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happy person. She had not had an easy day, getting up so early for that flight and then having to contend the whole way with her six-year-old son Victor’s epic squirming and resourceful misbehavior while her mother, Carmela, barely lifted a finger to help and just nattered on and on about how this trip had made her miss Mass. But the baby—Michael Francis Rizzi, christened yesterday, named after her brother Mike, who’d stood as the boy’s godfather—had been a perfect angel, sleeping and cooing and burrowing that little nose into her. Somewhere over the Rocky Mountains, for the first time, he had laughed. Now, every time she blew on his forehead, he’d do it again. It was a sign, she thought. Babies bring their own luck. The move out here would be a new start for everybody. Carlo would change. He
had
changed. He hadn’t hit her once since she’d gotten pregnant with this baby. Mike was going to give Carlo a lot more responsibility in the family business now. Carlo had been supposed to make the flight, too, to look at houses and help shop for other things they’d need, but at the last minute Mike had said he needed Carlo to stay. Business. Neither her father nor any of her brothers had ever done that before, made Carlo feel like he mattered. She moved her infant son to her other breast and stroked his soft, fine hair. He smiled. She blew on his forehead. He laughed, and she did, too.
    In the next room, Vincent started jumping on the bed, which he’d been told countless times not to do. The phone rang. Connie smiled. That would be Carlo. She let Victor answer.
    “Mo-om!” the boy called. “It’s Uncle To-om!” Hagen.
    Connie stood. The baby began to scream.
    On the street below, draped in a long black shawl, Carmela Corleone emerged from the hotel, head down, shielding her eyes from the glare of the neon lights, muttering to herself in Italian. She started down the Strip. It was after nine, too late for services anywhere, especially on a Monday, but in a town with all these wedding chapels, how hard could it be for a determined widow to find a priest? Or at least a man of the cloth. If all else failed, a quiet and holy place where she might escape these garish lights and fall to her knees and seek intervention on behalf of the souls of the damned, humbly beseeching the Virgin Mary, as she did every day, one suffering mother to another.

BOOK II
    September 1955

Chapter 3
    F OUR MONTHS LATER, early Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend, Michael Corleone lay in his bed in Las Vegas, his wife beside him, his two kids right down the hall, all of them sound asleep. Yesterday in Detroit, at the wedding of the daughter of his late father’s oldest friend, Michael had given the merest nod toward Sal Narducci, a man he barely knew, putting in motion a plan designed to hurt every formidable rival the Corleones still had. If it worked, Michael would emerge blameless. If it worked, it would bring lasting peace to the American underworld. The final bloody victory of the Corleone Family was at hand. A trace of a smile flickered on Michael Corleone’s surgically repaired face. His breathing was even and deep. Otherwise, he was motionless, untroubled, basking in the cool air of his new home, enjoying the sleep of the righteous. Outside, even in the pale morning light, the desert baked.
    Near the oily banks of the Detroit River, two lumpy men in silk short-sleeved shirts—one aquamarine, the other Day-Glo orange—emerged from the guest cottage of an estate belonging to Joe Zaluchi, the Don of Detroit, the man who’d saved his city from the arbitrary violence of the Purple Gang. The one in orange was Frank Falcone, formerly of Chicago and now the head of organized crime in Los Angeles. The one in aquamarine, Tony Molinari, was his counterpart in San Francisco. Behind them came two men in overcoats, each carrying two suitcases, each suitcase containing, among other things, a tux worn to last night’s Clemenza-Zaluchi nuptials.