He was sliding on his back across the wood-block floor of the dining alcove, but always the strength was in the hands around his throat. The croaked cry for help was deep in his chest and stifled, while his eyes, staring and bulging, searched for the door of the main living area through which his grandson and his driver should burst with their guns, and they did not come… Not to know, in his kicking throes, that a stabbing knife had taken the life of his grandson in the apartment's kitchen, that his driver was gagged and trussed in the hall beside the outer door. Not to know that five men had come with his Host into the apartment…

The Guest fought for his life until the will to resist was lost in his old body.

He was on the carpet. He was choking for breath and a little of the pulp from the tomatoes of his salad ran from his lips onto the carpet, and the piss flow came on his upper thigh and into the cloth of his trousers. The face above him, another old face, but flabby and jowled, had the sweat of effort running on it, and there was laughter at the mouth of the face and there was cold light in the eyes of the face. One of the men from across the table held the Guest's sparse hair, the other of the men from across the table sat on his legs, both made it easier for the Host, whose hands never loosened their hold and whose thumbs gouged down onto his windpipe.

It helped him not at all that as a child he had seen the Fascist Cesare Mori, that as a teenager he had met Don Calogero Vizzini, that as a young Man of Honour he had carried messages to the bandit Salvatore Giuliano… Nothing could help him. He seemed to hear the caution of his consigliere in the dawn in the hills above Canicatti…

He tried to shout that his Host was a shit, cunt, bastard… He wished that he could warn the man who was his friend, the head of the family of Catania… He knew it could last for ten minutes, the strangulation of a man.