WRITTEN FOR ME ( thomas shelby )

016 ━ Counting Seconds ..

He wasn't planning on lying, but of course, he wasn't planning on speaking the whole truth either, and Polly should be amongst the few not to judge that part of him.

"So why tomorrow?"

Tommy hesitated. "Like you said, tomorrow is Newmarket," he played on the card of agreeing with her slowly and calmly, as if it was his only card up his sleeve. "All the London bosses will be at the races."

"So you just roll up and take the city?" She mocked.

"No," Tommy shook his head shortly. "We take the opportunity to show our hand. The Italian gangs and the Jewish gangs have been at war in London for six months."

"It's not our war."

"The Jews been having the worst of it. They need allies."

"Yeah, but we don't," Polly kept her disinterested attitude.

"We need a foothold," Thomas insisted on an angle that had been on his back-burner during the planning of this whole ordeal about the expansion. What mattered then was that he knew regardless of its factual nature, his reasoning's mention would get his aunt to open the darn safe and let him get on with his day without the troubles of explaining himself to her; he knew what he had to say so that eventually he will wind up right there, on those docks, waiting and checking the time again as if delays were not a thing on busy waters or with old ferries.

Thomas Shelby had checked the time enough times during the drive to London, that John had to point out the unusual habit picking up, "It's the same as it was five minutes ago. Are we running late for something, is that it?"

He didn't tell neither of them — not John and not even Arthur either. All they knew was that this was supposed to be a holiday and if John suspected his role as a pawn in Tommy's scheming to expand their businesses to London, he sure didn't know the whole story, perhaps not even caring enough to anyway. They've left Birmingham in the morning and drove with plenty breaks such that after nightfall, they reached a city clouded by an obscene nightlife.

In order to make sure that no one will notice American smugglers with one arrest in their record, he had to make sure London's dangerous players with possible pawns at the docks were distracted.

Thomas had led his brothers straight across the street and to the Eden Club, where a bribe bought them entrance past panicked ushers, not necessarily expecting the infamous Shelby's to pay them a visit; in their land of work, an uninvited guest was a bad omen, a herald of war.

Even in the long run, what he was doing there that night was not just a blind gamble.

The Eden Club, a jazz extravaganza was the definition of sin and lack of class, all crammed under the elegance of golden and exotic decor, in tone with the latest trends. Together, the clash was blinding: fornication in the entry hallway right next to glamorous fountains depicting nudity in gold, madness driven dancing on a crowded floor otherwise marvelous with mosaics and polish. It smelled of thick cigars and plentiful lack of sobriety, but the alert jazz music was too loud for coherent appreciations of sense to actually be made; overall, the Eden Club was the sort of place Thomas Shelby would have never visited, but there he was anyhow, seated quietly at a table.

On the surface, his choice of being there and scouting the other clientèle could be seen in many ways: perhaps he was a good brother, getting John a break from his wife and her emasculating tactics applied on him, or the good brother in the sense that he got Arthur to do something else than fight in his little boxing ring in their neighbourhood; others, like those few in the crowd who met his gaze or the two ushers who recognzied him at the door, would argue that he's downright insane, walking into the territory of the Italians like that.