The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
173
Railroad and wanted access to the freight yards that honeycombed the area from 
Eleventh Avenue to the Hudson River. Fanucci’s apartment house was one of the few 
left standing in this wilderness and was occupied mostly by bachelor trainmen, yard 
workers, and the cheapest prostitutes. These people did not sit in the street and gossip 
like honest Italians, they sat in beer taverns guzzling their pay. So Vito Corleone found it 
an easy matter to slip across the deserted Eleventh Avenue and into the vestibule of 
Fanucci’s apartment house. There he drew the gun he had never fired and waited for 
Fanucci. 
He watched through the glass door of the vestibule, knowing Fanucci would come down 
from Tenth Avenue. Clemenza had showed him the safety on the gun and he had 
triggered it empty. But as a young boy in Sicily at the early age of nine, he had often 
gone hunting with’his father, had often fired the heavy shotgun called the lupara. It was 
his skill with the lupara even as a small boy that had brought the sentence of death upon 
him by his father’s murderers. 
Now waiting in the darkened hallway, he saw the white blob of Fanucci crossing the 
street toward the doorway. Vito stepped back, shoulders pressed against the inner door 
that led to the stairs. He held his gun out to fire. His extended hand was only two paces 
from the outside door. The door swung in. Fanucci, white, broad, smelly, filled the 
square of light. Vito Corleone fired. 
The opened door let some of the sound escape into the street, the rest of the gun’s 
explosion shook the building. Fanucci was holding on to the sides of the door, trying to 
stand erect, trying to reach for his gun. The force of his struggle had torn the buttons off 
his jacket and made it swing loose. His gun was exposed but so was a spidery vein of 
red on the white shirtfront of his stomach. Very carefully, as if he were plunging a needle 
into a vein, Vito Corleone fired his second bullet into that red web. 
Fanucci fell to his knees, propping the door open. He let out a terrible groan, the groan 
of a man in great physical distress that was almost comical. He kept giving these 
groans; Vito remembered hearing at least three of them before he put the gun against 
Fanucci’s sweaty, suety cheek and fired into his brain. No more than five seconds had 
passed when Fanucci slumped into death, jamming the door open with his body. 
Very carefully Vito took the wide wallet out of the dead man’s jacket pocket and put it 
inside his shirt. Then he walked across the street into the loft building, through that into 
the yard and climbed the fire escape to the roof. From there he surveyed the street. 

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