“Yeah, yeah,” Charley said irritably.
“A week from Sunday, like at dawn, that is according to his plan Sunday dawn, he has organized U.S. Marshalls and a gang of media to go out to your apartment and take you in, then he is going on television that night so it will be all over the papers—on the Monday eight days before Election Day, and accuse the mayor and the police commissioner of ordering you to do the job on Vito to protect their drug empire.”
“Whaaaat?”
“Yeah. Can you believe it? And he is gonna try to get a lot more mileage out of it than that. So far, the only name he has is George Fearons, the detective they say did the actual job on Vito. But the day you did the job on Vito, the computer mistakenly gave the cops the name of a cop who retired three years ago and lives in Montreal now. Mallon’s people were also all over Willie Daspisa, who says he seen you go into Vito’s building on that night. And he has Davey Hanly on the mat for all the good that’s gonna do him.”
“What kind of a frame-up is this?”
“He has a TV cameraman who went into Vito’s apartment right behind the task force sergeant and he says part of Vito was on his back on the floor and the rest of him was all over the walls before the sergeant fired a shot.”
“Politics. Boy!”
“But he can’t prove nothing—he can’t even get started—until he can close in on you, arrest you in front of two hundred media people, and nail you up in front of the cameras. He’s started the whole thing so now he has to follow it up wherever he can find you.”
“This is the craziest thing I ever heard.”
“He wants to nail you, but he don’t care about you. He wants to nail the mayor. All you gotta do is lay low until after Election Day.”
“Where?”
“I got it all set up.”
“What about school? Shit, Pop, I got exams coming up.”
“I’ll take them a doctor’s certificate that you got the flu. I’m your father. What can they say except too bad.”
“You got to send the Plumber over there starting Monday night to get my homework.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Jesus, Pop—you don’t know what else is going on. I’m in a bind not only with Mardell, but with Mae.”
“They’ll have to wait, Charley.”
“Is Eduardo handling it?”
“Eduardo can’t do nothing with this guy—directly. But he can slow him down. Eduardo and the don want you on ice until it’s over.”
“Jesus, Pop, that’s almost ten days away. Mardell’ll go outta her mind.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Pop. Lissena me. Last night she said to me that Maerose had called her and said that she and me was engaged. I mean—you can’t imagine what it was like.”
“Engaged? Mae told her that?”
“She’s gotta have me mixed up with somebody else.”
“Well—whatta you gonna do? Two women. I mean, it hadda come out.”
“But Mardell is very shaky, Pop. You don’t know. She gets that yesterday from Mae, now she wakes up and I’m gone. What’s she supposed to think? That I ran out on her, right? But with her, with Mardell, it’s ten times worse than if it happened to somebody else. Like I told you. About the father and having the kid and all that.”
“You didn’t tell me about that.”
“Well, it’s very rough.”
“Charley, life is life. Things happen. You’ll talk to her tonight from Dallas. I am gonna take her to dinner and explain everything.”
“Everything?”
“About why you hadda leave Miami this morning. Not the real reason.”
“Well—Jesus. What about Maerose?”
“That’s easy. I’ll talk to her.”
“No, no! I mean what about that she thinks she and me are engaged?”
“So it’s some whim she has. It ain’t official. I mean, it ain’t like she announced it to the don or Vincent. She’s just trying to steamroller you.”
“Pop, listen. I think it would be better if you didn’t talk to Maerose. She’s very proud. And we can’t blame her if she is so in love with me, because she tells me we’re engaged, it ain’t something she wants the family to know.”
“I’ll dummy up with her.”
“Where do I go now?”
“You got a reservation at the Mockingbird Hilton in Dallas, in the name of Frank Arriminata, after that pasta you make with the broccoli so you won’t forget it.”
“Arriminata. Arriminarsi means to move about.”
“That’s what you’ll be doing. I’ll call you tomorrow night. Stay over the weekend. See the Cowboys. Go to a movie. Monday they’ll be ready for you in New Orleans.”
“Gennaro?”
“Yeah. Rent a car in Dallas and drive to Tyler, Texas. Go to the city airport they got. One of Gennaro’s planes will take you to New Orleans.”
“Why can’t Mardell come with me?”
“You know why. Because she makes you more traceable.”
“But doing it like this is really gonna wreck her.”
“Even if Mallon’s people get lucky and they can trace Fred Fulton from Miami to Dallas, which is practically impossible, the trail stops there. At the Dallas airport.”
“How is Eduardo gonna handle Mallon?”
“Don’t worry. The verce of the people will be heard. The don is giving this his best thinking.”
“We now got one more reason for Eduardo to find Willie in the Program.”
“After Election Day. When you get back. That’s what we’re gonna do. No more Mr. Nice Guy.” Pop hung up.
26
When Mardell opened her eyes up and stretched out her hand across the bed to touch Charley, she woke up with a shock because the other side of the bed was empty. He had to be reading in the other room. Reading? What was there to read?
“Charley!” she yelled.
Then she remembered the woman who called her. She moaned, wondering whether she had overcharacterized the thing. She propped herself up on three pillows and thought the situation through objectively. It clearly had been a mistake to have taken the two aspirins as if they were sleeping pills, as if she were Cleopatra with her asp and she couldn’t bear to keep on talking to him. There was no question about it: the thing to have done would have been to just melt into the whole thing as if she couldn’t stand the agony it was causing him; holding him and kissing him and telling him that whatever had happened to him back in the past before he had ever set eyes on her was nothing she could possibly have anything to say about—and other nonsense like that.
She got out of bed, lay on the floor, and began to do the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises, remembering that she was missing a sensational shoe sale at Saks in New York. She had to locate a cleaning woman. Cleaning was wonderful exercise, but it kept her in the house and, more and more, Freddie was taking that shuttle flight from Washington to New York. Her mother thought he was behaving very seriously. Mardell knew he was behaving seriously. She was determined that he must value the prize (herself) that he would win, but she felt he really had to strive just a little more for it before she lowered her eyes and said yes to hear him say that she had made him the happiest man in the world. But it mustn’t all happen too fast. She had to round out this organized crime case history for Hattie Blacker before Mardell La Tour could cease to exist.
She was sure she had gotten herself into some kind of Sicilian blood feud with that intense woman on the phone yesterday. Still, that Charley was a real little devil, having a loving fiancée on the side and carrying on with her like the whole thing was a French farce. She yawned and stretched, wondering whether she should rent a car and go up to Palm Beach to see the Spaldings.
She found Charley’s note on his pillow and read it with amusement. He must have known his fiancée was capable of coming down here with a large gun and letting him have it. She tried to imagine what the fiancée could be like: short, with a light mustache. She probably wore litt
le bows on her shoes and had an ankle bracelet.
God knows what time he had gotten up to make his escape. She knew that he knew he didn’t intend to see her again because he couldn’t stand the heat from the Sicilian fiancée. It had been good fun while it had lasted. She decided to have a pitcher of grapefruit juice for breakfast. It was very filling and wouldn’t put one ounce on her.
She began to think of the fun of playing the whole string out with Charley and his fiancée. God, the passions these people could go through; it would be like singing the soprano role in grand opera; being right onstage in the middle of all the noise and the action. Although this looked like a very appropriate and natural time to withdraw discreetly from the adventure, she felt in her bones that she couldn’t just disappear in the middle of the second act. She had to wait around and see how the whole thing was going to turn out. She owed it to Charley. He was too sweet for her not to stay around to find out what was going to happen to him.
The phone rang. She picked it up, dropping back into her tremulous character of Mardell La Tour, fighting not to overdo it.
“Charley?”
“Miss La Tour?” It was a soft, low, sympathetic voice.
“Yes?”
“This is Charley’s father.”
“His father?”
“Charley works for me. A very big opportunity came up. I talked to him this morning but he must have taken it in the other room because he didn’t want to wake you up. You are a very important element in Charley’s life. You know that, I’m sure.”
This was a real pro. This man was smoooooth.
“Where is he, Mr. Partanna?”
“I’m in New York. The main thing is—there was no time so early this morning for Charley to wake you up and go over everything with you—but he insisted that I call you at the earliest civilized hour. So here I am.”
Mardell had never heard a slicker, trickier voice. She was beginning to realize that this whole thing could have many dimensions. Maybe Charley did have to go away on some awful criminal business.
“My assistant in our Miami office—a very dignified lady—will bring you back to New York, Miss La Tour, a first-class seat and a nice meal—then you and me will have dinner in some nice restaurant tonight and I’ll tell you the whole story about what Charley is doing for us. It’s a very big deal, a big responsibility. He had to move on it, Miss La Tour.”
“Please call me Mardell.”
“Mrs. Bostwick will have the tickets. The limousine will take you to the airport. Just tell the bell captain when you are ready. I will call you at five o’clock this afternoon at your place to tell you when we will meet tonight.”
“You are very kind, Mr. Partanna.”
“No, no, Mardell. Please. Not kindness. It is Charley’s way.”
“How will I know Mrs. Bostwick?”
“Mrs. Bostwick will be carrying two large suitcases and she’ll have one of them on the pavement at the door of the limousine.” Mrs. Bostwick was the mule who brought the pure to New York twice a week, where the Prizzi lab stepped on it only six times.
27
Charley checked into the Mockingbird Hilton in Dallas as Frank Arriminata. The reservation was waiting for him. Along with the room keys, the clerk handed him a large, heavy manila envelope, which had been scotch-taped at every seam. He told the room clerk that his baggage had been lost by the airline and asked where he could buy some clothes and luggage. The room clerk told him to take a cab to the Highland Park shopping center. Charley went into the coffee shop and had a real breakfast. He didn’t approve of airline food. He had never heard of anybody ever getting a good Italian meal on any airline, including Alitalia.
After ordering breakfast he opened the manila envelope. It contained a Texas driver’s license, a Mobil credit card, an AAA membership card, and an American Express card all in the name of Frank Arriminata. There was a heavy gold signet ring with the initials F.A. carved into it. He slipped the ring on his finger and stuffed the IDs into his wallet—after removing his own, putting the latter into the manila envelope, and addressing the envelope to his father in New York.
At five after ten he went out front, got a cab, and directed the driver to take him to Highland Park village. On the way out he saw that Dallas was the Brooklyn of tomorrow; the same low buildings, plenty of trees and sky; small houses with the occasional high-rise jutting up here and there, just like Bensonhurst. The people who lived here probably thought it was the greatest place in the world only because they lived here. He missed Brooklyn—known to anybody who knew anything about places as the Greatest Place in the World—and not just because he lived there.
He got out of the cab in front of the entrance to Sanger-Harris, a department store, so he went in and started buying. Using the fake credit card, he bought another suit, two shirts, some underwear and socks, a toothbrush, shaving equipment, a suitcase, and two identical cultured pearl necklaces—one for Mae and one for Mardell. He thought about the marvels of progress, how ten years before he would have had to carry a big roll of bills on him if he needed to shop like this. Progress was there to serve.
He walked around the shopping center, had some iced tea, and found a book called Lying Techniques whose cover said it had been twenty-two weeks on the bestseller list. He went into the movie house to cool off. He got back to the hotel just after three and went to bed. He woke up at four twenty and called Mardell. It was five twenty in New York.
“Mardell? Charley.”
“What can you possibly say to me, Charley?”
“Well—just for beginners—I can say that I love you.”
“Ah, Charley.”
“The note explained why we didn’t go to Marineland.”
“I talked to your father in Miami. I just talked to him again about twenty minutes ago.”
“We gotta straighten everything out, Mardell.”
“Your fiancée called me. I can’t stop thinking about that.”
“Well, stop thinking about it. She is not my fiancée. Can I help it if a woman walks around saying I’m her fiancé? I’m not engaged to her, and if she calls you again tell her I said that.”
“We’re going to have dinner tonight.”
“Who?”
“Your father and I.”
“This thing I’m doing down here—it’s going to tie me up until like the second week of November. Then I’m coming right home.”
“I just don’t know what to say to you.”
“Don’t say anything. Just say we’ll be together again very soon. Just give me a chance to straighten everything out.”
“I have to hang up now, Charley.” There was a soft sound, then the phone was dead. He couldn’t figure out whether things were better or worse than he thought. He stretched out on the bed and started to study the lying manual, but when he came to a part that said men were better liars than women, he sat up and dumped it in the wastebasket. Why didn’t they say that men who lied were better at it than women who lied? Did everybody lie? He had to watch himself.
He turned on the television and then sat in a low chair, staring at the tube but not seeing it. He let its familiar presence comfort him, his mind almost a blank in the American way that had been formed and molded by twenty-two years of television, but beyond its numbing edges he knew he was still in big trouble. He turned the sound off and let the bright, moving colors soothe him. There was a talking toilet seat commercial that was very well done, he thought.
He was to blame. He had let himself get involved with two women at the same time. He had cheated on two great women and now they were all paying for it. He felt such a wave of self-pity that he had to turn off the television and take a cold shower. He dressed in his new clothes and went down to the lobby to find out where there was an Italian restaurant.
They sent him to an Italian-type restaurant on Mockingbird behind the hotel. The pasta was out of a package and had been made with plain white flour. It lay there in lumps. The sauce was like hot ketchup. He ate
the bread and the salad.
He passed a half-price bookstore on the way back to the hotel and bought a James Bond paperback; one guy who never had any problems with women. The book would get him through Saturday but he would rather have been doing his homework. In two weeks Roja-Buscando was going to be able to skunk him. She was never absent. She probably went to day high school just so she could walk into the class every night and try to make him look like a bum. When you came right down to it, she was a pretty terrific-looking head even if she was a Puerto Rican. She was like the color of the don’s almond cookies, with a great pair of eyes on her, and very smart. He sighed. She was absolutely going to skunk him. She was going straight to the head of the class and there was nothing he could do about it. God damn George F. Mallon!
He left for Tyler in the rented car at seven o’clock Sunday morning, made it across some pretty flat country, and found the Tyler airport. He called the rent-a-car place and told them where to pick up the car. A two-engine Piper was waiting for him and it flew him to New Orleans.
28
Later that Sunday morning, two of Gennaro Fustino’s people met the light plane with Charley in it, and took him to Gennaro’s house in the elegant garden district of New Orleans where he sat down to a family-style lunch with Gennaro, Natale Esposito, and Gennaro’s wife, Birdie, who was Don Corrado’s little sister. She was a very jolly, fat lady in her early sixties who never actually sat with them but kept bringing more and more food to the table. She was certainly a lot better-looking than her brother, Charley thought, then he had a pang of disloyalty.
The meal started with chinulille, small fried ravioli stuffed with a mixture of sweetened and spiced ricotta cheese and egg yolk. Gennaro, a Calabrese who was famous for owning 117 pairs of shoes, piled it on about how Calabrese food was so much better than Sicilian food, to the point where Charley decided he had to be kidding. Charley (and practically everybody else in the world, Charley thought) preferred his ravioli stuffed with salami the Sicilian way, but he didn’t say anything. They had tonno bollito, boiled fresh tuna with oil, garlic, pickles, and green salad. It was good, but spada a ghiotta, a nice swordfish cooked in oil with onions, celery, tomatoes, and olives, was better. Pop had told him that Calabrese people knew absolutely nothing about food. At least the baked layered pastry called sammartina was Sicilian, Mrs. Fustino owed her heritage that much. Charley got out an envelope and a pencil and wrote down the recipe as Mrs. Fustino gave it to him with delight and her husband looked on with amused contempt.
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