“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 Ed 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.
There had to be five more days before the bank got the ransom demand. Maybe more than that because a bank and an insurance company, not people, were involved in making the move. It would take about three weeks before they could agree with the cops on how to make the payment. There would be one set of letters to the insurance company telling them to pay off in Central Park, where there would be two cops behind every tree, while the real letter would go to Gomsky at the bank, telling him to set up the payoff in Lagos, Hong Kong, Aruba, Panama, and São Paulo. So maybe it would be a full month before he’d be told to let Filargi go.
Charley nursed a beer and read the sports page until 6:10, then he drifted out to find a call board to locate Irene’s gate number and went to stand near it to wait.
The flight was early. Irene came out of the gate yelling and waving. They grabbed each other and held on. She said, “You look lousy, Charley. What’s the matter?”
“Better we’ll talk about it in the car.” He took her small case. She tried to hold on to it, but he took it. “What have you got in there?” he said. “The family jewels?” She grinned weakly.
They drove in the battered black Chevy van out toward the parkway entrance. Irene said, “What’s the matter, Charley?”
“You ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Don Corrado called me over for lunch with him yesterday. That Amalia is some sensational cook. So after lunch he says to me how sick Vincent is and how they are going to move him out to Vegas to take care of the action at the three hotels and that I am going to take over Vincent’s job and Vincent’s points.”
“Charley! That is te
rrif
ic!”
“Yeah?”
“Why not?”
“They are setting me up.”
“Why should they set you up?”
“Well I don’t know. But it has to have something to do with the three hundred sixty dollars. And Louis Palo. No matter what else, it’s got to be that Don Corrado knows all about that.”
“He knows. I couldn’t figure a way to tell you, but he knows.”
“Who told you that?”
“He did. The day we had dinner in town—the day before I flew out to LA. When I told you he had me over there to welcome me into the family.”
“Holy
shit
, Irene. Then that is why he is setting me up. He knows. He has you cold and you’re my wife so we both got to get it.”
“Oh, Charley!” Irene began to cry softly.
“Baby, I love you. You understand that? Love is for keeps with me. I won’t let
any
thing hurt you. You’re my woman.”
“Jesus, God, Charley, how I love you.”
“Listen, we have time. The don said the whole thing is on ice until the cops get Filargi,” Charley said earnestly. “He wants me to keep the Filargi thing together, then they move. We’ve got three weeks, a month, to get ready. Then you and me are going to take them before they can take us.”
Irene took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Charley,” she said, “you know how my jobs are lined up?”
“No.”
“The customers call a number in Kansas City or South Carolina, then that call is relayed to my answering machine in LA.”
“Telephones can do that?”
“Yeah. So—I got a call a couple of days ago and it says: full fee, meet me in Paley Park on Fifty-third in New York.”
“A
park
? On Fifty-third?”
“Yeah. Who do you think the customer is?”
“Who?”
“Vincent Prizzi.”
“
Whaaaat?
”
“Yeah.”
“What the hell? If Vincent wants somebody clipped,
I
do it!”
“Not this time. That would be suicide. He put out the contract on you.”
“Vincent? On
me
?”
“Well, he did.”
“Wait a minute. Vincent gives you a commission on me? He is buying my wife to clip
me
?”
“Charley, fahcrissake! He don’t know I am your wife. He called the KC number! He tells me it’s worth a seventy-five. I tell him you would be a very tricky hit. In the end we get it up to a hundred.”
“That’s crazy. The Plumber would have to do it for nothing. Any one of my boys, for nothing.”
“Baby! Don’t be offended! He wanted a specialist. Don’t ask me why.”
“I’ll tell you why,” Charley said. “He don’t want the family to know that he has put out a contract on me. The don is setting me up, but when they think they are going to take me, he isn’t going to spend any one hundred dollars to have the number done. That’s what he has workers for, to blow people away for nothing. But, and this is the nitty, if Vincent is paying out one hundred dollars for a specialist to take me out then, number one, he’s got to be crazy—I mean out of his head about something he thinks I done to him—and, number two, he’s gotta be using his own money; not that he doesn’t have it, but spending one hundred dollars has to hurt him more than the fucking hit would hurt me.”
“One thing is for sure,” Irene said dryly, “we are in bad with your family. Now what do we do? You know what Louis Palo told me? He said that even if we went to Rio, or any place, that you would find us, because that’s the way you are built. Do the Prizzis have anybody else like you? Do they have another guy who wouldn’t give up on us?”
“What do they need? They have Don Corrado to remember. They are Sicilians. Don Corrado tells five other guys to remember and he makes them swear that if he dies, the other guys remember. They are all over this fucking world. We go in a restaurant in Uganda and a spade tells some clerk at the Italian legation who passes it to Palermo and they move it to the don in New York and the word goes out—this much money for our thumbs. Maybe two thousand people in Africa are out after our thumbs unless he says he wants them to ship him my whole head. If we are going to run then we have to have face jobs. We have to have new prints and papers. We have to be
entirely new and still think every minute that they’re watching us.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
He swung the car into a side street and stopped it next to a curb. “We are going to use Filargi to get us out, somehow. Don Corrado won’t let anything touch us as long as we have Filargi.”
“You mean we can negotiate this thing?”
“The Prizzis need me. How much I don’t know, but there is such a bundle here that we need them.”
“You don’t know, Charley. You never asked me how much that old fuck decided to charge me for scamming him.”
“Whatta you mean?”
“He gave me a choice of being hit or tearing five hundred forty dollars out of my safe deposit box. I have it right here and I’m supposed to hand it to him. Jesus, I looked at my money in one of my boxes at the bank and I almost busted out crying. How I worked to get that money, pounding into their heads—Marxie and Louis—what they had to do and how they had to do it and getting a fight on it every way because I was a woman and therefore they knew better.”
“But how come five hundred forty?” Charley asked.
“Prizzi wants his three hundred sixty plus a fifty percent penalty—five hundred forty dollars of my blood, all gone because of a bunch of Sicilians who have been up to their ass in pathological crime for seven centuries and who have to cheat, corrupt, scam, and murder anybody who stands between them and a buck. It’s a peasant mentality, Charley, and I can’t stand that.”
“Irene, listen—fuck the Prizzis.”
“Charley!” She was genuinely shocked to have heard that from him.
“I have you and you have me. The Prizzis can’t always win.”
“But what are we going to do now?”
“There is only one thing we can do,” Charley said. “We gotta talk to my father.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Angelo Partanna’s bland face broke its lifetime pattern and showed them anger, which climbed toward an explosion point as its fuse burned shorter and shorter. When Charley finished with his report on Don Corrado’s setting him up and Vincent’s putting out a contract on him, Angelo stood up abruptly, walked out to the terrace, shut the door, and stayed there for almost ten minutes staring out across the bay. When he came back he was his old self. “There is nothing to get hot about,” he said. “It’s just business, except with Vincent.”
“Well, what the hell is it with Vincent?” Charley asked.
“Ever since his daughter came home she’s been making his life miserable. It starts up his gout and the blood pressure and he blames you for not marrying her in the first place, ten years ago.”
“Marrying who?” Irene said.
“Maerose,” Charley told her.
“
Maerose
?”
“That’s the way our minds work, whatta you going to do?” Angelo said to Charley. “But the sweetest part is Vincent tries to put the contract with the guy’s own wife to do the job on him. That is something.”
“What are we going to do?” Irene asked.
“You had it coming. There is no way out of that,” Angelo said to Irene. “Whacking Louis Palo was bad enough. He was a made man in our family so if he rated getting clipped, we had to do it. But robbing the Prizzis of three hundred and sixty dollars,” he held up both hands, “nobody can hold still for that, Irene.”