1

The St. Joseph’s Laundry, business headquarters for the Prizzi family, was a large, low, triangular building that occupied a pie-cut block in central Flatbush. In October 1969 Vincent Prizzi had been Boss of the family for five months, since the day his father retired; for his father, this had meant transferring the title to Vincent and not going into the Laundry anymore. It didn’t change anything else. Vincent was Boss, but Don Corrado was his boss.

Vincent was a serious man with a face like a clenched fist and an attitude of barely controlled violence, as if one of Señor Wences’ hand puppets had developed antisocial tendencies. He had gout, high blood pressure, ulcers, and psoriasis because he was a resenter. He had been his father’s sottocapo and vindicatore for twenty-four years; now he was the Boss. He resented that. Vincent conspired with his own ignorance. He was a perpetually baffled man who chewed on pieces of himself and then spat them out at the world.

Vincent had a two-window office with a big desk, clear of everything except two telephones and a neat bronze sign facing outward that said, THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. A large table against the left wall held a collection of nine-inch-high religious statues surrounding a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus framed in bronze. His own saint, the saint with whom he shared a birthday, was St. Nympha, the virgin of Palermo, who underwent martyrdom in Sicily and whose relics are united with those of St. Respicius and St. Tryphon in Rome; their statues were assembled with those of St. Anthony and St. Gennaro on the tabletop. On the wall facing Vincent’s desk there was a framed IBM slogan in Italian saying CREDERE in large black letters on silver appliquéd on an orange background. Three chairs, a blond leather sofa, and a blond carpet completed the decor.

He took a blood pressure pill, a diuretic, a gout pill, and the 325 grams of aspirin to cut down on the blood clots, then he waited for some kind of change in the way he was feeling. Nothing happened.

He yelled at the open door. “Get Charley Partanna in here.” Each word came out sounding like a stroke of a crosscut saw. He had been practicing the way he spoke for forty-five years. It was the diction of all the young men in the environment when he was coming up, cultivated so that anyone would know instantly that they were hard guys.

Charley Partanna’s office was two doors down the hall. It was the same size as Vincent’s without the decoration: no signs, no carpet, no statues, no sofa. Charley was Vincent’s underboss and enforcer. He was thirty years old. He had a quality of tentative detachment, as if he were not a part of whatever had been going on. When Charley was thirteen, Corrado Prizzi said he would grow up to be a contractor because nobody noticed when he was there; he could make a hit in Macy’s window and no one would know he had done it.

Charley Partanna was a heavy-boned, lithe man with a face like a carousel horse: expressionless; long and narrow; with large chrome eyes pasted on either side of his nose. His eyebrows were like awnings. His voice worked at making sounds like a heavy steel sledge being pulled over ashes. He contracted his thoughts slowly but with earnest precision. He sat behind a desk whose drawers were empty except for the one that held a Swiss Army knife with small scissors that Charley used to cut his fingernails. He was a tidy man.

Seated in three chairs around the desk were the three capiregime of the Prizzi family, each in command of a cohort of about six hundred men; specialists or muscle; active or in reserve.

Tarquin “Little Abe” Garrone, the labor capo, was talking about new developments in the mayor’s office. Garrone got his nickname thirty years ago from the chin whiskers he wore when he was first trying not to shave every day. He was short and meaty, like double. He spoke as if he had taught diction to Louis Armetta. He ran the construction unions in the city and just now he wanted to pull the plumbers, plasterers, and electrical workers from the Garden Grove development, a gigantic luxury condo going up on the site of a lot of low-cost housing that had been razed and from which the mayor’s people had taken a bundle without sharing.

“The little fuck is walkin’ wit’ like a million nine, fahcrissake,” Little Abe said.

The two other capi, Rocco Sestero and Sal Prizzi, the latter Vincent’s son by his first marriage—Vincent was now a widower for the second time—both started to talk at the same time, outraged by the amount the mayor was stealing without sharing when the Plumber burst into the room, interrupting everybody. “The Boss wants you, Charley,” he said.

“Tell him ten minutes.”

“Not me. His gout is killing him.”

Charley turned slowly in his chair to look at the Plumber. He hosed such fear all over him that the Plumber flinched. Rocco Sestero, the Plumber’s capo, felt sorry for him.

“Keep your hat off when you’re in the building,” Charley said. The Plumber backed out of the doorway, closing the door carefully.

When he finished the meeting, Charley went to Vincent’s office.

“You took your own fuckin’ time,” Vincent said.

“Elections are like six weeks away. They gotta be organized.”

“So how does it look?”

“The mayor is a shoo-in.”

“What about Mallon?”

“Not a chance.”

“Good. Lissena me, Charley. Gennaro Fustino and Farts Esposito come into town yesterday. They wanna go to the Latino tonight. I work all day here and they expect me to stay up all night like some fuckin’ Good Time Charley. My gout is killin’ me. So you take them, okay? They’re at the Palace.”

“What about school?”

The reference to Charley’s night school made Vincent’s ulcers grind against each other, but Don Corrado was proud of Charley deciding to get a high school diploma after dropping out of school at fifteen, so Vincent couldn’t do anything about it.

“The Latino is a nightclub, fahcrissake. It starts after. Anyway, the other people never miss a night at your school?”

“That’s okay, Vincent. I’ll handle it. Just so I don’t miss school.”