Prizzi's Honor Read Online Free PDF

that?”
    “Taxes.”
    “Taxes?”
    “You know—death and taxes. I’m a tax consultant.”
    “Like what do you do when you consult?”
    She gave him her tested-sentence answer. “Well, yesterday I had a client who had an interest in a bank and a financial account in a foreign country so I told him he had to file Treasury form nine-oh-two-two-one.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I save them money. Like if a corporation pays ransom to a kidnaper for the return of a corporation officer, then that is deductible as a theft loss. It’s technical, but that kind of thing.”
    “That is simply terrific, Irene. I really mean it.”
    He saw her for lunch and dinner for the next two days, Sunday and Monday. He kissed her on Sunday night. I am forty-two years old, he told himself, and this woman has got to be thirty-five and a kiss from her makes me drunk. He told her he loved her at lunch on Monday. “I gotta say it, Irene. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. I love you. I am a grown man. Insurance companies will back me up that I am past middle age but nothing, nobody in my life, ever made me feel what I feel about you. I love you. That’s it. That’s everything. I love you.”
    She touched his lips with her fingertips, then pressed her fingers to her lips. “I think I am in love with you,” she said.
    “Not in love,” he said fiercely. “In love is temporary, then you move on to the next in love. Everybodygoes in and out of love. I know about this. I remember everything I ever read about it in the magazines. In love is just a lot of exohormones which is—wait a minute!—a hormonal secretion by an organism which affects the smelling of another person so as to alter it in a certain way. I never forgot that. I wrote it down till I had it pat. Or it is feedback which is—ready?—a reciprocal effect of one person or another person. That’s what in love is. Who needs it?”
    “Love,” she said. “I mean—I love you, I think.”
    “That is not just good enough, that is unbelievable.”
    “It sounds like I hedged it. I just don’t know how to say it because I never said it.”
    “Never?”
    “I never loved anybody. All my life I had to protect myself, and you can’t protect yourself anymore when you love somebody. I love you, Charley.”
    “I thought all the time about you saying that to me. Day and night. Now that I know how you see it, I have to say to you that everything is changed now. You don’t need to protect yourself now. I protect you.”
    “We’ll protect each other.”
    “You have to live in LA?”
    “It’s going to take me a little while to get out. My house, my business—I’m in pretty deep.”
    “Then I’ll keep coming out here till we can get it all settled. I’ll work in New York for a couple of days then I’ll catch like a seven-o’clock plane out then I’ll catch the red-eye back.”
    “That will be heaven.”
    “Can you sometimes get away to New York?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Listen—Irene—everything being even, would you marry me?”
    “Everything being even? That’s some mountain.”
    “Just suppose.”
    “Yes, I would marry you, Charley.”
    They made love Monday afternoon on his rented bed at the hotel. There was never anything like it. Not for anybody. Not in history, Charley thought.
    ***
    Paulie ran the Irene footage for him at the studio. It was absolutely sensational stuff and, for once, Paulie didn’t have any comments. They got it down to two minutes, forty-nine seconds, out of almost three minutes of stuff. One shot showed them standing together. It was a real John Gilbert-Greta Garbo deal that could have stood up against any love scene ever made, Charley thought. He couldn’t get over the great way Irene looked at him. How come he didn’t see it when it was happening? Well, maybe actually he did see it, but he didn’t take in all of it. These were moments preserved on tape and Charley waited for Paulie to ask him if he could bring in all the movie directors on the lot