25

Charley was floating in the middle of a transparent, blue-green sea, taking the sun on Mardell’s creamy white belly, her head a few miles to his right and the cliffs of her painted toenails a few miles to his left. Maerose Prizzi was beginning to appear from the other side of Mardell’s left breast, the steady, heavy heartbeat making the climb precarious. As Maerose reached the summit she looked around, took out a gun, and shot at Charley. The gun made a terrible noise. It woke him.

The telephone on the night table beside his ear was ringing in the darkness. He picked it up and said hello into it, looking over his shoulder at Mardell, asleep beside him. With her, sleeping pills worked.

“Charley?” It was Pop.

Charley woke up. “What time is it?”

“Ten after six.”

“In the morning?”

“The girl with you?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll do the talking. Get dressed. Don’t pack anything. A car will pick you up downstairs in ten minutes.”

“I can’t. Something happened here.” He whispered into the telephone.

“Charley—I’m talking about that you temporarily got to run for your life.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not now. Get moving.”

“What about my clothes?”

“You’ll get new ones.”

“What is this?”

“George F. Mallon.”

“Oh.”

“We’ll talk later. The car will take you to the Miami airport. Go to the first phone booth nearest to the Eastern check-in counter. I have that number. I’ll call you there.”

“But what about—”

“Leave a note for the girl. Tell her your office called you away on business. Tell her a car will pick her up after she calls the bell captain when she’s ready. A woman will be in the car to take her to New York, so she’ll have company.”

“What woman?”

“Mrs. Bostwick.”

“Jesus, Pop, this is more complicated than you think.”

“You gotta move, Charley. You’ll understand when I talk to you later.” Pop hung up.

Mardell stirred dopily. “Whassamatta?”

He leaned over and kissed her bare shoulder. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”

He dressed rapidly, threw some water on his face, and combed his hair. He sat at the small desk in the room. “Dear Mardell,” the note said, “I have a business thing that came up. I have to travel, THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT LAST NIGHT.” He printed that sentence in fat capital letters and then he underlined it. “When you wake up and are all dressed and packed, call the bell captain and an assistant of my father’s will be waiting to take you back to New York. I will talk to you tonight. Everything is fine. No worrying, please. Everything is coming up roses. Love, Charley.”

He went to the window and looked out through the heavy curtains to make sure it was as early as Pop said. It was. Everything was coming up poison ivy. He let himself out of the suite on tiptoe and went out to the elevator bank. He pressed the DOWN button. The instantly answering ping of the waiting car made him jump. This business of being jammed between two hostile women had him all on edge. He looked down to see if he had remembered to put his socks on.

There had to be a book that would tell him how to handle the situation. He would go to the public library in whatever town he was being sent to. He punched the LOBBY button. When the elevator door opened the Plumber was standing there.

“What’s going on?” Charley asked.

“You got me, Charley. I got a limo outside.”

The Plumber handed Charley an envelope through the window of the limo. “The ticket,” he said. “In the name of Fred J. Fulton.”

“Who’s that?”

“You.”

“To where?”

“Dallas.”

Charley put the envelope in his pocket. “What a business,” he said bitterly. “See you, Al.” The car moved out along Collins Avenue.

As they crossed the Julia Tuttle Causeway for a direct run to the airport, he thought this had to be serious. Pop didn’t play games. But what could be as serious as the jam Maerose had put him in with Mardell? “I am Charley’s fiancée,” she had said—or something like that. How in God’s name had she gotten it into her head that they were engaged? He wasn’t engaged to anybody, including Mardell. What he and Mae had done on the new bed in his apartment was an absolutely natural thing for people of their age group and health ratings. The Surgeon General of the United States and Psychology Today would back him up on that. What they had done on that bed had been nice, it had worked the way both of them had a right to hope it would work, so they had tried it again a couple of times. If every time a young, healthy American male got on a bed with a young, healthy American female they automatically became engaged, there wouldn’t be enough engagement rings to go around. Sixty percent of the entire population would be interchangeably engaged to one another. No one could ever get married because they’d be engaged to so many people.

But look what it had done to Mardell. She was nearly totaled, and just at the time when she needed him most this goddam thing had come up to turn him into a fugitive. What would she do when she woke up? How would she ever get herself together again all alone?

There was nothing Mallon could pin on him. Davey Hanly wasn’t going to give up a nice steady sixty-thousand-a-year from the pad because Mallon asked him some questions. Anyway, Davey was eight floors below when the accident happened. Mallon could yell all he wanted but he couldn’t make anything stick. There was no witness who had seen him zotz Vito. Maybe the crisis was that Pop had a tip-off about Little Jaimito. They probably hadn’t even found Jaimito yet and, anyway, there was nothing that could hang it on him, and the cops would be too gratified that somebody did the number on a bunch of guys like that to get in an uproar. Maybe Vincent was setting up a contract in Dallas or somewhere that Pop didn’t want to talk over until he knew he had a safe line or until he could send somebody down from New York with what had to be done. But Pop had said George F. Mallon. How could it be Mallon? If that was it, he was going to have somebody’s ass because of all the times for him to have to leave Mardell this was absolutely the worst. She already figured he sold her out. But no matter what Maerose or anybody said, how could she think he sold her out? He brought her to Miami with him, not Maerose, didn’t he? It was a no-win situation.

Jesus, next he had to listen to Maerose. Wherever Pop was sending him, she was going to find out where he was and she was going to call him just as if they were engaged and she had the right to call him. It was a toss-up which was worse: Mae or Mardell. How could he tell himself not to lie? When it was all over, what would be the use of lying? If he wanted to get this straightened out, he would have to level with both of them. But if he lied to one he had to lie to both, because he knew in his heart that the one he didn’t lie to was the one he wanted to keep. That was instinct, but suppose his instincts were wrong?

It was better to have to hear it the first time from Maerose on the phone than to be in the same room with her while he tried to control his eyes and the sound of his voice. He was going to have to get a book on lying or he was never going to convince anybody. Whatever was going to happen out of all this, it wasn’t good for Mardell. This was going to make a lot of trouble for Mardell, and he was glad he’d had that talk with Pop about her because Pop would move in on the situation and ease it up until Charley could get back to New York. Sending Mrs. Bostwick in to ride up with her to New York showed how important Mardell was to him and he was grateful Pop had thought of it. But whatever it was Pop wanted him to do, wherever Pop was sending him, he couldn’t stay away more than a couple of days because he had very bad vibes about Mardell and he didn’t want anything to happen to her.

It was the usual pandemonium at the airport. Time of day made no difference in airports: it was about half past six on a Friday morning, and it looked like Ghandi’s funeral. How could tens of thousands of people even think of going anywhere at this time of day?

He located the phone booth nearest the Eastern counter, sat in it, and closed the door. In the next five minutes two different people came up to it, even at that hour of the morning, looked in, and banged on the door. Charley opened the door with deliberate slowness, thought of Humphrey Bogart, hosed fear all over them, and they went away. The phone rang.

“Pop?”

“Yeah. Did you do the work down there?”

“The work?”

“On Jaimito.”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Lissena me. You know Mallon who is running for mayor on the Reform ticket?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Charley said irritably.

“A week from Sunday, like at dawn, that is according to his plan Sunday dawn, he has organized U.S. Marshalls and a gang of media to go out to your apartment and take you in, then he is going on television that night so it will be all over the papers—on the Monday eight days before Election Day, and accuse the mayor and the police commissioner of ordering you to do the job on Vito to protect their drug empire.”

“Whaaaat?”

“Yeah. Can you believe it? And he is gonna try to get a lot more mileage out of it than that. So far, the only name he has is George Fearons, the detective they say did the actual job on Vito. But the day you did the job on Vito, the computer mistakenly gave the cops the name of a cop who retired three years ago and lives in Montreal now. Mallon’s people were also all over Willie Daspisa, who says he seen you go into Vito’s building on that night. And he has Davey Hanly on the mat for all the good that’s gonna do him.”

“What kind of a frame-up is this?”

“He has a TV cameraman who went into Vito’s apartment right behind the task force sergeant and he says part of Vito was on his back on the floor and the rest of him was all over the walls before the sergeant fired a shot.”

“Politics. Boy!”

“But he can’t prove nothing—he can’t even get started—until he can close in on you, arrest you in front of two hundred media people, and nail you up in front of the cameras. He’s started the whole thing so now he has to follow it up wherever he can find you.”

“This is the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“He wants to nail you, but he don’t care about you. He wants to nail the mayor. All you gotta do is lay low until after Election Day.”

“Where?”

“I got it all set up.”

“What about school? Shit, Pop, I got exams coming up.”

“I’ll take them a doctor’s certificate that you got the flu. I’m your father. What can they say except too bad.”

“You got to send the Plumber over there starting Monday night to get my homework.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Jesus, Pop—you don’t know what else is going on. I’m in a bind not only with Mardell, but with Mae.”

“They’ll have to wait, Charley.”

“Is Eduardo handling it?”

“Eduardo can’t do nothing with this guy—directly. But he can slow him down. Eduardo and the don want you on ice until it’s over.”

“Jesus, Pop, that’s almost ten days away. Mardell’ll go outta her mind.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

“Pop. Lissena me. Last night she said to me that Maerose had called her and said that she and me was engaged. I mean—you can’t imagine what it was like.”

“Engaged? Mae told her that?”

“She’s gotta have me mixed up with somebody else.”

“Well—whatta you gonna do? Two women. I mean, it hadda come out.”

“But Mardell is very shaky, Pop. You don’t know. She gets that yesterday from Mae, now she wakes up and I’m gone. What’s she supposed to think? That I ran out on her, right? But with her, with Mardell, it’s ten times worse than if it happened to somebody else. Like I told you. About the father and having the kid and all that.”

“You didn’t tell me about that.”

“Well, it’s very rough.”

“Charley, life is life. Things happen. You’ll talk to her tonight from Dallas. I am gonna take her to dinner and explain everything.”

“Everything?”

“About why you hadda leave Miami this morning. Not the real reason.”

“Well—Jesus. What about Maerose?”

“That’s easy. I’ll talk to her.”

“No, no! I mean what about that she thinks she and me are engaged?”

“So it’s some whim she has. It ain’t official. I mean, it ain’t like she announced it to the don or Vincent. She’s just trying to steamroller you.”

“Pop, listen. I think it would be better if you didn’t talk to Maerose. She’s very proud. And we can’t blame her if she is so in love with me, because she tells me we’re engaged, it ain’t something she wants the family to know.”

“I’ll dummy up with her.”

“Where do I go now?”

“You got a reservation at the Mockingbird Hilton in Dallas, in the name of Frank Arriminata, after that pasta you make with the broccoli so you won’t forget it.”

“Arriminata. Arriminarsi means to move about.”

“That’s what you’ll be doing. I’ll call you tomorrow night. Stay over the weekend. See the Cowboys. Go to a movie. Monday they’ll be ready for you in New Orleans.”

“Gennaro?”

“Yeah. Rent a car in Dallas and drive to Tyler, Texas. Go to the city airport they got. One of Gennaro’s planes will take you to New Orleans.”

“Why can’t Mardell come with me?”

“You know why. Because she makes you more traceable.”

“But doing it like this is really gonna wreck her.”

“Even if Mallon’s people get lucky and they can trace Fred Fulton from Miami to Dallas, which is practically impossible, the trail stops there. At the Dallas airport.”

“How is Eduardo gonna handle Mallon?”

“Don’t worry. The verce of the people will be heard. The don is giving this his best thinking.”

“We now got one more reason for Eduardo to find Willie in the Program.”

“After Election Day. When you get back. That’s what we’re gonna do. No more Mr. Nice Guy.” Pop hung up.