“I know he handles the rough stuff for the Prizzis.”
“You better believe it.”
“He’s just another enforcer for another big organization.”
“Charley is something else. He don’t just do what they tell him to do, he don’t look around and if he can’t find it, forget it; Charley takes Prizzi money very serious. It is like their honor with him when they tell him somebody ripped them off and he’s got to make a lesson for everybody. Charley never stops. He worries. He nags the people. He waits and he keeps working. What I’m telling you, Irene, is that we shouldn’t figure we are home free because we make it to Rio.”
“I don’t understand. Marxie told me about Charley. He says Charley is practically a square.”
“Very funny—a Sicilian square. But I know what you mean and that is what makes Charley so dangerous. He really believes he is in charge of Prizzi honor. He hurts when anybody rips them off or doesn’t pay respect to them. That’s the whole thing I am talking about. You remember Joey Labriola and Willy Daspisa?”
“The guys who turned about four years ago?”
“Yeah.”
“What about them?”
“Where do you think they are now?”
“Somewhere. Plastic surgery. New Social Security cards with new names. They are probably in the paint business in Winsted, Connecticut.”
“Charley found them.”
“How?” She was impressed.
“It took him almost three years, and a change at the top in administrations. He kept leaning on Ed Prizzi to squeeze the facts out of the government, to make them tell where Joey and Willie were. They cost the Prizzis about six hundred dollars and Charley couldn’t
stand it. How much money didn’t matter. They done it to the Prizzis, that’s all Charley knew. His father raised him right. Let somebody dishonor you and they got to be paid back, is what he taught Charley, and he’s right. The Prizzis wouldn’t have any business if anybody thought he could take whatever they had.”
“Jesus, I can’t believe it. Charley broke into the witness protection program?”
“Yeah. He did it. Look. They were big in the papers. They made the government’s case then they dropped outta sight. Six Prizzi soldiers went into the joint. That alone costs the Prizzis eighty dollars a year for their families. You say, how can he find two guys with new faces and new prints and new paper in a country this big? In a world this big? Charley never sees it that way. It is a direct line for Charley, between him and whoever crosses the Prizzis. He makes them call a Commission meeting. He was on the phone every day to all over, reminding every
capo
and all the hustlers all over that it was their duty to look for Joey and Willy. But people are people. They got other things on their mind. After a while they fob him off, then he really leans on Ed Prizzi. Ed gets hot about it after a while. He tells Charley to lay off. Charley won’t lay off. Charley keeps after him. Ed calls a meeting. Don Corrado Prizzi is at the head of the table. Vincent is there. Angelo Partanna is there, and the three
capiregime
. Charley makes them such a speech that nobody could tell him to lay off. He wants Joey and Willie because of Prizzi
honor
. They got to pay, that’s all. Don Corrado tells Ed to go ahead. It takes them eight months and some very big federal politicians. They get the run-down on Joey and Willy straight from the government.”
“Jesus!”
“You know what Charley did? He finds them in a furniture business in Yakima, Washington. The funny thing is they done what they done because they are
queer for each other. Yeah. That’s the facts. Jesus. Sicilians. Anyway, Charley rents a house in Yakima and he has the agent put out that he needs furniture, which the agent gets a commission on. He sees a lot of furniture guys but they don’t have what he wants. So the agent sends Joey over. The doctors done a good job on his face. Not a new face, you know what I mean, but you don’t make him right away. Joey don’t know me, so Charley has me be the front. I go over to their warehouse and I look. Willy is there, the second time. Gold bracelets, shirt open to the knees, long yellow hair. Jesus. I say what I need is an expert eye for them to tell me what is the right size of stuff, like whether it will fit nice at my place. So we make a date for some drinks, then we gonna go out to the house, me and Joey and Willy. Well, Willy is very, very gay by this time, maybe because he is the interior decorator partner; Joey is the one with the prices. So we go out to the house, I got them fulla wine and pasta, and the house is like outside town. They are sitting down when Charley comes in, and Joey vomits all over. Willy faints. We take them down to the cellar and this is where the real Charley comes through. He don’t yell at them and tell them a lotta shit, he
explains
the situation to them like it is important thing that they have everything straight. He tells them, calm and quiet, what they were when they come to the Prizzis—young punks working that shitty three-card monte layout, always running. He tells them, year by year, how they did pretty good and how, when coke got very big, the Prizzis put them into good slots in that business. Joey is crying now. Willy is saying, ‘What are you gonna do, Charley? The government is gonna blow you up, you lay a glove on us,’ and all stuff like that. Charley is like their father. He only wants them to understand they did wrong by their own people. They still don’t get it that they are dead. They think he wants something else, I don’t know what. What do
you want from us? they ask him. I want you to make some phone calls, Charley says, and I want you to say you are sorry you done what you done. That’s all? they want to know. He nods his head. ‘Who do we call?’ they say, and Charley gives them the names and the private telephone numbers of four
capi di mafiosi
around the country. He picks up the phone and dials the first number. He speaks in Sicilian. ‘Don Abramo,’ he says into the phone, ‘this is Charley Partanna.’ He listens. They exchange greetings. ‘I am sitting here,’ he says, ‘with Joe Labriola and Willy Daspisa, the boys we talked about a couple of years ago. They want to talk to you. Just a minute.’
“He hands the phone to Joey. Joey says, ‘What do I say?’
“‘Tell him you did wrong to the Prizzis and that you deserve to cook in hell for that,’ Charley said.
“Joey took the phone. ‘Don Abramo?’ he says in a shaky voice, ‘this is Joey Labriola. I say to you that I have put a shame on the Prizzis. I deserve to burn in hell for this.’ He looked up at Charley. Charley pointed his cigar at Willy. Willy took the phone and he said exactly what Joey had said. Four calls. At the end of each call Joey and Willy are looking better.
“‘Now we will call Don Corrado,’ Charley said, dialing.
“‘Amalia?’ he said in Sicilian, ‘this is Charley calling Don Corrado.’ He waited. ‘
Padrino
,’ he said, ‘I have Joey Labriola and Willy Daspisa.’ He listened. Joey stood up to take the phone. ‘Yes,
padrino
. Yes.’ Charley hung up.
“‘He forgives you,’ Charley said.
“Joey and Willy embrace each other. They are so relieved they are crying.
“‘But he wants your thumbs,’ Charley said.
“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.