Prizzi's Honor

by Richard Condon

  “They whirled around. ‘What?’ Willy said, and Joey couldn’t say anything.

  “‘Did you expect that all this would cost you nothing?’

  “‘You can’t do that to us!’ Willy screamed.

  “Charley shot them both in the stomach. When they fell down he took a hatchet out of a drawer. He knelt down beside each man and, spreading each man’s arm across the floor, chopped off his right and left thumbs. It brought them back. Their eyes rolled in their heads, then they focused on Charley. He stared down at them. He is a hard man, but he was soft with triumph that night, I can tell you. He said, ‘The Brooklyn cops will get your thumbs. Our man will see that the official sheet with your print gets to the papers. You will be famous again! Famous!’ and he shot them through the kneecaps. They made a lot of noise, I can tell you. Charley says, like Joey and Willy are listening to him, ‘We’ll hang around till you guys quiet down.’ After about twenty minutes—who could stand that kind of noise?—he shot them in the head and we left.”

  Irene stared at Louis. “We aren’t going to stay in Rio, Louis,” she said, “we are going from there to South Africa where the sun always shines, where nobody can find us because there isn’t hardly anybody there.”

  Not that she had ever intended to go anywhere with Louis after they made the score.

  She drove to her office in the amethyst Gozzy ($53,000, retail, with plates) thinking about Charley Partanna who, if she ever thought of him, she would have imagined to be another hoodlum like her father. She was grateful to Louis for telling her about Charley Partanna. She thought about a mob as a mob no matter what the family name was. Anybody who used his head could have robbed Polack Joe Saltis blind. She decided she needed to take some kind of course on Sicilians. They were too dumb to protect their money, then they went crazy for revenge as soon as somebody took it. Maybe her work was too specialized, so that she never got to see the big picture. There had to be more to it than just money with the Sicilians. They were all macho flash and they were so fucking dumb. She couldn’t get past that shit about their honor, when they lived by turning on each other for any rotten edge or one fucking dime. Their religion was betraying their families and their friends, they were the lowest kind of shit on earth, and if she kept thinking like that she could get herself killed.

  She had never looked at every job just like every other job. That’s why she was the best. So—she was going to start all over again and begin to study each hoodlum as different from every other hoodlum, not just as Polack hoodlums, or Jewish or Sicilian hoodlums, but as dangerous animals capable of doing her grievous harm. They had to have at least two minds: the group mind that made them need to be a part of a family, and a separate individual mind that let them survive inside the grinding, double-crossing mass of their families, betraying their own people for money again and again, fifty thousand times. She was sure that it was the macho disease that made the Sicilians so fucking dumb. The family lived only for power—and money, because it meant more power—but it was the use of subtle power subtly manipulated to move great mountains (as with Charley Partanna’s problem, which ultimately needed to be solved by an attorney general of the United States moving in his expensive ways his wonders to perform) that had made them what they were. Money, beyond a point that they had left behind long before, was only grease for the chariot. All those who followed behind the chariot gained money but, in appropriate measures, they were following the chariot because of the prodigious power of the chariot. It could do anything, because it had all the shit and coke, sixty-seven national sports to take five hundred million chump bets every day on, broads, loan sharks, labor unions, cops and politicians and judges, and a couple of hundred “legitimate” industries. It could go anywhere because all the people wanted them, and the people elected the politicians. She shivered deliciously with the thought of sharing all that at the top. She was a woman but as she saw it, looking back over the years that had taken her from a Chicago slum to the driver’s seat of a Gozzy, that was an advantage.

  She saw that she would have to know Charley Partanna. He had things that she did not have. She had things that, perhaps, he did not have. He was steadfast. Well, Marxie was steadfast in a shaky kind of way. Marxie did as he was told and he was glad to have her there to guide him. Charley Partanna was loyal, and although she did not know whether he loved the people to whom he paid loyalty, he loved loyalty as a separate thing, by itself, because he had been trained that way. Marxie was more dependent than loyal, because he was a half-a-lung man running a seventy-woman stable. Marxie needed women to help him get through life. He had been caught with his opportunism (and his cock) showing many times. He was more loyal to switching loyalties. Charley Partanna was strong. Well, no one could say Marxie Heller was strong.

  She didn’t know anything about Charley Partanna except what she had heard, and that was never good enough. When she had the time, which would probably be never, she would have to get to know Charley Partanna. In the meantime there was hardly anything more important than spending as much time as she could thinking about how she was going to protect herself from him when everything hit the fan at Vegas after the morning of the eleventh day.

  She slid the key into the lock of a door marked WALKER & WALKER, TAX CONSULTANTS, in gold leaf on simulated mahogany, with smaller letters in the lower righthand comer that said By Appointment Only, and locked the office door behind her when she went in. She went through the mail, almost all of it from the Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Service, but with four letters from clients. She dictated the responses to the letters into a machine after consulting files and tax references, twice telephoning lawyers, then she put the dictation sleeves into a large manila envelope that was addressed to a stenographic service, telephoned the service to send a messenger to get them, then checked the telephone answering machine attached to a telephone on the far left side of her long desk.

  It was an eccentrically, if sumptuously, furnished office. There was no anteroom because there was no staff. The room was approximately thirty feet by thirty feet, on the corner of the twenty-third floor of a new building, with four windows that overlooked Beverly Hills. The desk dominating the room had been a military map table; an oak top, four feet wide, eight feet long, upheld by oak horses. At each end of the desk a telephone sat, connected to a telephone answering machine. There was a steel engraving of Pilsudski. There was a romantic painting of Chopin at a piano. There was a framed photograph of Marxie with a lot of Teamster brass and Richard Nixon. A wheeled filing cabinet was concealed in portable window boxes packed with plants, the sides of the boxes concealing the filing cabinets underneath. The large side table had once been a casino craps layout. All the walls of the room on the windowless sides were lined with tax law reference books and schedules. Through connections here and there, Irene did a net tax consulting business that averaged out at about sixty thousand dollars a year; the lesser part of her income, but her solid front.

  She played back the single message on one of the far-separated telephone answering machines through the blower. It was a rough New York Italian voice. It said, “Room eight-oh-five, Peak Hotel, Brooklyn, Thursday, July twenty-third. Somebody’ll pick you up and take you to the meet. Bring tools.”

  The twenty-third was six days away. The twenty-third would be the seventh day of the Vegas scam.

  She called a tax-burdened client and told him they could have lunch.

  ***

  When Irene answered the knock on the door of Room 805, at the Peak Hotel, a beautiful Italo-Arabic-looking woman was standing there. “Hello,” the woman said, “are you Irene Walker?” Irene nodded. “I’m Maerose Prizzi. I’ll take you to the wedding.”

  When they got to Santa Grazia’s, Maerose told her to find a seat on the left side of the church. “I’ll pick you up as soon as the mass is over,” she said. Irene collected her repose like a pussycat and sat serenely watching the wedding, wondering whether she would be home this time tomorrow, deciding that things
must be moving right along at Vegas because no news was good news and Marxie had never failed to call her whenever things were going wrong.

  After the mass she found Maerose at her elbow and they were assigned a limousine to themselves to take them to the reception. In the car, Maerose gave her a sealed envelope. “You drop this in the silk bag at the door on the way in,” she said.

  Once they were inside the door into the reception room, which had been decorated as if for a Polish wedding, Maerose spotted somebody and called him over. This must be the contact. Then Maerose introduced him and she knew it was the contact. It was Charley Partanna, the legendary Charley Partanna. She gave him her full attention. Maerose darted away into the crowd. Charley looked at her like she was some kind of new species so she figured he had never worked with a woman on a hit. They all got used to it. She let him do the talking. “How about a drink?” he said.

  “Maybe a glass of wine to the bride and groom.” Jesus, he was a big man. He was like a high rectangle of meat and hair. He had a nice smile and that threw her off. It didn’t go with his business. His voice came up from his belly like in buckets of mud, she thought, but it was a listening voice, it responded to what it was talking to. Nice clothes. Most men she knew wore expensive clothes but not many wore nice clothes. It was an Italian and Polish necessity to wear a tuxedo to an afternoon wedding, but Charley’s jacket was quiet and black and it had natural shoulders, on him like an ox yoke, and the whole effect—no bright green ruffed shirt, no magenta bowtie, no wine-red lapels, and no yellow cummerbund—made him seem to her more like a real man than a headwaiter at an acid-dropping party.

  Someone began to talk into a sound system from the stage and it took her a few moments to register that it was Vincent Prizzi, but there was no mistaking who came out next, the grand old man, Corrado Prizzi, the oldest and most powerful surviving chief executive in the entire national Combination.

  They made the speeches short. Charley asked her to dance. It was a great tune from when she had been a little kid, “You, You’re Driving Me Crazy.” She answered Charley with her big brown eyes but as they turned to go onto the dance floor, Maerose Prizzi told her she had a telephone call so she knew, all of a sudden, that Charley had meant something entirely different by the way he had been looking at her. He wasn’t the contact. She followed Maerose through the crowd, thinking, Charley Partanna has gone fruit about me, and she measured how she felt about that. It was good, because she liked him. It was very good because, since they were deep into the Vegas action, which Charley Partanna was going to figure as being a shot at Prizzis’ honor, and since he would be the bloodhound they would send out to tear them to ribbons, she needed Charley Partanna on her side. If she was reading him right, this was her lucky day.

  Maerose led her to an alcove off a side room, off the ballroom, and didn’t introduce her to the tall, thin, old man who was standing there. She left them alone. It was Angelo Partanna. He showed her his expensive false teeth in a brilliant and courtly smile, then he threw the smile away, and there was nothing to look at in the face except those ballbearing eyes.

  “It’s a contract on Sal Netturbino,” he said. “Waldorf, twenty-one hundred, at three o’clock—one hour and ten minutes—he is expecting a woman he never saw. She won’t get there. He’ll think you are her.”

  “A hooker?” Irene asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I can do a hooker,” Irene said.

  “When you go out, after you clip him, go to the downstairs bar. Ask for Johnny. He’s a bartender. Tell him you think there might be a message for Mrs. Bronstein. He’ll give you the envelope and he’ll let us know everything is copacetic.” He smiled and nodded so she left.

  She got a cab to the Waldorf. She went straight to the twenty-first floor and Netturbino’s suite was right near the elevator. She rang the bell and decided to be a demure hooker type. He opened the door ready for action. His bathrobe was open and he had no pajama bottoms on. His dong wasn’t flapping. It was like an extra arm. “Hey! Right on time!” he said with the kind of desperate concentration that comes to men with a hard-on.

  “I’m Rhoda Bronstein,” she said, whacking her cheekbones with her eyelashes. “I’m sorry but I have to use your john.”

  “Be my guest!” he said expansively. “But don’t take all day about it.”

  She went into the john, closed the door, screwed the noise-killer to the piece and went back into the living room and killed Sal Netturbino. Then she peed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  There were two more days to go in Vegas and, while she was thinking how she could deflect the force of his pursuit after everything hit the fan, Charley Partanna called her from New York and asked her to lunch. Marxie was due to call her the next day at 12:30, when he woke up in Vegas, but a lot of times he was late. She made the date with Charley for one o’clock, at the Beverly Wilshire. Marxie called five minutes early. “Right on,” he said, inside one of his actor fantasies, probably doing the main Black Panther inside his head. She had plenty of time to freshen up and to balance her new ($190, retail) green balibuntal hat on her curls and drove out to the hotel.

  Charley looked pale when she spotted him in the lobby, but as he approached her chair he got all red. He loomed over her and blurted out how he was scared he wasn’t going to see her again. She had been absolutely right. He was nuts about her. Well, that happened. It was very nice. This time—she knew that she should be thinking about the positive value of his infatuation in relation to the bundle of money they were scooping up in Vegas, but there was something else. She felt something special about Charley. She didn’t know exactly what was happening to her, but looking into his eyes made her feel both older and closer to death, and at the same time eternal. She didn’t know what the feeling was because she had never felt it before, and the only reading she had ever done had been tax books, so what could she know about love? Charley was different from once before, at the wedding, and twice before, in his myth. He was a young middle-aged man. He looked so healthy and vulnerable. He was so big—everything was big: his hands, his nose, his head—but inside the big man there was a little man, and inside the little man was a boy, a yearning boy. She thought of what he was—what she was herself—inside the butter flesh, which pretended to know exactly what it wanted. There was uncertainty in both of them, but uncertainty that could be melted away, she thought, in an instant, if her uncertainty could join with his and they could suddenly be sure.

  Driving out to Las Tremblas, her favorite Mexican restaurant, Charley told her a story about helping people at a motel in a blizzard and it confused her about him, because she knew he was the Prizzis’ avenger but that didn’t match this other guy washing dishes and making beds because he wanted to be useful. She tried to remember who had had a number done on them in Lansing, Michigan, about that time, and it came to her—the business agent for the Teamsters who had been wasted with a shotgun. It had to be Charley’s hit.

  “You are different from what I thought you’d be, Charley,” she said.

  “Why is that?”

  She wasn’t going to volunteer what she did for a living on the high-income side, so she couldn’t tell him she had expected a hoodlum but had found someone else entirely sitting there beside her.

  “Well—you would be rough. I mean, I thought you would look at the women there and figure, what the hell, let them clean up the motel, that’s what women are for.”

  “Not me,” Charley said. “I live alone. I keep a clean, neat house so I figure wherever I’m living, that’s my house. Is that the restaurant? Up there?”

  Somehow, Charley began to ask her if she was married and the whole protection for the Vegas job fell together. Louis had to go anyway, because he actually expected that she would go away with him to Rio or wherever, and Louis was going to be the Prizzis’ first choice when they found out, because he was in the Prizzi family. Marxie was dying. He didn’t give a shit what happened and he was only going through the motions on t
his job so he could leave her a stake. She would have to take Louis and give Marxie to Charley so she wanted to give Charley a little extra reason for not liking Marxie so he would do everything more quickly. She let Charley pull the whole story of her marriage out of her. None of it was true except that she and Marxie were married.

  ***

  She had been eighteen years old, hustling her ass in the Loop hotel lobbies and bars, and getting fifty percent of it taken away from her by The Outfit, when she met Marxie. He wasn’t a pimp. He collected from the girls and from the pimps. He was plodding and methodical about it but he was a jagged man inside. Ever since she had been a child and her father had beaten up her mother, about four times a week, Irene had vaguely understood that she had some kind of thing in her that calmed men who were jagged inside. Marxie got her signals. He was a watery, tentative man all his life but whenever, all through their time together, she had needed him to move, he had moved. She was one of maybe seventy hookers he was collecting from, but, with what was to prove to be unerring psychic dependability (if absolutely no other kind), he asked her to have a drink in the fall of 1963 at the Palmer House. After a while he asked her to move in with him. Then, in the spring of 1964, he told her he had a job as a bookkeeper with The Outfit in Detroit and he asked her to marry him. She had been knocked flat on her ass by the idea, but just the same, she liked Marxie. He needed her and Christ knew she needed him. She didn’t have the indifference that successful hustlers have. She wasn’t a born suicide and she wasn’t a slob. She was attracted to numbers and Marxie knew all about numbers, so she cried all over him and said okay. They moved to Detroit. The Purple Gang had gradually converted from a Jewish mob to a Sicilian family. Marxie was a carryover from the old days, a part of the sentimental notion that Jews understood numbers better than the Sicilians. It slowly became clear to both of them that Marxie had a lot of things wrong with him: his lungs were shot, his heart was weak, he was a bleeder. After ten years in that climate, he couldn’t stand up to it anymore. By that time she was a courier delivering the Nevada skim for certain people and carrying it to Miami for the first split, then to New York for the second split, then to Chicago for the final split between Chicago and Cleveland. They moved her up then to the overseas routes, carrying the cash to Zurich, Geneva, Panama, Nigeria, and the Caribbean; long flights with lots of time to crack the tax books.