14

Charley, in an apron, was stirring a pot of riso chi cacuocciuli, boiled rice with cut-up eggplant, turnips, artichokes, and peas, in olive oil, flavored with onions. Maerose was frying some tiny sciabacheddu, working twelve of the little fish in the pan. They had that wonderful relaxed look of people who had been completely satisfied with each other’s work on the bed.

“Did you know that there are about twenty-five hundred different varieties of rice, some of which is red, blue, and purple?” Charley said.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. And I read in a magazine that eggplant looks like it drinks up all the oil in the pan, no matter how much you put in,” Charley said, “due to very spongy tissue which is almost all air pockets.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah. But when the heat and the oil begin to collapse the air pockets, it’s like squeezing a sponge—the eggplant gives most of the oil back to the pan.”

“Thank you, Fanny Farmer, junior. Charley, don’t tell me from cooking. Tell me from franchising! You are worried about it.”

“It could cause a lot of unemployment.”

“They’re all specialists, so when you sell the franchises, who’s gonna know how to run them except the specialists who have been running them for us? Whoever buys the franchise is gonna need them.”

Charley brightened. “Yeah. Maybe. But the guys we have who run the specialists, they gotta figure they are losing a lotta cash.”

“Like who?”

“Like the caporegimes. Like Matteo Cianciani who runs the shit operation for us.”

“So you sell them the franchises and they’ll make double. Besides, the capos are mostly old guys. It’s time to retire. With a bonus.”

Charley dumped the riso into a serving dish. “There could be a war,” he said. “This could split the family to pieces.”

“What family? That’s the whole pernt. The don is getting us all outta the family.”

“It’s all Greek to me.”

She arranged the tiny fish on two plates. Charley opened a bottle of Akragas, the Greek name for Agrigento, the Prizzi family’s home base. It was strong, dry, and white. They sat down and began to eat.

“The day the franchises are sold and you move out and up, we are gonna go to work to make a baby,” Maerose said.

“You been holding out, Mae?”

“Charley, lissena me. You want your kids to grow up in the environment?”

“What wrong with that?”

“They’d be outcasts—that’s what’s wrong with that.”

“Outcasts? I’m an outcast?”

“Charley, are you ever invited to the Academy Awards? Eduardo is.”

“I never thought about it.”

“Well, I thought about it. And the don thought about it. Whatta you think he’s gonna run Eduardo for president for, he’s gonna send you upstairs to take Eduardo’s place in the business for if he don’t want our kids to be respectable?”

“I always figured you had set him up for that, Mae,” Charley said cautiously.

“The thing is he wants it. You think anybody can sell the don anything, he doesn’t want it?”

“You want it, too.”

“Why not? My father threw me out of Brooklyn, Charley, and I found a new world. I like it there.”

“The thing is—your grandfather gonna like it there?”

“I’ll explain it to you as we go along. You ever been to Switzerland?”

“No.”

“It’s the best. As soon as you get the franchises settled we just sit in two of those first class Swissair seats, and from then on everything works. The food, the hotels, the face doctor—even the climate is right—no smoke, no smog, no soot, no slums.”

“How come you know about it?”

“I went to school in Switzerland for a year after Manhattanville. The nuns said I was too young for college. Jesus, Charley, your rice is delicious.”

“My mother. Also your fish.”

“I hate to say this,” she lied, “but I think you’re a better cook than I am.”

“There’s gonna be a war. I can smell it.”

“Charley, fahcrissake. You’re talking small money.”

“Small money?”

“You’re going up to where the big money is. You think my grandfather is dumb? Barker’s Hill has a Cray 3 computer in Omaha. Before I talked to my grandfather, I had the Cray work out the vigorish. No matter who you sell the franchises to, they have to net a bottom of thirteen point seven percent more than they are making now for the family, and—if they are operated as efficiently as you are operating them now—then they’ll bring in a net of up to twenty-two point eight percent more, even allowing for inflation.”

“How come?”

“Because everybody won’t be taking a split all the way up and down the line! Because everything will be pure profit.”

“We gotta pay the team who’s gonna collect and enforce.”

“Not if you set it up right. The franchisees gotta pay a handling charge. The service charge covers the enforcers plus a little profit. And as fast as that money comes in, we’ll be reinvesting it at Barker’s Hill until we gradually buy up thirty-seven percent of the whole country. That’s the Cray 3 talking, not me.”

“I called a meet for tomorrow.”

“Sunday?”

“People feel more peaceful on a Sunday.”