He finished scrubbing the floor. Thinking about his own wife dreaming up a thing like this made him horny. He got to his feet. “Hey, Mae,” he yelled.
“What?”
“Come on. We’re going on the bed and get some real work done.”
13
The don invited his son, Edward S. Price, to lunch with him on the same day he received the Partannas. Eduardo was a man so carefully and impressively dressed that, as he completed the daily wearing of each of the sixty suits in his rotation, his people then air-shipped each one to Huntsman, his tailor in London, to be pressed. He was a short, bony man, slightly taller than his father, but there were nine-year-olds who were taller than his father. His hairstyle was engineered and executed by Henry Desmond Purvis, the man responsible for the adventurous hair of the senior politicians in the Congress, the man whose work had startled more television viewers than the introduction of hard rock music.
Eduardo had an aggressive, not to say hostile, personality, in imperial opposition to everyone excepting his father. He seemed to return to his boyhood when he was with the don. As a boy he had been quiet and studious, on the shy side, perhaps rather too reserved. He had been all business, slaving long hours at his homework, ignoring distractions, and seeming to model himself upon the Mickey Rooney performance as young Tom Edison. His ambition from the cradle had been to be different in every known way from his brother, Vincent.
He had earned his earliest degree at Harvard University in three years instead of four, by going without summer vacations. He had been Law Review at Harvard Law School. He had excelled at the Harvard Business School, finishing as number three in his class when he was awarded an MBA. When his father thought that his education should have been completed, he continued it by enrolling himself in the Dale Carnegie Institute. His mastery of the Carnegie system marked his parting with shyness. Shyness was never to be a problem for Edward S. Price again.
He developed into a lordly man. Except when he visited Brooklyn, he traveled with an entourage that included hard-eyed men who murmured into hand mikes. His DC-10, called the “company plane” but whose use was restricted to Edward S. Price and his invitees, had been acquired from his late, great friend, the Shah of Iran. Within it, his public relations people had persuaded him to accent austerity rather than luxury to contrast with the universally known extent of his riches; the interior design was a replica of a Vermont country store at the turn of the twentieth century, with a cracker barrel, a brass double bed, horsehair furniture and spittoons in the main cabin, and a large rolltop desk that had dozens of pigeonholes in the office area, to which Eduardo went upon boarding and where he sat, belted up, on landing, dictating to Miss Blue, fiddling with a computer, barking orders into satellite telephones, and expanding his manifold businesses.
Heaven knows Eduardo had dignity, but the don estimated that, in any measurement of wisdom, Eduardo could be considered a smart man only when compared with his late brother, Vincent. Both of his boys had been shrewd with even more than average Sicilian deviousness; their cunning was a tribute to their heritage, but, for the rest of it, vanity had crowded out the smarts in both of them, in the don’s secret judgment, which must have, somehow, conveyed itself, because Eduardo was (almost) humble in his father’s presence.
When Eduardo had been firmly packed with one of his father’s cruel lunches, a Mexican cigar shoved into his dentures and a glass of grappa wedged into his right hand, the don broke the news.
Eduardo was horrified. “President?” he cried out in bewilderment. “Poppa, I am sixty-nine years old! I’ll be seventy-three when I’m elected. I’ll be seventy-seven at the end of my first term. I simply don’t have the energy for a job like that.”
“So?” his father said. “You’ll take naps. You’ll learn to wave. You’ll delegate. You’ll let the other guy handle details. You’ll make jokes about what you do wrong. You’ll take a lotta vacations. The people expect that.”
“But I have commitments! The museums and the charities and the opera of this city, not to say the nation, depend, to a large extent, on me. I am deeply into ballet!”
Eduardo was panicking because he was completely, even madly, devoted to his protégée, a Miss Claire Coolidge, who called him Woofy and whom he called Baby; he could not see how he could bring her with him to the White House. He had been able to arrange her transfer from the corps de ballet of the Metropolitan Opera Company and to place her in a few strong secondary parts with the New York City Ballet, winning her heart utterly when he had been able to enroll her in the advanced classes of the School of the American Ballet in exchange for a mere $100,000 endowment.
“I’ve been working hard at it all my life,” Eduardo ran on, “and finally I am a member of the old guard of New York’s nouvelle society. I have a right to retire when the time comes to consolidate that position. I am considered as being second in line to the arbiter.” By a miracle of applied phonetics, his speech patterns, if not his vocabulary, could not have been differentiated from those of William F. Buckley, Jr.
“Lissena me, Eduardo,” the don said harshly. “You have earned the honor of running for president. You are a great man in our country. Whatta you think running for the highest office in the land is gonna do for you in New York society? Your country owes this to you and I am talking about Air Force One as your personal plane.”
“I already have a plane that is bigger than Air Force One.”
“You’ll have Camp David. There is no hideaway like it. You’ll have the CIA to square anyone that ever crossed you. You’ll be getting inside information that will make you a fortune!”
Eduardo snorted. “Hilarious,” he drawled.
“You have worked and you must be rewarded with the honor beyond all honors, the recognition that comes with running for president.”
Eduardo stared at his father, a different look suffusing his face. “Well,” he said slowly, “I have a lot of friends around this country. If I did campaign out there for two years with the rest of the pack, I think I could count on a great deal of statewide and local support form American business and cultural leaders.”
“What else?” the don said. “And every family we work with in this country, and all the people they do business with, is gonna have such a quota of political action committees that you are gonna have the biggest campaign fund of anybody that ever ran for that sacred office.”
He rose to his feet with some difficulty and opened his little arms wide to his son. Eduardo stood, stepped forward, and entered the tiny arc. “I am proud of you, my son,” Corrado Prizzi said brokenly. “This is the proudest day of my life.” They broke the embrace and returned to their seats.
“If you don’t mind my asking—who is going to take my place at the top of Barker’s Hill?”
“Charley.”
“Charley?”
“Charley Partanna.”
“Charley Partanna!” Eduardo regurgitated his loathing. “As head of Barker’s Hill? Why he’s nothing but a hoodlum!”
“Some of your best friends are hoodlums, Eduardo.”
“He’ll be exposed for what he is on the first day in that office.”
“Trust me.”
Eduardo loathed hoodlums, the fratellanza, all immigrants, and Brooklyn-Italian speech patterns, and he had almost been able to live with the idea that the continuing cash flow and capitalization of Barker’s Hill Enterprises depended upon other enterprises that were so loathsome to him that he would not allow meetings with the money-movers who brought the cash into Barker’s Hill accounts. It was not a moral thing. It was that everything the family’s business stood for represented the lumpen murderer, sweater, and bath-free meaning of his brother, Vincent, who had spent his boyhood humiliating Eduardo with his utterly ineffable vulgarities. Six times in his life Eduardo had gone to his father with statistics as to the family’s wealth and influence and had pleaded with him to disband the family’s unsavory activities, but the don had laughed at him. “You’re just han
ging out with the wrong people,” he said. “You think they ain’t gonna like you if they find out where the money comes from. Lissena me, Eduardo, we got more than any of them. They are gonna kiss your ass.”
“There are several things you may have overlooked here, Pater,” Eduardo said, strangling diphthongs, “and one thing in particular.”
“Yeah? What?”
“What does Charley know about finance or international networking or interlocking philanthropies or the intricacies of corporate takeovers, or the art of the arbitrageur? Most of all, what can he possibly know about public relations? His life, necessarily, has been lived in the shadows. The entire thing, like everything else in this country, balances on an almost lapidary control of public relations. And have you forgotten what Charley’s profession has been for the past God knows how many years?”
“Eduardo, lissena me—nobody is indispensable, right? And nobody outside the Prizzi family is gonna take over if you got hit by a taxi, right? The way I look at it, this is strictly a management proposition. You have built an organization of experts and if there is one thing Charley knows how to do it’s how to run an organization.”
“Poppa, believe me, I appreciate everything you say. But thinking about it, campaigning for the presidency all over the country for two years is not something I really think I want to do at my age. I am sure you understand that.”
The don spoke softly but his words had sharp dentures built into them. “Eduardo, lissena me—you are gonna run for president is the way I look at it. But if you decide you don’t wanna run, then you are out anyway and Charley goes in your job. And even if you went back this afternoon and tried to transfer money from the company into your Swiss bank accounts, you would find out you can’t get at it. Also, it’s natural, you might be thinking that you can fix everything legally so that if and when I die, you got the stock proxies to vote you in and vote Charley out. Don’t believe it. I wrote a letter to the family. It has fourteen witnesses, all healthy. The letter says that as recognition of your running for president you will get twenty percent of the business. But if you don’t run for president—too bad—you don’t get a nickel. And I got people who will enforce that.”
“Who gets it?” Eduardo asked bleakly because as far as he was concerned he had always believed that when his father died he would automatically become the owner of Barker’s Hill Enterprises; after all, he had created it and built it from nothing to the colossus it was today, a $16 billion company with subsidiaries in every country of the world plus a firm footing in outer space. Twenty percent! The bitterness of the injustice nauseated him.
“Hang around for the reading when they read it.”
14
Charley, in an apron, was stirring a pot of riso chi cacuocciuli, boiled rice with cut-up eggplant, turnips, artichokes, and peas, in olive oil, flavored with onions. Maerose was frying some tiny sciabacheddu, working twelve of the little fish in the pan. They had that wonderful relaxed look of people who had been completely satisfied with each other’s work on the bed.
“Did you know that there are about twenty-five hundred different varieties of rice, some of which is red, blue, and purple?” Charley said.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. And I read in a magazine that eggplant looks like it drinks up all the oil in the pan, no matter how much you put in,” Charley said, “due to very spongy tissue which is almost all air pockets.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah. But when the heat and the oil begin to collapse the air pockets, it’s like squeezing a sponge—the eggplant gives most of the oil back to the pan.”
“Thank you, Fanny Farmer, junior. Charley, don’t tell me from cooking. Tell me from franchising! You are worried about it.”
“It could cause a lot of unemployment.”
“They’re all specialists, so when you sell the franchises, who’s gonna know how to run them except the specialists who have been running them for us? Whoever buys the franchise is gonna need them.”
Charley brightened. “Yeah. Maybe. But the guys we have who run the specialists, they gotta figure they are losing a lotta cash.”
“Like who?”
“Like the caporegimes. Like Matteo Cianciani who runs the shit operation for us.”
“So you sell them the franchises and they’ll make double. Besides, the capos are mostly old guys. It’s time to retire. With a bonus.”
Charley dumped the riso into a serving dish. “There could be a war,” he said. “This could split the family to pieces.”
“What family? That’s the whole pernt. The don is getting us all outta the family.”
“It’s all Greek to me.”
She arranged the tiny fish on two plates. Charley opened a bottle of Akragas, the Greek name for Agrigento, the Prizzi family’s home base. It was strong, dry, and white. They sat down and began to eat.
“The day the franchises are sold and you move out and up, we are gonna go to work to make a baby,” Maerose said.
“You been holding out, Mae?”
“Charley, lissena me. You want your kids to grow up in the environment?”
“What wrong with that?”
“They’d be outcasts—that’s what’s wrong with that.”
“Outcasts? I’m an outcast?”
“Charley, are you ever invited to the Academy Awards? Eduardo is.”
“I never thought about it.”
“Well, I thought about it. And the don thought about it. Whatta you think he’s gonna run Eduardo for president for, he’s gonna send you upstairs to take Eduardo’s place in the business for if he don’t want our kids to be respectable?”
“I always figured you had set him up for that, Mae,” Charley said cautiously.
“The thing is he wants it. You think anybody can sell the don anything, he doesn’t want it?”
“You want it, too.”
“Why not? My father threw me out of Brooklyn, Charley, and I found a new world. I like it there.”
“The thing is—your grandfather gonna like it there?”
“I’ll explain it to you as we go along. You ever been to Switzerland?”
“No.”
“It’s the best. As soon as you get the franchises settled we just sit in two of those first class Swissair seats, and from then on everything works. The food, the hotels, the face doctor—even the climate is right—no smoke, no smog, no soot, no slums.”
“How come you know about it?”
“I went to school in Switzerland for a year after Manhattanville. The nuns said I was too young for college. Jesus, Charley, your rice is delicious.”
“My mother. Also your fish.”
“I hate to say this,” she lied, “but I think you’re a better cook than I am.”
“There’s gonna be a war. I can smell it.”
“Charley, fahcrissake. You’re talking small money.”
“Small money?”
“You’re going up to where the big money is. You think my grandfather is dumb? Barker’s Hill has a Cray 3 computer in Omaha. Before I talked to my grandfather, I had the Cray work out the vigorish. No matter who you sell the franchises to, they have to net a bottom of thirteen point seven percent more than they are making now for the family, and—if they are operated as efficiently as you are operating them now—then they’ll bring in a net of up to twenty-two point eight percent more, even allowing for inflation.”
“How come?”
“Because everybody won’t be taking a split all the way up and down the line! Because everything will be pure profit.”
“We gotta pay the team who’s gonna collect and enforce.”
“Not if you set it up right. The franchisees gotta pay a handling charge. The service charge covers the enforcers plus a little profit. And as fast as that money comes in, we’ll be reinvesting it at Barker’s Hill until we gradually buy up thirty-seven percent of the whole country. That’s the Cray 3 talking, not me.”
“I called a meet for tomorrow
.”
“Sunday?”
“People feel more peaceful on a Sunday.”
15
Everything wasn’t exactly open-and-shut about setting up the metropolitan area franchises. Six hundred and nine soldiers decided to retire to Miami or Atlantic City, where there was still a good dollar. One hundred and eighty-nine began to think about setting up chicken farms in New Jersey. The three caporegimes felt that since the Prizzis were going to get out, they should inherit the whole Prizzi business without having to buy franchises, that they were entitled to divide up the whole operation among themselves. The heads of each operating division under the capos, particularly Matteo Cianciana, who ran the shit, coke, crack and boo operation, and Vanni Aprile, who handled gambling—the national sports book; the numbers and the lottery; the Sport of Kings; the blood stock importing business; the boxing industry; the jai alai frontons; the international tennis book; the relationships with two football league owners, coaches, referees, and linesmen; the three Prizzi hotel casinos in Vegas and the three in Atlantic City—got very agitated at the idea of anyone else being able to outbid them for what they had come to consider as their own thing because they were already skimming the split with the capos, Charley, and the Prizzis by almost 1 percent, a lot of money.
Charley called a meeting of all administrators at the board room of the Dorsetshire Bank & Trust Company in downtown Brooklyn immediately after ten o’clock Mass got out on the first Sunday of August 1988. It was in a big cork-lined, sound- and bugproof room, about forty feet by twenty-eight feet with a twenty-seven-foot-long table set at its middle. There was a pad, a ballpoint pen, an ashtray, and a sixpack of Mexican cigars at each place. These could have been Havana cigars, because contacts at the CIA had offered to bring them in, but Corrado Prizzi had never forgiven Castro for closing down the family’s two casinos in Cuba.