Read Prizzi's Honor for Free Online Page A

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, hesat 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 intowhich 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