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"Do you want me to get my face fixed?"

Kay nodded. "You know how kids are, your son will feel bad about your face when he

gets old enough to understand it's not normal. I just don't want our child to see it. I don't

mind at all, honestly, Michael."

"OK." He smiled at her. "I'll do it."

He waited until she was home from the hospital and then made all the necessary

arrangements. The operation was successful. The cheek indentation was now just

barely noticeable.

Everybody in the Family was delighted, but Connie more so than anyone. She visited

Michael every day in the hospital, dragging Carlo along. When Michael came home, she

gave him a big hug and a kiss and looked at him admiringly and said, "Now you're my

handsome brother again."

Only the Don was unimpressed, shrugging his shoulders

and remarking, "What's the difference?"

But Kay was grateful. She knew that Michael had done it against all his own

inclinations. Had done it because she had asked him to, and that she was the only

person in the world who could make him act against his own nature.

On the afternoon of Michael's return from Vegas, Rocco Lampone drove the limousine

to the mall to pick up Kay so that she could meet her husband at the airport. She always

met her husband when he arrived from out of town, mostly because she felt lonely

without him, living as she did in the fortified mall.

She saw him come off the plane with Tom Hagen and the new man he had working

for him, Albert Neri. Kay didn't care much for Neri, he reminded her of Luca Brasi in his

quiet ferociousness. She saw Neri drop behind Michael and off to the side, saw his

quick penetrating glance as his eyes swept over everybody nearby. It was Neri who first

spotted Kay and touched Michael's shoulder to make him look in the proper direction.

Kay ran into her husband's arms and he quickly kissed her and let her go. He and

Tom Hagen and Kay got into the limousine and Albert Neri vanished. Kay did not notice

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that Neri had gotten into another car with two other men and that this car rode behind

the limousine until it reached Long Beach.

Kay never asked Michael how his business had gone. Even such polite questions

were understood to be awkward, not that he wouldn't give her an equally polite answer,

but it would remind them both of the forbidden territory their marriage could never

include. Kay didn't mind anymore. But when Michael told her he would have to spend

the evening with his father to tell him about the Vegas trip, she couldn't help making a

little frown of disappointment.

"I'm sorry," Michael said. "Tomorrow night we'll go into New York and see a show and

have dinner, OK?" He patted her stomach, she was almost seven months pregnant.

"After the kid comes you'll be tied down again. Hell, you're more Italian than Yankee.

Two kids in two years."

Kay said tartly, "And you're more Yankee than Italian. Your first evening home and

you spend it on business." But she smiled at him when she said it. "You won't be home

late?"

"Before midnight," Michael said. "Don't wait up for me if you feel tired."

"I'll wait up," Kay said.

At the meeting that night, in the corner room library of Don Corleone's house, were

the Don himself, Michael, Tom Hagen, Carlo Rizzi, and the two caporegimes, Clemenza

and Tessio.

The atmosphere of the meeting was by no means so congenial as in former days.

Ever since Don Corleone had announced his semiretirement and Michael's take-over of

the Family business, there had been some strain. Succession in control of such an

enterprise as the Family was by no means hereditary. In any other Family powerful

caporegimes such as Clemenza and Tessio might have succeeded to the position of

Don. Or at least they might have been allowed to split off and form their own Family.

Then, too, ever since Don Corleone had made the peace with the Five Families, the

strength of the Corleone Family had declined. The Barzini Family was now indisputably

the most powerful one in the New York area; allied as they were to the Tattaglias, they

now held the position the Corleone Family had once held. Also they were slyly whittling

down the power of the Corleone Family, muscling into their gambling areas, testing the

Corleones' reactions and, finding them weak, establishing their own bookmakers.

The Barzinis and Tattaglias were delighted with the Don's retirement. Michael,

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formidable as he might prove to be, could never hope to equal the Don in cunning and

influence for at least another decade. The Corleone Family was definitely in a decline.

It had, of course, suffered serious misfortunes. Freddie had proved to be nothing more

than an innkeeper and ladies' man, the idiom for ladies' man untranslatable but

connotating a greedy infant always at its mother's nipple – in short, unmanly. Sonny's

death too, had been a disaster. Sonny had been a man to be feared, not to be taken