10

Charley Partanna had not, in fact, iced the grandmothers of the Saporita family in Cincinnati. Almost the entire muscle of that family—the contractors, the arm twisters, and the leg breakers—came from a family that had served the Saporitas since 1923. Their family name was Nonna. Beppino Nonna was the Saporitas’ first enforcer. He had twelve sons, nine of whom followed in their father’s style. It happened to be that the word nonna meant grandmother in Italian so, when the news came back to Don Corrado through Angelo Partanna that Charley had scored the four top Nonnas of the Saporita family, thereby easing the whole franchise-royalty problem, the don, either because he had gone temporarily ga-ga, or because the idea had appealed to him, always remembered the story to Charley’s disadvantage.

This embarrassed Charley, but he had made it a rule decades before never to contradict the don. If anybody else figured they could make a joke out of the thing, Charley broke his elbow. Charley Partanna was 100 percent a rule book player.

He was a large man, built like a moving van, with a face like a slab of concrete on which the company retained to draw the graffiti on New York subway cars had drawn heavy eyebrows, small eyes, a fleshy nose, and a straight line for a mouth. His teeth were undistinguished, even shabby, as if he had a mouthful of Roquefort. The overall effect made him look as if he were on the hard side, but that was strictly an acquired characteristic. Charley had practiced looking hard and throwing out fear ever since he was ten years old. He had worked with the mirror in his father’s bedroom, which used to be his mother’s mirror. His mother was with the angels.

Charley wasn’t hard, at least not hard in the sense that hard meant unfeeling. He was an organization man who ran his life by an unwritten book of rules that had been handed to him by his father. Charley obeyed orders to the letter. As he rose in the family’s command structure from the day he had made his bones on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx when he was thirteen (and using him to do the job was the only way the Prizzis could get anybody close to Little Phil Terrone), he grew more and more doctrinaire. He had become a made man in the fratellanza when he was seventeen. From the day his mother died, Charley lived and ate with his father, listened to his father, spoke like his father, and, because the only thing his father was interested in was the environment, that became Charley’s life.

Charley learned numbers from his father. Both the Partannas could read a balance sheet like it was a McGuffey’s Reader, or like Leopold Stokowski lying in a hammock and browsing through a Paganini score.

He had learned to cook and keep a clean house from his mother. When the don retired, his son Vincent became Boss and Charley was made Underboss and was invested as the family’s vindicatore.

His devotion to duty had made him Boss when Vincent, a ruffian’s ruffian, had inevitably been zotzed. Charley was firm but fair, as the rule book states for leaders everywhere. Also, his acquired bearing, to say nothing of his past performance, scared the shit out of every capo and soldier in the family.

If Charley was a slow thinker, he was a tenacious one. Not anyone’s typical man-of-action, he was thinking all the time. Within the American culture, which was itself studded with Sicilian mores, he had found a philosophy in the pages of women’s magazines, which he had started to read for household hints, then had continued to read for their wisdom. Not an originator, he could carry out orders with the dedication and mindlessness of a lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Marine Corps. It could have been that his reputation for having delivered some sixty-seven hits for the family in his time, probably an exaggeration, alone made him attractive to women, but whoever thought that way was wrong. Women, by and large, wanted what other women wanted. Because he was a tender romantic, and possibly combined with the implied mastery that comes with a reputation as a top zotzer, women wanted him. It was probably because Charley was a romantically tender man who, until he had passed the first great energies of his youth, had been so taken with, and so serviceable to, the women who had reached out for his heart that Maerose had taken so long to marry him. She had lost him to eight other women (known to her) during their nineteen-year engagement, something that could have broken the heart of a less resilient woman, but now that Charley was relatively exhausted from romancing so many other women, and because he was preoccupied with the administrative problems that came with running the street operations of a family as complex as the Prizzis, and because her grandfather looked as if he were ready to make the big decision when she put it to him, Maerose entered into the sanctity of marriage.