“There is no way we can pay her, Charley.”
“Well, Pop, with all respect, I have to hear that from the don.”
Angelo picked up the telephone on his desk and dialed a number. “Amalia?” he said into the phone. “Angelo. Charley and me got to see the don today.”
“The only way you can do that,” she said, “is you come over for lunch.”
***
Lunch at Don Corrado’s, which didn’t begin that day until 2:30, while Charley and his father waited for the call from Amalia because of the don’s overlong nap, lasted until a quarter to five. Charley was almost distraught thinking about Irene’s ultimatum—that she have the money by five o’clock or she would leave him—but the don would not speak of business that day while they ate. At last the two old men sat in the Morris chairs and Charley sat in a straight-backed chair facing them.
“You tell me what you have on your mind,” Don Corrado said, “then I will tell you what I have on mine.”
“Padrino,” Charley said, “we delivered Filargi to you in the best of good faith. It was agreed at the time that if I agreed to give Filargi to you, that my wife would be paid her fee for doing her stand as second man, and that the five hundred forty dollars would be returned to her. With respect, on her behalf, I am asking for that money now.”
Don Corrado and Angelo Partanna stared at him sadly.
“I am saying that we will forget the rest of the entire piece of money, a very big piece of money, but the return of the five hundred forty—that she’s got to get back. It was all okayed by you and she’s got to have it back.”
“Charley,” Don Corrado said gently, “there is a very good reason why she hasn’t been paid. The Grand Council decided last night that we must give the second man on the stand to the cops.”
Charley looked with horror from Don Corrado to Angelo Partanna. “Give her to the cops?” he said thickly. The words were like razor blades in his throat.
“Listen, Charley,” Don Corrado said, offering him the comfort of his alligator eyes, “last night the Grand Council, speaking for all the families in this country under a system which we have all accepted for fifty years, told me I had one week to give up whoever killed the woman who pushed the wrong floor or to find myself at war with every family in this country. The Grand Council sent Bavosi and Lingara here last night to tell me that. Do you know what a war would cost us? It could cost us our life as a family. It could cost us all of our people and everything we have. Nothing else can have any meaning to any of us except the family who made such a good life for us in America.”
“What do you want me to do?” Charley said.
“You have to do the job on her, Charley. You are the only one who can get close enough to her to do it,” his father said.
“Zotz her? Clip Irene?”
“You are thinking that Ed’s fixers can get her off and that she could be given to the police alive,” Don Corrado said. “But I have never seen them like this. The FBI is in it because it was a kidnaping. If they get her alive they will make her talk and if she talks she will drag all of us to prison. Maybe even to the chair. She would talk because she would have to talk. When she talks, then you, me, Angelo, and Ed will all be nailed. Filargi will go free. We will never get the bank back. There is no choice, Charley. The existence of the Prizzi family is in your hands.”
“But how will clipping Irene ever satisfy the cops about the woman who pushed the wrong floor?”
“Filargi will identify her body as the one who shot that police captain’s wife. There will be no one to question. They will have what they asked for and we can all go back to doing business.”
“But she is my wife, Padrino.” Charley’s voice broke.
“She is your wife, we are your life,” his father said. “Tell us your answer, Charley.”
“One woman who you have known for less than two months, or your family which is your life,” Don Corrado said.
Charley felt that he must be drowning. He wouldn’t have anything left if he did what they were asking him to. What else did he have except Irene? How could he do the job on the only person he loved? Everybody else—Pop, his job, the family—that was all only an automatic thing that had been massaged into him, beaten into him, fed and coaxed into him every day of his life. It was a Sicilian’s instinct to feel that way about those things. But Irene was his need, she was the emotion on which his life rested. She was all the things that made him a man. She was the only important thing in his life.
Maybe he would get old. Pop and Don Corrado had made it somehow. What would he have when he got old if he did what they wanted? He would have a pile of money in a Swiss bank. He would have houses, and people, and cars, and power—not his but on loan to him. He would have more respect and still more respect. He would have quick-eyed men like the Plumber and Cucumbers Cetrioli around him wherever he went and he would shrivel up inside from the endless talk of sports and odds and fixes. He would go dead and dry because for every minute of every day until he was dying he would remember what he had done to the only meaning of his life. He would have killed more than Irene’s body, he would be wasting both of their immortal souls. He would be passing a sentence upon himself to spend the rest of his life inside a 230-pound cake of ice. That was the bad part. If he blew Irene away he would be alone. No one could take her place. All his life he had never stopped looking, like everybody else, hoping to find that perfect match-up, edge to edge, of his body, mind, and spirit, and when he had found Irene he knew he had done it, that they were chemical complements, and could make each other safe forever.
What was the Prizzi family next to that? What was all of his life—apart from Irene—next to that? In his mind he stared blankly into her sweet, serene face as it smiled at him, completing him, saving him, and he knew that, no matter what she meant to him, because he had been formed by the history of the people he came from, by his father and Don Corrado, to become what he was, even though Irene was one being with him in his business—which was his life, too—even though she was the woman who was his mother and his lover and his partner all at the same time, he would be even more alone if he turned his back on his family than if he did what they were asking him to do. The family were what he had been since Sicily started breeding people. They were his food. They had been with him forever. There were hundreds of thousands of them, most of them ghosts, some of them bodies. They were all staring at him, waiting to know what he would do. He couldn’t do it. They couldn’t expect him to do it. How could he be the final one to cheat her out of her life the way her father had done it, the way the mob had done it? He would be the last of all of them to put her through the hoop. But the last one. She would never be able to start up again the way she always had done it. He would be finishing her courage. And in the few seconds before he could do it, he would see all of that in her eyes because, no matter what else, she trusted him and she knew he loved her. He wanted to drown.
“I will give her to you,” Charley said to them.
“It’s business, Charley,” his father said. “You know it’s only business.”
“Well—we can’t set her up without that money,” Charley said. “She has everything going on that money.”
“Then you’ll bring her the money,” Don Corrado said. “It’s in the same little case. It’s under my bed. Bring it out, Charley.”
Charley went across the room and got down on his hands and knees beside the big bed. He pulled a traveling case out and brought it to the don.
“Open it, son,” Don Corrado said.
Charley unsnapped the clasps and opened the lid. Packages of thousand-dollar bills were stacked inside. “That’s the five hundred forty dollars,” Don Corrado said. “If that’s what she wants, show it to her.”
“Where you gonna take her?” Pop asked.
“She left for California.” He couldn’t look at them so he kept looking at the money. “She told me if I wasn’t back at the beach with the money by five o’clock that she
would leave for California.”
“All right,” Don Corrado said with finality. “After you take the stone out of my shoe, leave her in a rent-a-car at the airport, then call Angelo and tell him where. He’ll tell the New York cops and they’ll call the LA cops, then she can be photographed and they can show the pictures to Filargi in the slammer and he can tell them that she is the hitter who did the job on the woman who pushed the wrong floor and the wind will stop blowing. We can all get back to our business again.”
Chapter Forty-four
By the time Charley got to the bottom of the stairs at the Sestero house, leaving the grimness of his father and Don Corrado two floors above, his body and mind felt as if they had been flash-frozen. He had spent his life with those two old men and he had carried out their devious and brutal orders as the ordinary course of his job, but although he spun around and around in his head what they had just told him to do, he could not make the jagged parts of it fit into any recognizable, coherent pattern. They had assigned him to do the job on his own wife, as if that were something that the fratellanza did every day. He was now the Boss of the Prizzi family and the first job they handed him was to kill his own wife. Charley had been brought up to believe that, no matter how vicious things got in business, the women were safe from it. That was the primary point of honor of the whole thing. No matter what you did for money, you never did the job on women—certainly never on your own women.
He could understand it, but he couldn’t understand it, but as he thought about it, he thought about the seventy million dollars and how Don Corrado had not even made a move to avenge his own son’s murder by a gang of pimps because, if a war started, it could get in the way of the seventy million dollars coming down the chute. That helped Charley as he walked away from the house toward the Chevy van. Don Corrado had had to put the considerations of honor to one side when the Boccas killed his son. Angelo had to see his own son in agony over what they had told him to do. The leaders had to sacrifice themselves first in order to make a better place for all those who followed them. He was a leader. No matter how he looked at it the family had been his life. What he felt for Irene was enormous, but it was separate. She had a different much paler, thinner meaning when he judged her beside the total meaning he got from his family. He was now Boss of the family. He had to set an example that would be remembered as long as the family stood. He saw dimly that it was right to sacrifice the woman he loved so that the family could go on and on fulfilling its honor, which was its meaning.
He suddenly saw clearly that Irene had stepped so far out of line that there was nothing left to do but to whack her. It wasn’t her fault entirely that she had scammed the Prizzis for $720. She was a Polack, so what could she know about the real rules? But she had made her mistake when she had given back the $360 and made out like she was innocent so she could keep the other half of it, because what could she expect—that the Prizzis would hold still to be taken for that kind of money?
It could even be, he forced himself to tell himself, that in all this time she had only made out like she was crazy about him in case—like she, herself, said—he would have zotzed her. Marrying him and all that grabbing and kissing him and cooking and washing the awnings and scrubbing floors had probably been a lot of bullshit. She had certainly fooled him. She had convinced him that she was crazy about him—but how could she take the fifty dollars from Vincent to blow him away if that was how she felt about him?
She had screwed up on the Filargi stand and that was what had finished her. He tried to go through the whole thing again in his mind. She threw the baby at the bodyguard just when the elevator door opened. The bodyguard went for his gun instead of the baby. What Irene should have done was to grab the woman who pushed the wrong floor and used her as a shield to make the bodyguard drop his gun or to give Charley a chance to get out there and sap him. Well, maybe she couldn’t. She shot the bodyguard first so he must have been pressing her. Irene had nerve. She did everything right. But why did she have to clip the dumb broad on the wrong floor? She wasn’t holding any gun on Irene. She was just standing there in innocent-bystander shock and Irene had done the job on her and put them all in the shit.
But what a woman. A clean woman in every way and a terrific housekeeper. Sometimes he had the feeling that she couldn’t stand Sicilian food but she could cook it like she had studied under the whole Spina family in Agrigento. She was some woman. She never complained; she hated Brooklyn, hated Sicilians, hated the climate but she never complained.
No use thinking like that, he told himself. He had learned a long, long time before that a contract on anybody was just business. He had grown up with Gusto Bustarella. They had been made on the same day. They liked the same kind of broads. Gusto’s father had spent maybe fifty hours showing them all the ways to use a knife when they had been fifteen-year-old kids, and, besides, Gusto was a very funny guy. He was a million laughs. He was the very best friend Charley ever had, except Pop, but when Vincent told him he had to do the number on Gusto, that was that. He did it. He even used a knife for old time’s sake. What’s the sense of thinking about things that had nothing to do with business whatsoever? Everybody had to die sometime.
And now he had to give it to Irene. When he had gone into Don Corrado’s house he had loved Irene but when he came out that was something that had happened to two other people a long time ago in a different country. Pop had said it. The family was his life.
He drove to the beach figuring out the best way to set her up. She wouldn’t be easy, but if he didn’t make a whole mountain out of that she wouldn’t be too tough either. If she had left on the dot of five o’clock, and that was the kind of woman she was, it would take her maybe forty minutes to get to the airport if the traffic was right. She could have caught the six o’clock plane for LA and that would get her there at half past nine, maybe to her own house by half past ten, which would be half past seven her time. So he would call her at eleven o’clock New York time.
He got to the beach at half past five and took a shower. Then he went to the box he kept on the floor of his closet and took out the long, balanced knife he had taken from Marxie Heller. He chose a light-weight soft leather scabbard and strapped the knife and the scabbard around the inside of his left calf. Then he put on a pair of pajama bottoms and got up to look at himself in the long mirror in the closet door. He couldn’t see anything under the floppy pajama trousers.
That was what he would use. He would wear a .38 Magnum in a shoulder holster, then when the time came for them to go to bed, he would take off the gun harness elaborately, so she could watch what he was doing, and hang it over the back of a chair away across the room from the bed, then he would get into bed with her and wait for the right chance to slide the knife into her. He wanted to do it the most painless way, the quickest way. He didn’t want her even to know that he had done it to her.
He made himself a hamburger and had two glasses of red wine while he ate in front of the TV screen and the video machine. He played Irene’s cassette over and over again. When its two minutes and forty-nine seconds were over, he pressed the button on his remote control and rewound it, to start it again while he chewed the hamburger and sipped the “Chianti-type” wine.
The cassette was as short as his life with Irene and many different pictures were crowded into it, but he was able to see what Paulie, and Pop, and that cameraman had meant when they hadn’t gone out of their skulls, the way he had, about Irene’s looks. She was a good-looking woman, sure. But no 12 on a scale of 10 the way he thought when these pictures were actually happening. He would rate her about a 7.
What tore him up as he analyzed it, watching the scenes again and again, was how he had been kidding himself when he thought that they had both gone crazy about each other the way he knew she had hit him. He had thought that she had been dropped by love at first sight, from the minute Mae had introduced them. Now he could see that it was Mae who had been standing there adoring him, not Irene. Irene just lo
oked at him like a passenger on some sinking ship looks at a lifeboat. She had needed him all right, but she hadn’t needed him for the reasons he had thought she needed him.