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“Can’t I? Let me think. Hang on. Oh, wait up, no. It seems that I can.”
Tears stream down his face.
“I’m thinking that I might let you have one of them back, but I’m finding it hard to decide which one. And you’ve been no help at all. Of course,” I smile, “I can’t really tell them apart. Especially not from the pics over the phone. Can you?”
His face is hollow.
“So, this is the showdown. Here it can go either way. I can give you all that you ask for. I’ll sign your paper and hand over everything. And you can watch your two sons drop into the ocean. One after the other.”
I reach for the paper and hold out my hand for a pen.
“Or,” I pull out the paper I had drawn up from my own pocket.“You can sign everything to me, and I’ll let you have one of them back. Up to you. Have you decided yet which one is your favorite? Dario or Ettore?”
His head is in his hands.
I tell him, “So. It turns out you’re not willing to make the big sacrifices after all. When it comes to it, you can’t take the tough decision.”
I look at him as his head slowly raises. “At the crunch point, the moment where winner takes all, you fold. You went all in on me, Don Romano. And you could have won so big. But it turns out you went all in on a busted flush.”
“Shut UP!” he yells.
“You put it all out on the table. Big move. Bold. Courageous. And you lost. Now,” I push my contract to him. “Now you belong to me.”
“I expect your contract said much the same thing as mine. I’m taking it all. Clubs, bars, Wood Street dives. Dockside concessions, routes, everything. Everything.”
His head is shaking. “I wonder how carefully you’re listening at this point. I am recording this so we’ll have a record.”
His head is turning in his hands.
I say, “I believe you have a limo company, and a couple of planes, right? A teeny, tiny airline. What – two Beechcrafts and a helicopter, is that right? You can keep the cars and one of the aircraft. Take the best one, I don’t care.” I pause.
I don’t know if he’s taking any of this in. “I wouldn’t try to operate any of them here. Not if I were you. I would strongly council you to get out of the Pacific Northwest altogether. Take a powder. Up sticks, catch a breeze. Step on the bus, Gus. Begone. Like, yesterday.”
I sit back and watch him for a while. Watching the collapse of a bully is never pleasurable, but it does give some satisfaction.
“So.” I urge him. “Which son?”
He throws up his hands and howls.
“Take me. Take me instead. Let them go.”
“Everybody hear that? Are we all clear?” I look around the room at his men. The man who have watched their boss, the vicious tyrant, reduced to a blubbering wreck.
I tell him, “Sign first.”
And as he signs, I look at the Don’s henchmen around the room.
For years, every one of them has felt his moods and his temper. Like a lot of impulsive bully bosses that get drunk on their own charisma, he must have been as hard to take for them as he was for everybody else. Only they had the added chore of knowing that he would still be there tomorrow and next week and next year.
“Does anyone have any doubts or questions about what happened here today?”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Bobbing gently in the middle of Puget Sound under a precious afternoon of unfiltered sunshine, I sip cold ginger lemonade as we sprawl on the top deck of the lovelyLady Giusi.
Carlo, even Carlo chews the inside of his lip and looks down and at his beer.
Bruno turns his head and squints through his Raybans as he nurses a tumbler of single malt. Alessio sits in a deck chair. Or he does when he can sit still. Most of the time, he slouches, leans against the rail and twitches his mouth as he scans the empty horizon.
