He didn’t feel used, he felt sad. He was never going to be able to forget her. But Pop had been right. Pop was always right. He had been a part of the Prizzi family all his life and he had been a part of Irene’s for less than three months. There was nothing to choose from there. She threatened the family—she stole from the family—and she had to go. But she was some woman. She was smart, she was brave, and she wouldn’t take any shit from anyone, not even Corrado Prizzi. He wished he could stop his life anywhere right in the middle of that cassette.
After he ate he cleaned up in the kitchen, then got out the vacuum to make sure there were no stray crumbs in the sofa or around the floor. The last thing he wanted was roaches.
When he was dressed he called the airline and booked a seat to LA, then sat down and filled in one of the hot tickets with the corresponding flight number. At 11:05 he tapped Irene’s number into the phone. Irene picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“It’s Charley. Jesus, you really meant it.”
“I always mean it, Charley,” she said.
“He could only see Pop and me at lunch but lunch didn’t start until after two and he wouldn’t talk while he was eating so it was about a quarter to five when I told him what I wanted.”
“Yeah?” She felt as tense as a junkie. No Sicilians were going to hand over $540 just because somebody asked for it. They had reneged on every other piece of money they owed her so there wasn’t a chance, unless they were setting her up, that they would pay back the money she had scammed from them. She gripped the back of a chair and held the telephone tightly and waited for what Charley was going to say.
If Charley told her that the Prizzis refused to give him her money, she was safe. If he said he had the money, they were going to try to hit her.
“I got the money,” Charley said. “It’s in your same bag. He hadn’t even unpacked it.”
Irene felt like a camera that had been laid on tracks and was now photographing as it withdrew tens of miles, then thousands of miles, then backward into outer space, without ever losing sight of the vision it was recording, a vanishing memory of what she had felt for Charley. She took one last look, then blanked it out forever. She remembered that day when she had told him she loved him. She had told him that she didn’t know how to say it, because she had never said it. She had never said it to anyone else. She had cherished the day she would say it only because it was true, then she had said it to Charley. She heard her own voice. “I never loved anybody. All my life I had to protect myself, and you can’t protect yourself anymore when you love somebody.”
She tore the past up as if it were a two-month-old telephone message. She had to protect herself. The Prizzis were sending a man to do the job on her and the man was Charley.
“No kidding?” she said. “Man, that’s a real surprise.”
“Yeah. You coulda knocked me over,” Charley said.
“Well, I’m glad it’s settled. You hang on to it. I got about three days’ work to get this house sold and the office lease fixed up, then I’ll be back in New York and we’ll spend some of it.”
London was where she was going, she told herself. They have the surgery and they have the right language and I’ll be able to lay my hands on new paper. Nine hours’ time difference. Over the Pole and I can be there tomorrow night if I get out of here tomorrow morning. Got to stay until the bank opens so I can get at the boxes.
“I got a better idea,” Charley said. “I got a couple of days before I take over at the laundry. I just booked space on a morning flight to LA and we can have a ball for a couple of days.”
She felt grief as if the new glacier had just moved in on her, embedding her forever as if she were a mastodon. How had she ever gone the fucking love route? She had worked for eleven years to build her business, the best business in the world, tax free and high fee with a front that was so legit it was absolutely foolproof. She had the kind of house her mother had never even looked at. If she wanted the occasional shot at grabbing cock, that was certainly no sweat to line up. She had the California climate, her car, her clothes, and her safe deposit boxes but built into that, the whole time, must have been some tilt toward destroying herself, to take everything she had away from herself plus her peace of mind by walking right into the trap of loving Charley with her eyes wide open.
What was Charley? An animal, a hoodlum, a Sicilian hoodlum who shot people in the kneecaps or choked them with a piece of rope. He was everything Marxie had warned her about Sicilians.
If Charley came to California, it would be his last trip to anyplace.
If Charley came to California before she could get away to London she would have to zotz him, and for the first time she felt loathing, not for Charley, but for the Prizzi money that had pulled her in and made her meet Charley. She had loved him but that was all over now. She had wiped out ever meeting him, ever knowing him, and everything else sappy like that.
“I know you, Charley,” she said gaily. “You can’t wait to get started in the new slot. Why waste time coming out here? I’ll be right back in Brooklyn in three days.”
“Listen—who knows when I’m ever going to get any time off again,” Charley purred into the phone, sweat pouring off him. He knew she was trying to beat them. He knew she had gone to LA just to get into the boxes at the bank. “What the hell,” he said, “I am practically on my way, I can’t stop now.”
“Okay,” she said, “it’s up to you. What’s the flight number? I’ll pick you up at the airport.”
When she hung up she went to the wall safe in her closet and dialed it open. She took out a 9mm pistol and unscrewed the noise suppressor from its barrel. It was the right caliber for close work. She checked its mechanism carefully then loaded it. She locked the safe and took the pistol to her dressing room and put it in her makeup box with its lifted top facing the doorway to her bedroom. Jesus, he was a big mother. Somehow she’d have to drag him out to the garage and get him in the trunk of the rental she had picked up at the airport. She would leave him in the rental at the airport just the way he had left Marxie to rot there. She didn’t feel the grief anymore. Charley was a contract she had put out herself, and had given to herself; full fee.
Chapter Forty-five
Charley strapped the shoulder holster into place on the left side of his chest, felt the knife in its leg scabbard, picked up Irene’s light case and his own bag and left the apartment. The telephone rang as he was closing the door. He went back in and answered it. It was Maerose Prizzi.
“Hey, Charley!”
“Hi, Mae. I was practically out the door.”
“Where you going?”
“I gotta go to the Coast.”
“I just heard the big news. Jesus! You really are a regular Horatio Alger.”
“Who’s he?”
“Your father told me you’re going to take over our house.”
“Well, yeah. This is too far from the laundry.”
“I been thinking about it ever since he told me. You can’t live in that dump. It’s furnished like a Calabrian coal miner’s hut. Lissena me. You got to let me redo the whole place. As a wedding present. Whatta you say?”
“That would be terrific, Mae.”
“Will it be okay with Irene?”
“Yes,” Charley said.
“I mean we have the access here. We can get the best colors, the best stuff, the really right wallpapers. I mean, of course I’m going to do the whole job with her, the way she sees it, how she wants it to look. Believe me, Charley, she’ll be crazy about it.”
“You have great ideas, kid. Look, I gotta get to the airport.”
“Call me when you get back, you hear?”
Charley drove the Chevy van to the airport and made his flight by an easy twelve minutes.
***
She was there when he came out of the chute into the airport building. Jesus, what a tremendous-looking woman, he thought. He was doing the right thing. A woman like this should never
get old. She was ripe. She was at her peak, so what the hell.
They didn’t speak. They moved into each other and hung on. Then they kissed and, for an exploded second, she almost changed her mind. For the first time in her life she wished she had been born a square and that Charley was the corner druggist. But he lived by the sword, she told herself, so it was against all the percentages that he could be expected to die in a bed. His time had come.
Together they carried despair on their backs like a mountain God had told them to carry three times around the world. This is the way it is with everybody, he told himself, they all do every day what I’m going to do tonight, they kill whatever they love. They take it in and let it warm them and expand them until they think there isn’t any more room under the sky to hold their joy then, sooner or later, they drag it out into the snow and kill it before it can change them.
“Did you eat on the plane, Charley?”
“Whatta you think? We are a couple of miles from that spic place. Our place. That’s where I’ll eat if I can ever stop looking at you.”
“Well,” she said, “we have been separated for at least twenty-four hours.”
“I love you, baby,” he said, and his tongue turned to wood. He told himself that she knew he had been sent there to do the job on her, but she thought it was all because of the $540 so, in a business way, it made sense to her that Charley should try to set her up. He was the new Boss. He wanted to start out with a clean slate. But she hadn’t looked at a newspaper in a week so she had no idea what a thing that woman who had pushed the wrong floor had become, he thought. She didn’t know she was the only natural patsy anyone had to stop the wind blowing on all the family business in New York and hurting the business.
They walked out to the rented car, a big gas guzzler with a large trunk. Irene drove.
“Ah, what the hell, Charley,” she said, “let’s go to my house and lay down on each other.”
“Not yet. We gotta go back to that spic place. I dream about that place and you are always there. It could be the last chance we’ll ever have to sit out there and hear the ocean and drink that pineapple stuff.”
“It’ll still be there, Charley.”
“Sure. But where will we be? I’m the new Boss. It’s going to keep me pretty busy.”
She drove the car along the Pacific Coast Highway and she thought, if I was a square and if Charley was out here for some other reason, like he had some other woman or something, and I knew he was getting set to zotz me, if this was a TV movie, I would drive this fucker with both of us in it right over a cliff and into that ocean.
Charley thought it would be a good place to clip her out here when it got dark. He could get her to drive up into the hills for a quickie and shove the knife into her, but that was only a tactical thought. It passed through his mind professionally, as a possibility only. He had to have time with her at the spic place where they had started. Then he had to go home with her, once more, for the last time.
Irene swung the car into the parking lot at the restaurant. “Ah, what do we want a lot of food for, Charley?” she said. “Let’s get home and train for the Olympics on my bed.”
“Just one whiff of the good old days,” Charley said. “You know what I was thinking?”
“What?”
“We got that satchelful of ready money in the car. We could cut out of here right now and head for the San Diego airport, then we could fly into Dallas and change for anywhere. Where do you like?”
“I once saw a travel folder I never forgot. It was about the South Island of New Zealand. Very calm and very beautiful.”
“Then, what the hell, let’s go. Let’s take the satchel and go right now.”
She leaned over, lifted his hand and kissed it. “What’s the use, Charley? You know they’d find us no matter where we went. I mean, the Prizzis’ honor is involved, isn’t it? You are Boss now. So let’s count our blessings. We can go to the South Island next year.”
He kissed her cheek softly. “Just one more of these crazy pineapple drinks then we’ll get lost in the sheets.”
***
She cut off the engine and opened the car door.
***
They sat at the same table as before and ordered from the same waiter. They were both cast backward into the first time. Each of them put away their separate deadly plans for a while. Charley held Irene’s hand and stared into her eyes. He looked like a thousand other guys in love with being in love, but his mind kept telling him that he was a professional and that he had to keep the right balance on things so she wouldn’t think she was being set up, and he wished bitterly that he could have poured everything out to her, to hear her say that she understood, that it was all right, until he could maybe even call the whole thing off, pack a couple of bags, and get the hell out of the country with the $540.
“Hey, maybe we ought to lock the car,” he said. “All your money is in that satchel in the trunk.”
“I never thought you’d get Prizzi to pay off like that,” she said.
“He’s grateful to you for Filargi. Five hundred forty is nothing. You are a big star around the Prizzi house.”
“What a business!” Irene said.
What was the use of bullshitting around like this, she thought. It only makes it worse. Men really want to get the last drop of romance out of the Valentine card. Everything they did was always for the wrong reason. Charley used to be a wonderful guy, in her whole life she never met anyone like him for churning her up and making her want to pull everything together. Maybe they were those floating two halves of the same being that the poetry talked about, maybe all they needed was that one thing—to be true to each other right down the line on everything that happened and never fuck around with other people’s reasons and the corny temptations. She wished they had talked all that over the day they had met. It was one of those things that both sides had to understand. It never worked when it was only clear to one of them. It was too late to even think like that. Thinking like that could slow her down and give her a bad case of the fatals. She reached out for his other hand and said, “It’s time to go, Charley.”
***
When they got out of the car in Irene’s driveway Charley said, “Anyway, here’s your five hundred forty.”
She opened the side door of the house, smiling. “Bring it in,” she said, “we’ll put it back in the same closet where we found it.” They walked into the pantry, then into the main hall. She opened the closet door. He put the satchel at her feet and, with her right foot, she slid the bag inside and shut the door.
“Aren’t you going to count it?” he asked.
“What for? You counted it.”
They went up the stairs with their arms around each other and Irene could feel the .38 Magnum under Charley’s jacket.
“Hey, you’re packing a lot of heat in there,” she said.
“Why not? I was walking around with a half a million dollars.”
“I hope you don’t wear it to bed.”
“I can’t wait to get the whole harness off.”
Irene’s large bedroom had a wall-to-wall mirror on the ceiling over the enormous, turned-down bed. She sat demurely and watched Charley hang up his jacket, then unstrap the gun harness from around his chest and hang it up in a closet far across the room.
They sat back-to-back on either side of the wide bed while they undressed and put on night clothes. When Charley had his pajama bottoms on he got up, walked around the bed and crossed to the bathroom in front of Irene, naked to the waist, so she could see how unarmed he was.
“I am really ready,” Charley said. “Twenty-four hours away from you and I come on like some sex fiend.”
“Keep it warm for five more minutes, honey,” Irene said, smiling, her eyes opaqued with phoney lust. When Charley came back and got into the low bed, Irene got up and went into the dressing room. He lay with Marxie’s long, thin knife in his right hand, hanging down against the far side of the bed. He was propped up agai
nst the pillow watching her as she brushed her hair in the lighted dressing room beyond the darkened bedroom.
As Irene brushed her hair she made up her mind. Charley, being Charley, would be counting on a whole night of making love so he wouldn’t be able to see it coming if she hit him now. She put the brush down and looked back into the bedroom. Charley was lying there with his eyes closed, working on himself so he could turn into a tiger in the sheets; waiting for her to come to bed.
She lifted the .22 pistol out of the makeup case and shielded it with her body as she let it hang down at her side at the end of her arm. She moved out slightly into the room and began to raise the pistol. Charley moved.
He lifted up the knife from the floor and threw it with tremendous force across the fifteen feet that separated them. Her pistol fired, missing him because the knife shattered her larynx and severed her spinal cord, nailing her to the frame of the door behind her. She had moved from glorious life into death in three short seconds.
Charley dressed himself methodically. He took his case down to the hall, removed Irene’s traveling case from the hall closet and put them in the front seat of his car. He opened the trunk. He went back into the house and plodded slowly up the stairs. In the bedroom he had to use all of his strength to pull the knife out of her throat and, while her body slid grotesquely to the floor, he wiped its handle carefully with a handkerchief, put the knife into its scabbard and restrapped it to his left calf.
He went back to the body and picked up the pistol that lay beside it and, holding it close to the body just under the bare left breast, fired once. As he picked up the warm corpse he discovered that he was sobbing.
Carrying Irene, wrapped in a blanket, over his shoulder, Charley made his way down the stairs to the side door. He opened the trunk of the car and dumped the body into it, thinking that at least he and Irene had never been married. Marriage was a sacrament performed in a Catholic church under the eyes of God, and no justice of the peace named Joseph Tierney Masters in a honkytonk town like Tijuana could perform a real marriage. Only a priest could do that and there had never been time to get that done. There had never been time for hardly anything.