26

Eduardo succeeded in arranging the meeting with Angelo to read his father’s last letter of simple wishes for his family by sending a limousine to bring Angelo from Brooklyn to Newark Airport and instructing his pilots to land the Ronald Reagan for a forty-minute stopover between Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Bangor, Maine.

The two men sat in the office section of Eduardo’s campaign plane behind a locked door. Angelo produced the letter and handed it over. Eduardo adjusted his reading glasses to study the letter.

TO MY BELOVED FAMILY,

I have very little to leave you except my love. My clothes, my personal effects, my paintings, furniture, and phonograph records, together with this house, were all given to the Blessed Decima Manovale Foundation long years ago for, you see, I wish to leave this world as I had once entered it: without possessions. You have all done so well in this new country of ours that I am filled with pride of you. How wise you were, Amalia, to save that nest egg of $500,000 from which you will have the interest for the rest of your life, then to pass that interest on to your son, Rocco. How generous you were, my Eduardo, son of my hopes and dreams who realized every one of those hopes and every dream, to form the Price Foundation at the very outset of the establishment of the Barker’s Hill Enterprises which will provide, in the majority sense of 51 percent, control of its funds and purposes by my great-grandsons, Conrad Price and Angier Macy Barton, to be administered by their loving parents until the brothers reach the age of thirty years. That you retained 20 percent of the funding of the Foundation for yourself is as I would have wished it, my son. May happiness and glory be yours for all of your days. My grandchildren, Maerose and Teresa, Arthur and Rocco, being of sound minds and bodies were successful in their own rights and to them I wish every continuing happiness, but to my grandsons I leave, to Arthur, my Ingersoll pocket watch, the timepiece of railroad engineers, and to Rocco, my John F. Kennedy FT boat tiepin.

(Signed) Corrado Prizzi

Witnessed by: Batsford Glick

Governor, State of New York

Carter B. Kilgore

Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court

Cencetto Balugi

Papal Nuncio

Patrick Joseph Mulligan

Secretary-General, United Nations Organization

Eduardo’s eyes were filled with tears. He could not read on through the list of the other twelve witnesses to the intimate note his father had left behind. As he wiped his eyes he thought again that, more than ever, he had to find some way to offset his father’s parsimony in some forthright tax-free way, not that the money itself mattered, but just to get a little back to show that he was not entirely that easily outsmarted, even by such a Sicilian as his father.

“I’m just a little surprised that he didn’t remember you with a little something,” he said to Angelo.

“He let me have eight percent of the franchise operation. I mean, what more do I want? I never travel and I don’t even eat out much anymore.”

“Eight percent must be a rather good piece.”

Angelo shrugged. “Fifteen, sixteen million a year.”