on Rattlesnake Island to have some kind of-what? Summit? Powwow? No matter. Forlenza said he’d spent the day in question as a guest at a Labor Day clambake sponsored by one of the union locals, huddled under a big-top tent, sipping ice-cold union-made beer and refusing to let the downpour spoil his celebration of an important national holiday, a story corroborated by any number of office-holding Cleveland Teamsters.

The physical description of O’Malley the police cobbled together from their interviews with rescue and medical personnel held little promise. They’d seen the man’s injuries but not the man. They were more fixated on the patient’s vital signs than the size of his ears, the shape of his (closed) eyes, or the subtleties of the jagged ridge of his much-broken nose, which had at any rate been broken again and was too purple and swollen to look much like the way it had.

No one outside the Corleone and Forlenza organizations could have guessed that Gerald O’Malley was the same guy as Nick Geraci. No one outside those Families knew much about who Geraci was or what he did. His seven years in the ring, even with all the fixed fights, had rearranged his face enough that boyhood friends would be unlikely to recognize him. He’d fought under more fake names than he himself could remember. Boxers become muscle guys every day, and any loyal muscle guy with half a brain can become a button man. But those guys don’t turn into big earners so often, much less into big earners a few courses shy of their law degree. He was known in New York as a guy who’d been under the wing of Sally Tessio, but all the different things he’d done would have made it nearly impossible for anyone to put all the pieces together. The more exceptional a person becomes, the more his place in the world seeks a similar extreme. It becomes more likely that he will be known either by everyone or by no one. He will either stand out, even though most people will never see him in the flesh, or he will vanish, even if he’s sitting right next to you at a lunch counter in Tucson, humming the bridge from that new Johnny Fontane record and tapping a dime on the Formica, waiting to use the pay phone.

It’s a crazy goddamned world. For months, Nick Geraci or what was left of him was out there in it, somewhere. Hardly anyone knew where. Hardly anyone was even looking for him.

Richard “the Ape” Aspromonte, who was asked only once, by a blind woman, how he got that nickname, was buried in Los Angeles, followed by a reception afterward at Gussie Cicero’s supper club. When the time came to make toasts, all four of Aspromonte’s brothers looked to Jackie Ping-Pong, who hardly knew the Ape, but whose words proved eloquent, moving, and a comfort to the dead man’s grieving mother. In San Francisco, Lefty Mancuso’s parents tried to keep his funeral small. The only celebrity there was a lesser DiMaggio brother, a high school classmate of Lefty’s. The only member of the Molinari Family was Tony Molinari’s younger brother Nicodemo. Out of respect, even his bodyguards stayed on the periphery, just in front of the small cadre of the cops and the curious.

Ordinarily, a Don would attend a funeral of such men only if they were close personal friends. But these were not ordinary times. And so it became known beyond their own small circles and throughout the underworld that, as expected, Jackie Ping-Pong and Nicodemo “Butchie” Molinari had each, apparently peacefully, assumed control of his organization.

Aspromonte’s and Mancuso’s bosses, Frank Falcone and Tony Molinari, were buried the next day. They’d had many common friends, but no one could attend both funerals.

A choice had to be made. These choices would be watched.

On a walk back and forth past the unfinished houses on Tom Hagen’s cul-de-sac, with Al Neri and two others in the car, parked so it blocked off the whole street, Michael Corleone, smoking cigarettes, told Hagen, who was smoking a cigar, only that he should start amassing untraceable cash, in case there was a ransom to be paid. Michael wanted to be protected from knowing exactly where the money came from, and otherwise he needed to protect Hagen from this entire matter. Hagen stopped at the end of the cul-de-sac. At the far end of the street, his boy Andrew, the thirteen-year-old, ran out the front door with a football under his arm, then apparently saw Neri’s car, dropped his head in lolling teenaged exasperation, and went back inside. Hagen looked past Michael to some vague spot on the saw-toothed horizon, and for a very long time he said nothing. Michael lit another cigarette and said that was just how it had to be. “You wouldn’t pay the ransom, though, would you?” Hagen asked. Michael looked at him with obvious disappointment but only shrugged. Hagen stayed silent for a while longer, then whipped his half-finished cigar across the bright white cement and said, “Protect me,” in a way that was neither a plea nor an incredulity, just a statement. Michael nodded. Nothing more was said.

Michael summoned Rocco, Clemenza, and Fredo to his home. They huffed upstairs and sat in front of his blond desk in those orange plastic chairs. He asked point-blank if any of them had any idea what happened to Geraci. Each said no with equal vehemence. “It wasn’t you?” Rocco asked and Michael shook his head, and they all seemed surprised. An accident was bad enough, but eventually the people who mattered would learn that the pilot had been Geraci. “Which is when the fan’ll hit the shit,” Clemenza said.

Michael nodded. The only way to fix this mess, he said, was to call a meeting of all the Families, the first since the one his father had convened right after Sonny was killed. Admit that this was a dumb decision, trying to go see a boxing match, even if Falcone did have a big bet on it and pressured him to go. Restitution could be made, all the Dons would give their word that the matter was finished, and it would all be a blessing in disguise because they could go right from that to formalizing a larger peace agreement. Everyone would benefit. Yes, such a meeting would mean that there would be a vote about putting Russo on the Commission, but at this point the definitive end to this war would be worth even that. It was going to happen sooner or later anyway. “But the problem we have now,” Michael said, “is that whatever happened-cover-up, kidnapping, maybe even the government-makes that kind of a summit impossible.”

Clemenza snorted and said he smelled something rotten in Cleveland, and Michael cocked his head. “I seen Hamlet with that fruit, what’s-his-face. The famous one. Not half bad, once you got past the tights.” He looked at Fredo and Fredo said “What?” and Clemenza shrugged and asked Mike if he figured Forlenza’s men sabotaged the plane or if they were trying to keep Geraci’s identity secret so that people wouldn’t think they’d sabotaged the plane? Since the best way out of this mess would be to point out that the Jew certainly wouldn’t sabotage a plane flown by his own godson, which would open up a whole other can of worms. Maybe it was all just a misguided attempt by Forlenza to protect his godson? Maybe even from us?

Downstairs, Michael’s half-deaf father-in-law had the TV blasting. In a piercing falsetto, little Anthony Corleone sang along to the theme song for a cowboy show.

“Jesus, what a giambott’,” Fredo said. “Makes my head hurt, how many different ways this thing could go.”

Michael nodded, so slowly it was clearly a theatrical pause for thought, not agreement. A necessary pause. He was not, so soon after his brother’s elevation to sotto capo, going to disagree with him forcefully, even in front of men as trusted as Clemenza and Lampone.

“None of this,” Michael said, “brings us closer to finding out what happened to Geraci.”

He leaned across his Danish modern desk. It was time to stop speculating. Time to get down to business.

The next day, Clemenza returned to New York with orders to run his operation as if peace were assured and the crash never happened. His men were to do the same. The day after that, Rocco, who knew the men in Geraci’s crew, also went to New York, where he would remain and oversee those operations until further notice. Fredo, as underboss, would temporarily be in charge of Rocco’s men in Nevada.

The Corleones had long been close to Tony Molinari, who’d protected Fredo in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on his father and whose cooperation had helped make it possible for the Corleones to establish themselves in Las Vegas and now in Tahoe and Reno. Neither Vito nor now Michael had ever regarded Frank Falcone as a serious person. Neither believed that his flashy, second-rate operation possessed either the means or the will to come out from under Chicago ’s apron skirts. Michael might have opted to be represented at neither funeral. Many expected him to make just that decision, and, on the face of it, this might have seemed the more cautious and more prudent of choices. But these are only words-caution, prudence-and they are words that can easily be replaced by other words-hubris, fear, weakness. A man is his actions, public and private, both when watched and when alone.

Fredo, who after all had been the closest of anyone in the organization to Tony Molinari, was dispatched to San Francisco. Michael, accompanied by Tommy Neri and the same two others who’d been hiding in the woods in Lake Tahoe, went to Chicago: the city where Frank Falcone was born, the city where he’d made his bones, was where his own bones, or what remained of them, would be buried. Those who’d known Vito Corleone recognized the logic in Michael’s decision. Keep your friends close, the great Don had said, and your enemies closer.

The ceremony was held in a tiny white clapboard church on the near west side of the city, in the Italian neighborhood known as the Patch, where Falcone had been raised and where his parents had once run a corner grocery. Hot for Chicago in September. The Chicago police had blocked off traffic for two blocks in every direction. Several of the dignitaries-including the lieutenant governor of California, the heavyweight champion of the world, and several movie stars, including Johnny Fontane-received a motorcycle escort right to the back steps. Others, including Michael Corleone, came early enough to take their seats without such ostentation. Out front, the street was packed. Falcone’s origins were the stuff of local legend, and although the mourners inside observed a respectful silence, no one among the buzzing horde in the street could have failed to hear someone tell the dead man’s story. When Frank was only a boy of fifteen, his father had closed the store and his older sister was counting the day’s receipts when they were both killed in a stickup, a crime investigated so halfheartedly by the police-“ain’t nothin’ but dagos killing dagos in Dagotown,” a detective said, laughing, within earshot of Frank and, worse, of Frank’s mother-that the boy vowed to get revenge. It didn’t take long. Somehow, the kid’s passion got him an audience with Al Capone. The thief’s corpse was found on the front steps of the precinct station, stabbed, as legend has it, sixty-four times (Frank’s father was forty-five years old; his sister was nineteen). The detective and his partner went on a fishing trip to the Wisconsin Dells and were never seen again. For a time, Frank and his mother ran the store, but the memories were too much. From nowhere (Trapani, actually), a buyer emerged and paid a fair price. Frank’s mother took that money and the money from selling her house and moved in next door with her brother’s family. Frank found employment with Mr. Capone. After Mr. Capone had his problems, Frank pursued other opportunities in Los Angeles. At first, he managed to remain in everyone’s good graces by doing well, remembering where he came from, and repaying the men who’d helped him get where he was. These men had enough problems without worrying about everything west of here that was supposed to be Chicago ’s, too, and Falcone was their boy anyhow, always would be. It’s hard to say when it happened, but it came to seem as though Falcone had always been the guy out there-his own outfit. Never did get his mother to move, even though he built her a house in the Hollywood Hills-swimming pool, the works.

Twenty policemen on horseback (every horse in blinders, because of the incessant flashbulbs) cleared a path through the crowd, and the funeral procession, many of the cars sporting large campaign signs for the politicians and judges inside, made its way to Mt. Carmel Cemetery. Thousands of people followed it on foot. Just inside the main entrance, the procession passed the final resting place of the rotting, syphilitic remains of Al Ca-pone, who died sixteen years after the IRS killed him, and whose own anticlimactic funeral had been attended by a fraction of the people here for Falcone’s. Vito Corleone had sent nothing but flowers.

The Falcone mausoleum was made of black granite and topped with a statue of an angel with a falcon tethered to its right arm. The falcon was taking off, its wings spread wide enough to provide welcome shade for several sweaty bystanders. Falcone’s father and sister had not been buried here, but brass plaques on two of the doors bore their names.

Falcone’s mother and his wife and kids sat beside the coffin. The only other person in the front row was Louie Russo, sporting those gigantic sunglasses. The rest of Falcone’s blood family sat in the second row, along with Jackie Ping-Pong and Johnny Fontane, who was listed in the bulletin as an honorary pallbearer. Fontane cried like a woman.

The other forty-nine honorary pallbearers-politicians, police captains, judges, businessmen, athletes, and entertainers; no one from the Chicago Outfit or any other organization-were all shown seats near the front as well.

Certainly there were people watching Michael Corleone, but, especially in the context of this circus, not many. He was not a famous man, certainly not in comparison with Fontane, the heavyweight champion of the world, the lieutenant governor of California, or even philanthropist and former ambassador to Canada M. Corbett Shea (row six, next to Mae West). Michael Corleone was not the target of the photographers’ flashes, and only a few of the men from law enforcement knew more about him than the public did, which was not much. He’d been a war hero, but a lot of men had been war heroes. His name had been in the papers during the troubles in New York in the spring, but the pictures of him were blurry, shot at a distance, and the public’s memory is shorter than a senile dog’s. In his world, Michael Corleone was known by all, but many of those men knew him only by reputation and couldn’t have easily connected the name to the face. He knew several of the people here well, but he did not approach them. Somber nods sufficed. Fontane didn’t appear even to notice him. Michael watched the proceedings in silence. Afterward, he stood patiently in line to offer his condolences to Falcone’s widow and mother, the only words he said in public all day, then disappeared into the frosty backseat of the humble black Dodge that had brought him.

Inside, for the first time, Michael Corleone wept for his dead father.

Don Molinari’s funeral procession rolled through the fog, a line of more than a hundred cars in long, snarling traffic, winding southbound and out of San Francisco. Frederico Corleone rode in the fourth car behind the hearse, in a two-tone Cadillac-black and white-that Tony Molinari used to like to drive himself. Fredo had come alone. He’d told Michael that bringing along Capra and Figaro, after all the protection the Molinaris had provided Fredo over the years, would look like disrespect-or worse, like the Corleones had something to fear in San Francisco-and was shocked when his brother had agreed. The driver was a Molinari soldato whose name Fredo was trying to remember. Also up front was Tony’s little brother Dino’s wife. Her two girls rode in back beside Fredo.

It was the longest ride to a graveyard that Fredo could remember ever taking, made longer by the crying kids and his clumsy attempts to console them. He’d had the foresight to bring two handkerchiefs, soft silk monogrammed ones that floated from kid to kid until one of them blew her nose so hard she got a nosebleed and had to use both of them to help stop it.

“Where is this place?” Fredo asked, reaching for the prayer card that had the name of the cemetery on it: THE ITALIAN CEMETERY.

“Colma,” said the driver. “They’re all in Colma.”

“Who’s all in Colma? Where the h-” He stopped himself. “Where’s Colma?”

“Cemeteries. They’re illegal in San Francisco. Gotta go to Colma, which we’re almost to now. Back in the gold rush days, you buried your people wherever they fell. The garden, backyard, some alley, whatever. There were some cemeteries, mostly for the rich ones. But those got moved to Colma, the bodies. They had to do it. My nonna, she still talks about how during the earthquakes all over the city, dead bodies would heave to the surface and come shooting-”

“Enough,” said Dino’s wife. “Talk,” she said in Italian, “when the chickens piss.” Meaning Shut your damn mouth. Her children didn’t seem to understand Italian.

The driver didn’t say another word.

Fredo supposed that the driver’s story wasn’t the kind of thing to tell the kids, but they’d both stopped crying and looked pretty interested.

Outside, the houses and neighborhoods just stopped, superseded in every direction by undulating plains covered with gravestones, vaults, statues, crosses, and palm trees, a vast, unyielding city of the dead, and for some reason he thought of what his brother Sonny had said when he’d effectively banished Fredo from the family: Las Vegas is a city of the future. No, Sonny. This, Colma, is a city of the future. The city of the future. City of the dead. Dead, like Sonny. Fredo felt a nervous laugh, the crazy kind, rising in him, and he stifled it.

The Italian Cemetery stretched for miles along both sides of the road. The procession entered a path on the south side, past a monument that had dozens of green metal hands sticking out, grasping a long black chain.

Fredo shook his head in wonder. This is the greatest racket I ever saw. Of course there’s a cemetery here just for Italians. Before any of this was here, back when you could still plant the dead under your rosebushes, Fredo would bet that this whole place had been bought up quietly by Italians. Land that looks like the Sicilian countryside, where poor farmers struggled to grow grapes and olives until someone came up with the idea for a better crop. You get the papers to run sob stories from doctors talking about health risks, you get an ordinance passed, presto! you’re getting paid twice to bury a hundred years’ worth of people who’d already been buried. Get paid once to dig and move, again for the grave site in Colma. Give jobs to a hundred Italian stonecutters who now owe you a favor. Same goes for anyone, really, who needs work and can handle a shovel. Then, for good measure, you buy up the land in San Francisco where the cemeteries were, prime real estate that comes cheap because it used to be full of corpses. But this is America. No history, no memory. You develop the land, and people line up to buy it. On the back end, you get a piece of everything it takes to keep hauling stiffs down here-plots, stones, caskets, flowers, limos. All this plus the traditional benefit of being a silent partner in the graveyard business (if that cemetery in Brooklyn that Amerigo Bonasera ran ever got dug up, it’d be kind of like Cracker Jack, a surprise under every box).

Colma. Even sounds Italian.

A chill went through him. His solar plexus contracted. He closed his eyes. He could see it: the marshes of New Jersey stretched before him like ten Colmas. The Corleones had the political clout in New York to get the ordinance passed. The turf battle in Jersey with the Straccis, that could be worked out. He could practically hear Pop’s voice: Every man has but one destiny.

“You all right?” asked Dino’s wife.

Fredo opened his eyes. Against the tide of his own elation, Fredo summoned what he hoped was a sorrowful nod. She and the kids piled out of the car. Fredo drained the rest of the whiskey in his flask and hurried to take his place beside the other pallbearers.

After the service, everyone drove all the way back to the city and through it, to Fisherman’s Wharf, where Molinari’s, the best restaurant in the city, had been closed to the public since the employees had heard the news of their boss’s death. The moment Fredo stepped out of the car, though, one whiff and it was clear that the staff had not spent the week at home curled on their davenports, weeping. The sea breeze throbbed with the aromas of drawn butter and soft-shell crab and bluefish and broiled lobster, tubs of boiling marinara sauce, newly built oak-fired grills crowded with filet mignon that the best meat cutters on the West Coast had competed to donate. Children, dozens of them, sprinted from cars to the back of the restaurant, where a prep chef waited not with scraps, as they must have ordinarily received, but gleaming steel buckets crammed with fresh sardines for the kids to drag out to the end of the pier and whip into the air fish by fish, detonating an explosion of beating wings, a roiling blur of gulls and pelicans. As Fredo lingered outside, watching, the birds swarmed over the unsupervised children like a shrieking biblical plague. This would have terrified Fredo as a child. His sister, Connie? Forget it. She’d still be screaming. Mike would have sat on one of the pilings, watching the squandering of good sardines in silent condemnation, his hands clamped over his ears. Sonny? Chucking rocks, not sardines, unless he’d somehow found a gun, which he would have. Hagen would have been dying to shoot the birds, too, but he’d never have risked Pop’s disapproval and would have watched the whole thing through the car window. But these kids just jumped around on the pier laughing, their faces lit up as though they’d been handed the keys to Coney Island. Even when some of the gulls started dive-bombing the buckets, the kids just found it hilarious. It wouldn’t be long before some adult ruined things, told them to simmer down and show some respect for poor Uncle Tony. Sure enough, a moment later, someone’s stout and scowling zia came bustling toward them. Fredo couldn’t bear to watch and turned to face the black ribbons on the restaurant door. It was at any rate time for him to do what he’d come here to do. He’d have rather gone back to his hotel room and thought about how to present his Colma East plan to Mike. If he were honest with himself, which he was not quite drunk enough to be, he might have allowed himself to think of other places the day and the night might take him, but he would not let himself think of that. Instead, he took a deep breath and went inside.

Under any circumstances, Molinari’s was a dark restaurant, with black cypress-plank walls, black leather booths, and red-curtained windows, drawn on every side but the one that faced the bay, where often the only light was a fog-defeated pallor. Today, even those curtains were closed. The usually dim lighting was even lower, the candles were smaller, and the room was filled shoulder to shoulder with dark-haired, olive-skinned people dressed in black. The brightest things in the room were the tablecloths, starched so impossibly white that Fredo found himself squinting. Standing in the middle of the restaurant’s famous marble fountain was a life-sized ice sculpture of Tony Molinari, its hand extended toward the bar. People kept reaching across the water and touching its forehead.

The crowd was bigger than the one at the cemetery-something that anyone who took a bite of anything could have explained. Fredo made his rounds, embracing people and shaking his head about the tragedy and the terrible waste of it all. A few people made cryptic allusions to his promotion to underboss, and Fredo thanked them and said, you know, a man’s got to eat, and then ate. He drank beer so he wouldn’t get drunk. He lacked the charisma his father and brothers had, but as he’d grown older, he’d realized that for that very reason he was better at this kind of thing than they were. He intimidated no one. He was so frankly awkward that women wanted to mother him. Men would see him hovering at the edge of their conversation, hand him a drink, and bring him up to speed on the story they’d been telling. He’d reciprocate; drink with him once, and until the end of time Fredo Corleone would remember your poison. He’d thrived during his years of exile on the hotel side of the casino business because he genuinely liked to see people enjoying themselves, not just because then they’d owe him a favor.

Around the other Corleone men, people behaved like robots, silently rehearsing each word before they dared to speak. Around Fredo, they could be themselves. People liked him. He knew people saw this as a weakness, but that’s where they were wrong. There is no greater natural advantage in life than having your enemy overestimate your faults, Pop had said. Not to him, true. To Sonny. Pop had given Sonny lessons, a lot of times with Fredo sitting right in the room, totally ignored. Sonny heard. Fredo listened.

The room buzzed with speculation about the missing charter pilot known as O’Malley, and people opened up to Fredo about it as they never would have to Mike. He heard every theory under the sun, the most frequent being either that O’Malley was some kind of undercover cop or else that he was somehow connected to the Cleveland family. Both, maybe. But the higher-ranking men had other ideas. Butchie Molinari, for example, as he released Fredo from his embrace, merely whispered, “It’s Fuckface, no?” As he had all day, Fredo said he had no idea whatsoever, which was also something Mike could never have pulled off.

Why did he do this to himself? This endless comparison with his brothers. Fredo stood in front of the gilded mirror in the men’s room. He stood up straight and sucked in his gut. His eyes looked like, how did that song go? Two cherries in a glass of buttermilk. His brothers, he was sure, didn’t waste time comparing themselves with each other, and certainly not with him. He ran his hand through his thinning hair. He’d had enough to drink, that was for sure. He looked at his round face and tried not to see in it the traits he’d inherited from his parents, the stronger version of his jawline that Sonny had, the eyes that were just like Mike’s only closer together. He picked up the glass jar full of combs and tonic and smashed it against his own reflection. Green liquid rained everywhere. The mirror only cracked. Fredo handed C-notes to the man at the sink next to him and to the Negro attendant, who said he understood, we all loved Mr. Tony. Fredo headed through the nearly empty restaurant, past the ice sculpture of Tony Molinari, its forehead gruesomely melted, as if it had taken a hollow-point slug instead of a thousand loving caresses, and out the door into the cool dark, determined to be nobody at all, not even himself.

He ignored the men at the cab stand and, head down, continued down the wharf. It wouldn’t be long, he knew, before the neighborhood turned rough, before he got to the bars full of stevedores and sailors and the back-alley bars that only the most depraved of those men knew about.

He stopped himself. No. Not again.

Ahead was Powell Street. A straight shot to his hotel. A long walk, but it’d do him good. Clear his head. He looked toward the gloomy distant lights of those bars, then up Powell Street. He was pretty sure it went by that old Italian neighborhood, North Beach. He could stop there, take a break, have a coffee, think this Colma thing through. It’d be nice, just the ticket.

The second he turned up Powell he felt a wave of self-congratulatory relief.

By the time he climbed the first big hill, though, he was sweating and having second thoughts. He was too winded to think about his plan or anything else except that he didn’t want a coffee anymore, he wanted something cold, even a beer, what could it hurt?

The street leveled out. The businesses started to have Italian names, but something was wrong. The streets were full of dirty-looking kids in sweaters and dungarees, some of them Negroes, hardly any of them looking especially Italian. He tried to remember when the last time was he’d been down here-’47? ’48? He looked down Vallejo and saw the coffee shop he was thinking of, smelled it a block away, and it still had the same name, Caffè Trieste, which he took as a sign-have the coffee, not a drink-but when he opened the door he caught sight of a redheaded white kid playing the bongos while a Negro in a black sweater stood next to him shouting who the fuck knew what-it was hard to make out over the shouting and finger snapping of the people at the tables. Mulberry-eyed girls, the man might have said. Mint jelly. Turtleneck angel guys.

Fucking Bohemians. He left. Somewhere in this city was a very tall whiskey and water with Fredo Corleone’s name on it.

He stopped in at another Italian place he remembered, Enrico’s, which looked about the same except for the sign outside saying LIVE JAZZ TONIGHT! Bohemians here, too, but the music sounded better, so fuck it. He paid his three bucks and took a seat at the bar. Piano, soprano sax, and a drummer with brushes. Crazy stuff, but Fredo got his drink and bobbed his head along with the syncopated beat. He was the only one in the room in a suit, which for some reason seemed to provoke people into coming up to him and talking to him about the “scene” and telling him about the wonders of reefer. He resisted the impulse to tell them he’d just come from the funeral of the guy who’d made most of the profit off their precious reefer. After another drink he started thinking this combo was about the best goddamned thing he’d ever heard. Before long he was at a table with a big group of people, men and women, even smoking some reefer when it came his way. The band took a break, and a fat Norwegian in a fez took the stage and said that after the intermission he’d read his haikus and the combo would jam along. Fredo felt a hand on his arm. It was a long-faced man with long sideburns, about thirty, in a sweater and taped-together eyeglasses. “I hear you’re with a record label,” the man said, practically blushing.

“That’s what you hear, huh?” Fredo dimly remembered having told this lie when he’d first sat down at the table.

“I got a band that plays here tomorrow,” the man said, and started describing his music in what was probably English. More gibberish. Turtleneck angel guy, Fredo thought. He looked him up and down. A fag, no question.

“I’m Dean,” the man said. “I like your suit.”

“Pleasure, Dean,” said Fredo. “Sit down, huh? The name’s Troy.”

The search for the missing pilot ended several weeks later, when a body was found at the bottom of a ravine by the Cuyahoga River, not far from the hospital, wedged in a sewer grate. Sewage and rushing water had accelerated decomposition. What remained had been feasted upon by river rats. The face and eyes were completely gone, and when the body was first lifted, live rats slithered out of its mouth and rectum. The admitting bracelet (GERALD O’MALLEY, MALE CAUCASIAN, AGE 38) and what was left of the gown were deemed authentic. The coroner ruled that the body’s injuries were consistent with the ones the pilot had suffered, right down to the distinct stitching style of his ER surgeon. Dental records might have been helpful, but the authorities had no idea who Gerald O’Malley had really been. Whoever he was, however he got from the ICU to the bottom of that ravine, the poor fellow was really most sincerely dead.

Chapter 13

THE PLAN HAD BEEN for Billy Van Arsdale and Francesca Corleone to fly from Florida to New York along with Francesca’s brothers, her mother, and her mother’s perpetual fiancé, Stan the Liquor Man, but Billy’s parents gave him his Christmas present early: a two-tone Thunderbird, waiting for him the day he came home from school in his yellow Joe College jalopy, an old Jeepster that Billy loved partially because it mortified his parents but that, in truth, had done well to make it back to Palm Beach from Tallahassee. The chance to hit the road for a long trip in a car like that Thunderbird, he told Francesca on the phone, was too much to pass up. She thought she knew what he was also saying, but she said nothing about it and neither did he. The plane tickets had been bought, but Billy’s parents, who were going skiing in Austria, called their travel agent and had him take care of the refunds.

The night before the trip, Billy drove down to Hollywood. He’d been there once before, at Thanksgiving, a month after he and Francesca had started dating, and seemed to have made a good impression on everyone but Kathy, who was cold to him the whole time and then wrote Francesca the next week to say she was disappointed that Francesca’s self-hatred ran so deep. Francesca’s translation: Kathy was so jealous she could die.

Without Kathy around, though, everyone else in the family apparently took it on themselves to make Billy uncomfortable. Before he even had a chance to give Francesca a hug, Poppa Francaviglia had dragooned him to go next door and help put in a new toilet. In the middle of that, Nonna came in carrying a plate with slices of the oranges she’d grown herself on one side and ones that had come from his family’s company on the other, asking him to taste and see if he could tell which was which. They all went to dinner at a tacky steak joint just because Frankie’s football coach’s cousin owned it. Frankie asked Billy why he’d been a swimmer instead of a football player, had he been cut from the football team? Francesca was about to kick her brother under the table, but Billy said that was exactly what had happened and told a funny story about it. Chip spilled his Coke on Billy. Twice. Is it really possible for a ten-year-old to spill his drink twice, on the same person, accidentally? Everyone but Francesca seemed to think so.

Sandra supervised Billy’s loading of the Christmas presents into the trunk and backseat of his car (the hauling of same being a key to getting Sandra to go along with this trip), then escorted Billy and Francesca next door to her parents’ house, where Billy was being exiled as a deterrent to intimacy. It was only nine-thirty, but they had a long day tomorrow. The only reason Billy was spending the night-he only lived an hour away-was so that they could leave at dawn and abide by their pledge to drive all day and night, twenty-four hours straight through to New York without stopping at any hotel. “And if you do have to stop,” Sandra said now, yet again, “for some, God forbid, act of God, you’ll what?”

“Get separate rooms, Ma,” Francesca intoned. “Call to let you know we’re okay.”

“Call when?”

“Immediately, Ma. C’mon. Stop it.”

“And the receipts for those separate rooms?”

“We’ll show them to you to prove it.” As if that would prove a thing. “Ma, this is crazy.”

Sandra made Billy repeat the same litany. He complied. Sandra nodded and said that was good, she trusted them, and she hated to think what would happen if they ever betrayed that. “I know you want to enjoy a nice kiss goodnight,” she said, “so I’ll leave you alone now, eh?”

Hypocrite, Francesca thought. When her mother was her age, she was already pregnant.

“I love you,” Billy whispered, leaning slowly toward her, and she whispered it back, her lips still moving with the words when he kissed her. As if so triggered, the porch light went on.

“I love your family,” Billy said.

“You’re nuts.”

“You wish they’d get off your back, but everyone who doesn’t have what you have wishes they had it.”

It was not the first time she was afraid Billy was with her only because she was different, exotic, the Italian girl, a means of shocking his parents but less extreme than going out with a Negro. Or an Indian, like her roommate Suzy. But it was the first time she summoned the courage to say something about it. “You sure you don’t just love me for my family?”

He shook his head and looked away. Immediately she wished she hadn’t said it. He must have said or thought this about every girl he ever dated, including Francesca herself. As she started to apologize, he leaned toward her and kissed her again, touching her with nothing but his warm lips, and held it. When she opened her eyes, his were already open.

Before noon the next day, they had registered as man and wife at a small beachfront hotel north of Jacksonville. Francesca was afraid the desk clerk would object-neither of them wore a wedding ring-but Billy tipped the clerk as he registered. “You’d be surprised,” he said as they walked to their room, “how much discretion you can buy for twenty bucks.”

Now Francesca stood in the bathroom and took out the pale green negligee that-knowing her mother would go through her luggage-she’d rolled up and hidden in her purse.

Okay, she thought. Here goes. She watched herself undress, as if it were someone else, there in the mirror. A girl-a woman-in the last moments of her virginity. Unbuttoning, unfastening, pulling off, stepping out. Folding each piece of clothing, placing it gingerly on the marble countertop, as if she is afraid it will explode. Patting her stomach. Rubbing her hands over the small dents in her flesh where her fat bra strap had been, trying to make them go away. Twisting around, craning her neck to see what she must look like from behind. She touches her hair, and it doesn’t move. She brushes out the hair spray-long, even strokes-then looks up and tosses her head to watch which way her hair falls, what it looks like after it does. She dabs perfume onto her fingertips, applies it to all the places any woman at a makeup counter would advise, then bends her head and slowly reaches for the flame of black hair between her legs and dabs it, too. The woman’s breasts are large but (Francesca noticed, sighing) cumbersome, asymmetrical: the bosom of a peasant girl in a painting of a half-harvested field (or like Ma’s, the last person on earth Francesca wanted to be thinking about now). The woman takes in a deep breath, deeper now; her breasts rise, assuming shapes somewhat more like the ones in those magazines. Almost imperceptibly, she reddens. She grabs an obviously expensive silk negligee from atop her scuffed brown purse and holds it in front of her by the delicate ribbonry of its shoulder straps. She juts one hip, then the other. She frowns. The negligee is undeniably beautiful, but, somehow all wrong for this woman, at this moment. She holds it at arm’s length and lets go. It falls, a pool of fabric atop her neat pile of clothes. She stands naked, breathing not so much deeply now as heavily. Naked. Nude. But nothing like a painting. A real woman, young and scared, shaved and powdered, covered with goose bumps and shivering despite the tiny beads of sweat on her brow and under her breasts, her chest covered with a faint, splotchy blush. The woman shakes her head and chuckles silently, then smiles in a way she must hope is wicked, or at least brave. She opens the door. She faces the doorway. “Okay,” she says (Is that me? Francesca thought, that chirpy girl’s voice?), “close your eyes.” She crosses her arms over her breasts, hugging herself, closes her own eyes, and emerges into the uncertainty, the inevitability of the next room.

They planned their stops miles in advance, looking for filling stations where they wouldn’t have to wait for an attendant. To cut down on stops, they drank as little as possible. They ate nothing but the sandwiches, fruits, and little strufoli cookies from the picnic basket that Nonna had sent, even though Francesca warned Billy he’d be sorry he was eating even that much. They were each supposed to sleep as much as possible while the other drove, and Francesca did try, but between the replaying of those four hours in the Sand Dollar Inn and the bracing speed at which Billy drove that T-Bird, trying to make up for those four hours, blowing past tractor-trailers and decent families motoring unhurriedly along in their dull Chryslers-not to mention Billy’s habit of turning up the radio all the way whenever he found a rhythm-and-blues song or a song off that amazing new Johnny Fontane long-player-the best she could do was close her eyes.

A state trooper pulled them over. Billy showed the man his license, registration, and another piece of paper, mumbling something about “courtesy.” Moments later, they were back on the road, uncited, going just as fast. His father’s massive donations to the Fraternal Order of Police, paying off once more. “My Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card,” Billy said. He blushed.

What an upside-down world, Francesca thought, the Carolina pines rushing by her window in a liquid blur. Billy, this older boy she’d once hated herself for being stupid enough to believe she might have, this big man on campus, this rich boy, reduced before her eyes to a boyfriend, her excellent boyfriend, eager to please, calling in favors on her behalf, crazy about her. It all started the day her sister left. That was the same day Francesca met Billy, but Billy’s falling in love with her, as much as he meant to her now, was a lucky by-product.

Growing up, Kathy had always been the smart twin. Francesca was the pretty one, or at least the one more interested in being pretty; the girly one. Kathy was the bohemian who loved wild jazz music and sneaked cigarettes. Francesca was the good Catholic girl. Francesca was a cheerleader and an attendant on the Homecoming Court. Francesca did her homework, or pretended to, in a malt shop. Francesca owned not one but two poodle skirts. But without Kathy around, Francesca-unconsciously-filled up the empty part of her where her sister had been by somehow becoming Kathy. At the time, she told herself that all the clothes shopping she’d done the first few weeks of the term was for her roommate, Suzy’s, benefit, something they could do together and a means of getting Suzy to stop wearing the terrible little-girl jumpers and dresses she’d shown up with. Only after she’d done it did Francesca notice she’d remade her wardrobe into Kathy’s, blacks and reds, turtlenecks and slacks. Likewise, Francesca couldn’t remember making a decision to start smoking, her sister’s brand, no less, but open her purse and that’s what was there. The smoking was probably a consequence of the studying. She never made a conscious decision to study more, but for no reason she understood, suddenly in class she was one of the smart kids, her judiciously raised hand sought by her beleaguered professors when they wanted to move things along. Which came first, the chicken of how good it felt in class to be one of those kids or the egg of long nights bent over her desk, smoke curling in the languorous haze of her study lamp?

Several times, she’d seen Billy Van Arsdale in the library studying next to a girl or coming out of a movie theater with a different girl, out of one of the bars on Tennessee Street with a different girl yet. Sometimes, Francesca, too, would be on a date (freshmen, no one special) or in a study group. Always Billy would nod hello, often he would make eye contact, occasionally he’d even pause and exchange pleasantries. She despised him for mocking her like this. She was cool toward him but polite, afraid that if she tried to ignore him or, worse, told him off, he’d embarrass her even worse. She had not for a moment believed she was deploying Kathy’s favorite tactic-indeed, her only tactic-in getting boys to like her. Francesca might never have known that was exactly what she was doing-however inadvertently-if it hadn’t been for Suzy, who was in Glee Club with Billy’s heavyset little brother George. One day, studying for midterms, Suzy told Francesca that if she wasn’t careful her playing-hard-to-get act was going to make it so that Billy Van Arsdale never worked up the courage to ask her out.

Playing hard to get? Ridiculous. Francesca was too nice, too eager to please, lacking the nerve it took to try to get what she wanted by rebuffing it. Francesca told Suzy she was out of her mind, but Suzy cited George, who cited a conversation he’d had with his brother about whether he had any classes with this girl Francesca Corleone. Why do you ask? George had asked. No reason, Billy had said. What, do you like her? George asked. Shut up, dickhead, Billy said, are you in her class or not? I thought you told me to shut up, George said. You’re an asshole, Billy said, and punched him in the arm and said forget it. And George said he wasn’t in any classes with Francesca but he was friends with her roommate. How do you know they said all that? Francesca had asked her, and Suzy said she didn’t know, though why would George lie? Francesca had thought about the way her brothers talked to each other and decided that Suzy, an only child, couldn’t have made something like that up. The next time Francesca ran into Billy she did nothing more than just hold his eye contact a few beats too long, but of course that did it. Seconds later, he was asking her out. He knew this great juke joint out in the country. H-Bomb Ferguson was playing; his hit was called “She’s Been Gone,” had she heard it? Can’t say as I’ve had the pleasure, Francesca said, trying, and failing, to restrain her smile, to stop blushing. The next day, the dorm mother knocked on her door and handed Francesca a single red rose and an envelope containing an H-Bomb Ferguson 45. Two days later, they had their first date. Two months later, here they were. Racing north.

Watching him now, and pretending not to, she could see-now that she’d seen all of him there was to see, now that they’d gone to bed together and even though he’d probably been with a hundred girls, he’d turned out to be the straitlaced one and she the curious one, pointing, asking, trying things out (yes, it hurt, some; yes, four times in four hours had left her tender enough that it now seemed slightly greedy), now that she was convinced they were in every adult way in love-that Billy Van Arsdale was not what she’d thought he was, that first day of school. He was a little short, with hound-dog eyes and a crooked smile that she thought was cute but certainly wouldn’t make it in the movies. His blond hair was always disheveled. He had the wardrobe of a small-town southern lawyer-brogans, seersucker and linen suits, pocket watch on a fob (it had belonged to his great-uncle, who’d been chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court), tailored Egyptian cotton shirts rendered unpretentious by their frayed cuffs-and somehow only moments after he got dressed, no matter what he was wearing, his clothes were shot through with wrinkles. He was a frankly awful dancer and seemed unaware of it. He sang along loudly to songs he barely knew. He laughed through his teeth, like a cartoon character. His parents hated each other and had neglected him and his brother. The beloved Negro woman who raised him had killed herself after her grown son was murdered in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan, and Billy had been the one who found her, crumpled on the bathroom floor with a cabinet full of pills in her stomach. He went to a psychiatrist once a week and spoke of it as if it were nothing to be ashamed of. All of which is to say that it was not his undeniable good looks, his multitude of talents, or his perfect storybook life that had gotten him all those other girls and the student body presidency as well. He was a born politician: one part the Van Arsdale name and what that meant in Florida, one part his own exquisite manners and social nature, and a third part that was hard to define. More than charisma, Francesca thought. Just shy of magnetism.

Except for a stretch of Virginia, Billy drove the whole way. Francesca did eventually get some sleep, too, before she felt Billy’s hand on her shoulder and awoke, disoriented, to the harsh glare of winter light off fallen snow.

“Thought you’d want to see this.” He pointed at the New York skyline. “Your hometown.”

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Billy was so obviously proud of his accomplishment, of providing this miraculous view for her. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen the city from the Jersey side before. It was a stunning view, but nothing about it looked like home. “Pretty.”

“Aren’t you excited?” he said.

“Are you okay? You sleepy? Have you ever driven in snow before? What time is it?”

Yes. No. Often, on ski vacations. Right on schedule. They’d made up all four hours.

“I love you,” she said, leaning over to kiss his stubbly cheek.

“Name’s Junior Johnson, ma’am,” he said, affecting a southern drawl. “At your service.”

“Who’s Junior Johnson?”

A race car driver who’d first developed his skills evading federal agents during bootlegging days. She’d never heard of Junior Johnson? A distant cousin, it turned out, of Billy’s mother.

“Ah,” said Francesca. “So that’s where the Van Arsdale fortune originated.”

Billy started to say something and stopped himself.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Get it out of your system now.”

“No need,” he said.

“You sure?” They’d discussed it before. She’d told him that her father had rebelled against all that, that he was a legitimate businessman. His import-export company was called The Brothers Corleone, but only out of respect for his father’s wishes. He’d been the only brother involved. “Because this isn’t discussed, okay? Anything you want to ask about all that, you ask it right now, but whatever you do, don’t embarrass me in front of my family.”

He turned toward her, his mouth open. “I don’t believe you think I would-”

“I don’t,” she said. “You wouldn’t. We’re just tired. I’m sorry. Just drive.”

Christmas Eve, yet still the morning traffic was awful. By the time they made it to Long Beach, they’d lost one of the hours they’d regained.

Two squatty men in long overcoats came out of the stone gatehouse at the entrance to the semicircle mall of houses her family owned. Billy rolled down the window. Francesca could smell the food cooking from inside her grandmother’s house, a good fifty yards away. She leaned over Billy’s lap so the guards could see her.

One of the men called her Kathy and said he was sorry, he hadn’t recognized the car, hadn’t recognized her at first either, without her glasses.

Glasses? “I’m Francesca, actually,” she said.

The man nodded. “We were told Silver Hawk, not Thunderbird. Your ma don’t know cars too well, I guess. Better get a move on. She’s been callin’ down here for hours.” The outside of her grandparents’ house-the smallest and least ostentatious on the half-circle mall, all eight of them owned by her family-was entirely undecorated. Her grandmother was still in mourning. With no lights or wreaths, the house seemed smaller. Diminished. Across the street, the bungalow where she and her family had once lived stood dark and empty. Someone had built a snowman in the front yard and hung a wreath the size of a truck tire on the door.

Before Billy could even turn into the driveway, Francesca’s family started pouring out of her grandmother’s house, led-of all people-by her twin sister, the languid bohemian one, wearing big black eyeglasses and bounding across the snowy lawn like, yes, a cheerleader.

“Hungry?” Francesca asked Billy.

“Starving,” Billy said.

“Pace yourself,” Francesca said, “but not too much, or they’ll think you don’t like them.”

She opened her door, blasted first by the shock of the cold-how could she have ever lived here, in this icebox?-and then by Kathy, whose embrace slammed her against the side of the car. They jumped up and down and squealed, none of which had been Kathy’s style for years. Though at Thanksgiving their reunion had been similar. Only when they separated to look at each other and Francesca felt the cold wind in her face did she realize she’d been crying. “You got glasses,” Francesca said.

“You’re pregnant,” Kathy said, then stepped back as the rest of the family descended.

Francesca, stunned, was enveloped in their hugs and kisses. Kathy rocked on her heels, smiling, and gave a little innocent-seeming wave, though the glasses made her expression hard to read. Francesca knew a person could get pregnant the first time, and she knew that what Billy had done wasn’t safe-pulling out of her, grabbing her hand and clutching it over him. But it was hardly a dangerous time of the month. And anyway, twins or not, how could Kathy know?

Billy hoisted a huge mesh bag of Van Arsdale oranges onto one shoulder, grapefruit onto the other. “The tree’s where?” Billy said.

“What tree?” Kathy said. She scooped up Mary, Aunt Kay’s adorable little girl, holding her against her hip, like somebody’s mom. “Wha ’twee?” Mary parroted.

“The Christmas tree,” Billy said. “To put the presents under.”

“We’re Italian, Billy-Boy,” she said. “There is no Christmas tree.”

“We Italian, Bee-Boy!” Mary shouted.

At least this was the Kathy of old. “For God’s sake,” Francesca said, “we have a Christmas tree at home. Grandma doesn’t have a Christmas tree, is all. Put it by the presepe.”

Her grandmother clucked at the for God’s sake. Billy cocked his head.

“A whaddyacallit,” Francesca said. “A nativity scene, I guess.” She stopped herself and looked at Kathy, who understood the unspoken question and nodded: yes, the presepe was holy enough to be in keeping with Grandma Carmela’s mourning. “In the living room. You’ll see it.”

Francesca’s mother arched an eyebrow, raised her left arm, looked at her wristwatch.

“The snow,” Francesca said. “It slowed us down.”

“All the way it snowed?” her mother said.

“From D.C. on,” Francesca said, just guessing. She’d been asleep.

“No, you made real good time,” blurted a bald guy, who’d introduced himself as “Ed Federici, friend of your auntie’s.” Kathy had mentioned him in a letter; he and Aunt Connie were engaged, even though her annulment hadn’t come through yet. “I’d say. With that much snow.”

Stan Jablonsky agreed. “Don’t mind her,” he said, winking at Sandra, which Francesca always found creepy. “She’s been up since dawn, your ma, looking out the curtains for you.”

The two fiancés loaded themselves up with the rest of the packages and on the way inside began interrogating Billy about the routes he’d taken, the bridges, the shortcuts, the gas mileage.

How is it possible, a family Christmas, and those two outsiders were the only other men? Stan, who’d been engaged to her mother for three years with no date set, and the accountant who did her family’s taxes, engaged to a woman who was still married? The manliest of them all, Francesca’s father, Santino, was dead. Her grandfather, always the laughing, doting epicenter of any family gathering, was dead, too. Uncle Mike wasn’t coming (he was in either Cuba or Sicily on business-she’d heard both, maybe it was both, but for Christmas? Grandpa Vito must be rolling over in his grave). The Hagens had moved to Las Vegas and weren’t coming either. Uncle Fredo was supposed to have been here yesterday but apparently had called and said he might not make it at all. Uncle Carlo had apparently disappeared from the face of the earth.

Just the two sorry fiancés. And Billy. Her Billy.

Francesca watched him go, eager to save him from an afternoon of cards, televised football, and endlessly proffered snacks, suddenly weak in the knees with desire for him-had that even happened, back in Jacksonville? But she was pulled away from him, powerless against the tide of women who swept her, as if in a dream, into her grandmother’s hot, pungent kitchen: a fortress of enduring love that time had somehow never touched.

Clouds of steam, a mist of flour, tubs of boiling oil, counters spread with sheets of dough, waxed paper covered with slabs of fresh, seasoned fish. That hulking white stove, a museum piece that would probably outlive them all. In the next room, the spindle of the record player was crammed with the same Christmas 45s that had been wafting into this kitchen for Francesca’s whole life: Caruso, Lanza, Fontane, you name it. Children ran in and out, always underfoot, nibbling sweet scraps. Aunt Kay stood at the sink, washing dishes until it came time to make the handful of things she knew how to make. Her mother, Sandra, sturdy and earthy, and Aunt Connie, shrill and bitter, had never liked each other, but in this kitchen they anticipated one another’s moves and needs as if they were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Angelina-her grandmother’s Palermitan aunt, who must be a hundred years old now and still without a word of English-sat in the corner behind a card table, assembling ingredients that came her way. And of course Grandma Carmela oversaw everything, barking out instructions, stepping in to execute the most tricky tasks, all with an abiding love always felt but never stated.

Kathy pointed to a pyramid of milky-white eggplant, then handed Francesca a chef’s knife and a freshly uncapped bottle of black cherry Brookdale soda, chilled in a snowbank outside. One look at the bottle-they couldn’t get it in Florida, of course-and Francesca broke into tears again. Where had the tough girl gone? Where was the part of her that had been Kathy?

“Ah, the sweet tears of joy,” her grandmother said in Italian. She raised her chipped coffee mug, the same one she’d used for as long as Francesca could remember, its faded image of the Hawaiian Islands now crusted on the outside with the remnants of a dozen doughs and batters. “For a proper cena de Natale, this is the ingredient most crucial of all!”

Who could help but be moved by this affirmation, from the lips of a woman widowed less than a year? Each of the other women scrambled to find her own cup, mug, or bottle and raised it high.

Against the nape of her neck, Francesca felt Kathy’s face, the temple of those eyeglasses. “You’re just a big sap,” Kathy whispered, and together, identically, the twins laughed.

At Mass, Francesca had to keep whispering instructions to Billy, who’d never set foot in a Catholic church before. He was as endearingly clumsy with the kneeling and the crossing as he was on the dance floor. But she could feel Kathy’s eyes on Billy, even if Billy couldn’t. She could hear Kathy saying that this was just the kind of thing that’s lovable now and makes you crazy later, even if Kathy-seated at the far end of the pew, steadying poor Zia Angelina-uttered nothing but hymn and litany.

When the church bell tolled for repentance, Francesca made a fist and struck her breast softly four times, one for each hour in the Sand Dollar Inn. At the altar rail, she did it again, one for each time that they’d made love. Walking back to the pew, she kept her eyes down, penitent, away from Billy’s, but once she kneeled and finished her prayer, she sat back and took his hand. Only then did she realize that Aunt Kay-next to her, still on her knees, her lips moving in silent prayer-had taken Communion, too.

“She converted,” Kathy said on the ride home.

“I figured that, but after all these years?” Francesca said. “For the kids, I guess?”

They were in Billy’s T-Bird.

Kathy raised an eyebrow. Even with the glasses, she bore a disconcerting resemblance to their mother. “Per l’anima mortale di suo marito.” For her husband’s mortal soul.

Her husband’s mortal soul? Francesca frowned at her sister.

“She goes every day,” Kathy said. “Just like Grandma. And for the same reason.”

“Everybody goes for the same reason.” Francesca still hadn’t been able to pull her sister aside and ask what she’d meant when she’d said, You’re pregnant. “More or less.”

Kathy’s eyes widened, exasperated.

Despite or more likely because of the heavy absences felt by nearly everyone around the table, the Corleone family’s traditional Christmas Eve feast of the seven fishes was as loud and raucous as ever. The wine flowed freely, the women making up for what, in years past, would have been drunk by men. During the early courses, the children’s Christmas letters, expressing their plainspoken love for their parents, were read one by one, youngest to the oldest. The poignant and disturbing notes receded as the writers got older, but every letter was received with strident good cheer, culminating in the letter from Aunt Connie. It was the first time in more than thirty years that Carmela Corleone had received only one declaration of filial love-a delicate moment that Connie, to the astonishment of more than a few, lightened with a letter so hilarious that it was still being passed around courses later.

Likewise, all hearts were warmed by the story of Vito Corleone’s lone intrusion into the romantic lives of his children-the blind date he’d arranged many years before for Connie, soon after she’d begun dating Carlo Rizzi, with a nice boy who’d just graduated from college with a business degree. Ed Federici’s lively, self-deprecating version of the disastrous date inspired Mama Corleone to slip a champagne toast to the happy fidanzati in between courses.

And what courses they were: Crab legs and shrimp cocktail. Fried baccala and stuffed calamari. Steamed clams in a marinara sauce, over fresh angel-hair pasta. And finally-at least until the break before dessert-flounder stuffed with spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and several secret ingredients Zia Angelina had inserted when no one was watching.

“The risk of heart attack,” said Ed Federici, palms on the table, dazed as a man looking at the empty space where his stolen car used to be, “triples in the first hour after a heavy meal.”

Stan had given up halfway through the last course and was asleep in the next room, bathed in the flickering glow of an unwatched football game. Only two people were still eating: Frankie, forking it in like a champ, and Billy, who was poking at his flounder like a man who’d found gold and was trying to recall why it was valuable.

Connie shushed Ed and slapped him on top of his florid, prematurely bald head. “Mamma hears that, she’ll be the one who has the heart attack.” She’d been drinking wine at the same pace all day and had just opened a new bottle of Marsala. Her slap, theoretically playful, was loud enough that those watching it flinched. Several people in other rooms stuck their head around the corner to investigate. The slap had immediately left a hand-shaped mark.

Francesca led Billy from the table, taking him into her grandfather’s old office just as Aunt Kay finished folding up the kids’ table. “You get enough to eat, Billy?” Kay asked.

“Yes, ma’am.” He sat down heavily on the leather couch against the wall.

“Save room for dessert,” Kay said, smirking. “Hey, either of you seen Anthony?”

“He’s outside, I think,” Billy said. “With Chip and a bunch of the Clemenza kids.” They were the children of kids Francesca used to play with when she was Chip’s age. Now those playmates had families of their own and lived in houses down the street.

They were alone now. “You did good, baby. They like you, I can tell.”

“Why are you grinning like that?” he asked, lying across the couch, clutching his stomach.

She knelt on the floor beside him. “No such thing as a free lunch,” she whispered. “So pay up, buster. Kiss me.”

He obeyed. It lingered, not the sort of kiss Francesca had meant to have in this house. When she opened her eyes, the lights were flashing off and on.

“Don’t make me dump cold water on you,” Kathy said. “C’mon. Dishes. March. I’ll wash, you dry.”

Billy lay back, the same sated look on his face he’d had in the hotel, and finger-waved.

The women had of course been doing dishes all day. Francesca was looking at ten minutes’ worth of plates, knives, stemware, serving bowls, and baby bottles. A jazz station played on a small console radio Kathy had found somewhere. On a creaking wooden chair in the corner, Zia Angelina snored. The twins were otherwise alone together. “Where’s Grandma?” Francesca said.

“Mass. She and Aunt Kay just left.”

“Twice? You’re kidding me.”

“Go look. Car’s gone.” Kathy bent her head toward Angelina. “Thank God she snores,” Kathy said. “Otherwise we’d have to be checking her all the time to see if she was dead. Don’t look at me like that. She’s deaf on top of her no English.”

“How much you want to bet she can understand more than she lets on?”

“Oh, you mean like Bee-Boy?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You think everyone else is so blind-”

“I don’t think everyone is so anything.”

“-but you’re the blind one. That snotty little good ol’ boy in there, asleep in Grandpa’s office-that’s some nerve, don’t you think? Can’t you see he’s just using you?”

“Using me?” Francesca said. “What are you, back in high school? I took him in there.”

“What are you, the Slut Princess of Tallahassee?” Her glasses were half fogged from the steam from the tap, but she kept them on.

“You’ve lost your mind. It’s sad, actually. I feel sorry for you.” Francesca held up a fish-shaped porcelain platter and arched her eyebrows.

“No idea,” Kathy said, “just stack it with that stuff under the phone there. Can’t you see Billy’s just here to experience a gen-u-ine Mafia Christmas? To him, we’re a bunch of dirty Guineas. Something for him to laugh about over highballs at the yacht club with Skip and Miffie, the year he saw real dago gangsters with tommy guns in their violin cases.”

Anthony Corleone had brought his violin all the way from Nevada just to play “Silent Night” for them-not well, but it was sweet. “I’m not even going to dignify that with a reply.”

Kathy clanked a wineglass against the faucet, and it shattered. She didn’t even curse. She was cut. It bled like mad at first but was really nothing. They cleaned it up, together, without saying a word. Francesca got her a bandage.

Kathy heaved a sigh, met her sister’s eyes, and said something in a voice so small Francesca had to ask her to repeat it. “I said,” Kathy whispered, “that it’s all true.”

“What’s all true?”

Kathy rinsed the scum from the sink and told Francesca to get her coat. They walked to the farthest corner of the yard, concealed behind a floodlight, and Kathy-an old joke they’d each done dozens of times-lit two cigarettes at once, in the manner of a Hollywood tough-guy leading man, and handed one to her sister. “You and Billy? That was probably the first kiss anyone ever had in that room that didn’t lead directly to-” She looked up into the snow, as if the right word might land on her.

“To what?”

Kathy stood with her hand on her hip and blew a stream of smoke away from the light. “Do you know how long it takes to have someone declared legally dead? Do you know how long it takes to get an annulment from the church?”

“A couple months, I guess.”

“You guess wrong, little sister.” Kathy was four minutes older. “Longer. That’s how it started.” When Aunt Connie had announced her engagement and set the date for December, Kathy had been as shocked as everyone else. She’d presumed that Connie was pregnant, but a chance discovery in Connie’s bathroom ruled that out. Kathy, being Kathy, had gone to the library and made some phone calls. It takes a full year before the state declares a person legally dead, and it’s complicated. Most annulments, even for a woman abandoned, take just as long.

“Oh, come on,” Francesca said. “Is that all? A donation to some judge’s campaign fund, another to the Knights of Columbus, and everything gets sped up. It’s the way of the world.”

Kathy shook her head. She looked away from her sister, into the darkness. “You don’t get it. She’s not getting an annulment. It’s a lie. She doesn’t need one. They lied to us. They hushed it up. Uncle Carlo didn’t disappear. He was murdered.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Uncle Mike and everyone he controls.”

“You’re a retard,” Francesca said. “There was never even a funeral for Uncle Carlo.”

“There’s a death certificate on file,” Kathy said. “I went to the courthouse and found it.”

“I bet the New York phone book has a dozen people named Carlo Rizzi.”

Kathy stood in the darkness, smoking, shaking her head. “The human eye is utterly passive,” she said, obviously quoting some professor or textbook. “Only the brain can see.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Kathy didn’t answer. She finished her cigarette, lit two more, and started again. One Sunday, she’d met Aunt Connie in the city, for lunch at the Waldorf. Connie showed up drunk, with a man who wasn’t Ed Federici, kissed the man good-bye, took her seat, and when Kathy confronted her by asking how it was going with the annulment, Connie blurted it out: Carlo didn’t disappear, she said. Mike killed him. Connie held up her hand and told Kathy not to speak. She was drunk, but her voice was steady. Mike killed him, Connie said, or had him killed, because Carlo killed your father. Carlo killed Sonny.

Francesca burst out laughing.

Kathy’s eyes looked lifeless. “Connie said that Carlo beat her up, knowing that Pop would come to her rescue. When she called him, Pop did just that, or tried to. Men with machine guns killed him when he was stopped at a tollbooth on the Jones Beach Causeway.”

“Aunt Connie is out of her mind,” Francesca said, “and so are you if you believe that.”

“Just listen,” Kathy said. “Okay?”

Francesca didn’t answer.

“Pop’s bodyguards were on the scene right after he was killed, and they took his body to an undertaker who owed a favor to Grandpa Vito. Nothing about it ever got into the newspapers. Some cops took bribes to write the whole thing up as an accident.”

“Pop didn’t have bodyguards. No one-” She was going to say killed Pop but couldn’t.

Kathy tossed away her cigarette butt. “Come on. You don’t remember the bodyguards?”

“I know what you’re thinking about, but those were guys from his company. Importers.”

Kathy bit her lower lip. “Do you honestly think I’d joke about this?”

“I don’t think you’re joking. I just think you’re wrong.”

“This is hard,” Kathy said. “Just hear me out.”

Francesca, frowning, gave her an after-you gesture.

“All right,” Kathy said. “So then Aunt Connie says that the men who… Well, the men at the tollbooth, those men, it turns out, were working for the same men who paid Uncle Carlo to beat her. She was crying her eyes out at this point, and if you’d seen it, believe me, you’d have believed her. Her own husband took money to beat her, and he did it, and the reason he did it was so that those men could kill her brother,” Kathy hissed, “so they could kill Pop-”

“Stop it.”

“-and she stayed with him for another seven years. She fucked him for another-”

“That’s enough.”

“-seven years, and she had babies with that monster. But it’s so, so, so much bigger than even that. Connie says that the same men who did all that are also the ones who shot Grandpa Vito and they’re the same people who killed Uncle Mike’s wife.”

“First of all,” Francesca said, “Aunt Kay’s not-”

Again, the hand. Not Kay, Kathy said. The other one, Apollonia, his first wife, in Sicily, about whom Kay knows nothing. She was blown to kingdom come with a car bomb.

Apollonia? Francesca thought. Car bomb? Kathy had enough imagination to invent things that wild, but Aunt Connie certainly didn’t. If Connie had really said that, she’d either fallen for someone else’s lie or was telling the truth.

Kathy kept talking faster, the stories Connie told piling onto the things Kathy had been able to confirm later. Moment by moment Kathy’s voice sounded colder. She might have talked for five minutes or five hours, Francesca had no idea. Francesca couldn’t stand there anymore and couldn’t move. She concentrated on the popping of the firecrackers in the front yard, the sound of children’s laughter. Later, she noticed those sounds were gone, but she hadn’t heard them stop. For a while she concentrated on how it felt to have snow melting in her hair. She tried to look at her sister and also past her, to the wintertime remnants of her grandfather’s beloved garden, where he died, happy, at peace.

“… and that’s why Aunt Kay became Catholic and why she goes to Mass every day and sometimes twice. They’re on their knees trying to pray their evil murdering husbands’ souls out of hell, just like Ma ought to do for-”

And then just like that Francesca was looking down at her sister, crumpled in the snow, bleeding again, this time from her nose. Her cigarette was still in her mouth. Her glasses had flown off her face and landed a few feet away. Francesca’s right hand was still balled into a fist, and it hurt. Kathy stirred. “Lunatic,” she muttered.

A tide of rage roared in Francesca’s ears. She kicked Kathy in the ribs. It wasn’t a direct hit, but it was enough to make Kathy grunt in pain.

Francesca turned and ran.

Francesca lay on her side on the edge of a double bed, in a darkened room that had once belonged to Uncle Fredo, who’d lived here with his parents until he was thirty. He’d been in Las Vegas for ten years, but the décor-dark drapes and wood paneling, a faded map of Sicily, and a fly-fishing painting that looked like it came from Sears-seemed unaltered, as if Grandma Carmela expected him to move back in any day.

After what might have been hours or minutes, Francesca heard someone in the bathroom across the hall, banging and running water in a rhythm that was unmistakably Kathy’s. Francesca heard Kathy’s footsteps, heard her get into the other side of the bed. She did not have to look to know that Kathy was facing the other wall, lying on her side, a mirror image of Francesca except for the pajamas. Francesca wore nightgowns.

For a long time they lay there. If Francesca hadn’t spent thousands of nights in the same bedroom as Kathy, she’d have had every reason to presume she was asleep. “Why did you say I was pregnant?” Francesca said.

“What are you talking about?”

“When we first got here. When you ran to the car like you were actually glad to see me.”

Again, anyone else might have thought Kathy had fallen asleep. “Ohhhhh,” she finally said. “That. Don’t you remember? When we dropped you off at school, the last thing you said to me was to not wreck my eyes reading. I said don’t get pregnant. You got here and the first thing you do, with your remarkable grasp of the self-evident, is tell me I have glasses. So I-”

“Other way around. You said don’t get pregnant and I said don’t wreck your eyes.”

“I stand corrected. So are you?”

“No,” Francesca finally said. “Of course not.”

“You haven’t? At all?”

“Why? Have you?”

“No,” Kathy said, so quickly Francesca figured the answer was yes.

They did not talk about what had happened behind the floodlights-the stories or the punch or even the fate of Kathy’s eyeglasses. They stayed on opposite hips on opposite sides of the bed. They stayed awake long enough to hear their grandmother downstairs, beginning to fry sausage, which meant that it was probably about four-thirty. Eventually, they did fall asleep. Eventually, as sleeping people will, they moved. Inexorably, each was drawn toward the center of the bed. They entwined their arms and legs. Their long hair seemed blended together. They even breathed as one, each exhaling on the neck of the other.

“Oh, honey,” Francesca whispered in the darkness, presuming her sister was asleep. “I can’t believe what I did. What I did to you.”

“Maybe I am you,” Kathy murmured, and they, as one, went back to sleep.

Francesca awoke to the piercing shrieks of children and the murmurs of herding adults. She sat up. Snow was falling. Downstairs, the pitch of the din grew higher. Over it all rose Grandma Carmela’s deep call of Buon Natale! Someone had arrived. Francesca hurried down the narrow back stairs. The kitchen was full of food but empty. She heard two sets of feet coming her way and stopped so she wouldn’t get smacked in the face with the kitchen door. The door flew open. Kathy and Billy were both showered and dressed, grinning like they’d just caught Santa Claus red-handed and commandeered the sleigh. Billy was decked out in a red blazer, a green tie, and a shirt so white it put snow to shame. Unfrayed cuffs. The white of divinity fudge.

“You’ll never guess who just drove up with your uncle,” Billy said.

“Which uncle?” She smoothed her ratty hair. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth.

“Which one do you think?” Kathy said.

“Mike.” They both came to get me because they were competing to tell me this news.

“Oh, please.” Kathy rolled her eyes. “Uncle Fredo.” She wasn’t wearing the glasses. She had a black eye, but not much of one. A person would have to be looking for it.

“C’mon, guess,” Billy said.

“I give up,” Francesca said. “Santa Claus.”

“Weirder,” Kathy said.

“Who’s weirder than Santa Claus?”

“Deanna Dunn,” Billy said.

Francesca rolled her eyes. On their last date, they’d gone to see that Deanna Dunn picture where she has a deaf baby and her husband dies at the end fighting the Great Chicago Fire. “Just tell me.”

“I’m serious as a judge.” He held up his hand, ready to be sworn in. Even at twenty-two, dressed in a red blazer on Christmas morning, Billy was easy to picture as a judge.

“He’s not kidding,” Kathy said. “It’s Deanna Dunn. Cross my heart.” Which she actually did. “I’d actually heard a rumor that she and Uncle Fredo were dating, but I didn’t-”

Just then the kitchen door swung open, and trailing in Grandma Carmela’s wake came Uncle Fredo and Deanna Dunn. In person, Deanna Dunn’s head seemed gigantic. She was very tall and more beautiful than pretty. On her left hand was a diamond ring as proportionately absurd as her head.

“Miss Dunn!” Francesca said.

“What’d I tell you?” Kathy said, even though it had been Billy who’d told her. Kathy liked foreign movies. Deanna Dunn was someone she made fun of. But the way Kathy was looking at her now, she could have been the secretary of the Deanna Dunn Fan Club.

“Please, darling. Call me Deanna.” Her accent was neither American nor British and in person sounded remarkably unlike human speech.

She took Francesca’s hand.

Deanna Dunn, so magnetic Francesca felt dizzy. Yesterday in Jacksonville had only in the most indirect way unleashed last night’s exchange with Kathy. It had nothing to do with the surreal sight of Deanna Dunn in this old, familiar kitchen. Francesca’s life had been seized by dream-and-nightmare logic.

The rich boy Francesca loved calmly served black coffee to a two-time Oscar-winning actress. Francesca’s grandmother sang a Christmas carol-not a hymn, but one about Santa Claus. Francesca’s dead father had been both a murderer and murdered. Uncle Fredo slouched against the doorframe, staring at his shoes. He looked like he’d eaten some bad clams. Behind him, as if someone had given a signal, came an explosion of flashbulbs. Francesca expected to see men with visors and big cameras jostling for position, shooting them as if from the edge of the red carpet. Fredo didn’t even look up.

From the next room, over shouted thank-yous and the shredding of gift wrap, came the voice of her mother-the voice that had been lying to Francesca all her life.

“If you people don’t hurry up,” Sandra called, “you’re going to miss Christmas.”

“Christmas!” cried Deanna Dunn, hurrying past Uncle Fredo. Deanna Dunn was not tall. She’d only come off that way standing next to Uncle Fredo, who was short, and because she had a tall woman’s walk and also a colossal head. The eye is passive. Only the brain can see. “How marvelous!”