Prizzi's Honor (17 page)

“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.

Angelo had thought it all through. He was a professional thinker about things criminal. He was the only one who knew Charley’s wife had done the Netturbino work. He was the only one who could make the connection that Charley’s wife was Marxie Heller’s widow. He was Charley’s father before he was the Prizzis’
consigliere
, so he had to take the chance of being the one to tell Vincent that Charley had gotten married because from now on, if anyone brought it up, Vincent would say he knew all about it and didn’t want to talk about it.

***

The next afternoon at five o’clock, Maerose Prizzi rang the doorbell of the Sestero residence on Brooklyn Heights. She had had her hairdresser come to her apartment at one o’clock and the beautician came at three. She knew how her grandfather liked to see her so she had them transform her into a young virgin, shining with beauty and goodness. Ugo Bustarella was on the door and he was delighted to see her.

“Jesus, it’s got to be four years, right? Jesus, you look marvelous,” he said.

“Ugo! You got so
fat
! Florrie must be feeding you six times a day.”

He grinned. “Florrie three times, Mrs. Sestero three times. Come on. I’ll take you down to Mrs. Sestero. She’s inna kitchen.”

He stood the riot gun in the corner behind the front door and led the way happily to the stairwell. “Hey, I can find the kitchen,” Maerose said. “I only been here like two hundred times. Tell Florrie hello for me.” She went down the stairs to the kitchen.

Amalia was waiting for her. She sent the girl on an
errand upstairs, then she said to Maerose, “He got your letter and it made him very happy. He has told Vincent to come over here tonight. He’s going to make Vincent bring you home.”

Maerose stood very tall and straight. She took in a deep breath and held it. She exhaled slowly then she said, “I am going to make my father pay. I am going to give him the next ten years the way he gave me the last ten years.”

“There is no joy in revenge,” Amalia said. “Revenge is something Sicilians talk about, but when they get it, it turns to nothing in their mouth.”

“I am Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter. When my father told me I was no longer his daughter, he stopped being my father to me, too. When he threw me out and kept me out for ten years, calling me a street-walker, telling me he would see that I stayed an old maid for the rest of my life, looking at me like I was a piece of shit on the few times every year that my grandfather made him let me come back, he was spitting on my honor. It isn’t revenge. I do it for honor.”

***

Corrado Prizzi wept as he welcomed his granddaughter back into the family. He was such an old, old man, she thought, so frail and helpless, then she remembered who he really was. “It will be settled tonight,” he said. “Your father will come to see me tonight.”

“I wrote to you, not only to be restored to the family, grandfather,” she said. “I want to be allowed to take my place in my father’s house. He is a lonely man. I want to cook for him and to keep his house for him. I want to be allowed to make up to my father for all the pain I have caused him.”

When she left her grandfather, Maerose Prizzi hurried to Santa Grazia di Traghetto. She lighted three candles, one for her father, one for Charley, one for herself, and put a twenty-dollar bill into the repository,
then went to the second row on the right side of the church, where she had spent the Sundays and Holy Days of her childhood, and prayed to the Virgin, then to St. Gennaro, to intercede for her and her plan. She was going to repay her father, pain for pain, just as he had inflicted his Purgatory upon her. She was going to ruin her father until he was unable to stand it any longer and became sick and died. When he died Charley Partanna was going to succeed in his place as Boss of the Prizzi family, with Maerose Prizzi as his wife. That was the joy in her plan. She was going to get Charley back forever. It could never have happened, none of it could have happened, if he hadn’t married Irene Walker. Her prayers, morning and night, had been answered. She had suffered in shame for almost ten years but, at last, justice would be done; honor would be restored. She would soon bury her grandfather and her father and, at Charley’s side, be at the head of the Prizzi family instead of its outcast.

Chapter Nineteen

After a part-time honeymoon which Charley and Irene were able to stretch out for a whole week in New York, and more than fifteen months after the incident itself, Charley was arraigned before the Brooklyn Grand Jury for the murders of Quarico “Pimples” Grifone and Sam “Jolly Times” Fanfarone, two freelance narcotics hijackers who were described in the arraignment as “garage proprietors,” so the family postponed the big sit-down until Ed Prizzi could get Charley straightened out. He was arraigned immediately, $250,000 bail was granted, then the judge ordered him released for reasons of insufficient evidence. Charley went straight home, where Irene had dinner almost ready. There were three or four minutes of kissing and grabbing, then Irene said, “Charley, would you mind if I redecorated this place?”

“Yeah?” Charley said, “What are you going to do?”

“Well, a couple of dozen books would be a start. Anyway, the whole thing looks like some stage set from summer stock. Let me fool around with it.”