He dressed carefully on that day. He gargled with stuff guaranteed to eliminate bad breath, even though he had read in a magazine that it was the liver that sent up the noxious fumes if it happened to get out of whack. He wondered if there was a way to have his teeth painted to add pleasure points to his smile, but he had left it too late; there was no time to call the dentist. He put on one tie, then another, until with the third one he caught the effortless knot he was looking for. As he went out the door he began to figure out the best way he could ask her for her picture without sounding like a dope.
He parked the van and went into Mardell’s apartment building. It was twelve forty-five on Monday afternoon. When she opened the door she was ready to go; she didn’t ask him to come in. His legs could hardly hold him up. He had never seen anything so gigantically beautiful. She was wearing a golden yellow turtleneck sweater, no jewelry. Her hair fell to her shoulders like a bright-gold Cleopatra wig, and her porthole golden eyes let him look back, back, deeply into the willfulness hiding inside, but he shook that off to stay pinned down under the visual squashing that the sight of her in daylight, without makeup and away from the Casino Latino, was doing to his willpower—his ebbing willpower—that was supposed to be keeping him from grabbing her.
“You are sensational,” he said.
“We had better go.” She started out, pulling the door behind her.
He put his hands on her waist and stared into her eyes as if his optic nerves had been frozen, as if he were Scott in the Antarctic in the last few seconds of life. His eyes stayed fixed and glazed, but he was able to bring his arms up behind her back, holding her and pulling her to him as Mohamet may have pulled the mountain in during the last stages of the classical overtake. She came in to him like a ferry easing into a slip. He stood on tiptoe. She bent her knees and sank a few inches, but kept her back straight. They kissed; softly; religiously. The kiss held them for some time. As they broke away, reluctantly, Charley perhaps more reluctant than Mardell, she closed the door behind her and they went down to the street.
They had lunch at an Italian restaurant called Italian Restaurant on Twenty-first Street. “Lemme order,” Charley said. Then, as he read the menu, he saw to his dismay that it was some kind of Florentine food, so he ordered steaks.
“I adore steak,” Mardell said. “Is that typical Italian food?”
“Whatta you gonna do?” Charley said. “This is a Tuscan restaurant.”
“It says Italian Restaurant on the window.”
“Tuscany is a little place way in the north of Italy. They don’t know about food. Next time I’ll get you some real food, in a Sicilian place.” He wiped his forehead with his napkin. “Listen, Mardell, what I believe is that where you start out is how everything is always gonna be. Do you believe that?”
“I—well—I suppose so—”
“So I have to tell you one thing. It’s no use trying to hide nothing from you.” He inhaled deeply. “I love you, Mardell. That’s what it is. Nobody can change that.”
“You love me?” She spoke of an utter impossibility.
“You’re shocked I said that? You don’t want that?”
“No. That is, I didn’t say that.”
“Then whatta you mean?”
“I mean—how can you love me? In total accumulated time you’ve known me about fifty-five minutes.”
“How can I love you?” he said wildly, brushing the drinks waiter away. “How can’t I love you? You are the most lovable thing I ever seen. You are the most important thing that ever come into my life.”
“Charley, I just can’t keep up with this.”
“Are you a virgin?”
“A virgin?”
“You want to know how deep I feel, that’s why I asked you that. It doesn’t matter if you ain’t a virgin. The past is the past. I love you, Mardell.”
“We have to talk. You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know what I see. I know what I feel. On some things I’m wrong, things I decide with my head, but I never felt anything like this in my life, so I know I can’t be wrong. You belong to me, Mardell.”
The waiter staggered to the table with two orders of bistecca alla fiorentina surrounded by strozzapreti, dumplings made with ricotta cheese, Parmesan cheese, beets, spinach, and egg, served in gravy with more Parmesan cheese. The steaks were as big as suitcases.
“Oh, Charley,” she said ecstatically. “Doesn’t that look delicious! I’m so hungry!”
4
Mardell La Tour, at twenty-three years, one month, was devout about her personal fantasies and had found a way to put them to use. Her best friend, Hattie Blacker, was practically knocking her brains out trying to get a master’s in sociology so she could go on to take a doctorate in the behavioral sciences. For the past year, Mardell had been backing up Hattie by researching various forms of human behavior. So far, she had been a trapeze artist named Francie Braden; a professional tennis bum called Lally Ames; a lady mud wrestler in Hamburg, Germany, billed as Gert Schirmer; and a movie press agent in L.A. known as Janet Martin. She didn’t need to do those things for a living, but she was determined to help Hattie.
Mardell, a mask name, had been born a Crowell and baptized Grace Willand. She was a graduate of Foxcroft, Bennington, and the Yale School of Drama. Her father was an Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Her mother was a painter and sculptor. They were so rich that if they closed an account in just one of the banks that held a small part of their money, it would constitute a run on the bank, forcing it to close. They lived in a large Federalist house in Georgetown that had a cribbage room, two bowling alleys in the basement, and a tunnel to the houses of whoever it might be that would be running for the presidency in ’72, ’76, and ’80, as well as last year, ’68, and in the the presidential election years before that. They were venerably old money that had owned a large portion of the country for many generations on both sides of the family.
There was nothing gnawing about the need to imbed herself within imaginary lives—i.e., being able to live other lives under the safe umbrella of money, improvising a living, moving, talking sketch of one life then moving on to the next—she merely wanted to help her friend Hattie Blacker shine above all the other members of her class at Columbia, not only because Hattie had really taught her how to play tennis, but also because Hattie had brought Freddie into Mardell’s life.
Freddie was the dream man of Grace Crowell’s decade. Ever since she had come out in Washington four years ago, Freddie had been either the secret or open target of every girl she knew. In a polygamous society Freddie could easily have had twelve or fourteen wives, all desirable; all knockouts. He was just nonpareil in every department. He was extremely beautiful in a brutishly lovely way. He was as graceful as any defecting Russian ballet dancer. At nineteen she had listed all the marvelous things Freddie was or had (he owned two Houdon busts, for one example), but she hadn’t bothered to remember all of them because she was simply too busy remembering Freddie after each time she saw him—which was as often as he could get away from his rather secret job in Washington.
She kept in touch with Washington through an exchange of letters with her mother. Sometimes, to stay in the character she was living currently to help Hattie research her papers, she wrote “case letters” to the people who she felt were closely related, dependent upon, or committed to the imaginary characters whose life she was living at the moment. The letters to the imaginaries were written because they were tools that helped her to expand her characterizations. Hattie was entirely too grateful for the research Grace was doing for her, to the point where Grace had had to tell her, “Oh, don’t be so wet, Hattie. I was a drama major. All these living impersonations help me, too. I mean—what better training could there be for an actress or a playwright than to live other people’s imaginary lives under the conditions in which they might live them?”
Briefly, in the five years since graduating from Foxcroft, Crowell/L
a Tour had tried coke, astrology, gin, psychedelic mushrooms, eastern religions, jogging, space shoes, transactional therapy, high-protein food, and W, which was either a newspaper, a magazine, or a catalog. She had never worked in either London or Paris. She had been in Shaftesbury to get the Sunday newspapers one summer weekend when she and Freddie had been the guests of some people named Weldon.
In fact, the Mardell La Tour identity hadn’t existed until she walked into the Casino Latino at show change time and had been hired on the spot. Blocking out the fantasy of this succeeding life as Mardell La Tour, showgirl, she was thinking of becoming a sexual glutton—albeit with only one man, if possible—but then all the way around the barn, just to see what it was like and to be entirely ready and able when and if the great legal moment happened with Freddie.
She was thrilled to meet a genuine hoodlum and to find him to be such a polite man who was so intent on doing what he saw as the right thing. The headwaiter, Mr. Smadja, was a darling. She learned from him that the Latino was owned by the Prizzi family, the nonpareil Mafia family of the United States, or at least prima inter pares, as her own father was to the American government. After a while, just keeping her ears open in the dressing room, she discovered that Charley Partanna was the underboss and the enforcer for the family and this knowledge drove her into rigorous disciplines of fantasy.
A week or so after she met Charley for lunch she wrote to her mother:
I have met the most fascinating man in New York. I think I could make him into a wonderful paper for Hattie Blacker. He’s what they call in his trade a “hit person,” my coworkers tell me, and if you don’t know what that is, it is just as well. He’s utterly ethnic, really adorable, and is an executive with one of the crime organizations of Brooklyn, which is a borough of New York City. He has marvelous manners and, although he is thirty years old, he is working for a high school diploma by attending night school. He has five months to go, making two and a half years of steady hard work in all. He seems to respect the diploma he will get more than the knowledge. He treats me as if I were a tiny, delicate, slightly confused Dresden doll, if your mind can fit me, a Size 16, into such a frame.
Seriously, he could represent a chance for some of the best research I have ever done. Hattie Blacker says that when she gets her doctorate she is going to settle into American tribal sociology. I am thinking seriously about doing a long paper for her on my friend, which is something that really could burnish the Blacker shield.
I had lunch with Edwina, whom you will remember because she married poor Puffy Witzel aboard that darling little train in Scotland. I see Charles, my crime executive, three nights a week after his school and my work. During the rest of the days and nights I either catch up on my reading or I do a few rounds of the discos with Chandler or Freddie. That has reached a most interesting point: Freddie wants me to marry him.
I think there’s a novel in Edwina. Three hours before her husband’s funeral she had a selection of widow’s weeds delivered to her from Bendel’s and Mainbocher, at the Campbell Funeral Home on Madison Avenue. She tried on seven outfits right in the room where Puffy was laid out (with the door locked, of course), but finally went out to the crematorium with only her sable coat over a bra and panties. She says she hates being a widow so she certainly isn’t going to dress the part.
I am eating a lot of Sicilian food because that is the only food my crime executive friend understands. It seems to be either saffron and sardines—or is it pine nuts and currants and anchovies?
All my love to Daddy,
Warmest and dearest to you,
Gracie
5
Vito Daspisa had barricaded himself in his ninth-floor apartment at the beach after a thirty-two-block car chase that started because some wise-guy cop had tried to take Vito in for possession. What got Vito so hot was that the guy was not only on the pad, but whenever he had needed quick money for an abortion or for his car insurance, Vito had always helped him out. So Vito lost his temper. And, the way it worked out, he shot the ungrateful prick. Then, in the car chase that happened right after, a crazy rookie just out of the Academy had stood in the street in front of the car waving his gun like he was Mr. Law-and-Order, so Vito had sideswiped him—what else?—was he supposed to drive up on the sidewalk and waste old ladies?
He made it to his apartment house at the beach, then an army of cops with tear gas and plastic explosives emptied the building of all the tenants except Vito and surrounded him. It was a Technicolor stakeout for the evening news with bullhorns, helmets, Air Force—type searchlights, and snipers on the roofs. A police task force swarmed over the area with assault rifles and bulletproof vests. It was potentially such a big media event in a slow news week in September that the commissioner was there to represent the mayor, whose wife had him pinned down at his literary agent’s in Montauk to rest up six weeks before the elections.
When His Honor heard about the Daspisa stakeout, he busted loose and started back to the city behind a motorcycle escort for his rendezvous with the TV cameras at Manhattan Beach. It was not only an election windfall, it was a national promotion windfall for his second book, Me, that nobody could have anticipated except that, as the mayor said, when New York was for you it always came through when you needed it.
A crowd of about eight hundred people collected in the open area, forming a semicircle around Vito’s apartment house. The three networks were demanding a minimum of two days for the stakeout and a maximum of three. Richard Gallagher, the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, told them nobody would believe it would take two days to get a punk like Vito out of the building. “All we gotta do is send up two men with plastic. One sticks it on the front door, the other on the back door. We blow the stuff simultaneously, the doors go down and the task force goes in and takes him.”
“No good, Commissioner,” said Manning, a network contact man. “They might have to take him out on a stretcher. That’s no good. He’s gotta come out standing up so the viewers can see him. Unless, of course, you shoot him down, which is the other alternative shot.”
“Shooting him will work better than just bringing him out, Gordon,” the standup reporter said.
“I wanna get you maximum cooperation, but this can’t go on more than two nights,” Gallagher said. “It ain’t fair to the taxpayer, and the mayor will be on our ass. Election Day is practically here, fahcrissake.”
The networks agreed to the two days. For a compromise, they said they had to have a little human interest on camera, they couldn’t keep shooting nothing.
“Like what?” Gallagher said.
“Like you could get one of his relatives out here and we could interview them.”
“Okay,” Gallagher said. “But let’s get some things straight here. I gotta have coverage on the mayor, who is breaking his ass to get here, and when he gets here I not only gotta have shots of him tearing up in the car and taking charge, but it’s gotta be guaranteed the shots will get on the air.”
Late in the afternoon of the second day, Vito wrote a message saying he wanted to talk to Lieutenant Hanly of the Borough Squad. He folded it into a schoolboy airplane and sailed it out of the window to the cops in the street. The cops located Hanly in a massage parlor and had him out at the beach in twenty-five minutes, burping tits.
On the scene, he was passed along the chain of command to the mayor. They stood together, isolated from the rest of the brass, in the overlighted open area in front of the building, a pregnant two-shot for the networks, while the mayor gave Davey his instructions. “Tell him to stretch it out for at least one more day,” the mayor said. “Be solicitous. Ask if he’s okay on food, et cetera. Promise him anything. Just tell him you have to come down to check it out with me.”
Hanly went up in the elevator alone. He stood against the wall next to Vito’s front door, flattened out. Backhand, he rapped on the door with the butt of his service revolver.
“Vito?”
“What?”
; “It’s me.”
“Who the fuck is me?”
“Davey Hanly.”
“Whatta you want?”
“What do I want? You threw down the airplane that said you wanted to talk to me.”
“I must be punchy. I ain’t had no sleep.”
“The families of those two cops ain’t had no sleep either, you prick.”
“Ah—I lost my head. Listen, Davey, whatta you say? You wanna make a deal?”
“A deal?”
“You set it to keep those crazy cops away from me and get me downtown someplace, better yet in New York, and I am gonna lay out the entire Prizzi shit operation on the East Coast for you.”
“Jesus, Vito—” Vito was talking about throwing away a big piece of Hanly’s bread and butter.
“Whatta you say, Davey?”
“What can I tell you? I’ll go down and they’ll talk it over.”
Hanly went back to the street conscious that the network cameras were covering him, playing it very grave, very troubled, but hopeful for justice. He reported to the mayor on full camera, no sound, saying that Vito was just buying time, but they looked like a couple of conspirators plotting the downfall of mankind. The mayor patted him on the back, dismissing him. Hanly lost himself in the dense crowd packed in the darkness around the building and went into the bar across the street. He went to the last booth where Angelo Partanna was waiting. He sat down opposite Angelo, took off his uniform cap, wiped his forehead and neck with a handkerchief, and said, “He says he’ll lay out the whole Prizzi East Coast shit operation if I can get him downtown and he can talk to a lawyer.”
Prizzi's Family Page 2
