The Godfather - Mario Puzo [105]
Vito never said a word to anyone and of course his terrified wife dared not open her lips even in gossip for fear her own husband would be sent to prison. Two days later Peter Clemenza reappeared in the neighborhood and asked Vito casually, “Do you have my goods still?”
Vito nodded. He was in the habit of talking little. Clemenza came up to his tenement flat and was given a glass of wine while Vito dug the bundle out of his bedroom closet.
Clemenza drank his wine, his heavy good-natured face alertly watching Vito. “Did you look inside?”
Vito, his face impassive, shook his head. “I’m not interested in things that don’t concern me,” he said.
They drank wine together the rest of the evening. They found each other congenial. Clemenza was a storyteller; Vito Corleone was a listener to storytellers. They became casual friends.
A few days later Clemenza asked the wife of Vito Corleone if she would like a fine rug for her living room floor. He took Vito with him to help carry the rug.
Clemenza led Vito to an apartment house with two marble pillars and a white marble stoop. He used a key to open the door and they were inside a plush apartment. Clemenza grunted, “Go on the other side of the room and help me roll it up.”
The rug was a rich red wool. Vito Corleone was astonished by Clemenza’s generosity. Together they rolled the rug into a pile and Clemenza took one end while Vito took the other. They lifted it and started carrying it toward the door.
At that moment the apartment bell rang. Clemenza immediately dropped the rug and strode to the window. He pulled the drape aside slightly and what he saw made him draw a gun from inside his jacket. It was only at that moment the astonished Vito Corleone realized that they were stealing the rug from some stranger’s apartment.
The apartment bell rang again. Vito went up alongside Clemenza so that he too could see what was happening. At the door was a uniformed policeman. As they watched, the policeman gave the doorbell a final push, then shrugged and walked away down the marble steps and down the street.
Clemenza grunted in a satisfied way and said, “Come on, let’s go.” He picked up his end of the rug and Vito picked up the other end. The policeman had barely turned the corner before they were edging out the heavy oaken door and into the street with the rug between them. Thirty minutes later they were cutting the rug to fit the living room of Vito Corleone’s apartment. They had enough left over for the bedroom. Clemenza was an expert workman, and from the pockets of his wide, ill-fitting jacket (even then he liked to wear loose clothes though he was not so fat), he took the necessary carpet-cutting tools.
Time went on, things did not improve. The Corleone family could not eat the beautiful rug. Very well, there was no work, his wife and children must starve. Vito took some parcels of food from his friend Genco while he thought things out. Finally he was approached by Clemenza and Tessio, another young tough of the neighborhood. They were men who thought well of him, the way he carried himself, and they knew he was desperate. They proposed to him that he become one of their gang which specialized in hijacking trucks of silk dresses after those trucks were loaded up at the factory on 31st Street. There was no risk. The truck drivers were sensible working-men who at the sight of a gun flopped on the sidewalk like angels while the hijackers drove the truck away to be unloaded at a friend’s warehouse. Some of the merchandise would be sold to an Italian wholesaler, part of the loot would be sold door-to-door in the Italian neighborhoods—Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, Mulberry Street, and the Chelsea district in Manhattan—all to poor Italian families looking for a