He could understand it, but he couldn’t understand it, but as he thought about it, he thought about the seventy million dollars and how Don Corrado had not even made a move to avenge his own son’s murder by a gang of pimps because, if a war started, it could get in the way of the seventy million dollars coming down
the chute. That helped Charley as he walked away from the house toward the Chevy van. Don Corrado had had to put the considerations of honor to one side when the Boccas killed his son. Angelo had to see his own son in agony over what they had told him to do. The leaders had to sacrifice themselves first in order to make a better place for all those who followed them. He was a leader. No matter how he looked at it the family had been his life. What he felt for Irene was enormous, but it was separate. She had a different much paler, thinner meaning when he judged her beside the total meaning he got from his family. He was now Boss of the family. He had to set an example that would be remembered as long as the family stood. He saw dimly that it was right to sacrifice the woman he loved so that the family could go on and on fulfilling its honor, which was its meaning.
He suddenly saw clearly that Irene had stepped so far out of line that there was nothing left to do but to whack her. It wasn’t her fault entirely that she had scammed the Prizzis for $720. She was a Polack, so what could she know about the real rules? But she had made her mistake when she had given back the $360 and made out like she was innocent so she could keep the other half of it, because what could she expect—that the Prizzis would hold still to be taken for that kind of money?
It could even be, he forced himself to tell himself, that in all this time she had only made out like she was crazy about him in case—like she, herself, said—he would have zotzed her. Marrying him and all that grabbing and kissing him and cooking and washing the awnings and scrubbing floors had probably been a lot of bullshit. She had certainly fooled him. She had convinced him that she was crazy about him—but how could she take the fifty dollars from Vincent to blow him away if that was how she felt about him?
She had screwed up on the Filargi stand and that
was what had finished her. He tried to go through the whole thing again in his mind. She threw the baby at the bodyguard just when the elevator door opened. The bodyguard went for his gun instead of the baby. What Irene should have done was to grab the woman who pushed the wrong floor and used her as a shield to make the bodyguard drop his gun or to give Charley a chance to get out there and sap him. Well, maybe she couldn’t. She shot the bodyguard first so he must have been pressing her. Irene had nerve. She did everything right. But why did she have to clip the dumb broad on the wrong floor? She wasn’t holding any gun on Irene. She was just standing there in innocent-bystander shock and Irene had done the job on her and put them all in the shit.
But what a woman. A clean woman in every way and a terrific housekeeper. Sometimes he had the feeling that she couldn’t stand Sicilian food but she could cook it like she had studied under the whole Spina family in Agrigento. She was some woman. She never complained; she hated Brooklyn, hated Sicilians, hated the climate but she never complained.
No use thinking like that, he told himself. He had learned a long, long time before that a contract on anybody was just business. He had grown up with Gusto Bustarella. They had been made on the same day. They liked the same kind of broads. Gusto’s father had spent maybe fifty hours showing them all the ways to use a knife when they had been fifteen-year-old kids, and, besides, Gusto was a very funny guy. He was a million laughs. He was the very best friend Charley ever had, except Pop, but when Vincent told him he had to do the number on Gusto, that was that. He did it. He even used a knife for old time’s sake. What’s the sense of thinking about things that had nothing to do with business whatsoever? Everybody had to die sometime.
And now he had to give it to Irene. When he had
gone into Don Corrado’s house he had loved Irene but when he came out that was something that had happened to two other people a long time ago in a different country. Pop had said it. The family was his life.
He drove to the beach figuring out the best way to set her up. She wouldn’t be easy, but if he didn’t make a whole mountain out of that she wouldn’t be too tough either. If she had left on the dot of five o’clock, and that was the kind of woman she was, it would take her maybe forty minutes to get to the airport if the traffic was right. She could have caught the six o’clock plane for LA and that would get her there at half past nine, maybe to her own house by half past ten, which would be half past seven her time. So he would call her at eleven o’clock New York time.
He got to the beach at half past five and took a shower. Then he went to the box he kept on the floor of his closet and took out the long, balanced knife he had taken from Marxie Heller. He chose a light-weight soft leather scabbard and strapped the knife and the scabbard around the inside of his left calf. Then he put on a pair of pajama bottoms and got up to look at himself in the long mirror in the closet door. He couldn’t see anything under the floppy pajama trousers.
That was what he would use. He would wear a .38 Magnum in a shoulder holster, then when the time came for them to go to bed, he would take off the gun harness elaborately, so she could watch what he was doing, and hang it over the back of a chair away across the room from the bed, then he would get into bed with her and wait for the right chance to slide the knife into her. He wanted to do it the most painless way, the quickest way. He didn’t want her even to know that he had done it to her.
He made himself a hamburger and had two glasses of red wine while he ate in front of the TV screen and
the video machine. He played Irene’s cassette over and over again. When its two minutes and forty-nine seconds were over, he pressed the button on his remote control and rewound it, to start it again while he chewed the hamburger and sipped the “Chianti-type” wine.
The cassette was as short as his life with Irene and many different pictures were crowded into it, but he was able to see what Paulie, and Pop, and that cameraman had meant when they hadn’t gone out of their skulls, the way he had, about Irene’s looks. She was a good-looking woman, sure. But no 12 on a scale of 10 the way he thought when these pictures were actually happening. He would rate her about a 7.
What tore him up as he analyzed it, watching the scenes again and again, was how he had been kidding himself when he thought that they had both gone crazy about each other the way he knew she had hit him. He had thought that she had been dropped by love at first sight, from the minute Mae had introduced them. Now he could see that it was Mae who had been standing there adoring him, not Irene. Irene just looked at him like a passenger on some sinking ship looks at a lifeboat. She had needed him all right, but she hadn’t needed him for the reasons he had thought she needed him.
He didn’t feel used, he felt sad. He was never going to be able to forget her. But Pop had been right. Pop was always right. He had been a part of the Prizzi family all his life and he had been a part of Irene’s for less than three months. There was nothing to choose from there. She threatened the family—she stole from the family—and she had to go. But she was some woman. She was smart, she was brave, and she wouldn’t take any shit from anyone, not even Corrado Prizzi. He wished he could stop his life anywhere right in the middle of that cassette.
After he ate he cleaned up in the kitchen, then got
out the vacuum to make sure there were no stray crumbs in the sofa or around the floor. The last thing he wanted was roaches.
When he was dressed he called the airline and booked a seat to LA, then sat down and filled in one of the hot tickets with the corresponding flight number. At 11:05 he tapped Irene’s number into the phone. Irene picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“It’s Charley. Jesus, you really meant it.”
“I always mean it, Charley,” she said.
“He could only see Pop and me at lunch but lunch didn’t start until after two and he wouldn’t talk while he was eating so it was about a quarter to five when I told him what I wanted.”
“Yeah?” She felt as tense as a junkie. No Sicilians were going to hand over $540 just because somebody asked for it. They had reneged on every other piece of money they owed her so there wasn’t a chance, unless they were setting her up, that they would pay back the money she had scammed from them. She gripped the back of a chair and held the telephone tightly and waited for what Charley was going to say.
If Charley told her that the Prizzis refused to give him her money, she was safe. If he said he had the money, they were going to try to hit her.
“I got the money,” Charley said. “It’s in your same bag. He hadn’t even unpacked it.”
Irene felt like a camera that had been laid on tracks and was now photographing as it withdrew tens of miles, then thousands of miles, then backward into outer space, without ever losing sight of the vision it was recording, a vanishing memory of what she had felt for Charley. She took one last look, then blanked it out forever. She remembered that day when she had told him she loved him. She had told him that she didn’t know how to say it, because she had never said it. She had never said it to anyone else. She had cherished
the day she would say it only because it was true, then she had said it to Charley. She heard her own voice. “I never loved anybody. All my life I had to protect myself, and you can’t protect yourself anymore when you love somebody.”
She tore the past up as if it were a two-month-old telephone message. She had to protect herself. The Prizzis were sending a man to do the job on her and the man was Charley.
“No kidding?” she said. “Man, that’s a real surprise.”
“Yeah. You coulda knocked me over,” Charley said.
“Well, I’m glad it’s settled. You hang on to it. I got about three days’ work to get this house sold and the office lease fixed up, then I’ll be back in New York and we’ll spend some of it.”
London was where she was going, she told herself. They have the surgery and they have the right language and I’ll be able to lay my hands on new paper. Nine hours’ time difference. Over the Pole and I can be there tomorrow night if I get out of here tomorrow morning. Got to stay until the bank opens so I can get at the boxes.
“I got a better idea,” Charley said. “I got a couple of days before I take over at the laundry. I just booked space on a morning flight to LA and we can have a ball for a couple of days.”
She felt grief as if the new glacier had just moved in on her, embedding her forever as if she were a mastodon. How had she ever gone the fucking love route? She had worked for eleven years to build her business, the best business in the world, tax free and high fee with a front that was so legit it was absolutely foolproof. She had the kind of house her mother had never even looked at. If she wanted the occasional shot at grabbing cock, that was certainly no sweat to line up. She had the California climate, her car, her
clothes, and her safe deposit boxes but built into that, the whole time, must have been some tilt toward destroying herself, to take everything she had away from herself plus her peace of mind by walking right into the trap of loving Charley with her eyes wide open.
What was Charley? An animal, a hoodlum, a Sicilian hoodlum who shot people in the kneecaps or choked them with a piece of rope. He was everything Marxie had warned her about Sicilians.
If Charley came to California, it would be his last trip to anyplace.
If Charley came to California before she could get away to London she would have to zotz him, and for the first time she felt loathing, not for Charley, but for the Prizzi money that had pulled her in and made her meet Charley. She had loved him but that was all over now. She had wiped out ever meeting him, ever knowing him, and everything else sappy like that.
“I know you, Charley,” she said gaily. “You can’t wait to get started in the new slot. Why waste time coming out here? I’ll be right back in Brooklyn in three days.”
“Listen—who knows when I’m ever going to get any time off again,” Charley purred into the phone, sweat pouring off him. He knew she was trying to beat them. He knew she had gone to LA just to get into the boxes at the bank. “What the hell,” he said, “I am practically on my way, I can’t stop now.”
“Okay,” she said, “it’s up to you. What’s the flight number? I’ll pick you up at the airport.”
When she hung up she went to the wall safe in her closet and dialed it open. She took out a 9mm pistol and unscrewed the noise suppressor from its barrel. It was the right caliber for close work. She checked its mechanism carefully then loaded it. She locked the safe and took the pistol to her dressing room and put it in her makeup box with its lifted top facing the doorway to her bedroom. Jesus, he was a big mother.
Somehow she’d have to drag him out to the garage and get him in the trunk of the rental she had picked up at the airport. She would leave him in the rental at the airport just the way he had left Marxie to rot there. She didn’t feel the grief anymore. Charley was a contract she had put out herself, and had given to herself; full fee.
Chapter Forty-five
Charley strapped the shoulder holster into place on the left side of his chest, felt the knife in its leg scabbard, picked up Irene’s light case and his own bag and left the apartment. The telephone rang as he was closing the door. He went back in and answered it. It was Maerose Prizzi.
“Hey, Charley!”
“Hi, Mae. I was practically out the door.”
“Where you going?”
“I gotta go to the Coast.”
“I just heard the big news. Jesus! You really are a regular Horatio Alger.”
“Who’s he?”
“Your father told me you’re going to take over our house.”
“Well, yeah. This is too far from the laundry.”
“I been thinking about it ever since he told me. You can’t live in that dump. It’s furnished like a Calabrian coal miner’s hut. Lissena me. You got to let me redo the whole place. As a wedding present. Whatta you say?”