Prizzi's Glory

by Richard Condon

  It had been a rough route. She had had to buy Charley a new face and teeth. There was a new house and servants and a different kind of work for him—well, not a different kind, just a different style of the same thing—and sometimes he thought she had bred the two kids so that her grandfather could have a newly made receptacle in which to leave his money so that Mae could show it. The more of it she showed, the more respectable she became. It wasn’t natural, Charley figured, and someday the whole thing was going to turn around and bite her on the ass.

  He hadn’t been back to the Bensonhurst house since he and Mae had left for Europe and they had held the Charley Partanna funeral. The house in Bensonhurst was maybe where he belonged, but he couldn’t go back. Not that he wanted to go back with any longing, like the women in the stories in the magazines he read. He liked Bensonhurst, but he liked the surroundings on Sixty-fourth Street just as much. The main thing was to stay curious about what might happen, because Mae said that he was meeting a better class of people and that he was finally out of the old rut.

  When he had been Charley Partanna, he had done what he had been told to do, but now, the way it was working out, nothing was different. As far as he could see, it was the same rut. Instead of Don Corrado, Mae now gave the orders. For now, it was all right that she gave the orders because she knew what went on where they were and he didn’t. But he was finding out. Maybe sometime not too far away he wouldn’t take orders anymore. He wondered how he would like that. A habit was a habit.

  He wasn’t so sure that he and his wife lived in the same country anymore. She kept herself far apart from where everybody else lived. She was like somebody up on the movie screen in the days forty years ago when he and Vito and Vito’s sister Tessie had watched in the back row at the Loew’s while they took turns giving Tessie a feel. The screen was the dream world. Tessie was reality. Mae had lost touch with the reality. She was working on herself with the intensity that she had worked on him to make him shape up as Charles Macy Barton during the year they had lived in Europe. They had it good being married to each other except that Mae wasn’t real anymore. He couldn’t figure out what she wanted beyond that crap about respectability, but, whatever it was, whenever she got it she wanted more of it.

  While they were still in Europe, he had thought the whole idea of the changeover was the don’s idea, but he didn’t think that way after a few weeks back in New York. Mae must have built every step of the stairs going up or going down, all the way, from the day she had decided she wanted to marry him, all the way. Ever since he had first met her, after she was grown-up, she had always acted as if she was living out some kind of master plan. She had talked about when this happened and when that happened they would have to be ready. Jesus, he thought as he rode across the bridge to Brooklyn and Bensonhurst, it must be a heavy load to be a Prizzi. Vincent had been a wreck before he was zotzed. Sal was a drunk. Amalia had zonked out on cooking smells. Only the don understood how to do it right, so it must be hard on Mae. The thing was, how would he know when she was going too far since, from the beginning, she had been rushing and struggling to get out to the end of the plank. But he figured he would know when she decided to go off the deep end because she would be wearing her Bill Blass diving suit and would find a trunk full of treasure at the bottom.

  He wondered about his sons. Which one would be the Prizzi, or would they both be Prizzis, with the insatiable Prizzi greed for power and money, or would they be shaped by the new environment? He wasn’t sure he liked his life anymore. But Maerose didn’t use liking or disliking as the measurement. She saw her life as a single durable club to whack people with, and now, in a flash, he saw his life as something that had been mass-produced, the stereotype of a rich man that he would be forced to live out, because there was no place to get off the roller coaster his wife operated.

  He began to feel that old urge for change, and whenever he thought about change, he thought about beginning the whole thing with a little incidental change in his women. Maybe he needed a little novelty.

  30

  Charley and his father sat on either side of a large (commercial) pizza that had arrived from Vesuvio Deliveries five minutes before Charley. It had a very Neapolitan look, but what are you going to do? Charley thought. His father was uneasy talking to a face that claimed to be Charley underneath and that Angelo was fairly sure had to be Charley’s, but it made him nervous talking business to a stranger like this, and he dreaded it when Charley started to speak, clutching all the sounds at the back of his throat as if he were being strangled, then releasing them like goo from a squeezed fist.

  “It’s about the franchises we sold them,” Pop said.

  “Yes?”

  “The Busaccas and the Hispanics needa talk to the don about who handles the Riker’s Island shit sales.”

  “Talk to the don?”

  “I ain’t satisfied the don is dead, Charley. I only thought he was dead when I said he was dead. We never had a doctor say he was dead. He could be alive, Charley.”

  “I don’t think so, Pop. Even if he were alive when we left him that last day, it’s not likely that he could survive the kind of winter this has been wherever he went in his nightshirt.”

  “Anyways, he ain’t here to settle this beef and unless we wanna let all the franchises think we’re some cockamamie outfit with no don we gotta come up with some ideas.”

  “We’re not an outfit, Pop. We’re a collection agency.”

  “We control the franchises.”

  “We control them as long as we can control them.”

  “I can’t be the one to let it fall apart, Charley.”

  “Won’t they talk to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then tell them the don said the Busaccas can have the hard shit for the island and the Hispanics get the rest.”

  “I told ’em that already, Charley. That’s not the point. It’s a very small beef and it can be worked out. But sooner or later there is gonna be a big beef that it is gonna take a capo di famiglia of the family which controls the franchises to sit down with them and settle it. But we don’t even know where the don is. Somebody else took control of our own capo di famiglia.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I wanna talk. Santo said it. He said that sooner or later the don had to go, then, when he went, there would have to be a new don to sit on top of this tremendous franchise business all over the world and when we had a don who could lay down the law to them, then everything would go back to normal.”

  “But we can’t even prove the don is dead. How can we show them a new don?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What else from Santo?”

  “It follows. The way we prove the don is dead, we have a big funeral.”

  “Like mine?”

  “If we had one, which is impossible, it would have to be bigger, Charley.”

  “But if the don’s body shows up after his funeral, we’re never going to get them straightened out.”

  “Maybe you better talk it over with Mae.”

  31

  When Charley got back to the house on Sixty-fourth Street, a severe case of havoc had set in; the house was all shook up. Mary Barton’s maid, Enrichetta Criscione, crashing into a nervous breakdown, had tried to sneak up behind her mistress and brain her with a large chair. She had had to be packed in wet sheets by Yew Lee and Maud Tinsley, Mary Barton’s social secretary, until a doctor could be called in to sedate her with a huge hypodermic needle filled to the top of its tube.

  When Charley came home, Mary Barton, faint with shock, was stretched out on a chaise longue in her boudoir with a wet cloth over her eyes. One arm was trembling like a crapshooter’s warming up dice.

  “Gracious evers, Mary!” Charley said. “What happened? The whole place is reeling.”

  “Enrichetta tried to kill me.”

  “Enrichetta?”

  “She had a complete nervous breakdown, Charley.”

  “A Sicilian woman? A
nervous breakdown? That’s impossible.”

  “She had it, Charley,” Mary Barton said. “And if I hadn’t seen her in the mirror, coming at me with the chair raised over her head, she would have killed me. My God! You should see the room. She tore up the place, fighting three of us off. And I fought her for five or six minutes before Yew Lee heard the crashes and came in. He had to call in Maud to help us and finally Danvers had to whack her over the head with a lamp to quiet her down.”

  “But why? What set her off?”

  “Nobody knows. She was incoherent.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “At Lenox Hill. We had to get an ambulance. Oh, Charley, it was awful. What did Pop want?”

  As Charley told her, Mary Barton only heard the part about there being mention of staging a fake funeral for the don. “Is Angelo out of his mind, Charley? If there is a funeral—any kind of a public funeral for grandfather—everybody in all the families would expect us to attend. How can we attend the funeral of a Mafia capo di famiglia? Your whole career would be ruined. We would be finished socially.”

  “Crickets, Mary, I don’t know about that. Some of the biggest people in this country would attend Corrado Prizzi’s funeral—senators, the mayor, the governor, the Papal Nuncio, the White House, South American and Asian dignitaries, the police commissioner, most of Hollywood—I mean we could even put a little pressure on the arbiter to get her to come.”

  Mary Barton was almost desperately emphatic. She said, “The public understands that sort of thing. It’s the way the political system works. But not private people. Not you or me.”

  “Eduardo went to your father’s funeral, Mary. I don’t know because I wasn’t there, but he might even have gone to my funeral.”

  “Charley, lissena me. Forget it. I know about these things and you don’t. We go to any funeral of the don’s, fake or otherwise, and we will be ostracized.”

  “By whom?”

  “By everybody! Think! Think of how hard everybody worked to keep Eduardo’s connection with the family quiet because hundreds of millions of dollars are involved. This could even involve us with the IRS, God forbid!” Her voice was hysterical. “They’ll have the FBI checking out everybody who shows up. Put it out of your mind, Charley. Not only is there not going to be any fake funeral because of a few crappy K’s of shit for those losers in the Riker’s Island can, but if and when my grandfather’s body shows up there isn’t going to be any public funeral then either.”

  “What’s the matter with you? Are you sick or something? If it weren’t for the don, we wouldn’t have anything. I could still be in the old country, fahcrissake—the don brought my father over here. If there is a funeral, we’re going to it.”

  Mary Barton began to weep, her head in her arms on a table. Charley knew something was wrong. He pulled up a chair beside her and put his arm around her. “What the hell, Mae,” he said, “who is gonna knock anybody for paying his last respects to an old man at his funeral? And even if they did, we’d have to do it anyway. We owe everything we have to the don.”

  Mary Barton wept inconsolably.

  At 4:00 P.M. the next afternoon, after he had settled the problem of Enrichetta, Charles Barton attended the semiannual meeting of the Ballet Council and met Claire Coolidge as she was getting into the elevator and he was coming out with Mrs. Colin Baker, the arbiter and a fellow council member.

  “Claire, darling!” Mrs. Baker exclaimed. “How marvelous to see you again.” The two women embraced briefly. “You must know Claire Coolidge, Charles?” Mrs. Baker said. “One of the most exciting ballerinas in our company?”

  “I have admired Miss Coolidge for some time,” Charles Barton said, “but we have not met.” Looking at her, he began to get that old feeling. She was even more gorgeous than when he had given her to Eduardo almost six years ago. She had matured like Parmiguma stravecchio, ripened, full, redolent of pleasure, lovely. He felt the old-time stirring in his trousers.

  “Mr. Barton is Edward Price’s successor on the council,” Mrs. Baker explained to Claire.

  “Ah,” Claire said. “How nice.”

  Charles Barton smiled at her. For a flicker, she thought she had known him once, long before. It was in his eyes.

  32

  Charley was bugged into electric insomnia by Mary Barton’s disloyalty to her deepest obligation, respect for the family. He pitched and tossed around the bed, not even helped by the memory of the sly way Claire Coolidge had smiled at him, the way she had withdrawn her hand from his, so softly, so slowly, the flesh so warm and suggestive that she might just as well have laid down on her back on the marble floor in front of the elevator, made pyramids with her legs, and with a slack, panting mouth, pleaded with him to mount her.

  He got out of bed, went into the gymnasium off the bathroom, and did four and a half miles on the exercise bike. Something wasn’t kosher about the Enrichetta thing, he kept thinking. She was a stolid farm girl. She understood the Catholic sacraments and the benevolence of the Honored Society, how to sew and how to wait on table, and not much else, including how to speak English, so it wasn’t possible that she had fallen in with some bad neighborhood crowd. How could she have a nervous breakdown? She was like a farm animal, a favorite ox or a faithful donkey. Things like that didn’t have nervous breakdowns.

  At eight o’clock in the morning, he got dressed. Danvers made him a light English breakfast of porridge, kippers, scrambled eggs and bacon, toast and tea, then drove him to Lenox Hill Hospital. Charley was on the board of the hospital. He told the desk who he was and asked to see the head nurse on duty.

  The head nurse was a motherly, sweet-faced woman named Rose Hunt who knew instantly about Enrichetta’s case.

  “Miss Criscione needs a long rest and a complete change, Mr. Barton,” she said.

  “Have you talked to her?” Charley asked. “Did you find out what made her explode like that?”

  “That is a difficulty, Mr. Barton. Miss Criscione doesn’t speak English, and although we have people here who are fluent in Italian, Miss Criscione seems to be able to speak only some dialect so—so far—the psychiatrists haven’t been really able to work with her.”

  “Do you think she’s insane?”

  “Definitely not. But she is very, very depressed.”

  “I have a man who may be able to translate for you.”

  “How did your wife cope with that?”

  “She viewed Miss Criscione as a mute. She employed her because she wanted to help her—and of course Miss Criscione is highly skilled at her work. Ah—tell me, Nurse Hunt—is Miss Criscione pregnant? That might have driven her to despair. If she had been deserted, and so forth.”

  The nurse shook her head. “No. And she is—aside from this storm of violence she underwent—in very good health. Do you want to see her, Mr. Barton?”

  “No. It might agitate her. And it wouldn’t be of much use because I cannot speak to her. Let me send the man from my office. His name is Angelo Partanna. I’ll see that he’s here this afternoon.”

  Charley called Angelo from a candy store on Lexington Avenue as soon as he left the hospital.

  “Pop, Charley. Listen, can you come into New York for lunch?”

  “Why not?”

  “Early, okay? Viandino on East Forty-sixth between Second and Third. Twelve-fifteen. You want me to send a car?”

  “That car is too gaudy. People look and they remember.”

  “I’ll send the Chevy van. I still got the van in my garage.”

  Pop was eating breadsticks when Charley got to the restaurant. “You know this place?” he said. “They got some nice old-fashioned things on the menu.”

  “The owner comes from Canicatti.”

  “Aaaaah.”

  They ordered lunch. Pop said, “What’s on your mind?”

  “Something fishy happened, Pop. You remember Enrichetta, Mae’s maid?”

  Pop nodded.

  “She had a nervous breakdown yesterday.”


  “A nervous breakdown? Enrichetta?”

  “She tried to brain Mae with a chair, then it took three of them to hold her down until they could get a doctor to hit her with a shot.”

  “Maybe she just went nuts.”

  “No. I went to the hospital this morning. I checked her out.”

  “What hospital?”

  “Lenox Hill.”

  “It’s very fishy, Charley.” He stared off at a mote in the middle distance. “I went to see her when Maerose brought her over here. She’s a good strong country girl. A nice, good-tempered woman. I knew some people from her town—where she grew up before her family moved to Agrigento. She grew up with the fratellanza all around her. Mae told me Enrichetta went to work for her because Mae is a Prizzi. Corrado Prizzi was Enrichetta’s hero. She couldn’t believe I knew him. When I told her I was Corrado’s consigliere, she knelt down and kissed my hand. Jesus, it was like being back in the old country.”

  “She can’t speak English. That makes a problem for the hospital.”

  “I know. But she speaks a very nice Enna dialect.”

  “So I told the hospital I’d have a man from my office who can talk to her go up there this afternoon. That’s you.”

  “I’ll go see her.” He passed his hand heavily across his forehead.

  “What’s the matter, Pop?”

  “Ah, nothing. Just that Corrado going like that hit me hard. I seen him like every day for over fifty years. We cut up a lotta touches.”