23

Calorino Barbaccia relieved Mariano Orecchione at 6:55 A.M. The men were old friends, an elite force, the palace guard of the Prizzi family.

“Did he have a quiet night?” Calo asked.

“Like a tomb.”

Mariano propped the sawed-off shotgun up against the wall and, yawning, started down the main stairs.

“It’s Lady Carrot in the fifth at Hialeah,” Calorino called after him, then entered the don’s room.

“Good morning!” he sang in a professional nurse’s voice, a merry call. There was no answer. He went to the windows and pulled back the curtains, letting light into the room, and singing a chorus of “Pretty Baby” with a heavy Agrigento accent.

Whenna youse wake up inna mawnin’

Anna sun begins tuh shine,

Priddy Bay-bee

He turned toward the bed, stopping short.

“Don Corrado!” he said sharply. He moved past the empty bed to the bathroom and came right out again, calling the don’s name. He went into the kitchen. He came back and opened closet doors. He looked under the bed, saying, “Come on, don’t kid around, padrino. What the fuck is this?”

He went to the telephone and dialed Angelo Partanna’s number. Angelo answered on the second ring.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Calorino, signore. I come in at the don’s and he ain’t there. I looked all over. I don’t see him.”

“Where’s the night man?”

“He went home.”

“Call the laundry and send somebody for him. Get him back. But stay calm. We don’t want nobody yelling about this. I’ll be right over.”

“Si, signore.” He hung up relieved that it was somebody else’s responsibility.

Angelo called Charley. Maerose answered, wide awake as soon as she heard his voice.

“Mae—Angelo. Lemme talk to Charley.”

“Charley flew to Washington last night. He’s got a seven-thirty breakfast with President Heller this morning.”

“How come?”

“Heller found out Charley is our Democrat. About eight big businessmen are invited. Four of them run companies which Barker’s Hill controls. They never met Charley, so they’ll be knocking themselves out to make points with him, which will be hard on Heller.”

“I gotta talk to Charley. Mae, lissena me—we got a problem.”

“Whatsa matta?”

“Not on the phone. You think you can get Charley at the White House?”

“I guess so. Why not?”

“Tell him to get back to New York as quick as he can and go to your grandfather’s house.”

“Angelo, fahcrissake.”

“Meet me there as soon as you can.” He hung up.

He called Eduardo’s private number, which had been installed primarily for Miss Claire Coolidge. The phone rang beside Eduardo’s bed. “Yes, sweedhard?” Eduardo cooed into the phone.

“It’s Angelo. Get out to Brooklyn right away. He left us.”

“He’s gone?”

“Yeah. Meet me there. I’ll bring all the PAC lists because there’s no chance we can have another meet today.” He hung up.

One of the Barker’s Hill helicopters had picked Charley up at the East River heliport and landed him at the National Airport in Washington at 7:02 A.M. Charley thought that perhaps he ought to be more awestruck about being summoned to breakfast by the president of the United States in the private quarters at the White House, but the country was still groping its way out of a heavy steam of corruption that had settled over it during the administration of the spry, elderly president who had preceded Heller. He was a man who had been so reflexively amiable, so defiant of the laws of morality and consequence that, by being all things to all men, he had insured anarchy in his government with his unrelenting charm and disregard for the Constitution and the law.

Charley knew it must have been full-time work for the elderly astrologer-president, just as it had been for Corrado Prizzi, in a slightly different way. But through all the studied diffidence and the boyish matinee-today-as-usual shrugs, 162 cabinet members, White House aides, a cherished family press agent, deputy secretaries, political lobbygows, military officers, cronies, and nominees of the old gaffer had been publicly charged with, indicted for, convicted of, or had resigned because of conflict of interest, influence peddling, perjury, illegal profiteering, fraud, conspiracy, felony, obstruction of justice, and many uglier offenses. There had been so much corruption in the highest places that, simultaneously, six separate investigations by as many government-appointed separate investigators had been required.

The old geezer had been more like a capo di famiglia than a president, Charley recalled fondly, but when asked to describe the legacy he would leave the nation after eight years in office, the old wool-gatherer had said, “I hope that the imprint would be one of high morality.” He urged schools and parents to impart “the right and wrong of things to young people.”

The holy men for whom the dear old clotheshorse had secured such exalted and profitable television pulpits inside the checkbooks of the American pious had fallen effortlessly into the ways of Sodom and Moloch and were indecently exposing themselves as moneychangers inside their own electronic temples. A wee television kirk in Fort Hill, South Carolina, with its 13 million worshippers, was not only $66.7 million in debt, but $92 million of its plate money had gone missing, disappointing the old bungler because he had made the television clergy his henchmen.

The Gipper, idolized by his people, had, in the dire times of the historic budget deficit that he had crafted and that threatened the safety and sanity of the country for generations to come, tripled the amount of unaccountable secret funds for his departments of defense, state, the CIA, and the White House to the point where such secret funds were the fastest-growing major sector of the federal budget.

Many of the dear old coot’s patriotic defense contractors had defrauded the country out of billions of dollars, just passing the time while they waited deep in the bushes under the shade of the money tree for the old outlaw’s promise of riches untold to come true with the glorious Star Wars opportunity that everyone but the money-eaters said could not work but that was guaranteed to cost almost as much money as the bastion of democracy could print.

While the old gent napped away the afternoons upstairs in the White House, a light colonel of Marines had run a secret government in the basement with his own private treasury, army, air force, diplomatic corps, covert operations, and foreign bank accounts, all of it funded by the taxpayers of the United States, who lived in numbing fear that Nicaragua, like Cuba before it, would attack and ravage the United States.

The elderly waver’s roster of corruption was so heinous as to make the malfeasances of U. S. Grant, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon, separately or combined, seem to be little slips in comportment or innocent, forgivable slips of judgment, but all of it had the effect of making Charley feel as much at home in Washington as if he were back in Brooklyn in the old days. He had to admit that the Prizzis weren’t in it at all when compared to the old dreamer. The dear old man, shuffling through history, had been more instantly lovable than Corrado Prizzi, but the overall effects produced had been the same. Both had offered diversions for the people, whether they had come packed in cocaine or wrapped in the folds of an enormous American flag. Neither of them had been able to do anything wrong in the public’s heart of hearts, particularly the old actor, no matter what crimes had been committed behind the dense hedge of lieutenants. Honor in government had become a sardonic phrase. The New York Times was moved to write, “No President in modern times has put up a more moralistic front and has done less to enforce ethical standards in government.”

Frantic to find safety from the shriveling blast of the president’s charm, the people couldn’t stop running and the poor were always underfoot. Foreign policy was made on what was best for the counting rooms, creating a perplexity in the country, which wondered why most of the world was its enemy. A nation starved for hope and heroes had either eaten its illusions—the cannibalism of the twentieth century—or had embraced its own image in a sky-high distorting mirror.

The president was waiting for Charley in the family quarters at the White House. Franklin M. Heller was the antithesis of his predecessor, the Old One. He had never been known to wave. As far as was known he did not know a single anecdote. His wife was only seen by the media on Christmas Day and even then cloaked in a black chador, the long head-to-foot garment of Islamic Iran, worn symbolically as a reminder to the incumbent of the awful mistakes that could be made. Heller had four children and they all lived at home. He smiled only at funerals and even then with a spamodic twitch like the opening and closing of a camera shutter, vanishing before he could be caught in the act. A black swag of skin hung under each eye in formal mourning for the national budget deficit.

On the morning of Charley’s visit, he was massively avuncular. He shook hands like a Sumo wrestler, put an arm around Charley’s shoulders, and said, “We can talk on the way down to breakfast.” Charley was stiff with awe of his new surroundings, if not the resident. He was standing where the American history he had studied in high school had been made. Thinking of high school made him think of a Puerto Rican woman he had known there, a fantastic dresser, but he shook the thought off. Presidents had always been people on the tube, the headliners of the greatest showbiz—now this one had an arm around him. “I was glad to read that you are a faithful Democrat, Charley,” Heller said as they waited for the elevator. “What I wanted to tell you, the first chance we had, is that it takes two hands to get them both washed. If you pitch in and organize the business community for me, when I’m re-elected, you are going to get recognition, you follow me? For example, do you want Treasury?”

“My stars and body, Mr. President. You have my one hundred percent support.”

“We can use however many PACs you are able to get together, Charley. Let me send some of my people to see you in New York so we can make the allocations.”

“Anytime, Mr. President.”

They went in to the breakfast room. Eight earth-tremblingly puissant men stood up.

The White House operator told Mary Barton that she’d get the message to Mr. Barton as soon as he came out of the breakfast meeting. Mary Barton ordered the car to meet Charley at La Guardia, dressed rapidly, drank two glasses of pink grapefruit juice, then went out on the street to find a cab. It took her almost forty minutes to get to the don’s house.

Charley was handed the message as he came out of the breakfast room at the White House. He was in a sour mood not only because it had been a fucking prayer breakfast, which he thought had gone out forever with Nixon and Carter, but because he was boxed in by the four executives who headed the colossal companies that were controlled by Barker’s Hill, each one crowding for a position at his elbow, but whom he had never met. They were giants of American industry. “Gimme room, here!” he snarled, laying the fear on them. They recoiled with the shock of his glance and stepped away. Charley read the message.

“I gotta get outta here,” he said and walked rapidly to the coat-rack, then to the South Portico. On the lawn beyond the driveway he said a few convincing words of strong support for Franklin M. Heller on behalf of the American business community into the permanent installation of television cameras, which kept an eternal vigil there for the evening news. The man from W magazine demanded to know whom he would support for chief of protocol in the upcoming administration. Charley handled him with kid gloves because he didn’t want Mae on his back. A White House car drove him to the airport.

Barker’s Hill kept a few fast six-passenger Sikorsky helicopters for the short intercity trips, but that was too slow for Charley. He caught a shuttle. Mae had the Rolls and Danvers waiting for him at La Guardia. He got to the don’s house at 11:35 A.M.