Prizzi's Glory
“Sorry to hear that.” They moved into the house to greet Aunt Amalia, who did not recognize Charley. He was thrilled. He knew then that it wasn’t all entirely out in front; he was carrying the whole new image deep inside himself; he felt different. Amalia had attended his christening and had slipped him pocket money when he was eight years old; she had written him once a week in Nam; she had supported his first marriage and had mourned when his young bride had passed away.
Charley leaned over and kissed her cheek. “It’s me, Aunt Amalia,” he said. “Charley.” She stared at him, totally bewildered; then she remembered that she had known since Charley and Mae had gone to Europe and she began to weep and giggle at the same time.
She led them up the two flights of stairs to the door to the don’s huge room, then hurriedly left them to get back to her stoves.
The don hadn’t seen Charley since he had become the new Charley. It made him nervous and overexcited at the same time. Nervous because he couldn’t believe it was Charley and he was confused as to how a stranger had appeared for lunch with him; overexcited because he knew it must be Charley because he was with Charley’s wife and Charley’s father and, tellingly, they had introduced him as Charley. The don insisted on a toast to the bride and the two sons packed inside her. He rushed to a bottle of Leonforte, which ran to 14.5 percent alcohol, which was waiting in a cooler. “This is from the mountains at the middle of the island near Enna,” he said larkily. He filled each glass for each of them and for himself, lifted his own, drank it down, and filled it again. “You done a terrific job on him, Mae,” he said. “I can’t believe it’s Charley. There is something familiar about him, not that he looks like Charley, but he looks like some other people I musta known once. And the verce! The way he talks! The clothes! He makes Eduardo look like a used-car salesman. Whatta day! Twins! Conrad and Angie! How did you think up the names?”
“It’s Angier,” Maerose said somewhat coolly.
“And Rado,” Charley said.
“I never heard such a name. You coulda knocked me over. I can hardly get my breath.” He gulped down another glass of wine.
“Hey, take it easy, Corrado,” Angelo said.
“Watch this,” the don said gaily, and with a flick of the wrist, he tossed the last few remaining drops of wine in his glass into a vase across the room. “Hey? I can still do it. That’s kottabos, a game of skill invented fifteen hundred years ago by aristocratic Sicilian Greeks. Jesus! I gotta sit down.” He tottered to a chair and fell into it.
Amalia and Mae rushed to him. He waved them away, weakly smiling his awful smile. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s just the news. I never had such terrific news since my father and my uncles sent for me and told me I was gonna be made.” He stared at Charley unbelievingly. “Go ahead, Charley. Say something. I can hardly follow the way you talk now.”
“Pshaw, padrino,” Charley said, toeing the carpet precisely in the mating ritual manner John Wayne had used when he was propositioning the schoolmarm. “I am so very glad to see you again.”
“You look so—so wholesome.”
“Don’t that beat all?”
“Magnifico!” the don cried. “Come, I can smell the food. Let’s eat.”
They sat down to a lunch that was as baroque and overassembled as the rococo room that contained it. It was the moment that Charley had been dreading since the invitation had arrived. They started with a tremendous beet salad, seven diced beets to a plate in nests of rugola and endive. “I wish I could tell you what beets do for me,” the don said, “but there is a lady present.” He began to eat as if the Turks were at the gates. The others, knowing the horror of nutritional doom that was to follow, nibbled at the beets or pushed them around the plate.
Platters of pasta ‘a Sfinciuni,’ noodles baked with bread crumbs, anchovies, garlic, parsley, and a tomato sauce, which was itself a creation of many ingredients, were laid down in front of them. The don ate with the speed of a vacuum cleaner, his face down out of the wind, his fork and spoon making rapid shovelsful to his mouth, pausing only to bite into the caciotti, small hot rolls filled with cheese, and to gulp the wine that he continually poured into a glass from a large bottle at his elbow before anyone else might get the same idea. Then came the pesce in gelatina, a mixture of lampreys and the meat of sea rays in vinegar-flavored gelatin. “I am made ecstatic by pesce in gelatina,” he sang, uncharacteristically, because he never spoke while he was dining. There was a second pasta course after that, spaghetti with finely chopped lobster and a drawn butter sauce, then what Charley saw as sheer impudence on Amalia’s part—a whole baked swordfish with an olive in its mouth, a dish honored in Agrigento, accompanied by stuffed artichokes and eggplant in a rich sauce of tomatoes, celery, onions, olive oil, pine nuts, and capers.
As he took the last forkful of the exquisitely baked fish, as he turned to ask Amalia what they would have for dessert, the don collapsed face flat upon his plate, as a samurai in days of yore and in ages and times long gone before might have fallen upon his sword. Maerose and Amalia screamed. Beautifully programmed, Charley yelled “What in tunket!” and Angelo Partanna ran to the door of the room to call down the stairs for Calorino to get the doctor.
Amalia darted to the telephone and called the rectory at Santa Grazia di Traghetto. Father Passanante, who was having an all smoked codfish lunch, said he would be right over.
The Bartons lifted the tiny body gently and carried the don to his bed. They laid him flat on his back, the almost transparent eyelids half-closed, his skin the color of white Carrara marble when it is streaked with green. Calorino rushed into the room and began to rub his wrists, then took off his tiny shoes and rubbed his feet and ankles. He set up a screen, explaining, “I gotta change him,” then took off the don’s clothes and dressed him in a lavender flannel nightshirt with cerise stripes and combed the few strands of his white hair.
Father Passanante arrived within fifteen minutes with his death kit of sacred oils. He went behind the screen, spoke softly to the don, and administered the last rites of the Church.
Dr. Winikus got there before the priest left. He conducted an examination behind the screen, only to emerge shaking his head. “No sense in moving him,” he said to the family. “It wouldn’t make any difference.” He shook everyone’s hand, then left the room after saying that the screen could be taken away.
Eduardo was located by the Barker’s Hill satellite. He was on the shuttle between Iowa, New Hampshire, and Florida within the clamor executed by the nineteen candidates for the presidential nomination fielded by the Party, their airplanes, motorcades; the chief advisers and lobbygows; the population of press agents and local committees; the vast camarilla of national press that attended them as the children had accompanied the Pied Piper; the portable public address systems and the high-speed Xerox machines; their women and their camp followers: their masseuses, astrologers, palm readers, and patch workers.
Eduardo flew to New York in the Ronald Reagan, reaching the don’s bedside at 5:20 P.M.
As he came into the huge room, leaner and meaner from the months of hard campaigning that meant, centrally, the designation of the distribution of PAC money to the pols within the state, a knockout electioneering effect, Mary Barton was seated in a chair beside the don’s bed, holding his hand, her tautened face made more beautiful by grief. The don’s daughter, Amalia, sat weeping on the other side of the bed. The don, on his back, looked like a rag doll made out of used linen handkerchiefs. Angelo Partanna and Charles Barton stood at the foot of the bed.
Eduardo, unused to the new Charley, mistook him for Dr. Winikus, the don’s doctor. “What is the prognosis, doctor?” he asked Charley anxiously.
“I swan!” Charley said. “Edward, how good to see you. I’m not the doctor. I am Charles Macy Barton, your successor.”
Shocked, Eduardo backed away from him, bumping Angelo. He turned. “What did the doctor say?” he asked.
Angelo’s eyes filled with tears. “He may have overeaten, h
e coulda had too much wine, Eduardo.”
“That’s not possible.”
The don’s little eyes opened. He turned to Maerose. “You are like me,” he said. “You forgive nothing.” His eyes closed.
He called for Amalia. She reached across the bed and took his hand. “My faithful daughter,” he said. “How could I have lived without you?”
“My cooking killed him. Killed him,” Amalia sobbed.
“Eduardo?” the don murmured after a while. Maerose called to her uncle, who came to the bedside. “I am here, Poppa.”
“Eduardo—”
“Yes, Poppa.”
“When they make the final deal for the nomination—” The don whispered the words.
“Yes?”
“Hold out for attorney general. I have talked to them, but you must remind them that we control 23,856 PACs spread across forty-three states.”
“We do?”
“Talk to Angelo.” The don closed his eyes again and called feebly for Charley. Frustrated, Eduardo took a step backward but remained beside the bed. Charley came forward.
“I am here, padrino.”
“You must do great things with the business,” the don said. “I have made my will with fifteen witnesses including the governor, a justice of the Supreme Court, Henry Kissinger, and his Eminence, the Papal Nuncio. Fifty-one percent of the business will belong, in trust, to your sons.” He paused to regroup his energies. “It is not a taxable will, you understand. It is just an old man’s wishes. I own nothing.”
Eduardo could not avoid overhearing his father repeat the dooming sentence. Now it was confirmed; in writing. Charley’s whelps would get 51 percent of the $11 billion. Eduardo almost went blind with frustration and resentment. His father had taken everything from him: his Sicilianness, his own nose, his way of speaking, which was the way his mother had spoken. He had cast him out upon a sea of dishwater WASPS and, ripping Eduardo’s birthright away from him, had forced him to become one of them, had driven him to administer the tens of millions of dollars that swept in upon them day after day like surf to build, alone and with his own hands and sweat—no, not sweat, gentlemen did not sweat—with his own mind to create the bottomless cornucopia, Barker’s Hill Enterprises, which his father was going to give away on his deathbed to two po-faced, boobish babies. He looked to his father for some sign that it was all a joke, perhaps a wink.
Don Corrado seemed to be trying to rest for the next great effort. His eyes were shut when he spoke again. “Bring me Angelo,” he said.
Angelo Partanna came forward to the bed. He had grown old the way a fine malacca cane ages. He was hard and supple and all about him was the sheen of elegance, a man in his eighties with dark skin, who weighed about as much as a cricket, with a beaked nose in the manner of a macaw, a widow’s hump, and black eyes as expressionless as a teddy bear’s. Corrado Prizzi, who had known some of the most labyrinthian minds of his generation, had called Angelo Partanna “the most devious mind ever to come out of Sicily, Israel, or Ireland.” He had brought Angelo to New York from Agrigento fifty-five years before, and Angelo had, from that day onward, plotted at his side. If a poll could have been taken among the executives of the twenty-six Mafia families of the United States, Angelo Partanna would have been voted “the consigliere’s condigliere.”
“Tell them to get out,” the don said.
Angelo turned and looked at the assembly that was scattered across the enormous room either stoical or sobbing. They filed out of the room.
“Are they gone?”
“Yeah.”
“Is the door shut?”
“Yeah.”
“The will—my letter—” He closed his eyes.
“Where is it?”
“La forza del destino—Angelo! Lissena me. When it’s over, you gotta promise me—the funeral—just the people who are here today. Don’t tell nobody till I’m in the ground. Protect Eduardo and Mae’s kids, your own grandchildren. Keep the money safe forever.”
He sagged into a dark brown forest where dark brown dust filled the air gradually shutting out all light. He called out as he fell. “Swear it!” Then the blackness cradled him.
“I swear it, Corrado.” Angelo felt the blow instantaneously. Don Corrado Prizzi, ninety-six, once an immigrant boy who had come to America, sweatless in December, with his little family and tiny nest egg, who had multiplied that pittance into an $11 billion fortune, had passed into the ages. He had been the most mafiusu of all of the capo di capi that the history of the fratellanza had ever known, and now he was gone to the angels. Angelo felt a great power of energy leave the room as when Santa went up the chimney on Christmas Eve. He crossed himself, wept for a few moments, wiped his eyes, and, as he had all of his life, kept his own counsel when he left the room.
In the hall Charles Barton was saying, “Jerusalem crickets! I never saw the don looking so badly. And that is saying a lot.”
“He looks so badly and he felt so still that I have a terrible feeling,” Mary Barton sobbed, holding up her Aunt Amalia.
Eduardo patted her shoulder. “No, no. Not at all. He needs rest, that’s all. It’s probably just a minor digestive problem.”
“Oh, I hope so, Uncle Eduardo.”
“I have to get back on the road, but you fellows can come cheer him up in the morning. Angelo, may I talk to you for a moment?”
Mary Barton knew she was only a few of the don’s breaths away from her destiny. From the time she was twelve years old, she knew that one day she would take over all the powers of her grandfather and become the first woman don, the first capa di famiglia in the seven-hundred-year history of the Mafia. This was the day of the greatest triumph of her life no matter what else ever happened to her. This was why she had married her husband and was going to have his children. Suddenly a terrible thought entered her dreams of glory. Her grandfather had to die for her to take over his powers, but when he died, there would have to be a funeral and she and her husband would be expected to appear at the funeral of the most notorious of all organized criminals of all time. The world would see her for what she was. She would be exposed to all the rotten things the media was capable of showing. Her already extraordinary position in New York’s nouvelle society would be at awful risk. She shuddered.
Angelo and Eduardo withdrew a few yards down the hall. Eduardo said, “My father told me to ask you about the PACs we control.”
“I have a list.”
“Is it—can it possibly be—23,856 PACs spread over forty-three states?”
“If he said it, it is.”
“Public campaign financing is a complicated system. A candidate must meet certain conditions such as raising five thousand dollars in at least twenty states before the government will match the money any campaign puts up—and that could run to six million dollars and up for a well-financed candidate to the day the government money is freed in January nineteen ninety-two, next month. I have spent almost six million in fifty states, so I qualify.”
“Your father was talking 23,856 PACs with twenty, twenty-five million dollars.”
“My God! If we can make the transfer before December thirty-first, I can make it. With the matching money, I can have thirty, forty million dollars in the campaign chest. I can be president! Nobody in the whole field of candidates can raise more than five million for the homestretch campaigning—plus equal matching funds.”
“Naturally, Eduardo, you know yourself all those PACs can’t go to you.”
“They can’t?” His face went blank. “Why not?”
“Because we got to protect the two-party system. Half has to go to the Democrats. What would be the sense of having muscle with only one party?”
“Half?”
“Say you get twelve thousand PACs, they get eleven thousand. We can shade it a little.”
“Can you meet with my people sometime tomorrow?”
“You are really going for it, Eduardo?”
He nodded. “It was my father’s wish,” he
said stiffly. “I’m not a frivolous man, Angelo. You know that. I’ve been going for it since my first denial that I was going for it. And I can get it. Can we set up a meeting?”
It was impossible for Angelo to give something and get nothing. “Will there be something in this for Charley?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you make it, a good spot—recognition. Something nice.”
“But Charley is the family Democrat.”
“So if you win you’ll be big about it. You’ll call for bipartisan action.”
“Like what for Charley?”
“Who knows? If you agree in principle, we can talk about it later. Quash a few indictments for him. Throw a coupla dozen defense contracts his way. Lose a coupla IRS files for him. Load him down with insider trading information. Move a little of that arms money for our Freedom Fighters into his personal account.”
“All right.” Accepting the idea really stuck in Eduardo’s craw. God! Imagine being forced to appoint a man with Charley’s background as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—but PACs were the name of the game. “Have the lists ready. And Angelo?” he drawled.
“Yeah?”
“I’d like to see that letter of my father’s. Could you send me a copy?”
“If there are copies people could say it’s a will. If it’s a will, it’s taxable.”
“But I am entitled to read that letter.”
“Sure you are. I’ll show it to you. Then you’ll hand it back to me.”
Eduardo shook his head slowly as if he had seen a miracle: 23,856 PACs. He couldn’t believe it. Then the realization hit him that his father had cheated him again. Half of those PACs had to go to the Democrats.
The don had been a student of what had to be seen as a possibly brutal side of American politics, that structure by which the Congress of the United States provided the means to have themselves openly and legally bribed. Corrado Prizzi had understood it instantly and had employed PACs from the first moment of their legal existence, even though it took away from bribery all the craft and skill that his people had been so many centuries learning. Not that he did anything differently from any other group that was now empowered to bribe its government. He had organized his people the way the American Medical Association PACs were set up, the way the American Bankers’ and the Used Car Dealers’ PACs had been organized. His national PAC mechanism source, under the warm-hearted law, was made up of the fifty-four principal crime groups of the country: the twenty-six Mafia families as well as the Blacks, the Hispanics, and the Orientals who constituted the national American merchandising force to bring forward the narcotics, gambling, vice, and the manifold other activities that the American people so zealously demanded. The PACs were all small organizations, truly the voice of the people: 23,856 PACs each offering up an average of $100,000 had yielded almost $25 million in political bribes, so it could be regarded as altogether certain that the bribed would show real gratitude to the bribers even as they had shown it to the American Medical Association and to the bankers, used car dealers, the toxic waste disposers, and so many others who celebrated the greenbacking of America.