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he was looking outside, his vision doubled, then tripled, and then dissolved to a totally meaningless blur.
    Tommy closed his eyes and cried. Then he called out. But not for morphine. He called out for his brother, Mario.
    Then the pain came back, and he crawled across the floor to return to his bed, where he lay in his own vomit and wept and shivered.
    One day.
    Another day. And another.
    On the evening of the fourth day, Tommy Falcone fell asleep.
    *   *   *
    N ILO S ESTA WOKE WITH A START. His tongue was thick in his mouth and he ached in every part of his body. The ache between his buttocks turned to pain and he wanted to cry out. But that would not do. A man, even an eighteen-year-old man, did not cry—at least, not because of physical pain. A broken heart, yes. Other things, perhaps. But not for physical pain.
    Nilo carefully scanned the nearby shore. He was still in the rowboat he had taken the night before. He must have fallen asleep at the oars, and the boat had run aground on a deserted portion of beach. Perhaps he had passed out. He remembered what happened—the shame of it, the pain of it—and for a moment he said a prayer that it had all been a bad dream.
    But it had not been. Nilo knew that and there was no use pretending.
    Slowly, Nilo remembered Fredo and what he had done to the burly fisherman. He half-smiled at the memory.
    The sun was coming up, far off to his right. He had drifted to the west during the night, drifted away from Castellammare and the men he had to kill. That was bad.
    By now every fisherman along the coast must have learned that Fredo was dead, and they would all be looking for him, them and the Carabinieri and all of Fredo’s family.
    I should have thrown his body overboard. Then no one would know what happened to him and I could have moved freely. I must be more careful in the future.
    It was too late to worry about it. Nilo leaned forward in the small boat and carefully unwrapped the shotgun that he had bound in a piece of canvas sailcloth. He inspected it and then, satisfied, rewrapped it. He had no love for guns, but sometimes they were necessary. He remembered Fredo. The fisherman had loved guns, fondled and caressed them as other men might touch a woman. But not him, not Nilo. At least, not until now. But who knows? This gun may become my closest friend.
    Nilo set the oars, eyed one of the old Saracen watchtowers more than a mile away, and began drawing slowly toward it. After a few minutes, he realized he was hungry. This surprised him. Thirsty he could understand: the body demanded water regardless of what indignities it had suffered. Thirst could not be controlled. But hunger was something else again. What he had gone through the day and night before should have driven all hunger from him, but it had not. Nilo thought of his mother’s kitchen, thought of the good things she cooked there, and wanted more than anything to be back in those familiar surroundings. It was not that he was babied or pampered. On the contrary: Nilo was an only child and often his mother and father seemed to treat him with disdain and indifference, causing him occasionally to wonder if he had been left with the Sestas as an infant and adopted.
    Nilo beached the boat, then hid it between some huge sentinel-like rocks at the water’s edge. He climbed the hill leading to the road, moving rapidly in the early morning sun. If he was where he thought himself to be, he should make it back to Castellammare by noon, even allowing for keeping out of sight and moving through the brush away from the main road.
    As he moved along, Nilo began to hum a tune, something he had known since infancy from hearing his mother, an old folk song that from its curiously flat melody must have been brought across the water by some of Sicily’s Arab invaders.
    The farther he went, the more he noticed—as he rarely ever had before—the intense beauty of his home island. The trail he was following was edged in vines and