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I step past the comment. “You sent for me?”

He nods slowly, folds the New York Times on his lap with careful movements. “Indeed I did. I sent for you because I’ve given your request some thought.”

I say nothing, but my body tenses just a bit.

He goes on. “You want my voice at the table when the Camorra elders sit down and decide whether you become Don in name, not just in fact.”

“It would matter, coming from you.”

“It would.” He sets the paper aside. “That’s the trouble with it.”

The meeting is a month out. In theory, it’s a formality. The Camorra elders convene, they formally acknowledge me as the new head of the Accardi family, the succession is blessed, and the city goes on turning. But that’s in theory. In practice, a formality is only a formality until someone decides otherwise. And right now, it would appear that my father has made such a decision.

“Here’s what I think,” my father says. “I think a man who needs his father to speak for him isn’t a man the table should be listening to in the first place.”

“That’s not what this is.”

“Isn’t it?” His black eyes don’t move off my face. “When I took my seat, Enzo, no one spoke for me. I walked in alone and made them respect me, and if they hadn’t, I’d have deserved whatever came after. That’s the job. That’s the only job. You stand on your own legs, or you don’t stand.”

“Times have changed.”

“Men haven’t,” he says and waves a trembling hand as if dismissing an entire generation. “You think because they wear better suits now that they’ve stopped being animals? They haven’t. They smell weakness exactly the way they always did, and a son hiding behind his father’s name is the strongest scent there is.”

“There’s a situation developing in the Santini ranks,” I say. “A young one, Luca, is moving faster than he should be able to, pulling men and money toward himself, and he’s doing it by promising the old ways: blood, territory. He’s making the kind of noise that piques the interest of the FBI.”

I let that sit. The last RICO sweep took three families apart and put my uncle in the cell he died in. My father remembers this.

“And he has some sort of personal issue with me. If I go to that table and the elders see that I don’t have your backing, they’ll read it as a rift. And he’ll read it as an opportunity.”

For a moment, I think what I’ve said has landed. Something moves behind his flat, black eyes; the old strategist is still in there somewhere, doing the math he spent sixty years doing better than anyone alive.

Then he shakes his head. “The Santinis,” he says, with a contempt so total it’s almost restful, “are nothing. They were nothing when I was young and they’re less than nothing now. A boy like him threatening war, making things personal… that’s a tantrum. You’re frightened of a tantrum.”

“I’m not frightened; I’m preparing.”

“You’re asking me to do your preparing for you.” He turns his face toward the window, toward the garden three floors down. “The answer is no. Whatever you’ve stepped in, you’ll clean it off your own shoe. I’m done fighting. I’ve earned the right to be done.”

“Then be done.”

It comes out lower and harder than I intended, before I can stop it, and the old man’s head turns back to me slowly.

We look at each other.

“Then go and run the business,” my father says, turning back to the window. “That’s the arrangement. You run things, and I stay right here in this seat. Tell me, son, how does it feel to be in charge? This little taste I’ve given you, that is. Is it everything you’d hoped it would be?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Get out, Enzo.”

I let out a small sigh of relief when I’m out of his wing, the temperature of the air cooling. I lean against the wall, thinking about the meeting I won’t have backing for. I think about Luca Santini, who would be licking his chops in anticipation if he were a fly on the wall of my father’s room just now.

War. I have no doubt it’s on the horizon. Luca will hear I’ve been passed over for official leadership and interpret this as weakness in the Accardi family.

It’ll be the war my father says isn’t coming.

And I’ll be walking into it alone, exactly the way the old man always said I should.

Gary Wendt runs placements for three hotel groups and half the restaurant floors in Midtown. For four years, every time Stevie Callahan’s name crossed his desk, he typed two words beside it. Not suitable.

Santini paid him four hundred dollars a month for those two words.