Prizzi's Honor

by Richard Condon

  Irene moved as coolly as always. She inflated the rubber doll and wrapped it in the swaddling that she carried under her coat. When the whole package was weighted and put together in its Baby Bunting sack, all that was needed was sound effects to convince anyone that it was a baby. She grinned as she put the package together, thinking of the look on the bodyguard’s face when she tossed the baby at him. She took her place in the south apartment. Charley waited behind his north door.

  On schedule, at three minutes after two, the bodyguard came out of the east apartment. He was a wiry-looking, medium-sized man with a blue-black underbeard and a loud red, purple, and white necktie. He pressed the elevator bell. Within ninety seconds the elevator door opened and the bodyguard stepped into it to push the Hold button. He left the open car and crossed the hallway to the door of Filargi’s apartment and knocked. The door opened immediately. Filargi, a man of about sixty-three, short, plump, and nervous-looking, wearing a bow tie and a Panama hat, appeared immediately. As soon as the spring locker of the door closed behind him, Irene opened the door and, carrying the baby, stepped out into the hall. Both the bodyguard and Filargi half-turned to look at her. Irene was about three feet from the bodyguard, her purse open behind the baby so she could grab her piece, when she said, “Catch!” and tossed the baby at the bodyguard.

  The bodyguard sidestepped the baby and let it fall to the floor. He went for his gun. Irene pulled her piece out of the purse. Charley came out of the north apartment, gun in hand. The second elevator door opened directly beside Irene and the bodyguard as they pulled the guns. A woman in her middle fifties started to come out of the elevator car just as Irene shot the bodyguard. The woman said distinctly, staring at Irene, “I must have the wrong floor.” Irene shot her in the face.

  The doors of the second elevator began to close. Irene leaped forward to stop them. Charley sprinted in behind Filargi and jammed the piece to his back and slammed him up against the mail chute between the two elevators while Irene went in, punched the Hold button, then dragged the woman’s body, which had been knocked backward by the force of the bullet, out of the car by the feet, the dress riding up to the hips to show the tops of pantyhose and dead-white belly skin. When the body was out Irene released the Hold button and pressed G to send the elevator back to the lobby.

  “No bloodstains,” she said to Charley.

  “Jesus,” he said, “I thought that elevator was going to take her down to the street.”

  Charley manhandled Filargi, grabbing him by the upper arm and pushing him toward the bodies. “Come on!” he said. “We gotta move this shit out of here.” Filargi, pale with shock, watched Charley take the bodyguard under his arms and drag him across the threshold of the south apartment, telling Filargi to bring in the woman.

  “I can’t,” Filargi said. “I don’t have the strength.”

  “Take one arm,” Irene said. “I’ll take the other.” Together they dragged the woman’s body into the south apartment. Its shoulder caught in the side of the mail chute. Irene had to jerk the arm to drag the body free.

  “I had to hit her, Charley,” Irene said, “she was looking right at me.”

  “It’s okay,” Charley said. “You had to do it.”

  They left the south apartment, closing the spring lock on the door, the unlucky woman sprawling obscenely over the legs of Filargi’s bodyguard, and pushed Filargi into the holding elevator. Charley pressed the Basement and Express buttons and the car fell from the forty-first floor.

  “He let the baby hit the floor,” Irene said. “Suppose it had been a real baby? It could be dead, the son-of-a-bitch.”

  “What are you doing?” Filargi said. “What are you going to do with me?”

  “Lissena me,” Charley said. “You are going with us. When we get down to the garage you are going to lay down on the floor in the back of the car. That’s all you got to know.”

  “You are kidnaping me?” Filargi said. “Are you crazy?”

  “All right. Here we are,” Charley said. The doors opened and Al Melvini was standing there, chewing gum. “What did you do,” he asked, “take a coffee break?”

  They walked Filargi rapidly along the short entrance to the garage, through revolving doors, and out into the open back door of a Buick sedan. “Get in front, Irene,” Charley said. He and the Plumber pushed Filargi into the back seat, got in and shut the doors. Filargi lay on his back on the floor. The plumber saturated a handkerchief with chloroform and strong, sweet, sick-making fumes filled the car. He pressed the handkerchief over Filargi’s face. Filargi struggled weakly, then Melvini covered him with a blanket. “Okay, Dom,” he said and the car moved sedately to the exit of the garage. Dom Bagolone was driver and second helper. Like the Plumber he was a made man. They drove east across town to the Queensboro bridge. No one spoke until they were in Long Island City, then Charley said, “What did you lay in for dinner?”

  “I thought the chicken cacciatore,” Melvini said.

  “This is Irene.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” the Plumber said.

  “Likewise,” said the driver.

  ***

  They settled Filargi in the cellar room of the house in Brentwood. Charley called his father at eleven o’clock that night.

  “On schedule,” he said.

  “You better come in,” Pop said.

  “When?”

  “Ten tomorrow. At the office.” Pop hung up.

  “They want me and Irene in New York,” Charley told the Plumber. He included Irene because, according to the original plan before the dumb broad pushed the wrong button, she wasn’t supposed to be there anyway.

  “What’ll we do for a car?” the Plumber asked.

  “Whatta you need a car for? You going someplace?”

  “You coming back?”

  “I’ll be back tonight.”

  “That’s great. Then we’ll have a car. I feel naked without a car.”

  “Charley, bring a case of canned tomatoes,” Dom said. “When we stocked up the house we forgot the tomatoes.”

  Charley made a careful note. “Somebody must have lost their mind,” he said. “Don’t try to cook anything until I get back,” Charley said. “We don’t want Filargi to have any complaints.” That got a laugh.

  ***

  They left Brentwood at three A.M. for the drive into the city. Charley took Irene to their apartment at the beach. They took a shower together, then they made love. Afterwards, lying motionless, intertwined naked upon the sheet in the air-conditioned room, Irene said, “I can’t get it through my head that that son-of-a-bitch sidestepped the baby. Suppose it was a real baby? It could have been crippled for the rest of its life.”

  “What the hell, Irene. You don’t think he thought that was a real baby?”

  “What the hell else could he think?”

  “Anyway, he wasn’t paid to bodyguard no baby,” Charley said.

  ***

  At ten o’clock Charley was in his father’s office at the St. Gabbione Hotel Laundry.

  “We got a little trouble, Charley,” Angelo Partanna said. “That woman you hit at Filargi’s was a police captain’s wife.”

  “Oh, boy!” Charley said. “That does it. How do you like a dumb broad who pushes the wrong floor?”

  “They don’t know we took Filargi yet. The woman with the theater tickets came home and she finds the two people piled on top of each other. The baby out in the hall—you know, the doll—helps the media to confuse everybody as usual so it looks like tomorrow before anybody notices that Filargi is missing.”

  “That guy never caught the baby. Irene threw it and he just sidestepped it.”

  “Very professional,” Angelo said.

  “When do you lay the first ransom note on the bank?”

  “Well! We figured three days after the papers know Filargi is gone. Now this throws the whole thing off, because tomorrow is Wednesday, when they figure it out that Filargi is gone, then we come into the weekend, and the bank is clos
ed. So I suppose we’ll mail the first letter on Friday and they’ll get it next Monday.”

  “I think we should have one more guy at Brentwood. That would give them three eight-hour shifts out of every twelve.”

  “Fuck that,” Angelo said. “They’re just sitting on their ass. Let them work it out. They’re getting a nice piece of money so how can I justify one more guy at that kind of money? Anyway, you’re going to drive out there every other day. That’ll give them a little time off.”

  “Well,” Charley said, “we’re going to catch a lot of heat from that dumb broad being a police captain’s wife.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Maerose telephoned to Amalia to ask, in humble spirit, for an audience with Don Corrado, so that she might thank him for the meaning he had returned to her life by convincing her father that she should be allowed to come home. Amalia, her good friend, called back within the hour to say that her grandfather would see her at five o’clock that afternoon.

  Maerose arrived, dressed in black, and knelt before Don Corrado’s chair to kiss his hand. He flushed at the old-fashioned flavor of the obeisance, clucked over her and bade her sit in a chair beside him and hold his hand.

  The ladies near Corrado Prizzi understood that he liked to hold females’ hands, not for amorous reasons, no longer at any rate, but because of the tactile sensuality of the hand’s plumpness or softness or definition—and because he believed he could flow into their bodies and minds through their hands as he had once felt the power of the Capo di tutti Capi of all Sicily flow into him when he was a boy.

  He held Maerose’s hand and, with his tiny, icy, augur-eyes, bored into her consciousness. Beyond the wide window, Manhattan lay out at his feet like a field of stone asparagus, and beyond that stretched America in a sheet of endless pavement. “Amalia has told me,” he said with his ruffled voice, “that you wish to thank me for bringing you home, but I am the head of our family—who else should have gone to your father and pleaded for the only place for you in the world where you belong? You are blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, and as long as I am able, I will think of your well-being.”

  “Thank you, Grandfather,” Maerose said, his match in the bravura aspects, “you have drawn me back from Purgatory. I am a part of you and the family again. Only that could fulfill me.”

  “I wish you had been a son. You have the sensitivity and you have the strength to endure. Would you like a cookie?”

  “It is I who must offer a gift to you, Grandfather.”

  “I love gifts. I think I have always enjoyed gifts.”

  She opened her purse and took out an envelope. She opened the envelope and removed three photographs. She gave them to the don.

  “Ah! Who is this handsome lady?”

  “That is Charley Partanna’s wife, Grandfather.”

  “His wife? When? Why wasn’t I told of it? Weddings, births, and funerals are the most important things a family can share.”

  “It was sudden, Grandfather. In California.”

  “Well, well.”

  “Grandfather, this is my gift to you. Not only the pictures but what they mean. Do you remember that Louis Palo was killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was shot in a car in the parking lot of Presto Ciglione’s place outside of Las Vegas.”

  “I remember.”

  “I took the pictures to Ciglione, a respectful man. I lay them down under his eyes and I asked him to show them to the people who worked for him—who were there the night Louis caught it. There was a girl who had been out in one of the cars in the parking lot and she said she saw the woman in these pictures get out of a car and walk to the car where Louis was hit. Then after a few minutes there was like a pop and she got out of Louis’ car and opened the trunk and took out a satchel then went to her own car and drove away.”

  “The woman who married Charley?”

  “Yes, Grandfather.”

  “That is serious talk, Granddaughter.”

  “She stole seven hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars from you. She gave half of it back to save herself. She still has your three hundred and sixty thousand dollars.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “She did the job on Louis, she stole the family’s money. She dishonored us. So she must pay, isn’t that right?”

  “But what would that do to Charley?”

  “Charley married her. He married her right after she gave back half the money. I’m not saying that he knew anything about what she had done, but he knew she was involved somewhere because her husband was Louis’ helper on the whole scam. Charley has to put her in the ground. That is what his penance has to be. Doing the job on her.”

  “Now you are his priest. You examine the sin and you prescribe the penance.” He gazed at her with admiration. “You are like me,” he said, with the affection that can come from any mirror. “We forgive nothing.”

  She lowered her eyes.

  “I must think about it,” the don said. “I must ask some questions. It is my duty as the head of the family to prevent injustice.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  When Maerose moved back into her father’s house after almost ten years of exile, she took great care to be sure she looked like a ruined spinster. She pulled her hair back into a tight bun at the back of her head. She wore no makeup, but powdered her face carefully, then worked in a few lines under her eyes with a black eyebrow pencil. She wore a black shawl and black dress and she pretended that she could not look him in the eye.

  Vincent stared at her, remembering the vital, beautiful young woman he had forced out of his life. In the years she had been gone he had thought about her constantly, and he had seen her living in the same kind of tenement flat his family had lived in when he had been a boy, facing an airshaft and the sound of the rats dragging off the neighbor’s baby, but he had never thought of that changing her physically. He began to weep as he looked at her. He held open his arms as tears poured down his face, and took her to himself, the top of his head just below her chin while her hardened eyes glinted with pleasure. She wondered how long she would have to stay in this dump before she could get the job done. She had kept the apartment at the Matsonia in New York; had negotiated a leave of absence from the interior decorating firm. She hoped that she would have ruined her father, destroyed Irene, and recaptured Charley in three months’ time—maybe two, maybe four.

  During the next week, she worked silently and ceaselessly as a penitent in her father’s house and he wasn’t able to tell her that she must stop this, because that was what he thought women were for, and because on his best day Vincent wasn’t a communicator.

  He saw his daughter rise with the sun, scrub floors, wash sheets, cook meals, make beds, and polish furniture (after she had applied the Charles Addams makeup grimly every morning), and since he believed that the beautiful girl who had once been the light of his life was a broken woman, and since it was impossible, under Sicilian rules, to blame himself for what had happened to his daughter, and since, at the instant he had forgiven his daughter, all possibility of blame had been removed from her—Vincent therefore blamed Charley. Shit, Charley had behaved as if he had been forced into the betrothal with her. Now that Vincent had to look at the results of that betrothal, to look day after day on this woman who had been so vital and beautiful and who had been turned into a crone whom he would never be able to get off his hands, Vincent was able to hate Charley openly: secretly to the world, openly to himself, the Sicilian way.

  More than only taking his beautiful daughter from him and giving him this indifferent slattern in return, there had been a defilement of Prizzi honor. He was Vincent Prizzi. There was nothing that a Prizzi could value and cherish and protect more than honor and Charley had walked up to it, unzipped his fly, and pissed all over Vincent’s only irreplaceable possession. So long as Charley remained alive, that was how long Vincent would choke on his shame.

  He began to scheme. Since the day Charley had co
me back from doing the job on Marxie Heller, Vincent had been convinced that something was fishy. Somebody had killed Louis Palo to get all the money. Half to Marxie Heller. All right. Half to Louis. All right. Whose half had Charley brought back and where was the other half? Charley must have copped the money. Every day Vincent convinced himself further that Charley must have copped the missing half of the money. What kind of Boss was that? When Vincent went to Vegas, Charley would be Boss—a Boss who started out by clipping his own family for $360!

  Since Maerose had come home, Vincent had not gone out at night. He sat with his daughter in the living room that had not been changed in the twenty-one years since his wife had died and, because she hardly said anything, he began to talk more and more against Charley and, by her silence, his daughter encouraged him in his hatred.

  He began at the beginning and covered, again and again, all of the ground that had become the swamp of his honor.

  Did Maerose think Charley had ever cared for her? She did not answer nor did he expect an answer. Had Charley ever tried to see her since she had come back from Mexico almost ten years ago? She did not answer. He said he was sure that Charley had never tried to see her because he had no use for her. He had accepted the honor of marrying into the Prizzi family but he had no use for her. Maerose protested the first few times her father told her this. Each night he brought all of it up again she allowed him to see her agitation more and more, a little bit at a time. On the fifth night, after he had spent the day brooding over how he could prove that Charley had ripped his family off for $360, he charged into his daughter like the exhausted bull that he was, bellowing out his shame that because of one foolish mistake by a nineteen-year-old girl, Charley Partanna had manufactured the excuse to turn his back on the daughter of Vincent Prizzi, the granddaughter of Corrado Prizzi, because he had no use for her.

  “He had use for me, Poppa,” Maerose said. “He came to my place in New York the night before he left to marry the woman in California and he forced himself on me and did it to me.”