“Okay,” I said. “But then what do I do with an unfinished book?” I sounded calmer than I felt.
He laughed at me. “Finish it,” he said.
“I can’t finish it. I don’t remember what you taught me,” I said, unable even to imagine living in a world without him.
He patted me on the shoulder and said, “You can do it. You know the story. I’ve written so much of it and we’ve talked about it for years. You can fill in the missing pieces.” Then he touched my cheek, and said, “I really have taught you all I know.”
Two weeks before he died, though his heart was failing, Mario was still completely lucid. And one day, as I was sitting in his study across from his desk, he reached down and pulled a bunch of pages, handwritten in red felt marker on yellow lined paper, from the bottom drawer of his desk. I thought it was something from Omerta, but it wasn’t. “Read it,” he said, and handed it to me.
And as I read I began to cry. It was the last chapter of the Borgia book.
“Finish it,” he said. “Promise me.”
And so I did.
About the Author
Mario Puzo was the author of the international bestseller The Godfather and cowrote the screenplays for the Academy Award-winning trio of films based on the book. Puzo’s other books include The Last Don and Omerta, both New York Times bestsellers. His companion, novelist Carol Gino, is the bestselling author of The Nurse’s Story, Rusty’s Story, and Then an Angel Came. She lives on Long Island, New York.
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OTHER BOOKS BY MARIO PUZO
The Dark Arena
The Fortunate Pilgrim
The Godfather
The Sicilian
The Fourth K
The Last Don
Omerta
Credits
Jacket design by Renato Stanisic
Jacket art by Bartolomeo da Venezia: female ideal portrait, so-called Lukrezia Borgia, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE FAMILY. Copyright © 2001 by The Estate of Mario Puzo and Carol Gino. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-184295-5
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