There had to be five more days before the bank got the ransom demand. Maybe more than that because a bank and an insurance company, not people, were involved in making the move. It would take about three weeks before they could agree with the cops on how to make the payment. There would be one set of letters to the insurance company telling them to pay off in Central Park, where there would be two cops behind every tree, while the real letter would go to Gomsky at the bank, telling him to set up the payoff in Lagos, Hong Kong, Aruba, Panama, and São Paulo. So maybe it would be a full month before he’d be told to let Filargi go.
Charley nursed a beer and read the sports page until 6:10, then he drifted out to find a call board to locate Irene’s gate number and went to stand near it to wait.
The flight was early. Irene came out of the gate yelling and waving. They grabbed each other and held on. She said, “You look lousy, Charley. What’s the matter?”
“Better we’ll talk about it in the car.” He took her small case. She tried to hold on to it, but he took it. “What have you got in there?” he said. “The family jewels?” She grinned weakly.
They drove in the battered black Chevy van out toward the parkway entrance. Irene said, “What’s the matter, Charley?”
“You ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Don Corrado called me over for lunch with him yesterday. That Amalia is some sensational cook. So after lunch he says to me how sick Vincent is and how they are going to move him out to Vegas to take care of the action at the three hotels and that I am going to take over Vincent’s job and Vincent’s points.”
“Charley! That is terrific!”
“Yeah?”
“Why not?”
“They are setting me up.”
“Why should they set you up?”
“Well I don’t know. But it has to have something to do with the three hundred sixty dollars. And Louis Palo. No matter what else, it’s got to be that Don Corrado knows all about that.”
“He knows. I couldn’t figure a way to tell you, but he knows.”
“Who told you that?”
“He did. The day we had dinner in town—the day before I flew out to LA. When I told you he had me over there to welcome me into the family.”
“Holy shit, Irene. Then that is why he is setting me up. He knows. He has you cold and you’re my wife so we both got to get it.”
“Oh, Charley!” Irene began to cry softly.
“Baby, I love you. You understand that? Love is for keeps with me. I won’t let anything hurt you. You’re my woman.”
“Jesus, God, Charley, how I love you.”
“Listen, we have time. The don said the whole thing is on ice until the cops get Filargi,” Charley said earnestly. “He wants me to keep the Filargi thing together, then they move. We’ve got three weeks, a month, to get ready. Then you and me are going to take them before they can take us.”
Irene took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Charley,” she said, “you know how my jobs are lined up?”
“No.”
“The customers call a number in Kansas City or South Carolina, then that call is relayed to my answering machine in LA.”
“Telephones can do that?”
“Yeah. So—I got a call a couple of days ago and it says: full fee, meet me in Paley Park on Fifty-third in New York.”
“A park? On Fifty-third?”
“Yeah. Who do you think the customer is?”
“Who?”
“Vincent Prizzi.”
“Whaaaat?”
“Yeah.”
“What the hell? If Vincent wants somebody clipped, I do it!”
“Not this time. That would be suicide. He put out the contract on you.”
“Vincent? On me?”
“Well, he did.”
“Wait a minute. Vincent gives you a commission on me? He is buying my wife to clip me?”
“Charley, fahcrissake! He don’t know I am your wife. He called the KC number! He tells me it’s worth a seventy-five. I tell him you would be a very tricky hit. In the end we get it up to a hundred.”
“That’s crazy. The Plumber would have to do it for nothing. Any one of my boys, for nothing.”
“Baby! Don’t be offended! He wanted a specialist. Don’t ask me why.”
“I’ll tell you why,” Charley said. “He don’t want the family to know that he has put out a contract on me. The don is setting me up, but when they think they are going to take me, he isn’t going to spend any one hundred dollars to have the number done. That’s what he has workers for, to blow people away for nothing. But, and this is the nitty, if Vincent is paying out one hundred dollars for a specialist to take me out then, number one, he’s got to be crazy—I mean out of his head about something he thinks I done to him—and, number two, he’s gotta be using his own money; not that he doesn’t have it, but spending one hundred dollars has to hurt him more than the fucking hit would hurt me.”
“One thing is for sure,” Irene said dryly, “we are in bad with your family. Now what do we do? You know what Louis Palo told me? He said that even if we went to Rio, or any place, that you would find us, because that’s the way you are built. Do the Prizzis have anybody else like you? Do they have another guy who wouldn’t give up on us?”
“What do they need? They have Don Corrado to remember. They are Sicilians. Don Corrado tells five other guys to remember and he makes them swear that if he dies, the other guys remember. They are all over this fucking world. We go in a restaurant in Uganda and a spade tells some clerk at the Italian legation who passes it to Palermo and they move it to the don in New York and the word goes out—this much money for our thumbs. Maybe two thousand people in Africa are out after our thumbs unless he says he wants them to ship him my whole head. If we are going to run then we have to have face jobs. We have to have new prints and papers. We have to be entirely new and still think every minute that they’re watching us.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
He swung the car into a side street and stopped it next to a curb. “We are going to use Filargi to get us out, somehow. Don Corrado won’t let anything touch us as long as we have Filargi.”
“You mean we can negotiate this thing?”
“The Prizzis need me. How much I don’t know, but there is such a bundle here that we need them.”
“You don’t know, Charley. You never asked me how much that old fuck decided to charge me for scamming him.”
“Whatta you mean?”
“He gave me a choice of being hit or tearing five hundred forty dollars out of my safe deposit box. I have it right here and I’m supposed to hand it to him. Jesus, I looked at my money in one of my boxes at the bank and I almost busted out crying. How I worked to get that money, pounding into their heads—Marxie and Louis—what they had to do and how they had to do it and getting a fight on it every way because I was a woman and therefore they knew better.”
“But how come five hundred forty?” Charley asked.
“Prizzi wants his three hundred sixty plus a fifty percent penalty—five hundred forty dollars of my blood, all gone because of a bunch of Sicilians who have been up to their ass in pathological crime for seven centuries and who have to cheat, corrupt, scam, and murder anybody who stands between them and a buck. It’s a peasant mentality, Charley, and I can’t stand that.”
“Irene, listen—fuck the Prizzis.”
“Charley!” She was genuinely shocked to have heard that from him.
“I have you and you have me. The Prizzis can’t always win.”
“But what are we going to do now?”
“There is only one thing we can do,” Charley said. “We gotta talk to my father.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Angelo Partanna’s bland face broke its lifetime pattern and showed them anger, which climbed toward an explosion point as its fuse burned shorter and shorter. When Charley finished with his report on Don Corrado’s setting him up and Vincent’s putting ou
t a contract on him, Angelo stood up abruptly, walked out to the terrace, shut the door, and stayed there for almost ten minutes staring out across the bay. When he came back he was his old self. “There is nothing to get hot about,” he said. “It’s just business, except with Vincent.”
“Well, what the hell is it with Vincent?” Charley asked.
“Ever since his daughter came home she’s been making his life miserable. It starts up his gout and the blood pressure and he blames you for not marrying her in the first place, ten years ago.”
“Marrying who?” Irene said.
“Maerose,” Charley told her.
“Maerose?”
“That’s the way our minds work, whatta you going to do?” Angelo said to Charley. “But the sweetest part is Vincent tries to put the contract with the guy’s own wife to do the job on him. That is something.”
“What are we going to do?” Irene asked.
“You had it coming. There is no way out of that,” Angelo said to Irene. “Whacking Louis Palo was bad enough. He was a made man in our family so if he rated getting clipped, we had to do it. But robbing the Prizzis of three hundred and sixty dollars,” he held up both hands, “nobody can hold still for that, Irene.”
“Pop, Irene and me have been over that, we know all that, so what are we supposed to do now?”
“The absolutely first thing is that she’s got to give back the three sixty. And if the don wants a fifty percent premium she’s got to pay that, too. That is for openers.”
“All right. I already got that straight in my head,” Irene said, “then what?”
“First hand over the money. We ain’t going anywhere until Don Corrado has that money. He can’t believe anything unless you give back that money. We won’t have any way to argue unless you do what you said and give him back his money. You and Charley are going to be taking big chances in the next couple of days and the only way you are going to come through is if you keep these deals separate and give him back his money so that he can see that you are serious when you lay out the deal that is going to keep you alive.”
“What deal?” Charley said.
“You have to take away the only thing Don Corrado wants. Filargi, the golden Filargi he needs to get back his bank for ten cents on the dollar and win sixty million, maybe seventy million dollars. You have to snatch Filargi again, this time from the Prizzis. You understand me?”
Charley nodded. “I was thinking of something like that,” he said. Angelo looked at Irene. She nodded sadly and turned away from him. She walked to the hall closet, took a small overnight bag from it and brought it out to stand it at Angelo Partanna’s feet. “There’s the five hundred and forty,” she said. “Give it to him for a little while, but before we give him Filargi, I want that money back.”
“This is the story on Filargi,” Angelo said, sitting down in the nearest chair. “Almost a year ago Don Corrado and Ed Prizzi had a meet with Filargi and they laid out for him Ed’s scheme to milk the bank with the crooked foreign currency deals. They told Filargi they would even take only a fifty-fifty split on everything he could steal from the bank. He refused them. He called them bad names and he told them if they ever came near him again that he would see that they were put in prison. He told them he was going to write down the whole conversation just in case they decided to send some people after him and that it would go to the DA’s office if he was hit. Now, anybody else except Corrado Prizzi would have let it go at that and moved along to some other scam, but Corrado buys himself an inside man at the bank—that fellow Gomsky—and talks him into going through with the ripoff for only twenty-five percent, a nice saving. Corrado tells me that this way not only is the pot that much sweeter, but that he can set up Filargi to get much worse than just getting buried—he will be ruined as a witness against the Prizzis. You got to hand it to him. There is nobody like him in this business.”
“Jesus, I’m quitting,” Irene said.
“What do we do with Filargi?” Charley said.
“First you get him. How many people they got out there holding him down?”
“Two, but they’re my people. They do what I tell them.”
“You think the don trusts anybody?” Angelo asked him amiably. “Where have you been? We use our suspicions instead of our brains in this business. Vincent told every man on that job that he is responsible for getting Filargi into court. They are all paid extra for watching each other.”
“Then—too bad,” Charley said. “They got to go, then.”
“What do we do with Filargi when we have him someplace else?” Irene asked Pop.
“You negotiate. You send the letter to the don saying that you got Filargi and that you want to talk but only through an acceptable third party. Corrado will ask me who the third party should be and I will tell him that I am the best man for the job because you aren’t going to trust anybody else.”
“Then we have to trust you,” Irene said.
“Yeah,” Angelo said, smiling broadly at her. “That’s right. But it’s easier than running for the rest of your life then getting iced anyway, right?”
She stared at him. Then she grinned. “Yeah, right,” she said.
“Filargi is worth sixty-seventy million to the Prizzis plus total control of what is maybe about the eighteenth-biggest bank in the United States, because they have to win if they get Filargi, and the biggest win is planting him in the joint here and in Italy for the rest of his life while they buy back the bank from the Italians at ten cents on the dollar. What are you next to seventy million dollars? Nothing.”
“Yeah,” Irene said, “but they’re Sicilians so—present company excepted—they are basically dopes who think with their balls. They are, man for man, the biggest dummies I have ever gotten rich off so what if they turn us down?”
“How can they turn you down?” Angelo said blandly, spreading his open-palmed hands out in front of him. “If they turn you down, Filargi goes in to testify against them. You and Charley will turn and go into the government’s Witness Protection Program and testify against them. The don, Eddie, Vincent and all the rest will be in the slammer for complicity to defraud, for murder, for—ah, shit! you name it—and not only will they never survive the prison terms they get but it will be the end of the Prizzi family.” He walked to the window and stared out at the bay. “I think maybe I can make the cops lean even heavier on the street people. That ought to take the Prizzis’ minds off thinking how they can blow you two away.”
“How?” Charley asked.
“It could turn out to be a good thing that Irene zipped the broad who pressed the wrong floor.”
Chapter Thirty-two
After he had straightened out some basketball betting patterns for the following week, and made the arrangements for the delivery of edges on the national professional tennis circuit, Angelo called Davey Hanly at the chief inspector’s office. He said he was Chester Feinstein calling and Hanly said he would call him right back. It took Hanly twenty minutes to get to a pay phone on Broome Street that should have had a tap on it for the past thirty years, but didn’t.
“Angelo? This is the call-back.”
“Hey, great. Look—lemme pick you up in front of the usual place at twelve o’clock, okay?”
“I’ll be there,” Hanly said and hung up.
They drove slowly around Prospect Park in Angelo’s six-year-old Ford. Angelo said, “I got a lead on the Calhane hit. It ain’t concrete. But this much I know, if you guys can double your pressure on every joint operating in the five boroughs, I think it’s possible that somebody might give you the hitter.”
“Jesus, I don’t know, Ange. We’re limping along on like half pay now. Shutting down half the action is costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars a week.”
“It was just an idea, Davey. Some people are sick and tired of being hassled and I think they could talk to certain other people. The Prizzis are only interested in one thing—getting the Department what it wants, the hitter, and gettin
g back to business as usual for both sides.”
“Lemme talk it over with my people. You got to be operating on information and you never had bad information. My people can go on the shorts if that will turn up the prick who shot that fine woman.”
“It could speed things up for all of us, Davey.”
***
Four days later, the police arrests clogged up every precinct house in the city, including Staten Island. The police redoubled their raids on handbooks and gambling houses. The hookers were driven off the streets and herded out of joints that had been protected by the pad for thirty years. What Dewey did to the prostitution business in the thirties, the NYPD was doing in spades to every moneymaker that the cousins had. The squads lifted sixteen million dollars in street price worth of narcotics. They came down so hard on book-making, on the street and on the phones, that nobody could figure the losses. The war affected seventeen separate national sports, which had created millionaire jockeys and tennis players, tens of thousands of golf courses, hockey rinks, and stadia, and a billion-dollar dependence on all of their stars by an army of barking media men and advertisers. Race tracks, ball parks, jai alai frontons, basketball courts, dashes, jumps, passes, throws, toboggan runs, yacht races, space shots, thoroughbred horses, shuffling fighters, and doped greyhounds generated sales of billions of dollars’ worth of television sets, hundreds of millions of gallons of beer. Each week, in bets alone, cost the citizens more than any foreign war. When the New York police shut all of this down it cost the media, the equipment manufacturers, and the air-conditioning industry—plus the team owners, and the thousands of players of the hundreds of industrialized games—the attention and patronage of the New York trading area, because if the games could not be bet upon they didn’t exist for the people. But most of all it cost the direct recipients of all of that betting cash—the New York Police Department and the Mafia families and Syndicate affiliates.