She played back the single message on one of the far-separated telephone answering machines through
the blower. It was a rough New York Italian voice. It said, “Room eight-oh-five, Peak Hotel, Brooklyn, Thursday, July twenty-third. Somebody’ll pick you up and take you to the meet. Bring tools.”
The twenty-third was six days away. The twenty-third would be the seventh day of the Vegas scam.
She called a tax-burdened client and told him they could have lunch.
***
When Irene answered the knock on the door of Room 805, at the Peak Hotel, a beautiful Italo-Arabic-looking woman was standing there. “Hello,” the woman said, “are you Irene Walker?” Irene nodded. “I’m Maerose Prizzi. I’ll take you to the wedding.”
When they got to Santa Grazia’s, Maerose told her to find a seat on the left side of the church. “I’ll pick you up as soon as the mass is over,” she said. Irene collected her repose like a pussycat and sat serenely watching the wedding, wondering whether she would be home this time tomorrow, deciding that things must be moving right along at Vegas because no news was good news and Marxie had never failed to call her whenever things were going wrong.
After the mass she found Maerose at her elbow and they were assigned a limousine to themselves to take them to the reception. In the car, Maerose gave her a sealed envelope. “You drop this in the silk bag at the door on the way in,” she said.
Once they were inside the door into the reception room, which had been decorated as if for a Polish wedding, Maerose spotted somebody and called him over. This must be the contact. Then Maerose introduced him and she knew it was the contact. It was Charley Partanna, the legendary Charley Partanna. She gave him her full attention. Maerose darted away into the crowd. Charley looked at her like she was some kind of new species so she figured he had never worked with a woman on a hit. They all got used to it.
She let him do the talking. “How about a drink?” he said.
“Maybe a glass of wine to the bride and groom.” Jesus, he was a big man. He was like a high rectangle of meat and hair. He had a nice smile and that threw her off. It didn’t go with his business. His voice came up from his belly like in buckets of mud, she thought, but it was a listening voice, it responded to what it was talking to. Nice clothes. Most men she knew wore expensive clothes but not many wore nice clothes. It was an Italian and Polish necessity to wear a tuxedo to an afternoon wedding, but Charley’s jacket was quiet and black and it had natural shoulders, on him like an ox yoke, and the whole effect—no bright green ruffed shirt, no magenta bowtie, no wine-red lapels, and no yellow cummerbund—made him seem to her more like a real man than a headwaiter at an acid-dropping party.
Someone began to talk into a sound system from the stage and it took her a few moments to register that it was Vincent Prizzi, but there was no mistaking who came out next, the grand old man, Corrado Prizzi, the oldest and most powerful surviving chief executive in the entire national Combination.
They made the speeches short. Charley asked her to dance. It was a great tune from when she had been a little kid, “You, You’re Driving Me Crazy.” She answered Charley with her big brown eyes but as they turned to go onto the dance floor, Maerose Prizzi told her she had a telephone call so she knew, all of a sudden, that Charley had meant something entirely different by the way he had been looking at her. He wasn’t the contact. She followed Maerose through the crowd, thinking, Charley Partanna has gone fruit about me, and she measured how she felt about that. It was good, because she liked him. It was very good because, since they were deep into the Vegas action, which Charley Partanna was going to figure as being a
shot at Prizzis’ honor, and since he would be the bloodhound they would send out to tear them to ribbons, she needed Charley Partanna on her side. If she was reading him right, this was her lucky day.
Maerose led her to an alcove off a side room, off the ballroom, and didn’t introduce her to the tall, thin, old man who was standing there. She left them alone. It was Angelo Partanna. He showed her his expensive false teeth in a brilliant and courtly smile, then he threw the smile away, and there was nothing to look at in the face except those ballbearing eyes.
“It’s a contract on Sal Netturbino,” he said. “Waldorf, twenty-one hundred, at three o’clock—one hour and ten minutes—he is expecting a woman he never saw. She won’t get there. He’ll think you are her.”
“A hooker?” Irene asked.
“Yeah.”
“I can do a hooker,” Irene said.
“When you go out, after you clip him, go to the downstairs bar. Ask for Johnny. He’s a bartender. Tell him you think there might be a message for Mrs. Bronstein. He’ll give you the envelope and he’ll let us know everything is copacetic.” He smiled and nodded so she left.
She got a cab to the Waldorf. She went straight to the twenty-first floor and Netturbino’s suite was right near the elevator. She rang the bell and decided to be a demure hooker type. He opened the door ready for action. His bathrobe was open and he had no pajama bottoms on. His dong wasn’t flapping. It was like an extra arm. “Hey! Right on time!” he said with the kind of desperate concentration that comes to men with a hard-on.
“I’m Rhoda Bronstein,” she said, whacking her cheekbones with her eyelashes. “I’m sorry but I have to use your john.”
“Be my guest!” he said expansively. “But don’t take all day about it.”
She went into the john, closed the door, screwed the noise-killer to the piece and went back into the living room and killed Sal Netturbino.
Then
she peed.
Chapter Thirteen
There were two more days to go in Vegas and, while she was thinking how she could deflect the force of his pursuit after everything hit the fan, Charley Partanna called her from New York and asked her to lunch. Marxie was due to call her the next day at 12:30, when he woke up in Vegas, but a lot of times he was late. She made the date with Charley for one o’clock, at the Beverly Wilshire. Marxie called five minutes early. “Right on,” he said, inside one of his actor fantasies, probably doing the main Black Panther inside his head. She had plenty of time to freshen up and to balance her new ($190, retail) green balibuntal hat on her curls and drove out to the hotel.
Charley looked pale when she spotted him in the lobby, but as he approached her chair he got all red. He loomed over her and blurted out how he was scared he wasn’t going to see her again. She had been absolutely right. He was nuts about her. Well, that happened. It was very nice. This time—she knew that she should be thinking about the positive value of his infatuation in relation to the bundle of money they were scooping up in Vegas, but there was something else. She felt something special about Charley. She didn’t know exactly what was happening to her, but looking into his eyes made her feel both older and
closer to death, and at the same time eternal. She didn’t know what the feeling was because she had never felt it before, and the only reading she had ever done had been tax books, so what could she know about love? Charley was different from once before, at the wedding, and twice before, in his myth. He was a young middle-aged man. He looked so healthy and vulnerable. He was so big—everything was big: his hands, his nose, his head—but inside the big man there was a little man, and inside the little man was a boy, a yearning boy. She thought of what he was—what she was herself—inside the butter flesh, which pretended to know exactly what it wanted. There was uncertainty in both of them, but uncertainty that could be melted away, she thought, in an instant, if her uncertainty could join with his and they could suddenly be sure.
Driving out to Las Tremblas, her favorite Mexican restaurant, Charley told her a story about helping people at a motel in a blizzard and it confused her about him, because she knew he was the Prizzis’ avenger but that didn’t match this other guy washing dishes and making beds because he wanted to be useful. She tried to remember who had had a number done on them in Lansing, Michigan, about that time, and it came to her—the business agent for the Teamsters who had been wasted with a shotgun. It had to be Charley’s hit.
“You are different from what I thought you’d be, Charley,” she said.
“Why is that?”
She wasn’t going to volunteer what she did for a living on the high-income side, so she couldn’t tell him she had expected a hoodlum but had found someone else entirely sitting there beside her.
“Well—you would be rough. I mean, I thought you would look at the women there and figure, what the hell, let them clean up the motel, that’s what women are for.”
“Not me,” Charley said. “I live alone. I keep a clean, neat house so I figure wherever I’m living, that’s my house. Is that the restaurant? Up there?”
Somehow, Charley began to ask her if she was married and the whole protection for the Vegas job fell together. Louis had to go anyway, because he actually expected that she would go away with him to Rio or wherever, and Louis was going to be the Prizzis’ first choice when they found out, because he was in the Prizzi family. Marxie was dying. He didn’t give a shit what happened and he was only going through the motions on this job so he could leave her a stake. She would have to take Louis and give Marxie to Charley so she wanted to give Charley a little extra reason for not liking Marxie so he would do everything more quickly. She let Charley pull the whole story of her marriage out of her. None of it was true except that she and Marxie were married.
***
She had been eighteen years old, hustling her ass in the Loop hotel lobbies and bars, and getting fifty percent of it taken away from her by The Outfit, when she met Marxie. He wasn’t a pimp. He collected from the girls and from the pimps. He was plodding and methodical about it but he was a jagged man inside. Ever since she had been a child and her father had beaten up her mother, about four times a week, Irene had vaguely understood that she had some kind of thing in her that calmed men who were jagged inside. Marxie got her signals. He was a watery, tentative man all his life but whenever, all through their time together, she had needed him to move, he had moved. She was one of maybe seventy hookers he was collecting from, but, with what was to prove to be unerring psychic dependability (if absolutely no other kind), he asked her to have a drink in the fall of 1963 at the Palmer House. After a while he asked her to move in with him. Then, in the spring of 1964, he told her he
had a job as a bookkeeper with The Outfit in Detroit and he asked her to marry him. She had been knocked flat on her ass by the idea, but just the same, she liked Marxie. He needed her and Christ knew she needed him. She didn’t have the indifference that successful hustlers have. She wasn’t a born suicide and she wasn’t a slob. She was attracted to numbers and Marxie knew all about numbers, so she cried all over him and said okay. They moved to Detroit. The Purple Gang had gradually converted from a Jewish mob to a Sicilian family. Marxie was a carryover from the old days, a part of the sentimental notion that Jews understood numbers better than the Sicilians. It slowly became clear to both of them that Marxie had a lot of things wrong with him: his lungs were shot, his heart was weak, he was a bleeder. After ten years in that climate, he couldn’t stand up to it anymore. By that time she was a courier delivering the Nevada skim for certain people and carrying it to Miami for the first split, then to New York for the second split, then to Chicago for the final split between Chicago and Cleveland. They moved her up then to the overseas routes, carrying the cash to Zurich, Geneva, Panama, Nigeria, and the Caribbean; long flights with lots of time to crack the tax books.
Marxie could be a drag, in fact a real pain in the ass, but the record certainly showed that he had been a good luck charm for her. It had been Marxie who had gotten her into her real work, at the top of the heap. There was a jeweller in New York who The Outfit used to move out hot stones in bulk, and he was switching the good stones for shitty ones, so there were a lot of complaints. He ran a diamond store on Forty-seventh between Sixth and Fifth, and the place was always filled with women looking for bargains they thought they could talk some guy into buying for them. Joe Licamarito, Marxie’s boss, was furious that this momser thought he could get away with such a
ripoff, and he wanted to have one of the New York families send a team into the store and give it to the jeweller. Marxie happened to be a good friend of Joe’s. “Lemme tell you, Joe,” he said, “the best thing for this job is a woman. She’ll hit him and get closed in the crowd so fast nobody’ll have anything to talk about.”
“A woman?” Joe says, “Where do I find a woman for a job like that?”
“I got her,” Marxie says.
Marxie brought it up while they were doing the dishes that night. “You stand at the counter. You pick the stone you want to buy,” Marxie said. “The jeweller bends over to open the case while you open your handbag as if you are getting the money. You blow him away, drop the gun in the crowd, mix with the other women, then rush out on the street yelling when they rush out on the street yelling.”
“What does it pay, Marxie?” Irene asked.
“Twenty-five thousand.”
“No kidding?”
“That’s nothing, Irene. Once it gets around the Combination that there is a classy woman contract hitter, you’re going to see that price go up to triple.”
Irene took the job, and everything developed just the way Marxie had said it would except that, with the inflation, she got herself one hundred thousand dollars for the Netturbino job, and there were always three, sometime four of them a year.
Marxie wanted to be her agent for lining up the work, for fifty percent, but she gave him such a look, no words, that he said, very quick, “No, that wouldn’t work. I’d be involved. I’d be the corroboratory.” She told him he could give her telephone number to Joe Licamarito in Detroit. After that she invented her system. She romanced a beautiful kid who was a student genius in the electronics lab at UCLA. The kid worked out the relay from the telephone in Kansas
City, an empty room in Kansas City, to the telephone answering machine in Beverly Hills. Then she bought a second number in Columbia, South Carolina, which also went directly to the answering machine in Beverly Hills. The relay was untraceable. Like Wow! for her business.