Chapter Thirty-three
All police leaves were canceled. Rich hoodlums were arrested on sight and held for twenty-four hours before being booked, then arrested again as fast as the lawyers could get them out. The heat was heaviest on the Prizzis. The police had quickly made the connection between Filargi and the family’s bank, which had been sold to Filargi’s group, and Hanly tipped Angelo off, saying that every Prizzi phone had been bugged. All telephone contact with the house in Brentwood was broken. If such calls had to be made, they would be placed by either Vincent or Angelo from different public telephone booths.
Vincent was arrested twice; and his three capi and about two hundred of his button men, as if they were moving through a revolving turnstile.
“What is this?” he asked a sergeant named Keifetz from the borough squad. “This is the third time I been here in two days on the same thing.”
“Who did the job on Mrs. Calhane, Vincent?” Keifetz asked him.
“Who’s that?”
“The woman who was wasted when Finlay got snatched.”
“How do I know? Everybody asks me! I don’t know nothing!”
“Vincent, let me tell you something which is strictly inside, you dig? Your family owns twenty-five percent of Finlay’s bank. That’s the connection. Nobody else has any direct connection. Your people took Finlay and on the way out they murdered Mrs. Calhane.”
“Keifetz, lissena me. What do I know about kidnaping? Am I crazy? I got a business. What do I need cowboy stuff for?”
The police weren’t only tossing people in Brooklyn. They were just as grim about it in New York and the Bronx. Every time they broke up a mob score or bounced soldiers and workers around, they planted that the Prizzis had once sold their bank to Robert Finlay.
After eight days of being hassled the Bocca family called a meeting of the five New York families at a rented meeting room on the third floor of a straight bank on Fifty-first Street. The bosses attended with their consiglieri. The meeting was opened by Quarico Bocca, who controlled, among other things, about sixty-eight percent of the prostitution in the country.
“They ain’t kidding around,” he said. “They are costing us all money and they are going to keep leaning on us until we give them whoever hit that cop’s wife. All I know is one thing here. The cops keep telling my people that the guy who was snatched the day the broad got it also did big business with the Prizzi family which everybody knows about anyway, including the Prizzis. Now I want to make this a short meeting. I want to put it to a vote that Vincent Prizzi and his consigliere take a break and talk it over then come back in the meeting and tell us what they’re going to do about it. All right? Raise your hand if you are in favor.” He sat down.
“Hold the hands. We don’t need no hands yet,” Vincent said, getting to his feet. “Angelo and me are going home now, we ain’t going outside to have a meeting. Who do you think you are talking to? I am Vincent Prizzi. When most of you people had holes in the ass of your pants or you was sticking up gas stations we was the biggest family in this country and now that some of you have learned how to run broads and roll drunks we can still buy and sell you. We lose more when the cops are in an uproar than any of you. We don’t like it. But you ain’t going to tell us how we run our business whatever it is and I ain’t saying that what you are talking about is a part of it. We’ll decide what can be done. If something can be done then we’ll do it. Anybody here doesn’t like it, you come and get us. We ain’t taking any shit from any outsiders about family business. If you want a war, we’ll get one for you. Otherwise do the best you can. Don’t tell Prizzis how to run their business, and I mean most of all a scummy little pimp like you, Signore Fatalone,” he said directly to Bocca.
He stood up. Angelo Partanna rose with him. They moved out of the meeting room, slowly and quietly, while the eight men around the table looked at their cigars.
They rode back to Brooklyn in Angelo’s little Dodge. “You would think they would figure it out,” Vincent said as they rode through the Midtown Tunnel. “Who has more to fall back on, us or the cops? We own the pad. They get their main juice from it. So they go ahead and bounce the guys around on the street for a couple of weeks. How much more? You think they’re gonna go back living on their salaries after eighty-five years on the pad? Every dime they cost us, it costs them thirty cents. Sure, their heart bleeds for the dumb broad who pushed the wrong floor. They got to do that. It’s a family thing. But all the time they are thinking of the business thing. They bounce us around, we don’t pay them. They don’t get paid, they hurt. Everybody understands they got to forget so we can get back to business. What I’m saying is, Angelo, is that Bocca lost his head in that meeting. He wants to be a hero with cops he runs? He wants to insult Prizzi honor so it gets back to all the cops on his pad? You noticed nobody else wanted to push us around today, only Bocca. Well, whatta you think, Angelo?”
“Bocca has done so much time that he gets a little hysterical,” Angelo said. “He is like a person who has a lot of accidents, they finally figure out that he don’t know it, but he wants to have accidents. That is how Bocca is about spending time in a federal joint. His own people are beginning to figure him out and they don’t like it.”
“Why does anybody want to spend time in the joint? Hey! Look out for that crazy son-of-a-bitch! A woman. Jesus, every time there is a crazy driver it’s a woman. Anyhow, why should Bocca want to be sent to the joint?”
“He has terrible luck with women. He treats them like they was some kind of beast,” Angelo said. “He throws chairs at them when company is there. He makes them sleep on the floor sometimes. He breaks their dishes. No woman is going to take that kind of a life. So they make it impossible for him. His wife, his girls he has stashed around. They dump on him all the time. One of these days one of them is going to wire up his car. That’s what his own people think.”
“Maybe we should do it for them,” Vincent said.
“Believe me, Vincent. He’s going to suffer more the way he is.”
“Who was the second man on the Filargi stand?” Vincent said.
“Only Charley knows. You said Charley should run it with his own people. Why, Vincent?”
“Why? What the meeting was about today is why.”
“Vincent, we’ve got to move very carefully here. Kidnaping is a federal offense, which is the same as first degree. They burn people for it. The FBI has taken over. If we go fucking around with making cops happy by turning in the second man on that stand, then we are implicated as accessories before and after and what is just a thing with New York cops becomes a whole federal kick in the head.”
“Yeah.”
“Charley knows. Charley was on the job. The Plumber maybe knows if the second man went out with them. And Dom. But if anything goes wrong it’s only them guys who get it. We got no connection with it. If the cops get the second man from us, they are going to sweat it out of him who the other people were. The other people—except Charley—might also start to talk. They could pull us all into it so, from the heart, Vincent, I am saying to you that the only thing we can do is to forget any cooperation on whoever shot that police captain’s wife.”
“I see what you mean.”
They drove in silence through Queens and into Brooklyn. “I was thinking about what my father would do,” Vincent said. “You know how he is about family honor, well, that is how he sees what the Police are going through. The wife of one of their people got it. They made a big reaction and now they can’t back down. We got to deliver. What I am saying is that Ed can talk to them. He can show them why nobody can turn in whoever shot that dumb broad because that would tie them in with the Filargi thing and the whole federal thing. Ed can say that we will deliver the body of whoever made the hit, in any shape, manner or form that they say and with a complete signed confession shoved down his throat on delivery. When we give back Filargi, he would make the ID. The television would take it from there. The papers would take it from there. They
would cooperate on the angle of how the cops shot it out with this prick who hit the broad who pushed the wrong floor and how they got a confession then how he escapes and they have to gun him down. Department citations, everything. They get what they got to have and everybody goes back to business the way it is supposed to be.”
“That could work. That is neat and tidy,” Angelo said.
“I’ll check it through with my father then we got to bring Charley in to give us the second man.”
***
Angelo reached Charley at Brentwood that night.
“Charley, lissena me. You got to take the man by noon tomorrow at the latest. Come in tonight and get Irene and we’ll set up the routine.”
Angelo hung up.
Chapter Thirty-four
Eight hundred and twenty-six engraved invitations for the banquet at Palermo Gardens honoring Vincent Prizzi went out at the end of July for mid-September, causing high excitement and a lot of speculation in the family. The Palermo Gardens had always looked great inside Vincent’s head, because he hadn’t really seen it for fifty years, not since he was fourteen years old, attending his first big racket there. He had gotten laid that night for the first time. He still thought it had happened because his father had been the grand marshal. Getting laid to Vincent wasn’t a big thing in itself. After that first time he could take it or leave it alone, but the first time had happened in the hat-check room with the forty-year-old hat-check girl who was only doing everything she could to get a renewal on the concession. Vincent thought of her as being ninety years old now, if she was alive, but a happy-minded person and a terrific piece of ass. In his mind, everything ran together into the splendor of Palermo Gardens itself.
Fifty years later Palermo Gardens was a dump that was still standing only because Corrado Prizzi wanted it that way. Palermo Gardens was his own memory, where he had brought all the people together to get his invisible hold on them, which had made the bank possible, then the lottery, then everything else. It was the social force of Palermo Gardens, the dances and entertainments that he had organized for the people to make them content, producing so many marriages and children, establishing him as their leader the right way, not with force. Palermo Gardens had made him the center of their bounty and their confidence in him had made possible the Prizzi family. The people still saw Palermo Gardens as he saw it and as Vincent saw it. The banquet for Vincent was a great triumph on many levels, but none greater than on the level of memory. The city had tried to condemn the building four times in the last twenty years and each time Don Corrado had told Ed to change their minds.
***
Angelo Partanna brought Maerose Prizzi and the wives of two of the three capiregime to the banquet. Special arrangements were made to get Don Corrado there. Charley and Irene Partanna were busy making plans for Filargi in Brentwood, and everybody wondered why Charley wasn’t there. The three capiregime, Sal Prizzi, Rocco Sestero, and Tarquin Garrone, formed a guard of honor to bring Vincent to the banquet in a black Lincoln limousine registered to the Carolina Peach Congress, Inc., of Great Neck, Long Island. Zingo Poppaloush was the driver. Everyone wore a black tuxedo, with a white shirt and a black bow tie; no faggy colors. A neighborhood crowd of about forty people cheered as Vincent got out of the car, because Rocco Sestero’s people had organized it as a little spontaneous tribute.
“Sit here and wait,” Rocco told Poppaloush. “The Boss wants the car right here when he comes out.”
The three men surrounded Vincent, two in front and one pushing behind him, and they propelled him forward into the banquet hall. He was brought along the aisles made by the crowded tables under the hanging streamers and the bunting and the garbage light while everyone cheered hoarsely, men whistled deafeningly through their fingers, women pushed up to brush against him. Vincent tried to shake a few hands, oozing forward through the excited crowd like a heavyweight champion of the world after a popular knockout. The force of the authority of the capiregime got him to his place at the dais where Angelo Partanna had seated Maerose and the capiregime’s wives.
A brigade of seventeen hired Bolognese and Venetian cooks had been at work in the kitchens of the Palermo Gardens since morning, preparing delectable Sicilian dishes. Most of the banquet guests lived by Sicilian food. The Prizzis certainly preferred it when it was homemade, but when they ate out, and could control who cooked what, they had always used predictable cooks ever since Charley Partanna, nineteen years before, had beat up an entire kitchen brigade for what they had done to his mother’s favorite dish, focàccia di Fiori di Sambuco. For Vincent’s banquet, they were cooking for 735 heavy forks. There were 203 more people sitting down to eat than the Fire Department regulations of 1927 had allowed.
The guests were the elite of the Prizzi family: the capiregime, their bravest soldiers, the outstanding accountants, collectors, narcotics distributors and a few dealers, bagmen, top labor-union leaders, pornography executives, stars, editors, the key suborners, the top loan sharks, the senior fixers, the heavy muscle, friends from the NYPD, and their wives. Although he could not attend the banquet himself Ed Prizzi had two tables down in front, which were honored by the presence of six congressmen, five judges, and legal counsel to the governor of the state. All the guests lined both sides of strips of continuous tables on sawhorses, which bore flowers, souvenirs, bottles of wine, gleaming white linen and rented silver and dishes. Everyone seemed to be manic with the idea that they were going to see the legend, Don Corrado Prizzi, the Caesar and Croesus of their time, walk into the spotlights on the dais in person. The noise was horrendous. Old friends greeted each other screaming across tables, rushing with outcries to embrace and kiss and laughing at everything because they were so happy.
The people at the dais sat, brilliantly lighted, under the eight-by-eight-foot sepia portraits of the men Corrado Prizzi admired most in the world: Arturo Toscanini, Pope Pius XII, Enrico Caruso, and Richard M. Nixon. They were his patron saints. At least one of them had been his long-time protector.
When everyone was seated, when each one was in his place on either side of the single empty chair on the dais, Cucumbers Cetrioli and Mango Passato brought Don Corrado into the building through the back door. When the old man appeared on the platform the applause and cheering were tremendous. Perhaps the applause would have been tremendous anyway, but Don Corrado, as always, had provided his entrance with insurance by having himself escorted by a man who neither he nor anyone else in the family had ever met before, who he had met for the first time twenty seconds before, who he knew his son regarded as the greatest bel canto singer in all history, although he, himself, preferred Enrico Caruso, the Italian master Giuliano Rizzo, whose manager had accepted a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars for the appearance, who had been flown directly from a benefit performance in New Orleans in an Air Force fighter-bomber in a special arrangement by Ed Prizzi with the Pentagon.
Before the 735 people, the don embraced one-eighth of the enormous tenor, then was lowered upon his seat while the crowd went wild with abandoned excitement.
The great singer stood facing them in a pool of pure emotion then, accompanied by an offstage piano, began Verdi’s moving aria from Les Věpres Sicilienne, which described the slaughter of the unarmed French by the Sicilian patriots.
People sobbed as he sang. Others were transformed to silence perhaps for the first time since their birth. When he finished the last magnificent note they all came to their feet, applauding maniacally, shouting hysterically, and weeping.
Rizzo kissed his hands and extended them in blessing to the family, bowed deeply, then disappeared from the building. The applause, whistling, and shouting ran on and on. Vincent stood up, raising his hands. For nine minutes he tried to quiet the exultation. Then Don Corrado stood, smiling. He did not raise his hands. He stood and smiled upon them and they understood that once again he had stopped at no expense or effort to bring them happiness. The shocking noise reduced itself to a clamor. The clamor became a few hundred
voices; the voices fell into a murmur. Everyone sat down.
“We are here to honor my son,” Don Corrado said simply. “He is going to leave us—” there was a shocked moan from the guests “—to live in a nine-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-dollar house overlooking his own golf course in Las Vegas, Nevada. I say to him, for you and from my heart—God speed you and God bless you, Vincent—and I present to him this small token of our combined esteem, the going-away present to which all of you have so lovingly contributed, a complete set of sterling silver golf clubs and five hundred of his favorite Mexican cigars.” He smiled. The guests cheered. Sam Falcone and Willie Lessato came staggering across the platform under the weight of an elephant-hide golf bag that held more golf sticks than had been seen on the St. Andrews links throughout 1754. Phil Vitimizzare followed them, balancing twenty cigar boxes.
The banquet guests, stunned by Giuliano Rizzo, pulverized by the unheard-of transfer of a Boss, all at once were brought to reality by the material manifestation and leaped to their feet, producing a response which almost—almost—matched what they had given to Signore Rizzo. A great surge of love and bodies carried several hundred of them toward the stage, reaching out to touch and congratulate, and Don Corrado was gently but swiftly moved out of the building by the three gift-bearers.
The three capiregime took charge. They formed a semicircle around Vincent and yelled at the people.
“Get the hell back to your seats!” Rocco Sestero bellowed.
Prizzi's Honor Page 21
