“Mae, how come you’re the only woman in the whole family who always wants to talk business?”
“Because I’m a Prizzi, that’s why, Poppa.”
“It ain’t right. It ain’t even natural.”
“Did the Prizzis lose their clout or their honor, or both?” she asked him relentlessly.
“Take it easy, here. You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“Poppa, you know I know what I’m talking about.”
“What can I do? Am I Eduardo?”
“Eduardo! You are Vincent Prizzi, the Boss. You are the Man. Eduardo is a fixer. He buys every connection there is with the money you generate, so how come he hasn’t told you where you can find Willie?”
“That Eduardo. Jesus! Everything is for show with him. How long is it, Willie went into the Program?”
“Months, Poppa. For months you’ve been taking the shame of what Willie did to the family.”
Vincent pushed the food away. “You ruined my dinner,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Poppa. But I made some cannoli just the way you like them and I got some conchiglie to go with.”
“I’m gonna talk to the don at the meetin’ tomorrow.” He gripped his upper lip between his teeth. “Jesus, I shouldn’t eat the conchiglie, but you make them so good.”
52
The next morning Charley went into Vincent’s office at the Laundry to tell him that he was engaged to marry his daughter, closing the door behind him. Vincent stared at him for several beats before he spoke. “You coulda said something, you sneaky fuck.”
“Whadda you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You took my little girl away from me, that’s what I mean.”
Charley thought about how he had been steamrollered by Mae and all the trouble she had caused in his life, but he felt sympathy for her, she was just a woman in love, a woman who couldn’t help herself.
“It hadda happen, a beautiful girl like Mae. If it wasn’t me, it’d be somebody else.”
“But do I have to find out about it from my little girl? Not from you?”
Charley sat down. “It just worked out like that.”
“The daughter of my heart, and you come right in and take her away and you don’t say nothing.”
“What could I say? She hadda clear it first.”
“No. That ain’t the way. You go to the father. You show respect. You ask the father if he will bless the union, if he will give his okay for you to ask the daughter to marry.”
“Only in the old country.”
“Here! Wherever. You coulda knocked me over.”
“So I am here to ask for your blessing, Vincent.”
“What can I tell you? Does a man give up a treasure?”
“It hadda happen. The time has come for you to get grandchildren.”
“Well, it’s not like you was an outsider. Angelo’s son. The son of my consigliere. My father’s oldest friend. His son.” Tears filled Vincent’s eyes. “My life is full, Charley. I give you the daughter of my heart with my blessing.”
“Thank you, Vincent.”
Vincent lit a large Mexican cigar to cover his mixed feelings and polluted the air of the room with heavy smoke. He decided to change the subject. “How long did it take the cyanide to work on Little Jaimito and his people?” he asked with professional interest.
53
At breakfast the next morning, while the don drank his one ounce of olive oil and watched Amalia lay down two hot focacce in front of her brother, he smiled his terrible smile and waited for Amalia to finish her ritual.
“How are you feeling, Vincent?” Amalia asked.
“Better. I feel better.”
“You look agitated. That’s not good for the blood pressure. But I am happy for you about Mae and Charley.” She patted his cheek fondly and left them. As soon as she was gone, Vincent laid it on his father.
“It’s been months, Poppa, since Willie Daspisa went into the Program and Eduardo comes up with zilch.”
“First we’ll talk about the betrothal.”
“It was good news.”
“Did you talk to Charley?”
“Yeah, about that and about Willie Daspisa. Charley has been with almost every family in the country about Willie. He is also hot, and he’s got a right to be, about Willie throwing him to Mallon. He’s got people on the street from coast to coast lookin’ for Willie and he also talked to Eduardo about it twice. Evvey time he talks to him, Eduardo don’t say nothing. He stiffs Charley, Charley told me this morning, he changes the subject. Why is Eduardo laying down, Poppa? Willie cost us. Everybody knows Willie cost us. He’s gotta pay.”
“It must be a misunderstanding, Vincent, my son. I remember Eduardo was upset because Willie’s brother got it after Eduardo had wasted a lot of money on arrangements for Willie’s brother to be handled, and—the way Eduardo sees it—if Vito had been taken care of in a different way, Eduardo’s way, Willie would never have gone in the Program.”
“What kind of thinking is that, Poppa? We don’t have Eduardo to tell us why he thinks Willie went into the Program.”
“You’re right, Vincent.”
“We gotta have a meeting with Eduardo, Poppa.”
Pop and Charley arrived at the don’s house together that night at seven o’clock. Vincent came in ten minutes later, then the don and Eduardo came down from upstairs together. They all sat around the table with the hanging light over it, a light with a large, round shade that had golden fringes on it. There was a big bowl of fruit at the center of the table.
The don said, “I been talking to Eduardo about Willie Daspisa. He wants to tell you about it.”
Eduardo said, “I didn’t see any reason to rush. Willie will be there, wherever he is.”
“You gotta put your arm around a whole new bunch of people in Washington,” Vincent complained. “It could take months.”
“So the longer we take the more Willie suffers when we give it to him. Every day gives him more of a false sense of security.”
“I think we gotta know now where he is,” Charley said in an even, ominous voice, which was all the more frightening because he felt it, he didn’t even have to think of Bogart when he said it. Even the don was hit by the fear. He blinked.
Eduardo tried to stare Charley down, but he couldn’t hold it. “You are at this meeting, Charley,” Eduardo said slowly, “only because you were the whole cause of Willie going into the Program.”
Charley didn’t answer him. He just kept staring at him.
Vincent said, “Whatta you mean, the cause? Willie went into the Program because he stole money from us and so he could keep doing it to Joey Labriola without anybody saying anything. Charley done Willie a big favor by icing Vito and giving Willie an excuse to go into the Program. Charley actually fixed him up with Joey—and what does Willie give him back? He tries to turn him in to Mallon.”
“I don’t mean the advertent cause. I mean if Willie’s brother were alive today, Willie would still be working for us.”
“That’s a lotta shit,” Charley said.
“Why are we getting ourselves lost in words here?” Pop said. “We are here to get something done about Willie Daspisa.”
“Then you want me to go to the Democrats for the information?”
“Eduardo—what’s the difference? Republicans or Democrats? You sound like you think we was children,” Vincent said. “Call your people in Washington and tell them what you want. Willie Daspisa has been living on velvet long enough.”
Eduardo looked at his father. The don nodded benevolently.
“Charley can go out there wherever Willie is right after the engagement party,” the don said.
Of the 25,465 lawyers who practiced in Washington, D.C., which came out to one for every twenty-five inhabitants, the law firm sponsored by Barker’s Hill Enterprises—Schute, Fink, Blanke and Walker—was the most effective because it had connected lawyers who had the most money behind them to solve their clients
’ problems.
An Assistant Attorney General of the United States had a purely social lunch at the Metropolitan Club with the firm’s senior partner, Basil Schute. The distinguished lawyer explained with profound delicacy why his firm was interested in locating the former Guglielmo Daspisa, who was under the protective cloak of the Witness Protection Program. It could mean an inheritance for Mr. Daspisa, and although the bequest could not be paid out indirectly, if it were possible, in this unusual instance, to divulge Mr. Daspisa’s whereabouts—the matter would be wholeheartedly appreciated by his firm’s clients.
Later, while they were having coffee and enjoying the AAG’s Havana cigars with a Honduran trademark on the box, the AAG earnestly brought up the matter of contributions to the Political Action Committee, which was seeking legislation to aid destitute corporation lawyers. The counselor agreed. “No cause could be nearer to my heart,” he said.
“Make the check out to the Needy Attorneys of America PAC,” the AAG said. “That will handle it.”
When Schute got back to his office, a Justice Department courier delivered an unmarked brown manila envelope containing four-color Polaroids of Willie’s and Joey’s new faces: full front and profile. They had raised Willie’s eyebrows and dyed his hair white, straightened his nose and put a bulb on the end of it, and sagged the right side of his face slightly by lifting the left. They had put a cleft in his chin and given him a crooked set of caps on his upper teeth. The double chin was gone. The eyes were still feral, but they were in a different face.
The more characteristic protective coloration was Joey’s. The surgeons had made him a pretty storybook prince; perfect teeth, where before they had looked like a mouthful of Roquefort; wide blue eyes where they had been squinty, small, and brown; perfect nose and cheekbones, which triangulated with his chin in a chatoyant, feminine way. His hair was blond, cut in the Prince Valiant style. It was so long the ends rested on his shoulders.
Willie’s new name was Hobart Thurman. He was living and working in Yakima, Washington, which was about ninety miles south-southeast of Seattle, over the Cascade Mountains, population about 43,000. Yakima was the commercial center of an agricultural region, very big on apples, and it manufactured lumber, flour, and cider. Mr. Thurman lived with his nephew, Chandler Owens. They were partners in an upmarket furniture and decorating business.
Schute slipped the information into another envelope, called for a car to catch the next shuttle, and sent a junior partner to fly the pictures and Willie’s new name and address to Edward Price in New York.
“If I didn’t know it was them, I wouldn’t hardly know who it was,” the don said at the meeting with Eduardo, Pop, and Charley. “Look at that Joey Labriola. How can that be? I knew his father and his mother, they lived six miles from Agrigento on the Caltanissetta road.” He shook his head in awe. “How could anybody think up names like that?” As he marveled, the phonograph reeled out Zerlina’s aria, “Vedrai, carino,” from Don Giovanni, in the 1939 recording with Ezio Pinza and Richard Tauber that the don planned to play over again as soon as these people left so he could keep a pure lyric line in his head.
“It cost a lot of money to get that information,” Eduardo said, “but just the same we have to be sure it’s right. We don’t want Charley going all the way out to Yakima and doing the job on some guys who always were Hobart Thurman and Chandler Owens just because the Department of Justice wants to even up some old hassle.”
“We’ll know the minute they see me,” Charley said. “They’ll pee their pants.”
54
The distinguished guests from all over America were pouring into the three Prizzi hotels in midtown Manhattan. The Papal Nuncio went to Brooklyn for lunch with Don Corrado directly after his fittings with Ungaro, planning to avoid the party itself if he possibly could. Movie stars, media stars, and television stars were stacked up like cordwood, waiting to heat up the Palermo Gardens. A story would appear in the society pages, but otherwise, in terms of news coverage, the engagement was strictly not a news event. The people who knew who the Prizzis were knew about the engagement, and the rest of the world had only vaguely heard of the Prizzis so they weren’t news—or at least they hadn’t been news for quite a number of years since the public relations policy of the fratellanza had been changed into a policy of nonviolence or, if there had to be violence, then violence that could be pinned on a lot of wild South Americans and blacks.
Maerose Prizzi, the young woman in whose honor the party was to be given, was the niece of the financier, Edward Price, just to place her vaguely, and no one had ever heard of Charles Amedeo Partanna. Hoodlums, if there still were such things as hoodlums, being the human component of such a nonexistent thing as the Mafia, were confined to television fiction or had become a part of American history. The people who owned the great companies or took them over in elaborate hijacking operations, or flipped them, or merged them with one another to hike the price up, were called financiers, not hoodlums. The public was finally getting its nomenclature straight, as it had when narcotics were renamed controlled substances and taxes were called revenue enhancement.
Everything was done on an enormous scale which dwarfed the antics of old-time “gangsters.” Everything was done out in the open, by people who were known leaders and whose names turned up regularly on the business pages. The fact that there was a Sicilian-American family that was prominent in an isolated section of faraway Brooklyn, headed by a forgotten old man, could mean nothing to anyone. So what, if the old man’s number in the dusty, never-consulted files of the New York Police Department was #E-14481, or if he was #362142A to the FBI, and #247 in the Federal Narcotics Bureau listings. There was nothing to report about the occasion except the joy of a bride-to-be.
Vincent provided a superstretch limousine driven by his own man, Zingo Pappaloush, to pick up Charley at the beach, then to go to Vincent’s house in Bensonhurst to take Charley, Maerose, and Vincent to the old Palermo Gardens near the Navy Yard, which was set among the borders of Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg. The Palermo Gardens had been the hallowed grove for every important Prizzi, Partanna, Sestero, or Garrone celebration for the past fifty years. The building was thirty-seven years old when Corrado Prizzi bought it, and he had used it constantly, organizing dances, observances, and assemblies for the immigrant Sicilian people who had rallied around him in the new world, establishing him as their leader in the right way, not with force, or certainly not entirely with force.
The city had tried to condemn the building twice in the past nine years, but each time Don Corrado had told Eduardo to get the ruling changed. It was now nominally owned by the Blessed Decima Manovale Order, a nonprofit organization of religious ascetics who had taken vows of poverty and who also held a voting trust of oil shares for the don.
Charley, riding from the beach to his fiancée’s house in Bensonhurst, couldn’t shake the depression he had fallen into. He had seen Mardell for the last time the night before; for the last time in their lives, and he hadn’t had the guts to say goodbye to her. He tried. At the time he was trying he reminded himself that he was at least trying, but he never made it. Neither one of them could have stood it if he told her. He would never have gotten away. They would have had to either elope or negotiate a suicide pact or something. It was like when you hit a ball against a wall which faces a wall, after a couple of strong bounces the bounce goes out of it and it can’t make it back to the other wall again. He couldn’t say the same things all over again. They had both heard the same song too often, so he hadn’t said anything; he hadn’t even said goodbye.
He couldn’t let it lie there like that. He could write her a letter. She liked Pop. He could ask Pop to go to see her and deliver the letter. She was so touchy about money that it wasn’t even remotely possible to leave her a big check when he slipped out of her apartment this morning. He hadn’t even set up something with a bank to send her enough money every month that it wouldn’t somehow make her ashamed—beca
use she was a little off her head where it came to money—but still enough so he would know that she was going to be able to keep eating and paying the rent. He was going to have to get Eduardo to have his lawyers set up a fake inheritance from some phoney relatives in England. That was the only way he could think of to get her to take money.
He knew her. When she figured it all out, or when he figured out some way he could tell her what happened, she would probably never call Marty Pomerantz again or pay any attention to Marty’s calls to her because he had set it up and she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him. Aaaaah, shit! He remembered that Vito used to say he didn’t have women to bring him trouble. Charley didn’t even understand that anymore. If you wanted to be around somebody there had to be trouble, because each side thought they knew better than the other one about what was the best thing for the other one. Jesus, that had certainly happened to him, two women—terrific women—had fallen so head-over-heels in love with him that they had lost all control. That was life. That was nature in the raw. He just had to learn to live with it.
If only Maerose could have been satisfied with being with him three nights a week and every other Saturday. They could have gotten married and he could have gone along with Mardell. His body would have gotten used to it eventually. After a year or two of a steady routine like that, he wouldn’t have to rest up in the daytime anymore. It would have been like the boy who had lifted the tiny calf every day until he was a man and the calf was a three-thousand-pound bull; it could be done. Both women would be happy and there wouldn’t have to be all this sweat. But no. Maerose had to have it her way.
The motorcycle cops of the escort were talking together on the street in front of Vincent’s house when Charley got out of the stretch car and went up the walk to the house. They were waiting for him. The front door opened and they were all dressed to go. Maerose was dressed more beautifully than even she had ever been dressed in her life, or maybe it was because he had never seen her wearing this kind of a long dress with all the bare everywhere and the hair like a helmet. Charley kissed Mae on the cheek. She stayed hanging there after he finished, like she was waiting for something more. They went out to the car. Both men were wearing tuxedos like a couple of waiters. Vincent burped twice getting into the car, so loud that Zingo looked around, alarmed, and put up the glass division in the car.