Angelo had thought it all through. He was a professional thinker about things criminal. He was the only one who knew Charley’s wife had done the Netturbino work. He was the only one who could make the connection that Charley’s wife was Marxie Heller’s widow. He was Charley’s father before he was the Prizzis’ consigliere, so he had to take the chance of being the one to tell Vincent that Charley had gotten married because from now on, if anyone brought it up, Vincent would say he knew all about it and didn’t want to talk about it.
***
The next afternoon at five o’clock, Maerose Prizzi rang the doorbell of the Sestero residence on Brooklyn Heights. She had had her hairdresser come to her apartment at one o’clock and the beautician came at three. She knew how her grandfather liked to see her so she had them transform her into a young virgin, shining with beauty and goodness. Ugo Bustarella was on the door and he was delighted to see her.
“Jesus, it’s got to be four years, right? Jesus, you look marvelous,” he said.
“Ugo! You got so fat! Florrie must be feeding you six times a day.”
He grinned. “Florrie three times, Mrs. Sestero three times. Come on. I’ll take you down to Mrs. Sestero. She’s inna kitchen.”
He stood the riot gun in the corner behind the front door and led the way happily to the stairwell. “Hey, I can find the kitchen,” Maerose said. “I only been here like two hundred times. Tell Florrie hello for me.” She went down the stairs to the kitchen.
Amalia was waiting for her. She sent the girl on an errand upstairs, then she said to Maerose, “He got your letter and it made him very happy. He has told Vincent to come over here tonight. He’s going to make Vincent bring you home.”
Maerose stood very tall and straight. She took in a deep breath and held it. She exhaled slowly then she said, “I am going to make my father pay. I am going to give him the next ten years the way he gave me the last ten years.”
“There is no joy in revenge,” Amalia said. “Revenge is something Sicilians talk about, but when they get it, it turns to nothing in their mouth.”
“I am Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter. When my father told me I was no longer his daughter, he stopped being my father to me, too. When he threw me out and kept me out for ten years, calling me a street-walker, telling me he would see that I stayed an old maid for the rest of my life, looking at me like I was a piece of shit on the few times every year that my grandfather made him let me come back, he was spitting on my honor. It isn’t revenge. I do it for honor.”
***
Corrado Prizzi wept as he welcomed his granddaughter back into the family. He was such an old, old man, she thought, so frail and helpless, then she remembered who he really was. “It will be settled tonight,” he said. “Your father will come to see me tonight.”
“I wrote to you, not only to be restored to the family, grandfather,” she said. “I want to be allowed to take my place in my father’s house. He is a lonely man. I want to cook for him and to keep his house for him. I want to be allowed to make up to my father for all the pain I have caused him.”
When she left her grandfather, Maerose Prizzi hurried to Santa Grazia di Traghetto. She lighted three candles, one for her father, one for Charley, one for herself, and put a twenty-dollar bill into the repository, then went to the second row on the right side of the church, where she had spent the Sundays and Holy Days of her childhood, and prayed to the Virgin, then to St. Gennaro, to intercede for her and her plan. She was going to repay her father, pain for pain, just as he had inflicted his Purgatory upon her. She was going to ruin her father until he was unable to stand it any longer and became sick and died. When he died Charley Partanna was going to succeed in his place as Boss of the Prizzi family, with Maerose Prizzi as his wife. That was the joy in her plan. She was going to get Charley back forever. It could never have happened, none of it could have happened, if he hadn’t married Irene Walker. Her prayers, morning and night, had been answered. She had suffered in shame for almost ten years but, at last, justice would be done; honor would be restored. She would soon bury her grandfather and her father and, at Charley’s side, be at the head of the Prizzi family instead of its outcast.
Chapter Nineteen
After a part-time honeymoon which Charley and Irene were able to stretch out for a whole week in New York, and more than fifteen months after the incident itself, Charley was arraigned before the Brooklyn Grand Jury for the murders of Quarico “Pimples” Grifone and Sam “Jolly Times” Fanfarone, two freelance narcotics hijackers who were described in the arraignment as “garage proprietors,” so the family postponed the big sit-down until Ed Prizzi could get Charley straightened out. He was arraigned immediately, $250,000 bail was granted, then the judge ordered him released for reasons of insufficient evidence. Charley went straight home, where Irene had dinner almost ready. There were three or four minutes of kissing and grabbing, then Irene said, “Charley, would you mind if I redecorated this place?”
“Yeah?” Charley said, “What are you going to do?”
“Well, a couple of dozen books would be a start. Anyway, the whole thing looks like some stage set from summer stock. Let me fool around with it.”
Charley felt a pang until he realized that Maerose would probably never see it anyway. “Sure. You want it, you do it,” he said. “Only don’t invite Maerose over here, okay?”
“Why not?”
“She’s a decorator in New York. She decorated this whole place.” His face lighted up. “Say—she could get stuff for you, for this place, wholesale.”
Irene froze for a second. “I never buy wholesale or boosted stuff,” she said. “What do you care, Charley? Anyway, I have nine whole rooms of stuff in California. Beautiful stuff. The best. You’re going to be crazy about it. You’re going to love it when I’m done.”
“So? What’s for dinner?”
“I am trying something new. It’s a very special meat and wine stew, very French, you know, farmhouse French.”
“No pasta?”
“With this dish, which is called la daube de boeuf Provençale, you get little farfallini, which is absolutely okay for this recipe.”
“Believe me—it is okay for any recipe.”
The telephone rang. It was Pop.
“Hen, Charley!” he said. “So Ed Prizzi took care of everything. That’s nice. Listen, ten o’clock tonight at Ben Sestero’s. They can’t wait anymore with this.”
“Sure, Pop. When are you going to come over and meet the bride?”
“I met the bride, remember? Anyway, she’s not sentimental. Depending on how things work out at the sit-down tonight, figure me dinner on Sunday.”
“Great.” They hung up at the same time.
“They have set a big meet tonight at ten,” he told Irene. “The same one Pop talked about when he called me in Mexico.”
“Big sit-downs bring big money,” Irene said, stirring a pot slowly.
“If everything is even, Pop is coming over here for dinner on Sunday.”
Irene put a lid on the pot. “Okay. Sensational. Then tonight we are going out for dinner and this stew is going to sit for two days until it is the most tremendous stew ever smuggled out of France when I give it to your father on Sunday.”
“You sit down and have a glass of wine,” Charley said. “Let me cook the dinner, which, you are going to have to admit, is going to be better than eating out.”
“How? What are you going to make?”
“I am going to make you something terrific.”
“What?”
“I am going to make you pasta con le Sarde from Palermo, which it is some great pasta shells, like maruzzi, about a pound, baked with sardines, secret amounts of chopped anchovy, fennel, raisins and pine nuts, in oil, and seasoned with saffron. Then, after I get you drunk on that, I am going to make love to you all night.”
“Well, at least until half past nine when you leave for the meeting.”
“Ah, the hell with the food,” he said, grabb
ing her, “we can eat anytime but I couldn’t eat anyways tonight, looking at you.”
***
He arrived for the meeting on Brooklyn Heights five minutes early. The guard, a new Agrigento boy named Sam Falcone, opened the door. Amalia Sestero greeted him, kissing him on both cheeks. “They are all in there,” she said. “I’ll bring Poppa down now.” She took Charley to the sliding doors, opened them, and he went into the room. She closed them behind him.
Don Corrado’s chair was empty at the head of the table. Vincent was seated to the right of it, Ed Prizzi to the left of it, the protocol being set by the order of their birth, not by how much money they brought in, which bugged Ed. Angelo sat at Vincent’s right and there was an empty chair for Charley at his right facing Ben Sestero and Harry Garrone, seated at Ed’s left. A stranger sat at the foot of the table. He was a somber man with a nose like a rope, a large stomach and two gold watch chains draped across his gray flannel vest. As Charley went around the table at that end nobody introduced him so Charley ignored him.
Almost as soon as Charley’s seat touched the chair, the sliding door opened and Amalia brought Don Corrado into the room and settled him in his chair, which faced all the others. Everyone stood. The don motioned Amalia out of the room with his left hand and, as she left, he said, in Sicilian, that he was happy to see that Charley was cleared of the charges that had been brought. Charley thanked him.
“The gentleman at the far end of the table is Alvin Gomsky,” Don Corrado said, in English, with his indistinct sandpiper voice, “and he is treasurer of our bank. I have asked Mr. Gomsky here so that you could hear from his own mouth what is happening.”
He looked sweetly at Gomsky for his statement. Mr. Gomsky had only been able to understand every other word because of Don Corrado’s rich accent but Ed had told him what he was there for.
“The president of the bank is stealing from the bank,” Mr. Gomsky said, “and, if he is allowed to keep up his scheme of bad foreign exchange deals, it will all be over for the bank within nine months or maybe fourteen months.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gomsky.”
“We will look at the books tomorrow morning,” Ed said.
“We will talk about that,” Don Corrado said. “Thank you, Mr. Gomsky. See Mr. Gomsky to the door, Arrigo,” he said to his youngest son-in-law.
“Eduardo will tell you about it,” Don Corrado said in Sicilian when Gomsky had left the room. Eduardo began to speak with full salesman’s voice, collecting the minds of the others, which had been scattered by the outrageous enormity of the news. Don Corrado closed his eyes, perhaps the better to concentrate.
“The bank was always like a cousin to me,” Ed Prizzi began, speaking in the Agrigento dialect. “The bank made everything happen, and not only with the money it generated. The man who bought seventy-five percent of the bank from us is a Neapolitan named Rosario Filargi. He calls himself Robert Finlay and anyone named Filargi who would call himself Finlay would also have to be stupid enough to think that we wouldn’t protect the remaining twenty-five percent of the bank which we own. The treasurer of the bank, Mr. Gomsky, whom you met tonight, has told us—you heard him—that Filargi is bleeding the bank to death with crooked foreign money deals and, if we don’t protect the bank, that it will be dead in a year.”
“How about a fink like that?” Angelo said. “We should cut his balls off, the fucking fink.”
“You got enough for us to do that, Eddie?” Vincent asked his brother.
“Poppa worked out a plan,” Eduardo said. “You got to hear the whole story.”
“Okay,” Vincent said.
“So where did Filargi’s money come from, to buy the eighteenth-biggest bank in the United States? Well—there is a bunch of robbers in Italy at the very top of the government, just like here, from big business, big money. We are like little stickup men robbing gas stations in the Depression, compared to these people. We are what one slot machine is, compared to everything in Vegas compared to these people.”
He filled the jelly glass in front of him halfway with anisette, then passed the bottle across to Vincent. Vincent wet the bottom of his glass because of his gout and passed the bottle to Angelo. Ed Prizzi didn’t speak again until the bottle returned to his end of the table.
“These men had to have a way to get their money out of Italy, into Switzerland, so they wouldn’t have to pay taxes, so Filargi opened two banks across the border from Como, in Chiasso, and Filargi’s people would pick up the bales of cash from these people and take them to Filargi’s Swiss banks. He did so well for them that he was able to convince them that they shouldn’t keep all their eggs in one Swiss basket, and he got the money from them to buy seventy-five percent of our bank. But Filargi’s name should be changed again, to spingularu, because he can never steal enough. Now he is stealing from their seventy-five percent and from our twenty-five percent, but he dishonors us more than he dishonors them, because we feel it more.”
“The loss of the money or the honor?” Arrigo Garrone asked.
Charley looked at him with such brutal questioning that Garrone became pale.
“Harry was trying to emphasize that we feel the loss of both more than anything else,” Ed Prizzi said smoothly. Angelo patted Charley’s leg under the table.
“Still, it is my father’s honor and my father’s money which has been put in peril here, so I will tell you my father’s plan for dealing with Filargi. Some men suffer when you take life away from them, because life is sweetest to them. To Filargi, my father has decided, money is sweetest, so that is what we are going to take away. We will leave him his life without money, and without any way to get money.”
Don Corrado opened his tiny eyes. He looked into the face of every man at the table, nodding. “That is how Filargi must pay,” he said. “I was able to figure it out because Charley gave me the key which showed me the way to justice for Rosario Filargi.”
“I gave the key?” Charley said blankly.
“You brought me the key that kidnap insurance premiums are deductible from the income tax. Eduardo will explain.”
Don Corrado closed his eyes. Everyone looked at Ed Prizzi.
Chapter Twenty
“Very recently,” Eduardo said, “Mr. Gomsky has persuaded his fellow directors of the bank to take out two million, five hundred thousand dollars worth of kidnap insurance to cover all bank officers. The amount of the coverage represents twelve percent of what our twenty-five percent interest in the bank is worth. Naturally, we will have to share up to twenty-five percent of the costs of the high premium rate for the policy, but, as Charley has established for us, that cost will be tax-deductible, and the ransom money the bank will have to pay will also be deductible, so that, in the event that one of the officers of the bank is kidnaped—if Filargi were to be taken, for example—the kidnapers themselves would get two million five hundred thousand net as ransom and the insurance company would have to pay.”
“Thank you, Eduardo,” Don Corrado said. “Thank you, Beniamino. Thank you, Arrigo. You may go now. Please—on the way out—please tell Amalia to come for me.”
The three men left the room.
“I think I am getting an ulcer,” Vincent said. “What kind of a thing is that at my age?”
“Don’t drink milk,” Angelo said. “Milk makes the acids flow. It makes the ulcers worse.”
“Who drinks milk?” Vincent said as Amalia came into the room for Don Corrado, leading him out of the room. She closed the sliding doors quietly.
“My father has a terrific plan here,” Vincent said to the Partannas. “We are going to put a two million five price tag on him after we take him, then we are going to leave a trail for the Feds so that they can prove that Filargi organized the whole thing to have himself kidnaped so he could cheat the insurance company out of that kind of money. Jesus, talk about felonies! They will give him ten consecutive life sentences for stealing that much money from such a company with the clout that an insurance company has.”
>
“Tremendous!” Angelo said, kissing his fingertips and throwing the kiss into the air. “Now you are learning how a real ’narugnutu should be handled, Charley.”
“That ain’t all my father has figured out for Filargi,” Vincent said. “When Filargi is picked up for engineering his own kidnaping, our people in Italy and Switzerland are going to put the pressure on the papaveri who were his partners in buying the seventy-five percent of the bank from us, by telling them how much Filargi was stealing from them on the crooked foreign exchange deals, and they are going to squeeze their government to bring Filargi to trial in Rome, so that if he ever gets out of the joint in this country, he is going to face at least twenty-five years’ time in some fucking Italian prison. In the meantime, as soon as they pick him up here, our people will organize the bank’s stockholders to take him for every dime he has in the world and what they can’t get at, the Italian pezzocannonati will take away from him. Believe me, over the next fifty years he’s in the joint here or in Italy, he’s going to have plenty of time to figure out and understand that he had to be out of his mind when he decided to piss on the honor of the Prizzis.”
“It is a beautiful piece of work, is absolutely all anybody can say,” Charley said humbly.
“Well,” Angelo said, “when you figure that we are going to be able to buy at least fifty percent of the bank back from the Italians after it hits the fan, it certainly is a beautiful piece of work.”
“There is going to be points in this for you, Charley,” Vincent said, somberly, because he was talking about giving out the family’s money.
Charley began to protest politely but Vincent held up his hand. “My father wants it that way. Fair is fair. You come up with the gimmick that is going to cook this guy. You are going to get five percent of this job. Five points on two million five is a nice score.”