Prizzi's Glory

by Richard Condon

  At the Berkeley Hotel in London, where they would stay for a few days until the staff got the Mount Street flat stocked with food and ready for them, they occupied a four-room apartment on the mews side. Over a bottle of room service Krug ’59, Maerose told Charley that she was pregnant.

  20

  While he flew in the company DC-10, the Ronald Reagan, or rode in the limousine between campaign appearances, or stretched out, exhausted, on some motel room bed after he had finished a day’s endless campaigning, for as long as he could stay awake, Eduardo thought about his father’s letter of intent that would allow him to inherit only 20 percent of the Prizzi fortune, as represented by the capital assets of Barker’s Hill, $14 billion (and 20 percent of $14 billion was only $2.8 billion), after he had spent his life, from the day he had left Harvard, building Barker’s Hill from a paper Delaware corporation into one of the great industrial colossi of modern times. He thought about it when he showered in the morning and during the two deep massages he got during the day between campaign appearances. He thought about it immediately after the time he had alloted to thinking about Claire Coolidge. It was deeply resentful thinking, which corroded his soul and violated his well-being.

  He could hardly believe that Charley Partanna, the son of a sweaty immigrant (which could have been true because Angelo Partanna had landed in New York from Sicily in late July and could not have escaped perspiring), would—for doing absolutely nothing—inherit the helm of Barker’s Hill Enterprises, while he, the man who had built all of it, had been cut down to a 20 percent share. He thought it all through carefully, considering what he would need to do to win some fraction more than the 20 percent, if only a token amount to prove that he cared.

  Because he was conditioned by his lifetime of training under his father, part of the problem was winning back some token amount of that money tax-free. The depression that had fallen upon him after being told he would be cheated out of his own money stayed with him for so long that he was simply unable to receive Charley Partanna for as much as a lip-service interview in advance of handing over the direction of Barker’s Hill Enterprises. Instead, after the Macy Bartons had moved overseas, when Eduardo announced his candidacy for the presidency after he had been running for seven months and had spent $5.25 million of campaign funds to establish that he hadn’t decided whether he would run or not, pressed by his father, almost as an afterthought, he named Charley as his successor.

  Eduardo had always patronized Charley, naturally feeling the contempt that a law-abiding citizen has to feel for a fellow of Charley’s sordid origins, but, on the other hand, he felt enormous gratitude to Charley for having given him Miss Claire Coolidge almost at the instant Charley had perceived how important Claire was to him. He knew that Charley had not sacrificed himself because of his indifference to her—no one could be indifferent to Claire. Charley had done it for the greater good of the family, Eduardo was certain of that. Charley had not hesitated. It had been an incomparably generous thing to do, but all of that gallantry notwithstanding, Eduardo was not going to receive Charley Partanna at Barker’s Hill headquarters until the complete physical overhaul had transformed him into Charles Macy Barton and he was able to enunciate like a human being and not like a Brooklyn Italian wop.

  Anyway, he knew it wasn’t Charley sticking in his craw and it certainly couldn’t be his nephews, Conrad Price Barton and Angier Macy Barton, on whom he had never set eyes. It was the injustice of that 20 percent that his father had thrown to him as feed is thrown before chickens. He would not go against his own father, dead or alive, but he knew that if he thought about it long enough he would find a way to better the odds.

  It was a prerequisite of presidential campaigning, despite the attention span of the voters, to spend as much money as the candidate could lay his hands on before the January of the election year so that whatever was expended could receive matching funds from the government. He was almost at the bottom of the money barrel because he didn’t intend to use any of Barker’s Hill money. The early money had been readily forthcoming from leaders of business and from various associations of his father’s, but he was facing the final year of the campaign with only the financial support of the forthcoming matching funds from the government. Nonetheless, he was more confident than he had been when he started. “I am certain of my candidacy now,” he said to the Los Angeles Times. “I am reasonably confident of victory next year.”

  When he campaigned in California, there was a special bonus, utterly unexpected by press and public alike. During a layover weekend, he spent a considerable amount of time with Arthur Shuland, the lieutenant governor of the state, his nephew, the son of Amalia Sestero. He set Arthur right on the basics. “Charles Macy Barton, who has succeeded me at Barker’s Hill, is a friend and a friend of the friends.”

  “That figures.”

  “If he calls on you, consider it a part of the general plan, your grandfather’s plan.”

  “I am at his orders, Uncle.”

  “While you’re at it, do you think you can do anything for my campaign in the state?”

  “I’ll think of a way.”

  Three days before the Republican presidential primaries, the popular Democratic lieutenant governor of California backed into a safe endorsement of Edward S. Price. He said, “Although, as a loyal Democrat, I am one hundred percent behind our great president, Franklin M. Heller, because as God knows there is no more staunch member of the Democratic party than I, I have to say that Edward S. Price is just as stalwart a Republican who deserves every vote of every real Republican at the polls on primary day.” Shuland’s support for Ned Price was put down to the fact that he was, after all, a Californian, a crossover politician in a crossover state and that he must have some local reason that only a Californian could figure out, because he had certainly delivered over $400,000 in PACs to the Heller campaign funds.

  Edward S. Price was a maniacally persistent man who, aside from his father’s constant counsel and the most extraordinarily tax-free cash flow in the history of capitalism, had successfully established a complexity of interwoven businesses and industries that represented an enormous empire. His experience and knowledge of inner politics and administration, as well as his arrogance, were profound. Also, he had complete access to the secret files of S. L. Penrose, famed Washington lawyer who was the Washington lobbyist for the fratellanza, a fellow Sicilian whose family name had been Scriverosa. Sal’s files would have enough on the necessary majority of members of the House and Senate to assure his success as president. For almost fifty years he had grown addicted to his own continually expanding ripples of power until, in terms of absolute power, the presidency would have been the only way to go if only it were possible for him to take Claire Coolidge along with him.

  He would put his mind to solving that problem after he had been elected, he thought. Claire was so lissomely beautiful, so effortlessly and poetically sexual, that despite the fact that he was in his seventies and despite his deplorable affliction, Peyronie’s Plaque, which, when in erection, caused his penis to bend at the middle, then curve drastically downward, which would have rendered it useless to any other woman, Claire was still able to engineer practical responses to what had been an utterly impossible situation for him for the past ten years. Somehow, miraculously, she had designed and then had attained what would have been an impossible position, except for a ballerina in training, and had actually contrived to place him within her, somehow bring it all off in an upside-down backward placement that was so much more like pyramiding than the old-fashioned missionary position. How had she ever learned the sexual eccentricities she understood, he had wondered over and over again. She was so learned about sex—so caring.

  He worried about losing her every moment he was on the campaign trail. He had thought of marrying her, but the media would make short work of the candidacy of a man in his seventies marrying a ballerina who was almost forty-five years his junior.

  He had received Charley brie
fly, on Charley’s return from Europe, in his tower at Barker’s Hill headquarters, wearing his statesmanlike, visionary Woodrow Wilson dentures. Eduardo had had several sets of variously shaped dentures designed for wearing at the right place at the right time. To dominate board meetings he always wore either his Von Hindenburg dentures, which gave him heavy authority and served up the sounds from his larynx as if they had been placed on large Chincoteague oyster shells, or, if the assembly were a hostile one, his Sicilian dentures, which narrowed his face threateningly, having narrow high teeth and deadly incisors. For meetings with his father, to indicate his total submission, he wore a copy of George Bush’s teeth, made from photographs taken on the day the Iran-contra scandal had broken.

  He wiped from his mind any idea of Charley Partanna, a vulgar street boss and professional executioner, having any connection whatsoever with this elegant, extremely well-spoken, indefectibly tailored gentleman now before him. Charley Partanna was dead and in his grave, but, were it even figuratively possible to stand the two men face to face, he knew that Charles Macy Barton would have turned away in distaste, if not dismay. Being able to think like that proved that Eduardo would make a great president, the first Sicilian president the nation had ever had.

  He counseled Charley at the two-hour meeting. “Never give an answer to a direct question. Tell whoever it is who asks that you will get back to him, then seek a consensus within the professional density of vice-presidents in the Office of the President. They are capable men in their fields who know, when you ask them a direct question, not to answer immediately but to seek a consensus from the trained people under them. Within a short enough time you will have a good idea of the answer to give to the man who asked you the question in the first place.”

  “Doesn’t that eventually put a terrific burden on the office boy?” Charley asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, I ask the vice-presidents, then they cull through the options of whoever is under them, who naturally ask the more broadly experienced people under them. Eventually, doesn’t the whole burden fall upon the office boy?”

  Eduardo ignored that, thinking Charley wasn’t capable of listening to what he was saying. “If you aren’t sure,” he said, “go over the whole matter with Maerose. She has been with me for over ten years and she knows every procedure. Most CEOs I know well go over these things with their wives anyway.”

  He did his best to dominate Charley with his heavy, penetrating gaze and his wavy, blue-white hair. “Our policy decisions have a failsafe factor built into them so that even if, despite all the consensuses, you have made the wrong decision, the PR people and the accounting department will get signals almost immediately and you will know automatically to reverse your course and cut your losses, shift the blame to an underling, and no matter what happens, look good under any circumstances.”

  “I’ll ask Mae,” Charley said.

  No one in the media would admit to never having heard of Charles Macy Barton because Edward S. Price and the Barker’s Hill board, who were the leaders of America, had chosen him and because the fact sheet on him that accompanied the handout was one of the most distinguished business biographies any of them had ever read. The newspaper stories referred to Barton as “a private person” who “preferred the background,” saying that he was known as “the Lone Ranger of international finance” who “worked out of his mansion on East Sixty-fourth Street to avoid the traffic congestion that a daily trip to Wall Street would entail” but who was “the personification of the American dream”: success without effort.

  The New York Times wrote: “Indeed, Mr. Barton is best known as a defensive specialist. When corporate America became paranoid about takeover raids, Mr. Barton built up a monumental business protecting his clients from unwanted acquisitions. Over a period of a few years, Mr. Barton, who has a reputation for doggedness, had signed up more than 140 corporate clients who did not want to be taken over, each of whom paid him a fee of $110,000 a year for the service and each of whom was successfully defended from raids through quiet strategies devised by Mr. Barton.”

  “He is a bona fide star,” said one lawyer who specialized in takeover business. “I don’t think there is an investment banker who wouldn’t talk to Charley Barton if he wanted a job.”

  The Wall Street Journal marveled that Charles Macy Barton had never been even remotely involved in insider trading. He was one of the three living people working in the financial center who had never been so named (the other two, however, had been charged and convicted of gross embezzlement). And the Journal went on to say that he was “perfectly cast” as the CEO of Barker’s Hill Enterprises. “There is a strong rumor,” the newspaper wrote, “that Mr. Barton has just returned after personally having closed for the purchase of the Republic of Ireland whose stock and bond issue he will underwrite on world exchanges.”

  Mary Barton had worked hard with Charley, drilling the biographical information into his memory. It had been the technical absorption of Charley’s overall background story that had kept them in London for more than four months.

  When the announcement story broke, Charles and Mary Barton were at sea on the maiden transatlantic voyage of the new luxury motorship, Thuringia. Mary Barton said to her husband, “When we land, it is really going to hit the fan. They’re going to ask you a lot of questions. All you have to do is remember that you are our Democrat and Eduardo is our Republican. You admire and support him, but you oppose with all your might what he stands for politically.”

  “Will that work?”

  “Of course it’ll work. It’s been working for over two hundred years.”

  “But, ginger! Suppose they ask me some posers? How will I know what to say?”

  “You’ll be wearing this miniaturized radio receiver in your ear. It’s almost invisible. I will pick up the questions they ask in the bedroom and, if I see you are stuck for an answer, I’ll tell you what to say and you’ll say it.”

  “Godfrey! Isn’t modern science the Dad-blamedest?”

  “It was developed by CIA scientists for Ronald Reagan’s press conferences so you know it is state-of-the-art.”

  When the ship landed in New York, it was overrun with reporters, photographers, and the network TV cameras that showed up everywhere. Charles Barton granted a formal media audience in the living room of his suite aboard the liner.

  “What can I tell you?” he said in part when the photo opportunity period was over. “Ed Price is a Republican, I am a Democrat. I wish him well and urge him to recall the great presidents the Republican Party has given to the people of the United States—every one of them an outstanding manager, a tried veteran of the complexities of corporate administration—Warren Harding, a handsome man; the great waver, Ronald Reagan; and the others, such as Calvin Coolidge, who knew what it was to work a two-hour day. National politics aside, I shall carry on Edward S. Price’s tradition at the helm of Barker’s Hill as a simple surrogate for the man who is being called by his people to make his attempt at achieving the highest office in our land.”

  Mrs. Barton entered the room to end the interview and surreptitiously distributed metal-point roller pens inscribed with her uncle’s campaign slogan: “Price is RIGHT!” after her husband had retired to a salon across the companionway to accommodate the television people.

  After Semley and Switzerland, the Bartons had stayed on in London for four months in a flat overlooking the Mount Street Gardens to give Charley time to get used to wearing hats and neckties while he was briefed and reprogrammed by Dr. Ciccio Ciaculli, a Sicilian neuropsychiatrist who had formerly been in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency. Professor Ciaculli used hypnosis, biofeedback, and state-of-the-art brainwashing techniques.

  Dr. Ciaculli was assisted by Mary Barton and, indeed, in a semiconscious way, by Charles Macy Barton himself, who wandered around the flat under the heavy influence of various grades and selections of psychotropic drugs wearing an electronic headset during the months
the prepared tapes were continually being played back to him on an endless loop. The purpose of the tapes and the drugs was to impress upon his psyche, for automatic response to any casual or formal future inquiries, the elaborate cover story that Mary Barton had fabricated in the form of a 237-page, 75,200-word biography of her husband’s illusory past: where he was born, the highly placed and distinguished records of his forebears, names of boyhood friends (now deceased); schools, colleges, and graduate schools attended (Rosay, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and the London School of Economics); the various high Episcopal churches at which he had worshipped and the history of his militant support for universal ecumenism; honors (including the equivalent of a Thai knighthood and an eternal place as an honorary lama in Lhasa, Tibet; athletic achievements (Olympic archery championship; discovery of Pele, the soccer great); experiences and anecdotes relative to his successes as a lawyer, as an arbitrageur and investment banker; war record (high in the councils of Combined Allied Intelligence Services and credited with cracking the code that led to the Eskimo revolt from German weather-tracking services in the high Arctic); illnesses (a severe cold in 1978 that confined him to bed for two days and a full night; his slow recovery from amnesia after an automobile accident in 1976, which left him with an irregularly recalled memory of his life before the accident, but which had impaired him in no functional way …

  Before the Bartons left England for America, this biographical precis had been distributed among three publishing houses in New York discreetly owned by Barker’s Hill Enterprises. On the day the Bartons sailed for the United States, an “auction” of the publication rights was in progress, and the first two bids had exceeded $700,000, excluding world serial rights and translation rights. There were published reports that Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been maneuvering to acquire the film rights to the Barton story, but Charles Barton’s innate modesty had precluded any such deal. He had brushed the possibility aside with the comment to The New York Times bureau in London, “Sylvester Stallone is a magnificent actor, but to me, as a bone-bred Yankee, he is too Italian-looking.”