“Now we call Don Corrado,” Charley said. He dialed the number. “Padrino? This is Charley. I have Willie Daspisa and Joey Labriola here.” Willie reached forward to take the phone, but Charley, listening to what the don was saying, held up his hand. He hung up the phone and smiled at Willie and Joey. “He forgives you,” he said.
Willie and Joey embraced each other. Joey kissed Willie. Willie kept nodding his head and patting Joey between the shoulder blades.
“But he wants your thumbs,” Charley said.
They broke away from each other and whirled around on him.
“Did you expect it wouldn’t cost you nothing?” Charley said.
“Our thumbs?” Joey was like a dumb ox.
Charley shot them both, at their middles, near where the main trunk of the aorta drops from the heart to the abdomen. They fell faceup, unconscious. Louis walked to the hall, and his steps could be heard hurrying down the cellar stairs. He came back carrying a hatchet.
“Take their thumbs,” Charley said. “I can’t get out of this goddam chair without falling on my ass.”
Louis knelt beside Willie, who was staring up at him. He held one of Willie’s spread-eagled arms to the floor and chopped off his right thumb.
“Other side,” Charley said.
Methodically, Louis took all four thumbs and wrapped them in newspaper. The shock of the chops had brought Willie and Joey wide awake, Louis realized.
Charley leaned over and spoke to them.
“The don wants me to tell you that the left thumbs will go to your wife, Willie. Rosa gets both thumbs and she will be avenged. The Brooklyn cops will get your right thumbs, and our man will see that a sheet with your prints goes to all the newspapers. You will be more famous than you were at the trial where you ratted on the Prizzis. Famous!”
He shot them both through the head, Joey first. Willie tried to scream as Charley bent over the wheelchair to do it, but he had no sound left in him that could come out. Charley and Louis left them there. The car came on the dot of six forty-five and they drove to the Seattle airport.
60
Flying to New York, Charley hardly knew that it was himself sitting in the airplane. His wheelchair had been folded and stored. He had been lifted into a well reclined first-class seat in the front row. His plastered leg was sticking out into the aisle, his nose was held in place with sticking plasters, and he wore a tight skullcap of plaster around his head. He had borrowed a two-ounce tinfoil smack container from the Seattle people to carry the four thumbs in and they were well sealed and secure in the pocket of his overcoat hanging in the forward locker.
Everything that was new and unknown in his life was spinning out in front of him. He wondered if Pop could fix it so that the mayor’s engagement present to him and Maerose could be quietly transferred just to him. The Garden Grove apartments weren’t in Brooklyn and it was a gorgeous layout, anybody could tell from the flyer the mayor had sent in lieu of a wrapped present, and he and Mardell had to have a classy place to start their married life, a place which wouldn’t be too close to the Prizzis.
He had to straighten Mardell out on this booze thing. She had to swear off it. He knew where he could lay his hands on two solid magazine articles by doctors that showed what booze could do to vitamin deficiency. He didn’t need any outside evidence to show what it did to the head.
The main thing was that they had to get married so she would understand that nothing could ever shake them up again the way she had let herself get shaken up. Jesus, wait until she saw the plaster helmet he was wearing under his hat plus the wheelchair and the nose, and she would see how crazy she had been to think he had run out on her.
After he found her and got her started on drying out, he would have to call Eduardo and have him line up a judge to handle the wedding, call Pop to be his witness, then go someplace and get married. It put him through a wringer just thinking about it, but he had to do it. She needed him. It had all worked out, just the way Pop said it would. Maerose had run away. He wouldn’t ever understand where she’d found the moxie to do it. It was all settled. Everything was the way Maerose wanted it, but he knew in his heart that if the engagement party had gone through the way everybody expected it to happen, then the whole thing would have worked out to be exactly the opposite. He would have married Maerose. He might have had a few bad weeks, but he would have gotten over Mardell. It would have all been settled. But Maerose had run away from him. He still felt her somewhere near around him, like in the air or something, but what the hell, she had solved everything. She had cut loose because that was the only way she could tell him that he didn’t have to go through with marrying her. He had certainly made a production out of not being engaged to her, but what else could he do? He was lucky, he supposed. He never’d had to choose between Mae and Mardell. Thank God. It had all worked itself out, just the way Pop said. But, for a guy in his business, he had certainly missed grabbing the brass ring. He could have been married to a Prizzi. He could have been a key part of the inner Prizzi family. His kids could have been Prizzis with all the clout that brought with it. Instead, although he kidded himself about having made the right choice, about marrying the woman who needed him most, when he got off the plane and looked at Marty Pomerantz he knew what he was going to hear. His heart froze in midbeat as the realization came over him. Mardell had loved him so much but she had decided that she had lost him because she got nothing but silence for twelve days, three lifetimes with Mardell’s kind of dependency and loneliness, and she had killed herself.
He brought both hands up and covered his face. He tried not to make any sounds.
“Are you all right, Mr. Marino?” the stewardess asked.
The flight got into La Guardia at 7:10 A.M. Marty Pomerantz was waiting for him. He hadn’t told Pop he was coming in. This was about Mardell, not business.
Charley and his wheelchair were lowered to the tarmac and then he was rolled into the airport building.
Marty was just standing there, looking like an undertaker. Charley got the message. Marty didn’t have to talk. Mardell had killed herself. It was all over. She was gone and nothing could bring her back. She had decided that he had deserted her and that he was never coming back, so she’d killed herself.
“Okay, Marty,” he said in a choked voice. “Give it to me straight.”
“Jesus, Charley, they really wrecked you. I had no idea.”
“Never mind that, fahcrissake—what about Mardell? Did you give the super the hunnert bucks?”
“Yeah.”
“And you found her lying there?”
“She wasn’t there, Charley. All that time we were breaking our hearts about her she wasn’t even in the apartment.”
“What?” He couldn’t believe he was hearing what Marty was saying.
“I found a letter on the kitchen table. It’s addressed to you.” Marty slid an envelope out of the side pocket of his overcoat and handed it to Charley. Charley looked down at it dumbly. He had never felt such a vast sense of absolute relief. She was alive somewhere. He didn’t know where but she was okay. He felt like some kind of a conservationist who has just saved something of value from some kind of toxic waste. He hadn’t saved her. But she was saved. She was okay. And he knew that inside that letter was a message from her that lifted him right off the hook. He had done right with Mardell and now she was going to do right with him. She had lifted him right off the hook. Both of the greatest women in his life had lifted him right off the hook. He knew it. The letter was going to be a Dear John, and it would be all fixed up. Everything had worked itself out. He was absolutely in the clear. There was no possibility anymore that he was going to break the hearts of two women.
He stuffed the letter into his coat pocket. He stared at Marty. Marty looked like he expected to be clipped because he brought the bad news. Charley reached over and patted Marty on the sleeve to let him know that it was okay, that he didn’t blame anybody. He grinned at Marty dopily. He wheeled the chair out towa
rd the cab rank, humming “These Foolish Things.” Marty came after him saying, “I got a limo for you, Charley.”
The limo took Charley out to the beach. The driver manhandled Charley and the wheelchair out of the car. Charley gave him twenty dollars and then rolled the chair into the elevator and rode up to his floor. He let himself into the apartment and, keeping on his overcoat, wool cap, and scarf, he rolled the chair out on the terrace, working hard to relax before opening Mardell’s letter.
“Dearest Charley,” the letter said, “I am going to try to be very direct because you don’t deserve less than that.” (Her pen had paused in flight. She knew she wasn’t going to be at all direct with him, she was going to have to tell him perfectly awful lies but that was the only way to make absolutely everyone in the whole set piece happy again.) “I met a marvelous man while I was in the hospital, a world-famous Brazilian psychiatrist who became interested in the radio beams that, you will remember, have been coming to me from Buckingham Palace. We fell in love, really in love. By the time you get this—if indeed you do come back to the apartment—I will have been married on the high seas on my way to Brazil. We will live in São Paulo, high on a mountaintop, surrounded by brilliantly colored parrots. I will never forget you. Mardell”
Just like Pop said, everything had come up roses.
He sat on the terrace in the early morning December cold until it was sometime in the afternoon when he rolled himself into bed, humming “These Foolish Things” like an electric cello.
61
Eleven chairs were ranged in a semicircle across the stage of the small auditorium, which was used mostly for club meetings at the Luis Muñoz-Marín Junior High School. There was a student in every chair. Señora Roja-Buscando, the class valedictorian, sat at the center. Charley, wearing a pressed dark-blue suit, a white shirt, and a solid dark-blue tie, sat third from the end on stage right, between Miss Edith Molina, a former correspondent of The Brooklyn Eagle, and the Russian woman from Brighton Beach named Luba, whose last name he had never been able to remember but which rhymed with the name of a player who was with the St. Louis team.
In the front row of the auditorium, in seats that had been reserved by Eduardo through the Board of Education, sat Corrado Prizzi, Amalia, Vincent, Pop, Eduardo, and a young woman named Baby. The don was wide awake until the actual ceremonies started, to be specific until Mr. Matson walked onto the stage with a cardboard box filled with rolled-up, certified diplomas bearing the seal of the City of New York and tied with a pale-blue ribbon, each one individually inscribed with india ink in Mr. Matson’s beautiful handwriting in the names of the graduates who were seated on the stage.
Mr. Matson made a short speech of welcome to the sixty-seven people in the audience, then he called out the name of each student on the platform to come forward to receive his or her diploma. When he called out Charley’s name he was mindful of the unusual status of the special guests in row one and, advised by his district superintendent, he gave Charley’s accomplishments as he called out his name: “Charles Partanna, male recipient of the greatest number of Gold Stars in his class, secretary-treasurer of his class, and a dedicated student.” Charley came forward as the audience applauded politely and the front row applauded heavily, he bowed to Mr. Matson, accepted his diploma, and returned to his chair.
After the diplomas had been distributed, Mr. Matson introduced Evelyn Roja-Buscando, the class valedictorian. The señora walked to the lectern holding a thick sheaf of papers in her hand, clearing her throat. She was dressed in a pale-cerise hugger of Orion that made a soft, rounded shelf of her bosom, which was utterly without the support of a bra, with a two-inch-thick gold ruffle around the bottom of the skirt and across the yoke neck. She wore heavy gold plastic earrings and her hair had been pulled up into a high peruke at the back. Jesus, Charley thought, where has this one been in all the years we been going to school together? He realized they had a lot in common. They were not only both high school grads, they were classmates. She was a gorgeous woman—how come he had never noticed that? She wasn’t in the environment so he’d have to get to know her better.
The señora cleared her throat and began to read from the pile of paper.
Oh, boy, Charley thought, we’ll be lucky if we get outta here by tomorrow morning.
About the Author
Richard Condon was born in New York City. He worked in the movie business for more than twenty years before beginning to write fiction in his forties. The author of twenty-six books, he is best remembered for The Manchurian Candidate and four novels about the Prizzis, a family of New York gangsters. Condon passed away in 1996.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1986 by Richard Condon
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2775-5
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Richard Condon, Prizzi's Family
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