Carlo woke each morning with New York City drumming through him like a heartbeat. Eventually, he learned to walk quickly down the crowded Manhattan avenues; to see the people around him without really looking at them; to let himself be buoyed along by the rushing pulse of humanity. The summer smell of rotting fruit and charred meat and hot cobblestone was replaced by the damp leaves and roasted nuts of fall, and then muted in winter. Carlo felt taller with each season that passed.

And Tommy Fianzo was a kind and knowledgeable tour guide. Tommy introduced him to men close to his age; one of them, Joey Colicchio, became his best friend. Together, they drank until dawn; they sucked down oysters by the dozen at hole-in-the-wall bars; they felt themselves begin to put out the roots that would bind them to New York City. And Tommy was there when they cried for their mothers as the winter wind sucked at their skin, and when they needed a woman, and when they needed a post office or a telephone installation.

For the first few months, in fact, Carlo didn’t know how he would have gotten along without Tommy. Tommy told him where he could go in search of clothing, furniture, tobacco, food; which church basement would become a dance hall filled with eligible Italian girls on a Friday night.

It was several years after he arrived in America, somewhere in the churning innards of one of these dances—the flocking of young men and women back and forth, the display, like birds, of their finest clothes; the turbulent air making them all jittery—that Carlo met Lina, who became his wife on a stormy fall afternoon soon afterward. Carlo despaired about the rain, sputtering as it did in sheets of icy needles with each gust of wind, but Tommy said, sposa bagnata, sposa fortunata, and straightened Carlo’s tie before the ceremony, and looked at him like a brother.

Tommy encouraged Carlo to befriend a certain type of immigrant—one with slicked-back hair and a clean-shaven face. Carlo learned to ask if someone was in the Family, and to keep his distance if the answer was no.

It was many years of work for Tommy before Carlo began to notice himself answering questions with, “Well, Tommy might not like it if . . .” or, “Tommy usually says . . .” It was years more before he began to catalogue the pieces of the life he had built for himself—apartment, wardrobe, whereabouts—and trace each thread of that life back to Tommy. By the time Carlo was keeping a shaky-handed, shallow-breathed watch outside of rooms where unspeakable acts of violence were doled out for minor infractions against the Fianzo Family, it was too late for him to extract himself.