Prizzi's Honor (5 page)

“Keep anybody out,” Charley said. Phil left. Charley and Al waited for Gilroy to come around. It didn’t take long.

“Where’s your checkbook, Marty?” Charley asked.

“Top drawer,” the black man groaned. “Charley, listen—”

Charley pushed the swivel chair back so he could open the drawer. He slid out a wide, three-tiered checkbook and a .38 caliber pistol. “Registered to you?” he asked. Marty shook his head. Charley put the gun in his side pocket and with the other hand took a leather notebook out of the opposite pocket. He read from its first page. “You got $208,439.21 in the A account, Marty. Make me out a check to cash for that.”

“Listen, Charley—this a mistake. You trying to say I fucked the Prizzis around? Man, no way. Man, I am
set
with the Prizzis, what I need to do that for?”

“You shorted on payoffs again. You know it and we know it, and you know we know it. So make out the check. Untie the arm, Plumber. You right-handed, Marty?”

“Lefty,” Gilroy moaned.

Charley moved behind Gilroy and pushed the barrel of the pistol into the base of his skull. Melvini untied
the left arm. “Don’t get wise,” he said to Gilroy, “or I’ll flush you right down the toilet.”

Marty made out the check while Al held the checkbook steady.

“You got $86,392.17 in the B account,” Charley read out from the small leather book. “Make it out Marty.”

“Charley, that my kids’ money. That the safety money.”

“What the fuck is this, Marty? Make it out already!”

While Al retied Gilroy to a chair, Charley tore the signed checks out of the book. “Hey, Phil,” he yelled. Vittimizzare put his head into the room. “Take these to Angelo Partanna,” he said. “Okay, let’s get Marty the fuck out of here.”

***

It took three of them to manhandle Gilroy and the swivel chair into the back of the Chevy van. Four of Gilroy’s runners watched them work, standing very still and wondering why
they
had to be witnesses. “Just keep your mouth shut and you’re gonna be all right,” Melvini said. “Start talking and you’re gonna get stuffed down a toilet without a plunger.”

Phil left to go back to the laundry with the checks. Charley and Al drove east on Long Island for about an hour and a half. They left Gilroy under his blanket on the swivel chair inside the van, which was inside a garage behind a frame house that was well into the fields behind Brentwood, while they went inside to keep cool, play cards, and wait for Pop’s call. He called in two hours. “All certified,” he said, and hung up.

Charley said, “Okay—now we take Marty over to the state park on the south shore. It’ll be dark when we get there. Bring me a crowbar from the shed. Marty ain’t gonna walk home.”

***

When Charley got back to the beach that night, he
sat on the terrace and called Paulie in California. “Hey, Paulie,” he said, “I told my father you got him in the movies and he’s all set up. He wants to see it. You got a cassette yet?”

“Charley?”

“Yeah.”

“Charley, don’t get sore.”

“Why should I get sore?”

“Your father called me this morning at my house and told me to bum the tapes on him and the girl.”

“What?”

“That’s what he told me to do, Charley. So that’s what I hadda do. I mean—what else?”

“You did right, Paulie,” Charley said, and hung up.

***

Charley had been a member of the honored society since he was seventeen. Ever since Charley had made his bones with Little Phil Terrone, when Charley had been thirteen, his father had pressed Corrado Prizzi for the boy’s early initiation. Don Corrado had suspended all new membership for five years. Charley had been twelve when the last members had been made, and his father spoke so much about it at home that, gradually, the ritual acceptance into the
fratellanza
became a mystically important achievement for the boy.

Charley was twelve when his mother died. Had she been alive, Angelo Partanna would never have gotten away with giving Charley the Gun Hill Road contract when he was thirteen. But after that day, Charley became special to his father and, although the don concealed it better, to Corrado Prizzi. Charley lived and ate with his father, spoke like his father, thought like his father. Angelo Partanna knew only the environment, but he seemed to know what was happening in it from coast to coast: who had the most booze going for them, what the daily handle with layoff bookmakers was, which labor union was about to fall into
which family’s arms, who had killed whom and why. That was Angelo’s job with the Prizzis, as
consigliere
he was supposed to know all those things. But he knew techniques as well and he taught Charley how to garrote instantly, the right and the wrong way to throw a knife, and all of the methods of bribery that had been known to the most cunning of the friends of the friends for seven hundred years.

Charley was a big boy at fourteen, larger still at seventeen. He had left school and had been working for the family, learning the shit business, from the importing, to the cutting, to the distribution and price-fixing, to the financing of subdistributors and dealers, to the marketing that would widen the use of the product across the country. Although it was Vincent Prizzi who later got the credit for getting behind the unstable and more emotionally dangerous narcotic, cocaine, it was Charley’s active marketing research into cocaine, through Paulie, among the population of the entertainment industry, which had him convincing the family in the early sixties that its time had come as the dope which could help to siphon off the prosperity of America’s middle classes.

Charley was thirty when he put the Prizzis into the cocaine business with both feet, causing Don Corrado to believe even more in Charley’s star. His business foresight obtained Charley’s appointment as Vincent’s underboss on the working side of the Prizzi family when Charley was thirty-two years old.

On the night of Charley’s initiation into the friendship of the men of respect, the Prizzis had assembled forty “made” men at the St. Gabbione Laundry sorting room, in the basement. Charley had waited in an anteroom, amid the heady, strong, cleansing smells of soap and lye, with his fellow nominees: Dimples Tancredi, twenty-nine; his best friend, Gusto, twenty-three; Momo “The Cobra” Ginafonda, thirty-four, and two other guys who died from Asian flu within the following year.

Charley had taken it for granted that his father would be his sponsor, so that he and all the others, including the members, were astounded when Don Corrado himself came out of the meeting room and escorted Charley into the presence of the brotherhood to be sworn in.

Don Corrado was a robust fifty-nine years old when Charley was seventeen. He was, himself, fast becoming a national legend in the
fratellanza
and was already one of the nine richest men in the United States. Solemnly, he drove a dagger into the wooden table and, holding its hilt, said, “The first new member to enter the honored society within the Prizzi family for five years is the son of my oldest friend, Angelo Partanna, my
consigliere
. This son, who stands beside me now, is seventeen years of age, the same age his father was when he was sworn into membership before he left Agrigento, and the same age as I, myself, when I took the sacred oaths.”

He placed a revolver at the base of the embedded knife. “Charley,” he said in his piercing voice, “you are entering into the honored society of the brotherhood of men of the greatest courage and loyalty. You enter our companionship alive and you go out dead. You will live and die by the gun and the knife. Take my hand upon the knife.”

Charley reached across the table, towering over the tiny Don Corrado, who said to him, thrillingly, “Does the
fratellanza
come before anything else in your life?”

“Yes,” Charley said.

“Before family, before country, before God?”

“I swear it,” Charley said.

“There are three laws of the brotherhood which must become a part of you. The first—you must obey your superiors, to death if necessary, without question, for it will be for the good of the brotherhood. Do you swear it?”

“I swear it,” Charley said, his face shining.

“You must never betray any secret of our common cause nor seek any other comfort, be it from church or from a government, than the strength, protection, and comfort of this
fratellanza
. Do you swear it?”

“I swear it!” Charley said, his voice rising.

“Lastly, you must never violate the wife or children of another member.”

“I swear it,” Charley said humbly.

“Violation of these oaths will mean your instant death without trial or warning.”

Angelo Partanna asked him to raise the first finger of his right hand. He pricked the finger with a straight pin and a tear of blood came forth. “This drop of blood symbolizes your birth into our family. We are one until death,” Don Corrado said, reaching up on his tiptoes to embrace Charley.

“As we protect you, so must you protect Prizzi honor. Do you swear it?”

“I swear it before God,” Charley said.

He kissed the don, then he kissed his father. The members applauded. The large room was alight with their admiration.

Chapter Five

His father’s baffling order to Paulie made Charley so restless that he had to scrub the kitchen floor to try to calm down. He filled a pail with soapy water and added his own formula of rubbing alcohol and straight ammonia, because he had it from the Prizzi chemist who cut the
cinnari
that it was stronger than household ammonia, and Charley insisted on a spotless house. He had always been a Mr. Clean. His mother had run the cleanest house in Brooklyn and nobody needed anybody to tell him why clean, cleaner, cleanest was the only way, because that was the facts. He rolled up his trousers, got down on his hands and knees with the pail and a wire scrubbing brush, and revenged himself upon the kitchen floor.

When he had finished, he washed all the windows on the bay side of the apartment while the kitchen floor dried. When he could get in there to begin to make dinner he took the home-made
cuddiruni
pizza, with the sardines, the cheese, the tomatoes, the garlic, the Oregano, and a stuffed artichoke, out of the freezer to let it warm up a little before he put it into the microwave. All the hard cleaning work had made him stop brooding about his father’s order to Paulie. He was hungry.

He took the
fungi ’Ncartati
out of the refrigerator
and looked at it lovingly: the best mushroom caps in the market, which he had grilled himself with breadcrumbs, minced anchovies,
pecorino
, garlic, lemon, and oil—and a little
prezzemolo
. Even Pop, a really heavy fork, preferred to eat at Charley’s because the food came out like Momma’s food.

He put the pizza into the microwave oven, took the cork out of a half-drunk bottle of red wine, set the kitchen table for one, propped up the
Daily News
against the wine bottle, and had himself another great dinner. How could restaurants stay in business, he marveled, when anybody who could read could cook?

He ate slowly. He chewed carefully. His mother had raised him critically on the point of chewing carefully and he knew, secretly, that he had the best bowels of anyone in the Prizzi family. He wondered if Irene chewed her food carefully. He tried to remember how she had eaten the food at the spic restaurant but he couldn’t get it together. She had terrific skin and a fine, healthy deep chest. Her teeth were one of her best features, after her eyes. Her teeth were square and white and the gums were a good pink so, until he could actually check it out, there was no reason to worry. It stood to reason that she had to have been exercising those teeth all her life so, he reasoned, she had to have a great set of bowels.

But when dinner was over, while he was cleaning up, his mind went back to why Pop had called Paulie. He could see the shot of Pop and Irene in his mind very clearly. She was listening to Pop, concentrating on what he was telling her, and Pop wasn’t making any wedding party conversation. They were standing alone and out of the way, in an alcove, and if Charley hadn’t hit the photographer with the C-note and Paulie’s card, nobody would have noticed them talking. How could Pop tell him he didn’t remember talking to Irene when it was such an intense talk? Jesus, anyway, how could anybody say he couldn’t remember Irene?

When he had put the silver away, Charley went back to the terrace and sat there with the telephone in his lap staring out at the bay, trying to figure out what he was going to do about Irene. He was in a different kind of business, after all. Women could certainly be expected to resist his business unless they were born into it like Maerose. If Irene had been connected with the family all her life she would understand that it was just another business that got the people what they wanted—but in this case, things the law said they couldn’t have, because that kind of law got the politicians reelected. People had always gambled. People had always rushed in to grab sensations that they were told they couldn’t have. People had reasons for not borrowing from banks. All that produced a lot of money and there were a lot of hoodlums who got ideas about stealing some of that money so the system had to have men like himself who put them down when they tried to make their grab. He had never wasted a legit guy in his life. He was like the chief security officer for the big business that got the people what they wanted and that was all. If Irene had grown up with that she would understand it, she would accept it the way Maerose did.

But she hadn’t grown up with it, so what was he supposed to do—look for some other kind of work? Nobody in the family would understand what the hell he was trying to do if he did that. They would look right through him as if he wasn’t there anymore and nobody would ever be able to trust him again. Anyway, what kind of business could he operate in? He had a future where he was. Vincent Prizzi was maybe sixty-five years old. His own father was seventy-four. Charley was next in line because he knew the operation backward and he had fear and respect going for him. All the other Prizzis on Vincent’s side of the business were either dopes or kids. Most of the Prizzis were on the legit side of the business or they had left the family to be doctors or engineers or sports announcers.
Don Corrado couldn’t keep going forever, at eighty-four, but even if he did, when Vincent went, the don would put him, Charley Partanna, in charge of the whole thing. Was he supposed to turn his back on his life because he couldn’t figure out any other way to marry a woman?