Prizzi's Glory by Richard Condon
Charley reached over and held his father’s hand. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Pop,” he said. “Shoot the bell ringer.”
33
The insistent, prodding, overwhelming presence of Claire Coolidge in the same city almost violated Charley’s mind. The memory of her primary and secondary sexual characteristics was so strong that once, while he and Mary Barton were looking at a channel 13 presidential retrospective that showed footage of Calvin Coolidge, Charley was so overcome with the marginal lust that swept over him merely at the mention of the name that, with a hoarse cry, he fell upon Maerose and ravished her upon the unborn Persian lamb upholstery of the enormous sofa in the brobdingnagian study at Sixty-fourth Street. Mae was extraordinarily pleasured and, for once, utterly unsuspecting of Charley’s motives. It was all Charley could do not to cry out Claire’s name as he reached the dynamite apogee. It was so close a call that it forced Charley to do something about the danger. The lesson it taught him stayed with him until, the next morning, it pushed him into telephoning Miss Coolidge at the apartment in which Edward S. Price had set her up high in the Trump Tower off Fifth Avenue.
“Miss Coolidge, please.”
“This is she.”
“Ah, good morning, Miss Coolidge. This is Charles Macy Barton.”
“Mr. Barton. How nice.”
“Some people have been talking to me about perhaps proposing a new ballet and I thought of you.”
“Mr. Barton!”
“Do call me Charles. Or, as the president says it, Charley.”
“Whose ballet is it?”
“I thought we might chat about that at lunch—whenever you’re free.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m free today.”
“How fortunate. So am I. The Russian Tea Room?”
“That would be really convenient.”
“One o’clock then. The Russian Tea Room.”
Charley hung up, wondering why he automatically thought of the Russian Tea Room whenever he wanted to have lunch with Claire Coolidge. He knew why. Mae would be lunching at Le Cirque or La Grenouille. The West Side was out-of-bounds for his wife, castewise.
They had the same booth as they had had their first luncheon.
“My lucky table!” Miss Coolidge exclaimed. Charley finessed it.
“There is no music yet and, of course, no set designs,” Charley said easily, “but this young Argentinian librettist, Santo Calandra is his name, has this rather gripping conception for a storyline.”
“Really.”
“The ballet would be based on the Cherokee tragedy, the Trail of Tears, along which the Cherokee nation was forcibly moved by the United States Army in eighteen thirty-eight to be resettled on the Oklahoma strip after the disastrous Cherokee wars.” Charley had heard the arbiter, Mrs. Colin Baker, mention the possibility of such a ballet and he had dug the rest out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“How exciting.”
“Very sad, actually. Out of eighteen thousand Cherokees, four thousand died along the way, and when they got to the reservation in Oklahoma, feuds and murders with the white settlers began.”
“How perfectly tragic.”
“But it does have the makings of a moving ballet.”
“Oh, yes.” Miss Coolidge wasn’t taking any of this seriously. She was waiting for Charley to make his move.
“Do you think real tragedy can be expressed in the dance?”
“I think anything can be expressed in the dance, Charley.” She covered his hand with hers for an electric moment. The voltage she generated hit Charley as if some hooded executioner had pulled a switch. He stiffened, arching his back.
They stared at the menu silently. Charley ordered. Miss Coolidge said, “I have the most uncanny feeling that we’ve met before.”
“Before who?”
Miss Coolidge smiled. “I suppose you know about me and Edward.”
“People do talk about beautiful ballerinas.”
“Have you known Ed long?”
“Yes. I suppose so. In a business way,” Charley said. “I advised him on mergers and acquisitions for a number of years.”
“Do you think he’ll get the nomination?”
“Oh, yes.”
“The election?”
“I’m a Democrat, my dear.”
“I think he can win it. And, of course, if he wins it, I lose him.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Any number of our presidents have maintained their dear friends. Thomas Jefferson, for example. And it is said that JFK had outside friends.”
“Edward doesn’t have that sort of flair.”
“Well, he has a lot of things against his winning the election, too. He’s a widower and Americans like to think that a man has a wife who is really running the country. He’s an Eastern establishment banker. And he certainly doesn’t have what one could call a charismatic personality, does he?”
“I suppose not. But he’s sweet.”
“On the other hand he does have money.”
“God, yes.”
The food came, the wine was poured.
“Would you like me to see if I can—uh—mount—that ballet for you? The Trail of Tears, that is?”
She stared into his eyes with the large green grapes that were imbedded on either side of her perfect nose. Charley swayed in his chair. He fought the madness. He had to stop these little adventures. He was fifty-five years old. “Do you think,” he said slowly with a thick tongue, “that we might skip lunch and go back to your place?”
“That would be impossible,” Miss Coolidge said. “Edward has made a friend of every one of those building employees, and the last thing I want to do is to break Edward’s heart. Not right now. Not four days before Super Tuesday.”
“I have to be in Boston next Monday. I can have a plane standing by for you.”
“I will be dancing in New York at the Monday performance.”
“Do you have any objection to perhaps some champagne in a suite at a hotel?”
“Hotels are such an impermanent arrangement, Charles. But …”
“But—what?”
“Let’s wait out Super Tuesday. If Edward comes out of that with a clear chance at the nomination, then, well, he is really going to need me to help him through to Election Day.”
Eduardo did very well on Super Tuesday. He split twelve states evenly with Gordon Manning: the nominating votes of seven states went to Manning and six went to ESP. In terms of delegates, he was still very much of a contender for the nomination. Manning sent a team to offer him the vice-presidency if he would withdraw in Manning’s favor, so Eduardo sent his people to Manning to offer him a place in his administration as chief of protocol, an equally meaningless job, if Manning would withdraw.
34
Mary Price Barton, once the supreme New York interior decorator, celebrated as the niece of Edward S. Price, had been a familiar presence in the nouvelle society of New York for over twenty years, since she had been exiled from Brooklyn by her father in 1967, when, by her grandfather’s order, she had become Mary Price. When she took up her exile in Manhattan, through her uncle, a leader of the old guard of the nouvelle, she sought out the leaders of the nouvelle for the growth and steady continuance of her decorating firm. She had been a cultivated young woman, beautiful, rich (in addition to her decorating business, her grandfather had given her 5 percent of the income from the city-wide restaurant and bordello linen supply business as an allowance), well-educated, with an incomparable knack for making clothes seem as important as great literature. She knew French and Italian. She was a renowned gourmet and opera authority, so that, at the end of the 1970s, when she ascended to the right hand of Edward S. Price as his executive assistant in the direction of the manifold financial complexities that he controlled (and in the administration of the institutional mercies that were his far-reaching philanthropies, and in his earnest cultivation of the arts, from within the shelter erected by the crazying amounts of his ever-burgeoning fortun
Therefore, when she compounded the increments of her glory with a brilliant marriage to Charles Macy Barton, successor to Edward S. Price, who had become a candidate for the highest office in the land, it was, by the measurement of the nouvelle, as if she had been beatified.
While the vast PR staff at Barker’s Hill built the mountainous public record of the Macy-Barton ascension in all the media, from the day of the Price-Barton wedding to the moment when they moved into the quadriplex of houses on East Sixty-fourth Street, the nouvelle of New York waited with dread that any one of them might not receive invitations to Charles and Mary Barton’s housewarming.
The moment came on the thirtieth of May 1992. One hundred invitations for two hundred of Mary Price Barton’s closest friends had gone out by Federal Express. One hundred and ninety-three couples who did not receive invitations left the city for doctrinaire Memorial Day weekends. The hotels and motels at Gettysburg and Richmond were packed out. The one hundred to whom had been accorded the peace that exceeds all understanding poured out their gratitude in the form of commissions to the dressmakers for which the nouvelle existed and nailed down instantly the longest of the city’s available stretched, rental limousines.
It was a transcendent night for every one except Charles Macy Barton. His wife had danced again and again with a man whose looks Charley didn’t like, a youngish man who looked sex-crazed and was too handsome, maybe even a little gay. At twenty minutes after two on the morning of May 31, Charley confronted his wife as they prepared for bed.
“Who was the guy?”
“What guy?”
“Don’t jerk me around!” Charley snarled.
“You mean Jake Hapworth?”
“I mean the guy you kept dancing with, pressing your hips into him, staring at his face as if it would go away and your life would be ruined.”
“Oh, Charley, fahcrissake, he’s a seeded walker.”
“What’s that—a walker?”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“No more parties.”
“What’s that going to solve? If you have decided that if we went to parties that I would spend my time with Jake Hapworth, then what’s to stop me from seeing him if I don’t see him at parties?”
“You’re a married woman. You have two children.”
“You feel the knife, Charley? Good. I felt the knife for twenty years. Every time you looked at a woman, I thought I would lose you. Now, it’s my turn.”
His eyes got wild. “The don is dead, Mae. I don’t need to keep doing what I’m doing for a living with all my working time. I don’t even know Jake Hapworth, but if you start screwing around with him, he isn’t going to last long.”
“You think you can go back to being Charley Partanna? You can’t. He’s dead. You haven’t got anywhere to live except inside your new skin. You can’t take Hapworth out or anybody else because you are stuck with being legit, Charley.”
“There were plenty of women with big eyes for me tonight.”
“So—that’s up to you. But remember one thing. Every time you take on a woman, and I’ll know every time you do, I am going to take on two men. You’re fifty-five years old and I’m stronger than you. It’s time you put the fires out.”
“I haven’t done anything!”
“My intuition tells me that you’ve been thinking about doing something. Let my moves with Jake Hapworth warn you that you had better not make that one false step because I’m on my way to take over this town, Charley. The arbiter can’t live forever and I’m going to be the arbiter. I’m going to run the nouvelle, the opera, the ballet, the theater, the museums, the libraries, the universities, the choice committees, and the big charities, and I can’t do that if I have to think every minute of the day that you might be sniffing up the skirts of some woman. I won’t need you any more if that’s the way you want it to be, Charley. You can shape up or ship out. There are plenty of Jake Hapworths.”
Charley looked at her and knew she meant it. Reluctantly, he pushed Claire Coolidge into a far closet of his mind and locked the door. He wondered if he could have some kind of operation to get the stone out of his private parts.
35
Charley waited nearly two days to hear from his father about Enrichetta. He couldn’t reach him at the laundry or at home, and when he called Lenox Hill, they always said he had just left. In the late afternoon of the second day, Pop called Charley.
“Hey, Charley, you wanna have dinner?”
“Sure, Pop.”
“Can you meet me at Idlewild?”
“Idlewild?”
“Kennedy, I mean. The restaurant in the main building at eight o’clock. They probably don’t have real food, but we can get a steak or something.”
“How come the airport?”
“I’m flying to London at ten o’clock.”
“London? You?”
“I know, I ain’t been much of a traveler, but something came up.”
“What came up? What, fahcrissake, could come up to get you to fly in an airplane for the first time in your life?”
“Not on the phone, Charley.” Pop hung up.
As usual, Pop was seated at the table when Charley got to the airport restaurant. The noise was horrendous, as if the success of all restaurants depended on how much noise they could generate. Charley was agitated. Pop was as calm as Buddha on a good day.
“Pop, what is going on here?”
“Siddown. Have a drink.” He poured Charley a glass of mainland Italian red wine.
Charley gulped the wine, staring at his father. Pop called a waiter. “First we’ll order,” he said. He ordered two steaks. He took a ten-dollar bill out of his wallet and handed it to the waiter. “This is extra. Not the regular tip, you folla me? I want you to stand next to the cook when he makes the steaks. I want charred on the outside, pink on the inside. You got it?”
The waiter gulped, nodded, and went off like a red-assed bird. Pop sipped the wine.
“I think I found Corrado, Charley,” he said.
“Holy shit!”
“I think I’m gonna pick him up in England.”
“But—how—?”
“I talked to Enrichetta. You won’t believe it, what I’m gonna tell you. Her and Mae snatched the don.”
“Mae?” It was a scream of pain.
Pop nodded.
“But how did they move him to London? They’ve been right here all the time.”
“They packed him in a Two Boros Meat Company truck; they drove him to pier eighty-nine, where the floating ice-box Barker’s Hill owns, the RS Jack Frost, was tied up; and they packed him in a freezer-locker. He’s been on a merry-go-round from New York to someplace in Africa, then to London, then back to New York, then around all over again. The ship gets into Liverpool—that’s in England—the second time around for Corrado—day after tomorrow.”
“Why would Mae do a terrible thing like that?”
“Later. What I need from you right now is that you radio the captain of the Jack Frost and tell him to do anything and everything I tell him so I can get Corrado outta that icebox and take him home without shaking up the British media or their cops.”
Charley was dazed. “Yeah. I’ll go to the office tonight. I’ll set it up through the satellite.”
The steaks came. Pop looked at them. He sliced his steak at the middle. “You done good,” he said to the waiter. “Please, take the ketchup away. Do we look like people who would use ketchup?”
Charley ate automatically. He had been raised by his father not to talk at dinner. Once he opened his mouth to speak, but his father shook his head slowly from side to side, chewed the steak and sipped the wine. At last the plates were taken away. Pop ordered coffee, no dessert, and Charley blurted, “So okay, why did Mae do a thing like that?”
<
“I shoulda known,” Charley moaned. “I shoulda known.”
“Why?”
“The way she threw such a fit when I told her we were talking about a fake funeral for the don to handle the Riker’s Island beef.”
“What did she do?”
“She went wild oh the idea of a big funeral. She was afraid it would ruin her socially. Mae’s got big dreams.”
“So the day the don died she musta hung around, then went in to him and found out he was gone. Then the fear of the big funeral hit her. She panicked.”
“She panicked all right.”
“She needed some help and she figured Enrichetta hadda do whatever she said, so she talked her into helping her do the lift on the don. She probably hadda give Enrichetta pills so she could get her to commit such a sin, but Enrichetta lifted and pushed and did the work; then, after it was all over—the next day—it hit her what she did. She had denied Don Corrado Prizzi, the capo di tutti capi of her whole world, his right to a consecrated burial in the Holy Mother Church. It ate her. She is a simple woman. To save herself, the whole thing snapped inside her and she tried to zotz Maerose with that chair.”
“Jesus, poor Mae. It must have broke her heart, the whole thing.”
“Talk to her, Charley. She’s gotta hurt.”
“Yeah. She needed me but what could I do? I gotta talk to her and tell her it’s all right, she don’t have to blame herself anymore.”
“That’s good, Charley. But I gotta do this for Corrado because he woulda done it for me. But when you’re dead, you’re dead. What’s the difference if somebody sends you on one of those cruises even if it is too late to get the most out of it?”
The coffee arrived. The waiter left. Charley drank the coffee cautiously. “There’s gotta be a funeral, no doubt about that.”
“Of course. But there’s a right way and a wrong way.”
“So call me when you have the don. Mae is gonna have to take a trip to Australia, where it’s too far away to get back in time, when we have the funeral. Ah, shit!” he said, slamming his napkin down on the table. “Women!”