38

Amalia stayed in her room upstairs. Angelo went down to the main floor and told Calo Barbaccia to get him a taxi. He went to his house in Bensonhurst and called Charley. “Tell Mae I’m comin’ to dinner wit’ choose,” he said.

“How did Amalia take it?” Charley asked.

“Not on the phone.” He hung up.

Charley met him at the door. They went into the drawing room, crossed into the cozy book-lined study that made Angelo think of the old One Hundred and Fourth Field Artillery Armory. It had a gigantic snooker table that no one had ever played on and a movie screen behind a Fra Angelico that could be cantilevered from the ceiling by an electric switch. “The Wodehouse Playhouse” was on the television screen to keep Charley kosher about upper-class attitudes. Mary Barton was waiting—a different Mary Barton—more subdued, womanly again. A police report might have said there were no marks on her, but Angelo could see the marks, welts upon her soul endlessly bleeding in her punishment for what she had done to her grandfather. Angelo went to her and took her in his arms. “Like you always did, Mae,” he said gently, “you was only thinking exactly like the don.”

She clung to him until Charley said, “How did Amalia take it, Pop?” and Angelo broke away gently.

“Lemme put it this way,” Angelo said. “She wanted a big public funeral with evvey family in the country coming in and all the Prizzi soldiers and their women doing their thing for the TV cameras and the FBI.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Maerose said.

“There was only one way to go. I told her what the don told me just before he went to the angels.”

“What, fahcrissake?” Mary Barton said.

“That nobody should know he was dead until he was inna ground. That’s what he made me swear. You and him think the same, Mae.”

“Oh, Jesus!” She covered her face with her hands.

“But she held out that Rocco had to go to the funeral and I told her no. Anyways, we made a deal. Rocco don’t go, you don’t go, Mae. And if you don’t go, Charley don’t go.”

“My stars and body,” Charley said. “Who does go then?”

“Amalia, Eduardo, and me. That’s it.”