They went out and looked at the house. Joey dictated pages of notes to Willie. They went back to town, and Willie told Louis that he’d be calling him as soon as they had everything together. Louis told them he was dying to see what they’d come up with, but the final presentation would have to be made to his boss who would be flying in from Milwaukee.
59
Charley flew from New York to Seattle two days after Louis left, intending to check into the Olympic Hotel in Seattle to wait for Louis’ call. He had a once-removed sentimental attachment to the Olympic. Many years before he’d had a friend who was an old press agent for the Ringling Brothers Circus who said he had left his last erection in a bureau drawer at the Olympic and, although he had gone back three days later to reclaim it, it had never shown up again anywhere.
The flight got in on time. It was a beautiful day filled with the special air that is carefully guarded by the Northwest. Charley was second in line to get off the plane. He was eager to get the work done and get back to Mardell, while he wondered simultaneously what was happening with Maerose. He felt safer for her since his talk with the don, because it had to be that the don had talked to Vincent so that, when they brought her back from Mexico, Vincent wouldn’t beat her up.
He was concentrating on trying to imagine the chaos and misunderstanding the coming announcement of his marrying Mardell was going to cause in Brooklyn—not to mention possible violence when Vincent heard it. After thinking about it, he ruled out violence. The way Maerose had set the whole thing up, he was the injured party; no matter what he did he had a right to do it because he had been wronged. He was a couple of thousand miles away, hovering somewhere near Maerose, trying to think how he could somehow soften the blow on her already broken head when she heard the news about him and Mardell. She had to expect it. Mae had done what she did because she had figured the whole thing out long before he had. She had decided that he wanted to marry Mardell. He hadn’t said otherwise because he had wanted to marry Mardell, but he also wanted to marry Maerose. If only everything had gone along the right way, the way it had been until he went to Miami and she had to call him there. Mae had it figured, but she had it figured wrong. She wanted to keep Vincent and his vengeance away from Charley and to keep Charley from losing her grandfather’s respect. And she certainly knew about Mardell. Every time, as soon as he thought like that, he knew it was all impossible. She had wrecked her life. She was an outcast from the family. It was going to be like living in darkness inside the freezer compartment of a refrigerator, and he was going to be building his own life with Mardell on a foundation of Mae’s pain. She had thrown everything away to prove what she didn’t have to prove: that she was a Prizzi and that she was going to decide for herself what was going to happen to her and not be swept along and finally discarded because Charley had decided that he had to hold somebody up who was weaker than she was.
The passenger tunnel for off-loading the passengers from the plane into the Seattle airport wasn’t working, so they had to roll up one of those old-fashioned boarding staircases that politicians always come down, never wearing a hat even in a blizzard, waving at the TV cameramen.
Preoccupied with the past, favoring the bad leg he had got out of the war, Charley tripped on the sill as he came out of the plane, tried to get his balance, got his foot jammed in a tight place and, while the upper part of him fell down the stairs, he broke his right leg between the ankle and the knee. Then, suddenly freed, he was taken by his weight and gravity down the whole cascade of steps, headfirst. He landed on his face on the tarmac, breaking his nose and picking up two big shiners. Just to make the weight as a hospital statistic, he suffered a line fracture of the skull and a concussion of the brain.
They had to let him lie there until the ambulance came, because his leg was twisted into such a grotesque shape and he was bleeding from the ears. The stewardesses would not let anyone move him. The sixty-seven other passengers coming down the stairway from the plane had to step over him. Some noticed him as they stepped over him; they had to hear him because he was making a lot of different kinds of noises even though he wasn’t conscious. Most of them didn’t look down, either because they were in a hurry or because they didn’t want to hold up the line. Three people just didn’t see him at all.
When the ambulance got there, they loaded him on a gurney and lifted him into the ambulance where they doped him lightly for the ride to the hospital. While they were getting him ready for the emergency room, a nurse went through his pockets and his wallet and came out with Pop as next of kin. The hospital called Pop. Pop spoke to them in a voice that left no doubt: they were to do nothing until the best of the specialists got there.
When Pop hung up he called Lazzaro Fissa, Boss of the Seattle family, told him what had happened to Charley, and asked him to get the best bone man in the area to look at Charley’s head, his nose, and his leg. In ten minutes Fissa had Dr. Abraham Weiler, the best orthopedic surgeon in the Northwest, in a limousine on its way to the hospital.
After a delay of four hours during which Weiler stared at X rays and plotted his procedure, they finally put a helmet cast on Charley’s head, operated on his leg and put it into traction, and reset his nose. All the soft flesh around his eyes had turned dark purple. The eyes were closed tight on either side of the huge dressing, which covered the upper part of his face and the back of his head, handling the broken nose, his fractured skull, and his concussed brain.
Dr. Weiler talked to Pop on the telephone after the operation and told him Charley was going to be okay. He gave him a lot of medical bullshit which Pop didn’t listen to because he didn’t understand it.
Pop called Louis Palo in Yakima and told him to go into Seattle and look out for Charley. After that was done, he told the don and Vincent, in that order, but he forgot about Mardell. The shock of what Maerose had done still filled his mind. The party had been held to announce Charley’s engagement to Maerose, so he figured that Charley had worked out some kind of a solution with Mardell. She had ceased to exist for Pop. She lived in a different kind of world anyway.
It was eight days before Charley could put together the facts that Louis was in the room and that Louis could call Mardell. Time had just telescoped into itself. He’d hear Louis’ voice, then the night nurse would be there and Louis would be gone. At the tenth day, although Charley couldn’t see through his two swollen eyes, he was able to realize that he didn’t know where his wallet was, and that’s where Mardell’s number was because he hardly ever called her, he just went there. He yelled for the nurse and when she came in he demanded to know where his wallet was. She told him to calm down, his wallet was in the hospital safe. He told her to go get it. She said they wouldn’t release the wallet without Charley’s signature. Charley wasn’t able to see well enough to sign until the twelfth day, and by that time he was in despair. In the vision that his intense confinement had brought to him, he knew what had happened on West Twenty-third Street in New York. He knew Mardell had killed herself. On the twelfth day, although his leg was still in traction, he didn’t need Louis to make the call. He called Mardell himself.
He couldn’t reach her at the apartment and he couldn’t reach her at the nightclub that Marty Pomerantz had booked her into. Those calls covered a time span of five hours, so he really sweated it out. Fuzzily, he decided if she was still alive she must have closed in Newark, but after two more tries he was able to get someone on the backstage phone who told him that Mardell was supposed to be there but that she hadn’t come in.
Charley had Louis look up a number for Marty Pomerantz. When he got the call through, Marty said she was on her way to play a club date in Boston.
“Cut the shit,” Charley said. “They told me in Newark she was still booked there. How can she play Boston?”
“Who’d you talk to in Newark?”
“How do I know?”
“What do they know? I got her booking slip right in fronna me.”
“Boston?” Charley said
hoarsely. “Boston is outta town.”
“It’s a weekend date and it pays two grand.”
“Is this a weekend?” Charley asked Louis. Palo nodded.
“Listen, Marty,” Charley said into the phone. “I’m gonna give you a telephone number in Seattle. You have her call that number, and if I don’t hear from her by nine o’clock tomorrow morning, then you are out of business.”
“Charley—what’s the matter? Tell me what’s the matter.”
“I’m worried that she coulda killed herself, Marty. It was in the cards. That was the way she was.”
Marty saw he had done everything he could do to protect Mardell if she had done the human thing and had backslid. “Charley?” he said tentatively.
“Yeah.”
“She ain’t in Boston. She’s here, in New York—at the apartment.”
“What the hell is going on here, Marty?”
“She’s drunk. She locked herself in and she won’t answer the phone or the doorbell.”
“Then why the fuck did you tell me she was in Boston?”
“Because she’s such a nice kid. Anybody can tell she’s crazy about you, and I didn’t wanna make trouble for her.”
“Drunk?” Charley was appalled. He couldn’t stand drunks. “She don’t hardly drink!”
“Well—I dunno. The only time I got her onna phone three days ago, lemme tell you, she was drunk. She kept calling me Charley. I couldn’t convince her. It ain’t my fault. I can’t even get her to answer the door.”
“Ah, shit, Marty. I don’t wanna give you a hard time.”
“Please. Whatta you want me to do?”
“Look, Marty—I broke my leg getting off the plane in Seattle. I got two plaster casts on my head. I’m on a bed, in a cast with a pulley. So can you check her personally twice a day for me? Just for a coupla days till I can get outta here? But don’t tell her about my leg or my head—just tell her to call me at the number I’m gonna give you.”
“What happened to your head?”
“I broke it when I fell down the stairs from the plane.”
“That could be a serious thing.”
“Mardell is the serious thing. Mardell!”
“Suppose she won’t answer?”
“Hang on.” He covered the mouthpiece and looked over at Louis. “Suppose she won’t answer?”
“Give the super a hunnert bucks,” Louis said.
“Give the super a hunnert bucks,” Charley said into the phone. “Then go in. If she passed out, get her to a hospital and let them dry her out.” He gave Marty his hospital number.
Charley hung up. Louis took the phone off Charley’s stomach and put it on the night table. Charley rang the call bell. The nurse was one of those handsome black women who won’t take lip or a compliment.
“Listen, Clarice,” Charley said, “can you get Abe in here?”
“Dr. Weiler?”
“Yeah.”
“What for?”
“A friend of mine is in trouble in New York. I gotta help.”
“Okay.” She left the room.
Dr. Weiler was a short guy with a gray mustache, a three-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year practice, a problem with casino gambling, and a long white coat.
“Look, Abe,” Charley said. “I got trouble in New York. If I broke my leg on a ski lift in Sun Valley you could fix me up with one of them metal rockers on the bottom of the cast so I could walk.”
“What good would a metal rocker be on your head? You have a fracture and a concussion up there, Mr. Partanna.”
“I gotta get outta here.”
“The concussion is the tricky part. Let me talk to your doctor.”
“Abe—listen. You gotta convince him. I’ll take my chances.”
“The new electric wheelchairs are nice.”
“I’ll sign a release.”
“Bet your ass.”
“Can you put leeches on my eyes or something.”
“So you’ll wear shades.”
“When can I leave?”
“Tomorrow morning?”
As soon as Dr. Weiler left, Louis got up and closed the door. He came back to the bed and sat down. “You want me to handle Willie and Joey?”
Charley shook his head. “I got a lot of time tied up in them guys. I gotta do it.”
“Like tomorrow night?”
“I don’t wanna come all the way out here again. It made too much trouble. Yeah. Set them up for tomorrow night.”
Louis left that afternoon for Yakima. He called Charley at the hospital at ten o’clock the next morning and told him the address of the rented house. “I got a driver from the Fissas to pick you up at the hospital at noon, Charley. He’ll get you to the house by the back roads, then I’ll bring Willie and Joey out there at six tonight.”
The driver brought him a piece. They fitted the wheelchair in sideways, directly behind the driver’s seat. Charley sat on the back seat with his bad leg propped up in front. He had a nice view of a lot of trees and land as they went over the mountains. The car rolled him into the driveway of the rented house at five o’clock. Charley told him to park in the woods somewhere and then come back to pick him and Louis up at six forty-five.
He was tired of looking for Willie. He couldn’t even remember Joey. The whole edge had come off it, but the work had to be done; nobody who screws the Prizzis can expect to get away with it. Charley sat in the wheelchair in the kitchen of the house and waited, blaming Mardell for taking the whole edge off the end of a hunt that had lasted months for two guys who deserved to get what they were going to get.
He wondered what Mardell had looked like when she was a little kid. He started to feel contempt for her mother, but he remembered what her father must have been like to make the mother like that. He thought about Maerose. He wondered where she was and how she was hacking it. As long as she stayed away from the booze. They had to make sure she stayed away from the booze. Then he really remembered how and where she was and he didn’t worry about her and booze anymore, he worried about her getting away from Vincent. Anyway, why blame anybody except myself, he brooded. If I had taken lessons on how to get off an airplane I wouldn’t have tripped and I would have been back in New York in two days and Mardell wouldn’t have got drunk and I would have had pleasure in putting Willie and Joey away—but that now had become just another job. At five thirty he heard Louis come in with them. Louis walked them around the front rooms, telling them how the landlord was going to move the furniture out when they decided which furniture was going to be moved in, and Charley could hear Joey saying what would look nice.
When Louis got them back in the main room, Charley rolled himself in on the wheelchair.
Willie looked across the room at Charley, grabbed the back of a sofa for support, and vomited. A deep, dark stain appeared at the front of Joey’s beige trousers as he sank slowly into a chair. Joey’s jaw was on his chest, his shirt was open to his knees with gold chains around his neck and gold bracelets. Charley didn’t greet them.
Louis got them to their feet and guided them patiently along the hall to the back stairs, which led down to the cellar. Charley followed until he saw where they were going. “No good, Louis,” he said. “The wheelchair is no good on stairs.”
“Stairs?” Willie said blankly.
“Take them out to the garage. Bring a coupla kitchen chairs.”
They went out through the kitchen door, Willie and Joey each carrying a kitchen chair. “Hey, wait,” Charley said. “There ain’t no telephone in the garage. We’ll have to talk here.”
“Talk?” Joey said.
Louis told them to sit down. Charley faced them, about eleven feet away. Louis stood out of the line of the droplight, against the wall.
“Lemme explain something,” Charley said reasonably. “I been tryna find you for months but I didn’t care if it took ten years. Where’d you get the idea that you could get away with it?”
Both men were very pale. Willie had the shakes, so he folded
his hands under his arms and leaned forward on them. Joey started to cry. He leaned over into his hands making high, sobbing sounds. Willie took a deep breath and said, real hard, to Charley, “Whatta you tryna do, Charley? The guvvamint will break your back if you lay a glove on us.”
“The guvvamint gave you to us.”
Willie thought about that as Charley said, “I am here to try to make you understand what you done to your own people, the people who gave you your place in the world.”
“Joey and me hadda get away, Charley. We couldn’t live the way we hadda live. Not in the environment. So when you gave it to Vito, we saw our chance an’ we took it.”
“You made a lotta trouble, Willie. You almost fucked me up with that Mallon. You cost the Prizzis a lotta money.”
“There was nothin’ else we could do.”
Louis watched Willie and Joey brighten up because Charley was so conciliatory. They didn’t seem to have any idea that they were dead.
“Whatta you want from us?” Willie said, hard again. “You didn’t look for us for months to give us this Dutch-uncle shit.”
“I want you to make some phone calls. I want you to say you’re sorry for what you done.”
Joey’s sobs had calmed down. Willie put his hand between Joey’s shoulder blades and patted him steadily. “Who do I call?” Willie said.
“Joey, too.” Charley rolled the chair to the wall phone, taking a piece of paper out of his pocket. He dialed a number, then talked into the phone in Sicilian. “Don Gennaro? This is Charley Partanna. I am sitting here with Willie Daspisa and Joey Labriola. They wanna talk to you. Just a minute.”
He waved Willie to the phone. “Gennaro Fustino.”
“What do I say?” Willie asked.
“Tell him you done wrong to the Prizzis and you deserve to pay.”
Willie took the phone. He delivered the message mechanically. Charley gave the phone to Joey. Joey said his piece calmly, no wailing. Charley made four calls to four dons. Willie and Joey said the same thing to each of them. When it was over they were looking much better.