7

The three-story sixteen-room brick house (owned by the Little Sisters of Pain and Pity, a spinoff of the Blessed Decima Manovale Foundation), had been built sixty-one years before at the top of a Brooklyn slope that rolled through a large garden to the riverfront. The holy order rented the house to Don Corrado for ninety-six dollars a month, which took a bite out of his Social Security benefits. The tenant was allowed to rent the furniture and furnishings of the house: bibelots, rugs, exotic chandeliers, and heavy lamps, and all the overstuffed furniture. There were gold fringes everywhere, on everything, hundreds of pictures in gilded frames, a fine phonograph record collection, the dark 1980 Buick automobile in which he rarely rode; all of the suits, shirts, underwear, cravats, shoes, and shoelaces he wore. And he got all this for an additional eleven dollars a month because compassion had shown the gentle nuns that he was an old man with little time left and they planned to use the house as the bingo center for western and southern Brooklyn after his death.

The back of the house faced the river and the jagged teeth of lower Manhattan, a sight that never failed to stimulate the tenant, who saw the island as the lower jaw of a gargantuan alligator whose widely opened mouth had poised an invisible upper jaw far above, which would one day chomp down upon the guilty. He hoped he would never witness this terrible event because some of his best friends were New Yorkers. He was a tiny man, white-haired and seamed, who resembled a chalk-white stalk of dwarf asparagus, having a multi-indented top and no shoulder definition. It was a question whether the eyes in that overused face or the terrible, terrible smile was the more terrifying. Taken all in all, Don Corrado, at least on his exterior, was as lovable as a dropped load of napalm.

Almost one year had gone by after his granddaughter had planted the idea of respectability—her message still hung like incense in the great room that the don inhabited—before he reached its resolution in the summer of 1988. On a July day he sat alone at the dining table, because he could not bear to share food, and made his decision. Very few men, never women, had sat at his table. To be invited to join him for food was a measure of the don’s admiration, which few had enjoyed. He dined in the room that had been made off the upstairs kitchen, which had been installed because his daughter, Amalia, was getting too old to carry so many dishes up two flights of stairs. In a lifetime of gluttony he had never known such a cook as Amalia, and sometimes he grew frightened when he tried to imagine what he would eat after she died.

Amalia was a widow. She had two sons: Rocco, who was one of the three caporegimes of the Prizzi family, and Pasquale, also known as Arthur Shuland, the name his grandfather had persuaded him to adopt legally, twenty-four years before he had become the lieutenant governor of California. Arthur was the elder son, but more remote, although he was in constant touch with his uncle, Amalia’s brother, Edward S. Price, the financier, arbitrageur, philanthropist, arts patron, and CEO of Barker’s Hill Enterprises.

Don Corrado ate slowly, which was uncharacteristic, but he was thinking. Whenever he was awake he was plotting, a concentrated form of thinking. The process resembled a mattanza del tonno that he had witnessed off the coast at Trapani when he was eleven years old when the tuna, as always, had entered the many-chambered nets to be slaughtered. Some of the fish had been nine feet long and had weighed almost a thousand pounds, like some of the ideas he had when he had done his best and most concentrated thinking.

He finished the second bowl of the inspiring zuppa di pesce alla Siciliana with zest, savoring the lingering taste of fennel and thyme. At once he began to eat Amalia’s delicious cavatoni incannati with its rich sauce that held up chunks of zucchini and fried eggplant, nourishing his thoughts. His thinking as he chewed became more like that of a fisherman who is trawling a line behind a moving boat: each catch of new thought was random and different.

As he started to eat the beet salad on the platter Amalia placed before him, he thought for the two hundredth time of what his granddaughter had said to him about respectability. He had admired respectability since he had been eleven years old and, one summer, while the family of the Duke of Camardi had been on holiday in Paris, while his father did his business with the gabellotto, he had found himself allowed to wander through the main rooms, sitting on the chairs and the sofas, admiring the hundreds of paintings on the walls. It had been the greatest eighteen minutes of his life. That day, and its associations with respectability, had remained with him always.

It had been his duty to get the power, then the money, to insure his continuing influence in a new country. He had known many respectable people, including Pope Pius XII, Arturo Toscanini, Enrico Caruso, and Richard M. Nixon, over his years of power, and they had made indelible impressions upon his susceptibility toward the respectable. He was a student of the nobility and aristocracy of Sicily, keeping his records of them as carefully as any good philatelist might keep a stamp album. Researchers in universities in the old country were retained by him to send information, history, and background from every leaf and branch of Sicilian nobility. The hobby had taken up an important part of the last ten years.

All in all, his favorite granddaughter’s appeal to him was, in a sense, a strong and deep appeal to his pariah complex, so ingrained since he had been allowed to wander through the duke’s country house. He saw at once, as Maerose had spoken to him, that what she had foretold must be made to happen. Nonetheless, if he agreed with her too quickly he would lose a more important point. She would have to agree to give him great-grandchildren, plus his street operations in New York would have to show a proven capability of yielding a sharply increased net profit.

He marveled at the Sicilian essence of his granddaughter. She had set her trap and made it impossible for him to avoid it. If he wanted great-grandchildren from her, and a sharply increased net profit, he had to give in to her while insuring that his blood and his line would be accepted everywhere in the years ahead, allowed to become leaders of the most respectable people in the United States of America. Besides, it could all bring about his only surviving son’s becoming the attorney general of the United States—which could be very good for business.

His thoughts changed to this son, Eduardo, whose name and nose had been changed to Edward S. Price before he had entered Harvard. Eduardo was a great mountain of respectability who sat on the boards of the great museums, opera companies, libraries, two great universities, twenty-three banks, and more than sixty-seven American corporations. Eduardo held more honorary degrees and titles than any American in history excepting Herbert Hoover. His listing in Who’s Who in America ran on for almost three pages.

The don considered the past and the future carefully. He listened to the plea of history, to the immutable law that stated that great amounts of money and property demand respectability, and he bowed his head to the inevitable. It had been slightly different in the old country. There, as here, the people who had been able to enforce sudden ownership of large tracts of property—if they also had the arms to persuade the locals to work the property for them—became dukes and princes. There, however, the mafiosi were also men of respect, even if untitled: lawgivers, an honorable society that merely chose to take a different path to power and riches. What could be the objection to exploiting one’s power over other men? Here, in America, it was a way of life except that it was done differently.

In the past few months, Don Corrado had aided his digestion by thinking about that law of nature that demanded inexorably that respect be delivered unto money and property. He thought of his descendants, all Americans, and how he could make certain that they would take their places among the acknowledged leaders of the United States—a marked difference from the unacknowledged—as he had already arranged to happen for his son Eduardo.

Thinking of Eduardo and of his place among the mighty suddenly clarified for the don what he had been slow to realize: that he had been looking at the problem from his own narrow perspective, that of the old Sicilian, still enamored of the local duke. His granddaughter had seen it from the other, wider side, Eduardo’s side, and to her it had become vividly clear. His organization, the Prizzi Family and its international branches, had functioned as part of the vast marketplace that was the world, offering goods and services to its customers, the consumers. The laws of supply and demand, which defined any national marketplace, had ruled the relationship. Supermarkets did not sell cocaine. Department stores did not make book on the National Football League.

Nonetheless, he reasoned with himself as he chewed and swallowed the delicious red beets, trying to anticipate the next course Amalia would lay before him, a certain mystique had come to surround all the transactions of his family, which was due, without doubt, to the old-time Warner Brothers movies; the television about Capone, a Neapolitan; the occasional congressional investigation; the ever-cooperative media; and many paperback novels, which gave his organization a certain glamorized aura but which barred the way to respectability within the national community.

Instinctively, he had been on the right path when he had remade his son’s name, nose, and speech before Eduardo had entered Harvard. With total clarity he saw that, if his blood line were to realize its greatest meaning so that full use of Prizzi wealth and power could be developed, he must extend the method he had used to legitimize Eduardo. He would insure that generation after generation of his seed would embrace the total potential of their power by becoming wholly acceptable, even socially desirable, to all of the voters and consumers who were the rest of the North American population. When he had laid down the rules defining the actual marriage of his granddaughter to Charley Partanna, he had done the right thing by repeating the first step of Eduardo’s program—telling Charley that he must change his name.

Maerose’s way of allowing Eduardo to step down gracefully, without loss of dignity or honor, by running for the American presidency, while at the same time she was providing for Eduardo’s successor was the most brilliant stroke. Not that Eduardo could get elected—he was tainted by being an Eastern establishment banker. But it would keep him busy campaigning for two years and after that, Maerose had been right again, they would see that he became attorney general.

But there still was one big problem.

Maerose’s husband, Charley, didn’t have any of her instant respectability. He was a sicario. When the family of Ciccio Saporita, in Cincinnati, had tried to cheat on the royalties they owed for the fake credit card operation in their territory, Charley had gone out there and had iced the grandmothers of the heads of the Saporita family: Ciccio Saporita’s own grandmother, his consigliere’s, and the grandmothers of his two caporegimes. The cheating had not only stopped right away, it had given the lesson to everyone else they did business with.

But, and it could be a big but, Charley had done the job on so many people in the course of the years of his work that there might be big mouths who would say, if he put Charley in Eduardo’s slot, that Charley had in fact done the job on too many people ever to be entirely respectable. But Don Corrado refused to believe that the power of rumor was greater than the power of money. Surely rumor could not hinder the inexorable command that a man be respectable if he was told to be respectable.

Twenty-six of the don’s descendants had achieved respectability on their own, without help or hindrance from him, but, excepting his son, Eduardo, and his grandson Arthur Shuland, the lieutenant governor of California, they were only people, not the kind anyone would expect to carry on a line. They had married legitimate people and had had two generations of children without a single police record among them. But only his granddaughter Maerose had the cunning, the ferocity, the singleminded ruthlessness, and the desire to insure a real Prizzi ascendancy. Eduardo had it, of course, but Eduardo was too old, and not only a widower but childless, for consideration in carrying on the Prizzi line.

Don Corrado built upon that promise of respectability that great wealth made to all of its owners. He could see that it could be a wonderful thing. Look at Eduardo: square people would practically lay down in front of him so that he could have a softer something to walk upon and not get his shoes dirty. Look at his grandson Arthur Shuland, a lieutenant governor of one of the biggest states, who was absolutely sure to be swept into the U.S. Senate whenever he decided he was ready.

Amalia removed the empty plate in front of him.

“How old am I now, Amalia?” he asked her.

“You are ninety-two, Poppa. And you never looked better.”

He nodded at that and at the large plate of his second pasta of the day, the chi vruoccolu arriminata, a beautiful assembly of twisted maccheroncelli with broccoli, anchovies, tomato sauce, pine nuts, onions, and raisins, all of it entirely the most delicious part of every Sicilian’s heritage, which achieved the heights of heaven because of the sauce—garnished with eggplant and sweet red peppers—made from very ripe tomatoes with basil, anchovy, olive oil, and garlic. How could they say Sicilians were Italians, he wondered? Italians would never think of making a tomato sauce like this. Sicily had been Italian for only a hundred and thirty years, fahcrissake, he thought. It had been Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Vandal, Ostrogoth, Arabic, Norman, German, French, and Spanish for fourteen hundred years before that. And what would have happened to Sicilian food if it hadn’t been for the Arabs? he asked himself.

His son Vincent was dead so nothing could make Vincent respectable. That would have been an impossible job anyhow, he agreed with himself. It was impossible to make his daughter, Amalia, more respectable, in the same way that it would be to make a cathedral more respectable. Amalia’s son Rocco had decided to become a hoodlum so there was not much to work with there. Amalia’s daughter was married to a chiropractor in Iowa and her children had scaled heights in the 4-H Clubs, God bless them. Twenty-six members of the family were lawyers, managers, accountants, technicians, or publicity people at Barker’s Hill, and no one could get more respectable than that.

That left his two granddaughters: Maerose and Teresa. Teresa was respectable in London, Ontario, where he had set up her husband in a solid dental prosthetics business. But the sister, Maerose, who on the outside looked like she was the most respectable of all of them, had too much of his own character. Of all of them, she was mafiosa; there was something so perpetually devious and eternally patient about the woman that he felt, in a rush, if respectability for the family were to be accomplished in the few moments of time left to him, because it stood to reason that he couldn’t live forever, he had to begin now to pave the avenues to make it accessible.

“Amalia, my dearest child,” he said after swallowing dreamily, “ask Angelo to come to see me.”

“Yes, Poppa.”

Angelo Partanna, seventy-seven years old, had been his friend and adviser for sixty years. Angelo did not need a mantle of respectability. He was immensely dignified, beautifully put together, and pitiless. Angelo was mafiusu, the heartless Sicilian omo di onore, when it came to business. His son, Charley Partanna, Mae’s husband, had all his life tried to better himself, to be more American than the president of the United States. But he wasn’t sure Charley had any feelings about respectability. Chances were he thought he was already respectable because he had a high school education. Charley was a slow thinker, but if everything was explained to him clearly, if all the pioneering thinking was laid out in front of him and he was told that this was his duty to the family to carry out what was required, there was no man alive who could or would deliver the results the way Charley would do it. And most certainly after Charley had the future explained to him by his wife, after he and Angelo had laid down the major line to Charley, there was no other way for Charley to go except the right way.

Four things had to be done, the don decided with a feeling of release, to accomplish a meaningful plan: 1) he must make those of his people respectable who wanted it; 2) Eduardo, who was certainly ready to be retired, had to be kicked up the stairs so that Charley could succeed him; 3) Charley’s past work had to be cleaned up; and 4) Charley and Maerose had to have some children so that they could succeed Charley and so that their children could succeed them. What else was respectability for?

Amalia took the bare plate away and placed before him the platter of coniglio in agrodolce, the dish from his home province of Agrigento, rabbit in a sweet-sour sauce that was so different from the agrodolce found in Italy. The magnificent sauce had pieces of eggplant, celery, olives, capers, roasted almonds, honey, lemon, and vinegar. The Arabs hadn’t wasted their two hundred years in Sicily for nothing, the don salivated proudly as he attacked the plate.

“I called Angelo, Poppa.” Amalia, a buffona, a woman with a not unpleasing moustache, said.

The don nodded.

“He’ll be here at half past four, right after your nap.”

“Good,” the don said. “No telephones, dear child. Not even the White House.”