40

Edward S. Price (or Ned Price, as he was known in politics) had won forty-eight separate delegate-selection contests, beginning with precinct caucuses in Iowa and ending with the Delaware State Democratic Convention and primary elections in California, New Jersey, and Ohio. He entered the presidential nominating convention of the Republican party at Dallas as the leading candidate, having a delegate total of over 1,200 of the 1,505 needed for the nomination.

Wearing a bulletproof T-shirt and jockey shorts under his sublime tailoring, Ned Price left the Crescent Hotel in Dallas and made his way slowly inside a bulletproof limousine in a minimotorcade through a crowd of 1,800 people (police estimate) who were waiting at the hotel gates, to drive to the fair grounds, where he would spend three hours at a reception for Price delegates, under wall-to-wall banners and hoisted placards that read PRICE IS RIGHT! The candidate wanted to shake the hand of each of the men and women pledged to him, to let them know that he personally cared about individual human beings as long as they toed the line and knew their place.

That evening, at 9:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, starting late to accommodate the West Coast, the 3,353 delegates and half-delegates were assembled, a number that was swelled by the media representatives, security people, gate crashers, hookers, political aides, mutual fund salesmen, and floor managers to between 5,000 and 7,000 people milling about on the convention floor. The delegates were 66 percent male and 44 percent female; their age averaged forty-three years. Eleven percent were black, 48 percent were Protestant, 14 percent had Hispanic names, 2 percent were Amerinds, 54 percent were college graduates; all were faint with the heat, thinking with dread of leaving the air-conditioning in the building for the sledgehammer of heat that would fall on them outside.

Collectively, they did not have much power to nominate, but, individually, an amazingly small percentage within the bewitching definition of democracy did have that power.

A group of about fifty Republican leaders representing the visible constituencies—organized labor, women, blacks, conservation, the professional and industrial lobbies, gay rights, the electronic church, abortion-position surrounders, etc.—had met to recommend the optional nomination slates. However, that caucus of fifty could act only on options prepared by a smaller group of twelve, whose clients were a more powerful bloc than the visible constituencies. The posse of twelve included three full-time politicians who were paid by the party; two Washington attorneys, including S. L. Penrose; a power banker; three state governors; two senators; and the Republican minority leader of the House of Representatives.

The Twelve group maintained its staff of delegate counters and a spread of assembled tools: charts and blackboards to show the current delegate strength of each candidate; telephones directly to floor captains and delegation leaders; and hot-line phones to the principal candidates, who were waiting in their hotel suites for the word to race out to the convention to accept nomination.

Including the tight group of twelve controlling the convention decisions, it was the television networks who owned the convention. Their future problems had to be considered: the charisma-on-camera of the candidate; his wife’s smile, style, and abject devotion; his height when standing beside other heads of state; his horseshit quotient; the state of his teeth when bared in smiles; and his stand on tax shelters. The networks would spend more than $27 million for the week in Dallas, while the Republican National Committee was spending only $2.18 million.

Therefore, due to circumstances which had been beyond his control from the day he had begun his run for the nomination, Ned Price, a five-feet eight-inch widower who was stuck with talking like Franklin D. Roosevelt, which had become discordant against the diction of around-the-clock television speech and was an absolute disaster when contrasted with the shouted, omelet-diction of the commercials, was denied the Republican nomination for president of the United States despite the overwhelming number of delegate votes that he had so painfully bought and paid for. His father, who had understood clearly who owned what and whom, had anticipated this and had made arrangements for the ultimate disposition of Eduardo’s (and the fratellanza’s) ambitions. At the end of the first ballot, when the convention opened on the second night in Dallas, Ned Price was only 297 votes short of winning, but because he had become such a candidate of the wild-eyed religious far right, which had led to disasters for the party in 1988, and mainly because he had no wife to take the blame for any heinous mistakes that could be made during his administration, and also because there had not been a more Eastern establishment figure in politics since Averell Harriman, the professionals decided to fill a room with smoke and settle in to alter the destinations of American history in the usual manner.

The Twelve group met in a large suite in The Mansion on Turtle Creek, demolishing table after table from room service, and decided without contest that Ed Price was not electable. Two of them could not stop grinning because all of that PAC money had disappeared not quite in vain; a lot of the party faithful would be able to keep up the payments on their summer houses because of it.

After they had deliberated, the work was split up so that things could get moving. The floor captains and delegation leaders were given their orders over the direct-line telephones to the convention floor. The convention’s vote was swung behind Gordon Manning of Connecticut.

Price’s supporters were allowed a forty-six-minute demonstration on the floor of the convention, after his conceding speech in Manning’s favor, mainly because the networks had to fill the time if they were to realize the emperor’s ransom of income from the commercials that made the convention possible. Ned Price was dumped.

Manning, governor of Connecticut and a crusading champion of the expedient, who understood clearly that ’92 was not going to be a Republican year at the White House because the nation would need at least twelve years to recover from the old codger whose administration had vanished like steam, carried the convention by a majority of ninety-six votes on the next ballot, then was nominated unanimously on the third ballot.

The first move Governor Manning made after he had carried the nomination was to telephone Ned Price to offer him the key post in the proposed Manning cabinet as attorney general of the United States, which Ned Price accepted.

“The people have spoken,” Price told the convention over the greatly flawed public address system. “The party now has given America the strongest and most electable candidate in its history, a great American, Gordon Godber Manning.”

Humbled not at all, Ned Price left the convention hall, returned to his hotel, where he locked himself in, changed out of his visionary Woodrow Wilson dentures into a more homey set, the Adolf Hitler set, and telephoned Miss Claire Coolidge in New York. “It’s over, baby,” Eduardo said into the telephone, “and not only can nothing ever keep us apart again, but I am going to get you the lead in Giselle.”

“Oh, Edward!” Miss Coolidge answered breathily and, while not entirely erasing Charles Macy Barton from her memory, she did put him on hold.

“Manning has offered me Justice.”

“Have you been arrested, dearest?” Claire cried out.

“No, no. The Department of Justice. He wants me to be his attorney general.”

“Oh, Woofy! You’ll be wonderful!”

Reluctantly, Ned Price ended the conversation, feeling the sharpest of basic longings but unwilling to articulate them at his age. He stared at the telephone for a moment or two as if he knew he could reach into it and pull Miss Coolidge out of it, then began to think about his other major preoccupation again, the screwing his father had given him over his birthright, and, all at once, the devious plans he had been constructing inside his soul with a Sicilian lapidarian’s precision came to a head like an angry carbuncle, and, with one telephone call, he lanced it.

He called his nephew, Rocco Sestero, in Atlantic City, grateful that his former secretary, Miss Blue, kept his address book up-to-the-minute. He would have placed Rocco in Brooklyn.

“Rocco?” Ned Price drawled into the telephone. “This is your Uncle Eduardo.”

“Uncle Eduardo!” Rocco was awestruck. He had seen his uncle in the distance at family weddings, christenings, and funerals, but his uncle had never actually spoken to him. Throughout the evening, he had been sitting with his son in front of the television set at the fashionable New Jersey spa, watching history being made in Dallas, helpless with pride that a member of his family might be nominated for president of the United States; then, like it wasn’t even happening, his uncle had called him on the telephone.

“What a magnificent speech!” Rocco sang. “But the American people were gypped out of a great leader.”

“Thank you, Rocco.”

“Beppino and me watched every minute of the convention here!”

“Beppino?” Eduardo hated immigrant names like that.

“My son! Beppino—your grandnephew. Anyway, what I wanna tell you is—maybe I don’t understand politics, but I know enough to know you was robbed.” Since he had been a boy, Rocco had hero-worshipped Eduardo; then, as a man, the feeling had been even more so since People magazine had identified Eduardo as one of the three richest men in the United States.

“No, no,” Eduardo said. “The best man won. Rocco, as you know, I am in Dallas.”

Who ever heard such a crazy accent? Rocco thought. This guy makes William F. Buckley, Jr., sound like Nathan Detroit. “That figures, Uncle Eduardo,” he said.

“I’d like you to have breakfast with me tomorrow at my apartment in New York. Are you free?”

Am I free? Rocco thought wildly. What does he think, I’d charge my own uncle? “I’ll be there, Uncle Eduardo.” What an honor!

“Do you know where it is?”

“Not exactly.”

“The Trump Tower. Eight-thirty tomorrow morning.”

Rocco Sestero was Amalia’s son, Corrado Prizzi’s grandson. He was a demandingly acquisitive man in his early fifties who had been one of the three caporegimes of the Prizzi family. When the franchises had been sold, because he believed he was going to inherit millions through his mother when the don died, he had stayed out of the action with the result that he had had to accept an enforced retirement check for $418,652.39 from the Prizzi settlement and take work as a pit boss at one of the Prizzi casinos in Atlantic City. Rocco thought about money the way other Italians thought about pasta when they were hungry. Rocco was always hungry and money was the only food that could satisfy him. He was a Prizzi.

Eduardo checked the current-status address book. S. L. Penrose, a member of The Twelve, one of the foremost political consultants in Washington, and a head of one of the capital’s largest law firms, was also the guiding force behind the National Landscapers Congress, formerly the Unione Siciliane, the fratellanza’s lobby, in which the relatively newly established Black, Hispanic, and Oriental organizations held associate memberships. Eduardo allowed time for S. L. to finish his business at the convention and return to his hotel, the Plaza of the Americas. Sal Penrose had been a protégé of Corrado Prizzi. When Sal was a young law student at Tulane University, the don’s sister, Birdie, married to Gennaro Fustino, Boss of the southern-southwestern rim of the United States, had recommended him to her brother as deserving of all the help the don could give him. The don put him through law school, where he was editor of the law review. After graduation, after four years of service in one of the great Barker’s Hill Wall Street law firms, the don provided the capital for Sal to open a law office in Washington, which, in thirty years, had become one of the two greatest law firms in the city. S. L. Penrose was a considerable figure in American affairs, an adviser to presidents, an esteemed, and toweringly expensive, “political consultant,” and the source of the fratellanza’s power in national politics, which ranked third in national consequence after the gun lobby and toxic waste disposal.

Although administratively, being a Barker’s Hill lawyer, Penrose worked directly under Charles Macy Barton, he had, until Eduardo had retired to run for president, worked for Eduardo.

“Sal?” Eduardo said into the phone. “Ned Price. When the convention closes down tonight, come over to my hotel. I’d like to have a chat.”

“Certainly, Ned.”

“I’ll look for you.”

When Penrose arrived Eduardo only kept him for about twelve minutes. “Manning offered me Justice,” he said.

“That’s where the diamonds shine.”

“I want you to get the committees in both houses ready for my confirmation. A two-thirds majority, no more.”

“And if Manning doesn’t win?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when, as, and if.”

“Justice. Jesus. We can really win with Justice.”

Edward knew how much they could win. He would be sitting right on the sweet spot where he could force every crime family in the United States to amalgamate his way and really grow so that their profits could be reinvested and their regional companies could be brought under the Barker’s Hill formula. Ask not what you can do for your country, he thought. Let the other guy be president. Glue me into that chair in the attorney general’s office and let me write the nation’s songs.

But his loathing of all those unwashed, crudely accented people in the fratellanza who would directly benefit from such policies choked in his gullet again. Whenever he thought of those people, he thought of his swinish brother, Vincent. He loathed being the force that would make all of those swinish people richer and more powerful. As if they could be. If he did do it, he was going to make some hard, hard deals through Sal Penrose so that at least he could know that he was making something substantial out of every enhanced dollar he would be helping to let them make. God, he thought, imagining the CIA flying in drugs from all the contributing countries of the world for absolutely trouble-free entry into the market cities of North America. There were hundreds of billions to be made and the lion’s share of it could be his. They could put cocaine in every household, as available as packaged bread. He decided to forget his objections to most of the individual members of the fratellanza. He would carry out his father’s policy willingly and serve his government.

The fratellanza, when advised by S. L. Penrose, was, in all its innocence, unconscious of the hyperactive destiny that Eduardo Prizzi had in store for them and was pleased by the outcome of the nomination. Eduardo, they were told by their consiglieri, would be more useful to its directly patriotic interests than if he had won the nomination for the presidency in that he would be the chief law enforcement officer of the United States: after all, their principal business was breaking the law on behalf of a pleading public.

Those portions of the families that had been contributing to get Eduardo elected president were now told to switch their allegiance to the Manning ticket, while the other half of the families worked and spent for the candidacy of Franklin M. Heller so that the two-party system would be preserved.