Prizzi's Honor

by Richard Condon

  “What’s the matter, Charley?” Pop asked.

  “I don’t feel so good, Pop,” he said. “Maybe the food was off, or something.”

  “You like her.”

  Charley could not acknowledge that.

  “You love her?” Pop’s voice wasn’t amazed. He was gentle. He was Pop, the consummate adviser, the wise man of all consiglieri.

  “Pop, I can’t talk about it now.”

  “You don’t need to talk, I’ll talk. She is a smart woman, the best. Look, Charley,” he said quickly as his son turned away, “what do you know about her except what you feel about her?”

  “What I know is all wrong.”

  “Whatta you mean—wrong? You think you can know everything about everybody? You know her a couple of days, a week maybe. Hey—what did you tell her you did for a living?”

  “Olive oil and cheese. But she knew, Pop. She is what she is so she knew what I was and she didn’t say anything. She went to the wedding to get the nod from you, then she went and did the job on Netturbino. She tells me she is a tax consultant.”

  “Charley, suppose it was the other way around? Suppose I told you, up front, that she took the contract on Netturbino and then you see her and she asked you what you do? You’re gonna tell me that you woulda told her that you were the enforcer for the Prizzis?”

  “No.”

  “We both know a dime-a-dozen bunch of guys who go around telling that they knocked off this guy and that guy and you know they are fulla shit. This woman is the McCoy. She figures you are gonna know about her sooner or later but she ain’t gonna come out and tell you. Listen, Charley—anybody who has a hunnert thousand a customer bidniz like her can’t take any chances with it, you know that.”

  “What a business for a woman!”

  “You think she decided what business? Her father was a pig but she stuck with him until they found him under a pile of garbage in the city dump. She was a good daughter. Then she finds Marxie Heller and he was good to her. She went to Detroit with him and she saw him through the whole lung business, then he left her because he couldn’t stand it to make a young woman like that try to settle down in Phoenix. So she goes to Chicago and gets a job with the wire, handling cash. They like her. They move her up. She was a courier and while she went back and forth across the ocean she studied the tax laws and she was good at it.”

  “So what’s the use of being good at it if she’s a piece man?”

  “She’s an American! She had a chance to win even more money so she grabbed it! She had a great front, her tax racket. She knew the environment. She had the connections. She knew there would always be special situations where a woman could handle it better than like Al Melvini or you. So she went out and did a great job. She’s got it made, Charley.”

  “I don’t know, Pop. This is a serious thing. We were going to get married.”

  “She would be a good wife, believe me. But Don Corrado and the family wouldn’t understand that. Bring her to New York, sure. Live with her, sure. But you know the Prizzis. A woman, to them, belongs doing what she does.”

  “I gotta think, Pop.”

  “You remember what I said, you hear, Charley. You don’t get crazy, you understand?”

  Chapter Eleven

  After Dom and Phil came with the car to take Pop home, Charley went out on the terrace and brooded. He was glad Pop’s bodyguards had arrived just when they did because, for the first time in his life, he wanted to beat the shit out of Pop. He would have beat the shit out of Dom and Phil except for what it would have done to the furniture. He felt like going down to The Corner and seeing who was in the luncheonette and beating the shit out of them. What else could he do?

  He suddenly felt sick and sprinted to the bathroom with his hand over his mouth, knocking over a coffee table and breaking a vase on the way. While he vomited he deplored having broken the vase. Where could he replace it? It had absolutely the color green that matched the stripe around the rug and the trees in the big painting. He would be three weeks trying to get the right vase, he thought, vomiting. Maybe somebody could bond this one together again so that the cracks wouldn’t even show. Jesus, he certainly hoped so.

  While he washed he knew that he hadn’t gotten sick about what Irene did for a living, he was sick about the Prizzis’ missing $360, which somebody had lifted off Louis Palo after they whacked him.

  As he dried himself with sweet-smelling cologne he shook his head in disapproval. Louis Palo, the most suspicious man who ever ate a cuddiruni pizza, walking around with the $360 on him, had gone all the way out to a dump of a bar where the waitresses tricked in the parking lot, away out on the state highway, to a toilet like Presto Ciglione’s, to meet somebody. Well, Louis would never have gone there, Charley knew, unless some doll he had wanted to win bad for a long time had handed him a line of shit and got him to go out there. Son-of-a-bitch!

  He walked unsteadily out of the john and set the coffee table right. He picked up the pieces of pottery that had been a vase that Maerose had knocked herself out to find, wrapped them carefully in a sheet of newspaper, and put them into a drawer. He would have to tell Maerose what had happened and she would bawl the shit out of him. He really had it in for whoever had hit Louis.

  He went out to the terrace to think. He sat down and looked across the bay and lighted a cigar. He tried blowing a smoke ring but the breeze took it away. Okay. It was impossible that Irene had hit Louis. But if Marxie Heller was dying in a couple of days he would be too weak to take on Louis. Anyway, the longest, strongest day of Marxie’s life he couldn’t take Louis. Louis was a rough customer and he was suspicious of everything. So who the fuck had iced Louis Palo? He got up and went back into the apartment. What was the sense of playing guessing games. He had to try for a little information. He went to the hall closet and rummaged inside it until he found a copy of the Las Vegas telephone book. He looked up the number of Presto Ciglione’s bar and went back to the phone to dial the number.

  “Put Presto on,” he said. “Tell him it’s New York.” He waited.

  “Presto? This is Charley Partanna.”

  “Well, hey! How about that? I mean, how are you?” Ciglione said.

  “Listen,” Charley said, “that night Louis caught cold, did he actually come into your place?”

  “No. I was surprised. I mean, he never come in.”

  “All right. Okay. Keep it between you and me. Thanks.”

  Charley hung up. He went back to the terrace puffing on the big heater. That proved it. Louis hadn’t gone out to the bar to meet somebody. He had gone to the parking lot to meet somebody.

  No witnesses. Whoever had talked Louis all the way out there had then nailed him in his car in the parking lot, had stood in his car lights, had got in the car with him to do the job on him, and had lifted the $360. It had to be a woman.

  Who was the woman Pop said was the best in the business? Who was the woman who was married to Louis’ partner on the scam? Who was the woman who had given the Prizzis back $360, but who was holding out the other $360? Who was so gorgeous that Louis, totally suspicious Louis, would have grabbed his cock and forgotten his money? That’s who.

  Around and around and he came out always at the same place. Two guys are passing phony markers back and forth at the cage. They don’t need anybody else in the scam with them. They are all the troops they need to rip off the $720 from the Prizzis. Louis didn’t need to meet anybody in Vegas. He had scored. Marxie Heller left Vegas right away. Why did Louis wait? Louis waited for the only thing he had ever waited for—a broad. She had convinced him that she was going to leave Marxie and run away with him and the whole score and Louis was waiting in that car with his cock in his hand until she came out of the night and got in beside him and did the job on him. That was the only way. Irene had iced Louis and had racked up the whole $760. Then it figured that, maybe because Marxie had been good to her but mostly because he was dying, she had divvied the money up into two piles so that when the Prizzis s
ent him to take her and Marxie she could do her impression of Lillian Gish and give him back half the money. He sat on the chair in the corner of the terrace, holding his stomach with both arms and rocking back and forth, gripping the cigar in his teeth, tears running down his face. Then he reached down for the telephone on the floor beside him, pulled it up into his lap and dialed.

  “Maerose?” he said into the phone. “Charley. Charley who? Charley Partanna, fahcrissake! How many Charleys call you at this time of night?”

  “Charley, what is this? It’s a quarter to one in the morning! What do you want from me, another Polish broad?”

  “Mae—Mae, listen—I broke the vase.”

  “What vase?”

  “The special vase that matched the border on the rug. That vase you knocked yourself out trying to find.”

  “Charley, what are you, outta your head?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Of course I’m alone, you klutz.”

  “I got to see you, Mae.”

  “About a vase?” But she heard the need in his voice. “You got to see me, Charley?”

  “Yeah. Whatta you say?”

  “Charley, what’s the matter? What happened? You in trouble?”

  Even Charley, even Charley at that nadir of his life, knew enough to answer, “Why should I be in trouble because I got to see you? I—I miss you. I need to talk to you. Okay?”

  “After almost ten years, you suddenly miss me?”

  “Can I drive in and see you?”

  “Sure, Charley.”

  “Half an hour. Forty minutes tops.”

  He went to the mirror in the bathroom and combed his hair. He went to the bedroom and put a tie on. Then he took off the tie and his white shirt and put on the short-sleeve black sports shirt he had worn in Phoenix, smelling it carefully to be sure it was kosher, then dousing himself under the arms with cologne just to be sure.

  ***

  Since her father had banned her from the Prizzi family, Maerose had lived in Manhattan in an apartment house on East Thirty-seventh Street off Park Avenue called the Matsonia. She had ten points in an interior decorating business on East Sixty-second Street and, in business, she used the name Mary Hoover. She was a good decorator and she handled the firm’s male clients, the inside kind who could afford the prism paintings of James Richard Blake. Angelo Partanna, with an okay from Corrado Prizzi, was her go-between with the family. She was allowed to visit with them on Christmas and certain other holy days, like St. Gennaro’s, and for birthdays, weddings, and funerals. At first, everyone talked to her except her grandfather, her father, Eduardo, the heads of the Sestero and Gennaro families and other men of the Prizzi family. Many of the women did not speak to her until Don Corrado mentioned that he wanted that changed, but by that time Maerose wouldn’t speak to them. Charley, who was considered to be the cause of her exile, always said hello, if not much more. Angelo Partanna and Amalia Sestero were the only two people in the family who welcomed her. That had been going on for nine years and two months—“almost ten years” as the people said—but Maerose never missed a chance to cross the river to hold her head up among the Prizzis. Her fidelity brought Don Corrado’s silent support in the third year, so that gradually many of the men including Eduardo, spoke to her with kindness when her father wasn’t in the room, but her father would not change. Nor was it possible for her to get permission to visit her family—in a symbolic kind of way to enter Brooklyn—on any day other than the days that had been prescribed by her father.

  Maerose Prizzi was a princess in exile, who longed for her home and her people while she lived about four miles away from them, and the objects of her longing were like planets to her sun—some farther away from her warmth, others closer—but the greatest part of her aching need to go back to Brooklyn was to live forever in bed with Charley Partanna.

  She was strong. She had negotiated her visiting rights through Angelo Partanna when her father had been determined that she must be banished never to set foot there again. She used all of her intelligence and toughness and Prizzi determination to win back her rights to be with her family on Christmas, then holy days—because these were irresistible objects to her grandfather—then the weddings and funerals. She lost out on New Year’s Day, the opening day at Shea Stadium, which was in Queens anyway, but at which the Prizzis held important concessions behind first and third base, and on Vincent Prizzi Day at the Palermo Gardens, at which the big Easter party was held. And all other days. When she saw that she had gotten as much as she could get, Maerose held to the bargain.

  Angelo Partanna came to see her at the Matsonia every Friday at eleven A.M. to spend an hour with her and to bring her allowance from her grandfather, which was the five points he had given her in the restaurant supply racket. He brought all the family’s news. Angelo’s profession depended on his memory. She would always ask for Charley last, as she was walking with Angelo to the door, and Angleo would always say the same thing in different words, which went something like, “I think he longs for you, Maerose. But that was almost ten years ago—and, of course, there is the family.” She would nod somberly, then Angelo would kiss her cheeks and go away for another week.

  Maerose waited, certain of her father’s forgiveness and of her place with Charley Partanna. Almost ten years and he had never married. If he saw women, he didn’t bring them around the family presence. She understood as well as the men that honor was more important than love, and certainly more important than marriage and fatherhood. Honor was the face of a family and the heart and soul of a family. She did not know how she could restore the honor that had been taken away, but she waited for Charley.

  In almost ten years, only once had she lost heart. Charley, who had never called her since she came back from Mexico City, all of a sudden called her to get a woman’s telephone number from her. Christ, it had almost dropped her womb. And the woman was a contract hitter. She knew that only because Charley’s father had asked her to go and get her at the hotel, take her to the wedding, and take her back from the church to the hotel so that Angelo could give her the office to take Netturbino—as it turned out. A real ice-water dame. Jesus, it was like a knife, Charley calling to ask her that. Then Amalia told her about the woman’s husband ripping off the Casino Latino with Louis Palo and how Charley had to ace the husband, all the time getting him closer and closer to the wife.

  Maerose talked to Amalia Sestero every morning on the phone and she always asked what was happening with Charley and the Polack. Amalia would say that Charley was flying out there, then flying back, and how he walked around looking like he had been conked. So, when Charley called at that hour of the night to say he wanted to see her, Maerose knew that he figured he would get even with the Polack by cheating on the Polack with her. It was a start anyway. It was a lot better than the nothing she had gotten out of Charley for almost ten years, she thought.

  She formed a simple-appearing but providentially devious policy for herself about Charley: she decided to hold to the policy with Charley that one thing could lead to another.

  When Charley rang her doorbell at the Matsonia, Maerose was dressed in the spirit of the occasion. Her beautiful, blacker-than-black hair fell like Chinese silk below her shoulders and below her waist, framing her tremendous, aquiline, hawk-nose, Arab-wop face, setting off the oliveness dusted with that undercoating of pinkness that was the warm envelope of her body, and contrasted with the brilliant whiteness of her teeth as she smiled welcome upon the man she was convinced God meant her to have.

  “Hey, Charley,” she said. “What’s with you?”

  He took a deep breath. “We gotta—like—talk.”

  “You want to talk here or you want to come in and sit down and talk?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  They sat beside each other on the large sofa.

  ***

  The room was furnished like the interior of an important Chinese pagoda during the period of Napoleon II when the emperor had reigned ove
r farmhouses stuffed with Middle American antiques. “Authentic, it ain’t,” Maerose had said to her partners, “but we’re like custom tailors, you know? We’ve got to dress the set to get the maximum attention.”

  “Yes,” said the senior partner, “but what if a client goes into shock after seeing this?”

  “Listen, Gascoigne—the colors are right, that’s what counts. Everybody sees shapes differently but the colors are forever.”

  ***

  “This is some beautiful set-up you got here,” Charley said.

  “Well—that’s my thing.”

  “How come you got so many books?”

  “I’m alone a lot.”

  “How come you didn’t set me up with books at the beach?”

  “You aren’t alone a lot.”

  He had been trying to look only at her face. Not at her eyes, he couldn’t look into her eyes, but he kept looking downward and he began to feel the talons scraping his scrotum because she didn’t have anything on under that thing she was wearing, and it was thin enough so he was, almost, able to see her boobs. Jesus! What a pair of secondary sexual characteristics, as the doctor in one of the magazines had called them. He needed to adjust his clothing.

  “I hear you’re on boo,” he said casually.

  “I’m not on it. I smoke it, but I’m not on it. You want a stick?”

  Charley couldn’t decide what to say. Boo, cocaine, and shit were for squares. He and Pop had open contempt for any kind of user. Including juiceheads, ever since they had gone into the counterfeit whiskey-stamp business. Thinking about booze made him think of the spic place in California where Irene had got them the jugo de piñas con Bacardi. To get his mind off that he said, “Sure. Why not?”