The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
217
work to do,” he said and she did not dare question him because of the look on his face. 
Bonasera went out of the house and walked the few blocks to his funeral parlor. 
This building stood by itself on a large lot with a white picket fence running all around it. 
There was a narrow roadway leading from the street to the rear, just wide enough for 
ambulances and hearses. Bonasera unlocked the gate and left it open. Then he walked 
to the rear of the building and entered it through the wide door there. As he did so he 
could see mourners already entering the front door of the funeral parlor to pay their 
respects to the current corpse. 
Many years ago when Bonasgra had bought this building from an undertaker planning to 
retire, there had been a stoop of about ten steps that mourners had to mount before 
entering the funeral parlor. This had posed a problem. Old and crippled mourners 
determined to pay their respects had found the steps almost impossible to mount, so the 
former undertaker had used the freight elevator for these people, a small metal platform, 
that rose out of the ground beside the building. The elevator was for coffins and bodies. 
It would descend underground, then rise into the funeral parlor itself, so that a crippled 
mourner would find himself rising through the floor beside the coffin as other mourners 
moved their black chairs aside to let the elevator rise throngh the trapdoor. Then when 
the crippled or aged mourner had finished paying his respects, the elevator would again 
come up through the polished floor to take him down and out again. 
Amerigo Bonasera had found this solution to the problem upseernly and 
penny-pinching. So he had had the front of the building remodeled, the stoop done away 
with and a slightly inclining walk put in its place. But of course the elevator was still used 
for coffins and corpses. 
In the rear of the building, cut off from the funeral parlor and reception rooms by a 
massive soundproof door, was the business office, the embalming room, a storeroom 
for coffins, and a carefully locked closet holding chemicals and the awful tools of his 
trade. Bonasera went to the office, sat at his desk and lit up a Camel,,one of the few 
times he had ever smoked in this building. Then he waited for Don Corleone. 
He waited with a feeling of the utmost despair. For, he had no doubt as to what services 
he would be called upon to perform. For the last year the Corleone Family had waged 
war against the five great Mafia Families of New York and the carnage had filled the 
newspapers. Many men on both sides had been killed. Now the Corleone Family had 
killed somebody so important that they wished to hide his body, make it disappear, and 

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