35

Charley waited nearly two days to hear from his father about Enrichetta. He couldn’t reach him at the laundry or at home, and when he called Lenox Hill, they always said he had just left. In the late afternoon of the second day, Pop called Charley.

“Hey, Charley, you wanna have dinner?”

“Sure, Pop.”

“Can you meet me at Idlewild?”

“Idlewild?”

“Kennedy, I mean. The restaurant in the main building at eight o’clock. They probably don’t have real food, but we can get a steak or something.”

“How come the airport?”

“I’m flying to London at ten o’clock.”

“London? You?”

“I know, I ain’t been much of a traveler, but something came up.”

“What came up? What, fahcrissake, could come up to get you to fly in an airplane for the first time in your life?”

“Not on the phone, Charley.” Pop hung up.

As usual, Pop was seated at the table when Charley got to the airport restaurant. The noise was horrendous, as if the success of all restaurants depended on how much noise they could generate. Charley was agitated. Pop was as calm as Buddha on a good day.

“Pop, what is going on here?”

“Siddown. Have a drink.” He poured Charley a glass of mainland Italian red wine.

Charley gulped the wine, staring at his father. Pop called a waiter. “First we’ll order,” he said. He ordered two steaks. He took a ten-dollar bill out of his wallet and handed it to the waiter. “This is extra. Not the regular tip, you folla me? I want you to stand next to the cook when he makes the steaks. I want charred on the outside, pink on the inside. You got it?”

The waiter gulped, nodded, and went off like a red-assed bird. Pop sipped the wine.

“I think I found Corrado, Charley,” he said.

“Holy shit!”

“I think I’m gonna pick him up in England.”

“But—how—?”

“I talked to Enrichetta. You won’t believe it, what I’m gonna tell you. Her and Mae snatched the don.”

“Mae?” It was a scream of pain.

Pop nodded.

“But how did they move him to London? They’ve been right here all the time.”

“They packed him in a Two Boros Meat Company truck; they drove him to pier eighty-nine, where the floating ice-box Barker’s Hill owns, the RS Jack Frost, was tied up; and they packed him in a freezer-locker. He’s been on a merry-go-round from New York to someplace in Africa, then to London, then back to New York, then around all over again. The ship gets into Liverpool—that’s in England—the second time around for Corrado—day after tomorrow.”

“Why would Mae do a terrible thing like that?”

“Later. What I need from you right now is that you radio the captain of the Jack Frost and tell him to do anything and everything I tell him so I can get Corrado outta that icebox and take him home without shaking up the British media or their cops.”

Charley was dazed. “Yeah. I’ll go to the office tonight. I’ll set it up through the satellite.”

The steaks came. Pop looked at them. He sliced his steak at the middle. “You done good,” he said to the waiter. “Please, take the ketchup away. Do we look like people who would use ketchup?”

Charley ate automatically. He had been raised by his father not to talk at dinner. Once he opened his mouth to speak, but his father shook his head slowly from side to side, chewed the steak and sipped the wine. At last the plates were taken away. Pop ordered coffee, no dessert, and Charley blurted, “So okay, why did Mae do a thing like that?”

“She just flaked out, Charley, I guess. Enrichetta don’t know why.”

“I shoulda known,” Charley moaned. “I shoulda known.”

“Why?”

“The way she threw such a fit when I told her we were talking about a fake funeral for the don to handle the Riker’s Island beef.”

“What did she do?”

“She went wild oh the idea of a big funeral. She was afraid it would ruin her socially. Mae’s got big dreams.”

“So the day the don died she musta hung around, then went in to him and found out he was gone. Then the fear of the big funeral hit her. She panicked.”

“She panicked all right.”

“She needed some help and she figured Enrichetta hadda do whatever she said, so she talked her into helping her do the lift on the don. She probably hadda give Enrichetta pills so she could get her to commit such a sin, but Enrichetta lifted and pushed and did the work; then, after it was all over—the next day—it hit her what she did. She had denied Don Corrado Prizzi, the capo di tutti capi of her whole world, his right to a consecrated burial in the Holy Mother Church. It ate her. She is a simple woman. To save herself, the whole thing snapped inside her and she tried to zotz Maerose with that chair.”

“Jesus, poor Mae. It must have broke her heart, the whole thing.”

“Talk to her, Charley. She’s gotta hurt.”

“Yeah. She needed me but what could I do? I gotta talk to her and tell her it’s all right, she don’t have to blame herself anymore.”

“That’s good, Charley. But I gotta do this for Corrado because he woulda done it for me. But when you’re dead, you’re dead. What’s the difference if somebody sends you on one of those cruises even if it is too late to get the most out of it?”

The coffee arrived. The waiter left. Charley drank the coffee cautiously. “There’s gotta be a funeral, no doubt about that.”

“Of course. But there’s a right way and a wrong way.”

“So call me when you have the don. Mae is gonna have to take a trip to Australia, where it’s too far away to get back in time, when we have the funeral. Ah, shit!” he said, slamming his napkin down on the table. “Women!”

“She don’t hafta go to Australia. We’ll have a little funeral—you and Mae, Amalia, me, and Eduardo. We’ll have Corrado inna ground before anybody knows he’s dead.”

“You would do that for Mae, Pop?”

“Not for Mae, Charley. I gotta do it for Corrado. I swore to him I would do it.”