He listens to Terri breathe and for the first time really considers it.
Maybe I do owe that to her, to the baby in her belly.
A fresh start somewhere, a legit job.
She’d be torn, because it would mean turning on her family, but on the other hand she’d be relieved to be safe.
But could I do it?
I could flip on John, but on Pat?
He chews on it, and somehow it all gets mixed in with his mother’s abandonment of him and his dad; it becomes all about Dogtown and loyalty and all that shit and it just goes sideways, like a boat drifting into the rocks.
Twenty-Three
Peter Moretti has to eat serious rations of shit.
He knows he’s starting to lose the war and has to make moves to turn things around.
Painful, humiliating moves.
First he had to give Solly Weiss his stones back, and the old prick was so sanctimonious about it Peter would have liked to shoot him in the face. But he had to go, hat in hand, apologize, and hand over the stones. Not before he had to take that necklace off his gumar’s neck, which didn’t exactly make her horny for him.
That was bad enough, but then he had to extend a hand to Sal Antonucci, because without Sal and his crew, the war with the Murphys was swirling the toilet. Truth was he needed Sal, he needed Tony. But Peter couldn’t go himself, he just couldn’t make himself do it, so he sent Chris.
Chris argued against sending anyone to see Sal. “It’s a mistake. He’s an egotistical motherfucker in the first place, and now we go begging him? It will only make his head swell up more. Anyway, believe me, he can’t help himself, he’ll get back in the fight.”
“Yeah, but on which side?” Peter asked.
They sit down across a table at Fiori’s, Chris and Frankie V on the one side, Sal and Tony on the other.
Technically Sal is the host, even though Chris asked for the meeting, because this is his turf and the restaurant is under his protection. So Sal orders a good bottle of wine, sips it for approval, and pours a glass for Chris.
Chris gets right down to it. “Peter is prepared to give you back the tax he took from the Manchester thing.”
“Why?” Sal asks. “Why is that?”
“C’mon, Sal, you going to make me suck your dick?”
“I promise I won’t come in your mouth.”
“Peter knows he was wrong,” Chris says. “He knows that and he’s sorry and he wants to make amends.”
“Then why isn’t he here?” Sal asks.
“I advised him not to,” Chris answers. “If he comes in person and you spurn his overture, he loses enormous face, you know that. If we can come to some kind of arrangement here tonight, if I can take that back to Peter, I know he’ll be eager to come over himself. I could hardly hold him back tonight.”
“But you managed,” Tony says.
Chris looks at Sal. “He talk for you now?”
“He’s free to speak his mind,” Sal says. “And let’s be honest—Peter didn’t have no ‘change of heart,’ he didn’t wake up one morning and it hit him, ‘I was a dick to Sal.’ You’re losing the war, you need me and my crew.”
Chris doesn’t answer, but he dips his head in a way that says this is the case.
Always the fucking diplomat, Sal thinks.
“You could take this money, buy your house,” Chris says, and then sees from the look on Sal’s face that this was a mistake.
“The house got sold,” Sal says, his voice low and angry.
“There are other houses,” Chris says, trying to recover.
“Not like that one,” Sal says.
“I wasn’t finished,” Chris says. “You come back, after this thing is over, you get the longshoremen’s union.”
It’s big—far more than the Manchester job was worth. A big chunk of the Murphy business, a big piece of Moretti’s potential income. It’s a real sacrifice by Peter—a real offer.
“I don’t want it,” Sal says.
“What?” Frankie V asks.
He sure as shit wants it.
“I’ve been thinking,” Sal says, “about this thing of ours. It’s changed, not like the old days. There used to be rules. Now? Peter can come in and jerk my money from me just like that? What says he couldn’t do it again? He ‘gives’ me the union? Fuck that, I took the union for him. He ‘gives’ me shit. And then he can just pull it away with the other hand when he feels like it?”
He lets that sit in the air for a second, then says, “Nah. I have businesses—the restaurant, the parking lot, the linen—my family eats. Maybe I just sit back now, be content with that. Because I’ll tell you? Looking around the last few years? Everyone ends up dead or in the joint. I’m thinking of dying at home.”