Prizzi's Honor by Richard Condon Read Free Book Online

way, because that was the facts. He rolled up his trousers, got down on his hands and knees with the pail and a wire scrubbing brush, and revenged himself upon the kitchen floor.
    When he had finished, he washed all the windows on the bay side of the apartment while the kitchen floor dried. When he could get in there to begin to make dinner he took the home-made cuddiruni pizza, with the sardines, the cheese, the tomatoes, the garlic, the Oregano, and a stuffed artichoke, out of the freezer to let it warm up a little before he put it into the microwave. All the hard cleaning work had made him stop brooding about his father’s order to Paulie. He was hungry.
    He took the fungi ’Ncartati out of the refrigeratorand looked at it lovingly: the best mushroom caps in the market, which he had grilled himself with breadcrumbs, minced anchovies, pecorino , garlic, lemon, and oil—and a little prezzemolo . Even Pop, a really heavy fork, preferred to eat at Charley’s because the food came out like Momma’s food.
    He put the pizza into the microwave oven, took the cork out of a half-drunk bottle of red wine, set the kitchen table for one, propped up the Daily News against the wine bottle, and had himself another great dinner. How could restaurants stay in business, he marveled, when anybody who could read could cook?
    He ate slowly. He chewed carefully. His mother had raised him critically on the point of chewing carefully and he knew, secretly, that he had the best bowels of anyone in the Prizzi family. He wondered if Irene chewed her food carefully. He tried to remember how she had eaten the food at the spic restaurant but he couldn’t get it together. She had terrific skin and a fine, healthy deep chest. Her teeth were one of her best features, after her eyes. Her teeth were square and white and the gums were a good pink so, until he could actually check it out, there was no reason to worry. It stood to reason that she had to have been exercising those teeth all her life so, he reasoned, she had to have a great set of bowels.
    But when dinner was over, while he was cleaning up, his mind went back to why Pop had called Paulie. He could see the shot of Pop and Irene in his mind very clearly. She was listening to Pop, concentrating on what he was telling her, and Pop wasn’t making any wedding party conversation. They were standing alone and out of the way, in an alcove, and if Charley hadn’t hit the photographer with the C-note and Paulie’s card, nobody would have noticed them talking. How could Pop tell him he didn’t remember talking to Irene when it was such an intense talk? Jesus, anyway, how could anybody say he couldn’t remember Irene?
    When he had put the silver away, Charley went back to the terrace and sat there with the telephone in his lap staring out at the bay, trying to figure out what he was going to do about Irene. He was in a different kind of business, after all. Women could certainly be expected to resist his business unless they were born into it like Maerose. If Irene had been connected with the family all her life she would understand that it was just another business that got the people what they wanted—but in this case, things the law said they couldn’t have, because that kind of law got the politicians reelected. People had always gambled. People had always rushed in to grab sensations that they were told they couldn’t have. People had reasons for not borrowing from banks. All that produced a lot of money and there were a lot of hoodlums who got ideas about stealing some of that money so the system had to have men like himself who put them down when they tried to make their grab. He had never wasted a legit guy in his life. He was like the chief security officer for the big business that got the people what they wanted and that was all. If Irene had grown up with that she would understand it, she would accept it the way Maerose did.
    But she hadn’t grown up with it, so what was he supposed