“Thank God,” Filargi said. “I can’t believe it.”
“We leave in forty minutes. See if you can tidy this place up after you eat. Okay? I’ll appreciate it.”
Irene had their dishes washed and put away when he came up from the cellar. “How are you going to take him in?” she asked.
“I’ll blindfold him down there and plug up his ears then we’ll lay him out on a mattress in the back of the van and we’ll drive in to Long Island City. When we get there we’ll unpack him and sit him up front in the passenger seat for the ride into New York. You call Pop from Long Island City and tell him I’ll be letting Filargi loose in fifteen minutes so he can have the FBI at Filargi’s hotel. Then you take a subway out to the beach, and I’ll see you there at about twelve-fifteen.”
“Okay.”
“It’s too bad about this little guy. He shoulda took the don’s deal.”
“Well—it’s too late now,” Irene said.
“Filargi is a witness,” Charley said. “You got him scared so let’s keep him scared. Give him the stone eyes when you go down there. Where he remembers your face from has to keep him quiet for the next twenty-five years.”
Filargo flinched when Charley opened the door to the cellar room and Irene went in, grinning at him like a television actor’s idea of a homicidal killer.
Charley sat Filargi in the only chair, put cotton pads over his eyes and plugs in his ears, and while Irene held them there he wound the blindfold around his head, across the cotton pads. He taped Filargi’s hands behind his back, then picked him up like a sack and, carrying him over his shoulder, went up the stairs to the kitchen of the house then out the back door to the Chevy van. Irene opened the doors to the van and Charley lowered Filargi in, full-length across the floor, while Irene locked up the house.
They got into the front seat of the van and moved out the country lane driveway toward the city.
***
They drove in silence for ten or twelve minutes then Irene said, “Charley, what are you going to do about the money the Prizzis owe me?”
“Well—I’m going to bring it up. I’m going to tell them we want it.”
“Suppose they say no dice?”
“Jesus, I don’t know.”
“Charley, we had Filargi. They needed to get Filargi back. Seventy million dollars is what Angelo said so what it probably is is a hundred million because they are going to get a whole bank back. A bank, Charley. Like maybe the eighteenth-biggest bank in the country. So you could do anything to them and they would have to say okay because we had Filargi. We still have Filargi. But they owe me five hundred forty plus they owe me one hundred fifty for doing this Filargi stand, plus the first three hundred sixty. There was also the understanding with Don Corrado and Angelo that they had to pay the fifty Vincent was going to pay me to do the job on you. That’s a million one hundred, Charley. They owe me a million one hundred, more money than I ever got in one lump in my life. They tell you they are going to pay you two and a half million for your stand on this thing, but you never saw the money. You don’t know that they ever paid that to Switzerland. So what are we giving them Filargi back for? For some money which they supposedly have in their bank in Switzerland, or wherever they hide it? What are you getting for Filargi? You are getting the job as Boss of the Prizzi family which, the minute Vincent was clipped, they had to give to you anyway just to keep their business running, because there was nobody else who could have taken over for them to keep their business running.”
“Irene, fahcrissake, that Boss spot is worth maybe three million bucks a year to us.”
“Charley, who else is going to do it except you? You do it for them and that’s the going rates for the job. They aren’t doing you a favor, you’re doing them a favor. But we’ve got Filargi and they owe us two and a half million six hundred. They owe us that. They accepted your letter and said certainly, it is worth that to us to get back Filargi. So where’s the money, Charley?”
“Lissena me, Irene,” Charley said desperately. “The Prizzis didn’t say they wouldn’t pay us what they owe us. In fact, Don Corrado said he was absolutely going to pay us. I was there. He said it to me.”
“That’s a lot of Sicilian shit, Charley,” she answered hotly. “Did you ever hear of a deal where the chump hands over his entire bargaining edge because some Sicilians said they were going to pay him what they owed him someday?”
“Irene—all my life I have been waiting to be the Boss of the biggest family there is. I’m talking about the biggest family in the country, the family that runs this country just the same as the Senate does or General Motors or Alexander Haig, junior. You think I’m going to throw that away for half of a three million six hundred score? Ten years in the Boss slot and we got thirty million dollars in Zurich. Twenty years and we got sixty million. We can’t miss. We give up a little piece of money and we make fifteen times that much. We give them Filargi and they fall all over themselves to give us whatever we want. Fahcrissake, Irene!”
“Well, there is no way I can see them paying out any three million six to us. They would eat their kids first.”
“It so happens I happen to agree with that first part,” Charley said. “But eat kids—never.”
“So okay. We forget the two million five from the insurance. All right. I’ll even forget the rest of the contract from Vincent. Listen, I would even be willing to bypass the money they owe me for this stand just to have it on them. But there is one thing I will not give up on. I got to have my five hundred forty back. That is the one thing they absolutely have to pay—the five hundred forty.”
They rode on through fifteen minutes of silence, then Irene spoke again. “It’s hard for me to say this,” she said, “because you are the only thing that counts with me, Charley. But, the Prizzis owe me five hundred and forty dollars and I have to take that very big. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll help you get Filargi all unpacked and into the front seat. I’ll call Pop and tell him fifteen minutes, then I’m going back to the beach and I’m going to wait until five o’clock today and if I don’t have my money from the Prizzis by five o’clock then I’m getting out of here and I’m going back to LA and that’s the end of the world for you and me.”
Her eyes were filled with tears. He reached out and took her hand. “Okay, Irene,” he said, “you got a right. I’ll dump Filargi and go and see Pop and we’ll both go and tell Don Corrado what he’s got to do. Like you said, fair is fair. But don’t talk about getting out. I couldn’t handle it if you got out. Everything’s going to be okay, just like you want it.”
Charley and Irene worked silently in the back of the van beside a vacant lot in Long Island City, getting the tapes, the earplugs, and the blindfold off Filargi then pulling him into the passenger seat at the front of the car. As the van moved away toward the bridge, Irene went into a phone booth at the corner and telephoned Angelo Partanna at the St. Gabbione Hotel Laundry.
“Pop? He’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.” She hung up and set out on the eight-block walk to the subway station for the beach.
At the laundry, Angelo took out a small black book and tapped a number from it into his telephone. “Davey?” he said into the phone. “Robert Finlay, the banker, will be walking into his hotel in fifteen minutes.” He hung up. Hanly called the chief inspector, who told him to notify Chief of Detectives Maguire, The New York Times, and The Daily News, then the FBI. “They gotta make the collar,” he said, “but we gotta make sure we get the credit for the detective work on this.”
***
Charley drove the Chevy van, with Filargi sitting in the front seat beside him, across the Queensboro bridge. “A few more minutes,” he said, “and you’ll be walking across Madison Avenue to your hotel. Do you remember what I told you?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody can keep you safe. If they show you ten thousand pictures and you tell them that any one of them is any of us, then you are dead. Do you believe that?”
r /> “Yes, yes.”
“It’s all over. You are alive. Breathe the air. Look at the people. Stay alive. You were blindfolded all the time, you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know nothing because you couldn’t see nothing or hear nothing all the time we had you. Avete capito?”
“Yes, yes. I understand.”
They rode in silence across Sixty-first Street. Charley stopped the car at the near corner of Sixty-first and Madison. “Get out,” Charley said to Filargi. “Good luck.”
Filargi stepped down to the pavement. He leaned into the window and stared at Charley. “I have forgotten you already,” he said in Italian.
Chapter Forty-two
Filargi went into the hotel through a revolving door, crossed the lobby and went directly to the front desk. An assistant manager was on duty. “Mr. Finlay!” he said loudly. “You’re alive! How wonderful to see you actually standing there.”
Filargi said, “I need to rest and then I must telephone. But not in that same apartment, please. Give me another apartment.”
“Certainly, of course, oh, yes, Mr. Finlay,” the assistant manager said.
Filargi was aware of people standing on either side of him. “Mr. Finlay?” the man on his right side said. Filargi turned. A short man, built like a fire plug, was standing there with his hat on. “Agent-in-Charge McCarry,” he said, flashing his ID. “You’ll have to come with us.”
***
Irene sat on the terrace at the beach and looked out across the bay. There was despair in her eyes. She could hear Marxie Heller’s voice as it had drilled her over the years to beware of Sicilians. “The Jews in this business are bad enough, sweetheart, but the Jews, the Irish, the coloreds—they got a little heart. The Sicilians don’t even spend their money. There are three thousand fucking button men out there who are millionaires. Just soldiers, button men, the dirty-work people, not even workers. Millionaires. But they can’t spend it because it’s all hot money and when they die what do they leave to their families? Five thousand dollars. That’s it. The rest goes back to the bosses, like they were priests in a church. The bosses got ten, maybe a hundred times that money, so what do they do with it? There in only one thing they can buy with it and that’s more power, so they always gotta have more money to get more power because that’s all there is for them. But they can never corrupt enough people until there aren’t any innocent people left, everybody is working for the Sicilians in the end. Stay independent, Irene. Stay a freelance specialist. They need what you got to get themselves more power but if you ever join up with them what good are you to them anymore?”
She had gotten too fat on Charley. She had pushed her luck right over a cliff. What is that love shit? Was washing the awnings in this Brooklyn dump better than making a nice steady five hundred dollars a year and living in the most perfect climate in the world? She thought pasta was like hot garbage, but that’s what she had signed on for because of love—love! Pasta for every meal except breakfast. Marxie didn’t hold her up for love. Marxie was a schlepper, but he was safe and he was good company and they could have been on a beach in Spain right now with the $720, plus what she already had in the boxes, and with new faces and with new paper, living the way people ought to live without this horseshit of love that was costing her over a million cash, the greatest distance she had ever put between herself and her father. She could have taken that and all the other money she had and been halfway around the world away from these fucking Sicilians and Charley Partanna, who might just as well have been sticking her up like she was some gas station and it was his first stand. Charley was very big with the love shit, but Charley had cost her more money than all the other people she had ever met in her life.
Chapter Forty-three
Corrado Prizzi and Angelo Partanna sat down to breakfast at 8:00 A.M. Don Corrado ate as he always did: one jigger of olive oil. Angelo had a bowl of stracciatella alla Natale Rusconi. Rusconi, the great Milanese cook of the thirteenth century, was a Partanna family idol. Don Corrado surprised him by talking business before breakfast was over.
“Filargi will be in jail before noon,” he said, “everything will now proceed automatically until I own my bank again. We will have made a good profit with Filargi. Now we have to get back to our regular daily business by giving the police what they want.”
“I don’t see how you are going to do that, Corrado,” Angelo said. “The police want us to give them the second man on the Filargi job. If we do that, the second man will sing, we will all be implicated and that would be the end of the family.”
“I considered all those things, Angelo. I think I have found a way around it. I want you to tell the police that we have heard that someone is about to give them the person who killed the woman who pushed the wrong floor—within the next forty-eight hours, maybe less. Then call Charley and tell him we want to meet him here.”
“What is your plan?”
“Listen to me, Angelo. This is what we have to do to put everybody back in business again.”
***
Angelo called Lieutenant Hanly at 10:30 that morning.
“How is Mr. Finlay holding up?” Angelo asked.
“He’s not holding up so much as he’s holding out,” Hanly said. “He says he was blindfolded and with ear plugs all the time they had him. He says he doesn’t know where they held him or for how long or anything else and he sticks to the story.”
“Well,” Angelo said, “I got one break for your people. We got a blind tip early this morning that the Calhane killer is going to be turned over in forty-eight hours, maybe less.”
“How reliable is the tipster?”
“I don’t know. It was a blind tip, but I can tell you this much, the person who got the blind tip and passed it along to me is what the papers call an unimpeachable authority.”
“How do we work it?”
“I am going to get my source to get his source to call me when the hitter is ready to be turned over, then I will call you, no matter what time, so that you can call the detective bureau to make the pick-up so that Robert Finlay can make the ID.”
“Finlay insists he was blindfolded. How can he make the ID?”
“He wasn’t blindfolded when they took him in his hotel room. The hitter must have burst in, shot the bodyguard and taken Finlay out just when Mrs. Calhane stepped out of the elevator. Finlay had to see the hitter.”
“I’ll be sitting right beside the phone.”
“Davey? I have a little present for you.”
“What present?”
“Bet the Young Turks against the Buccaneers. They are gonna win by exactly eleven points. Bet the whole roll.”
“Where can I put down a bet in this town?”
“I’m gonna give you a number in Jersey.”
***
After watching Filargi cross Madison Avenue and start up the street toward his hotel, Charley turned the Chevy van into the traffic and went north to Sixty-second, then turned off again to go across town to the East River Drive, down to the Brooklyn Bridge, then to the St. Gabbione Hotel Laundry. Irene was right, in her way. She wasn’t able to see the big picture, but if she wasn’t right she had right on her side. The Prizzis had agreed to what it would cost them to get back Filargi. They had to live up to that. They were going to get a bank for practically nothing so they had to understand that they had committed for certain expenses to get the bank, and that they had to pay for their commitments.
He would lay it out to Pop, who had been in on the commitments every step of the way. Then he and Pop would call the don and go over to see him and get the whole thing straightened out. He was proud of Irene. It took a lot of moxie to stand up like that. He had himself a tremendous woman. He knew that. Pop knew that. It was time that it was laid out for Don Corrado.
Pop was looking out the window when Charley come into his office. He turned around in the swivel chair as he heard the door open.
“Hey, Charley!” he said.
“You ready to take things over?”
“Yeah,” Charley said. “I almost forgot.”
“Who is going to be your Underboss?”
“You’re the consigliere, what do you think?”
“You make your pick, Charley, then I’ll tell you if I agree. You got to make the decisions now.”
“We’ll move up Sal Prizzi.”
“Good.”
“Pop, I got to talk to you.”
“What’s up?” Pop asked.
“Pop, it’s simple. Irene wants her money like the don agreed when he got the letter from me when I had Filargi.”
“She wants her money?”
“She wants what is coming to her. She even can see that there is no chance at the insurance money for Filargi, even though the family agreed to pay that. She is willing to forget the rest of the contract Vincent put out and, if absolutely necessary, her money for the Filargi stand. But she wants the five hundred and forty back. She has to have it by five o’clock today.”
“Five hundred and forty?”
“The money she had to pay back to the don.”
“But three hundred sixty of that is Prizzi money.”
“It was, but we had Filargi. The don wanted Filargi and that was a part of the price.”
“Charley—where have you been?”
“What do you mean?”
“The don made you the Boss. How could there be more than that? That is going to like pay off ten, fifteen times more than the Filargi thing and she is your wife.”
“Pop, I know that. But Irene wants her cut. She sees Vincent’s job as my end and, anyway, she has no way of figuring what Vincent’s end can make. And if she did know it, she wouldn’t believe it because the Prizzis and everybody else in her life have always shortchanged her.”
“There is no way we can pay her, Charley.”
“Pop, I am asking you to see this from Irene’s point of view. I mean, it’s like she’s looking back on her whole life when she says we have to pay her. It was a crappy life, Pop, until she took over from all the people who told her what to do. And what did they tell her? They said she was nothing, but she knew better. She knew she was as good as they were. She climbed out of Chicago. They fixed her up with a great job in Chicago peddling her ass so she could split what she made on her back. She took on the slobs and the pimples and the stink so they could make fifty percent off her. She quit. She got books on bookkeeping out of the fucking library so she could understand numbers, then she went back to Chicago and got a job pushing a pencil for the main wire. They paid her nothing, but she learned how to talk and what dresses to wear and she talked numbers to them until they saw she was a great-looking head and that she could be trusted and they made her a courier for three families. But while she sat in those airplanes, back and forth, back and forth, she studied books on income taxes. Irene was always ready, but nobody ever paid her her end. So she went in where they lived. She opened up as a contract hitter and we know the rest, but they never let her in. They still paid her nothing compared to what they got out of what she did. And now—now—she has delivered for the Prizzis on every count. It was her moves that got Filargi out of that hotel, not mine. She handled everything that happened out of nowhere with fast decisions, so we were right every time. We got Filargi and that is going to make the Prizzis seventy million dollars. She paid them back the money out of the Vegas scam which meant they got paid twice, once from her and once from the insurance companies, but the don still whacked her with a fifty-percent penalty for getting her to double his money. What the fuck, Pop. We are always talking about honor so we have to pay off Irene for every cent we promised her we would pay her.”