42

Rocco set the meet with Santo Calandra by inviting him for a weekend at the fanciest of the three Prizzi hotels in Atlantic City. When Santo got there on a Friday afternoon, Rocco laid on a gorgeous broad, stacks of chips, all the New Jersey champagne Santo could drink, a suite with a private steam room, and four hard-core porn videos. The whole hospitality knocked Santo out until three o’clock the next afternoon, which was when Rocco went up to see him.

Santo had worked in Rocco’s regime during the years of Vincent Prizzi and Charley Partanna. He had a wary respect for Rocco, who not only had been the source from which all good things had flowed for most of his professional life, but also was a Prizzi on his mother’s side, where it counted.

They sat at either end of an enormous sofa, smiling at each other. Santo was wearing a light pink undershirt and orange shorts. He looked like the flag of an emerging African nation. Santo was a bulky man with a nose like a boxing glove who had so much respect for his skin that he only shaved every other day. Beardwise, Rocco thought, he could have took a shave every four hours. As long as Rocco had known him, Santo had stayed just busy enough not to have the time to clean his fingernails, or even to wash his hands for that matter. He could have grown Perricone grapes in the accumulation of soil at the end of each grimy finger. Most of all, just sitting around like this, he missed Santo’s neckties. Santo’s adventurousness showed in his neckties, which made him look as if he had encouraged people to break eggs all over his chest. His suits were too tight but looked a lot better than his underwear. Just the same, Rocco remembered wistfully, when Santo didn’t have his feet up on the furniture like this he wore the most beautiful shoes in Brooklyn.

Rocco was a vertical of the right creases, old-school tie, button-down collar, and a charcoal-gray blazer with brass buttons. He wore a black mourning band on his left sleeve.

“They take good care of you?” Rocco asked.

“Sensational.”

“How was the broad?”

“Sensational.”

“Wait’ll you see what I got for you tonight.”

“No kidding?”

“Two. Real movie stahz.”

Santo grinned, which, considering the state of his teeth, his stubble, and the size of his head, was not the most considerate thing he could have done.

“How did you make out downstairs?”

“Like I broke even, maybe won a little.”

“I ain’t seen you for a long time. Not since the franchises.”

“Yeah.”

“I got a tremendous proposition for you.”

“Yeah?”

“For maybe three-four months I been asking around about who is the most natural leader to take over the family if the family was gonna go back into bidniz again.”

“Whatta you mean?”

“I mean the franchise thing ain’t right. We gotta take them back and operate them the way my grandfather set them up.”

“But those other outfits paid like thirty million for the franchises.”

“So we’ll give them the money back.”

“Where are we gonna get that kind of money?”

“Later. Don’t worry about it.”

“Where do I come in here?”

“You are the natural capo di famiglia. Everybody I talked to from the old setup agrees with that.”

“No shit?”

“We’re gonna call it the Calandra family.”

“No shit?”

“What else?”

“Whose idea was this, anyway?”

“Angelo Partanna.”

“Angelo?”

“But he wants you to stay far away from him until we get the whole thing set up.”

“This ain’t easy to follow, Rocco. It’s coming at me very fast. So if we gotta pay thirty million to get the franchises back, then where we gonna get it?”

“That’s the beauty part Angelo thought of. You know who got the money when my grandfather went?”

“Who?”

“My cousin’s kids.”

“Who?”

“Maerose’s kids.”

“So?”

“So you line up a couple of solid helpers and you lift my cousin’s kids.”

“What for?”

“For thirty million bucks.”

“The don left that kind of money?”

“Then you get the franchises back and you head up the Calandra family.”

After Rocco left, Santo went back to bed to think the whole thing over. It was a terrific proposition. The more he thought about it, the more he knew he needed to talk to Angelo before he made any moves on Maerose’s kids. What he needed more than he needed the thirty million was a consigliere, and everybody knew Angelo was the best in the business, coast to coast. He lay on the emperor-size bed on top of an antique American patchwork quilt made by little old ladies high up in Vermont or maybe Taiwan, and he could feel the power inside his head like it was water on the brain, but even so he was big enough to admit that he owed it to Angelo to offer him the job because he never forgot how he owed it to Angelo, who had given him his start as a contract hitter when he had been a young guy just starting out. Also he wanted to lay it on Angelo a little because the time had finally come when he was about to move up from wiseguy to the top of the heap. The Calandra family! Jesus, he wished his mother was still alive.

Santo and Angelo met at the laundry on Tuesday morning.

“Look at it this way, Angelo,” Santo said. “Nobody can say nothing against the Prizzis because there ain’t no Prizzis. Also Charley is gone. No family honor is involved here. You are like the janitor for the operation, so nobody is gonna blame you.”

“Janitor?” Pop said. “If I’m the janitor, what does that make you—the men’s room attendant, you marble-headed wop stupe?”

“No offense, Angelo. It just gets you off the hook.”

“I’m over eighty years old. That’s the only hook I needa get off.”

“What I’m saying is, it has nothing to do with you. Nobody is gonna blame you.”

“But they’re gonna blame you, Santo. The Blacks, Hispanics, and Orientals and the families who bought them franchises are gonna blame you. They paid out all that money to buy them businesses—how do you think you’re gonna stay alive after that?”

“Because I am gonna give them back the money they paid for the franchises.”

“Why should they sell it back for what they paid? Why should they sell it back at all? What the fuck you think they bought it for inna first place? You think they keep paying us the royalties if it wasn’t making a shitpot fulla money?”

“I didn’t say they’d sell it back. I said I’d make the offer to pay it back so I could have a position if it comes up in the Commission. Pretty good, hah?”

“If it comes up? If? And suppose they say sure, old pal, we’ll give it back. Where you gonna get that kinda money?”

Santo hadn’t expected such a question; then he remembered how Rocco had told him that Angelo had to be kept far out of this until the new Calandra family had been set up, so he improvised. What was the difference? Whatever he said, they both knew exactly what they were talking about. “Where? You are gonna give it to me.”

“Me? Where am I gonna get it?”

“You’re the only one left out of the whole Prizzi family. You got the money. So you give it to me, and I give it back to them.”

“Santo, don’t work overtime being a schmuck. You think the Prizzis put the thirty million from the franchises inna tin box and handed it to me? Use your head, fahcrissake.”

“Whatta you mean?”

“I mean the Prizzis wouldn’t let fifty bucks lay around without reinvesting it. The money was all washed. It’s out working. It’s been moved under a half dozen different names since it was paid in. Whatta you, some kinda cretino?”

Santo thought maybe he could be wrong thinking about Angelo as a consigliere. Where was the respect here? What kind of attitude was this? “So who got the don’s money?” he said. “Maerose Prizzi?”

“The Salvation Army,” Angelo said.

“Yeah? Rocco’s mother told him Mae’s kids got it,” Santo said.

“Jesus!” Angelo said. “Now you give me street gossip. Santo, lissena me. You got a good thing going with the override on the franchise collections. What you were thinking you could do only looks good on paper. Forget it. And I’ll forget we ever had this meeting.”

“Fuck that, Angelo. I’m not running no collection agency for a lousy three percent when I can have the whole thing.”

“So maybe we can work it out to five percent,” Angelo lied. “That’s a lotta money, Santo. That was the boss’s cut in the old days.”

“A lotta money? You know what’s left after a hundred and thirty-four collectors get their end and the payoff money is taken out and I pay the overhead? Practically nothing, that’s what’s left.”

“It’s more money than you ever saw in your life,” Angelo said. “And the way you wanna routine it, it’s gonna be a very short life.”

“So a buncha hoodlums are gonna get in an uproar. So there’ll be a little war. Then everybody will go back to business.”

“You are gonna sting Sicilians for thirty million plus and they’re gonna forget it?”

“Maybe I didn’t think it through, Angelo. But I will. And when I do, I’m gonna take over all that business. And you’re gonna hafta decide whose side you’re on.”

“Think what through, you asshole?”

“I’m gonna get the money, that’s what I’m gonna think it through.” Santo saw that he would need to get back to Rocco to get this thing opened up for him a little more.

“How’re you gonna get the money, you shithead?”

“That’s what I gotta think through,” he said stiffly, deeply offended. He stood up and left the laundry.

Pop swiveled his chair around and stared out of the window at the bricks and the cats in the garbage. After a while he turned back to the desk. He called Charley at the Barker’s Hill office. “Something came up, Charley,” he said into the phone.

“When do you want to make it?”

“Like now.”

“The laundry?”

“Yeah.”

Charley drove himself to Brooklyn in the Chevy van. He was wearing a gray flannel suit with the tailoring that Mary Barton said made him look like Gary Cooper around the torso, and a maroon Bohemian Grove tie. The Ralph Lauren alligator scuffles he had on had cost him more than the quarterly rent on the apartment at the beach in the old days and that was after inflation had set in. Pop was sitting too quietly when Charley came into the office, staring at a statue of St. Gennaro, a leftover from Vincent Prizzi’s time. It was a nice summer day. There was a redolent breeze off the Gowanus Canal, three miles to the northwest.

Charley sat in one of the two chairs facing his father, who was behind the desk that held Vincent’s fake bronze plastic sign that said: THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING.

“A nice suit, Charley.”

Charley shrugged. “It happened in Europe.”

“I used to be a snappy dresser. But—you get outta the habit, I guess.”

“What came up, Pop?”

Angelo spoke mildly, watching St. Gennaro do nothing. “You remember I told Corrado that selling the New York franchises wouldn’t work?”

“I remember.”

“It ain’t working. It’s starting to fall apart, Charley.”

“No kidding?” It was all very distant to Charley.

“Santo come to see me here. Prince Nowhere. He told me he’s gonna organize the old soldati and go back into business the way it used to be.”

“It’s too complicated for Santo.”

“You ain’t kidding.”

“How does the dummy figure they can get away with that? The other outfits paid us to get out.”

“Santo said he was gonna give them back the money.”

“What money?”

“The thirty million plus.”

“Where is Santo gonna get thirty million plus?”

“That’s what I asked him. He said he was gonna get it from the Prizzis. He had it in his mind that it was all in a little sack and that I could hand it to him.”

“I know he’s very stupid, but what happens when he understands he can’t have it?”

“That’s why I called you. He thinks the don left the thirty million to the twins.”

“The twins?” Charley froze. Pop finally had his full attention.

“What he was telling me, although he didn’t know he was saying it, is that he is gonna snatch the twins to get the money.”

Charley turned to stone. He shook his head slowly, back and forth, denying the meaning of what he had heard, staring at his father. “That’s how you figure it?”

“That’s what he thinks.”

“I’ll hit him myself,” Charley said thickly.

“No, no. I’ll get people to hit him.”

“First, it’s my wife and my kids. Second, Santo’s too tricky. But I know him. I’ll handle it. Like quick. Now—before he can get set.”

“It’s prolly the best way. You’ll need a piece.”

“Yeah, right.”

Angelo got up and shuffled out of the room. He was gone about five minutes. He came back with a bundle wrapped in oilpaper. “This is a nice, clean piece with a noise suppressor,” he said. “Also a harness.”

He closed the door and began to unwrap the package on his desk, taking care not to touch the weapon. There was a pair of transparent surgical gloves under the piece. “Today is Friday,” Pop said. “The Busaccas usually leave their royalty envelope on Saturdays, but it’s summertime so they could change it. The daughter will answer the door. You tell her you brought the envelope from the Busaccas. She’ll tell you to wait; then she’ll go in and tell her father. You follow her in and do the job on Santo.”

Santo lived in a big apartment house with his divorced daughter, Melba, in Sunset Park, between Bay Ridge and the Greenwood Cemetery. As Charley drove across from Bensonhurst, he felt like he was moving through a fog of time over which he had never had any control. His own wife, the don’s own granddaughter, had set up the don to change them all from flesh-and-blood Sicilians into cut-out, coloring book Americans who lived in a world where respectable was everything. The land of Dick and Jane and their respectable little dog.

Charley was like some reluctant fallen angel, the only one out of the 133,306,668 fallen angels, according to the Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum in 1273, who had not wanted to leave the paradise on high where he had always existed, but who had gone along with the trend because the two men, his father and Don Corrado, who had made all the large decisions of his life, had ordered him to fall into the pit of respectability with Mae, Eduardo, and the twins. Now there was no going back. By doing the job on Santo he wouldn’t be going back or changing anything. He would be giving it to Santo to preserve the respectability that his wife had lusted for, a lust, in fact, that must have been the central curse laid upon the Prizzis because the grandfather had lusted just as hard after respectability as the granddaughter.

It had reached the point where Santo, that dummy of dummies, had laid a threat on Charley’s two children so that there was nothing he could do except what he was going to do. He was protecting the holy of holies of Prizzi respectability, his own two sons, who were preordained by the will of their mother and the bottomless purse of their great-grandfather to grow up to talk like Eduardo and learn how to play polo. Time was pouring all of their essences from chalice to chalice. Charley was suspended hundreds of thousands of miles away in lightless, freezing outer space, between a life now gone, which he understood, and a life that was measured by the tread of pomp in an unspeakable procession toward the altar of respectability.

He put on the transparent rubber gloves in the hall facing the Calandras’ front door, thinking of another hallway twenty-five years ago when they had made him put Vito Daspisa away. But this was an entirely different proposition. He looked at his watch and rang the doorbell at a quarter to six. He could smell the ragu on the stove inside, a terrific smell.

Melba Calandra answered the door. “Whatta you want?” she said. She was a short, plump, bottle-blonde in a skirt like a pelmet.

“I brought the envelope from the Busaccas.”

“Today ain’t Saturday.”

“We got a big weekend coming up. We’re going to the beach tonight.”

“Wait here.” She slammed the door so quickly, Charley couldn’t follow her in. He waited. Santo opened the door. “You from the Busaccas?” he said.

“Yeah. With the envelope.”

“That’s a nice suit.”

“Barney’s. Seventh Avenue and Seventeenth Street.”

Santo held out his hand for the envelope. Charley’s hand went to his inside breast pocket and came out with the bad news. He shot Santo through his left eye; then he stepped over the body, shut the door behind him, and went into the kitchen, where he shot Melba in the chest and, when she went down, in the throat. She was a heavy bleeder. He dropped the piece on her stomach, watched it bounce and somersault like an acrobat hitting a trampoline, then leaned across her body and dipped a rubber-sheathed finger in the ragu for a little taste. It was absolutely delicious. He turned off the low flame under the pot.