33

On her way back from the office, Maerose stopped off at a florist and sent a small bouquet of gladiola to the woman at the hospital, with her business card enclosed. Directly under her name on the card she wrote: “CP’s fiancée.”

After she found out about Charley and the woman, she told her father she had to go to Washington on business. She went into the apartment she kept in New York on East Thirty-seventh Street and took her own time about getting drunk. She knew she had to clobber Charley to make sure he knew who was boss and who was going to be boss for the rest of their lives. But she had to move carefully, because if her grandfather found out that Charley was cheating on her with a two-ton showgirl, it was really going to hit the fan. And if her father ever got it into his head that Charley had dishonored her, then it could even be goodbye Charley. Her father was such an animal about honor!

She had to stay cool if she was going to get what she wanted yet protect Charley from her family. The girl she would buy off. She would give her a chance to get back to New York, then she’d sit down with her, give her a check for fifteen hundred dollars, maybe two thousand, and watch her while she changed the locks on her doors. There was no rush. It would all be done in her own sweet time after she had trained Charley, but nothing must stand in the way of putting Charley in her father’s job as Boss of the family. With the clout she would have through Charley, she could put the pressure on her Uncle Eduardo, so that when he had enough of it she could take over his operation. Being a woman could be a drag, but she was a Prizzi.

She sipped more champagne and wondered what it was the woman had that she could get out of Charley more than Maerose Prizzi could get out of him. He went to Miami to do the job on somebody, but he took the woman, not her, so in a lot of ways the woman had to have the edge on her with Charley. It couldn’t be in bed. The woman was too big and heavy to be able to keep up with Charley in bed. You had to be a tiger in the sheets to stay even with Charley.

She sipped more champagne and began to see it the only way it could look. Charley being who he was, nobody could have an edge on a Prizzi with Charley. He wouldn’t have to realize it, he would feel it on all the levels from his feelings about herself, which she was sure were one-hundred-percent-twenty-two-carat-absolutely-the-most, then on the working level with her father, who Charley knew was famous for his vengeance, then—towering above all of them—on the effect it would have on her grandfather if Charley jilted her for another woman. No matter what, Charley couldn’t do it. Charley was hers. The woman was only temporary.

She drank some more champagne. But suppose Charley had flipped? Suppose the woman was to him like the woman who is always showing up in the books and in the movies, even in opera? Suppose he had decided that nothing was going to keep him away from this broad? He wasn’t afraid of Vincent; he could take Vincent any day. Charley couldn’t take Vincent’s entire organization any day, but he would have Angelo in there rooting for him. He had respect for her grandfather but that was a ritualistic thing, a formal thing that his feelings for the woman might brush away no matter how much it hurt his own honor or her grandfather’s belief in the family. She knew if Charley really decided to go with this woman even his own father couldn’t stop him. Charley was the only man she had ever known who worked like some kind of a horse until he decided what was right, then he did what he thought was right whether it was right or not.

He had blown his best friend away because—need against need—his need against the family’s need—he had understood in his heart that Vito had to go. If he decided—need against need—the woman’s need against her own need—that the woman had to be supported because somehow he got the idea that she, herself, was strong and could go right ahead with her life without him, then he would throw her away and protect the woman. She had been handling the whole thing wrong. She saw that. She had come on accusing him, trying to get the maximum sweat out of the guilt he had to be feeling. But what was guilt to Charley? It wasn’t there. It had never been there because he only understood that all he had to do was the right thing, the right thing in his own head, and when he did that there was nothing to feel guilty about.

She drank more champagne. Charley was a contractor, sure. Out of the 1,800 soldiers in her grandfather’s family there were about fifteen or twenty who did that kind of work, but with a big difference. She knew some of the other men who did what Charley did, not the big jobs maybe, but that’s what they did, they zotzed people for a living. And they were all mostly a bunch of average slobs who did the work for money. And because they did it for money they felt the guilt and the guilt made monsters out of them. Charley was different, he never took a dime for the work. He had his two points in the Prizzi street operation. He had his Swiss bank account, his Panama bank account, and his Nassau bank account. Charley did everything first and foremost for the reasons that the Prizzis were right, so she was going to have to handle Charley differently.

She got out her book and called her Aunt Birdie in New Orleans. What could she have thought she was doing, telling Charley she was going to New Orleans like he was Prince Nowhere at whom she could scream for a little while and then tell him to do whatever she wanted him to do? It was the shock of Charley’s taking the woman to Miami, and not taking her instead, that had wrecked her judgment.

“Aunt Birdie? Maerose.”

“Hey, what a treat!”

“I wonder if I could come down and see you for a couple of days.”

“Lissen—that would be the most terrific thing that could happen to us. How come we rate a treat like this?”

“Charley Partanna is there. We’re engaged?” She said it shyly, very ladylike. “I want to surprise him.”

“Engaged? You and Charley? I can’t believe it. This is tremendous. Does Corrado know?”

“He knows. I have his blessing.”

Birdie got serious. “Lissen, don’t surprise Charley. Never surprise a man, because they’ll surprise you worse every time if you do it. Those things happen. It’s lonesome on the road. I ain’t saying that Charley is lonesome, but he could be so don’t give him no surprises. When you coming?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Take the courier plane. Eastern. Our people ride down on that every day. Somebody will make your reservation out of New York.”

“You are some organizer, Aunt Birdie.”

“Wait’ll you see how I organize a lunch for you and Charley tomorrow. Bring all the news you can lay your hands on.”