“What came up, Pop?”
Angelo spoke mildly, watching St. Gennaro do nothing. “You remember I told Corrado that selling the New York franchises wouldn’t work?”
“I remember.”
“It ain’t working. It’s starting to fall apart, Charley.”
“No kidding?” It was all very distant to Charley.
“Santo come to see me here. Prince Nowhere. He told me he’s gonna organize the old soldati and go back into business the way it used to be.”
“It’s too complicated for Santo.”
“You ain’t kidding.”
“How does the dummy figure they can get away with that? The other outfits paid us to get out.”
“Santo said he was gonna give them back the money.”
“What money?”
“The thirty million plus.”
“Where is Santo gonna get thirty million plus?”
“That’s what I asked him. He said he was gonna get it from the Prizzis. He had it in his mind that it was all in a little sack and that I could hand it to him.”
“I know he’s very stupid, but what happens when he understands he can’t have it?”
“That’s why I called you. He thinks the don left the thirty million to the twins.”
“The twins?” Charley froze. Pop finally had his full attention.
“What he was telling me, although he didn’t know he was saying it, is that he is gonna snatch the twins to get the money.”
Charley turned to stone. He shook his head slowly, back and forth, denying the meaning of what he had heard, staring at his father. “That’s how you figure it?”
“That’s what he thinks.”
“I’ll hit him myself,” Charley said thickly.
“No, no. I’ll get people to hit him.”
“First, it’s my wife and my kids. Second, Santo’s too tricky. But I know him. I’ll handle it. Like quick. Now—before he can get set.”
“It’s prolly the best way. You’ll need a piece.”
“Yeah, right.”
Angelo got up and shuffled out of the room. He was gone about five minutes. He came back with a bundle wrapped in oilpaper. “This is a nice, clean piece with a noise suppressor,” he said. “Also a harness.”
He closed the door and began to unwrap the package on his desk, taking care not to touch the weapon. There was a pair of transparent surgical gloves under the piece. “Today is Friday,” Pop said. “The Busaccas usually leave their royalty envelope on Saturdays, but it’s summertime so they could change it. The daughter will answer the door. You tell her you brought the envelope from the Busaccas. She’ll tell you to wait; then she’ll go in and tell her father. You follow her in and do the job on Santo.”
Santo lived in a big apartment house with his divorced daughter, Melba, in Sunset Park, between Bay Ridge and the Greenwood Cemetery. As Charley drove across from Bensonhurst, he felt like he was moving through a fog of time over which he had never had any control. His own wife, the don’s own granddaughter, had set up the don to change them all from flesh-and-blood Sicilians into cut-out, coloring book Americans who lived in a world where respectable was everything. The land of Dick and Jane and their respectable little dog.
Charley was like some reluctant fallen angel, the only one out of the 133,306,668 fallen angels, according to the Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum in 1273, who had not wanted to leave the paradise on high where he had always existed, but who had gone along with the trend because the two men, his father and Don Corrado, who had made all the large decisions of his life, had ordered him to fall into the pit of respectability with Mae, Eduardo, and the twins. Now there was no going back. By doing the job on Santo he wouldn’t be going back or changing anything. He would be giving it to Santo to preserve the respectability that his wife had lusted for, a lust, in fact, that must have been the central curse laid upon the Prizzis because the grandfather had lusted just as hard after respectability as the granddaughter.
It had reached the point where Santo, that dummy of dummies, had laid a threat on Charley’s two children so that there was nothing he could do except what he was going to do. He was protecting the holy of holies of Prizzi respectability, his own two sons, who were preordained by the will of their mother and the bottomless purse of their great-grandfather to grow up to talk like Eduardo and learn how to play polo. Time was pouring all of their essences from chalice to chalice. Charley was suspended hundreds of thousands of miles away in lightless, freezing outer space, between a life now gone, which he understood, and a life that was measured by the tread of pomp in an unspeakable procession toward the altar of respectability.
He put on the transparent rubber gloves in the hall facing the Calandras’ front door, thinking of another hallway twenty-five years ago when they had made him put Vito Daspisa away. But this was an entirely different proposition. He looked at his watch and rang the doorbell at a quarter to six. He could smell the ragu on the stove inside, a terrific smell.
Melba Calandra answered the door. “Whatta you want?” she said. She was a short, plump, bottle-blonde in a skirt like a pelmet.
“I brought the envelope from the Busaccas.”
“Today ain’t Saturday.”
“We got a big weekend coming up. We’re going to the beach tonight.”
“Wait here.” She slammed the door so quickly, Charley couldn’t follow her in. He waited. Santo opened the door. “You from the Busaccas?” he said.
“Yeah. With the envelope.”
“That’s a nice suit.”
“Barney’s. Seventh Avenue and Seventeenth Street.”
Santo held out his hand for the envelope. Charley’s hand went to his inside breast pocket and came out with the bad news. He shot Santo through his left eye; then he stepped over the body, shut the door behind him, and went into the kitchen, where he shot Melba in the chest and, when she went down, in the throat. She was a heavy bleeder. He dropped the piece on her stomach, watched it bounce and somersault like an acrobat hitting a trampoline, then leaned across her body and dipped a rubber-sheathed finger in the ragu for a little taste. It was absolutely delicious. He turned off the low flame under the pot.
43
Charley got back to Sixty-fourth Street in time to change into dinner clothes, have a light snack, then, at ten o’clock, leave with Mary Barton for the October in Albania Ball in Southampton, which would be heavily covered by W, which meant that Mae had been dressing for it since four in the afternoon, surrounded by fitters, combers, and handlers, to wow the dozens of rich dressmakers who would be at the fete.
Danvers drove them to the East River heliport. They boarded one of the Barker’s Hill eight-passenger Sikorsky choppers and were set down at Southampton twenty-two minutes later. It was really gala. The women were lined up in phalanxes behind their dressmakers to make it easier for the W photographers and caption people. They danced to an Albanian bagpipe orchestra and drank Diet Pepsi. It was a fun night, but they got away early because Mary Barton was chairing the annual meeting of the Public Libraries Association at 3:00 P.M. the next day after a policy lunch at Mortimer’s with the arbiter, and, after the libraries meeting, she looked forward to her time with the twins in Central Park. Also, they couldn’t stay on at the ball because Charley had an oil company takeover beginning at 8:00 A.M., which involved full control through an offer of $6.2 billion for the 45 percent Barker’s Hill did not already own. Whether the $72 a share offer would be enough was still uncertain because the oil company’s stock price had since risen above the bid, but it was only money and Charley was confident of reeling the deal in. But he had to be sharp. So they left the party early, Danvers met them at the heliport, and they were driven to bed at Sixty-fourth Street.
The hit on Santo Calandra reverberated throughout Brooklyn, with the outer waves immediately reaching Atlantic City. He had been one of the elder statesmen of the community, so secure in his place that the surviving professional population was aghast at what had happened. Exce
pt Rocco, who, in faroff Atlantic City, with his prior, intimate knowledge of Prizzi thinking, understood what had happened to Santo from the moment Santo called him to tell him that the Prizzis weren’t going to give them the money.
“Who?” Rocco asked.
“Angelo.”
“Angelo? You asked Angelo for the thirty million dollars?”
“He knows me a long time.”
“How in Christ’s name did you ever think Angelo would let you have thirty million dollars? I told you Angelo was the one who had figured out how we were gonna get it. He musta thought you were nuts.” Rocco was talking on the telephone in the kitchen while his wife worked at the stove and his son, Beppino, ate his breakfast.
“I wanted to show him my appreciation that the family was gonna start up again and that he wanted me to head it up. He woulda got his money back plus he’d have his old job again. I woulda made him my consigliere.”
“Holy shit.”
Rocco vacillated between telling Santo to get out of town and telling him to forget the whole thing, that they weren’t going to do what they had talked about, but in the end he decided that the best thing would be to let them move Santo out of the way so that a new plan could be made.
After the call he went back into the small living room and dropped himself on a sofa. His son, Beppino, came in and said, “Whatsa matta, Pop?”
“Nothing a Turns for the tummy won’t cure,” Rocco said.
The next day Beppino came back to the apartment star-crossed by the fate of men. “Somebody done the job on Santo and Melba,” he said.
“Melba?” Mary Sestero said. “What did Melba ever do? What the hell is this, Rocco?”
“It was Angelo’s contract,” Rocco said.
“But—why Melba?”
“She musta saw the contractor.”
“You think Angelo set it up?”
“I know it.”
Rocco ate the lunch his wife had prepared; then he left the apartment and went to one of the three big Prizzi hotels on the boardwalk and let himself into the room he had been alloted on the fourth floor to get the load off his feet when his relief came on. He called his Uncle Eduardo in New York. Eduardo took the call on a scrambler phone.
“Yes, Rocco?”
“Somebody took out Santo.”
“Somebody?”
“Angelo.”
“How is that?”
“Santo went to the laundry and asked him for thirty million to start up a new family.”
“I see. So?”
“So should I forget the whole thing?”
“Absolutely not, Rocco. You’ll have to handle it yourself now—that’s all.”
“Yeah?”
“Then we’ll proceed as planned, shall we?” Eduardo hung up.
The oil company merger pressure had slackened off by about one o’clock. Charley got most of what he wanted by giving in graciously to a few golden handshakes and platinum parachutes. At 1:20 P.M. Claire Coolidge called him.
“Mr. Barton, I feel awful about bothering you, but I wondered if you had had the chance to speak to Edward about—you know.”
“Not yet. But it’s very much on my mind.”
“It’s just that we’d like to set a date, but I feel that I can’t do that until the unfinished business with Edward has been confronted and settled.”
“You can count on me.”
“Thank you, Mr. Barton.”
At 1:50 P.M., Dr. Winikus called him. He told Charley that Angelo had had a “small” stroke. Charley said he would be right there. He hung up and was out of the office and into the private elevator to the garage before anyone knew he had gone.
Charley drove himself to Brooklyn in the Chevy van, which he kept in the basement garage of the Barker’s Hill building. He was all shook up. He couldn’t imagine life continuing on the planet without Pop.
Dr. Winikus was waiting for him in the front room at Pop’s house in Bensonhurst. “He’s much improved, Mr. Barton,” he said. “He had minor motor loss on his right side, but we’ve had him under sedatives for almost seven hours, and already his movements, although impaired, are discernible. This time tomorrow will tell the story.”
“Seven hours?” Charley said. “Why wasn’t I told before this?”
“When he became conscious about an hour ago, he asked me to call you.” Winikus looked curious as to what the connection could possibly be between this old Sicilian hoodlum and such a man as the Great Organizer.
“I’m his executor,” Charley said. “Can I see him?”
“Five minutes. That’s all he can take.”
Charley went into his father’s bedroom. Angelo was propped up on pillows staring at the door. Charley had never seen anybody who looked so awful. Angelo’s face had separated into two faces. One was slack, pulled downward by gravity. The other side didn’t match at all. “Ah, Mr. Barton,” he said weakly out of the left side of his mouth.
Charley shut the door behind himself and pulled a chair up to the bedside.
“Jesus, Pop,” he said. “You scared hell out of me.”
“Whatta you expect? I’m eighty years old.”
“Do you hurt?”
“Where I can feel, I feel great.” He sighed. “Except that I’m finally pissed off, a little late. Corrado built a great thing. Then he threw it away.”
“Barker’s Hill doesn’t do too bad.”
Angelo smiled scornfully. “You’ll never come within thirty percent of what the gambling and shit business made for us. The shit business alone—cocaine, that gold mine bigger than the sun—and he sold it all for a nothing royalty. Why?”
“Maybe he saw coke being legalized. It’s very popular on Wall Street.”
“Never. He sold out to buy respectability, Charley. Mae planted the idea on him, and once he had bought it it was if he was cursed with it. He threw it away to become an American. It’s worthless to us, Charley. We been Sicilians for seven hundred years. Corrado knew that better than anybody. He controlled the most respectable people in the world.”
“Take it easy, Pop. What the hell. It’s done.”
“Mae, that crazy, mixed-up Maerose. She’s never gonna make it past St. Peter, Charley. And she is gonna have to pay in this life for all the things she did. What the fuck are we because of her? Like the lost tribe of Israel, scattered and wandering in the wilderness.”
He shook his head; then he threw off the despair. “Charley, lissena me. Don’t let them take me to a hospital. I hate hospitals. Whatta they got that I can’t have here? Round-the-clock nurses, oxygen, portable X ray if that’s what Winikus wants, lab tests—we can have it all right here. Okay?”
“I’ll handle it, Pop. Don’t even think about it.”
Dr. Winikus opened the door to signal that the meeting was over. Charley told Angelo he’d be back as soon as he could; then he left the room to talk to the doctor about turning the small house into a miniature hospital.
44
It was a quarter to six when Charley opened the front door at Sixty-fourth Street with his key, tuckered out and ready for an early evening.
He thought he had wandered into the wrong house. The entrance hall was full of uniformed cops and plainclothesmen. He gaped at them. He saw Dick Gallagher, the deputy chief of detectives, whom Charley knew from the old days when Gallagher was a homicide lieutenant. He saw Horace Gavin, agent-in-charge for the FBI, his bald head shining like a spotlight. “What is this?” Charley said. “What’s going on here?”
They turned toward him. He heard Maerose scream at him from the top of the stairs, “Charley!”
He raced across the entrance hall and up the stairs. Mae was haggard. She stared at him as if she could not believe what she had to tell him. “They took the kids, Charley. The babies. They took them, the twins.”
He held her in his arms closely and spoke in a whisper into her ear.
“Where was Al?”
“Al’s dead.” She began to sob. “Two men. They hit Al; then t
hey slugged me, and when I came to, the cops were there and they told me the babies had been lifted. In the park. In that beautiful park.”
“You know anybody?”
“My cousin, Rocco, his son, Beppi.”
“You didn’t say nothing to the people downstairs?”
“No. I hadda talk to you. But I ain’t going along with that omertà shit. I just can’t figure out how I’m suppose to know hoodlums like Rocco.”
Dick Gallagher, allowing a fraction of time for the wife to tell the husband, arrived at the top of the stairs. Two FBI men were right behind him.
“We’d like to talk to you, Mr. Barton,” he said respectfully.
Charley broke away from Mary Barton.
“We’ll go into the upstairs study,” Charley said. “I assume you won’t need my wife for this?”
“No, no,” the agent-in-charge said.
Mary Barton wandered off toward the nursery. One of the nannies came out to comfort her.
Charley couldn’t get himself together. He was shaking as he listened to Horace Gavin. “When they call, we’ll be listening, whether here or at your office,” Gavin was saying.
Charley stared at him.
“Have you had any hint, any threat, that this might happen, Mr. Barton?”
Charley shook his head.
“We’ll get the people. You can be sure of that.”
“Never mind them. Get my children back.” He sat up straight. He laid the fear on them. “Listen to me,” he said. “They want money and we’re going to give them the money. Understand that. And until I have those kids back, you are out of this. Surveillance, contact, payoffs, everything. You stay out until I have my kids back.”
“Within certain parameters, I agree with you, Mr. Barton.”
“Forget parameters,” Charley said slowly. “I am going to handle this. You are out until my children are back in this house.” His voice rose. “Do you understand that? Do you want the president to explain that to the director? You are going to stay out of this until those infants are returned.” He pounded on the arm of the chair in an outburst of fear. “It can’t be any other way!”
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