Delivery

You may recall a scene in the film, "The Godfather", where the clothes of Luca Brasi, one of the Corleones' top hitmen, are delivered to the family home wrapped around a fish. The meaning of this, it's explained, is symbolic: "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes." He's dead, in other words, his body presumably dumped in the sea or in a river.

This Mafia-specific courier service - a sort of DHL with knobs on - while obviously quite efficient, is, however, not really commercially viable. This is because, while you of course do need to execute hitmen every now and then and inform people of the fact, it's not something that happens so regularly that, for example, Hallmark could turn a profit by producing a dedicated card to celebrate the occasion, or Parcel Force offer a special “fish and frock coat” 24/7 delivery service. Besides, even if they did, they’d still be left with the serious logistical problem of, on each occasion, having to source a whole, fresh fish to stick into the deceased’s clothing. If, thanks to time constraints (half day closing at the fishmonger, for instance), crap fishermen, or whatever, they couldn’t readily get hold of the genuine article, I shouldn’t imagine a kipper or a packet of cod in parsley sauce would be regarded as an acceptable substitute.

With this in mind, I suppose it’s also fortunate that the Mafia doesn’t have a Newfoundland or Spitsbergen branch. If they did, and they were contractually obliged to dump dead hitmen in the sea over there, too, then, given the marine demographics, the resultant message would perforce be more along the lines of “Luca Brasi sleeps with the sperm whales.” Wrapping any sort of cetecean in a standard-sized man’s suit could be something of a challenge. As indeed could delivering the combination to its intended recipient without drawing lots of unwanted attention to yourself.

Then again, we're talking here about people who can routinely hack a horse's head off, transport it unnoticed to someone's luxury mansion, then, in total darkness, locate the owner's room out of the dozens, if not hundreds of other rooms in the house, and finally slip it under his bedclothes without waking him. So perhaps it’s doable after all.

I reckon you'd still need a fucking big duvet before you could slip in a whole whale unnoticed, though.