5
In July 1987, eleven months after Maerose’s wedding, her Aunt Amalia, the don’s daughter, led the way up the stairs. As they reached the door they could hear the overture from Rossini’s William Tell, with its beautiful passage for violoncellos, through the heavy door. Amalia knocked lightly and they heard Don Corrado’s voice calling out faintly for them to enter. As she went into the huge room, Maerose, once more, was inundated by its decoration. There was hardly a space on any of the three walls that was not covered with heavy gold picture frames in many sizes, which contained such a variety of painted subjects as had not been seen, except in Sicily, where they had multiplied on the walls of aristocrats in the decades before Garibaldi came and the Honored Society had entered its modern phase.
Her grandfather beamed most kindly, not showing any teeth, working hard to make his eyes simulate feeling. “What a wonderful time,” the tiny old man sang, “because it has brought you to me.” Maerose knelt before him and kissed his hand.
“Sit down. Sit down,” he said gently. “Where are the cookies? You must have a cookie, my dear.” Amalia moved the huge plate of cookies from the table at the don’s side to the table that stood between them. She kissed Maerose on the cheek and left the room.
Maerose sat primly on a chair at his side, her feet held together, her hands correctly in her lap. She was dressed in dark, simple clothing. Her only jewelry was an old-fashioned brooch that had been her mother’s, pinned to her dress at her throat. She was a striking woman, as beautiful as a condor.
He held on desperately to his smile, allowing her to get used to its implied threat, staring at her with what he hoped to be benevolence. “How is your marriage?” he asked in the dialect of Agrigento.
“Rewarding, Grandfather.”
“No complaints?”
“Not one.”
“I have a complaint.”
“A complaint?”
“When are you and Charley gonna have kids?”
“Why shouldn’t we have kids?”
“You are married for a whole year! Where are the kids?” he shrilled.
“Of course we’re gonna have kids. Why shouldn’t we have kids?”
“When you have kids you wanna be somebody for them and you and Charley are somebody.”
“Maerose looked away.”
“Whatsamatter?”
She took a deep breath as if forcing herself to say something that she had been rehearsing for a long, long time. “In the old country, Grandfather, to be a mafioso was to be a man of honor and respect. You were an important part of the life of the country—the people looked up to you, the government and the aristocracy understood that they had to respect you, and you made the history of Sicily.”
“Yes?” He was perplexed by her use of the obvious.
“Here we are criminals.”
“Criminals?” His tiny jaw dropped with disbelief.
She shrugged. “Read the papers.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “I am saying that I don’t want to create children who will be seen as criminals with a father who is the Boss of a fratellanza family.”
“What else should they be? Your father, my son Vincent, was the Boss before your husband. I, your grandfather, was Boss before that. Your children will be Sicilians who will be born into the Honored Society. That is their good fortune. What else did you think they could be?”
“Do you want your grandchildren to be outcasts?”
“Outcasts? With the other families owning all the legit businesses and industries they own, we control the country.”
“You think money is everything?”
“Gimme an example where it ain’t.”
“Yeah? Do you remember when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and Al Capone offered, from the can, to intercede to get the baby back—what did the Lone Eagle say? He said, ‘I wouldn’t ask for Capone’s release if it would save a life,’ that’s what he said, and I am telling you that because you’re always saying what a nice man Capone was.”
“Lindy said that?”
“Grandfather—thirty years ago you invented franchising—before McDonald’s, before Pizza Hut, before Colonel Sanders. That let you expand your business nationally and internationally, while sharing in the profits with the franchisees. You had operating manuals written on every franchise operation, no matter what it was: labor racketeering, recycled postage stamps, dope, loan sharking. The one on the shit business alone, at 504 pages, is thicker and better than the manual for Burger King. You made it possible for dummies who couldn’t find their noses with both hands to put big, tricky operations on a businesslike basis in hundreds of cities everywhere, extending our influence, tripling our income from the royalties, but letting the franchisees take the heat.”
“So?”
“Grandfather, lissena me! The family’s street operation—Charley’s operation—it’s too labor intensive! Everybody along the line takes a piece of the action before what is left gets to you. Who needs that?”
“Whatta you mean?”
“I mean if you franchise the entire New York East Coast street operation to the Blacks, the Hispanics, and the Orientals, and you take the same high net royalty that you take from the franchise operations around the country, the profits will be absolutely net profit—the franchisees will have to live with the cuts their soldiers and capos take and be stuck with handling all the political payoffs. It could deliver a net that is bigger than Charley’s street operation delivers to you now.”
“How come you know so much?”
“My father was your Boss! My husband is your Boss! I am a certified public accountant and a lawyer! I am in charge of the Cray XMP 48 super computer that Barker’s Hill has in Omaha!”
“The computer says this is the way to go?”
“Grandfather—I can show you the printouts—it cannot miss.”
“What does this have to do with you and Charley not having kids?”
“You said—I didn’t say it—when you have kids you wanna be somebody for them.”
“So?”
“So—by franchising Charley’s street operation, we take the family out of all the areas which the media and the politicians keep calling the organized crime area. In America, which is not Sicily, that is something that kids are supposed to be ashamed of. So, right away, when I have kids, they don’t have to grow up ashamed of their father and their family.”
“Who’s gonna enforce it with these franchises? Who’s gonna collect?”
“Just like now on the national basis. Charley sets up a unit.”
“If we lease out the street operation, what happens to Charley?”
“Charley moves up to take over Barker’s Hill Enterprises.”
“You mean after Eduardo retires?”
“Now.”
“If Charley takes over Eduardo’s spot now, then what happens to Eduardo?”
“You run Eduardo for president in ’ninety-two. He’ll have to campaign for two years just like the other twenty-six candidates.”
“President of the United States?”
“Eduardo is the leading financier and industrialist in this country, among other things, and his public relations department, the biggest in the world since the Office of War Information in World War Two, has been reminding the country of that for over twenty years. Eduardo is sixty-nine years old. After two years of campaigning he’ll be seventy-one, which most of the American people consider young for a candidate. Even if he doesn’t get elected, it can be arranged so that he’s appointed attorney general, a profitable spot for us.”
“I see what you mean.”
“That’ll give Charley a year to set up the East Coast franchises and organize the enforcement, and it’ll give Eduardo time to break Charley in with my help.”
“Mae, lissena me, Charley ain’t no Eduardo. Eduardo is a Harvard man, a lawyer, a business school graduate, a leader of the community, or else how could we be talking about running him for president? Charley is—well Charley is not only the Boss on the street but, after all, he had a lot of years as the vindicatore of this family.”
“How did you get Eduardo started? You gave him a new name, a new nose, and, even before he began Harvard, you got somebody to teach him how to speak funny. That’s what you’ll do for Charley, and he’ll be as respectable in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of his own children as Eduardo. The family will be out of street operations, the net profit on all operations will go way up, and you will make the Prizzi family as respectable as money has insisted that all very rich families be since the dawn of history.”