Prizzi’s Glory
Richard Condon
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
For the memory of
John Huston
Seeking good fortune
As we rise from the mud,
’Tis often we’re paid
From a purse filled with blood.
THE KEENERS’ MANUAL
You can make a fresh start with your final breath.
BERTOLT BRECHT
1
Early in December 1985, a rotten day weatherwise, Charley Partanna, CEO of the Prizzi family, sat behind his desk in the St. Gabbione Laundry, the family’s executive offices for street operations, in central Brooklyn, and listened, over the sloshing roar of the laundry vats turning outside his office door, to a proposal by Sylvan Robbins, president of the hotel company that ran the three Prizzi casinos in Atlantic City.
“This is it, Charley,” Robbins said. “Believe it. The wave of the future. Could you ever conceive of such a thing? A credit card for slot machines?”
“I don’t get it, Sylvan.”
“No more coins, no costs for cash security, handling, counting, wrapping, and guarding coins. No theft.”
“Sylvan, please, tell me how it works.”
“The player just sticks the credit card in the machine, coded to the value he wants to play for, and pulls the handle. If he hits a payoff, the recording inside the machine makes a sound like a bunch of silver falling out, but nothing happens, nothing comes out. But the card gets credited with the win, or, if he loses—ho, ho, ho—the card shows a debit. It can save the Prizzis about five million three a year on all the machines they have out.”
“Jesus. Modern science. But a lot of romance is gonna go out for the players.”
“I should put them in?”
“Not only put them in, send me all the dope so we can put them in at Vegas and all the other locations. You done good, Sylvan. If this really works, we’re gonna give you another quarter point.”
Charley didn’t depend only on outside inspiration. He checked out every operation zealously so that his middle management would know that he was on top of every one of their opportunities and all of their problems. At four in the afternoon he had an appointment with the chemist in Matteo Cianciana’s shit division to test batches of a new delivery of cinnari that had just come in from Miami and to supervise cutting it into dealer lots.
At half past six he had a meet with Girolama “Jerry” Picuzza to evaluate one of the new convenience orgy opportunities that they were testing out at eleven locations around town. If the orgies continued to win money the way they were going, he would recommend to Don Corrado that they go national.
Jerry Picuzza was an old-timer who ran vice and pornography for the Prizzis, and, being the old pro that he was, he had built up the orgies into something that really looked like it could hit. He had set up a regular schedule in four of the boroughs and in eastern New Jersey and southern Connecticut. He circulated a weekly chain letter to prospects, and it was really building membership. Sessions were held every weeknight, although special bookings could be arranged for Saturday, a slow television period, as well as patently promotional “brunch” orgies, with door prizes, on Sundays, at selected locations.
Jerry picked him up at the chemist’s at seven o’clock. They had dinner at a small Sicilian joint on West Fourth Street, a nice, clean place with white tablecloths and white-haired waiters who wore old-fashioned tablecloth aprons. In the entire restaurant there wasn’t a ketchup bottle in sight. He liked the atmosphere, but Charley hated to eat out because, no matter where, the food was never as good as the food he cooked himself—and they charged too much for it.
“Hey, how about this farsumagru?” Jerry asked. His cousin owned the place.
“Where’s the salami?” Charley asked with harsh justice. “Where’s the parsley?”
They drove uptown in Charley’s beat-up Chevy van. They got to the site just before eight-thirty. The action began at ten; and Jerry felt that within four months they would have to add an extra midnight session. The site was in an apartment house at Seventy-fourth and West End Avenue that was owned by one of the realty companies of the Prizzis’ Barker’s Hill Enterprises.
“This ain’t our top orgy unit,” Jerry said. “This is what you call a nice middle-class orgy opportunity.”
“We got other kinds?”
“What the hell, Charley: poor people are Americans—they gotta have a little fun of their choice, too.”
He rang the bell at apartment 7E. A very large man wearing a white jacket and pressed black trousers over his muscles opened the door. “Good evening, Mr. Gibson,” he said to Jerry Picuzza. “Miss Coolidge is expecting you.”
They went into the large, heavily carpeted living room, entirely free of furniture, with about two dozen cushions placed on the carpet around the room. “Miss Coolidge is in the viewing room,” the man said.
“We get sixty-five bucks a head from people who just like to watch,” Jerry said. “One hundred and ten bucks a head from the players, plus they both gotta pay a membership fee and an initiation fee. After all, this is a club. Also, we sell alia them refreshments, mostly pot, some coke, and a little booze. The players don’t know the watchers are watching, and neither side knows that both of them are having their pictures taken in case it should ever come up that we need the shots to negotiate something.”
“Good thinking,” Charley said.
Jerry opened a door and they went into a room with tiered chairs facing a one-way glass partition. A beautiful, willowy young woman, severely dressed in a black skirt and a gray blouse with high niching at the neck, was testing the lighting in the main room when they came in. She stood up abruptly. Charley felt a jolt of high voltage electricity run through his body, starting deep inside and spreading out simultaneously to the roof of his head as if a horned ibex had leaped from his stomach and had crashed into his skull. He had to take a step and a half backward because of the sudden force of an instant erection. He knew he had never had such an instantaneous reaction to seeing a woman. He couldn’t understand it. Nothing showed on her. The high collar of her blouse came up under her chin almost, and he couldn’t see her legs because she was standing behind a sofa, but if anybody asked him to bet, and he never bet on anything, he would bet that she had absolutely gorgeous pins.
“Good evening, Mr. Gibson,” she said.
“This is Claire Coolidge, our manager for the site,” Jerry said to Charley. To Miss Coolidge he said, “Whatta the bookings look like tonight?”
“Thirty-eight players, sixteen watchers,” Miss Coolidge said.
“That ain’t all we got going for us,” Mr. Gibson said to Charley. “We got exotic book sales. We’ll make them an individual videocassette of their action for an additional two-fifty, and the membership is beginning to show a lot of interest in S and M equipment.”
They left the site at 9:10 P.M. and drove back to Brooklyn with Jerry talking numbers all the way. “Figure this, Charley,” he said. “At this site alone we are taking down $4,180 from the players and $1,040 from the watchers plus the refreshments, which average about $800, and that’s only from one session a night.”
“Not bad.”
“Wait! Popular demand is gonna make us move up to midnight matinees. Eleven sites are working tonight and they work five nights a week.”
“Very nice.”
“But that’s nothing. When it goes national, we’ll have seventy-four national availability cities with an average of three sites per city, each one holding seven sessions a week. You can’t beat it for a moneymaker. This can be the biggest thing since crack and hula hoops. The public is really going for it.”
“You done good, Jerry. And if we go national, we’re gonna get y
ou a piece of the action.”
“Jesus, Charley. That is terrific.”
“Who is the girl?” Charley asked. His tone was mild, but that wasn’t how he felt. His heart began to kick at his ribs as he asked the question. He had been absolutely knocked out by the girl. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.
“What girl?”
“The girl—the orgy manager. Is she a hooker?”
“A hooker?” Jerry seemed shocked. “She’s got the worst case of the straights of anybody ever worked for me. She’s an outta-work ballet dancer.”
“Whatta you mean?”
“What I mean? She couldn’t get any work at what she does so somebody sent her to us and she was so straight I figured to myself this is exactly what we need to run the retail side. I took out the hookers I had in the other ten operations and I put in straights and business went up twenty-three percent.”
“How come?”
“Straight people don’t approve of orgies. They show it. That provides the necessary feeling of guilt which the players and the watchers gotta have.”
“That’s very tricky.”
“You gotta know my side of the business, Charley.”
“She wants to be a ballet dancer?”
“Go figure it. I am paying her five hundred bucks for a twenty-hour week but I know all she’s doing is saving up so she can quit me and go back to being an unemployed ballet dancer.”
“That’s the way you figure it?”
“No question. I got her replacement all lined up.”
“When she quits, tell her to call me.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe I can get her a job as a ballet dancer.”
2
By February 1986, when Claire Coolidge called Charley, he was forty-nine years old. He had spent half of December, all of January, and a week in February agonizing as he waited for her to call him. Charley could go along for months, even longer, without falling in love, but when he did it was as though he had been dumped into a giant Cuisineart, whirled around, and chopped into so many small pieces of anxiety and doubt that he might as well have never gotten out of bed in the mornings. He couldn’t do anything to bring her to him any faster than the route originally planned with Jerry because if he told Jerry again to tell her to call him that would be giving Jerry information that he didn’t need to know because then if Jerry used the information on Charley, thinking he was playing on a weakness to get himself an advantage, Charley would either have to fire him, which would cost them money, or have him zotzed, which would lose them the best flesh-fantasy man in the business.
So Charley waited it out and suffered. He lost eleven pounds, and although he knew he would gain it back after she called him, he had a tailor put alterations in one of his suits—both of his suits were made of dark blue serge—so that it wouldn’t be hanging on him when he met her again.
Charley’s ordeal happened a couple of times a year, less than when he had been fifteen years younger, but he put so much into his idealization of each girl as she happened to him that he couldn’t remember the process of having it happen to him—he only knew it had all started in the back row of a Loew’s in South Brooklyn with Vito Daspisa’s sister Tessie.
Charley Partanna was not a womanizer, not a lady-killer, but his susceptibility to beautiful women went beyond Mother Teresa’s susceptibility to the poor. For the past nineteen years, when a new woman happened to him, as lightning happens to trees when it strikes, he hated himself for a few seconds because all during the nineteen years, excepting for the few months he had been married to what’s her name, he had been engaged, on and off, to Maerose Prizzi, a great beauty and granddaughter of the capo di tutu capi in the entire world, so, as it kept working out, he was always a little ashamed of himself.
Now Claire Coolidge had happened to him. How could it be? He was forty-nine years old, approaching the half-century mark. Could it be possible that this could go on until he was a little old man like the don and the women whose beauty he admired would laugh at him? “Why me?” he had asked Father Passanante during confession. “God created beauty” was all the priest would tell him. “He must have meant you to enjoy it.” He only gave Charley two Hail Marys and one Our Father as penance.
After eight or ten years, Maerose could tell almost before he knew it himself that he was in the grip of his destiny—he knew she could tell, because she threw dishes and small furniture around—but she was very busy assisting her Uncle Eduardo at Barker’s Hill Enterprises so she never had the time to bring it up. He dreaded the day when she would have the time. He liked Sicilian women, but most of the time he wished Mae wasn’t so intense.
Claire Coolidge called him at 10:21 A.M. on February 16, 1986.
“Yeah?” he said into the phone.
“Is this Mr. Partanna?”
His heart leaped. Was this her? It sounded like her, although he wasn’t that sure of his memory for voices. It had been a very short time that they had been together and that he had heard her voice, but this had to be her because the only other woman who had his private number was Maerose Prizzi and it certainly wasn’t Mae. “Yes?” he said cautiously into the phone.
“This is Claire Coolidge.” His gasp cut into his throat and scalded his lungs. “Mr. Gibson suggested that I call you about the possibility of an opening in your ballet company.”
What the fuck kind of a thing was that for Jerry to tell her, that he owned a ballet company? “Oh, yes, Miss Coolidge,” he said, as if he had been searching his mind and had finally made the connection. “Maybe we could set up a meet.”
“Pardon?”
“Let me look,” he said into the phone, but there was nothing he wanted to look at except her. “Ah, are you free for lunch today, Miss Coolidge?” Good luck. He held on tightly. Jerry had said she was very, very straight, and he hoped to God that the implied intimacy of the question would not offend her.
“Yes, I am, Mr. Partanna.”
“Let’s say the Russian Tea Room at one o’clock.” The family owned 486 restaurants in New York and had the linen and towel concessions in 7,492 others, so why did he say the Russian Tea Room? He had never been in the Russian Tea Room. He wouldn’t even recognize the food—maybe they only sold Russian tea. “Do you know where that is, Miss Coolidge?”
“Two blocks north of the New York Ballet Company. One o’clock. Thank you, Mr. Partanna.”
Charley hung up and called Eduardo Prizzi’s secretary. Eduardo’s name had tremendous clout everywhere, from the halls of Congress to restaurant reservation desks. “Miss Blue? This is Charley Partanna. Do me a favor and call the Russian Tea Room and tell them I gotta have a nice table for two at one o’clock. Then ask Mr. Price if he can fit me in between four and five.”
“Can you tell me what you want to see Mr. Price about?”
“The ballet.”
“Ballet?”
“Where they dance on their toes.” Edward S. Price (Eduardo’s legal name) was on the board of directors of everything. He would know how to handle this.
He put on a hat and coat and left the office. “I’ll call back later,” he told Al Melvini.
“Whatta you mean?”
“What do I mean? I’m going out.”
“Oh. Hey, listen, Charley, if you’re going near it, could you pick me up a tube of Preparation H? My air cushion is leaking.”
“I can’t, Al. I’m busy. You duck out and get it.”
“Who’ll man the phones?”
“Drop dead, Al.” Charley dashed out of the laundry, got into the van, and drove to his apartment at the beach. He showered, powdered, applied a deodorant so strong that it could also have been used as embalming fluid, put on fresh underwear, his second set of the day, then immediately took the underwear off because it had blue and pink polka dots and if, by a miracle, he had to strip down with her that afternoon, he didn’t want to give the impression that he was frivolous. He re-brushed his teeth, gargled with chlorophyll-packed disi
nfectant, took liver salts because he had read in a woman’s magazine that the liver was where bad breath started, combed his hair, brushed it, then dressed in the blue suit with the slenderizing pencil stripe that he usually only wore to meetings with Eduardo Prizzi. Either Eduardo could set the ballet job direct or he’d know somebody who could do it. Why did he always read magazines whenever he had the time? Why hadn’t he read books on the ballet so he could give this woman the feeling that he had some idea of what he was talking about?
When he was ready to travel, it was ten minutes to twelve. He started for the door, then wanted to yell at himself. He was a Boss. Why didn’t he have a car and a driver like the other Bosses so he didn’t always have to worry about the fucking parking every time he went into New York? But he knew the answer. If he had a car and a driver, he would be expected to have an entourage, and if he had a lot of guys hanging around him all the time, he would have to talk to them. He telephoned the laundry.
“Al?”
“Yeah?”
“Send one of the picciotti to meet me in front of the Russian Tea Room in New York—West Fifty-seventh Street—at ten to one.”
“What kind of a specialist?”
“Get him there. I need him to park my car.”
He drove from South Brooklyn to the Tunnel, up the West Side Highway, east on Fifty-seventh Street. He got to the restaurant at five to one. Vinnie Le Pore was waiting for him on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.
“Park it, Vinnie,” Charley said. “And if you can’t park it keep driving around the block till I come out.”
“How long you gonna be, Boss?”
“I don’t know. Maybe two hours.”
“Jesus, I better get gas.”
Charley went into the Russian Tea Room. Claire Coolidge had beat him to it, which was all right, he told himself; it made him look cooler. What flashed across his mind was the movie guy who told him that he always got laid an hour before he had a date with the woman he loved because then she could sense his aloofness. Charley marveled.