Prizzi's Honor

by Richard Condon

  “He runs the thing for us in Mexico.”

  “Oh, that Dwye Williams. Jesus, he used to be a big man.”

  “My father wants me to call him.”

  “You going to see him?”

  “Probably.”

  “Do it right away, then we’ll have all the rest of the time for us.”

  “Sure. You want to come?”

  “No. It would make me too sad.”

  ***

  Dwye Williams had been the mayor of Philadelphia once. He was so well set politically that even after he had given the keys of the city to the mob, even after he had the citizens of the city whimpering on their knees and groping in the darkness because he had stolen them so blind, in order to get him out of the way (for his own safety and the safety of his party from certain public investigation), he had been appointed ambassador to Mexico, where he served out his full term, perpetually drunk in a wise-owl sort of way.

  When a new administration swept him out, Dwye Williams went into private law practice in Mexico City; well, not a law practice exactly, he was more a consultant. He didn’t go home because that had been one of the conditions of getting him out; he could never go home.

  The business of exporting cocaine, shit, and boo from Mexico to the States was developing big, and the Mexican coyotes were trying to tear away pieces of it so Dwye, with his official connections, made various high officers of the Mexican government full partners, and the river of dope became an ocean of dope as it oozed and moved across the thousand-mile-long frontier, into the nostrils and veins of Americans.

  Charley called Dwye from the lobby of the hotel. Dwye insisted on sending a car for him, asked for the name of his hotel, saying he would handle it, saying the car would be there in ten minutes.

  Charley waited in the air-conditioning in a chair near the front door. He felt queasy about Mexico because it made him think of the Plumber and Little Philly Zanzara jerking Maerose around and beating up that guy while they made her watch because her father told them to do it that way. The Plumber was very embarrassed and had apologized to Mae at least once a year every year after that. Charley wasn’t exactly sorry that he and Maerose had somehow lost each other, but sometimes, especially since the only night they had ever been together, even including the endless time they had been engaged and he had walked around on his toes with frozen balls, he felt a sweet longing to be with her, just to have her around, not to fuck her or anything, just to have her around because she was his friend. They were in different parts of his mind and his life, Irene and Maerose. There was no place they could ever join: oil and water. He was the happiest man in the world because he had Irene, but he owed Maerose for straightening him out, because he wouldn’t have Irene if Maerose hadn’t made him sane again. Jesus! He was never going to see her again and it made him sad.

  The doorman came over to tell him that the car was there.

  The car took them to the airport. “What the hell is this?” Charley said.

  “Mr. Williams is waiting for you at his office in Mexico City,” the impeccably blank-faced, Swedish-looking driver said.

  “He’s out of his fucking mind!” Charley said. “I thought he was around the corner. That’s five hundred miles away. Back to the hotel. Don’t fuck me around.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They drove for two miles in silence.

  “I am—and the car is—at your service. Mr. Williams wanted me to be sure to tell you that after you refused to fly to Mexico City.”

  “That’s very nice,” Charley answered. “Leave me the car. We don’t need you.”

  “Mr. Williams wants to be sure that you are comped wherever you want to go, sir.”

  “That’s different. Okay. Be out front about half-past-seven tonight.”

  They agreed that it was the greatest honeymoon anyone had ever had. “That sounds dopey,” Irene said, “but I would bet my next fee at thirteen to five that the combined people of New York, Brooklyn, Detroit, Chicago, and LA, one on one, never got laid fifty-one times in five days and watched three people pulled out to sea by the undertow to drown right under their window.”

  “The pasta wasn’t bad, either,” Charley said weakly.

  They were packing to leave a day early because Pop had called to tell Charley he had to come back to New York. “Something come up, Charley,” he said. “The grand jury is going to indict you and Don Corrado wants to get that out of the way before he calls this meet.”

  “What meet?”

  “A top family, both sides, meet.”

  “Both sides?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About the Vegas scam?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean—what would both sides know about the Vegas scam—right?”

  “Yeah.”

  ***

  They had a short goodbye at the airport. Irene cried. Charley blew his nose. He was flying through to Kennedy. Irene was headed for Dallas.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Irene checked in at the Plaza of the Americas and watched a movie on TV. She went to bed at eleven after having dinner in the room. She slept as late as she could the next morning, until 8:30, then she stretched the time by bathing, washing her hair, sewing on a small tear in her nightgown from when Charley had rolled over on her, and having a slow breakfast, sending things back and complaining that the waiter had forgotten the hot milk. At a quarter to one she got into a taxi for the twelve-minute ride to the Hilton Inn at Mockingbird and Central. She counted six tables along the window at the left and sat down opposite a fat man who was wearing a green suit, a bright pink shirt, and a green tie. He said, in that almost cultivated kind of high voice, “Hello, there. We haven’t talked since you were in Columbia, South Carolina.”

  “Yes?” Irene said. “What number?”

  He told her the number of the phone at the left end of her desk.

  They ordered omelets for lunch, hers cheese, his strawberry. “What’s the layout?” Irene said, and after that the whole thing played itself out in two days.

  The contract was on some local lawyer who was tight with the mob until he held out on them. An independent oil operator, the fat man’s client, had sued the lawyer for breach of contract, negligence, fraud, and misrepresentation. The oilie had hired the lawyer to bring an antitrust action against two oil companies for conspiring to fix oil prices. A federal jury returned a 27.2-million-dollar verdict, and the attorney was awarded 2.7 million in fees, but the appeal yielded a settlement for ten million dollars under which the oil companies agreed to pay 1.5 million immediately, and the rest over a five-year period. The lawyer didn’t bother to tell his client about the settlement and refused to give an accounting of the money. Also, he didn’t mention it to the boys. The oil man had sued and the lawyer was tying everything up with court postponements until it looked like three years before the oil man could get at the money. So he wanted the lawyer dead. The boys okayed it.

  The lawyer lived at one of the big downtown hotels, so the fat man wanted Irene to go into his rooms dressed as a chambermaid and substitute for his high blood pressure pills identical cyanide pills the same size and shape, mixing them in with the prescribed ones.

  Irene said that Texas juries understood using guns to clip people, because that was the American way, making it easier for the judge to let somebody like that off, but were very strict about poisoning and almost always returned against. She asked the fat man if the client had anything against shooting the lawyer. There were no objections so Irene called the lawyer, told him a story involving a hundred-million-dollar estate that she had inherited by will and out of which “some model” was trying to cheat her, and the lawyer invited her to his office at 9:15 the next morning.

  She wore widow’s weeds with a heavy black veil when a secretary took her in and closed the door. It was a big room with lots of heavy curtains and leather to kill the sound. Irene shot him, holding the gun under the desk, pointed through the deskwell. It hardly made any sound. Then she walked around the d
esk close up and let him have it twice through the head. She left the body there and went out to the secretary’s office. “He asked me to tell you to give him at least fifteen minutes while he goes over the papers on my case.” The secretary gave her a sappy nod and a smile and Irene asked if she would show her out to the elevator. It was an hour and five minutes before the secretary went in to check something with her boss, after holding eight phone calls, and by that time Irene was on her way to LA to pack up for the move to New York, to close the house, and to leave the full fee in her safe deposit box at the Beverly Hills bank.

  Chapter Eighteen

  On the afternoon of the day he talked to his son in Acapulco, Angelo Partanna made his regular Thursday call at Amalia Sestero’s house in Brooklyn Heights to have a glass of elderberry wine and to pick up whatever casual instructions Don Corrado had accumulated during the week. Amalia knew how to make sensational Sicilian sweets, so it was the visit he enjoyed most in all the week.

  He was sitting in the kitchen of the large house, wiping his smooth brown bald head, sipping wine, and nibbling on cubaita, the instructions from Don Corrado in his pocket, when Amalia asked him how Charley was.

  “Between you and me, and don’t let it go any further at least for the time being,” Angelo said, “Charley just got married. He’s in Mexico.”

  “Married? Charley? My God.”

  “He’s forty-two years old.”

  “Who did he marry, for God’s sake?”

  “A California girl.”

  “He can certainly keep a secret. What’s her name?”

  “Irene Walker.”

  “That’s no Sicilian name.”

  “She’s American. She’s a tax consultant. Very nice. Very smart.”

  “That is some terrific news.”

  “Well, let’s see how it goes. A mixed marriage.”

  “And she’s not in the environment.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I meant.”

  Ten minutes after Angelo left, Amalia couldn’t hold in news like that any longer. If there was one person in the world who was entitled to know, it was Maerose Prizzi. She called Maerose at her office. “Mae, I got some news.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Charley Partanna just got married.”

  Maerose didn’t answer. She put the phone down on the desk and walked away from it to look out the window. After a while she could hear it squawking so she went back, sat down, and picked it up. “Is she a woman named Irene Walker?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I heard he was seeing her.”

  “Well,” Amalia said, “I don’t know how you look at it, but the way I look at it, it’s the end of an era. You know what I mean, Mae?”

  “What?”

  “I think if you write a letter to Poppa now and you tell him the news and you say you think the time has come to let you come home, that he will tell Vincent that he’s got to do it.”

  “Thanks, Amalia.”

  “I’ll be right there with him when the letter comes. I’ll encourage him.”

  “Jesus, I’d like to come back just to have it on my father.”

  “That isn’t the only reason and you know it.”

  Maerose answered grimly that she was now in a kind of war.

  “Write the letter now, Mae,” Amalia said.

  Maerose got on the telephone and canceled the two remaining appointments of the afternoon. It was raining heavily so she called the switchboard. “Check me out on all calls for the rest of the day, Edwina,” she told the receptionist, “I’ve got a lot of planning to do in here.” She locked the door of her office and sat down with a large yellow pad. Her grandfather was suspicious of typewriters.

  Dear Grandfather (she wrote in Sicilian):

  I am twenty-nine years old and I have had to live away from my family since I was nineteen. Charley Partanna, whom I wronged, is now going to get married to a woman from California. He is happy. He has forgotten all about me.

  I am asking you to talk to my father and to tell him that I have suffered enough because of what I did almost ten years ago. I am asking you to ask my father to forgive me. Your loving granddaughter,

  Maerose

  Angelo Partanna moved very carefully. He had confided the news to Amalia Sestero because she would tell Corrado Prizzi. Corrado would think about it for a while then he would call Vincent. Angelo had to be sure Vincent knew about it before Corrado told him, so that Vincent would be ready when his father gave him the news.

  He walked down the hall and put his head in at the doorway to Vincent’s office. “How about an early dinner tonight?”

  “Sure. Where you want to go?”

  Vincent always said that but they always wound up at Tucci’s.

  “How about Tucci?” he suggested.

  “Great. You want to pick me up at six o’clock?”

  ***

  They talked baseball in the car on the way to Tucci’s. Angelo didn’t know a baseball from a cocómero but he had learned the patter after years of talking to Vincent, so he could fake the responses. As soon as they got to Tucci’s things got serious. They studied the menu, which they stared at five nights a week.

  Tucci’s had a bar in front, six tables, and a jukebox. Tucci’s wife and daughter-in-law took turns working in the kitchen. Vincent’s driver, who was also his bodyguard, had his dinner up front at the bar.

  Tucci was a Neapolitan.

  “I think I’m going to have that fisherman’s soup di Pozzuoli,” Vincent said adventurously. It was on the card twice a week, and whenever it was on the card, he ordered it.

  “Good. Me, too.”

  “Hey, look! He’s got peperoni imbottiti! Whatta you say?”

  “Lovely, lovely.”

  They had a bottle of the Tears of Christ, grown in the lava at the foot of Vesuvius. It was Vincent’s happy moment of the day, but it never lasted very long, so Angelo went to work for his son.

  “Vincent? Whatta you know? Charley got married.”

  Vincent wasn’t able to take that in. He stopped his wine glass in midair and put it down on the table. “Charley got married?” His small eyes went opaque. He stopped looking at Angelo. His mouth contorted into a tight ugly scar, until he realized what he could be showing to Angelo. He brought his napkin up to his face; then he forced himself to drink the wine.

  Angelo nodded gently. He knew what was happening inside his friend’s always predictable mind. For almost ten years, Vincent had pretended to feel shame and sorrow over what his daughter had done to Charley, but as the years went on, more and more he had blamed Charley for Maerose’s unhappiness and his own misery over the way things had turned out. How could his daughter be expected to marry and come home to her family when the man she had shamed kept the shame alive by staying single? Even if she never got married again, and he knew in his heart she must never marry after what she had done, Charley’s public mourning over what had been done to him still stood in the way of Maerose’s ever being allowed to come home. For almost ten years he had had to go out to a lot of goddamn restaurants like Tucci’s and get heartburn because Charley had made his daughter keep living in New York when she should have been keeping house for him and cooking his meals for him.

  Charley had to be the cause of the girl’s running away to Mexico in the first place. He had probably wanted her to do shameful acts, and she couldn’t stand that—she had run away. If she had been engaged to anyone except Charley, almost ten years ago, she would be married by now and he could be living with them, eating the only kind of food that could sit on his stomach, not this Neapolitan garbage of Tucci’s. Charley Partanna had forced his daughter to shame her father in front of the family. Charley Partanna had caused him more pain than anyone else in his life. Charley Partanna didn’t deserve to have a wife—a housekeeper, a cook, a companion—after what he had caused Maerose to do to himself, to herself, and to her father. He controlled his anger as well as he could because Angelo Partanna was his father’s oldest
friend.

  “Who did he marry?” His voice shook. His eyes would not look at Angelo. Vincent knew Charley couldn’t be marrying inside the family because he would have known about it long ago. What did he do—marry into one of the other four families? That could be good and that could be bad.

  “He married a California woman,” Angelo said. “She’s not in the environment, I understand. She’s a tax consultant.”

  “Not in the environment? Jesus, Angelo, what are the women going to talk to her about? Jesus, we’ll all have to shut up every time she comes into a room.”

  “Well, they’re married,” Angelo said. “They’re in Mexico on their honeymoon right now.”

  It was a calculated risk. Angelo was the only one who knew who had made the Netturbino hit, because that was the way the system was designed. That was what insulation was. No witnesses. No corroboration. Because of the traditional system of insulation Vincent had no need to know who had made the Netturbino hit. If Vincent had wanted to know, he would have asked him, but he never asked him. That was one trouble area. Then there was the other trouble area; that Charley’s wife had, just over three days ago, been the wife of Marxie Heller, who had ripped off the family for $722. Both trouble areas were dynamite. He didn’t see how Charley was going to survive it if Vincent found out about either one. The first was a violation of the Prizzi, Sestero, and Garrone women, bringing in a contract hitter as one of the family’s wives. Nobody would hold still for that. The second was even more serious than honor; it involved almost three-quarters of a million dollars stolen from the family, of which only $360 had been returned. In fact, Angelo thought, all things considered, it would be impossible for Charley to be in a worse situation than he had gotten himself into. Maybe, and even so it was too big a maybe, if Charley had happened to meet and marry this woman like three years after the scam, then nobody could say he was connected with it. But he had zipped the woman’s husband, then he had married the woman four days later, and since it was a matter of record that the woman was a worker, a worker who had the $360 that she gave back to Charley, it figured that she had clipped Louis Palo, and Vincent, feeling about Charley the way Vincent felt about Charley, if he ever was able to put the two things together, could make a deadly case against Charley about the whole $722, and the wife.