City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(64)

Ned waits a second, then follows him.

The cold war between the Murphys and the Morettis is over.

The real war is back on.





Twenty-Seven


I lost my temper and I shouldn’t have, Danny thinks. The problem is that the Morettis have too many soldiers, the Murphys too few.

Unless we get more guys.

But there are no more Irish to get.

He has his own small crew, John has maybe a half dozen guys who will step up to the plate, Liam maybe the same. He can get a few guys off the docks but they aren’t really hitters.

Sooner or later, we’re going to lose the war.

But he has an idea he’s been thinking about for a long time. He walks into the Gloc, little Bobby Bangs has a cup of coffee ready for him. And a bagel, toasted with butter.

Danny takes it into the back room.

“You’re what, Jewish now?” Liam asks, seeing the bagel.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Jews don’t toast their bagels,” Liam says. “And they don’t use butter, they use cream cheese.”

“Can I just eat my bagel?” Danny asks. Liam goes to Miami, so he thinks he knows all about Jews. Thinks he knows all about everything. Danny slides into the booth with John Murphy and Bernie Hughes. “We need more guys.”

“Maybe we can send back to Ireland,” John says.

“We’ve seen that movie, haven’t we?” Danny asks. “We know how it ends. Last thing we need is having to babysit a bunch of strangers who don’t know their way around. I’m thinking something different.”

“Like what?” Liam asks.

“I’m thinking of approaching Marvin Jones.”

Danny waits for the reaction he knows is coming.

They—the proverbial “they,” the common-wisdom dispensers “they”—say that the day John Murphy sits down with the Blacks is the day that pigs get wings. There’s no racist like an old Irish racist, Danny thinks. Danny, he don’t have a lot of Black friends—okay, he don’t have any—but that’s not because he’s prejudiced, it’s just because he sticks with his own.

He played basketball against a lot of Black kids back in high school and he didn’t like them much, mostly because they always kicked his ass but also because they were mouthy and always talking shit and showing off. What did the coach call it, “jungle ball”? All slam dunks and one-on-ones and shit that the Irish kids couldn’t do, so Danny and his teammates took a loser’s pride in playing “team basketball” like Naismith taught, which was code for “losing basketball.”

“And what would you be approaching Marvin about?” John asks.

“An alliance,” Danny says. “We need the manpower, we need the guns.”

“We have Ned,” Liam says. “We have Jimmy Mac, the Altar Boys . . .”

No, Danny thinks, I have Ned, Jimmy Mac, and the Altar Boys. But he says, “Marvin has about twenty guys. That would bring us up to strength against the Morettis. Maybe they’d back off.”

“What, you want peace?!” Liam asks.

“You don’t?”

“No!” Liam says. “I want Sal Antonucci dead. I want the Morettis dead.”

“Then go out and do it, Liam,” Danny says. He lets it sit for a few seconds. Then he says, “Or shut the fuck up.”

Liam shuts up.

“I played ball against Marvin,” Danny says. “I know him a little.”

Which is sort of true, Danny thinks, if you could call Marvin slam-dunking over my head knowing him a little. And he’s seen Marvin around, but who hasn’t? The man pretty much runs prostitution and gambling in South Providence, so he’s on the street all the time.

And the word is that Marvin wants to take the drug trade from the Italians.

“The Zulus have already taken half our neighborhood,” John says.

Danny can’t argue with that. The Irish who could got out to the suburbs—Cranston, Warwick, down to South County—when the Blacks started moving in.

“So you’re going to offer them what, the rest?” John asks.

“I’m not going to offer them anything that belongs to us,” Danny says. “I’m going to offer them what belongs to the Morettis.”

“I don’t know,” John says. “Getting in bed with the Blacks . . .”

“Times change,” Bernie says. “We have to change with them. If we don’t, we’re dinosaurs.”

Liam asks, “What’s wrong with dinosaurs?”

“Do you see any around, Liam?” Bernie asks.

Danny gets the okay to approach Marvin.



The Top Hat Club is mostly empty about two in the afternoon, except for Marvin and his guys sitting in a booth in the back. Danny is pretty aware that he’s about the only white guy ever to walk in there, if you don’t count the cops coming to get their monthly envelopes, and one of Marvin’s guys gets right into his face. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk to Marvin.”

“Who are you?”

“Danny Ryan.”

“Wait here.”

Danny watches him walk back and talk into Marvin’s ear. Then Marvin slides out of the booth and walks up to Danny. Tall motherfucker, Marvin Jones, solidly built, looking good—gray suit, red shirt, red tie. Marvin’s done all right for himself, Danny thinks.