City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(65)

Better than me.

“Danny Ryan,” Marvin says. “I heard about you.”

“We played ball against each other,” Danny says.

“Is that right?” Marvin answers. “I don’t remember.”

“No reason you should,” Danny says.

“You here to play ball now?” Marvin asks.

“Sort of.”

Danny lays it out. At the end of the day, they both want the same thing—the guineas out of South Providence. Marvin has been competing with the Morettis for years for who gets to sell heroin to his people. Marvin is of the strong opinion that it should be him. John Murphy, Danny says, is ready to share that opinion.

“Is that a fact?” Marvin asks.

“Could be,” Danny says. “John wants a sit-down.”

Marvin smiles. Then he says, “All right, on one condition.”

“What?”

Marvin says, “Murphy has to invite us for dinner. At the Gloc.”

Danny tries to remember the last time a Black ever came into the Gloc and can’t. Probably because no Black has ever stepped into the Gloc, not for long, anyway. No, there was that Black woman Liam brought in one time, just to stick it in everyone’s eye, but she was a model who’d been in Vogue so she got a pass.

Danny smiles back. “Okay.”

He goes and tells John, who thinks about it for a minute, then asks, “The Blacks, what do they eat?”

“I dunno,” Danny says. “Food.”

“I know ‘food,’ but what? Soul food?”

This amuses Danny, because John has probably just taught himself to say “Blacks” and now he’s catching up on “soul food”?

“I dunno what soul food is,” Danny answers. “Pork chops? Collard greens?”

“What are collard greens?”

“I don’t know. I just heard that.”



John settles on steaks and baked potatoes, which is good, because that’s about as much as the cooks at the Gloc can manage. Now it’s all set out at a long table—steaks, potatoes wrapped in tinfoil, green beans, a salad. Some bottles of wine, beer in buckets of ice, bottles of whiskey.

“You think I should have gotten grape soda?” John asks when Danny comes in.

“What?”

“I heard the Blacks like grape soda.”

“Who told you that?”

“Kennedy that runs the movie theater,” John answers. “He says when he has a movie the Blacks like, he stocks up on grape soda.”

“Black kids, maybe,” Danny says. He don’t know that they even make grape soda anymore. Hasn’t had a grape soda since he drank one in a single gulp in a bet with Jimmy and it came up out his nose.

A few minutes later Bobby Bangs sticks his head in and says, “They’re here.”

“Let them in,” John says.

Pigs flying all around, Danny thinks.

Three guys come with Marvin, each of them playing the angry Black man role, scowling, each of them with a bulge under his jacket. Marvin takes one look at the spread, hands a hundred bucks in cash to one of his underlings, and says, “KFC.”

Guy goes out, John fills the silence by making introductions.

Marvin’s guy gets back, so now there are steaks and baked potatoes and buckets of fried chicken on the table. Danny would rather have the KFC than the overcooked beef, but he don’t want to be disloyal, so he spears himself a steak.

Marvin ain’t one for small talk. “So what are we doing here?”

“We want your help against the Morettis,” Danny says. “Right now, they control the drug business in South Providence.”

“It’s neocolonialism,” Marvin says. “The white man selling drugs in the Black community.”

This prompts an ugly stir from the Irish side, who don’t want to admit that this is now a Black community, and who have no idea what neocolonialism is, so Danny quickly says, “We want the Morettis out, too.”

But one of Marvin’s guys says, “But we don’t want to replace them with a bunch of donkeys.”

Danny don’t mind Irish slurs—bogtrotter, mick, Harp, donkey—go for it. But Marvin gives his guy a shut-your-stupid-fucking-mouth glare, and the man looks down. Which means that Marvin don’t think he can beat the Morettis without us, either, Danny thinks. “We don’t have any interest in selling drugs.”

“No,” Marvin says, “you have an interest in adversely affecting the Morettis’ income stream. What weakens them strengthens you.”

Danny nods.

“The Italians kicking you all’s ass,” Marvin says.

“They’re tough,” Danny says.

Marvin shrugs, as if to say Not so tough. Like he’s killed tougher guys. Maybe he has, Danny thinks. Word is that Marvin Jones has put a lot of rivals away—Blacks, Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans. “So what would you want?”

“Our unions,” Danny says. “Our docks.”

Marvin takes this in, and then says, “We’d want jobs on the docks.”

“No,” Danny says.

“No?”

“You get dope, women, and the numbers,” Danny says. “The docks are ours.”

Danny knows it’s a risk that could scuttle the deal. But there’s no point in just replacing Peter Moretti with Marvin Jones, and anyway, he can’t get Blacks into the unions because the union guys simply wouldn’t accept it, and Marvin should know that. Danny’s betting that he’s just testing, seeing how far he can push.