Prizzi's Honor (11 page)

Maerose talked to Amalia Sestero every morning on the phone and she always asked what was happening with Charley and the Polack. Amalia would say that Charley was flying out there, then flying back, and how he walked around looking like he had been conked. So, when Charley called at that hour of the night to say he wanted to see her, Maerose knew that he figured he would get even with the Polack by cheating on the Polack with her. It was a start anyway. It was a lot better than the nothing she had gotten out of Charley for almost ten years, she thought.

She formed a simple-appearing but providentially devious policy for herself about Charley: she decided to hold to the policy with Charley that one thing could lead to another.

When Charley rang her doorbell at the Matsonia, Maerose was dressed in the spirit of the occasion. Her beautiful, blacker-than-black hair fell like Chinese silk below her shoulders and below her waist, framing her tremendous, aquiline, hawk-nose, Arab-wop face, setting off the oliveness dusted with that undercoating of pinkness that was the warm envelope of her body, and contrasted with the brilliant whiteness of her teeth as she smiled welcome upon the man she was convinced God meant her to have.

“Hey, Charley,” she said. “What’s with you?”

He took a deep breath. “We gotta—like—talk.”

“You want to talk here or you want to come in and sit down and talk?”

“Sure,” he said.

They sat beside each other on the large sofa.

***

The room was furnished like the interior of an important Chinese pagoda during the period of Napoleon II when the emperor had reigned over farmhouses stuffed with Middle American antiques. “Authentic, it ain’t,” Maerose had said to her partners, “but we’re like custom tailors, you know? We’ve got to dress the set to get the maximum attention.”

“Yes,” said the senior partner, “but what if a client goes into shock after seeing this?”

“Listen, Gascoigne—the colors are right, that’s what counts. Everybody sees shapes differently but the colors are forever.”

***

“This is some beautiful set-up you got here,” Charley said.

“Well—that’s my thing.”

“How come you got so many books?”

“I’m alone a lot.”

“How come you didn’t set me up with books at the beach?”

“You aren’t alone a lot.”

He had been trying to look only at her face. Not at her eyes, he couldn’t look into her eyes, but he kept looking downward and he began to feel the talons scraping his scrotum because she didn’t have anything on under that thing she was wearing, and it was thin enough so he was, almost, able to see her boobs. Jesus! What a pair of secondary sexual characteristics, as the doctor in one of the magazines had called them. He needed to adjust his clothing.

“I hear you’re on boo,” he said casually.

“I’m not
on
it. I smoke it, but I’m not on it. You want a stick?”

Charley couldn’t decide what to say. Boo, cocaine, and shit were for squares. He and Pop had open contempt for any kind of user. Including juiceheads, ever since they had gone into the counterfeit whiskey-stamp business. Thinking about booze made him think of the spic place in California where Irene had got them the
jugo de piñas con Bacardi
. To get his mind off that he said, “Sure. Why not?”

She opened the carved ivory box on the table and held it out to him. “I didn’t know you were on this stuff,” she said.

“I am not on it,” he said flatly, taking a stick. “I don’t even smoke it.”

“What do you do—make brownies with it?” she asked, lighting up, inhaling deeply, and passing the joint to him. “What the hell do you want from me, anyhow, Charley?”

He drew on the grass, held it a long time, then said through the exhaling smoke, “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“You drove all the way from Brooklyn at almost two in the morning just for that?”

He allowed his hand to rest on her knee, maybe more on her thigh. It was warm, nice, warm. “We wasted a lot of time,” he said.

“Almost ten years? You call that a lot of time? How come you didn’t wait till I was fifty?”

“Well,” he said slowly, exhaling slowly, “you could be a fat wop broad by fifty.”

“Yeah? By the time I’m fifty you’ll look like the Plumber’s father—if he had one. You want to do it, Charley? Is that what you want?”

“Hey! Come on! Take it easy. What the hell.”

“Nobody took it slower and easier than you and me, Charley. Ten whole years. Answer the question—you want to do it?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Okay, let’s do it.”

She stood up and began to get out of the three-ounce overcoat.

“With all the lights on?” he said.

She stood there in high-heeled mules, nothing else except for some heavy eye shadow, and she began to breathe hard. “Yeah,” she said, “right here. On the V’Soske rug. With the lights on.”

“
Madonna mia
,” Charley said.

***

An hour later they had made it on the rug, in her four-poster bed with the showbiz curtains, and with Charley seated on a little stool in her shower, because he was getting a little tired. He kept moaning into her ear about the velvetness of her skin, the deliciousness of her boobs, and the elasticity of her hips, until she told him to either talk dirty or shut up.

At seven o’clock she made him such a breakfast that he knew even he couldn’t cook:
caciotti
, small, hot rolls filled with cheese, and a minced kidney, and some
sarde beccafico
, little sardines with a stuffing of bread crumbs, minced salami and pine nuts with a little
lemon juice, a bottle of cold, white wine and a quart of black coffee.

Chewing, he looked up at her with dismay mixed with adoration. She had put a small apron on, but that was all. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“What is ‘yeah’ supposed to mean?”

“Well, Charley, for Christ’s sake, you say hello to me, when you think of it, for almost ten years—from the time I was nineteen years old—until you needed Irene Walker, then you use me like I was information at the telephone company and that was supposed to be it, right? Forever, right? Then you call me in a sweat at one in the morning and you gotta make it with me. So it figures you’re in the worst trouble since I took off for Mexico City.”

“Yeah? How do you know that?”

“What is my name—Jones? I am a Prizzi. I am Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter.”

“Can I talk to you?”

“I don’t know, Charley. I knew a couple of minutes ago but now I don’t know.”

“I was almost going to shoot myself last night.”

“Ah, fahcrissake, Charley!”

He stared at her, nodding. His face was helpless. She had never seen that before.

She sat opposite him in the gadget-packed kitchen and they looked at each other as if they were both listening to all the digital clocks not tick. “Tell me about it, Charley.”

“I can only tell
you
, Mae. It won’t come out of me when I try to tell Pop and who else is there? I am doing this to you to make you feel bad so I’ll feel better and that takes my manhood away from me. It dishonors me.”

“Charley, how can I feel worse than I used to feel? That was the worst. That was how you feel now. I was going to kill myself, but what I had already done to
Prizzi honor would be nothing to my grandfather if I did that. But, what the hell, Charley, believe me—the calendar takes care of everything.”

“I don’t know what happened. I seen that woman in the church and inside my head it moved so that I was seeing everything different. It just happened. I seen her and I went. Then I caught up with her in California and we were together for a couple of days. Not like together—that was only once, that time—but we had time and I concentrated so I could remember and I thought I knew her.”

Maerose took her lower lip between her teeth and held on.

“All right!” he said wildly. “Okay! So Louis Palo, who was so straight he could have been a Jesuit, gets himself inside the cage with a cashier name of Marxie Heller and they rip off your grandfather for seven hundred twenty-two dollars and some change. So your father sends me out to get back the money and to pay off the bad guys. Louis is already blown away. I handle Heller, then I wait in the house for his woman to come home—his
wife
, Maerose—and she turns out to be my woman!” He held his heavy hands up and out in supplication. “What was I gonna do? She gives me the bag with half the money and a big line of shit. I figured it all as soon as she turned around in that kitchen. Louis couldn’t think of that dodge! Heller was dying from leaky lungs and he didn’t care.
She
laid it all out.
She
went and grabbed Louis’ cock and pulled him into the scam.
She
wasted Louis!
She
has the other half of the Prizzi’s money. Oh,
shit
! Did I pack her in the trunk of Heller’s car and move her out with him for the cops to scrape together at the airport? No. I come home and I tell your father she is clean. I tell your father that the guys who blew Louis away were the ones who walked with it.”

“But, Charley—”

“To me that was nothing. I am straight all my life
and I lie to your father and that is still nothing! It’s like because of how I pissed on my own honor that I find out—from Pop—that she is the piece man who took the Netturbino contract.” He put his head into his hands and leaned on the table. “I love her. That is the rock which I can’t move out of the way and which is too big to try to get around it. I love her.”

“Well,” Maerose said harshly, “what are you going to do?”

He produced a brass laugh. “I got to straighten it out,” he said, “because I got to live with it.”

She took a deep breath. “Then do it.”

“How? What am I going to do? How am I going to do it?”

“Charley, even people in office jobs don’t live so long, believe me. You do it. That’s all, you just do it, and when you are dying—if you have time—you are going to know you did it. You’ll get back your respect for yourself. You can’t lose more respect for yourself if you get on a plane and go to California and face her.”

He stared back at her, not believing that he had heard her solve his problems.

“Look, Charley,” she said, as she walked into the living room to get the ivory box. “A woman like that thinks like that only in those situations. She was brought up with the idea that she had to make a score using what she had. So what did she have? A bent mind and a Saturday night special and she used them like notches in a tree to climb up toward the big scores. Well, look at her.” Maerose passed him the lighted joint. “She made it. But, what the hell, Charley, because she’s a thief and a hitter, that doesn’t mean she isn’t a good woman in all the other departments. You never needed to be a thief, but you are the enforcer for the family and that never kept you from doing right. You see what I mean? What the hell, if she was some fashion designer like, or just a
rich broad, and you got it together with her, it couldn’t last for thirty days. You and this woman see everything with the same kind of eyes. You are lucky you found out in time, you know that, Charley?”

He began to sob with relief. She stared down at his bowed head, smiling with Sicilian triumph, and she left the room.

Chapter Twelve

Six days before Teresa Prizzi was married in New York, Irene Walker, naked, slid out of bed beside Louis Palo, wishing that he would wash his hair. She was a handsome, if not overly handsome, woman but she had something more important than looks winning for her. She had calm, she had the stillness that soothed violent men.

Irene slipped into a blue silk dressing gown that had cost her $825 retail. She got into a pair of imported French mules that had cost her $150 retail.

“Where you going?” Louis asked with a muffled voice.

“Coffee!” she sang.

“What time is it?”

She glanced at the Patek-Philippe light clock on the mantel ($3,500, retail). “Coming up to a quarter to eight,” she said. Louis grunted and turned over like a stock car at a county fair, driving the pillow into the headboard of the bed.

Irene put the coffee on, then took a shower, scrubbing her hair. She was dressed in a Dior suit ($695, retail) when the coffee was ready. Irene bought everything at retail because that was the legitimate way. “Buy from a fence and who do you take it back to when it turns out lousy,” she said to Marxie Heller.
“What kind of a rat race is it for people who don’t even have a fence but they’ve got to buy wholesale to keep their self-respect? People with money. You think there is any class in buying wholesale? Class is retail.”

She carried the two china cups and saucers, the spoons, cream and sugar on a tray to the table at Louis’ bedside. “Okay, lover,” she said.

He threw back the bedclothes and sat up looking as if his eyelids had been stitched to his chin. He reached out. She guided his hand to the cup. He lifted the cup to his mouth. “Hey!” he said, his eyes popping open. “Where’s the coffee?”

“In the kitchen. The pot wouldn’t fit on the tray.”

“You certainly have a different point of view, Irene,” he said admiringly. “A lot of people wouldn’t hand me an empty cup.”

“It got you awake, right?”

“Yeah. Just like coffee.”

She came back with the coffeepot and filled his cup. “We are ready to go, Louis. Tonight is the first night.”

“Those are beautiful markers you got together.”

“It cost a lot of money.”

“They are perfect.”

“Jack Ramen leaves when you get there today. Ten days for the action. Two markers to Marxie tonight, three tomorrow night, one Tuesday, and so on. Fourteen markers. That gets us $722,085. How about that?”

Louis grinned. “Inflation dollars,” he said.

“Oh, sure. Sixty percent to you because you have the toughest stand, and twenty percent each to Marxie and me. We fly out to Rio and live happily ever after.”

“It depends, the ever after.”

“Depends on what?” Her clear brown eyes were bright with curiosity.

“Charley Partanna.”

“How come?”

“You know about Charley?”