Irene said, “Does it still feel right, Charley?”
“No matter how I add it up it comes out that we got to win. No running. No face jobs or new paper. We pick up all the points, plus we run the whole thing from now on. Did you ever think you’d be married to the Boss of the biggest family in the whole country? It’s fantastic.”
“You are fantastic. If it wasn’t for you we’d be up that creek.”
“I don’t know how it happened,” Charley said, “but I’m not going to believe it until I hear it from Corrado Prizzi.”
“Let’s find a drugstore phone booth somewhere and I’ll wait there tomorrow night so you can call and tell me how it went.”
“Yeah! Anyway, we got to set up where we’ll meet because the next step is that we have to spring Filargi, the poor bastard.” He turned and stared compassionately at Filargi’s door. “However that works out we’re going to need the Chevy so why don’t you and the Plumber figure to be in Brentwood where the van is at say six-thirty, seven tomorrow night and I’ll call you there.”
“Fantastic,” Irene said.
Charley took the train from Smithtown to New York at two P.M. the next day.
***
Don Corrado wept as he spoke to Charley about Vincent. He went back to the family’s earliest days in New York, when Vincent had been a small boy, and they had lived on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. “He was a serious boy, even then,” Don Corrado said. “We had so much trouble keeping him in school because he wanted to help me to get the business started. The Spinas, my wife’s people in Agrigento, were able to arrange good credit for me to be able to import cheese and olive oil. I began to expand out to Brooklyn. By the time we moved everything to Brooklyn Vincent was twelve years old and I had to beat him every day to make him go to the school, and he went until I was too busy to be able to think about it, just a few months more. I had the bank going by that time—a small, store-front bank for the Italian people of Brooklyn—and the idea came to me that with a bank behind me I could start an Italian lottery. It was a colossal success but I needed someone to run it so that I could go on expanding. I wrote to Pietro Spina in Agrigento, the friend of the friends, and he sent your father to me in 1926, when he was a young man of seventeen years, and he arrived just in time, right in the middle of Prohibition, so we prospered, we became successful. Your family has a great place within my family. The Prizzis and the Partannas have worked side by side for almost sixty years. Your father is my most important friend, my oldest and dearest friend, and now the great circle has come to rest and you are here to take up my work just as your father took it up for me so long ago. My son is taken from me and now you shall be the son of my family. I name you now, under your oath of obedience and silence, to be the Boss of the Prizzi family’s most sacred operations. Do you accept, son of my friend and son of my family?”
“You have honored me, Padrino.”
“We will seal that,” the don said, taking a straight pin from the lapel of his jacket. He pricked the end of his forefinger with the pin and a droplet of scarlet blood appeared. He held the finger out to Charley, who licked the blood away. “You have gained,” Don Corrado said. He took up Charley’s hand and pricked his forefinger. When the blood appeared, he licked it away. “We are now of one mind and substance. My enemies are your enemies. My will becomes your will.”
Charley felt dizzy with the power he had just received. “I will serve you well, Padrino,” he said huskily.
“To the business,” Don Corrado said briskly, blowing his nose. “The Plumber must go. His betrayal of the family on this Filargi matter must be faced. Also he now knows too much about you and your father. Soon he could be drinking and talking about how he worked both sides. Besides, he did what he did only for more money, I am sure. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“He wasn’t defending his marriage, as you were. He wasn’t even acting out of loyalty to you, his sottocapo. He betrayed his family only for money. If he had been loyal to me, he would have agreed to join you and your wife so that he could do the job on you. He dishonored me. Let him finish this job with Filargi. Let him believe I have forgiven him. In a week or two have your people handle it.”
Charley was disgusted with himself. He had blown his first chance to show that he was a real leader. But he had learned a lesson.
“But that is incidental. We are talking about my monument, Charley. Listen to how you must release Filargi so that, step by step, it will lead to his arrest, his trial, his disgrace, his conviction, the shaming of the bank, and its return to my family for ten cents on the dollar.” The old man shoved a box of Mexican cigars at Charley, talking enthusiastically. “The insurance company has paid over the money and it is now in the bank in Zurich. Beginning tomorrow, at any time you say, your share—the whole two and a half million—will be transferred to your own account.”
Charley grunted, deep in his stomach, with emotion.
“Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock bring Filargi into New York and take him to Madison Avenue and Sixty-first Street and let him out. We must treat him courteously, it is a matter of honor. He will go to his hotel which is two blocks away. Angelo will tip off the FBI and they will be waiting for him when he comes into the lobby. They will take him downtown for questioning and he will be charged with criminal mis-management of the bank’s funds, and embezzlement. The right cops will be tipped off to look for the evidence, pushed by the insurance company, that Filargi rigged his own kidnaping and worked out the devious payoff so that he could steal his own ransom just as he has been embezzling the bank’s money. They will get him for complicity to murder his bodyguard and that elevator woman, the cop’s wife. The trail, with Filargi’s scent all over it, will lead from Lagos, Aruba, Panama, Hong Kong and São Paulo and end at a Filargi numbered account at the bank in Lichtenstein. The Justice Department will prove criminality so that the Swiss banks will be forced to impound the money in the Filargi account, but by the time that happens, all the money will have been moved on—nothing will be found except that the account was in Filargi’s name. Gomsky has all the evidence planted against him at our bank. Filargi will go to jail for twenty-five years, the bank will be disgraced, the Italians will be happy to sell out for our price to our agents, and Filargi will know that he made the mistake of his life when he refused my offer to do business with him.”
Don Corrado got to his feet. The audience was over. He walked Charley slowly toward the door. “Tonight, put the fear deeply inside him, Charley. He is a Neapolitan. He remembers things which his mind forgot. Tell him how our arm is everywhere and that if he mentions in any way anything to do with any of his suspicions of how all of these things suddenly happened to him, that no matter where he is—in prison, within a circle of police guards, behind the highest walls, that we will kill him. Make it strong, Charley. He is not Mr. Robert Finlay, the great banker. He is Rosario Filargi, a Neapolitan, and he will understand.”
***
Charley rode away from Brooklyn Heights wearing a nimbus of exultation. One week ago he had thought that he and Irene would be on the run by now, running for the rest of their lives—homeless, faceless and friendless. Now he was the Boss of the Prizzi family. He had been paid two and half million dollars for defying the Prizzi family. They hadn’t worked out Irene’s end of their payoff demands and maybe Don Corrado would never talk about that but, what the hell, he would split the two and a half million with her as a consolation prize, and she would be as knocked out as he was when she knew he was the Boss and everything that went with that.
He was going to reorganize the whole Prizzi setup. All three of the capiregime were dragging their ass. He was going to ask Ed Prizzi to build them a whole new modern laundry from the ground up, a new building with the right kind of offices and good equipment—a place that was one hundred percent clean so that he could feel good about going in and working there, not like the dump they had to work out of now, a cockroach ranch. Let them build a big city-wide h
otel laundry business and make the place pay for itself and put other laundries out of business.
He was dissatisfied with the loan-sharking operation. Vincent had built it up fifteen years ago so that he had reached the point where he figured he was getting the biggest dollar out of it, but Charley could see a half dozen wrinkles to add at least thirty percent more to the gross. The sports book handle was so tremendous, day in day out, that nobody seemed to stop and think about the losses they were taking on weak collections and no-pays. Vincent had always looked at the gross business instead of seeing that he could have added maybe eight percent more to that gross by putting a few more soldiers on the collection side, giving them their commission and letting them beat the shit out of a few sportsmen until the word got out and everybody paid their markers.
Charley wanted to talk to Don Corrado in a week or two about how their honor demanded that Vincent be avenged even if he had been taken out by an all-family-approved hit. The Boccas had to pay for clipping Vincent. Fuck the Grand Council.
He knew how to settle with Quarico Bocca. Their biggest business was running women. The Boccas controlled all the vice in New York and supplied women for Vegas, Miami, and other major U.S. cities, as well as the Caribbean and the Bahamas. Charley was going to talk to Ed Prizzi about getting new state vice commissions appointed and very heavy laws passed with big teeth written into them so that the Boccas would have to spend sixty percent of their time staying out of jail, or straightening out police raids, and losing buyers and Johns because they were tired of being hassled. The Boccas had no political muscle. The Prizzis had the political muscle in the country on every level, so the Boccas would have to come to Charley, their hats in their hands, and ask him to straighten the law out, and Charley would explain it to them. He would tell them that if they gave him Quarico Bocca he would see what he could do. Nothing could happen—no reorganization, no improvements, no nothing—until Vincent Prizzi was avenged.
Also the price of uppers, downers, coke, and shit had to keep up with the percentage increases in inflation; just like every other business passed the increases along.
He realized they couldn’t live at the beach anymore. It was too out-of-the-way and it couldn’t be protected well enough. Maerose was probably going to move back to town so he would ask the don for Vincent’s house, then steam-clean it from roof to basement. Thinking about Maerose gave him an erection. He parked the car near a drugstore and went in to a phone booth. He dialed her number.
“Mae? Charley.”
“Charley?”
“I had to tell you how cut up I am about your father.”
“Well—thanks, Charley.”
“Family business made me miss the funeral.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“You all right, Mae?”
“I’m all right when I talk to you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going back to New York.”
“When?”
“Any minute now. Ah, shit, Charley. I lost all the games—the game with my father, the game with you, and the game I had going with myself.”
“I think about you a lot, Mae.”
“That’s no big deal, Charley. Anyway, it’s not enough. How can things go this wrong in one person’s life? Since the time I began to have bumps on my chest all I ever wanted was you.”
“What the hell, Mae. I mean, what’s the use? What’s done is done.”
“Ah, in your hat, Charley, and right down over your ears.” She hung up heavily.
***
It was all a blur to Charley. Being Boss, the way the Filargi war had turned out, and Maerose Prizzi were all parts of the same piece. It proved that it only seemed that the fixed things were meant to be. What was truer—that he become Boss or that Maerose got drunk and walked away from him with that guy, so that everything in his life, her life, and Vincent’s life had to change? What was going to happen to her now? He felt it like his own pain. She was really gone now and there was nothing he could do about it. Irene was separate, but Irene was his life now, and it only went to prove that the past and the present not only weren’t of the same piece, they weren’t even compatible.
He drove out to Brentwood, remembered that he had agreed to telephone when he got halfway there and stopped at a gas station booth to call her. Irene picked up on the first ring.
“Charley?” she said breathlessly.
“Everything is great, I’ll tell you when I get there. You won’t be able to believe it.”
“Oh, Charley!” she said, “it makes me so horny! Hurry, hurry!”
***
When he got to Brentwood, Charley gave the Plumber a dummy American Express Gold Card that Ed Prizzi’s office had made up for him in the name of Robert Filargi and sent him off to return the mobile home to Bayshore. “Everything is handled,” Charley told him. “Everybody had agreed to make the payoff so I’m going to take Filargi into New York and let him go.”
“He’s a nice little guy,” the Plumber said. “And very profitable.”
“After you drop the truck off, take a train back to Brooklyn and I’ll see you around next week about your end.”
“Sensational,” Melvini said, “but I’m going to miss your cooking. Listen—is it all right if I rent a car with this card instead of taking a train to New York?”
“Why not? Filargi would probably rent a car after he turned the truck in. I tell you what—rent the car then ditch it somewhere between Fifty-ninth and Sixty-second between Park and Fifth. Jesus, that is a nice little detail.”
***
When the Plumber left them Charley and Irene hit the upstairs double bed and went at it for forty minutes, both of them putting their hearts and hips into it. After they had showered together, they went to the kitchen and Charley began to cook dinner while he told Irene what had happened with Don Corrado.
“Actually only two things were settled,” he told her. “I get my end, the two and a half million plus, and this is going to knock you over—I am now absolutely the Boss of the Prizzi family. I’m the Boss. We got ourselves maybe three million a year plus so many extras that you’re going to think every day is Christmas morning. I got twenty-one hundred men under me. I get the respect wherever I go. I sit on the Commission. I have to okay every piece of work everybody does. Not only that, but you are the Boss’s wife. How about that?”
“That’s terrific, Charley. Congratulations.”
He felt let down. He expected more, but he had to remember that Irene was a Polish freelance so she probably didn’t have any idea of the amount of respect that went with the new job. Compared to that, what he was now, Underboss, which was what he had been for eleven years, was like being one of the workers. Then, he had to personally run the capiregimes and he had to personally handle the heavy enforcing. But that was all over now. From now on he would have total insulation. No involvement in the work. He would have to close down on his social contacts with his people and eliminate all obvious links to the actual operations. The bosses have to be protected. Shit, he thought, the Plumber would have made a natural Underboss for him but now the Plumber was in the shit.
“What about my end for the second-man stand?” Irene asked.
“Well, it figures that if the first thing he tells me is that my end is ready, that it also means your end is ready—that goes without saying.”
“What about my five hundred forty and the other three hundred sixty and like that we asked for? Did he talk about that? That extra was the biggest part of my end.”
“Irene—fahcrissake—his mind was on the two big things of his life right now, his own son’s funeral and the whole Filargi thing which is so big he calls it his monument. Things like he’s going to talk about somebody’s end doesn’t even come to his mind at a time like that.”
“He told you about your end. He guaranteed that.”
“So all right!” We have to wrap up Filargi tomorrow morning then I am going to see the don right after that. You wa
nt me to get him to sign a fucking paper with guarantees for your end?”
“No. Just tell him to pay out my end. That’s all. Fair is fair.”
Charley went down to see Filargi in the room in the cellar.
“I’m going to let you go tomorrow morning,” he said.
“It’s all over?” the small, plump man asked.
“Yeah. You get out at Sixty-first and Madison at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“I can’t believe it,” the banker said dazedly. “Every day when I woke up I was sure that woman was going to come in and kill me.”
“You were born in Naples, right?”
“Yes.”
“You were a poor kid?”
“Yes.”
“You remember the Camòrra?”
Filargi nodded.
“We are worse. They were small. We are big. We wiped them out in this country. There is no place we can’t go in this country.” Charley leaned over, closer to Filargi. “You could live in a steel room on a battle-ship in the middle of the ocean and we could get to you. Do you understand me? When you go in tomorrow, when you are free, the police are going to talk to you. If you say anything about who you think was the people who took you—anything then we are going to kill you. Wherever they hide you, we will find you. If you talk, we will kill you.”
Chapter Forty-one
Charley set the alarm for 5:30 A.M., leaving them time to give the house a thorough cleaning and have a hot breakfast before leaving at eight o’clock, so that Filargi could surely be dropped off in New York at ten.
“What’s to clean, fahcrissake, Charley?” Irene said as she struggled out of sleep against the noise of the alarm.
“Listen, we use this place. You might want to spend a couple of weeks here this summer.”
“I just spent a couple of months here this week.”
“Two total pigs have been living here. I made them clean up, but what do they know about cleaning?”
After the rooms had been vacuumed, the beds made tautly, the bathrooms and the kitchen floor scrubbed, Charley made Filargi a three-egg ham omelet, a stack of toast and some hot coffee and took it down to him. “We go into New York this morning,” he said. “This is your big day.”