That left his two granddaughters: Maerose and Teresa. Teresa was respectable in London, Ontario, where he had set up her husband in a solid dental prosthetics business. But the sister, Maerose, who on the outside looked like she was the most respectable of all of them, had too much of his own character. Of all of them, she was mafiosa; there was something so perpetually devious and eternally patient about the woman that he felt, in a rush, if respectability for the family were to be accomplished in the few moments of time left to him, because it stood to reason that he couldn’t live forever, he had to begin now to pave the avenues to make it accessible.
“Amalia, my dearest child,” he said after swallowing dreamily, “ask Angelo to come to see me.”
“Yes, Poppa.”
Angelo Partanna, seventy-seven years old, had been his friend and adviser for sixty years. Angelo did not need a mantle of respectability. He was immensely dignified, beautifully put together, and pitiless. Angelo was mafiusu, the heartless Sicilian omo di onore, when it came to business. His son, Charley Partanna, Mae’s husband, had all his life tried to better himself, to be more American than the president of the United States. But he wasn’t sure Charley had any feelings about respectability. Chances were he thought he was already respectable because he had a high school education. Charley was a slow thinker, but if everything was explained to him clearly, if all the pioneering thinking was laid out in front of him and he was told that this was his duty to the family to carry out what was required, there was no man alive who could or would deliver the results the way Charley would do it. And most certainly after Charley had the future explained to him by his wife, after he and Angelo had laid down the major line to Charley, there was no other way for Charley to go except the right way.
Four things had to be done, the don decided with a feeling of release, to accomplish a meaningful plan: 1) he must make those of his people respectable who wanted it; 2) Eduardo, who was certainly ready to be retired, had to be kicked up the stairs so that Charley could succeed him; 3) Charley’s past work had to be cleaned up; and 4) Charley and Maerose had to have some children so that they could succeed Charley and so that their children could succeed them. What else was respectability for?
Amalia took the bare plate away and placed before him the platter of coniglio in agrodolce, the dish from his home province of Agrigento, rabbit in a sweet-sour sauce that was so different from the agrodolce found in Italy. The magnificent sauce had pieces of eggplant, celery, olives, capers, roasted almonds, honey, lemon, and vinegar. The Arabs hadn’t wasted their two hundred years in Sicily for nothing, the don salivated proudly as he attacked the plate.
“I called Angelo, Poppa.” Amalia, a buffona, a woman with a not unpleasing moustache, said.
The don nodded.
“He’ll be here at half past four, right after your nap.”
“Good,” the don said. “No telephones, dear child. Not even the White House.”
8
Calorino Barbaccia, a short, dark man of abnormal physical strength, tripled as a front doorman and lupara specialist as well as acting as the don’s valet. He was a retired shtarker who had made the occasional hit as a standby replacement during the annual summer holidays of the regular workers. He was a handy fellow with a garrote or a pillow when close quiet work was demanded.
Calo removed the old man’s bed socks tenderly, rubbed his feet either pink or until feeling returned to them, whichever was first, and gradually dressed the upper half of him while he was still in bed. Then, with a series of practiced, quick movements, he slid off the don’s pa-jama bottoms and slid on, in succession, his long woolen underwear and his trousers. He swung the short, frail legs off the bed and pulled on the woolen socks, then the tiny, soft shoes made of vici kid.
“How is your boy?” Don Corrado asked.
“He’s still in solitary, padrino.”
“How can we help him, Calo? The most important thing to him is beating up on policemen, now prison guards. Every time we have it set to have him transferred to the farm, he sneaks up on a guard.”
“That is smorzando, padrone.”
“More like spiegando. Why don’t we have somebody dope him for a couple of weeks? At least until we can get him out of the constant solitary and on to the farm if he’s too doped to wanna beat up on a guard.”
“That’s wonderful, padrino. That’s terrific! Can you do that for my boy?”
“Starting tomorrow. Get me to my chair.”
Calorino lifted the don as if he were a bag of toy balloons and carried him across the room to the chair, which half-faced the river and the great up-thrusting teeth of lower Manhattan. “What time is it?” the don asked.
“Half past four, Excellenza.”
“Send Angelo Partanna in.”
Angelo sat in a comfortable chair facing the don, not speaking because he had not initiated the meeting.
“Have a cookie?” the don asked, indicating the several large dishes of cookies and confections on the table at his right.
“I think a cigar.”
“You got one on you?”
“No.”
“Calo!”
Calorino appeared in the doorway. “Yes, boss?”
“Bring cigars.” He turned to Angelo. “You want some grappa?”
“To tell you the truth, Corrado, I’d like a nice glass of iced tea.”
Calorino offered the opened box of Mexican cigars to Angelo, who selected one from the center, where it had been exchanging aromas with the cigars on either side, bit off the end, spat it into Calorino’s palm, and accepted a light.
“I’ll get the tea,” Calorino said and left the room.
The don spoke generally about the hot weather and the traffic on the river, so Angelo knew he was waiting for the tea to come and for Calo to go before he would say what was on his mind. “How’s Charley?” the don asked.
“Fine.”
“Is Mae pregnant yet?”
“He didn’t say nothing.”
“He woulda said?”
“Yeah. Anyways, Amalia woulda heard from Mae herself.”
“What are they doing when they go to bed? They are married two years! I had two kids when I was married two years.”
“It’s in God’s hands, Corrado.”
“Lissena me, Angelo. No more hanging around. She’s gotta go to a couple of specialists and find out what they’re doing wrong.”
Calorino brought the iced tea: a tall glass, a tub of ice, and a pitcher of tea and ice cubes with lemon slices floating on top. He prepared the tea elaborately and served it to Angelo. He bowed to both men and left the room.
“So?” Angelo said.
“We gotta do a lot of thinking, Angelo.”
“Just give me your general direction, Corrado.”
“We all gotta take our chances, okay? But I spent my whole life figuring out how to beat the odds. The future keeps crowding us, Angelo; then all of a sudden there is no floor to walk on—we’re not even here anymore—so while we’re here, we gotta concentrate on beating the odds.”
“Just give me an idea of what you got in mind, Corrado.”
“I’m gonna make a will. Not actually a will, with a lawyer and all the tax problems, but a statement that you and Amalia and maybe the Papal Nuncio will witness, that tells what has to happen when I’m not here to make sure.”
Angelo nodded. Angelo did not deny the don’s possible death.
“I’m gonna put in the will I don’t want no big funeral. Not even a small one. Just you and Charley and Mae and Amalia and Eduardo.”
“Whatta you wanna do a thing like that?”
“I wanna be in the ground before the papers get it. I wanna keep the TV and the FBI away. We gotta protect Eduardo and Charley. Capeesh?”
“Whatta you mean—protect?”
“I don’t want Eduardo standing in front of no television cameras at a funeral where all the families in the country are there. I got some big ideas for Eduardo. And Charley is go
nna be the next Eduardo after that, don’t forget it.”
Angelo shrugged.
“If you can figure out how to do it,” Don Corrado said as if he hadn’t already figured out the whole thing, “I’m gonna say in the will that Charley is the one who is gonna run Eduardo’s thing.”
“Figure out how to do it? Like whatta you mean?”
“For starters how do we get Eduardo out?”
“Out?”
“I already figured that part. That part is easy—we run him for president in ’ninety-two.”
“President?” Angelo blinked. “Eduardo?”
“It will take up every minute of his time.”
“The election’s four years away.”
“We need a year for Charley to do some work that I’m gonna tell you about and for Eduardo to break him in on the quiet. Then we need the three years for Eduardo to campaign all over the country.”
“But, Jesus—”
“Don’t be so nervous. He ain’t gonna get it. He’ll be one of the nineteen candidates they run for president to keep the people’s mind off the real issues. In the old country they have nineteen parties each with two candidates; here we have nineteen candidates and two parties. Go figure it. We’ll let Eduardo run like third. He’ll have the honor.”
“But what platform does he run on? Eduardo has had to work every side of the street.”
“So he’ll run on the platform that if he’s elected, he’s gonna resign in favor of Ron and Nancy, fahcrissake!” the don snarled. “Who cares what platform he runs on?”
“Listen—there’s nothing wrong with that platform. It’s a great platform. Jesus, what a sign-off for Eduardo. He’ll cream.”
“Then we will make him attorney general.”
“A key job in law enforcement no matter how you look at it.” He understood at last what he had just said. “Holy shit, Corrado! Sensational!”
“The problem is Charley taking over,” the don said. “After thirty-five years, Eduardo is a pillar of this country.”
“Wait a minute. If Charley takes over from Eduardo, who takes over from Charley?”
“Nobody. That’s the beauty part. We won’t need the street operation. We’re gonna franchise all the action to whoever bids highest, division by division.”
“Corrado, lissena me. It won’t work. Franchising things like the recycled postage stamps and credit cards, or race horses or shopping malls, even the orgy opportunities, is one thing, but that ain’t gonna work in New York.”
“Why not?”
“New York ain’t the Big Apple for nothing. This is where it is. New York turns over more than alla the rest of them together. You tell the New York families you wanna franchise here and they’ll think you’re through and they’ll move in on you.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m gonna have Charley set up a regime of collectors—enforcers—a coupla hundred soldiers, all workers—under Santo Calandra so the franchisees are gonna know, if they think they can fuck around, that they got a real war. They are gonna see that—why fight for it when you can buy it? Everybody’s rich. We got the biggest territories—Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, and Staten Island. We franchise it and let the other guy knock himself out. The real problem is Charley taking over from Eduardo.”
“Why is that a problem?”
“Eduardo’s an elder of three religions, an industrialist, a philanthropist, a leading banker. He’s a patron of the arts, a lawyer, a college man, a Mercedes owner, a society leader—and everything else that a great front man has to be. But Charley is the problem.”
“How do you mean?”
“But he’s your son and he’s married to my granddaughter. Eduardo has gotta be over sixty-five, maybe seventy,” the don said, thinking it all through seconds before he said it. “Who else am I gonna have run the ownership of about thirty-two percent of this country—only five points down on the Japanese—except my granddaughter and Charley—some stranger?”
“But how do you mean Charley is a problem to take over Eduardo’s spot?”
“Fahcrissake, Angelo, Charley is a Boss. Charley was the vindicatore of the family for twenty years. Those things could carry over.”
“But if we tell Charley to do it, he does it.”
“You remember Eduardo when he was in high school?”
“Sure.”
“The big nose, the way he talked only Brooklyn? That doesn’t seem possible now, does it?”
“Well—no.”
“We changed him into a Mayflower American, and we changed his name to Edward S. Price. We found him that speech teacher. He was a natural learner. We told him where to buy his suits. It was no miracle, Angelo, it was just good planning. It was cutting the odds on the future.”
“You mean—”
“Look, Henry Garrone, my nephew, handles our business in Zurich. Charley goes there and Henry sets him with a good face doctor, then a top dentist, and we bring a speech teacher in. I never told you, but before him and Mae got married, I had him change his name.”
“Charley changed his name?”
“Yeah. Listen, it was good thinking.”
“So what is his new name?”
“It ain’t Sicilian, Angelo.”
“So what is Charley’s new name?”
“Charles Macy Barton.”
“Jesus!”
“I’m not talking about a new face, just a face changed here and there maybe, like the name, and maybe his prints, so none of the media people or some cop can make him if they see him. Maybe a little bald or he’ll wear glasses or something. Charley knows how to run people, so when we put him in Eduardo’s slot all he’ll be doing is running a couple of hundred managers, nothing for Charley. When it comes to the new stuff that’s gotta come up and has to be decided, he’ll have Maerose to talk it over with. She’s had nine years with Eduardo. How can he miss?”
“I can figure out the Barton part—that’s like Partanna—but where did you get the Macy?”
“It was Mae’s idea. And a very sweet thought. Your wife’s name was Macellaro—right?”
“Yeah.”
“So that’s where the Macy part comes from.”
“That really is a sweet thought.”
“But I ain’t making a move till they have a kid.”
“The whole move depends on that?”
“What are you gonna do? It’s the name of the game. What is immortality if people don’t keep having kids? Lissena me, Angelo—”
“Yeah?”
“The will I made, the letter—”
“Yeah?”
“I want you to swear the one very important thing so you can do what I want after—if—I go down the tube.”
Angelo crossed himself. “Corrado, please—”
“I want you to make sure that there is no big public funeral. Just the close family. Nobody else. Capeesh?”
“Sure. Absolutely.”
“Swear it. Take an oath on your only son’s head.”
“I swear it. No big funeral.”
9
Charley and Maerose Partanna had had a long and stormy courtship of nineteen years, but no matter what had happened to them, and plenty had happened, no matter how long the separations, they always found their way back together again. Charley was aware of her, as Vincent’s daughter, by the time she was five years old and he was in his teens. They had come together formally at a birthday party for Mae’s sister, Teresa, at the old Palermo Gardens, in 1967. They had had a fairly involved affair then, but, due to circumstances which were (probably) unfair, Maerose had been exiled from Brooklyn by her father for nearly ten years, because she got drunk at the party for her engagement to Charley and ran off with some guy to Mexico. She was barred until her father happened to get zotzed. It was toward the end of the exile that she and Charley had seen each other again, but, what with one thing and another—like Charley getting married to a California woman, then the woman dying tragically on him??
?they didn’t get a chance to spend much time together. But, throughout the exile, they had seen each other at family weddings, christenings, and funerals.
Really finding each other had been a slow, even excruciating, process. Charley had tended to “lose himself” with a flock of other women, undoubtedly trying to forget the wife whom death had torn out of his arms, meeting and seeming to become infatuated with either eight or ten, or thirty or forty, young women in such a succession that their names and faces had become a blur, even to him. Through all of this, perhaps from the day she met him, Maerose seemed to have been in love with her own sense of who and what Charley was. By force of will, by a stamina that far exceeded his stamina, and keeping in mind whatever it was she needed to keep in mind about what Charley Partanna could provide for her special needs, Maerose gradually surrounded him, as the Sioux had surrounded General Custer at Little Big Horn. When they finally married, to the utter satisfaction of Don Corrado, Maerose was forty-one years old, and perhaps somewhat rigid in the pelvis to deliver children, and Charley was forty-nine, perhaps somewhat rigid in the head for adjustment to marriage, but despite the flight of their youth and the drawbacks of long familiarity, it was a marriage that had been made in heaven.
Maerose was a woman who had matured with style. At twenty-two she had resembled a Tuareg queen in the deep Sahara at the time of the Crusades, surrounded by an ardency of knights who had wandered from their crusade to find her, deep in the desert, to seek her out and join her mystery. Now, at forty-three, after ten years of exile in Manhattan, after twenty-one years of flinging herself at the rock of Charley Partanna, and a certain amount of secret champagne, she resembled rather a hunting falcon dressed by Balenciaga, causing that great man to weep with gratification wherever he was, as he looked down and wondered where he had taken the right turning. She was elegantly predatory. She was singleminded, and she hunted only for the food for her power.
Maerose had a magnificent nose, passionate, yet merciless; eyes so glorious in their brightness and liquidity, in the fish-shaped, caramelesque calm of their implacable stare that surely they had been retouched, repolished, and replaced before the final gift of life had been bestowed upon her. She wore clothes as a work of art by Caravaggio wears paint. Her fingers were of such length and her hands of such slenderness and lightness of touch that Charley told her, adoringly, that she could have been one of the great cannons of all time and he meant it from the heart.