“Hey, Charley!” Angelo said. “A hundred twenty-five dollars! How about that?”
“What can I say?” Charley said, “it is very generous.”
“Well, you are a married man now,” Vincent said blankly. “You can use the money.”
There was a thoughtful silence. Angelo coughed lightly. Charley thought, shit! Here comes the knife about Maerose again.
“Well, anyways,” Vincent said, “you gettin’ married finally lets Maerose off the hook.”
“God bless her,” Angelo said. “Now back to the Filargi job.”
“It’s a job I should be doing myself,” Vincent said, “as my father’s son I should be the one who sets Filargi up, but I got this fucking gout and now, I think, this fucking ulcer, and my father don’t think the Little Sisters’ prayers to St. Gerardo will work in time.”
“When you get gout like that, you really got gout,” Angelo said.
“How do you want me to handle it?” Charley asked deferentially.
“You’re in charge. You pick your own people. We don’t want to know. You run the show. We got the working side of the operation all worked out. You take Filargi on a Monday afternoon at his hotel, because Tuesday is a good news day and for the rest of the week. He goes home for lunch, fahcrissake, the head of the eighteenth-biggest bank in the country and he goes back to his hotel and fries himself an egg in the middle of the summertime.”
“When?”
“Soon. We’ll give you plenty of notice. My father has to work out how the payoff is going to be picked up.
“We got a layout of Filargi’s floor at the hotel, Charley,” Angelo said. “You take that home and study it. Everything is marked with circled numbers for the moves you got to make and it’s got the positions marked with arrows beside it. Once you got it absolutely clear in your head, I’ll come over to your place and we’ll go over it.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Charley and Irene had spread the floor plan out across the kitchen table and the back of one chair and he was going over it with her carefully. “If you spot anything soft, speak up. All right. This is the forty-first floor of Filargi’s hotel. There are only three apartments to a floor up that high. Okay, that is Filargi’s apartment facing the elevator.” He touched the plan where the circled number one appeared. “Every day, when Filargi is ready to go back to the office, his bodyguard goes out that door first and rings for the elevator. When the elevator comes he puts it on Hold, then he goes back and raps on Filargi’s door.”
“Filargi always waits for the rap?” Irene asked.
“Yeah. That’s their SOP. On Monday, when the bodyguard goes to the elevator button, my second man will come out of the apartment on the south side, across the hall from Filargi’s place but beside the elevators, so when the bodyguard puts the car on Hold, my man will pin him down inside the elevator. As soon as the bodyguard is handled, I come out of the north-side apartment, straight across the hall beside the elevators, and I rap on Filargi’s door. He comes out. I take him to the elevator where my second man is with the bodyguard, push the button for the garage basement, and push the No Stop button. Al Melvini will be waiting at the bottom. We walk Filargi to the car Zanzara has waiting there and we take Filargi out to the Island.”
“What happens to the bodyguard?”
“My second man takes him up to the roof on a No Stop trip and does the job on him.”
“Pretty clumsy,” Irene said.
“Pretty clumsy?”
“Charley, fahcrissake, if the bodyguard sees a man outside that door, he isn’t even going to call the elevator. If the second man comes out while he’s waiting for the elevator to come up, the bodyguard is going to drag out his piece and maybe whack him. It’s a licensed piece. He’s a licensed man, which the insurance company is going to say Filargi has to have with him wherever he goes. The insurance company tells him, don’t take chances.”
“You think we should drop the guy right there and bring Filargi out?”
“Well, I certainly don’t think you should take him all the way to the basement, then bring him all the way up to the roof before you clip him. But the clumsiest part is with the second man. You’ve got to have a woman to do that stand.”
They were in the middle of a heavy discussion when the doorbell rang and Pop arrived. He listened to Irene’s argument and shrugged. “She’s right, Charley,” he said. “A woman should do that stand.”
“Look,” Irene said, “listen to me. A woman should take a fake baby out of the south apartment after the bodyguard pushes the button for the elevator, smile at him nicely, fuss with the fake baby, then, when he puts the elevator on Hold, let him rap on the door for Filargi and get him all the way out in the hall. When they are both out there, she throws the baby at the bodyguard who, naturally, tries to catch it, and while he is doing that she covers him with her piece. Then you come out of the north apartment, Charley, while the woman takes the bodyguard back into Filargi’s apartment, and does the job on him in there. By that time you are going to have Filargi in the elevator car and you’ll be on your way down to the basement.”
“That’s good,” Pop said.
“Fahcrissake,” Charley said, “where are we going to find a woman for a stand like that?”
“Where?” Irene said. “Me.”
“You? Listen—wait a minute—I didn’t get married so my wife could keep working.”
“Charley, lissena me. Irene is right,” Pop interrupted. “No matter how you look at it, we will be taking chances any other way. Even Don Corrado is going to agree with me when I tell him why a woman has to do the stand.”
“You fellas work it out,” Irene said, “I have a terrific meal in danger in here so, please, go out on the terrace and look at the view.”
She shooed them out of the kitchen.
***
The two men went out to the terrace. Charley closed the glass door carefully, then he turned to his father with desperate impatience. “Pop, what the hell is the matter with you? You got to turn her off this thing! Fahcrissake, Pop!”
“Charley, she’s right and you know it. That is a woman’s stand there by the elevator. A woman has to do the stand, and throwing the fake baby—that is terrific.”
“Pop, lissena me. Sooner or later the Prizzis are going to find out that Irene and me are married. If they then find out that I used my own wife on this job, man, that is really going to shake them up. It would get out, Pop. Every family in New York would fall down laughing that the Prizzis now use their wives on jobs. Pop, fahcrissake! You know how the Prizzis are about honor! They could have me cupped for this. At the very least they would clip my wife.”
“Charley, siddown a minute. Lemme talk, all right?” Charley sat down and Pop pulled a chair close to him and sat down, looking into Charley’s eyes. “In the first place, who is going to know? The bodyguard? Irene will clip the bodyguard. Filargi won’t even know she’s in the action, he’ll be so scared. Now second—and it should be first—there is no more important job than this job. This job Don Corrado sees as his monument. You ever hear of a soldier or a caporegime getting five percent of a two million five price tag for a job? Any job? A hundred twenty-five dollars? You bet your ass you didn’t. It’s got to go right, the job. This is the bank Don Corrado is protecting here. The bank he put together when he first came to this country, the bank that brought me to this country, the bank that made the whole business possible, and he figures he doesn’t have much time left and that it is right that he should complete a circle with his life and end by getting his bank back for ten cents on the dollar, and then let Eduardo build it all the way back up again. Charley, lissena me. This ain’t no two million five ransom deal. What is that? It’s nothing. It’s just to ruin Filargi. The real money in this thing is that we see that Filargi’s trial smears the bank enough so that them Italians don’t want to have anything to do with it and they are glad to sell it back to our dummies for ten cents on the dollar. This is like a sixty-, seventy
-million-dollar deal for the Prizzis, Charley. Nobody is ever going to know your wife was on this job—fahcrissake—she never leaves the forty-first floor until you have Filargi on the Queensboro Bridge already! But even if it was possible for the other families to know that your wife did a number for you on this job, what the hell, people forget, so maybe it wouldn’t be so great for the Prizzi honor but what is a little honor compared to seventy million dollars—right?”
“Well, yeah, when you put it that way, Pop. But Irene’s got to be paid for doing the stand.”
“Of course. She’s a specialist. When I clear it with Don Corrado that there is no other way except we use a woman here, he will not only agree—because it makes so much sense—but he is going to know that a specialist, a woman, a woman who comes up with the idea of throwing the fake baby at the guy, has to get the top dollar.”
“How much, Pop?”
“One hundred dollars.”
“I think more. I swear to God, Pop, that stand is worth one hundred fifty.”
“I won’t say yes, I won’t say no, because it isn’t up to me. Lemme get back to you tomorrow night.”
Irene tapped on the glass door to the terrace and motioned them into the room, her lips moving. Pop opened the door. “My God, have I got a meal for you!” Irene said.
Chapter Twenty-two
Vincent sat with his father in the Sestero house on Brooklyn Heights. He listened with growing emotion as Don Corrado spoke. They were alone. It was hot in the room because the don liked to keep a fire going all year around.
“Your daughter has suffered. Ah, I know! You have suffered too, but compassion says we must make ourselves look to the end of suffering. Jesus teaches us that. The Holy Mother is the personification of that. A natural period has come to an end. After almost ten years of wandering in the wilderness outside her family, your daughter—my granddaughter—has asked for forgiveness because the man she had wronged has symbolically ended the ritual punishment of all of us by marrying another woman. Maerose is released. You are released. I am released. Honor is protected. So I have asked you to come here to beg you on my knees to forgive your daughter and permit her to come home. Look—here is her letter. Read the letter, Vincent. See how the child loves you, perhaps because of the punishment which you inflicted upon her because she had sinned against honor and knew she must be punished. She wants to take care of you. You need that, Vincent. You have lived too long in loneliness. Open your arms. Say to me that I may send her to your open arms. Let us love each other. Each of our days are numbered.”
Tears were pouring down his withered cheeks when he finished. Vincent was sobbing. They enjoyed a long moment of purging, happy emotion, then Vincent said, “Send her to me, Poppa. We will make up those years to each other. She is my daughter again.”
***
Maerose was in Presto Ciglione’s office, upstairs over the bar, in the big bar, dance hall, and old-fashioned gambling hall out beyond the western end of the Strip in Vegas while her father and grandfather were exploring the mysteries of compassion in Brooklyn. She carefully laid out three headshots of Irene on the desk in front of Ciglione, a classical early-talkies type of hoodlum, who spoke flawless Sienese Italian.
Next to the three photographs Maerose counted out ten one-hundred-dollar bills.
“You know who I am—right?” she said.
“Yes, miss.”
“You understand that this thousand dollars is for you—right?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Did you ever see this woman?”
“She was here twice. Alone. She had one drink, maybe looked around, and left.”
“When?”
“A couple of weeks ago, maybe three weeks.”
“Around the time Louis Palo was hit?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Presto, lissena me. I’ll go downstairs for ten, fifteen minutes. You bring your people up here one by one. Ask your people if they ever saw this woman on the night Louis Palo caught it.”
“Sure, miss.”
Maerose left the office and went down to sit at a table at the far end of the bar, away from the staircase. She ordered a Shirley Temple.
“A what?”
“You heard me. You want me to have Mr. Ciglione explain it?”
“It’s all right. I’ll look it up.”
“Not too sweet,” Maerose said.
Twenty minutes later the bartender came to the table and said, “Mr. Ciglione wants to see you now, miss.”
Maerose put a ten-dollar bill on the table. “That’s for you,” she said and walked to the stairs.
Mr. Ciglione was waiting for her with a pretty young woman in a waitress uniform.
“Tell the lady about the night that fellow was shot,” he told her.
“Well, if you’re sure it’s okay.”
He nodded gravely.
“I was using a Toyota Celica as a trick room out in the parking lot with a truckdriver John and, as I lifted my head up, I seen this woman in hot pants run into the headlights of a car which was the car the guy was in who they hit. My trick is all knocked out because he had a lot to drink and he had just come so he don’t pay any attention. In like three minutes, the woman gets out of the front seat and gets in the back seat, then like three minutes later she gets out of the car and goes to the trunk and takes out a satchel, then she goes back to the car she came from. I think it was the car she came from, and she drives away. I forgot all about it until Mr. Ciglione asked me just now.”
“Did you look at the pictures carefully?” Maerose said.
“That’s her. That’s the same broad.”
“Thanks.” Maerose nodded to Mr. Ciglione. He took a roll of bills out of his pocket, peeled off two fifties and gave them to the girl. “Buy yourself a cigar, honey,” he said.
***
“All right,” Don Corrado said. “That’s settled. I’ll tell my granddaughter she can go home. Now we have to settle the bank business so that Charley can go ahead. Please tell Eduardo to come in now.”
When Ed Prizzi had settled into a chair, Don Corrado passed out Mexican cigars and began to talk.
“We’re going to make the bank pay the ransom for Filargi overseas, Eduardo, so you got to have your people set it up.”
“Overseas?”
“Number one, it is outside the jurisdiction of the kidnaping—the local police can’t do nothing and Interpol is just a telegraph office anyhow which tells the local police what is happening but, of course, out in front, Gomsky at the bank, who will be in charge of the payoff, will tell the cops that the bank is going to pay the money over to the kidnapers in the States—like in Central Park or something—so that while they wait around here, we can collect the money there.”
“Where overseas, Poppa.”
“I was thinking Panama, Lagos in Nigeria, like maybe Aruba, one in Hong Kong, and maybe one in Sāo Paulo. You pick two banks in each place. Gomsky sets it up with one bank to pay out five hundred dollars to a courier who signs Filargi’s name to the receipt in a code number, you know, Filargi, not Finlay, his new name. Then, when we blow it off, the police investigation will show that Filargi’s couriers then take the five hundred to the second bank in the same town and have them transfer it to a numbered account in Lichtenstein which I want you to have opened by our bank in Zurich. Even if—and it’s going to be impossible, believe me—they can establish criminal motives, except against Filargi, they are still not going to be able to trace that money to anybody except Filargi and after a couple of years the Lichtenstein bank will ask the Swiss bank to invest the money in U.S. securities and, when we are ready, we cash them in plus the appreciation.”
“That is very good, Poppa,” Eduardo said.
“That is tremendous,” Vincent said. “That is a sensational wrinkle. The problem part of any snatch, irregardless, is always the payoff. They are always nailed when they reach for the ransom money. We could turn this into a very, very nice business in this country with a wrinkle lik
e that.”
“No, Vincent,” Don Corrado said sadly. “Stick to the harmless rackets which bring people a lot of pleasure and which they want. Start snatching big shots and the media starts screaming, they get the people all agitated, the politicians see right away that they can’t protect us because the people don’t want them to protect us on a thing like that, and we’ve got ourselves a lot of heartaches. Besides, the payoff, the way it is set up for Filargi, could be one of those things that only works once.”
“You’re right, Poppa,” Vincent said contritely.
***
Angelo Partanna sat with his old friend in the overheated study on Brooklyn Heights at six o’clock that evening, explaining in exhaustive detail why Charley had decided that a woman had to do the second man’s stand on the forty-first floor of Filargi’s hotel. When he came to the part where the woman tossed the fake baby at the bodyguard, Don Corrado nodded his appreciation of the fine point. “That is really professional,” he said. “And much better than my way.”
“Then it is okay?”
Don Corrado nodded.
“It is a woman,” Angelo said. “And that is a specialist.”
“Give her whatever she wants, my friend,” Don Corrado said, “this is my monument.”
Chapter Twenty-three
The Prizzis had rented the north side apartment on the forty-first floor of Filargi’s hotel in devious ways eight days before the Monday on which Filargi was to be taken. Angelo Partanna sent matinee theater tickets and a luncheon invitation for two at one of the city’s heaviest restaurants as the grand prize of a community contest that the woman tenant of the south apartment couldn’t remember entering, but which she was delighted to have won. Irene checked into the south apartment at 1:25 P.M. of the day they were going to take Filargi. Charley took his place in the north apartment at 1:37. Filargi’s bodyguard would come out of the east apartment, Filargi’s, at between two and six minutes after two o’clock.