15

The first time Charley saw that something was definitely out of whack with Mardell was when he told her he was going to have to be out of town for a few days on a business trip. From the beginning he had figured she was a little nuts, the way he would have accepted it if she stuttered or had one leg shorter than the other. He had even taken the business she had handed him on the first night they met—about radio beams and Buckingham Palace—in his stride, like it was her idea of some kind of a joke. But when he said he had to go out of town, she went to pieces right before his eyes. She got a grip on his wrist that he couldn’t break without hurting her, and she stared away from him, straight at the wall of her apartment, absolutely silent, tears rolling down her face.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

She wouldn’t answer. Gently, but with great difficulty, he pried her fingers loose from his wrist. He pulled up a straight-back chair and sat beside her. They were both naked after two hours of making love.

“Talk to me,” he said. “What is it?”

“You’ll never come back,” she said.

“Whatta you talking? I’ll be back in three days. I’m going on the company jet. Just me and the pilots.”

She shook her head, stared, and wept.

“Mardell, fahcrissake, where do you get ideas like this?”

“That’s how my father left my mother. I can’t talk about it, Charley.”

It took him almost an hour to get the story out of her. It was about as lousy a story as he had ever heard. Her father had raped her when she was twelve then had disappeared. She got a baby out of the rape and her mother made her give the baby away for adoption. She had never understood any of it. Now it all came down to the kick in the head that, if Charley went away, he would never come back, either, and if he didn’t come back she was afraid it would make her pregnant. They wept together. They went back to bed. Charley didn’t talk anymore about needing to go away for a couple of days. He reorganized the trip so that he went in and out of New York on the jet, leaving early in the morning for the distant cities and coming back at night sometimes just in time to go straight to the Latino to pick her up after the show.

When Charley told her that he had to travel out of town, Mardell knew it was her chance to add to the dimensions of the character she was playing. It would help Hattie Blacker authenticate the case history of the woman Mardell La Tour. For her own purposes, it was becoming clear to her that with the amount of detail she had piled up over the past year and a half on the other case histories, and the detail she was accumulating as the mistress of a very successful mafioso, that someday she might want to write her own autobiography into which she had already built so much drama, conflict, and suffering.

Charley was wonderful about the all-out way he supplied the responses to the lines she improvised within the character. He deserved credit and, when the autobiography was published, she was going to see that he got it.

Charley saw the heads of six families on a day-trip basis. He brought copies of the pictures of Willie and Joey that had been taken on a family picnic to Indian Point three summers ago when the don had rented an excursion boat from the Hudson River Line and everybody had such a wonderful time that three of the girls who had gotten pregnant from the picnic had become brides.

“Chances are the pictures don’t mean nothing, Charley,” Sal Partinico said in Detroit. “You go in the Program, they change your face if you want it.”

“We gotta start someplace,” Charley said. “I want to get all the people in the country looking for them. Joey is very, very gay. Willie is a beast. The people can maybe put that together.”

“If we can help, we wanna help,” Partinico said. “But don’t expect too much. There are a lot of beasts around.”

When he got back to New York after the sixth meeting, Charley knew it wasn’t going to work. “Willie probably looks like Calvin Coolidge now that the Program’s plastic surgeons are finished with him,” he said to Pop.

“We gotta light a fire under Eduardo. Things are too quiet with George F. Mallon,” Pop said. “And Mallon’s been working Davey Hanly over. They been giving it to Munger. They got depositions from the camera crew that followed Munger into Vito’s—they ain’t got nothing they can go on yet, but that could be even worse. Mallon could decide to pick you up.”

“He ain’t got nothing to go on, Pop. Not unless Davey or Munger spill.”

“My inside people report out twice a day. I got two people on his campaign staff and one in his house. We gotta be ready. If anything happens, if somebody tells Mallon something—anything that lets him even begin to pin Vito on you—then we gotta get you outta town until the election is over and Mallon is sent back to building television churches.”

Charley talked to Maerose the three times that she called the Laundry during the next two weeks to report progress on the apartment. Charley had always liked Maerose in the way the French feel about the British Queen: with a distantly feudal, hopeless fealty and devotion. She was Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter, which made her not only sacred but maybe even a little dangerous. The only time he had ever thought about her until she had come into his life as his interior decorator was as the little kid he remembered dropping bags of water on people in the street from the third floor of her father’s house, which to Vincent was the funniest thing he ever saw until she dropped one on him. Her mother had been alive then, Charley remembered, or else Vincent might have lost his head and shot the kid.

Things had been developing differently lately. She wasn’t a little kid anymore, and even Charley was beginning to understand that she was locking her teeth into him, and if he didn’t do something about it soon he would never be able to get her to let go. He would get back to Pop’s house at night and find little notes from her saying she had darned his socks. Then, before he could get his hat off, she would phone him and ask him if he’d found the socks. He said, “Whatta you wanna sew socks for? They get holes, I throw them away.”

She said, “Oh, Charley,” and he imagined she was shaking her head and smiling mysteriously.

She talked to his father about things he liked to eat and when Charley got home from the Laundry he would find a little note saying that there was some sarde a beccaficu in the refrigerator, or something like that. He would have to call her to thank her, and do it before he got his hat off, because if he didn’t, she called him. She had other little presents for him. “Jesus, Mae,” he would tell her, “I’m supposed to be the one who gives you the presents.”

“So? Go ahead.”

She gave him a cordless telephone for his terrace and a natural noises machine for beside his bed. It could make sounds like the ocean, waterfalls, or rain in two strengths. She gave him an electronic horse-race analyzer even though it was a known fact that he went to the races only once a year, bet only on sure-thing information, and never put a bet down away from the track because let-the-civilians-have-it was how he saw it.

He was forced to give her a bottle of perfume but it was the wrong kind. “Whatta you mean, not subtle?” he asked her on the telephone. “Either it smells or it don’t.”

He had to have lunch with her one Tuesday because she said she had to show him some fabrics, that it was a matter of what he was going to have to live with, but the lunch worked out okay because he was always on the lookout for new food ideas, and in the little Sicilian joint she found for them on the Lower West Side in New York he had stumbled on a menu item called a Crown of Thorns, a nest of spaghetti woven into an open-topped toque which had pointy olives and red pimentos imbedded in it. He was going to make it for Easter and send it to Father Passanante at the rectory of Santa Grazia di Traghetto in his mother’s name.

Five days later, she talked him into going out to the apartment. The job was finished and she said they had to see it together. He had to say yes, even though it was the middle of the afternoon on a working day, because she was insistent about it on the telephone and, after all, if she had finished the job she rated it to have him look at the work with her. He also felt pretty good because Mardell had developed a much more positive attitude since that terrible afternoon when she broke down so pathetically because he said he had to go out of town.

Mae was actually glowing the way women are supposed to glow when they are pregnant, which she absolutely could not have been on his account. She had come out to the Laundry in a cab, but they switched to Charley’s van for the ride out to the beach. She was wearing something white and filmy, which didn’t seem right somehow for a raw November day as they drove through a sleet storm but, as Maerose saw it, it made her look like a bride, which was part of the central idea. Riding out in the van with the swivel seats, the two phones, front and back, the icebox, the stereo TV, and the pile carpet, she held a single long-stemmed red rose in her hand. “I should have it in my teeth,” she said, “but we couldn’t talk.”

She unlocked the apartment door and threw it open upon the small entrance hall, which she had done in cream and beige. There was a V’Soske throw rug in eight shades of caramel and green on the floor. The Japanese prints on the walls had beige leather frames. The single half-wall facing the door held a bowl of brown and green silk orchids made in Taiwan by a Prizzi company. The lighting was soft.

“Hey,” Charley said. “Is this the right floor?”

“Carry me over the threshold, Charley,” Mae commanded.

Charley had gone ahead of her into the apartment. “Holy Jesus, Mae,” he said, “Vito should see this. You really done a terrific thing here.”

Vito’s old furniture was gone. It had been picked up by the Salvation Army. Brand-new stuff like he had never seen in his life outside a two-dollar magazine had taken its place, all of it in beautiful, living color. “How’d you ever figure out how to do this?” he asked.

She was still standing outside the apartment. “Charley?”

He turned to face her.

“Carry me in,” she ordered.

They stared at each other for many seconds before he understood what she was telling him. He crossed the room and lifted her into his arms. Jesus, he thought randomly, thank God she ain’t Mardell, we’d go through the floor. I’m gonna have to work out with the barbells.

He kicked the door shut and stared down at her face, so close to his—her nostrils flaring in and out like a swan’s wings, her enormous black eyes glazed with lust as she stared up at him—that he kissed her and she held him there, arms around his neck. It wasn’t so bad was the sensation he got, so, being very healthy and in the prime of his life, he staggered with her into the bedroom, laid her down on the bed, and then he laid her.

It was tremendous, even if he did keep remembering Mardell in brilliant, passing flashes. It was like being locked in a mailbag with eleven boa constrictors. Several times he thought the whole ceiling had fallen on him. His head came to a point where it suddenly melted and flopped all over his shoulders and out all over the bed. His toes fell off. Then, when it was over, it hit him what he had done. He had laid a Prizzi and, depending on what attitude she took, what was he going to do about that?