The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
85
doing the same thing with donkeys. 
Clemenza worked inside the heated garage, he hated cold. He ran over his plans. You 
had to be careful with Paulie, the man was like a rat, he could smell danger. And now of 
course despite being so tough he must be shitting in his pants because the old man was 
still alive. He’d be as skittish as a donkey with ants up his ass. But Clemenza was 
accustomed to these circumstances, usual in his work. First, he had to have a good 
excuse for Rocco to accompany them. Second, he had to have a plausible mission for 
the three of them to go on. 
Of course, strictly speaking, this was not necessary. Paulie Gatto could be killed without 
any of these frills. He was locked in, he could not run away. But Clemenza felt strongly 
that it was important to keep good working habits and never give away a fraction of a 
percentage point. You never could tell what might happen and these matters were, after 
all, questions of life and death. 
As he washed his baby-blue Cadillac, Peter Clemenza pondered and rehearsed his 
lines, the expressions of his face. He would be curt with Paulie, as if displeased with 
him. With a man so sensitive and suspicious as Gatto this would throw him off the track 
or at least leave him uncertain. Undue friendliness would make him wary. But of course 
the curtness must not be too angry. It had to be rather an absentminded sort of irritation. 
And why Lampone? Paulie would find that most alarming, especially since Lampone 
had to be in the rear seat. Paulie wouldn’t like being helpless at the wheel with Lampone 
behind his head. Clemenza rubbed and polished the metal of his Cadillac furiously. It 
was going to be tricky. Very tricky. For a moment he debated whether to recruit another 
man but decided against it. Here he followed basic reasoning. In years to come a 
situation might arise where it might be profitable for one of his partners to testify against 
him. If there were just one accomplice it was one’s word against the other. But the word 
of a second accomplice could swing the balance. No, they would stick to procedure. 
What annoyed Clemenza was that the execution had to be “public.” That is, the body 
was to be found. He would have much preferred having it disappear. (Usual burying 
grounds were the nearby ocean or the swamplands of New Jersey on land owned by 
friends of the Family or by other more complicated methods.) But it had to be public so 
that embryo traitors would be frightened and the enemy warned that the Corleone 
Family had by no means gone stupid or soft. Sollozzo would be made wary by this quick 
discovery of his spy. The Corleone Family would win back some of its prestige. It had 
been made to look foolish by the shooting of the old man. 

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