“A date? Jesus, Mae—”
“A line has to be drawn, Charley. We can’t go on and on like this.”
Charley thought of his father and his mother. He thought of the don and the family and how he had never lived outside it because, as far as he was concerned, there was nothing outside the family. If he decided that he had to stay with Mardell he would have to leave the family, leave all his people. If only Mardell was the kind of a girl who would take a bundle of cash and forget the whole thing.
“Yeah,” he said to Maerose, staring into her eyes. “We gotta set a date.”
She kissed him. “It better be all settled in your mind, Charley, because by now the don has told a lot of people. Like my father.”
39
George F. Mallon knew he had been outgeneraled by God, by fate, or by some rotten sons of bitches at City Hall. He knew who had done this to him and to poor Marvin; the party in power had cold-bloodedly set out to ruin him through his son; his poor ham-fisted, dim-witted, poor relation of a son. He should have sent the boy into the seminary for television training when he had declared for Jesus. He could have had his own television church by now, raking in the bales of money, helping to set the foreign policy of the United States; but he had to insist on trying to turn the boy into a businessman. Somebody had to take over the business. They were only beginning to build television tabernacles.
Mallon boiled with outrage. A conscienceless pack of unscrupulous politicians had been willing to wreck a fine young man’s life just to hold on to their rotten, filthy power over the city he had tried so hard to love. What was there to love? New York was, at most, a picture on an airline calendar which stretched for thirty blocks each way on three avenues in Manhattan, and its symbol was an apple, just as the symbol of the fall of Adam and Eve had been an apple.
Those rotten ward heelers must have been into ten times the graft that he and his people had suspected. The stakes must be higher than heaven for a man like His Honor the Mayor to go along with a terrible scheme like this—using his whey-faced, boob-brained son’s natural life as if it were some ten-cent chip in an evil gambling game.
George F. Mallon certainly knew about organized crime. He was an American businessman who had been in the construction business all over the country for most of his life. Even though he had been building for the Greater Glory of God and His Nielsen ratings, that fact had not spared him from the inexorable demands of hoodlums. He had paid them off. He had even entertained them from time to time because it had seemed like sound business policy. Some of the most religiously thrilling Christmas cards he had ever received had come from organized criminals, their wives, and their families.
Nonetheless, the main plank in his platform had been to use the powers of his office, if elected, to crush, or otherwise negotiate with, the forces of organized crime in the City of New York. But, despite his long experience with them and his plans for organized criminals, he did not make the connection between the heinous threat to his candidacy and the future of his son with the life and liberty of the underboss of the Prizzi family. George F. Mallon knew it was just rotten politics and rottener politicians who had framed his boy and would continue to threaten his future until the election had passed.
He was sickened by the enormity of knowing that people outside his intimate circle of counselors, aides, and speech-writers had known about his determination to prosecute the hoodlum who had shot the other hoodlum almost in the actual presence of the mayor of New York at Manhattan Beach that fateful night, and most certainly in the presence of and with the full knowledge of high officers of the police department, and it was slowly coming to him that perhaps even the criminal organization of the city had had something to do with Marvin’s predicament. He spoke with perplexity to the two campaign aides who were hunkered around his desk.
“I can’t believe it,” he said, “I simply cannot believe that in this day and age the mayor of the City of New York would stoop so low as to do this thing to my son just to ensure his chances of re-election.”
“Well, you better believe it, G.F., because that’s what he did.”
“You don’t think it was the hoodlum element?”
“What could they have to do with the election?”
“Set up a meeting with the mayor for tonight.”
“Tomorrow is Election Day, G.F.”
“He is holding my son as his hostage! I have to see him.”
The meeting was arranged with considerable difficulty because the mayor, understandably, felt that George F. Mallon had maligned him beyond the call of political campaigning. The meeting was to be held in a room reserved by a Mallon aide at the McBurney Branch of the YMCA on West Twenty-third Street for fifteen minutes between six thirty and six forty-five that evening. The mayor arrived alone, wearing shades. George F. Mallon was waiting when the mayor knocked on the door of the single room. He sat on the bed. The mayor sat on the only chair.
“I’m sorry about your troubles, Mallon,” the mayor said. He was a hyperkinetic man who thought of himself as being at the center of a sea of calm.
“Let’s not waste this precious time with hypocrisy, Heller. My son is in a Louisiana prison. He could be seventy-three years old before he gets out—at the minimum.”
“Whatta you want from me? Maybe you should have gotten him laid before you sent him to New Orleans.”
“I will pray for you, Franklin Heller. Now. Let us talk about how you can undo what you have done to my boy.”
“Done? What I done? Who gave him such an allowance that he could afford two ounces of heroin? Did I tell him to carry a gun?”
“Who planted that dope and that gun on him?” Mallon exclaimed. “Who switched his room at that hotel while he was out at the Evangelical Convention? Who framed him?”
“How do I know? What? You mean you think my people set your kid up?”
“Who else?”
“Who else? You’re six months in politics and you think this is how people get elected? You should have your mind washed out. I’m twenty-one years in politics. You win some, you lose some, but you don’t frame people on narcotics charges and murder charges and rape and indecent exposure charges just to keep a city job. Shame on you, Mallon. And good night, you disgust me.” He leaped to his feet.
“Mr. Mayor! Please. Accept my profound apologies. I am—I’m distraught. I have no experience with this kind of thing—politics included—I’m grabbing at straws.”
The mayor shrugged. He knew less than Mallon about how it had happened that Marvin Mallon had been arrested in New Orleans. George F. Mallon had told the world that he planned to break his back and throw him out of office by making him an accessory in the zotzing of Vito Daspisa. But he didn’t know Vito Daspisa had been zotzed. He thought Vito Daspisa had been shot while resisting arrest. He had been there himself. He had seen most of it happen with his own eyes, and the rest of it, like everybody else, on a television screen. Mallon was a monster but he had been ruined, and his kid was in trouble.
“All right. Listen to me, Mallon. About what happened to your boy in New Orleans, I don’t know whether he is innocent or guilty. But I can tell you two things. First, whatever happened down there cost you the election—although, frankly, you never had any chance to win the election—and two, me and my people had nothing to do with it. What happened to your kid, I mean. Now I gotta run. We got a big rally at the Garden. Tomorrow is Election Day, in case you want to remember.” He patted Mallon on the shoulder and left the room.
40
Mallon did the straightforward, law-abiding, thing. He retained the most influential law firm in Louisiana for his son’s defense, Groot & Talliesen, a member firm of the Barker’s Hill Enterprises Group, which was run by Edward S. Price. Although they put their best people on it, they had to tell him that the case against Marvin was watertight; there wasn’t a chance of even getting him off with a suspended sentence; Marvin faced forty years for the possession of narcotics with criminal intent alone, which
under federal law had to be served without the possibility of parole, but his attorneys thought they had a chance, at least, to bring the charges down to mere possession, with a sentence of only seven to fifteen years. With the right judge—and money could do a lot in the state political machine—Marvin might get a suspended sentence at least on that charge.
The murder charge was tricky and dangerous, the lawyers said, but it was circumstantial. If they could find an explanation for why Marvin was carrying the weapon that had caused the death of the narcotics wholesaler in Baton Rouge, they could, thanks to Marvin’s lack of prior criminal records, feel confident that they’d win a jury over to Marvin’s point of view. If not, Marvin would surely be sentenced to a fifteen- to thirty-year prison term.
“Explanation?” George F. Mallon exploded. “It was a plant! The whole goddam thing is a plant deliberately calculated to cost me the election.”
“Then there is the aggravated assault and the attempted rape of a minor, the indecent exposure, and the illegal breaking and entering,” the lawyers told him on the roundtable conference call between New York and New Orleans. “Those could bring an aggregate of twenty to thirty years.” But the real difficulty, the lawyers felt, beyond the rape and the aggravated assault, were the charges that Marvin had tried to force a fifteen-year-old girl into committing unnatural sexual acts, because Marvin had been caught in flagrante delicto on those counts: he had broken into the girl’s hotel room and ripped her clothes off, battered her and assaulted her. There were badly damaging pictures of Marvin after he had exposed himself to the teenage girl. The girl and her mother were pressing the police and the media to urge the courts to bring the case to earliest trial. The two arresting officers and the house officer at the hotel would testify as to how Marvin had battered the girl. There was absolutely nothing anyone could do for Marvin about those charges, which could carry a thirty- to fifty-year sentence in Louisiana.
“My God, poor Marvin—”
“He faces a total combined sentence of a possible 150 years in the state’s prison—although of course he could be out in sixty-five with good behavior—unless—”
“Unless—what?” Mallon asked.
“There is a—ah—man—here—in New Orleans, that is, who has considerable—ah—community influence and the consensus is that if you could talk to him—”
“Who is he?”
“His name is Gennaro Fustino. He is a—ah—philanthropist.”
“You are speaking euphemistically?”
“Yes.”
“What can he do?”
“I would say there is no limit to what he could do, in this case.”
“Like what? How?”
“He might be able to persuade the—ah—girl, Laverne Toby, to withdraw her testimony and—ah—in the case of the narcotics and the—ah—alleged murder weapon which your son was allegedly carrying—well, we would say it would most certainly be worth your talking to him.”
“What church group is he with?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to have some pretty formidable introductions arranged. If he can do anything, I want to talk to him under the best possible auspices.”
“From his name, I would guess he’s a Catholic.”
“I can get to the Pope. Check the man out on his religious affiliation, please.”
“Well—perhaps this office can—ah—arrange such a meeting.”
“Set it up for late Wednesday morning. I’ll fly out as soon as this election is definitely settled. Not that it isn’t definitely settled right at this moment. I had this city government on the run and now they have broken my back.” Mallon slammed the phone down.
41
Charley rode back on the plane sitting beside a man who hummed “These Foolish Things” for three hundred miles. It was torture, not because it reminded him of Maerose or Mardell, he didn’t need any help with that, but because it was one endless drone.
Charley changed his seat. He looked out the starboard window and began to hum “The Washington Post March” and tried to think. A week after Election Day it was all set up that Laverne Toby and her mother would fade out of the picture, unavailable to testify against Marvin Mallon, the ballistics report would turn out to be a mistake and, on laboratory examination, the contents of the two tinfoil parcels would turn out to be talcum powder. After Marvin signed a release absolving the hotel of any responsibility for his misadventure, he would be all fixed up. But he, Charley Partanna, would be in exactly the same bind with the same two women in his life.
He was all clear on George F. Mallon, but he was going to have to live like a thief on the lam. If Mae had been shook up enough to hire private detectives to check him and Mardell out at the Miami airport and to pin down that he had stayed over at Mardell’s apartment in New York a couple of dozen nights, then she was going to keep the same people on him until after the engagement party, when there wouldn’t be anything he could do about it anymore.
But Mardell had had pneumonia. Nobody just turns his back on somebody who has just had pneumonia. If she needed him before, she needed him triple now. Pop would have handled the hospital bill, but who knew how much cash she had on hand? How much food could she have in the house, and how could a woman who had just come out of the hospital be expected to carry heavy groceries home from a supermarket? She wasn’t working, and also she was nuts enough to send any extra money she had to her mother in England, so it could be that she didn’t even have enough money to buy groceries. He had to see her. He had to talk to her and make sure she was all right. If she was all right, he would be able to cool it because, after almost a three-week break, she might even have gotten used to it.
He could bring her a list of club dates from Pomerantz and make sure that Pomerantz had the loot to take care of her if she wasn’t strong enough to work yet. The time had come to lop her off, Charley admitted that, but even Maerose would understand that the only thing he could do was to go and see Mardell so he could tell her all this. But it was risky, so the best thing would be to not even go home to the beach but to lose any possible tail Mae might plant on him at the airport, and to go straight to Mardell’s. Not so straight, either. Down the alley behind her house and into the building by the back door.
The cabin attendant brought lunch. “How come airlines never have Italian food?” he asked her.
“You ever eat reheated pasta?” she asked him. “You know what it’s like?”
“I can guess, I guess.”
“You ever eat canned spaghetti?”
“Canned spaghetti?”
“Reheated pasta is worse. I know—my husband is an Italian and he can handle canned spaghetti. But when it comes to reheated pasta he like wants to slash his wrists.”
“I’ll eat the salad. I hope I can keep it down.”
“The bread isn’t great, but it isn’t bad.”
The flight came in at La Guardia. Charley got on the non-public phone on the tarmac outside the airport building and called Arrigo Sviato, who headed up the high tech freight and luggage robbery unit at La Guardia for Religio Vulpigi, Charley’s old boss. He told Arrigo he had to get out of the airport without anybody seeing him go. Arrigo asked him for the number on his baggage check, then where he was, and when Charley told him he said to stay right there until they could send a van over for him that would take him right into Brooklyn. “I gotta go into New York, actually,” Charley said.
“Why not? The van will bring your bag.”
42
Mardell dressed carefully. She put on her gold sweater, which she had worn the first time she had lunch with Charley, and made sure that her Cleopatra hair was precisely in place. The outfit had moved Charley to expressions of admiration and she did want to make a good first impression on Miss Prizzi, if only because she wanted Miss Prizzi to be proud of Charley’s choice of her as a rival for Miss Prizzi’s affections.
Miss Prizzi had telephoned the evening before. She had been very correct, not one bit rude or vulgar.
She said she wanted to come by for a chat. A chat? Well! Miss Prizzi had been so correct that Mardell had felt constrained to invite her for tea. Promptly at five the doorbell rang, and it was Miss Prizzi.
Mardell’s English speech was entirely in place. “How do you do, Miss Prizzi,” she said, extending her hand. She felt that it was impossible to overdo the accent. Maerose took her hand and shook it, silently. They went into the living room, where the tea things had been laid out.
“I didn’t know whether you preferred high tea,” Mardell said, “so I settled at a medium-high level. Please do sit down here.”
Maerose sat contemplating the medium tea, staring hungrily at the small pile of tiny, paper-thin smoked salmon and cucumber and watercress sandwiches. “That looks delicious.”
“The tea is vintage Darjeeling, from the highest Himalayan tea gardens. One hopes you like Darjeeling. One was leaning toward Lapsang souchong even though it is smoky and pungent.”
Maerose glared at her. “I have looked forward to meeting you.”
“I, you, as well.” Mardell tried to pattern her performance on her distinct memory of Dame Edith Evans.
“I understand you work at the Casino Latino?”
“Yes.”
“My grandfather owns it.”
“Well! Your grandfather. There is a really famous man.”
“Yeah.”
“I have a friend—a Miss Harriet Blacker—who is working for graduate degrees in the behavioral sciences. She would give her toes to meet your grandfather.”
“He’s quite old, my grandfather. And retired. He doesn’t see people anymore.”
“Pity. How nice of you to come by.”
“I am here to talk to you about Charley.” Maerose’s speech was taking on the slightest of British accents, Mardell noted, feeling that scored points for the La Tour side.
“It would all have been so much more effective if Charley had been here,” Mardell said. “While we were both here, that is.”