7

Angelo drove through the traffic from Flatbush to Mid-wood to get Charley from night school. He, too, was proud of Charley’s determination to get a high school diploma. Charley had quit school when he was fifteen to go to work as a helper on an ice truck for what looked like a lot of money to him—forty-eight dollars a week. Louis Palo, a neighborhood guy who was about five years older than Charley, had come off the ice truck to go to work for the Prizzis and he recommended Charley for the job.

Angelo didn’t try to stop Charley, but he said, “I hope you ain’t gonna be sorry about quitting school.” Charley didn’t know what Pop was talking about. He left the ice truck when he was sixteen because Pop got him a job as a runner in the counterfeit liquor stamp operation. He was a made man at seventeen (although he made his bones at thirteen under very unusual, but necessary, conditions), the same age his father had been made in Sicily. After that, his advancement in the environment was assured. From seventeen until twenty-one he worked in Religio Vulpigi’s setup, which handled high tech in-flight robberies and the hijacking of negotiable securities. They lifted passenger baggage holding jewels and money on commercial airliners and heavy freight shipments coming through La Guardia, Newark, and Idlewild.

When Charley was twenty-one he was transferred to be the bridge man between the mob-owned racetracks around the country and the racehorses they had to keep buying in England and Ireland at the right prices so there would always be enough to keep running enough races for the bettors to keep pouring the four hundred million dollars a year into the business.

Charley was drafted when he was twenty-four. Eduardo, the don’s other son, could have fixed it, but Charley said all the guys his age were going in so he went in. He wound up in Special Forces for fourteen months because he was good with weapons and had high tech skills, then he was blown right out of it in a Cong attack on a U.S. base near Pleiku in the Central Highlands.

Pleiku was the South Vietnamese Army headquarters for patrols against Cong infiltration routes coming down through the jungles from Laos and Cambodia. Charley’s detachment was billeted three miles away at Camp Holloway. His outfit guarded a fleet of U.S. transport and observation aircraft and helicopters. The Cong hit at about 2 A.M. on February 7th, 1965, with mortars and heavy automatic fire. Eight Americans died and more than a hundred others were wounded; ten U.S. aircraft were destroyed. Charley had the bone in his right thigh shattered. After four operations, the last two in Washington, his thighbone was replaced with an aluminum rod. He was just turning twenty-seven when he walked out of the hospital and went back to Brooklyn, where the don turned out practically the entire family at the old Palermo Gardens and gave him the party of the year.

When Charley came back from Nam he told Pop he would sign up for night school. Pop was so proud he told the don, and the don had Charley come over to the house so he could tell him he’d done the right thing; he was a real American.

They ate a tremendous lunch. Charley couldn’t believe how much a little old guy like the don could put away. The don asked him when he would get his diploma.

“Like in two and a half to three years, padrino.”

“Do they have a thing at the night school after you finish the job?”

“I don’t know, padrino. They never said.”

“How are you doing in the school so far?”

“Okay, I guess. I run a B+ average. I was elected Secretary-Treasurer of my class.”

“If they have a graduation I wanna know, because me and Vincent are gonna be there. Amalia, too. If they don’t have a graduation I gonna ask Eduardo to talk to the head of the Board of Education to have them set one up.”

“You pay me tremendous honor, padrino.”

“Whatta you talkin’ about?” the don said. “You are gonna have a high school education, the first soldier we ever put on the street with a high school diploma.”

The Luis Muñoz-Marín Junior High School in Midwood operated from 7 to 10 P.M. as a night school. Charley was in a class with eleven other adults; two-thirds were women; six Puerto Ricans, four blacks, a Russian woman from Brighton Beach, and Charley. The teacher was a blocky determined Norwegian from Bay Ridge named Mr. Matson. The desks, meant for twelve- and fourteen-year-olds, were small for a lot of the night class. Charley had to sit in a chair on the far side of the room. He sat there daydreaming about Mardell La Tour. Tonight could be the night. He had set up a careful pattern after that first lunch. He didn’t want her to think he was some kind of a wolf. But enough time had gone by. Enough confidence had been built. He was only human, for God’s sake, but tonight could be the night.

He had attacks of dizziness when he thought about Mardell. He found it impossible to imagine her either: (a) naked, or (b) lying down. But he was as eager to know those two things as any astronomer-topographer who had ever sought to map outer space. Not only was she a spectacular girl, she had a body on her that was bringing him to his knees because, with Mardell as it had never been with anybody else, there was no place else to go. Also, there was no denying it, she had an unusual imagination. He had found out what Buckingham Palace was, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica his father had given him on his twelfth birthday. When he found out, he had to decide that Mardell must be some kind of a nut.

The gleaming jewel of the night school class was Señora Roja-Buscando, who sought to answer every question put by Mr. Matson, interrupting the answers by any other student to the point of exasperating Charley so much that he broke his rule of never putting fear into a woman. Night after night, he poured fear over the señora, but it had absolutely no effect. She dominated the class, giving advice, scorn, and pity; winning Gold Star after Gold Star. She had four more stars than Charley.

Angelo drove his beat-up Chevy straight to the school, got directions from the office to find Charley’s classroom, and stood outside the room staring through the glass pane of the top half of the door, hoping to catch Charley’s attention. He had to tap on the glass with a dime. The entire class and Mr. Matson looked at him. Pop made motions at Charley to come out. Charley cleared his throat and spoke to Mr. Matson. “That’s my father,” he said.

“You better go out.”

“You shoo tell your father that he shoon innarupt the class,” Señora Roja-Buscando said. “We are serious here. This is no time for grittings.”

Pop drove Charley to the beach. On the way he explained what had to be done.

“Vito?” Charley cried out. “Vito Daspisa? He’s my best friend!”

“He’s finished, Charley, and he knows it. He wanted to give the entire shit operation to the cops.”

“But I know him all my life.”

“Vito’s trouble is he’s a hothead when he has a couple lines in him.”

“Why does a guy who is a natural wine drinker for hundreds of years go around fooling with that stuff?”

“He’s an American, Charley. He is integrating. His old man was just as much of a hothead, and he only took wine. He got himself killed because he lost his temper in a game of pool and peed on the cue ball because he missed a shot.”

“Jesus, Pop.”

Charley knew Vito from the old neighborhood since they were five years old. When they were teenagers they used to make side money together playing semipro stickball all over south Brooklyn. One summer Vito was the menace at a crap game Charley ran on Sunday mornings at Coney Island. Vito was a natural athlete, a hulk. When he was eighteen he took his shot at being an Armory fighter in the lightweight division, and Charley was his manager. Vito boxed under the name of Dimples Tancredi because if his mother found out what he was doing she would beat the shit out of him. The second time Charley ever did the job on anybody was because of Vito. A gambler named Four-Eyes Ganz had been bothering Vito to throw fights so Ganz could clean up on the bets. Vito had told him to fuck off but he kept coming back. The whole thing got Charley’s goat so he slammed Ganz and his bodyguard against the wall in Vito’s dressing room and told them if he ever saw them again they would be dead. Like a dummy, Ganz came around five nights later and made the same proposition to Vito, so Charley put them in a car with the Plumber driving, took them out to the southwest part of the Belt Parkway, and gave it to them. Nobody missed them.

Vito was a good-looking kid, but he grew up a little battered on account of the scar tissue, and after a while he got a little punchy from pleasing crowds by taking punches just to show how rugged he was. Little kids could have fun with him by jumping up and down in front of him with their hands held stiffly at their sides and watching him fall over backward on his head. It was part of being punchy.

Every Saturday afternoon when they were thirteen, Charley and Vito used to take Vito’s older sister Tessie to the movies and take turns giving her a feel. When they were seventeen they cleared over six hundred dollars. They ran a New Year’s Eve party for ten dollars a head, all the beer you could drink, where they had a man who did nothing but sweep up the broken glass and a four-piece orchestra that, it turned out, couldn’t play anything but “Sweet Georgia Brown.” It was so successful that they did this every New Year’s Eve until, the fourth year, two guys were hurt over a woman and a cop almost died. The word was passed down that they had to quit holding the rackets.

After Charley was made, he and Vito went into different kinds of work. Vito was never made so he bodyguarded bookmakers and picked up extra money intimidating building trades people. After about a year, Charley got his father to get Vito a slot with Vito’s brother Willie, who ran the controlled substances merchandising for the Prizzis from Miami to Maine. The government called it controlled substances at Eduardo’s suggestion because that way the voters who read about it didn’t get scared that the whole country might be turning into dope fiends. The people who run up those kinds of statistics said that just calling shit something that it wasn’t—controlled substances, a meaningless kind of a name—had increased gross sales of all shit products by 21.3 percent.

Willie’s operation was very big because of the tremendous demand for the shit. The people who made up the shit market had to run very fast trying to keep up with their own lives and their credit cards. Grown-ups and kids were working two jobs each at one time to keep up with the mortgages, taxes, toxic waste, dentists’ bills, and the rest of the American dream. They had to find something to pull them through from one day to the next. Booze made them sleepy and could get them fired. Pot made them think they felt sexy when they were only exhausted. The media kept saying that cocaine was a recreational drug. So the Prizzis handled the top end on a national basis, took their share, then split the profits with the franchisees, who were the other families across the country.

Vito was third man in the East Coast operation, under Joey Labriola, who everybody suspected of being a culatino but didn’t say nothing because he was a big part of Willie’s operation. Suspected Joey was a culatino? Joey was either supergay or he was a female transvestite trying to act like a man. But he had Willie’s protection and Willie delivered a lot of money, so everybody pretended Joey was a visiting lumberjack.

“What did Vito do, fahcrissake, Pop?” Charley asked.

“He killed two cops and then got himself surrounded by about two hundred cops in his own apartment. He tried to make a deal with Davey Hanly to give them our entire shit operation on the East Coast. He has to go down, no matter what,” Pop said.

“Aaaah, shit,” Charley said.

“We got an Army assault rifle for you. It hits so hard it’ll go right through the door, through Vito, and out the back of the building.”

Charley remembered Vito swimming in the Gowanus Canal when everybody said it could give typhoid; Vito yelling up Bushwick Avenue at Arcade Annie who was pregnant again, “When you gonna drop it, Annie?” and the laugh he got. He remembered Vito scoring his nineteenth consecutive kayo at the Armory. He thought of Vito doing the Peabody and moving faster, forward or backward, than anybody on the floor.

“He done everything wrong, Charley. He shoulda depended on the Prizzis to get him out, but he had to fink. Eduardo had it all set up. They were gonna bring him out surrounded by twelve state troopers holding an armor plate on his head to protect him from the cops, and even the TV people said it would be the shot of the year. He was gonna be lost inside under a different name until the two cop killings blew over and Eduardo could set up the right kind of a trial. Then, when he was cleared, there would be a job waiting for him as manager of an Ohio track.”

“What’ll I tell him to get him lined up?”

“Tell him Eduardo made a deal with the mayor and it’s fixed so after a couple years inside we’ll give him a good job in Vegas.”

“He hates Vegas.”

“Tell him Louisiana. He ain’t going nowheres anyways.”