Prizzi's Honor

by Richard Condon

  “I made some panzerotti, Poppa.”

  “Do I remember that? What’s that?”

  “You love it. It’s fried cappiddi d’ Angilu surrounding cannaruozzoli stuffed with mozzarella, ham and eggs and tomatoes, onions, and anchovy.”

  “It smells so good!” the little old man sang, clapping his hands. “It is from Bari, the birthplace of Urban the Sixth.”

  Suddenly Charley was released by the wonderful aromas, all of the beautiful food, and by the don’s consumed and consuming appreciation of every bite of it. He felt safe. He was no longer afraid of this hungry little old man whose name or presence had been as terrifying as garlic to a werewolf for all of Charley’s life. These were the sights and sounds of his mother’s kitchen, the haven of havens. This was the tremendous food of his childhood and all of his life. His second wind as a great golóso, as a gargantuan ghiottone, returned to him in one piece as if the Holy Ghost had been seated on his shoulder with a napkin tucked around where his chin might have been. Charley signaled to Amalia with his eager eyes, piled high the panzerotti upon his plate, and dug in. Don Corrado nodded gleefully, chewing with great zest.

  Charley had a vision of himself at Don Corrado’s advanced age, enjoying such food on and on until, at last, his bowels failed; he would be the envy of every Italian-American to whom his legend would be told. Food was like money or power. You took it into yourself and you defied the other guy to get any of it. All it took was one meal with Don Corrado to get that through his head.

  He saw clearly, in a sudden vision, that because of the kind of work he did in the business he was in, he might not last as long as Don Corrado. In fact there was a statistical chance that he might not last out the year.

  As he ate he pondered his mortality. He decided that when he delivered the Filargi contract to Don Corrado, as required, as the don graciously handed him his share of the payoff money, while the old man was in high spirits because of the seventy million dollars he was now going to make by getting back the bank at ten cents on the dollar, he would shut himself out from the muscle work, with all of the odds it offered against his length-of-life span, and ask the don for the family’s national sports book out of Vegas, Miami, Atlantic City, Dallas, New York, and LA, turn in the fifty million a year net to the Prizzis and take his steady end of five million a year and let the other guy knock himself out.

  Irene would be proud of him for thinking of taking over such a dodge. There would have to be a certain amount of rough stuff before they got established, sure. No one was going to just hand it to him, but every family had its basic sports book, which made the American mania for sports possible, and that was going to be Charley Partanna, backed up by a wife who had a real head for figures. The oncoming food, which had drugged him, awoke him again. The next course arrived.

  ***

  After the panzerotti they had boiled fresh tuna and a tart called pitta ripiena, which was made of layers of ricotta cheese, layers of fried pork, layers of cacio-cavallo cheese, layers of sausage, and layers of hard-boiled egg. Charley silently ignored the tart.

  “And now,” Don Corrado said, breathing easily as he poured from a bottle of Eloro wine, “the main dish which I took care to inquire about this morning, dear Charley, because you were to be my luncheon guest, a supreme dish from our own Agrigento, coniglio in agro e dolce, cooked the way the great gabellotti, the Spinas, my darling wife’s own family, cooked rabbit, in a sweet-sour sauce—different from any argo e dolce found anywhere else in all of Italy—in a sauce having pieces of eggplant, celery, olives, capers, almonds, honey and lemon. It will exalt you.”

  They finished off with various little cakes, tarts and sweets such as Nipitiddata and Nfasciatelle and Scursunera, an ice flavored with the essence of jasmine.

  “We must discuss our business,” Don Corrado said to Charley, “or else we would have a proper dessert—unless you would care for some of Amalia’s famous cassata—in both styles.”

  “No, thank you, Padrino. All of these sweets and cakes are dessert enough for me.”

  “Then I shall try your cassata cake, Amalia, chilled but not frozen, stuffed as only you can do it, with ricotta and candied fruits and chocolate. And we will both have, of course, a glass of the Malvasia.”

  ***

  After lunch the two men settled down in the Morris chairs in Don Corrado’s sitting room and looked out at the hackles that rose from the neck of the city in lower Manhattan. They drank coffee and smoked large maduro Mexican cigars. Don Corrado said, “Never once in your life, Charley, have you been less than my favorite of all the family.”

  “You were my sponsor when I was made, Padrino. I have tried to live up to that honor,” Charley answered in his flawed Sicilian.

  “How well I remember. You swore absolute obedience and you have lived by that oath.”

  “You made that possible, Padrino.”

  “Charley, let me tell you that you made possible so much of our family’s success. You are the best worker we ever had—and that includes both Vincent and your father. You never failed on a contract and you always got the last dollar.”

  “I wanted to repay you for the faith you had in me.”

  “I have even greater faith. More faith in you than ever. And so has my son, Eduardo.”

  Obliquely that struck Charley as an odd note. Why not Vincent? He was Vincent’s Underboss, so why should Don Corrado speak of Ed’s faith in him? Ed Prizzi had always stayed strictly away from him. They had spoken to each other indirectly at rare meetings, but the only other contact Charley had ever had with him had been through a bank of criminal lawyers.

  “Charley,” Don Corrado said, leaning forward to touch Charley’s knee lightly to emphasize their intimacy, “Vincent is a sick man. The blood pressure is very high—dangerously high, his doctor tells me—the pain of his gout distracts his mind, but worst of all are his kidneys. This is confidential, you must remember that, but Vincent’s kidneys are shot.”

  “Well,” Charley shrugged, “modern medicine—”

  “We are going to move Vincent out to Vegas. The three hotels can use one central adviser who has the authority Vincent would bring the job. We got to firm up a fixed odds line on the sports for the whole country without shaking up the Justice Department too much. The casino action is nothing compared to the sports book.”

  “I know,” Charley said. Jesus, he thought, why do I always think of everything a year too late?

  “You wonder why I’m telling you all this, Charley?” the don asked, smiling.

  “Yeah.”

  “Because you are going to take over Vincent’s job here.”

  Charley blinked.

  “That’s right,” the don said, popping a blue-black grape into his mouth. “You are going to run everything. You are going to be Boss.”

  “Me?” Charley said.

  “You and me and your father will work out a deal on how many points you’re going to get. Less until we get Vincent all the way out on deals he set up, but still you got to do yourself forty dollars a week and have the biggest organization in the business—twenty-one hundred people out on the street for you. What do you say, Charley?”

  Charley let himself go for a few seconds so that at least he could enjoy the idea of all that money and power being all his, but he knew it didn’t happen that way. Vincent was the don’s oldest son. It was a Prizzi business. The Prizzis would decide together if Vincent was to do the impossible and give up what he had to go out killing time in Vegas because of a couple of dumb kidneys. Then if such a miracle were passed and they all agreed that it was the best thing to do, Vincent would call Charley in and lay it out for him. And after he laid it out he would tell Charley how many points he was going to have to kick back to get the job. Charley wouldn’t get all the points until Vincent was dead, then, when the time came for him to hand over, he would set up the next guy.

  “I am speechless, Padrino,” Charley said to the don. “This is an honor and a privilege beyond my dreams.
How can I show my gratitude? How can I thank you?”

  Don Corrado’s little eyes brimmed with tears. He took a brilliantly white handkerchief out and dabbed his tiny, sunken eyes. “This is an even greater day for me than it is for you, Charley,” he said with a trembling voice. “To be allowed to witness the son of my oldest and dearest friend in the world assume the duties of my own son fills me with joy and emotion.”

  “When will this begin, Padrino?” Charley had cold foreboding. Irene’s scam in Vegas filled his mind. It was impossible that Don Corrado would ever forgive or forget the loss of any amount of money through betrayal and theft and this was a great big bundle of money.

  “For the time being, it must be our secret. You must not even tell your father.”

  He was being set up! It had to be! A jolting stab of certainty that he was being set up socked itself into Charley. The change-over involved a three-hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar business. Don Corrado would not make a move involving any matter of policy, either small or as large as this, without talking it all over, testing every angle with his consigliere, who was Angelo Partanna, but he had just said Pop wasn’t supposed to know.

  “I understand, Padrino.”

  “Vincent will be ready to move out when the Filargi thing is all settled. Not long. About three weeks before we can collect the payoff and you can let Filargi go so that he can go to the police and suddenly find himself in prison. On the day Filargi is arraigned for trial, Vincent will move out of the laundry and you will move in.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Angelo Partanna had a call from Lieutenant Hanly, bagman for the chief inspector’s office, who wanted a quick meet.

  “Certainly, Davey,” Angelo said. “Wherever you say.”

  They made a date at the usual place, Chez Hans, an Irish restaurant near Prospect Park, for the next day. When Angelo got there, with Charley as his listener, Hanly had brought along a police captain named Kiely from the PC’s squad. Kiely had the rank but Hanly ran the meeting.

  Everyone was effusively cordial. Highballs arrived and the Partannas let them rest on the table in front of them. They all ordered corned beef and cabbage, the only food item that Hans ever seemed to sell. Hanly and Kiely did most of the talking. It was mostly about sports and national politics.

  After Angelo passed around Mexican cigars Hanly got down to the basics.

  “I don’t know if you guys kept up with it,” Hanly said, “but it was hard to miss—the murder of Captain Calhane’s wife.”

  “I seen that,” Angelo said. “Like you say, it would be hard to miss it. It was a terrible thing. We sent flowers to the funeral and—well, what can you say?”

  “Well, it shook us up, Angelo. Believe me. We see it the same way you would see it—it’s a family loss, the whole Department feels it. Everybody—I mean cops on the beat and the bosses. And we gotta do something about it, respect has got to be paid, Angelo.”

  “We are with you, Davey. Anything. If you know anything we can do, if we can put the word out to every family to find whoever done this, or anything else, we want to do it.”

  “Well we are asking all the families for that kind of help, of course. And we will appreciate it because we know that you know how we feel about this. But that isn’t the whole thing. I am here to tell you and the Prizzis the same thing we are telling every family in this town. All contracts are off until we get the killer of Vicky Calhane.”

  “How do you mean that, Davey?”

  “We have to come down hard on you, Angelo. A week from now half the horse rooms in Brooklyn, for example, will be out of business and the people will be held on high bail.”

  “We are gonna break you guys on the narcotics,” Kiely said. “This time when we go in and take it, you won’t be getting any of it back. Every racket you run is gonna get it.” His eyes were vindictive. He smiled unprofessionally when he said, “Business is gonna get very bad for you guys.” Kiely had strong traces of a North-of-Ireland accent. Hanly was a redhead with a bullet-dented jaw. Both men had calm eyes from years and years of the good life.

  “Davey,” Angelo said softly, “I been doing business with the guy who has your job in the Chief’s office since I was a young fella in the twenties. Over the years I worked with the PC’s squad, too, and the divisions, and the borough guys. We only had one rule, an easy rule, and mostly we have done business that way.”

  “I know,” Hanly said, “but circumstances alter cases. What can we do?”

  “If you take our money,” Angelo told him, “you let us alone. Every one of our people working on the street has a contract with your people, insurance, we pay for them to work, your people give them their license to work. The all-borough squads protect that.”

  “Look at it our way, Angelo. It’s got to be a point of honor with us and you guys, of all people, have to see that.”

  Angelo sighed. “Okay. How much time do we have? Can you give us three days?”

  “Listen, Angelo, you can have no days. We’re being pushed for results, now. We toss the first banks today, then the broads tomorrow, the bookies Saturday, and so on.”

  “The public ain’t gonna like this, Davey. Shut down all the gambling and narcotics and loan-sharking and broads and you are going to have a much worse crisis than the baseball strike.”

  “Take away the coke from the very important people is like holding out hamburger on a working man,” Charley said. “They are going to panic then lean on you.”

  “How long can it last?” Hanly said. “Right, Charley?”

  Charley shrugged. “With you guys working on it and every family in the combination working on it, you ought to have your man inside a week.”

  “That’s it,” Hanly said. “That is exactly it. I give it a week.”

  “But if it takes more than a week, Davey, I just want to say that you guys are gonna hurt a lot sooner than we hurt. The ice has got to stop for you, today. It’s human nature to get to depend on that kind of money coming in over the past eighty, ninety years.”

  Kiely leaned across the table. His voice was hard and cold. “Sure, we’ll hurt, Angelo. But we’ll have the dirty rat who hit Vicky Calhane.”

  ***

  As they rode back across Prospect Park in Charley’s van on the way to the laundry, they chewed on their cigars and thought about what had happened. Charley said, “How long do you think they can stand it without the pad?”

  “Listen, I’d hate to count how many weeks they kept the lid on and lived on cops’ pay when Arnold Rothstein was hit and they had to get his files before the reformers got them. This is worse, I think. They have their own kind of omertà, the cops. They are no different than us except they all wear the same suit. When that dumb broad who pushed the wrong floor went down, it was like every one of their wives had leaned on the bullet. It is their honor, Charley. You got to watch your step when you are fucking around with somebody’s honor.”

  “Well, it’s very close to home for me,” Charley said. “This kind of pressure is very dangerous.”

  “We have our own honor, Charley, never forget that. We protect our women. If necessary, you can hit the Plumber and Dom because outside you and me, nobody else knows who did the job on the woman.”

  “The Plumber and Dom think I hit her,” Charley said. “But Filargi knows who. And, correct me if I am wrong, but nobody is gonna ice Filargi when seventy million bucks is involved.”

  “Listen,” Angelo said, “—we are talking about Corrado Prizzi’s honor. Nobody is gonna get near Irene.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The day after his talk with Don Corrado, Charley was still hollow with fear. Don Corrado had written him off, but he needed him to run Filargi until the time came to turn him loose. Charley thanked God that He had made him a worker, not just a rackets guy. If they were setting him up, then maybe they were setting themselves up, because like two days before he set Filargi loose, Charley, maybe with a little help from Irene, would wipe out Don Corrado and Vincent and E
d Prizzi.

  It was 3:40. Irene’s plane would get in from the Coast at 6:20. He decided to go straight to the airport and wait for her to get in. As he drove along the Belt Parkway he thought of going to the beach and picking up the blank airline ticket stock, then taking off from JFK to Zurich to assembly his money, then going on to New Zealand, but he knew he and Irene would have to have more muscle than just running. He thought vaguely about turning but he didn’t have much confidence in the government’s Witness Protection Program either. Ed Prizzi had been an enormous factor in organizing big campaign money for the new president and he’d be set up as soon as he walked into it.

  He drove slowly to kill time. He parked the car at La Guardia and went to a newsstand. He bought a paper and went into the coffee shop.

  BANK PRESIDENT KIDNAPED

  DIRECT LINK TO CALHANE KILLING

  the front page said. A hotel chambermaid had found Filargi’s bed not slept in for two nights and the bank had called on the morning of the second day to ask the hotel to check Filargi’s apartment to see if he was all right. By that time they had traced the dead bodyguard’s papers to a one-man office in Long Island City, and his records showed that he had been guarding Filargi. That was Wednesday. The cops had tried to keep a lid on the story, but by Friday Gomsky had seen to it that somebody spilled it to the papers. The combination of a police captain’s wife and a bank president would keep it on the front page for the rest of the week and Charley knew that no ransom instructions would be sent to the bank until the really heavy pressure had died down and the media was ready to give it another tremendous shot.