Prizzi's Honor (16 page)

Irene cooked a dinner that was part Polish, part Sicilian, and part Mexican. “I never ate food this good,”
her fiancé said and, what with the strains of the day, the Olympic sex with Maerose the day before, the travel, his anguish over Irene, the post-Olympic sex with Irene, then the four-pound meal with the bottle of French wine (Petrus ’70) that Irene had produced, Charley fell like an obelisk into bed.

When she was sure he was sleeping, Irene went to the TV room where Marxie had liked to play solitaire and called her telephone answering machines at the Beverly Hills office. It was half past ten. The South Carolina machine had recorded a male, reasonably cultivated voice, which was pitched on the high side. The voice said, “Would it be possible to have a meeting in Dallas on the ninth of August? This would be a full-fee job.” Irene smiled in the low-key lighting; full-fee was one hundred dollars. “Let’s make it for lunch at one o’clock in the coffee shop of the Hilton Inn on Central, at Mockingbird. Look for me at the sixth table near the window on the left side as you come in. We’ll supply the tools.”

She checked the calendar. The ninth would be six days from tomorrow. A short honeymoon was better than no honeymoon. She erased the tape and snapped out the light.

They were up and out at seven the next morning. “Charley,” she said before they got out of bed, “there is a lot of red tape if people aren’t Mexican nationals who want to get married. It could take like three weeks to set up.”

“Yeah?” Charley said.

“I had to check it out once, two years ago, for a friend of mine.”

“Yeah?”

“Tijuana’s the place. Then we get a plane out for Acapulco.”

“Let’s go.”

While they were dressing, Irene told him they had six days, that she had a business meeting in Dallas on the ninth.

“What kind of business?”

“Work.”

“How much do they pay you for one of those?”

“One hundred dollars for this one. It depends. Mob people—but still tricky hits—run about seventy-five dollars.”

“How many do you get a year?”

“Three or four.”

“Yeah? That many?”

“That’s not many when you consider the population of this country.”

They finished packing and Irene called for a taxi.

“Okay,” Charley said, “how long you going to be in Dallas?”

“I don’t know. Maybe three days. They do the groundwork.”

“No more living on two coasts, okay, Irene?”

“We’ll be married. Everything changes. You’re my husband. I’ve got to build on that. We have to live together.”

He rushed across the room and held her face in his hands tenderly. He kissed her face softly, on the eyes, on the soft cheeks, on the softer mouth. “I can’t believe it,” he said.

***

They were married in Tijuana, using two professional witnesses and a justice of the peace (Joseph Tierney Masters, JP, “Your Blue Heaven”). “Jesus,” Charley said, “it should be by a priest. There is something wrong here.”

“It could be even more legal this way,” Irene said. “Anyway, when we get to Brooklyn you can get something up with your own priest. A little bit of this kind of excitement goes a long way. It is terrific to feel so legitimate. I agree we ought to get married a couple of more times.”

They flew to Acapulco. After they were settled in at the hotel, Charley called his father at his home number in New York.

“Pop? Charley.”

“Hey, I ain’t seen you around.”

“I’m in Mexico.”

“Yeah? How’s the weather?”

“It’s hot or it rains.”

“Whatta you doing in Mexico?”

“I got married, Pop.”

“The contractor?”

“Yeah.”

“Keep it to yourself, Charley.”

“I just wanted to tell you.”

“Give Dwye Williams a call.”

“Anything special?”

“No. He’ll see that they comp you at the hotel and the restaurants.”

“Ah! What’s his number? And maybe he’s got some fresh airline ticket stock. We could use it.”

“When you coming back?”

“The ninth.”

“The contractor coming with you?”

“Later. She has to get everything together.”

“If we need you, I’ll call Dwye. And, hey, Charley.”

“Yeah, Pop?”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Pop.”

“We’ll hope for the best.”

Charley went down to join Irene at the swimming pool. The gold lamé bikini she had on made her so stacked that he got a hard-on.

“Hey, Charley,” she said, grinning widely. “Who you got in there with you?”

“Pay no attention to it,” Charley said, “maybe it’ll go away. You know Dwye Williams?”

“No. Should I?”

“He runs the thing for us in Mexico.”

“Oh,
that
Dwye Williams. Jesus, he used to be a big man.”

“My father wants me to call him.”

“You going to see him?”

“Probably.”

“Do it right away, then we’ll have all the rest of the time for us.”

“Sure. You want to come?”

“No. It would make me too sad.”

***

Dwye Williams had been the mayor of Philadelphia once. He was so well set politically that even after he had given the keys of the city to the mob, even after he had the citizens of the city whimpering on their knees and groping in the darkness because he had stolen them so blind, in order to get him out of the way (for his own safety and the safety of his party from certain public investigation), he had been appointed ambassador to Mexico, where he served out his full term, perpetually drunk in a wise-owl sort of way.

When a new administration swept him out, Dwye Williams went into private law practice in Mexico City; well, not a law practice exactly, he was more a consultant. He didn’t go home because that had been one of the conditions of getting him out; he could never go home.

The business of exporting cocaine, shit, and boo from Mexico to the States was developing big, and the Mexican
coyotes
were trying to tear away pieces of it so Dwye, with his official connections, made various high officers of the Mexican government full partners, and the river of dope became an ocean of dope as it oozed and moved across the thousand-mile-long frontier, into the nostrils and veins of Americans.

Charley called Dwye from the lobby of the hotel. Dwye insisted on sending a car for him, asked for the name of his hotel, saying he would handle it, saying the car would be there in ten minutes.

Charley waited in the air-conditioning in a chair
near the front door. He felt queasy about Mexico because it made him think of the Plumber and Little Philly Zanzara jerking Maerose around and beating up that guy while they made her watch because her father told them to do it that way. The Plumber was very embarrassed and had apologized to Mae at least once a year every year after that. Charley wasn’t exactly sorry that he and Maerose had somehow lost each other, but sometimes, especially since the only night they had ever been together, even including the endless time they had been engaged and he had walked around on his toes with frozen balls, he felt a sweet longing to be with her, just to have her around, not to fuck her or anything, just to have her around because she was his friend. They were in different parts of his mind and his life, Irene and Maerose. There was no place they could ever join: oil and water. He was the happiest man in the world because he had Irene, but he owed Maerose for straightening him out, because he wouldn’t have Irene if Maerose hadn’t made him sane again. Jesus! He was never going to see her again and it made him sad.

The doorman came over to tell him that the car was there.

The car took them to the airport. “What the hell is this?” Charley said.

“Mr. Williams is waiting for you at his office in Mexico City,” the impeccably blank-faced, Swedish-looking driver said.

“He’s out of his fucking mind!” Charley said. “I thought he was around the corner. That’s five hundred miles away. Back to the hotel. Don’t fuck me around.”

“Yes, sir.”

They drove for two miles in silence.

“I am—and the car is—at your service. Mr. Williams wanted me to be sure to tell you that after you refused to fly to Mexico City.”

“That’s very nice,” Charley answered. “Leave me the car. We don’t need you.”

“Mr. Williams wants to be sure that you are comped wherever you want to go, sir.”

“That’s different. Okay. Be out front about half-past-seven tonight.”

They agreed that it was the greatest honeymoon anyone had ever had. “That sounds dopey,” Irene said, “but I would bet my next fee at thirteen to five that the combined people of New York, Brooklyn, Detroit, Chicago, and LA, one on one, never got laid fifty-one times in five days and watched three people pulled out to sea by the undertow to drown right under their window.”

“The pasta wasn’t bad, either,” Charley said weakly.

They were packing to leave a day early because Pop had called to tell Charley he had to come back to New York. “Something come up, Charley,” he said. “The grand jury is going to indict you and Don Corrado wants to get that out of the way before he calls this meet.”

“What meet?”

“A top family, both sides, meet.”

“
Both
sides?”

“Yeah.”

“About the Vegas scam?”

“I don’t think so. I mean—what would both sides know about the Vegas scam—right?”

“Yeah.”

***

They had a short goodbye at the airport. Irene cried. Charley blew his nose. He was flying through to Kennedy. Irene was headed for Dallas.

Chapter Seventeen

Irene checked in at the Plaza of the Americas and watched a movie on TV. She went to bed at eleven after having dinner in the room. She slept as late as she could the next morning, until 8:30, then she stretched the time by bathing, washing her hair, sewing on a small tear in her nightgown from when Charley had rolled over on her, and having a slow breakfast, sending things back and complaining that the waiter had forgotten the hot milk. At a quarter to one she got into a taxi for the twelve-minute ride to the Hilton Inn at Mockingbird and Central. She counted six tables along the window at the left and sat down opposite a fat man who was wearing a green suit, a bright pink shirt, and a green tie. He said, in that almost cultivated kind of high voice, “Hello, there. We haven’t talked since you were in Columbia, South Carolina.”

“Yes?” Irene said. “What number?”

He told her the number of the phone at the left end of her desk.

They ordered omelets for lunch, hers cheese, his strawberry. “What’s the layout?” Irene said, and after that the whole thing played itself out in two days.

The contract was on some local lawyer who was tight with the mob until he held out on them. An independent
oil operator, the fat man’s client, had sued the lawyer for breach of contract, negligence, fraud, and misrepresentation. The oilie had hired the lawyer to bring an antitrust action against two oil companies for conspiring to fix oil prices. A federal jury returned a 27.2-million-dollar verdict, and the attorney was awarded 2.7 million in fees, but the appeal yielded a settlement for ten million dollars under which the oil companies agreed to pay 1.5 million immediately, and the rest over a five-year period. The lawyer didn’t bother to tell his client about the settlement and refused to give an accounting of the money. Also, he didn’t mention it to the boys. The oil man had sued and the lawyer was tying everything up with court postponements until it looked like three years before the oil man could get at the money. So he wanted the lawyer dead. The boys okayed it.

The lawyer lived at one of the big downtown hotels, so the fat man wanted Irene to go into his rooms dressed as a chambermaid and substitute for his high blood pressure pills identical cyanide pills the same size and shape, mixing them in with the prescribed ones.

Irene said that Texas juries understood using guns to clip people, because that was the American way, making it easier for the judge to let somebody like that off, but were very strict about poisoning and almost always returned against. She asked the fat man if the client had anything against shooting the lawyer. There were no objections so Irene called the lawyer, told him a story involving a hundred-million-dollar estate that she had inherited by will and out of which “some model” was trying to cheat her, and the lawyer invited her to his office at 9:15 the next morning.

She wore widow’s weeds with a heavy black veil when a secretary took her in and closed the door. It was a big room with lots of heavy curtains and leather to kill the sound. Irene shot him, holding the gun under
the desk, pointed through the deskwell. It hardly made any sound. Then she walked around the desk close up and let him have it twice through the head. She left the body there and went out to the secretary’s office. “He asked me to tell you to give him at least fifteen minutes while he goes over the papers on my case.” The secretary gave her a sappy nod and a smile and Irene asked if she would show her out to the elevator. It was an hour and five minutes before the secretary went in to check something with her boss, after holding eight phone calls, and by that time Irene was on her way to LA to pack up for the move to New York, to close the house, and to leave the full fee in her safe deposit box at the Beverly Hills bank.

Chapter Eighteen

On the afternoon of the day he talked to his son in Acapulco, Angelo Partanna made his regular Thursday call at Amalia Sestero’s house in Brooklyn Heights to have a glass of elderberry wine and to pick up whatever casual instructions Don Corrado had accumulated during the week. Amalia knew how to make sensational Sicilian sweets, so it was the visit he enjoyed most in all the week.

He was sitting in the kitchen of the large house, wiping his smooth brown bald head, sipping wine, and nibbling on
cubaita
, the instructions from Don Corrado in his pocket, when Amalia asked him how Charley was.

“Between you and me, and don’t let it go any further at least for the time being,” Angelo said, “Charley just got married. He’s in Mexico.”

“
Married
? Charley? My God.”

“He’s forty-two years old.”