“Help me.”

After years of petty conflict and drifting affection, the sisters felt a shock of understanding shoot through them. They’d had their differences the past few years, but the bond they had as twins never went anywhere. Summoned, it obeyed. There is nothing more complicated and less so than family, nothing easier to understand and at the same time unknowable. With twins, that all goes double.

Francesca didn’t explain any of the particulars to Kathy, yet Kathy understood what she needed to understand. She helped Francesca with her hand, helped her get dressed, listened to her instructions about Sonny (get dinner at Eastern Market Lunch, he loves that, loves the market, too, but dress warm, it’s supposed to snow later tonight). Kathy tried to soothe her but not counterproductively so.

Francesca kissed Sonny and grabbed the keys to Billy’s Dual-Ghia. They had only one car (though it cost more than two nice ones), and of course it was his, the selfish prick, a big fancy custom-built thing he was ordinarily reluctant to let her drive. At least he’d left it for her today so she could go pick up Kathy at the train station.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Kathy called as Francesca slammed the apartment door behind her.

“Maybe I am you,” Francesca shouted back.

When she got there, since only Billy himself was allowed to use the parking garage, she had to circle round and round the building, looking for a space. Her tightly wrapped hand throbbed. Pain shot through it each time she had to shift. The pain wasn’t exactly unpleasant. It was somehow keeping her from crying. The last thing she wanted to allow herself to do was cry.

She banged her unbandaged fist on the leather-wrapped wheel, trying to quell her anger. It only made it worse. You are what you do, nothing more. Francesca was disgusted to be the kind of person who’d look for a legal parking space at a time like this. She growled, feral as a cornered wolf, and whipped the car into an empty space in a loading zone.

She strode but did not run up the steps to the Department of Justice.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Van Arsdale,” said the receptionist in Billy’s office. “Mr. Van Arsdale is in an off-site meeting with the attorney general. I don’t expect them back until tomorrow.”

Which Francesca knew. She was supposed to meet Billy at a bar he and his friends from work liked, down by the river in Georgetown, then go out for dinner and a movie. “Billy needed some files,” Francesca said. “He forgot them. He told me right where to look.”

The next thing Francesca knew, she was alone in Billy’s office, going where the whore had told her to go, looking where the whore had told her to look: in the backmost file in the top drawer. The file was thick and battered; the handwritten label-Billy’s handwriting-read Insurance.

Francesca couldn’t be seen going through it, not there. She tucked it under her arm, thanked the receptionist, and left. She went back to the car. It had not been towed. It had not been ticketed. A good omen, she thought, with no sincere hope it would be.

Inside the folder, as the whore had promised, was information about her family. Newspaper clippings that anyone might have kept, but from papers all over the country. Hundreds of carefully arranged and catalogued snapshots, including quite a few Francesca had taken with her own camera, even before Billy had met her: photos of everyone in her family, but especially those on her father’s side. There was the picture of her uncles and grandfather at Aunt Connie’s wedding that used to be on their dresser and had supposedly been lost in one of their moves. There were four notebooks, the same kind Francesca had been required to use for her freshman English themes, filled with notes about her family, and a several-page typewritten summary of the contents of those notebooks. She tried to figure out when he’d started doing this. The first began in December 1955, the day after they first made love. It wasn’t about that; it was everything that happened at Grandma Carmela’s house, not a journal of any sort, but notes, as if from a class. They weren’t faked. There were things in there only Billy could have known, rendered in handwriting that was unmistakably his (right down to the cursive-style capital A’s and M’s that he’d used then and replaced with printed style a few years later).

Can’t you see Billy’s just here to experience a gen-u-ine Mafia Christmas?

Billy told his whore blonde from Sarasota that he had this file. He probably showed it to her. They probably had a good laugh about it, naked in a hotel room overlooking Dupont Circle.

Dizzy, she collapsed, falling sideways against the gearshift and not caring. She let herself cry. That made nothing better. She wanted to do something, not sit in her cheating husband’s fancy car, crying like some helpless woman.

She was not some helpless woman.

She was a Corleone.

She was the daughter of a great warrior king, Santino Corleone.

By the time she noticed she was murmuring “Daddy, help me” over and over, she’d been doing it awhile.

A Capitol Police traffic cop stopped to write her a ticket, but when Francesca sat up-her face contorted in anguish, her hair and eyes wild-the cop put the summons book away. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. He turned and walked the other way, shaking his head.

In a dark parking lot down by the Potomac River, Francesca waited in her husband’s red car, watching the bar across the street, where she was supposed to meet Billy. She’d been there for a long time, long enough to read every speculation, half-truth, and condescending comment in that hateful file. She wasn’t wearing a watch, and the clock in the Ghia kept lousy time. There had been a handful of aspirin in her purse (next to the kitchen knife, a wedding present from Fredo Corleone and Deanna Dunn), but they’d worn off. Her hand was throbbing worse than ever. But the emotional and physical pain were working together to keep her from passing out, the way two deadly poisons in the bloodstream can keep a person alive.

Maybe an hour ago, Billy had gone into the bar with several other young lawyers. He hadn’t seen her. If he had, they’d have probably had this out already. She wouldn’t really have used that knife (would she?), and she wasn’t above making a scene. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Every moment since then, she’d been a moment away from getting out of the car. She would have, she thought, if she knew what she was going to do or even what she wanted.

She kept going back and forth between wishing she hadn’t brought the knife at all and fearing that she couldn’t possibly do this with her left hand.

She kept thinking about her tough and funny little boy, which made her alternately more and then less inclined to act.

She kept thinking that if only she could calm down, she’d think better.

She realized, now, that this was as absurd as thinking that if only her father were here for her, her whole life would be different and better.

She thought she might soften when she saw Billy again, but when he finally came out of the bar, alone and unsteady on his feet, turning up the collar of his coat against the cold, the opposite happened.

Insurance.

Her heart raced. Her hand hurt so badly she whimpered like a dying animal. Billy turned the corner and started up a steep, narrow cobblestone alley toward M Street. She knew what he was doing. He was a rich boy who’d bought this fancy car because it was what Johnny Fontane, Bobby Chadwick, and Danny Shea drove, but he was also too cheap to hail a cab if it meant having to ride around an unnecessary block. On M Street, he’d be able to get one that wouldn’t have to turn around.

Francesca turned on the ignition. It was a fast car, that Dual-Ghia, one of the fastest made. A perfect hybrid of Italian engineering and American flamboyance.