“Yeah. Okay. Marxie is in the Oldsmobile in your garage. I’ll drive the Olds out to the LA airport and leave it in the parking lot. The cops will pick up on it. Is it your car?”
“No. And it has Nevada plates.”
“Fine.”
“Charley—do you believe me what I said about not seeing Marxie for four years?”
“Baby—he was just over the hill in Vegas. He moves in with you here because this is his house—the man had a fucking arsenal on him tonight, that was all—he brings a big suitcase in because he is running and you cook for him and lay down for him and when you come home of your own free will, you sing out to him ‘I’m home, dear.’ No. I don’t believe anything you said.” His voice rasped with bitterness. “Maybe if you were somebody else I would just blow you away. But it doesn’t matter because there is nothing I can do to change how I feel about you even if I wanted that, but I can see your eyes, Irene. I believe them because that’s what I want to see. I got to go back to New York and hand all this in, then Marxie Heller is finished for both of us. My people are going to ask about you and I am going to tell them lies. Then I’m going to come back out here, I think, and ask you again if you want to marry me.”
“I want to marry you, Charley,” she said.
Chapter Ten
He felt like somebody had handed him an armful of dead fish. Jesus, he thought, this has to be the original merry widow. I zip her husband while she’s out tracking down specials in the supermarket, and she wants to marry me. What kind of a nothing woman is she?
What the fuck was he going to do about her? She had absolutely set the husband up because she had to know the Prizzis were coming for their $720. She was the bad guy. It had to be. She had to be the shit. With her mind, and with her body, she had to organize Louis Palo, that cunt-simple schmuck, and her own husband, to steal the money then to take the fall for her. There was only one thing he could do, what the Prizzis expected him to do; he was going to have to do the job on her and pack her in the trunk with the husband. But what about the rest of the money, the $360? If he zotzed her there wouldn’t be anybody to tell him where to find the Prizzis’ $360. He had to get whatever look had come on his face off it because she was beginning to look scared shitless.
“Listen, Irene,” he said hoarsely, “I’m gonna tell you what you are gonna do. You are gonna stay awake tonight and think where that other three hundred sixty dollars is, you hear? I gotta lose Marxie and the car and get back to New York. I gotta do something and that’s all I can decide to do right now.”
“Okay, Charley,” she said, “I will turn this whole house inside out until I find out where Marxie hid the money. When will you call me? When am I going to see you?” She felt like she was going to fold right there. She hoped she could stay standing. If she sat down that could look like some kind of guilt to him. His need to kill her was just beginning to fade out of his face.
“I don’t know, Irene,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you’ll see me again?” She had to hold him. She had to anchor him down on her side of the fucking swamp because if she let him drift away she knew he would come back and she would be dead.
“Shaddap!” he shouted. “The Prizzis are out three hundred sixty dollars and nothing happened to you.”
“Marxie is dead,” she said simply. “He was my friend. What is the loss to the Prizzis of some money which their insurance company is going to give back to them compared to what I have lost?”
“What are you, a professional liar?” he cried. “Five minutes ago you said you wanted to marry me, and you know, if you got a big loss on your hands, I am the one who fixed you up with it.”
“Maybe there is something wrong with your emotions,” she said, feeling safer because she had him talking and doubting what he thought he believed. “Marxie was dying. He had maybe a week, maybe ten days. I knew I was going to lose him. That is one legitimate set of emotions, okay? But you came in and gave it to him. When I left him, he was alive. When I walk in here, he is iced. What do you know—what do you care about a woman’s emotions? Either way, he had to go, but nobody was set for your way, Charley.”
“Aaaah, shit,” he said. “Lissena me. Find the three hundred sixty. That’s all. Find it and bring it to me.”
He left the house by the kitchen door and drove the car and Marxie’s body to the airport. He ditched the gun in an ashcan in Watts. He left the car in the airport parking lot for the rental people to find. He caught the red-eye out of LA, disillusioned with the most important thing in his life. Irene was a cold-eyed, hard broad, that’s what she was. Who needed a woman like that? All that shit about being a tax consultant! It was disgusting! She was like some lowest kind of hoodlum. He had almost broken his heart trying to figure out how he could explain to her about the environment, while all the time she was setting up the scam to beat the Prizzis out of the money. She had to be laying Louis because there was no other way she could get to Louis. Who else could have zotzed Louis behind Presto Ciglione’s? She stole the fucking money and she did the job on Louis so she had to know that the Prizzis would be sending somebody after her so she figured it out that if she gave them Marxie and half the $720 and came back with an armful of supermarket and that “I’m home, dear!” shit, anybody would buy it that she was just a simple tax consultant caught in some mystery web. The worst part of the whole thing was that she had to know that the Prizzis would send him after the money, and she had counted on that as her insurance. And he had let her do it.
Shit! If he wasn’t trapped on this fucking 747 somewhere over Arizona, he would grab somebody’s car and drive back to her fucking house and blow holes in her, all over her.
He had himself a Seven-Up and a corned beef sandwich, automatically began to remember all of Irene’s good points. She was a tremendous woman, no two ways about, he reminded himself. She drove a fifty-two-thousand-dollar car, so she had to be a terrific tax consultant. How many even men tax consultants made enough to drive a fifty-two-thousand dollar car? She could speak Puerto Rican like a native. She was crazy about him. She had a terrific house and tremendous clothes and she had probably gone to college with Maerose Prizzi and that was all very nice, but the important thing, the unbelievable thing, was that she was crazy about him. He even had it on TV tape. As he measured Irene’s pluses against her possible minuses, he began to calm down.
Could it be that Irene was two women, he wondered? That was possible. There had been a movie about that once and he could vaguely remember some magazine piece about it. The fact was, first and foremost, she was a wonderful girl. He knew what he knew and that was it. How could anybody fault a woman for marrying a man who had been good to her for most of her life? He told himself he should be grateful for that marriage because, at least, it had given Irene an understanding of the environment that she otherwise couldn’t have had. She had probably figured that Marxie, a very sick man, needed her, so she married him. That was part of why she was a wonderful person. When he thought back on how close he had come to clipping her and stuffing her in the trunk with Marxie he felt terrible. But the surprise had been terrible. He had almost come apart when she turned around and he saw who she was. He had been ready, God knows he had been ready, but her goodness had come through and it had held him together. Her goodness, coming through like that, had let him know that he had to find time to think before he did anything that could have ruined their whole thing. Look how right that instinct had been. He had had time to cool off and look at the whole thing scientifically and he was going into Santa Grazia’s tomorrow to light a couple of twenty-dollar candles in gratitude.
Above and beyond everything else, Irene had proved that she understood the environment. Even though he had done the job on her husband she had been willing to push that aside because she could see that the man had done a lousy thing to the Prizzis. He had stolen such a bundle of money from them that absolutely nobody, including the man’s own wife, could look the other way. Next
, it had to be that Heller had done the number on Louis. How could he have tortured himself with a fantasy that Irene had done the whole thing? There was no way Irene could have zotzed Louis. She understood the environment, yes. But that didn’t automatically turn her into a hitter.
But—shit! If Heller had zipped Louis why was there only $360 in his satchel? If Heller had zipped Louis he would have the whole score. But because there was only $360, that didn’t mean that Irene had to be the one who had iced Louis. The opposite was true. If the whole $720 had been in that house and if Heller had really been dying on his feet, then—maybe—somebody could say Irene had clipped Louis, as crazy as that had to sound.
When the plane landed in New York he didn’t even bother to look at the time, he called Irene from the airport.
“Irene? Charley.”
“Oh, Charley!”
“You okay?”
“Are you okay?”
“I just wanted to let you know I landed. I’m here. At La Guardia.”
“That is fabulous!”
“I’ll call you later, hon,” he said, and hung up.
He drove the Chevy van to the beach and fell asleep thinking that, after he got out of the meeting about the $360, he was going to get Pop out here, cook him a tremendous meal, then run the Irene Walker cassette for him so he could ask him some questions and get everything together in his head. They would get married after a while and she would move to New York, of course. He would ask Ed Prizzi to find her a classy office in Manhattan and throw her some tax business. Ed had so much going that they could double her take from what it had been in LA, no matter how much that was.
When he woke up, he felt great. He showered, singing the old-time tune “You Belong to Me.” When he was shaved and dressed he checked out the food in the house, then went out to the stores to get everything his father doted on eating. He prepared most of the stuff for dinner then got into the van and drove to the St. Gabbione Hotel Laundry.
***
His father took him into Vincent’s office. They shook hands and Vincent asked how everything went.
“Well, it went half right,” Charley said. “Half the seven twenty-two I got back. Only half.”
“Yeah?” Vincent said. “How do you figure that?”
“Louis and Heller—it figures—split the take in Vegas, then Heller goes to his wife’s house in LA. Then Louis makes the meet out at Presto’s and he’s got his split on him and whoever’s got the three hundred sixty, nailed him and lifted it.”
“Louis is going to hang around Vegas for twenty-four hours? Then is he going out to some meet with half the split on him?”
“What else? That is how come the other three hundred and sixty dollars disappeared,” Charley said calmly.
“Maybe.”
“I talked to Heller in LA and he won’t say anything. He says he don’t know where the money is. So I pay him off. Then the wife comes home. I talk to her. No problem. She takes me to that money. I count it and there is only half there.”
“You have to work her over?”
“She took me right to the satchel, no problems. She didn’t even know there was money in the bag. She didn’t know anything about him. She hadn’t even seen him for four years.”
“There is something fishy here,” Vincent said, “and somebody’s got our three hundred sixty dollars.” He chewed his lip. “But you done great, Charley. There is going to be a couple of extra points in this for you.”
As he walked with his father along the hall away from the meeting, Charley said, “You think Vincent was trying to tell me something, Pop? Like how he thinks it could even be me who copped the three sixty?”
“Aaa, that’s Vincent’s way. Don Corrado is gonna climb him about the money so he’s got to look in every box.”
“You think I should worry about it?”
“Well, not yet anyhow.”
“Listen, Pop, why not come on over to my house for dinner tonight?”
“Sensational,” Pop said.
“I got everything you like all ready and it’s time I cooked up something really great for you.”
“Sensational,” Pop said.
“I want to show you the pictures of that woman I was telling you about. You know. The girl at the wedding? I got the video machine installed this afternoon.”
“I always wanted to see one of those things work,” his father said, “but it’s got to be an early night.”
***
The video recorder had been installed at three o’clock that afternoon. Charley told the man to have the machine copy something from Channel 13 because he didn’t want to start it on junk, so the man had it copy “The Story of English Furniture” (Robert Adam) for about three minutes and Charley was sorry it had to be turned off, so the man said they could keep copying the same show while they looked at something else. They looked at a black-and-white 1937 movie for another couple of minutes and the man reminded Charley that everybody in the movie was almost fifty years older than they looked on the screen.
“If alive,” Charley said. “TV movies are this country’s biggest cemetery.”
The machine worked! They had it play back about two minutes more of “The Story of English Furniture” (Robert Adam), and when he knew he understood how to operate it, Charley tipped the man five and gave him the carton to take out with him. “Always tip just right,” his father had taught him. “Never too much, never too little.”
He slid the cassette marked IRENE WALKER into the machine. He pushed the PLAY button. He backed up rapidly to a chair, sat down, and she was in the room with him on the twenty-six-inch screen in gorgeous color. She was floating out of the car with Maerose in front of the hotel. Then she was dropping her envelope into the black silk bag at the door to Palermo Gardens, then he was holding her hand and they were smiling at each other in the boy-meets-girl scene of any movie. He pushed FREEZE FRAME on the remote control and gaped. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He started Irene moving again and when he got to the end of the two minutes and forty-nine seconds, he rewound the spool and started it running from the beginning again, exalted.
After three run-throughs he was filled with tremendous feeling. He had seen something vital; the way she kept touching him when they stood near each other. She wasn’t just a toucher. She hadn’t touched Maerose or Pop, only him. He was still exhilarated when Pop arrived for dinner. “Hey, Pop,” he said manically, “you know what I got for you for your dinner tonight? I got sisizzo ci ’U Cimulu. Your favorite—right? What else, hah? I got some fresh shad, that’s what else, which means for you some alose in camicia which I am going to feed you with a gang of capotina. How about that?”
“Listen, it’s better than a McDonald’s.”
“You are The Man, Pop.”
They had a subdued dinner because they concentrated on the food. Pop said, at least twice, that he swore to God he didn’t know how Charley did it. “I’m telling you, Charley, I close my eyes and I think your mother cooked this.” They never talked business while they were eating.
After the dinner he got his father in place in front of the television set with a jelly glass of anisette in one hand and a Pruelba cigar in the other.
“Now,” Charley said, “I am going to show you the woman I asked you about.” He started the tape and sat next to his father. They watched the pictures silently while Charley waited for Pop to tell him why he had told Paulie to get rid of Irene on that tape.
“That’s some terrific invention,” Pop said. “Whoever woulda thought you could get Pete Spina on with the cream of the police commissioner’s squad?”
“Yeah—right. But what about the woman? How come you know her, Pop?”
“I didn’t actually know her. I knew her father. Maybe I met her once, I think.”
“Yeah? Her father?”
“He was a mechanic for Polack Joe Saltis’ mob, the old Polack mob around the Stockyards in Pro’bition. They done hijacking and strong-arm stuff. They were never
much of an outfit. Somebody did the job on the father after the war. Nobody missed him.”
Charley was half-dismayed, half-elated. Well, Jesus, he thought, no wonder Irene understands the environment. She didn’t need Marxie Heller for that. Her own father was a worker for a Chicago mob. She had lived in the middle of it, she grew up in it and she knew it and she was still a tremendous broad. He had just found out about her too fast, the way everything was happening too fast, that was why he felt a little sick. She knew the environment. She would understand completely.
“Hey!” he blurted out suddenly to his father. “How come you made Paulie kill that shot of her and you?”
“Well, what the hell, Charley,” Angelo Partanna said, “she was the outside talent we brought in to make the Netturbino hit.”
***
The furniture of Charley’s mind suddenly began to come loose, the pieces crashing into each other like unfastened objects aboard a ship at sea ploughing through a hurricane. The huge concert grand piano, at which he had sat with such dedication and absorption playing his ancient ballads to her, was careening across the decks of his mind, loosed and dangerous among the smaller objects that were hurtling through his consciousness, glancing off him or crushing and wounding him.
He had known many people in his business whose job was to kill other people and he had accepted them, some warmly, some with indifference. They were necessary. But they were men. Mostly, that she had taken men’s work was what cut the gaping holes in Charley’s hopes for the proper order of things. The people who did his kind of work were like all the other people who did things to win comforts and the acceptance of their peers and, like the other people, formed attitudes because of their work. They had to get the job done and, in his kind of work, it took a kind of detachment that, Charley knew, was something God had never meant women to have. He had known her for a few minutes and for an eternity, but even his eternity of valuing her had twisted the truth of her in his mind, until, against the meanings of his life, he had conjured with the bare information he had hoarded concerning her and had, himself, changed her into something she was not. She killed people by contract, for money. He felt deep pain. He was being crushed by the furniture of his mind inside the ship of his hope in a hurricane even while he knew she hadn’t betrayed him. He had wanted so completely for her to understand the environment and now, with one sentence from his father, he knew where all her own invisible pain had come from, he was inside her, he had become her, but so much more than he had yearned to be, that it had tapped his joy and had left him empty again.
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