39

The small church was nearly empty. Three people stood in the front row. Father Passanante led the procession just ahead of the closed casket as it was rolled on its gurney away from the altar by the mortician’s staff. The three mourners peeled out of the front pew and followed the casket down the aisle, Amalia between her brother and Angelo Partanna, the two men needing to support her.

The three mourners got into the only limousine that waited behind the black hearse in front of the church. The short cortege rode across Brooklyn to the Verrazano Bridge to the family’s cemetery, Santa Grazia di Traghetto in Staten Island, swiftly following the route that Charley Partanna’s funeral had taken so slowly almost two years before.

Father Passanante intoned the litany at the graveside and the three mourners repeated the words after him. The priest closed his breviary.

“I have known Corrado Prizzi for thirty years,” he said. “There was no man who matched his qualities. He was a positive man. He was generous to those whom circumstances forced him to encourage or to chastise. He was a singleminded man who kept an openness to God and who husbanded the temporal power accorded to him with a kind of justice. He died shriven. He has gone to the angels.”

The simple wooden casket was lowered into the grave. Father Passanante sprinkled earth upon it and intoned the ritual. The three mourners wept, the men bowed and uncovered on the perfect early spring morning.

When the service was over, the mourners returned to the limousine, which rolled slowly out of the marbled park. Father Passanante got into his Korean two-door and left after he had offered up his own prayers at the grave.

Amalia sat between the two men, staring straight ahead. “We are free of the oath which Poppa made you take, Angelo,” she said with a dulled voice. “Now I can avenge what has been done to my father.”

“What are you talking about, Amalia?” Eduardo said, thinking several hundred thoughts at once about the Republican nominating convention.

“You have respectability, you think, Eduardo. But it was laid over you like a blanket and it can be snatched away.”

Eduardo leaned across her and looked at Angelo. “Do you know what this is all about?” he asked testily.

“Let her talk it out, Eduardo.”

“I am going to take us back to where we all belong, to what our meaning is, to what we are.”

“Please, Amalia, shut up. I have a lot on my mind.”

“Listen to her, Eduardo,” Angelo said.

“When I get to a telephone, I am going to call the television and the Daily News and tell them whose son you are. I am going to tell them who Charles Macy Barton is—that we are all Sicilians, mafiosi, and that we have become what we are at the pleasure of our father, the don of dons, Corrado Prizzi.”

Eduardo stared at her with transfixed horror. “What’s happening here?” He looked confusedly at Angelo across his distant, dreaming sister.

No one spoke until the car returned them to the don’s house on the slope above the river. Angelo got out of the car and helped Amalia down. “Stay here,” he said to Eduardo.

They went into the house. As Amalia walked unsteadily toward the stairs, Angelo spoke to Calorino Barbaccia. “Keep her away from the phone,” he said. “And don’t let her leave the house. I’ll call you. Stay here.”

Angelo went back to the limousine and got in. “You can drop me in Bensonhurst on your way to the airport,” he said to Eduardo.

The car moved away. “Was she serious?” Eduardo said. “Because if she’s serious I might as well shoot myself.”

“She’s depressed,” Angelo said. “But Calo is with her and he’s a solid man.”

“I can’t believe any of this,” Eduardo said.

“Let me handle it. You got the convention coming up.”

When Angelo got to his house in Bensonhurst he called Calo at the don’s house. “How is she?”

“She’s tryna get the phone. I hadda lock her in her room.”

“Remember the time you had the meet with Melchiorre Vitale down at Long Beach?”

“Yeah.”

“Show Amalia how it worked.”

“Yeah?”

“Then go back to the door and wait till your regular relief comes in.” Angelo hung up.

Calo went slowly up the stairs. He unlocked the door to Amalia’s room and went in. She was on the bed, but she got up as he came in.

“Okay, Calo?” she said. “You unnastan what I gotta do? You’re gonna lemme use the phone?”

He pushed her down on the bed. He put two of the bed pillows over her face, then lay across them. Amalia’s lower body flopped around crazily. After the legs stopped moving, he looked at his watch with a technician’s interest, then let ten full minutes go by before getting to his feet again. He lifted Amalia’s body and took it to the center of the room. He let it fall to the floor. He smoothed the covers on the bed, fluffed up the pillows and put them back in their proper places; then he left the room to take up his vigil at the front door.

Mariano Orecchione, the night man, discovered Amalia’s body at 7:20 A.M. the next morning. He went into the room to see if anything was wrong because, as regularly as sunrise every morning for the six years he had been on the job, Amalia had arrived at his post at 6:15 A.M. with a breakfast tray and a big pot of coffee. He called Angelo. Angelo called Dr. Winikus. On the death certificate Dr. Winikus gave as reason for death from natural causes instantaneous heart failure, and Eduardo had to fly back to New York for his sister’s funeral.

The day after the don’s quiet funeral, a short, paid announcement appeared in the death notices in The New York Times. The day after that, all the New York newspapers and all the networks carried flamboyant recollections of Corrado Prizzi, inserting his memory into the national mythology with gory accounts of the twenties and thirties, wistfully recalled, but the people, who had been conditioned to feed on a rhythm of instantaneous change that had come to be measured by the forget’ table images on their television screens, were no longer able to harken back that far. He was only another old, old man from the bad, old days who had died forgotten in faroff farcical Brooklyn. The federal prosecutors and the media marked well that the don’s death had signified the end of the Mafia in America, a nice gesture on their part.

The day after the funeral, Angelo Partanna drove out to the don’s house in his old Dodge. He told Calo about the nice job he had set up for him in sunshine-filled, fun-packed Vegas. Then he climbed the stairs slowly to the don’s room, emptied forty-one album liners of nearly-forgotten operas and burned in the fireplace everything he found except the forty-one thousand dollars in cash.

The day after the obituary accounts appeared, the Blessed Decima Manovale Foundation of the Little Sisters of Pain and Pity made their claim to take over the geegaw-packed Prizzi mansion. Within a week it was stripped bare of every bibelot and gilded frame. Walls were torn down and the bingo equipment and chairs were moved in. The don’s great floor space at the top was given over to the storage of three hundred gross of short pencils and forty-two thousand printed bingo forms. A large sign was erected at the entrance, which read:

BLESSED DECIMA MANOVALE

WEST BROOKLYN BINGO CENTER

The bishop of the diocese of Brooklyn, The Most Reverend Patrick J. Girty, blessed the first drawing. When Charley read about the transformation of the don’s miniature Sicilian museum into a gambling hall, he wondered: although the Church certainly thought a bingo parlor on the site of Don Corrado’s greatest days was respectable, would Mrs. Colin Baker, the arbiter, rule that it was?