Prizzi's Honor (2 page)

The man looked. “The beauty?”

“With the little white gloves! The one moving out into the aisle?”

“Oh, that one. Yeah.”

“Shoot as much as you can get on her when we get over to the hotel, you understand? Save everything you get for me, you understand?” Charley had a harsh, metallic voice, metallic in the way heavy truck gears sound when they are covered with sand. It made a punishing sound even when he was singing Christmas carols. His voice, his size, and his ball-bearing eyes almost made up the cameraman’s mind, but he was confused so he hesitated.

“Look, friend, I’d like to do it, but—”

“You want to eat this card?”

Charley put Paulie’s card in the man’s hand. The man nodded vigorously., “Certainly,” he said. “My pleasure. She will flash up the footage.”

“You ain’t kidding,” Charley said.

***

The decorators had turned the ballroom of the hotel into a replica of the old Palermo Gardens. Everybody from the old neighborhood who came into that room was kicked in the head by what they saw because what they thought they were seeing was their youth. It was such a terrific effect that three old ladies were laughing and crying at the same time.

“Hey, fahcrissake, look at
this
!” the head of the Bocca family yelled. “How about what these here people done here?”

Above the heads of the entering crowd the whole ceiling was festooned with crepe-paper ribbons: red, white, and blue from one side of the room to the central chandelier, and red, white, and green from the chandelier to the other side. Balloons jostled each other against the ceiling, bobbing with the rising warm air. Everybody felt good. What had been a solemn wedding turned into a party. People suddenly liked each other. Some people hugged. There was so much
love in the room that Charley’s heart filled with the foam of it, like a stein of beer pumped too fast.

Two long tables stretched down either side of the hall, holding up mountains of sandwiches. Dozens of steins of beer were being filled by Jewish waiters from the Prizzi chain of delicatessens around the city, which Ed Prizzi had put the family into because no matter where he was he couldn’t seem to get a good (dry method) piece of corned beef. That had led the Prizzis into bakeries, which soon went national because nobody could get rye bread that had any crust, and before anyone knew it, the Palermo Maven delicatessens had gone national on a franchise basis, including the Jewish waiters.

A mass of Sicilian-speaking waiters were filling pitchers of elderberry wine from a large barrel. There were nine kinds of salad on the tables, mountains of
farfalline
, mounds of cold meat and piles of
salsiccia
and banks of pastries set among fourteen kinds of Sicilian candies and ice creams. Jesus, Charley marveled, even the orchestra was right—a piano, an accordion, a clarinet, and a bass playing a rock arrangement of
Giovanezza
. Above the stage, behind the band, were big eight-by-ten-foot sepia photographs of Arturo Toscanini, Pope Pius XII, Enrico Caruso, and Richard M. Nixon in heavy gilt frames.

A lot of the older men were dressed right, in tuxes, and the older women all wore the correct color for a wedding, black, but the young people and the civilians were schlocked out like
ziticones
. Charley wore a tuxedo. It was three o’clock on a summer afternoon but it was a Prizzi wedding and people should know how to pay respect.

One thing was right. Don Corrado’s eighty-three-year-old sister sat at the door weeping happily in a black dress. As the guests came in they dropped either sealed envelopes or cash for the bride into the black drawstring bag she held between her feet. It looked
like a sixty-dollar score. People in the environment liked to think of a thousand dollars as one dollar to confuse the tourists at Vegas, but the measurement became universal because so much money was lying around in heaps, pleading to be taken. Sixty dollars was sixty thousand dollars.

Charley had hustled a ride over from the church in a police car so he could be sure to get there first. He gave the sergeant who set it up a credit slip for six veal steaks packed in ice by the Prizzi meat company. When he got inside the ballroom he planted himself just inside the door and waited for her to come in.

She got there after about twenty minutes, probably she had stopped off in the john. He watched her drop her envelope, then he saw that she was with Maerose Prizzi, the bride’s sister. He worked himself ahead of them in the crowd and positioned himself so that they couldn’t get around him. What a face! She didn’t look exactly Italian but she was beautiful. She had a mouth on her like a bunch of poppies and skin like he had never seen. He managed to stand as if he had been shoved in their way by the press of people near the door.

Maerose was a great woman even if she had screwed up. She was a very wop looker, all eyes and beautiful bones among the grabbing domes and dunes. She was almost as tall as Charley, with sad eyes and long fingers. She was a woman who had done everything right—except once.

“Hey, Charley!” she called out. “This is great. Meet my friend, Irene Walker. This is Charley Partanna.”

She waited for him to speak. She was going to take her lead from him, which was very smart, he thought. How could a woman have such a face and (probably) such a body and also turn out to be this smart? He thought he could see her eyes change when she looked at him. To Charley she had something like the look
which had come over Pizarro when he had first spotted the Peruvian gold. It was an expression of some kind of historic discovery.

Jesus, Charley thought, I never saw anything like this woman.

Maerose darted away into the crowd.

“How about a drink?” Charley said.

“Maybe a glass of wine to the bride and groom,” she said. She had a voice like a jar of smoke! It just drifted out of her and, to Charley, it was visible. It had a color like Florentine gold, with a pink under-painting of the smoke out of a Roman candle on the Fourth of July. He was gonged by her eyes. Jesus! She had
healthy
eyes. They had fringes like on the lampshades his mother was always making when he was a kid. The white part was bright white and it pushed out the brownness of the rest like flowers coming off a pond. The brown was like maple syrup, then inside that, swimming around among tiny tangerine peels, were little goldfish, and they were changing his life. What would happen when he was able to break away from the eyes and look at the rest of her? He was dropped by this woman.

“Can I take you home? I mean—when you’re ready.”

She stopped a waiter who was carrying a tray loaded with glasses of champagne. Charley lifted two glasses off the tray. “I live in LA,” she said.

“I meant to my home,” Charley said.

Vincent Prizzi began to talk into the microphone on the stage. He was a cement-faced man with crinkly-gray hair, and he still had some of the old-country accent. He was so stolidly built that he seemed like the morganatic husband of Mother Earth, like the patron of rocks, television, and fallen cake. He introduced Don Corrado Prizzi to the guests. Charley stood at attention. He hadn’t as much as seen Don Corrado for two years. A hush fell over the awe-whacked ballroom;
not even the Jewish waiters made any noise in all the time it took the ancient, enfeebled body to shuffle across the platform to the microphone, an essence of violent death and corruption so vibrant that the assembly seemed to sigh with gratitude that this sine qua non was the prisoner of such withered flesh.

Of all the leaders of the
fratellanza
, Corrado Prizzi alone had steadily risen in strength and prestige, because he had never deviated from the code of omertà. In turn, it had preserved and protected him. He was the only one who attended both the Cleveland meeting in 1928 and the Apalachin meeting more than a quarter of a century later in 1957. Of all of those arrested at the Cleveland meeting in 1928, he was the only one whose photograph was no longer in the police files. For over sixty years his renown and power in the
fratellanza
had steadily increased while his power in the government of the United States had geometrically squared itself. He was the sole United States “friend” who had enjoyed a personal relationship with the late Don Calo Vizzini, who was so close as to be actually within the family of the present
Capo di tutti Capi
of Sicily, Don Pietro Spina, whose son had attended the wedding today.

Don Corrado tapped on his son’s arm and motioned for him to bring his head down. Vincent bent over, nodding as he listened, then he turned back to the microphone.

“My father welcomes you to this great family occasion,” he translated. “He says you are all going to have a good time. He offers his toast of love to the happiness of the bride and groom and wishes them many children.”

Vincent lifted his glass. The eight hundred guests lifted their glasses. Everyone drank. The old man shuffled slowly off the stage and disappeared behind the piano into the curtain, one man clearing his way, another following him.

The music began again. It was “You, You’re Driving Me Crazy,” a great natural Peabody, the dance people were doing the last time Charley had ventured out on the floor with a woman. “Hey, how about a dance?” Charley said.

Maerose Prizzi grabbed Irene just as Charley was turning her toward the dance floor. “Phone call, Irene,” she said.

“Phone call?” Charley said blankly, but Irene was moving away with Maerose and they got lost in the crowd. He stood where he was, wondering if she would come back, thinking he wouldn’t be able to handle it if she didn’t come back. Numbly, he began to make plans to keep his mind filled. As soon as the bride and groom got away, he would take Irene across the street to the cement park. They would sit on a bench and when they got tired of sitting they would walk around the block, then they would sit on the bench again and decide where they would go for dinner.

After twenty minutes of waiting he went looking for her. He couldn’t find her. He saw Maerose dancing with Al Melvini and he moved around the dance floor in the direction in which they were dancing, waiting until the music stopped. He didn’t want to cut in because Irene might come back and he didn’t want her to think he was interested in any other woman. When Maerose came off the floor he stopped her. “Where’s Irene?” he said.

“Irene?”

“You dragged her away to the telephone.”

“Baby, how should I know?”

***

He was the last wedding guest to leave. He stood at the door, staring into people’s faces, not having any idea of what he could say to her if she did come walking past with some guy. Well, he would talk to her. He had a right to talk to her and if the guy made any
objections he would break all his fingers. But what if she didn’t want to talk to him? What if she just gave him a wave and kept moving on or if he tried to stop her and she just froze him with a look?

When everybody had gone he gave the ladies’ room pro five bucks to go in and make sure Irene wasn’t sick in there or something. Nothing. He went to find the Head Cameraman.

“Did you get her?”

“Get what?”

Charley grabbed the man by his shirtfront and lifted him up on his toes. “You want to be dropped in a Dispos-All?” he asked the man plaintively.

“Listen, I remember now. I got the shots for you. Very good. You’re gonna like it.” Charley let go. “When do I see it?”

“We only shoot it, mister. I mean, we turn it in and it goes to the lab. You gotta take that up with the company.”

“All right,” Charley said. “I can do that.”

He got into the beat-up black Chevy van in his tuxedo and drove out to the beach thinking that maybe it was just as well that she had disappeared because he would have had to drive her in this dumpy heap. But what the hell, he thought. He could have gone to the bell captain and rented a limousine. He could have left the Chevy and sent somebody in to get it tomorrow. When he got home to the four-room apartment that Maerose had decorated for him—without any books, though he hadn’t noticed that omission in the nine years he had lived there—he took off his bow tie and sat on his small terrace overlooking the bay and thought the whole situation through. He had to find her. That was all. That was all there was to it. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of life like some kid thinking about what his life would have been if she hadn’t disappeared, he had to find her. It wasn’t exactly kosher but he had to call Maerose and ask her. It
could result in a whole series of pains in the ass but she was his only connection with Irene. He lifted the phone to his lap and dialed her number.

“Mae?”

“She isn’t here. You want to leave a message?”

“Who is this?”

“This is the girl.”

“You got a pencil?”

“Wait. I’ll get a pencil.”

She came back. “Okay.”

“This is Charley Partanna. You want me to spell it?”

“No. I got it.”

“So spell it.”

She spelled it. “Good,” he said. “You give me your name and I’m going to mail you ten bucks at that address.”

“Ten
bucks
?”

“Yeah. What’s the name?”

“Miss Peaches Altamont.”

“All right, Peaches. Tell Miss Prizzi she has to call me no matter how late. She has the number.”

“Yes, sir.”

He hung up and called Paulie at his hotel. There was no answer. He went to a table and pulled open a drawer. He took out an envelope, put a ten-dollar bill into it, sealed it, then addressed it. He went out of the apartment to the mail chute across from the elevator and got a stamp out of his wallet. He put the stamp on the envelope and dropped it into the chute.

The elevator door opened and two men got out.

“Hey, Partanna,” the big one said.

Charley felt a flash of panic, naked without a gun in the open hallway. The man flashed his shield. “Gallagher, Homicide,” he said.

Charley relaxed. “What’s up?”

“You don’t want to talk about it out here.”

“Sure. Come on in.”

They went into the apartment.

“So?” Charley asked.

“Somebody hit Sal Netturbino this afternoon.”