41

Rocco entered his Uncle Eduardo’s security system on a high aerie floor of the four-floor Price apartment in New York’s Trump Tower at 8:26 A.M. the following morning, requiring that he get out of bed at 3:45 A.M. to drive from the Jersey shore into the city. He was processed by Eduardo’s security people and ready to enter his uncle’s breakfast room at 8:37. He resented the whole thing. Rocco had been a resenter all his life, one of the people with cancer of the soul. He had made capo because his mother controlled what his grandfather got to eat, and his mother had been determined to make something out of Rocco. All his life he had figured that, when the don died, he—or his mother, which was the same thing because he’d get it in the end—would come into a fortune. He was Corrado Prizzi’s grandson so—what else? But nothing happened when the don died. The don left his mother the income on five hundred thousand dollars and not a dime to him. Then his mother died twenty minutes later, so he got it. What was it, the income? Twenty-two thousand nine hundred a year. Fahcrissake, he had spent more than that on a weekend at Vegas. What kind of a life had they handed him, the grandson of Corrado Prizzi, who got only the income on five hundred grand and a big line of horseshit?

Eduardo was waiting for him in the breakfast room. It would have been an imposing room for the state dinners of the Shah of Iran in his salad days. The furniture was made of solid silver, which shone capriciously in the morning sunlight, requiring a full-time staff of two to keep it polished. The powerful, not to say overwhelming, Rembrandt, The Master Clock Maker, valued by Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous at $8.7 million, which was quite large and very striking, would have dominated the room were it not for the glassed-in junglelike arboretum that filled the longest wall, in which families of rhesus monkeys swung from branch to branch or searched for lice in each other’s fur. The arboretum was Eduardo’s statement in support of worldwide environmental protection, a deeply personal, not merely political, conviction.

Eduardo rose and embraced his nephew. “I am brokenhearted about your mother.”

They settled down to a reassuring Sicilian breakfast of focaccia, which were rolls with a filling of ricotta cheese and minced kidney; strong coffee; and cubaita, an expressive sweet made from sesame seed, sugar, and honey. Eduardo, of course, never ate Sicilian food unless he was with members of his family from whom he needed something, which was as seldom as it needed to be, so his people had been scouring the Sicilian food markets of the city since dawn to come up with something approximately suitable.

“This is tremendous, Uncle Eduardo. You must have a fucking genius of a Sicilian cook.”

Eduardo shuddered lightly. He offered Rocco a selection of Zeno Davidoff’s breakfast cigars. He passed a ruby- and emerald-studded Zippo lighter to Rocco, saying, “Keep it as a little souvenir.”

“Holy shit, Uncle Eduardo!”

“As the surviving head of the Prizzi family, I’ve been thinking, Rocco, about how your grandfather had somehow passed you over in his few bequests.”

“Shit, yes.”

“I think you are entitled to more than the interest on the five hundred thousand dollars which was passed on to you from your mother.”

“Shit, yes.”

“I don’t suppose the interest is very much?”

“A lousy twenty-two thousand nine hundred a year.”

“Whaaaaaat? Good heavens I could do better than that for you.”

“How much?”

“Say thirty thousand.”

Rocco snorted. “Thirty thousand,” he said. “I gotta work my ass off just to stay even.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a pit boss at the number three in Atlantic City.”

“You must be on your feet most of the time.”

“You can say that again.”

“Well, by God, by my lights, it just isn’t fair. You, the grandson, get twenty-two thousand nine hundred a year, but Maerose, the granddaughter, is the custodian of billions.”

“Ah, shit, Uncle Eduardo,” Rocco moaned.

“The injustice of the whole thing has been bothering me so that I can’t sleep nights. Really. I’ve had to put on my thinking cap about it, and I think I have evolved a way in which you can pick up a million or two in a perfectly straightforward way.”

“How?”

“Tax-free, of course.”

“No kidding? How, Uncle Eduardo?”

“Do you know an absolutely stupid but reliable man whom you could enlist to sort of—front—this thing for you?”

Rocco thought. His mind wasn’t as fast as an Olivetti 260 work station, but he got there. “Yeah. Santo Calandra.”

“The collector for the franchises? The former vindicatore?”

“Yeah. He’s like the stupidest anywheres.”

“I see. Well! That’s splendid. Now—this is what I want you to do. Down to the last detail. We’ll go over it two or three times, but if there is anything about the plan which you do not understand, I rely on you to ask me about it now, because—except for one more time—we won’t be meeting again.” He smiled benignly. “In this connection, that is.”