Minutes later, he heard a gunshot.

Soon after that, Mr. Neri came back in the boat alone.

Anthony sobbed. He didn’t stop crying for days.

During his parents’ contentious divorce, the boy summoned the courage to confront his father with what he’d seen. Michael Corleone dropped his demand for custody of his two children, which was awarded to Kay Adams Corleone.

The cold waters of Lake Tahoe often prevent the formation of the internal gases that make corpses float. The body of Frederico Corleone was never found. His nephew never again went fishing.

Book VI. 1920 – 1945

Chapter 21

IT IS SAID that babies bring their own luck, and so it was with Michael Corleone. The Corleones were mired in poverty, living in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement. Railroad tracks ran right down the middle of the street. Day and night, freight trains rumbled by, loaded with animals headed for slaughter. Children clamored for the chance to play cowboy, to mount a horse and warn pedestrians to get out of the way. Every week, one or two failed to hear.

Since Santino’s birth ten years earlier, Carmela had suffered four miscarriages. The baby who’d survived, Frederico, had been sickly all five years of his life. Vito was working six days a week in a corner grocery store owned by his adoptive parents. To make ends meet, he’d helped his friends Clemenza and Tessio hijack a truck, only to find that a bullying neighborhood dandy named Fanucci expected an extortionist portion of the proceeds. Weeks before Michael was born, Vito’s murder of Fanucci-widely suspected but only furtively discussed-brought Vito the respect of a grateful neighborhood. With a minimum of words, he began sorting out conflicts and protecting store owners from hoodlums and the police.

Michael’s birth itself was as painless as such a thing might ever be. He had ivory skin, long black eyelashes, and a head of lustrous hair. When the midwife spanked him, he took a deep breath but didn’t cry. She sighed like a girl at a Valentino movie. The moment he was at his mother’s breast, he was her favorite child. Vito had barely crossed the threshold to the room when he saw Michael’s noble features. The baby was the image of Vito’s own father, who’d fought alongside Garibaldi. Vito dropped to his knees and wept with joy.

The next day, thoughts of his father’s beloved olive grove inspired Vito to go into the olive oil business. Tessio and Clemenza would be his salesmen. Prohibition-which provided other profitable uses for their delivery trucks-was another stroke of luck that came into the world about the same time as Michael Corleone. Soon they were all rich.

Michael’s babyhood passed without his temperature ever climbing above ninety-eight. It was often cooler. He had a confidence about him, as if he knew people would love him and do what needed to be done and saw no need to make a fuss. His christening party was held in the street, which the police closed as a favor to the generous young importer. It seemed every Italian in New York was there. Michael’s godfather, the saturnine Tessio, spent the afternoon making silly faces at the baby, who was already able to smile. It was Vito’s smile, drained of menace.

After a year or so, the older boys saw that Michael had usurped them and become the favorite of both parents. Fredo reacted by putting mice in the baby’s cradle and, briefly, regressing into a period of bed-wetting. Once he even went to school and told everyone his baby brother had been sliced in two by the cowcatcher of the Eleventh Avenue freight train.

Sonny took bolder action, complicating Michael’s claim on Vito’s affections by bringing home a new rival, one Sonny chose himself-a sick and filthy kid whose parents had died of drink. At the age of twelve he’d been on the street, living by his wits-which, it turned out, were considerable. His name was Tom Hagen. Sonny ceded his narrow bed to his orphaned friend and slept on the floor. No one discussed making this arrangement permanent. But like so many of the Don’s affairs, a need presented itself and with a minimum of words was resolved.

Michael’s earliest memory was of the day his family moved to the Bronx. He was three. His mother was on the stoop, hugging neighbors good-bye and crying just as hard as baby Connie. Tom and Sonny must have been up at the new apartment. Michael was in the car with his father and a driver. Fredo stood at the curb, looking toward the trains. “What’s wrong?” Vito shouted. Fredo wanted to play cowboy. Sonny got to do it at least a hundred times. Fredo hadn’t done it once, and now they were leaving the neighborhood. Vito saw the misery on Fredo’s face. He took Michael by one hand and Fredo by the other and marched them down the narrow street. The man with the horse saw Vito, and a moment later Fredo was in the saddle, waiting for a train. When one appeared in the distance, Vito hoisted Michael onto his shoulders. Fredo rode the horse across the tracks, screaming his warnings, happy and unafraid.

The Corleones’ new apartment was in the Belmont section of the Bronx, on the second floor of an eight-story redbrick building. The apartment itself was humble but had a new icebox, good heat, and enough space for everyone. Vito owned the whole building, though so discreetly not even the super knew it. To young Michael, Belmont seemed like paradise. The streets were filled with boys playing stickball and the cries of men with laden pushcarts. The air shimmered with the tang of simmering onions and the sugary haze of rising breads. After supper, women carried chairs down to the sidewalks and gossiped away the twilight. Men shouted affectionate taunts to one another. There were more Italians in Belmont than in most of the towns they’d originally come from. They’d go years at a time without leaving the borough.

Outside the Corleones’ apartment was an iron fire escape. On hot nights they slept on it, an adventure tempered only when the wind shifted and sent the smell from the Bronx Zoo wafting down Arthur Avenue. “Enough,” Vito would say to his complaining children. “That zoo? It was built by Italians. What you smell is the fruit of their labor. How can a child of mine refuse fruit, which is a gift from God?” The others still complained sometimes, but not Michael. There were lions in that zoo, too. He loved lions. The Corleones. The lionhearted.

The Corleones became active in their new church. At first even Vito attended. Fredo went with his mother to Mass almost every day. When he was ten, he stood up at supper and announced that he’d had a talk with Father Stefano, his mother’s favorite celebrant and also his boxing coach, and decided to become a priest. The family exploded in congratulations. That night, Michael sat on the fire escape and watched his mother parade Fredo around the neighborhood. By the time Fredo returned, his face was covered with smeared lipstick.

At school, when Michael’s friends practiced that age-old ritual of bragging about their father, Michael would walk away. He’d been raised not to boast. He also had no need for it. Even the worst schoolyard bully knew that Michael’s quiet father was a man of respect. When Vito Corleone walked down the street, people backed away, almost bowing, as if he were a king.

One night at dinner, when Michael was six, there was a knock at the door. It was Peter Clemenza. He apologized for interrupting dinner and asked to have a word with Vito alone. Moments later, from behind the locked parlor door, Vito began to yell in Sicilian dialect, which Michael understood, but imperfectly. His father’s rage was clear enough. Michael’s mother fed olives and calamari to Connie and pretended to be oblivious. Tom smirked and shook his head. “It’s Sonny,” Tom said. Sonny wasn’t at dinner-which had become less and less unusual-but Tom’s smirk seemed to indicate that nothing truly grave had befallen him.