He was annoyed. After all the work and money he had put into persuading the mayor and the governor to cooperate with his plan to salvage Vito, in an election year, his brother Vincent had just thrown the whole thing away and instead had strong-armed the problem, which was the way Vincent approached everything.
Eduardo either didn’t know or didn’t want to know that Vito had fucked up and that Corrado Prizzi had authorized what Charley Partanna had had to do. Eduardo wanted to believe that Vincent had thrown his monkey wrench into delicate clockwork and that was that. Subconsciously, Eduardo may have hoped that the whole thing would blow up such a scandal that it would wipe out the entire Prizzi street operation. The family didn’t need Vincent, that was Eduardo’s belief. Vincent was a visible social embarrassment. Eduardo wasn’t going to be the one to find the people who had—albeit unwittingly—done so much toward putting Vincent away.
“What is this, some kind of a radical movement in Washington?” the don asked Angelo Partanna plaintively. “They won’t give us the names of two nothings after all we done for them?”
“Yeah.”
“Whatta you mean?”
“Getting them two names out of the Program is nothing for Eduardo. If he wants something, they sell it to him.”
“We’ll wait.”
“Corrado, my Charley is involved here. You’re sure you explained the whole thing to Eduardo?”
“I got some ideas for Charley. He’s gonna be okay. Maybe Eduardo really isn’t trying on this one. But if I call him on it what is he gonna tell me? He’s gonna say how tough it is and how he’s working on it. Not counting Charley, it’s not important enough to make trouble.”
“It’s important. It could put Charley on the hot seat. It could bust up the whole street operation of the family.”
“How?”
“It can be turned into a big scandal if Mallon uses what Willie said to get elected. He’s a reformer, the worst kind. He’ll hound us until he has our top people in the can and he’ll scatter the rest. It’s a dangerous thing, Corrado.”
“If anything goes wrong on Eduardo’s end, it’s because he’s blaming Vincent. They don’t understand each other. Let’s give Eduardo a little more time. I’ll give him a push. Then, if it looks bad, we’ll have a real basis for coming down on him.”
Angelo had been concerned about the relations between the two Prizzi brothers for some time. Things between them had been getting worse for the past few years. Vincent did not resent Eduardo’s education—he understood they had to have a lawyer they could trust—as much as he resented that Prizzi money, made in the streets, had lifted his brother up to a place among the mighty of the earth. Eduardo had acquired the power to run the people who were supposed to have the power. Eduardo moved behind the Prizzi money like a snow-plow. Vincent knew that, as the elder son, as the older brother, he should have had the place of precedence.
Eduardo, on the other hand, could hardly contain his contempt for Vincent as a ruffian. Vincent was that lowest human category in Eduardo’s lexicon: a strong-arm. Eduardo didn’t quite deplore the fact that his family had come up from the streets; that to a large extent—an extent which, in his mind, excluded himself and his father—they were common hoodlums. He could not see the need for continuing the street operations, no matter how much they earned. He could prove that the family didn’t need that.
Angelo reminded Vincent as subtly as he could, while yet being sure that Vincent was getting the message, of the operational differences between the two brothers; they were at one of their regular thrice-weekly lunches at Tucci’s—the only Italian restaurant Vincent had ever eaten in that gave him indigestion and that made him have to lie down for an hour after each lunch, chewing on Turns for the tummy. To Vincent, because of the zuppa di pesce di Pozzuoli, every lunch was a gourmet experience. For six years, Pop had been eating bread sticks for lunch at Tucci’s.
It was a Neapolitan joint, fahcrissake, he told Charley. Pizzas or something they might understand, but they couldn’t even make a good sartù. While Vincent’s two donkeys, the Plumber and Phil Vittimizzare, shoveled the food into themselves at a table across the aisle like the famine was due to start tomorrow, Angelo spoke quietly to Vincent about how the don, after all, had spent his lifetime in total power from the day he started the lottery, three days after he had landed in this country fifty-four years ago. Vincent, Angelo said, was still a relatively young man and, although he should be stricken down for saying it, the plain fact was that the don couldn’t live forever and when, in the mercy of God, he had to travel that road upon which all men must go, Vincent would have all the power on the real side, the Sicilian side, of the operation. The rest of the business was for a bunch of American college kids and lawyers anyway, Angelo said. Let them knock themselves out delivering the rest of the country to the family.
“Eduardo would be just another fuckin’ lawyer if it wasn’t for my operation,” Vincent said in his cobblestoned Brooklyn English. “I got him the cash to buy all the action he has going. He hangs out with White House people and senators and tells them what to do. But anybody could be a big shot like that, all the money my operation dumps on him.”
No matter how much Angelo talked, Vincent refused to see that he and his brother were two perfect halves of the new America, that they were paving the way together for the time when the third and fourth generation of Prizzis and their franchise holders would own more than thirty percent of the country. They were already the most important single part of the national economy. They generated more running cash, created more credit, more jobs, owned more businesses and controlled more financial institutions and industries, and influenced more government executive, legislative, police, and judicial decisions across the board than any other entity within the American dream on the simple formula of investing and reinvesting the billions of dollars of tax-free income they earned each year from the basest desires of their fellow citizens.
Angelo gave equal time to exploring Eduardo’s side of the problem whenever his assignments from the don took him into Eduardo’s rarified territory on the other side of the bridge and uptown in the heart of the high-rent district. Eduardo was more statesmanlike about the problem when Angelo presented it to him. “Vincent is a hooligan who thinks smashing people’s heads has something to do with power. We could knock off the family’s street business tomorrow and, in strict dollar terms, take only about a 9.24 percent loss on capital appreciation in the first three years and, after that, it would drop to less than four percent until, in twelve years, you would never know we had ever had a street operation. And that’s on capital appreciation alone. We don’t need Vincent’s operation. It’s an embarrassment. We should expand and develop the franchise operation and let the Hispanics and the blacks do Vincent’s dirty work.”
Eduardo was a miracle with an American-style nose—something that mystified, even awed, everyone in the family. He was fifty years old. He maintained a succession of young women, all called Baby, all graduates of Foxcroft and Bennington, who seemed to be clones of each other. Eduardo himself was entirely tailored. His hair was tailored. It couldn’t possibly fit anyone else. His teeth, as well, were tailored, and his speech, and certainly his nose.
When he wasn’t talking in family councils or at weddings in Brooklyn, his diction (tailored by phonograph records taken from videotapes of old William F. Buckley, Jr., television shows) had no basis in any other identifiable accent or speech pattern of any English-speaking country of the world. The sounds, although originally manufactured by someone else, were now Eduardo’s own.
One morning, at an early meeting in Eduardo’s four-floor mansion-apartment, which rose in fourteen-foot increments fifty-eight storeys above Fifth Avenue in New York, Angelo had come upon him in that more than adequately heated palace wearing an ankle-length ermine dressing gown whose edgings were piped in black mink. He was smoking a Davidoff cigar which, if he had bought it at retail, would have cost $12.40. Angelo, who was worried about w
hat could happen to Charley if George F. Mallon weren’t stopped in his tracks, brought up the subject of finding Willie and Joey, a matter which Eduardo eluded blithely, passing on it in his own interest.
“Let me tell you something else, Angelo,” he said with that crazing diction. “Within twenty-five years nobody is going to remember that we were ever an immigrant family. The calendar takes care of everything. Think about the robber barons of the 1870s—the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Mellons, and the rest. They all began as hoodlums. Look at the Irish and the Jews when they came to this country—all hoodlums. Everybody will forget where we came from—our names will become anglicized through marriage and by deed poll—and we’ll be the leaders of society. As long as our money holds out—which, the way we’re going, will be forever. In twenty-five years we’ll be old money, and because we have more money than any of them we’ll be more respectable than any of them.”
14
Maerose Prizzi, Vincent’s daughter, graduated from Manhattanville five months before the don made Charley her father’s underboss. She was one of the women in the environment who felt drawn toward Charley because of his new status but not because she had always admired him from afar. If she knew he was alive before he became the family’s underboss and vindicatore—and she vaguely thought she must have, because after all he was Angelo Partanna’s son—in her mind he was just another family soldier.
Maerose had been educated by the nuns so she understood both elemental and sophisticated power. Perhaps this understanding derived from her being a student of her grandfather’s bearing. She had a thirst for power that was worse than anyone’s thirst for water after being stranded in a desert for a week.
She was eight years younger than Charley and she was a Prizzi, so they didn’t turn up at the same places very often except at weddings and funerals.
When she graduated her grandfather gave her five points in the restaurant linen supply industry to assure her cash flow, and fifteen points in a going interior decorating business in New York, not only because decorating was what she wanted to do, but because the Prizzis owned two big antique reproduction furniture factories in North Carolina and a big upholstery fabrics company near Florence. In New York, and to her clients and acquaintances, she was known as Mary Price, niece of the industrialist-financier, Edward S. Price. No one in Brooklyn except her grandfather, certainly not her father, knew her nome di battaglia. When she graduated from college she had it made legal, using one of her Uncle Eduardo’s law firms, but the name change was their little secret as far as her father was concerned.
She had a feeling for color; like her grandfather, she knew money, and by reading in the New York Public Library at night for two months, working with the craftsmen of North Carolina and Florence (who were sent to New York), and listening carefully to an elderly queen who had once been an Oscar-winning set dresser in Hollywood whom Angelo found for her, she was able to sound like a professional equal of her two partners. After a while she bought one of them out and dominated the survivor. Eventually she would be the sole stockholder of a thriving business that operated in New York, Beverly Hills, and London with a little help from her friends.
Maerose was a tall, gorgeous grabber who wore clothes with the assurance and style that Marilyn Monroe had worn her ass. She was the most classically Sicilian Prizzi of them all; a tall, cool aristocrat risen from a lump like Vincent and a line of Arab Greek Phoenician Sicilians; ancient, with a nose like a Saracen, passionate and unremitting, having the sexually inquisitive eyes of a Bedouin woman in purdah. She had the pitiless lower face of her grandfather—giving fear generously—but as the upper face emerged the slap of fear became the command of authority. She was the definition of serenity and total adjustment on her surfaces, but underneath, in the bottomless crevices of her boiling ambition, she was like the center of the placid earth, eruptive.
After Manhattanville, although she kept an unannounced apartment in New York on Thirty-seventh Street off Park, she lived at home with her father and her then sixteen-year-old sister, Teresa, in her father’s house in Bensonhurst, two streets away from Angelo Partanna’s house. She had an occasional fling with two or three clients in New York, but in Brooklyn she was strictly virgin territory.
When she was in New York, working with clients or seeing friends, she spoke with the grammatical elegance and diction of a woman on whom many years of higher education had been lavished. But when she was in Brooklyn, speaking to anyone—her father, her grandfather, anyone in her family because, outside her family and its extensions, she had no interest in having friends—she spoke the street language with a heavy Brooklyn-Italian pronunciation and phrasing.
Maerose liked to drink. That was anathema to her family, so when she drank she drank in New York. There was usually a filled glass of champagne on the desk in her office, not for effect but because she was always pitched so that she needed a drink.
She had been thinking about what she really wanted to do since she had been twelve years old. She wanted to take over, run, and control both sides of her family’s business operations: the street side where her father held the power and the political/investment side where her Uncle Eduardo lived. She by no means resented having been born a woman, holding however that acceptance only for as long as being a woman didn’t block her way in taking over both sides of the Prizzi operation someday. What was implicit in her plan to take over both, and what therefore exalted it to an extreme, was one clear fact: she would need to replace her grandfather as head of the family. Her reasoning had refined itself into a fairly straight line. Her grandfather was an old man; he had to die soon. Her father was a sick man, he couldn’t last too long. Eduardo was healthy and younger than her father so he would have to be taken from the inside. She was going to have to continue to cultivate Eduardo, as she had been doing since she was fifteen, and after establishing her own decorating branches in Palm Beach and Washington she planned to sell them to Eduardo, giving him an idea of how well she understood business. Then she would have her grandfather persuade Eduardo to take her into Barker’s Hill Enterprises as his assistant, so that gradually, over, say, a ten-year period during which he got older and older, she could undermine him with her grandfather and any other key elements of the family’s hierarchy.
Until she spotted Charley she knew the weak link in her plan was the street side of the family operation. Her father, the Boss of the street side, would never allow her, a woman, to have anything to do with the family business. It would be necessary for her to wear him down by going back at him again and again just to get him to talk about the intricacies of the street operation. Out of nowhere, Charley Partanna was made her father’s underboss and vindicatore. Her grandfather respected Charley. Charley had a big future in the family. Charley was going to have a lot of power. Therefore, she was going to have to marry Charley in order to take him over and control the street side, which fed the money to Eduardo so that, when she took over from Eduardo in say ten or fifteen years, she would control both sides of the family’s operations. Everyone would have to call her Donna Mae, the first woman in all history to stand at the head of a Mafia family. Maybe you had to be slightly mad to be able to continue to live with such an ambition. Any Sicilian man could have told her it was the impossible dream.
She had her first clear shot at Charley at her sister Teresa’s seventeenth birthday party. Charley Partanna was there as a feudal duty. Teresa was a Prizzi. Everyone whose surname was either Prizzi, Sestero, Partanna, or Garrone was there; men, women, and children. At the proper time her grandfather, in a show of great age, would shuffle to the microphone and make a speech. The way he did this was whisper into Vincent’s ear in Sicilian, then Vincent spoke it into the microphone in Brooklynese, dumping the words out of the depths of his stomach the way a piled wheelbarrow is emptied by upending it. Then the don would hand over the traditional annual birthday check of one thousand dollars to Vincent and would beckon Teresa to the stage and hand the check to
her. She would kiss her grandfather, her father, and her uncle Eduardo, in the order prescribed by Vincent. The four-piece band, all bald or white-haired men who had been playing at the Prizzi parties for fifty-one years, would then play “Happy Birthday to You” and all the Prizzis, Sesteros, Partannas, and Garrones would sing out the words. Vincent would lead Teresa to the dance floor. The band would play “The Anniversary Waltz” and, after one turn of the floor, Patsy Garrone, Teresa’s fidanzato, would cut in and then everyone would join in the dancing.
Maerose made sure she was standing next to Charley Partanna during the singing, so that when the band began the dance music all she had to do was to say, “Come on, Charley. Let’s dance.”
“Jeez, Mae,” Charley said. “I ain’t danced since Rocco’s anniversary.”
“Whadda you do on Saturday night? Raise pigeons? Come on!” She pulled him onto the dance floor. “Hey!” she said after a few turns. “You’re a terrific dancer.”
“I put $840 into Arthur Murray’s to learn how to do it right.”
“Yeah?”
“I do rhumba, samba, mambo, waltz, and fox-trot.”
“No lindy? No Peabody?”
“I could always do them.”
“I heard you went to night school.”
“Not for dancing.”
“How come I never see you around?”
He shrugged. “I’m around. You go to New York.”
“Why don’t you come over to the house for dinner?”
“Vincent sees me all day.”
“How about lunch Sunday? Poppa has to eat lunch on the don’s boat Sundays.”