Ed looked up and grinned at his brother. “I never knew Charley was such a joker,” he said, “lissena this.
“‘So, the first thing I got to have before you get Filargi back is that you deliver Vincent to me where I tell you, when I tell you.
“‘Don Corrado told my wife that he would forget the whole business about Louis Palo and the three hundred sixty dollars if she paid back the three sixty plus fifty percent. Now, from past experience with the Prizzi policy, it could be that Don Corrado was going to have my wife clipped after she paid back the money. Therefore, the second thing we got to have before you get Filargi back is that you pay to my wife the seven hundred twenty dollars she had to give up
out of the Vegas scam, plus the fifty percent penalty on the three hundred sixty, plus the difference of fifty dollars which Vincent Prizzi would have had to pay her for giving her the contract on me. That is only the side money.’”
Vincent was the color of a bouquet of flowers. His blood pressure had taken off because of outrage and fear. His breathing was shallow. He made choked sounds while Angelo got out of his chair and patted him softly on the back, making comforting sounds.
“We are trying to do business here,” Ed Prizzi said, his face as long as a horse’s and as seriously disapproving. “You’re going to have your chance at a stroke later, Vincent. Calm down, fahcrissakes.”
“Charley is dead,” Vincent said. He remembered Angelo and turned to him. “I’m sorry, Angelo,” he said, “but Charley is strictly dead.”
“Listen to Ed, Vincent,” Angelo said softly. “For seventy million dollars.”
“‘For the main money, this is what I want,’” Ed continued reading from the letter. “‘Twenty-three hundred and fourteen dollars and some change for expenses. That’s what I figure it’s going to cost me for the three weeks while you set it all up. Then I want fifty dollars for the fee for my helper and, of course, the fee that was promised to my wife as second man in the Filargi stand.’”
Ed looked up with surprise. “Charley’s
wife
was the second man?” he asked Angelo incredulously.
Angelo nodded. “She was right,” he said. “She was the only way we could take out the bodyguard.”
Vincent passed a deadly look to Angelo. Angelo had held out on him.
Ed went back to reading from the letter. “‘Then I want all of the full insurance coverage on Filargi’s kidnap policy which is two million five hundred thousand. Altogether, that comes to eleven hundred to my wife, fifty for extra labor, the twenty-three fourteen for expenses,
and two and a half million from the policy. That makes a total of $3,652,314—plus Vincent.
“‘There is only one man I trust to deal with, my father. Talk it over. Make your mind up. If you want to do business, run the house flag of the New York Athletic Club on the pole on the thirty-third-floor terrace of the building at ten after twelve on Thursday. That gives you two days. When I see the flag I’ll send you the letter about how we’ll work this out. Charley.’”
The only sound was Vincent’s breathing.
Ed Prizzi said briskly, “Look at it this way. On seventy million dollars that is only an eight percent sales cost if we were paying out the two and a half million. But we aren’t. The insurance company pays and the premiums are deductible, so what we are looking at here is a sales cost of like two point two percent, plus overhead, to get the whole bank back. Listen, how can we not recommend a deal like that?”
“How? I’ll tell you how,” Vincent yelled. “Because I’m a part of the fucking sales cost, that’s how.”
“Come on, Vincent!” his brother said. “Charley is just making a point! That is negotiable. Right, Angelo? Am I right?”
Angelo put an arm across Vincent’s shoulders. “You know Charley, fahcrissake, Vincent. You know he’s got to make his point. It’s a thing like honor with him. All right. He made his point. Now we dangle the three million six in front of him and we tell him take it or leave it and he takes it.”
“Fahcrissake, Vincent. You don’t think we would turn you over to Charley, fahcrissake?” Ed said. He didn’t wait for an answer. “I am not saying the whole wad, Angelo. After all, what is negotiating? We make him an offer, then we settle.”
“You never worked with Charley, Ed,” Vincent said. “He don’t settle. He is a very straight boy. If you
want Filargi you are going to have to pay all the money.” He left the rest of the payoff unmentioned.
“Then let’s go over to Poppa’s and get this thing settled,” Ed said. He handed Angelo Charley’s letter. Angelo folded it and put it into an inside pocket.
The three men rode down in the elevator just as silently as all the other passengers, no more, no less. Ed copped a feel from a nice-looking young head standing just ahead of him in the elevator car. She turned around and smiled at him. He got so hot that he would have gone out with her if Angelo hadn’t grabbed his arm and held him back.
When they got to the entrance on Fifty-sixth Street, they were starting out to the curb when Ed said, “I got to pick up a Wall Street closing,” and turned back toward the newsstand. A blue Oldsmobile 98, which had been parked fifty feet down the street, moved and sedately passed the three men, who were at different distances from the curb: Angelo was a few feet back of Vincent, turning to acknowledge Ed, who was ten feet farther back, turning toward the building, when Cheech Scaramanzia of the Bocca family opened rapid fire from the blue car as it went past. Vincent went down. The blue car moved out and turned with the stream of traffic at the avenue. Ed came running out of the building.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Vincent Prizzi was dead on arrival at the Roosevelt Hospital. Angelo Partanna and Ed Prizzi had faded into the crowd, watching the ambulance crew take Vincent away. Angelo told Ed to go back to his office, stopped a taxi and followed the ambulance to the hospital. Within ten minutes he had bribed two nurses and three orderlies so that he could sit in the visitors’ room on the emergency floor and receive the medical bulletins. When it was confirmed that Vincent was dead, he telephoned Ed from a booth and told him he was on his way to Brooklyn to tell the don.
“Who did it?” Ed whispered in the phone.
“The Boccas.”
“How’s Vincent?”
“He’s gone.”
“That’s terrible,” Ed said into the telephone. Two large tears ran out of his dark eyes. “It’s going to be very hard for Poppa.”
“He’s strong,” Angelo said.
“Well, at least, now we won’t have to give Vincent to Charley.”
“No,” Angelo said. “But the fact is something happened to Vincent. He lost it. He was a tremendous man, I never saw a tiger like him from the time he was just a kid, but something snapped and he lost it.”
“It was the daughter,” Ed said. “She wore him down. Well, you better go over and break the news to Poppa.”
***
Angelo paid off the cab in front of the Sestero house at five minutes to six. He climbed the front steps and the door opened when he got to the top. Amalia was waiting for him in a front room, her face ravaged by grief. Angelo held her in his arms, patting her shoulder, murmuring softly. “Poppa can’t understand why everybody is so late,” she said.
Angelo climbed the stairs slowly and knocked on the double doors of the room that faced west. He could hear the voice telling him to come in. He entered, closed the doors behind him and walked toward Don Corrado.
“Who is dead?” the old man asked.
“Vincent.”
“Who did it?”
“The Boccas.”
“How?”
“Outside the building.”
“You saw it?”
“Yes.”
“He missed you?”
“I was about eight feet back. Ed was getting a paper. They were only looking for Vincent anyway.”
The little old man looked out at Manhattan, caught in the dying heat of the summer light, the buildings standing like a crowd waiting to get into a bathhouse. “Vincent was a lovable man,” he said. “He was shy, he couldn’t show anything, but he felt everything. He loved his family. He lived for honor.”
“We won’t forget him,” Angelo said.
“He was such a man. Then—I don’t know—he got old. Something happened. He lost it. I told him he had enough and he agreed with me. Then I had Charley over here for lunch a couple of days ago and I
told him he was going to take over Vincent’s job. He will hold everything together.”
Angelo felt a pain go through him that came up through his stomach and across through his left arm and it knocked him right straight down into a chair. “Angelo,
An
gelo,” the old man said. “Jesus, you been under a terrific strain today. You ain’t no kid. You got to take it easy.”
Angelo got a vial of pills out of his right jacket pocket, took off the top very slowly, shook two pills out, and popped them into his mouth. Don Corrado handed him a half glass of red wine and he washed the pills down.
“I’m okay now,” Angelo said.
“Can you talk or do you want to rest for a while?”
“I can talk,” Angelo said. “Give me a full glass of that wine and I can sing.”
The don poured out a glass of red wine carefully. He sat down in the Morris chair facing his
consigliere
. “What did the Filargi letter say?” he asked.
“Charley wants the earth,” he said, drawing the letter out of his pocket. He opened it carefully on his lap, put on a pair of wire-framed eyeglasses and read the letter through, aloud, to Don Corrado.
“You know what?” the old man said. “I can see now that Charley thought I was setting him up when I told him he had Vincent’s job.”
“Well,” Angelo said, “that’s the way Sicilians think.”
“Vincent’s daughter wanted to make her suffer. Maybe they were two of those kind of people who are put here, side by side, to make each other suffer. That’s why he put out a contract on Charley. He told himself that Charley made him suffer so she made Vincent suffer and he loved her and he wanted to have a life with her like a father and his daughter have a right to have a life, and then when Charley married the woman who ripped us off with Louis Palo in
Vegas, I suppose he just collapsed inside. He put out the contract on Charley, and because everything was against him by that time, he had the bad luck to pay Charley’s wife to do the job on him.”
“I seen it go like that, too, Corrado. Vincent lost it. It all ran out of him.”
“Well, what did we expect from Charley—if we knew. He thinks I set him up so he wouldn’t suspect anything while Vincent sends out a specialist to hit him, so he naturally figures that when I tell his wife that she can pay back the money and a penalty, because she is Charley’s wife and we don’t do numbers on wives, that I am only telling her to get the money and then set her up so our people can hit her. Charley is a man. He has to protect his wife. He has to fight back. And he does it with the fire that he gave to his family from the time he was a thirteen-year-old kid and he took Little Phil Terrone up in the Bronx. So we got to straighten this thing out. Sure, Ed wants to get the bank back and win the seventy million, and so do I, but just as much I want to get this all straight with Charley. Who is going to negotiate this?”
“Me.”
“Good. All right, set the first meeting. Tell him that he’s got to make the final deal with me. Tell him to come here. Lunchtime is good because he likes to eat but he’s going to be tense so he can’t enjoy it, so make it around five o’clock in the afternoon of a sunny day—if it rains we’ll wait until a sunny day comes along—and tell him to come here. Tell him my daughter Amalia will go out and wait with his wife wherever he says—only you will know where—so that if I am lying to him, if I betray him, then the wife can take my favorite daughter. We’ve got to straighten this out with Charley.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
The mobile home that Irene rented had been built on a Macktruck chassis in 1961, and either it had been mothballed for fifteen years or they had built much better automobiles then. The housing was designed to provide two bedrooms, a combination living room and dining room, a galley, a toilet and a shower. Up front, behind the driver’s seat, was a wide, comfortable bunk. Charley relieved the Plumber with the driving for two hours every five hours. The Plumber slept, when he wasn’t driving, in the driver’s bunk, which within two days he had decorated with nude beaver shots from the national magazines. The Plumber was the only student of the media on the team and didn’t look at the news columns. The others never thought about reading a newspaper because they figured they knew what was happening, and that was what the newspapers would be conjecturing upon, and they had neither radio nor TV with them.
Not that they didn’t know what was happening. Irene always looked at the headlines when she went shopping in towns along the way for food. But she didn’t go shopping very often because Charley didn’t think it was a good idea. “The vegetable department is always handled by a wop and they have brothers and cousins who could be looking for us,” he said.
“Believe me, Don Corrado has a long arm.” Still, Irene’s eye caught a headline about the fire at Palermo Gardens and she brought the paper back to the truck. Charley and the Plumber were almost sick when they read the names on the list of people who had been burned in the fire. They had known every one of them for all of their lives. “This is the worst single thing I ever seen in my life,” the Plumber said, “Jesus! Mary Gingarola! I almost married Mary Gingarola.” He dropped the paper and turned away. They were took sick about it to read past the list and the front page. They never made the connection with the Boccas. They were away out on the Island after that, so they missed the news about Vincent getting hit.
Irene and Charley handled the shopping, the cooking, and the cleaning up. Filargi was settled in the forward bedroom. Charley had rigged a heavy shutter over its window for when they were parked, but the shutter was left open when they were running, which was most of the time.
The truck moved on a regular pattern between Riverhead and Montauk, going out to the end of Long Island along the South Shore roads, as far out as Montauk Point, coming back through Sag Harbor and taking the ferry from Shelter Island to Greenport to cruise the North Shore. As much as they could, they stayed off the main highways. At night, whenever they could they parked at trailer camps for water hookups. On the fourth day, the second day after Charley’s letter had been delivered in New York, Irene took the morning train in from Riverhead, took a cab from Penn Station to Fifty-sixth Street and checked out that the house flag of the New York Athletic Club was flying from the thirty-third-floor pole. When that was confirmed she sent a messenger to Ed Prizzi with the second letter.