Maerose then reread the small, oblong card that was an invitation to the reception at old Palermo Gardens. It was the absolute clincher.
She folded one copy of the formal announcement and one copy of the press release and stuffed them into a heavy cream-colored envelope, then dropped the small card into it. Smiling serenely, she sealed it and addressed it to Miss Mardell La Tour at 148 West Twenty-third Street, New York, NY 10011. She stamped the envelope and put it carefully aside in a small drawer of her desk before beginning to addresss the other envelopes from the long list at her elbow.
46
Natale Esposito went into the Purple Onion, a vegetarian restaurant on the West Esplanade in Metaire, New Orleans Parish, at exactly seven fifteen the following night and joined George F. Mallon, who was seated alone by the far wall beside the men’s room door, as prearranged. Natale was wired with a transmitter to send whatever he and Mallon were going to chat about to the recording machine inside the van parked thirty feet down the Esplanade from the restaurant entrance. Natale was dressed for the contractor bit: shades, floppy Capone fedora, and a horseshoe stickpin in his tie, which he had picked up that afternoon in a pawn shop.
“Mr. Mallon?”
Mallon half-rose, slightly flustered at his first meeting with a professional hit person, a figure that loomed so importantly in his country’s folklore. Although Natale had never killed anybody in his life, he had hung around with and bossed a lot of guys who had, so he knew how to comport himself with verisimilitude, which, excepting his apparel, did not differ very much from the comportment of a successful chiropractor.
“Ah. Yes,” Mallon said. “Are you the—ah—”
“Yeah. Keep your voice down.” Natale wasn’t being cautious about their being overheard—they were the only diners on that side of the restaurant—but he was afraid of causing an overload on the tape machine.
Natale sat down. He stared at Mallon.
“Are you George F. Mallon?”
“Yes. Were you—did they tell you about the assignment?”
Natale nodded. “Well—yeah. They gimme the general idea. You want somebody taken out, right?”
“What?”
“You want somebody zotzed?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“They never talk straight out about business. The man who puts out the contract lays out the hit. They call it insulation. The fewer people know, the better.”
Mallon nodded sagely. “Have you—ah—decided on your terms?”
“Sixty thousand. Forty down, twenty when the job is done.”
“That’s quite a lot of money, Mr.—ah—”
“Call me Tony. What are you talking about, a lot of money? That’s my standard money.”
“All right. I’ll pay it. I hope you know that the man I want—ah—handled—is in New York.”
“What’s his name?”
“Charles Partanna.”
“You want him hit.”
“Yes, but your fee will have to be all-in, no expenses. Air ticket, hotel, haircuts, meals, and transfers will all have to be included.”
“You drive a hard bargain.”
Mallon took a slip of paper out of his side pocket. “This is the man.”
“Read it to me. I forgot my glasses.”
“Charles Partanna. His business address is the St. Joseph’s Laundry and Dry Cleaning Service, in the telephone directory in Brooklyn, New York. His home address is Number Three Manhattan Beach Plaza, Brooklyn. He drives a Chevy van with midnight black glass all around. The license number is WQH 285.”
“You want me to rub him out?”
“Yes.”
“You mean you want him dead.”
“Yes. Take him for a ride. Blow him away. And just before you do it, I want you to tell him that he is getting it courtesy of Marvin Mallon, son of George F. Mallon.”
“Your son is in on this?”
“No, no. But say it just that way. He’ll know what you mean.”
When Angelo told him at the Laundry the next day, Vincent wanted to know who got Mallon’s one hundred and forty thousand dollars.
“Who gets it? Gennaro gets it.”
“How come? He should at least split it.”
“How come? He gets it because he’s got it. Who’s gonna take it away from him?”
“I see what you mean,” Vincent said.
47
Eduardo had a private screening room just off his office in the penthouse of the Barker’s Hill Enterprises Group Headquarters. When Angelo Partanna told him the film was your-eyes-only stuff, Eduardo told the office boy who usually ran the machine to go and get a cup of coffee and he asked his personal secretary, Arrigo Garrone, to run it.
He enjoyed the film. They sat together in the screening room discussing it afterward.
“You mean that on top of this crazy movie, Farts Esposito has a tape on which Mallon actually puts out the contract on Charley?” Eduardo said incredulously.
“Absolutely.”
“This is unbelievable. The Mallon kid gets released down there this morning. The girl refused to bring charges and she and her mother went back to Texas, et cetera, et cetera,” Eduardo marveled.
“He’ll think Gennaro spread his money around and got instant results.”
“This guy has to be the first nine-year-old who ever ran for mayor. Did you tell Charley?”
“Charley has his hands full with his engagement party coming up.”
“This is terrific work you did here. Leave the movie with me, and when the audio track comes in from Gennaro, send it over, straight to my apartment.”
The following Tuesday afternoon, at the cocktail hour, George F. Mallon arrived at Eduardo’s mansion apartment and was shown into the intimate study on the third floor, which was the sixty-first floor of the building. Mallon had got off the elevator at the fifty-eighth floor and Eduardo’s houseman led him into a second elevator, which took him to the most elegant room Mallon had ever seen.
Flowers, arranged in the nine parts of the Rikka style (Muromachi, fifteenth century) by an ikebana master, dominated the room at center and in its four corners. Covering almost the entire east wall was the James Richard Blake portrait of a perfect gardenia. The furniture was made of gleaming turned silver and glass, with deep-emerald upholstery. The interior window frames were made of silver. The elaborate and wholly compelling rug in front of the large emerald and silver sofa had been woven into an enlarged replica of a sketch made by a ninth-century Chinese emperor while shaving. From somewhere a tape machine was delivering exalting sounds of a great fiddler playing Tchaikovsky before a sonorous orchestra. Reflexively, Mallon glanced at his watch to see whether time had stopped.
Edward Price was seated on the large sofa. He rose to greet his guest. Mallon had heard of Edward Price as a great financier, a patron of the arts, and as a generous contributor to the evangelical church, which was not only Mallon’s own passion but his principal source of income. He had no idea why Edward Price had invited him here, but, overcome with curiosity, he had come with some eagerness.
“How good of you to come, Mr. Mallon,” Edward Price said. “The Most Reverend John Jackson has often spoken of your abiding interest in the American television church.”
“That is very kind, Mr. Price, I am sure. Dr. Francis Winikus of the Southeastern Evangelical Movement, who is such a friend of the White House, has been equally praising of you.”
“He’s a great man. Please sit down here, Mr. Mallon.”
Seating himself, Mallon said, “This is a magnificent room. May I ask who decorated it?”
“A firm called Price-Hoover. Very talented young people.”
“It is an extreme pleasure, but also something of a mystery, to be invited here.”
“I have something I want to show you.”
The two men were seated side by side, facing the Blake painting on the east wall. “Would you like a drink?” Eduardo asked his guest. “An RC Cola? A Dr. Pepper?”
“No
, thank you. The fact is, I cannot contain my curiosity.”
Eduardo pressed a button on the end table. The Blake portrait of the perfect gardenia lifted itself into the ceiling exposing a motion picture screen. The window curtains drew themselves. The lights were dimmed. A moving picture image of George F. Mallon in fullest Eastmancolor came on the screen and began to talk to them. By the time it was over, Mallon’s face had become dead white. His mouth moved but he made no sounds. There was a light foam at the corners of his mouth.
Edward Price said, “And that’s not all.” He turned on a tape recorder, which was also built into the table at his end of the sofa, and they heard George F. Mallon’s voice ordering the murder of Charley Partanna.
“What are you going to do with that?” G.F. managed to say, although his voice hardly sounded like his own voice.
“Both the film and the audio tape are going into my deepest vault, Mr. Mallon,” Eduardo said.
“You are going to blackmail me.”
“Not unless that becomes absolutely necessary.”
“What are you going to do, Mr. Price?”
Eduardo smiled on him benevolently. “My dear Mr. Mallon,” he said. “You have only to do as you are told and this information will never leave my vault. I am going to run you for the United States Senate and—who knows?—perhaps someday for an even higher office.”
48
Four hundred and nine announcements and invitations went into the mail, to a net of eight hundred and twelve guests. All Prizzis, Sesteros, and Garrones were included down to the ages of eighteen.
Maerose was on the phone constantly with her Aunt Amalia. Her grandfather insisted on being consulted at almost every turn about the list because, whereas there were people who had to be invited for family and business reasons, there were quite a few other people whom he absolutely couldn’t stand, or didn’t trust, or had tried to kill, or who had tried to kill him, so the don had to double-check everything.
When the list was finally approved and all the invitations mailed, one hundred and ninety-six tuxedos were sent to the dry cleaners around the country; a total of $476,000 was spent on dresses, furs, and hairdos; eighty-three advance reservations were made for 137 stretch limousines, and travel agents and airlines customer relations people felt a strain.
There weren’t going to be enough available suites in the three midtown Prizzi-owned hotels, so twenty-seven of the year-round tenants were given free, premature holidays in the Prizzi hotels in either Miami, Atlantic City, or Las Vegas—the spa of their choice—together with $500 worth of chips. They went out; the guests to the engagement party went in.
Angelo Partanna had agreed to respond to Vincent’s announcement from the dais that his daughter was to be married. Don Corrado Prizzi personally had a meeting with Biagio, the florist who now operated all the way out in Newark. Despite the distance, Maerose’s grandfather insisted that Biagio be the one to handle the decorations at the Palermo Gardens.
A courier service was laid on between the Lum Fong Chinese Restaurant on West 127th Street, which the Prizzis operated, and Gennaro Fustino’s hotel suite—a gesture of hospitality, because Mr. Fustino enjoyed that cuisine so much. A total of fifty-eight full-sized pizzas were delivered in warming ovens to the various guests. Barbers shaved men stretched out on Chippendale sofas, somber priests heard the ritual confessions of four visiting wives who expiated themselves of the sins of sloth, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and thinking bad thoughts, in $600-a-day suites. The weather held; clear, sunny, crisp, and altogether admirable all during the engagement party weekend.
Eight judges and three congressmen, feeling sufficiently anonymous in a crowd of that size, had accepted with pleasure. Two Cabinet members, eleven U.S. senators, and the White House sent their wives or secretaries out into the stores in Washington to select suitable engagement presents. In all, 419 invitees spent $405,289 on congratulatory gifts for the young couple; a future Boss of the Prizzi family was going to marry the granddaughter of Corrado Prizzi.
Lieutenant Davey Hanly and the entire Borough Squad accepted the invitations as tokens of the New York Police Department. The mayor of the City of New York personally provided the motorcycle escort to take the bride-to-be and her father to the reception, and he also pledged to her and to her fiancé a seven-year lease on a six-room apartment in the new luxury Garden Grove apartments, which were rapidly being constructed in an emerging part of the city, even if it wasn’t in Brooklyn.
The principal families of the fratellanza, from New England, Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York planned to send not representatives but contingents, including many blood relatives of the Prizzis: Sal Prizzi had married the sister of Augie “Angles” Licamarito, Boss of the Detroit family. Two of the Garrone daughters had married sons of Gennaro Fustino, who was married to Don Corrado’s baby sister, while the don’s niece was married to Sam Carramazza, son of the head of the Chicago family. Don Corrado was second cousin to Sam Benefice, head of the New England family, and to Carlo “Gastank” Viggone, Boss of the Cleveland combination.
In addition to the more spectacular guests, the third generation of Prizzis, Sesteros, and Garrones, the strictly legitimate members of the family, had to be accommodated because each one of them knew there was no way to get out of attending the engagement party of Maerose Prizzi.
There were so many connections with the Los Angeles outfit that it had been a hard job for Maerose to boil down a final list. To bulk things up further, she had attended Manhattanville with the twin daughters of the Boss of the Seattle family, with whom the Prizzis also maintained a joint military industrial extortion business which involved national politics, and somebody, thank God, had remembered at the last minute.
With a profound sense of ritual, Mae dropped the first invitation into the mailbox herself, addressed to Miss Mardell La Tour. Then she went back into the maelstrom of dressmakers, caterers, car-parkers, musicians, balloon suppliers, memento manufacturers, floral delivery schedules, waiters, table and chair rental companies, and faced a meeting with the three capiregime, all cousins, about selecting an honor guard of eight bouncers from the family’s 1,800 soldiers to keep order as the hour got late, the wine got flowing, and the men began to get accustomed to the presence of the new ladies.
Mae didn’t sleep much. She kept sipping champagne all through the work of planning so she didn’t eat much. She wasn’t really physically ready for it when, ten days before the engagement party was to happen, the people she had following Charley reported that he had gone directly from his New Orleans plane connection to Miss La Tour’s apartment and had been spending every other night there.
That really did it. Maerose’s wig slipped. She went into a kind of controlled hysteria which pulled her further and closer to the edge of doing something irreversible.
She couldn’t believe the written report that she held in her hands and read over and over. In New Orleans he had looked her in the eye and had renounced this woman. That was how she remembered it. She tried to firm it up in her mind, but now that she thought about it, it was all kind of vague. He had pulled her up that ladder to the bed, held her in his arms, and said—maybe she was kidding herself, she knew she couldn’t remember much after they got to the top of that ladder. But he knew the engagement was officially announced, because he knew she had told her grandfather so he should have known that the woman had to be thrown away.
She felt burning contempt for Mardell for pulling that pneumonia shit. She had to have found some quack doctor who had injected her with pneumonia because she knew that a boy scout like Charley couldn’t walk out on a sick woman who was playing it so helpless that he probably had to lift her on and off the john like the soprano in Puccini’s French opera La Bohème. Everybody knew Charley was a goddam dummy where women were concerned and she had been willing to make every allowance for that. But he had promised her, he had given her his oath that he understood that they were the family and that
the woman was an outsider and that he knew that it was all over, that he had to be finished with the woman forever. He was marrying a Prizzi, for Christ’s sake. What was this woman—some hick from the English sticks, a nothing who came over here to get her hands on American money.
Her second thoughts were that Charley didn’t deserve to live. He had dishonored himself, and by dishonoring her as well he had dishonored the Prizzis. She decided the quickest way to have the job done on Charley was to tell her father how she had pleaded with Charley, shaming herself and her family, in New York and in New Orleans, and how each time he had given his sacred oath that he would never see the woman again, but, as soon as her back was turned, he had gone into the bed of the woman who must, every day of her life, laugh at her and at the honor of the Prizzis. She knew her father. He would put out work on Charley. Charley wouldn’t last two days after she finished massaging her father.
But even while she was thinking that way, she knew she couldn’t let anybody give it to Charley. If her plan to take over the Prizzi family was going to work, she needed Charley. Charley was her ticket to the whole thing.
How could she make him come to his senses? She could make up her face with ashes and dress in black and go to see her grandfather and tell him what Charley had done to all of them, but that would diminish her to nothing in her grandfather’s eyes and she would never ever be able to persuade him to make Eduardo give her the job as his assistant so she could take over Eduardo’s operation someday. But what the fuck was the use of taking over Eduardo’s operation if she didn’t have Charley to protect her off side as Boss of the street operation? Charley had totaled her life in more ways than one.
The terrible blow to her pride she knew she would eventually get over. Why not? The only place women didn’t get over the betrayals by men was the opera, but that figured, because they were all so fat that they knew they couldn’t get another guy if the tenor dropped off their string.