Charley went from La Guardia to the St. Gabbione Hotel Laundry where Vincent Prizzi ran his end of the family business. Pop was waiting for him.
"Before I forget," Charley said, "I got a gimmick maybe you or Ed can use." He told his father about the tax dodge on kidnap insurance that Irene had told him.
"That's a good wrinkle," Pop said, "where'd you get it?"
"Some tax expert. So—what's the problem?"
"Marty Gilroy is shorting payoffs again."
"What?"
"So break his legs."
"No, Pop. This proves it. Marty has to be stupid. If I talk to him that will make the second time and that ain't right. He don't give a shit. We only break his legs and the other bankers are going to think he is getting away on us."
"You want to hide him in the garbage?"
"I want to shove a bruciatóre in his mouth and keep it there until he signs a check for every dime he has. Then I want to take him out on the Island until his checks clear, then I want to break his legs and let him hitchhike home."
"Why is that different?"
"Because we will flash his certified checks to every banker and runner in Brooklyn and Queens and they will know Marty isn't getting away with only broken legs."
"That's very good. It'll keep Marty straight. I like Marty, he's a real hitter."
"Pop?"
"What?"
"Who was the girl you were talking to at the wedding?"
"What girl? Half was girls."
"A great looker in a green-and-yellow dress."
"A great looker?"
"Yeah—sure."
"Hey! I'm an old guy. I don't remember those kind of things like you do."
"Maybe if I showed you pictures?"
"Why not? But how come this is such a big deal?"
"She's a very special woman and I need to know all I can find out about her. Paulie has a movie shot of you and her."
"From where?"
"From Teresa's wedding. From after—at the hotel."
"Yeah? I'd like to see it."
"Can you come over to my place tonight? I'll cook you a meal. It's video, the picture. It takes a machine."
"I got a meet tonight."
"Well—as soon as you can."
"Sure, Charley."
"I'll go talk to Marty Gilroy."
Charley went to a phone and called Al Melvini, who was called "the Plumber" because he always threatened to flush people down toilets when he was on a job. Charley told him to be at The Corner in half an hour and to bring tools.
It was too early to call Irene in California. He went out the back door of the laundry and got into his anonymous, black Chevy van and drove the four blocks to The Corner. He went into the luncheonette to see who was around. Phil Vittimizzare was eating a Danish while he played the pinball machine and two dealers were counting out decks of heroin at a table in the back.
"Hey, Cholly!" Mrs. Latucci yelled at him from behind the counter. "Come on. Have a cuppa coffee and give me a good horse for today."
Charley waved to her and stood next to Phil. "I'll be in the car," he said. "Take your time. We gotta wait till the Plumber gets here."
He started to go back to the Chevy van.
"Hey, Cholly!" Mrs. Latucci yelled. "First, give me a horse."
"Lady Carrot in the third at Pimlico," Charley said as he went out. The two dealers and Mrs. Latucci wrote the information down.
Charley got into the van and read a newspaper. There was still stuff about the Netturbino killing. Charley read the story as a piece of trade news. Netturbino had the lifetime habit of having a new hooker sent over to his hotel suite every afternoon at three o'clock, except Sundays, which he spent with three uncles who played bocce for a living in New Jersey. The police said whoever hit Netturbino had been welcomed by him, because he was alone and wearing only a bathrobe and a pajama top. Charley grinned. That was how to set up a tag, he thought.
Phil and Al got into the car. Charley drove.
"Manischewitz! What a beautiful day," Al Melvini said. "When the breeze is right and the sun is shining there ain't anyplace like Brooklyn. Where we going?"
"Marty Gilroy's," Charley said.
***
Marty Gilroy was a very large black man with a bushy moustache that joined his sideburns. He had the best disposition in Greater New York. "He is a regular Ronnie Reagan," Pop liked to say, because he admired a sweet nature. Marty was a Prizzi banker so there was no trouble getting into his inner office in the garage where he operated, but Charley knew that even the three of them would have a hard time with him so, smiling a greeting, he kept moving in and slammed Gilroy across his sideburns with a fistful of quarters while Gilroy was half-rising to greet him. When Marty hit the floor it was like a comet hitting a planet. Everything shook and seemed to keep shaking. Phil and Al lifted him back on his swivel chair and tied him to it, doubling up on the knots.
"Keep anybody out," Charley said. Phil left. Charley and Al waited for Gilroy to come around. It didn't take long.
"Where's your checkbook, Marty?" Charley asked.
"Top drawer," the black man groaned. "Charley, listen—"
Charley pushed the swivel chair back so he could open the drawer. He slid out a wide, three-tiered checkbook and a .38 caliber pistol. "Registered to you?" he asked. Marty shook his head. Charley put the gun in his side pocket and with the other hand took a leather notebook out of the opposite pocket. He read from its first page. "You got $208,439.21 in the A account, Marty. Make me out a check to cash for that."
"Listen, Charley—this a mistake. You trying to say I fucked the Prizzis around? Man, no way. Man, I am set with the Prizzis, what I need to do that for?"
"You shorted on payoffs again. You know it and we know it, and you know we know it. So make out the check. Untie the arm, Plumber. You right-handed, Marty?"
"Lefty," Gilroy moaned.
Charley moved behind Gilroy and pushed the barrel of the pistol into the base of his skull. Melvini untied the left arm. "Don't get wise," he said to Gilroy, "or I'll flush you right down the toilet."
Marty made out the check while Al held the checkbook steady.
"You got $86,392.17 in the B account," Charley read out from the small leather book. "Make it out Marty."
"Charley, that my kids' money. That the safety money."
"What the fuck is this, Marty? Make it out already!"
While Al retied Gilroy to a chair, Charley tore the signed checks out of the book. "Hey, Phil," he yelled. Vittimizzare put his head into the room. "Take these to Angelo Partanna," he said. "Okay, let's get Marty the fuck out of here."
***
It took three of them to manhandle Gilroy and the swivel chair into the back of the Chevy van. Four of Gilroy's runners watched them work, standing very still and wondering why they had to be witnesses. "Just keep your mouth shut and you're gonna be all right," Melvini said. "Start talking and you're gonna get stuffed down a toilet without a plunger."
Phil left to go back to the laundry with the checks. Charley and Al drove east on Long Island for about an hour and a half. They left Gilroy under his blanket on the swivel chair inside the van, which was inside a garage behind a frame house that was well into the fields behind Brentwood, while they went inside to keep cool, play cards, and wait for Pop's call. He called in two hours. "All certified," he said, and hung up.
Charley said, "Okay—now we take Marty over to the state park on the south shore. It'll be dark when we get there. Bring me a crowbar from the shed. Marty ain't gonna walk home."
***
When Charley got back to the beach that night, he sat on the terrace and called Paulie in California. "Hey, Paulie," he said, "I told my father you got him in the movies and he's all set up. He wants to see it. You got a cassette yet?"
"Charley?"
"Yeah."
"Charley, don't get sore."
"Why should I get sore?"
"Your father called me this morning at my house and told me to bum the tapes on him and the girl."
"What?"
"That's what he told me to do, Charley. So that's what I hadda do. I mean—what else?"
"You did right, Paulie," Charley said, and hung up.
***
Charley had been a member of the honored society since he was seventeen. Ever since Charley had made his bones with Little Phil Terrone, when Charley had been thirteen, his father had pressed Corrado Prizzi for the boy's early initiation. Don Corrado had suspended all new membership for five years. Charley had been twelve when the last members had been made, and his father spoke so much about it at home that, gradually, the ritual acceptance into the fratellanza became a mystically important achievement for the boy.
Charley was twelve when his mother died. Had she been alive, Angelo Partanna would never have gotten away with giving Charley the Gun Hill Road contract when he was thirteen. But after that day, Charley became special to his father and, although the don concealed it better, to Corrado Prizzi. Charley lived and ate with his father, spoke like his father, thought like his father. Angelo Partanna knew only the environment, but he seemed to know what was happening in it from coast to coast: who had the most booze going for them, what the daily handle with layoff bookmakers was, which labor union was about to fall into which family's arms, who had killed whom and why. That was Angelo's job with the Prizzis, as consigliere he was supposed to know all those things. But he knew techniques as well and he taught Charley how to garrote instantly, the right and the wrong way to throw a knife, and all of the methods of bribery that had been known to the most cunning of the friends of the friends for seven hundred years.
Charley was a big boy at fourteen, larger still at seventeen. He had left school and had been working for the family, learning the shit business, from the importing, to the cutting, to the distribution and price-fixing, to the financing of subdistributors and dealers, to the marketing that would widen the use of the product across the country. Although it was Vincent Prizzi who later got the credit for getting behind the unstable and more emotionally dangerous narcotic, cocaine, it was Charley's active marketing research into cocaine, through Paulie, among the population of the entertainment industry, which had him convincing the family in the early sixties that its time had come as the dope which could help to siphon off the prosperity of America's middle classes.
Charley was thirty when he put the Prizzis into the cocaine business with both feet, causing Don Corrado to believe even more in Charley's star. His business foresight obtained Charley's appointment as Vincent's underboss on the working side of the Prizzi family when Charley was thirty-two years old.
On the night of Charley's initiation into the friendship of the men of respect, the Prizzis had assembled forty "made" men at the St. Gabbione Laundry sorting room, in the basement. Charley had waited in an anteroom, amid the heady, strong, cleansing smells of soap and lye, with his fellow nominees: Dimples Tancredi, twenty-nine; his best friend, Gusto, twenty-three; Momo "The Cobra" Ginafonda, thirty-four, and two other guys who died from Asian flu within the following year.
Charley had taken it for granted that his father would be his sponsor, so that he and all the others, including the members, were astounded when Don Corrado himself came out of the meeting room and escorted Charley into the presence of the brotherhood to be sworn in.
Don Corrado was a robust fifty-nine years old when Charley was seventeen. He was, himself, fast becoming a national legend in the fratellanza and was already one of the nine richest men in the United States. Solemnly, he drove a dagger into the wooden table and, holding its hilt, said, "The first new member to enter the honored society within the Prizzi family for five years is the son of my oldest friend, Angelo Partanna, my consigliere. This son, who stands beside me now, is seventeen years of age, the same age his father was when he was sworn into membership before he left Agrigento, and the same age as I, myself, when I took the sacred oaths."
He placed a revolver at the base of the embedded knife. "Charley," he said in his piercing voice, "you are entering into the honored society of the brotherhood of men of the greatest courage and loyalty. You enter our companionship alive and you go out dead. You will live and die by the gun and the knife. Take my hand upon the knife."
Charley reached across the table, towering over the tiny Don Corrado, who said to him, thrillingly, "Does the fratellanza come before anything else in your life?"
"Yes," Charley said.
"Before family, before country, before God?"
"I swear it," Charley said.
"There are three laws of the brotherhood which must become a part of you. The first—you must obey your superiors, to death if necessary, without question, for it will be for the good of the brotherhood. Do you swear it?"
"I swear it," Charley said, his face shining.
"You must never betray any secret of our common cause nor seek any other comfort, be it from church or from a government, than the strength, protection, and comfort of this fratellanza. Do you swear it?"
"I swear it!" Charley said, his voice rising.
"Lastly, you must never violate the wife or children of another member."
"I swear it," Charley said humbly.
"Violation of these oaths will mean your instant death without trial or warning."
Angelo Partanna asked him to raise the first finger of his right hand. He pricked the finger with a straight pin and a tear of blood came forth. "This drop of blood symbolizes your birth into our family. We are one until death," Don Corrado said, reaching up on his tiptoes to embrace Charley.
"As we protect you, so must you protect Prizzi honor. Do you swear it?"
"I swear it before God," Charley said.
He kissed the don, then he kissed his father. The members applauded. The large room was alight with their admiration.