I HAD CALLED SPIKE on the short ride home and given him the bumper-sticker version of what had just happened. He said he was on his way.
“Slow night?” I said.
“There are no slow nights at Spike’s,” he said. “There are just some nights not as fast as the others.”
“What about the meteorologist?” I said.
“A cold front has moved in,” he said. Then he said, “But as we like to say in television, the bigger breaking news here is that Tony might not be the lead dog everybody still thinks he is.”
Within the hour Spike and I and Rosie were on the couch in my living room, Rosie between us, a bottle of Jameson Black Barrel in front of us. Spike was drinking his with ice. I was having mine neat, with water on the side.
“So if Tony isn’t calling the shots for Tony anymore, who the hell is?” Spike said.
He was wearing one of those untucked shirts, distressed jeans, battered and bruised and beloved Doc Martens.
“Maybe that’s the secret about which is he most afraid,” I said.
“You can’t be the biggest and baddest if somebody else is running the show,” Spike said.
“But all I keep hearing is that Tony has been consolidating power while a lot of the old bosses have faded away,” I said. “Or started to, the way Desmond has.”
“Maybe Tony has formed an alliance with some of the younger guys who have stepped up with the old guard like Gino Fish and Joe Broz and even Antonioni gone,” Spike said. “I don’t know all the new players and neither do you. I don’t even know who’s running Antonioni’s outfit now. Do you?”
“I don’t,” I said. “But even if there’s been some kind of merger or acquisition, why would Tony give a rip if people knew that?”
Spike sipped some of his drink and smacked his lips and smiled.
“Maybe he just doesn’t want everybody to know he might not be the cock of the walk,” Spike said.
He held his drink up closer to the lamp next to the couch, as if to see it in a better light. “Did you know George Bernard Shaw once called whiskey ‘liquid sunshine’?”
“I do,” I said.
“So why isn’t this whiskey shedding any light for us?” he said.
He put his head back. I did the same.
“You’re gonna laugh,” I said. “But I think Tony did love her.”
“Too much of a romantic to laugh,” Spike said. “Even if we are talking about Tony Marcus.”
“So who’s got enough juice to boss a boss like Tony?” I said.
“You’re going to find out, aren’t you?”
“I am,” I said.
Spike turned and presented his glass to me. I touched it lightly with my own.
“I’ll drink to that,” he said.
We both did.