23

Maerose appeared to be looking out the window of her office, which faced a pleasantly landscaped backyard behind the double brownstone her company occupied in Turtle Bay, but she was really looking into her mind and seeing Charley. Her face was blank, her eyes were like the Xs in the eyes of a cartoon character after it has been wonked over the head with a fact of life. She couldn’t believe it. She had called the Prizzi hotel in Miami Beach, she had asked for Mr. Charles A. Partanna, and a woman had answered. Her reaction had been one of impatience when she assumed the goddam telephone operator had given her the wrong room. She found out. The woman’s voice, very British, wanted to know who was calling Mr. Partanna, and Maerose’s reaction had been, who the hell was this, asking her that question in that tone of voice as if Maerose didn’t have any right to call Mr. Partanna wherever he was.

“Put him on the phone.”

“Mr. Partanna is not here.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s at his office.”

It was one of those superior Limey voices. Charley’s office! “Who is this?”

“This is Mrs. Partanna.”

The shock of those words was like an icy sword thust into Maerose’s bowels. “Missus Partanna? When did that happen?”

“To whom am I speaking?”

“This is Miss Maerose Prizzi. Please remember that name so that you can get it right when you tell Mr. Partanna I called. I am Mr. Partanna’s fiancée.”

It was the broad’s turn to take the kick in the head. She gasped. She made a light geek sound. “His fiancée?”

“What’s your name?”

“Mardell La Tour.”

“Listen, Miss La Tour. I’m calling from New York, or else I’d come over there and we could both break a couple of chairs over that son of a bitch’s head. Where do you live?”

“In—in New York.”

“Where?”

“148 West Twenty-third.”

“When do you get back?”

“Monday, I suppose. But, really, Miss Prizzi—”

“You and I will have a little talk. I’ll call you.”

Maerose was still shaken up from the call that had produced a woman in Charley Partanna’s hotel room in Miami almost a half hour ago. The moment she hung up on Mardell she put private detectives on it in Miami and in New York, and she knew they were going to come up with absolute, incontrovertible proof that Charley had been two-timing her with the woman all along. She had to break his back. He had to know that if he had done such a thing to her she would have to demolish him.

She knew from pumping her father that Charley was in Miami to handle a problem with a schmeck producer, but he had told the woman that he had to go to an office, not that he would have told her why he was there no matter what, but the point was, she couldn’t be in the environment because any woman in the environment knew that men like Charley didn’t have an office when they went to Miami. Anyway, she certainly couldn’t be in the environment talking the way she did. She sounded like C. Aubrey Smith.

Maybe she was some local talent Charley had picked up or someone Casco Fidele’s people had fixed him up with. That she could talk herself into accepting. That was something men had been known to do on the road. But if he had taken that woman with him all the way from New York when he had never so much as had the courtesy of inviting her to Baltimore when he went, even if he knew she couldn’t come because she had a business to run, she was going to have to—she swallowed bitterly—she was going to have to find out how she could put out a contract on him.

She knew she couldn’t do it. Making the threat inside her head made her feel a little better, but if she had Charley handled she would be just like her father, and anything was better than that.

She needed Charley. All her plans depended on Charley. Finding out that he had a woman with him in Miami only made the whole feeling sharper, more disemboweling. He was a devious no-good son of a bitch, and what was she going to do? She was a Prizzi. He knew all about her being a Prizzi, better than most of the people in the world, and yet he had done this to her.

She knew Angelo Partanna would know about the woman, because he knew what Charley was going to do before Charley himself thought of doing it, but she didn’t know how to ask him without opening up the whole can of worms.

She knew one thing. She had to nail Charley to the stage. She had to take away his options and make him see the uselessness of hanging around with a woman like that or any woman except Maerose Prizzi. He had to understand that he had committed himself to a Prizzi, he was engaged to be married to a Prizzi, even if she had never insisted that they make it formal, or even that he acknowledge that they were engaged. He had to be made to understand that he couldn’t just travel around the country with any broad he wanted to lay his hands on as if they were in central China, for Christ’s sake. He was in Miami. Everybody knew him. His out was that nobody knew that he was engaged to Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter. In order to nail him to the floor where he stood, she would have to make it official, she would have to let the world know to whom he belonged. She was going to have to tell her father and her grandfather that they were engaged. She could hardly bring herself to do it because, once she did it, if Charley kept it up the way he was doing with other women, they would drop him in cement.

Also, it wrecked her timetable. She wanted to get the business established in Washington as solidly as it was set in New York so that, right after her engagement to Charley was made official, at the red-hot crucial moment, at the peak of the good news, she could ask her grandfather to tell Eduardo that Eduardo should take her on in his office and she could sell him the decorating business as a going proposition for a large hunk of cash, then settle down on the long-term basis to learn Eduardo’s operation, to undermine him with the family, and finally to take his place.

She began to have certain doubts about being able to make this whole thing stick about being engaged to Charley. Charley never called her to ask her out. She always had to call him. Charley never lured her into bed. Every time it happened she’d had to make elaborate arrangements to set it up. Sooner or later she was going to run out of stories to tell him just to get his clothes off and the door locked. Tears welled up in her beautiful dark eyes. She couldn’t give him up. That would wreck her plans to work her way into a position to be able to run the whole Prizzi family someday. Every time they were together he became more hers, and she knew—she absolutely knew—that after ten or twelve more times he would start being the aggressor. He would call her for dinner. He would be the one who thought up the plots and did the sweet-talking to get them into bed. With the kind of money and power that was at stake, they belonged together.

But for all the other reasons, all the reasons she had started out with, Charley was an important link in her life chain. They had to be the new blood together, the new power team. Charley was only her father’s underboss now, but by the time she was in a position to knock Eduardo out of his seat at the head of the legit Prizzi enterprises, her father would surely be finished, either dead or retired, and Charley would be the Boss of the Prizzi street operation, with all the muscle of a boss, which would be the final clincher to back her play when the time came to cut Eduardo down.

She took up the phone and dialed.

“Aunt Amalia? Maerose. Could you get me in to see him some time this afternoon?”

“Whatsamatta, Mae?” Amalia’s voice was anxious.

“I want to tell him that I am gonna marry Charley Partanna.”

“Mae! Mae, that’s wonderful! You will make him so happy!”

“I want to tell him first. I haven’t even told my father yet.”

“But Charley will tell Angelo—”

“Charley won’t open his mouth. Will you get me in, Aunt Amalia?”

“Come on over here at half past four. This is the happiest day of my life.”

Maerose put on a green tweed Lovat dress with a green sweater and green woollen stockings. She wore flat-heeled shoes and very little makeup to create a little-girl effect. After she was completely dressed she changed her mind. There was a better way to look like a little girl for her grandfather. She took off the dress and put on a kilt with the Fraser plaid and a Shetland pullover, then a tartan tam-o’-shanter with a chin strap and a big tuft on top. She stared at herself in a full-length mirror and wondered how Scotch transvestites dressed.

The phonograph was playing Vincenzo Bellini’s Il Pirata, a Sicilian story. It was in the middle of the melting cantilena, “Pietosa al padre,” when Amalia brought her into the don’s room. Her grandfather smiled at her and bowed with his head but held up a hand to keep her from speaking until the aria was finished. Maerose sat down with her feet held primly together.

The room was a replica of the duke’s bedroom from Corrado Prizzi’s boyhood. There was hardly a space on the wall that was not covered with a nineteenth-century painting or aquatint in a baroque frame. The furniture was dark, heavy, and overstuffed, and everything in the room except the don had fringes on it.

The aria ended. The don stood and opened his arms to her. She rushed into his embrace—but carefully, because he was so small and fragile.

“My beautiful girl,” the don said. “Come, you must sit down and have a cookie, my dear.”

They sat side by side with a small tabouret holding a heaping plate of Sicilian sweets and cookies between them.

“How good it is to see you,” the don said.

“I wanted you to be the first to have the news, Grandfather. I haven’t even told Poppa yet.”

“News?” he said delicately.

“I am going to be married to Charley Partanna.”

“Oh! What wonderful news.” He clasped his hands before his tiny chest and rolled his eyes heavenward. “The two most perfect young people of my life—a marriage!”

“I have come for your blessing.”

“You have my blessing a thousand times, if you are sure this is what you want and that there will be a marriage.”

“We are sure, Grandfather.”

“Then we must have a big party and make the announcement. Because it is for you—my favorite granddaughter—it will be the biggest party our people have seen for months. At the old Palermo Gardens. About four weeks from now?” He held out his hand and she kissed it. She left the room with wet eyes. On the phonograph, the quintet and soon the sextet began to develop with comments from the chorus. It was a beautiful moment, and she had nailed Charley to the stage.