5

Vito Daspisa had barricaded himself in his ninth-floor apartment at the beach after a thirty-two-block car chase that started because some wise-guy cop had tried to take Vito in for possession. What got Vito so hot was that the guy was not only on the pad, but whenever he had needed quick money for an abortion or for his car insurance, Vito had always helped him out. So Vito lost his temper. And, the way it worked out, he shot the ungrateful prick. Then, in the car chase that happened right after, a crazy rookie just out of the Academy had stood in the street in front of the car waving his gun like he was Mr. Law-and-Order, so Vito had sideswiped him—what else?—was he supposed to drive up on the sidewalk and waste old ladies?

He made it to his apartment house at the beach, then an army of cops with tear gas and plastic explosives emptied the building of all the tenants except Vito and surrounded him. It was a Technicolor stakeout for the evening news with bullhorns, helmets, Air Force—type searchlights, and snipers on the roofs. A police task force swarmed over the area with assault rifles and bulletproof vests. It was potentially such a big media event in a slow news week in September that the commissioner was there to represent the mayor, whose wife had him pinned down at his literary agent’s in Montauk to rest up six weeks before the elections.

When His Honor heard about the Daspisa stakeout, he busted loose and started back to the city behind a motorcycle escort for his rendezvous with the TV cameras at Manhattan Beach. It was not only an election windfall, it was a national promotion windfall for his second book, Me, that nobody could have anticipated except that, as the mayor said, when New York was for you it always came through when you needed it.

A crowd of about eight hundred people collected in the open area, forming a semicircle around Vito’s apartment house. The three networks were demanding a minimum of two days for the stakeout and a maximum of three. Richard Gallagher, the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, told them nobody would believe it would take two days to get a punk like Vito out of the building. “All we gotta do is send up two men with plastic. One sticks it on the front door, the other on the back door. We blow the stuff simultaneously, the doors go down and the task force goes in and takes him.”

“No good, Commissioner,” said Manning, a network contact man. “They might have to take him out on a stretcher. That’s no good. He’s gotta come out standing up so the viewers can see him. Unless, of course, you shoot him down, which is the other alternative shot.”

“Shooting him will work better than just bringing him out, Gordon,” the standup reporter said.

“I wanna get you maximum cooperation, but this can’t go on more than two nights,” Gallagher said. “It ain’t fair to the taxpayer, and the mayor will be on our ass. Election Day is practically here, fahcrissake.”

The networks agreed to the two days. For a compromise, they said they had to have a little human interest on camera, they couldn’t keep shooting nothing.

“Like what?” Gallagher said.

“Like you could get one of his relatives out here and we could interview them.”

“Okay,” Gallagher said. “But let’s get some things straight here. I gotta have coverage on the mayor, who is breaking his ass to get here, and when he gets here I not only gotta have shots of him tearing up in the car and taking charge, but it’s gotta be guaranteed the shots will get on the air.”

Late in the afternoon of the second day, Vito wrote a message saying he wanted to talk to Lieutenant Hanly of the Borough Squad. He folded it into a schoolboy airplane and sailed it out of the window to the cops in the street. The cops located Hanly in a massage parlor and had him out at the beach in twenty-five minutes, burping tits.

On the scene, he was passed along the chain of command to the mayor. They stood together, isolated from the rest of the brass, in the overlighted open area in front of the building, a pregnant two-shot for the networks, while the mayor gave Davey his instructions. “Tell him to stretch it out for at least one more day,” the mayor said. “Be solicitous. Ask if he’s okay on food, et cetera. Promise him anything. Just tell him you have to come down to check it out with me.”

Hanly went up in the elevator alone. He stood against the wall next to Vito’s front door, flattened out. Backhand, he rapped on the door with the butt of his service revolver.

“Vito?”

“What?”

“It’s me.”

“Who the fuck is me?”

“Davey Hanly.”

“Whatta you want?”

“What do I want? You threw down the airplane that said you wanted to talk to me.”

“I must be punchy. I ain’t had no sleep.”

“The families of those two cops ain’t had no sleep either, you prick.”

“Ah—I lost my head. Listen, Davey, whatta you say? You wanna make a deal?”

“A deal?”

“You set it to keep those crazy cops away from me and get me downtown someplace, better yet in New York, and I am gonna lay out the entire Prizzi shit operation on the East Coast for you.”

“Jesus, Vito—” Vito was talking about throwing away a big piece of Hanly’s bread and butter.

“Whatta you say, Davey?”

“What can I tell you? I’ll go down and they’ll talk it over.”

Hanly went back to the street conscious that the network cameras were covering him, playing it very grave, very troubled, but hopeful for justice. He reported to the mayor on full camera, no sound, saying that Vito was just buying time, but they looked like a couple of conspirators plotting the downfall of mankind. The mayor patted him on the back, dismissing him. Hanly lost himself in the dense crowd packed in the darkness around the building and went into the bar across the street. He went to the last booth where Angelo Partanna was waiting. He sat down opposite Angelo, took off his uniform cap, wiped his forehead and neck with a handkerchief, and said, “He says he’ll lay out the whole Prizzi East Coast shit operation if I can get him downtown and he can talk to a lawyer.”

Angelo sighed heavily. He got up slowly and walked to a phone booth across the room. He was a tall, scrawny, bald, and relentlessly dapper man in his late fifties. He had brush strokes of white paint on either side of his head above the ears; no hair above that. He was cocoa-dark with a nose like a macaw’s beak. There was no jewelry on him, but nobody would ever call him any slob. Angelo was the consigliere of the Prizzi family. He was inclined to overvalue cunning as a human quality. It was his conviction that there was no situation imaginable that he couldn’t plot his way out of. Even among Sicilians he was viewed charily because of his deviousness. “People look at television,” he said to his son Charley, “and they think everybody in the business is an ignorant strong-arm. I never strong-armed nobody in my life. When they see me they think I’m a rich dentist. Always dress quiet. Keep the suit pressed, the shoes shined, and let them think you are a civilian. And always wear a hat when you leave the house.”

He took the OUT OF ORDER sign off the mouthpiece of the telephone, put it in his pocket, and dialed Corrado Prizzi’s private number.