Six people who would show up.

Sunday night, lights off, the Corleone wedding on again. I know it the way you know the house you grew up in: the oranges on the table, Luca Brasi practising his speech in the corner, Michael in uniform telling Kay it's his family, not him. People assume it's the guns. It was never the guns. It's the study with the blinds half shut, and the man behind the desk who says he'll take care of it and does. I work somewhere a reorganisation arrives by email. Noted: there's a man on my floor who checks on me every week and wants nothing for it. I'd been sitting in the study with the blinds shut without noticing. Last Sunday I switched the film off after the wedding and rang him instead.

Tuesday, 8:58 p.m. Forty-one green dots in the voice channel, three continents, a raid schedule that's held for six years. Somebody's baby crying in the background in Perth. I say pull in two and forty people I've never shaken hands with go quiet and do exactly what I say. I keep the spreadsheet, I wrote the rules, I handled the one who emptied the guild bank. I've never once been late. At work I'm the one who forgets his timesheet. Noted: the organisation is real, the trust is real; the only thing that isn't real is the dragon. So I started finding out what it costs to do it in the room I actually live in. Rec league, two streets over, Thursdays. Fourteen weeks. Not late yet.

No names, no city. A back room behind a restaurant, a card table with a cigarette burn in the felt, and an envelope in my hand at twenty-two. I drove, I waited outside, I kept my mouth shut, because I'd seen Goodfellas and knew the two rules. Then an older man sat me down over a coffee and said the thing the films only say sideways: they love you until you cost them something. The loyalty runs one way, upward. The ones at the bottom who mean it get used up first, because they mean it. I watched that happen to my friend. What I wanted is what you want: somebody at my back. I have it now. A brother-in-law, a foreman, a card game that's lasted eleven years. Nobody hands me envelopes.

Kamurocho, two in the morning. Neon on wet pavement, the Millennium Tower, a kid in a leopard-print shirt looking for trouble outside the convenience store. Between eleven and three there's a mission, a map, and a man in a grey suit who keeps his word whatever it costs him. Kiryu did ten years for a killing that wasn't his, to protect his brother; I couldn't return a text. Noted: the quiet hours are when the other stuff comes in, the job, the friends I haven't rung, and the game keeps count. Throwing the console out lasted nine days. Now, one night a week, it goes off at midnight and I write down one line of whatever comes in. Worse than the game. The only thing that's ever made the mornings better.

Every few weeks, growing up: the trumpet, the undertaker in the dark, 'I believe in America.' My father never bothered with the sequels. He put the first one on after dinner and we didn't talk. He died in March. In his things I found the case worn white at the corners, and I watched it properly for the first time as a grown man. What I saw was a man who wanted two things, his family safe and his word to mean something, and got the second at the price of the first. My father was quiet. Forty years at a plant, never a raised voice at home. I think it was the only place he saw a version of himself taken seriously. This year I'm putting it on for my nephew, and I'm sitting beside him.

Found it in a volunteer fire company. Half of them are over fifty and the dispatcher's name is Carol. My first year, standing in the bay at five in the morning while a man twice my age checked my straps, I had everything I'd loved in the films and the games. A crew. A chain of command. A code you have to keep. A name that means something in four towns. De Niro in Heat says don't get attached to anything you can't walk out on in thirty seconds; that's the sales pitch. Arthur Morgan rides for a man who says it's all for the family, right up until it isn't; that's the ending. What I found has the loyalty and it points somewhere. It costs me Tuesday nights and a pager. Nobody has to die for it.