The reunion with Byrnes and Danese is a bit chilly, but Joe does grab Deuce’s hand and tells him, “Don’t ever scare us like that again, huh?” They listen to Chucky’s summation of events, but neither of them has much to say to the others, especially Byrnes.
Nobody ever really seems to care much about what Byrnes thinks or doesn’t think, does or doesn’t do, anyway. He usually isn’t asked for an opinion, and he usually doesn’t offer one. He’s so quiet it’s easy to forget he is there, no matter where “there” is. He might as well be the wallpaper in the room.
But then, that is his job. Quite apart from whatever Byrnes is told to do as a member of the crew, he has another job entirely; it is secret and much more important. He is a cutout, a soldiering spy for Il Padrino, and he has been since day one. Everything the crew has done or tried and failed to do, everything anyone has said of any importance, Byrnes quietly and efficiently reports to The Man or one of his designates, Henry Tameleo or Nicholas Bianco, at The Office on Federal Hill. That’s his job, and he does it surpassingly well.
Byrnes is important insulation for the boss of bosses. With him in place, Il Padrino won’t be blindsided by any unforeseen, untoward developments. With Byrnes’s help, Ouimette’s efforts to assassinate Rudy Sciarra were blocked at every turn. Sciarra knew what was afoot all along. He knew where to be and where not to be, and when and what and whom to look out for. Patriarca is always there, in one form or another. If there comes a day when Sciarra has to be taken off the boards, it will be because Il Padrino decides it, not “that fucking Frenchman,” Gerry Ouimette.
And when it came to hauling loot from the hideout on Golf Avenue after the heist, who was going to bury it somewhere? Byrnes. But he didn’t bury the loot, he delivered it to the Patriarcas, with Danese’s help.
“Those silver bars?” Danese says nearly forty years later. “Jesus fucking Christ. At least fifty thousand of that went to help Nicky Bianco pay off his lawyers because he was in all kinds of tax trouble, yeah.”
Compared to Byrnes, Danese is a grunt in this army of thugs, a tough slogging soldier with a lot of hard, muddy road behind him. He sees and accepts things as they are, in black and white, not in subtle shades of gray, where nuance, compassion, and useless sentimentality abide. He’s a pro. You hire him to do something, he does it and moves on. What you see is what you get. What’s hard to understand? This isn’t complicated.
Danese is satisfied with his cut of the Bonded Vault cash, even if the sixty-four thousand dollars turns out to be a minor portion of the haul. Sixty-four thousand dollars was what he was paid, so that must be what he earned. The story ends there. He doesn’t expect to see another cent from the fenced valuables; that’s somebody else’s work, somebody else’s risk, and therefore somebody else’s reward. It’s got nothing to do with him. All he wants is what Raymond Patriarca Jr., via John Ouimette, and then Chucky, told him to expect for doing as he was told: more jobs down the line.
But then comes this business with Deuce, whom Danese never really trusted anyway, and the Attleboro lawyer in the newspaper story, and Joe feels like he’s being kicked in the head. He and Chucky have been tight for years; they’ve partnered on countless jobs.
At the MGM Grand casino, when Chucky tells him and Byrnes that Deuce has given his assurance that he won’t rat anybody out, Danese smiles and shakes Deuce’s hand, but then he takes Chucky aside and unloads his opinion with all of the grandiloquence he can muster.
“You’re the stupidest motherfucker I ever met in my life,” he tells Chucky. “We’re in serious fucking trouble here. We took up a collection and gave this guy $9,500, but that wasn’t enough for him. The writing is on the wall here. If you bring this dumb bastard back to Rhode Island, I’ll kill the motherfucker. I’ll put a fucking bullet in his head.”
Anybody else speaks to Chucky that way, he might never be heard from again, but Chucky knows and likes Joe and takes him at face value, always has. Danese’s loyalty is beyond reproach, and that matters to Chucky more than anything.
“I’m not going to jail over this fucking motherfucker,” Danese says. “I’m not going to jail because of this fucking piece of shit.”
Chucky takes it under advisement—“Crazy Joe” letting off some steam, that’s all.