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MARIO PUZO hated checking into hotels.
He was horrified at the notion that a finicky desk clerk might confuse him with a real-life Mafioso and upgrade his room out of fear.
The author of "The Godfather," who freely admitted that he never met a mobster in his life, wanted to be admired for literary inventions, not for some imagined fear that he, too, might make an offer no one could refuse.
"It was the funniest thing," recalled Carol Gino, a fellow writer and Puzo's companion for the last 20 years of his life. "We traveled often and there was always a certain deference offered to him." So if the accommodations were unsatisfactory, Puzo would ask Gino to go down to the desk and arrange for a better room.
"It got to the point where Mario would tell the clerk to show me the room first, before we checked into a hotel. He didn't want to be seen as a man you dare not cross, as if he were the Godfather."
Puzo died of heart failure on July 2, 1999, at the age of 78, but Gino declined to talk about their life together until now, with the publication this month of "Omerta" (Random House, $25.95), the final novel in Puzo's Mafia trilogy.
The mythic series began with the publication of "The Godfather" in 1969, when Puzo was 48. It was his third novel and his first commercial success. He was on the verge, he said, of giving up "small classics" that never made a penny.
The novel was a hit and soon enough became a multimillion-dollar property with the 1972 production of the first of three "Godfather" films. "The Last Don," the second in the series of novels, appeared in 1996, though Puzo wrote three other novels in the intervening years.
"I'm ashamed to admit that I wrote 'The Godfather' entirely from research," he once said. Four years ago, in a new introduction to "The Fortunate Pilgrim," his second book, he recalled, "Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth, in my own mind, I heard the voice of my mother...I heard her wisdom, her ruthlessness and her unconquerable love for her family and for life itself."
He perceived "Omerta" as a life-ending book, "for me...