Brandishing his Saturday-night special, Carmine made the hapless truck driver get in front of the tow truck. The wrecker screeched to a halt. Carmine jumped into view.
"You!" he told the wrecker driver. "You hook this wrecker up to that truck there."
"You crazy?" demanded the driver. " I can't haul a sixteen-wheeler. It'll bust my rig."
"You fuggin' do as I say, cogsugger, or I'll give you a lead fuggin' eye."
The driver didn't understand all of it, but the part about the lead eye was clear enough. He lifted the cab, and as cars whizzed by without pause or interest, Carmine made the two drivers haul the remains of his Beetle out of the way.
Then he made the driver of the wrecker tie up the truck driver. Carmine then bound the latter.
Carmine Imbruglia left them by the side of the road saying, "I hope yous jerks rot." It all had been too much like work.
After Carmine had gotten through telling Don Pietro Scubisci the whole story, Don Pietro paused to extract a toothpick from between his teeth and casually inspected a fragment of cold pink shrimp meat impaled on it.
"You left the wrecker?" he asked, unimpressed.
"What was I to do? You wanted shrimp. I brought you shrimp. When do I get my cut?"
Don Pietro snapped his fingers once.
Soldiers began bringing in cases of bottled shrimp cocktails and set them beside Carmine.
"What's this?" he asked.
"Your percentage," said Don Pietro.
" I expected money!"
"You are a smart boy, Carmine. I will let you sell your share of the shrimp for whatever price you see fit. This is only fair, since I will be moving volume at a very low price."
"You are very kind, Don Pietro," said Carmine sincerely, touched by the consideration of his capo.
He was a happy man as he carried the shrimp, one case at a rime, on the HIT back to Brownsville.
"We're gonna make a fortune," he told his wife. "Restaurants will be fallin' all over themselves for quality shrimp like these!"
"At least you got work, you bum," Camilla had said.
The next evening, Carmine Imbruglia dragged himself home with a solitary case of shrimp under his arm. It was the same case he had started the day with. The others remained stuffed in his refrigerator and in the cool air of his basement.
"I got no takers," he complained to his wife.
"What're you talking? No takers?"
"Somebody got to every fuggin' restaurant first. I got undercut. Except the last guy, who still wouldn't buy."
"Why not?"
"The stuff had spoiled by then," said Carmine, setting the case on the kitchen linoleum and kicking it methodically.
Carmine and Camilla had a rough next month, but as Carmine explained it to his wife over breakfast once morning, "At least we ain't fuggin' starving. We're eating better than any of the neighbors."
"If you call cold shrimp three times a day eating," Camilla had spat. "And I still say it was that rotten Don Pietro that undercut you with the restaurants."
"Get out of here! Don Pietro wouldn't do that. I'm a made guy now. A soldier. We're practically like this," said Carmine, putting two cocktail-sauce-covered fingers together."
"Put your balls in there and it would be the truth."
"When the time comes for me to make my bones," snarled Carmine (Fuggin) Imbruglia, "I hope it's for breaking yours."
The years rolled by. Carmine toiled in wire rooms, ran numbers, served as a wheelman, and whenever Don Carmine had a yen for seafood, he asked for Fuggin.
One day, at the height of the Scubisci-Pubescio wars, when Don Pietro and Don Fiavorante Pubescio of California were at war for the title capo da tutu capi, boss of all bosses, Don Pietro summoned Carmine Imbruglia to his scarred walnut table.
Carmine noticed a long gouge along the top where a .38 slug had chewed a furrow that had not been there the week before.
Don Pietro was pouring Asti Spumante into the furrow, trying to get it to match the color of the rest of the wood.
"Fuggin," he said softly, "I have need of you."
"Anything, Don Pietro. Just ask. I will make my bones with any Scubisci family member you name."
"Forget bones. I want cod."
"You want me to clip the Lord?" sputtered Carmine. "I wouldn't know where to find him. Would you settle for a priest?"
"I said cod, not God."
"Who's he? I don't know no west-coast wise guy that goes by the name Cod."
"Cod," said Don Pietro patiently, "is a fish. A tasty fish."
Carmine sighed. "Just tell me where the truck will be."
Don Pietro lifted a rag. "Not a truck. A boat. I want you to steal this fishing smack, whose hold is filled to the brim with fresh cod."
"I don't know nothing about hijacking no boats," said Carmine heatedly.
"You will learn," said Don Pietro, going back to his polishing.
It was actually pretty simple, Carmine found.
He rowed out into the Sound in a stolen rowboat and waited for the smack to happen along. Carmine wondered why it was called a smack. Maybe it was running drugs.
When it finally muttered into view, he rowed in front of it, chortling, "This is a snap. It's gonna be just like the shrimp heist, only smoother. I won't need no wrecker."