17

At 5:00 P.M. on March 10, 1990, at the don’s house in Brooklyn Heights, Charley had his final meeting with his father and Don Corrado, grateful that he had been spared an invitation to lunch. It was five hours before his departure from Kennedy for Zurich with Maerose. Charley was ready and stable when he went into the meeting but kind of disoriented when he came out.

He had had a general idea of what they wanted him to do, but now it hit him that he was probably seeing Brooklyn, from the inside, for the last time in his life. Flashes of stickball games and the little broads, Coney Island, and the welcome feeling he had every time he drove over the bridge lit up a scene with people he thought he had forgotten. The don and his father had asked him to do some pretty whacked-out things in their time, but this one he felt like it had never hit him before.

“Everything is set at this end, Charley,” the don said. “All you gotta do is work hard at your end beginning tomorrow in Europe. Harry found a nice house for you and the doctors they got is the best.”

“I’m not so sure what I’m supposed to do,” Charley said.

“All you do is listen to Maerose,” the don told him. “She knows both operations, she can talk like Eduardo sounds, and she knows what you should wear and how you should sound. She’s been running the PR people at Eduardo’s for eleven years besides a lotta other things, so she’ll also handle that end of the operation. By the time you get back, you’ll be well-known here.”

“That’s the whole thing,” Charley said. “To certain people I am already well-known.”

“Charley, lissena me,” his father said. “You’re not gonna be around to be known to anybody anymore. Mae and the don got it all figured. You leave tonight and you are what it says on your new passport—Charles Macy Barton. Meanwhile, next week back in Brooklyn Charley Partanna gets sick, goes inna hospital, then he goes with the angels. We got a funeral organized that is gonna convince all those people you are talking about that you ain’t around no more.”

“Before the funeral even,” the don said, “nobody is gonna connect you with Charley Partanna. You won’t be here. You’ll be in Switzerland where you’re gonna get a new face, new prints, new clothes, and a whole new life.”

“But who is gonna be buried?”

“Just the casket. There won’t be nothing in it.”

“It is gonna be a terrific funeral, Charley,” Pop assured him. “I’ll send you all the coverage on it. You’ll be knocked out.”

“I was gonna have them make a video of it,” the don said, “but they got a different kinda current over there.”

“So make one anyways,” Charley said. “I’ll play it when I get back.”

Charles Macy Barton, as he rode in the forward cabin of a Swissair flight from New York to Zurich that night, said to his wife, Mary, “Don’t ever tell the Prizzis how to rob a train.”

“It will be beautiful,” his wife said. “Absolutely beautiful.”

“Well, it’ll getta lotta people out in the fresh air.” He thought for a while. “Mae?”

“Yeah?”

“How’m I suppose to run a business as big as Eduardo’s? I read in a magazine it was the biggest business in the world.”

“So?”

“So how do I run it?”

“Charley, lissena me. You are gonna have PR people telling the country how smart you are, you are gonna have economists, cost accountants, trained executives with high batting averages in sales, production, marketing, buying, personnel, all around you, giving you the answers.”

“That figures, but how does it work?”

“We set up a schedule of meetings with people—the home office people plus we bring them in from all over the country. You lissena them. You don’t say yes you don’t say no. You put a little fear in them. They go out and do it.”

“Suppose they are wrong what they tell me. How would I know? What then?”

“Every week the computer brings you a list of what the companies won or lost. These are compared to last month, six months ago, and last year. Statistics back it up. They say how much money the public has, will have, used to have, how they are spending it and where. You’ll know which companies are winning and which are losing.”

“Like a form sheet.”

“Yeah. So if some companies are winning, you tell them they are doing good. If they are losing, you bring them into New York and you put the fear in them. It’s no different from running a division for the family.”