Marxie could be a drag, in fact a real pain in the ass, but the record certainly showed that he had been a good luck charm for her. It had been Marxie who had gotten her into her real work, at the top of the heap. There was a jeweller in New York who The Outfit used to move out hot stones in bulk, and he was switching the good stones for shitty ones, so there were a lot of complaints. He ran a diamond store on Forty-seventh between Sixth and Fifth, and the place was always filled with women looking for bargains they thought they could talk some guy into buying for them. Joe Licamarito, Marxie’s boss, was furious that this momser thought he could get away with such a ripoff, and he wanted to have one of the New York families send a team into the store and give it to the jeweller. Marxie happened to be a good friend of Joe’s. “Lemme tell you, Joe,” he said, “the best thing for this job is a woman. She’ll hit him and get closed in the crowd so fast nobody’ll have anything to talk about.”
“A woman?” Joe says, “Where do I find a woman for a job like that?”
“I got her,” Marxie says.
Marxie brought it up while they were doing the dishes that night. “You stand at the counter. You pick the stone you want to buy,” Marxie said. “The jeweller bends over to open the case while you open your handbag as if you are getting the money. You blow him away, drop the gun in the crowd, mix with the other women, then rush out on the street yelling when they rush out on the street yelling.”
“What does it pay, Marxie?” Irene asked.
“Twenty-five thousand.”
“No kidding?”
“That’s nothing, Irene. Once it gets around the Combination that there is a classy woman contract hitter, you’re going to see that price go up to triple.”
Irene took the job, and everything developed just the way Marxie had said it would except that, with the inflation, she got herself one hundred thousand dollars for the Netturbino job, and there were always three, sometime four of them a year.
Marxie wanted to be her agent for lining up the work, for fifty percent, but she gave him such a look, no words, that he said, very quick, “No, that wouldn’t work. I’d be involved. I’d be the corroboratory.” She told him he could give her telephone number to Joe Licamarito in Detroit. After that she invented her system. She romanced a beautiful kid who was a student genius in the electronics lab at UCLA. The kid worked out the relay from the telephone in Kansas City, an empty room in Kansas City, to the telephone answering machine in Beverly Hills. Then she bought a second number in Columbia, South Carolina, which also went directly to the answering machine in Beverly Hills. The relay was untraceable. Like Wow! for her business.
So she told Charley that she had been married once, for a couple of weeks, about four years ago. She told him she was a Polack, something she hadn’t admitted since she was eighteen years old. She told him she was in the tax consulting business, which was the truth. She handled a small piece of the tax work for the Syndicate in Southern California. Then, all of a sudden, something happened that she certainly should have foreseen but didn’t. She went to bed with Charley Partanna and she was ready to swear to God that there had never been anything like it. Not for anybody. Not in history, she thought.
She was in love with Charley Partanna. She loved Charley Partanna, or however else his demanding rules said they had to feel it.
Chapter Fourteen
She did the number on Louis Palo in his car in the parking lot. She was wearing hot pants and a bandanna so that Louis could see plainly that she had no gun on her as she got out of the Avis and ran across the lot, as happy as a bride, to run away with him. Marxie had fixed the gun under the dashboard of Louis’ car, on the passenger side. While she kissed Louis she pulled the gun away from the magnets and shot him through the head. She lowered him across the front seat as she got out of the car. Then she got into the back seat so she could lean over and go through his pockets. The money was in the trunk of the car, with his suitcase. It was packed into a satchel.
She carried the satchel to the Avis and drove to Reno. On the road, early in the morning, she changed into a pretty dress. She flew from Reno to LA, picked up the Gozzy and drove to her house. When she got there, Marxie was in bed. He was in bad shape. He had hemorrhaged twice.
“I can’t get moving, Irene,” he said.
“Rest, Marxie. Don’t talk.”
“They’re going to come looking for their money. We should be on our way to Hong Kong right now, but I just ain’t got it in me, Irene.” He coughed badly into a handkerchief. “They got this house in the file.”
“Marxie, please! I’ll think of something.” She had thought of something fourteen days ago and Marxie was dying anyhow.
“Tell them I come in here and held a gun on you,” he said. “Tell them you don’t know anything about any money.”
She went to the small room where she looked at television, and counted out the money into two equal piles. She put one of the stacks back into the satchel, because that was Marxie’s cut, and stashed the satchel in the closet in the front hall. Her half would go into the vault at the bank. If anything happened to Marxie, like any minute, she figured she would have a right to the whole score.
The next day Marxie insisted on sitting up. They got him into a dressing gown with a pistol in one pocket and she sat him behind the desk in the television room with a pack of cards. That day, and the next, he played solitaire while he was dying. They were short on food so Irene went shopping. It was time. They had to get here soon, she thought. She could feel another presence when she came back from the supermarket, as she came into the kitchen, so she went into her performance as the happy wife.
“I’m home, dear,” she sang. Then she heard Charley’s voice behind her and, thank God, everything was ready for him. As she whirled to face him she was thinking of Marxie. She knew the hard, hard life was over for Marxie.
Everything worked. She took him to the money. She kept herself in a kind of shock. She experienced her own innocence. Then Charley admitted to her what he suspected and told her what he wasn’t going to do about it. He wasn’t going to kill her. He loved her. She had never meant anything so feelingly in her life when she said, “I want to marry you, Charley.”
They would have to get it back to where it was or take it far beyond where it was. He was miserably unhappy with himself, but that was his own fault. He couldn’t prove anything. She had given them back half the money voluntarily. They had nothing to connect her with Louis. Only Marxie, but Marxie had been her husband, and they knew better than anyone what wives had to go through in that business because of husbands and, besides, Marxie was dead. If she lived out her innocence for Charley, it would get better day by day. He would be all right. They were both going to be all right, and in the meantime she was $360 ahead.
***
She had to keep the money, certainly, but she had to hold on to Charley most of all. Jesus, she thought, how could anybody knock somebody by calling him a Boy Scout? The fantastic thing about Charley was that he was a Boy Scout. Charley paid his dues to his life. Charley believed. She had to get him back to find out how much she had hurt him by being the cause of making him turn on what he believed in. She had to make him believe that she understood the things he believed in—loyalty, the Prizzis’ honor, the deep necessity of responding to the trust he was held in, which told him to do the work no matter what the effort or the cost.
Because there weren’t too many guys in the business who were in their thing, people who could do their kind of work, she had prospered. She knew it wasn’t only because she was a specialist, or because she was a woman. Even for the rough work, clipping crappy little hoodlums, not taking out top people, the business only had about a twelve percent yield of workers: butchers, stranglers, and quality workers. The Prizzis could put 2,100 people on the street but they had maybe 150 workers, no more, and of the 150, probably 100 were just a bunch of shtarkers who could pull at one end of a rope that was looped around some poor fucker’s neck, while some other l
ump pulled at the other end.
Charley was a legend as a worker. Charley had taken contracts in broad daylight, out in the open with dozens of witnesses, and had walked away when the job was done because he had everything going for him that a top worker was supposed to have plus he had going that he knew that he was right when he blew that guy away. It had a lot to do with power, sure. But Charley didn’t throw his power around. It had nothing to do with money. No piece man with any family ever got paid by his family for making a hit. Most of them were animals. What kept Charley from being an animal, she knew, was that Charley had emotion. Charley knew he was serving a purpose, not a buck. The purpose was to do every job like an artist, so that class shone out so much the bosses were forced to pay more points for a hit so they could be absolutely sure.
It was different for her, she figured. She wasn’t locked into any family, she was a straight, commercial freelance who couldn’t expect any protection from anybody if she didn’t do the job right, which was why they paid her the big money. She didn’t have to believe in anything but her head and her nerves, but now that Charley had come into her life, she could feel how cold it was out there. It was one thing to work alone, but she had never been able to live alone, and her luck—good and bad—had brought her Marxie. She knew she would have to die alone but, what the hell, so did everybody else. The thing was, if she could only get Charley back, she might not be as safe as she was right now, but she could live inside him and learn to think like him, and when she did and she was able to believe the way Charley believed then, what the hell, maybe they could take a chance on having some kids, maybe they could throw away all the shit that most of her life was made of and she could live, because she believed.
She considered her chances like a chemin de fer player against a bank. First, she had to get Charley to listen to her. She had to tell him what she did mainly for a living. It would shake him up, but he saw that kind of work from the inside. He knew the mechanics, the economics, the reasons. She felt it was eighty-twenty in favor. She had to convince him that they saw things the same way and that was why they loved each other.
On the bad side she saw the Vegas scam, which broke down into different pieces. One, she had to convince Charley that she had nothing to do with it. How could they trace anything to her? On the other hand, Louis was dead and Marxie was dead and only half of the money had turned up. They couldn’t ever show that she had any connection with Louis, but Marxie was hanging around her neck like a fish. He was the only connection they had and they had often moved on much less information than that.
She had made one mistake, probably because she was working on her own and not polishing her reputation for the future. Maybe the mistake was good. Maybe any mistake on any hit was so out of character for her that they would automatically rule her out. But she didn’t really think so. She had left Louis in Nevada after she shot him. The Commission, which was the arbitration council made up of the five families from New York plus Chicago, had set down a rule that nobody could do a job on anybody in Nevada unless they took the body to another state and dumped it. Somebody in the Commission could decide to make a noise with that, just to crowd the Prizzis, and the Prizzis would have to straighten it out the only way they could straighten it out, by clipping whoever they decided had wasted Louis.
So—she loved Charley more than she had ever loved anything, but if she was ever going to give Charley kids she needed Charley to stand off the Prizzis if they began to move in on her as the only connection to dead Louis and the money.
She reminded herself that they weren’t going to be seeing her as Marxie Heller’s little widow, a workhorse housewife who just happened to be washing the rugs the day the Prizzis found half the money in Marxie’s house. Very soon, Angelo Partanna was going to bring it up that she was such a part of the environment that they had just paid her one hundred dollars to blow Sal Netturbino away. They couldn’t pin any scams on her but they would know she wasn’t legit, and they could take it from there.
She really needed Charley Partanna.
Chapter Fifteen
It was a beautiful Sunday morning. Manhattan Island, across the river, looked clean and serene, as if it really existed only upon airline calendars. Vincent Prizzi picked up his father at 6:45 to attend the working man’s mass, in a black Lincoln sedan driven by Phil Vittimizzare with Zingo Poppaloush, a Greek guy, riding beside him. They were both workers. Poppaloush’s family had been Greek when it migrated to Sicily 673 years ago. It would be hard to take him for a Greek, but he was proud of the little edge it gave him. Behind the Lincoln, two and a half car lengths back, came a new Toyota some parishioner had given to Don Corrado, which was registered in the name of the Hurry Up Sandwich Company of Rockrimmon, Connecticut. Cucumbers Cetrioli drove it, separated from Willie Lessato by a sawed-off shotgun.
Father and son were dressed for church in black suits with white shirts and black ties. Don Corrado wore a sporty white cloth fedora.
“You know what I heard on the late news last night?” Vincent said.
“What did you hear?”
“They took a poll and sixty-seven percent of the American people think that what they all call the Mafia is the most efficiently run business organization in the whole country.”
“That is a genuine compliment. That comes from the heart.”
“All I can say is, there must be a lot of dopey American businessmen.”
“What do they care? There aren’t involved. They go to work at nine and they quit at five. All they get is a salary, so what do you expect?”
The small religious procession halted in front of the Church of Santa Grazia di Traghetto. Vincent got out on the open street side, slammed the door and hurried around the back of the car to open the car door for his father. He and Zingo helped the old man out of the car then, as was correct, established for many years, two Little Sisters of the Precious Blood appeared as if by God’s will, and stood silently before the don, scowling piously. He nodded to Vincent. Vincent gave each nun a fifty-dollar bill, thus establishing Don Corrado as a casual, as well as an institutionally charitable man, but reserving for his son the prayers of the Little Sisters for the relief of gout.
Cetrioli and Willie stood at the back of the church throughout the mass. Phil and Zingo sat in the reserved pew directly behind Don Corrado and Vincent. Don Corrado slept through the mass and Vincent, even as he went to communion, hummed once-popular musical comedy selections silently inside his head to keep himself from thinking about whether he was ever going to get his daughter off his back.
When the mass was over, Cetrioli and Willie came down the aisle and stood as a screen between the Prizzis and the congregation while the church emptied. When it was empty, Father Malgaragno came hurrying out of the vestry to walk with Don Corrado to his car, Vincent leading, Cetrioli and Willie behind, then the don and his confessor, then Phil and Zingo.
“Did the bishop enjoy the wheel of parmigiano stravecchio which I sent him?”
“Don Corrado! He eats it with red wine, with white wine, and when he is alone I think he eats it with champagne.”
“It is very good with champagne. How is the young people’s baseball team going?”
“We could win the league championship this year. We have two fine pitchers and three heavy hitters.”
“The church should have its own Boy Scout troop. There is nothing equal in the world to what a boy brings to scouting and what he gets out of it.”
“That is an excellent suggestion, Don Corrado. It has been on my mind for some time.”
“Do you want me to mention it to the diocese?”
“It would help, Don Corrado. It could make the difference.”
“I will talk to them tomorrow morning.”
The old man held up his arms to kiss his priest before getting into the Lincoln. The two cars drove to Sheepshead Bay, where they boarded a seventy-eight-foot power launch (Don Corrado forbade the word yacht), which was owned by the Tarrawonga Golf & Country
Club of Hillsboro, North Dakota. Don Corrado had some difficulty getting aboard, but his will prevailed. The launch moved slowly out, past Sunday fishermen, outboards, and sailing boats, and cast anchor in the middle of the bay. The crew went below. The captain remained on the bridge. The four soldiers played cards in the bow, while Don Corrado and his son sat under a striped awning in fishing chairs at the stern of the vessel.
Vincent unwrapped two roasted pepperoni sandwiches to break his fast. Before he bit into the first one, he poured his father a jigger of olive oil, which the old man lifted in toast to his son before he drank it down. While Vincent demolished the pepperoni heroes his father spoke to him quietly.
“You have been my strong, sure son,” he said in the Agrigento dialect. “You were a lion.”
Vincent chewed and nodded with gratitude, wondering about the past tense.
“You have never sought reward for yourself but you have earned a vaster reward than your family can ever give to you.”
Biting into the sandwich, Vincent held up an admonishing hand, an action forced upon both of them by his modesty.
“You must be recognized before the world,” his father said. “You must be acknowledged. The world must see your father’s pride in his son. You have won the distinction of peace.”
Vincent realized that something was happening. His father was glowing with intentions. He took a much smaller, warier bite of the sandwich, chewing it more like a chipmunk than like a lion. “What’s goin’ on, Poppa?” he asked.