With all this external perfection, Maerose Partanna had an inner life that combined the objectivity of Albert Einstein with the brisk efficiency of Attila the Hun. Most of the time, which is to say between the ages of eighteen months and the present, she was less than straightforward because not only did she admire her grandfather, Don Corrado Prizzi, but indirection, subtlety, and labyrinthian deviousness were to her as if they were parts of the oath of the Girl Scouts of Sicily, and, deep within her spirit, Mae wanted to prove with her life that she was more Sicilian than her grandfather had ever been.
People who live with each other are seen by outsiders to be coping with each other’s immutable traits when, all the time, they are merely intent upon developing their own unchangeable foibles. Any outsider would have thought that the union of Maerose Prizzi and Charley Partanna would fall short of any possibility of success, but, because they were so different, it was a perfect marriage: each supplied what the other lacked.
Maerose was quick and informed. Charley was slow-thinking and had a suspicion of information because, in the practice of his business, people had seldom proved to operate the way the instructions on their package said they would. Charley was chary of commitment. Maerose was its agent. They had approached their marriage with considerable circumspection, perhaps needing to insure themselves that their judgment was correct, but more likely needing to get any number of other things done before they settled down to domestic life. The fact that they had overdone this caution was characteristic of both of them because Maerose found it almost impossible to make any decision that did not immediately advance her in terms of power, and Charley was just as indecisive unless something happened, anything at all, that could release him from the chores of his daily existence into one or another (and yet another) steamy Eden of romance. Charley was a ruthless romantic. Maerose was a devout realist. Maerose was brutal in conception, Charley in execution, and he had done a lot of those.
When they were both sure that, by marrying each other, they would get what they had to have, they entered into holy matrimony at a high Anglican Church of England service, in Manhattan—a happenstance that the groom hoped his parish priest, Father Passanante, never found out about, entirely because his don had ordered it—in which the bride had exulted because of the presence of her uncle, Edward S. Price, at his father’s bidding, giving the bride away, with the preeminent Washington lawyer, S. L. Penrose, standing as best man, and, somehow by some miracle, the lady general of the Salvation Army at Mae’s side as her maid of honor, all resulting in the formation of the true Prizzi dynasty, an all-reaching reality to house and legitimatize the Prizzi billions. At the benign intonation of an Episcopal dominie, she had been transformed from Mary S. Price to Mrs. Charles Macy Barton. The announcement on the New York Times society page stated that the groom, chief executive officer of Lavery, Mendelson, the great Wall Street investment banking house, was a descendant of Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, and Captain Richard H. Macy, founder of the great department store that bore his name. Lavery, Mendelson was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barker’s Hill Enterprises, which was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Corrado Prizzi.
10
Charley Partanna had not, in fact, iced the grandmothers of the Saporita family in Cincinnati. Almost the entire muscle of that family—the contractors, the arm twisters, and the leg breakers—came from a family that had served the Saporitas since 1923. Their family name was Nonna. Beppino Nonna was the Saporitas’ first enforcer. He had twelve sons, nine of whom followed in their father’s style. It happened to be that the word nonna meant grandmother in Italian so, when the news came back to Don Corrado through Angelo Partanna that Charley had scored the four top Nonnas of the Saporita family, thereby easing the whole franchise-royalty problem, the don, either because he had gone temporarily ga-ga, or because the idea had appealed to him, always remembered the story to Charley’s disadvantage.
This embarrassed Charley, but he had made it a rule decades before never to contradict the don. If anybody else figured they could make a joke out of the thing, Charley broke his elbow. Charley Partanna was 100 percent a rule book player.
He was a large man, built like a moving van, with a face like a slab of concrete on which the company retained to draw the graffiti on New York subway cars had drawn heavy eyebrows, small eyes, a fleshy nose, and a straight line for a mouth. His teeth were undistinguished, even shabby, as if he had a mouthful of Roquefort. The overall effect made him look as if he were on the hard side, but that was strictly an acquired characteristic. Charley had practiced looking hard and throwing out fear ever since he was ten years old. He had worked with the mirror in his father’s bedroom, which used to be his mother’s mirror. His mother was with the angels.
Charley wasn’t hard, at least not hard in the sense that hard meant unfeeling. He was an organization man who ran his life by an unwritten book of rules that had been handed to him by his father. Charley obeyed orders to the letter. As he rose in the family’s command structure from the day he had made his bones on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx when he was thirteen (and using him to do the job was the only way the Prizzis could get anybody close to Little Phil Terrone), he grew more and more doctrinaire. He had become a made man in the fratellanza when he was seventeen. From the day his mother died, Charley lived and ate with his father, listened to his father, spoke like his father, and, because the only thing his father was interested in was the environment, that became Charley’s life.
Charley learned numbers from his father. Both the Partannas could read a balance sheet like it was a McGuffey’s Reader, or like Leopold Stokowski lying in a hammock and browsing through a Paganini score.
He had learned to cook and keep a clean house from his mother. When the don retired, his son Vincent became Boss and Charley was made Underboss and was invested as the family’s vindicatore.
His devotion to duty had made him Boss when Vincent, a ruffian’s ruffian, had inevitably been zotzed. Charley was firm but fair, as the rule book states for leaders everywhere. Also, his acquired bearing, to say nothing of his past performance, scared the shit out of every capo and soldier in the family.
If Charley was a slow thinker, he was a tenacious one. Not anyone’s typical man-of-action, he was thinking all the time. Within the American culture, which was itself studded with Sicilian mores, he had found a philosophy in the pages of women’s magazines, which he had started to read for household hints, then had continued to read for their wisdom. Not an originator, he could carry out orders with the dedication and mindlessness of a lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Marine Corps. It could have been that his reputation for having delivered some sixty-seven hits for the family in his time, probably an exaggeration, alone made him attractive to women, but whoever thought that way was wrong. Women, by and large, wanted what other women wanted. Because he was a tender romantic, and possibly combined with the implied mastery that comes with a reputation as a top zotzer, women wanted him. It was probably because Charley was a romantically tender man who, until he had passed the first great energies of his youth, had been so taken with, and so serviceable to, the women who had reached out for his heart that Maerose had taken so long to marry him. She had lost him to eight other women (known to her) during their nineteen-year engagement, something that could have broken the heart of a less resilient woman, but now that Charley was relatively exhausted from romancing so many other women, and because he was preoccupied with the administrative problems that came with running the street operations of a family as complex as the Prizzis, and because her grandfather looked as if he were ready to make the big decision when she put it to him, Maerose entered into the sanctity of marriage.
11
At 8:30 A.M. on July 11, 1988, which Amalia Sestero explained to them was St. Gomer’s Day, the saint invoked against hernias, the patron saint of glovemakers, Angelo and Charley Partanna were summoned to Don Corrado’s house. She led them up the two flights of stairs to the don’s enormous room, knocked at
the door, opened it, then left them. The don waved them absentmindedly into the room as, simultaneously, he pursued his hobby, the lineages of the nobility of Sicily from the Arab invasion to the arrival of the American troops in the western end of the island in World War II, which had so vigorously reestablished the Honored Society after it had been almost wiped out by the Italian government.
“Come in, come in,” the don called out gaily, then ignored them for the next twenty minutes. Angelo Partanna lighted a cigar. Charley looked out the window at two youths mugging an old woman on the esplanade until Don Corrado announced his readiness to open the meet.
“I got two big jobs for you, Charley,” he said. “First, we’re gonna franchise all the East Coast operations either to our own people, the other New York families, or to the Blacks, Hispanics, and the Orientals, which means, deal for deal, you gotta scare them shitless so we can be sure of collections.”
“Blacks, Hispanics, Orientals?”
“What’s wrong with giving the other guy a chance?”
“What about our own people? We got eleven hundred out there working their asses off and nine hundred more around in case we need them.”
“Charley, lissena me. Before you talk to the Blacks or the Hispanics, certainly you’ll offer the franchises to our people and, if they’re ready to put up more money than the Blacks or Hispanics, then they get it. I don’t needa tell you, loyalty comes first with me. The big thing is—whoever gets it we gotta be sure we collect our end so out of the people we got out there, you gotta hold out a couple of hundred soldiers—from the rest who’ll be absorbed by the new guys—for enforcement and collections.”
“Don’t worry about the collections, padrino. Anybody takes a franchise from us, I make the collections.”
“That’s the second thing I want from you, Charley. After you set the franchises with solid people and after you set up the special enforcement to make the collections—you don’t make any more collections yourself—I want you to move up into Eduardo’s job.”
“Me?” Charley’s jaw dropped. “What about Eduardo?”
“We’re gonna run him for president.”
“But—whaaat?”
“Don’t worry. In the end he’ll settle for attorney general. But what you gotta do is get us outta the street operation. I want strong franchise deals for every piece of action we got going for us—not like the national franchises, where we were choosy about what we let them have—but franchises for everything we got going on the East Coast and maybe Colombia, Turkey, and Asia. All we’re gonna have left is the enforcement organization you’re gonna set up.”
“The operating manuals for every racket we operate outta New York are all mimeographed and ready, Charley,” Angelo Partanna said. “They run more than five hundred pages each, and they make it just like the franchisee has signed on to run a Taco Bueno. Anybody can run a franchise if they follow the manual. You just gotta sign up the franchisees and put the fear into them, then line up the picciotti you want to do the enforcing and collecting.”
“And a solid worker to run it,” the don said.
“Run it? I’ll run it.” Charley wasn’t the quickest guy in the world to catch on.
“After you set it all up,” the don said patiently, “you are off the street.”
“Off the street? I won’t be Boss no more?”
“Boss of what? There won’t be no street operation. You wanna be Boss of enforcement and collection? You’re an executive. Execute. No pun intended.”
“Charley, lissena me what the don is saying to you,” his father tried to explain. “You are going up to the top, to where the big money is, you’re gonna run Eduardo’s operation. You’re gonna triple your money.” Charley was already banking 6 percent of the street operation and 2 percent of the national franchise operation in eleven safe banks overseas. He had no idea of how much money he had.
“What do I know about Eduardo’s operation?”
“You know how to run the people who run everything Eduardo runs,” the don snarled. “And whatta you needa know about the inside over there? Your wife can tell you anything you needa know. She’s been Eduardo’s assistant for nine years.”
“She’s smart, Charley, we don’t needa tell you that,” Angelo said.
“What you needa tell me is how we’re gonna get away with this. Eduardo is a big man in every department. The media and the cops know me. What are they gonna say when I take over an operation the size of Eduardo’s?”
“Charley, on paper you are already CEO of Lavery, Mendelson in Wall Street.”
“I never been on Wall Street in my life. They’d make me the first day.”
“That’s the third thing,” the don said.
“There’s a third thing?”
“After you set the franchises up, you and Mae are going to Europe. Harry Garrone is lining up a good face doctor, maybe also a dentist, and Mae is looking now for somebody to show you how to talk like Eduardo talks.”
“Jesus, padrino!”
“A couple of tailors will come over to Switzerland from London, and in eight months, a year, you’ll be ready to come back to New York to take over Eduardo’s spot.”
“What happens to the real me?”
“The papers will run it that you got pneumonia or something and that it put you under. We’ll give you a big sendoff and everybody will forget all about you. No offense meant.”
Charley gave a little shrug. “Well, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’m gonna do, but no wonder today is the saint’s day for the patron saint of hernias.”
As they drove away from the don’s house in Charley’s van, Pop said, “Whatta you think of this franchise idea for New York?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“It can’t work. They’ll go along with it. They’ll pay the advance because Corrado is who he is, but it ain’t gonna work. They’ll run with it and they’ll laugh at us when we come for the royalties.”
“But why would the don make a mistake like that?”
“Because he’s hung up on this respectability thing. I can’t do nothing with him. That’s all he wants. He’s through with the street operation, throwing away all that money just so that everybody can look up to his descendants. Well, what the hell. He made the biggest score of alla them in his time. I tried, but I can’t change his mind; there ain’t nothing I can do about it. So we gotta go with it.”
12
To clear his thinking, Charley scrubbed the kitchen floor at the Matsonia on East Thirty-seventh Street, in New York, where Maerose had had an apartment for over twenty years and where he and Mae lived. While he scrubbed, Maerose watched “The Wodehouse Playhouse” on PBS in the living room to keep them current on perfect speech.
Charley wasn’t exactly confused, because the don had never told him to do something that he knew Charley couldn’t do, but he was having trouble imagining himself at the head of Barker’s Hill Enterprises. It was bigger than Exxon and more complex than AT&T and, Maerose had told him, it had 9,208 senior executives, lawyers, and accountants. The number of middle managers, she said, was bigger than the population of Staten Island. He felt it in his bones that he was going to have to subscribe to Forbes magazine, and probably The Washington Monthly. He had a lot of things to get straight. He was going to look different and sound different, but that figured because what he was going to be doing was more legitimate than running a bank so he had to look more like a banker than any banker looked. What he couldn’t get through his head was that he wouldn’t be Boss because the Prizzi family, the biggest mob ever put together in history, wasn’t going to be there anymore so, naturally, they wouldn’t need a Boss.
He decided to handle the problem by thinking about it when it happened. Right now there was going to be trouble no matter how he sold the franchises because somebody was going to think they had been left out. And there was a lot of money going on it. He shuddered at the don’s idea that they sell the franchises to the Blacks, the Hispanics or the
Orientals. Santo Calandra, his vindicatore, for example, was his manager for the extortion division, a nice piece of whose income came from shaking down the automobile companies, for one example, domestic and foreign, for every car they brought into the metropolitan area, a pretty big area, which included New Jersey, lower Connecticut, Long Island, and the five boroughs of New York—about fifty million people, which was a lot of cars. It had turned out to be such a good business that the don had franchised it out to families right across the country, and, all together, it produced about $60 million a year. The operation took down eighty cents for every new car that came in and forty cents for every used car that was sold by a legitimate dealer. Santo had also made a solid arrangement with all the food chains operating in the city and was knocking them off for three cents a shopping item, and he took down 3 percent of the gross on each one of his projects before passing the rest up to his caporegime. Maerose had said once that it was the constant population increase that caused inflation, but just looking at the range of Santo’s projects, Charley wasn’t so sure.
He knew that if he sold Santo’s division as a franchise to anybody else, whether Black, Hispanic, Oriental, or even Santo’s own uncle, there would be trouble. Multiply that by the about nineteen divisions that had to be franchised and the Prizzis could have a war on their hands.
He knew he had to sell the franchises inside the family and figure out how to explain it to the don afterward. Let one dollar be moved outside the family and there would be a war. They would have to go to the mattresses and that was rotten public relations. The media would get all excited, the cops would want more money, the politicians would start investigations, and it would all be bad for business. Still, he had to be proud of Mae. She had thought the whole thing up, and when you looked at it, no matter how much of a collevazione it caused, it was going to bring in a bigger net profit and wipe out almost the entire overhead, so, if a couple of dozen soldiers had to get mussed up, no matter how you looked at it, it was worth it.