She opened the carved ivory box on the table and held it out to him. “I didn’t know you were on this stuff,” she said.
“I am not on it,” he said flatly, taking a stick. “I don’t even smoke it.”
“What do you do—make brownies with it?” she asked, lighting up, inhaling deeply, and passing the joint to him. “What the hell do you want from me, anyhow, Charley?”
He drew on the grass, held it a long time, then said through the exhaling smoke, “I just wanted to talk to you.”
“You drove all the way from Brooklyn at almost two in the morning just for that?”
He allowed his hand to rest on her knee, maybe more on her thigh. It was warm, nice, warm. “We wasted a lot of time,” he said.
“Almost ten years? You call that a lot of time? How come you didn’t wait till I was fifty?”
“Well,” he said slowly, exhaling slowly, “you could be a fat wop broad by fifty.”
“Yeah? By the time I’m fifty you’ll look like the Plumber’s father—if he had one. You want to do it, Charley? Is that what you want?”
“Hey! Come on! Take it easy. What the hell.”
“Nobody took it slower and easier than you and me, Charley. Ten whole years. Answer the question—you want to do it?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
She stood up and began to get out of the three-ounce overcoat.
“With all the lights on?” he said.
She stood there in high-heeled mules, nothing else except for some heavy eye shadow, and she began to breathe hard. “Yeah,” she said, “right here. On the V’Soske rug. With the lights on.”
“Madonna mia,” Charley said.
***
An hour later they had made it on the rug, in her four-poster bed with the showbiz curtains, and with Charley seated on a little stool in her shower, because he was getting a little tired. He kept moaning into her ear about the velvetness of her skin, the deliciousness of her boobs, and the elasticity of her hips, until she told him to either talk dirty or shut up.
At seven o’clock she made him such a breakfast that he knew even he couldn’t cook: caciotti, small, hot rolls filled with cheese, and a minced kidney, and some sarde beccafico, little sardines with a stuffing of bread crumbs, minced salami and pine nuts with a little lemon juice, a bottle of cold, white wine and a quart of black coffee.
Chewing, he looked up at her with dismay mixed with adoration. She had put a small apron on, but that was all. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“What is ‘yeah’ supposed to mean?”
“Well, Charley, for Christ’s sake, you say hello to me, when you think of it, for almost ten years—from the time I was nineteen years old—until you needed Irene Walker, then you use me like I was information at the telephone company and that was supposed to be it, right? Forever, right? Then you call me in a sweat at one in the morning and you gotta make it with me. So it figures you’re in the worst trouble since I took off for Mexico City.”
“Yeah? How do you know that?”
“What is my name—Jones? I am a Prizzi. I am Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter.”
“Can I talk to you?”
“I don’t know, Charley. I knew a couple of minutes ago but now I don’t know.”
“I was almost going to shoot myself last night.”
“Ah, fahcrissake, Charley!”
He stared at her, nodding. His face was helpless. She had never seen that before.
She sat opposite him in the gadget-packed kitchen and they looked at each other as if they were both listening to all the digital clocks not tick. “Tell me about it, Charley.”
“I can only tell you, Mae. It won’t come out of me when I try to tell Pop and who else is there? I am doing this to you to make you feel bad so I’ll feel better and that takes my manhood away from me. It dishonors me.”
“Charley, how can I feel worse than I used to feel? That was the worst. That was how you feel now. I was going to kill myself, but what I had already done to Prizzi honor would be nothing to my grandfather if I did that. But, what the hell, Charley, believe me—the calendar takes care of everything.”
“I don’t know what happened. I seen that woman in the church and inside my head it moved so that I was seeing everything different. It just happened. I seen her and I went. Then I caught up with her in California and we were together for a couple of days. Not like together—that was only once, that time—but we had time and I concentrated so I could remember and I thought I knew her.”
Maerose took her lower lip between her teeth and held on.
“All right!” he said wildly. “Okay! So Louis Palo, who was so straight he could have been a Jesuit, gets himself inside the cage with a cashier name of Marxie Heller and they rip off your grandfather for seven hundred twenty-two dollars and some change. So your father sends me out to get back the money and to pay off the bad guys. Louis is already blown away. I handle Heller, then I wait in the house for his woman to come home—his wife, Maerose—and she turns out to be my woman!” He held his heavy hands up and out in supplication. “What was I gonna do? She gives me the bag with half the money and a big line of shit. I figured it all as soon as she turned around in that kitchen. Louis couldn’t think of that dodge! Heller was dying from leaky lungs and he didn’t care. She laid it all out. She went and grabbed Louis’ cock and pulled him into the scam. She wasted Louis! She has the other half of the Prizzi’s money. Oh, shit! Did I pack her in the trunk of Heller’s car and move her out with him for the cops to scrape together at the airport? No. I come home and I tell your father she is clean. I tell your father that the guys who blew Louis away were the ones who walked with it.”
“But, Charley—”
“To me that was nothing. I am straight all my life and I lie to your father and that is still nothing! It’s like because of how I pissed on my own honor that I find out—from Pop—that she is the piece man who took the Netturbino contract.” He put his head into his hands and leaned on the table. “I love her. That is the rock which I can’t move out of the way and which is too big to try to get around it. I love her.”
“Well,” Maerose said harshly, “what are you going to do?”
He produced a brass laugh. “I got to straighten it out,” he said, “because I got to live with it.”
She took a deep breath. “Then do it.”
“How? What am I going to do? How am I going to do it?”
“Charley, even people in office jobs don’t live so long, believe me. You do it. That’s all, you just do it, and when you are dying—if you have time—you are going to know you did it. You’ll get back your respect for yourself. You can’t lose more respect for yourself if you get on a plane and go to California and face her.”
He stared back at her, not believing that he had heard her solve his problems.
“Look, Charley,” she said, as she walked into the living room to get the ivory box. “A woman like that thinks like that only in those situations. She was brought up with the idea that she had to make a score using what she had. So what did she have? A bent mind and a Saturday night special and she used them like notches in a tree to climb up toward the big scores. Well, look at her.” Maerose passed him the lighted joint. “She made it. But, what the hell, Charley, because she’s a thief and a hitter, that doesn’t mean she isn’t a good woman in all the other departments. You never needed to be a thief, but you are the enforcer for the family and that never kept you from doing right. You see what I mean? What the hell, if she was some fashion designer like, or just a rich broad, and you got it together with her, it couldn’t last for thirty days. You and this woman see everything with the same kind of eyes. You are lucky you found out in time, you know that, Charley?”
He began to sob with relief. She stared down at his bowed head, smiling with Sicilian triumph, and she left the room.
Chapter Twelve
Six days
before Teresa Prizzi was married in New York, Irene Walker, naked, slid out of bed beside Louis Palo, wishing that he would wash his hair. She was a handsome, if not overly handsome, woman but she had something more important than looks winning for her. She had calm, she had the stillness that soothed violent men.
Irene slipped into a blue silk dressing gown that had cost her $825 retail. She got into a pair of imported French mules that had cost her $150 retail.
“Where you going?” Louis asked with a muffled voice.
“Coffee!” she sang.
“What time is it?”
She glanced at the Patek-Philippe light clock on the mantel ($3,500, retail). “Coming up to a quarter to eight,” she said. Louis grunted and turned over like a stock car at a county fair, driving the pillow into the headboard of the bed.
Irene put the coffee on, then took a shower, scrubbing her hair. She was dressed in a Dior suit ($695, retail) when the coffee was ready. Irene bought everything at retail because that was the legitimate way. “Buy from a fence and who do you take it back to when it turns out lousy,” she said to Marxie Heller. “What kind of a rat race is it for people who don’t even have a fence but they’ve got to buy wholesale to keep their self-respect? People with money. You think there is any class in buying wholesale? Class is retail.”
She carried the two china cups and saucers, the spoons, cream and sugar on a tray to the table at Louis’ bedside. “Okay, lover,” she said.
He threw back the bedclothes and sat up looking as if his eyelids had been stitched to his chin. He reached out. She guided his hand to the cup. He lifted the cup to his mouth. “Hey!” he said, his eyes popping open. “Where’s the coffee?”
“In the kitchen. The pot wouldn’t fit on the tray.”
“You certainly have a different point of view, Irene,” he said admiringly. “A lot of people wouldn’t hand me an empty cup.”
“It got you awake, right?”
“Yeah. Just like coffee.”
She came back with the coffeepot and filled his cup. “We are ready to go, Louis. Tonight is the first night.”
“Those are beautiful markers you got together.”
“It cost a lot of money.”
“They are perfect.”
“Jack Ramen leaves when you get there today. Ten days for the action. Two markers to Marxie tonight, three tomorrow night, one Tuesday, and so on. Fourteen markers. That gets us $722,085. How about that?”
Louis grinned. “Inflation dollars,” he said.
“Oh, sure. Sixty percent to you because you have the toughest stand, and twenty percent each to Marxie and me. We fly out to Rio and live happily ever after.”
“It depends, the ever after.”
“Depends on what?” Her clear brown eyes were bright with curiosity.
“Charley Partanna.”
“How come?”
“You know about Charley?”
“I know he handles the rough stuff for the Prizzis.”
“You better believe it.”
“He’s just another enforcer for another big organization.”
“Charley is something else. He don’t just do what they tell him to do, he don’t look around and if he can’t find it, forget it; Charley takes Prizzi money very serious. It is like their honor with him when they tell him somebody ripped them off and he’s got to make a lesson for everybody. Charley never stops. He worries. He nags the people. He waits and he keeps working. What I’m telling you, Irene, is that we shouldn’t figure we are home free because we make it to Rio.”
“I don’t understand. Marxie told me about Charley. He says Charley is practically a square.”
“Very funny—a Sicilian square. But I know what you mean and that is what makes Charley so dangerous. He really believes he is in charge of Prizzi honor. He hurts when anybody rips them off or doesn’t pay respect to them. That’s the whole thing I am talking about. You remember Joey Labriola and Willy Daspisa?”
“The guys who turned about four years ago?”
“Yeah.”
“What about them?”
“Where do you think they are now?”
“Somewhere. Plastic surgery. New Social Security cards with new names. They are probably in the paint business in Winsted, Connecticut.”
“Charley found them.”
“How?” She was impressed.
“It took him almost three years, and a change at the top in administrations. He kept leaning on Ed Prizzi to squeeze the facts out of the government, to make them tell where Joey and Willie were. They cost the Prizzis about six hundred dollars and Charley couldn’t stand it. How much money didn’t matter. They done it to the Prizzis, that’s all Charley knew. His father raised him right. Let somebody dishonor you and they got to be paid back, is what he taught Charley, and he’s right. The Prizzis wouldn’t have any business if anybody thought he could take whatever they had.”
“Jesus, I can’t believe it. Charley broke into the witness protection program?”
“Yeah. He did it. Look. They were big in the papers. They made the government’s case then they dropped outta sight. Six Prizzi soldiers went into the joint. That alone costs the Prizzis eighty dollars a year for their families. You say, how can he find two guys with new faces and new prints and new paper in a country this big? In a world this big? Charley never sees it that way. It is a direct line for Charley, between him and whoever crosses the Prizzis. He makes them call a Commission meeting. He was on the phone every day to all over, reminding every capo and all the hustlers all over that it was their duty to look for Joey and Willy. But people are people. They got other things on their mind. After a while they fob him off, then he really leans on Ed Prizzi. Ed gets hot about it after a while. He tells Charley to lay off. Charley won’t lay off. Charley keeps after him. Ed calls a meeting. Don Corrado Prizzi is at the head of the table. Vincent is there. Angelo Partanna is there, and the three capiregime. Charley makes them such a speech that nobody could tell him to lay off. He wants Joey and Willie because of Prizzi honor. They got to pay, that’s all. Don Corrado tells Ed to go ahead. It takes them eight months and some very big federal politicians. They get the run-down on Joey and Willy straight from the government.”
“Jesus!”
“You know what Charley did? He finds them in a furniture business in Yakima, Washington. The funny thing is they done what they done because they are queer for each other. Yeah. That’s the facts. Jesus. Sicilians. Anyway, Charley rents a house in Yakima and he has the agent put out that he needs furniture, which the agent gets a commission on. He sees a lot of furniture guys but they don’t have what he wants. So the agent sends Joey over. The doctors done a good job on his face. Not a new face, you know what I mean, but you don’t make him right away. Joey don’t know me, so Charley has me be the front. I go over to their warehouse and I look. Willy is there, the second time. Gold bracelets, shirt open to the knees, long yellow hair. Jesus. I say what I need is an expert eye for them to tell me what is the right size of stuff, like whether it will fit nice at my place. So we make a date for some drinks, then we gonna go out to the house, me and Joey and Willy. Well, Willy is very, very gay by this time, maybe because he is the interior decorator partner; Joey is the one with the prices. So we go out to the house, I got them fulla wine and pasta, and the house is like outside town. They are sitting down when Charley comes in, and Joey vomits all over. Willy faints. We take them down to the cellar and this is where the real Charley comes through. He don’t yell at them and tell them a lotta shit, he explains the situation to them like it is important thing that they have everything straight. He tells them, calm and quiet, what they were when they come to the Prizzis—young punks working that shitty three-card monte layout, always running. He tells them, year by year, how they did pretty good and how, when coke got very big, the Prizzis put them into good slots in that business. Joey is crying now. Willy is saying, ‘What are you gonna do, Charley? The government is gonna blow you up, you lay a glove on us,’ a
nd all stuff like that. Charley is like their father. He only wants them to understand they did wrong by their own people. They still don’t get it that they are dead. They think he wants something else, I don’t know what. What do you want from us? they ask him. I want you to make some phone calls, Charley says, and I want you to say you are sorry you done what you done. That’s all? they want to know. He nods his head. ‘Who do we call?’ they say, and Charley gives them the names and the private telephone numbers of four capi di mafiosi around the country. He picks up the phone and dials the first number. He speaks in Sicilian. ‘Don Abramo,’ he says into the phone, ‘this is Charley Partanna.’ He listens. They exchange greetings. ‘I am sitting here,’ he says, ‘with Joe Labriola and Willy Daspisa, the boys we talked about a couple of years ago. They want to talk to you. Just a minute.’
“He hands the phone to Joey. Joey says, ‘What do I say?’
“‘Tell him you did wrong to the Prizzis and that you deserve to cook in hell for that,’ Charley said.
“Joey took the phone. ‘Don Abramo?’ he says in a shaky voice, ‘this is Joey Labriola. I say to you that I have put a shame on the Prizzis. I deserve to burn in hell for this.’ He looked up at Charley. Charley pointed his cigar at Willy. Willy took the phone and he said exactly what Joey had said. Four calls. At the end of each call Joey and Willy are looking better.
“‘Now we will call Don Corrado,’ Charley said, dialing.
“‘Amalia?’ he said in Sicilian, ‘this is Charley calling Don Corrado.’ He waited. ‘Padrino,’ he said, ‘I have Joey Labriola and Willy Daspisa.’ He listened. Joey stood up to take the phone. ‘Yes, padrino. Yes.’ Charley hung up.
“‘He forgives you,’ Charley said.
“Joey and Willy embrace each other. They are so relieved they are crying.
“‘But he wants your thumbs,’ Charley said.