Prizzi's Honor Read online

  Prizzi’s Honor

  Richard Condon

  Copyright

  Prizzi’s Honor

  Copyright © 1982, 2013 by Richard Condon

  Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2013 by RosettaBooks LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover jacket design by Terrence Tymon

  ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795335020

  For the Memory of

  Benn Reyes

  “But dreadful is the mysterious

  power of fate; there is no

  deliverance from it by wealth or by war, by

  fenced city, or dark, sea-

  beaten ships.”

  Chorus, Antigone

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter One

  Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter was being married before the baroque altar of Santa Grazia di Traghetto, the lucky church of the Prizzi family. The bride shimmered in the exalting sounds of the choir and the chanting bishop. The groom, shorter but more intense than the bride, was her cousin, Patsy Garrone, a member of the inner Prizzi family.

  The church was dressed with sensual shafts of light and the fur of holy music. Don Corrado Prizzi, eighty-four, sat on the aisle in the front pew, right side of the church. He was asleep, but even in repose his face was as subtly distorted and burnished as that of a giant crown of thorns starfish predator. Every few moments both small, sharp eyes, as merry as ice cubes, would open, make a reading, then close again.

  Beside Don Corrado sat his eldest son, Vincent, father of the bride, a cubically heavy man. He clutched his kneecaps with both hands, frowning and humming, very softly, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Beside Vincent was his brother, Eduardo, and his third “natural” wife, Baby. Eduardo called his wives Baby, not to sound colloquially American, as he had once explained to his mother, but because Cristoforo Colombo had named his first ship of discovery the Niña which means Baby. “They are all little women,” his mother had said. “How come you don’t call them Pinta?” One thing was for sure, the family wisdom went, no one would ever call any of them Santa Maria. Eduardo wore the only elegance of the family: silver hair in high, teased waves, tailoring by Cifonelli (Roma), and money by Gucci.

  Directly behind Don Corrado sat Angelo Partanna, his oldest friend and the family’s counselor. He was a tall, scrawny, bald and relentlessly dapper man in his early seventies.

  Behind the first two rows on the right side of the church, captured like pheromones in the thickening smell of hundreds of burning beeswax candles, in serried ranks, row upon row, were lesser Prizzis, one more Partanna, and many, many Sesteros and Garrones. Heavily larded among them were relatives from most of the principal families of the fratellanza in the United States. Sal Prizzi had married Virgie Licamarito, sister of Augie “Angles” Licamarito, Boss of the Detroit family. Two of the Garrone daughters had married the sons of Gennaro Fustino, head of the New Orleans family that controlled the entire southern rim of the United States. Don Corrado’s niece, Caterina, was married to the son of Religio Carramazza, head of the Chicago family, and Don Corrado was second cousin to Sam Benefice, head of the New England family, and Carlo “Gastank” Viggone, Boss of the Cleveland combination.

  Together, all sides of the fratellanza enterprises formed a loose conglomerate that was only able to operate as long as it could neutralize law enforcement on the one hand while sustaining cordial, continuing relations with its customer-victims on the other. The Prizzi family business depended entirely, in a way that no other business organization needed to, on strong relationships with the noncriminal sections of society. These relationships were kept in profitable repair by both sides. It would be a mistake to think of the Prizzi family as being “different” from “legitimate” society—continuing profits and mutual conveniences were established and encouraged by both sides. The Prizzis weren’t “wrong-side” players making deals with strictly differentiated “right-side” players. Both sides had in fact evolved together in the long night of the money-tilted culture, helped each other, and were, combined, the most important part of the political and economic system of the society.

  On the left side of the church, seated expressionlessly in the last half of the pews, were the working troops of the Prizzis and their capiregimes, an honor guard of about seven hundred men, a third of the available soldati. In front of them were the bag men from the chief inspector’s squad, the borough squads, and the PC’s squad of the New York Police Department, all in plain clothes. Alongside them sat the chief operating officer of one of the multinational conglomerates, the Papal Nuncio, the national union leaders, and the superstars of screen, opera, theater, TV, and the great world of sports. The groom’s best man was the current light-heavyweight champion of the world. The bride’s maid of honor was the reigning Miss America, who she had met that morning. In the first three pews, senators and congressmen sat side by side with high police officials, network anchormen, and the best and the brightest minds of the media, the district attorney’s office, the attorney general’s office, and the White House staff.

  In the church choir lofts network TV cameras had been installed side by side with the Prizzis’ own cassette taping units. Radio coverage was dense from this vantage point and the hum of their steady reportage joined the glorious song of the choir, the chanting of the bishop, the responses of the altar boys, and the clicking of plain, old-fashioned news cameras. A granddaughter of Corrado Prizzi was being married.

  Charley Partanna sat in the eleventh row, right side, next to his cousin, movie executive Paulie Sestero. Charley was a large, lithe man of forty-two who resembled the late Phar Lap, with strong facial bones and a jutting chin, chrome eyes and brows like awnings. He had been a “made man” in the honored society since he was seventeen, the age at which his father had been made before him.

  Charley Partanna was Angelo’s son, Vincent’s sottocapo, and the Prizzis’ enforcer. When he was thirteen he had made his bones on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx, where he had never been before that afternoon. His father had been unable to f
igure out any other way to ice Little Phil Terrone, the heaviest shit and boo dealer in the north Bronx, who always seemed to be at the center of a crowd of people. Charley was a kid in short pants. There were a lot of other kids, maybe thirty of them, milling around to get some of the silver money Terrone always threw around on them, and Charley just stepped out from behind a car and blew Terrone’s head off. Then he dropped the gun and lost himself in the mob of other kids.

  Charley was solid. Nothing shook him up. He made his plan then he walked through it deliberately, missing nothing. One time the police staked out an apartment. They had searchlights and bullhorns and snipers on roofs and in windows, the whole movie drill, to get at a hoodlum named Dimples Tancredi, who not only worked for the Prizzis but had killed two cops. Tancredi got a message out to the Prizzis saying that he was sorry but that he was going to have to make a deal to blow the entire Prizzi shit business on the East Coast to buy himself some time instead of being knocked off by the brooding cops. At least enough time so that his lawyer could get some things settled and the crazy cops cooled down. Don Corrado was stunned by Tancredi’s intentions. He talked it over with Angelo Partanna and Pop said, “Why, my Charley will go in there and blast holes in that little prick.” Charley was twenty. It was his fourth hit.

  Eduardo Prizzi made a deal for a sit-down meet with the Brooklyn police brass and reassurances were passed around until everybody understood that all anybody wanted was for this fucking cop-killer to be dead while the Department got the media credit for it but wouldn’t have to risk any more cops’ lives.

  Temporarily, the cops gave Charley a different name. In the newspapers the next day he became, without any pictures, First-Grade Detective George Fearons, complete with a police heavy rifle. He went up in the service elevator to the back door of the apartment Tancredi was trapped in and got him to move close enough to the door so that Tancredi could hear him explain the deal that the Prizzis wanted to make for him. That didn’t get the door open, but it got Tancredi close enough so he could hear the proposition and Charley burned him through the door. Then he went down in the service elevator, handed in the riot gun, and told the cops how things were upstairs; four of them went up to the apartment, kicked down the front and back door for friendly TV crews, and blew eleven holes in Tancredi’s dying body.

  ***

  “There are even people here from Agrigento, Charley,” Paulie said. He was a very short man when he was standing, but massively tall when he was sitting down. “See that turtle-faced guy over there? Four rows up? That’s Pietro Spina. Now we are talking real old-country fratellanza.”

  “Never mind that,” Charley said, “who is the great-looking head across the aisle, two rows up?”

  They stared at the woman. “Great-looking?” Paulie said. She was okay. He would rate her about a 7.

  “Jesus, Paulie, she’s gorgeous!” Charley stared fixedly at the woman. She was handsome from some angles, but to Charley she was a classic, like the Truman win over Dewey. She was dark and she sat as reposefully as a swan.

  “The name I don’t know,” Paulie said, “but she’s gotta be a big friend of the family or else heavy media.”

  “If she’s a friend of the family she’s on the wrong side of the church.”

  The choir ran down for a few beats and Charley became aware of the sound of the taping cameras. Four camera set-ups! he marveled. Paulie had told him that the whole wedding was going to be made into a one-hour feature with music, titles, and special effects by Scott Miller; with Toni Muto, who had three records in the top fifty, singing “It Had to Be You” in the Sicilian dialect of her choice. The movie was going to be put on videocassettes and everybody at the wedding was going to get one so they could enjoy it in the years to come.

  “Listen, Paulie,” Charley said, “I want something.”

  “What?”

  “As soon as the mass is over I want you to tell the head guy on the cameras to shoot stuff on that girl for me.”

  “Why not? You want it, you got it. Here,” he took a card out of his side pocket and scribbled on it. “Give him this. He’ll get whatever you say.”

  Amalia Sestero, in the row ahead of them, turned around and smiled. “Hey, Paulie,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Shut up and watch the wedding.”

  ***

  While the crowd was working its way out of the church, Charley moved fast and grabbed the head camera guy. He put a hundred-dollar bill in the man’s hand, figuring it would work better than Paulie’s card. “I am only trying to help the movie,” he said. “See that girl over there? The beauty in the green-and-yellow dress?”

  The man looked. “The beauty?”

  “With the little white gloves! The one moving out into the aisle?”

  “Oh, that one. Yeah.”

  “Shoot as much as you can get on her when we get over to the hotel, you understand? Save everything you get for me, you understand?” Charley had a harsh, metallic voice, metallic in the way heavy truck gears sound when they are covered with sand. It made a punishing sound even when he was singing Christmas carols. His voice, his size, and his ball-bearing eyes almost made up the cameraman’s mind, but he was confused so he hesitated.

  “Look, friend, I’d like to do it, but—”

  “You want to eat this card?”

  Charley put Paulie’s card in the man’s hand. The man nodded vigorously., “Certainly,” he said. “My pleasure. She will flash up the footage.”

  “You ain’t kidding,” Charley said.

  ***

  The decorators had turned the ballroom of the hotel into a replica of the old Palermo Gardens. Everybody from the old neighborhood who came into that room was kicked in the head by what they saw because what they thought they were seeing was their youth. It was such a terrific effect that three old ladies were laughing and crying at the same time.

  “Hey, fahcrissake, look at this!” the head of the Bocca family yelled. “How about what these here people done here?”

  Above the heads of the entering crowd the whole ceiling was festooned with crepe-paper ribbons: red, white, and blue from one side of the room to the central chandelier, and red, white, and green from the chandelier to the other side. Balloons jostled each other against the ceiling, bobbing with the rising warm air. Everybody felt good. What had been a solemn wedding turned into a party. People suddenly liked each other. Some people hugged. There was so much love in the room that Charley’s heart filled with the foam of it, like a stein of beer pumped too fast.

  Two long tables stretched down either side of the hall, holding up mountains of sandwiches. Dozens of steins of beer were being filled by Jewish waiters from the Prizzi chain of delicatessens around the city, which Ed Prizzi had put the family into because no matter where he was he couldn’t seem to get a good (dry method) piece of corned beef. That had led the Prizzis into bakeries, which soon went national because nobody could get rye bread that had any crust, and before anyone knew it, the Palermo Maven delicatessens had gone national on a franchise basis, including the Jewish waiters.

  A mass of Sicilian-speaking waiters were filling pitchers of elderberry wine from a large barrel. There were nine kinds of salad on the tables, mountains of farfalline, mounds of cold meat and piles of salsiccia and banks of pastries set among fourteen kinds of Sicilian candies and ice creams. Jesus, Charley marveled, even the orchestra was right—a piano, an accordion, a clarinet, and a bass playing a rock arrangement of Giovanezza. Above the stage, behind the band, were big eight-by-ten-foot sepia photographs of Arturo Toscanini, Pope Pius XII, Enrico Caruso, and Richard M. Nixon in heavy gilt frames.

  A lot of the older men were dressed right, in tuxes, and the older women all wore the correct color for a wedding, black, but the young people and the civilians were schlocked out like ziticones. Charley wore a tuxedo. It was three o’clock on a summer afternoon but it was a Prizzi wedding and people should know how to pay respect.

  One thing was right. Don Cor
rado’s eighty-three-year-old sister sat at the door weeping happily in a black dress. As the guests came in they dropped either sealed envelopes or cash for the bride into the black drawstring bag she held between her feet. It looked like a sixty-dollar score. People in the environment liked to think of a thousand dollars as one dollar to confuse the tourists at Vegas, but the measurement became universal because so much money was lying around in heaps, pleading to be taken. Sixty dollars was sixty thousand dollars.

  Charley had hustled a ride over from the church in a police car so he could be sure to get there first. He gave the sergeant who set it up a credit slip for six veal steaks packed in ice by the Prizzi meat company. When he got inside the ballroom he planted himself just inside the door and waited for her to come in.

  She got there after about twenty minutes, probably she had stopped off in the john. He watched her drop her envelope, then he saw that she was with Maerose Prizzi, the bride’s sister. He worked himself ahead of them in the crowd and positioned himself so that they couldn’t get around him. What a face! She didn’t look exactly Italian but she was beautiful. She had a mouth on her like a bunch of poppies and skin like he had never seen. He managed to stand as if he had been shoved in their way by the press of people near the door.

  Maerose was a great woman even if she had screwed up. She was a very wop looker, all eyes and beautiful bones among the grabbing domes and dunes. She was almost as tall as Charley, with sad eyes and long fingers. She was a woman who had done everything right—except once.

  “Hey, Charley!” she called out. “This is great. Meet my friend, Irene Walker. This is Charley Partanna.”

  She waited for him to speak. She was going to take her lead from him, which was very smart, he thought. How could a woman have such a face and (probably) such a body and also turn out to be this smart? He thought he could see her eyes change when she looked at him. To Charley she had something like the look which had come over Pizarro when he had first spotted the Peruvian gold. It was an expression of some kind of historic discovery.