Vito was a good-looking kid, but he grew up a little battered on account of the scar tissue, and after a while he got a little punchy from pleasing crowds by taking punches just to show how rugged he was. Little kids could have fun with him by jumping up and down in front of him with their hands held stiffly at their sides and watching him fall over backward on his head. It was part of being punchy.
Every Saturday afternoon when they were thirteen, Charley and Vito used to take Vito’s older sister Tessie to the movies and take turns giving her a feel. When they were seventeen they cleared over six hundred dollars. They ran a New Year’s Eve party for ten dollars a head, all the beer you could drink, where they had a man who did nothing but sweep up the broken glass and a four-piece orchestra that, it turned out, couldn’t play anything but “Sweet Georgia Brown.” It was so successful that they did this every New Year’s Eve until, the fourth year, two guys were hurt over a woman and a cop almost died. The word was passed down that they had to quit holding the rackets.
After Charley was made, he and Vito went into different kinds of work. Vito was never made so he bodyguarded bookmakers and picked up extra money intimidating building trades people. After about a year, Charley got his father to get Vito a slot with Vito’s brother Willie, who ran the controlled substances merchandising for the Prizzis from Miami to Maine. The government called it controlled substances at Eduardo’s suggestion because that way the voters who read about it didn’t get scared that the whole country might be turning into dope fiends. The people who run up those kinds of statistics said that just calling shit something that it wasn’t—controlled substances, a meaningless kind of a name—had increased gross sales of all shit products by 21.3 percent.
Willie’s operation was very big because of the tremendous demand for the shit. The people who made up the shit market had to run very fast trying to keep up with their own lives and their credit cards. Grown-ups and kids were working two jobs each at one time to keep up with the mortgages, taxes, toxic waste, dentists’ bills, and the rest of the American dream. They had to find something to pull them through from one day to the next. Booze made them sleepy and could get them fired. Pot made them think they felt sexy when they were only exhausted. The media kept saying that cocaine was a recreational drug. So the Prizzis handled the top end on a national basis, took their share, then split the profits with the franchisees, who were the other families across the country.
Vito was third man in the East Coast operation, under Joey Labriola, who everybody suspected of being a culatino but didn’t say nothing because he was a big part of Willie’s operation. Suspected Joey was a culatino? Joey was either supergay or he was a female transvestite trying to act like a man. But he had Willie’s protection and Willie delivered a lot of money, so everybody pretended Joey was a visiting lumberjack.
“What did Vito do, fahcrissake, Pop?” Charley asked.
“He killed two cops and then got himself surrounded by about two hundred cops in his own apartment. He tried to make a deal with Davey Hanly to give them our entire shit operation on the East Coast. He has to go down, no matter what,” Pop said.
“Aaaah, shit,” Charley said.
“We got an Army assault rifle for you. It hits so hard it’ll go right through the door, through Vito, and out the back of the building.”
Charley remembered Vito swimming in the Gowanus Canal when everybody said it could give typhoid; Vito yelling up Bushwick Avenue at Arcade Annie who was pregnant again, “When you gonna drop it, Annie?” and the laugh he got. He remembered Vito scoring his nineteenth consecutive kayo at the Armory. He thought of Vito doing the Peabody and moving faster, forward or backward, than anybody on the floor.
“He done everything wrong, Charley. He shoulda depended on the Prizzis to get him out, but he had to fink. Eduardo had it all set up. They were gonna bring him out surrounded by twelve state troopers holding an armor plate on his head to protect him from the cops, and even the TV people said it would be the shot of the year. He was gonna be lost inside under a different name until the two cop killings blew over and Eduardo could set up the right kind of a trial. Then, when he was cleared, there would be a job waiting for him as manager of an Ohio track.”
“What’ll I tell him to get him lined up?”
“Tell him Eduardo made a deal with the mayor and it’s fixed so after a couple years inside we’ll give him a good job in Vegas.”
“He hates Vegas.”
“Tell him Louisiana. He ain’t going nowheres anyways.”
8
Davey Hanly had passed the word to Angelo that they wanted the human interest shot to keep the networks sweet, so Angelo called Vito’s brother Willie and told him to come over to talk to Vito. “And come alone, you hear? Don’t bring Joey.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are a buncha TV cameras here! Whatta you think? the don wants everybody to think we’re a bunch of finocchi?”
“Jesus, Angelo, watch what you’re saying.”
“Just don’t bring Joey.”
Willie was an animal who had been taught to wear shoes and a tie. He sold dope like it was the alchemist’s lost formula for turning vegetables into gold; he didn’t care what it did to anybody, but his profound feelings about Joey were something else. He resented Angelo’s attack on Joey so deeply that he could hardly think of anything except getting even. He went out to the beach considering what kind of a club he could find to beat Angelo with and, when finally he was standing in the crowd outside Vito’s building, the whole thing came to him. What Vito was doing inside that apartment house was giving him and Joey their big chance to get out and make a whole new life together. It would be like they were married.
He took his instructions from Gallagher and from Manning, the TV guy, nodding to show he understood. He could hear the stand-up reporters on the air live referring to him as the brother of the alleged killer, a respectable wholesale grocer who could not understand where his brother had gone wrong. Willie stood in the clearing that had been made in front of Vito’s apartment house, in the floodlights that had turned night into high noon, the avid crowd in a deep, wide semicircle behind him, facing a battalion of more than eleven television cameras, countless still cameras, radio microphones, police brass, and gofers, then he talked into the field telephone the cops had set up in the open space in front of the building with the big crowd all closed in behind him and the network cameras shooting him from the front. After seventeen rings on Vito’s number, Vito came on the phone.
“What?” he said.
“Vito? Willie. How you doin’?”
“How’m I doin’?” Vito screamed. “I’m fuckin’ doin’ my own funeral.”
“Lissen, Vito—you can come out. It’s okay.”
“Okay? Okay? There’s two hundred cops down there who gotta get even for their buddies or something. Fuck you, Willie. I ain’t coming out.” Vito hung up. The rotten language would be beeped out of the tape before it went on the air. Willie looked at Gallagher blankly. Manning, standing beside a TV camera and facing Willie, made revolving motions with his hands for Willie to keep talking.
“For our dead mother’s sake, Vito,” Willie said into the dead telephone, “throw down your guns and come out here where we can help you. This is your brother. It’s Willie. Lissena me.”
Five blocks away Rosa Daspisa, who was slugging away at a bottle of muscatel as if it had never given anybody a hangover, watched her husband become an instant media celebrity on the twenty-three-inch screen and went crazy. She streaked out of the apartment in her kimono and kitchen apron, wearing bedroom slippers. She was a swarthy woman who still had a nice figure and a head of black ringlets like Medusa, but the muscatel, over the past couple of years since her husband had become engaged to Joey Labriola, had stepped all over her face.
She burst out of the building, flagged down a cab as soon as she hit the street, and in five minutes she was at Vito’s apartment house. She tore through the crowd as if someb
ody had just handed her the Heisman Trophy and grabbed Willie by the arm. “You fag-lover!” she yelled, tears glazing her cheeks, “whatta you tryna do to me?”
The cameras had moved. Willie shook her off like raindrops. Two cops grabbed her, but Davey Hanly said something to one of the cops, who turned her over to Davey. He pulled her, sobbing, through the crowd, which had lost interest in her, to the bar across the street. He led her to the back of the saloon, where Angelo was seated alone in a booth.
“Siddown,” Davey said.
“What’s this?” Pop said.
“Mrs. Willie Daspisa.” He left them.
Rosa stopped crying because she was fascinated by Angelo’s suit. It was gray vicuña, the stuff cumulus clouds are made of, carrying a darker gray herringbone pattern. “That’s a beautiful suit,” she said.
“What happened, Mrs. Daspisa?” Pop asked gently in Sicilian. There wasn’t a more tender man in the environment.
9
After Willie dumped his wife he stood at the forward edge of the crowd, where he had a good view of everyone who moved in front of the building. He watched Hanly come out and go in again. Willie sensed that something was happening. They were setting something up, he was sure, because the task force was bunching up outside the building. They must be organizing to take Vito out. He almost jumped straight up when he spotted Charley Partanna on the far side, edging through the crowd to the west entrance of the building. He watched Charley go in, then he had a figure on it. He decided to wait around and see if they brought Vito out feetfirst. If they did, Charley had done the work. Willie grinned. He could now sink the hooks into Angelo for what he called Joey.
When Charley was inside, the stand-up TV reporters, fed by Gallagher, identified him as Detective-Sergeant George Fearons, who was going to try to persuade the suspect to give himself up. Fearons, they reported to an audience later rated at thirty-one percent nationally, was one of the new breed of psychologist cops. He was going in to face, entirely unarmed, an alleged killer, relying on his own knowledge of human motivation to protect himself and to get a hunted man to surrender. Either he would come out with his prisoner in handcuffs or the final assault would be made to bring Daspisa out by force. There was a short break for commercial messages.
Charley picked up the assault rifle from Davey Hanly inside the building, where Hanly was waiting with Sergeant Ueli Munger, the officer in charge of the task force. Munger had been demoted from the rank of captain recently for knocking down two superior officers following a nineteen-hour ordeal of getting a woman down from the high cables on the George Washington Bridge.
“You wanna go through a short course on the weapon?” Munger asked Charley. Charley shook his head. He was getting depressed. Twenty years of hanging around with Vito, and now he had to blow him away. He looked at the rifle and hefted it. It could blow anybody away.
“It’s a sweet piece of equipment,” Munger said. “It gives about ten rounds a second and each one travels 2,300 feet a second. The beauty part about these babies is that like if the bullet goes in at the shoulder it can come out in the thigh, so if you got ten of them going in every second God knows where they come out.”
“You got thirty bullets in the magazine, Charley,” Hanly said. “That oughta do it.”
Charley took the noisy elevator up to Vito’s floor. Riding up, he remembered an article he had read once that said there was only an imaginary connection between the past and the present. The article, written by a big scientist, had asked Charley directly how could there even be a present when it was always, instantaneously, becoming the past. Charley could look back and see all the great times he and Vito had, but, as the magazine article said, those two people didn’t exist anymore, they had existed only while those other things he remembered were actually happening—and only when they were happening. The friend of Vito’s he had been back in the past wasn’t the same Charley Partanna who was going to zotz Vito now. The Vito he would be doing the work on wouldn’t be the same Vito he had all the good times with. There were hundreds of Vitos and hundreds of Charleys all existing separately in time, strung out across their memory like beads; spaced out like separate frames of film on a continually running, irreversible reel. He hadn’t even met the Vito he was going to have to put away.
Charley didn’t flatten himself against the wall. He rang the doorbell of Vito’s apartment, admiring the nice, clean hallway, his kind of place.
“Davey?” Vito yelled from behind the door.
“It’s Charley.”
“Charley Partanna?”
“Who else?”
“Where’s Davey?”
“Angelo sent me. He talked to the don.”
“How come?”
“Eduardo had everything handled. He had it set so the state troopers were gonna take you out with a two-inch-thick armor plate over your head. The cops wouldn’ta been able to touch you. The mayor was gonna lose you for two years, then Eduardo woulda talked to the right judge.”
“So—what happened?”
“You blew it, Vito. Eduardo had it all set up for you but you hadda tell Davey you’d give them the Prizzi shit operation.”
“How could I blow it? I been right here.”
“You talked to Davey, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Who do you think Davey talked to when he went back to the street—his mother?”
“Ah, shit—I blew it.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m all wore out. I shouldn’ta whacked that cop with the car, but Teddy Egan had it coming. Hey, Charley?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on in and we’ll have a cuppa coffee.”
“Why not?”
“All I got is instant.”
“Instant is okay.”
“Hey—in case I forget it, will you tell them to give out my ring name like when I fought under it. Okay?”
“Absolutely.”
Vito checked the load and the safety on his gun. He held it at ready as he took the chain off and unlocked the three dead bolts. His face was sad. What the hell, he figured, he had to do it, it was Charley or himself. Vito flung open the door and fired. The shot went into the ceiling because Vito was flung backward so far and so fast by the force of the rounds that were piling into him and jerking him crazily like he was being pulled everyway by powered steel cables.
The assault rifle was on automatic. Charley had opened it up, holding the rifle waist-high. Vito was slammed back across the entrance hall to crash into the furniture on the far side of the living room. Charley went into the apartment and gave Vito one more burst until the magazine was empty. He said, “Vito?” but there was no answer.
He went back to the main floor. Hanly and Munger were waiting for him.
“From what it sounded like, he’ll go quietly now,” Hanly said.
“Yeah.”
“You gonna bring the TV in?” Munger asked Davey.
“That’s the name of the game, ain’t it?”
“Listen, Davey,” Charley said, “I hadda promise him that you guys would give out his name under his ring name he fought under, Dimples Tancredi.”
“Holy shit,” Munger said excitedly, “you mean that guy up there was Dimples Tancredi, the great Armory fighter?”
The task force, led by Sergeant Munger—who, the networks revealed, was a courageous Swiss who had been born in Schaffhausen, one of the relatively few in the Department—rushed into the apartment of the alleged killer, just ahead of the NBC camera crews, with guns blazing, subduing and killing the suspect instantly and delivering a terrific camera shot that one network used beginning eight months later in three separate cop series and miniseries. Munger was decorated for valor and eventually repromoted to the rank of captain although subsequently it appeared that that could have happened for reasons of mayoral politics. Almost all of the resolution of the thrilling stakeout was seen on television nationwide, repeated for the requisite three days, then bumped by a serial murderer who wa
s terrorizing the nation’s capital, who in turn was bumped by the hijacking of the Orient Express by a fanatical Middle Eastern sect, all of it covered, day and night, by the oculus mundi and nineteen Canadian stations.
10
Hanly got Charley out of the building through the back delivery entrance. Charley walked around the block and gradually made his way to the bar across the street from Vito’s building. Pop was sitting in the last booth.
“Okay?” Pop asked.
“Yeah.”
Pop got up and went to the telephone booth, took out the OUT OF ORDER sign off the mouthpiece, put it in his pocket, and dialed.
Charley decided he would have time to catch a quick movie before he went to the Latino and picked up Mardell at eleven thirty. He could use a little of Mardell after the work he had just done, if there was such a thing as a little of Mardell. Pop came back from the phone booth.
“The don is prouda you, Charley,” he said, smiling broadly.
“Did anybody tell Vincent yet?”
“How could I tell him? He’s home, asleep.”
“I mean did anybody tell him about the stakeout?”
“It’s hard to say. Jesus, you can’t imagine what a tiger Vincent used to be.”
“I still wouldn’t want to be the one who crosses him.”
“You wanna have dinner?”
“I ain’t really hungry, Pop.”
“Can I drop you?”
“I gotta get a cab and go back to the school. My car is still there.”
“You done right tonight, Charley. That’s all you gotta know, you done right.”
Charley nodded. “That Vito was sure a crazy guy.”
He was waiting for Mardell at the Latino bar on the street level when she came up the stairs from the club at eleven forty. She was surprised to see him. He asked her if she wanted a drink, but she wanted to get out of there. As they moved out to the street he said, “How come the rush?”
“That place is filled with gangsters. They make me nervous.”