“We used to make buys from them,” Pop said.
“Anyway, that ain’t what I got you in here for. Charley, you remember Little Jaimito Arrasar?”
“The South American guy, the supplier.”
“He is short-weighting us. I want you to fly to Miami and give it to him.”
“Jaimito moves around with four bodyguards,” Pop said.
“How do you wanna handle it, Charley?”
“Send the Plumber and Phil down ahead of me to lay out where he goes and where he’ll be.”
“Five guys. If even the three of youse jump them, it’s gonna make a helluva racket,” Pop said.
“I can handle it,” Charley said. “I don’t need them two for the hits.”
“Five guys? No way.”
“I can do it with a coupla cyanide grenades.”
“Where you gonna get cyanide grenades?”
“Religio’s outfit can make them or steal them from the Army. Just have somebody in the high tech unit deliver them to me on the plane so I don’t have to take them through security at the airport.”
Vincent sighed. “I can’t understand it. Jaimito is clearing a nice steady five and a half millions a week but he has to short-weight us.”
“A thief is a thief,” Pop said.
“Jaimito’s a nice little guy,” Charley said, “so suppose he don’t know that his people are short-weighting us. I mean, it could be policy in Colombia before it ever gets to Miami. If we zotz Jaimito we could be hitting the wrong guy.”
Vincent and Pop looked at each other in bewilderment. “What’s the difference?” Vincent said.
“The thing is they’ll get the message, Charley,” Pop said. “The next time they won’t offend such a big customer. The whole goodwill thing would be threatened.”
While he waited for the nod from Miami, Charley worked with Religio’s technicians on locks and electronic release mechanisms, so when the Plumber called in and said everything was ready, Charley was ready.
He flew down from New York with Mardell. She had put so much pressure on him that he had to take her. She wasn’t working. She was waiting for the act to be written, so she couldn’t rehearse yet, and the costumes were still being made. (Also, although she didn’t tell him that, the New York season had not gotten under way yet.)
When he told her he would have to be away for a couple of days, she stopped eating. She ran a fever of 104 by taking the medicine that Edwina always took when she wanted to drive her temperature up. She sat in her underwear and stared at the wall. It was a big pain in the ass. Then after he told her she could go with him to Florida, he had to handle the other end of the deal: Maerose.
While Mardell packed, Maerose spent the night at the beach and she got up at dawn to make him a big breakfast so he would know she cared and would be grateful. After the big breakfast, she ran him back to the bed and held him in such a scissors lock around his waist that he thought she wanted the whole breakfast back. She packed his suitcase for him, but thank God she had an early appointment at her office so she didn’t insist on riding to the airport with him.
He was driven to the plane by Zingo Pappaloush, his prospective father-in-law’s own driver, so he certainly couldn’t take Mardell out to the plane in the same car. He had a limousine service pick Mardell up and he got away with it because she knew he lived all the way out in Brooklyn. They had assigned seats on the plane, so that was where they joined up and where a short man in white coveralls carrying the airline’s name across the back walked down the aisle and dropped a small package into Charley’s lap.
“I’m so excited, Charley. I’ve never been to Florida.”
“It’s very nice.”
“I’m going to have to buy a bathing costume.”
“A what?”
“A bathing suit.”
“So long as you don’t wear it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t wanna be killed in the riot when they see you come out in a bathing suit.”
She gave him a playful shove, which numbed his arm and almost knocked him into the aisle. “Oh, you!” she said happily.
“We are in a nice hotel at the best end of the beach, so anything you want during the day, just pick up the phone and tell them.”
“Where will you be?” she asked anxiously.
“I gotta work. I am a nine-to-fiver just like anybody else. I kiss you goodbye in the morning and I go out. Then I come home and we do whatever you wanna do.”
“It’s all right, Charley. I feel secure.”
Jaimito was at the Bolívar. The Plumber had fixed up Charley’s reservation. At eight o’clock in the morning, Charley installed himself in the penthouse suite across the hall from Jaimito’s apartment; they were the only two apartments on the floor. He changed into a T-shirt and a white jumpsuit—which was what the hotel’s handymen wore—and at a quarter to ten he sat in a chair and looked through the hole he had bored in the door, until Jaimito and the four men left the suite and went down the hall to the elevator. Charley waited ten minutes, then he went across the hall and removed the lock from the front door of Jaimito’s suite. He replaced it with a remote-control lock and tested it. He went into the suite and put identical locks tied to the same circuit box into the sliding door to the terrace and the only other inside door, which led from the living room to a hall that gave access to the bedrooms.
He hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob, put a gas mask over his nose and mouth, got up on a light aluminum stepladder with some difficulty because of the leg he had got out of the war, and fixed the grenades to each of the chandeliers at either end of the room. They were suspended on release wires that were controlled from his circuit box. Upon being released, the grenades would drop to face level on copper wire, and that would pull the pins in the grenades, liberating the cyanide gas.
While he worked, the other door opened and a small blonde with black eyebrows came into the room wearing a short nightgown. She was about nineteen, and very wise-looking. The Plumber’s survey had missed her. “Whatta you doing up there?” she said sharply. “Why you got that thing on you face?” She walked over beside the ladder and stared up at him.
He kicked her on the point of her chin with his good leg, hoping he wouldn’t fall on his ass. He climbed down from the ladder, stripped off her panty hose, and used them to tie her hands and feet together behind her back. He dragged her along the bedroom hall to the second bedroom, jammed a big ball of Kleenex into her mouth to keep her quiet, and dumped her in a closet. He returned to the living room and cleaned everything up before he took the DO NOT DISTURB sign off the door and went back to the apartment across the hall at twelve ten in the afternoon.
He waited in the apartment across the hall. At three twenty he could hear the five men returning down the hall, making Spanish noises like a pet shop in a fire. Charley broke the electronic connection with the door to the suite and thus released the lock, so when the first goon got there he said, “Hey, boss, the maid forgot to lock the door.”
“You guys go in first,” Jaimito said in Spanish.
Charley watched through the peephole as all five men disappeared into the suite and shut the door. He activated the remote electronic locks on all three doors. Then he triggered the chandelier mechanism that released the grenades and pulled the pins. He waited twenty minutes, then he slipped the gas mask over his face and went into the apartment. The five bodies were sprawled around the room, on chairs and on the floor. Charley released the lock on the terrace door and opened it wide to let the ocean breeze ventilate the room so that when the night chambermaid came in to turn the beds down, the air in the room wouldn’t make her sick.
He was back at his hotel with Mardell at six thirty. Mardell was preoccupied. Her voice sounded far away.
“Did you have a good day at the office?” she asked.
“Very good.”
“That’s nice.”
“Did you have a good day?”
“I had
lunch at the pool.” She spoke listlessly. “Some men wanted to join me so I picked up a priest and that kept them away.”
“Did he give you any trouble?”
She tried to laugh but she had something else on her mind. “No. Where shall we have dinner?”
They ate a big seafood dinner at a place the bell captain recommended.
“How come you’re so quiet?” Charley said.
“I’m eating.”
They got back to the hotel early. While they were getting ready for bed, Mardell decided to talk.
“A woman called you today.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“She said her name was Maerose Prizzi.”
He was stepping out of his trousers and he had his back to her.
“She wanted to know what I was doing in your room.”
“It must have been some crazy woman.”
“She said she was engaged to be married to you.”
He turned to face Mardell, in his boxer shorts and Paris garters. “She said that?”
“Yes.”
“She had no right to say that. I never said I was engaged to her.”
“Who is she, Charley?” Mardell asked as if she were talking over the recipe for a ham sandwich.
“She’s the granddaughter of the man I work for. She’s much younger than me.”
“How much younger? About twenty years? Is she about ten, Charley?”
“Listen—I know her all my life. I mean, she’s had one of those schoolgirl crushes from way back.”
“Then you are not engaged to marry her.”
“Engaged? To Maerose Prizzi?”
“You’ve got to arm me with all the facts, Charley.”
“I don’t get what you mean.”
“She said she was going to call me when we get back to New York. She wants to come to see me.”
“She’s behaving like a kid who is trying to make trouble! I mean, I’m going to have to talk to her grandfather about this. You certainly don’t think I could bring you with me to Miami if I was engaged to another woman.”
“That has happened. Men do things like that.”
“Mardell—she’s like a relative to me.” He gave God a chance to strike him down. “I mean, like a second cousin—or a kid sister.”
Mardell got into bed, took two sleeping pills, shaking them out of the vial elaborately, snapped out the light on her night table and lay on her side, facing away from the other side of the bed. “Don’t talk to me anymore, Charley. The only way to settle this is to sit down, all three of us, all together.”
Charley jammed himself into his pajamas and stamped off into the living room. He dropped into a chair, lit a big cigar, and stared at a racing form. He suddenly knew what Vito had felt like when he threw the bolts on that door and flung it open. He was a condemned man.
23
Maerose appeared to be looking out the window of her office, which faced a pleasantly landscaped backyard behind the double brownstone her company occupied in Turtle Bay, but she was really looking into her mind and seeing Charley. Her face was blank, her eyes were like the Xs in the eyes of a cartoon character after it has been wonked over the head with a fact of life. She couldn’t believe it. She had called the Prizzi hotel in Miami Beach, she had asked for Mr. Charles A. Partanna, and a woman had answered. Her reaction had been one of impatience when she assumed the goddam telephone operator had given her the wrong room. She found out. The woman’s voice, very British, wanted to know who was calling Mr. Partanna, and Maerose’s reaction had been, who the hell was this, asking her that question in that tone of voice as if Maerose didn’t have any right to call Mr. Partanna wherever he was.
“Put him on the phone.”
“Mr. Partanna is not here.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s at his office.”
It was one of those superior Limey voices. Charley’s office! “Who is this?”
“This is Mrs. Partanna.”
The shock of those words was like an icy sword thust into Maerose’s bowels. “Missus Partanna? When did that happen?”
“To whom am I speaking?”
“This is Miss Maerose Prizzi. Please remember that name so that you can get it right when you tell Mr. Partanna I called. I am Mr. Partanna’s fiancée.”
It was the broad’s turn to take the kick in the head. She gasped. She made a light geek sound. “His fiancée?”
“What’s your name?”
“Mardell La Tour.”
“Listen, Miss La Tour. I’m calling from New York, or else I’d come over there and we could both break a couple of chairs over that son of a bitch’s head. Where do you live?”
“In—in New York.”
“Where?”
“148 West Twenty-third.”
“When do you get back?”
“Monday, I suppose. But, really, Miss Prizzi—”
“You and I will have a little talk. I’ll call you.”
Maerose was still shaken up from the call that had produced a woman in Charley Partanna’s hotel room in Miami almost a half hour ago. The moment she hung up on Mardell she put private detectives on it in Miami and in New York, and she knew they were going to come up with absolute, incontrovertible proof that Charley had been two-timing her with the woman all along. She had to break his back. He had to know that if he had done such a thing to her she would have to demolish him.
She knew from pumping her father that Charley was in Miami to handle a problem with a schmeck producer, but he had told the woman that he had to go to an office, not that he would have told her why he was there no matter what, but the point was, she couldn’t be in the environment because any woman in the environment knew that men like Charley didn’t have an office when they went to Miami. Anyway, she certainly couldn’t be in the environment talking the way she did. She sounded like C. Aubrey Smith.
Maybe she was some local talent Charley had picked up or someone Casco Fidele’s people had fixed him up with. That she could talk herself into accepting. That was something men had been known to do on the road. But if he had taken that woman with him all the way from New York when he had never so much as had the courtesy of inviting her to Baltimore when he went, even if he knew she couldn’t come because she had a business to run, she was going to have to—she swallowed bitterly—she was going to have to find out how she could put out a contract on him.
She knew she couldn’t do it. Making the threat inside her head made her feel a little better, but if she had Charley handled she would be just like her father, and anything was better than that.
She needed Charley. All her plans depended on Charley. Finding out that he had a woman with him in Miami only made the whole feeling sharper, more disemboweling. He was a devious no-good son of a bitch, and what was she going to do? She was a Prizzi. He knew all about her being a Prizzi, better than most of the people in the world, and yet he had done this to her.
She knew Angelo Partanna would know about the woman, because he knew what Charley was going to do before Charley himself thought of doing it, but she didn’t know how to ask him without opening up the whole can of worms.
She knew one thing. She had to nail Charley to the stage. She had to take away his options and make him see the uselessness of hanging around with a woman like that or any woman except Maerose Prizzi. He had to understand that he had committed himself to a Prizzi, he was engaged to be married to a Prizzi, even if she had never insisted that they make it formal, or even that he acknowledge that they were engaged. He had to be made to understand that he couldn’t just travel around the country with any broad he wanted to lay his hands on as if they were in central China, for Christ’s sake. He was in Miami. Everybody knew him. His out was that nobody knew that he was engaged to Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter. In order to nail him to the floor where he stood, she would have to make it official, she would have to let the world know to whom he belonged. She was going to have to tell her father and her grandfather that they were enga
ged. She could hardly bring herself to do it because, once she did it, if Charley kept it up the way he was doing with other women, they would drop him in cement.
Also, it wrecked her timetable. She wanted to get the business established in Washington as solidly as it was set in New York so that, right after her engagement to Charley was made official, at the red-hot crucial moment, at the peak of the good news, she could ask her grandfather to tell Eduardo that Eduardo should take her on in his office and she could sell him the decorating business as a going proposition for a large hunk of cash, then settle down on the long-term basis to learn Eduardo’s operation, to undermine him with the family, and finally to take his place.
She began to have certain doubts about being able to make this whole thing stick about being engaged to Charley. Charley never called her to ask her out. She always had to call him. Charley never lured her into bed. Every time it happened she’d had to make elaborate arrangements to set it up. Sooner or later she was going to run out of stories to tell him just to get his clothes off and the door locked. Tears welled up in her beautiful dark eyes. She couldn’t give him up. That would wreck her plans to work her way into a position to be able to run the whole Prizzi family someday. Every time they were together he became more hers, and she knew—she absolutely knew—that after ten or twelve more times he would start being the aggressor. He would call her for dinner. He would be the one who thought up the plots and did the sweet-talking to get them into bed. With the kind of money and power that was at stake, they belonged together.
But for all the other reasons, all the reasons she had started out with, Charley was an important link in her life chain. They had to be the new blood together, the new power team. Charley was only her father’s underboss now, but by the time she was in a position to knock Eduardo out of his seat at the head of the legit Prizzi enterprises, her father would surely be finished, either dead or retired, and Charley would be the Boss of the Prizzi street operation, with all the muscle of a boss, which would be the final clincher to back her play when the time came to cut Eduardo down.
Prizzi's Family Page 10
